“Friendship” by Paulo Otavio Diniz Rodrigues (https://flic.kr/p/7qBgkT)

Friendship keeps us going, gives us support, tells us who we are, and forms a basis for our life’s stories. This week’s contributors examine different ways that friends can impact our lives.

“4’33” by Glenn Kane relives a day of mischief, courtesy of a fellow high school band member.

Old friends reconnect in “Visitor” by Kevin J. Lenihan, as their memories give way to a darker present.

“Stoned English Majors” by Stuart Michaelson is a coming-of-age story where independence, and friendship, sometimes prove to be at odds.

“Burning Out” by Kevin J.B. O’Connor examines the way that memories may be discarded as friends drift apart. 

Okay, okay, I know … I remember opening this bottle of Zocor that is right here in front of me. I mean, it was just a few minutes ago that I did, just before I let myself get distracted by the news on TV that wasn’t really news, nothing that Walter Cronkite would have put on the news anyway. The question remains, the question the bottle seems to be asking me is: did I already take my nightly tablet? Honestly, I haven’t a clue—and that, of course was something I did or didn’t do after I opened the bottle. I do remember taking a tablet—but was that last night, the night before, the week before??? And yet there are things I can remember from so long ago. Not everything, of course, but certain things. Why those? What I have long suspected is that what gets recalled is what is tagged by emotion. Like pride. Or fear. Perhaps pride, however undeserved, touched by fear, however unjustified, is the most potent mnemonic of all.

~~~

It was late afternoon at a high school in a suburb of New York, during the mid-nineteen-sixties, and time for band practice. The teenage version of me—yes, I was that young once—barreled into the commodious rehearsal room, only a little late, grabbed my baritone horn from the instrument closet, and hurriedly settled into my assigned seat. The music teacher, the conductor, was already on the podium from which, grimacing, he tracked my progress.

The usual cacophony at the start. Yet, a pattern: two acoustical diamond shapes laid end-to-end. A crescendo of random utterings of woodwinds, brass, percussion, and unruly adolescents. The gradual quieting precipitated by the conductor’s rapid beating of a metal music stand with his baton. The one moment of pristine silence preceding what was even more pristine than silence: the pure tone beckoned from the concertmistress’s clarinet. Triggering another crescendo as more and more musicians attempted to match the pitch. Followed by the inevitable decrescendo as each individual tune-up was completed.

Far to the conductor’s right, beyond the sea of clarinets, the smatterings of flutes, double reeds, and saxophones, in a crescent of gleaming blond metal, lay the domain of the lower brass: trombones, baritone horns, and tubas. Instruments whose players have a reputation for irreverence and outright mayhem. Often well-deserved. Why might this be the case?

A theory.

Every brass player knows, in his heart, that what produces even the sweetest of his music is, in essence, a controlled fart. Made with the entrance rather than the exit of the gastrointestinal tract. Which instructional manuals like to call “a buzzing of the lips.” But it’s a fart, nonetheless. Now the sound of the upper brass, the trumpet for instance, is so far removed from that aforementioned disagreeable bodily function as to allow those hoity-toity prima donnas to conveniently forget their humble roots. For the lower brass, however, such self-deceit is impossible. The very tones these musicians produce are, at times, flatulent in pitch, timbre, and volume. Yet from such tones, the tenderest of music perfumes the air. Perhaps it is the stunning paradox inherent in coaxing angels to fly out of their assholes that inevitably grants lower brassmen an absurdist take on life.

Merely a theory, of course.

Not once have I wept over art
in the Louvre, Uffizi or Met.
Well, almost over van der Weyden’s
Descent in the Prado, Mary’s grief,
but that may have been indigestion
after Madrid’s tapas, the Museum of Ham.
A lithograph in Chelsea,
Kathe Kollwitz’s dead mother and child
splayed, stiff, discarded on the curb,
brought a single, quiet tear.

At the reception, the gallery on Water Street,
I am at first preoccupied with drawings,
paintings, prints, porcelain; delicate, curious
assemblages, diminutive Constructivism;
with wine, cheese and those gooey sweets
with marshmallows, coconut and caramel;
with the hot breath of claustrophobic
conversation. In a corner, a soprano,
hired for the evening, presses “play”
for her boom box accompaniment.
Unexpectedly, the press of gawkers hushed,
from this spare, pretty young woman an aria.

At my age, too cynical or circumspect,
on most days, I assume nothing
may move me so again, but with
her voice, sobs come suddenly,
exquisitely pure, crystalline tears.
All pretense and pettiness fall away.
Instantly, this moment is beauty.
I am Saint Teresa in Ecstasy,
her voice piercing me with divinity.
However skeptical my arrogant past,
this, at last this, must be God’s love.

Woolworths at Cedarbrook Mall, just outside my home town of Philadelphia, didn’t look like much, but that was beside the point.

Back in the Sixties, it was a great place for teenagers like me to visit during trips to the mall, especially the variety store’s record cut-out bin. Filled with carelessly tossed-in crap, near-crap, and the occasional gem, at 33 cents for a 45-rpm single, a buck for an LP, it invited those long on musical thirst and short on cash to find keys to their universe.

One afternoon in 1968, I found one of mine, a rare version of Buffalo Springfield’s self-titled 1966 debut LP. Overflowing with clever, hook-filled songs, minus the one tune most people ever heard by the band, it starred three hyper-talented guys who went on to bigger things than cut-out bins: Richie Furay, who fronted the influential country-rockers, Poco (the cartoonist behind Pogo wouldn’t let them use the name), along with Steve Stills and Neil Young. They went on to be, well, Steve Stills and Neil Young.

And while it was Young who penned two of the LP’s most memorable numbers—an ode to alienation with the confusing title of “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing,” and a tune about a guy who loses his girl because he smokes pot, appropriately called “Flying on the Ground is Wrong“—Stills wrote and sang “For What It’s Worth.” That was an enduring protest song, capital P and S, which sold well as a single, and which the record company added to later pressings of the LP. My cut-rate beauty was a first edition that languished in the store after the change was made.

That move made sense for the company, and certainly for Stills, but I didn’t know or care much about it at the time. For a buck, I got the LP, which I played to death for months, long before I learned that, as a collector’s item, it was worth more because it lacked “For What It’s Worth.”

And when I finally realized what I had and announced it to classmates at lunch at Temple University, my way-too-loud voice carried to an adjacent table and caught the ear of an attractive blonde named Gretchen, who ambled over, introduced herself, and confronted me with two offers she thought I couldn’t refuse.

“Buffalo Springfield without ‘For What It’s Worth‘? I gotta have it. Bring it in tomorrow, and if you’re telling the truth, fifty bucks.” (Righteous bread in ’68.)

Trouble was, she was standing, I was sitting, and try though my eyes did to reach her face, they lingered on the rest of her, too. (Shit, I was 17.) I think she noticed, because when I turned her down, she upped the ante.

“OK, OK. How about this… you bring in the record, and I’ll sleep with you.”

She didn’t actually say “sleep with”—something far coarser—but you get the idea. Except I was a bashful virgin at the time and really didn’t get the idea; I muttered “nah,” perplexing the guys at the table and sending Gretchen back to hers. She looked wonderful walking away.

“What is wrong with you, man?” lamented several of my fellow long-hairs. “Ah, come on,” I sputtered. “She would’ve taken the album and left me hanging. I don’t even know her.”

That changed, eventually, though it took seven years, by which time I was neither bashful nor a virgin, and, so I thought, no longer intimidated by forceful, free-thinking blondes.

One May Sunday night in 1975, I was leaving my parents’ West Oak Lane house, on the way to my Baby-Boomer-issued VW bug, which would lead me to my Germantown apartment, when Gretchen appeared in the gloaming, walking a large dog.

I feigned car-key fumbling until they reached my parking spot, then offered a hearty “Remember me?”

“You didn’t want my money and you didn’t want my body. You’re an idiot.”

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t quite ready for all that then.” Her dog—-she called him Dandy—put his front paws on my cut-off bare knees. “I wouldn’t have been much in the sack.”

She flashed a wicked smile. “Probably still aren’t.”

I wasn’t sure where to go with that, so I let Dandy step up to the plate. I took his front paws in my hands, looked deeply into his eyes in the fading light of dusk, and warbled the opening line of, you guessed it, “For What It’s Worth.”

There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear

“You still can’t look me in the eye, can you, Stuart? That’s the name, right?”

I admitted as much, spewing out, kind of all at once, that after graduation I became a newspaper reporter, had a live-in girlfriend for a few years, no more, and I still had the LP, in a frame on my wall, no less.

“Well, I don’t want the album anymore, and I don’t care about your love life, in case you’re brandishing your single-hood as some kind of treasure I’m supposed to mine. Not interested.”

Except she was: By the time Dandy made it clear he’d had enough of our chitter-chatter, she’d scribbled her phone number on my right wrist with a Bic.

(continued on page 2)

This is just an experiment. Let’s be clear about that right up front. I don’t want you thinking this is going to be a regular thing. This is a one-time-only day-by-day account of my life (such as it is) in an Illinois prison, over the next few days. Maybe a couple of weeks. I’m not sure yet.

I should give you a background about myself. I was born on March 23, 1969, right before the Summer of Love. My name at birth was Nicky Joe Elliot. That’s what was on my original birth certificate. I know what you’re thinking: a totes legit name for a convict. It didn’t stick, though. Mom divorced Pop, remarried, and then — around the time I was five or so — allowed me to be adopted by my step-father. It was decided that not only would my last name be changed, but my first and middle name, too. I became Nicholas Joseph Chittick. Much less cool, but I wasn’t consulted in the decision. I have oft wondered whether my true destiny of fame and riches was unable to find me, because I lived most of my life under an assumed identity.

I’m locked up for murder. Nothing especially interesting: it was a drug deal gone bad that happened on Christmas night 1998. I was arrested on January 5, 1999. Been behind bars ever since. No need to go into details, but I will admit that I’m the reason the deal went south. I wanted crack but didn’t have any money. What I did have was access to a gun, an abundant intake of alcohol, and a great deal of pent-up holiday frustration. I confessed and pleaded guilty. No sense in denying it is how I saw it; they had me red-handed.

So why am I writing this? And just what is this, exactly? I guess technically it’s a journal. Not a diary. The word diary has too feminine connotations for me. Chronicle is a good, strong word. The Prison Chronicles. Well… whatever this is, the main question is why? A couple of reasons. One, I was egged on by the popularity of such reality shows as “60 Days In,” “Behind Bars: Rookie Year,” “Locked Up,” “Locked Up Abroad,” “The System” — the list goes on and on. There seems to be a fascination within our culture of life behind bars. Probably nothing new. They made plenty of black-and-white prison movies in the 1930s. Anyway, along the lines of incarceration curiosity, I figured I might provide a unique perspective. I’m a minority, after all… a white guy in prison. That’s the first reason.

The second is that I’m at a crossroads in my life. There’s a lot going on. I stand at the precipice of many changes. This is an anomaly in my experience. Here (not here in this prison specifically, but here, in prison in general… any prison) clocks tick differently. Long spans of time — years, decades — slip by almost without notice, much the same way ships on the ocean can travel great distances — thousands of miles — without seeming to go anywhere. The other day a C.O. (correctional officer) said to me, “Chittick, you’ll probably never leave this joint. You’ve got it made here.”

I replied, “Yeah, but you could ship me anywhere and, in three or four years, I’d have it made there, too.”

He couldn’t believe the casual way I’d said three or four years. To him, this was an excruciating length of time. To us (those who’ve endured long-term incarceration), we tend to view years the same way a free person might look at a couple of weeks. That’s the difference. So when I saw a lot is happening at once — and it is —  that’s a big deal to me. I guess I feel a certain need to document it.

It’s Sunday night, September 11, 2016. The anniversary of 9-11. Hard to believe it’s already been fifteen years. I was in Menard in 2001, a maximum-security hellhole in southern Illinois. I’ve earned my way into a medium-security facility now. It’s not Shangri-La, but it’s tolerable.

If you’re hoping for stories of the ultra-violent American prison system, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. It happens, no question, but not on the daily basis that popular culture would have you believe. Certainly not in a level-three facility like this.

The joint softball league championship series started today. Yes, we have a softball league. Basketball and soccer leagues, too. Anyway, I’m one of the umpires for the softball league. We went out to the field at 7:30 a.m., but it was a swamp. We’ve had a lot of rain lately. Our LTS (Leisure Time Services) Supervisor got us some rakes, shovels, brooms, and a wheelbarrow. We got to work pushing the excess water off the infield with brooms, slogging through the slop, then transferred sand from the volleyball pit via wheelbarrow and just pretty much bullied Mother Nature into giving us a dry field. It worked. By noon we were able to start game one of a seven-game series between Housing Unit One and Housing Unit Four. My team was in the semifinals last week, but we got beat by Housing Unit Four. They swept us three games straight in a five-game series. Losing sucks. I always cringe when I hear someone say, “C’mon, we’re just playing for fun.” Know what’s fun? Winning. Anyway, I live in Housing Unit Three. I’ve been here for five years, but they’re about to move me to Housing Unit Two. That’s one of the upcoming changes I was telling you about.

Housing Unit One won two in a row today. I umpired second base for game two. My homie (I won’t use any names, but I can tell you he’s the drummer for the prison band; I’m the guitar player) umpired second base for game one and only had to make a couple easy calls the entire time. I step onto the field for game two, and it was one close call after another at second base. I’m secretly rooting for Housing Unit Four to win, even though they’re the ones who beat my team, because Housing Unit One wins this thing every year. Even so, I called the calls as I saw them, even though guys were arguing with me, yelling at me. It’s not easy. You’ve got to be solid when you’re an umpire, even if you’re wrong. Especially if you’re wrong. I looked over at my homie (the drummer) after one particular dust-up (I called a guy out on a slide, but it was very close… he might’ve been safe) and he was laughing like a maniac, the jerk. You can always count on your friends to give you a hard time.

Coming in after the games I saw Blinky. Blinky is a rabbit. The grounds are full of ‘em. He’s got one eye and a big scar down his back. I and a few others call him Blinky, but he’s got a lot of different names. Pirate. Thug. Chief. More I don’t know. I didn’t see it happen, but a couple guys did, and the story spread like wildfire. Blinky got scooped up by a hawk one day. So he’s a good ten of fifteen feet in the air, on his way to certain death, when he starts kicking his legs like crazy at the hawk. He freed himself at a price: the hawk’s talons tore out one of his eyes and sliced up his back, but he hit the ground running and made it to safety. Now he shows up out on the walk, begging food like all the rabbits. I don’t have anything to give him, but I wish I had. All the convicts love Blinky. He’s a survivor.

They’re having a concert tomorrow in the gym, classical music from some outside people. The prison band has our own concert coming up Wednesday. Ours is “The Concert for Change.” It’s all original material, each song a chapter in a story. Our group is a mixture of different musicians from different musical backgrounds, of different ages, ethnicities and cultures. The music we wrote for this concert reflects that diversity.

It’s getting late. I have to be at work early tomorrow, at 8 a.m. I’m the clerk in the counselor’s offices, a.k.a. Clinical Services. I’ve held down that job assignment for going on three years now, but that’s about to change, too. I told you, I’m at a crossroads. A storm of changes lies on my horizon.

My muse sings only country—

An eighteen wheeler siren
Crying, dying, going somewhere
With a juke-box beat.

I am road-house Homer;
Honky-Tonk laureate,
Truck-stop troubadour
Singing to steel-guitar wails
And humming tires.

I am highway minstrel
Teasing tears from good ole boys
When waitresses are Didos
In a cross-country Odyssey

My muse sings only country.

The machine engulfed Travis, but he didn’t seem to mind. Travis chain-smoked unfiltered Camels; and one was always burning at his side as he pressed the buttoned keys for all the letters to appear, just as I had originally typed them. Sometimes, yes, he made mistakes but not often. And anyway, when the words appeared in print, I was the editor; I was the responsible party.

And so I never mentioned Travis or his work to anyone.

He was frail and hunch-backed. Stooped just in the form you’d expect from one who spent eight, maybe ten hours each day typesetting others’ words, making sure others’ ideas or suggested messages came out cleanly, appropriately, and of course, without error.

So Travis, naturally, knew all the secrets, the stories.

Yet I never wondered what he thought about the simple panty raids, the SGA proclamations striking down women’s curfew, or the “startling exposes” that exposed administrative corruption and the juggling of academic data to pacify and satisfy accrediting agencies and the US News and World Report. I wondered if Travis read what he typed at all, or did he simply concentrate on those little keys, putting each in its appointed place?

I visited Times Printing only on those occasions when I dropped off the copy and then, once Travis was finished, picked up the mock-ups. I was nineteen and didn’t much know how to make small talk with a man in his 70’s, a man who did not have the privilege or benefit of attending university. Still, I’d try sometimes: “Hi Travis. How does it look today?”

Most often he wouldn’t look up, and only rarely did he pause at all. But when he would, I think it was more due to his need to inhale the Camel again than to respond to me. So at best, I’d get: “Good. She’s good.” And then back to his work.

I knew back then that men of his age took work seriously; they didn’t live for their breaks and try to stretch fifteen minutes into thirty, as I did in my summer job.

But one day, when I came to pick up my copy, Travis stopped his work. He rose up from the cramped space and looked directly to me:  “That band you wrote about that’s coming next Friday. It says they play bluegrass. Is that real bluegrass or just what they think is bluegrass?”

More words in one smoky breath than he had uttered in two years.

“It’s real bluegrass, Travis. It’s The Dillards. You know, the band that’s ‘The Darlin’ Family’ on Andy Griffith.”

“You say it’s real? Maybe I’ll go.”

“I’ll get you tickets, Travis.”

I dropped the tickets off for him the next day, though he was at lunch, and so I left it with his boss.

“Travis asked for these?” he asked.

“Sort of,” I said. “Anyway, he wants to go.”

“Hhhm.”

When I got to the auditorium that Friday night, not only was Travis there, he was on the third row aisle seat, all alone.

“Hey Travis! Can I sit next to you?”

“That’s all right,” he said.

The Dillards put on a lively show for the crowd of 500 students and one old man.

It took about two songs before Travis was dancing in his place, clapping his hands in the air, and singing along to “Rocky Top” and “Dooley.” After the fourth song, he smiled at me:  “They’re all right!”

I remember so little about that night, really, at least what was happening on stage. But what I do remember, and what I can still see so clearly now, forty years later, as I set my own type, is Travis, with his old-timey horn-rimmed glasses, his stooped shoulders, and still in his uniform. And especially his fingers, the ones that were his trade, the ones stamped equally with black ink and yellow cigarette burns.

The ones he held so high as he clapped his way into my life.

In his poem “Nameless Child,” Fred Dale contemplates the tantalizing promise of tuning up for a performance.

In the short story by D.E. Fredd, “Full Frontal Idiocy,” a small-time journalist unwittingly causes tumult in a concert cellist’s life.

In a poem by Sean Lause, “Leaving the Concert Hall,” a concert opens up worlds of imagination for a young girl.

She is eleven, maybe twelve,
but numbers no longer matter,
for she has heard Bach and Mozart
for the first time,
has mastered the mathematics of the wind,
the heart’s algebra,
where A is not A and need not be,
and now her fingers conduct the weather
until it shivers with illuminations.

She walks, then skips, then
spins to a private pantomime
that need not reveal itself,
for she is the conductor.
Silent notes come swirling around her
in wizard colors of the new,
and the ecstatic leaves whirl
in xylophones of dance.
She feels her joy float from breath to breath.

Bezeled light dazzles round a point,
a perfect jewel, emerald, topaz, diamond,
as her will decides, for she is the conductor,
and everything is all right, for a moment all right.
Then, as the sky imagines a storm,
and the school bus pulls up,
she folds a crescendo inside a breeze
and sets it free.

I take full responsibility for depriving the world of Soon Rae Suks’ talents.  True, she was certainly not in the pantheon of the cellists like Yo-Yo Ma, Pablo Casals or Jacqueline du Pre.  Yet coming in second to those luminaries is nothing to be ashamed of.  And that was the track she was on until I came into her life and imploded a promising career.  Not a day goes by that I don’t think of what she might have been, had our paths not crossed.

I was hired to escort Miss Suks’ four-week New England tour.  I was a part-time culture critic for the Portland Press Herald.  The Roberts and Loeb Agency, her West Coast management team, had called my paper to drum up publicity for her appearances and, by the by, wondered if anyone locally could act as her cicerone, saving them travel expenses for someone on their California-based staff.

So there I stood on a Wednesday afternoon in late April near the baggage claim area at the Portland International Jetport, holding a cardboard sign that read “Suks” which, after too many double takes, I changed it to read “Miss Suks.”

When I first spotted her, I thought she was closer to a teenager than the thirty-something her publicity sheet advertised.  She was barely five feet, her moon face dominated by huge sunglasses.  She wore diamond print stockings, a crushed velvet hat, an artsy hand-painted scarf decorated with a silver antique pin shaped like a musical staff.   My first thought was that I would be spending several weeks with a diva for whom I would never be able to get the correct latte order.  We shook hands tepidly and headed for the baggage carousel where, to her credit, she made modest strides in trying to yank her oversized duffle bag off the merry-go-round before I interceded.  After a good ten minutes and some anxious looks on her face, her cello, encased in sturdy aluminum and with a decal of the South Korean flag, slid towards us.

I didn’t know what I was up against with respect to English.  Her bio indicated musical training and education in South Korea.  She had, however, studied in the States under Madam Ospensky and referred to graduate courses at Stanford.  She tended to the cello while I lugged the duffle out to the parking lot, where I made room for all in my Ford Escape.

I’d booked her in the Holiday Inn by the Bay on Spring Street. Many rooms above the seventh floor look out over Portland Harbor and the price, during the week, is under $150.  She had the rest of the day, Wednesday, to recover from the flight. Rehearsal time was scheduled for Thursday morning and Friday afternoon, with concerts on Friday and Saturday evening at the Merrill Auditorium.

We said little on the drive from South Portland to the hotel.  I pointed out the sights, basically chain stores and shopping malls.  I double parked, toted the bag in and registered her.  I explained I’d be back at eight tomorrow morning to drive her to the auditorium and began to leave.  At the revolving door, I waved.  She looked like a lost dog I was abandoning on the shoulder of a remote highway.  I went back.

“Did you have anything to eat on the flight?”

She shrugged, which I would soon learn was her answer to most everything and could be interpreted as a “yes” or “no,” whatever was most reasonable.

We took her belongings up to the room.  She used the bathroom, and then we strolled down Congress Street to a Thai place with a varied menu and great prices.  Once she got some food in her, she opened up a bit in a very animated way.  I liked her.  She had a round face, pale but with muted makeup, not gaudy like the Matryoshka nesting dolls, just the right artistic touches on the cheeks, eyes and lips — idiosyncratically cute — especially when she shoveled in the noodles using her chop stick like an oar.

She had toured Arizona and New Mexico a few months ago and didn’t like it. The air was too dry, and unsophisticated audiences clapped between movements of the concertos.  While she was raised in South Korea, where temperatures were cold in winter and spring, she was nonetheless worried about dressing properly for New England this time of year.  I promised a trip to L. L Bean in Freeport if she wanted anything to keep her comfortable.