Ear to Heart to Funny Bone: 2012

If you are reading this, it means you actually listened to me and checked out all the links that I told you to check out. Good.

I feel like we have talked so much about what you are going through and although i'll never understand completely your pain i do feel like i understand your sorrow. i understand what it means to lose control. to feel like you are looking down at someone else's life. to find yourself without inspiration. without a feeling of accomplishment. sometimes i just can't quite say what i want to say. i've always been better on paper.

sometimes i'll write here. sometimes i'll leave you links. or pictures. or a story.

today i want you to read this and remember i am always willing to bury you alive...

Buried Alive

When Johnny suggested I be buried alive, it was difficult for me to say no. I love being buried alive. My mother always said that it wasn’t safe for boys my age to be buried like that. I insisted that ten was the perfect age for a boy to be buried. If you waited until you were old and died, you wouldn’t be able to appreciate it the rest of your life or the smell of the dirt. It is something that since the day I was born seemed to me the best way to truly find out who your friends were. If they bury you and leave you to rot, they aren’t worth your time. But if they bury you and dig you up, you know that they can be trusted. And, on the off chance they refuse to throw dirt in the hole, they probably aren’t any fun.

Johnny Weston was different though. Not only did he want to bury me in the dirt, he wanted to be buried along with me. Filling in the hole turned out to be more of a pain in the ass than we thought. Sitting down in the shallow grave, we had to reach our arms up and pull the dirt down on top of us. We took turns grabbing the dirt and packing it in around us. Johnny was taller than I was, so in the end it was him who had to finish the job. When we were done, we sat there in silence. I could faintly hear his lungs expanding, but it was the smell that I remember best. Not quite as sweet as when Danny Crawford buried me (it had been strawberry season), but not as fermented as when Mary Jo Clement did (she was the only girl I ever let bury me). I think it was her bad breath that made me pass out.

As far as dirt goes, Johnny’s was some of the highest quality. The real deal. It had the moist feel of springtime. The earthworms practically crawled along in front of you, removing the chemicals. Kind of like a natural detox. We sat like that for a half an hour, although it seemed like days. A half an hour is really all the longer you can stay down there. Even with straws for breathing holes (something I had first done with Raymond Walker) it was difficult to breathe for all that long. Plus, if you weren’t careful and didn’t remember to keep flexing your ass every once in awhile, the tingling would start there and move all throughout your body. That happened to me the first time I went under. Bobby Rae buried me, got called home to eat a grilled cheese sandwich and forgot to dig me up. Lets just say that friendship didn’t last that long.

Back to Johnny. I remember crawling out of that hole, with dirt plastered to our faces, embedded in our hair and sticking to our teeth. I couldn’t see anything but the whites of Johnny’s eyes, and even those were difficult to distinguish. He grinned, letting dirt fall into his mouth and stuck out his hand. “Ha! Thanks man. That was incredible.” My mouth widened into a toothy grin and I took his hand in mine. “Not a problem! You are the first one that ever wanted to go down there with me.” I was telling the truth, too. I had never actually expected anyone to want to risk life and limb for some time under ground. Even I knew that it wasn’t the average thing for a kid to do, but it made perfect sense to me. How else was I expected to choose my friends? It was like this that our friendship came to terms. The bond we formed that day was one of undeniable strength. Not a day went by that Johnny and I didn’t do something together. It started out with the evening game of baseball out in the street. Sometimes we would gather all the neighborhood kids up and play Kick-The-Can or Red Rover. We always chose teams and it was us that made the rules. We never fought. If things got tense, and they sometimes did, we would bend down and throw some dirt to the feet of the other person. Silently reminding ourselves that there are things in life that are better left unsaid.

As time went on, we started enjoying the company of some of the girls in the neighborhood. We would switch off playing good guy, bad guy. He was my wingman and I was his. Not a single girl that I ever went out with went out with Johnny. We were that good. If one of his old flames asked me out, I would smile and simply give a polite “No thank you.” It got to be understood at school that no girl of mine would become a girl of his, and vice versa. I am not saying it was all easy, though. Mary Jo Clement finally fixed up that bad breath of hers and I remember more than one occasion that Johnny and I had some unpleasant silent moments as we passed her in the hall. She had buried me once, so she was mine from the start, but I could tell that Johnny had taken a liking to her. Thing was, she liked me and had since that day she dumped dirt on my head. Finally I asked her out just to clear the air and fix things for Johnny. He was happy when I finally did it, and after that there was no need for him to feel bad. He had moved on from her.

Life wallowed by. Junior high school turned into high school. We played sports. I played football and jumped the long jump (I could never get away from those dirty sports). Johnny ran track and played basketball (he had always been taller than me). My life started to get a little more complicated when I took up writing and started looking deep inside myself for stories to put down on paper. By the time we graduated, we had run out of girls to date and the little city that we called home was starting to look as small as that hole we had dug ten years prior. It was time for us to move on. Thing was, we really didn’t know where to move on to. Johnny got a scholarship offer to play basketball at some big university and seeing as I had always been the imaginative one, I started looking towards New York as a place to start writing. One night we figured out we were going to have to go our separate ways. No one really enjoys saying goodbye to people he or she care about, but for Johnny and I, we never really looked at it as goodbye. It was more of a “see you later” or a “talk to you in awhile”. A moment in life where things seem to stand still, like when you are underground with twenty pounds of dirt pressing down on you. We couldn’t really move from the water tower balcony where we sat, passing a bottle of gin back and forth, thinking about all the times we had caused hell throughout the town. Talking about girls we dated, people we knew and things that we remembered. We talked about Raymond Walker and the fact that he now had a boyfriend up in some little city north of our town. We knew he’d be happy and it didn’t make a difference to us that he had found someone of his own sex to love. Love was love and that is all that mattered. We talked about Mary Jo Clement and how she would probably end up with some meathead over at UCLA where she was headed in a few months. But mostly we talked about us. About all the fun we had, all the things we saw. We laughed a lot and cried even more. As the sun was rising and we were plenty drunk we wiped our faces so the towns people wouldn’t see two grown boys crying and climbed down. I stuck out my hand and he shook it with the vigor I remembered from that first time at the hole. Turning towards home, I kicked the dirt beneath my feet. The smell that floated up was drier that day than the day Johnny and I buried ourselves, but a faint hint of earthworms found its way through my nostrils. I knew this wasn’t the end.

My move to New York turned out to be a good one. I got a job at a big newspaper and worked my way up the ranks. Days were filled with following leads, sneaking around in alleys and paying men under the table for every little bit of evidence that I could muster. It wasn’t the most honorable work, but it was a way to allow myself the opportunity to write what I wanted to write. I got letters and phone calls from Johnny at college. He seemed to be having a good time and enjoying the basketball team. He always said he missed his wingman and that the girls down there would strike my fancy. I would write him back, too. Tell him about all the time I was spending at work and that I was finally taking journalism classes at NYU. I sent him a copy of the first story I got published, a little memoir about some time I spent underground. He called me the night he got it, laughing on my answering machine. Telling me I always was one for the dramatic. Time moved by and we corresponded less and less. He got busy with his education after he blew out his knee and couldn’t play basketball anymore. I got busy with my column and traveling the world looking for hot new scandals to report on. One day over in the Mideast, I was bunkered down in a hole, trying to avoid getting shot at and a large cloud of sand covered up most of my body. Sitting there, listening to my own heartbeat, I thought about home, thought about life, but mostly I thought about Johnny. Thought about the jokes he would have been making if he were here.

When my plane landed back in New York, the first call I made was to that man I called my best friend. The automated voice on the other end informed me that the number was no longer in service. I sent a letter to his mom back in our hometown and asked her to forward it on. A couple weeks later he called me up. It was just like old times. Talking shit and not caring about the things around us. We hung up the phone promising to keep in touch. After that talking got to be a once a year thing. He had married and I had bounced from girl to girl. Of course I had thrown one hell of a bachelor’s party, stood proud as his best man and got drunk with him on his wedding night. He returned the favor when I wed a girl from the other side of the world. Him being fresh off a divorce and in no mood for a party, made his appearance all the more sweet. As I sat alone, watching my new wife dancing with her father, he walked up behind me and stuck a bottle of gin in my hand. “Congrats!” His voice was strong, but the look in his eye was distant. I could tell he missed his ex and the life they had built. “It’ll be alright.” I reassured him. That was the last day we spoke for a long time. By the time our twentieth high school reunion came along, we were practically strangers.

As I raced my new Mini Cooper down the highway on the way back to my hometown, my wife asleep in the seat next to me, my mind wandered back to the days of innocence. My mouth was dry from the wind whistling through the open windows and the smell of earthworms crept into my nostrils. My memory was instantly jolted and I could smell the moist soil and feel the dirt move as my chest expanded, allowing the grains to roll down my body and between my fingers. I could feel the hard limestone beneath my ass and vaguely hear Johnny’s body adjust itself under the weight of the dirt. I could see the whites of his eyes and the grin on his face. Sliding into a parking spot near the front of the high school my eyes searched through the SUVs and sports cars. I think most people must rent a nice car for their reunion - something about making a good impression. At least mine was actually mine. I had no idea what kind of car Johnny was driving these days, but I looked anyway. Grabbing my wife’s hand I slid through the door of the school and entered the large, decorated gymnasium. My eyes scoured the room, dodging aging beauties that smiled at me as I moved throughout. Finally on the far side of the dance floor, I saw him. Tall and proud, his back to the wall, talking to a small women. His eyes were diverted away from mine. All the better. I dropped my wife’s hand and reached in to my pocket, a smile breaking out across my face.

Strutting up to him, I removed my hand and dropped a large pile of dirt onto his freshly shined shoes. His head dropped down towards the floor and without even looking up he reached out his hand and said, “Thanks man! That was incredible.”

Ear to Heart to Funny Bone

Monday, December 31, 2012

Number 5

Monday, December 24, 2012

Number 4

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Number 3

Friday, December 14, 2012

Number 2

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Number 1