It was in early adolescence that I first began to feel as if I were disappearing — actually discorporating. At times I felt insubstantial, airy. I thought I could feel wind blowing through me. My thoughts during these episodes were similarly ethereal, vaguely hallucinatory and beyond recall after returning to my “normal” state. In retrospect, I wonder if it might have been low blood sugar, or perhaps early onset existential angst.
One late Sunday afternoon I was walking down Colorado Springs' Colorado Avenue, the West Side's main drag. The street was utterly deserted and dead quiet. I could hear the clink of glassware and muted voices from Roger's Bar a block away. Feeling nearly weightless, I gripped a parking meter and began banging my forehead on it. There was a pickup truck parked in the slot in front of me and I noticed a tool handle sticking up from the truck bed. It was a sledgehammer. This, I thought, is just what I need. An anchor. I climbed into the truck, lifted the hammer with some difficulty, and tossed it onto the road. It was half as tall as I was and very heavy. I got down and picked it up and swung it up onto my shoulder. I discovered that if I choked up on the handle I could wield it without too much difficulty.
Standing there with my hammer on my shoulder, I felt a little better. Weightier. Stronger. I can't remember the thought process that led me to my next act. But I gripped that hammered tight, rocked it back and forth a few times and swung it with everything I had — right into the parking meter. As it exploded — and it did, spectacularly — I became Thor. Asgordian heralds trumpeted a fanfare from the heavens and lightning suffused my body. Insubstantial? Me? I was marble in motion, rooted to the earth, powerful, puissant. Glass, coins and cast metal littered the sidewalk. I picked up the little red indicator arrow for a souvenir and moved on to the next meter. Pow! My brain was filled with boiling blood. On the next one I swung down and hit it top first — Kee-Runch! I grew 6 inches and forgot that I'd ever been afraid of anything.
When I reached Bancroft Park and the end of the metered area, I look back on the devastation. Debris and small change littered the sidewalk and street for two and a half blocks. The parking meters looked like they'd been bitten off by some hungry robot dinosaur. It was nearly dark and a powerful anti-climatic depression was threatening. I dragged my hammer down the sidewalk to the Empire Market where I began working over the newspaper machines, but without the fervor and passion that I had brought to the parking meters. It was over. And it was relief I felt when the rollers pulled up and announced over the patrol car PA: “Drop the hammer, son.”
* * *
Step-fiend Dennis had departed the scene shortly after we arrived in Colorado Springs, but not before putting my mother in the hospital with a broken face, setting the garage on fire and killing the dogs. I know, I know — how could she let such a prize get away? I was relieved, of course, but the atmosphere at home, while different, wasn't really better. My mother spent her nights in bars and brought home strange men. I used to sneak into her bedroom early in the morning and go through their pockets and stab the tires on their cars. I thought I was going to get my mam back — no such luck. I was on my own, mostly. I spent as much time away from home as I could, hustling pinball and foosball at the pool hall, scrounging, stealing, and sometimes just wandering — which is what I was doing in that fateful Sunday gloaming.
* * *
A lot of 13-year-olds might be scared their first time in the back of a cop car. I was thrilled. I felt like a character in one of my books. The cops threw my hammer into the trunk and opened the back door. “Climb in, Cool Hand,” one said. “Do I need to cuff you? Are you going to behave?”
“Yes sir,” I said. “I mean, no sir. I'll behave.”
The cop riding shotgun turned to face me. “What you got against parking meters, son? You didn't even pick up the money,” he asked.
“Nothin',” I said. The whole experience had taken on a surreal quality in my memory like a movie I had seen or a dream I had. I kicked back and began enjoying my ride downtown.
I should probably take a moment here to mention the job my mother had at the time: Counselor at Zebulon Pike Detention Center, local juvenile facility and my eventual destination after booking at the police department.
When I arrived at Zeb Pike, the first thing they did was call my mother. “Don't give him any books,” she instructed. “If you let him read he won't care where he is.” So I was led to a cell with a bundle of linen and dumped unceremoniously inside. As I lay on my bunk pondering this situation, I came to a realization: my psyche, or spirit, or chi, or whatever, was inherently flawed and would require regular infusions of loud, dangerous, violent, aimless and indiscriminate behavior to patch it and allow me passage through life. The hammer — and more importantly what the hammer and I had wrought — symbolized my freedom, as was made ironically manifest in that jail cell. We had smashed not just parking meters, but the brittle carapace composed of layers of abuse and fear and doubt under which I scuttled like a roach, instinctively searching out darkness and solitude.
I began hammering on the door. Bam! Bam! Bam! “Let me out! LET ME OUT!” I increased the volume and tempo. “LET ME OUT, you motherfuckers!”
Eventually someone came and opened the door. Before he could say a word I lowered my head and ran into him, knocking him flat. I took off down the hall as he blew madly on his whistle, summoning the rest of the staff. Several of them appeared at the end of the long hallway with arms spread, crouched like goalies. I could hear the one I'd knocked over approaching me from behind. I was trapped. I stood there awaiting the inevitable and when the first counselor reached me and grabbed my arm, I bit him hard. His satisfying yelp spurred me to action and I flailed, bit, kicked, scratched, hit and spit. Eventually, of course, they subdued me. But to my 80 pound credit, it took a minute. I lay there in the hallway being held down by eight arms, all of us panting heavily.
“If you put me back in that cell without a book, I swear to god, I'm going to kill myself,” I said.
“That's what this is about? A book?” One of my captors asked. “Give him a fucking book.”
“Judith said not to give him anything to read.”
“Yeah, well, Judith isn't here. Go get the kid a book.”
They let me out and lead me back to the cell where I stiffened. The counselor who had been dispatched handed me in a worn paperback. It was “The Hustler,” by Walter Tevis. “Thank you,” I said, and walked docilely back into the cell. They kept a light on all night and true to form, as my mother had warned, I was no longer at ZPDC. I was in 1955 and pool halls and Cadillacs with Fast Eddie Felsen, Tuscaloosa Squirrely, and Minnesota Fats. I finished the book some time in the wee hours and went right back to page one.
They let me go home the next day, ordered me to undergo psych testing and evaluation pending a Child In Need of Supervision (CINS) hearing. I was taken to a shrink to undergo the usual battery of diagnostic tools then in vogue: the CAT, the WRAT, the TAT, the KTSA, MMPI, Rorschach, and there were probably more but these are the ones that stick in my memory. Oh yes, Stanford Benet and Wechsler.
After completing these and a dozen or so talk sessions, the therapist came to the conclusion that I was “a very angry young man.” Score one for the psychiatric profession! They used all that education and expensive testing material and office time to determine the patently obvious: what I could have simply told them, had they only asked. God damn right I was angry. And I wasn't finished letting the world know it, either.
By the eighth grade I had pretty much given up on school. I spent my morningss reading at the library and afternoons at the pool hall, honing my various ball skills — nine, foos, and pin.
One day in early spring after a couple weeks of snow and bitter cold, the sun appeared with pellucid alpine brilliance, warming the air and melting the snow. It was such a beautiful day I decided to have myself a little picnic. I went down to the liquor store and hung around outside until I found someone willing to buy booze for me. “Bottle of Annie Green Springs Original. Pack of Kools,” I told him. Thus armed, I headed up to the Garden of the Gods, a park featuring spectacular rock formations, and staked out a crevice. I took a healthy pull off the bottle, lit a smoke, and set out enjoying the day. My thoughts turned philosophical as is their wont at such moments and I pondered the nature of existence and the mysteries of consciousness. Having had no religious training, I was not imbued early on with a belief system. When I encountered the concept of a creator later on, on my own, I was skeptical. By the age of eight I was a confirmed atheist and then, by 13, I held religion and its adherents in utter contempt. But I was a wanderer and a striver at theories that made sense of the fact that always floored me during these philosophical interludes: that I existed, that I could understand that I existed, and the untold billions of precisely interlocking interactions that led to my being there in that moment pondering them all. The bottle got lower, my thoughts got deeper, I closed my eyes and felt the noonday sun like warm butter on my eyelids.
I opened my eyes some moments later — five minutes? an hour? — stretched, and reached for my lunch. When I looked back up I saw, not 10 feet away from me, looking directly at me, a mountain lion. Its tail was erect and flicking and it stared fixedly at me. Now, mountain lions are not a rare occurrence in this area. Chained dogs provide them with regular meals and signs abound around the park instructing visitors not to become part of the food chain. I stood up, raised my hands in the air, jumped up and down, and yelled at the creature. It cocked its head bemusedly, stretched, settled into a sphinxlike pose and yawned extensively. I ceased my puma-deterrent efforts immediately.
“Are you finished?” she asked me. I say “she,” because the lion sounded like Elizabeth Montgomery, portrayer of Samantha Stevens in the popular television program “Bewitched.” Now I am not one of those people you encounter in the stories or movies or TV who, when encountering something unlikely, refuses to believe the evidence of their senses and instead presumes hallucination or madness. That goddamned cat spoke to me, and it's tone was markedly supercilious besides.
“Yes,” I answered.
She got to her feet and said, “Follow me.”
We walked down a hiking trail for a while, with her looking back occasionally to check on me. In a half-mile or so we came upon a small copse of scrub pine a little ways off the trail. We entered into the thicket, inside of which was a small clearing with a large flat rock in the center with a large brown bear sitting on it. My expression must have betrayed my shock and fear because the bear said, “Relax. I mean you no harm, and the lion works for me. Right?” He growled, looking over at her washing her face.
“Yes, sir,” the cat said.
The bear looked me over carefully for a two moments. “Sit down, boy,” he said.
I sat.
“Look at you, Flynn,” he said in an admonishing tone. He knew my name! This was getting good. He continued. “Drinking pop wine, smoking menthol cigarettes — is that any way to live? What would your father think?”
That threw me a little. “Do you know my dad?” I asked.
"I know things,” said the bear. “I hear things, I notice things, and most importantly, I get things. And dead dad is written all over you. I can smell it all over your body. So I repeat: What would your father think?”
The lion interrupted. “My father killed and ate a city councilman once.”
“Shut up, cat,” said the bear.
“Well, he did,” she said. “I'm just saying.”
“And I'm just saying shut your varmint hole. Flynn?”
“Well, he probably wouldn't like it — he definitely wouldn't like it. But if he was alive, I'm sure I wouldn't be doing it,” I said.
“If? IF? If ifs and buts were candy and nuts we'd all be Yogi and Boo-boo. What else do you like to do besides drinking fortified Kool-Aid and indulging your fanciful philosophical ruminations? That way lies calamity, boy.”
“I like to break things. Windows, flower pots, dishes, parking meters. All kinds of stuff. I liked the sound it makes and I like how it makes me feel. I think I might like to learn how to make bombs so I could break bigger things,” I said.
The bear sputtered in frustration. “Kid, listen to me. You got potential. Stop with the smashing and breaking. Make some friends. Find some interests that won't land you in jail. Go back to school. Get your shit together.”
“What business is it of yours?” I asked.
“Well, insofar as its direct effect on me, it's not. But as a fellow traveler on this earth, a resident of this park, a concerned bystander, and a large, dangerous predator, I'm making it my business. Capice?”
“Ooooh, burn,” said the lion. “Keep cracking wise, you're liable to get eaten.”
“He's not getting eaten,” said the bear. “But he is going to dance. And sing. Kid, do you like musicals? Because me and Thor over there, we like to work up little song and dance routines from the classical musicals — Showboat, Camelot, South Pacific — like that. I — we — think that if you joined us in a number, it might benefit all of us.”
Instead of answering, I stood up, slowly looked left, looked right, began tapping my foot in the dust. I cocked both arms and began the rhythmic finger snapping. The lion roared happily and took a position on my left. The bear clapped with glee and joined me on the right. We stepped forward in unison — left, snap, right, snap. “A one - two - three…”
“When you're a jet, you're a jet all the way, from your first cigarette to your last dying day. When you're a jet you're the top cat in town.
When you're a Jet, You’re the top cat in town. If the spit hits the fan, You got brothers around, You're a family man!
You're never alone, You're never disconnected! You're home with your own: When company's expected, You're well protected!
Then you are set With a capital J, Which you'll never forget Till they cart you away. When you're a Jet, You stay a Jet!”
I must say we sounded pretty damn good.
Next: I am jettisoned from the family.
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