I remember years later working the day bar getting a call from a Florida police detective and how the line was disconnected.
I remember how the call came through again and the detective said I am putting Vera on the line.
I remember that Vera was my step-mother’s sister and she was around 90 and probably never used a cell phone before in her life.
I remember how the line got disconnected again as soon as she came on.
I remember knowing the phone would ring again and I figured she was calling to tell me Dorrie had died in the nursing home where she was currently residing.
I remember finally keeping the connection and Vera telling me, “Bill is dead and you need to come down here right away.”
I remember Bill was my father.
I remember thinking, despite heart issues my father wouldn’t be the first to go.
I remember thinking Vera was going to tell me that Dorrie had died from her cancer.
I remember thinking, not for the first time, show’s what I know.
I remember that was the Spring and Summer of spending six weeks in Florida and not getting any closer to a beach that a crematorium in Daytona.
I remember the first time I saw a blue tattoo in the city at a market with my mother.
I remember my mother telling me that was a phony mark.
I remember I was just a kid but I knew, instinctively, that couldn’t be right.
I remember, many years later, all the things she told me that were the opposite of what they really were.
I remember thinking her delusion was a defense mechanism to conceal information she couldn’t process.
I remember wondering if there was a correlation in her well-diagnosed mental illnesses with Trump’s undiagnosed ones.
I remember how young I looked when I was eighteen.
I remember how young I looked when I was thirty.
I remember the last time I had my proof checked I was forty-four years old.
I remember the summer of my junior year getting my proof checked to see ”My Sister, My Love.”
I remember it sucked.
I remember seeing “Belle de Jour” at the Stanley in Utica and taking turns making up sex scenes to describe to the legally blind guy we had taken with us.
I remember being squeezed in the back of a Triumph driving from Utica to Syracuse in the middle of Winter to see “Carmen Baby.”
I remember, except for one scene, it sucked too, but not as bad as “My Sister, My Love.”
I remember “I Am Curious Yellow.”
I remember being curious what all the fuss was about.
I remember thinking I’d almost like to see it again and find out what the hell they were talking about.
I remember seeing “Last Tango in Paris” and except for the bloody suicide what an absolutely great movie that really didn’t need that graphic sex scene which was only a distraction in a otherwise masterful acting performance.
I remember thinking, I know why they included it and that people were bent out of shape for all the wrong reasons.
7-
I remember Sounds of Silence
I remember Mellow Yellow.
I remember the first time I saw Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony Live.
I remember how my heart almost stopped when the chorus stood up in their white robes and began the Ode to Joy.
I remember my youngest son’s third grade teacher being in the chorus and how he died such an unnecessary self-immolation death and the poem I wrote “The Burning Song Book.”
I remember it was in my long out of print book Stop Making Sense.
I remember drinking unpasteurized milk on St Croix.
I remember toxoplasmosis.
I remember Johnny Jelly Beaner
I remember “Pluck Your Magic Twanger, Froggie.”
I remember the singing nun and wished I didn’t.
I remember “Deck the halls with Boston Charlie.”
I remember Jean Shepard reading Byron with a Spanish guitar accompaniment on his nightly WOR radio show.
I remember his inspirational readings from the Manhattan phone book.
I remember phone books.
I remember In God We Trust All Others Pay Cash.
I remember seeing Curtis LeMay at a political rally in Utica.
I remember seeing Hubert Humphrey and the demonstrators chanting, “Dump the Hump, Dump the Hump.”
I remember that Tommy James and the Shondells were the “musical act” meant to attract and appeal to younger voters
I remember it was the first time we seen Tommy and his friends live.
I remember the dance my friends and I went stag to, stoned out our minds, and hung out with boys.
I remember they got a kick out of us.
I remember wondering why no one stopped us from having complete access to the band.
8-
I remember peace marches through the city.
I remember America Love it or Leave it.
I remember all the Utica cops had that phrase on bumper stickers on their patrol cars.
I remember when President Nixon called for the Silent Minority to be heard, Uticans turned out in force.
I remember when we had a peace fair on campus for the locals no one showed up.
I remember “This Little Bird.”
I remember “Girl on a Motorcycle.”
I remember Marianne Faithfull’s soulful Ophelia.
I remember Billy Pilgrim
I remember Kilgore Trout and Venus on a Half Shell.
I remember Ace Science Fiction Doubles
I remember Mother Night.
I remember The Penultimate Truth.
I remember The Man in the High Castle.
I remember the first time I heard Dylan Thomas read his poetry.
I remember, ”rage, rage against the dying on the light.”
I remember losing almost thirty pounds when I had double viral pneumonia mid-way through my first semester freshman year.
I remember taking up smoking beginning with Luckies when I got over it.
I remember how stupid I was when I was 19 and immortal.
I remember writing “Visions Fill the Eyes of a Defeated basketball Team in a Showroom: a symphonic poem in three movements.”
I remember think no one would guess where I got that tile from.
I remember seeing Jumping Johnny Green live at the old Garden, at six foot six, out center jump Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlin 7’1’ and it wasn’t even close.
I remember writing “An Explanation Offered to an Extraterrestrial of Bernstein Conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on Television with the Sound Turned Off.”
I remember the first time I saw The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.
I remember the second time I saw Marat/Sade and thinking it was a little too close to home.
I remember the first time I visited my mother at Pilgrim State when I was seven.
Remember the years prior to that on St Croix.
I remember being told we were going there for “a rest cure,” though no one told me why my father wasn’t going to be there.
I remember understanding that my father was never going to be there or anywhere else in my mother’s life ever again.
I remember that I was eventually told I would see him again.
I remember it was close to two years after we went to St Croix, came back and she had the “nervous breakdown.”
I remember how I felt being alone twelve hundred miles or so from home with an out of control, hysterical woman.
I remember during the visits on weekends to Pilgrim State how mellow and laid back she was and I thought this is not my mother, this is someone impersonating her.
I remember on one of those visits watching a movie in a day room with in-patients where I saw Frances the Talking Mule.
I remember how one patient in particular looked at me, as an outsider, as if I was somehow in league with Wilbur and that we were interfering with the messages Frances was trying to convey.
I remember how it wasn’t until many years later when I was writing my chapbook Visiting Day on the Psychiatric Ward that the patient actually believed Frances was a talking mule and had special messages that needed to be understood.
I remembering wondering if the people who ran Pilgrim State and by extension, were responsible for treating her severe mental illnesses, did not have Clue 1.
I remember the second time she was at Pilgrim State, Involuntarily Confined, on a conference call with family and the doctors in charge of treatment and getting no real answers as to what her condition actually was and understanding that my first impressions was correct; these people had no fucking clue much less an understanding of how she thoguht and why she did the things she had done.
I remember, after my father died, finding the divorce decree and learning that in 1953, if you established residency in St Croix for one year you could get a No Contest divorce in the States.
