What I want to do I can't. What I want to do is draw a very precise and exquisite pen and ink. I want to freehand lines with a Micron 005...black...1/32" apart. Can't. The most I can do is watercolors on tissue
I can't because it was long ago and because I wasn't there for a lot it. I was there for some of it though. Very there. And when you're very there for some of it, you can throw color around with feckless abandon.
My male coming of age story can be told with the above photo. Five people facing the camera. Met in Missoula, Montana 1970 and me and those four others facing the camera could not have been a tighter group. i'll go with the small i here and while i say we could not have been a closer group, i understand this story has been told a million times. mine is not any different than all the others.
Could not have been tighter. Chris and I, Chris is that one brushing his hair back in the back of the picture, started an odd job service with the State of Montana. Bought a 57 Chrysler so we could transport a lawn mower around. It had a push button transmission. We paid $57 for it and a bag of weed. Almost used more oil than gas. Chris and I were hired by a contractor to move a dump truck of sand from a pile, down a basement and spread it out evenly. He liked how we worked and hired us full time. And that led to Chris working for a long time in Alaska as a carpenter. I built houses along the west coast of the US and Canada for twelve years after that.
Ben, the guy tossing the glove. This one question changed my life. I remember it as a very cold fall day, Ben and I were driving in Chris' van from EJ's trailer park where everybody lived. Ben was telling some real deep something he was going through in his life. He got done and I sat there.
Ben said, What? You have nothing to say?" I didn't. I had no emotional language at that point. It took me so many years to be able to wet myself in the aquifer that runs under all humans. "What, you have nothing to say?" The best gift I've given myself is crying about something every day. Those things that define us are universal and that's the aquifer, the one river we cleanse our self in. That started from that morning with Ben.
Bryant, he has his head down. Maybe thinking about what his father had said. Bryant, Ben and Dennis, I'll get to Dennis in a bit, were on football scholarships at the University of Montana.
I remember Bryant sitting on the floor talking with his father on the phone with tears streaming down. His father was ordering him home to Edina, Minnesota if Bryant was choosing not to stay on the football team and lose his scholarship.
We partially named our son after Bryant.
Ben and Dennis as well were choosing not to play football. They gave up the free ride. It was LSD and pot that made them see the light on that. I was a lightweight. They were not. Hundreds of acid trips. Dennis famously played a collegiate football game on acid. Ben told me once tabs of acid no longer had any effect on him.
Anyway, Bryant made that choice too. Silly to play such a silly game and hit people hard and have others hit you hard. He had to leave the group and move back to Minnesota.
I'm the headband-er on the left. Ben and I went to party where I met a woman, I later married her. I met her and at some point moved in with her. The four, Chris, Ben, Bryant, Dennis, blamed her on being the Yoko and breaking up the Beatles. Truth be told, that wasn't the case. But it was at that point that I peeled away from the group and that's when the pen and ink became swishy water color on tissue.
Dennis, the headband-er on right just died a few days ago. Bryant said "mercifully." Dennis' god thought it would be a good thing to put him into the suffering thing for many years. Or maybe Dennis' god thought it would be funny. Or mean. Or just because Dennis' god is an Asshole. And for many years he suffered.
I don't know if drugs lead people to religion or the other way round.
Since I had moved away from day to day with the group, everything afterwards became watercolors on tissue. I heard something from somebody or what was told to me is was a memory of someone else. There wasn't email yet and so no instant back and forth to catch up. Maybe a phone call once in a blue moon.
Dennis, and probably to a lesser extent, Ben started to follow the 14 year old Perfect Master, Prem Rawat of the Divine Light Mission, North American headquarters in Denver, Colorado.
They cut loose this life in Montana, bought that truck below, put a house on the back and went to Denver to become one with the One. That's Dennis on the left. They were going to devote their life to Divine Light Mission.
Dennis sold his car so they could buy enough psychedelics for the duration and built a false floor and put them in there. Through some shenanigans at the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake, an entire police escort of flashing lights and sirens led them forever out of the town. So I heard. Many times.
Ben recently saying he could not understand why they weren't arrested.
Much of who I am today I can tie back to those four.
Back in the year Taylor graduated from High School (this is important), I pushed and cajoled the five us to get together again in Missoula. Because you know, we don't know when one of us won't be here anymore and because we were such a force together.
It so happened that I arranged this re-union at the same time Taylor was graduating. Yes, I screwed that up pretty good. I did both. Flying up to Missoula for a day and night, then back to Berkeley for Taylor then back to Missoula for another day, then back.
By this time in history, Chris has a recycling company with 900 employees, given up all types of stimulants, Dennis and Bryant have become PrimeTime Christians. Dennis has a venture capital firm and real estate firm, Bryant works for him. Ben has an insurance business in Billings, Montana.
Dennis would not come to the reunion. Embarrassed for his past life or some shit like that. If you read his obit, he's left behind in death a philanthropy for those less fortunate. Cool. But like he couldn't come to Missoula to sit and talk with the people that had become a tattoo on his arm of his early life. That tattoo is indelible.
Bryant decided to leave his wife. Dennis said he could not work for him any longer since he violated God's rules around marriage.
I have a belief. Religion is the pox of humanity. Like Lenard Cohen says.
"I stuck a needle in my arm,
Did some good
Did some harm."
It may sound like I'm down on Dennis for his ultra christian crap deciding his past life wasn't worth revisiting but my religion won't allow that. Dennis was just being human.
My religion is that aquifer that we all baptize in.
Dennis, my friend, Thank you for what you've given me.
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