Michael Anthony Adams Jr.'s Blog, page 3

I Think I’m Ready Now

The night before I graduated from college, my parents took the family out for dinner. Afterwards, my brothers and I went out for drinks. I took the two of them to Bukowski’s, my favorite bar. It was one, dark, cozy room with a long bar to your left as you walked in, smoky tables to your right, a neon sign in the window, and either punk or metal or techno blaring out of the speakers depending on who the bartender was. That night, it was punk.

Gabe looked around a little before he led us over to a table. He seemed to be sniffing the air and finding a vague scent that he found mildly displeasing. “Nice place,” he said, but I think he was too enthralled with the idea of me graduating to really care. Otherwise, I’m sure he would have suggested that we go somewhere else.

Seth seemed to kind of like the place though. He had a hard time keeping his eyes off of two leather clad girls at the bar, but he managed to keep an air of superiority about himself. His body language implied that although he might have been there, he was better than the place.

I sat down against the wall. Gabe was across from me. Seth faced us on a perpendicular to my right and Gabe’s left.

A waitress came over to take our orders. She was blonde and cute. Seth smiled at her when she spoke. I liked it when he smiled like that. His lips curled out like the Joker’s, and his eyes lit up like he was insane. It was one expression that was entirely his own. For all their similarities, Gabe never looked like that. The waitress walked away. Seth craned his neck to watch her hips sway. Gabe laughed a little about that.

We talked until the waitress came back and set our drinks down. We raised our glasses. They met above the middle of the table in a toast to me and my future, and we didn’t even spill a drop of foam. We each took a swig of beer. I leaned back into the wall and wiped a little dribble off my lips.

We laughed about our family. Gabe and Seth reminisced about their graduations and what they’d done immediately after: how hard Seth had worked to make money; how nervous Gabe had been about whether or not he’d do well in med school.

Finally, Gabe said, “So tomorrow’s the big day?” He was smiling. His skin was still as smooth and fair as when we were children. It hardly wrinkled at all.

I looked down at my beer, narrowed my eyes, and nodded.

“And you’re gonna be coming back to New York?”

I nodded again.

Gabe stopped smiling. He took another sip, smacked his lips, and went on, more soberly than before. “I guess you’re staying with Mom and Dad, but you know you’re welcome to stay with Ariel and me until you find your own place.”

“Thanks, but I…”

Just like when we were kids, unable to be outdone, Seth broke in, “I don’t know if Mom and Dad told you, but it’s fine for you to stay in the city with me for a little while too. I could even ask around the firm to see if any positions are opening up. It would be entry level, so there wouldn’t be much money at first, but it would be enough to live on, and once you start learning how the market works, you could move up. You’re smart. I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard for you to figure out, and then you could make bank, if you know what I mean.” Seth tipped his beer towards me, and he flashed the same grin he’d grinned earlier.

I took another sip of beer, sighed, and glanced around. I didn’t know how to have that conversation right then. I nodded politely and said, “Thanks guys. Really, thanks.”

Gabe and Seth each smiled their older-brother-helping-out-the-baby smiles. Gabe leaned across the table, grabbed my arm, and said something about the benefit of family. We all drank from our glasses again.

My brothers both look exactly like our father. They both have long noses, thin faces, and full lips. If it weren’t for their differences in coloring – Seth’s dark curls and almost olive skin, Gabe’s blond hair and fair features – they could be twins. Their personalities are different as well. Seth was so cool and uncaring. Gabe was so intense and powerful.

Their oppositions formed my earliest memories. In my mind, the beginning of my life had always consisted of the two of them arguing with each other about what part I should play in their games or else each of them pulling me aside separately to give me advice about what I should or shouldn’t do. Then, they’d both disappeared, and I’d still had a lot of growing up to do.

With barely a year separating them, Gabe and Seth were the brothers. I was an only child whose link to them was spending my entire life being punished for whatever mistakes they had made when they were whatever age I was at. For Christ’s sake, they grew up in Texas. I grew up in New Jersey. I was nine years old when we moved. Gabe and Seth were seventeen and sixteen respectively. I was starting middle school when Seth left. They didn’t know me at all. I didn’t even look like them. You wouldn’t think we were related unless you saw a family photo. There were plenty of those being taken that week. We were more related than we had ever been.

I look like our mother. I always have. I have brown hair. My nose is squat. My face is round. As I get older and my metabolism slows down, I’m sure I’ll get fat. But right now, I look okay. It took me twenty-two years to realize that. Gabe and Seth seemed to have each known it about themselves from the day they were born. At least, that’s what the awkward pre-pubescent me had always thought as I grew up, aghast at the powers that were my brothers.

And because of that, they had had as much authority over my childhood as any adult. Even more because their proximity to me had instilled a certain awe that could never be replicated by any of the giants whose stomping grounds were well outside my sphere of play.

So I wanted to understand them. So I acted as them. As soon as I entered the theater when I was in high school, I was always one of them onstage because there was nothing spectacular about me.

Gabe smiled proudly, “Mom and Dad are so happy you’re gonna be close to the family again. I’m happy about it.”

I politely acquiesced with what had become my habitual nod.

“Yeah,” Seth laughed, “It’ll be nice to tour around the city with my baby brother.”

My face reddened, and I shifted around uncomfortably.

Gabe cast a mistrustful glance at Seth. Seth shrugged, What? It was a replay of my childhood. Growing serious again, Gabe looked back at me and asked, “So what are you planning on doing in the city?”

I sat up a little straighter. “I don’t know. I’ve got a lot of friends who have been there for a while, and I’m hoping they can help get me some parts in some shows. I’ve got a pretty good résumé already, but to get the kinds of parts I want, I really need to do more work in New York.”

Now, it was my brothers’ turns to nod.

Gabe cleared his throat and straightened his pants. “I meant, what are you gonna do for work?”

That was the conversation that I really didn’t know how to have. I stared at my beer. Tilting my head to the side, I slowly answered, “I’m not really too worried about it. I figure I’ll see what happens.”

My brothers exchanged a glance. Gabe pulled himself closer to the table, closer to me. He rested his arms around his beer. “You know, Carey,” he began, “New York isn’t a place where you see what happens.”

I answered that one with my nod. It was the safest response.

“It’s a tough place to live,” Seth agreed. My mouth dropped open, and I turned to him. I never expected him to take Gabe’s side. Realizing what I was thinking, Seth smoothed his hands down his pants. He chuckled. “It’s not Boston, you know. It takes money to live in the city.”

My tone grew a little irritated. I didn’t mean for it to, it just did. “It takes money to live in Boston, too, Seth, but I’ve done just fine.” Now, if there was one thing I had learned by the time I was four, it was never to give Seth anything that he could perceive as a challenge. And that was exactly what I had just done.

Seth narrowed his eyes and tightened his lips to make the face that he always made right before he hit me when we were kids, but he relaxed quickly. He knew I was frustrated with Gabe. He was always frustrated with Gabe. It must have been nice for him to see someone else getting grilled by the oldest for a change.

Gabe looked concerned. “Mom and Dad won’t be helping you out anymore. You’re more than welcome to stay with any of us for a little while, Carey, but not forever.”

“I wasn’t planning on staying with mom and dad or either of you guys.”

They were both shocked at my assertion. Gabe lifted his pint off the table, leaned back into his chair, and took another sip. Seth moved closer to me.

Blinking a few times, Gabe asked, “So where were you planning on staying?”

“With a friend of mine in Brooklyn.”

“So you’ll be living with your friend?”

“For a little while, I guess. Until I get my own place.”

“You can’t get your own place if you don’t work.”

“I’m gonna work. I’ll probably wait tables or something.”

“You can’t live in Manhattan these days on a waiter’s salary, Carey. I’m sure Seth can tell you that.” Gabe turned to Seth who had been distracted by one of the girls in leather standing up at the bar, but as soon as he saw Gabe set his jaw, he came back to our conversation. He nodded. I wondered if he knew what he was agreeing to.

“I was planning on living in Brooklyn anyway,” I said.

“Even Brooklyn isn’t affordable anymore. Seth can tell you that too.”

Seth nodded again.

“Look, Gabe,” I was being diplomatic. I could tell that Gabe’s concern was turning into frustration. “I know plenty of people who are doing it. Things are tight for them, but they make it work. I can too.” I didn’t really know how to get myself out of the conversation.

“And what are their lives like?” Gabe was getting angry. I’d seen him act like this with Seth when we were younger, but he’d never used this tone of voice with me.

“They do just fine. They’re happy.”

“Happy that they don’t have a future? That they aren’t giving anything back to the people who care about them? Carey, you’re not a kid anymore. These are the things you have to think about now. You have responsibilities, responsibilities to your family and yourself. Where do you want to be in five years? In ten years?”

What was I supposed to say? I could tell him that I wanted to be an actor, but that wouldn’t be a sufficient answer. So I did the one thing I never thought I would ever do in my entire life: I rolled my eyes at Gabe. I didn’t mean to. It just happened, and as soon as I did it, I wanted to apologize, but…

“Forget about it.” Gabe finished his beer in one gulp. Setting the sudsy glass back on the table, he said, “I’m gonna go to the bathroom.” He stood up and stretched. I nodded in the direction he should go, and he sulked away.

I felt bad. I knew he was disappointed in me. He had helped me out a lot with money while I was in school, and I guess he figured that once I got out I’d repay my debt to him by paying something to somebody else. I was going to do that, just in my own way.

As soon as he left, Seth pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. “I hate the way he looks at me when I smoke,” he admitted. After taking one out, he set the pack on the table and nodded to let me know that I could have one. I thanked him, pulled one out, and let him light it for me. The waitress came by again. Seth ordered another round for us.

He grinned as she walked over to the bar. He watched her place our order, and he turned back to me. “Don’t let Gabe get to you,” he said. A haze of smoke clouded and dispersed around his face. “He’s been pulling that shit with me for forever. ‘Why don’t you start a family? Why don’t you move back out to Jersey?’” With a flick of his wrist and a purse of his lips, Seth waved away everything Gabe had ever said. He laughed. “What do you expect? He’s a doctor. It’s just the way he is.”

I snorted a short laugh, flicked my ash on the floor, and leaned into the wall.

I was glad to be alone with Seth. My guilt was already dripping away. He always stuck up for me. Granted he was the only one who ever got really angry with me, too. But he always told Gabe that I should get to do whatever I wanted to do. Thank God for Seth.

Seth finished his beer. His smile disappeared. He deepened his voice to add, “I am serious about the money, though.”

I quickly tensed my body. Seth must have sensed my reaction because he laughed apologetically. “Come on, Carey. Forget about all that shit Gabe said. I’m just talking about you doing what you want to do.”

“That is what I want to do, Seth,” I whispered.

He threw his hands up in mock surrender. “Okay, okay. Far be it from me to smash your dreams of being a starving artist in the big city.” He laughed and leaned closer to me. His dark eyes shined in the dismal light. “But you know it’s not the nineteenth century anymore. Hell, this time next year, it won’t even be the twentieth century, and if that whole artist thing didn’t go out with the invention of capitalism, it definitely ran straight for the door when e-commerce came around.” He laughed again. I didn’t. “Carey, I’m just saying that you’re young. You wanna be able to live. You’ll be in New York City. Don’t you want to eat at a restaurant instead of scraping change together for a slice of pizza? You should be able to go to clubs and bars that have more attractions than the sixty year old drunk falling out of his chair. I’m not saying that you should give up acting, just get yourself some capital, then worry about making art. Christ, if you do things right, you could live off the interest from your investments alone, and with the elasticity that the market has these days, you could retire by the time you’re thirty. I’m serious. I know people who do it. Me, I love it too much, but you, you’d have all the time in the world to act. Plus,” he pulled his chair closer to me, and he whispered conspiratorially, “You don’t wanna have to hustle some little hottie in a cab all the way back to Brooklyn.” He laughed again. I couldn’t figure out what he thought was so funny. “I mean, Brooklyn might be kind of cool these days, but if you wanna wait tables, you’re gonna be living in the ghetto, man. And none of the city’s finest wanna bare their sweet stuff in the hood.” He raised his eyebrow and nudged my shoulder.

I didn’t answer.

Seth leaned back into his chair. “All right. I’m just saying that if you wanna live in New York, then you should live in New York…”

“I will be living in New York, Seth, just a different one from the one you live in,” I said, and I glared at him.

Seth didn’t think there was a New York other than the one he lived in. His smile disappeared. He gave me the look. He leaned towards me, but I didn’t cower away from him. I waited to see what he would do or say. We were two grown men in a bar. What was going to happen? Was he going to spit on me? Smack me in the face? Even if he did, for the first time ever, I wasn’t scared. I guessed I’d have to spit back at him or maybe even hit him. The bouncers would break us up before Seth hurt me, but I wasn’t so sure that Seth could hurt me anymore…

Right then, the waitress brought our beers. Seth had to smile at her as she leaned over the table. “You’re lucky,” he whispered to me.

I didn’t believe him, and I didn’t care.

He waved me off as if I’d actually offered to pay, and he pulled a money clip out of his pocket. He counted the bills out slowly, mouthing each amount and glancing up to see if the waitress’s eyes lit up at the size of his wad. He gave her a two dollar tip on each beer. She smiled as he handed the money to her. He winked at me. His smile curled wider and wider as he leaned towards her. She pulled the money from his hand, and she walked away.

I was embarrassed.

Seth picked his beer up off the table. He took a sip, but before wiping his lips, he leaned over to mash his half-smoked cigarette out in the ashtray.

I looked up quickly. Gabe had come back. Glaring disappointedly at both of us, he slid back into his seat. I was trembling, but I didn’t stop smoking.

He looked at the fresh beer in front of him. “You ordered this for me?”

Seth nodded.

Gabe looked around the bar. Then, he said slowly, “You guys figure anything out while I was gone?”

Seth laughed.

We sat silently for a little while. My brothers were practically ignoring me. Eventually, Gabe asked Seth what he thought the future held for the market. Seth spouted out a few theories about off-the-charts growth and wireless technologies or something like that. I didn’t know anything about any of it.

Pretty soon, the second beers began dwindling down to nothing. Gabe said he was going to take off as soon as he was done. Seth said that he should probably head back to the hotel too. They asked me what I was going to do, and I told them that I thought I’d sit at the bar for a little while longer. Gabe nodded politely. Seth didn’t even look at me. They picked up their conversation where they’d left off. Pretty soon, they were standing up to leave. Seth murmured something about how goddamn early Boston closed, and they each gave me a hug. But the tension never disappeared.

Once they left, I ordered another beer.

I glanced around the bar. The gay bartender was flirting with some young guy who had come in all alone. An old drunk was unsuccessfully striking up a conversation with the washed-out woman next to him. A group of hipsters on their way to some club were trying to figure out what the best round of shots would be to get them pumped for the evening. The smell of spilled beer and stale smoke and fresh sweat stuck in my head. I inhaled deeply. It smelled nice.

The waitress came back. “You’re not leaving with your friends?” she asked.

“They’re my brothers,” I said.

“Really? You don’t look anything like them.”

“I know.”

I asked her if I could bum a cigarette from her. She smiled at me with a sweeter smile than she ever gave to Seth, but I didn’t care like he did, and she pulled a pack out of her pocket and handed me one.

I lit the cigarette with the fat, little candle on the table. Smoke streamed toward the dim lights above everybody’s head. My own puff swirled through the air on its own for a bit before mixing in with what everybody else was exhaling. I leaned back into the wall. I could smell the nervousness from my conversation with my brothers sweating through the armpits of my shirt. “I’m through with being Gabe and Seth onstage,” I said. I thought that maybe I should spill some beer so that I could be even more of a piece of everything that was going on around me.

From my story collection, Welcome to the Modern World, Charlie.

Carpe Diem

What should I do? What could I do?
What can anyone ever do
other than to love and to live?

We must love pitter-patter rain
as it beats upon rich, green leaves
of towering forests of trees
that filter the sun into dots
of light upon the earthen soil
beneath our stomping stepping feet.

We must love the powerful form
of the cat as it slinks through our
backyards on its soft and lithe paws
with its shining coat drawing the
sun into each follicle to
reflect its own darkened light back.

We must love the beautiful form
of humans with our radiant
skins covering sublime muscles
that protect our fragile souls from
the pain that surrounds every
physical action – thought movement.

We must live life! We must shout loud!
From eternal depths of our souls,
we must shout out that we are free.
We must be free that we may live.
We shed our clothes, hair, and our skins,
our bones, and all else but our souls.

For in our souls, there we are free.
There, hidden deep inside ourselves
we are all the same, with the same
fears, loves, joys, insecurities,
and with the same need to live life.
Yes, we must live, and we must love.

We must not leave a stone unturned;
we must not leave a thought unthought.
Leaving no action untaken,
never, not ever, never must
we turn from the paths that we have
chosen for ourselves…  For Ourselves!

From my poetry collection, At the Side of the Road.

Godzilla As a Disco King

Riding in the back of a slow-moving pickup truck, I was sitting atop the open tailgate, dangling my feet over the end, dragging my toes along the road ribboning out behind me. Of course, dragging my feet along the rough concrete would mess up my shoes, but that wasn’t the first thing on my mind. We were rounding the corner in a suburban neighborhood away from our drummer, Mark’s place and toward our rehearsal space. We rehearsed in our bassist’s garage every night. His parents didn’t like the noise. They especially didn’t like me cursing into the microphone. I’m sure his neighbors didn’t either, but I didn’t care. I was 16 and oblivious to their complaints.

That afternoon, in the back of that pickup truck, I was contemplating the lyrics I’d been writing for that band. We called the band Broken Chains of Segregation, BCS for short. I wanted to write words for kids like me, kids whose parents had split up, kids whose first stepdad had been a nightmare, kids who loved this world more than life itself but couldn’t find much of a reason to stay here. I wanted to write words my peers could relate to, words that would mean something to them, that would move them to feel something regardless of what our music sounded like. I wanted to write lyrics about love and alienation and politics and disappointment. The wind blew softly against my cheeks. I flipped my hair out of my eyes, and I felt an overwhelming sense of identification with all the lost children of my generation.

In January, a year and a half earlier, I’d ran away with my friend, Kevin, to live across the street from the Park Lee housing projects at Kevin’s uncle’s place. My other friend, Shannon, had stayed in touch with my mom to let her know I was okay, maybe not safe, but okay. Having got sober already herself at her boyfriend’s behest, she’d been urging me to quit drinking and doing drugs as well.

Those nights I spent on the streets with Kevin were the scariest of my life. It was March, and when we ran away, it was so cold, I was afraid we might freeze to death. We’d been drunk when we’d left my mom’s home. We hadn’t put much thought into what we were doing. Kevin had called his mom and told her he’d been arrested for acid that night. We’d each dropped a hit, but it never kicked in. We must have got ripped off. Kevin’s mom sent the police out to check up on him. Since Kevin was already on probation, we didn’t want to take a chance on having a cop find us in our intoxicated states. Even if that intoxication was only alcohol. We were underage after all. We packed some bags, threw on our leather jackets and snuck out under the cover of night.

We hiked to some construction site and set up camp. We built a fire, but neither of us being outdoorsmen, it didn’t burn very well. The following morning, we got in touch with a friend of ours who owned a car. He drove us out to Kevin’s uncle’s place down on Jeff Davis Highway across from the Park Lee apartments on the way from Richmond to Petersburg. I stayed out there for only a couple more nights. I don’t know how long Kevin stayed. I got clean shortly after that and lost touch with him.

A year and a half later, I spent every night in our band’s bassist’s garage, going through the set list we had yet to perform live for anybody other than a handful of four or five of our friends. Eventually, we wound up showcasing our music for the closest thing to a Richmond scenester we knew. In the fashion of contemporary hardcore dancing, he moved like Godzilla as a disco king. He thought we were good. We could be playing any number of local clubs, he told us. We were exhilarated.

After playing all our songs and working out some new ones, we’d all head down to the James River where we’d take off our clothes and swim naked beneath the moonlight. Boys and girls together, our only rule was nothing sexual could happen while we were naked in public in our little group. The nudity wasn’t meant to be enticing. It was our way of accepting our burgeoning bodies. The first night we did it, Mark, two of our female friends and I sat in a circle having normal conversations about our social insecurities. It was invigorating.

The inspiration for spending every night of that summer naked came from this one guy a couple of our crew knew. He was a community college student who was a little older than us and slightly overweight. To learn how to accept his body as he imagined it looked to others, he brought another friend of ours with him to the local mall one afternoon. Our other friend waited out front in a beat-up, old pick-up truck. This guy snuck into the mall’s bathroom, took off all his clothes, threw the bathroom door open, shouted—Woo-hoo! and ran the length of the food court in the nude. We were impressed.

That summer, after my mom’s second divorce, she and I moved into a new home. The place looked like it hadn’t been redecorated since the 1970s. I peeled wallpaper off the kitchen walls while listening to my brand new GBH CD—Church of the Truly Warped.

Right before my mom and I moved into that place, I was standing in the music room of our old home. Mark was up there with me. So was my best friend, Shawn. Back then, Shawn drove me everywhere. He wasn’t my chauffeur. We were simply inseparable. Neither Mark nor I had our licenses yet. We were old enough to drive. Something simply held each of us back from taking that step. I’m sure the reasons for each of us were different. I told Shawn it was because not having a license was my last excuse for not asking girls out on dates. It was me trying to hold onto the innocence of my childhood for a little while longer. Today, I don’t think that was true at all.

My music room was a single room with a wall of mirrors on the second floor of a modern home. The room was all mine. I set up my massive component stereo system in it. The three walls that weren’t mirrored were covered in posters of punk rock and heavy metal bands—Sex Pistols, Anthrax, Suicidal Tendencies, The Ramones.

I was manically spouting off to Mark what I pictured BCS being. “I want this band to be us, man. But I want it to be us totally free. So, we can do whatever we want to do. So, we can be whoever we want to be. And I want to show everybody else on this planet they can do that, too. They can do whatever they want. They can be whoever they want. Nothing holds us back, man. Nothing holds us back other than the lies we’re fed, the lies we’ve learned, the lies we’ve inherited and the lies we tell ourselves. I mean, it’s a lie we can’t do whatever we want to do. It’s a lie we can’t be whoever we want to be. It’s a lie we’re not free. Don’t believe them when they tell you you’re not free. I’m free, man. And so are you. That’s what BCS is. It’s our chance to be free, to be exactly who we are. It’s our way to show this world we figured out what it takes to be ourselves. And they can figure that out, too. Every kid, every adult, every person on this planet. Because that’s what it’s all about. To be yourself honestly. It’s just nobody sees that yet. But we can show them, man. That’s our job. With this band, with BCS, we can show them what it takes to be free…”

~ ~ ~

“Remember, you’re free. Nobody can tell you what to do. Nobody can tell you how to be. You are you, yourself, your own person. So, Everybody Dance Now!” I shouted. Matt, BCS’s guitarist, played the first few notes of C&C Music Factory’s classic Gonna Make You Sweat. With a four count on the high hat, we broke into our first song of the evening.

The church basement we were performing in became a churning, swirling mass of sweaty teenagers’ arms and hands and heads and legs and feet. In the darkness, the mostly high school audience appeared as a single body, an undulating wave rolling in and out. The ocean of youths roared closer to where we stood on the floor. Then, they poured away again before they could crash into us and scatter our equipment across the cheap, laminate flooring. I leaped up and down, rocked back and forth, shouted and screamed above the crunching guitar, chugging bass and smashing drums, “1, 2, 3… Try to make a slave of me. When will they ever see? I’ll still remain free.”

This particular show was a benefit for my high school chapter of Amnesty International. All the proceeds were going to that organization, which would then funnel the money out to help the greater cause. I can’t remember how much money we made that night. Broken Chains of Segregation was the headliner. Usually, all our proceeds went into a band fund, which we then held onto for recording dates, stickers and other merchandise. We funded two albums that way. Mark, the most trustworthy in our opinion, kept all the money in cash in an envelope in his closet.

Having joined Amnesty International at the end of my junior year of high school, I’d organized this show. Back then, we always called our music performances “shows” not “concerts.” Concerts were for rock stars, which none of us wanted to be. Food Not Bombs had a table set up at this show, too. It was staffed by the vocalist for Richmond’s biggest punk band of the era, Avail. After we played, I asked him what he thought of us. He’d never heard us before. He thought we were good, but he was only listening to country back then. I walked away disheartened. Avail was on the same East Bay record label Green Day had graduated from. I wonder if he had any idea what his approval would have meant to me. Instead, he was busy informing the suburban kids about the needs of the homeless in the city.

We played hard. We played fast. The crowd was whipped into a frenzy. Those kids were starting to rip the place apart. A police officer who had been hired by the church to work security for the show approached me between songs. Towering over me in his hat and uniform, he rested his hands on his gun belt and shouted above the din the high school audience was making, “You need to tell these kids to calm down. Or else I’m going to have to pull the plug.”

As he walked away, I stared in disbelief. I started pacing circles around our makeshift stage. “All right…” I said into the microphone. “We all have to calm down. Otherwise, they’re going to cut us off.” I was afraid the audience wouldn’t get to hear everything we’d come to perform for them that night. Nothing was more important to me than that those kids heard us, our music, our words.

“But you told us we were free!” somebody shouted back at me from the darkness in the distance. A snicker rippled through the crowd. I turned red beneath the muted lights shining down on me. I was reminded of how at a house show we’d played a couple weeks before, I’d become so aware of my feet and the way I was standing. I couldn’t help imagining how I must have looked to anybody who was watching. All I could see was me looking foolish.

That night when I got home, as I lay down to sleep, I reflected on the rage those kids had unleashed to the noise we were making, and I imagined what it would be like to perform for audiences like that every night. I pictured myself standing on progressively larger and larger stages witnessing progressively larger and larger versions of the violence the police officer had asked me to please calm down earlier that night. I couldn’t calm those kids down. Once the music started, the audience had a life entirely its own. The audience decided when it would stop. The audience decided how far things would go. The reality of the situation wore me out.

Ever since I was a little kid, all I’d ever wanted to be was a rock star. I’d spent over a decade prancing around living rooms and bedrooms, pretending I was inspiring and inciting audiences. Now, I’d had a taste of what that stardom might mean, and I didn’t like its flavor. There was already a kid who called himself our biggest fan. He was disappointed when he met me. He didn’t think I looked punk enough to be BCS’s lead singer. I didn’t like the responsibility my newfound local fame had bestowed upon me. I didn’t want to be the center of attention.

I wanted to retreat and forget any of this had ever happened. I didn’t want to have ever started a band. I didn’t want anybody to have ever seen me perform. I didn’t want to have fans who knew who I was when I didn’t know them. I wrapped a pillow around my head. In the darkness, I wanted the world to be quiet again forever. Like it was right then.

~ ~ ~

The night of my high school graduation, I had other things on my mind. I was broken up with Diana, the girl I’d been dating since the end of junior year, and my heart felt as if a herd of elephants were trampling upon it. Diana had had another boyfriend back home in Minneapolis the whole time we’d been dating. It had become too much for me to bear. I gave her an ultimatum: Do you want to be with him, or do you want to be with me? She chose him. They had a history together, which she’d explained to me the first night we’d ever hung out alone when she was babysitting her neighbors’ kids. That’s why I never called her my girlfriend. We weren’t “going out.” We were only dating.

My dad and grandmother were in town from California, and Broken Chains of Segregation had a show to play. I invited the two of them into the city of Richmond to watch us perform. They’d never seen me on stage in any capacity, neither in a band nor in a play. I was excited to reveal to them how powerful our live shows were.

Waiting for the two of them to arrive, I kept putting off when we’d start. Every other band on the bill performed before us. My dad and grandmother never made it to that abandoned warehouse. It was probably for the best. There was a DIY aesthetic to that night that neither of their suburban sensibilities would have appreciated. Decrepit art installations adorned the walls. A hand-painted banner hung on the bricks behind Mark. My dad admitted he turned around because he figured he had to be in the wrong neighborhood. The whole area looked a little dodgy to him. It was the same neighborhood where I’d spent the past three years of my life. I lied and told him he must have been in the East End while we were playing in the West End. He looked relieved.

When we did start playing, I was already upset about my dad not showing up. To make matters worse, the whole place emptied out before we took the stage. The city of Richmond had recently instituted an 11pm 18-and-under curfew. We didn’t go onstage until 11:03. The following week somebody reminded me about the curfew. That made sense out of why nobody wanted to see us when we’d always been popular before. But the damage had been done. I was hurt and enraged. I didn’t have a girlfriend, and neither family nor fans wanted to see my band perform that night.

After that show, I argued with the empty air inside my car. I begged the lonely night to tell me why nobody cared about my band anymore, to explain to me what I’d done wrong to make it so Diana had never been able to be my girlfriend and to tell me where my dad had been that whole night. Nobody answered. All the excitement of the past couple years of playing in bands crystallized into an icy shard sticking straight into my heart. I didn’t want anything to do with Richmond, Virginia or its hardcore scene anymore. I didn’t want to play in dead end punk bands in some nowhere town. That night, I went to bed dejected.

I woke up late the following morning. My dad and grandmother were already at my mom’s, sitting out on the back porch with the rest of my family. The mail had arrived. I had an acceptance letter waiting for me from a small liberal arts college in Maryland I’d already ruled out as a place I’d go to school. I didn’t want to leave Richmond. There was nothing for me in the world beyond my own little hardcore scene. Besides, my band had two records coming out that year on two different labels. If I even went to school, I was going to stay in Richmond and go to VCU. But after the night before, with depression still rattling around my mind, I told my family I was going to accept that offer to start school in Maryland in the fall. That’s exactly what I did. I never even sent the DATs to either of those labels to produce those two records. I was so ready to leave my entire life behind.

By Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.
From his memoir, Disorder: An Avant-Garde Memoir of Psychosis, Healing & Love

Eternal Recurrence

Life is mute – its tongue
cut out by the hands of All.

Mind chatters incessantly – bound
as tight as the curse of Time.

Her fingers caress three skulls –
cigarette burns surround her
palms… I feel the same on
my lips, tongue: Death seeps,

drips into the deep water
rising above six feet:
jackets are required, suits
so we don’t appear naked.

I crawled back into
the tomb out of which
I first issued: green
and new, alive in my…

mind chatters incessantly – wound
as tight as the clock of Time.

Life is mute – its lungs
breathing breath for All.

By Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.
From his poetry collection, Recipe for a Future Theogony.

Mitch and Michelle

“Oh God, will you please hurry up,” Mitch whispered into the chilly November air. With the words, a mild mist of breath rose off of his lips. When he was a little kid and that used to happen, he would move his fingers up and pretend he was smoking a cigarette, but he wasn’t a kid anymore. His breath disappeared before he noticed it.

He anxiously tapped his fingers on the rock he was sitting on. The rapids roared all around him. They raged in an overlap of white water that consumed itself quicker than it consumed everything else, but for now, Mitch was safe and dry on the rock.

The bank across from him was stark and lifeless. In a vain attempt to puncture the low-lying, gray clouds to let the sun stream through to warm the world, the leafless trees reached their naked limbs into the sky, but the clouds were bunched too closely together. The branches clattered in a bone-like rattle beneath the wind’s breath.

Mitch was so far away from it that every gust was a dying man’s sigh. “I’d rather be over there,” he mumbled, but he couldn’t get there. His side of the rock dropped into nothing other than the rapids. He’d gone as far as he could. The path was on the other side.

Turning a little, he looked over his shoulder at where he had come from. The wind had streaked his wet footprints across the stone surface, but they still held their beaded shape enough to tell that they had come from him. Farther away, a few steps from where he had clambered up from the river’s lower rocks, Michelle was carefully picking her way along the jagged path.

She was walking on water. In the wind, her hair streamed off to one side. Trying to figure out where to go from every step, she paused and shook her head. The desolate bank behind her was no different from the one across from Mitch, but she was a splotch of reality on the dismal scene. The color of her clothes and the curves of her body added a dimension to the world. Her slow motion invigorated the frigid landscape. Mitch spun back around and tried burying his face in his sweatshirt’s neck.

She stamped her feet behind him on the rock. “That last step was almost impossible,” she said. “The water was rushing across it so fast I almost asked you to come back to the other side with me.”

Mitch nodded slowly.

Michelle’s damp tennis shoes squeaked as she came closer to him. Mitch brought his shoulders up and tried disappearing into himself before she got there, but there was nowhere for him to go.

Michelle was standing and shivering next to him. He didn’t look up at her. He knew how she was looking down at him. It would be the same way she had looked at him after he had kissed her when he had gotten off the train. She tilted her head to the side, knit her eyebrows together, and pursed her lips. Mitch thought she was so beautiful when she looked like that, when she was studying or thinking about something serious, but that was before. He had been gone a long time, much longer than the time had actually been.

Exhaling heavily, Michelle sat down next to him. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t think he could. He wasn’t sure what would happen if he did.

She bumped her shoulder against his. “So what’s up?” she asked.

Mitch gazed out at where they couldn’t get to. He shook his head and mumbled, “Nothin’.”

“Somethin’ must be up,” Michelle went on. “You’ve been actin’ like a freak ever since I picked you up.”

Mitch shrugged and fiddled with the folds in his jeans.

“All right,” Michelle said. For the first time, she sounded a little annoyed.

With each of them sitting on their own little piece of the rock, thinking their own private thoughts, and wishing that something about right then could be different, they were silent for a little while.

Finally, Mitch stammered, “I met somebody else.”

He didn’t look at Michelle when he said it, but he could feel her lean toward the water. He could sense her tighten her jaw as her stomach twisted into a knot. He knew that her mouth was drying out and her eyes were filling with tears because the same things were happening to him.

“I figured that,” she mumbled.

He looked at her. “Why didn’t you say anything then?” he asked.

“What was I supposed to say? I figured if you wanted to tell me, you would, and you did.” She turned away from Mitch and stared down the path the rapids were flowing along. She sniffled, raised her shoulders, caught them, and slowly dropped them. “So what do you wanna do now?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “I guess we should break up.”

Michelle nodded, “If that’s what you want.” The wind carried her voice away to drown it beneath the rapids.

“You don’t think we should?”

Michelle turned back around. Her eyes were almost ready to overflow. She was looking in her boyfriend’s direction, but she wasn’t looking at him. “I think it’s up to you,” she said.

“Why’s it up to me?”

“Because you’re the one who met somebody else.”

Mitch looked down at the rock. He shook his head. “I can’t make that choice.”

“You have to. It’s not mine to make. I still love you.”

“Even after this?”

“It doesn’t change the way I feel. It just hurts.”

“If it was the other way around, I’d break up with you.”

“I know. But it’s not that way. It’s this way.”

Mitch dropped his head into his hands. Why won’t you just break up with me? he thought. “I don’t know, Michelle. I just don’t know.”

Michelle nodded. Her voice cracked as she spoke, “Well, call me when you figure it out.” She stood up to leave.

Without raising his head, Mitch reached up and grabbed her arm. Her thick sweater trapped her body heat. Her skin couldn’t warm his wind-blasted hand. “Please don’t go away,” he begged. Tightening his fingers, he added, “Not yet.”

Michelle stood still for a second. Mitch listened to the rapids. She sat back down. He let go of her. It was nice to know she was still there.

They didn’t look at each other. They didn’t say anything to each other. Feeling the distance widen between them because the distance shouldn’t have been there at all, they sat there.

Mitch shifted around a little. He looked up at the sky. “I didn’t expect you to say that,” he said.

“What did you expect?”

“I don’t know.”

“You figured I’d cry and ask you why?”

Mitch shook his head, No, but that was a lie.

“Or you figured I’d yell at you and leave you alone?”

Mitch shook his head, but he was still lying.

“I thought you knew me better than that by now.”

“I do,” Mitch mumbled.

“You think I didn’t know something like this would happen? I mean, you’re meeting new people all the time…”

“It’s not like I met somebody new. I just kinda hooked up with this girl. That’s all.”

Michelle straightened up. She looked at him with that expression that he had always thought was so beautiful. “Then why’d you tell me about it?”

“I don’t know. I just figured you should know.”

“That I should know or that I should break up with you?”

Mitch raised one shoulder to show that he didn’t know the answer.

Michelle slouched down. She drooped her head. “So you wanna break up?” she asked weakly.

Mitch didn’t move.

“You wanna break up with me for some girl you don’t even know.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“What did you say then? Will you please just tell me something?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think it would be this hard.”

“To get me to break up with you? I’ve waited for you for two months. Because I thought you were worth it. I still think you’re worth it.”

Mitch burst into a flurry of nervous motion. He started looking around frantically for something to throw into the river – a twig, a pebble, a scrap of paper, anything that would break the endless surface of white noise – but there was nothing there other than him and Michelle. “Jesus! Will you just leave me alone!”

Michelle jumped up. She was trembling. Her face was twitching. “What are you gonna do?” she asked hesitantly.

“I’ll figure it out,” Mitch whispered as he dropped his head into his palms.

“I don’t know what the hell is wrong with you,” Michelle said. She turned around and started walking away. Mitch didn’t try to stop her this time. She might have been crying.

He was alone in the middle of the river. In the distance, Michelle’s car crunched through the gravel parking lot and zoomed down the winding road that led back to both of their homes. Mitch kept sitting there.

His mind wandered back to the other night, to a drunken party, and to Cora. He thought about how soft her short, dark hair was. Still smelling her Japanese perfume’s aroma, he inhaled deeply. He grinned at the recollection of her small body’s smooth curves winding around his.

“That was worth it,” he whispered. “That was what I wanted.”

His grin spread up his cheeks to crinkle his eyes. Snorting a short laugh, he looked back down at the river. The memory warmed him enough that he didn’t feel the wind’s bite.

As he sat there feeling pleased with himself, the evening’s bright colors began bleeding through the gray day. The air’s texture changed. The clouds took on the rich luster of a fall night. Beneath the sky’s elastic clarity, the bank across from him transformed. The wind picked up. It sent its fingers to prod through his clothes to try and touch his bones. He shivered.

He started trying to figure out how he was going to get home now that Michelle was gone. Thinking about that reminded him of his parents, of saying goodbye to them when they dropped him off at college. He remembered saying goodbye to Michelle as well. He remembered kissing her in his driveway. He held her close as tears trickled out of the corners of her eyes. He had cried too, but not until after she was gone. When she was still standing there, he had buried his face in her hair’s pleasant smell.

“I missed you so much, Michelle,” he whispered to nothing and to nobody.

He traced his fingers along the rock. The creases in his skin got caught on the jagged surface as memory after memory, things he hadn’t thought about at all over the past two months, washed over him.

He remembered the time when Michelle’s parents had gone out of town. He’d stayed at her house that weekend. One night, he’d laid a comforter down for them to lie on to watch a movie. He’d smoothed it across the hardwood floor. He’d pushed down every ripple in the fabric so that they could lie on something soft. Michelle had stood above him the whole time. He’d felt her there, watching over him, and he’d felt something inside himself. As he spread that blanket across the floor, he’d realized that he’d found something, some sort of security that steadied him. He was completely in love with Michelle, and he never wanted that to end.

“That was stupid,” Mitch whispered to the empty night descending upon the river. The wind answered with a gust that rattled the trees into a chorus sounding like cicadas. Mitch hugged himself tightly. It was almost completely dark now.

He ran his fingers across the contours of his face. His bone structure felt hollower than it ever had before. “She should be home by now,” he whispered. “And if she isn’t, she will be by the time I get somewhere to call her,” he told himself. “And then I can talk to her, and I can fix all this.”

Nodding his head, he stood up. He turned around distractedly and walked to the other side of the rock, but when he got there, he froze.

The last step, the one that Michelle had complained about, was gone. Searching the river, hoping that, in the darkness, he had simply misplaced his memory, Mitch turned around frantically, but the rock wasn’t there. Nothing other than the river, dark now beneath the darker sky, surrounded him.

“The tide must have risen,” he whispered. The rock beneath him didn’t feel solid anymore. The river that constantly raged against it, chipping away at it, had finally dissolved it into itself. Numbed from vertigo, scared he might fall, Mitch sat down. “I’m stuck,” he admitted. “I’ll be stuck out here all night.”

It would get cold, too, colder than he was certain he could live through. He wouldn’t be able to sleep. If he did, alone in his sweatshirt, he might freeze. He would have to stay up at least until the first hints of day peeked through the clouds, and even then, he might still be stuck for hours. The loneliness of his thoughts and his feelings might drive him insane. His parents would be terrified. “What did I do?” he wondered.

A dark, waterlogged branch, battered by and drowning in the waves, floated past him. “Jesus, what the hell am I doing out here?” he wondered. Nobody answered. He started to cry.

By Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.
From his story collection, Welcome to the Modern World, Charlie.

More Sense than Existence

It’s not what we do that makes us strong;
rather, it’s doing what we don’t.

Lost in a world I’ve never seen
in the daylight. A beat
pulses through my radio, throbs
in my guts, in my soul, attacks
my mind with night’s madness…
I tuned in closer to the channel.

It’s not what we know that makes us wise;
rather, it’s knowing what we don’t.

Words trickled off the curled tip
of her tongue… so young. I
leaned away from her. My sight
traced the curve of her neckline
down to the food of my youth.
I closed my mind and saw the truth.

It’s not who we are that makes us unique;
rather, it’s saying who we aren’t.

Alone in the park, a crowd
of others swirled around us
as we laid bare our souls, stripped
away the molds, and got to the heart
of the issues tormenting us. Complete,
we disappeared back into the mass.

It’s not where we are that takes us home;
rather, it’s being where we aren’t.

I turned off the lights, wrote
on my body your mystery. The sun
returned. With it came sight.
I saw myself differently, read
the words out loud. Suddenly,
sound made more sense than existence.

By Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.
From his poetry collection, Indigo Glow.

To hear Ursprung Collective’s interpretation of this poem, click here.

She Says

The sweet scents swell
a fever in my brain,
a maelstrom for pain,
a shower of cleansing
water to water the seeds
of passion swelling,
but still buried,
inside of me.

In my dream, a lion’s mane
adorned the shaggy neck
of a wicked wolf who snarled,
who snapped at my heels
as I walked down the street
feeling the beat
pulsing life
through my organs.

I want to wrap my arms
around this whole city,
hold this place as close
to my heart as I can,
feel it beat the pulse
of ten million
people doing
people things.

By Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.
From his poetry collection, The Tree Outside My Window.

Check out Ursprung Collective’s rendition of this poem here.

Highway Poem

It’s hard to reach you when this highway shakes my hand,
and it’s hard to see when this world flies past so fast,
and it’s hard to talk above the wind ruffling your hair,
and it’s hard to care when everything will always change.

Sometimes I want this trip to stop –
just settle down and let me breathe my life
because I think I saw a flower blurred outside,
and I want to steal some time to steal a look at it.

I need to stop this trip to step outside and smell a scent –
I need to stop this car to stretch my legs and see the sights –
I need to stop my mind to let it simply sit –
because I need to stop my life and take a look at that flower again.

By Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.
From his poetry collection, At the Side of the Road.

A Thunderclap and a Crash of Lightning

Still today, whenever I enter Virginia from 95 South in Maryland, I notice the blue sign with a red cardinal sitting in the corner on a dogwood branch: Welcome to Virginia, it says. That was the same sign my mom and I took a picture of from the highway as we drove down to Richmond for the first time after the memorial service for my grandfather in Baltimore. His ashes were scattered from a helicopter over a lake. My mom still visits that lake sometimes today. It was 1988. I was 11 years old. My mom planned to marry my first stepdad, Bob, at a service in my grandmother’s backyard in Chicago at the end of that summer. Sixth grade was going to start for me shortly after that.

Mysticism surrounded my grandfather’s death. A thunderclap and a crash of lightning signaled a storm had begun the moment the doctor told GB, my mother’s stepmother, my grandfather had passed away. A symbolic piece of cutlery broke when my mom moved GB into her new home in Florida. A shadow followed them in their train compartment all the way from Maryland. I believed in magic. I believed in spirits. My California grandmother had taught me their reality. My grandfather resided on a plane I didn’t have access to except in dreams and meditation. He watched over me. He could guide and speak to me. All I needed was to be open and listen.

We had a basketball hoop in our driveway in the house we rented outside Richmond. I spent every day out there dribbling, shooting baskets and playing made-up games. The kid across the street had a hoop as well. He was a year older than me. My mom and Bob said I should challenge him to a game. We might even become friends, they said, but I was too shy. I preferred to play alone.

I spent the evenings alone in my third-floor bedroom with my dog, Juli. The third floor only had two rooms. Each was half the size of the entire house. I covered the walls of my bedroom with heavy metal posters from Hit Parader and Circus Magazine.I never went across the hall to the other room. We set my old Commodore 64 computer up in there, but I wasn’t interested in playing the sports and fantasy video games I’d always played at our old place in Houston any longer.

Juli and I would listen to old Kiss albums from the 1970s, back when the band still wore makeup. I’d prance around with a broomstick like I was performing on MTV, and I’d develop movie plots based on the lyrics the band had written. The movies were always some variation on a teen drama. I’d been inspired by Grease and The Outsiders. They revolved around a bad boy with a heart of gold whose soul was saved by a beautiful girl. I pictured how that would be my life by the time I got to high school.

One night as I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, I noticed hair was growing on my chest. None of the rockers on my posters had hair on their chests. I was embarrassed. With a hairy chest, I’d never be the rock n roller I’d envisioned myself becoming. I made a deal with God. If I wound up with a hairy chest, I’d write books. If not, I was going to be a rock star. I was certain that’s what God wanted me to become. Rock n roll was my destiny.

Bob’s parents were supposed to join us for Christmas that year, but a snowstorm where they lived in upstate New York necessitated they stay home. They lived in the Catskill Mountains. I knew about the Catskills from My Side of the Mountain, a book I’d read in elementary school.I liked that book. Bob’s father delivered heating oil for a living. The people in his town were counting on him to keep them warm during the storm. My parents decided to borrow an RV from one of Bob’s coworkers in Richmond and drive the three of us up there to visit them instead.

I’d never seen snow like the snow I saw on that trip to upstate New York. It was piled up in high walls along the side of the road. When we’d still lived in Texas, there’d been snow one year, too. But that storm was nothing more than a dusting. My dad still lived with us, then. My grandfather and GB were down visiting us from Baltimore that year. Our pool froze. My dad spent Christmas Eve breaking up the ice on it so the pump wouldn’t get damaged.

When my dad told me that story on Christmas morning, I realized if he’d been outside all night, he must have seen Santa Claus. My dad didn’t miss a beat. He told me he came inside for a moment to get a cup of coffee. While he was in the kitchen, he heard something on the roof. He went out to the living room. When he got there, all our presents were under the tree. He rushed outside to catch a glimpse of the mythical man and his flying reindeer, but Santa Claus and Rudolph had vanished.

By the time I got to sixth grade, though, there was very little I looked forward to about Christmas any longer. One of the presents my mom bought said on the card that it was “to help grow” my extensive vocabulary.

“You didn’t buy me a dictionary, did you?” I asked. I was hoping she’d bought me a warlock’s grimoire that could give me the language I needed to conjure the spells I imagined myself performing alone in my third-floor bedroom. Although, I knew that couldn’t be the case, I imagined she might have been guided by some otherworldly presence. Maybe she didn’t even know what she’d bought. Maybe she’d been in a trance. But when I said those words, my mom was visibly hurt. Her gaze brought a lump to my throat. As I unwrapped the present, I was more disappointed in my attitude than I was in her gift.

My mom also gave me The Rolling Stones’ Singles Collection that year. That was a present I was excited about. I didn’t know The Stones very well yet, but I wanted to. They scared people. I considered them one of the godfathers of heavy metal. My dad had taught me there were two kinds of people in this world—Beatles people and Stones people. My mom was a Beatles person. The Stones were my uncle in California, Jeff’s, favorite band. My Uncle Jeff had been to jail. He rode a motorcycle and smoked pot. I only owned one tape by The Rolling Stones. It was a live collection called Love You Live. I used to listen to it on my Walkman during the drives to and from school with my mom before we left Texas. I’d never listened to the whole album. Star Star and It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll were my favorite tracks. The Singles Collection contained even earlier work. I wanted to listen to all four cassette tapes on our drive back to Richmond.

Halfway through our trip, the final song on the collection came on—Sympathy for the Devil. I’d never heard that song before, but I’d heard about it. My dad had told me there was a debate as to whether Sympathy for the Devil or Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven was the greatest rock n roll song ever recorded. Those songs formed two poles of a duality between good and evil. My dad came down on the side of Zeppelin. Uncle Jeff liked Sympathy for the Devil.

With a head full of eighties’ metal, Sympathy for the Devil didn’t sound like I’d expected it to. I’d thought it would be heavier, angrier and scarier. But the hand drums and acoustic guitar contained an eeriness mimicked by the lyrics. The woo-hoos confirmed that. As I listened, I started seeing visions. The music was a ceremony. The lyrics were the incantation.

As I listened to that mystical track for the very first time, I envisioned my grandfather. I’d often seen him in my inner mind’s eye as I drifted off to sleep ever since he’d passed away. He looked the same in all my visions. He wore a monk’s white robe, and instead of the combover of his later years, he was bald. He walked with his hands in his sleeves. We were going down a path together. He was talking, giving me sage advice.

Then, the landscape changed. What had been a verdant scene died. My grandfather grew wary. We were on our way down a rocky slope. Fiery coals greeted our descent. A decaying city rose in the distance. At the mouth of hell, I told my grandfather to follow me across the burning coals into Pandemonium’s citadel. He didn’t want to, but for my sake, he agreed. As soon as we set foot on those coals, with a scream, my grandfather vanished in a puff of smoke. I scrambled on to discover the damnable city of my dreams. My grandfather never visited me in that guise again.

~ ~ ~

When I was a little kid, I called our dog, Juli, my sister. At the very least, next to my grandfather, she was my best friend. The day I met Juli, I had just returned from visiting my grandfather and GB for the first time alone in Baltimore. It was the summer after first grade. My parents drove me to the airport where we lived in Houston, put me on a plane, and I flew the whole way by myself. My grandfather and GB met me at the gate. That was long before 9/11, when you didn’t need a ticket to get past security. Anybody could go anywhere in an airport.

My mom gave me a journal to record that trip. I didn’t write much, but GB did. She helped me record thoughts and events in there. It wasn’t until a few years later, after my parents divorced, I started using that notebook to keep track of the lyrics I wrote every night to help me go to sleep.

Juli was a present from my dad to our family. We’d had another dog since before I was born, but she’d passed away earlier that same year. She’d had kidney disease. She couldn’t stop urinating everywhere. The first vet my dad took her to told my dad that the dog simply wasn’t trained very well. My dad redoubled his efforts. After the second vet told him she was sick, my dad never forgave that first vet. Not until the day he died. He felt so guilty about how he’d treated that dog at the end of her life, trying to train her not to go to the bathroom inside when she couldn’t help herself. Both Juli and our first dog were springer spaniels.

I met Juli as soon as I walked in the door from that first visit to my grandfather. I didn’t know we were getting a dog. Nobody had told me. It was a surprise. I dropped down on my knees immediately. She was only a puppy. Juli and I rolled around on the floor and wrestled and played and got to know each other. When my parents asked what I wanted to name her, I told them Juli, in honor of the character, Princess Anjuli, from a miniseries about the British occupation of India I’d recorded from HBO.

From the moment she moved into our home, Juli and I spent all our time together. We played throughout the day, and she slept in my bed at night. Juli was big for her breed. Her father had been a champion show dog, and the breeder my dad had bought her from kept calling us to say he wanted Juli back. It was a shame for a dog as beautiful as Juli to be a household pet, he said. But Juli and I were such good friends, my dad would never let her go.

Juli and I wrestled and cuddled. I used her as my pillow and chased her around our living room coffee table. I raced her at the end of our walks and bounded through my parents’ flowerbeds with her. Then, my parents divorced. My mom remarried, and we moved from Houston, Texas to Richmond, Virginia. Along with my own, Juli’s personality changed.

By seventh grade, I’d started calling myself a Satanist. I inverted my value system. Everything I’d been taught was good, I had to believe was bad. Everything that seemed bad, had to be good. I developed a skewed worldview from that reckoning.

I didn’t act on many of my thoughts, but I believed in them. I shared them with others. I drew up a contract with the devil and marked it with my own blood. I encouraged friends to act in concert with my visions, and I conducted rituals in my bedroom to unleash that prism upon the world. I’ve never forgiven myself for the things I said during that phase of my life. Even though I was only in seventh grade. Ideas have power. Words have meaning. Once something is brought into this world, it never disappears.

My dog could tell what I’d become. She must have been able to smell the evil boiling beneath my skin. She turned and started attacking me. I’d enter a room, and she’d snarl. She’d get up from where she was lying, and she’d run at me. I’d slam the door in her face, and she’d froth and snap at the air. The vet said she had a pituitary tumor. But that didn’t make a difference. She couldn’t sleep at the foot of my bed anymore. She couldn’t be left alone in a room with me anymore. Juli didn’t like Bob either. He had to fight her off one night in bed. He held her by the jaws as she went for his throat. Eventually, my mother was able to get her out of the room. Juli had been my dog, but by then, she would always huddle around my mom as if she were protecting my mother from the scent of violent masculinity wafting off Bob and me. My mom was the only one of us in that house who Juli never attacked.

We had to put Juli to sleep that year. She was too dangerous and unpredictable to keep around any longer. We had no idea who she might attack next. It might have been one of us. It might have been some neighborhood kid who tried petting her. We were afraid she’d get ahold of somebody soon, and we didn’t know whether she would let go without drawing blood. We took her to the vet one afternoon. Bob went into the room with her and the doctor. I wasn’t thrilled Bob was the last of us to say goodbye to her. My real dad had picked her out. Juli had been my sister, my best friend. I should have been there with her, but I was too young.

By Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.
From his memoir, Disorder: An Avant-Garde Memoir of Psychosis, Healing & Love.

Petra

This river flows through
the middle of my soul,
though I barely pay it any mind.

This cityscape exists
at my edges of consciousness,
unconsciously governing my thoughts.

My actions are not my own.
They run through You to
deeper pastures and bayous.
From the Pacific Ocean, I
flowed to merge my stream
with Yours. Up the great
Mississippi, I came, the same
path my genes wound to run
away from you, looking for work.
We never found it; now we’ve returned.

I will spin my paddlewheel yet
again. I will churn the locomotive
yet again. I will follow the worn
paths of my ancestors to the heart
of this mystery where I will rebuild
the skyscrapers that broke the
tongues of my fallen kin. There
is nothing that will give me the
release I seek. There is nothing
that will fulfill my deep-seated fantasies.

This ramshackle Virginia
shack gave birth to my history,
yet I will never share its bond.

My destiny resides on the other
side of this promised land, where
Moses set his weary feet down to rest.

By Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.
From his poetry collection, We Are the Underground.