Writing in the Raw: Shamrocks at Your Doorway

(HhD is in the raw tonight… – promoted by pfiore8)

This apartment is too clean, too sterile.  Like it hasn’t been lived in enough, or at all for that matter…

De reir a cheile a thogtar na caisleain.

It takes time to build castles.

There are definitely some signs of life here, though…and in one case, remnants of a life.  I saved the orange “funeral” placard that was on my front window during the procession that brought my best friend from the wake to his final resting place, a little fenced-in Catholic cemetary in Union County, New Jersey.  Lots of trees, lots of green.  Lots of places to sit and think.  It’s best at night…the stars make no noise.  A respite from the nastiness of the world.

I spent most of my last day in New Jersey there. I sat there, and I thought about…

… Do not stand at my grave and cry-

I am not there… I did not die…

Okay, so we’ll leave there then, man.  We’ll go back to my place again, okay?

Let’s dig much deeper…

I also saved the little card they gave us at the funeral home.  That’s hanging on my wall, too.  Right above my computer setup.  It’s got three pictures of my best friend on there.  We’re 8 years old again, and we’re playing basketball.  Then I moved back a few years later…now we’re 14, and we’re smoking up in his grandmother’s backyard.  And then in the next picture, we’re finishing up the 11th grade…neither of us really have anywhere to go after the final bell rings.  We can stay at my girlfriend’s place for a week or so at a time, maybe even tack on a few extra nights if we sneak in through the rear window after her parents and her sister are asleep.  Then we go to his girlfriend’s place.  But they fight a lot, so we find ourselves back on the street at 1 AM or so on a random weeknight.  Hey!  My mother’s talking to me again, so we can stay there for a few nights.  But never for long back in those days…

“You see my old man’s got a problem

He live with the bottle that’s the way it is”

– Tracy Chapman, “Fast Car”

No comment…

So we had to make a place for ourselves up in the wooded area just off the freight tracks.  Heh…the couch is still up there, as of this past October.  I specifically went looking for it when I was in NJ that month.  Still there.  We carried that thing…must have been half a mile from the apartment building it was out in front of, back to our spot on those tracks.

Everything else has changed, but that remains.

For whatever reason, I never saved any pictures from my childhood…or from any period of my life, for that matter.  I’ve got memories, though.  They stand in fine.  Until I start to forget things…but then I won’t really know what I’m missing anyways, right?  Right.  That’ll be a long time off, though.  Our people don’t go easily, I certainly didn’t.

One of the last times I saw my best friend was about a decade ago…I was in the hospital, slowly recovering from a filthy, dirty nasty sickness that should have killed me.  Did come thisclose, though.  I was laying in the bed there, couldn’t walk.  Couldn’t hear.  Could just barely move…my head, and that was about it.  From one side to the other.  Slightly.  I could only see who was there.  Who came.  Who cared.  He was one of the first to come visit me, and I’ll never forget that.

Didn’t have to say a word, just knowing he was there was enough.

Ni heaspa do dith carad.

There is no need like the lack of a friend.

A few months later, those roles were reversed.  I was standing over his remains, getting one final look at the vessel that used to contain my best friend.  He wasn’t there anymore, though…although I’d like to think that he saw us there, somehow…some way.

Looking down at all of us, probably laughing his ass off at me because I was the only one who showed up in a suit.  That’s definitely something he would have found funny.

“Eyes blurry

Saying goodbye at the cemetary”

– Tupac Shakur, “Life Goes On”

Okay, you knew I wasn’t gonna write about you without quoting at least a little bit from your favorite song, right bro?

Is fada an bothar nach mbionn casadh ann.

It is a long road that has no turning.

We never got to say a proper goodbye.  We talk about that sometimes.  He’s talking right now, as a matter of fact.  Only I can hear him, though.  He’s helping me write this right now, prodding me as always.

We talk about many things.  Lament the fact that we only knew each other for 16 years, and that those years were interrupted by my childhood moves.  And we also think of that whole year of his too short life, that was wasted in the “Essex County Youth House” and the “NJ Training School For Boys at Jamesburg / Monroe”.  Ha!  They tried to kill his spirit in there, but they only made it stronger.  That year did do some damage that we never could have seen, though.

Life is a strange lad.

Things happen, people change.  I made up with my family, he drifted further from his.  A year out of high school, I started at a job that I ended up staying at for 9 years.  I had a kid to feed, 50 hours a week to work…and eventually all of my ‘free time’ went towards trying to rescue my kid’s mother from the grip of a nasty heroin addiction…

“And I got a job that pays all our bills

You stay out drinking late at the bar

See more of your friends than you do of your kids

I’d always hoped for better

Thought maybe together you and me would find it

I got no plans I ain’t going nowhere

So take your fast car and keep on driving”

– Tracy Chapman, “Fast Car”

Well, I eventually did go somewhere.  But that’s another story for another time, though.  And I’m getting ahead of the storyline here, anyways…

May you be in heaven a full half hour

before the devil knows you’re dead.

Oh, my best friend was quite the wily bastard…and if there is an afterlife of some sort, I’m absolutely positive that he negotiated the best possible deal for himself…looooong before ‘they’ actually had a chance to look through his ‘books’, and make a judgment based upon his deeds…

Is gairid ar cairt ar an saol seio.

Our lease on life is short.

He got into some pretty nasty substances himself in his final couple of years, although he kept it pretty well hidden until just before the end.  By then, it was much too late to do anything.

They found him a few days short of his 21st birthday…hanging from the ceiling in the darkness of an old, cold North Jersey house that he was staying in.

We were born 8 days apart, right near the end of the 1970’s.  Hundreds of miles apart, but no matter how far we drifted away from each other at any given time…for months or years at a time…we always ended up near each other again eventually.  And now I’ll carry him around, as a part of who I am, forever.  I just hope that now he’s finally happy and carefree somewhere, enjoying good things…like he never had the chance to do while he was here amongst us.

May you see […] light on the path ahead

When the road you walk is dark.

May you always hear,

Even in your hour of sorrow,

The gentle singing of the lark.

When times are hard may hardness

Never turn your heart to stone,

May you always remember

when the shadows fall-

You do not walk alone.

I’ll try to remember that, thanks…

Because if I close my eyes, I can almost see it again.  We’re all back on Passaic Street, just off McCarter.  Years later, when I worked up there a few days a week – they called that road “21”, but we never did.  We called that our walk.  We’re just kids, killing time whatever way we could.  Beer, weed…whatever it took.  We’d make a right a few blocks later, head up Park or Bloomfield.  Into Branch Brook Park.  Or walk left down Broad, and head downtown.  Under the highway, past the train station.  The huge boarded-up Westinghouse plant.  A few years later, Rick Cerrone and a few other folks built a baseball stadium for the Newark Bears across the way.  I just happened to do some work on that, as it turned out…

And we’d stop at a payphone…one or two calls, we got a place to stay for the night.  Over at what’s-her-name’s place on Kinney, or Pennington, or South…or with what’s-his-face up on Ferry Street.  All else fails, we’ll split a cab up to Passaic.  Or Paterson.  My cousins were always glad to see me.  Or take the train down to Rahway, or Woodbridge.  Fams is down there, too….

I close my eyes and I’m back there again.  Even from right here, and right now as I type this.  Almost 15 years later…and way out here…3,000 miles away on the other coast.

Mikey used to be with us back then, as well…more often than not.  But he’s gone now, too.  Somebody’s gun took him away from us a few years later.  Again, another story for another time…

Is tuisce deoch na sceal.

A drink precedes a story.

Well, this drink succeeds a story.  And I really need one right about now….

So here goes.  A Broken Halo IPA, and I’m raising it to all of youze…

Here’s to keeping on, one foot in front of the other…steadily moving forward.

I’m still here, and I’m gonna love every fucking minute I have left…

Slainte!

And, of course…

Athbhliain faoi mhaise duit!

A prosperous New Year!

To you all, and bring on the last weekend of 2007!

Who wants to dance with me?

🙂

– HhD

12.27.2007