Back in college, I often hung out with a group of guys, one of whom I was in love with. My need to be near this person meant I sometimes wound up, with or without him, in strange places; I recall once sleeping thirty feet up in a tree, no treehouse, just two other guys and me balanced in the branches until sunrise. We wound up together at lacrosse games in Maryland and Ukrainian bars in the East Village and, after I graduated, one time had them sleep on the floor of my railroad apartment in Carroll Gardens, or sleep on the floor but for the guy in bed with me, though I don’t recall relations that night, I recall us all talking room-to-room in the dark, the conversation going very late and growing rambling and arcane until one guy asked, “So what are the rules to hockey, anyway?” a line I found so hilarious and sometimes still use, if never to the effect it had that night, which was to make us helpless with laughter.
The guy’s name was Pete McLaughlin, and of all the guys, I knew him least. He was a lanky boy from San Francisco, with the kind of glint-eyed smarts I found intimidating. The last time I saw him was in that apartment, and though I stayed in touch with a few of the guys, I did not know anything about what happened to Pete, until 2017, when I received a text that he had killed himself and a link to what he had been doing for the last 30 years. You can read about that here.
Why I am writing about Pete today is because yesterday my daughter asked that I send her a poem of Pete’s I’d shown her back in 2017. I can finger the thread that led from the tall glint-eyed boy I knew to the poet and horn player living in Santa Cruz but it would be conjecture to follow it. I also do not need to, not when Pete left us this.
OLD SCHOOL TIMMY
Hi my name’s Timmy Archibald and I’m seven
going on eight and you’re invited to my
birthday party at Magic Lane Fun Center
this Saturday but leave your sissy parents
at home ’cause we’re bowling without those wimpy
little fences that block off the gutters so your
sensitive feelings won’t get hurt because
you’re too uncoordinated to roll a sparkly
eight-pound ball straight down the alley.
I’d rather bowl an honest seven than some pretend
sixty-three and if you cry for any
reason I’ll sock your shoulder so hard
you’ll really have something to cry about
we’re eating corn dogs and drinking Mountain Dew
and we’re putting seventy-five cents in
the condom machine in the men’s room even
if we have to stand on the garbage can
to do it let me tell you, show and
tell is gonna really be something on Monday.
If you’re a spazz I’m not picking you for my team at recess
go play four square with the girls
or tetherball by yourself, creep.
I don’t want fairy tales without kids
getting eaten I don’t want a trophy
for picking my nose in right field
I’m sure as hell not hitting a baseball
off a tee and if you crowd the plate
I’ll drill you just like my dad told me.
I can’t stand grownups who wear costumes
on Halloween and take pictures of every dumb thing
their rotten kids do. I can cross the street
by myself so don’t hold my hand I’m
almost eight for God’s sake.
My uncle told me back in the day
playgrounds had metal slides ten feet high
you could jump off and kids threw
dirt clods at each other real hard and
dogs would have fights like savage wild
animals and you could watch them have sex
and sometimes they’d end up stuck together
and you could ride in the open bed of a truck
or at least pack nine or ten kids in
a car all crazy like clowns at the circus.
Johnny’s mom is a piece of ass, that’s what
my dad says, I’m not sure what he means
but the other moms don’t like her at all she
bartends at TGIFriday’s where the
dads go to watch sports my mom works
at the daycare she hates my dad she
says he’s emotionally bankrupt he works
at the lumber yard but his back hurts a lot.
He can’t really play too much any more.
He mostly just watches TV.
He was a great bowler before I was born,
he has trophies and a smashed-up old pin
with 300 written on it and pictures of him
smiling with other guys all wearing shiny shirts
that say Al’s Refrigeration on them
they look really happy.
He’s pretty fat now
and has to take pills for his heart
he has a girlfriend she’s a hairdresser but
she usually comes over after I’m in bed
I hear them laughing then it’s quiet.
Once I heard him tell her I was a mistake.
Mom says she’s through with men the assistant
principal took her out a couple times she
says he’s a goddam toe-licking pervert.
Mom and Dad went to counseling before they split
and the time I went I drew
pictures of how I felt.
mostly they were of people
living deep underground.
I remember Mom cried real hard.
Dad just sat there, looking at his hands …
sometimes I wish I was invisible,
and no one would ever know I was there,
but I’d be there,
just kind of floating around, you know,
like a really nice ghost, or maybe just part of the air.
Pretty crazy, huh?
Anyway, the party’s at three,
no grown-ups allowed.
I guess we see grace best in contrast. That grace seems to have been in recession for a while, that we blame the interwebs or the youngs, I don’t really believe any of it. Grace and its opposite(s) are always at hand, always within us, “like an STD that flares up every once in a while,” according to a friend, albeit she was talking about the protests in Portland.
Robby Soave over at Reason has been doing heroic work writing the stories of people who have been shown the opposite of grace, whose careers and lives are upended if not destroyed by those who find community in the public destruction of others. You can read his story about Daniel Elder, “A Composer Condemned Arson. Now No One Will Hire” here, and listen to Matt Welch and me talk about it on the Paloma podcast
(Want audio only? All Paloma Media podcasts are on Spotify, Apple and Simplecast.)
Matt and I also talked about the Elder on Mornin’!!! with Bill and Jo…
… where the launching point was the latest Chrissy Teigen kerfluffle (h/t Kmele), which I cannot get up the energy to much care about except, in a way, to thank Teigen, to acknowledge that her part in torpedoing the career of Alison Roman had a grace inflection on me. I’d heard of Roman before she was set upon last year, before she became persona non grata at The New York Times, before her assumed corpse was thrown atop the others whose viscera had been sucked in the hope of satisfaction, funny how rage calories never really satisfy, how they instead create an appetite for more rage, anyway, I became in the last year an Alison Roman stan, became one before knowing what stan meant, including learning that her recipe for Shallot Pasta had done what few recipes do, it inspired people to love her, a love that kept doubling and doubling, and though I don’t know this for sure, kept Roman making that pasta in the postage-stamp kitchen where she’d originally filmed it for the NYT and filmed it again for us this week.
We learn right at the opening that Roman is moving, that this will be her last “Home Movies” cooking video in this apartment. She cries a little but mostly laughs as she talks about how life changes, how jobs and romances change, and as she touched each of her appliances, saying, “The fridge is too small and the stove is too tiny,” it seemed to me a metaphor for the Times which, for all the breadth and access it offers, is in at least one way graceless, they have wandered or been yanked off the path, viz. Donald McNeil Jr., Bari Weiss, Andy Mills.
And Roman, who nevertheless cooked for us today, and the minute she did, I knew I needed to make this pasta for someone I love.
As it turns out, I cannot cook this today, that instead I am eating matzoh with butter at my desk and writing to you, on the eve of flying to Portland, to write more stories, to talk, if I am very lucky, to the shopkeepers and the cops and the reporters and the kids and ask, how are you doing? What’s the temperature these days? Will we see another flare-up or, during the 100-degrees it will be this weekend, cool down together in the Columbia River?
Until soon, big love and please see me chopping those shallots xx
My brothers and I threw dirt clods at each other. You almost always have a turn of phrase that strikes me, like this one, "...destroyed by those who find community in the public destruction of others."
Oh man that poem.