On the Verge of Leaving, Spring 2005

One.

I'm going to miss walking these streets and alleys, 4 am, half-drunk, staring at the stars, the night as still as a sleeping child. And I know I like to talk about how much I hate this town, but the truth is, it isn't all bad and if I'd never moved here, I wouldn't be who I am today. I would have never discovered punk rock or met any of the people I've become so close to. I can't really speculate about what things would be like had I stayed in Ellsworth with my dad instead of moving up north with my mom and brother, but I'm positive that I'd be a totally different person. And I would probably be in prison.

Ellsworth was a quaint little farming town of around three thousand people, about a half an hour or so from the Minnesota border. Throughout most of my childhood I was an outcast, with one or two friends and a very over-active imagination. My family lived a mile out of town in between two farms and there were a zillion cats living in the garage. I'm hard pressed to remember any specifics from my childhood, but I tend to remember it as a pretty happy time, even if that's only because I've suppressed all the memories of my parents fighting and all of the other drama that was going on at the time.

In Junior High, I started getting stomach aches. Just about every day. I was depressed and hardly had any friends and hated school, especially Phy Ed. I was missing a lot of school and going to all sorts of doctors all the time, and they told me that the stomach aches were psychosomatic, which I thought meant, simply enough, that I was faking it. I wasn't very happy with that diagnosis. The pain that I was feeling was very real and very hard to deal with.

Towards the end of eighth grade I started hanging out with the wanna-be gangsters and the metal heads who would often cheat off my assignments. That summer I started smoking cigarettes and drinking liquor. I remember the first time I got drunk--I ended up puking up what looked like a whole pizza. We would drink peppermint schnapps because we thought our parents wouldn't be able to smell it on our breath. When my parents would question me about why I always reeked of cigarette smoke, I said it was because all of my friends smoked and there was nothing I could do about it. I'm sure they saw right through that and weren't particularily happy with the crowd I was hanging out with, but what could they do?

My first drug bust wasn't long after that. I was around a lot of drugs (mostly a lot of grass and, later, crystal meth), but for a long time I never bothered with any of it. I was as sober as a stone when some friends and I were hanging out at our friend Kenny's house and three officers from the Ellsworth P.D., along with two county deputies and a drug-sniffing dog, busted through the door.

Kenny was a greasy little white kid, flesh decorated with shitty home-made tattoos, about a year younger than me. He said he hung out with G's from Minneapolis but I never got to meet them. In fact, Kenny said a lot of things that were impossible to validate. Nevertheless, he was my friend. He was living in a dumpy little duplex right next to the laundromat with his older brother Eric, who was five or six years older than all of us. Their mother, who my friends and I had all refered to as "Ma," had just died of cancer about a week previous and there were still bouquets of flowers from the funeral sitting around the house when it was raided. I was scared out of my mind. The cops were all yelling, tearing the place apart, pushing us down on the floor. We were searched one by one, photographed, and then told to wait outside while they finished searching the house. After more than an hour of waiting out in the cold, Eric came out, sobbing, and told us that they'd even poured out his mother's ashes, looking for drugs in the urn. He told us that we should probably get out of there and that either he or Kenny would get ahold of us and let us know what was going on.

We walked around town, angry but too tired to really show it, mostly quiet but every once in a while mumbling something about "fucking pigs." They hadn't found anything on any of us, other than cigarettes, and we later found out that all they'd found in the house was one roach. The cops, embarassed that they had not found the mountains of drugs they'd hoped for, told Eric and Kenny that they had twenty-four hours to leave town.

My friends were not well-liked by the authority figures in Ellsworth, be they cops, teachers, or parents. I was a good kid teetering on the edge, about to go bad, and on the night of the raid, the chief of police had taken me to the side and told me that I was better off without "these punks." Maybe he was right, but fuck him, really, and these were the first good friends I ever really had. They were accepting, unlike the preps and jocks we were constantly fueding with. They were understanding--understanding that I was poor, that my family couldn't afford to buy me the cool clothes, that my parents weren't getting along and were on the brink of divorce. We shared backgrounds. We were of the same class. And, most importantly, we had a common enemy: those preppy jocko fucks that were always trying to start shit with us.

There were lots of parties. Lots of drinking and lots of my friends trying to get me to smoke pot. Sometimes I'd help them steal cigarettes from the Super America downtown, whole cartons at a time, which we'd then sell to all the Junior High kids for five bucks a pack. I was enamored with the lives my friends were leading, but I was always careful not to get caught up in it. Not because I knew better, mind you--mostly because I was scared of getting caught. I felt like Jack Kerouac, always chasing after the mad characters around him, ready to "explode like spiders across the stars." That is, I would have felt like that, had I read On the Road at the time, but it wasn't until well after I moved to Park Falls that I got around to reading authors other than Michael Crichton, Tom Clancy, and Dean Koontz.

The summer before I moved I caved in and started smoking pot, and my friends and I would sit around Tiff's house listening to bad rap and drinking forties we'd just stolen from the supermarket. It was a sad summer, but still a lot of fun times were had, and I made all sorts of promises to write and visit and all that jazz. The next summer when I came back, Chris had gotten really bad into meth and was impossible to be around when he wasn't high. Justin had gotten busted for selling pot to an undercover cop. Travis had given up drugs but was drinking constantly. It seemed like everyone was in a bad way, and the next summer it was even worse. Perry and Chris were driving around drunk, blew through a stop sign and plowed into another car. Perry and Chris came out mostly unscathed, but the driver and passenger of the other car--a man and his four-year-old son--were in really rough shape. Chris was charged with attempted vehicular manslaughter and was facing prison time.

It seemed like everything was unravelling, and I couldn't take seeing any of those people any more. It's been more than five years since I've seen any of them, and there are a couple in particular that I really miss sometimes. I wish I knew whatever happened to Chris or Justin or Travis or any of them, really, but if the paths they were on are any indication--well, I don't really want to think about it. And I don't want to think about where I might be right now, had I never left them behind.

Two.

I’ve been trying to map out in my head my Park Falls history--the order I met people, how my feelings about certain people and things have changed, events that set in motion other events. You know, the people, places, and things that have really shaped who I am.

But this is no easy task, and it’s easier instead to just make up lists and re-write old stories. A time-line isn’t really necessary, and, more importantly, it’s not interesting to anyone other than me, so I’m not going to take the time to write a linear history of my time spent here. Instead I’ll sit and smile while I remember sitting in running cars smoking cigarettes and talking about music. Forming and re-forming band after band after band. Drinking forties in my living room and watching Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. Trips across the country. Loves and heartbreaks. Aimless midnight walks. Sitting on rooftops. Learning the guitar. Camping out in the middle of the national forest.

You know. Happy memories.

I have my fair share, and, truth be told, I don’t give them the time they really deserve. Instead of cataloging in my head all my fond memories, I tend to brood and stay focused on the bad stuff, and I’m finding out the hard way that that’s no way to live life. Sure this town may oftentimes be a pillow held tight over your face, but just as often it’s been an impetus for creativity and fun times and a haven for angelic faces and good friends. I’m not going to try to pretend that the good outweighs the bad or vice versa, because that doesn’t matter. That’s not the important part. We can’t change that stuff, our histories, so there’s really no use in dwelling on it. It’s important to remember the past but not to live in it. So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to remember.

Three.

One of the best times I ever had with you was when we were sitting in your Thunderbird, when you still had your Thunderbird, sitting with the car idling in front of my house listening to Green Day. By this time we were both older and wiser and knew better than to admit to anyone else that we still liked a band like that--our tastes were more refined now, and that pop-punk stuff was for kids-but for forty glorious minutes we sat without speaking, nodding our heads to the beat, in love with the world. It was the first record that either of us had ever bought--me, a dorky kid with no friends wanting desperately to fit in, you a home-schooled angel with stars in your eyes--well before we’d ever met or even knew that the other existed--and that day, in that car, we weren’t afraid to admit our love for Green Day or to sing along, loudly and out of key. I remember wanting to kiss you but I didn’t feel like I had permission, so I just stared out the window, every once in a while sneaking glances in your direction. This was after we’d broken up and we were trying to be “just friends.” It seemed to be working better for you than for me, but I restrained myself, despite how beautiful you looked in the afternoon sunlight.

I’ve been trying to come to grips with the fact that I’ll probably never get over you, that you are the proverbial one that got away. I learned from you, though. I learned to never second-guess a feeling, to never hold back just because you weren’t sure how the other would react. I never told you that I loved you back then, but I can still remember the moment that I knew for sure. I never told you because I was scared that you’d say you didn’t love me back, or that we were moving too fast. And besides, we were both really bad at being open about our feelings. We wrote letters to each other in chicken scratch, passed back and forth with averted eyes. To this day I’m not entirely sure why things happened the way they did, but I think maybe it was because I never made a point of showing you how I felt. Because I loved you in theory but never in practice.

Four.

One summer a bunch of friends came up from Menomonie to hang out for a day in Park Falls, go hiking at beautiful Morgan Falls, and then camp out by Lake Superior. We spent the day walking around town, marvelling at the old decaying houses painted the most awful colours. We went to Satellite Park, which, for a long time, was kind of a secret place for me and my brother and our friends, where we could sit and stare at the stars and smoke sloppily-rolled joints--until the city decided to actually put a park there, complete with baseball diamond and everything. Anyway, the park was still under construction when we went there that day towards the end of summer, and the four of us stood around the base of the water tower, looking up towards the top, filled with awe, amazed and inspired by the accomplishments of man. I told stories about Park Falls and its history, about how Fifield was once a bustling logging town bigger than Park Falls and Phillips combined, until it was all destroyed by a fire, the “Chicago fire of the Northwoods.” I told them about the paper mill, and how if the mill ever went under, just about everyone and their brother would be out of work and our grey and dismal little town would be even more of a ghost town. The shops and stores downtown were already all going out of business, and there were threats of a Wal-Mart coming in to further destroy the local economy. We climbed the big piles of dirt where they were going to start building something or other, and then we walked back to my house through the woods that encircled town.

We spent the night drinking Keystone Light and listening to crust punk, my records hauled out from my room and scattered about the living room. My housemates were in especially good moods, and we all smoked these nasty cigarettes that Holt had purchased at some gas station between Menomonie and here. The beer was disgusting but it was cheap. I don’t remember if I actually got drunk that night or not, but I remember having a lot of really good conversations about just about everything. The next morning we got up around ten and set out for Morgan Falls, spent the day hiking to the top of St. Peter’s Dome, where we could see literally for miles in every direction, and for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel so bad about living in Northern Wisconsin.

Five.

Nonetheless, Chris, who was the driver on the trip, remarked that Park Falls was the single most depressing place he’d ever been to. I couldn’t disagree that the whole town had this atmosphere of decay and atrophy, like there was this chemical fog hanging over affecting everyone’s brains. Every day you couldn’t help but feel that you were on the brink of collapse, and every day survived felt like an honest-to-god miracle. That’s not to say that people didn’t have fun, but all of the fun seemed to carry with it this heavy feeling that the only reason we were enjoying ourselves was to spite our environment, to prove that it wasn’t impossible. Good times were only a momentarily escape from the dreary reality of small town life, and that idea was always hiding in the back of our heads, trying to keep us from actually being able to have any fun in the first place.

Everyone in Park Falls was going nowhere. Some of us fast, some of us slow, some of us in shiny new cars, a lot of us on skateboards or on foot. We all pretended we were on our way to someplace better, but it was bullshit, because none of us had the ambition to go anywhere worthwhile. We were all trying to escape by staying in place. We smoked pot, we dropped acid, we got drunk, we listened to punk rock, we bought useless junk to litter our houses with. We made spontaneous trips across the country but we always came back to our dismal little nowhere land because we knew it would always be here waiting for us.

Even the kids that got out, that moved away to cities like Minneapolis or Milwaukee--they still came back every weekend, or at least most of them did. Why? Why would anyone come back here? It’s like you have an opportunity to get the fuck off a boat that you know is sinking, but still, even as the panels burst and it begins to fill with water, you stay planted firmly in place. We all do. We sit there with fear in our eyes and a longing in our hearts as our lungs begin to fill. We take our last breaths.

At least we aren’t going down alone.