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The Autobiography of Alex Mead How To Care About Humans Chapter 2: How the Other Half Lives
"I know now that I'm ready, Because I finally heard them say It's a different world form where you come from." -Bill Cosby (sung by Aretha Franklin)
Culture Shock (Jan.19.2003) When I was 8 years old we moved from Dodge Street to St. James Place. These were two VERY different places. Much of the person I have become today is a result of having lived on Dodge Street and then having lived on St. James Place. Main Street divides the East Side of Buffalo from the West Side of Buffalo. On the East Side one block looks like the next. Mostly black folks living in neglected homes and Dodge Street was certainly like that. The West Side of Buffalo has diverse communities and some are run down and others are rather extravagant. St. James Place was on the upper end of the scale, so this move from the East Side to the West Side had put me in a very different place. When kids became hungry on St. James Place they went home and had lunch. On Dodge Street we went with either plan A: Everyone comes over to my house and my mom feeds the whole neighborhood; or we went with plan B: We go down to the corner store and shoplift some food and feed ourselves. On Dodge Street my house was one of the few that had two floors, and that was only because the house was built weird. On St. James Place it was I who lived in a one story apartment and everyone else around me lived in 3 and sometimes 4 story houses. Shortly after I moved to St. James, Susie, my next door neighbor became my best friend and her family had a four story house. One whole floor for every person in her family. On St. James Place you never saw a kid getting a beating in the street by their parents. There were no drunks playing the guitar on their porches and having loud arguments into all hours of the night. There were lots of couples on St. James Place. Married couples with children. Couples that got along with one another and supported their children. There were no vacant lots filled with weeds for catching bees on St. James. There was no broken glass on the street. There were no black people. I looked all summer long. I didn't find any until I went to my new school in the fall. This crazy new place was a whole new system to learn. My mom was still there to be a constant in my life, but everything else I had to learn to do differently. When a dog started barking at you, it was no longer acceptable to pick up something like a rotten apple and throw it at him. Hell, there wasn't even anywhere to go to get a rotten apple. There was a different language on St. James Place. I recognized it at the language we used when we went to visit my Grandmother and Grandfather in Pittsburgh. It was that weird language with "May I" and "Please" and "You're very welcome" and it didn't have "ain't" in it, and "bad" actually meant "bad" now and no longer meant "good". My mother liked both places. She wanted me to know both languages. She wanted to give me an opportunity to see both. My mother would have been perfectly happy to live out the rest of her days on Dodge Street if it were not for me. She had moved to Dodge Street to help people, and she did help a lot of people. She did not want me to learn more and more about shoplifting and drunks and throwing things at dogs, she figured I had a handle on all that by the time I was 8. She made a lot of sacrifices and worked very hard and changed her life and found a different way to help people that would also earn enough money to stay on St. James Place and support my expensive toy habit. My mother lived her life for me and I am SO, SO glad that I learned to appreciate that and started giving at least some of that back to her before she died. Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child (Jan.19.2003) Alex Mead (Jan.19.2003) Sometimes I feel like a motherless child Sometimes I feel like a motherless child Sometimes I feel like a motherless child A long, long way from home She sang those words and I cried Not a lot, just a little But I had been wanting to cry for a long while Needing to cry The tear barrier finally broke My mother died on August 19th, 2001 My first life ended and my second life has still not begun I was just down the block from where I live but I am a long, long way from home wherever I go I once wrote in a poem "There are two kinds of people in this world people whose mothers have died and people whose mothers are still alive" I still feel that way sometimes Like the motherless child But that wasn't enough to make me cry I always feel like that I'm used to it This morning I cried because I am a childless father A long, long way from home Crying (Jan.19.2003) Okay, now you might get the impression that I cry a lot. I don't. I almost never cry. Since the age of 14 I have cried 5 times.
Okay, so for those who are good at math, yes I did in fact go roughly 16 years without crying at all. Ever. During that time I may have gotten so sleepy that my eyes started watering but I don't include that. I got profoundly sad and contemplated suicide, but I don't include that. I'm talking about real crying: Getting so sad or hurt that your eyes leak. So how did I go from being a spoiled brat that cried every single time he couldn't get what he wanted and a cry baby who cried to his mother every single time he fell and hurt himself into a stoic that never cried ever? Well, His name was Martin. Martin came to stay with us when I was 12 or 13 years old. He put a stop to all of my crying. BUT FIRST! Before I tell you the story about how the crying stops, it occurs to me that I've promised a number of times to go into how bad the crying was, and I keep avoiding the issue. Okay. Well. It was bad. I cried almost any time I didn't get my way. If we went into a store and I wanted my mother to buy me something I had the tears right there on demand. They could be summoned in an instant. Then would come the begging and the bargaining. 'If you buy me this now I will (make sure you're sitting for this) clean my room'. YES! I want this item SO BAD that I am actually willing to clean my own room. My mom's coworker Tom used to call my room the "Cosmic Junkyard" because it had Star Wars toys strewn about with piles of clothes and papers and drawings of Star Wars people and assorted other junk. But if I got a new toy through my bargaining skills, I, of course, could not be bothered to clean my room; I had A NEW TOY TO PLAY WITH!!! Woo hoo! If I fell down and skinned my knee or elbow there was no question about whether I would go running and crying to my mom. That was just automatic. It wasn't like there was a saturation point either. Nor was there a grace period. I was quite capable of crying to get something one minute, getting it, and then crying to get something else not even five minutes later. I remember one time I was sitting on my front porch on St. James Place and my mother had bought me a toy that I had been begging for about a week. She gave it to me and my landlady was sitting right next to me and she watched in amazement as I, rather than opening up the toy, flipped the box over and started begging for the next toy from the picture on the back. No, my mother didn't give in every single time. There were a few times when she actually said she couldn't afford it and I cried the whole way until we left the store and the whole way home before I actually realized she really meant that she couldn't afford it. And there were times when she'd say I can't afford that now and she'd give me a time table and tell me when she could afford it and we negotiated a peace that way and we got out of those situations without the crying. Then.... then there was this sneaky one she had. There was this wicked thing she did where she told me "I don't really think you want that, but if you still want it a month from now I'll get it for you." I used to HATE that one! What do you mean you don't believe I want it. You see me here crying don't you? Of course I want it. That made me so mad to not be believed about how badly I absolutely needed the whatever it was. I would resolve to want that thing EVERY SINGLE MOMENT of the month. Sometimes I'd last a week before I forgot I wanted it. Sometimes not that long. So back to Martin. Martin was a Puerto Rican kid from New York City. He came to live with us for one summer while I was 12 or 13 or something. There was some kind of family thing going on in his family and his cousin or brother Rudy was one of my mom's coworkers at her new job. She volunteered to watch him, and it changed the whole crying thing all around. Martin didn't grow up having toys and somehow he wasn't in the habit of running to anyone when he fell down. Me and Martin got along great. He was a couple years older than me. He was telling me lots of things about girls that I was curious about. I looked up to him A LOT. I trusted what he had to say. One day he observed my department store cry-begging routine and when he got home he asked me "Why do you cry like that?" and he seemed quite concerned about me like there was something wrong with me.
Sometime later I hurt myself pretty bad. It was time to start crying. I decided not to cry. And I didn't cry. It was like an epiphany. That was who I wanted to be. The guy who didn't cry. I had heard stories about my father and how he had severely injured himself at times and didn't even wince and just calmly walked to the hospital instead. I wanted to be like that. Not to mention the fact that I got picked on at school for how easy it was to make me cry. Now I had a defense, I could simply choose not to cry. And with practice I learned how to get really, really injured and not cry ever. I learned how to not get toys and just say "Oh well" about it instead of crying about it. I learned how to have my world ripped apart so badly that I wanted to die and not cry about it. Yep. See. That's the thing. I did not realize that once you turn the tears off, it's hard to turn them back on. All kinds of hard times came and went during those 16 years where it would have been appropriate to cry, where it would have been beneficial to cry, or where every single other person around me was crying and it would have been nice to cry just to fit in. I had lost the ability. I would try to cry and get zip, nada, nothing. Or I would need to cry and there was no crying to be had. It took 16 years to get crying back and even still I barely have the ability. I think that my mother's passing started me on my way back to being a real person with a full range of emotions. There are lots of those kinds of gifts that she is continuing to give me. And I'm still ever so thankful that I learned to appreciate them. And it isn't that I didn't appreciate my mother when I was young and spoiled, nor is it like I didn't have my good qualities and show my appreciation to my mother when I was young and spoiled. It's just that there were a lot of things I stopped taking for granted, and I'm glad I did that while she was still alive. Robbin and Stealin (May.20.2004) I lived next door to my best friend Susie for about two or three years maybe. Our landlord didn't like us very much. So we moved down the block to the middle of St. James Place. I met a new circle of friends. After a while I made a new best friend, Matt. Matt had a relative named Chris. Chris liked to take things. He loved to come over to my house because I had so much stuff that it took me a while to notice anything was missing. I remember that my mother used to put a paint dot on the bottom of every single one of my legos so that we would know which ones were mine. I remember one time when I had unadvisedly left him in my house alone while I was out front and he came flying out of my backyard on his bike talking about "My mother just called. Got a real emergency at home. See ya later. Gotta go," and I chased him on foot until I caught up with his bike and I dumped out his bag to find a collection of my best Lego pieces with the tell-tale dots painted on the bottom. But Chris didn't just like to take stuff from us, he liked to take stuff from anyplace he could find it. We were curious about it. I had some experience with going into a store and taking food from Dodge Street, but the rest of the kids on St. James were really interested in the idea of going into a store and just taking something without paying for it. One day we decided to go see if Chris was really able to do as he claimed. We all rode our bicycles all the way up to Hertel Ave without notifying our parents. It was the most unthinkably illicit thing we could possibly be doing. Venturing very far away without telling any adults where we were and then observing a blatant act of theft. And he did it too. Chris went into the store. He stuffed a G.I.Joe action figure down his pants. He walked out of the store. And as we rode back home he showed it to us. It was one of the NEW action figures that we all wanted and he hadn't had to beg his parents for it or anything. He just took it. So we all started to take stuff. And we weren't too careful about it. Eventually, through speaking with each other, our parents began to discover that we were starting to have things that none of them had bought for us. And so they questioned us. And we got very scared, and we blamed it all on Chris. Chris had a history of stealing and so they were willing to accept that it was all his idea. We got grounded or whatever, but our parents were mostly not mad because they believed we were led astray by a bad seed. They had raised us to "know better" but we had just had a youthful indescretion. And the funny thing was, nobody even got that mad at Chris either. It was weird. On Dodge Street kids would get caught stealing and their parents would beat them within an inch of their life. And then they would wander around the house screaming about how they had such BAD, BAD children. And they would beg God to explain to them why their children had to be so rotten. Here on the West Side the parents all believed that Chris was to blame for our shoplifting, but they FELT BAD FOR HIM! He was "going through difficult times" and stuff like that. They would say things about how Chris knew his parents would buy him things if he would wait but he's just acting out trying to get attention, and stuff like that. I felt bad for blaming him because I thought he was going to get the mother of all beatings but I found out that it just didn't work that way over on the side of town where people actually had some money. Nobody had any "bad kids" they just had kids that "needed some counciling." BREAKDANCE! Do da backspin! (circa Jan.09.2003) The 70s came and went. My disco dancing faded into the past. And with the 80s came breakdancing. I was good at it. I was acrobatic, agile, nimble and had great body control. I had great rhythm. I could see movements and mimic them easily. And I spent a LOT of time doing it so naturally I got better and better. My mother would get me anything I wanted if I wanted it long enough and I really wanted a big roll out piece of linoleum. She got me one. I used to take it out on the street and take a can of Pledge and shine it up and make it all slippery and I used to do the backspin and the glide and a big crowd would gather. Disco went out of style and I stopped doing it. Breakdancing went out of style a looooong time ago and I have NEVER stopped doing it. Nor will I ever I suppose. In fact, there is a young woman for whom I'm writing this autobiography now and she has hardwood floors and when she's not looking I go and breakdance on her floors. I do the glide all around and then giggle for a while. Aside from her being in it, that's the best thing about her apartment. Okay. So where was I? Breakdancing. Okay. So then I should talk about my grade school friend Dave. We were in the 8th grade together. We had been in the 7th and 6th grades together too I guess. Dave was pretty cool. He and I were both in the mid range of "sort of" popular kids. The popular kids liked us and the unpopular kids liked us and we were sort of in the middle. Personally, that's the way I liked it.
Until!... The 8th grade dance! Ha ha, that's right. Time to shake your groove thing kids. It's the end of the year. We're graduating from 8th grade and we're gonna party like it's 1999. Even though it's the early 80s. And at the time all dancing that is not breakdancing is officially lame and boring and stupid and dumb. Since breakin required a lot of practice only the few, the proud, were going to rise to the top on this night. I wanted to be one of those few. Dave, unfortunately, did not. As the date of the dance approached I would talk about the moves we were going to do at the dance and try to come up with things that were going to look really cool. Dave would ask me stupid questions like "Do you really think you're going to be able to dance in front of all those people?" Why did he even have to bring that up. I never even thought about it until he mentioned it. Before he said anything I was thinking of course I'm going to just bust out and go berzerk. But Dave was all nervous. And he was making me nervous. And then he would start telling me things like "I don't think I'm going to do it, you should just dance by yourself, you're way better than me anyway." WHAT? That is such a lie. Okay, maybe I'm slightly better but there is no way I'm way better. And that's not the point. The point is what happens when we're both on at the same time. But the closer it got to be to the dance the more he was punking out. Frustrating. At school I let it leak that Dave and I were GOOD at breakin. People didn't believe us but I let them disbelieve. They were going to be shown. They were going to be shown in a BIG way. Rumors started about us being good. People kept asking us to show some moves. Dave was too scared. I pretended to be shy but really I didn't want to give any sneak previews, they were going to see when the time came and not before. They started to not believe that we were really going to dance at the dance. That was fine with me. Their belief was not required. The parents who were organizing the dance (in a futile effort to be cool) had hired a "professional break dance troop" to entertain us at the dance. I thought the point was for us to go there and for US, the 8th graders, to dance. What did we need these guys for? Still, it was just a minor setback. I didn't need to be better than any professionals I just needed to prove that I was not afraid, and that I was good. I wanted to be the best among the 8th graders and there were a few kids who liked to break in school in the cafeteria around lunch time but they were not good. A lot of the school's athletes and popular kids liked to breakdance. I knew this because some lived on my block. They also were not very good. A few of them had seen me dance and knew how good I was and they added to the suspense by telling everyone I was really good and so now there was a debate leading up to the dance as to whether I was actually good, whether I was chickenshit and was going to hide in the corner the whole night; whether I just thought I was good but actually sucked. I enjoyed the speculation. Those who knew knew, and those who didn't know didn't need to know. The Big Night (circa Jan.12.2003) So then came the night of the dance. There was so much buzz about how the dance would go. A little bit of it was about me, but mostly people were wondering how good the professionals were going to be and what music would be there and who would be the prettiest girl. That kind of thing. Actually there was already a consensus on who would be the prettiest girl. There was already an established prettiest girl in 8th grade. In fact she had also been the established prettiest girl of the 7th grade and the 6th grade too. My family likes to procrastinate. Why do today what you can do 10 minutes before it reaches the crisis stage and absolutely has to be done? The other kids were all talking about what they were going to be wearing that night and I hadn't even thought about that at all or attributed any importance to it. I just thought everyone was going to dress the way they dress in school, but Nooooo. The girls were going to be in dresses. The guys were trying to dress cool. I had lots of breakdance clothes and parachute pants and spiked bracelets and stuff like that. But suddenly I was struck with the realization that this was not going to be sufficiently cool. My mom had taken the day off from work to drive me to the dance and everything, but I ran home in a panic to impress upon her the need for us to go shopping immediately and elevate my level of cool. We drove up to k-mart where they had an even better spiked bracelet that I begged for until I got it. And then the heavens opened and a beam of light shown down on a wonderful, wonderful shiny thing. It was a Michael Jackson jacket just like the kind he wore in the Beat It video where they did a little bit of breakdancing. It was brand new. No one would have it but me. It would draw everyone's attention immediately. Now I just had to actually have it. So I began with the begging. I had seen the pricetag on it and I expected to have to do a LOT of begging. I was thinking I might even have to do some crying. I was very surprised when my mom picked up the jacket and just put it in our shopping cart before I even really got warmed up with the begging. My mom just sort of understood the importance of things like this. Even as expensive as it was, it was vital to my life that I must have this jacket.
I quickly discovered what had amplified the interest in me as the kids gathered around me to tell me what was going on at the dance so far. The break dance crew that the parents had hired, and who we were all expecting to be grown adults, were only teenagers a few years older than us. There were four of them. Four Puerto Rican kids. And they were monopolizing the dance floor. They weren't letting anyone else dance and they kept asking if anyone wanted to challenge them and they kept beating everyone and then making fun of our school and telling us how much we sucked. Well, yes, a very serious situation. I reassured them all that I was the right man for the job and told them to just point me in the right direction and I would go get the floor back. Breakdancing was just starting. It was confrontational and it was peace at the same time. The breakdancing movie that had come out was about a breakdance battle so all of breakdancing was equated with competing to us. At the same time breakin was a way to compete where no one got physically injured and everyone was still friends at the end. In cities and neighborhoods much tougher than the one I had moved to breakin was being used instead of gang violence to settle things. It was a way for young urban kids to express themselves. It was a great thing that happened at a great time. I got shoved to the front of the crowd and I got my first look at them. I think they were actually from New York City. They were popping and locking to the music and eyeballing me and they were VERY good. No matter. Dave and I were going to handle them. There was no doubt in my mind. I looked around for Dave. I saw him on the edge of the crowd. He looked shell shocked. He looked like he might have been afraid this whole time that I wasn't going to show up at all and I was going to leave him there all night with people begging him to dance against these four guys. As IF! I mean as if I would have missed this for anything. It was all I would talk about to Dave lately. But he looked seriously out of it. Like he was going to faint. It didn't seem like he was just scared to dance himself, he seemed like he was scared even to have me dance. Still I had faith. I knew that after a few minutes of me being out there he was going to realize that it wasn't so bad and he would be by my side and we would handle them together. No mater how good they were we would handle them. There was no doubt in my mind. Now the problem was that my feet were stuck to the floor too. Everyone was looking at me. Waiting. Expecting something. I had promised something. Now, how to actually deliver it? What to do first? How do I get my body to move with all these people watching me. Damn Dave for even making it an issue in the first place. And these four guys were looking at me. They were older than me. They didn't look impressed at all. You could see it on their faces that they thought they were going to massacre me. What if they were right? No! They were wrong. Wrong period. I just had to make my first move and everything would flow naturally from that. I had the benefit of knowing the song. I knew that a really good beat break was coming up. And when it did it took me with it. Right into the middle of the open space and into some moves. aggressive moves. I needed to make people say WOW right from the beginning and I did it. I was doing the glide all around the floor and doing the wave with my arms and people started cheering. Cheering for ME. I began to feel encouraged like nothing could go wrong. I glided over to where Dave was standing and did a full body wave that ended with me pointing at him. That was his cue to jump in and help me turn these suckers out. He shot me a look like HELL NO DOG! YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN! I couldn't believe it. There was no WAY he was going to let it be four against one. Who was going to guard my back? He knew that we had moves that required both of us. I tried one more time. I did a move that ended with a part where he was supposed to jump in. Still, no Dave. No Dave and no hope of any Dave. There was going to be no Dave. None. Get it through you mind Alex. You are on your own. Deal with it.
I did some mundane stuff to lower people's expectations of my floor work and then BAM! Knee spin. Back spin. Game over. The four kids actually came up to me and congratulated me and told me I was pretty good. That was the only way they could keep from loosing was to call it a draw. A tie was fine with me. Anything that got them off the floor was going to be a victory in the eyes of my peers, and right after they called a draw they went to go get themselves something to drink. I was immediately besieged by requests to show people how to do this and how to do that. People that never talked to me were talking to me. My friends were extra happy to be my friends and the few people who had claimed that I was good started bragging about how they knew all along that it would go down like this. As 8th grade moments go, I'd have to say it was the best. Slow Dancing (circa Jan.12.2003) Then came the slow dancing. No idea how to do that. The boys who had girlfriends took to the floor, people stopped celebrating me, I was left to wonder what in the hell was going on. I went to go talk to Dave to make sure he was alright. He was in a hallway downstairs getting something to drink. He told me that I had been great by myself and that he would have probably messed me up. I let him off the hook, but really I was still mad. The only way I had ever imagined it happening was that when I needed him he would reach down and find some way to overcome his nerves and he would be out there with me as a team. It would have been so much easier that way. I went to talk to other people that I knew. I wanted reassurance from every single person that I knew that I had really been good. I got back upstairs and there was still slow dancing. No matter how good I might have been at breaking there was still no 8th grade girl that was going to lower herself to dance with me. Why bother to even ask? Any girl that agreed to slow dance with me would probably get picked on for the remaining two weeks of 8th grade. I was sure of it. I mean, the night had changed things a little, but the Earth was still revolving around the sun and I was still not a guy that an 8th grade girl would want anyone to think was her boyfriend. The thing that I didn't realize was that there was a 7th grade girl there at the dance. To this day I do not know why she was there. Maybe her parents were chaperones or something. But she was there and before I knew what hit me SHE had asked ME if I would slow dance with her. She was cute for a 7th grader. My whole brain shouted out YES and jumped for joy. My mouth, however, said "I don't know how." She looked so disappointed. She assured me there was nothing to it. She offered to show me. All I could do was to shake my head no. She was undaunted. She invited me over to a quiet corner of the room and asked me to show her how to breakdance. I nervously did so. She was such a cool 7th grader. My friend Tom came over and the three of us practiced breakdancing. She kept trying to be close to me. She kept trying to tell me, hey I like you with her body language. My body language said "Ahh! You're scaring me! YOU'RE SCARING ME! Please go away! Don't touch me. I'm frightened!" Over the summer the 7th grade girl ended up being Tom's girlfriend. That was how I learned to confront my fear of rejection. When I meet an interesting woman and I am seized by fear that if I ask her out she might slap me and tell me I'm ugly, I just remember that the 7th grade girl could have been my girlfriend, and I could have kissed her instead of Tom. That was a defining moment in my life. Obviously, or I wouldn't have just rambled on and on about it like I did for like a billion paragraphs. But really. I think about how when I was seized by fear and got on the floor and danced anyway I was rewarded. When I was seized by fear and got paralyzed by fear, someone else got the 7th grade girl. Pimp Daddy Martin, Mackin and Mackin (Jan.20.2003) So, as I had started to explain before, one summer when I was young Martin came to live with us. It was REALLY easy to look up to him. He was so different than anyone I ever met before. He was confident. Confident with girls. He was so cool. There was a girl that was the prettiest girl on our block. She was too old for me to ever think about her in that way, but I certainly did notice that all of the guys in the grades above me used to come to our block and try to talk to her.
Martin didn't end up going back to New York City. He ended up staying with his Buffalo relative Rudy. I only got to see him once in a while at office functions for my mom or at the office softball games or something. Those were few and far between. But a couple years later I started going to high school and it was the same High School Martin went to and he was always walking the hallway with his arm around a girl. I so wanted to be like that. Yellow Bellied Bed Wetter (Jan.20.2003) But I wasn't like that. Far from it. I was scared of girls. Scared of meeting new friends. Scared when people came over to my house. Scared because tears were not the only fluid flowing from my body. I had managed to forget this for a long time. I find it VERY strange that a person can forget something that caused them so much shame and embarrassment, but I had honestly not thought about this for many years. Something about writing my autobiography has reminded me of it and now that I remember it, the memories are so vivid that it's even harder to believe that I'd forgotten. I used to wet the bed. A lot. Okay, you'd guessed that already by the heading. Well, good for you. That had a lot to do with why I was scared of girls. I was scared that if I ever had a girlfriend she would want to see my bedroom. And my bedroom smelled like pee. From me wetting the bed. A lot. I was scared every time I made a new friend or even every time that my mom brought an adult home that they might discover my secret. If you thought my crying for toys was bad, that was nothing compared to how I used to cry when I woke up and found I'd wet the bed again. My mother tried anything she could think of: Not letting me drink anything after a certain hour at night; Waking me up several times a night to ask if I had to pee... She tried everything. She really did. And not because of the burden of washing pissy sheets every morning and waking me up so early for school to get a shower every morning. She tried everything because she recognized how bad I was hurt by it all. There were days when I thought I had showered well only to get to school and discover I still smelled like pee. There were the times when one of my close friends would figure it out and then I would live in fear that someday I would do something to make them mad and they would tell the whole world. There was constant strategizing on my part to figure out how to keep people away from my room. And then there'd be the occasional night where I'd wake up with a dry bed. I would start to hope that maybe this is the day it's finally over. Maybe this is the day that my mom keeps telling me will come when it finally all stops. But there were rarely two days in a row of a dry bed and then I'd be crying again. 50 Years Later (Feb.15.2004) When I was 12 years old my Grandparents renewed their vows at the Fiends' Quaker Meeting House in Pittsburgh. They had been married for FIFTY years! That was almost inconceivable to me. How old would you have to be to have been married that long. That time at the Toronto airport when I was five and I got lost was one of the rare occasions when most of my family got together. This 50th wedding anniversary was the ONLY occasion where ALL of my family got together. I remember every single one of my cousins were there and great uncles and second cousins and people who's relation to me was so abstract that I figured I might as well just pretend they weren't related. Their ceremony was quick. It seemed unreasonable that all this preparation was made and all of these people had come so far and then that was all there was to it, just a simple little ceremony and some cake eating. Then they were given a document written in calligraphy and all of us signed it. It's still hanging in my living room now, so I can go get it and tell you exactly what it says: Whereas Willard Mead and Gertrude Campbell Mead, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, having completed fifty years of happy marriage, and having duly sought and received the approval of the Pittsburgh Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, did in an appointed meeting for worship renew their marriage commitment on the third day of the ninth month in the Year of Our Lord 1983, pledging once more their mutual trust and devotion * * * * * We their family and friends, join them in joyous celebration of their fifty years of marriage.
I've heard stories from my mother and her siblings about how my grandma and grandpa were sometimes very mean while they were growing up but I could never really believe that of my grandma and grandpa. They were warm, loving and nurturing every time I ever saw them. And they were married for FIFTY years! I wanted to find myself a girlfriend that would marry me for fifty years. I figured I would have to wait until she was 18 of course and by that time I'd probably be twenty since I would be the obligatory two years older than her. So I figured I would be looking at SEVENTY years old by the time my 50th rolled around. And that would be pretty damned old. I considered it might be smarter to find a girlfriend the exact same age so I would only have to be 68. But whatever her age was, I was ready to love her the way my grandpa loved my gramma. Okay. I'm ready. (Jan.21.2003)
I was READY! Now, the only problem was how do I find a girl that would be willing to let me touch her. I mean, puberty was helping me a little. I had grown a few inches and was a little bit less tubby, but now I had the problem of having pimples. And I was still weird. I still liked Star Wars and G.I.Joe and stuff like that. I still drew weird comic books and had big lips and funny looking hair. I was still the same guy that had gotten smacked in the coat room in the second grade for liking a girl. My first strategy. Simple enough. Have my mom get me one. I'm not kidding. I tried to get my mom to get me a girlfriend. I tried so hard to talk her into it but she kept telling me I was on my own or that she didn't know how to get me a girlfriend. I had given up the crying to get her to give in but I still had guilt as a weapon. I tried to guilt her into getting me a girlfriend but she wouldn't do it. I felt fairly sure that she could put an add in the paper or ask around at work to find out who had daughters they'd be willing to give up or SOMETHING! But no dice. It took a few months, but it finally started to sink in that I was on my own on this mission. I looked around and a lot of my new High School friends didn't have a girlfriend either so I did realize they were in kind of short supply. But something inside of my body hungered for one. I didn't have a lot of requirements. Any girl that was nice, could walk upright and speak in sentences would do. I was scared to approach one though. I needed one to fall out of the sky right onto my lap. The Sky is Falling (Jan.21.2003) It was a few months into my freshman year of High School. First period was my favorite class. I loved to draw, and my first class every morning was mechanical drawing. I was cruising to an easy A. Our teacher was a really nice old guy named Vince. The whole class loved him. He was a fair grader, he told you what you did wrong and remembered everyone's work and congratulated you when you were getting better. Even though he was getting up there in age he was still easy to talk to. He could still relate to us. He was also the coach of the swim team which I later joined so I got to hang our with him some more even after my freshman year. I thought everyone in the class was doing well and going to get a good grade. I guess I was only noticing the people who were doing well and those were the only people showing their grades. Oh, one other important thing about the class. It was a mixed level class. All my other classes except study halls had only freshmen in it. But Mechanical drawing had people from all four grade levels in it. I kind of liked that because I was a freshmen, I was getting great grades and sometimes upper classmen were coming to me for advice. It was Autumn. Just before Thanksgiving break. A lot of kids had skipped school to give themselves an extended holiday. The masking tape was making its way around the room. Every morning the masking tape would make its way, desk to desk in an orderly fashion so that we could tape our paper to the drawing board before we began the days assignment. Every day the tape would land on my desk. I'd tear four neat, small pieces to conserve tape, I'd pass it back over my shoulder to the guy behind me. On this day, the guy behind me had skipped school. The guy behind him, had skipped school. I looked back behind me and discovered that the whole row I was sitting in had skipped except the girl in the very last seat of my row. She was a sophomore. I had noticed her a few times before but she was a sophomore so there was no use in even entertaining thoughts about her being interested in me. I was about to stand up and walk the tape back to her but she said "Throw it". "No, I'll walk it back to you," I insisted. "Just throw it," she said looking at me impatiently. So I tossed it. Gently. She put both of her hands out in front of her to catch it and it went right between both hands and hit her in the face before landing on her desk. Moments later I was there at the desk in front of hers apologizing profusely. She seemed to think the whole episode was funny. I was glad that she wasn't mad. Something about the way she smiled when she laughed was so pretty. I caught myself thinking about her. Wishing. And then right before I got a chance to tell myself how stupid I was for thinking such thoughts and ran back to my desk to try to forget about her, she started talking to me. She asked me how was it that I could be so good at all of this Mechanical Drawing stuff. I didn't know how to explain why I was good I just was. It wasn't very hard, you just see the shape you're going to draw in your mind and put a 3 dimensional representation of it on the paper. We taped her paper down, passed the tape over and I started to show her. While I was showing her we started to talk. It was natural. She was just like a person, only female.
That was it. Game over. Story of my love life. I made small talk for the few remaining minutes of class and then spent the rest of the day stewing in the ruins of my shattered dream. Documents (Jan.22.2003) I have kept a lot of records. That Mechanical Drawing class was nearly twenty years ago. My relationship with Dori a thing of the distant, distant past. Yet I still kept all the high school notes she passed to me in the halls. I never reread them I just keep them. I'm not exactly sure why I kept them, but I think somewhere in the back of my mind I always wanted to write an autobiography of some sort, I was just waiting for something interesting to happen to me. Recently I've been reading a book that's been showing me that what happened is important, sure, but not nearly as important as the way you tell what has happened. So I figured I might as well give it a go while I still remember this stuff called my life. I have a good memory. Still, even with a good memory I figured I'd go dig out Dori's letters and refresh my memory a little bit before I wrote about her. I am in the process of reading a lot of letters by her and other ex-girlfriends of mine. It has not refreshed my memory, it has completely and totally changed the past. Here, have a poem. Alex Mead (Jan.21.2003) I do not like this box of lies Rewriting my past It took time to move on It took time to forget It took time to put it back together in my mind the way I liked it It took no time at all to break everything To shatter my carefully reconstructed past where I was good and nice And replace it with what actually happened One should not keep records of the past It will make you hate having ever been young Now the problem in writing this will be to keep this whole Autobiography thing from being dominated by my relationships with women. There has been more to my life than that, but I don't have the records to remind me of it all. More than that though, a book full of my self-recriminations focusing on how I have been the bastard of all mankind to the women I've come into contact with would get very repetitive. I like to brag about how I learn from my mistakes and don't repeat them. I had no idea how long I have been trapped in a cycle of revolving mistakes and misdeeds until I started reading some of these letters from my past. I have always tried to be a good person. I had no recollection of how many times I'd failed and conveniently forgotten. You might have already guessed, but I'm not feeling so good about myself right this moment. But hey, I'm gonna try to remember and document the good times and the bad. I'm gonna try harder to remember some other stuff so that there'll be some semblance of an interesting mix of things. Okay? Okay. Muscles and Super Heroes (Jan.23.2003) Before we tell the story of Dori and get into all that heaviness, how about we back up a little? Get in a few more stories about grade school and my family that will help in understanding the Dori story. So I will tell you about the rest of the 7th and 8th grade crew. I already wrote about my buddy Dave, my Breakdance partner. But I haven't said anything about Ezra or Worthy, so we'll need to revisit 7th and 8th grade for sure. But first, let me tell you just a bit about my family. My mom's name is Sue. I grew up calling her Sue because that was what everyone else called her. People would ask me why I didn't call her mom. I would ask my mother if I was supposed to call her mom. She would tell me I could if I wanted to. So I kept calling her Sue. She was my mom and my friend. We would talk all the time. She knew a lot about a lot of stuff. If I had a question, she had the answer or at least knew where to find the answer. My mother used to tell me that when I got older we might not be so friendly toward one another anymore. All of my mother's friends that had older children, teenagers, would have explosive arguments them. So my mother used to tell me that when I got older I might start to resent everything she did and get into screaming matches with her. I used to tell her that was completely impossible. I was always going to love her and be nice to her. I had very stong ideas about how my adult life was going to go. I used to disagree with my mother about whether or not I was going to ever try drugs or drinking and stuff like that too. She used to insist that I was going to at least try it. So far, I've been right and she's been wrong. We remained the best of friends even through my teenage years and I never tried drugs or drank and that's been a pretty agreeable way to live for me. I have an uncle Walter who lives in Pittsburgh. I love him dearly. I've often described him as "my relative that's actually related to me". I'm not sure where I got that from but I think it means that he's my one living relative that I keep in contact with and feel the need to see once in a while. He's someone who's always been there for me if I needed him and there for me when I didn't know I needed him but did. My Uncle Walter taught me a lot. He's a teacher. My mother's father was an English teacher and my uncle Walter is a Math teacher. Whenever I went down to Pittsburgh I could be sure I was going to learn something about Math or English. I totally can't write a sentence like the one a few paragraphs above: "Get in a few more stories about grade school and my family that will help in understanding the Dori story." without thinking to myself "What is the subject of this sentence???" Then I feel the overwhelming need to rewrite the sentence. With this book I've managed to just leave the damned sentences alone because they say what I felt like having them say. But yeah, a lot of my knowledge in the fields of Grammar, Logic and Math come from my family more than they come from school. Now, if only someone in my family would have taught me to spell. But I digress. My uncle Walter was always much like my mom. He would listen to me. Be interested in me. He would find the things I needed to grow and see if he could get them for me. Sometimes he came up to Buffalo to visit us, but mostly we went down to Pittsburgh to visit him. One time when he was up in Buffalo, when we still lived on Dodge Street, he built "The Swing." The Swing was not so much a swing. It was closer to a trapeze. Literally it was a thick pipe with strings running through it fixed to the ceiling of our back porch on Dodge Street. I used to love Spider-Man and superheroes and things like that, so he built me the swing. I would jump up and grab it every day and pull myself up and wrap my knees through it and swing upside down. Eventually I learned to hang by my ankles and heels and toes and elbows. From pulling myself up so much every day my body changed. My chest got big and my shoulders got broader. I am proud to say I am in the second best shape of my life right now as I write this. But I don't think I can ever touch the shape I was in as a 7 and 8 year old. Unless I find about 5 hours a day to run around playing with my friends and having races in the street and build myself a new "The Swing" and do trapeze shows for all the neighbors several times a day. I totally believe that a lot of your attitudes toward health and fitness are developed when you're very young and so I'm grateful to my uncle for getting me off to a good start. BUT, after we moved from Dodge Street to St. James Place there was no place to put The Swing. It wasn't as important to have street races to see who was the fastest. There were other things to do. We watched a lot more tv on St. James Place. Or we played inside the house using more of our imaginations and less of our bodies. At least I did. From 4th to 5th to 6th grades I got fat. The 7th & 8th Grade Crew and more Muscles and Super Heroes (Jan.23.2003) Okay. Now I have a little time to tell you about Worthy and Ezra. Two very different kids with some significant impact on my life. I don't think they ever knew each other very well. But they were both very good friends of mine that I met around the time of 6th or 7th grade. Worthy was black. Matter of fact, I bet he still is. He was a weight lifter. He was a 6th grade freak of nature who looked like he had been chiseled out of rock. Kids in class would ask him to make a muscle and he would roll up his sleeve and flex his muscle and it looked like a tennis ball was inside of his arm. And he had the thick vein through his bicep and the whole deal. For whatever reason, Worthy really liked me. We became good friends. I don't think I ever went over to his house even once, but he used to love to come over to my house all the time to play Atari 2600 football. I lived only one block away from the school and I have no idea where he lived. I think that a lot of the fights that I didn't get into in the 6th, 7th and 8th grades were because people were scared Worthy would beat them up. Ezra was white. Still is, I'm sure. He was skinny, freckly, with bright red hair and he lived on my block. We weren't good friends or anything like that. We didn't hang out all the time. We'd see each other once in a while and decide to hang out if there was nothing better to do. Ezra had a LOT of comic books. He was a collector. He used to have all his comics in plastic bags and he made you be super careful when you read them, and then you had to put them back carefully and tape them up. I had a small collection of G.I.Joe comics but they ended up on the floor of the back seat of the car for people to step on or got mangled and ripped to shreds. I thought that I liked all the super heroes and knew about them from watching cartoons. It was Ezra that showed me you could NEVER really KNOW about the super heroes from just watching the cartoons. The REAL details about the super heroes lives happened in the comic books. He also showed me that Marvel Comics rules and DC comics sucks. So Superman and Batman were out, and now the X-Men were in along with Spider-Man and the Hulk. Not hard to guess what happened next. I decided to become a comic book collector. I begged and cried to my mom until I had a healthy comic book collection going. And around the time when I stopped all my crying and decided I was less interested in toys it was replaced by my interest in comic book collection which was funded more and more with my own money. I liked to draw all the time and it was not long before I realized that what I needed to do with my life was to draw comic books for Marvel Comics. I started drawing the X-Men all the time. When I became super interested in girls and didn't know how to get a girlfriend or what to do with that energy, I used to draw the marvel super hero women naked. I would dream, on pretty much a daily basis, that I was going to walk into Marvel's offices and get hired. I had my life all figured out already. So in addition to drawing people with muscles all day I was also growing some of my own. This was mostly due to Worthy. Somewhere along the line Worthy and I got tired of sitting around playing video games so we started hanging around in the basement and lifting weights. Worthy used to have body building competitions against me that he would automatically win. I got more and more built up but I was never going to catch up to Worthy ever. And at the same time I had started going over to Dave's house to breakdance a lot so I was getting a good workout with that. I was entering into puberty so I was growing a bit taller and that was helping. So by the time of my 8th grade dance I was in fairly good shape. By the time I got to High School I was still in decent shape and getting better. I think part of the reason I had any confidence to talk to Dori at all was because I felt like even if I was weird and ugly and liked comic books and nerdy things and had been a constant bed wetter for years at least I had some muscles. Yeah. At least there was that. Okay. So now the Dori story. [next: BreastQuest] |
