goals are just wishes that never come true: September 2014

This piece was originally written for Bring Your Own Stories, a monthly live storytelling event in New Orleans very similar to The Moth Radio Hour. Seven to ten stories are told in an evening back to back. After a short reprieve, judges in the audience vote on their favorite story of the evening and it is aired on the local NPR station the following week. Through my teens and early twenties I found it very natural to speak or perform before crowds, but in recent years it has become slightly more difficult for some reason. Maybe it's because I don't really drink like I used to. Anyhow, putting this somewhat personal story together for the Bring Your Own Stories event, telling it to a crowd of people who had never met me, was an exercise in attempting to find that comfortable space again. The theme for the night which I preformed at was "heroes." The story I told covers about twenty years of the relationship I had with my first, and for many years only friend, Joseph. It ended up the winning story of the evening and was aired on WWNO in the Spring of 2013. It is a true story.

Joseph in 2001

LOOKS GOOD ON PAPER

I made my first friend in California in 1989. I was six. I was playing in the front yard of my folk’s place when another kid approached the end of the lawn. He says to me, “Hi, I’m Joey. Want to be friends?”

I’ve always really enjoyed reflecting on this memory. We lose our innocence pretty fast and after a certain point relationships become more complicated to carve out, but at this time he was a kid and I was a kid and that’s all that really mattered. He liked GI Joe and I preferred the world of Lego toys, but whatever. Right off the bat, we were virtually inseparable.

How Joey came to my folk’s front lawn that day is unknown to me. He lived in a dilapidated farmhouse on the outskirts of town, nowhere near the cul de sac I was growing up in. On weekends I’d be allowed to ride my bike out there though, where we pretty much had the run of the place. Aside from he and I, it was just his little sister and his mom, neither of whom paid much interest in what we did. We spent years of uninterrupted weekends and summers there. It was the place where we laid the foundation for our entire boyhood fantasy world, but as a childhood locale this place had its serious pitfalls as well. While a dilapidated house on the outskirts of town may be stupendous for the fostering of two boys’ imaginations, but it also facilitated a shroud of privacy for any adult on the property. The freedom was equal to people of all ages, and so simultaneously while Joey and I were devouring Marvel Comics and fusing Ninja Turtle heads to Barbie torsos, his mother was deeply applying herself in the world of drugs.

When you’re little kid you don’t truly know “bad” yet. It’s hard to recognize bad when adults propagate it. It’s hard to understand why bad is done. And even if you do recognize and understand bad, it’s another challenge entirely to counteract it. In Joey’s house I was starting to understand bad, but I thought at the time that if I told anyone then I would be punished by association. It was an early lesson that a problem left a problem is allowed to grow, and these problems were growing along with us.

By the time we were close to spitting distance from our teens, food had become scarce in Joey’s home. I’d bring some sometimes, sneaking it from my parent’s house as not to raise any questions. We’d couch dive for change, and when the spoils were good we’d make the trek down the highway to the gas station for garbage food- Charleston Chews, beef jerky, Jolt; but sometimes there’d just be needles, used, uncapped. Sometimes there’d be strange men sleeping there. They’d wake up as we wandered through, offer us beer and cigarettes and give us bad times for being virgins, even though we were only twelve or so. A permanent fog collected in the place and consistently it smelled like burnt plastic. The TV was always on; something like COPS or Springer or just plain static. There were stacks of porn on VHS in the living room. Almost exclusively biker gangbang stuff in big awkward cardboard cases. Nothing to play them on though. The rug was sticky in spots, there was a hole in front of the toilet that your feet dangled into when you sat down, threatening to swallow you. Details stack upon details within this story and they all and more atrocious ash to the tray, but I’ll spare it. Unsurprisingly, eventually, it all came to a head.

Joey’s dad showed up one night. He was in a powder blue van, the words "US MARINE CORP VETERAN" painted on the side. Nobody was ever clear with me why he was away and honestly I’m not sure anyone was ever clear with Joey either. He believed a convoluted story of military service and duty, but I quickly gleaned that it wasn’t true, or if it was his service was a distant memory. I’m pretty certain that he’d been serving time. In any case, to celebrate his return there was a big party. My memory of this night is hazy at my age now, and also possibly because I’d been drinking these strawberry daiquiris that Joey’s mom had been making for us with Coors Light instead of hard alcohol because they were “for the kids,” but sometime late, around my fourth of fifth sweet-mud tasting beverage there was a huge, huge fight. A man had been caught creeping into the room of Joey’s sleeping younger sister. The place exploded!

Joey’s dad dragged the guy into the dirt driveway and beat him within an inch of his life with what I think was a pipe. This hard justice came at the cost of most of one of his ears though, which was bitten off. The cops came and arrested Joey’s mom for a whole mess of charges. We poured over the peeling linoleum in the kitchen to find the mangled bits of severed ear, picking them up with party napkins which were all over printed with Sesame Street characters, putting them in the freezer. The ear couldn’t be saved though. I’m not sure why we, as kids, weren’t taken out of there, why my parents weren’t contacted, or why his dad didn’t go with his mom. I genuinely don’t remember. It just seemed like everyone was just suddenly gone and Joey and I were falling asleep on the living room floor like always, talking about cartoons and flipping the channels between QVC and scrambled porn. I do remember that by the end of the month though, Joey his sister moved to Florida from where their father had come.

I didn’t see my friend again for years. We kept up with letters and occasional phone calls, but the latter was expensive via our landlines, and the gaps in our communication slowly became greater. Finally though, just after I turned 18 he got ahold of me telling me that he was coming back to the West Coast. Great!

By the time he arrived I had moved. I’d gotten out of my hometown and found my first apartment in San Francisco. I’d picked up some tight pants, gotten a chest tattoo and a gig at a record store. I was desperately trying to be cool. Joey, who preferred Joe now, was crashing with an aunt in the North Bay, but he was going to visit me whenever he could, and he did. It was weird though.

Things hadn’t gone much differently with his father in Florida. Turned out his dad was a brutal alcoholic living off of some kind of government stipend for taking custody of the kids. He physically was abusive, and despite Joe’s best efforts to convey otherwise, he was clearly damaged by it. He’d turned to drugs which at first didn’t frighten me as I’d taken to experimenting with a good amount of them too, but I quickly realized that his use was bit higher stakes than my casual curiosity. While fundamentally I’ve got no real problem with a healthy (“healthy”) term of drug bingeing in anyone’s life, being of sound mind is a big help in dealing with any perception altering device. At this time the shit coming out of his mouth was a fucking mess.

He talked constantly of two things then. Sex (very specifically a foot fetish that he’d picked up, an unrelatable concept for me) and the so-called “third eye.” He was understandably really caught up in the idea of transcendence of reality, leaving behind a world of pain and misery for some sort of zen/sky/lotus understanding of all things, which I could totally empathize with considering how shitty his life had been at that point. Clearly though he lacked the confidence or strength to slow his intake and bring these thoughts to any logical conclusion.

I lived in a number of apartments in SF, moving just about every year. For the first handful of those years Joe, for a least some period of time, would be a fixture on my couch. I lucked out and had a series of great roommates who put up with this, but it fast became a problem for me. He rarely had money and he didn’t work during his visits, so I was providing just about everything for him. Also, the drugs that he somehow managed to get were really taking significant toll on his mind. Coupled with his childhood demons he was losing his grip. You couldn’t get a word in edgewise without him bringing up zen or feet. He was constantly rambling, unbelievably lost. It was awful.

I wanted to help. I wanted to help. However, I had neither the money nor the faculties to do so, and finally, when I found out that he’d been making bizarre phone calls to my mother while I was at work, leaving long messages of pseudo spiritual and sexual psychobabble, that was it. I wasn’t harsh, but I was final. I told him he needed help which I could not provide. He told me he loved me and politely left later that day. I never saw nor heard from him again. Years later a mutual childhood acquaintance of ours called me to ask if I’d had any contact with him recently. When I told them that I had not they informed me that they’d seen him passed out in the parking lot of our hometown’s Payless Superstore. It looked like he had shit his pants. “A big yellowish, brownish streak that went all the way from his ass to one ankle.” That was it. No other information and as far as I know nobody helped him.

When Joey and I were real little kids we pretended to be superheroes a lot. Once we were hanging out at the elementary school we attended after hours. There was this other kid named Vincent who I had class with there as well. He was whizzing around, rollerblading on these new Bauer rollerblades he’d got for his birthday, which were a big deal to nine-year-olds in nineteen-ninety-whatever. As he was goofing off, I think maybe trying to impress us, all of the sudden he lost control and fell forward into the side of one of the classrooms. He put his hands out to stop himself, but instead of landing them on the stone part of the wall, his arms punched right through a window at about chest level. Immediately pulling them out, he paused, then started screaming as blood begins pouring out of him like two cracked hoses. He’d lacerated himself all the way from his wrists to his shoulders.

I had no idea what to do, but within seconds Joey was over there. He took off his shirt and stood on one end of it, ripping it into strips and immediately demanded I do the same. It turned out that a recent PSA at the end of an episode of GI Joe he’d watched had taught him how to tie a tourniquet. I had never seen so much blood in my entire life and probably haven’t since. I felt otherworldly, but Joey was so calm the whole time. Vincent passed out and I helped hold the bandages while Joey ran off all crazy bloody, throwing himself before the first car he saw and getting the driver, who I later learned first tried to drive around this screaming child rather than stop, to call 911 from his car phone. If Joey hadn’t been there I’m totally certain that Vincent would have died.

About a week later some cops and firemen came to our classroom. They pulled Joey up to the front of the class and presented him with an award, a certificate. You could tell he was really embarrassed, but also really proud. It was a pale blue piece of paper and in big black letters trimmed with gold it said “HERO for actions above and beyond the call of duty.” There was also a twenty dollar certificate to Baskin Robbins 31 flavors, which he shared with me.

A lot of people saw a lot of things in my friend over the years; a burden, a battered child, a deviant, an addict, a nuisance, a pervert and a very sick man, and on and on and on. I knew him for a long time though. Long before most of those titles but for the first, which was how his parents treated him. In that time, even through the worst of the bullshit near the end of our friendship, he always displayed that deep down he really, really wanted to be the good guy. When we played he was the noble character, who conquered the villain, transcended the drama, and fell to the feet of the fair lady he'd rescued to delicately kiss them- not too wet, not too dry, no tickling. Just kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss, again and again and again.