Bummed a car
Wrapped a tree
Sang a lullaby
To the evergreen …
That happened, a long time ago. In summertime, late at night. I was off to see a girl. It was a tan-hued and trusty suburban cruiser with balding tires, a Pontiac or something, which I drove carefully at the speed limit. Carefully because the car wasn’t mine and I had no driver’s license, no money. I was a banana-peel slip away from nowhere to live again. My buddy had come over and loaned it to me, and waited with a bottle back at my place.
Before the tree caught the car, smoke had begun to curl out from under its hood as I crested a rise into North Phoenix. In a minute or two the flames. The motor had inexplicably caught fire. I swerved off the road and bam.
Behind the burning car stood a wide, hastily thrown up strip mall, fronting Shea Boulevard in North Phoenix. Stores closed, lot empty. I stumbled from the car, legs jumpy, but nary a scratch, and got out of there. After a few hundred yards I looked back and saw the car engulfed in flames. Soon heard the sirens. I hooved the last couple miles to where the girl lived, at her mom’s house. I moved through the dreamy restraint of suburbia on a coolly melting summer night. Slivers of TV light flickered in large living room windows, sprinklers pulsated over expansive lawns. A comfort and well-being presented itself there, which I longed for, yet my presence in it felt like an exposed mistake.
My friend was asleep when my shocked girlfriend gave me a ride back to my place in the early morning hours. He was, and still is, a sweet, gentle guy. He’d managed to always be employed in restaurants outfitted with drive-thrus and seemed to have a gift to simply enjoy life and his drink. He never uttered a word about the fire, except to say the cops called him about a burnt-out abandoned car registered to him. I had apologized to him profusely, and his only response was he was glad I was OK. He showed up a few weeks later in a different car, ready to go get sloshed at the Impulse Lounge where drinks were free.
I was living in Downtown Phoenix, at the now-demolished Patio Royale, then a rundown Spanish Colonial-style apartment hotel, which was built in 1928. Its lovely faded beauty recalled past glories, like the decaying parts of the lower Hollywood Hills. It had the hum of desperation; a grimy, wasted elegance.
This onetime Phoenix resort, so-called “Hideaway of The Stars,” recalled Valentino’s Falcon Lair with wrought iron and lime-washed white stucco. Joan Crawford had a second-floor balcony installed. I’d heard the stories of night reveries of former guests, Tom Mix and Errol Flynn, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, drunk in the tiled courtyard with the tropical plants, fountain and fish pond. The Patio felt like a summons of a ghost story. I could imagine the rooms, their arched ceilings, inbuilt dressing tables and ironing boards once festive with fine linens, silver and Moroccan furniture. The once stunner of a place was at the tail-end of a lifelong bender.
My room saw dozens of roaches crawling across walls and floors day and night, particularly after a neighbor bug-bombed. Real plaster ceilings bowed in a kind of architectural sadness, retaining swamp-cooler water as if out of embarrassment, until finally unleashing heavy leaks or a total cave-in.
The place was taken over by punks, artists, misfits, the unemployable and stray cats. A few Phoenix punk-rock heroes were my neighbors, including Doug Clark and Bill Yanok, among others.
A one-bedroom was $60 a week in the mid-’80s, which I split with my brother Stuart. Coming up with the $30 wasn’t easy. All the drinking. In those days, down and out as I was, depressed and alcoholic, I must have had some charm or luck on which to skate by. No other explanation comes to mind. I was a dead boy walking, passed off as a rock ’n’ roll singer, whose band (Gentlemen After Dark) had just fizzled out for the first time.
Drink and drugs were the daily reliefs to the abbreviations of my depression. Emotional reflexes were never critically thought through, and the base stuff was all there, and all visceral—sadnesses, dread, panic, insecurities, angers, jealousies. Drinking made them seem funny.
I know my parents at least let me have nature and beauty as a child. It can be really simple getting off drink, at least for me, looking back now — it was all about finding nature and beauty again.
It is easier to turn around and lose a decade or more to that shit, while some friends don’t make it. It was just as easy to stand at their funerals, having learned nothing. If you are lucky, as it is said in the recovery rooms, your wounds will become as essential as breathing.
Cut to now. I am sitting here on the evening of the anniversary day of my father’s death. If anyone had told me then that in 2024, I’d have the soulmate and be a father to five young children, I’d think them mad. My wife brings out a candle to light.
I am forever considering my parents lately. Remaining fragments and images and memories haunt, and so many suck the air from me. It is easy to sit here suffocating. I can suffocate over that or other things until there is nothing to say. Count the pestilences: The genocide in Palestine, the trigger-happy and Trump, the loss of biodiversity, the autonomy stripped from women, and so and on.
Dad died 11 years ago, the last day of April. Maybe only the truly blessed are allowed to get over the loss of their father. I can’t. He never met my children, my wife. I think of things I did to myself while he was alive and am filled with shame.
He could be so kind and shy around others, but also a mean son of a bitch. So many tenderless reflexes rarely thought through, an anger inside him. As a kid it was like he couldn’t tolerate another pinprick of parental pain, or letdown. He parented five children, and endured things, and I often shudder to consider them.
The past is always changing, new learnings and contexts sort of rewire it, those connections between what’s old and what’s new, and as I get older with children, my empathy and longing for my father only broadens. That part feels as essential as breathing.
The Patio Royale, which stood near Central and Third avenues in Phoenix, is long gone too. The area is unrecognizable with cemented-in right angles, smoked glass and ugly slices of enterprise. That hum of desperation seemingly gone.
