song on a dogday moon

I was born in 1948. I did not awaken, however, till my third year, when I found myself living with my family on the grounds of the Veterans Administration Hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts. I clearly recall that I ran free, a puppy at the fairgrounds, during the time we lived there. There were wild cats in the dark-pathed woods, a field of strawberries I picked and sold for comic book money and 5 cent Cokes, and secrets held within the brick walls where my father worked. My older brother, Kevin, was involved in a mysterious place called "school," and I developed an affinity for innocent but costly mischief for which I was ultimately required to go to nursery school at neighborhood insistence. There I met the strangest children, and my underwear kept falling down. I remember once that a group played doctor, and I did not participate, but I did see some girl's ass. The teacher pinned my underwear. I was younger than the others, and I don't remember having any friends there really.

My friends at home were an older boy named Twiggy and Maura O'Leary. Maura pissed in the woods one day and I watched and I was not to tell her father which I did as soon as I saw him. (Oh Maura, you pissed so lovely I wish I were four with you in the woods again.) Twiggy was another issue. He pelted me with rocks and sexually manipulated me in ways that were well beyond my understanding. That taught me fear.

My father learned one day that he was going to have to get a doctorate to continue working at the VA. That meant moving. I remember the night we left, packed up in that '48 Chevy where I lay like Lenin-in-State on the shelf beneath the rear window. Mr. O'Leary gave me a taste of his Schlitz beer before we drove off into the fat summer darkness towards Syracuse, New York.

What I remember of Syracuse are huge snow sculptures at the University, a hill that seemed filled with snakes, my girlfriend, an old army fort with arrows and feathers on display and with an outhouse with no tissue, kindergarten, and polio. My girlfriend was a twin with Irish setter hair, and we walked wordlessly through the fields behind our homes with our arms flexed around one another. I soon became so ill that my parents had me sleep in their room, and I ended up at the hospital. Memories of my convalescence are hazy and dusty, but I do remember being held down by five nurses while a spinal tap was administered to confirm my illness. That taught me pain.

I was the fastest case on record, and my picture was put in the newspaper. I had on a black cowboy hat in the picture, and grinning nurses stood on each side of me holding cap guns pointed at my head. I was angry that they wouldn't let me take any of my baseball cards home. I was also angry that one of the nurses holding a gun had been mean to me but still got to be in the picture.

My father finished his studies over a relatively short time, so we packed to move again. On our way to our ultimate destination, we stopped for a visit in Northampton. Kevin and Dusty Hoffman arranged a fight between me and Twiggy in which I had no interest but which proceeded anyway. My height had increased dramatically over the prior year, and my brother and his friend considered me to be in an excellent position for revenge. The fight was mercifully brief and consisted of a simple wrestling move and Twiggy weeping hysterically without a blow being thrown. I was the obvious winner, but I ran down from the hill where we fought in inexplicable terror with Kevin and Dusty calling after me.

My first year in Stoughton was delicious. In a sweltering heat in the first July, there was a nuclear blast not far from our humble slab ranch. I ran down Pearl Street and learned that the cracking explosion heard for miles was the entire roof of a factory being blown off and not really the end of the world. I don't recall being either afraid, disappointed, or relieved. In late summer, Hurricane Carol created a lovely pond at the end of our street where we swam and splashed with abandon. We sucked popsicles from the ice cream truck like hummingbirds.

My best friend lived next door. Jack was born cool. At one point, we involved ourselves in filching various cleaning fluids and any other liquids that would burn and trotting off into the woods to ignite little pools of the substances to satisfy simple curiosity. Our favorite flame color was blue. Jack's mother got wind that we were setting fires in the woods, and she confronted us about it. We denied it. We walked back and forth outside the screen door complaining to each other that anyone would think us capable of such reckless behavior. Our performance was so convincing or cute that Jack's mother came to the door with visible tears and said that she knew we boys had not really set any fires.

What I remember of early school is being eager to start and then being far more eager to get out. I liked the boys I got to chum around with: Eric, Larry, Roger, Bud, John, Joe, Bob, Rick, Dick, Bob, Eddie, Wes.... I wrote stories for the class in the 4th grade which I read every morning but which weakened to the point that I stole a "Father Knows Best" episode just to keep the ball rolling---someone in the class spotted my obvious theft, but the teacher hushed the criticism.

That summer in July, two brothers who lived up the street were murdered at Field Park in Brockton. My brother and I and two other brothers became honorary pall bearers wearing our little league uniforms. We stood by white caskets in the funeral home for a picture that became the whole front page of the Record-American. The murderer was arrested. He was 19. He had killed the boys with a "Mexican knife" and burned their bodies. His mother was insane, and he was insane. The whole town seemed to convulse with sympathy for the boys' parents. That taught me evil.

When I was 10, my father saved my life, or at least part of it. I got my tongue stuck on the freezer in the refrigerator. My father heard me yelping and groaning like a seal from where he was working upstairs. He ran down into the kitchen and quickly grabbed two handfuls of warm water that was sitting in the sink and threw it over my head and down my face. It still makes me squirm to think of how I would have freed myself if my father had not been home. I probably would still be there.

I started a one-man newspaper in the 5th grade, and a few others started competing papers. Bob was a better artist than I, and I liked his paper better than my own. Bob drew a political cartoon with a likeness of the principal with his head in a toilet and his hand on the handle captioned "goodbye cruel world." My passion was baseball, and I was to become the fastest and the wildest pitcher my peers would ever face. Football was also great fun, all grass stains and cool sweat.

In the 7th grade, I decided to do an assigned paper on the subject of communism. I looked at all the books and pictures at the library, but I don't recall my paper as being very good. It did inspire me to start a club with six of my friends: the Mad Blundering Bolsheviks (MBB). I was Premier Clancikov in our small hierarchy with Russianized names, membership cards, and membership coins stamped "What me worry? I read Pravda" that Bob made up at Paragon Park. One of my friends had to resign from the club when his mother became concerned that we would be investigated by the government. Our activities consisted mainly of smoking cigarettes at secret locations, theorizing about sex, and making match bombs with nip bottles stuffed with the heads of wooden matches (beautiful spitfires in the sandpiles at night). We actually did get busted after a short time when the manager at the supermarket noted the extent of our wooden match purchases. There were also 10,000 match sticks behind the shed at the public works yard ominously close to the diesel gas pump. Joe was the one to get nabbed, and he spilled every one of us before leaving on vacation. The police interrogation was a textbook good cop/bad cop routine with the good cop just barely carrying the day.

I kissed girls, and hugged, and felt ten feet tall with crushes on pony-tailed pretty faces on streetlit nights in early summer. High school was a blur of new experiences. I achieved athletic prowess in football and track, but I had no intense interest in the subjects being crammed at us except for math. My main interests were in girls and sports. Before tongue-kissing and petting under fogged windows and alcohol and fretting over menstrual cycles---I remember Karyn. She made my forehead flush whenever I saw her. She was blonde and cute as a puppy in the rain. I walked cold miles to her house after school, and I would have walked farther. We sat in the deepening afternoon dark on her couch in the cool dying sunlight and kissed soft kisses and told each other "I love you." (Oh Karyn, I will always love you when I was 15....) That taught me love.

I did well in school academically despite other interests. At my father's incessant urging, I was also president of the senior class. My father had grandiose aspirations for me. I was shy and chronically felt out of place, but others seemed to think it was an act and that I was a cute show. With a sudden inspiration born of the desire not to do physics homework, I wrote our class night play. "West School Story" was filled with inappropriate political foolishness I picked up in one of my classes and required considerable editing by others, and I ended up playing the part of a dog with howling coming from behind the curtain because I was too bashful to howl for myself.

I reported to college early to play football, but I found sport to be far less fun when you are not counted among the elite, and I did not complete the season, though one of my team mates did dub me "Zardo the Wonderdog." Really, I felt more like the hunchback of Holy Cross. Courses were sometimes interesting if over-paced. I lost my religion and had a cryptic inspiration to major in philosophy to recapture my hopelessly Catholic sense of devotion. (I also wanted to explore every steaming inch of my Protestant girlfriend at home with no interference from a Jesuit confessor.) I remained terminally homesick and became a weekend alcoholic, a habit that would only be moderated with the advent of marijuana. I went home nearly every weekend to hang with my familiar friends. I often felt isolated at school, though I had trysts and infatuations. I was haunted by recurrent bouts of depression (a cycling black melancholy that tracks me to this day).

Over sophomore summer in July, I was just getting home from my factory job when a cab pulled into the driveway. The driver gave my mother a telegram. She opened it, read, and screamed. Kevin had crashed his plane on a carrier and gone down in miles-deep water in the Gulf of Mexico. His sacred whisper, lost at sea. I was 19, and I had finished my ration of innocence. That taught me grief.

For my senior year, a friend and I decided to live off-campus. We moved furniture, got an old refrigerator from my home, and set up a cheap little apartment. I wallpapered around my bed with the National Enquirer. My friend did not last, as his girlfriend moved up and they got a place of their own. A recent transfer student was looking for a place, so Hank moved in. Studies went well, and I applied for naval OCS to cover my ass from Viet Nam. Hank's father was a physician, and at one point Hank made his supply of benzedrine that his father had given him available to me. Boy, did I get deep into the books I read. My ebb mood lifted like helium, my thoughts reached upward like flames, and I felt like a rich man. I don't remember how many of the pills I took, but I know it was far too many. I met a new girlfriend at home, Janis, and I think I was slowly changing at that time.

In February, Hank, Jeb and I took a ride to New Orleans for the Mardi Gras. With benzedrine, I drove from Worcester to New Orleans stopping only for gas. I have amnesia. The Mardi Gras was a drunken gas. I have amnesia. I do not remember the ride home.

The next few weekends I spent with Janis. We were wildly infatuated and talked of marriage and children. I got an acceptance letter from OCS. A few days later, as I walked up the hill to the student center at school, I suddenly felt different. Multiple initials Janis had written on an envelope I was studying as I walked started to spill out obvious and infinite meaning. My thinking took on a magical quality. Everything seemed humorous despite the cycling pathos of life, and I was convinced that the final redemption of the world was at hand. That night Janis came down from Westfield and I called just about everyone I knew to come to a party. I bought 15 bottles of wine with my tax refund and centered myself in a celebration. The next morning I made loud love to Janis where others could see and hear. I then made love to an old girlfriend and had Janis do the same with another young man. It was insane. I was insane.

I managed to get myself arrested that night, and I was sent to Westboro State Hospital for observation. I remember the details of the following months with chilling precision:white coats, seclusion rooms, and injections of Thorazine. I gave the other patients names: Johnny Appleseed, Billy the Kid, King Lear, Goneril and Reagan, David Balfour, Prince Hal, Dagwood, Telemachus, Magdalene---really, they were either drug-dependent, war-crazed, soon-to-be convicted felons, malingering-to-avoid-being-convicted-felons, schizophrenic, alcoholic, depressed, terrified, or manic like me---and I, Hamlet, wove them all together into a God-safe delusion.

When the mania broke...a frightening depression quickly festered, and I was to be plagued by guilt and shame. I was terrified that I would go completely insane and spend the rest of my life in the back ward of a hospital. My depression would last for a year after discharge while I worked at a factory on the night shift and played solitaire during the day---always with the beast panting down my neck. That taught me madness.

Depression lifted when I began using amphetamines again the following year. (It took me 20 years to realize the connection between drugs and my manic episodes.) Mania gradually drew closer again, then stalked and seized me. Another ticket to the bin, or the "wacky shack," or the "candy slammer," as I called the institutions that then passed for mental health facilities. The most memorable features of this episode: offer of a job in a band by Bo Diddley, who must have mistaken my mania for charisma; arrest at gunpoint while playing the organ in the local Catholic church; and commitment to a hospital where my mother walked the grounds.

There would be days when the past would pulse in soft waves, and memories that nourish would sweeten the aftertaste of discontent.

The next couple of years I worked at factories and in construction. I swilled alcohol, smoked dope, but amphetamines were mercifully unavailable. I started working in construction through a friend of my father. On mornings the crew met at Al's Store and ate runny egg sandwiches with coffee before driving off to the inner city for the digging, lugging, and swearing that made up a day's work. The crew was a comic book cast of drug casualties, faint-hearted criminals, and incredible laboring behemoths. I worked most closely with Zeke, and he told me his wife had taken several shots at him as he fled through the back door of his house one time. He joked about the whistling sound of bullets zipping over his head in the woods. Zeke and his wife both looked like movie stars.

On a day in July when I was 23, I decided not to go to work, and without any plan or even forethought I loaded my VW van and moved out of my family's home to Cape Cod where an old friend, Bill, was living on an island in Pleasant Bay. He let me stay with him and his brothers for a month until I found a place. We made the rafters sing in that cabin during my God-sick year on the Cape, and our guitars danced in the flicker of kerosene light. Those were bitchin' days. The dogday moon howled in harmony. Susan and I half-loved each other in the halting measures of past disappointment. I did physical work that left me sweetly drowsy at night. And then the rows to the island at night with luminous strokes and the gorgeous breezes with salt and low tide and wildflowers in silver-lit white pine shadows...(Oh Maura, you pissed so lovely I wish I were four with you in the woods again.)...that taught me beauty. (Oh Karyn, I will always love you when I was 15....)