Dune

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sand_Dunes_National_Park_and_Preserve 

Part of the allure of the west for me was that I had never seen it before. It was true: the very first time I "saw" Colorado was the night we drove up to a hotel in Boulder, and it was the dark of a rather recently settled west, which meant there were almost no lights. I couldn't see a thing. I asked Dave once or twice while we were on the highway if we would be able to see the mountains at all, even in the dark, and he laughed at me, saying that the mountains were facing his direction and not my side of the van. Oh. The next morning gave me no better clues about the landscape, because a blizzard had hit the area overnight, blanketing everything in a deep white snow that sparkled painfully in the bright desert sun. "Welcome to Colorado!" He laughed at me as we dug out the old gray van (a.k.a."The Rat") from the light powdery snow. 

Acute altitude sickness left me light-headed, queasy, and then actively vomiting. He was better with that because it mimicked his hard drinking ways, and he flattered himself into thinking that it gave me a taste of the morning sickness from pregnancy that would surely come to us one day as "marrieds". It allowed him to briefly feel like he had the upper hand over me, because his troubles were far too serious for anyone to handle outside of expert medical care, and they had failed at that, too. I knew that if he was going to stick it through, a big move like this would either shake him loose from me or give him the ballast he needed to endure serious married life with a woman like me. 

It was, in fact, exactly what I told my friends and family back home. Suffice to say, Dave was less ripe for adventure than me. Incurable brain disorders will do that to a person. Still, he was sailing on the illusion of greatness, and this was a performance opportunity for him. "Yeah", he explained to me as we swiped snow from the van, "you'll feel sick for about a day or two, but once you acclimate, it'll go away." Nowadays, I could've looked that up on the Internet in 3.5 seconds, but back then he felt that it gave him the leverage he needed to lead like a man, because he'd visited his older sister on their parents dime when she lived out there on a gated golf course community. Great. Along with the factoid about us being a mile high, thus ended Dave's supreme intellectual reign about all things western. Really, that was it.

After Dave went home, I began dating a man who was much more independent (like me), because he was estranged from his child-abusing parents by necessity. It wasn't great, but at least we could get up-and-go early in the morning, without the 12 p.m. wake-up call and grueling hours of coffee and cigarettes that Dave's manic-depression needed for him to remain sitting upright. I didn't have to sit around waiting and babysitting a man-child who would never really be fully functioning without massive support from his too tight crew of incestuous locals who also never broke away from home to explore the world. Vacation badly at a Floridian tourist trap or consistently hit an "all-you-can-eat" cruise ship buffet, yes. Real travel? No. Can't do it.

But Kent could, so we did. After so many years trapped inside a series of dark smoky rooms at night with a bunch of uneducated drunks, I felt free to roam. He was a burly sort of permanent bachelor used to being on his own, and after the cloying co-dependence of David, I found his carefree attitude refreshing. At least I was on my own again. No more playing nursemaid to a sick man. It seemed like I got away from a really bad situation cleanly, in a powerful "no harm, no foul" play that had set me completely free of a family that had never really warmed up to me. In addition to my mobility, Kent also had a great appetite for food, unlike the pale hard-drinking chain-smoker I'd just left.

We ate our way through Denver with expensive dinner dates that left me two sizes bigger than normal, but given what I'd been through with a depressed angry alcoholic, I figured I could lose the weight later, in exchange for my name and my life back. Hard as it was at the time (Denver was suffering through a skinny tan fad brought on by Californian relocatees in the millions), I knew I could bounce back from it, and slowly I did. I had my own feelings to contend with, and during a visit from my mother, she was surprised at the strength of my returning appetite. I'd spent years eating poorly or not at all with Dave, given his weird schedule of habits, and it had left me wanting. I was shocked and afraid at the ferocity of my returning hunger that seemed to never dull, and the somnolence that constantly weighed down my limbs.

The height of the mountains didn't help, either, so even though Kent and I were free to roam around and travel, I often felt too tired to do so, in sharp contrast to the 10-mile hikes I could walk in the mountains back home, even when I was loaded down with a pack. Being considered "fat" and "tired" was new to me, though my status as an outcast for this divorce was not. There was always something about me that pushed the scared conformists away, saggy as they were with their own fears. But gradually my energy returned, and with it, new life. I began ditching the car so I could walk to work instead, and we had a new dog that needed as much walking as we could stand. We hit the mountains, avoiding the obvious tourist spots for the more down-to-earth open spaces that are free to the public. 

I could feel my blood moving again, and I knew I was on the way to recovering from this most recent ordeal. Still, some trips from that time period bring it all back to me, like the sluggishness that felt like I was wading through thick muddy water during our trip to the Great Sand Dunes of Colorado. As I walked through a desert that looks much smaller than it feels after you're in it, I felt a weight sucking me down, trying to pull me in, chaining me to the sand, forcing me to take slow heavy steps, and it was a good thing, too. The desert opens up like a surreal pop-up book after that first small hill, rapidly expanding into a large full-blown desert, and that's no place for a New York girl like me to break down. I come from the water. I come from a solid place I was destined to return. I wanted to make it back home.

Miss American Pie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_%28music%29

Madness wasn't something that occurred just inside the home for me, safely tucked away behind locked, closed doors; it was everywhere I went out in the world, too. In this modern world that marks the abolition of segregation from our free society, I went to public school, like all of my friends and neighbors did, boys and girls happily included (with the occasional "Baby Jazz", too). That harmony and mature acceptance was (and still is) reflected in every environment I went into, like college, or going to the gym, or grown-up office work with my first real suit bought just for interviews as part of that special occasion, but otherwise, me and my generation formed a heterogeneous blend of mixed company wherever we went or now find ourselves in, because in "homosapien", it's a language easily understood, or so I thought. 

Baby geniuses have it rough out in the world; a wild place of limited abilities and other people's impairments, which pretty much guaranteed that sometimes the only other humans in the world who understood me in my smaller social circles of childhood were the very people who were most closely related to me through the "magic power" that is genetics; a fascinating branch of science that tells the truth about who we really are, whether we like it or not. Madness was the same way. Sure, people try to game us into thinking they're healthier than they are, but with time and experience, that window closes to ever-smaller widths all the time. It naturally limits the access people have to me, and for the truly sick, that's a frightening thought. I could be the only muthfucka on "da block" who will really help them out of the mess they're in, be it the inherited kind or not. I am a master problem-solver, but that don't always make the medicine go down smooth, know what I'm sayin'? Drunk fucks are still just that, same as any other century with Problem-People. 

Still, I've always wanted to help, much like my innate joy at all things "baby", animal and human alike. Are we not cute furry mammals? We sure are! But, much like the divorces that broke up bad marriages right around the time kids grew old enough to handle it (like junior high school age), parents began fleeing the scenes of their crimes the way baby birds leave the nest: very quickly while fattened on family funds, a kind of last-ditch-effort flight that belies the desperation felt by the fleeing parent, male or female, though as so often is the case for most native New Yorkers, that flavor is almost always of the male kind. And so we grew up a generation without any real father figures, though that was also like many other generations before us, certainly that of a lot of Acadian Métis; an ethnicity that knows their papas have limited ranges of domesticity built into their crazy boat-trippin' lifestyles, so much so that after the third or fourth month, you want them to leave anyway, so as to make their way at sea, bringing home bags filled with goodies and tales of adventure born on the high seas. 

We didn't exactly want them around full time, anyway. Ain't it time for you to catch some fishing boat off the coast? "Bring back lobster!", we shouted to their navy-clad backs and slammed doors. Whew...glad he's gone. He was becoming one ornery motherfucker! After my dad left, my friends' fathers quickly followed suit, swallowed up by the vastness that is the metropolitan New York City area. They were gone, gone, gone, baby! I adjusted quickly to it, as the lifelong realist I remain, but my friends with troubles didn't. Quick changes are disastrous to kids with mental problems, and my friends quickly broke apart like their parents did. The first one to go was my friend Molly, and it was epic. She left school with a bad case of chickenpox that happened during high school, way after we all had the disease and moved on from it, scars aside. She did not. That time period home, after her father left her mother, must have been the straw that broke the camel's back, because she came back to school pox-ridden and skittishly scared, breaking out in hysteric tears even at my less funny material. I was worried, and so were my friends. 

She began using drugs hard, moving straight from the sneaking-cigarettes-in-the-bathroom phase to sniffing coke and losing her virginity, then onto date rape in the backseat of one of our friend's car while she watched, a friend who'd already been to rehab and back by sixteen. They started getting shipped off to the relatives, those with out-of-state and -country grandparents, or (in the worst cases like Molly's) institutions way upstate, supposedly out of harm's way. I knew it was bad when she threw me under the bus with her mom for the minor infraction of pot smoking, which is about all I had done in comparison to my deflowered addict classmates, except they hid how bad it was for them from me, to use my younger inexperience as much-needed leverage in their savage working class households. Our toeholds on middle-class respectability were very fragile new ones at that. Any one of us could go back down at any time, and my less respectable friends would much rather it was me than them. 

She became one of the first people in my circle to honestly betray me, which she never apologized for, because I never saw her again after her coke addiction and promiscuity came to light. It had absolutely nothing to do with me because I wasn't around her anymore, after she successfully back-stabbed me several times. She went down on her own, like the genuinely addicted and insane typically do. One of the last times I ever saw her socially was during her tentative school attendance after her bouts with divorce and chicken pox, trying to recover her health in the newly shark-infested waters of her parents broken marriage. Like a lot of my classmates, she didn't make it out of their madness, because like most seriously sick people, her first brush with real madness came on the heels of her puberty, and she never fully regained her footing with the healthy life. I went over to her house after school, to see if she would apologize to my face for taking the hits from her mom for my supposed "fast life" of sex and drugs; me at fifteen and never been kissed, watching from the sidelines of their depression. I wanted to see how she was doing, not that she actually cared about me anymore, in the face of her much larger adult woes. 

She sat on the floor of her bedroom in a corner, rocking back and forth, asking me if I liked Doug McClean's* song "American Pie" (I didn't, and much like everything else about most of my hometown classmates, my taste in great music surpassed theirs at a much earlier age than normal, too), as she picked up the needle from her plastic kiddie 45 record player, playing the song over and over again, asking me if I heard the strange messages that she swore she heard, too. I couldn't follow her into madness during my teenage years. 
I certainly can't do it now, but I can tell you all about a young Irish/German girl named MollyAnn Dougherty who left our town seeking a cure and never returned, because that's exactly what I promised my friends I would for them when I got to the top: I would tell everyone about them, about what happened to them in their very abusive homes, so that we could break the cycle forever. This one's for you, kid.

American Pie

Don McLean

A long long time ago
I can still remember how
That music used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And maybe they'd be happy for a while

But February made me shiver
With every paper I'd deliver
Bad news on the doorstep
I couldn't take one more step

I can't remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride
Something touched me deep inside
The day the music died
So

Bye, bye Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry
And them good ole boys were drinking whiskey and rye
Singin' this'll be the day that I die
This'll be the day that I die

Did you write the book of love
And do you have faith in God above
If the Bible tells you so?
Do you believe in rock and roll?
Can music… Full lyrics on Google Play

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_McLean 

Jimmy O.D.

Years ago, I worked for a small Jewish family business in trouble. The two kids hated the business of publishing, which they tried to use for their "creative" endeavors, like screenwriting and music. It didn't work for them, because publishing is about books. And so, I was left with two spoiled "Manhattanites" who'd been told all their lives that they were gifted from their parents. Into this mess, I was charged with righting the ship of one of their Barnes and Noble imprints. It had been ditched into the gutter for being "crass" in comparison to the other Classic series of copyright-free works, which was a total joke. 

The bargain books were face-out on the shelf in every store in the nation, a fact that had become a traveling game for me. In each town, I'd look for my name on the jackets of titles I worked on, and wherever I went in America, there I was in book form, too. Because I broke my ass for two years to put it back into shape, I had a lot of pull in the company (and the industry), which gave me the power to make some tricky decisions, especially uncomfortable ones that included their family who drew income but produced no revenue. Their single daughter would sweep in from London to treat me like a Kinko's kid making copies for her, because she wanted to brag about her designer apartment that just got a write-up. Did I want to see it? They had tons of people in their lives like that, but such was the era of housewife decorators and artsy stay-at-home moms. You know the type.

When I finally conflicted artfully well with their small son over IT support (it'd been a handy weapon from Day 1 of my time), I knew I carried the whole history of desktop publishing and Mac computers with me. My enemy camp kept making petty remarks about Apple's business tactics and the inherent snobbery designers had about their corporate-sponsored trophy computers, neither of which I disputed. I pointed that out in several meetings with the enemy camp; a row of rich white men on one side, with me and my cowardly deaf mute designer on the other. She always backed out of speaking up in meetings by citing her deafness, which usually worked at stalling the machine, but not for me, because I have a deaf father. And so, when they finally realized that shutting out design and technology had dearly cost them their business edge, the son surprisingly decided it was time to finally pursue that music career full time, by touring and cutting a self-made CD, another type of business he knew I had under my belt, too.

Enter the scene one dramatic and showy character named Jimmy. The company admin gave him "advice" within my earshot about how to work me over as a client, by giving him "tips" like appealing to my Irish side and being charming, Yeah, Mick. Fooking do that. I liked Jimmy, as I typically do with my kind. He was smart, gifted, quick, and good with the older crowd who feared computers like they were boxes sent form Hell to deliberately torture them. Because he was older than me, he knew how to mock and demonize technology so that the older rich guy would cough up the dough. After all, Jimmy was a trained actor, as well as an IT guy, professional musician, lapsed Catholic, martial artist, and newly graduated fine artist.

He showed me pictures he took of his beautiful wife and classically Celtic sons: a striking "Black Irish" clan with bright blue eyes, fair skin, red lips, and dark dark hair. Yeah, I know. The boys were into Mohawk hair designs and boxing poses, which slayed me, but I wanted him to play me like a fiddle to get us what we needed, and he knew I knew the game cold. On one warm St. Pat's evening, I took the publisher's intern nephew on a long walk with me that spanned from the East 30's all the way down to Stone Street, to hear him play. It was loud brash standards (which embarrassed him a bit), but I could tell he was good. I wanted to show him support in lieu of his recent divorce, a shock that rocked him to the core.

I didn't know how bad it was until he showed up at the job with a bagel and hysteric tears, which frightened me. I told him about my own brief brush up with a marriage I'd been suckered into, but I realized it was much worse for him. His wife had done herself up buff at the gym while he worked and played around, which couldn't have meant he spent much time at home, and the kind he did was questionable at best. You don't cry onto your client's keyboard without a really bad heartache, because I paid him every penny he was worth. 

When he broke down in front of me, I knew I could either save him or lose him in that very moment. And so I did what anyone like me would do: when he bitched about his weight gain, I caught his darting red eyes, locked in on him, and told him the truth flat-out. He was in danger of something a lot more serious than a brief spat with gluttony, and he knew what I meant, because he bowed his head down for a moment. I left to get coffee in the company kitchen, and let him collect himself. By the time I came back, he'd put on a brave front with a sheepish grin. He knew I'd never fire him, but he'd embarrassed himself at work, and that was a lapse I knew he didn't do often, because I worked under the same threats as he.

After St. Patrick's Day, I only saw him once. The struggling family outfit finally let me go to "clean house", after they'd tried to use every political card they had against me. He'd done me a right turn by getting me an interview at his day job. I wasn't suited for it as a lowbrow market and I knew it, but it was good PR for me, because it let the industry know I was shopping around. I heard him gossip to the art director of a splashy photo mag there that she'd seen my portfolio with CD's. He asked her quietly: "How did it look?". She said she caught one minor error about a tiny line of 5 point copyright info placed too close to the donut whole on one disc layout (I did all my own layouts and production), but that my music creds were solid and true. I did have a famous musician or two in my book, complete with logos, booklets, cases, and all. "Shit", he said under his breath. I could see them out of the corner of my eye in his office from my vantage point in the conference room, him at his desk with her standing over him. 

The interview was over, and the next time I heard anything about Jimmy was on Facebook, because he committed suicide that winter by taking a handful of sleeping pills while home alone in Woodstock, packing up his stuff during his first Christmas alone and without his family. He'd been gracious enough to post us a good-bye photo on Facebook, with a caption below his last self-portrait that read about how tired he was, and that was the last of it. Forever.

For Jimmy 

 http://www.silive.com/obituaries/index.ssf/2011/01/james_odonnell_55.html