Rock-N-Roll Tee

I spent some of my days in high school tripping on hallucinogens. Some of those days I was most likely wearing a rock-n-roll tee: either Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, The Rolling Stones or the Doors. If not, I would’ve been sporting my high school football jersey, the yellow one with 35 in black (the practice jersey) or the black one with 35 in yellow (the game jersey). Either way, varsity jersey or rock-n-roll tee; I was trippin’ face in school. I was straddling an intangible line. The line was a demarcation of bad versus good.

I’m sure I looked pretty sketchy in those rock-n-roll tees.

But I’ll bet I looked like a respectable teen dressed in a varsity jersey and clean jeans, attending school with books afoot. Books that hadn’t been opened in like forever. Homework was not an option in those days, if ever. I swear, looking back in hindsight, with all we know now about football head injuries, the way I just stared at those text books and those homework assignments, I probably did have a little brain damage going on. I couldn’t understand or comprehend my inability to concentrate and keep focus. From age seven, I played organized tackle football, and played it hard. And rough. Puttin’ a hurt on someone was justified, encouraged. And I seemed to get off on that. Hurting someone for the sake of hurting someone. Getting your bell rung was just a thing. A little thing. I remember getting my bell rung, being wobbly and sent back in the game. Often. So, with the invisible brain injuries from tackle football and the invisible brain injuries from drugs and alcohol, homework simply was not a priority in high school. Partying and girls were my only priorities. And though I may have looked respectable, I was not. I had fallen in with a couple of seedy desperados. I became a desperado. A seedy miscreant. I enjoyed that feeling of being a bad guy. I was rebelling against society, though I didn’t realize it then. The move from Philadelphia to southern New Hampshire at age fourteen affected me greatly. I was rebelling against my parents for uprooting me from my friends and my little world as I knew it. It helped, the rebellion, that is, that my new acquaintances were bona fide delinquents.

Taking drugs whenever and wherever was cool as shit. Or so I thought. I can’t imagine how I’d feel if I found out my teens were up to what I was up to when I was their age. God forbid. I became fond of skipping school. Some days my hooky consisted of breaking into houses with one of my seedy desperado friends. Booze and money was our goal, not studying for the SAT or even passing classes for that matter. I was a creepy scumbag, going through peoples’ houses, high on weed, purple micro-dots, and orange sunshine. As I look back at that hazy, forbidden, locked-away and hidden time of my life I wonder if that’s when it all changed for me. If that’s when the internal isolation was sown in my heart. If that endless series of awful left turns created the foundation of the isolated bubble I live in now. There aren’t any excuses for becoming a bad person, I guess. You just become one. Yet, I wonder what would have become of me if my parents hadn’t uprooted us. I don’t think I would’ve been going to high school high on mescaline. I don’t think I would’ve become a teenage burglar. That shit happened. Ironically, under my parents watch. Thinking about it now, I think they kinda ‘let go’ on me in a way. I’d show up for dinner, some days after skipping school and hanging out at our tree fort in the woods, drunk and/or stoned. The ‘rents didn’t seem to notice or didn’t want to notice. Being a parent of teens now, myself, I see how easy it is to ‘let go’. Its easier to let go and let nature take its course than it is to actually teach, guide, or parent. Even if that nature is a psychological/emotional self-implosion of loneliness, doubt, self-loathing, and vulnerability.

I live an honest life now. I have for twenty years. But I don’t have any friends. Not a one. Ever since the birth of my rebellion my friends could have been considered as bad influences. In truth, I was just as bad of an influence on them as they were on me. A combination of ammonia and bleach. Separately, a potentially beneficial existence with redeeming qualities, but together, an awfully hazardous paradox. We fed off of each other, my so-called friends and I. I was drawn by the rebellion. I was drawn to the rebellious. That is who I was, a rebel. I started walking that thin line of looking respectable but being down-right scary. I methodically abandoned my friends as I needed to, like a snake shedding its skin to survive. Something I learned from the move. I lost all of my friends when I was fourteen. My son turns fourteen in a month. I can’t imagine moving him three hundred miles away. Three hundred miles away from his network of friends, his tight little crew. I can honestly say it would fuck him up. I can honestly say it fucked me up. I spent the rest of my life abandoning friends. Not trusting friends. I knew life moved on and friends weren’t for the keeping. I learned how to become a successful loner. I befriended the outcasts. I found it easy to walk away and forget anyone, everyone, at any given time. That became my signature, my trademark. That became a big part of my personality. That was a defect. That is a defect still. The self-loathing I acquired and manifested back then led to very poor decision making. Quite frankly, I’m thankful I didn’t end up in prison or dead. I came close. To both: death and prison. I was lucky in that respect but not so lucky in the consequence from my personality defect. I truly am a loner.

You got some big dreams baby, but in order to dream you gotta still be asleep.

When you gonna wake up, when you gonna wake up When you gonna wake up strengthen the things that remain ? -Bob Dylan

(Now, Bob. Now. I want to strengthen what remains of me. I really do want to.)

The friends I had in high school were like the friends I had after high school. I think every single one of them could’ve ended up in a Florida rehab. I know the latter ones sure did. My high school buds? What a great team we made. We made the front page news of the small town newspaper. FIVE TEENS ARRESTED FOR ROBBERY. My parents moved back to Philadelphia after that, isn’t that wild? Sometimes it is easier to let go. I was out of school by then, I stayed. Drifted north as they high-tailed it south.

The robbery was my idea. Who’s the bad influence? The five of us were huddled in my van drinking beer. It was around 9pm. It was dark. We were parked off of the road on a dirt path hidden in the woods. We were running low on the libation. We wanted more. We didn’t have enough money between us to buy a six-pack let alone a case of beer. We sat in the shag-carpeted van taking turns pulling from the 3-foot bong. The van was so cloudy you couldn’t see the shag-carpeted mural that read PARTY on the driver’s side of the interior, the side that didn’t have the sliding cargo door. My dad warned me not to buy that van. Another reason making it easier to let go. I’m pretty sure he could figure out I wasn’t going to be an accountant by then.

I was sitting in the driver’s seat when I saw a guy meandering down the country road, solo. He looked drunk. Walking slowly and not exactly in a straight line. I’ll bet he’s good for ten dollars, was my bright idea. I’ll bet he’s good for ten dollars coulda been the epitaph of my parents’ welcome in that quaint little town.

Sure enough, he wasn’t good for ten dollars. He was good and fucked up though. We got out of the van and circled him. We scared the living shit out of him and took what he did have, something like eighty-six cents. Scumbags, the lot of us. We laughed about it back in the van, finishing off the beer. We laughed and laughed until we saw a police cruiser zip by on the country road on which we had just committed the crime. Which didn’t even register with me at the time as being a crime. In my little pea-sized brain; clouded with beer, weed, and rebellion, the crime we had just committed seemed like just a bit of malicious bullying, not a felony.

A second cruiser whizzed by. That ended the laughter completely, and when I saw a police van headed our way on the dirt path I knew we were fucked. Cops were closing in behind us and in front of us. The van was surrounded. Spot lights were beaming through every window of the van. Holy Shit. It was a night out with the boys, how did we end up in this shitstorm. “I think that’s them”, I heard a voice say. It was the same shaky voice as our eighty-six cent robbery victim. Eighty-six fucking cents. There was so much commotion from the police activity outside the van I don’t remember what was being shouted at us. All I remember, and probably won’t ever forget, is the service revolver poking through the open driver’s-side window and pointed right at my head.

We were lined up with our hands on the side of the van, legs spread. The victim identified us as the assailants. We were cuffed and taken to the police holding cells. A view from the outside-looking in- would show me standing alone in a cell holding onto the bars asking myself How did I get here? Why did I end up here?

A view from the outside-looking in- now would show me sitting alone tapping the keys of this laptop and asking myself those same two questions.

I’ve been riding this BiPolar Coaster for a while now. Alone. One day feeling good about my life. The next day feeling depressed. Not a super-high/super-low thing, but a bumpy road of melancholia for sure. I’m getting a little worried. Is it normal to be as friendless as I am? Does it date back to the rock-n-roll tee shirts I wore in high school? Does it go deeper than that? Was I born this way? I don’t know.

I feel like a fox running through a forest fire of loneliness. Running. Worried. Trapped within the confines of my troubled personality. I feel the need to find a lover. I am afraid of the consequences of finding a lover. Will it be fleeting? Will I take a lover and then decide it was just the physicality I crave? Then end it ruthlessly. Is it a mistake to believe that all couplings don’t end up unhappy?

The last time I had a date, which is over a year ago now, I felt like a vampire in the end. The date had been a long time since my wife left me. A long time since I had sex, or even had any simple form of the human touch. A pandemic can really limit that stuff, can’t it. For fuck’s sake…the coincidence of my separation/divorce and a global pandemic happening concurrently was not ideal.

The date was sexy. An illusion of innocence prevailed through our conversations. Through our movements. Through our positioning like we were in play rehearsal figuring out the blocking of the burgeoning romantic scene. My date was pretty hip to the scene, physically. The kissing and necking on the backyard deck was lustful. She asked if I was ready to sleep with another woman or if it was too soon since the separation from my wife. I told her I didn’t forget how to ride a bike. She loved that response. She told me so through the giggles.

The sex was a heavy atom bomb dropped on an unsuspecting recipient who essentially triggered it. It actually took me a couple of days to recuperate physically from the atom bomb event. I felt like a vampire drained from the lustful, sinful gorging of female flesh. I felt like a lion who just feasted after an extended famine. Essentially, I got what I needed. I guess that’s all I wanted. Just the sex. But my mind plays tricks on me.

I think I want someone to be with emotionally not just physically. I think I may be wrong for that type of situation. My coupling history is ch-ch-checkered at best. I’m mindful of it now, whereas in my more youthful days I was nonchalant about the consequences of hooking up. My mind can’t decide. Sex and only sex, then let the lion sleep off the feast. Let the vampire savor his blood-thirst victory. Or sex and so-much-more? Dates. Friendship. Bonding. Love. I am optimistic that nature will take its course and its Mother Nature’s decision in the end. Yes, it has to be! Stop searching in vain and it will come to you. Be patient. Be more patient. More patient than that even. Alas, the patience is getting painful at this point. Patience versus the fear of success seems to be my ongoing struggle. What if… I am a vampire only?

Is my glass half empty? Am I broken beyond repair?

Is my glass half full? Do I work hard every day to make my life a more fulfilling, happier life?

My past says its half empty. It says I went bad, real bad, and it is unforgivable. And I’m to blame. And I’m to pay. And I am to be lonely, unloved, and unhappy because I chose to wear the black hat. That I had preferred to wear the black hat of rebellion when I strayed off-course. That it was unnatural. That it was antisocial, very, very antisocial and I’m to be ostracized because of it. My time has come to pay the piper.

The future in my mind resists this line of thinking. I don’t have to be lonely. I don’t want to be the sad, lonely old man on the block. I have love in my heart and soul to share. I do. But here lies the problem: I also think about biting asses like a vampire occasionally….okay more than occasionally. So….sheesh, where does it leave me. Do I need a soulmate? Do I need sexy asses to bite?

What exactly do I want? What exactly do I need? As a human. As a humanVampire.

Can I have both? Can I find both? Are they mutually exclusive? Or is there one vampire slayer with a bitable ass out there to satisfy my humanVampire needs?

I will take what I can get, I guess. Because I’m not getting anything at all right now. But I’m not trying either.

It is a struggle.

When I was younger I didn’t have mindfulness nor patience. But I had plenty of time.

Now I have mindfulness and patience but…let’s face it, time is of the essence.

It is a struggle.

Its the BiPolar Coaster.

I need to keep the faith. The faith of patience. Because like Keith Richards says, If you struggle it only tightens up.

My days of hallucinogens, rock-n-roll tees, and strong-arm robberies are in my past. My marriage, in my past. The divorce, in my past. Today, not in my past. Tomorrow, the future, and the vampire slayer not in my past either.

I just hope she can tame the vampire without sinking a wooden spike into my heart.