Twenty-six and a half months ago I moved to San Francisco. I came out here with three other souls. One of our little band of friends has since gone on to the next life. Three remain.
For the first sixteen months of life here, I averaged one new post on this blog every six days. I also started two photo blogs and took a volunteer position writing online art reviews for a magazine in Berkeley.
This period of time was the most prolific period of self-expression I had experienced since I lived in Chicago in 2002. Audrey and I got engaged in Chicago, on August 8th. I proposed in the grass in front of the aquarium, beside Lake Shore Drive, with the skyscrapers of the windy city giving witness to my hopes and dreams.
Audrey said yes, and then less than a year later Audrey and i left Chicago and moved back to the city where we had met, Indianapolis, with the goal in mind that Audrey would finish an art degree she had walked away from years earlier to travel the world as a flight attendant.
The six years we spent in Indianapolis were bittersweet for me. My mother was diagnosed with Stage Four Kidney Cancer, a death sentence. A feud started between me and my sister Karen over politics and religion. A feud also broke out between my mom and my sister Sheryl, over my mom's smoking and some issues of mutual respect, or a lack thereof, if I remember correctly.
My father began work on a new house he and my mom had planned to build in the vacant lot next to the house I grew up in. He and I tore down the great pear trees, and the maples, the mulberry bushes and the walnut tree. We eradicated the brick walkway my father had laid by hand. We removed flower beds and overturned the very blades of grass on which the precious countless starry nights of my youth were spent.
A back hoe came and dug a foundation for the new house. A swirling, primordial mudpit took over where once squirrels and little children had frolicked.
As winter slowly passed, my mother fought for her life. Sick with spine-wracking chills she laid in hospital beds recovering from chemo, my father, my sister Cyndi and I by her side.
Our old house was on the market. We suffered the weekly insults of fools as they toured my childhood home with heartless real estate agents, shredding the decor and the layout with their mean words. This house in which my parents still lived, this home in which my life had come into being, was to me, and to my parents, a museum of our love, our struggles, our victories, our sadness, our losses, our dreams and our conviction that we were worth loving, worth remembering, worth saving.
During this time, our two family cats, Heathcliff and Patches, passed away. And my father's mother, Stella Barcio, passed away.
Come February of that winter, mom let go. She passed in the presence of my dad and me and Audrey, her loving partners in an incredible life.
Soon afterwards, the house sold. The new house was completed. Dad moved in. Then Rudy, our beloved cocker spaniel, a Christmas present to my mother, joined his best friend in the next world.
It was only my dad and I and Audrey left in Indiana. We watched from right next door as the new owners of the house where I had spent more than 30 christmas dinners gutted the place, threw the parquet floors into a dumpster, bulldozed the greenhouse and uprooted the garden.
My dad and I spent many Saturday nights engaged in what became a helpful ritual: Church at 6, pasta and NPR at 7. Conversation and reflection until we couldn't take it anymore.
I do not know how we got through that awful time. But right when we were beginning to see the light of day, Audrey's father, Bob Liphard, was killed in a motorcycle crash.
I remember feeling like everything was haywire. I became intolerable to be around. I found myself insulting people I loved, screaming at nice people at parties, arguing over the most petty things. I stopped going to karate. I started losing skin on my fingers and knees, a condition called psoriasis, apparently stress related.
Simultaneously I became obsessed with the idea of trying to save the little, decrepit neighborhood Audrey and i had moved to. I lobbied absurdly hard for Audrey to support a folly I had dreamt up, an idea to buy little, unloved houses from their slumlord owners, and rehab them. We bought three such houses. One of which (below) we restored and lived in.
My dad and I spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours at another one of them, which came to be known as the Lexington House, gutting it and transforming it into a new space, a cute something out of the ashes of a sad something else.
(Before...)
(After...)
I also became fanatical about a neighborhood mural project, designed to turn despicable alleyways into art destinations, instead of the meth-head whore magnets they had become.
This was maybe me trying to say something to the world. I have no idea what. Maybe that ugly things turn into less ugly things sometimes if you give them time and attention and love.
I sympathized with the little sad houses and the garbage-ridden alleys. I sympathized with defeat. I sympathized with failure. i sympathized with death. What can I say? I became my reference group.
This was a time of strange days and long nights in the hillbilly neighborhood I was so busy trying to foible. It was a time of arguments with Audrey, of awful sights and sounds. I remember looking out my window one night, at about three in the morning and seeing a poor street cat being ripped in half by two wild dogs on the sidewalk in front of our house. I banged on the window and screamed at the dogs. Then I got a plumbers wrench from the shed and i walked the streets looking for the killer dogs. i found one, laying still behind a neighbor's garage, feasting on its share of the kill. I stood and stared it in the eyes for a good minute. Then I sat down in front of it and contemplated smashing in its skull. It would kill again, there was no doubt in my mind.
I wish I forget that night. But when i recalled the experience the next day to a friend, he just laughed and said, "Nature is unbelievable violent. Animals kill each other in order to survive. Don't let it bother you."
But this was a city of a million people. It wasn't the jungle. It was a neighborhood.
We experienced love and joy periodically, and profound moments of artistic bliss. Audrey and I accepted an opportunity to become the managers of a local art gallery called Big Car. Big Car was a collective of misfits who made beautiful art and wrote hilarious things on blogs and in little hand-made books. big Car made music happen and film happen. Big Car took dark, hapless Indiana nights and turned them into feverish beer-fueled art attacks. I cherish Big Car still.
I also witnessed my neighbor, a young art student who I barely spoke to, kill himself by dousing himself and his room in gasoline and then shooting himself, ending his life and igniting the gasoline. I heard the gunshot. I saw the smoke pouring out from under the gutters. I alerted my friends on the other side of the duplex and called the fire department.
This was six years of fantastic transformation, filled with atrocious, horrible moments and passionate loving embraces, contradictions as wild and varied as the universe offers any man in any place.
I played witness and victim to these years and their exploits.
When we left Indiana for San Francisco, we left behind unfinished business. One of the little houses we bought for $20,000, hoping to restore it but lacking the fortitude, still sits gutted, awaiting a transformation that may never come.
Our arrival in San Francisco reminded me that it was possible to see beautiful things again without assuming they were going to explode in my face. I have gradually come to a peaceful place in my heart. Over the course of the past two+ years I have been traumatized by the loss of my beloved pet, Pico, and I have suffered the rapid erosion of my relationship with both of my half-sisters. I have lost friends and been held to the fire for miscalculations and errors in judgement of my past.
I have continued to see bad things happen, some too painful to reveal.
But the miracle is this: I am not discouraged. i am hopeful my friends who knew me when I lost my mind will understand and get to know me again. I am hopeful my half-sisters will move on and let me move on and not hold grudges. I am hopeful I didn't leave so big a mess in Indianapolis that it can not one day become a legacy of love.
Over the past eleven months, since I took a job as GM of a cocktail bar, I have averaged one blog post every two months. The sixteen months prior to taking that job I averaged one blog post every six days.
I have been in a cocoon of sorrow since Pico died. I have felt like I have no friends. I have felt unloved and at times worthless.
There was not much I would have blogged that would have been worth the trouble.
Lately though, I feel my old self coming back. My psoriasis is clearing up. I no longer expect everyone I love to die every waking moment.
In the words of Monty Python, "I'm feeling better. I think I'll go for a walk."
