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Trey R. Barker

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The Metaphoric Music of Tom Gatti’s Long Players

On the way to a recent short cruise, I stopped in an airport bookstore and found Tom Gatti’s book, The Long Players. Someone had tossed the book on on the shelf but backward, so the back cover caught my eye. It was half a vinyl album and I was hooked. Turns out the editor, Gatti, had asked various writers to lay out the album for them. Not their favorite necessarily, but their most cherished.

There was no way that book could go wrong. Writers talking about the music that informed them as a person, not just their writing, but their very being? Yes, please.

The concept started as a column in the New Statesman magazine. Because it was a magazine, each essay had to be short, about a page and a half. In Hemingway’s hands, brevity was a precise scalpel, but in most of these essays, brevity became a dull machete that tore rather than cut.

I am deeply interested in the how of artistic creation; what the moment of artistic creation can tell us if understood. That moment, generating the idea of a novel or story, seeing a finished painting in your head long before it hits the canvas, can lay bare who we are and how we came to be; how all the things that happened to us created us.

So while I had hopes that this book might lead to some self-insight through the moment of creation of others, I also understood that my interest in that kind of thing is way beyond what most people care to stomach.

Yet most of the essays were mildly diverting. They offered a quick look into all kinds of lives though but not a particularly deep look at those lives, and eventually, the sameness of the essays wore badly. It was as though they all blew in the key of E. Or all banged away in the same bland, medium-tempo swung 4/4.

Most listed a favorite album, name-checked two or three songs, and gave the reader an emotional moment to attach the songs to: I had just broken up with a girlfriend, I had just started college and was exploring myself, I had just…fill in the blank of standard life experience. All of which is perfectly fine, if superficial.

There were great essays, though. Ben Okri took three and a half pages to riff on Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. Since middle college, that has been one of my all-time favorite albums, discovered on the medium-tempo 6/8 lilt of the bass line and floating trumpet melody of “All Blues.” I got lost in Okri’s discovery of that album in the seventies during his middle teens living in Lagos. He then showed me how that album, though his whole life, consantly reprised it’s original role and provided an emotional callback.

Neil Gaiman, over three pages, explored all the reasons why David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs wasn’t a great album, but was great to him. Why? Because it was his. It came along at that moment in life when he wanted something fully his own. It gave him “Rebel Rebel,” but also led him to George Orwell’s 1984, the same way Sebastian Bach once said Rush’s 2112 led him to author Ayn Rand. Gaiman also wrote that Diamond Dogs, “…fed the part of me that made things up, that fell for dystopias and mutants, for rotting skyscrapers and rats the size of cats, shaped the inside of my thirteen-year-old head and made me who I am.”

But it was in the last essay, by Ali Smith, a British writer of whom I’d never heard, that I got the payoff. She got it. She understood the entire concept in a way none of the other writers did. At the very least, she held the same perspective as me and that felt like understanding.

A single favorite album? That moved the needle of her life one direction or another?

Fucking impossible, and she knows that. I could never make that choice. Gatti wanted them to write about their most cherished album and most writers took that to mean a single moment when their lives changed, when they found new colors with which to paint or discovered new architectural styles with which to build their mansions.

Smith had no single moment.

Nor do I. I’m a middle-aged white guy, slightly overweight, with no history of hunger or homelessness, of abuse, of want, whose life has been fairly straight forward. No single moment of change stands out more than any other. Thus no single album stands out more than any other. There are simply too many moments and too many albums.

I’d thought I’d do an essay based on the premise of the book, hopefully a bit more incisive, but in the course of reading the entire book, I realized that maybe my journey is different. Maybe my journey, rather than being that single defining moment, is to dig up each defining moment-and that moment’s music-and examine what the entirety of those moments are. Maybe, in digging up the sound of a number of single moments, I can understand the why of the entire piece of music.

So now, rather than re-listening to one or two things, I’m going to be forced…forced, I tell you…to re-listen to tons of music and spend hours and hours navel-gazing.

Oh, the musical agony!

Stay tuned….

Transitions and Totems

Things become totems.

Banal, routine things take on significance out of any legitimate proportion to what they actually are. I deal with death fairly frequently in my job and I’ve seen family members, crushed with grief, find some sliver of solace in a book Gammie read to them when they were four-years old, or in a lawn mower their father used every Sunday afternoon and from which they could still smell not only freshly-mown grass but grape Kool-Aid and store-bought chocolate chip cookies.

Recently, I got a check for a story I’d written and sold a few years ago. It had been long enough ago that I sort of forgot I hadn’t yet been paid. The business end of writing was never my best thing so when the check arrived, it was quite a pleasant surprise. I set the thing on my desk and promised self I’d get to it in a bit.

But during that ‘in a bit,’ period, something I’d lost years ago came back to me.

My life, were one to read the unwritten autobiography, would have two overall arcs: literature and music. Those have been the obelisks, a personal Easter Island, that have stood tall over my days (20,535 days, in fact, as of the day I’m writing this).

Construction began on those obelisks in my pre-history and continued in the time before I have memory. My mother read incessantly and loved music and those loves carried down to me. I’ve written endlessly about Mama’s library but her music was always there, too. It was the early ’70s so it was funk and soul, symphonic, a little blues: Eugene Ormandy, the O’Jays Live In London, Lou Rawls on the radio.

This was my every day and I grew up fueled by the breadth of their emotion and the depth of their critical thought. I not only read, as so many people do, but I also wrote, as fewer people do. I not only listened to music, as so many people do, but I also played, as fewer people do. I played in school bands, in choir pop groups, in orchestras, in jazz bands and rock bands, in a metal band, in a drum corps, in percussion ensembles and marching drum lines, even in a wind ensemble once.

In fact, up until I moved to Denver in 1992, playing music was one of the most important things in my life. But it was also in Denver that playing began to fade behind writing. I played in a band or two, played with an orchestra a few times, but then, like west Texas rain evaporating before it hits the ground, it all just…dissipated.

Life became real in Denver. A mortgage, bills, real jobs. I became an adult but one with a desire to hit the bestseller list. Yet not only was writing not supporting me, it wasn’t even supporting itself, so working all day to pay those bills meant, by definition, writing at night.

I wrote fiercely. I wrote and wrote and focused on publishing. When I got published, I focused on larger, more prestigious publications. When I published in those, my focused changed to novels, to plays, to poetry, to essays. There were also conferences, readings three or four times a week with national and international authors, two different writers’ workshop groups, and constant reading to learn how other writers did it.

The point being that my entire life, beginning in junior high school (the time when I discovered both writing and playing) had been a balance of writing and playing but in Denver, that balance changed. It was a place of transition: me consumed into being an adult and my free time consumed into being a writer.

Understand, I never stopped listening to music, or buying music, or attending concerts, or piddling away at drums or guitar alone in my basement, but I did stop playing writ large because everything became bedrock to being a writer.

While it was Denver where the balance I’d had in my life changed, it was also in Denver that I started to have success. In June, 1994, I sold my first story to an Irish speculative magazine Albedo-One. After Denver, when I moved to north-central Illinois and got a job with a pension and health care and a company car, I continued to have success as a writer, though it was success writ small.

It was short stories ‘sold’ to markets that hardly paid, if at all, and novels ‘sold’ to publishers who offered almost zero marketing support or those who waffled between publishing only a few titles every year to make each title something special or publishing scads of hardly-readable books in order to flood the market and pick up random sales.

It was in that context that, while working on a new short novel a few months ago, I realized I had no idea what was supposed to happen next and that even if I did know, I didn’t care. I hated the story, the setting, the characters, the color, the pacing. Everything about that novel drove me bananas.

Except it wasn’t that particular novel, nor was it writing generally. What I had come to hate was writing fiction and, more so, trying so hard and desperately to sell that fiction. The world of publishing fiction, and trying to hyper-aggrandize one’s self to sell everywhere to everyone, had turned me into a zombie.

That realization had been a long time coming, and in the months preceeding it, I longed to play music again. I longed to be in an ensemble, part of something larger, that would move my soul as playing had done in Midland and Lubbock and even in Denver.

Perhaps those two things were connected, perhaps not, but regardless, I walked away from fiction. Set it aside, and immediately felt a lightness of soul I hadn’t felt in years. Then I hooked up with the Illinois Valley Symphony Orchestra, and even before I’d finished my first rehearsal, I felt the stirrings of who I had once been.

I had, in the course of just a few months, transitioned again.

Which brings us to the totem.

The check I’d set on my desk with a vague promise to deposit it soon.

I realized, when I stood in JC Penny, buying a new black suit for the IVSO concerts, that the suit was going to cost almost exactly what the check had been.

A totem. Something simple, an every day thing, that symbolized fleeing fiction for music. The last of my fiction writing was going to pay for the first of my music playing. The issue of Black Cat Mystery Magazine that had what could well be my last sold fiction was published a few weeks before my first concert with IVSO.

Transitions.

That check symbolized that transition.

A totem.

Of Self Bondage

I’ve been thinking of hostages lately.

I’m back on dry land after a recent four-day cruise to Key West and the Bahamas. The weather was so vile that the cold wind closed most of the boat’s observation decks. The weather also closed one port of call and forced a change in the second to a lesser stop.

Not quite what the travel brochure promised but it’s no one’s fault. Captain and crew, regardless of their power asea, cannot control weather. You take a vacation built around getting outside, you dare Mother Nature, ever the fickle mistress, to say, “Today is not your day. Nor tomorrow. Nor the day after.”

After interminable hours aboard the boat, I joked to my wife that I felt like a hostage; unable to leave, unable to enjoy the thing I’d desperately needed: to quiet the white noise that constantly blares through my days.

Yes, I found time to read from books of essays and yes Kathy found time to play with her house design and work on Barker Farm, her food insecurity non-profit, but we didn’t do it from deck chairs while a light and comforting sea sprayed our faces or while embraced by a warm sun. We did it by almost desperately seeking out hidden and forgotten places of quiet that appeared and disappeared like eddies in the water. Those eddies ran counter to the main current of endless drunken pool parties with the screaming thumps of DJ So-and-So or this or that beat-heavy, massively over-amped band.

But that joke, “I feel like a hostage,” led me down a thought-chasm: mankind is perpetually in a hostage state and there ain’t thing one we can do about it. Pay this bill or lose your car, accept this assignment or lose your job, etc.

Yet perspective is everything. Does doing something that is required to survive make one a hostage to that thing, even if there is a threat at the end of the sequence? “Pay the electric bill or you’ll freeze to death,” versus “Pay your electric bill or we, the electric company, will turn off your power and you will freeze to death.” Does the added spice of someone else acting upon the situation make it a threat more so than a survival action?

The hostage-situation on the boat was, obviously, nothing on a scale so grand. It was: stay inside because it’s cold and windy. Ultimately, Kathy and I found a house band that played really great jazz. We also had a conversation with the assistant art curator who gave us a quick, very cool, history of the English artist Peter Max, whose work I’d seen ubiquitously but hadn’t known. We read, we talked, we laughed outrageously. Plus, we had gobs of time with the kids and their plus-ones, which was the point of the entire affair.

But those good moments tore at me as I fell deeper into my self-created thought-chasm. Why couldn’t I get out of my own head about what was missing from the cruise and simply enjoy the vacation as it was presented?

In Ethics, the philosopher Spinoza took apart man’s intellectual passions, which he called affects, and said that allowing oneself to be dominated by these affects can torment someone into a life of disharmony.

(Yes, I realize this is a wildly reductionist view of Spinoza’s work, but it points toward the bottom of my thought-chasm that started with a joke. And oddly, the ‘joke’ reminded me of the 1968 Bee Gees hit, “I Started A Joke,” which, seen through this particular lens, is more more Spinozian than I’d ever realized.)

Spinoza’s disharmony, thought and heart disordered by passion, has always been part of my life but only recently become part of my vision.

There is an obstacle in my road, coming soon, that has held me hostage for seven years. I can neither walk away from it nor chase it full-throated, and I have done both…passionately. It both seduces and repels me, and it claws out space in my heart and soul when it chooses rather than when I choose. That lack of choice leaves me useless and impotent and angry.

Or…to summon up Spinoza…disharmonious.

Am I Spinoza’s bondage? Or am I simply surviving, though not necessarily on my terms?

And really, who actually ever survives on their own terms?

(Which could lead me to a whole different thought-chasm about defining one’s own terms throughout life and whether we are being true to ourselves if we redefine as we mature or if that just means we’re moving the goalposts to make life easier…see how these thought-chasms work? Sheesh!)

In most other ways, my life-56 years in-is finally harmonious. I’ve jettisoned some baggage, inward and outward, I’m playing with an orchestra, I just bought the drum set I’ve always wanted, I’m taking percussion lessons again, I’ve begun reading again, and I’ve found a new connection with God through nature and Barker Farm, which is the most peaceful place I’ve ever found…physically or emotionally.

But this thing coming down my road is exactly where I fail to control my own bondage. I’ve told myself for years that not only will I not enjoy it but that I will actively hate it, therefore I don’t want it. Which is exactly what I said about the cruise. Yet I managed to have not only a decent time but an occasionally great time, hostage or not.

So maybe what’s coming down the road is not to be feared or raged against. Maybe it is to be enjoyed, or at least dealt with, just as it presents itself.

Harmony.

The Road I’ve Traveled Less

It was a Christmas gift.

A melancholy laugh? A wistful sigh? Maybe just a smile and a “Thanks.”

Not because of the whiskey, or the gift, or the lovely thought behind it, but because of the actual writer’s tears.

This road, since my first words went to paper, has been so twisty and endless, I can hardly see it with clarity anymore. There were vivid water stops along the way to be sure: the first story written, the first story sold, the first story published, good reviews, bad reviews, stories written with other writers, this and that, etc., etc. Thousands of stories and essays, poems and novels, plays, observations.

Millions of words.

It was a joyous road to travel. Putting words on paper was not only the best way to spend my time but, along with listening to and performing music, the only way to spend my time. I read constantly, as broadly and deeply as I possibly could, and then re-read. I took every book apart, sentence by sentence, word by word, and tried to apply those take-aparts, be they learning what to do or what not to do.

When I started writing, it was all about the writing…the story. I was discovering my version of the world, how it tasted and sounded, how it lived. All the way through high school and college and as I became a member of different writers’ groups in Denver, that energy and sense of epic discovery was with me.

There was a time, as a newbie member of a writing group facilitated by the legendary Edward Bryant, that I wrote a new story every month. Five-thousand words…every…single…month. It was exhilarating. Hell, there were editing sessions so hot and exciting, when I bashed and pounded, sculpted and polished, I was actually breathing hard and sweating when I was finished.

Though it was about the physical and mental act of writing and creating, it was also about readers. I wanted to be read. Maybe it was a need for confirmation of my views, maybe a need for simple affirmation of self, maybe I didn’t get what I needed emotionally from those around me so had to cast a wider net. Hell, maybe it was simple ego, as complex as that can be. Regardless, I needed readers.

Thus while I was perfecting my craft, learning to observe the world, to detail it and take it apart, I was also dreaming that, eventually, all the publishers in the world would tear down my door. I dreamed up a list of novel titles, I had a file of dedications in the order I would attach them to my novels, I carried a bevy of songs in my head I would use as a personal soundtrack to guide each novel.

Once I actually started publishing, the first story sold and published in 1994, I was ecstatic. I was almost giddy when I read the acceptance. It was from the Irish speculative fiction magazine “Albedo-One.” More sales and publications followed and eventually, I started being contacted specifically by editors and that was when I knew I was on my way.

It was the late ’90s and I was everywhere in the horror and speculative fiction world. Publishing in magazines and anthologies, giving readings to relatively full rooms, being asked to be a panelist at various conventions, being bought drinks by young writers who wanted to know the secret handshake. It was a giddy, heady time for me. Even when a pseudo-editor who didn’t particularly care for me emailed me with an “invitation” to her anthology. Her email said, I kid you not, “This is invite only so consider this your invite.” Quite the soft and cuddly conversation, don’t you think? Worse yet, she never bought the story I submitted.

But even that nasty invite-o-gram was a water stop on the road! If I was getting invites from editors who didn’t care for me personally but still wanted my work, could the major publishers be all that far behind?

Yet what I felt at the time, vague and inarticulate, was that maybe the whole thing had already started going bad, as slowly as a carcinoid tumor.

Because while I was doing well in terms of publishing, I wasn’t doing well in terms of self-promotion. It seemed, on the face of it, that I didn’t need to self-promote if editors were asking me for stories. But at the same time, I was almost obstinately unwilling to participate in the annual begging season, during which the entire speculative fiction community of which I was a member would lose it’s collective mind. All of us, writers and editors alike, would shotgun mass emailings to writers and editors both known and unknown, pleading with them to recommend a story or nominate a novel or otherwise cheerlead a collection or screenplay for the bevy of masturbatory annual awards.

I hated it.

On panels at various writers’ convention, each panelist would prop their most current couple of books on the table tent with their name on it. Their convention name badges were hardly readable for being covered with repros of their book covers as business cards or stickers stuck all over them.

I hated it.

In the last few years, that kind of self-promotion has morphed into a relentless Frankensteinian monster, where every tiny thing becomes fodder for the news feed or the status update. Every new anthology, every new book acceptance, every new magazine sale, gets hyped. Every signed contract gets hyped. Every cover and decent review gets posted and reposted or pinned to the top of the page. I’ve even seen, in a spasm of massive overthinking about connections, writers post news about other writers who’ve sold or published or tweeted something, because the first posting writer had previously been in a publication with the second posting writer and thus took the opportunity to bring that back to life under the guise of offering ‘Congratulations’ to the second posting writer.

I hate it.

And I hated seeing that, every day, my own FB feed was inundated with yeehaws and yippees and 100% emojis and thumbs up emojis because some writer or other had sold something here or there, or that they’d had an honorable mention in a Year’s Best, or sold to a Best Of or landed a deal for this or that number of novels.

That’s great. I am so happy for all those writers. Truly. I wish them all the best and success enough to fill their cup but all that dogged and ferocious self-hype just serves to both coarsen the process and to remind me that, when it comes to that kind of thing, I fail because I simply can’t stand doing it.

That knowledge grinds my psyche and my soul because, if self-promotion to break through society’s cacophony of white-noise to be read is foundational to being a writer, then wasn’t being a failure at it also failing as a writer? It seemed to me, from when I first noticed self-promotion in Denver in the early ’90s, through to today…the answer is yes.

I also detest, and always have, the business end of writing. As long as I can remember, I’ve hated researching new markets, making clean copies of manuscripts, creating cover letters (which involve a degree, although small, of self-promotion), mailing the packets out, and making note of when the rejection or acceptance came back. Keeping track of when whatever story went to whatever magazine drove me bananas.

When I started seriously writing novels and had to try and find an agent? Which agents politely declined any interaction based on the query letter? Then which agents, impressed by the query letter, wanted the first three chapters. Then which agents, impressed with the first three chapters, asked for the entire manuscript. Beyond that, a writer must know to whom, within each agency, they sent their packet because some agents like this kind of fiction and some agents like that kind of fiction.

I hated searching for an agent. I hated even thinking about searching for an agent. Hated asking writer friends if they’d recommend me to their agents, which most of them rarely did for fear that when, not if, their agent turned down their friend, their friend would blame them.

When I sold something, dealing with the business end almost became worse than not selling. Every project had a contract with all kinds of paragraphs and subparagraphs. I had to keep track of when something was going to come out, which started the clock ticking on when it could be resold (with proper ‘originally published in,’ credit). Or when it was supposed to come out, which started the clock ticking on when it could be reclaimed and resubmitted elsewhere. I had to keep track of which rights I’d sold primarily and when they could be resold elsewhere, or which rights hadn’t been sold or had been sold only to a single area of the world, or which this and which that….

I hated it.

Those dislikes, and my shoving them up under the dented front fender of my career and hoping the car got further down the road because eventually the water stop I’d been counting on would appear, got less and less amorphous over the last twenty years. They became clearer, like a fogged windshield warmed enough to dissipate the opaqueness.

Over the last fews years, I worked on an anthology series I created with another writer. He’s frequently a great writer and can get anything done anytime without any of the soul-searing to which I am prone. He’s a monster editor and an even better juggler, keeping quite a few projects perfectly balanced.

He and I worked this series, six short novels a year based on our created world, and it quickly became a hellscape for me. Immediately upon having the idea, which seems to have two different birth parents, we had to put the idea in good enough shape to sell to a publisher. Once that was done, we had to put it in good enough shape to get other writers to come play on our playground. Then we had to read those short novels and work those short novels and rework those short novels, over and over, until they were publishable within the world we’d created.

Don’t get me wrong. Those stories, and the world he and I created, were incredible. A great many of them I published green with envy that I hadn’t written them. And the two or three times I wrote for the series, I loved what my co-editor got out of me. I loved writing that series. But I hated working that series; the business work that had to be done to get it up and running and then keep it up and running shaded my heart. Truly, I hated all the promotion that had to be done to sell the individual novels once a season was underway. It was endless and grinding and mind-numbing and soul-deadening.

Thank God for my co-editor, who did more and more of the heavy lifting as the series went into Season Three. In fact, before Season Four, I told him I wasn’t sure I couldn’t do anymore. Once we got through Season Four, I was done.

I considered myself, and had for more than 40 years, a writer. Period. Not a business man. Not an editor or a carnival barker. A writer.

Except around the same time, the vague unease I’d had for a while cleared up and I realized, with great horror and no small measure of shame, I didn’t even enjoy writing anymore. This thing I’d birthed and lived with for more than 40 years was more and more alien to me, to the point where I actually became hostile to having to do the work.

Yet, because I had done this work, faithfully, for so long, I couldn’t not do it. So I ended up sitting at my computer, tunes playing, actively hating what I wrote; hating the characters and the story line and the pacing and then hating myself for hating the writing.

It was a helluva devolving spinning wheel.

What I eventually figured out, with lots of help from my wife and friends who’ve been there since day one, was that dealing with the tsunami of tangential bullshit that comes with being a modern writer, as well as royalty statements from a small publisher that never put much into its original writers and concentrated instead on the newest hip flavor, had bled all the fun out of being a writer.

I had been in the middle two short novels and the beginning of one I’ve wanted to write for years and I just faded…away…. I couldn’t open the files, I couldn’t see where the stories were going or figure out how to put a sentence together even if I did know where.

I spent long days and nights trying to get my head around this new concept: not a writer.

After 40+ years of “A Writer,” now it was the converse, “Not A Writer,” and I wasn’t sure how to think about that. It was a harsh truth. Yes, I had had some success, certainly more than the vast majority of people who say they want to be writers, but not as much as I’d wanted.

I worked out a thousand reasons it had never worked out to the degree I’d wanted: did I not have enough talent? Or not the right talent? Or did my disgust at self-promotion and business put a cloud over the purity of craft? Or just a bad luck of the draw?

Ultimately, though, none of those possible reasons mattered. In the practical universe, I was at another water stop. But this time, instead of watering up and getting back on the road, I stepped off. There were other roads snaking away from that water stop so maybe I’d take a look at some of those and see where I ended up.

I’m not really sure what road I’m on now, just that it’s not the road of the last 40 years. It’s a road where I don’t have to write fiction, where I don’t have to deal with deadlines and contracts or writers on FB shouting “Look at me! Look at me!”

Roads are only so long. Eventually, everyone has to get on to something else. That realization, the harshest truth of all, has been a long time coming. I’ll keep thinking about that as I drink off some of this Writers Tears whiskey and finish this written essay. Yeah, I’m still writing.

So maybe the truth is not “Not A Writer,” but “Not A Fiction Writer.”

On The Death of Someone I Knew

Tod Settle is dead.

I knew him, though not well, and I hadn’t seen him since 1987? Maybe 1988? He died in December, 2020.

During the summer of 1982, I marched with a drum corps based in Houston, the Nighthawks. The corps wasn’t great but we were sincere and genuine and we had fun during an incredibly difficult inaugural marching season. Tod marched, too. That’s how we met. A good looking kid, with California-style blow-dried hair and a giant, gentle grin but with eyes that could flash as dark as a West Texas storm.

He played the vibraphone and understand this: marching vibes was a helluva thing to carry. Incredibly heavy and not particularly mobile. He carried those things, playing a fairly complex series of tunes while executing some decently complicated marching steps.

He and I spent some good time together that summer, laughing and comparing our high school band programs. I came out of Lee High School and he came out of Clear Lake High School and we forever argued over whose band was better.

Tod in his Clear Lake HS band uni. I swiped this pic from the album on the website of the funeral home that handled his funeral.
Tod, lower center, to the left of the orange cone, marching with the Nighthawks.

The next summer, I think we hooked up at West Texas State University band camp. I say I think because I seem to have memories of being in one of the concert bands with him, but the memories are hazy and half-formed so they might be crap. It’s entirely possible that, because I only knew him a little but wanted to know him better, I’m projecting him into things I think he would have enjoyed.

Later, we definitely hung out at Texas Tech. I have no idea if he was in the music program or what he studied. I can’t remember how we stumbled into each other but for a few months, we were fairly close. By which I mean we grabbed burgers and beer, went to clubs, Fat Dawgs springs to mind, and spent lotta money at Players. It was a standard, shitty strip club and he told me his girlfriend danced there.

There are no memories after that so I assume, as with so many friends from one’s past, he and I simply faded into the threads that make up the ‘used to be.’

Occasionally, I’d wonder where he went and what he did, but I never looked. There are a number of people in my past like that; people who were once friends, even incredibly intimate friends and who I would desperately love to see again, but who I know have traversed a foreign path that might have left them, metaphorically, in a completely different world.

A foreign path, something unknown and perhaps even exotic, isn’t a bad thing. After all, two of my greatest friends ever, Bradley Crowley and Tammy Adair each took a path different than mine, wildly different from each other, and I still love them fiercely.

Regardless of Tod’s journey, for a brief few moments he and I were on the exact same page, narrow though that page was. We were enamored of the grandeur of music and enthralled with power of marching bands and drum corps. If it was music on a field, it was us.

That’s a fairly short page to read from, but isn’t that most childhood friendships?

I had an elementary school friend who was, I thought at the time, the greatest thing ever. We spent the nights at each other’s houses constantly, walked to and from school every day, though I lived a couple miles further from school than he did. I went with his family on a long weekend once. We were inseparable.

Until we weren’t.

I discovered music in early elementary school, and by 5th grade had my first drum. In 7th grade, I joined beginning percussion, and by high school, me, Brad, and Tammy were as deep into bands and music as it was possible to be. This other friend also discovered music and took beginning brass but wasn’t as serious and by 9th grade had dropped it for standard West Texas boy stuff: football, shop, metal shop.

We faded and he went to the military while I became a writer. Years later, after he’d retired from a police agency, we reconnected and I was excited to find he had a couple of my books. But what I discovered was that his path had taken him further and further from my own path. I had lunch with him and a friend of his in 2015 and they joked about ‘hadji’ stores, by which they meant convenience stores run by ‘the other,’ be they Indian or Pakistani or Arabic or some other flavor of brown-skin.

At that moment, eating really good Tex-Mex, it was as though part of my childhood instantly withered away. Or maybe that I realized part of my childhood had been in a hall of mirrors and this friend wasn’t where I had thought he’d been. His path had led him to racism and an intensely harsh view of criminality, of poverty and social justice, of politics, of the world and our place in it.

That friend is still alive and I wish him a long, long life, but the smashing of a facet of my childhood was the same with him as it was when I discovered Tod had died, and when Tammy died suddenly in September, 2021, though that hurt was much deeper and will last much longer.

My favorite picture ever of me and Tammy. Graduation, May, 1985.

When the atomic bombs went off in Japan, there were shadows in the aftermath. Shadows of cars and bicycles, of telephone poles, of people. The intense light from the bombs bleached out what they hit. When that light hit bodies, the concrete or mortar or whatever behind them didn’t get bleached, leaving the shadows. Those shadows are a perfect illustration of what used to be there, of what once was.

Image credit: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

I texted Brad and told him about Tod. He hadn’t known Tod but had been almost as close to Tammy as I had been, and he said, “We’re too young to be dropping like this.”

He’s right, of course. We both understand death does not count years but simply takes who it wants. Or that the bad luck floating around the universe has to land on someone, depending on how you look at things, but it’s a shock to the system nevertheless.

What has struck me most, as selfish as it is, is not that they’re missing, but what their missing has plucked out of my past. Select parts of my childhood have just gone missing, as though I’m wandering through a gigantic warehouse with a hundred-million items, relics of a childhood I both loved and hated, and I can’t find some of them. I’ll look and look, and look again, but they won’t be there.

It doesn’t matter how long it had been since the last time I’d taken them out to play with them, I won’t be able to again and that’s just heavy in my soul.

Secret Knowledge

I remember my first book.

Well, not my first book, which was probably a Little Golden book, but the first book I chose. My first conscious choice about what to read, rather than something assigned me or given as a gift.

My first visit to Anson Jones Elementary School library is lost in the foggy shrouds of memory, but the library itself is as clear as a west Texas sun hanging just off the horizon. In the silence of that room, horse shoe-shaped, was a promise that if I chose a book, damn near any book, and consumed it completely, I would have the Secret Knowledge. As Young Trey of 1973, I desperately coveted such knowledge and feel the same fifty years later. Maybe, if I finally read Michael Allen’s Western Rivermen, 1763-1861, or Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, or all 47 alternate endings to Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, life will take shape.

The Anson Jones library wasn’t the only library in my life. It was the safe library. See, Mama had a library, too, and it scared me to death. It was sharp and treacherous, filled with Mama’s science fiction and horror and fantasy. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison, 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke, Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters, by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, The Stand by Stephen King, Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. Her shelves held risk. Dangerous Visions? What the hell? Honestly, though, that title might be scarier now because of adult freight: cancer, poverty, black holes in our empathy and compassion, our inhumanity toward living things, people who preach against ‘the other,’ whoever that happens to be that particular time and day.

Mama’s books were unknown worlds that not only might be dangerous but actually were dangerous. As much as I wanted the Secret Knowledge, the titles and cover art scared me the piss outta me, no matter how hard I tried to conquer my fear and be grow’d up and manly. “Don’t be a pussy.” It was a standard exhortation back then, years before Midland, Texas had shaken hands with the word misogyny. In my head since then, the phrase has morphed into “Let your balls drop.” Slightly cleaned up language, I guess. You can take the boy out of West Texas, but the West Texas has irrecoverably scarred the boy’s inner landscape.

Choosing to read visions steeped in danger? Sheer madness. Plastic eaters? The hell that even mean? But that fear was seductive, too, and and some part of me was sure I would read Every. Single. Dangerous. Vision. The cosmic literary joke is that, as widely and deeply read as I am, I’ve never cracked Dangerous Visions, though I did meet Harlan Ellison once.

As Young Trey of 1973 became Slightly Less Young Trey of 1975 and ’77 and ’79, her library became less scary. I can argue that, like the Airport movies (Airport 1975, Airport ’77, and The Concord…Airport ’79) becoming less disaster-scary and more been-there-done-that, I got both more comfortable with that fear and also closer to the madness of my own teen nightmares. By the time I entered junior high school and began to see my tastes change (I went from buying Shaun Cassidy’s “Da Do Run Run,” to Styx’s “Renegade,” when it came to 45s), Mama’s taste had gone from scary to mainstream. She’d left science fiction behind, mostly, and moved onto history and bios, where the titles were much less frightening. His writing is top-shelf and his grasp of history nuanced and intriguing but does Bruce Catton’s title The Civil War even begin to compare to Mutant 59?

See, I needed the Secret Knowledge; a shield and sword. In my elementary school years, the world was terrifying and confusing. My father was a chump, an abusive sperm-donor, and my stepfather was mentally unstable. Both were out of the picture and all I had was Mama working multiple jobs to keep my brother and me fed and clothed and out of the desperate clutches of child protective services. Mama had me involved in the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program as well as counseling at the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation, but none of the counselors gave me any understanding of the World so I had to climb my own way out of the muck and books were the ladder.

Books, as I understood them early in life, were filled with spelling and math and history. Books had Normal Rockwell-style art of well-dressed young children who listened intently to well-built policemen with square jaws, mayors of Your City who explained how to properly place your hand over your heart when you recited the Pledge of Allegiance, so the first book I chose from the Anson Jones library was much like that. Katie and the Big Snow, by Virginia Lee Burton. Maybe because of the snow, which we had precious little of in West Texas. Maybe it was the giant machine saving the day. After all, my entire life later, I intently watch the 50-ton rotators on The Weather Channel’s Heavy Rescue 401. Or maybe, subconsciously and growing up with a single mother, the thought of a strong woman saving the entire town tripped my trigger.

I don’t remember any other titles from the Anson Jones library. Ditto libraries at my 5th or 6th grade schools. Neither those libraries nor those schools made much of an impression on me. Went to each school for a year as a result of the Midland Independent School District’s tangled response to 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education. MISD’s solution was to create three-school clusters of elementary schools. Each school would have 1st through 3rd as well as either 4th or 5th or 6th grades, too. That plan was built on chaotic lawsuits and court decisions, at least one of which (written by District Judge Ernest Guinn) blamed people of color for their own segregation: “The Court further finds that the racial concentration of Negros and of Mexican-Americans in the 1968 Plan was not caused by public or private discrimination or state action but by economical (sic) factors and decisions of the Negroes and Mexican-Americans to live in their own neighborhood rather than in the predominantly White (sic) neighborhoods.” I realize that was written in 1968 in a very particular place, but reading it now? Just proves how little progress we’ve made in those intervening years in terms of economic realities and the color of poverty.

My next school library was at Alamo Junior High and I have only one specific memory of it. I’d been reading Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles during my English class while my teacher yabbled on and on. Allegedly, she asked me to put the book away multiple times but I didn’t hear her, or more likely I ignored her, and she came unglued. She stood over my desk, red-faced, hands shaking, spittle between us, seized my book and sent me to the principal’s office. The next day I went to the library (an ugly, industrial cavern of row after row of metal racks) to find another book. To my surprise, the librarian had the Bradbury on her desk, my marker still in place. She was silent but her slightly mischievous grin said, “Don’t do that again. Or…be more discrete if you do.”

By that time, my tastes had left Katy in the snow. The end of my elementary school career saw me reading about the American West with the U.S. Cavalry. As I entered junior high school, my tastes began to broaden to include all of Mama’s science fiction. The titles didn’t scare me anymore, they intrigued me, even as my interest in soldiers continued apace, updating into World War I and then World War II. The world of Young Trey of the 1970s had shifted into that of Slightly Older Trey of 1980, and it was a massive perspective change. Katy, reliable and indefatigable and hardworking, was gone…replaced by General Custer and soon to be replaced by Major Boyington and his profane, hard-drinking, lecherous fighter pilots.

My first bought book, remembered as clearly as my first checked out book, had a fiery orange cover and a beautiful, blue Vought F4U Corsair being chased by a Japanese Zero. When Baa Baa Blacksheep premiered on TV, September, 1976, with Robert Conrad and Red West and John Larroquette, I was agog. I had no idea how bad Conrad’s acting actually was, nor that West had been a songwriting partner of, and bodyguard for, Elvis, nor that I would one day adore the performance Larroquette turned in during season one of The John Larroquette Show but not really care much for the retooled remainder of the show.

Sometime after that show had gotten deeply into my soul, I found myself pedaling my bike around town until I ended up at the Dellwood Plaza mall. The pre-eminent mall in Midland in the late ‘70s. It had everything. Tires? Firestone. Clothes? Dunlap’s. Ice Cream? 31 Flavors. Lion’s Club Pancake Breakfast four times a year? Yes, as far as the nose can smell. I probably grabbed an ice cream before aimlessly wandering through various stores until I ended up in the bookstore. I probably casually scanned cover after cover, maybe even read a few back covers or flipped through pages in an attempt to be a sophisticated, discerning, book buyer, but without really having any idea what I was looking for. And then, as if someone had lit me up with a blowtorch, I saw that burning orange cover. Even more than the cover as a whole, I saw the plane—the inverted-wing Corsair—and the type: THE BLACK SHEEP SQUADRON: DEVIL IN THE SLOT. It filled the top third of the cover and hammered me. Threw me back against the wall and my blood not only raced but boiled. I couldn’t not notice the book. I couldn’t touch it for fear of getting a scalding, I couldn’t speak for fear of spluttering with imbecility. All I could do, for long minutes, was stare at this book I hadn’t even known I couldn’t live without until I saw it.

The TV series ran until April, 1978, but immediately went into syndication so I was still watching it when, a year later, May, 1979, the novelization by Michael Jahn hit the shelves. I read it immediately and was blown away that on those pages were the exact things I had heard the characters say. Chapter after chapter of Major Boyington and his guys doing what I had seen them do, saying what I’d heard them say, flying and shooting and drinking and it was all exactly as on the show. But not just what I’d seen…more than what I’d seen. What in hell was this guy, this Jahn guy, doing? Who’d he think he was, changing it all around? No clue at all that I was getting seduced by, to some degree, character and plot development. And when, a few months later, I found Jahn’s follow-up Black Sheep novel, The Hawk Flies on Sunday, it was the same. Ditto Mama’s Science Fiction Book Club edition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars. More of everything! Yet not just more…somehow deeper. More fully realized, though I didn’t think of it that way at the time.

What I did think was that maybe, just maybe, I was stumbling into some of the Secret Knowledge.

Jahn’s novels filled the summer before, and the year of, my 7th grade year at Alamo JHS. But in the summer of 1980, as my tastes continued to broaden, I hesitantly pulled someone I’d never read before from Mama’s library shelf: Stephen King.

And he introduced me to Jack Torrance.

The summer between 7th and 8th grade, Mama and my brother and I headed to Colorado for vacation. We had an old, 1970s Coleman pop-up camper and we humped that thing all over Colorado, but other than Cripple Creek and Royal Gorge, that whole trip is just a smear of trees and mountains and KOA campgrounds. However, along with all our camping gear, Mama had packed a copy of The Shining, the paperback with the original yellow cover with the face staring out of the T. Yeah, that cover disturbed me for years but the book’s obvious premise…and old haunted hotel…was too delicious not to dive in. The real subject—alcoholism, isolation, distrust, madness—wasn’t obvious until later.

So the hard miles we pounded out between Texas and Colorado (with a quick stop in Oklahoma to see family) never touched me because I was lost in that book. It is still one of my favorites of King’s oeuvre and reading it, I didn’t see our 1976 Buick Electra 225 Limited, I saw the Torrances’s Volkswagon. I didn’t see Stillwater, Oklahoma, I saw Sidewinder, Colorado. I didn’t see the Harley-Davidsons on the highway, I saw the snowcats at the Overlook Hotel.

King is always good and frequently great and the chapters surrounding Room 217, specifically Chapters 25 and 30, were unlike anything I’d ever read. In Chapter 25 when Danny finally finds the courage to go into the room that he and King have been circling endlessly, when he pulls back the shower curtain and finds the rotting woman, I stopped breathing. I was scared to death and actually ran faster than he did to the room door to get the hell out. And when the door wouldn’t open? And the woman grabbed his neck? I died a thousand deaths.

So in Chapter 30 when Jack went to Room 217, I knew what was going to happen. He’d find the woman, she’d kill him or seduce him or booze him and it was going to be awful. Except King changed the pitch. This time, he emptied the room and the implication was that Danny was a problem child. Except when Jack left the room…he heard the woman who didn’t exist. She was fussing about behind the door just after he’d closed it. She was there and it was a revelation.

The revelation…more Secret Knowledge borne straight out of The Shining…was a deeper understanding of what writers did. Because I recognized King had played me. He had led me exactly where he wanted me to go, he’d made me feel exactly what he wanted me to feel. Had he suckered me? Sure, but I was good with the suckering. It was exquisite. Give the woman to me when I don’t expect her, take her away when I do. King wanted something specific from me and he had gotten it and I was in awe of that. Looking back with this sudden The Shining-inspired realization, I immediately understood all the writers I’d read, including Virgina Lee Burton, had wanted something specific from me and had gotten it.

Feeling what King wanted me to feel, being in the man’s thrall, was all I could think about. It was, almost, like when I fell in love with D* A* that same summer. She was tall, had a wide grin that reminded me of Carly Simon, long hair that caught the west Texas breeze easily, and clear blue eyes that seemed to reach as deeply into me as I was deep. Much like the long phone conversations she and I had, King and I talked, too. I studied each scene and every sentence, and puzzled out why he used this word but not that word. Somewhere during that summer, which included huge amounts of Golden Age Science Fiction in which men fought against all manner of obstacle, I realized I wasn’t just analyzing all those words, I was comparing them to what words I would have used.

Another realization. So I wrote a story.

Well, not so much wrote as straight-up stole from Jahn. The title was something like “The 168 1/2th Squadron,” because as an 8th grader, that was hilarious, though I have no other memories of it. Handwritten? Six or eight pages? I”m sure it went nowhere and did nothing; at best, a terrible copy of Jahn’s work. At the same time? I’d created something that made my friends laugh and mumble “Cool,” and that was intoxicating. It was one of the first times I’d felt noticed and significant and even a little powerful.

The problem was that story wasn’t really me. Yeah, I was into planes and those goofy fratboy pilots were fun, but my vision had taken a much darker turn, informed by all the SF, all the horror, all the magic realism and dark fantasy I’d suddenly begun devouring. That darkness was me and how I saw not only the world, but my world: dark and edgy and cynical, filled with the betrayal of fathers who were usually absent and shit-worthless when they were around, of bullies at school, of health issues, family members I couldn’t comprehend, of the violence that surrounded me growing up. The woman in Room 217 was how the world interacted with me so that’s what I wanted to read and ultimately write. Koontz and King, Suffer the Children, Ghost Story, The Haunting of Hill House, McCammon and Grant and Campbell.

I never wrote another plane story. In fact, I didn’t really write at all for a long while. Maybe I was gathering my literary strength. Maybe the dribs and drabs, the false starts and empty attempts, the random phrases and ideas jotted on yellow legal paper and ultimately put together in a blue English folder (which I still have somewhere) was me unsure of whether or not I could swim in a sea of words and ideas and books. Regardless of why, there wasn’t much of anything until my sophomore year in high school. Then my words exploded. So much so that Mama got irritated with typing my handwritten stories. She forced me to take a typing class and it was the best class I ever had. Now, suddenly, my fingers could keep up with my head. I won an award my senior year, even though all of my teachers were slightly disturbed at my brand of fiction: end of world apocalypses, murder stories, ghost stories, all manner of mayhem and madness but also, though I hadn’t yet realized it, one person against the World. The World was defined different ways in every story, but it was always a single man against everything.

I wrote and wrote and wrote, and while still in high school I started submitting those stories to Twilight Zone Magazine and The Horror Show. When I got to Midland College, I kept going but added Night Cry to my revolving table of magazines to which I sent my prose. After graduating Texas Tech and moving to Denver, I added Iniquities and Cemetery Dance to the list and then a plethora of small press magazines whose names are mostly forgotten. I still have most of those rejections—and there were hundreds upon hundreds—and somewhere along the line, I passed the million written words that Ray Bradbury opined was the mark of a true writer. Eventually, in June, 1994, I sold my first story. It was a zombie thing long before zombies were fashionable and it clocked in at a compact 150 words (it had been a challenge from Ed Bryant to write a beginning, middle, and end in under 100 words) and it sold to an Irish speculative fiction magazine called Albedo One. Ultimately, I sold those Irish lads a number of stories over the years.

All the while, I wrote novels; trying to do what King had done in The Shining and Peter Straub in Ghost Story and Robert McCammon in Usher’s Passing. My first novel, written as Robert E. Lee High School senior, was called Power Play. Had a bunch of characters that did a bunch of things and came together in a conflagration of death and destruction. I don’t remember much about it but I do know it used quite a few of King’s stylistic twitches. My second novel, written my sophomore year at Texas Tech, was called Razor King, set in a haunted amusement park and was just as shitty as the first novel.

Then, in 2004, after four failed novels, including a zombie rewrite of The Wizard of Oz and a short thing set during the Barbary Coast wars, I met Hal Turnbull. I’d had no idea he existed, or what his story was, but he pushed and pulled me, harassed and threatened me, until I told his story. Then he demanded we tell his brother’s story and then an ex-stripper’s story and finally the story of a young dead girl.

Welcome to 2,000 Miles to Open Road. My first novel.

That book, as bad, and in many ways good, as it can be, is both a pure distillation of what I had read since the beginning as well as a hard left turn. I’d gotten more and more into crime—2,000 Miles is a caper novel and a desert noir—and had begun to recognize the two themes I always seemed to come back to: one man against everything and one man in love (which, I guess, could also be considered one man against everything). The definitions of ‘everything’ and ‘in love’ continually shifted but those themes were in every word I’d ever written. 2,000 Miles, along with those themes had everything else, too: Katy was there, trying to save it all. Ditto Hal Turnbull. Black Sheep Squadron was there, each man fighting against something he might not even be able to see and which came at him hard and fast. The Shining? Only the entire psychological underpinning. The entire book is built upon the screech and shriek and whisper of demons, both emotional and spiritual.

It was the greatest thing in the world, the publication of that book. Yeah, yeah, I thought the literary world would kick my door in when they rushed to fete me and proclaim me the next Hemingway or Steinbeck or even better…King or Straub. That didn’t happen and it’s been a long road from where I thought my life as a writer would be to understanding and accepting where it actually is. 2,000 Miles only sold a few copies, not anywhere near enough for the publisher to keep me on the string. So the sequel, Exit Blood, and the third in what came to be the Barefield trilogy, Death Is Not Forever, never got published by the original publisher. They did get picked up by someone else and sold a few copies.

I can draw a straight line from Katy and the Big Snow to The Blacksheep Squadron to The Shining to 2,000 Miles to Open Road. My novel would never have happened without those other books and perhaps, ultimately, that’s the Secret Knowledge; not how the world worked, but how my world could work. Or maybe the Secret Knowledge wasn’t that I checked out a book in a school library on my own, but rather, started a multi-faceted journey by checking that book out, a journey I’m still on, as cornpone as that sounds.

The Anson Jones Library is still there, still full of books, and for all I know, some other little kid has found Katy and the Big Snow and grabbed themselves their own first bits of Secret Knowledge.

I wonder what they’ll do with it.

The Dogs At The Window

A few days ago, I watched my yellow labs, Grace and Oakley, race from the large living room window to the equally large dining room window, barking and whining and mesmerized by something outside. Their nails clicked incessantly and it reminded me less of pleasant rain on a tin roof than a scene in a show I once worked during my theater tech days where the director had his young cast tap the ends of unsharpened pencils against the set. Tap-tap-taptaptap, faster and faster, until each droplet blended into a torrent of sound. Those dogs ran, furry Olympic sprinters, window to window, back to window, back again to window, then back again. Their barks and whines intensified and sat in my ears like Stevie Ray Vaughn building a solo note by note.

Whatever was visible through those windows had reached out to Grace and Oakley, grabbed hold of their scruffs, and demanded they participate. Maybe participation meant coming outside and sniffing some butt. Maybe it meant noising up the house as signal to the world that they were involved. Either way, I realized, watching them, listening to their sound and fury, that all their earnest movement and heart-rending passion signified nothing.

It occurred to me that those windows had become, for a short while, Grace and Oakley’s social media.

One window, at perfect medium-sized dog nose and eye height, gave them a particular perspective: dead-on perpendicular to the action, a broadside vision filled with detail. The other window, also at perfect medium-sized dog nose and eye height, presented at an angle. It was the same event—probably a dog being walked down Grace and Oakley’s street—but an altered view, which gave them an only slightly changed perspective.

I can only imagine that, as with human social media, the altered perception changed how those two yapping mutts thought about that event.

(And yes, I know they’re ‘just dogs’ and I realize I’m anthropomorphizing.)

Yet watching them, and realizing how they continually changed their view but only a little, made me realize I was seeing one of the myriad problems with social media. Like drug slingers, both legal and back alley, the algorithms give us what the tech behemoths think we want: endless videos of cats playing with twine, or dogs splashing in the water, or high-speed police pursuits, or angry politicians trying to convince you The Other is coming to steal one of your three cookies while they protect hundreds of plates of their own cookies.

Eventually, as hundreds and thousands of statistical analyses have shown, we become desensitized and require harder content, with just a bit more of whatever drew us in: fluffier cats, more swimming dogs, faster chases that now end in crashes, angrier politicians. Our dealers must up our dosage to keep us happy or we go find that fix somewhere else. So each algorithm-inspired suggestion has to be a bit more extreme until we’re in a mouth-foaming, enraged lather and simply can’t think of anything but what they’re showing us.

Just like my dogs.

They were completely, absolutely in that moment. Nothing else existed in the world. Not food or water, not treats, not going for a walk. Those things, and the rest of everything, had ceased because of the view out those two windows. Had Grace and Oakley gone to my office instead, their view would have been completely different, which would have led to a different focus and response.

Instead, the mutts chose to narrow the focus to just that single event, regardless of how crazy it made them. Having not much in the way of higher reasoning, not realizing they could walk away from what angered them and see the rest of the world, they simply followed their baser instincts and lost their collective mind.

Sound familiar?

Fortunately, the dogs were smart enough to realize there was more to life than just those two windows, more walks to take, more treats to eat, but mostly?

More butts to sniff.

Thoughts on Steve Edwards “When Are Men Dangerous?”

In Steve Edwards’ wonderful essay, “When Are Men Dangerous?” he posits that question through a number of vignettes that show men being dangerous, then questions the foundations of those incidents to disassemble their inner workings. The questions he asks are not only worth asking, but asking repeatedly.

Having been a police officer for nearly twenty years, one piece of this essay in particular grabbed my attention.

“I’ve only really gotten yelled at once,” he said, grinning and brushing it off. “We’re supposed to carry two pens in our shirt pocket, and I had a black one and a blue one. Turns out they’re both supposed to be black.”

I laughed reflexively at the punchline. But as we kept talking, and even afterward, on the chilly walk back to my office and the rest of my day, the detail about the pens gnawed at me. He was being indoctrinated and didn’t know it. Or maybe he knew but felt as though he had no choice but to live with his decision. Maybe he thought that on the other side of his training, the pressures would ease. Unfortunately, you can’t escape an ideology by hoping it changes. You end up becoming it instead. Perpetuating it. You normalize stories that in other settings might set off alarm bells. What if I yelled at him about the color of his pens?

Edwards, whose work I had never encountered until today on Lit Hub (a website I whole-heartedly urge you to read every day), is a teacher at a small college and his classes are full of 19-year olds trying to figure out who they are. The student he’s talking to in that passage was training to be a police officer and had written essays about honor and integrity, the sacrifice of duty, all of the standard things a young police officer writes about.

Where the student in that essay was looking out over the horizon of an entire police career, having no idea what the reality actually was, I am on the backside of that career, and know the Two Pens intimately.

Everything has context and Edwards is correct, had he-as a teacher-yelled at a student for having different color pens, chances are exquisite he would have been disciplined, but differently than the police recruit. The recruit was yelled at for not following a petty rule where Edwards would have been counseled for having such a petty rule. (That’s an assumption on my part because I’ve never been a college teacher other than as guest writing instructor or as a guest police instructor.)

Initially, I chuckled about the Two Pens because the court system, at least where I am in north-central Illinois, actually prefers blue pens to black. Why? Blue ink makes the original of an official document clear. Obviously, that has changed given the ease with which copiers and computers can hand out color copies but generally, copies of an official document are black.

But the issue also illustrates, as clearly as a pen and ink drawing, police culture.

There is no rational argument, in any training manual for any department anywhere in this country, for two pens. Why are two better than one? Wouldn’t three be better than two? Pens are small, five or six could be comfortably carried in a uniform shirt pocket.

So why two?

It’s small, petty rule and, as Edwards points out, recruit officers laugh it off, not realizing that Two Pens teaches obedience to the rules. Obedience then becomes the first step into ideology and ideology is where policing has run aground.

Ideology, manifest through indoctrination is, I believe, what kept J. Alexander Kueng from telling Derek Chauvin to get off of George Floyd’s neck that terrible day in Minneapolis. Kueng had learned the lesson well. The older officer, the senior officer, in that specific case the field training officer, is always right, regardless of what your gut and heart and head might tell you.

I’m sure Kueng wanted to be an officer for the same reason the student in Edwards’ essay wanted to be an officer. In fact, in the New York Times podcast The Daily on this very issue, the reporter talked to people in Kueng’s life and he had grand ideals for, if not changing the world, then certainly making his piece of it better.

Instead, he got sucked into police culture, which is one of the most intensely powerful forces I’ve ever dealt with in my life, and obedience to that culture led him to prison for helping to commit murder.

That’s what rings in my head about Kueng and Thomas Lane (the other rookie officer in that incident) constantly. Kueng joined to help people and now he will stand trial in mid-June for aiding and abetting murder.

In other words, Kueng became the dragon he set out to slay, and he did it because of the Two Pens.

I have spent nearly twenty years believing that no one could possibly change police culture, especially new officers who are generally the officers most excited about changing their world. My reality and the era in which I’ve policed, has been that new officers simply don’t have the voice to be taken seriously. Spiritually, new officers are part of, whether they want to be or not, a police culture and ideology that indoctrinates them to believe that veterans are right and newbies are newbies, and never the twain shall meet.

Yet, now it feels vaguely like spring time. Temperatures are rising whlie days are lengthening, and I see new shoots of grass breaking the surface. George Floyd may well have been the wildfire that ravaged policing to insure new growth. Don’t misunderstand me, I support police and believe society needs policing, but I also believe policing needs to burn. Police culture must have that new growth.

Artistes…and their bullshit

Fashion? You seriously want us to worry about fashion?

Heard on NPR yesterday…some fashion guru babbling about how she hopes, as we come out of the pandemic, that people begin to put more thought into what they wear. Her area of expertise isn’t just fashion, but fashion with history and a story.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot does that even mean?

Her thoughts were that perhaps we could only wear clothes that had a special story attached. Maybe Mama gave it to you before she died. Maybe we wore it the night we met Frank Sinatra and he commented on how cool it looked. Maybe it had belonged to Great Grand MaMa and we repurposed it to fit whatever we have going on in life.

Really? This is what you hope mankind is thinking about coming out of the pandemic?

600,000 Americans died of Covid but maybe their loved ones can set aside their grief long enough to stroke your fashion ego. And maybe the 33.4 million (as of this writing) who’ve had Covid can set aside their sickness and focus on your need to fill time on NPR.

Maybe all those people whose jobs disappeared in the economic crash, or whose businesses closed, can forget about paying their bills long enough to realize how brilliant your suggestion was; that all they needed was a fashion guru to tell them how to process their grief and anxiety over the details of their sad little lives to get all better.

I thought: wow, not gonna hear anything quite so artistically pretentious again for a while ’cause that’s some serious navel-gazing.

Until this morning on 1A. A terrific show that is usually about things that matter.

Today, it was some chick who produced a show called Broad City. During the conversation, and I didn’t hear all the conversation, just about 15 minutes worth, when the host told her it was a good show, the creator agreed and said, “It changed the world.”

Uh…what?

Are you fucking shitting me? Changed the world? She offered no data for this bold statement other than that she and her creator/partner had changed the “fem” conversation.

I don’t even know what that means. There were lots of buzzwords around her fem comment and I felt like I had been dropped into the middle of a militant 3rd wave of feminism ops planning session.

The kicker? I’m a pretty smart guy, quite the consumer of fine art in its many guises, and I never heard of her show. Soooo…changed the world?

Did. Not. Even.

Both of you shut the hell up. I can’t even begin to imagine anything more First World Privilege than those two comments. THIS is the kind of shit, the kind of moronic comments that make regular people who’re busting heavies every day to make the mortgage payment and get medicine for the baby and keep the car running one more week, roll their eyes and dismiss art out of hand and thus have no issues when their local school cuts music funding or art classes or creative writing programs.

Ain’t no regular people got the time to pick and choose their clothing based on what story it tells and sure as shit no TV show ever changed the world.

Fuck off and get a real job, discover what real sweat, real contributions, real accomplishment, feels like.

CopStories: Lost

Law enforcement is an honorable job.

Not the most popular sentiment right now. Nor should it be because right now, I don’t recognize my profession.

Right now, I don’t see the men and women I’ve worked with who strive every day to do the right thing-regardless of how they feel about that particular client.

Right now, I don’t understand what some command staffs are directing their forces to do.

Right now, I am lost.

Those men and women I’ve worked with, those who’ve done the hard work of treating everyone with respect regardless of how those people treat us are still there, but they’re being buried under an avalanche of “What the fuck?” and “Who have we become….”

I know for the black community policing has always been a scary proposition, but for a middle-aged white guy whose only problems with the cops were entirely and completely self-inflicted, and who has lived a decent life built on at least some measurable degree of white privilege, I don’t recognize what we are right now.

I don’t understand Buffalo cops shoving a 75-year old man to the ground, hearing his skull snap on the concrete, seeing the blood flow, and walking away.

I don’t understand a commander telling his guys, “Don’t kill them but hit them hard.”

I don’t understand cops slashing tires, then offering up not 1, but 2, bullshit excuses.

[Note: never, ever, in any tactical class I’ve taken or demonstration I’ve seen have we been told to slash tires to keep people from driving dangerously.]

I wrote a few weeks ago that I didn’t know how to help heal my profession; that 800,000 cops around the country are not going to listen to some rando working at a department that only fields about 15 road deputies and has a jail that houses 32.

I wrote that before the protests and now it becomes all the more clear that I don’t know how to even begin to think about how to heal my country and my citizens and even my friends.

Law enforcement is an honorable profession and something which every single person in America needs. It is men and women trying to make their worlds better in ways both large and small, profound and mild.

Is it rife with issues? With corruption and bad cops? Absolutely. The police response to anti-brutality protests illustrates that in horrendous detail.

Does law enforcement need to be revamped and rebuilt? Yes, more than anyone who isn’t in law enforcement can even begin to understand. Which is why the reductionist, simplistic logic I saw on FB recently made me insane.

“While it is the 17th most dangerous job in the US, you don’t hear about the 16 jobs more dangerous being used as an excuse to kill people.”

An excuse to kill people.

I don’t even understand how anyone who can carry a thought in their head can say that about the entire profession.

Let’s slip that around to another industry. Trucking. Truckers fall asleep, truckers don’t keep their trucks in working order, and more than a few truckers have been convicted of driving all over the country snatching people and killing them (seriously, the FBI even has an OTR trucking task force).

So do we assume all truckers are simply driving around looking for an excuse to kill people? Of course not, it’s ridiculous to think so.

Part of the issue with policing, I think, is that there are no other jobs that, as a regular part of the job, end in death at someone else’s hands except the military.

When you sell electrical components, you don’t assume your client is going to shoot you. When you visit a hospital to sell rubber gloves, you don’t assume your client is going to stab you. When you wait on someone at your retail store, you don’t assume your client is going to…pick one: drown you, run you down with their car, throw you off a roof, set you on fire, file frivolous lawsuits, stalk your family, lie to the press, etc., etc., etc.

That’s the reality for police officers and that reality engenders a bunker mentality that is incredibly difficult to displace.

Us versus Them.

There’s a story I tell sometimes at writers conventions or where ever when people learn I’ve done jobs other than being a copper.

The story is about my reaction when someone comes up and knows me by name and I have no clue who they are. See, I used to be a journalist in my county at the local paper so I interviewed lots of people. I also used to own a bookstore in my county and sold lots of books to people. But I’m also a deputy in my county and have arrested lots of people.

So the punch line is that I tell people to stand six feet away until I figure out whether I interviewed them, sold to them, or took their asses to jail.

Us versus Them.

I don’t know if that person is a Them and until I figure it out, I need Them to stand a little apart from me because I don’t now what they’re going to do.

And yes, I’ve had people I’ve arrested see me some place off duty and get in my face.

Us versus Them, a sad commentary on the entire affair.

I’m not really sure what I’m writing about in this piece, not sure what the through-line is, the take-away or epiphanous moment where it all makes sense.

I do know that law enforcement is an honorable profession and that a majority of us are good people trying to do a difficult job that we, admittedly, chose.

I also know that there is a sickness in law enforcement, not new but certainly newly discovered by mainstream America, that leaves my heart shattered and my head filled with broken glass.

I do believe we can cure that sickness but it’s going to be the longest, hardest road America has ever tried to traverse because it is absolutely tied to American racism, our original sin, and we’ve been treading that road for 400 years.

About Trey

“Trey ain’t such a bad guy.”A jail inmate, charged with murder. Murderers, thieves, junkies, those … Read More

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