to hell with all your heroes

“Mommy” It was a cry a crying a solitary figure lost in the fog of memories somewhere tattered and torn like fragments of old love letters. She stood there and then.. “Oh God. I think I’m going to be sick.” Nancy looked scared. She held that pinkish hue as if she was going to be sick. I felt the rise of nausea, I looked up at the stage lights behind the velvet curtains. “Randy, I don’t know if I can do this.” Yes you can and you will, you will be great, because of this, tonight what you are about to do you – all your dreams will come true. Tonight I am your fucking Genie your true love will kiss you, you will fall in madly in love, you will marry raise children, you will laugh and cry and ten years from now …

“It’s ok.” It just seemed to be the thing to say. I was with her physically and metaphorically. I did not think I could do this either. Especially since of course I was still trying to figure out what all of this was.

“But we practiced so hard. You practiced so hard.”

“That’s not the point.” Not that I knew what the point was. This moment was still coming into focus, I glanced about us, the multicolored lights a halo in my head. “The point was for me …” She didn’t let me finish, instead she retched into a garbage can. 

“Oh Christ.” And she emptied her stomach.

I reached over and held my hands to the small of her back, feeling the warmth tender and curative. What was I doing to her? How could you do this to her? Don’t you realize what this could cost her? You know why she is doing this! Don’t bullshit, don’t be coy, naïve, she loves you or at least thinks she does and will follow you to the ends of the earth. Well you brought her here and now you are asking her to jump off with you. “There’s only so much you should try to do Kiddo. This isn’t your battle.” Christ! Where did that come from? I squatted down a position relieving the strain on the back and able to let you stand in the jungle for hours crouched and ready… it would be a position I would learn in the military fighting in the jungles of Central America. It was a position you could sleep in and yet be ready to spring into action at at the sound of a misspent breath. It was raining. Christ when wasn’t it raining! My bare feet scrunched into the mud. Exercise the feet, don’t let the position …

I had a red bandana style handkerchief in my pocket and reached up to wipe her eyes. “It’s ok. This is my battle. You helped me to get here that is more than I should’ve asked of you.” This was something I would learn how to do early in life – an adoption of personality that would haunt me continuously: stoic; steadfast; adversary head-on with a wink, a smile a glimmer of something else. But I also learned that the power of intimacy especially in crises would overcome most things. I could see that Nancy was trying to pull herself together, she kept daubing her eyes and wiping away at her mouth trying to remove the phantom residual bile she thought must lie there. I remained in my crouch balanced on the balls of my feet like I would learn. I knew it was what she wanted, what she had hoped for many nights as we practiced, many nights that we were together. I wanted her to know that she meant more to me than just a momentary lapse of passion. That I was sorry for killing her daughter.  “I’m sorry Nancy.” I rose slightly her eyes on mine and cupped her face in my hands, in that moment I could feel the warmth of her passion rising through my fingertips; and my eyes swimming from my own.  “I’m sorry,” and tilted her head and kissed her soft, her lips trembling but parting, our tongues shy and vulnerable. I held her tightly before she would realize the moment, before she would come out of the passion and back into a world of pretense and false respect.  I held her for all of the sorrow I would bring to her, for all the pain I would burden her with because I simply … It was but a kiss in time but for the moment I had found my anchor and was grounded for an eternity.

“Randy my god. I just,” and she rolled her eyes pantomiming with her hands towards the garbage can, “y’know. Oh now I’m embarrassed.”  She toyed with her hair, trying to primp herself.  But her eyes, the sighing of eyes I would learn quickly that moment that no matter how brave a front you put up, no matter how stoic, your eyes would show the sadness, the longing, the fear. The poets have always said that the eyes are the windows to the soul and if you stare through the window long enough you will see that moment you have been waiting for. Can you let the moment go? Can you just watch it observe it and wish your were there outside the window, there playing, running in the sun, existing in the moment of the chance awakening?

“I can do this.” And she pulled her sweater down tight against her small hips. 

“You sure?”

Her eyes lit with determination and focused on my own. “Yes.” She smiled, “They asked for this.”

“Ok darling.” I could always be the strength for others but what I did best was bring out there own. Most times at my expense, my own haughtiness concealing, denying – but never purging my fear: shrieked and compressing, sucking in like a black hole swallowing all that fall within its gravitational fields.  “Ready?” Nancy nodded, her smile not as strong as it was but still just as bright and beautiful and for the moment I think I actually was in love with Nancy also.

The auditorium wasn’t full but still there were a lot of people, some who had heard wisps of tonight’s events some who anticipated and many who were there as contestants waiting their turns. Nancy wasn’t afraid of the performance. She was a class “A” competition singer and a piano prodigy. It was me that was making her sick, her fear of getting caught in my gravitational orbit pulling everything into a misshapen  happenstance of their existence. I had difficulty with Ms. Taylor our chorus director. She was of the mind that only those who knew how to sing, not those of us who actually wanted to learn, were entitled to sing in her classes. I challenged her authority and she did not like that. I could not sing – not for lacking ability but for lacking direction. I had the audacity to think the schools were institutions of learning and I wanted to learn how to sing.

Nancy would put my sorry poems to music. Creating beautiful songs that only she could sing – she was the first woman to sing for me, not to me. I had stood up during some school rally and read a poem reflecting an attitude unwelcome concerning the current state of affairs in Vietnam. People at school began calling me the “Poetryman” as if this was to be an insult. Phoebe Snow had a hit at that time with a song by that title. And I was in lust with Phoebe’s voice. Nancy knew this and one day as some after school practice for one thing overlapped with another she saw me scribbling away in the corner (she had mistakenly thought I was feverishly writing poems in my tattered sheaf of papers). I was trying to memorize lines for the play, reviewing rehearsing: it was the last night of auditioning. I had dropped from the football team. I had been a varsity starter since my freshman year and had found more interest in the theatrical arts as opposed to smashing heads in on the football field. Only now I was worried I would not make the cut. I should have worried about making it.

Nancy was seated at an upright piano near the stage and I could hear her plunking away – a song not like the songs that were blasted daily on every song dial. Nancy had a sultry voice for such a little girl.  Her voice was lilting, smooth, she did not trill or waver in tone, rather he voice was musky, warm and deep. “.. you bashful boy you’re hiding something sweet please give it to me, yeah to me…”     She would drop the ends of words at the end of the lines as if forcing you to listen closely and carefully like she was whispering in your ear and you needed to run after her to catch the words before they fell to the ground and disappeared. And I knew she was singing to me, for me, enticing me in with her voice, her wares… She sang facing the piano, sans music, from memory adding minor and sevenths deliberating the keys. “Talk to me some more you don’t have to go you’re the poetryman you make things all rhyme…”  I glanced about the room absorbing everything in the singular glance understanding the moment, cataloging the moment, no one else even seemed to hear the song. But there it trailed across the room, roping me in its waif-like grip “When I am with you I have a giggling teen-age crush Then I'm a sultry vamp.” And she looked sideways through the locks of sandy hair, holding my eyes in hers, glancing at me then closing slowly, still facing  me as if I needed her to erase any doubt. As if I needed her.

          

My name was announced, “Randy Hirsch, Class “C” Baritone with piano accompaniment.” This was to get the judges ready for their scoring. Nancy walked upright the stage floor a well known friend and took her seat at the black baby grand. I stepped out, “Mr. Hirsch will be performing “Sinner Man” a Class “C” piece…” I cringed, they kept announcing the Class “C” status, I looked out over the auditorium, the murmurs were beginning That’s right I can’t sing your way but I want to and I’m not going to let some fat ass uptight choir director stand in my way. into the light my guitar in hand … I wasn’t supposed to have a guitar…

I drew the slide across the frets, my daddy’s aged steel Kay guitar crying along the muted chords. Nancy’s smile was going to tear her pretty face in half. We had reached the crescendo, the judges still frantically flipping through their charts too polite or too proud to admit that they had made a mistake. Nancy pounded they keys into a rollicking sea shanty ballad building between the chords with minor fills and rising staccato, I strummed along in almost blind panic, the strings whining a sad despair under the chrome spark plug socket. I reached deep within my shower voice gravelly and growling spitting the words into the audience with every ounce of theatrical fervor, “… and hashish in a hookah pipe  and bonny grass to burn…” I winked at Nancy our little piece d' resistance reverberating through the old auditorium. For a moment we felt we were superstars and that nothing could ever hurt us again, “Our mission is a secret but we’re fool enough to try… we’ll sail the bloody ocean boys or drink the bastard dry.”

the null hypothesis

I was staring out of the window clambering on the sitting chair next to the bed. This is what I’d do – I would long for whatever remained outside while I was locked away, always afraid that something important was going to happen, to come to me, but I would be locked away in an overstuffed bedroom helplessly watching that moment as an observer as an outsider from a distance. It would be nap time now and I was supposed to be sleeping. I could not sleep, never sleep. It was our neighbor lady this much I remember because I would stare out at our own backyard hoping I would not miss the moment. She seemed pleasant enough, this was the only time I had to be with her, my parents both working. Those half day Kindergartens making it incredibly difficult for working parents. This lady would always get into these one-up-manship spats with my mother, as if she was not as good of a mother because my mother complained about my not sleeping. Mom would just let me go, and they would get calls from neighbors who would find me outside in my pajamas at three o’clock in the morning playing at the curb. But my sitter she was proud of the fact that she could always get me to sleep. I did not sleep. I learned how not to fight and fuss when the time came and I would pretend for her very well. Listen for her footfalls as she came to the door, she’d open it a crack to see if I was asleep. I would peer back at her under the covers having twisted and contorted myself to make it look like I was lost in deep slumber. Sometimes our eyes would meet, and I could see that look, that look of hunger in her eyes. That look that…

But staring out of the window at the back yard was my sense of longing. There I would sit watching and waiting feeling held back a prisoner locked in some dungeon. I was, however, more fortunate than some. I remember myself doing time in a county cell somewhere on the outside of Olympia. I didn’t have a window in there. I didn’t have a means to watch the time slip away or to see that the glorious moment of our definition come and go. I was fortunate. I could not look out and long  for something that I could not have. I was therefore content to sit Hurricane like in my cell traveling to and fro through time.

It is purgatory enough to be locked up in my own mind traversing the distance of here and now – but my mind as devastating as it has been is something I can handle. I think of that phrase “it is better to have loved and lost than to not have loved at all…” I can agree with that, it is better to experience than to sit on the sidelines watching. But to stare out at a something a thing of existence and to long for, perhaps it is the longing for that makes one crazy. To understand that we exist in a finite space of calculations and exponential variables is one thing, but to watch the variables shift and change and recalculate – to be an observer during the time shifts. To not be able to interact but solely watch the transformation of equations, the calculations as time progresses to a zero point never reaching it but always getting closer. That would be too much to try to handle. To watch your life slip away with the probabilities and possibilities swimming in your head – calculating the chances of predictability … to be infinite in a finite world and not to be able to grasp onto the legs of Pythagrea but only to watch. To feel the null hypothesis as one’s own existence to reach through time only to find yourself reaching back. This is much too much to hope for much less to stare at outside the windows of a jail cell. To watch others lose at love while you never have a chance that would be worse than being locked inside my brain, that would be worse, to not even have a tormenter to keep you company, to never have the chance… that would be an unbearableness of being.

how reputations begin

Linda sat next to me excited and scared. I had given up trying to downplay my reputation, if people wanted the badass swinger that was what I would give them. The irony was that I was this romantic at heart, waiting for that first kiss, that moment when the world would shake and I would find perfection in the dance of love. Instead, I ran. I was that 16 year old virgin who no one would go out with because they had all heard of my exploits with the college girls at the all night discos in the warehouse district. In their minds I was always high, under the influence of something, had caught the clap dozens of times. In retrospect it would have been nice to have experienced the person I was supposed to have been. Instead I was sitting in the back of  a darkened school bus bumping along the highway trying to seduce a young freshman who was scared to death I might try to take her right there on the bus and perhaps more afraid that I would not. I looked out the window past Linda her reflection odd on the dark mirrored glass. I was always staring out windows trying to pin point or perhaps reconcile something that was out there just beyond the horizon, lost to the peripheral.

never running far enough

Wojo, I think, knew or at least understood as my car was never ticketed nor towed. I think he took on the responsibility of being my surrogate father, waking his son up each morning to get ready for school. We laughed at Wojo then, a big reddish man with a walrus mustache and long wild hair. I had not laughed at Wojo for a long time. We shared a passion for running, not jogging as was the fad of the day but running. I stopped laughing at him the day he crossed the finish line at a local marathon, my 14 year old body setting a personal record of just under 2 and a half hours. I stood at the finish line gasping, catching my breath feeling the muscles in my body come back to life after being numb from the exertion. I was  cooled, my muscles stiffening, when I saw Wojo come around the corner. The course was 13 miles long and you ran it twice. I had finished my two laps and Wojo was just finishing his first. I hadn’t known that he ran then and I ran up to him, surprised by my admiration. He had an easy pace, slow steady and we talked sporadically and I didn’t even realize that I had gone through another half of the course.

My muscles were tearing now I had pushed them too far and told him that while I enjoyed running with him, I had to stop. He smiled that big drooping mustache molten with perspiration. He thanked me. Said he didn’t have a team like everyone else seemed to have.  Parents, friends, family supporting you as you ran, providing you with water, times, towels. I nodded, I knew what he meant. Told him I’d see him at school on Monday. And stopped, watching him run on the course a forty year old man proving to himself that he still had what it takes to take on the world. I turned to the west, without a team myself, I would have to walk the 15 miles home. My legs burned and my knees felt like there was gravel underneath my knee caps. Much later when I would become a “Wojo” I would find out that I had damaged my knees by not running properly and that the gravel feeling was the loss of cartilage in my knees. At 14 I would find that I would never be able to run far enough.

greasepaint

“It’s been 25 years! Oh my god did I say that out loud? My god that makes a body feel old now doesn’t it?”  The redhead I thought of as Linda still gripped my hand in hers. My head pounded from the swirl of time. That head pounding ache you get at the back of your eyes, the kind that explodes in the light.  The old woman had turned away realizing that she was not part of this equation and began perusing some of the organic vegetables. Math was never a good subject for me still I tried to do the math. This put me at an even deeper loss.

“Well you’re looking good.” And she gave me that look. It was a look I was too familiar with, too close too. It was a look I received from a lot of women, hungry yet distant as if I was a piece of meat on display in the butcher’s window. It was a look I have tried to run away from, but yet one that drew me intimately close.

“...do you live here? I mean this is the first time we’ve run into each other. This is just so…” She still held my hand.

I stared into her eyes those bright blue microscopes, I watched her mouth move as she put words to voice. I played this slowly through my head trying to make a connection. I imagined those eyes half closed, the mouth parting slightly breath coming warm and in deep rasps… and there we were in the back of a bus as we headed back from a contest of theater. I was two years Linda’s senior and she had been dating another guy in the troupe, Phil I think his name was Phil Lee: a cowboy. The only guy in our town who wore a cowboy hat, boots and those western shirts with the mother of pearl buttons. I had worn a cowboy hat also, not because of Phil but before I met him -- a black Stetson. I stopped not because it did not fit in with the social norms of Brookfield, our little suburban oasis in the middle of yet another Midwest nowhere state, but because my father would knock it off my head. He would berate me insult me as his father had, reliving or revisiting a time he only knew too well. But that was all I could remember of Phil, that and some vision of him bronco riding Linda in some small wire twin bed holding his hat high over his head...

I remember Linda had a crush on me, perhaps because I was the lead in the play perhaps because I had that reputation. Because of timeliness and the necessity of getting all of us back on the bus and for some reason now lost to me I had not been able to remove my stage makeup. And there I sat with Linda, together in the dark of the bus, lit up by the occasional headlight surrounded by excited voices chattering away about how well we had done, how we had placed, what our chances were for going on to state… but I was sitting next to Linda. The  little redheaded girl who was trying to break into the high school drama scene by doing makeup. I think she had done my own. I knew that she felt both exhilarated and scared to death to be sitting with me. I was Randy Hirsch, Central’s very own bad boy. I had a reputation that went on for miles. No girl in her right mind or rather no good girl in her right mind would want to be alone with me – and yet every girl wanted to be seen alone with me. It was they way of high school, it was the way of things yet unuttered. The reputation was unfounded.

Because of economic necessity I had to work, I worked at the only place an inexperienced worker could work – in the restaurant business. I had worked my way up from dishwasher to a line cook at Sabrina’s a fairly decent restaurant located inside the Marriott hotel.  I had lied about my age and now at the age I could legally work had worked there for several years. The restaurant business is fairly transient in nature, people are always coming and going and the life is gypsied in the friendships. The hotel hired a lot of the college girls to work the floors as this was the denizen of many a lonesome man. The girls brought in business. Business and young girls, isn’t that what it is always about?

It was 1978 disco was at its last hurrah and we were not aware of it yet. After we closed many of the girls would head downtown to the clubs, the discos and would dance their nights away or into someone’s arms. Thinking I was one of them they’d drag me along because having a man around would give them the excuse to leave if they desired one.

In the warehouse district of Milwaukee, a place known as the Third Ward,  was a club modeled after Warhol’s factory. It was even called the Factory and it too had several floors for dancing, partying, with that one floor where you could go only by invitation.

We used to dance there after work, the girls buying my drinks for the safety of having an excuse. They didn’t have to as many of the patrons there bought me rounds. The Factory played to a different clientele, it was place you could dance all night, way past any legal bar time, the drugs and sex ran rampant on the dance floor. It was there I developed my reputation. The sad irony was that I was there to dance, many drinks went wasted, and no drugs touched me. But that was not what people remembered. Some of the girls I went with had brothers or sisters I went to school with, acquaintances that would hear about my dancing with men and women, about my being invited to the upper floor, the invitation only club. I could go, I would go bringing my dates with me as my excuse. I was naive, hell I just wanted to dance. It was a reputation I would never live down.

Often I would not have time to go home, I would park my little station wagon with the gold tinted windows and sleep in the back in the school parking lot. Mr. Wojowicz would every morning about 6:30 come tapping on my window telling me that I could not park there since ‘I was not a senior and that I would have to move my car.' He would move on and I would go into school, shower in the locker room and put on a change of clothes I kept in my locker. This is how reputations begin. I’ve yet to see how they end.