Day 17: To forgive the sins of such as have abandoned the physical garment and have ascended to the spiritual world....Remembering Mike Truskey (b.)...

In the summer of 2004 I had been crashing with Uncle Mike for just over a year in the apartment on Heading avenue when, out of nowhere, he decided to move to a large house in West Peoria, the corner of Sterling and Heading Ave. The house had five bedrooms. A large bathroom upstairs. A basements that could easily be converted to another three bedrooms. It had a pool in back and a brick portico that looked like a Zen garden.  The front lawn was the size of a high school football field. The back yard was a sprawling 20 acres and a pain-in-the ass to mow.

I jokingly called the house Howard’s End.

Uncle Mike simply referred to it as home.

It took us all summer to move. I had the upstairs to myself. When guests came we had plenty of room for them. As in before, Mike refused to charge me rent.

Not a dime.

The absolute highlight was that the house was located on the edge of a botanical bluff known as the Nuclear Woods, the woods on the edge of Heading avenue. Walk down the bluff and you will find yourself in dry run creek, that feeds into Bradley park and later spools into the graffiti’d swath of connecting tunnels known in the Peoria underground vernacular as the plumes.  

The woods aren’t called the Nuclear woods. Ironically, in the large novel, the one I had added another 400 pages to the past autumn, I had transitioned West Peoria into a post-modern factitious  fairy tale chronicling the timeless pubescent pixie-dust of adolescent , a lullaby from my youth. In the novel I wrote about the woods I used to play into when I was a kid with Pat McReynolds and David Hale. I later crowned the woods with the moniker, ‘The nuclear woods’ in the novel. I started the book in autumn 2000. Little did I know less than four years later I would be living on the bucolic banks of the Nuclear woods.

The house was beautiful in the autumn. Daily after classes I lost myself in the woods, letting my hair down, drinking beer. The woods were flooded (flooded) with deer, sylvan blurs rippling in sashays through the taupe autumnal foliage. In winter I would grab a six pack and escape into the woods, chain smoking cigars, sifting for hours with my thoughts.

   In the new house Mike continued with his hospitality. Continued to cook dinners and invite strangers over to the house. He rented the Franciscan center across the street for Naw Ruz parties and had epic turnouts.

When I told Uncle Mike that I had grown up in West Peoria he would respond by saying, "See. The you are moving back home."




The novel in autumn 2000, house on Heading ave. (note floppy and zip drives)...one phuckava sprawling-ass manuscript....

That spring I graduated from Bradley. Mike insisted on hosting a party inviting all the local Baha’is.  We had lived in the Heading Avenue house for almost a year. I started working full time for Bradley. I was making 20,000 dollars a year, which at the time, was the most money I had ever earned in my life.  Gradually I would come home from work every night around 3 and drink a 40oz Icehouse and drown a Foster’s Oil can. Gradually the forty and the oil can turned into a  forty, two oil cans and a cheap six pack which gradually turned into a forty, two oil cans, a twelve pack and beyond. I was still writing. I was working my ass off although (as I would discern later) I was being treated like shit. I still gave Mike backrubs every night. I went on trips. I partied. I was writing less. I had a novel I didn’t know what to do with. After two years of working just insane hours I could finally relax. I bought everyone expensive Christmas gifts. I was drunk all the time. I spent the weekends with Mike, helping out around the house (there was always a crazy project, we were always going to Menards). Gradually I grew listless. I was 28. I wanted a female companion. My writing career seemed to be going nowhere. I would get pissy at Mike for no reason. I felt trapped. As much as I loved Mike it felt like we had some weird kind of marriage. He was still always cooking. I was writing but the bulk of the time I soused.

I felt imprisoned. It seemed like Mike oriented his weekends so that we could spend as much time possible running errands together. One night while I was giving Mike a backrub I realized that over the past four years the tips of my fingers had spent more time massaging his back than touching any other female I had ever known.

It was in the middle of May 2006 when I discreetly moved out. I didn't tell Mike where I was for a couple of days. Finally I called him. I told him that I moved out. I thanked him for everything he had given for me the last couple of years but I told him I needed to work on my writing.

I told him I loved him. The conversation was terse. He told me to go work on my writing then.

I know I hurt him inside.

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I had my own apartment for the first time in my life. I had a murphy bed (remember those).

The next week I went out and got laid.

And the week after that. and the week after that.

                                                                     
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From May 2006 to July 2008 I saw Mike twice, only he didn’t see me. Once I was walking to the ATM and saw him getting out of his Cadillac heading into the Verizon store in campus town and I turned the other way. Once I saw five feet behind him at a store and ducked until he was out of reach. When local Baha’i Juliette Whittaker  (who Richard Pryor credited as giving him his comedic start) died in 2007 Mike called me at work. I had just had a dream about Mike the night before and wanted to chat longer only the conversation was terse.

The world was changing. In a microscopic blink e-mail was supplanted by Instant messaging was superseded by texting. Everywhere you went human being were drilling cryptic SOS’s into the diminutive lens of their cell phones. Everyone was spending all day being vicarious connected to everyone else via facebook. The simultaneous airships of Wikipedia and YouTube gave human beings access to see everything they have ever wanted to see and know everything they had ever wanted to know and still be all alone. It seemed like the bulk of my friends, even the ones I considered well read  and artistic were twittling their thumbs, filling the language I use to bead sentences and milk metaphors with ubiquitous 180 character vacuous  lettered tweets. Everyone was LOL and OMG. The superficial antics Kim Kardashian became the postmodern venerated Athena.  Everyone I knew seemed to all of a sudden end every other phrase of conversation with the platitude, “I know, right?”

I thought about the epigram from Howard’s End, 'Only Connect.'   It seemed like everyone was more and more viscerally connected yet more and more existentially truncated from the soulful rudiments that make us truly human, thinking that even a highly sophisticated hen could learn how to text in quickly tapped three-lettered pecks.

 

One day I googled the address of my old house on Heading avenue only to see via Google earth that is was directly in front of me. I could even see Mike’s car in the driveway from the Orwellian comfort of my own writing desk.

One Sunday early in the semesters I arrived to work and received and e-mail from my creative writing teacher to the news that my mentor, the great David Foster Wallace, the individual who compelled me to compose commodious manuscripts, the individual who wrote so eloquently about a culture who was so busy entertaining itself they too had forgotten the verities that make us human,  had taken his own life.

Only connect.

 

 

 

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At the same time my own life had become unmanageable. I was miserable at work. I drank an accumulated 8-12 beers a day. On weekends it wasn’t uncommon for me to slam thirty beers a day on my days off.

I was scraping by to afford rent. What money I had went to getting plowed. I dated a gorgeous yet psycho girl from Nepal. I dated a really cool hippie from Morton and partied like I was Jim Morrison.

Still my writing career was going nowhere. With technology ferrying us every image imaginable (and still somehow it not being enough to sate our blundering urges) I had developed an addiction to good-ol fashioned friendly neighborhood porn. I still wrote every day but somehow I enacted the ritual of porning for three hours, drinking beer after beer until, finally, sitting down, pissing out a page or two and mistaking it as art.

I started to miss Uncle Mike. I started to Miss the long car drives the hippie and the old man would take together where Mike would share with me his metaphysical stories about conversing with the next world.

Started to miss Gandalf to my Frodo.

I was still partying and getting laid. I was hung up on a girl who moved overseas. After cutting my hair in 2004 to apply for a loan my hair was finally dripping past the knobs of my shoulder blades. I started smoking weed, since, when you have long hair and write poems and live in a University setting everyone mistakes you for having connections and gives you a bag quid pro quo.

In the mornings I would glean my first 12 pack from the convenient store on the corner of Laura and Western. It opened at 5:30 although they wouldn’t sell beer until six.  Often I would go ambling through the dimly-lit suburban labyrinth of West Peoria thinking of Uncle Mike. I walked passed my childhood home on Sherman. I walked past the Owls Nest and the Tartan Inn and (unbeknownst to me at the time) the house on the corner of Ayres and Waverly where I would live after Mike died. I walked past Haddad’s and, usually once a week, I would lurk into the backyard of the house on Heading avenue, chain smoking, watching the sun explode into a spate of orange streamers from the east, smoking, it was spring. I started picking up flowers from trees and placing them under the windshield wipers of his green Cadillac.

                         

 

It was spring.

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