Better Late Than Never… (Part Two)

I grew up in the magical world of nineteen eighties American suburbia.  There were bicycles and beaches, bonfires and mischief.  Lots and lots of mischief.  This is neither that tale of surviving Compton nor being down and out in Beverly Hills.  We were right in the middle.  Middle class defined.  Neighborhood after neighborhood of families with a working dad, a homemaker mom and no electronics.  We got our first VCR when I was half done with high school and our single phone stood in the middle of the kitchen causing more than a few embarrassing conversations with girls that called.  Things like air conditioning and cable TV were for the rich kids that lived a few miles away in the other school district.  We weren’t poor either (though my kids might dispute this).  There was a beach that our subdivision shared and we also had a park.  My parents had two cars and we never missed a summer vacation.  Again, my kids would be horrified at the idea of camping as a money saving tool on the way to Disney rather than a novelty in itself, but still, we had it pretty good.

My little cohort within the interconnected subdivisions collectively known as Highgate, liked to push the envelope a little.  There was Mike across the street, Jeff down the street, and my brother Craig.  This was the inner circle, surrounded by a larger group of about another ten boys and girls that may or may not have been there from one day to the next.  If soccer was fun, why not play it on the roof the local elementary school?  If diving off the local swimming platform was fun, what not do it naked in the middle of the night with girls?  And on it went.  These little hijinks of adolescence had a way of inflating themselves every year.  We discovered the forbidden fruits of alcohol and tobacco around the seventh grade and it wasn’t long before the stolen beer had given way to the half-gallon of whiskey.  Stealing cigars from a local store led to a lifelong affection for them but drugs and alcohol really had their consequences.  It wasn’t long until we could steal a whole fleet of golf carts or were taking our parent’s cars to parties while they slept.  This is before we had driver’s licenses.

Well, one thing led to the other and we all slowly grew up.  By the time I had graduated from college, it seemed that we had all gotten away with it.  We had pulled off the caper without any consequences.  You can spend years of your life getting totally wasted, smoking whatever you like, lying, cheating, and stealing and nothing bad will come of it.  Nobody died anyway. 

I had secured my first “real” job after college and was renting a house with another guy and two girls (growing up was a more of a progression than an event).  By real job, I mean that I actually wore a suit and tie and was working in a field that I had actually studied in college.  It was not real enough to support myself yet, but I was on my way.  I had gone upstairs to change out of the suit before looking for dinner when the phone rang.  Now mind you, this was the early 1990s, so still no cell phone.  My roommate answered it and yelled up the stairs for me to pick up the cordless that we kept on a table in the hallway.  It was my mom.

“Honey, I need you to sit down” she said.

This was a first and my heart skipped a beat.  I sat on the edge of my still unmade made and asked her to go ahead.

“Jeff killed himself last night” she said.  Then she waited for it to sink in.

I didn’t say anything because it didn’t sink in.

“Honey, are you still there?  Are you ok?  Did you hear me?”

“Um, what happened?” I managed.

“I just heard the news.  I got a call from the neighbor.  I guess it happened last night.  He shut himself in the garage and started the car in the middle of the night.”

“Could…”  I couldn’t get the word out.

“It wasn’t a mistake.  I guess he left a note.”

“Did he say why?”

“I don’t know Honey, but I wanted you to l know.  I guess he was struggling with depression and had been drinking.  Are you going to be alright?”

I told her that I was, though there were already tears welling up in my eyes.  I hung up the phone and went down the stairs and out the door, still wearing my suit with the tie untied around my neck.  I got in the car and started driving.  And driving.  I wound up at a McDonald's of all places, about twenty miles away.  Throwing my tie in the back seat, I ordered three cheese burgers and sat in my car for a very long time taking turns weeping and eating.  This was the first real thing that had ever happened to me.

Going through the motions of the viewings, the funeral, and meeting up with the old gang several times seemed like a blur to me.  All that I could think about while I sat in that pew of the Orthodox church was I wanted to write it all down.  Not just the absurdity of this immaculately ordained church that we had tarnished years before (in a summer job they had hired us as janitors and we blared Ozzy Osborn music from the organ speakers), but the full cycle.  The cycle of this son of immigrants that had come our crazy neighborhood and got wrapped up in a mess that had led to this.  I wanted to tell all the stories.  I suddenly wanted people to know about Jeff and I dancing on the hood of my parents’ car at a Beach Boys concert with girls we had just met and how on another time Jeff had demanded we row him home in the middle of the night while we camped on an island.  People needed to know the story.  Well, that’s how I felt, but I didn’t know where to begin.

In my last piece on reading, I mentioned that I skated through most of my youth without reading.  Well, my track record with writing had been about the same and I didn’t know where to begin, so I just started.  The book was called the “Highgate Chronicles” and told the story from the point of view of a boy growing up.  There were thinly veiled stories of sleepovers that led to police chases, and parties of epic proportions.  I say point of view, but frankly I didn’t know anything about it and found it frustrating.  I just wanted to tell my story and kept getting fouled up in the rules and mapping of the whole thing.  I found it very frustrating and after notebooks full of attempts, I gave up.  Who wants to hear the story of a bunch of self-consumed brats anyway?  Years went by.  That was my first attempt to write.

I decided to give up the Highgate story, at least until I figured out was I was doing.  I reasoned that I had plenty to write about and that I needed to give up this notion of finishing my original idea before I started the next.  I started a novel about a local American Arab kid (there are a lot in Detroit and Jeff had been one of them) that gets swept up in espionage after 9/11 (see how now it’s 2001 already?).  I got pretty far with it, but it fizzled and I got frustrated.   All the while, my reading obsession (see the last piece on that) continued and started to branch out from classics to just about everything that I considered “smart.”  Subjective I know, but to this day, I cannot read pop fiction.  It was around this time, now in my thirties, that I found and fell in love with David Sedaris.  No, not that way.  I just couldn’t get enough of this guy that actually made a living out of just writing these fabulous essays about his world.  I wanted to be like him!  I even dragged my wife to go see him speak at an event where I got him to sign my copy of “Me Talk Pretty One Day.”  I started writing essays on everything I could think of.  I would pen a whole piece on my last haircut or how I felt about running and don’t even get me going on skiing.  I started filling up notebooks and I think I finally started to get a little (I said little) better at the craft.  I carried around a little pocket notebook and wrote down ideas of whatever popped into my head and then I would stay up late composing anything from a poem (not so good) to short stories.  Somewhere in here – I got distracted.  Life just sort of got in the way.  A change of job, parenting, and next thing I knew – I hadn’t written in a couple of years.  Years!

I’m not really sure what happened, but one day I started again with One Step Ahead.  I just started to type.  And type and type and type.  It became an obsession for me.  I would do it in our guest room, in the library on the way home from work, and in hotel rooms on business trips.  I would sneak back to my room during meetings or skip the cocktail hour to type, type, type.  The longer the flight – the better.  Anytime I wasn’t actually with my family (which I value) or physically at work (which I need), I was finding an excuse to type.  The crazy thing grew to 350 pages.  When I finally came to my conclusion, I spell checked it and was ready for publication!

And then my lesson in writing really began…