Sunrise, Sunset

They clouded one's vision with red, or they practically deafened you with riotous orange. Some sweetened the world with honey and gold. Still others spanned the sky in thick waves of vermillion, violet, and peach so vibrant as to make a person weep with joy at witnessing such beauty. I remember the best sunsets.

All of them were seen in Picnic Point, New South Wales, Australia, the suburb of Sydney, where I lived from ages ten to eleven. I was a lucky kid. Just a few hundred paces down the street from my house was the perfect place to sit and watch the day dwindle. A stand of trees terminated abruptly at a cliff face overlooking a couple of tennis courts. Young Byron rode his bike down there at least a couple of times each week. A particular weatherbeaten boulder offered a perfectly butt-shaped contour for watching the sky-show.

On a different bluff, halfway around the planet and a number of years later, friends and I sometimes watched the sun come up over Kansas City railyards. We called the place Pendergast Point, because of a statue of renowned Kansas Citian William Pendergast that stood there. Its actual name was Case Park, but I didn't learn that until years later, when a fit of reminiscence prompted someone I know to google the location. It had been a place for lookouts. Because of an elbow in the Missouri River to the north, Civil War soldiers – and, before them, watchful Native Americans – could see for miles up- and downstream.

Case Park's wrought-iron benches sat all in an arc along what felt like the literal edge of the city. The kind of steep embankment that only an earlier, less litigious age would leave unfenced looked down at humming patches of interstate. After a very long night of activity, a couple, sometimes a handful, of young adults could sit there and be soothed by the gentle rise of another day. We sat in silence as the sun came up before our eyes. Its amber glow rimmed the hills surrounding railyards and reflected off the tracks, like veins of gold crisscrossing the city that we called home. The sunrise was our curtain drawn, the end of our revels.

While awaiting trial for first-degree murder, my neighbor in the county jail was a grizzled biker who went by "Frenchie." He'd shot a man dead for sleeping with his girlfriend, then beat and kicked the body until his own boot flew off. It was hard to make that violent image of drunken-rage Frenchie jibe with the man I ate meals and watched Survivor: Africa with. He had showed me pictures of himself snuggled up on the couch with Rootin' Rudy, his potbellied pig, and with the son he was so proud of. I watched him break down in tears, saying, "I'll never get to watch another sunset."

Years after our legal ordeals ended, Frenchie and I stood on the yard at Crossroads Correctional Center, where we both ended up, and I pointed to the sky. "Remember when...," I asked him, and he nodded. Through the chain link and razor wire, we saw the sun glowing poppy red at the horizon. It dipped lower and lower as we watched. I thought of Australia. I thought of friends come and gone. When the announcement came that the yards were closed, neither Frenchie nor I moved right away. We waited, each lost in his own thoughts, until the just-right moment came. When it came, we went.

Homeschool May Have Saved My Life

My parents encouraged me to be honest about everything... except one. They said that if I was ever approached by an adult and asked why I wasn't in school on a weekday morning, while we browsed through the public library or shopped for groceries, I should definitely always lie.

Telling the bald-faced truth came pretty easy to a tactless little boy on the autism spectrum. Doing otherwise took some coaching. The response to strangers' inquiries that my parents concocted for me was, "I had a doctor's appointment, but I'm feeling better now." After that, Mum and Pops would fend off further interrogation by what I assumed were more sophisticated means.

In 1983, the year I started kindergarten, most Americans could still be taken to jail for homeschooling their kids. The state of Kansas, where I grew up, required state certification in order for anyone to teach. This requirement was only rolled back a few years later. Sad old Michigan didn't legalize homeschooling until 1993. Considered in this light, my parents' decision to keep me out of the public school system represented quite a little rebellion, hardly a minor risk to the well-being of our little family.

Most families choose to homeschool their children for religious reasons. Statistically, the majority of them are white Christian conservatives. We were of another sort: progressives whose closest involvement with organized religion involved frolicking in our own lush backyard Garden of Eden. Although we steered clear of dogmas, my parents' most impious acts involved occasionally name-dropping Mother Nature and referring to the Schmutz on people's faces on Ash Wednesday. I'm saying, amoral heathens we were not. Their reason for keeping me out of public school was to avoid what they considered the spirit-deadening effects of institutionalized learning.

My parents paid what must've been a handsome sum for the privilege. Every August, UPS delivered the secular curriculum to our front porch, heavy on ancient history and multiculturalism. I used to love opening those boxes. After prying three big copper staples out of their top flaps with a butter knife, each box opened to reveal stacks of brand new textbooks. The books all but bulged with knowledge, and it thrilled me to think that I'd be assimilating their contents over the coming months. I sniffed their aroma of glue and paper, and hefted their weight in my little hands. I riffled pages to peruse the illustrations. I didn't want to set them down.

Mum was my first teacher, as any mother should be to her child. She and my father ran a business out of our home, but his work involved full-time bustling around the city. In the evenings, he offered more help than she did at math, but staying home to run the office during the day meant she handled the biggest part of my instruction.

I couldn't have asked for a better teacher. Her patience brought us through the most frustrating lessons untraumatized, and the boundless enthusiasm she turned to my classwork helped me power through even my times tables. She also took me on mini adventures several times a week – to the health food co-op, to the auto mechanic's, to the bank, to pet stores, and wherever else the day took us. Sure, we took trips to local parks, museums, art galleries, and the zoo, but she taught me that even errands could become field trips, if one applied a smidgen of creativity.

Neither of my parents knew that I had a neurological condition. (In all fairness, they couldn't have; diagnostic criteria for Asperger's syndrome was still almost two decades away.) My enthusiasm for discovering even the most tedious minutiae about subjects that interested me awed adults. Rather than a child on the autism spectrum, they considered me a brilliant little professor. And my parents felt lucky to have a son so well-behaved, who didn't run wildly around the house or demand twenty-four-seven attention; I just read books, wrote my little stories, or drew quietly in my room. That I had to sleep on my back, with my hands folded together, was peculiarly sensitive to sounds, and had no filter in social settings didn't seem like a big deal. What did it matter if the smell of baby powder made their son angry – he started reading before age three. Sometimes weaknesses look like strengths.

My homeschool career ended after my parents’ divorce, when I enrolled at my first public institution, in Windsor, New South Wales, Australia. At first, being a foreigner seemed to afford me carte blanche. Anything unusual that I did was waved away as "just an American thing." But there are only so many personal tics that can be blamed on nationality before people realize that, no, you're just a weirdo.

After I found pariah status with my so-called peers, teachers started worrying that I spent too much time away from others, reading on the far edge of the schoolyard. One of my greatest strengths, my preference for being alone, looked to them like sadness at being cast out. Sometimes strengths look like weaknesses.

Had the other students just left me alone, public school wouldn't have been so bad. Early IQ tests showed that I had exceptionally high intelligence, so it's not like I couldn't do the work. Subjected to the cruelty of classmates and the tyrannies of abusive teachers, however, I started to circle the drain. Depression was just the start. Everyone who knows me knows what happened next: I washed down.

Dropping out of high school meant being seen by some as a loser or a failure, but public school was killing me. My parents had been right about its deadening effects all along – more so than they even knew. If we'd have been rich, I might've gone to the Montessori school they talked about, where my intellect could flourish in unhindered learning. "We aren't rich," Pops told me once, "but we're rich in culture." A fat lot of good culture did for my social standing with a bunch of ninth graders.

The argument my parents always heard was that, by homeschooling me, they deprived me of socialization skills crucial for my psychological growth. I might not be a pillar of social standing today, but I call bullshit. In light of my atypical neurology, the negative experiences I had in public school would've simply arisen earlier, probably at an age when I was less resilient. Delaying my entry to the public school system probably prevented years' worth of behavioral, emotional, and health problems, a few of which might've led to irreversible trauma.

American education has improved a great deal since the days of one-room schoolhouses and corporal punishment. Most of the necessities of modern life continue despite a global pandemic, thanks in part to technology, but mostly to humans' creative drive. Distance learning gave kids and parents a taste of homeschool. If it wasn't to everyone's liking, I'd venture to say that critics' idea of what school should be (in this case, a taxpayer-funded babysitting program) might benefit from revision.

I don't want to tackle the complex economic issues of school vouchers or educational coalitions in this blog post. I hardly claim to have all the answers to the country's ongoing education crisis. I just felt like voicing an opinion about a life-affirming experience that enabled me to excel in the areas of study that interested me most, drew my parents and me closer together, and quite probably diverted me from a path on which I'd have known a lot more pain, a lot earlier in my life.

I loved homeschool. I wish more kids who could benefit from it were in a position to, and that more parents were able to appreciate it as much as mine did.

The Neighborhood

Apparently, there are whole Facebook pages devoted to my teenage years. Kind of. The Hurricane, arguably the most popular live-music venue in Westport, until its closing in the early aughts, has a remembrance page there. As a prisoner, I don't have access to the Web, but I hear that a community of 1990s nostalgists maintain a lively conversation there. There's a Facebook page for fans of the Broadway Café, too. "The Broadway," however, remains in business today. In fact, it seems to be thriving.

During what many consider the heyday of both places, my mother and I shared a three-story redbrick apartment building a quarter of a mile away. As a mature-for-his-years teenager, I owned no car but was prone to roaming. Acutely grateful to be within walking distance of Kansas City's premier entertainment district, I took full advantage of our close proximity to hipster havens such as these. When I stayed with my father, in the other Kansas City, no such freedoms presented themselves.

It always struck me as ironic that Kansas City, Kansas, located in the state that gave the city its name, is the lesser of the two Kansas Citys. That Kansas City, Missouri, surpassed it in cultural relevance and sheer population alike must've been a slap in the face to the Wheat State, which worked so hard to get to the mediocrity that obtains there today.

Gen-X students from the Art Institute and the University of Missouri-Kansas City played chess and smoked (indoors!) at the Broadway's mosaic-tiled tables. The same man with a dark ponytail, glasses, and a single name made everyone's drinks. He always struck me as prickly, but any other kid wearing heavy eyeliner and all-black clothes, as I did, might've felt the same.

I went to the Broadway to people-watch. Enough regulars came that I got to recognize a few faces – the twenty-somethings who parked their baby's stroller in front, the Rastafarian chess master who schooled countless newcomers, the gutter punks who'd spanged enough that day to share a cup of espresso, the goth girl I spent whole minutes staring at before she looked up and my eyes darted away.... The place offered comfort to all, drawing suit-wearing professionals and homeless people, disaffected teens and bubbly teachers, Mormon missionaries and queer activists, med students and drug addicts. The coffeehouse somehow catered to this variety of patrons, who all behaved themselves enough to sit side by side with nothing more heated than an occasional ideological debate flaring up.

The neighborhood is called Westport, a historic area of Kansas City that was once a town. There are statues and plaques, but few who live there today could tell you that Westport got its name for having been a gateway, back in the 1800s, to the Santa Fe Trail. Nor could they tell you much about the Civil War battle waged there.

Nineteenth-century merchants and settlers traveled the Santa Fe Trail en route to America's untamed West, and the westward migration of people seeking better lives endured even in my time, in the form of young runaways aspiring to better lives in Portland, Oregon. I befriended several of them. Some kids, unshowered but not unfriendly, hung out in the miniature labyrinth of brick corridors behind the Broadway. (See "Double Life, Part Two" for an earlier post about them.) At some point I fell into their circle, or at least into its periphery, and was made to feel welcome whenever I came around.

The Jerusalem Cafe, right around the corner, offered salubrious Mediterranean food at fair prices. Across the street, Vulcan's Forge sold handmade jewelry, incense, and New Age books, while down the block was a shop named Zowie!, which sold "SCREWING THE NEXT SEVEN GENERATIONS" bumper stickers and Urban Decay hair dye to a more jaded clientele. (I once bought some incense, a satin shirt, and a studded collar with five feet of chrome dog chain there.) A block away, Pyramid Pizza sold big two-buck slices from a window counter until mismanagement led to bounced paychecks. The cleaner-looking Joe's Pizza took its place overnight, but Pyramid's unruly, freewheeling vibe was gone.

Neighborhood nostalgia seems silly when deeply considered. The word, neighborhood – a static concept of a group's agreed-upon perception – does it really refer to anything of value? Why are the memories we accumulate in a given place, at a certain time, prized more than certain others? Those Facebook pages for bygone zeitgeists are efforts to trap lightning in a bottle, to recreate what their members miss. It's all gone, really. In another sense, it – that specific time and place, the ephemeral subject of this little meander – was never there at all.

A Personal Poem That Might Be Better Left Unshared

Joy Buzzer

Shelved at the video-rental store I worked at, at nineteen,
Were all the movies you'd expect, plus thousands
In a special section walled off from the general population
But accessible through a door, unlocked remotely
From behind the counter by a plastic doorbell-button.
The pornography the store carried was triple-X,
And the manager, whose lisp like dragon's breath singed up close,
Touted free employee rentals and the city's largest selection
Of bisexual flicks. He fished, but all I ever took home
Were Bowie's Ziggy Stardust concert film
And a Siouxsie & the Banshees compilation.
Some guys (of course it was always guys)
Strode across to the door, took the knob in hand,
And waved. For them I pressed the Joy Buzzer
Without delay. But with the skulking meek
Picking up DVDs of Antz and Apt Pupil and not reading
The plot summaries but, rather, casting glances
At nearby browsers before scurrying to the door the second
Backs were turned, I pretended pressing the button,
Seized by invisible laughter as they futilely tugged
And mugged aghast. We did a dance at that distance:
I shook my head, mimed confusion, then stooped again
In imitation of admittance, and they either tried the door
A second time or first spun to verify that eyes remained averted.
I tell you, I craved catharsis — for the shamed to see my thoughts
And know the one and only thing keeping them locked out.
But months of workdays went by without it, and I returned
To my cat and single-bedroom unit, to nights
Avoiding calls and company y in favor
Of sticking binoculars through the blinds
And reading smiling couples' lips
At the café across the street.


* * * * *

The situations depicted in this poem are, oddly (and sadly) enough, altogether fact-based. Maybe that's why I was never able to find a poetry journal or literary magazine interested in publishing it: they picked up on its reportorial vibe. This is why I decided it makes a better blog post than poem. Still, by virtue of form and language it is a poem. Can the poet say anything for himself that the poem itself doesn't reveal? Sure. That's the stuff of autobiography, though, and I'm not writing one of those

Decadence

It was the time I staggered up the cracked and buckled sidewalk, having just drank too much Congress vodka and Coca-Cola in the backseat of a friend's VW, and strove to keep my steps straight until the police cruiser passed or turned the corner. It was a miracle that the three flights of steps to my apartment didn't involve a tumble, and doubly astonishing that I successfully found the toilet in which to experience my first glorious, life-altering purge.

Or it was the time I occupied a Formica-topped table at Sydney's, with a rotating cast of the diner's regulars, for seven straight hours, drinking cup after cup of brackish coffee and excusing myself every half hour to "powder my nose." The lights there might've seemed too bright, but I felt incandescent. At dawn I couldn't find a toilet fast enough.

Or it was the time someone's mother asked me, after I inadvertently broke her backyard fence and terrified the family dog, to take my cocaine and devil-may-care attitude out of her house. Her daughter, the girl throwing the party, wasn't pleased, either, and would've given me an earful at school the following Monday, had I not dropped out the summer before.

Or it was the time I was a drunk (not to mention very high) passenger in the woefully inadequate backseat of my friend Abraham's old Datsun, singing "Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall" all the way through. In a British accent. While sitting upside-down.

Or it was the time I walked to work, in wrinkled chinos, from an acquaintance's apartment, the thick taste of the night before still at the back of my throat, then spent eight hours shilling Barbie dolls and remote-control cars to parents whose children's allowance exceeded my own income, even before you deducted for drugs.

Or it was the time I awoke fuzzy-headed on the floor of a bedroom belonging to a girl I didn't remember meeting, in a different city than the one in which the excitement of the night before began. Her pretty sister drove me home — a great personal inconvenience about which she didn't try to hide her vexation. I never saw either of them again.

Or it was the time Jason and Ash, humming in their respective intoxications, laughed in giddy falsettos at my tissue-plugged nostrils. They pointed out to me the blood-spattered carpet all the way to the bathroom. We resumed band practice once they caught their breath, forgetting my bloodstains on the basement floor, which had, by the next time we played together, darkened to resemble soy sauce, brown calligraphy ink, or oil leaked from a slowly dying machine.

Or it was the time I blacked out at an illegal warehouse party and came to on cold concrete, staring up into unfamiliar flashing multicolored faces — none of whom I recognized — and believed that my pathetic life was not my own.

What do these sad instances, and countless intoxicated others, add up to? How many years of ignorance before I reached this point! How much suffering! And while I might sometimes wish that those regrettable years had gone differently, that I had found a way to avoid so much more — and more enduring — agony, I always remind myself of their necessity. Without them, I couldn't have arrived at the mental peace I now know, free to live a life of deeper meaning, where the importance of certain things previously taken for granted has been rendered as clear and as bracing as cold water from a deep spring. That's well worth the streak of sad senselessness.

Black Celebration: A Personal History of Goth

Can someone join a subculture without knowing it exists? Is it possible for a single person to comprise a sub-subculture — a clique of one? These are questions I contemplated a lot, based on how I spent my teens and young adulthood.

The riotous colors of 1993 hurt my eyes. Worse yet, its hot dance-poppy tracks (think: Haddaway, Tag Team, Ace of Base) burned in the open cut of my deepening depression. I rejected all of it. The alternative was literal: alternative — as in, alternative music, as in, more specifically, grunge, which to most minds meant Nirvana, a band I could barely stand. Mainstream culture left me feeling conspicuously out of place. Aimless and alone, I stumbled down the gloomy, unlit path of goth.

Before all-black clothes and eyeliner became my daily wear, I'd never heard the word goth. It's likely that I encountered the iconic look — the pitch dark hair, the deathly complexion, the silver-buckled, -spiked, and -chained accessories — in a movie, on TV, in a book, or on the streets of a foreign city before adopting goth's dark splendor for myself. But contrary to what you'd expect, I never set out to dress that way. My transition was organic, a product of several factors.

I came by the pale skin honestly, thanks to genetics and insomnia. Being an overweight tween had inclined me to wear black, which seemed to slim away a bit of my huskiness. The mysterious, the Romantic, the (I'll just go ahead and say it) Byronic had always compelled me. Temperamentally speaking, autism spectrum disorder and major depression made me standoffish. Through my father's broad musical tastes and penchant for nightlife I was exposed to pulsing, subversive-feeling stuff that struck nerves I hadn't known I possessed. Shut in my candlelit room, writing tormented poems while darkwave beats, borrowed from my dad's music library, trembled from the stereo, I was like a caterpillar in its cocoon. All the stuff swirling around in there was bound to solidify into some new form of life eventually.

I emerged as a beautiful black butterfly shortly before turning fourteen. As my personal mythology has it, the trigger was seeing a daytime talk show on which a "troubled" teen spoke about why he wore that ghastly makeup and black velvet, lace, and leather. The dramatic monologue he delivered, about coping with darkness by embracing darkness, was my own angst given voice. Before that epiphanic Oprah episode (or whatever it was) I'd believed myself alone in feeling this way. In the egocentrism of youth, what teen doesn't think he's the first, the only — even when that exclusivity is to his detriment? Regardless, from that day forward, every time someone asked why I dressed all in black, I answered in one of two ways: either "Color is nothing more than trumpery and lies," or "Because the price of tomatoes has fluctuated again." I was a blast at parties. (No one invited me to parties.)

Better than any other lesson, school taught me that I did not fit. The adjective peerless implies good — unequaled, unrivaled. But I dropped out of my academically prestigious high school in large part because I had neither equals nor rivals. To be an outcast, that is, to be cast out, you have to first be in. I'd joined no clubs, hitched myself to no teams, took part in no extracurriculars. I'd walked to classes unaccompanied, literally on the fringe. Except in the eyes of one accidental girlfriend who mistook my awkwardness for cool, I was a non-entity.

I was eventually old enough for the clubs that, if only one night a week, played the darkwave and industrial (i.e., goth) music that lured palefaced youth out of seclusion. In preparation, I'd powder my nose, smear my eyes with kohl, take one last appraising look at myself in the mirror. My studded collar and high Doc Martens looked suitably fetishistic. My silver rings glinted. My lacquered fingernails reflected darkly. I'd head for the car, slipping a Djarum Black from its box. I'd light the clove cigarette and inhale. I'd turn the ignition key. I'd crank up the music and drive.

The parking lot would be scattered with vehicles and little groups of black-clad twenty-somethings, all rendered paler than normal in the sulfurous light. Most showed up every week, drawn by the camaraderie of other gothic oddities. The DJ was basically irrelevant; no one ever really danced. Like me, they huddled at the periphery of the dance floor and watched the poseurs do their thing. The poseurs were the worst. The poseurs were whoever they suspected of wearing color during the week, and anyone deemed insufficiently cool. Which was everyone.

Inside, the club's red lights would smooth and unblemish every face. "This Corrosion," a Sisters of Mercy song so stereotypical as to be almost a joke, would crash along while everyone feigned indifference. I'd stand, drinking my nonalcoholic drink, not talking to any of the people milling around, ignoring me. Many hugged each other, displaying affection more freely than you might expect from people wearing spikes and claw rings.

Although I looked the part, my club experiences were from a certain standpoint no different from school. Perhaps recognized by sight, I remained unacknowledged, unknown. I returned, week after week, in the hope of making a friend, yet lacked the wherewithal to break the ice. After a few hours, I'd go home feeling more alone than when I arrived.

Online newsgroups and IRCs (Internet chat groups) opened the world of goth to me, in the form of band recommendations, links to clothing boutiques, recipes for cocktails, lots of biting social criticism, and tips for coloring everything, from clothes to flowers, black. Goth's online contingent was even more fiercely cliquish and territorial than the clubgoers, but as long as I didn't try joining in, I could slink along the virtual periphery, reading their tips, quips, and laments, and silently judge those self-appointed arbiters of gothic taste and macabre fashion.

I couldn't stand those elitists' mentality, the way they gazed down with gother-than-thou scorn from their obsidian tower. I soon disassociated myself from the lot of them, the online contingent and their real-life counterparts. I continued to dress the part, and certainly didn't give up the music I loved so much, but I wouldn't permit anyone to mistake appearance for substance. For instance, my father was on the phone in the next room one afternoon, talking to a friend about me. I heard him say, "He's too goth to go see Mrs. Doubtfire with us." Without getting up from my computer desk, I shouted, "I'm not goth!" And I meant it. However, this irony was not lost on me: in my browser window was a man in black lipstick, modeling a very tall pair of boots beside a crying angel statue. That picture made me really want to buy those boots. Deep down, I was goth as fuck. No impassioned arguments would change that.

A thousand essays and academic papers have been written with the title "What Is Goth?" Debates over what (or who) does and doesn't qualify as goth continue to rage on the Internet. Goth is what was once freely called a lifestyle — heavy on the style. It's precisely this quality of insubstantiality that I believe has made it so difficult to define. It's shallow, and you can't base an ethos, and certainly not a philosophy, on black clothing and minor-key music. So, what happens when the kids who dress in impractical, pseudo-archaic outfits and head for the club, as I once did, realize the vacuousness of this aesthetic ideal they've built their lives around?

I chose to dance to the beat of my own drum machine. I toned down the eyeliner. I put away the spiked leather collar. I embraced my ungothly geekiness full-on, with Frisbee in the park, They Might Be Giants on my stereo, and posters of the periodic table of elements in my kitchen. I grew up and all but forgot about the subculture that had seemed so tantalizingly close to my heart.

It sounds like a riddle: I clothe myself in shadow but will not be overshadowed. My sound is dark as night itself. I am forty and still love The Nightmare Before Christmas. What am I?

Neighbors

My mother's apartment, where I can allege to have lived in my tempestuous mid-teens, was in a six-unit walkup. It was nice enough, just old and not as well maintained as it deserved to be. Cherry wood floors and accents couldn't compensate for a structural problem that made half of my bedroom look to be gradually splitting away from the rest of the building. On the south wall, a crack ran from ceiling to floor, like a vertical canyon. The plaster patch job was sub-par and had to be hidden behind an abstract charcoal artwork seven feet high.

Those richly textured walls were flimsier than they looked. There were many afternoons when I had to turn up my stereo, even when I wasn't in the mood for music. It was the only way to drown out that damned Cranberries album the next-door neighbor liked so much. The vocals he contributed to Zombie were hard to overpower. That guy had enthusiasm.

The floors insulated no better. Downstairs lived a couple, an artist and a musician, with no idea how much of their private lives telegraphed upward: indistinct conversations, arguments, moans of pleasure from biweekly love acts. My own day-to-day constituted a string of inconceivable conditions that were, at least on the home front, less sonically varied. If the couple heard anything of me, it was all heel-clops on hardwood, some melancholic music, the rolling of my desk chair, the connection-establishing screeches of dialup Internet. My mother probably made even less noise than I did. I don't know. At that age, I stayed on the move. Home was for computing, for eating, for bathing, for sleep. Mum had a boyfriend and was sometimes out. I didn't entertain guests.

By contrast, the couple downstairs always seemed to have company, gaggles of creative types spilling out their back door and onto the building's wide wooden landing. Coming home sometimes meant apologizing my way through those crowds. Their smiles were enviously easy, lubricated by Coronas and Heinekens. Social groups were tough for me. I clammed up in a crowd, overwhelmed by stimuli. I believed that a normal person might stop by and say hello, Ned Flanders-like. "Hi-diddly-ho, neighborinos!" Then he'd stay a while and gab. Well, okay, even I knew that normal people would consider the friendliness of the Simpsons' cheery neighbor unacceptable.

Coming in late was my habit. I had another, worse habit then as well, which confused my hours of waking and sleeping, and left me bedraggled after days of high flying. With feet safely back on terra firma, I'd undress and shower in the dark. I never bothered turning on lights. Nighttimes were nice. Meditative. Solitary. Recuperative.

Bathed and dried, I'd shrug into my robe and swing open the bathroom door. I loved how the apartment's cool dry air would swirl in, pimpling my follicles as the chill passed through me. It always felt like a renewal.

On one night that I recall particularly well, along with the chill that poured in was noise — the muted, bassy sounds of the party below. Quite suddenly, I very much wanted to be down there, in the company of people I'd never met. Of course, I couldn't possibly bring myself to go and introduce myself. I'd be the odd man out, on so many levels. I stood there, listening, for a full minute before an idea came to me.

Where had I seen it done before — a bad '80s comedy, some black-and-white suspense film? Barefoot, I took a flat-bottomed glass from the kitchen cabinet and padded to the dining room. Beside the table I knelt and set the mouth of the glass against the floorboards. While my knees said no to the unforgiving wood, my palms said yes, meeting its surface and relishing its coolness. Much like my mind, my body was not in accord with itself. My ear touched the base of the glass. The cold shock of it made me rear back. I set my ear down again, this time better prepared, and strained to hear.

The sound dispirited me terribly: the thwump-thwump of my own elevated heartbeat, imparting secrets I already knew.

A Tragedy at Twenty: Justin Bruton

Twenty years after he blindsided everyone by sending a shotgun slug through his own skull, Justin Bruton is as much a cypher to me as ever, despite reams of police reports and the fact that there was a time, in the months prior to his terrible suicide, when I called him my best friend. Obviously, I didn't know what friendship really was.

Eighteen and socially handicapped, your "best friend" is the person who finally accepts you unquestioningly. Justin saw past my black-and-white screen-starlet makeup, conflation of funny ha-ha with funny strange, and adeptness at conversation equivalent to how well a three-year-old ballroom dances. He shrugged this stuff off and invited me to come throw powdered donuts at rich people. You know, what best friends do.

Look at the perpetual adolescents of Jackass, The Dudesons, and Can't Kill Yourself: lots of boys play rough. It could be that Justin wasn't trying to put out my eye when he embedded that blowdart in my brow from a few feet away. Maybe this was how he channeled his fraternal affection, through acts of minor violence. What to make, though, of his pain experiments, when he laughed in disbelief at my silent responses to various stimuli he administered — thumbtacks colorfully studding my forearm, hydrochloric acid drops eating the flesh of my open palm, electric shocks to wherever he could reach out and touch with his stun gun? Were these forerunners to the sado-motivational tactics of Tyler Durden, in Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, or were they nothing more than cruelty to a trusting younger kid?

What did I know about Justin? At the time, virtually nothing. I knew that he'd lived in Tulsa and come from money. He disdained familial meddling yet depended on his parents for literally everything. He had a sister, my age. He once dated a girl who seemed cool, the first and only time we met, but whose name I subsequently forgot. He'd been suicidal on multiple occasions and was prescribed Prozac for depression. He dug PJ Harvey, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, and French surrealist films. There was undoubtedly more to him, but this was all that he was willing to reveal.

Similarly, whatever his feelings about Anastasia, his girlfriend of maybe seven months, I was privy to only their external effects. The couple's countless arguments became almost normal, given his hot-and-cold affections, her fixed and potent passion. Justin never verbalized his feelings, for Anastasia or anything else of consequence. I'm unsure how much of that reticence was symptomatic of his unhappiness, and how much led him to collude with her to bring about their deaths.

So: Justin Bruton, question mark. Interested organizations with resources and authority far outstripping mine have looked into solving the riddle and come back empty-handed. His family won't talk, out of some sense of Southern propriety, embarrassment, fear, or snobbery — which doesn't help. The sole insight that I've gained since his death is that he'd been born in Texas. Thanks, Internet, for nothing.

Justin Bruton was my friend — or "friend." What's that even mean? Together we watched some great movies, had a few laughs, debated political and ethical systems, sang a few stupid songs, took memorable road trips, and drank too much coffee while daydreaming of lives with meaning. The way things ended up for me, though, leaves no doubt that our association was far from meaningless.

A Tragedy at Twenty: Anastasia WitbolsFeugen

Anastasia died at eighteen, twenty years ago today. She'd been a clever, spirited girl. In school she joined the National Junior Honor Society, Latin club, and academic competitions of all sorts. A couple of months before her untimely death, she started classes at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. The world had been her oyster.

A different version of the truth is less palatable.

Anastasia died at eighteen, twenty years ago today. She'd been a temperamental depressive for at least a year. In her diary and in e-mails to close friends, she romanticized death, expressed emotional volatility somewhat greater than typical teenage impulsivity, and fixated on a fickle boyfriend. For weeks before her seemingly inevitable death, she spiraled into a textbook example of suicidal behaviors, isolating herself, dropping out of college, and talking openly (and often) about killing herself. She didn't stand a chance in this indifferent world.

The dead have it easy — their reputations are projections of might-have-been, forever idealized, unburdened by their foibles or survivors' beliefs that anything but the best had been in store for the beloved deceased. The culture fetishizes potential. While those who die young remain for all time in grace, the living must forge our legacies through successes and failures — the actual.

Which is fine. Whitewashing who Anastasia WitbolsFeugen was wouldn't be terrible, just an anodyne comfort, except that another life hangs in the balance between her pristine reputation — Anastasia, the young light extinguished too soon — and the ugly alternative — Anastasia, the doomed soul. Mine is no longer young but had (and still has) potential at least equal to hers. By not allowing her to be seen from less-flattering angles, her eulogizers obscure the truth that contradicts the righteousness of my imprisonment.

Anastasia was my friend. We hung out in coffeehouses, discussing our naive ideals and cackling at life's absurdities. We went to movies together. We lent each other books that we each considered essential reading. We commiserated about shittiness and shared the happiness that kept us going. When she died, it was like no grief I'd yet known. I struggled to cope, to keep myself together in the aftermath. Even in that confused state, I clearly saw that the Anastasia portrayed by the funeral sentiments was a caricature, largely unrecognizable to many of us at the service. Frankly, she was no one special. The Anastasia we knew was complex, flawed, and passionate to a fault — a person we all thought eminently worth being friends with.

After two decades lived in the shadow of her death, having matured and made discoveries against which ordinary relationships are immune, I'm now less sure of my friendship with her. Personal documents seized during the authorities' homicide investigation showed me yet another facet of Anastasia. She lied about people behind their backs. She engineered squabbles between friends, probably for drama's sake. She had terrible self-esteem and vied for attention at every opportunity. Her flaws go on and on. She was, after all, only human.

Teenage relations, those gossipy, mercurial, emotionally heightened filters that distort one's world like the wildest Instagram effect — they don't even begin to explain why the night we parted ways struck me as both perfectly typical and utterly unexpected. Knowing what I now do is similarly befuddling. Was her death planned? If so, by whom — her or Justin, or by both, mutually? Either she wanted him, her flaky, intermittent love, to put her out of her misery, or she intended to do the deed herself with him looking on. Or, just as they decided one day to pack and move to New Orleans by the weekend, the two of them might've intended, with no plan whatsoever, to wing it, take a gun to a cemetery, one after the other welcoming oblivion.

So much for the pretty notion that there are no secrets between friends.

Ten years back, I wrote in this post about Anastasia's death, "the ever-widening wake of her death laps onward, continuing to rock and capsize in spite of the distance. Meanwhile, her memory on our horizon gradually melds with the glare of the sun." Pretty words for the gruesome results of teenage self-centeredness. I can't muster this kind of poetry for it anymore. Anastasia WitbolsFeugen died, but I'm the one who's rotting.

Ghost Story

There was a girl with beautifully sculpted eyebrows who worked at the neighborhood donut shop. It wasn't love because I didn't really know anything about her: she lived alone in a sad Missouri town, sold knives door-to-door on weekends, and drove a 1986 Dodge Omni. That's practically nothing.

Certain days, I walked to the shop right as she was closing up. While she talked, I held the thirty-gallon trash bag for her to dump that day's donuts in. The pieces of her life that she shared were sweeter to me than all of that wasted icing — like that her favorite thing on rainy nights was to climb atop her trailer home and lie so the falling water in her face felt like being propelled skyward, to the clouds.

One night she invited me to her place. I was fifteen and had no car. We clattered along rural roads in incomprehensible darkness until turning up her long gravel drive, then there it was: her boxy hideaway in the weedy field. Inside were stacks of Dickinson and Plath, a saggy couch, some records, and a tidy kitchenette where she made us herbal tea and smiled at my earnest attention. I silently hoped for rain.

She gave me a blanket but my rest on the couch was fitful. After what felt like hours she called from the bedroom, a soft voice, somehow pained. I went, unsure, and held her. This was all that she wanted. “You’re safe,” she murmured. It didn't occur to me, the number of meanings this could have.

In the insect-riddled morning she took me back. A lingering hug, after which she shrank into herself and disappeared from my life as quietly as she entered it.

A Freshly Scribbled Personal Poem with Nowhere Else to Go

"When I Was Young…"

The words slipped out before their import struck.
Further utterance obstructed, I clutched my face and slumped.
A low groan deeper than any half-assed laugh
Rose as camouflage.

There it is, I thought, cradling my skull.
Embodied gray in one point five kilograms,
Almost four decades a little more tattered
By every peek, reconfigured subtly by the act of reference.

Mutti, did you really used to call me Kleiner Mann,
Or was it someone else who aged me prematurely?
To a lover, once, who declared that mine
Was an old soul, it's true I offered a bag of prunes.

The boy with his slippers and robe, and his
Antiquarian collection of fossils and rocks,
Used to shred bread for ducks at the park.
He had in mind a future as an Egyptologist.

In mummification the brain was the first thing to go
Because ancient Egyptians believed it served no purpose.
Other organs were preserved in jars for the soul's journey.
Anubis, jackal-headed assayist, weighed one's vital baggage.

Immortal at sixteen, I dressed and rimmed my eyes in black,
I kept, as a pet, a rat. Rattus rattus was once deified,
Symbolic to the Egyptians as representing wise judgment and,
Further reading in adulthood reveals, also utter destruction.

* * * * *

The seed from which this poem grew was a conversation I had, sitting at the Old-Man Table. The topic that day is irrelevant. What matters is that I began a sentence with the four words that became this poem's title. There was no turning back; once you acknowledge that you're no longer young, it's all downhill. And so this poetic tumble through weedy memory, flowery patches of erstwhile interests, and past-life brambles, ending in the discovery, at the bottom, of a happenstantial connection that won't completely make sense unless you understand how I was wrongfully convicted of murder.

Predicting the future is largely impossible, but scouring the past for signs of a now-inevitable present can be all too tempting. There is nothing to stem our sense that we're onto the true reasons for everything that came to pass. As if we humans need something else to think we've got all figured out!

Comic-Book Adventures and Aspirations of the Phenomenal Fanboy

No cosmic rays, no secret government experiment, no ancient amulet, no genetic anomaly (that I know of) is to blame. Simple exposure is what transformed me, when a stranger aboard a flight to Amsterdam shared some comic books. One look through the pages of those four-color marvels and I was no longer a mild-mannered Kansas kid but

At every page of my seatmate's Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor, Excalibur, et cetera, I pointed and asked characters' powers and origins. The urge of the fan to talk comics dwells deep. It knows no age. For anyone else, a hyperinquisitive nine-year-old could be a drain, but the tourist beside me was patiently indulgent. By the time we deplaned I felt like an expert in superheroics. Silly me. That stack of comic books barely skirted the labyrinthine Marvel universe, never mind those of other publishers. Still, this peek into a fictional reality was huge and couldn't be unseen.

What kid hasn't read a comic book? At least in this respect I was typical. Asterix and Obelix was a favorite, as was The Adventures of Tintin. A few kiddie comics, like Uncle Scrooge and Casper the Friendly Ghost, also entered my possession here and there, thanks to neighborhood yard sales. One time, too, I found a lurid Tales from the Crypt knockoff so creepy that I buried it in a box of books in my closet and, when I uncovered it again, months later, just glimpsing the cover startled me. But the comics on that transatlantic flight, my first encounter with superheroes, appealed to that primal myth-making urge. In our secular age, comic-book characters' costumed adventures stand in well for bardic tales of derring-do. The distance between Beowulf and Wolverine isn't so great as scholars might prefer to think.

The form that comics take, coupling words with pictures, is also sometimes considered remedial, the stuff of ABCs and Dick and Jane, but the history of humanity since it discovered written language is replete with "mature" examples of images paired with language: the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs, illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages, twentieth-century pop art…. Comics are highly malleable, too, allowing any style or story, as simplistic or sophisticated as you could ever want. They're limitless. An artist can contain a whole narrative in a single panel, or stretch one moment across the panels of an entire page. And it's not just time that comics have the power to subvert. A conventional book is read a certain way, left to right, top to bottom. With comics, sequence is fluid. A page may start in the lower left and proceed clockwise, with panels' shape and content prompting you in the appropriate direction, while the next page may go all Snakes and Ladders, or radiate simultaneous panels from a central hub, or offer a disorienting hodgepodge — all in the service of the story. The order, the shape, the proximity of panels — none are arbitrary; each has meaning. You learn how to read a comic book whenever you open one for the first time, inferring and adapting as you go, propelled by the visceral, almost physical momentum of the story being told.

Naturally, I drew my own comics, tinkering with this protean storytelling method. Entire afternoons winked by, on the floor of my room, pens and markers arrayed around me, a large white page filling with elaborate color. You could illustrate it as a splash page. In childhood's omnivorous creativity, I was just as apt to steal ideas from books, TV, and movies as to invent my own. One strip that I did was Dr. Droid, a sci-fi serial about an alien scientist whose spacecraft crash-lands on Earth. The gentle three-foot-tall humanoid is discovered by fearful humans who, mistaking his cybernetic implants for weapons, hunt him through the woods, to his crippled ship, and blow him up. The end (with shades of Frankenstein).

Years later I did a much more ambitious comic, a proper twenty-two-page book entitled Animal World. It imagined a posthuman future Earth on which anthropomorphic lions and tigers and bears (and cockatoos and crocodiles and chinchillas and… ) waged high-tech Darwinian war against each other — carnivores versus herbivores, with the omnivorous species forced to commit to one side or live as outcast "primitives" in the wild. I used themes from the classic Greek and Roman sagas that thrilled me — heroism and villainy, political intrigue, blood feuds, even a little forbidden love between the herbivore's leader, Keras, and Ghi'ra, one of the carnivores' royal family.

Through some Dungeons-and-Dragons nerds in my sixth-grade gym class, I learned about Clint's Books and Comics. My father, the afternoon I asked him for a ride, told me about buying Mr. Natural comics there in the ’70s. I had no idea what those were, but he smiled as though recalling a fond memory. While he hit the used-record store next door, I entered Clint's solo, in search of Usagi Yojimbo, the adventures of a masterless samurai rabbit in a feudal Japan "peopled" by animals — ninja bats, vampire cats, Panda Khan. I'd read about the series someplace or other. My first impression on walking through the door was that Clint's would have it, because it looked like Clint's had everything.

Every square inch a stereotypical comic-book shop, the place was a Shangri-La. Posters layered its black walls — Vampira, Green Lantern, X-Force, Bone, the Joker and assorted Batman variants, Conan the Barbarian, Captain America, the obligatory Superman. Polyvinyl (oh, magical word!) sculptures held aggressive, anatomically suspect poses everywhere. Action figures wielded claws, swords, guns, and ion blasters on the glass counters that displayed myriad trading cards — hologram, oversized, foil-stamped, ultragloss, and more — plus pogs. Comic books (did you forget the reason you came?) screamed for attention along every wall, lunged forth from spinning wire racks, and massed in row after row of black two-tier wooden shelves spanning one full side of the shop. In the back were source books and supplements, dice and lead figurines — the role-playing paraphernalia those kids from school dealt in. In the basement, adult fare. Over, around, and through everything hung the inextricable smells of aging paper and stale cigarette smoke.

A nice Usagi Yojimbo collection, a trade paperback, was available for cover price. When I went to ring up, the man at the counter, ponytailed, bespectacled, bearded, black-clad, cannily suggested another black-and-white animal-martial-artist title, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. "It's not like the cartoon," Ponytail intoned, his voice roughened by authority and Marlboros. "In fact, it's fairly gritty. Dark, even." He knew who he was selling to. I bought two back issues.

Free for the taking, in a basket by the door, issues of the eight-page Comic Shop News hung, packed full of reviews, artist and writer interviews, convention info, and handy checklists of next month's must-haves. I studied the paper all weekend long, in my father's passenger seat, at the dinner table, in my room, until not one word remained unconsumed, like Galactus devours planets. I had to know all, all, all. About every publisher. About every title. About every limited series, one shot, exclusive, ashcan, and TBP. Bitten by the comic-book bug (it wasn't a radioactive spider), I was suddenly ravenous.

But decades of back issues from the Big Two intimidated me; how could anyone start his collection with, say, Action Comics #308 (let alone #8) and not know what happened in previous issues? And what if those previous issues weren't to be found or afforded? Then there were crossovers and tie-ins to consider. Even if TPBs collecting every single story arc were available, the commitment required was staggering. Instead of taking an impetuous leap, I satisfied myself with once-removed comic-book geekery, reading the Wizard guides and Comic Shop News every month, talking the trade with old-guard fanboys at Clint's, cadging rides to conventions — sad little affairs in hotel suites and big trade-center events alike. Those tantalizing superhero comics remained beyond my summer-job budget and bedroom-closet storage capabilities, until Image came along.

Written and drawn by Todd McFarlane (renowned for his work on Spider-Man), the first Image Comics title hit shelves in May of 1992. Spawn is the Faustian tale of a murdered government assassin who bargains to see his wife again, only to be conscripted into Hell's army and discover that his widow went on to marry his best friend. Critics raved. To me it appeared sufficiently "gritty" and "dark," and because Image was a blank slate, with no burdensome back list of titles to beggar a beginning collector, I baby-stepped into the genre that, for better or worse, defines the form. Spawn #1 was mine. After that it's kind of a blur. Image burgeoned into a major publisher, and I bought everything they brought out.

Collecting in general was out of control then. Fans watched prices on precious vintage books go up, up, up, and inferred that all their favorite titles would be worth a mint someday. Vendors did nothing to disabuse them of these delusions; there was a fortune to be made in storage supplies. Every book had to go in a polybag — a clear plastic sleeve made especially for comic-book preservation — with an acid-free backing board. Issues thus packaged went into a sturdy, dark box stored somewhere cool and dry. Obsessives with money to burn could buy $400 vacuum sealers (as seen in Comic Shop News!) for keeping their paper treasures free from air, starch-hungry insects, and oily human touch forevermore. Polybags not included.

I drank this Kool-Aid. Each issue I bought got read once, cautiously, laying atop a clean, flat surface, then — thwip — slipped with a backing board into a polybag that, in turn, slid into one of five meticulously labeled Comic Defense storage boxes in my closet, beside my dresser. On rare occasions I'd treat myself to staring at covers through ten-mil ultraviolet-blocking plastic, wistfully.

Unable to reread the books in my collection, I created superhero characters of my own. The first was another alien, Shifter, whose power was to rapidly change shape. He could grow gills to breathe underwater, camouflage himself like a chameleon, morph his face to mimic a human's…. His two partners in the hero-for-hire field were a debauched telekinetic, Adrian d'Arq, who insisted that his psionic ability was really sorcery, and a genetically optimized swordsman named Yang, whose blades were second only to his wit in sharpness.

Others followed — a whole constellation in the Case Comics universe: the 1960s cyborg, Dreadnaught; the wind-wielding Gail Two Hawks; the conjoined (yes, I went there) psionic Serinkov Twins; the mute madman, Andre Chevalier; the hulking Megalith; the extraterrestrial Guise, Shifter's ex-colleague; the gaseous murderer, Nobody; the cthonic mutant Demiurge; the psychotic battle-droid, RAndoM; the (literally) explosive Ryott; and more, even less interesting to read about in the abstract.

Digging deeper, I pored over books on the technical aspects of comics, their forms throughout history, their cultural influence, and culture's influence on them. I bought VHS cassettes on how to draw in comic-book styles, how to break into the industry as an artist. My parents bought me a drafting table and chair. I hung a chart of the human muscular system, for reference, on my closet door. I blew an entire month's earnings on a set of markers. Later money went to pens, a forty-dollar mechanical pencil, drawing paper. Other fourteen-year-olds had friends; I drew, every evening, for hours. That I was going to someday draw comics for a living was commonly accepted among my family.

It seems a foregone conclusion that anyone this focused on his goal is going to, if not succeed, at least admirably fail while trying. The life I fell into admitted of little vocational planning, however. Profligacy killed my juvenile dream — a death from which, unlike a beloved superhero's, there would be no astounding resurrection.

Can you ever really outgrow comic books? Even at thirty-eight, I still get a little excited whenever a new X-Men tie-in comes to theaters. Drawings of stylized Spandex-wrapped physiques affecting action-ready postures still momentarily snag my attention. Still, from time to time, the face I find myself mindlessly doodling is Shifter's. The Phenomenal Fanboy may have hung up his cape decades ago, but the iconic imagery, the outlandish premises, the devoted geekery required and rewarded, the timeless good-versus-evil struggle we humans exist in thrall to — they shine like a beacon against dark, looming clouds overhead, signaling to the former Fanboy in his lonely hideout. He looks up and feels the old rush of adventure, remembers his erstwhile compatriots' heroic exploits. A mysterious smile teases up the corners of his mouth.

Memories of Bast

I knew it was love when she acted embarrassed for shitting on my leg. Little Bast hid in the closet for nearly an hour after that, impossible to cajole out even with canned tuna. It wasn't her fault she came from the shelter with an upper-respiratory infection and lower-intestinal parasite. Our first few weeks together, every time she sneezed — well, I'll spare you the details. This affectionate six-month-old kitten was no less adorable for having a minor soiling issue. Even then, I could tell that she was the perfect cat for me.

Bast quickly learned that I sleep like a corpse, and took to sphinx-posing overnight in the furrow between my legs. (Fitting, since I named her after a gentle cat-goddess of ancient Egypt.) Often she was still there when I woke up. If not, no matter; we always met in the kitchen for coffee, kibble, and a brief chat. "Morning," I'd say. "Mrrrow," she'd reply.

She always met me at the door with that aloof gaze, chest puffed imperiously, but I knew she'd been sitting there for a while, awaiting my return from work. The whole thing was an act; my absences weren't actually held against me. She'd soon enough be perched on my lap, playing predator with the cursor on my computer monitor until I persuaded her to stow the killer instinct in favor of behind-the-ear rubs and — her favorite — under-the-chin nuzzles. We'd have been satisfied to sit like that for hours at a go. Bast's was the softest fur of any animal I've had the delight to pet.

After my abduction, Bast got another excellent, loving, attentive home with my godmother, Judy. Photos and regular updates on my velvety little darling (and she was always that — my cat — no matter how long we'd been apart) came in the mail like a time-lapse film of Bast's sleek black coat turning brown and discomposed. Increasingly, my knee hurt and her back legs wobbled. She needed shots every month, for a recently developed disorder. I took daily pills for chronic heartburn. Our bodies were betraying us. I wondered so many times whether or not she'd remember me if I got out of prison today. Those bittersweet reminders of passing time, of mortality. I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss her terribly.

Judy wrote last week. My little Bast, at nineteen, has finally died. In truth, I'd been waiting to hear this for so many years, worrying how it might hit me when word came, that its sting was absent. There's only this fat, dull ache in my throat, this warm pressure behind my eyes. I remind myself that it's better to be a degree removed from grief, separated, like this, by time and physical distance, but memories and the foiled daydream allure of could-have-been adds back what detachment takes away. Grief's toll is always paid somehow.

Last Night on Earth

Why, still, the lifelike memory of that last night? It wasn't special, just a drive through town and a couple of hours with a friend. With renewed energy, at the conclusion of a long, violent week in bed (or, by appearances, in a grave), it was a kind of liberation: out of bed; black pants, black T-shirt, black Docs; earrings; concealer, powder, eyeliner; away.

"Hey, you pale and sickly child," sang Martin Gore. "You're death and living reconciled." In the car, the new Depeche Mode album compelled me along the streets and terraces. I could've driven anywhere — dropped in on the Captain, rang up Brahm, invited out that girl from the art museum, stopped by the coffeehole — except I wasn't fit, not yet, for that level of interaction. My friend F.C. was chill. F.C. was unambitious. F.C. was the perfect person to hang out with while affecting a resurrection. Such was his ease, when I showed up on his porch, he gave no sign of noticing, until "Coffee?"

We watched Requiem for a Dream on rented VHS. Darren Aronofsky directing the adapted Hubert Selby Jr. novel. Everyone in it loses their mind (and body) to drugs. One character overdoses on diet pills and hallucinates what's likely cinema's only scene involving, according to the credits, a "refrigerator puppeteer." Some have called the film depressing. I recall it being wonderful — the last thing I watched as a free man.

No want of a cigarette afterward, which felt weird. Being sick had kicked the habit — two and a half packs (or more) a day, for longer than I kept track — right out of me. It was a conspicuous absence. I wasn't sure what to do with my hands, so I knifed them into my pockets and told F.C. I'd see him around.

The car, my enormous silver car, belched a plume of exhaust. I tingled with amusement at the absurdity of it, the stink of wasted gasoline (eleven miles to the gallon, new, in 1974), the engine's out-of-tune havoc. I left F.C.'s driveway without cueing up a different soundtrack than its mechanical one.

There was swirling fog when I plunged into a low section of the barren expressway. Here was where the night was at its most potent, across that span of solitude, unfettered by any more pain or fatigue from illness. Here came the full appreciation for my liberty. I was piloting into the night, waves of mist sweeping around my vessel, which bobbed along nautically, like a boat on dark seas through which I could travel in any direction — any direction at all.

Foot off the gas pedal, for the neighbors' benefit, it was 1:30 in the morning when I coasted down my street. Ever the insomniac, inside, I logged on the usual IM clients and my webmail: four unread e-mails waiting — a band's tour dates, pics from my recent ex, adult-site spam, notice of a software update. I surfed art and humor sites until yawning.

I undressed. I slipped into bed. I slept dreamlessly. I woke up to guns. To shouting. To something altogether different from anything I'd known.

And that's where some think the writing ought to begin, yet here we are at an ending. Retrospect alone — the thereafter and the heretofore — is what gives these paragraphs relevance. I'm haunted, as I have been for almost sixteen years, by that simple night. Worse is not knowing when, or if, the memory will ever leave me be.

The Fragile Collection

Where we lived in southern Wyandotte County, Kansas, was quiet without being too quiet. The suburban houses were widely spaced, constructed in a mishmash of styles, over multiple decades, an architectural grab bag. Most of our neighbors were older, and I was one of maybe five kids within a one-mile radius. A lot of the neighbors we knew by name but weren't close enough for block parties or borrowing cups of flour. What the neighborhood did have was an ample selection of nooks and semi-hidden passages that would've been irresistible to any free-range seven-year-old.

Mama and Papa's ease with their little boy's unsupervised traipsings wasn't negligent or crazy. The kid whose room was as organized as an entomologist's specimen drawer, who once laid a trash bag on the foyer floor before going tromping through backyard mud, and whose reaction to the "stranger danger" talk was a faintly irritated "I know" — he needs minimal minding.

I was forever picking up stuff while roving. Of the random rusty machine component half buried until my inquisitive fingers pried it free, I wondered what it did, then visualized some Rube Goldberg contraption it operated inside. If I found an out-of-place rock in a sand heap, I'd theorized about freak geological events that could've brought it there. Every child's curious about the whys and hows of things, and at least in this respect I was no different.

Lots of the objects I gathered got imaginatively repurposed. A seafoam-green glass insulator off a power pole became a bookend. Ball bearings found their way into my bag (which itself once sheathed a Crown Royal bottle) of marbles. A length of flex tubing made an arm for my robot costume. But not every object had practical potential. My "useless" finds usually gained a place of honor in the box.

If the box smelled weird because of what it held, I considered it a good weird. That scent: dry paper, soot, a hint of vinegar. Just sniffing the box could be gratifying. Careful not to tip it and disturb its contents, I liked lifting it from the shelf, bringing it near my nostrils, and taking in a deep breath. Maybe the box smelled the way Egyptian mummies do, the way ancient scrolls do, the way treasure buried on a desert island does. I fancied likening my stuff to priceless antiquities, since what I kept in the box was priceless — at least to me.

FRAGILE: HANDLE WITH CARE, read the lid. Without measuring, I had concentrated very hard on making my letters big enough to span its width precisely. I also put permanent-marker cautions on the sides. Who might go into my room and rummage through its shelves of bric-a-brac, I hadn't the faintest idea, but wasn't safe better than sorry? Further insurance: a lining of cotton balls glued to the underside of the lid, and to the box's interior bottom and sides.

To open the box you pulled forward a fold on the front. Two tabs slid up, then the lid clamshelled open, revealing the trove within: my Fragile Collection.

My mental inventory of the box is still mostly intact, thirty years later:

1. Ant, large unknown species
2. Ash, volcanic (Mount Saint Helens)
3. Butterflies/moths, various species
4. Coral, fan
5. Egg, robin
6. Egg, quail
7. Flowers, various species
8. Honeybee, queen
9. Honeybee, worker
10. Honeycomb
11. Nest, mud dauber
12. Nest, unknown bird species
13. Nest, wasp
14. Oil, crude
15. Poop, moose
16. Quills, porcupine
17. Skin, garter snake
18. Skin, reticulated python (partial)
19. Skull, mouse

Excessively keen of touch, smell, and hearing, my affinity for the delicate makes sense to me now. Saying that my sense of life's hardness developed prematurely, leading young Byron to marvel at how soft, brittle, gossamer, crepey, precariously formed things flaunted their easy destructability in our red-in-tooth-and-claw world, would be overstating it. But I had an inkling. When I weighed the robin's egg in my palm, feeling its tiny earthward pull, a kind of empathy was at work. We're all just barely here, flying through the void on this sphere, minuscule marvels of chemistry and physics. The blown-empty eggshell was a memorial to a life that might've been — except it, too, was doomed to destruction. The world couldn't let it last.

My Fragile Collection survived as long as I was its curator. Whatever happened to that box? Has the papery wasp nest crumbled to dust? Did the plastic bottle of Mount Saint Helens ash crack open and scatter its ultrafine contents with the wind? And what about me? Consigned to fire, I was somehow tempered, rather than charred. In the process I realized that the naive young collector's kinship with those fragile things was misplaced. He didn't consider the wide gulf, between existence and death, called living.

Frisbee Goth

Springtime! The yellow sun smiled down from a sky as blue, blue, blue as a robin's egg. Little birds flitted to my neighbor's windowsill and peeped at each other, exhorting the beauty and promise of the season. High gentle breezes herded puffball clouds around like sheep in a field. But, peering through the slit my sleepy fingers found between the bedroom curtains, it wasn't a playful baaaaaah that I intoned but a Scroogelike bah!

No matter how well adapted I felt to living nocturnally, every so often there'd be a morning when, after my overnight shift at the hotel's front desk, my circadian rhythm dropped a beat and left me lying in bed, staring in the inky vicinity of the ceiling, curious to know what the hell was wrong with my brain that it wouldn't reliably shut down. This was one such morning. Hence the exploratory gander at the bright world of daywalkers.

"Experts" say that the best thing the sleepless can do for themselves is to just get up and go do something until they get tired. As much as it felt like acquiescing to the oppressive diurnal-normative agenda intended to marginalize us self-identified nyctophiliacs, I decided to get my ass out of bed. Slipping into my black kimono, I ventured from my Stygian hideaway to see if my roommate had brewed any coffee.

The Captain squatted in the hallway, elbows-deep in a cardboard box she'd pulled from the closet, and surrounded by books, electronics components, and geeky miscellanea. If the guys on The Big Bang Theory prepped for a rummage sale, it'd look a lot like this.

"The fuck?" she said at the sight of me. "No sleepies for owlie?"

Like creepy twins in a supernatural suspense movie, the Captain and I had our own special means of communicating. I answered, "Blarg."

She made sad-face, her small mouth curling down to the points of her jet black bob, empathizing with my pain. (Every ninety days, her job made her work a month of nights, and the insomnia was brutal.) She hitched her thumb kitchenward. "Fresh pot."

When you work overnight, you get a different perspective on the world, civilization, infrastructure, and even biology. You don't take for granted that anyone shares your lifestyle, too, because it's painfully obvious that most don't. I couldn't say how many accusations of laziness I got for not answering my phone during "normal" hours. Incredulous friends didn't get how I slept the days away, even after I pointed out the equivalence of my 2:30 PM to their 2:30 AM. Some people are stubborn in their ignorance of how the world works.

But coffee? Coffee is a universal. Coffee is critical for all late workers, all predawn risers — for burners of the midnight oil, and early birds alike. Coffee, we can all, I think, agree, is life.

I was on my way to loving life when I returned to the hallway with a mug of strong Guatamalan in one hand, a lit Turkish Special in the other, my cats doing synchronized figure-eights around my naked ankles. Everything would be okay, I thought, as long as I had the three Cs — coffee, cigarettes, and cats — close by.

I nudged kitties back to clear space for myself on the floor. Bast nuzzled my chin; Isis sniffed my bare toes; the Captain extended a Ziploc bag and shook it at me, the way you do when you're offering someone a potato chip: "Capacitor?"

"Thanks," I demurred. "I've got my power breakfast right here. What is all this stuff?"

"It's from Mom's basement. Old stuff from school, et cetera," she sighed, repositioning her wire-rimmed glasses. "I'm deciding what to keep and what goes to Defenbaugh."

I read the spines of a few books beside her. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Semiconductors. A Dame to Kill For. Eclectic selection the Captain had.

A black-and-silver plastic something in the box caught my eye. I pointed. "What's that?"

I'd seen Frisbees in all colors, plus a few knockoff "flying saucers" with gaudy decals (typically at Everything's $1-type places), but never in black, with faux-chrome accents. This one, which the Captain introduced as not just a Frisbee but her Frisbee was an actual brand-name Frisbee Frisbee with grooves on top and a metallic silver design in the center, in imitation of that little three-armed plastic device you snap into vinyl singles to play them on a standard turntable. The Captain's Frisbee looked like a record.

It was cool, so I said as much, then added, "We should go down to Loose Park and play sometime."

Since way before I stopped wearing clothes with color, keeping my complexion milky with mail ordered Japanese SPF 70 sunscreen, and dying my hair a shade or two darker than India ink, I'd been going to the Jacob L. Loose Memorial Park — a scenic parcel of nearby land offering leisure-seekers a one-mile loop of pavement to bike or jog or promenade or walk dogs or push strollers; herb and rose gardens for olfactory pleasures; tennis courts; a picnic pavilion, complete with public-use barbecue grills; swingsets; fountains; a placid, attractively landscaped duck pond; ample rolling green lawns; a clutch of shady, fragrant pines; and a memorial to the historic Battle of Westport, with an account of the conflict presented on a series of large brass plaques alongside an authentic Civil War cannon that reeked of ammonia throughout the summer until park officials decided to plug the barrel, thus curtailing after-dark revelers' drunken games of Let's Urinate in the Most Inexpedient and Socially Unacceptable Places We Can.

Loose Park was great. Just because you're goth doesn't mean you can't enjoy scattering bread crumbs for ducks. Frisbee, though? That might have been pushing it, which is precisely the message I read in the Captain's eyes before she said the words "Are you fucking kidding me?"

Sure, my manifestly common-sense sunblock use, not to mention my clunky waffle-soled leather footwear's suitability for any number of potentially rough-and-tumble environments (most of them clubby or mosh-pitty, it's true), could seem to be born of a desire to be prepared, but I was not what you'd call outdoorsy. The Captain and I spent our workdays in front of computer screens; when we came home, it was to our PCs and hours of Internet, lobbing instant messages back and forth to each other from adjoining bedrooms — with the connecting door open. I'm saying ours was a sedentary existence. Yet somehow my roommate and best friend, a young woman who refused to order anything more adventurous than spaghetti red at every Italian restaurant we ever went to, believed that my all-black wardrobe and eyeliner made me less inclined to do something out of character than she was. I was almost offended.

What I thought: I can be spontaneous! I can cast off my gothy mantle whenever I want — go ride the bumper cars at Worlds of Fun, be the only white guy in a sketchy neighborhood's fried-chicken place, sing along with some poppy ’90s hit playing over a store PA, catch a demolition derby, make snickerdoodles, I don't know. I'm not a slave to my subculture, dammit!

What I said: "Whatever," then took a nonchalant drag of my cigarette.

A half hour later we were cruising up Broadway in the Captain's car, windows down, Gary Numan yowling from the stereo:

Down in the park
Where the chant is
"Death, death, death"
Until the sun cries morning
Down in the park
With friends of mine

Was it stupid to soundtrack our lives by picking a song "for the moment"? Probably, but we did it all the same.

We waited in our parking spot while the track played through, then set out on calf-high booted feet for where dogs ran and picnickers picnicked on weekends, this midday abandoned but for us, a couple of oddballs in black, come to toss around a color-coordinated Frisbee.

It's the kind of skill that sticks with you, Frisbee-throwing. Like riding a bike. I was never especially good at that, either. My Frisbee flings banked right too often, crashing into the grass and rolling far afield of their intended target, but the Captain didn't complain about chasing them down, so long as I cast a few into her waiting hands. Don't let her long-sleeved Nine Inch Nails T-shirt fool you; over-the-shoulder slings, boomerang flicks, behind the back catches — the Captain's masterful discmanship exposed her secret teenage flirtation with hippiedom. (And I happened to know she also played a mean game of hacky-sack.)

Beneath my velvet pants, my skin was feeling a little dewy, to which the Captain responded, "Eew!" She was feeling the effects of our fun under the sun's cheerful beaming, too, so we retired to a concrete bench in the umbra of tall pines, blanketed all around by their shed needles. Light gusts of air stirred their fresh scent, and I yawned. So quiet, so dim. I could just lie down right....

"Hooman?" the Captain prodded my elbow. Translation: Are you ready to sleep yet? I nodded, suddenly feeling drained.

She drove us home. Without another word I shut my bedroom door, barely getting my laces undone and boots off before collapsing into bed like a corpse. I didn't even care that I was damp; more laundry for later, was all. The only thought in my head, just before I lost consciousness and plummeted through enough restful hours' sleep to get me through that night's work, was, Huh, the experts were right.

The Unsolved Mystery of Room 309

The first came five years ago. With the early-morning circulation of everyone’s passes to see the nurse, doctor, lab technician, dentist, or caseworker there arrived in my door one pass indicating I was scheduled to report to room 309, in the programs hallway. I hadn’t signed up for any programs, nor did I have any inkling of what room 309 was. Passes, though, are nonnegotiable. At the appointed time, I went to the housing unit’s control module where a guard signed me out.

At the far end of the hallway where prisoners report for religious services, canteen pickup, haircuts, and the filing of grievances, room 309 turned out to be a dinky office, a small window in the door of which afforded a view of just a desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet, and a withering potted plant. A paper sign on the door read PSYCHIATRIST. I have never needed the psychiatric services of a prison shrink, it should be pointed out.

“I have this pass for room 309,” I told the guard working the hallway that day, but no one’s there.”

He evaluated my pass as though it was a foreign object. “Wait around a little while. I’m sure he’ll be back in a few minutes,” the guard said, manifestly disinterested in my confusion.

I waited, then waited some more. Eventually the guard, probably just wanting me out of his hallway, placed a call to the main psychiatrists’ offices, adjacent to the infirmary in another part of the building. As it happens, the psyciatrist who occupied room 309 had relocated his practice for the day, so the guard sent me in search of a different office, in a separate hallway. It was a sweltering summer afternoon and I was already irritable from the runaround I was being given. The brief walk outside, from one entrance to another, stoked my fire.

Following another period of waiting, this time in the much cooler lobby of the mental health department, I was seen by one of the prison psychiatrists, a big man at a big desk. My name, though, was not on his list of appointments, and neither of us knew why I was there. He apologized for the inconvenience, as if he had anything to do with it, and I thanked him for his time, as if I’d taken more than a few moments of it.

I returned to my cell and promptly put out of my thoughts the wild goose chase I’d just participated in.

Months and months passed. Then one morning I awoke to find another pass for room 309 in my door — for the same time as the last had been. Again I journeyed across the yard to the programs hallway. Again I walked to the last door on the right and found the office empty. Again I told the guard, “Hey, I have this pass....” Again I was told to wait. Again no one showed. I decided to take a calculated risk and skip the trek to other offices. No one reprimanded me for missing an appointment, so I made the right decision.

My next pass to room 309 came the following summer; my attitude was by then one of mild amusement — more Here we go again than Oh no, not again. I toyed with the idea of not even leaving for the appointment but figured that, with my luck, this would be the one time the mystery pass was legitimate, resulting in me getting a conduct violation for not reporting to my assigned location. It could happen. So I went.

The office had changed hands since the last time. It now belonged to the institution’s investigator — the house detective, so to speak. The switchover threw me, momentarily. A sense of foreboding grew as my mind raced to think of how I could have become embroiled in whatever matter she might have been looking into. But no, the investigator was as surprised at my appearance there as I was apprehensive about it.

With admirable professional thoroughness, she attempted then and there to track down why I kept receiving passes there, going so far as to photocopy my current one, call the prison’s control center, and promise me that a memo would be sent to the admin building regarding the ghost passes. I have no doubt that there’s now a copy of her memo in my institutional file.

None of her efforts had the slightest effect.

One year after the investigator’s valiant attempt to stop them, another pass showed up. I ignored it, filing it away beside the previous year’s pass, in a folder reserved for my institutional paperwork. I decided to start collecting them — always to room 309, always for the same date and time — as curios of a sort. This year’s phantom pass brought my collection up to three. I have a little fantasy of accumulating a bunch of them and taking them with me to the admin building on the day I’m released from this place (which, despite my sentence of life without parole, I believe will come). I’d like to present the paper bouquet to someone there — a sort of parting gift, a symbolic giving back of the time lost to this purgatory, a token bespeaking no hard feelings, a kiss-off, a sign that I haven’t lost my sense of humor. I doubt it would be appreciated.