Up on the Wall ...

I hang 10 new comics on my cubicle wall every week. i don't do it to remind me of my childhood or bunnies or whatever. I hang them up cuz the shit looks good on my wall and i can forget where i am for a few brief, imaginative moments throughout the day.

After I started researching these books in depth and discovering the writers, artists, story-arcs, and cultural/sociological relevance, i began to see a similarity in the enjoyment of the comics genre to the pasttime of following a sports team like the Red Sox or maybe a tennis diva. You could maintain an infinite involvement with statistics, relationships and storylines without having to buy tickets to the game (why would anyone ever pass that up?!) and the admirers are a loyal crowd. I admit without hesitation to my friends or other comics aficionados that i'm in it for the art. I love the potential animation that a color newsprint page presents from an issue of Metal Men or Looney Tunes, but I'm a technology geek, too, so I like to sort and collate information. It orders my world.

If you're not enthralled with comics, just skip the technical stuff and enjoy the artwork. i call that "reading", too.

Adventures On the Planet of the Apes #4 (“Trial By Fear”), Feb/1976

On the cover, an Orangutan judge decrees: “The defendant has been found guilty … and the sentence is death!” and the Charlton Heston look-alike in shackles responds: “Dirty animals, you won’t get away with this! I swear I’ll have my revenge!”

All I can say to that, is, you should be polite when you’re visiting someone else’s planet.

Superman #82 (“Back For Good”), Oct/1993

This is one of my favorite variant, specialized covers; a full mylar wraparound with liquid silver, emerald green and gold with a clenched-fisted Superman in his superhero tights, emblazoned on the centerpiece. This issue had at least one other cover variation (non-mylar) that shipped in one of those Big “S” sealed plastic bags and I was really lucky to find this particular copy for a buck with a protective bag and board. At the same time, I snagged some 50-centers at my favorite Cup of Kryptonite coffee/comic shop near the airport right after the owner, Kyle had picked up the collection this comic was in. This one exhibits no sign of the typical superfine surface scratches, an unusual thing for these special mylar covers. I think I have only one other that is in such great condition. The spine is tight with no puckering and I would grade it at NM 9.8.

Captain Marvel #43 (“Destroy! Destroy!”), Mar/1976

It doesn't show through on this scan but the cover colors are spectacular  -- the “Captain Marvel” red lettering with yellow highlight makes for a garrish, hotdog-style title that pops off the page. When I first saw this in the 50-cent bin at the store, the cover was grubby enough to imagine that the last owner had actually been eating an oscar myer wiener slathered with mustard while enjoying Steve Englehart’s writing with Al Milgrom’s artwork, and color assistance from Bernie Wrightson.

That puts this comic into an interesting intersection of Wrightson’s and Englehart’s timeline. Wrightson had just a few years earlier been doing spectacular musculatures with “The Swamp Thing” at DC (I think his skill, and possibly, style came through the inspiration of meeting Frank Frazetta in 1967), and Englehart was soon to be jumping ship in the opposite direction, going to DC, after having editorial disagreements with Marvel. I love, love, love Wrightson’s Swamp Thing – but it is the cameos of Englehart’s lifestory that capture my attention here.

Engelhart’s condensed bio is on Wikipedia along with his liberal political ideology and how it dovetails with his comicbook writing.  Earning a degree in psychology, he served in the army during the Vietnam War and was discharged honorably as a conscientious objector! Wiki states:

Englehart brought a complex, freewheeling style to Marvel's comics, often dealing with philosophical or political issues in a superhero story, such as a celebrated run on Captain America (with artists Sal Buscema and Frank Robbins) that reflected the then-ongoing Watergate scandal.

And that’s not all. Along with artist Frank Brunner, Englehart gets snagged for a Dr. Strange story arc in Marvel Premiere #13/14 as a result of a character named Sise-Neg (spell it backwards), a sorcerer who time-travels backwards to collect all magical powers ever created. He travels ultimately to the Big Bang of the Universe and becomes omnipotent. Sound like a familiar three-letter word? After publication of issue #14, Stan Lee noticed the conclusion of the storyline and feared the market loss of creationist readers and demanded that Englehart and Brunner print a retraction stating that “God” should have been “a god”. In an interview in 2005, Brunner tells how the artist and writer responded: he and Englehart, posing as a minister from Texas write a fake letter of praise for the storyline and send it to Marvel. Marvel gets the letter, serendipitously prints it, and Lee’s retraction order is dropped.

Brave and the Bold #66 (“Metamorpho and The Metal Men”), Jul/1966

Metamorpho is a character that I became interested in after discovering the 6-issue series that Dan Jurgens and Jesse Delperdang published with DC in 2007 (“Metamorpho Year One”). Jurgens wrote through all the issues but only pencilled the first two (followed by Mike Norton pencilling on 3 thru 6), but Delperdang’s color work really got me going.

This Brave and the Bold is one of four featuring Metamorpho (also appearing in #57, #58, then #66, #68) in B&B Vol 1. I don’t have 57 and 58 but the artwork is delicious, and what better character combination could you ever achieve than Metamorpho with The Metal Men?? I think the highlight of The Metal Men series was from the artwork of Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, and the orginating artist for Metamorpho, Ramona Fradon, presents a similar character style to Andru and Esposito but slightly more emphatic action with delightfully whimsical pencilling flowing from her covers and story panels. I believe for the first four or five issues of Metamorpho Vol. 1, Ramona did all aspects of the art, inside and out.

For Issue #66, Fradon did the cover (Charles Paris contributing color) with Mike Esposito adding his inks to the interior story.

The Tomb of Dracula #14 ("Dracula is Dead!"), Nov/1973

“Blade has managed to slay Dracula by impaling him in the heart with one of his wooden daggers. However, before the vampire hunters can get rid of Dracula’s body, the villagers in Dracula’s thrall break into the mortuary and overpower the heroes, taking away Dracula’s corpse.”

This is another example of an awesome 50-center I pulled out of the bins at Cup of Kryptonite and it will be one of those that hangs at home for  ghoulish Halloween atmosphere in the coming weeks.

How about the dialog on the cover?

“You’re doomed, Dracula! We brought you back to life – only so that we could kill you again!“ 

Poor Dracula. Sounds like my life at work every day.

Ok, does the cover have ANYTHING to do with the storyline? Sometimes stories are written last, around the cover, sometimes it gets kinda loose and sometimes the cover action doesn’t even relate to an internal panel but is simply ‘atmospheric’. Angry mobs waving pitchforks, flaming torches, and crucifixes are appropriate for any godless monster sleepwalking into your average contemporary village. Throw in a gorgeous, unconscious, blonde damsel draped in Dracula’s arms and you’re instantly marketing the right literature to any 13-year old kid in 1973 standing at the magazine rack. Only twenty cents at the register, duh, gimme a Defenders-101 for fifty cents while yer at it.

Well, that's only five -- the others were not as notable (another Brave and the Bold and some more Tomb of Draculas). If you like this post i'll do more, please leave me a note and let me know what you thought about it.

yellow jersey

jobhunter bicyclist rides the lightspeed track

to his finish-line meeting, texting semaphores of hope

with apples and blueberrys,

jumping potholes, dodging drivers,

deftly scoping morning rushhour mentors.

bluegold spandex suit stretches on sinew, bone and absent gristle

like a weight-room poser before the tour de france.

could he break away from an interview as easily as his hounding pack,

knowing the difference in risk of losing a job or losing the race;

losing the vaunted jersey to unemployment and someone else’s sweat?

i still wear my yellow silks and keep my backward connections:

a waterfall of letters with endorsements from my top desk drawer,

envelopes and  cancelled stamps,

paper meeting agendas crashing down to the foaming rocks of

boredom and scribbled in pencil.

i’m wireless, too! certified papers that document my day.

away! away! from cell tower conversations

whose tasteless,

invisible microwaves spread,

attenuating out to the small talk of space.

i always imagined a tour de france cyclist late for a meeting or job interview and the sweat and tension this situation presents.

the bug

clings to the cracks in

the bricks of my vestibule

like a blind rock climber patting

the surface with stick hands

and a cane,

probing for new lines to chock its

bug-spit carabiners,

waiting for a brighter light,

the touch of a mate,

an acrid puff of air.

it has no driver’s license,

and it smells bad

devoid of compassion, its life

charted by a

jagged, vertical path on the wall.

without malice, but then a sting,

it may unwittingly

kill me.

no public notice, no knock on the door.

I will not understand its motive.

It will not understand my funeral.

opened flowers

 

near-buried in the summer-young hay

with afternoon flits, swallows sounding in the wind

and grain-thieving varmints swimming

in the waves of this four foot tall

field cover, I wondered

what crayon color this was and dozed off

in the liferaft of a do-nothing day.

with each breath, a tide of sweet green air swelled in my lungs.

there is no quelling my thirst for green like this and

I drank deep the prairie vale,

its emerald fluorescence breaking along the moving hillside.

all that I could see before me was immutable, opaque, plate glass green.

I awoke standing (to opened flowers),

a challenge of parasols on fire

in the meadowed embers of the sunset,

and drank heavily through the evening,

washing down the mood-ring sky with these

flamenco blooms, their floral cast, and slowly lost my way

into the dark, azure tarpaulin shade of night.

Garage Sailor

there are definitely a few things better than the drudgery of a day’s work! this poem is how I might act out my impulse to end the day early.

Scuttle the click of keycaps

beneath calloused fingertips and

anxious gangplanks

cantilevered above

your business meetings -

strip from your office-soured clothing!

Jump into the port-side wake to

tred through the eddies of

weekday flotsam

for the trinkets, knick-knacks,

the neighborhood buried treasure;

…but now hear this …

Reach for the bargain lifesaver!

Like a ouija board on the water,

let it pull you up

the driveways;

new discount harbors,

navigating

the perfect price!

foothills of the past

Shortly after the time Marconi began his famous radio transmissions, my grandmother as a young girl was still on horseback for supplies at the small general store. Situated at the crossroads of a Swedish settlement in Iowa, it was near the church my great great great grandfather built and ministered.

As I grew up, my grandmother recounted these tales of my family as they were passed down to her but the basis of her own existence as a little girl was modern: riding a horse into town for supplies was better than walking. And she knew stories of hardship. Even before the homes were staked, the first winter was severe and early, forcing her ancestors to dig caves  into the hillsides for shelter.

She lived in between two centuries, to the age of 103 and was lucky enough to see the memorial of the immigrants’ community in its ghost-town form of Calliope Village, put onto a plot of land near her town's present day railroad.

--- 

at the end of her burial day as

the wind cut through the switchgrass,

a soot-black suit carried forward

the muted explorations of a cobweb-rattled

stable from one hundred years ago.

steeped in molasses-soaked barley, the sweat

of a horse under cracked leather tack

drifts through the homesteader’s air on a calliope song

long gone across the tracks to the empty side of town.

clouds of dust ripple out like marconi’s waves on the

gravel road as she meditates in the saddle to the clopping

hooves of her four-legged ride.

a stone-ground loaf of bread waits on the sill,

baked for her by the shopkeep’s boy at the grey clapboard

store facing north near the church and cemetery where

her great grandfather Ring lowered the

dead and softly sang their praise:

swedish hymns to the tenders of the prairie

and the harmonies they knew in the dust, rough-milled grain

and the holes dug into the winter ground.

I learned these ballads at her side in this four-cornered

churchyard where the sandstones lean distilled through

time and I quietly now sing out my goodbyes

to the girl with her warm bread and

long-stride friend as they fade down the road

to their far place in the foothills of the past.

See also: 

Lost at Sea - Part One

Lost at Sea - Part Two

 

Lost at Sea - Part Two

A Search for Meaning

  

Mark and the Healey, Fall 1966

When a friend’s car in storage finally had to move, Mark brought it home and managed his teen-survival by escaping to our garage where he and his high-school buddies would spend their time for the next couple of years restoring a very ugly, very non-running Austin Healey 3000 MK-I that would “soon be cherry, really!” Pistons, connecting rods, and camshafts would land in one of four spider-filled corners as each new portion of the engine block was split open like a carp on the riverbank. Sections were gutted and placed to rest in the right sequence - or not - and they prayed for their salvation with the hope to finding their way back to the convertible’s beginning; the mechanical mecca of their 2.9 liter car, to purr again like it did at LeMans in 1959.

This was how the dream spunout in their heads while eating Scrumptuous cheeseburgers and hanging at the drive-in theatre watching “The Graduate” and “Bonnie and Clyde.” They played like teenagers late at night and away from home, and the car was still a dream remembered every morning, but that wasn’t the moving force for them. It was the refuge of the garage and its social event playing weekly that was their raison d’etre. It was better than a Wednesday night cardgame though you might have easily seen their caricatures off the sideroad parking lot as dogs around a table painted on black velvet; green plastic visors on their foreheads and wrenchs in their hands; doobies in the ashtrays. Their time as friends working on the car together was a process that would help them all slowly pull that family crap of their households out of them like a swallowed fishhook; away from the environment most damaging, away from the emotional chaos and dysfunctional alignment to their parents.

Their idea worked for awhile but the closer they got to putting pistons and cylinders back into harmonic balance, the farther away from reality a maiden-voyage fill-up at the Sinclair pump would ever become. They had the dream, but lack of cash dashed their hopes as gran prix mechanics, and their time in the garage became less time spent on the car and more on their bravado.

Gran Prix Mechanics, Fall 1966

After the second year with Mark and his friends holed up in their ashram, it was apparent to my dad that the Austin Healey wasn’t going to roll down the driveway on its own ignition and he had the heap towed and scrapped and regretfully gave Mark the fractional money returned from the sale for his college funds as a payoff. He had better things planned for the garage, like lawnmowers and rakes, and wanted the oil stains over and done with. At this point, quite the drinker in his own right, my dad hadn’t gone so far yet to check himself in to the 12-Step Program but the Healey stood as an incentive moment from a latenight confrontation illuminated under the swinging glare of a naked bulb dangling high from a single wire, each arc shifting the light and stretching the shadows of an ugly moment of ultimatums; friends scattering into the dark; fouled spark plugs kicked on the floor, and the garage door closing on the dream of a cherry car with a high-performance history for the last time.

You should know that my dad had grown up in the Great Depression where northwestern Iowa bordered South Dakota, in the midst of thousands of other Scandinavians who had staked their claims and  transplanted their farming knowledge in the 1860s onto the restless fields of 4-foot tall grasses, blackened sod, and tight little Seventh Day Adventist communities. His ancestors had founded a township in South Dakota near Big Springs and his great-grandfather, as carpenter and pastor, built the church and its graveyard on the knoll beside that still quietly covers those first settlers of that small corner of the American landscape.

My dad was without brothers or sisters and his childhood was all about work. His grandfather was a banker who had lost everything in the 1920s and went back to the dirt and muck to survive. My dad’s mother was also an only child and sang from a strict and a severe prairie hymnal, and he was bequethed the same at age four when his father died. His mother quickly remarried for survival, to a smalltown entrepreneur in Hawarden who owned a dry-cleaning business and the three worked together in the steam-filled rooms mixed with solvent to make ends meet.

He believed in a strong work ethic and freely assigned our chores but I also think he wanted us to understand that we could survive the inevitable drudgery of work and still live a fulfilling life. As the eldest male, Mark felt inequitably burdened by this dogma and with resentment held it over my head as ‘older brother ammo’ for years. After the garage repair shop was closed, my dad decorated it with his favorite lawn implements but NO power mowers until it was deemed that I was old enough to carry on the torch of turf trimming. Into our adulthood, Mark would continue to torment me with the guilt that ‘I got off light with the power-mower’, that his indentured summers were defined by Greek mythology; to forever push a rock up the hill of our 2-acre lawn by the helical blades of a push-mower and the heroic determination of his own adolescent muscle.

All behind him now. Finger Lakes, Summer 1968

First the oil paints, canvas and lessons, then the sportscar to the metalcrusher, and now, my fault, the power mower that might have given the meaning of love to his life. He could only stand by helplessly as my father bestowed upon me (obviously his favorite son) the luxury of a new and  powerful LawnBoy with razor-sharp blades and limegreen paint. Mark stood planted in one spot for the next half hour, glaring and seething as I pushed it effortlessly, trickling a gratuitous bead of sweat down my unworthy, undeserving brow over the buff green. I felt him looking on as the mower hummed smoothly over the yard like a hovercraft, row after row – then sensing his resignation – I glanced up to see his retreat into the house, back to the quiet of his black lair under the basement stairs and the comfort that was there for him.

Next … Closing in on the Gulfstream

Previous ... Part One - Casting Off

kid gloves

in a certain way, our hands and the expressions we create with them limit or extend our connections to the world. i think our link to the animal world is very different than what binds our souls into Humanity and it is the search for these distinctions, to step outside of ourselves, that determines the success of our brief time on this planet.

there is an aquarium in my house

with fish who never wave when

I hover above the water, waiting to drop food flakes.

humble and unaware, they have

no right or left, can’t hold a bat,

and would strike out on the third pitch

despite their lower jaws, forever in a bulldog’s snarl at home plate.

without thumbs or aspirations,

they can’t hitchhike, they’ll never pass the butter,

and will forget your birthday.

my hands, tools, are for this poem; ordering

pizza; shoveling my driveway.

these covered, calloused palms; missing humanity,

afraid to wave to that guy walking the dogs in our neighborhood,

who,

reaching out for love,

sees only the kid gloves hiding the tendrils of my soul.

another manifestation

my dreams are often vivid and bizarre representations of travel, vehicles and transportation, houses and buildings, with animals and sometimes spirits that have just whisked around the corner out of sight. this poem, like others, is written after dreams i've had that move between the semblance of stability, and the marginal haze of sleepwalking. 

 

startled awake

deep in the night,

sliding downward to the end

of a fresh-mopped floor, you peer,

head sideways to the gape of an elevator shaft,

opened, like a guillotine.

you don’t remember falling

asleep but land your dreaming thirst

outside to the fountain in the park because the water

is cold,

even though it tastes like wet dog,

and the air that you expel

from your lungs coats your mouth like

the stale closet air beneath your back staircase.

you might wake up,

with a limp in your walk

from a clump you stepped in near the fountain, packed into

the grooves of your boot and no time to scrape …

here’s the bus! with a picture on the side with happy people

and text that says “we love the bus!”

you step up to the changebox,

the bus driver’s hat says

kerouac and you say hello.

he’s driving to denver, yammering into the mirror

to some gonzo donned with sunglasses and a

blue feather boa draped over his violin case,

discussing universal health care

because it’s in the papers.

they’re barely dressed with their opinions, going west,

smoking cigars like castro twins.

you take your seat.

gonzo man takes a drag

on his havana and punctuates

with a truman capote flick

of his finger, “something smells …”

a guy with a dog reading

steinbeck juts forward

like a ventriloquist’s dummy

with a wooden jaw to say, “why yes, it does, doesn’t it?

"what a beautiful day.”

it’s a day where things come alive, even if

in the wrong way, even if  in a dream where

a cigar is more than a cigar

and where the love for a bus with

a cadre of dead fools is

just another manifestation of the perfect day ahead.

almost the same

my wife sells shoes at an upscale department store in west des moines, while i work in the offices of a bank. the way we deal with people at our jobs is so very different but we always come together again at the end of the day, and i try to imagine parallels that will provide continuity in our lives. at my job we used to have a contractor who would bring in donuts every friday (to keep his employment!) and this poem is about my reflections around this. 'Donald Pliner' is a high-end brand of shoe.

I thought of you, while
leaning back in my chair
at work eating one of
those donuts that someone
brings in every friday. I knew
you’d never be so lucky;
on break with powdered sugar
on your shirt. instead, you’ll stand
all day for impatient customers,
measuring feet
with that odd, flat, boat-like ruler
that always gave away my toe, raised
skyward like a flag
on the bowsprit of my foot.
while I smell fresh cake donuts,
you smell musty feet and the crumbs
they carry in their shoes
from suburb breakfasts of english muffins and
cornflakes. I can’t protect you
from these things or the report cards from
the kids, tv, or even the drunk tomorrow night
whose wheels will jump the curb and
plow into the person strutting
with the pair of donald pliners you sold today.
I can’t protect you from this,
but I can love you,
and hope that I’ll see you again, unscathed,
maybe almost the same as before.

humanity

here is more of the blacktop circus from a little different perspective.  i provide a deeper explanation at the end of the poem ...

my windshield cracks with a morning glint of head-on glare,

though I manage to see your feigned indifference.

a sideways glance lands sharply on my dash and

I stuff it in the glovebox with my out-of-state parking tickets,

covering leftover knapkins from a happy meal.

you imagine that my slackjaw gaze

begs for your attention while you float along in your vanity sedan.

you think it’s you,

or maybe even your car that I want, with its speedtrap promiscuity,

armani styling, and leather upholstery like fresh-buttered bread.

if it were given to me, it’s true, I would take it.

but I’d stand it in the driveway to glisten and fidget;

an impatient runway model with smeared mascara

while I, ignoring pomp, dig bulbs in the dirt of my garden.

my thought was humanity as I pulled alongside,

this road at sharp sunrise, lost, pan-handling for directions amidst these

mundane, vapid, pre-disco boomers.

commuter bumpers hooked in traffic, 8-tracks hooked in pop.

for this half second, before you snapped your look away,

you and I were equal distance from the sun and I thought

you might advise which high roads would take us to adventure.

I never thought it mattered what one drove;

my semi full of elephants trumpeting wildly,

late for the bigtop party.

-------------------

this poem is about a friend who drove an elephant semi for circus kirk in the seventies. he also played euphonium in their band. for the most part, he was adept at asking directions and an expert at u-turns with a trailer loaded full of giants.

  

blacktop circus

I hitch-hiked several cross-country trips in the '70's and '80's from Iowa to Boston; Iowa to San Diego, and this poem is an example of one of my first rides. it was indeed 'an experience': a carnie driving a trailer of circus animals, but nonetheless, it was meeting people by the generosity of their hearts and their curiosity to the human experience. I sadly fear those days of trust are gone ...

at the end of my last year of college

with a burning scalp in the sun and the itch

of highway freedom at 55 miles an hour, I stood there with

a stupid smile and my earth shoes planted in the

gravel like one of the burma shave signs

on the side of the road, pointed east.

no map.

I was counting on the like-minded kindness

of drivers pointed in the same direction as

my thumb and one guy stopped with a semi packed full of

elephants, I was aimless; he was

curious; and he asked me

“what about the circus?”

he had a Bozo weeble-wobble compass on his dashboard

and a picture of his girlfriend in full greasepaint, dusting

an emmet kelly five-oclock shadow, and I thought

about it … then I thought about all that shit

behind an elephant and

me with a shovel too small so i said

no.

I waved goodbye in Davenport then

wanted ‘yes’ for all the rest of my brass

carousel ride through life. but what a story

all those beasts and carnies, cargo trailers, ropes

and canvas tentpegs beaten into the ground,

zipped from lonely town to town,

split by KMarts and

their blacktop, whiteline parking lots.

I thought, “not now, the ride will do me just fine.”

and i could safely boast at

parties how I

almost joined the circus.

farther away

my wife and daughter are off to orlando, visiting family (not mickey). i wrote the poem "farther away" a couple of years ago when she had gone to Maine but it is appropriate everytime she travels. for clarification: we have two cats, but only one would ever actually answer the telephone or meet me at the door.

I called from work today to say hello,

like I always do but remembered the kids

were away at camp and you were

still visiting friends in Maine.

I call everyday because it balances me and

even today, knowing I could only leave a message

and erase it when I come home. I wanted the

cat to hear it, maybe he would respond to me when I

unlock the front door, maybe greet me in his cat way

and tell me that he heard the phone ring. He could tell me

that you also called to say hello and you were sure

the kids were fine,

and that you missed me while

you were having fun, somewhere else

farther away than I can ever walk.

Lost at Sea - Part One

Casting Off

I recently reconnected with someone I hadn’t seen in years who was a friend of my older brother Mark, from high school; Chuck. He was already working for a large corporation by the time I left school, and we had both turned hometown Cedar Rapids into our geographic midlands as we took separate North American coasts as home. Thirty years after our moves away we were pulled together again, if only for a few moments of renewal, by social networking and my older sister.

“Dan, my God, is this you?! I ran into Sally a couple of years ago in DM and she told me about Mark. One of the saddest days of my life. How are you ….”

I read this as if a message pulled from a bottle, adrift for years before settling near my path. The words had spoken deeply to me and I scratched a short reply, put it back into the vessel and threw it to the foamy, outgoing surf of my memories of Chuck and Mark. I thought if I didn’t hear from him again it wouldn’t matter because his note, brief and simple, returned me to another world and time that I retreated from. This moment was a spark carried back in the wind from a distant fire I had long ago doused in my past.

I really didn’t know Chuck that well -- he and my brother were seven years older than I and they used to pal around together. I was the deadweight brother hanging around their necks whenever they wanted to go out and have fun. Hearing the sidedoor hinges sharply squeaking from their attempted getaways, my mom would pop out of nowhere and demand, “Mark, are you boys going out? You need to take your brother with you!”

Great, on a Saturday afternoon I could be enjoying Laurel and Hardy or The Three Stooges, but the drawbridge chains started rolling and the moat opened up behind me – I had no choice but to follow along. oh yeah, here we go again, rolling my eyes to the back of my head. These forced tag-along outings quickly shifted from the ‘boys hanging around’, to the ‘idle tough guys ready to torment a younger twit’. It was my own damn fault for being there. They were saddled with the responsibility of watching me but they also benefitted from juicy opportunities for creative sibling torture. They had to be careful not to go too far – if you left marks or made the kid cry, you got into trouble. It was things like “open your mouth and close your eyes, and you’ll get a big surprise” (ryegrass, wads of clover, soap, carpet fuzzballs, dirt, you name it, and I always fell for it) or threats to throw me down into the bear pit at the Beaver Park Zoo, my god, the odor, or ditching me in the woods. That was their favorite one.

If we were an episode of “Leave It To Beaver”, Mark would be Eddie Haskell, and Chuck would be … Eddie Haskell – there was no Wally Cleaver; righteous, protective older brother. I kept wanting to believe they were kind-hearted, I guess they never pounded me to smithereens, and to Chuck’s credit, he sometimes offered light-hearted words for safety: “Don’t worry, Dan. Your brother’s really kidding, he’ll be back before tomorrow, just hang loose, my man,” then they’d ditch me.

They did their share of boozing as rebellious high school youths in the 60’s and like a 16 year old parolee, their driver’s license swung the iron gates open to freedom and excess. I won’t forget the next morning when Chuck slept overnight at our house after a night of partying. They’d had too many cheeseburgers along the way and he barfed several from the top bunk in Mark’s room. Imagine the splash.

And for Mark, there were the drugs; the Saturday afternoon community service. He’d had plenty of ‘issues’ about which I’d only found out later because my parents kept me in the dark, wanting to avoid the ‘drug conversation’ with their 9-year-old. I’m sure bringing up post-World War II kids in America wasn’t easier than any other time. Drugs and alcohol are never simple to deal with and even more complex when the language used to treat those problems hadn’t fully developed yet. I think my parents realized he was more than they could handle; they practiced avoidance, let him serve out his time with his community service then hoped for the best. He built a black plywood cave under the basement stairs as a quiet place to hide when he was high.

He had an active well of fresh resentment to my parents. There was some kind of behavioral infraction for which my father felt appropriate for punishment. Mark was an astonishing artist and was given oil paints regularly along with lessons. He painted The Matterhorn like Van Gogh from an encyclopedia and scenes from movie posters and it made the insides of the house smell like the pacific northwest, delicious with turpentine and linseed oil. There was one canvas in particular that he painted with glow-in-the-dark paints of the Creature From The Black Lagoon that he placed on an easel like a sentinel right around the corner from the bathroom. The blood red of the mouth was like lipstick and the pale green eyes pierced the dark like rapiers’ thrusts. It nearly caused me kidney stones because I was too afraid to get up in the middle of the night anymore.

He never let go of the evisceration he experienced when my father halted his art career - no more paints, no more lessons. It didn’t matter what he had done wrong and I don’t think he even remembered the details but it was enough to throw him into long term shock from the emotional abrasions to his ego. The punishment was not meted out to encourage time and reflection, but rather, to create a timeless, throbbing pain deep to the bone. I think Mark’s life after that was consumed with finding ways to smooth the scarring.

Next … Part Two - A Search for Meaning