The OCD Diaries

May 9, 2010

Granny

The author introduces his Granny, a funny gal with an edge.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/9mcloY9BlOU

During my storage dive yesterday, I found a bunch of photos of me and my late great-grandmother, Jesse Wiener. She was Granny to me.

My first memories of Granny are from the basement in the old house in Revere. I’ve written about that basement as my hiding place, but a decade before I took the space over Granny lived there.

We would sneak down there in search of doughnuts and cereal in the little boxes. I’d bring my friends downstairs and ask her to do the teeth trick, where she’d push her dentures out and back in again.

She had a couple different dogs during that period. One was a vicious little scamp named Gigi, who met an untimely death after swallowing a pill Granny had dropped on the floor. I forget the second dog’s name, but I do remember he was docile and ugly. In fact, the day he arrived Granny laughed so hard over his appearance that she went into a crying fit.

One night my mother had Laurie Cabot, the witch of Salem, over to read palms. She refused to read Granny’s palm because Granny wouldn’t stop laughing at her. That’s how the story has been told over the years, anyway. I believe it.

I do know Cabot was in my house, because I snooped a bit that night. I was supposed to be in bed but there was too much commotion and noise that evening.

That was the 1970s for ya.

Granny eventually moved to an elderly apartment building at the other end of Revere Beach. She was always sick with one ailment or another but her wit was still like a double-edged knife.

One Christmas, as she struggled up the stairs to my mother’s place, my mother yelled down “Merry Christmas!” Granny yelled back, “Oh, fuck you.”

Granny used to delight me with stories of her younger years. She ran a nightclub in Boston that a lot of drag queens and mobsters hung out in. There was the story of a large snake found in a bathroom toilet, and when the movie “Johnny Dangerously” came out she laughed herself to tears. The mobsters in the film were just like the characters she used to deal with. This part especially hit home for her:

Yes, she told me, the mobsters did do a lot of nodding.

I especially appreciated Granny’s humor because she had a hard life.

Her husband had a fatal heart attack in the 1930s and she never remarried. She brought up my Nana and two great-uncles on her own. In the 1950s, she was hit by a car on Revere Beach Boulevard and lost most of her money in the ensuing hospital stays.

She lost a lot of people in her life, including my brother. I’ll never forget, as long as I live, the night my brother died. Granny was driven to my mother’s house late at night and when she came in the house and demanded to know what was the matter, my mother told her. I’ll never forget how she collapsed into a pile of rubble right there.

But she was made of leather, and she bounced back. She always bounced back.

Though there was a lot of love from her to my grandmother and my mother, the relationships were also pretty volatile. A lot of abuse was passed down the family line. Saying so will piss off some of the people in my family. But it’s the truth, and those who might take offense are already pissed at me, anyway.

I’m pretty sure I inherited some of my addictive and obsessive-compulsive impulses from Granny.

But that’s not her fault. I’ve learned that in many ways, a person can’t avoid the addictions their genetic code comes embedded with. Nobody becomes an addict because they woke up one day and decided it would be a shitload of fun. We evolve into addicts because we’re trying to smother deep emotional pain.

I inherited something much more important from Granny: That biting sense of humor. It has gotten me through the roughest moments of my life. I can never thank her enough for that.

Granny spent most of the last year of her life in a rehab center after going through surgery. I can’t remember which limb was being rehabbed. While there, she discovered her long-lost brother was also a patient there. That reconnection was a gift of the wildest sort. It’s a drag that they would only have weeks to enjoy it.

I was very wrapped up in my own sordid world that year — 1994 — and I never got around to visiting her. I was a self-absorbed idiot knee deep in other, less important things that seemed pretty important at the time.

You might say it was revenge that she died a couple hours before my 24th birthday, on Aug. 25, 1994.

I don’t consider it revenge, though. Some would lament having their birthday ruined, but to me it wasn’t ruined at all.

In a strange sort of way, I’m honored that she picked the hours before my birthday to leave this world. She had suffered enough. It was time for her eternal reward.

Spending that day remembering her and all the wonderful stories was a pretty good way to spend a birthday. I wouldn’t change it for the world.

Thanks, Granny.

May 8, 2010

Digging Through Trash, Finding Treasure

I’ve slowly been digging through a bunch of old boxes I put in storage in my father’s Saugus warehouse, and while I have yet to find my old journals, I did strike some gold in today’s rummage fest.

The biggest find of all: my late brother’s high school yearbook, which he never lived to see. Near the end of the book they put a page in tribute to him.

Also in the pile: A very faded photo of my brother fishing on the Marley Family boat. At the wheel is Sean Marley. This is around 1980, half a decade before the friendship between me and Sean truly began taking root.

I also found pictures of my great-grandmother, Jessie Wiener. To me, she was always “Granny.”

Expect upcoming entries that focus on these finds.

May 4, 2010

The Healers (Adventures in Step 9)

Tripped on Step 9 many times. But I got back up. Here’s what happened next.

Mood music for this post:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrUdulMG4Qg&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Of the 12 Steps of Recovery, three are the thorns of my existence:

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

Step 9 has been especially vexing. There are some folks I can’t make amends with yet, though Lord knows I’ve tried.

I feel especially pained about my inability to heal the rift with my mother and various people on that side of the family. But it’s complicated. Very complicated. I’ve forgiven her for many things, but our relationship is like a jigsaw puzzle with a lot of missing pieces. Those pieces have a lot to do with boundaries and OCD triggers. It’s as much my fault as it is hers. But right now this is how it must be.

I wish I could make amends with the Marley family, but I can’t until they’re willing to accept that from me. I stabbed them in the gut pretty hard, so I don’t blame them one bit.

Thanks to Facebook, I’ve been able to reconnect with people deep in my past and, while the need to make amends doesn’t always apply and the relationships can never be what they were, all have helped me heal.

I recently got back in touch with two of my brother’s friends — John Edwards and Scott Epler. They were my friends as well, but they were always the older kids. Scott and I both lost a brother in 1984, and he had a hard road to travel like I did. But I found him alive and well, doing great things with his life. Last time I saw Edwards was at Sean Marley’s funeral. I always assumed he was angry with me, too. He had good reason to be. When he went into the military and Sean and I were being anti-military (in my case because I was a chicken shit, afraid of service and the danger attached), I was a real asshole to him. He’s a minister now, and I’ve gotten a lot of wisdom from him already. I’m loving the reconnection.

Getting back in touch with Shannon Ross Lazzaro has been a gift as well. She’s one of those people who was always part of the Point of Pines circle I existed in. She was close to my brother and was still part of the family after he died. She’s now in Atlanta and has two precious kids of her own.

Mary Anastasio I met through Sean, and she never really went away. But in the past year we’ve had a lot more to talk about. She often reads this blog and tells me I’m too hard on myself, though I don’t try to be. I used to have a Thanksgiving Eve tradition where I’d go to her house and shoot the breeze with her mom. Her mom had a heavy Irish accent and all the word color you would expect with that. One of my favorite lines from her was that Mary “could use a good blow” — Irish-speak for a slap in the face. I can’t remember what Mary did to get that response, but we laughed hard, and I still do. Now Mary lives in Revere with a great husband and son. Her husband, Vinny, is a biker type, exactly the kind of guy I expected her to marry. I say that as a compliment.

Then there’s Joy, Sean’s widow. She’s remarried with kids and has done a remarkable job of pushing on with her life. She dropped out of my world for nearly 14 years — right after Sean’s death — until recently. The contents of our exchange are private, but this much I can tell you: I was wrong all these years when I assumed she hated my guts and wanted nothing more to do with me.

I have to be careful with this last reconnection. I still have a lot of questions about Sean’s final years and the OCD in me wants to know everything now. If I’m lucky, some answers will come in time. But I’m not going to push. I have no right to.

Besides, simply being reconnected is, as Joe Biden might say, “A big fucking deal.”

It is to me, anyway. And as remote as that connection may remain, it’s still gone far in helping me heal.

May 3, 2010

Birthdays of the Dead

The author observes another birthday for someone who isn’t around to celebrate.

Mood music for this post: “On With The Show” by Motley Crue:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyapJ9iCWxA&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

I’m a lot better at remembering the day someone died than the day they were born. I guess that’s understandable. Birthdays come and go. Death dates for those who are close burn a scar into your brain that makes the moment feel like it only happened seconds ago. Even if its 14 years later or 26.

Today would have been my brother Michael’s 44th birthday. He died at 17. Sean Marley’s birthday is around Oct. 7 and I almost always forget until a week later. He died at 30.

It creeps me out to think that I’m almost 40, much older than two people who were always the older brothers I looked up to.

But for whatever reason, I woke up remembering that it’s Michael’s birthday.

The night he died — Jan. 7, 1984 — I remember clearly. He had had another bad asthma attack and we were used to them. When someone is having a major asthma attack in your presence, it’s a scary fucking thing. One of his attacks happened a year before his death while we were in a movie theater watching the James Bond “Octopussy” film. We never saw the end of it because we had to rush him to the hospital.

To this day, I have no interest in rewatching that film.

But on this night I wasn’t there. An ambulance was called in and I’m told he walked onto the back of the ambulance on his own. A couple hours later he was dead in Lynn Hospital, currently the site of a Super Stop & Shop. It shouldn’t piss me off to think he died in what is now the cereal aisle or the deli counter. But I guess it does a little bit.

Strangely enough, the memory of the day Sean Marley died is much more painful to think about, probably because I was grown up by then.

On Friday, Nov. 15, 1996 I was having a good day in the newsroom where I was writing for the Stoneham Sun. Sean had been spiraling downhill and I had last spoken with him around the previous Tuesday. He was pretty depressed during that call, and still I was too stupid and self absorbed to realize I should be taking the short walk down the street to his house to just be there for him. But I had a busy work day the following morning, and I just hung up the phone and shook my head.

So that Friday I get back to the office after attending a co-worker’s birthday lunch. The day was brilliantly sunny. Then my mother called. She was driving past Sean’s house and saw police, firefighters and an ambulance, all kinds of commotion and someone lying on the ground with EMTs standing over him. I knew at that moment it was the end. I called the Marley’s number and Sean’s wife, Joy, got on and told me he was dead.

Blog rewind: Lost Brothers

It’s been so long since Michael was with us that it’s sometimes hard to remember the exact features of his face. But here’s what I do remember:

We fought a lot. One New Year’s Eve about 30 years ago, when the family was out at a restaurant, he said something to piss me off and I picked up the fork beside me and chucked it at him. Various family members have insisted over the years that it was a steak knife, but I’m pretty sure it was a fork. Another time we were in the back of my father’s van and he said something to raise my hackles. I flipped him the middle finger. He reached for the finger and promptly snapped the bone.

We were also both sick much of the time. He had his asthma attacks, which frequently got so bad he would be hospitalized. I had my Chron’s Disease and was often hospitalized myself. It must have been terrible for our parents. I know it was, but had to become a parent myself before I could truly appreciate what they went through.

He lifted weights at a gym down the street from our house that was torn down years ago to make way for new developments. If not for the asthma, he would have been in perfect shape. He certainly had the muscles.

He was going to be a plumber. That’s what he went to school for, anyway. During one of his hospital stays, he got pissed at one of the nurses. He somehow got a hold of some of his plumbing tools and switched the pipes in the bathroom sink so hot water would come out when you selected the cold.

He was always there for a family member in trouble. If I was being bullied, he often came to the rescue.

I miss him, and find it strange that he was just a kid himself when he died. He seemed so much older to me at the time. To a 13-year-old, he was older and wiser.

He was close to a kid who lived two doors down from us named Sean Marley. After he died, I quickly latched on to Sean. We became best friends. In a way, he became a new older brother. Sean died in 1996 and the depression he suffered has been one of the cattle prods — next to my own fight with mental illness — for this blog.

A year after Sean died, I found another, much older brother named Peter Sugarman. He died in 2004 after choking on food. His death sent me over the cliff with the OCD firing in every direction. That was the year I realized I needed help and started to get it.

Blog rewind: Marley and Me

Sean Marley, who introduced me to metal music, taught me to love life, and whose death has been one of the cattle prods for my writing this blog.

I had known Sean for as long as I could remember. He lived two doors down from me on the Lynnway in Revere, Mass. He was always hanging around with my older brother, which is one of the reasons we didn’t hit it off at first.

Friends of older siblings often pick on the younger siblings. I’ve done it. It happens.

Sean always seemed quiet and scholarly to me. By the early 1980s he was starting to grow his hair long and he wore those skinny black leather ties when he had to suit up.

On Jan. 7, 1984 — the day my older brother died — my relationship with Sean began to change. Quickly. I’d like to believe we were both leaning on each other to get through the grief. But the truth of it is that it was just me leaning on him.

He tolerated it. He started introducing me to Motley Crue, Ozzy Osbourne, Van Halen and other hard-boiled music. I think he enjoyed having someone younger around to influence.

As the 1980s progressed, a deep, genuine friendship blossomed. He had indeed become another older brother. I grew my hair long. I started listening to all the heavy metal I could get my hands on. Good thing, too. That music was an outlet for all my teenage rage, keeping me from acting on that rage in ways that almost certainly would have led to trouble.

We did everything together: Drank, got high, went on road trips, including one to California in 1991 where we flew into San Francisco, rented a car and drove around the entire state for 10 days, sleeping and eating in the car.

This was before I became self aware that I had a problem with obsessive-compulsive behavior, fear and anxiety. But the fear was evident on that trip. I was afraid to go to clubs at night for fear we might get mugged. When we drove over the Bay Bridge I was terrified that an earthquake MIGHT strike and the bridge would collapse from beneath us.

I occupied the entire basement apartment of my father’s house, and we had a lot of wild parties there. Sean was a constant presence. His friends became my friends. His cousin became my cousin. I still feel that way about these people today. They are back in my life through Facebook, and I’m grateful for it.

He was a deadly serious student at Salem State College, and his dedication to his studies inspired me to choose Salem State as well. Good thing, too. That’s where I met my wife.

In 1994, things started to go wrong for Sean. He became paranoid and depressed. He tried to hurt himself more than once. I didn’t know how to react to it.

That fall, he got married and I was best man. I absolutely sucked at it because I was so self-absorbed at the time that there was no way I could effectively be there for someone else, even him.

Over the next two years, his depression came and went. He was hospitalized with it a couple times. By the summer of 1996, he was darker and more paranoid than I’d ever seen him. But I was so busy binge eating and worrying about my career that I didn’t pay enough attention.

Those two deaths pushed me along the road to a very dark place.

A lot of my own depression would follow, as would a lot of self-destructive behavior.

Fortunately, I got therapy, medication and a 12-Step recovery program for compulsive binge eating. I also let God into my life.

All I want to do now is thank God for that and say Happy Birthday to my brother.

And get on with the show.

April 28, 2010

Needles

Why the author has a mild obsession with needles this morning.

Mood music for this post: “The Needle and the Damage Done,” by Neil Young:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvb65dCMjZI&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Sean had his annual physical yesterday and came home in a subdued mood after having blood drawn and a booster shot. I felt kind of bad for him, but not for long. He has it easy compared to my experience with needles. Not that I ever like to see him scared or in pain. It kills me every time.

A lot of needles went into my arms, hands, feet and legs as a kid when I was being treated with severe Crohn’s Disease. There were weekly blood tests. There were IVs. There were three surgeries where a feeding tube was inserted through my neck and chest.

The IVs were the worst. They could never find an optimal place to leave the needle so they’d stick, stick and stick some more. The blood tests didn’t bother me. I would watch as the needle went in, while other kids would turn away and scream. I was too used to it for that.

The whole needle experience was probably a blessing in disguise.

I was born with an addictive personality and was destined to get hooked on something. I think the reason it wasn’t something like smack is because I had already had my fill of the needle. I would never be able to associate needles with feeling pleasure. The pleasure is what addicts go for.

So for me, that pleasure came from compulsive binge eating. How food became the addiction of maximum damage is easy to understand. I come from a family of comfort eaters, and I was banned from any food or drink during my childhood hospital stays. Then I had to take Prednisone, which sends the appetite into overdrive.

I should be grateful. Injecting dope through needles is one of the most deadly addictions a person can have. It leads to relationships with a lot of dark, unsavory personalities. You end up dead or in jail, unless you’re lucky to kick it.

Those things were never really an issue with the food. If anything, my addiction made me hide from people and relationships period, which left me with little opportunity to get into trouble with the law. Besides, I was too much of a chicken for that sort of thing.

I could spin this stuff in my skull over and over again. But it doesn’t matter.

I’m in recovery, I’m grateful and I have too much to do these days to regress to the older behavior.

Or so I hope.

April 23, 2010

Newsroom Nightmare: A Sequel

Another Facebook flashback strikes the author on his dirty newsroom side of the brain.

Mood music for this post: “Mean Street” from Van Halen:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2R2KXNQR1M&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

I thought I was done writing about my newsroom experiences with “The Crazy-Ass Guy in the Newsroom.” But Facebook has put me back in touch with another blast from my past, so here I go again.

Meet Steve Lambert, editor of The Eagle-Tribune a decade ago. He hired me as night editor and promoted me to assistant editor for New Hampshire.

When he left for California in 2002, I was put back on the night desk. Good thing, too. I was within inches of smashing my direct supervisor in the side of the head with a bat after his management style drove me within inches of a nervous breakdown. I would have been fired and brought up on charges for doing such a thing, but I would have been a hero among some of my newsroom colleagues.

Still, I’m glad it didn’t come to that because it would have been wrong. And the reality is that my insanity back then made me as evil a newsroom presence as the supervisor was heavy-handed and ruthless.

I always liked Steve, though. We shared a love of The Beatles and I respected his efforts to make the paper more of a voice for New Hampshire and, later, Lawrence Massachusetts’ Latino community. He took a lot of criticism for the latter, which ended in spectacular failure. It really got under the skin of a lot of bitter Hispanic haters, which is why I think I loved it.

He also did a lot to bring more humanity to the newsroom. He gave low-level people like me a shot at bigger things, and always let us put family before work. It’s hard to find that in a newsroom, though The Eagle-Tribune does deserve credit for nurturing a deep family streak. The current managing editor, Gretchen Putnam, balances a demanding job with being one of the best Moms around in a way that would make a lot of journalists envious. It’s very easy for reporters and editors to put every egg of their existence into the career basket, and that never, ever ends well.

Back to Lambert. He may not realize it — or maybe he did — but I was Grade-A nuts during the time I was in his employ.

I was all about pleasing my masters back then, before I realized being a people-pleaser is dumb. When Lambert wasn’t happy about something the NH edition had done, I kept it with me for weeks at a time. I brooded. I gave in to my addictive behavior in the nastiest fashion I could. I felt picked on.

Let me be honest: Most of my troubles back then were nobody’s fault but mine. I had a brain chemistry imbalance and bottled-up traumas that I wouldn’t become fully aware of for another couple years.

I was a major control freak, which is an OCD trademark. I had an ego much bigger than I deserved to have. That combination slammed into the wall at The Eagle-Tribune, because criticism and toughness are trademarks of the culture. That’s not always a bad thing. But in the hands of someone who takes things deeply personal, it becomes toxic.

The stress level was already high when I realized I wasn’t clicking with the New Hampshire editor. It felt like disaster was just around the corner. And it was.

I remember the newsroom on 9-11-01 like it were yesterday. The first World Trade Center tower had just collapsed on the TV screen mounted above Lambert’s office. He came out, stood on a desk and told everyone to collect themselves a minute, because this would be the most important story we ever covered.

Up to that point, it was. But I was so full of fear and anxiety that my ability to function was gone. I spent most of the next few days in the newsroom, but did nothing of importance. I was a shell. And I stayed that way until I finally left the paper in early 2004.

I thought all my emotional trouble was solved when I left that place. I so badly wanted the job to be that one thing I could point to as the root cause of my pain; the thing I could hate for life.

But my mental nightmare was only beginning.

Looking back, that period was probably the beginning of the end, a time of madness where I was close to rock-bottom and had to change, but wasn’t yet in tune to reality.

It was not a happy time. But I’m glad I worked with Lambert. He’s a good man.

April 17, 2010

Random Madness

It’s Saturday morning, and me and the kids are engaging in our weekly ritual.

In a few hours, we go to Salem, Mass., home of former Skeptic Slang guitarist Chris Casey, his wife, Nancy and their kids, Mark and Melissa. I’m going to help them get some old photos online and start a blog for Nancy’s writing.

I’m going to look his kids in the eye and tell them that I’m a little bit responsible for their existence. I did introduce their parents to each other, after all. 😉

I’ll make them listen to the new Slash album, which is quickly becoming my favorite album of the year so far.

Then I’ll put the boys in the car and we’ll head to Saugus so we can make their grandpa buy some school raffles.

All in all, a good day in the making.

The only bummer is that Erin has a work conference to go to. Saturday morning business events. Ah, the life of a freelancer.

Nancy has a stack of old Skeptic Slang photos, which should be hilarious. Expect to see those images in this space soon.

Have a great day.

April 13, 2010

Meet My Demon

Why the author treats his demon like an imaginary friend, and how it helps.

It won’t give up

It wants me dead

God damn that noise inside my head

From today’s mood music, “The Becoming,” by Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDfyR22u_gI&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

At last night’s OA meeting, I saw quite a few people with heavy weights pressing on their minds. I won’t share details, because these meetings are all about anonymity. But it got me thinking…

You see, for all our awful behavior, there’s one thing we addicts do exceptionally well: self-criticize. If you want to meet people who are good at focusing on their own vulnerabilities and venting shame, we are the best there is.

It doesn’t really help us, mind you. It just makes us feel worse and, in response, lose ourselves in our chosen addiction. In OA, the addiction is compulsive overeating. But it’s the same with booze and narcotics.

We often describe it as our inner demon. The demon comes to you when you are feeling low and taps on your shoulder. Then he suggests you sooth your anxieties with a pile of junk.

Many of those who suffer from mental illnesses — mine is OCD, which fuels my addictive behavior — tend to give their demon a persona.

Winston Churchill called it his Black Dog.

I call my demon The Asshole. That’s what he is, after all. He’s my dysfunctional imaginary friend.

I got the idea of making my demon an imaginary friend from my kids, both of whom have imaginary friends. I believe Sean used to call his “Rexally.” Rexally was a sperm whale, by the way.

So let me tell you about The Asshole.

He’s like one of those overbearing relatives who will constantly push food on you when you drop by for dinner.

The Asshole: “Try that slice of pizza. It’s wonderful.”

Me: “No thanks. I’m full.”

The Asshole: “Come on, try it. It’s really good.”

If I’m not in recovery, I shove the slice of pizza down my throat, followed by another 10 slices. When it comes to binge eating, I can’t have just five of something, whether it’s pizza or potato chips. I have to have them all, and when they’re gone I’ll keep pushing other things in my mouth, no matter how vile and shameful I feel two hours later.

When I am in recovery, which, thank God, I am now, I tell The Asshole: “Piss off. I’m full and got things to do.”

Facing The Asshole used to fill me with fear and anxiety. I was the weakest person in the room when he was around.

But in the years since I entered therapy for the OCD, found my Faith and started taking medication, the relationship has changed.

Now The Asshole is more like an annoying cousin; someone I keep at arm’s length. I don’t shut him out of my life completely — I can’t, really — but one day I stopped fearing him, and that made a world of difference.

He still taps my shoulder just about every day. But with the fear gone, I’m able to go about my business.

Another thing that’s changed: What he has to offer just can’t compare with the other parts of my life: My wife and kids. My writing. A good book.

But I’m not stupid. I know he’s never going to go away. He’ll always be there, lying in wait. He’s like a terrorist, that old Asshole. He may lose most days, but he keeps trying, knowing that one of these days he might just pull off the attack.

And, truth be told, I’m never more than a few minutes away from the relapse. It’s that way with anyone in recovery.

And so I must be careful.

April 6, 2010

The Short, Strange History of Skeptic Slang

The author is tells the story of his 2 years as lead singer of a little-known band called Skeptic Slang.

I avoided this for as long as I could. I don’t like to admit that I used to sing in a band. For one thing, my singing really sucked. For another, the band never went anywhere.

But some pictures of me from around that time have been unearthed, and people are starting to talk.

Here’s the picture of me with hair halfway down my back, in the center:

I’m bald now, but I still have all that hair on my back. Erin doesn’t mind, so neither do I.

The other thing that has sparked curiosity is this poem I found in an old foot locker last month. It was written by a long-lost friend, Joy Affannato, before she married my best friend, Sean Marley:

“Blessed and Black Clad, Dedicated to Bill Brenner”

Clad in black

with a black-lined heart

like the charred edges

of our burnt society

Gathering the ash

to sift through and find

some satiating solution.

…A poet

with a doctrite of humanity

But, no one really has the answers:

Every question is relevant

And using words of metaphor

he transforms the WRITTEN WORD

At the bottom left of the page she scrawled the logo for Skeptic Slang.

So ok, then. Let’s talk about this band.

Members:

Bill Brenner: Vocals

Chris Casey: Guitar

Elias Andrinopolous: Bass

Joe Gentile: Drums

We got together in the spring of 1992. It started as me and Chris. We’d sit in my basement and write songs, thinking we were the shit. I was going through my chip-in-the shoulder angry phase and was writing all kinds of lyrics about how much I hated my mother and hated that my brother was dead.

There was the song “Knife,” with this jolly refrain: “Knife… You’re my best friend.”

The songs about my mother were called “Tunnel Vision” and “You’re Dead” The song I wrote about my brother was called “Rest.”

Let’s fast-forward for a second: I should point out that today I do not carry a knife and I don’t hate my mother. I love her, despite our inability to get along.

Back to the past: Chris and I were smoking buddies with a lot of the same anger at life. We were a natural fit. Then Elias came along; a peaceful, friendly soul who was in many ways the opposite of me. Joe joined later, but he was older than the rest of us and was in and out of the band.

At the time, I was also working at the legendary Rockit Records, and being a musician was sort of an unspoken bonus.

We went out and bought a bunch of gear at Daddy’s Junky Music on Route 1 in Peabody: Amps, a mixing board, PA system, monitors. We didn’t know how to use any of it, and we were on a payment plan as if we had purchased a new car together.

But it looked cool and made us loud in the bomb shelter beneath the garage that we practiced in. This was in the house in Lynnfield, where I lived from late 1992 to late-1995.

We wrote a lot of songs and practiced. And practiced. And practiced. Elias was the least experienced on his instrument, but quickly became the best musician of us all. I was the worst. I couldn’t sing to save my life.

But I could write lyrics, and that was all that was required.

When it was time for a break, we’d go out into the woods and smoke pot. In fact, the last time I smoked pot was with them. I stopped when I started dating Erin.

We played a couple acoustic sets along the way at Roosevelts, a hang-out in Salem. We did a couple performances at North Shore Community College in Lynn.

Then we did a battle of the bands event, and it was a disaster.

Elias’ bass was way out of tune as we launched into the opening song. Instead of just rolling with it, we panicked. it was all hell from there.

We retreated to the bunker and did more writing and practicing. Those songs would never be played live. Joe had a kid and had less and less time for the band. Chris burned out and left. After awhile it was just be and Elias. We tried to keep it going with a new guitarist, who played wonderfully but could never settle on anything. We kicked him out, and Elias and I continued on for awhile longer.

Then it just sort of stopped.

But I’ll tell you what: That band, bad as we were — or I was, anyway — was a Godsend. I was going through a lot of depression back then and clashed with everyone.

The band gave me an outlet to vent those emotions. It couldn’t save me from my addictions, but it saved me from my worst instincts, one of which was to go out and destroy things, whether that meant kicking a dent into the side of my dark-blue 1985 Monte Carlo or throwing stuff around in my father’s warehouse.

It wasn’t meant to last, but it was there when I needed it most.

After the band disintegrated, the music store bought back all the gear, Elias went on to study classical guitar and I went frantically forward in my pursuit of a career in journalism.

A tape of our songs is probably kicking around somewhere. Someday it will surface.

We’ll listen and have a good laugh. Not at the guitar, drums and bass, which were very good. But at the rest of the package.

To Chris, Elias and Joe: Thanks for the memories.

April 2, 2010

The OCD Diaries 4-2-10: Long-haired Freaks

Mood music for this post: “Hurt,” by Johnny Cash (cover of the Nine Inch Nails song):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o22eIJDtKho&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Going through an old stack of books this afternoon, I found this photo:

I’m on the left holding the bass. On the right is Sean Marley. I told you about him in the post “Marley and Me.”

The photo is one of those stupid mock rock magazine covers, shot in the summer of 1989 at a carnival on the grounds of the Suffolk Downs racetrack near Revere Beach.

It was a simpler time. I had seen my share of illness and death by then, but that summer was a more innocent era. As close to normal as things got back then.

My addictive behavior had already taken root but wasn’t yet at the self-destructive point. The OCD was there at that point, but I hadn’t yet become aware of the patterns. All I knew at that point was that I hated authority and I had a mighty temper.

Sean was a unique character with a dark side at that point, but he was not yet showing signs of a depression that would eventually kill him. That wouldn’t show its wretched face for another five years.

That summer was about parties in my basement, music and getting ready for college.

I had absolutely no clue what was ahead of me.

The kid in that picture wouldn’t like who I am today. He would despise the Catholicism and make fun of the 12-Step program. But we’d still have a love of heavy metal in common.

Come to think of it, if today I had to spend time in the same space as the kids in that picture, I probably wouldn’t like either of them all that much. I’d tolerate them though.

I’m Blessed beyond comprehension with the life I have today. But, admittedly, looking at that picture hurts a little. A lot of good people have come and gone since then.

It’s a little overwhelming to think about, so instead I’ll go to bed.