All You Need to Know: In which the roots are tangled

One birth story about my mother is heavily contested. In fact, nobody in our family subscribes to it except my Great-Aunt Isabel. In Isabel’s story, she had an affair with my grandfather; gave birth to my mother, their love child; and then gave her to my grandmother and vowed never to tell. As far as I know she told no one but my mother, sending my mother monthly letters until she died in the late Nineties in either a convalescent home or a mental hospital. She had no insurance so each of her siblings, my grandmother included, had to pay for her funeral expenses. My grandmother was convinced she did this on purpose, as one final jab at her. I didn’t meet Isabel until two years before her death, when she showed up at a family reunion in Arkansas and hugged me like I hadn’t just met her. I remember she had two black children with her, whom she said she’d recently adopted. They both had runny noses. That was when my mother told me her birth story.

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All You Need to Know: In which she moves

When I think of Sara Goldfarb, the good-hearted, desperate mother who becomes addicted to amphetamines after her doctor prescribes them to her as an appetite suppressant in the book and movie Requiem for a Dream, set in the Seventies, I think of my mother sleepwalking from dirty couch to halfway house until she emerged from her own addiction and decided to become my mother before I was two years old. She doesn’t remember much about that time, except fondly bringing up how skinny she was.

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All You Need to Know: In which I am born

Jesus Christ, Pecos Bill, Frankenstein’s monster—everyone has a birth story. Some are sealed in myth and legend, others recorded on blogs and personal web pages, but they’re all important. They tell us from where we come, and in many cases foreshadow the rest of our lives.  My mother tells mine thus: 60 hours of labor, with the doctor urging her the whole time to give me up for adoption, that she was ruining her life. Wayne Martin being led in shackles to see me, and looking happy to see her for the first time since she got pregnant, then leaving for the last time back to prison. Handing me over to my grandmother, not knowing if she would give me to another family, and sobbing. Getting back to 80 pounds by the time I was a month old.

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All You Need to Know: In which the clock strikes 3AM

…and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day. At that hour the tendency is to refuse to face things as long as possible by retiring into an infantile dream…

I tend to justify, even romanticize drug use as a gateway to both community and artistic expression, which I think is a by-product of being an American in the Twentieth Century. Fitzgerald and Exley both traded their families, their dignity, and their faith in the benevolence of the American Dream for the alcoholic visions of The Crack-Up and A Fan’s Notes. Burroughs and the Beats framed a counterculture around sex, drugs, and social critique that’s now so entrenched in our national identity that it’s a running trope of many of our movies, music, and ad campaigns. And even Fleetwood Mac—on a five-year cocaine bender in the second half of the Seventies that left Mick Fleetwood bankrupt, Christine and John McVie divorced, Lindsay Buckingham certifiably insane, and Stevie Nicks a diva who was too out-of-it to even comprehend her own influence—left behind two pop albums that realized perhaps most fully the reality of the American family in the Seventies. But my own family’s addictions led only to a community characterized by early deaths and old ghosts, and its sole artistic expression is a wide swath of disillusioned, fractured children searching for home.

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All You Need to Know: In which the progeny rises

For two years of the early Aughts I thought I had an older sister. R. had been given up for adoption by her mother, one of the female addicts who ran in Wayne Martin’s pack in the Seventies. After a slew of state and federal legislation in the Nineties extended the rights of adoptees, R. sought the papers she hoped would determine her origins. She contacted her mother, the only parent listed on her birth certificate. This woman, now a deeply religious mother of four somewhere in Colorado, didn’t want any contact with R., and told her to seek out Wayne Martin, her father. When I came home for my ten-year high school reunion, Wayne Martin asked me if I would accompany him to dinner with R., to keep things from getting awkward. "She works on an organic farm," he confided. At dinner, R. mentioned casually that she considered all people bisexual. “The way I see it,” Wayne Martin replied jovially, “you either suck dick or you don’t.” Noticing the waiter’s seemingly boundless enthusiasm for our table and my new sister in particular, he asked what one does to get such good service. “Sleep with the waiter,” R. replied. Over the ensuing months he began wondering if R. was really his daughter, but never asked for a paternity test. Two years later, his wife did. When the answer came most of my family ceased contact with R., including all of my uncles who shared a roughly equal possibility of being her father. But I refused to let go of this person who is more like me than any of my paternal siblings, and we agreed that we are still brother and sister. I share a deep bond with this sister-not-my-sister: of an eternal hope, a fractured past, and an earned distrust of parental authority. Unlike me, she’ll never get the chance to speculate on her father’s true nature, because she’ll never know who her father is.

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CAPS LOCK RANT - Against Twitter, Part II

TWITTER, I'VE DECIDED I HATE YOU. THE ONLY SUBSTANTIAL THING I CAN USE YOU TO SAY LATELY IN UNDER 140 CHARACTERS IS THAT I HATE YOU. I HATE THAT I CAN'T HAVE A REAL CONVERSATION ON YOU, AND THAT YOUR FORM ENCOURAGES RUSHED, SHALLOW READING. I HATE THAT I CAN NEVER KEEP UP WITH MY TWITTER FEED. AND I HATE THAT I GET SO FEW RETWEETS. YES, YOU HAVE SO MANY LINKS TO FOLLOW, AND THAT IS PROBABLY GOOD ENOUGH REASON TO LIKE YOU. BUT LET ME GO AHEAD AND SPIN THAT INTO A NEGATIVE: EVERY SINGLE TIME I GO INTO MY TWITTER FEED I INSTANTLY SEE THREE OR FOUR THINGS I MUST READ, THEN I REALIZE THAT BEFORE I READ ONE OF THEM I'LL HAVE 50 NEW TWEETS. IT'S NEVERENDING, AND IT FEEDS MY OWN SUSPICION THAT I'M ALWAYS MISSING OUT ON SOMETHING.

All You Need to Know: In which I go Top 40

On the week I was born, “Brother Louie,” a one-hit wonder by Stories that was quite racy in 1973 for documenting an interracial romance between a white man and a black woman, was #1 on the Billboard singles charts. I’ve always found this vaguely ironic, as my mother was the only white woman to my knowledge that had a child with Wayne Martin. When I was sixteen years old and first met Wayne Martin, my Uncle Buster asked me if I was also into black girls.

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All You Need to Know: In which my mother replies

Wayne Martin didn’t tell me how he went to prison until I was almost forty years old. Part of me was afraid of actually knowing rather than trusting the mythology I’d built up around him, but a bigger part was afraid he wouldn’t tell me, that it would remain forever a part of him I couldn’t know. After he told me I immediately called my mother, ready to surprise her with this new bit of information I’d gathered. “Oh, yeah,” she said, giggling. “I remember Candy.” My mother had kept meticulous track of all of Wayne Martin’s girlfriends after he’d gotten her pregnant, and the winter after he’d gone to prison she and her friend Linda ran into Candy at a bar. Candy didn’t know who my mother was, and my mother and Linda bought her drinks until she was thoroughly soused. They then offered her a ride home. On the ride home, with Candy passed out in the backseat, they took a detour and drove ten miles outside of town. They steered off the road, into a frozen field, and parked. Then they pulled Candy out of the backseat, laid her down in the middle of the field between broken cornrows, and drove back to town. “That,” my mother said, “was the last I heard of Candy.”

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All You Need to Know: In which Candy says

In the winter of 1973, shortly after getting my mom pregnant and while living with his girlfriend Donna who would the next year bear him the first of two boys, Wayne Martin began seeing a woman named Candy. They got to know each other after she’d approached him for drugs. She seemed aloof at first, but soon became as sucked in by his charm as my mother, Donna, and all the others. Then, after a couple of months, Candy disappeared. One warm spring evening while making a routine sale of 50 LSD tabs and a pound of marijuana, Wayne Martin was picked up in an organized sting. At his first hearing he saw Candy in court, preparing her testimony against him. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation had made her get to know him as part of the sting that resulted in 23 arrests that spring. She approached him outside the courtroom and apologized, saying she loved him but if she didn’t do it they’d take her child. That summer, two months before I was born, Wayne Martin was sentenced to twenty years at Hutchinson State Penitentiary.

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All You Need to Know: In which we traverse

At the advent of the Seventies, Wayne Martin followed his father from Chicago with his brother Butch to Lawrence, Kansas. Drug connections with his old friends in Chicago, the mystery and allure of coming from a big city, and his own rapscallious charisma spawned him an almost-instant following among the disaffected local youth that would eventually become my extended family. He specialized in LSD, cocaine, and amphetamines. More than 25 years later, sitting with me at an Italian bakery in Brooklyn, he told me with a smirk how everyone in Kansas thought he had mafia connections. “I think it was because I was from Chicago.” “Maybe it was because you went to prison for selling drugs, and served a twenty-year sentence in nine months,” I replied. “Oh, yeah,” he said, feigning surprise.

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All You Need to Know: In which we pause for a word from our sponsor

Perspective changes with the passage of time. A story, or a life, is in essence a list of events. The greater the distance between the event and the telling, the more it’s cloaked in narrative, clothed in myth, retold, hardened into memory. At some point—adulthood, perhaps—all one person knows is backstory.

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All You Need to Know: In which the echo reverberates through decades

Steve Palmer died in the mid-Seventies when, while bending down to pick up a joint he dropped while driving a truck for Garrett’s Produce, he swerved into the middle of the road and ran head-on into a school bus. I never knew him, but my parents knew him intimately. Wayne Martin still talks about the heists they would pull off local businesses after he got out of prison. My mother was obviously in love with him, though they never to my knowledge dated. She still speaks of riding with him on his motorcycle as late as 1974, as if imagining riding off with him away from her family, her addictions, her life. His death marked a certain loss of hope for her. Palmer is one of the two links I can find remaining between my mother and my father after he left us. The other is Palmer’s half-brother, Buster Wisdom. Buster is still Wayne Martin’s best friend. I call him Uncle Buster. After my mother divorced in 1990, she dated Buster. After my mother’s sister Marti’s husband died in 2005, Marti dated Buster. In 2008, in the month I was married, Buster was almost killed in a single-car accident. Wayne Martin took a call from him while walking with me along the Hudson River the day after my wedding reception. I sat next to him on a bench as Buster confided that he wished he’d died in that accident, that he’d lost hope that life held anything for him. Looking at my father—who had existed to me in the Eighties only as a phantom, in the Nineties as an enigma, and in the Aughts as a periodic phone call—as he talked his oldest friend down from the ledge, I thought of Steve Palmer, and the burden he was spared dying young.

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All You Need to Know: In which we start at the bottom

In 1970, in an act that would define him for generations to come, Milton Metfesser, with a crowd of fellow teenage boys swarmed around him, drank a glass of milk with a piece of shit in it. Tripping on acid, the whole group had just gotten in a bidding war about the gross things each of them would do for money after reading in High Times that Jimi Hendrix had sucked a slushie out of Grace Slick’s crotch on a dare. The things each of them would do got grosser while the price for which they would do them shrank, until Milton sat back and said, “Hell, I’d eat a piece of shit for five dollars!” Wayne Martin, the leader of the crowd by virtue of being the supplier of their drugs, took him up on that bet, and Buster Wisdom told him he would supply the shit. Milton Metfesser left Lawrence shortly thereafter, and when he’s mentioned now it’s usually as The Shit-Eater. The Milton Metfesser Story has been told and retold to me by Wayne Martin and Buster Wisdom so many times that I can tell it as well as they can. Now, when our Chihuahua eats its own shit to prevent us from finding it, I think of Milton Metfesser. Milton Metfesser is not his real name.

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New Resident Dad Post: On Re-Nicknaming My Children

Presenting Crazy Eights and Checkers!

"Stringbean is actually a nickname that goes back generations in my family—I in fact am still Stringbean to a few family members, and occasionally to my wife. And Butterbean, in all honesty, is probably a fair enough descriptor of most babies.

But the more I thought about it, the more introspective I got. And the more I read about body issues in developing young girls...the more I realized that I don’t want to saddle either of my young girls with body-type nicknames. I want my four-year old’s Princess Thing to be a phase and not a way of life, and I want my 18-month-old to retain her assertiveness and spunk without being saddled with the “tomboy” label."

Read the rest here!

All You Need to Know: In which the line it is drawn and the curse it is cast

Ian MacKaye, founding member of Eighties hardcore group Minor Threat and Nineties alternative group Fugazi and a child of the Seventies, said this of the adults in his life then: “I was wrapped up with it as a kid. I never understood what happened to these people who were starting their own farm, these people who were fighting the government. What happened? Everyone was getting high. That was it, all anyone wanted to do. The late Seventies, all everybody wanted to do was get high.”

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All You Need to Know: In which all stories are one

In 1979 V.C. Andrews wrote Flowers in the Attic, which started a series of books that became a blockbuster hit in the Eighties. Laced with incest, switched parents, and warped family secrets, the series sold millions while establishing Olivia Foxworth as the quintessential evil grandmother, who held her grandchildren hostage in the attic while their weak-willed mother caroused with other men. In 1987 a prequel to the series, Garden of Shadows, was published, which told Olivia’s backstory from her point of view. This served two main purposes: first, it deepened the story’s narrative arc by showing how the flawed parents became who they were; and second, it showed that everyone has a story, or perhaps it’s all one story, told from an infinity of possible perspectives.

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My Aughts: In which fatherhood becomes me, and vice versa

My fears were only partially unfounded. My wife’s water broke before she had any contractions, and when we went to the hospital the nurses were concerned that the other, smaller heart rate dropped about 40 beats per minute every time the contractions started. The contractions weren’t getting any stronger, and the cervix wasn’t dilating. Two hours came and went, and the next hour I was in scrubs and getting sanitized, my wife was on an operating table with a curtain up below her shoulders so I couldn’t see the rest of her, a roomful of doctors and nurses were coaching my wife while cutting through layers of skin, muscle, and finally uterus, I was wiping her brow, and then I saw a baby come up, heard “It’s a girl!” and ran over to see her and describe her to my wife while she tried to remain conscious. And that was how, in the last year of the Aughts, I became the thing I feared the most—a father.

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My Aughts: In which past becomes present

A mere two weeks after we were married, we found out my wife was pregnant. The following January, I started writing letters to my unborn child. Then, less than a month before the due date, I began having a series of dreams, in which terrible things happened to both my wife and child in the course of the delivery. My panic attacks returned. I made a mistake and told my wife about these dreams, and she told me to leave our apartment until I’d talked about my dreams with someone besides her. So I called a few people, and when they didn’t answer I called Wayne Martin. My brother J.P., his son, hanged himself at age ten in 1999, and my brother Brian’s first son had died in childbirth just two years earlier. I thought, even though I hadn’t even met Wayne Martin until I was 15, and even after running away from home and making a home of my own, maybe I was finally subject to some sort of family curse. I told him that I just needed him to be a father for 20 minutes. And then, despite my expectations, he was. He told me about being on anti-depressants for seven years after J.P.’s death, about his fears for my sister Brianne, who was two years old when J.P. died, about missing even getting to be my father. “I think you learned how to be a good father from a bunch of bad ones. Now the only worries you got are the ones in your head.”

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My Aughts: In which the list becomes the story

Sometime in the course of writing about the Aughts, I had a thought. I started writing about them as a list, much like my To Do list, only backwards since I was doing the things first, then writing them down. But somewhere along the line my list became a narrative, a series of events became a story, my past became my present, an invention became a life.

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My Aughts are almost up!

Wow, almost at the end of My Aughts! Ironic that, one of writing's ostensible purposes being to capture moments and stop time, this project seems to be moving so swiftly. We have three more entries, then I'll take a break for the Thanksgiving holiday and we'll go back to the Seventies for All You Need to Know on Sunday, December 1.

Allow me to get all mushy for a few seconds, if only in honor of the holidays. I've gotten so many wonderful responses over the last three months, I feel like the most popular guy in the world. Well, except for maybe George Bailey. And he's a fictional character. (I'm only a quarter fiction, which was enough to get me into a traditionally nonfiction graduate college.)