BETTE DAVIS EYES

 

          There was a time when the girls were five or six years old and we lived in the house on Lamar Street.  They did a little chorus line song and dance shtick, something copied from TV.  It was the cutest thing I had ever seen, then or since.  I quickly projected that they were beautiful and talented.  That they would go on to become big name entertainers, play to huge throngs of people and have their name in lights.  They would grow to adulthood together and be close like that all their lives.  They would support each other into old age long after their parents were gone.

It didn’t work that way at all.  They are both gone from me now.  I have, in essence, lost both of them.  One is living out of state and estranged from me.  The other took her own life twenty eight years ago today, April 22, 1985.  I would never be able to give her away as a bride should she choose to marry.  Never knowing the man she married and maybe even liking him.  Never holding her children---my grandchildren.

I remember long ago making funeral arrangements for a woman of great age.  Her children asked that I list by name among the survivors, a child who had died forty years before.  The newspaper didn’t want to print it until I insisted.  They took the attitude that the family should “Get over it”.  I understand much more now than when I was a younger man.

For years I lived with a constant, burning, all consuming rage.  Gone now except for searing nanoseconds of vignettes.  Images that come suddenly in the day or in the nights.  I don’t talk about it except in therapy but it never goes away.  Children should bury their parents.  Parents should not have to bury their children.

THIRTY YEARS OF SANITY

As a lad, coming up on an Indiana farm, WLS out of Chicago would beam out 50,000 watts of country music.  One of my favorites was the mellow voice of Eddie Arnold singing “Make The World Go Away”

A couple of years later, in a different setting, I found something that would really make the world go away.  Alcohol.  And the more I drank of it and the more often I drank it  the more of my world went away.  But it always came back and worse than it was before.

On this date in 1865, Lincoln was shot, and on this date in 1912, the Titanic went to the bottom.  And it has been thirty years ago today, April 14^th, 2013, since I took my last drink of alcohol.

I lost many things during the twenty six years I drank and I continued to lose things after I stopped.  A house, my car, my dog and my family.

I have gained back many things throughAlcoholics Anonymous.  My dignity, for one.  I have learned a new way of living by following the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.  I have learned to be honest---- with myself.  I have made amends, where possible, to those I have harmed.  Not all of them were accepted, but the important thing is that they were made.  The program does not say that I should make amends to those I have pissed off.

I am as close as I can be to knowing peace.

DENIAL IS NOT JUST A RIVER IN EGYPT.

AMOIRE

When He was a beardless youth

He had an imaginary playmate

Who refused to play with him

But now he has a girlfriend

She is his salvation

And the mother of his bastard child at seventeen

He drinks too much because he is depressed

And he is depressed because he drinks too much

But he has played the game

And lived the lie

For so long it has become reality.

As long as he can consume

A six-pac of Bud

With his bud

And as long as he can lay on his back

With his hands folded behind his head

As long as he is done, but does not do

------Then he ain’t

                                                                        Drum roll

                                                                        Daniel Wenger

                                                                        February, 2013

© Daniel Wenger 2013

IF BLUEBIRDS FLY, THEN WHY, OH WHY CAN'T I? I

FOR ALL THE YOUNG MEN

Here’s to all the young men –

Who have thrown a noose over a beam in the haymow.

Those who have sat by the water with the shotgun, contemplating who to shoot first.

Those who would put the muzzle in their own mouth.

Those who have driven unfamiliar Nebraska country roads too fast at night.

Who drown their talents in bad whiskey to seek oblivion.

Who marry for validation.

Those who sob into their pillow at night because it is not getting better.

And they can’t express their angst to anyone.  No one.  Because no one can handle 

such unspeakable things.

For the sensitive ones without the hardcock assurance that the jocks take as their birthright.

For those in the hinterlands who would run but have no idea of where to find asylum.

For those who already know the policeman is not their friend.

Those who have endured the flaming words of flaming hate.

Support the ones who would spring the trap and drop into a permanent oblivion.

Persevere.  Endure.  You are my friend.  Your day will come.  Don’t give up.  Keep 

the faith.  You are the strong ones tempered in the flaming words of hate.

                                                                             Daniel Wenger     

                                                                             For me.

                                                                             January 20, 2013
(C) copyright
Daniel Wenger 2013

DANA AND PAULIE WERE LOVERS

I find very little on the web.  There are some yellowed newspaper clippings in the bottom drawer of my file cabinet and that is about all to mark a tragedy that took two lives and never needed to happen.

In the mid ‘80’s I was living on Capitol Hill in Denver, engaged in the long process of trying to repair my life after a hard and bitter fall from grace.  I was attending AA meetings and tenaciously supporting myself by driving a hack.  I knew Dana Sue.  Not well.  I had sat in the rooms with her and her lover, Paulie.   I saw her on the street one day and gave her a ride to a meeting in my cab.  I found her to be a pretty, affable girl, big boned and muscular.  Hardly the brooding hulk described in the newspaper.  She was a bewildered little girl in a woman’s body.  That she had problems was evident but who in AA didn’t?  Or on East Colfax or on Denver’s Capitol Hill or in America?  She appeared to be heavily medicated.

I hadn’t seen her for a while.  I had moved to the Barrio and was attending a different meeting.  As I have the story, second hand, (it’s in the newspapers of he time but I am unable to provide a link) someone talked Dana Sue out of taking her psychotropics. She was desperately trying to control her illness that was caveing in on her.  Ultimately it didn’t work.

Paulie came home one evening to find Dana Sue, naked, covered with blood and holding a bloody knife.  She had picked up a man.  A one legged man at that and she had taken him home with her.  His body was tied to her bed.  He had been stabbed 117 times and her initials were carved into his chest.  Dana’s absolute rage had taken over.  I do not know what went into the inception of that fury but I think I have a better idea than most.

It could have been prevented.  The woman was obviously insane.  Anyone would know that.  Except the people who might have done something.  The mental health system and the Denver police dropped the ball.  Mental health lawyered up and the police actually admitted it, after throwing the lowest man on the totem pole under the bus.

Except for a sensible judge who ruled that Dana Sue was legally insane and committed her to the Colorado State Hospital in Pueblo.

The last time I saw Paulie she was walking alone toward the rougher edge of Larimer Street in Denver.

End of story.  Not by a long shot.  Dana Sue got off the leash.  After a couple of years in Pueblo she got out with the help of a female employee of the hospital either willingly or under duress.  After a couple of weeks and a drama filled Thelma and Louise chase throughout the Southwestern United States, Dana Sue was found in a motel room in Albuquerque with a bullet through the roof of her mouth. 

That kid got a raw deal her entire life.

The people we send to Washington to represent us are not doing their job.  They succumb to greed and worse they sell us out to special interests.  Our government is not proactive, they are reactive.  Dear God, the answer is right there, so plain, and yet our president and our congress refuse to act.  They play partisan politics instead.  Tell me why I should have any respect at all for those we send to govern us.  What is happening today is only an escalation of what happenened to Dana Sue Jones.  Dana Sue Jones went down only a few years after the mental health budget was drastically cut under Ronald Reagan, who is not my favorite president for reasons already stated.  See my post:  The Lifeblood of a generation.  Dec. 8^th.

WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEARTS OF MEN?

THE SHADOW KNOWS

MUSICA

When I came up on the farm I can remember milking cows by hand with the light of a kerosene lantern.  In 1948 my father broke down and ran electricity to the farm.  Bindweed County had run the wires out to Sowthistle Township in 1935.  Apparently my father, a true Nineteenth Century man, wanted to wait and see if it worked and was not a passing fad before undergoing the investment. 

Ironically the house caught fire the following February.  The fire was caused by a faulty brick chimney, the bane of very old rural homes.  The house was saved, one of few which took fire at that time.  Soythistle Township did not have their own fire department and they had to contract to Jimson City for fire protection.  By the time it took to get a pumper out into the rural areas it was usually a lost cause.  The common humor ran that they had never lost a cellar.

What did this have to do with music, you ask?  Some time after installing electric lights, we came up with a small table radio with a brown bakelite case.  It didn’t have much power nor did it have an antenna.  The case had acquired a crack and it had a loose wire.  Every so often the signal would wander off into the ozone and one had to bitch-slap it back into consciousness.

We could only pull in two stations.  A 600 watt Polish station out of South Bend which played a constant stream of Polka music and WLS out of Chicago.  WLS beamed out 50,000 watts of country music.  Country music at that time, around 1950, was just pulling away from the hillbilly music image and morphing into classic country.  So I came up exposed only to Eddie Arnold, Hank Snow, Ernest Tubbs, Kitty Wells and, of course, the tortured genius of Hank Williams.

I still listen to Hank on nights that are so godawful lonely that I want to ratchet right into self pity.  This is as close as I come to drinking.  And I submit to you that nothing of any worth has taken place in country music since Patsy Cline flew into the side of a mountain in 1963.         

                                      THE SHADOW

THE LIFEBLOOD OF A GENERATION

20 The  harvest  is  past,  the

summer is ended, and we are

not saved.

 21 For the hurt of the daughter

of my people am I hurt; I am

black; astonishment hath taken

hold on me.

 22 Is there no balm in Gilead;

Is there no physician there? Why

then is not the health of the

daughter of my people recov-

ered?

<< Jeremiah 8:20, 21, 22 >>

These are the names of men I have known.  They were my friends.  They lived and worked and laughed and loved.  They are dead now, the victims of a strange new plague and an unresponsive government.  Some of them were gone before I knew their last names and some of their names, time and memory have erased or distorted.  But I will never forget them.  I have done the best I could.

George Banchero   Charles Ned Holland   Jim

Larry Glass   David Dobrovolny   Scott Kaiser

Jack   Eddie Nunez   Rex Sumner   Cordell Nelson 

Kenneth Waters  Joseph Bankston

I had planned to post this on December 1, World Aids Day.  

That didn't happen.  I'm sorry.