The Trip (through the 70's)

Seeing as how the title of this here BLOG is "The Long Strange Trip" and my idea for this thing was to write down some sort of recollection of my life I figure maybe I should get to it. This is more certainly not a memoir or autobiography or anything so high and mighty as that - just my recollections of my life so far and maybe a form of cheap self-therapy. Then again maybe that's what a memoir or autobiography is really... so call this what you will. I call it a long, strange trip... and (hopefully anyway) I am a long way from the end.

So some of my first memories are of me with a little plastic pretend kiddy doctor's kit administering fake candy pills to my ill grandmother laying on the living room couch. It seemed as if she was always ill, at least in my memory. We lived with my mother's parents in their quiet home in Northwest Washington DC when I was a small child and as I said it seemed as if grandmother was always sick and I was always giving her fake candy remedies to cure her ills - I would use the term "I was playing doctor with my grandmother" but that conjures up some very sick imagery that some stupid ass would misconstrue so let's just not go there ok? Admittedly by saying that I have already taken you to that ugly place but now I can just use that term without any of the silly innuendo and stupid associated crap... ok? I PLAYED DOCTOR WITH MY GRANDMOTHER - there I said it. But not in a weird way ok? Anyway... I don't know if she actually ate the little candy pills I offered up but in retrospect this memory sets the tone for the direction of this long, strange trip that I call my life. I don't even know how sick my grandmother really was - I had been told when I was much older that grandmother (who had by now long since passed away) was a bit of a hypochondriac.

All of this had to have been around the time when I was 5 or maybe 6... sometime in the late 60's. I also remember how much I loved my grandfather - I can still remember scampering into his lap as he sat in his easy chair in the living room and he would give me one of the cherry throat lozenges he always seemed to have on hand. My grandfather, I am told, had a glorious tenor voice and sang in the choir at the church he attended in Georgetown. I guess that's why he always had those lozenges. In any case they were a treasured treat to me. I was told that I was my grandfather's favorite of the grandchildren by my mom - I don't know if that is so or not but I always felt like the apple of his eye. I don't recall him getting ill but he was hospitalized in late November or early December of 1970 with a blood clot I think. In any case I remember being pulled out of class on December 10 and being told that my grandfather had died and I would be staying with a family friend that night. Apparently my grandfather refused to use the bedpan and had gotten out of bed to go to the bathroom - the clot shook loose and went straight to his heart or brain or lung or wherever it is these things go to kill you. I do know that my mother was in the hospital cafeteria at the time it happened and heard the call of "Code Blue" over the loudspeaker - she rushed to the room only to arrive in time to see my Grandfather laying on the floor as the doctors tried unsuccessfully to revive him. I can't recall who told me he had died - maybe it was a school official or maybe my parent's came to pick me up and told me themselves. I just remember feeling very empty and lonely and helpless and worst of all, removed from my mother who I adored and who I knew adored her father and she was in pain that I couldn't do anything about. No amount of candy pills could ever fix this. I don't recall ever playing with my little fake doctor's kit again. Around this same time (maybe before maybe after I can't really recall) my mother's beloved dog Tinkerbell also died but that was just one more encounter with our new uninvited friend Death.

After my grandfather's death, my grandmother's health quickly declined and the family elected to have her placed in a nursing home... as is often the case with people who have been married to one another all their lives, she died within a year and a half of her husband. But still Mr. Death wasn't done with us. Two weeks after my grandmother's death came the high profile murder case of my mother's brother - my Uncle Corky Nalls. He was 17 years old when he was shot in the head by James Walburn, the father of the pregnant girlfriend Corky wanted to marry. The killer was captured a few days later at his rural cabin running around nude acting like a crazy man. Maybe he was crazy, I don't know. I only know that his actions drove the final stake into the heart of what remained of my family. The ensuing murder trial was big news for the next year or so in the local media and I have strange little memories of the trial itself. I had a very bad poison ivy infection that covered almost every inch of my body at one point (I don't know - maybe I was rolling around in it or something). It was so bad that I obviously couldn't go to school so my parents had to bring me along to the trial. I have vague memories of sitting in the court room as the trial unfolded... mostly it is a blank but I do have distinct memories of a chalk board on which the defense lawyer drew an overhead view of the crime scene (the front porch of the killer's home) and arguing that the killing was accidental. Yes he said the accused did have a rifle and was threatening my Uncle and telling him to stay away from his daughter and get off his property when he tripped over the leg of a rocking chair that was on the porch which caused the rifle to discharge. The shot hit him in the face. My poor Uncle staggered a few houses away where he collapsed and died in a pool of his own blood. Eyewitnesses had a different story as to how the murder happened. I don't remember their testimony - I may not have even been present for that but I do remember waiting in a room for the jury's decision with the family of the killer and our family crammed together in horrible, deafening silence. There we all were, his family and our family, all destroyed by a moment of rage. I can remember playing with one of the boys from the killer's family during the trial in the hallway - or maybe it was in the waiting room as we all sat with our lives in tatters all around us. We were too young to understand. Broken families, broken people, broken lives. But to two little kids the importance and gravity of this moment was lost - at least for the time. But the ripple effects of the event were far reaching and treacherous. For my family that was the final blow... the family home was sold (I presume to pay bills for my grandmother's care and funeral and my uncle's funeral and so forth). The family drifted apart and (I suppose) did their best to find ways to heal the wounds of the past couple of years or at least forget them. One of my Uncle's spent the majority of the remainder of his life in and out of mental institutions and addicted to drugs. The other spent his life doing his best to live a "normal" life with his family. My Aunt's moved away and my mom... well she just survived as best as she could. Her marriage fell apart and her health steadily declined until her death in 1995. She never really got over the events of those 18 months in early 1970/1971. I don't know much of what became of the killer and his family. He was convicted of murder but was released from prison after a few years because he allegedly had cancer or a heart condition or some such nonsense and only had a few months to live. I don't know what kind of strings he pulled to get out of jail but I know he lived for many years later, albeit without much dignity. My father once swore that he saw the killer picking through a garbage can in an alley in downtown Dc - homeless and broken. I don't know if that's true but it would be a fitting end to a miserable man's life. He had apparently done horrible things throughout his life and was suspected in the deaths of at least two of his family members - so who knows, maybe he was crazy. As to the rest of his family I don't know what became of them although I would guess they were as ruined by this tragedy as my family was. I don't recall ever seeing that little boy again. I feel as bad for them as I do for my own family - none of us asked for this to happen but all of our lives were changed by this one man's actions. A tough lesson for 2 little boys to have to learn. I wonder if he took from that experience the same lessons that I did...

The next few years of my life were more or less uneventful and average, relatively speaking. I did the typical kid things like playing baseball and soccer and theater stuff. For a few years I got to have a somewhat normal childhood. Well... if you take into account the fact that my father was an alcoholic and my parent's marriage was falling apart. They tried hard to fix the marriage and pull our little family unit together by doing things like weekend camping trips that more often than not turned out disastrous due to my father's drinking. Those trips didn't last though. The "gas crisis" made trips like those virtually unaffordable and even had that not been the case the truth was the camping trips did nothing to bring us closer together as a family. If anything it created more stress and friction. I can recall one Friday just before going camping my teacher telling the class that one of our classmates (and one of my best friends) had died overnight of kidney failure. We knew he had been sick for a while but still I was destroyed by the news. Fernando was a "little person" - a midget... maybe a dwarf. I don't really know - it wasn't important to me at that age - I just knew he was my friend and now he too was gone. And then I had to go camping with my broken family. It all seemed so futile to me at 10 or 11 years old. And that's pretty much how all of my memories of those camping trips are, which is really sad because I am sure that in reality there had to have been some wonderful adventures and fun that we had that was overshadowed by all the pain of the times we were going through. I wish I could go back and relive those times so that I can at least remember a few of the good times. But that isn't how life works... I just have to believe that those moments DID happen and they are burned into my brain somewhere on a subconscious level.

By this time I had dealt with the rapid loss of my grandparents, the murder of my uncle and the resulting trial, the loss of one of my best friends, the sudden death of my mother's sister's husband due to a massive heart attack on a golf course, and just for fun, being sexually molested by my father's father. I wasn't the only one - he got to pretty much all of the kids in the family before I ratted him out to my parents after he gave me a dollar to pull my pants down and let him touch my penis. I don't recall exactly what happened but I remember afterwards knowing that what he did was wrong and I should tell my mommy which I did. He was never allowed to be alone with the grandchildren again. Let me just say here that I don't think he was a bad man - I believe he had a mental illness and I always looked at it that way throughout my life. So you might expect that my life was overdue for some semblance of normalcy by this point. Ahh... once again that's not how life works. Life had other plans for me and far bigger challenges to overcome.

My parent's relationship continued to deteriorate and my brother continued to act out always getting into trouble (and trying to get every girl in sight pregnant to boot). By the time I was in my early teens my brother and father had both moved out of the house and my mother had been diagnosed with severe emphysema. Her lungs were like Swiss cheese from smoking since she was a teenager. She tried to quit but the strain of her marital problems led her back to her trusty crutch - the cigarette. She was on oxygen at home and her mobility became more and more limited due to her inability to breathe. Other than going to Bingo and the grocery store she was more or less home bound and I was left to care for her. I can remember the ordeal of coming home from school every day and getting off of the bus a block from my house. It was always such a long walk in my head because I was always thinking in the back of my mind that one day I would come home and find her dead or dying on the floor. This was, unfortunately a very real possibility and the reality I had to deal with on a daily basis. I can actually recall one night my mother turning blue before my eyes as I frantically called my dad to come take her to the hospital. She was hospitalized and one morning I received a call that my mother had gone into respiratory arrest and had stopped breathing several times overnight and that they had to resuscitate her and had put her on a ventilator and she was in critical condition. I was not prepared for what I saw when I arrived at her room. There on the hospital bed was my mother, horribly bloated, eyes open but more or less rolled back in her head with no focus and she was a strange grayish color. There was a large machine next to her bed bellowing out loud whooshing sounds with a tube leading from the machine to her mouth and down her throat. The tube was taped in place over her mouth and her hands were bound to the bed because she had tried repeatedly to remove the tube from her throat. I remember speaking softly to her telling her how she had given us all a scare and that I loved her but she was non-responsive. I left the room and collapsed in the ICU lobby. When I finally composed myself enough to speak to the doctor things only got worse. After my mother was diagnosed with emphysema she did try to quit but as I said cigarettes were her one crutch in life (she wasn't a drinker or drug taker) and the burden of the marital problems coupled with her health problems drove her right back to smoking. It was her only outlet. But since she was essentially housebound and didn't want my father to know she had started smoking again she had no way of getting cigarettes except to send her sons to the local pharmacy to get her fix for her. Eventually I think my brother refused to do it but I was never able to refuse my mother so I began making the pickups of the drug that was killing her. Somehow (I don't really remember how this came about) the doctor had caught wind of the fact that I had been supplying my mother with cigarettes. The end result being the doctor telling me that if my mother died it was my fault because I bought her the cigarettes. I was devastated to say the least and to this day those words still haunt me. And that... more or less... was the 70's for me. But the Long Strange Trip was just getting started...

Perception

Sometime the very things that we perceive to be holding us down or back in life are actually the only thing holding us UP in life. Sometimes the burdens of our lives are the very things that give us strength and reason to live.

Life is all a matter of perspective. If you don't like the way things look try changing your point of view - altering your perspective. Sometimes what we see and how we see it all depends on the window we are looking through.

Think about it.