Another old piece. These stories are distorted by romanticized memory, at times, and others likely remember them differently. I by no means intend to insult any of the real persons that lived through this stuff with a cavalier treatment of tender recollections, or harsh description of personalities or actions. Each of us always did exactly what seemed to be exactly the right things to do at the time. And there survives much, much love, which has grown and developed like it always does, in ways we never see coming.
I'm not putting these old ones up because i'm too lazy to write new. I'll have one of those next--but some of this old stuff fits. Hope you like it.
11 May 2009
One day during the summer of 1980 my
brother David was in the hospital at Case Western Reserve University for yet another
open-heart surgery. The scene that day was dramatic I suppose, but for our
family at the time, it was in many ways just another day. The state of the
relationships between us had come to the condition that existed then because
each and every incident that had occurred in the history of the Universe had
added to that cumulative point. The way it came together then could have been
viewed as tragic, really, but we never noticed.
I don’t even remember how I got the
news that this particular episode was approaching. David’s surgery that year
was one of many—so many, in fact, that by now surgeons and academics had
written papers on his congenital condition, and even given it a polysyllabic
title. His lead surgeon, a Dr. Ankeny as I recall, had once claimed that he had
“learned more from David Bass than fourteen years of medical school.” We four
siblings had in effect grown up in the hospital, with the constant potential
for death in attendance on a daily basis. Many years would pass between that
summer and the moment I decided any of this was applicable to self-reflection,
and the sweltering summer afternoon was as present and imminently experiential
as any other I lived through during that period.
Our family seemed done that year. I
had been out of the picture for over a year. Dad had left soon after, leaving a
sour tinge in the air with those remaining, though I never blamed him. When
David queued up for one more death-defying, experimental, split-chest open-heart
surgery, Dad came back to Cleveland from Florida to put in an obligatory
appearance.
Here was a meeting that defied conventional
description. Dave, the least guilty of all our immediate family, had been deeply
affected by Dad’s exit from the filial stage earlier that year. I hadn’t seen,
or even spoken to Dad for well over a year, nor could our interactions prior to
then be described as warm and supportive. Outnumbered by angry or indifferent
family members, and perhaps less acclimated to hospitals than the rest of us, Dad
was way out of his simpler, down-to-earth element.
I showed up unannounced, with glorious
southern tart Candy Stone from Mobile, Alabama in tow, she in dirty bare feet,
nearly illegal shorts, one of those dangerous eighties tube-tops, and very red
eyes. I don’t think Dad spoke more than a half dozen words to me. His eyes told
the whole story of uncertainty, pain, and failure. Dave, fresh from surgery,
quite literally green, with a repulsive grey crust around his lips and
appending to the tubes and what not projecting from several of his orifices,
refused to see Dad. Refused to allow him in the room. Dad left unrequited to
return to his exile in Florida. I didn’t see him again for many years.
Once, David,
following the Dead tour in our Mom’s old family van showing all the effects of
the Rust Belt, with his underage Russian girlfriend, his fiddle, and a
patchouli oil manufacturing operation, got pulled over in Alabama, for sport. By
this time, David was unkempt, smelly, and obviously committing some crime
or another. The cops shook him down pretty good, but of course he had no
contraband. He has a vice or two, but the heart thing keeps him from excess. He
had that young Russian girlfriend, though, and Alabama’s finest figured they
could really hang him out to dry, (dang hippie). But she and Dave convinced the
alpha cop to let them call her mom in New York to confirm that permission had
been granted for the road trip and no heinous kidnapping was going on. The
mother spoke zero English, but somehow the girlfriend convinced the cop to
allow her to translate for her mother. Mother and daughter held a five minute
conversation about the mental acuity of Alabama cops, duly translated as an
expression of permission, and the travelers were on their way. David drawls
this story on stage in his hillbilly persona, fiddle in hand. It’s hilarious.
It seemed to
me for a long time that David was the only one of us to escape that little
bubble of anti-reality that made up our family life while we siblings were
young. Maybe he somehow managed to avoid being trapped in it in the first
place, residing only temporarily, with some sort of metaphysical pass
associated with potential imminent death. I don’t know, but years later, during
one of the high points of my own endeavor, Renaissance Paint and Remodeling, (shared with another brother), I
remember feeling jealous of David. This was a recurring sentiment, and all the
more abberant for the fact that my strongest memory of it falls during a visit
to Dave’s place in North Carolina that amounted to a just-in-case kind of deal
before a heart transplant. Whatever the rationality or fairness of my little
envy, (not real envy, mind you, but one of those little personality spikes that
one notes and passes through), David is the one of us that got away the least
damaged, and has lived his idiosyncratic dream out in full, down to the fine
print, with joy.
Mom tells a
story about my first day at school. Or maybe the second. I had asked some
question that Miss Gardner couldn’t answer, and after day two, came home
grousing about how those people were ignorant, and furthermore lazy, since no
one had even bothered to look up a response. Mom likes to carry on about how
smart her offspring are. She doesn’t usually bring up in public how warped we
can be.
Mom, we
brothers agree, bequeathed us a legacy of somewhat dubious mental processes.
She’s nuts. We all know it. She knows it. Dad knows it. The rest of her family
knows it well, and most of them recognize a common bond of familial, brand-name
insanity that we all seem to share. I expect this is a more or less common
thing among families, but I remain convinced that we are a bit stranger than
most, at least in part because of the unique circumstances we lived through.
Back in the
day, Mom’s thing was what they call control issues. The dynamic of her issues
was so complex I can’t imagine I’ll ever figure it out. Some of her personality
came to her by heredity from her mother, whom we call Mo. Much of it developed
in that crucible of stress Dave kept heated by his repeated, continuous
flirtation with death. Mom, responding to my over-the-top reaction to a pubescent
hormonal tsunami, became madly obsessive with minutiae, dividing her time among
us brothers and badgering us constantly in a fashion no one can really get
unless they have their own experience to compare. I think she and I trapped
ourselves in a sort of feedback loop that could have ended no other way.
I was out of
the house for good, by the age of fifteen, for all purposes off to lead a life
of crime, I suppose. For some years, I lived out my interpretation of the old Kerouac/Kesey/Abbie
Hoffman mythos, on the road, in the street, an utterly directionless rebel. A
good five or six years passed without more that a word or two passing between
Mom and me.
I was
nineteen when I came to Colorado Springs. The vague and unformulated manifesto
for global revolution I had worked out in my head was on hold, kept in place by
a twelve-pack of cheap beer. I had a job as an electrician, and didn’t see any
reason to change that, but we actually didn’t do much of anything but work and
drink beer that year.
One day Mom
called to say Mike, another brother, got himself in trouble again and she
expected him to “run away.” I told her to give him my number and I’d let her
know when he called. He did just a few days later, and can I come pick him up over
on south Circle.
Mike and I
spent a couple years engaging in the sort of insanity to which we had become
habituated in Cleveland. The reader will require imagination to add flesh to
the story here. The statute of limitations may prevent backlash, but I don’t
mean to poke at a bees’ nest, and it seems unlikely you might imagine anything
more extreme than what actually took place. We weren’t stupid, though, and the
business of working for wages, or relying on illicit behavior for advancement
just wasn’t good enough, so we formed a construction company and went to work. That
proved to be a trap. Maybe an extension of the weird, family trap that all of
us have discussed so deeply, without resolution.
Mike and I
had it in our minds that the working man’s habit of grousing over how
management acts is crap and that if we were going to grouse, we ought to just
take the reins ourselves. It turned out we were pretty good, too, in a lot of
ways. We worked together for the best part of twenty years, and reached moments
of national prominence in our little niche. The whole period was characterized
by more bone-crushing stress and absurd, super-human feats. We had little
breaks from the madness when we’d crash the business, which we did three times.
We were great at getting shit done, but lousy at administration in the final
analysis.
Hiring
employees in the construction business kept me exposed to the street element to
which I had become accustomed. I involved myself in various efforts to assist
folks in their low-budget struggles, imagining still that I could somehow
change the world. In fact, contrary to Mike’s primary obsession with business
success, I figured the whole pursuit as a means to some vague end involving
social revolution. For a while a religious experience had me involved with a
church effort to “reach out” to the hoodlums that used to cruise Nevada Avenue on
Friday and Saturday nights. I even managed to glean an ordination from the
Baptists, though now I suspect they’d regret bequeathing me with it. My
identification with street folks and the urge to help them rise above
conditions has never left me. Actually I’ve worked up the notion that we could all stand to rise above conditions.
Dad. I went
even longer without speaking with him than I did with Mom. He dealt with our
family’s teen-aged fulguration by folding his hand and striking out on his own.
Offered a transfer by his employer, the story goes, he told Mom, “I’d like you
to come to Florida with me, but I don’t think I can love you anymore.” No woman
in her right mind would go for that deal, and Mom didn't fall for it either.
Dad packed his company car and struck out, leaving his all-important nest egg,
and everything else, behind. When David was in the hospital again that summer,
that’s where Dad came from to visit him.
I had been
away, and I don’t recall blaming Dad for his poor dealings with the family. He
had been raised in a very old-school, European style, and he simply couldn’t
handle our ways. To this day, in spite of Dad’s expression of a taste for
“philosophy,” our conversations are often guarded, pregnant with unspoken
truths. I still don’t know his philosophy.
Last summer
Dad, my youngest brother, and I went to Montana to camp and fish, riding an
outfitter’s horses into some of the most pristine wilderness left in the lower
forty-eight. I had genuinely hoped to break the communication barrier that
stands between us, but we had to settle for hugs and meaningful silences, for
the most part. Dad still plays with his cards pressed tightly to his chest,
flashing a look of panic if the conversational waters begin to threaten him
with submersion. I guess he can’t swim.
Dad’s
experience, it seems to me has also been different from the norm, though I’m
uncertain that any human being matches that mythical standard. His family,
unlike Mom’s which fought in the Revolution, was barely American. They were
proud American citizens, but their traditions came from old Europe, and they
still lived communally on the old Bass farm as they had done for a thousand
years.
During my
childhood, whenever David was out of the hospital, we’d spend weekends at the
farm with the scene looking very much like something from an era that had long
since passed in this country, all Dad’s siblings and extended family eating
together, playing cards, children roaming the grounds like Huck Finn. It was
all rather idyllic, truly, and the moment Grandma Bass died and the farm
disappeared under a layer of vulgar office towers marked the shift from one
childhood to another.
Dad’s life
since then became an effort to recreate those years. His brother and sister had
never left the farm. Even when his brother Paul married and had a child, he
stayed there on Rockside, as the place was known. I think that scene served as
an anchor for my Dad, and when he retired, impressively early despite having
suffered huge financial setbacks, he bought his own farm, secluded and sylvan,
and moved his socially inept brother and sister in with him.
Paul was a
very strange dude. Throughout his lifetime he suffered from some sort of
condition that caused him to wobble quite a bit and to mumble when he spoke,
like a cartoon character. I still have no idea what the actual condition
was--it was never discussed in medical terms, and Paul worked, loved, laughed,
and lived in a fashion perfectly suited to him. He represented another unusual
facet of our lives that never seemed unusual to us, simply because it just had
always been what it was. During his declining years, Paul became more and more
difficult to live with, his condition developing into a matter that caused him
to actually require care, rather than merely one engendering bemusement. He
became cantankerous, incontinent, and dangerous to himself, given his refusal
to use a cane. Dad actively cared for him, there on the new farm, forty-five
minutes from a paved road, until he died a few years ago.
I couldn’t
make the funeral, but I spoke to Dad on the phone as he was back in the city
making arrangements. I told him I thought his dealings with Paul were among the
most impressive and moving things I had ever seen. I still see it that way. The
conversation, which lasted no more than ten minutes I guess, may have been the
deepest we’ve ever shared.
For the past
eight or nine years every Sunday, so long as I’m in town, I give away food we
cook up to whomever we can get to come up to the Colorado College campus and
sample our fare. Often our guests are homeless or dirt poor, but we’re not so
much stipulating low economic clout as a qualifier. We’ll feed anyone. Dick
Celeste, college president, former governor of my home state, Ohio, and once ambassador to
India, comes now and then. He’s a friend, and I visit him at his home, during
party season at CC. Arlo Guthrie came down to our basement kitchen once--I put
him to work washing dishes. Many of the crowd I see every week are chronic
though, plagued by demons I surmise to have been born in conditions similar to
mine as a youth. I’ve occasionally contemplated the accusation of “enabling”
bad behavior that people toss my way once in a while, but many of our regulars,
some of whom I’ve known for twenty-five years, are simply never going to
approach any sort of productivity. They are too extraordinarily damaged,
and as the proverb goes, there, but for the grace of God, go I.
The
Christian experience I mentioned earlier was a reflection, or maybe an
extension, of spiritual drives I always apprehended. I pursued it heartily for
a time, beginning my adult involvement with the sort of hands-on charity our
Sunday college-drivenkitchen represents, in a Christian context. The Church always felt skewed
to me though, and a couple years’ studying of the questions involved convinced
me to adopt thinking anathema to most of my Christian friends. The exclusionary
thinking shared by many church folk, in turn, began to seem anathema to me.
Something
about my family and its ability to weather long, rending forces, becoming over
time a stronger entity for all its roiling turbulence, seems to me akin to the
aspect of the human condition that produces the wrecked lives that bring folks
to visit me on Sunday afternoons. Further spiritual thinking--some would say
metaphysical thinking--concerning Chaos and Oneness has encouraged me to feel
like the separation between me and the crowd I serve is illusory in some
indefinable fashion. When members of our family passed through periods during
which we found it necessary to step back from one another, the bonds that hold
us together never broke, and the etheric bonds between my soup kitchen crowd
and me, and ambassadors or presidents, don’t seem breakable either. We all seem
to share certain common struggles, differences arising simply from disparate
approaches, variant perspectives. Our family, it turns out was never what we
imagined it ought to be, but perhaps something greater, and more viable, after
all.
Part of my
mission in ditching the construction business for more cerebral and perhaps less
lucrative pursuits at an age when many of my peers in the building industry are
thinking of golf courses and retirement comes from a belief that the
differences in individuals are reconcilable. Feeding people is necessary, but
falls short of bridging the apparent expanse between souls. I still want to
change the world, even though I understand the futility of such a grandiose
notion. Utopians always fail. But I expect that each time some failure becomes
apparent, we can learn a little something, and maybe the next day we can fail a
little better.
No account
of self-examination is ever going to be complete. I won’t be asserting anything
about how I’ve come full circle. Our family will never return to the conditions
of my childhood. Nor is the new generation my brothers and cousins and I have
brought into the world a retread of old lives. I haven’t even touched on my own
experiences as head of a new family, but my children live lives vastly
different from their forbears, and even though I rather hope they can avoid
some of my mistakes, I suspect they’ll be making many of their own. It seems to
be in their genes to require hard lessons. But, like my tortured friends in
line at CC on Sunday mornings, or those in my circle equally tortured but
accustomed to fine linens, whatever they may suffer holds its own value.
We all learn
what we must learn. Life is perfectly safe. Its lessons are self-taught, but
deep. I genuinely plan to write a real memoir and a family history, for my
kids’ sake, but by the time we come full circle, it’s too late to write about
it.
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