Sad news from the old home front this week, as my long-ago classmate and long-time friend and teammate Jeff Burroughs has moved into the big AV in the sky. And though our paths haven't crossed in many years, my mind is yet infused with the magic elixir of enduring memories of your too short sojourn in this realm, Jeff.
As I recall, you were always smiling, a fox-like grin in spite of circumstance, calamitous banality, or expanding evil. You knew, Jeff, how to measure your powder in anticipation of the final barbarian charge. Yours was a quiet, noble strength that reminded our dwindling band of snarling panthers that we were right in never submitting to the asphalt abyss that is the modern world. We fought, we fight, we'll never stop fighting. Thank you for being a friend, Jeff, as remembered in four parts.
Once on a foggy school morning in the eighth grade domes you yawned and asked me, “Did you see Benny Hill last night?” Benny who? “Benny Hill, the English comedian.” Never heard of him. “Oh man, he's hilarious.” What time is he on? “Eleven thirty on KQED.” You stay up that late? “On school nights, yeah. Don't you?” I'm asleep by nine. “You'd like Benny Hill. He does silly skits, and sings stupid but smart songs. Plus there are girls in bikinis and blouses that are too small and stuff.” Like in their underwear? Jeff smiled: “Last night was a Russian lady in a fur hat trying to make a phone call to a cabbage farmer while taking a bath in a cauldron of potato soup.” That sounds pretty good, I admitted. “Plus some Three Stooges-type pranks.” I love the Three Stooges. “Yeah, I thought so.” I still can't believe you stay up that late. “Yeah, usually I fall asleep during Monty Python, which starts at midnight.” I was incredulous. How could he be awake, let alone upright at a flimsy desk, while the formidable Miss Wallis discussed the importance of new world sugar in the dynamics of the slave trade?
A couple of years later, outside the post office, which was beside Jeff's grandmother's house in downtown Boonville, I was preparing to treat myself to an icy cold bottle of RC Cola at Reuben's Market, when I saw Jeff lugging a small wicker basket. I asked if was going on a picnic. “Even better,” Jeff said, opening the lid to his carry-with. Inside were several freshly caught trout. He pulled out the largest. “Eight and a half rainbow.” The Navarro? He grinned, “Nah, up on Jimmy Creek, on the Johnson Ranch.” Towards Ukiah? “Yep.” There's water in the streams up there? “Plenty. You gotta hike up, fish the ripples along the way. Wherever there's a small pool below a rock or two, the fish like to rest there, in the cool, where the water's still moving.” How deep's the water? “About two feet at most.” I can't believe there are fish that big in water so shallow. Jeff motioned at the day's catch: “Imagine how it used to be.”
In basketball, Jeff was an excellent shooter, and a teammate since third grade. But in all the hours of bouncing balls and skidding soles and teeny-bopper cheerleader cries in bandbox gyms from Leggett to Laytonville, what I remember most is a pre-game moment in the Boonville locker room. The year would have been 1982-83, and our pre-game music was usually a mix of Kool and the Gang and English Beat, with maybe some Greg Kihn, .38 Special, and Whitesnake thrown in for small town flavor. Remember this is before the world went crazy, before Bluetooth, the iPhone and digital music, so we had to physically change cassette tapes inside the boom box if we wanted to modulate the soundtrack. Jeff, being Jeff, which is to say polite, asked if he could play a song. Of course. I mean, it's not like the rest of the team was Attila the Hun when it came to setting the vibe (at least not yet). Jeff chose ELO's “Showdown.”
Bad dreamer, what's your name?
Looks like we're ridin' on the same train
Looks as though there'll be more pain
There's gonna be a showdownAnd it's rainin' all over the world
It's rainin' all over the world
Tonight, the longest night…Now my heart is turned to stone again
There's gonna be a showdown
Save me, Oh, save me
It's unreal, the suffering
There's gonna be a showdown…
Not exactly Bill Haley and the Comets urging us to rock around the clock, but maybe a little Schopenhauer at the OK Corral set to some far-out synthesizer and strings was just what the doctor ordered. He could have chosen a more upbeat ELO hit, like “Turn to Stone” or “Sweet Talkin' Woman,” but Jeff was Jeff; and thus we were injected with electric lights sonically flaring in orchestral symmetry.
Another Time in the Great Amorphous, when I was visiting FOB Deepend, I saw Jeff outside the Navarro Store. He was going somewhere, and I was going someplace else, but we chatted for a minute in the shadows of the redwoods as log trucks wheezed past on 128. Jeff said that he'd just gotten back from a train trip to Arkansas or some such foreign land; I think a girl might have been involved. He said at nights when most of the other passengers were asleep he'd climb up to the top of the observation car and sit beneath the glassed-in ceilings and walls. In some places rolling along the long forever the prairie stars were so big, that he thought he was dreaming. He said that America was right here, and experienced in the proper way it was full of magic and wonder and everything else they try to drum out of you in the 9 to 5.
That might have been the last time I saw Jeff, I can't say for sure. Because you rarely know when it's going to be the last time you see someone, or roll through a small town you used to play baseball in, or feel the brace of the Pacific Ocean on a bluff in Mendocino, with the setting sun dancing off the wavetops and the little gym on the hill, and the cypress trees, and Jeff smiling from his observation deck, watching all the beautiful things roll by. Even when, as the song goes, it's rainin' all over the world.
Thanks for sharing. Beautifully written.