Explosions in the sky

Alcohol, tobacco, and fireworks in America

Image copyrighted Shuttershot45.

When I was in college there was a house called The Crib that was one of many gross college-guy houses that hosted shows throughout the week. It was the kind of place where the rent is cheap and everything stays broken because no one wants to replace what will inevitably break again this semester or next. I came to know all the guys that lived at The Crib, which wasn’t just a place but a scene and as such had hangers-on, girls and guys who had no place to be since many had stopped going to class and were in the beginning stages of committing to doing nothing besides taking spontaneous trips to Florida that never quite lined up with the way the semesters broke. It took a few instances before I realized that going to Florida was code for sunny, deluxe, inpatient rehab, something patently unattractive to me as a native Floridian who always felt it was prison enough, sober or not.

The front door at The Crib was always unlocked and often open. A completely carpeted house with a carpeted basement all of which was always ashy and wet with alcohol coming to room temperature and evaporating, leaving little circles of condensation in the waves of the fibers along with color from whichever liquids got spilt over the years, an entire biome painting a visual history of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs onto the rug. I went to The Crib dozens of times and don’t remember a single occasion in which someone wasn’t drinking, usually out of a 40 of Mickey’s or Old English or else a jug of wine, a microbrew emerging if someone felt rich.

The place was basically a multiracial mostly sausage-fest with many smart, disaffected kids getting extremely fucked up and talking music, philosophy, film etc. One such alum would go on to help NASA figure out how to mathematically compensate for warbling between the web of geosynchronous satellites that keep time for us down here on Earth. But back in college he was just another alcoholic with a high IQ who had been sexually abused as a kid and played in emo and hardcore bands. An archetype that passed through the house over the generations of kids who crashed there as it aged and patinated across the calendars. There were lots of soon-to-be downwardly mobile suburban kids, guys who had done stints in foster care, and a few socially anxious biracial kids who were extremely popular and never happy despite having infinite girls they could kick it to. For a long time the house was unkillable despite the fact that many who passed through would die untimely deaths. Every few years, I’ll learn about more as smoky, washed out Polaroids appear online with messages like, “I love you, bro,” and “I’m so sorry.”

I was way too good of a kid to live there, which is one of the things that keeps me alive today and, while I wasn’t a hanger-on, I would come through on occasion especially when they hosted their monthly reading series in the basement. Sometimes people were billed on photocopied flyers but each instance had hours of undiscerning open-mic. Co-eds slurring fortune cookies of trauma into the wee hours, all possessing the one common quality that they be extremely moving for the speaker and torturous for everyone else. My friend Miles was one such guy. Smart, bearded, and depressed, except he actually had talent both for poetry and music. Under other circumstances, I’d link a video of him performing a song that would make many a lady’s heart sink but he didn’t ask to become the subject here and I’m not about to ask.

There’s this one poem of his he used to read that I’ve only heard a few times but, as I write this twenty years in the future, I can still remember the final image. Miles is bent over in a boat where the floor is littered with the remains of two 30-racks. A bottle rocket sits in the center of his asshole, waiting to be lit and shot into the night sky. With a flick of the lighter, the rocket sings, exploding into smoke for all to see. Miles is now a teacher and someone I haven’t seen in a decade but I can still see him drunk, holding a cigarette, describing the anticipation and the show of what was most certainly an autobiographical work. I’ve seen him moon people many times before but the only time I see The Supernova is when I think about him reading.

During my freshmen year, around the time I started going to The Crib, I got word a teacher from my high school had died. Chaperoning a trip, no less. Teddy was probably over 400 lbs and everyone kind of assumed he had had a heart attack or stroke even though he was only 32. While I’m sure his size was most of the cause, it turned out his pancreas ruptured and he died either on the way to the hospital or shortly after getting there.

Teddy was a big fat ginger with a 1,000 IQ who was unapologetically into Star Wars, obscure music from the 70’s, playing all kinds of instruments (like tuba, trombone and recorder), and jousting with some kind of martial arts stick that felt like the kind of implement you’d meet on Locked Up Abroad.

While it’s not my strong suit, if I were going to write a poem about Teddy, I’d show him jousting, hitting me with this massive wooden stick when he was allegedly tasked with maintaining our welfare outside our parents’ homes, or shoving a whole McDonald’s hamburger in his mouth just to show he could. I might write about the way we’d both play in the annual 4th of July band at the golf course in the suburb where we grew up, ripping fat chords as fireworks rained over miles of fresh cut grass and snakes of hotdog-and-hamburger smoke slithered through the air and up your nose. I might write about Teddy reading fantasy novels or even his demise, dying in pain on the way to a hospital in the middle of Central Florida and whether he knew what was happening to him or not. While a pancreas is not a bottle rocket, people really love a grand finale, a dramatic ending and final image they can link to a feeling before it’s over.

While I never saw him shoot a bottle rocket from his ass and I’m not quite sure how it would have worked out logistically, I do have a very distinct memory of Teddy that sticks out. Teddy was, as I said, a big nerd who liked old things both prestigious and niche. He had a huge head and it was filled with every fact that ever was, twice, and then some. While not exactly a niche thing, most kids don’t really vibe with tubas or orchestral music all that hard but for Teddy they were just categories of things in an endless string of categories that were just as arbitrary and ridiculous as the opinions one might have on them. He may have been a loser to many but to me and a handful of other kids, he really was larger than life. He had so much brains and so much feeling, it felt like it had no other place to go.

It turned out that when Teddy was a kid he went to the very same school where he was teaching us. And as it turned out, he didn’t have a lot of friends. Not with the kids his own age enrolled alongside him. But little Teddy liked music and used to hang out with the janitor and the music teacher, so much he would go to school early just to be somewhere and would stay far later than needed. A generation on, and here we were, a handful of kids who were also weird and played bass or flute or trombone and we would show up early and stay late just to have a place to be. Over and over people see relationships between masters and those they keep, and over and over again people think the masters choose their flock when it’s usually the other way around.

I mention it from time to time but you can probably tell by this point that I was a fat nerd too and, even though I’m now a jacked guy with a house and a wife, I still have love for big, tubby dorks. They’re funnier than pretty much everyone else and, for that, they will always be mi gente.

But fat nerds are also romantics. For starters, fantasy novels are basically romance + space lasers. But you can also tell by seeing the way some really resent hot women, who they often outcompete intellectually while simultaneously getting dismissed by cliquish ladies and horny guys dying to defend their honor while pretending their opponent has none. Teddy’s arch nemesis was another teacher who had also been enrolled as a student when Teddy was. She was a pretty woman with thick legs and a ponytail who coached cheerleading and married a super jacked Aryan who taught math. No one who’s been to high school themselves would be confused why they weren’t best friends.

But as fun as it would be to write about the hot cheerleading coach with the noble haunches for my 4th of July piece, this is for Teddy and Miles and all the guys who are good with words and music, who get jammed into performing for people as schoolteachers and chaperones but rarely ever get their due or live to hear about it. Remember, when you’re being nice or mean or affectionate, that just because you aren’t famous doesn’t mean you never changed anyone’s life.

I mentioned a specific memory of Teddy sticking out to me all these years on and it would probably make good material for a poem if I ever get around to writing one. The memory goes like this. In the weeks following September 11th, 2001 we had an assembly at my high school. We did all the usual things you do like setting the flags to half-mast and holding a moment of silence, but at this assembly we watched a slideshow Teddy put together for us. It showed pictures of people killed in the attack interspersed with slides describing the history of fanfares and the specific history of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.”

Fanfares, it explained, are musical compositions played to herald the arrival of important figures. They were saved for royalty, generals, aristocrats but not the type of thing anyone commissioned for regular people. To make a point, I’ll contrast the genre with folk/rock songs like Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” or Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” which describes the realities of war visited upon the Americans who lacked capital and connections:

Some folks are born made to wave the flag

Hoo, they're red, white and blue

And when the band plays "Hail to the chief"

Ooh, they point the cannon at you

But “Fanfare for the Common Man” is an instrumental written in 1942, decades before CCR and the conflict in Vietnam. Rather than centering themes on the abundantly negative aspects of war, the idea behind “Fanfare” is that the men who fought World War II were both common and worth valorizing. That these men would go on to shape the world.

Writing a fanfare for regular people was not about the disillusionment of war that solidified as the century marched on. It was a tribute to the grit of everyday people. A music teacher, a janitor, a soldier, a guy who shoots rockets from his ass, and office-workers who cluelessly walk into their jobs, punch the clock, and end up buried under a Bible verse of rubble. In previous eras men had kings but no lightsabers; in the coming years democracy would harness atoms in ways that would make The Death Star look quaint. Either way, the idea was that the common man kept civilization going, not because we were a country of cogs in a machine but because we shared a vision and set of beliefs about self-governance and nationhood. Here in the future, we have our doubts. But I can still see the flag waving. I can see the faces of the victims. And I can hear the horns swell around my ears. It was only a PowerPoint in a cafeteria but it was a whole ass vibe, as the kids say.

I think about regular people a lot, the same kinds who died on 9/11, and that’s who I’m thinking about now. Even people who annoyed me at this or that job I’ve worked, I always end up missing them. When they aren’t around to bug you, you inevitably miss them bugging you. Even nuisance can give pattern and pulse to your life.

And now, twenty years later without either of these guys in my life, I still wonder about Teddy’s last drive and Miles at sea. When Teddy felt his pancreas burst, did he know he was at the end of the road? As he raced to the hospital and took his last breaths, did he know he’d have an elegy before 33? And when Miles was three sheets to the wind and face down in the boat, how did it feel to have all eyes on him? Not a king. Not a general. Just a regular guy with a Bic and an idea. Did he know when he was smoking and slurring his words, that I’d be able to see him send this thing off? When the flint connected and the flame licked the fuse: One last explosion over the sea.