Day 19: Grant them to behold thy splendors on the loftiest mount...remembering Mike Truskey (finale)

The night I found myself fired from the University I loved I found myself wading, as if the atmosphere had morphed into an aquarium, as if everything was underwater and I was  endeavoring to slosh upstream. It was cold. I was in shock. I sat in the park bench in the entrance to Bradley park near where Main drips into Farmington Hill, snow pecking at my cheekbones, a feeling of being blind-sided, stabbed in the lower back with an icicle-shaped stalactite by people and a system you thought were your friends.

While seated in Bradley park I looked across Main street and at the corner of Main and cooper saw a female friend of mine jumping up and down in the window of the house she rented.  When I looked again I noticed that she was naked, jumping up and down as if on pogo stick, dancing.

I left the park, traipsing down Heading avenue. Minutes later I was at Uncle Mike’s back door.

 

                                                                ***

“Look at it another way. We’re here. We’re nice guys. We’re doing ok, but we know in X number of years we won’t be here, and between now and then something unpleasant is gonna happen, or at least potentially unpleasant and scary. And when we turn to try and understand that, I don’t think the humanist verities are quite enough. Because that would be crazy if they were. It would be so weird if we knew just as much as we needed to know to answer all the questions of the universe. Wouldn’t that be freaky? Whereas the probability is high that there is a vast reality that we have no way to perceive, that’s actually bearing down on us now and influencing everything. The idea of saying, ‘we can’t see it, therefore we don’t need to see it,’ seems really weird to me.”

                                                                          --George Saunders, New York times profile

  
                                                                        ***
 

The next couple of weeks is a subsistent blur. I was suicidal. I made a noose out of Christmas lights. I duck-taped the largest knife I could find in my kitchen to the side of my fridge and tried to throw myself on the point. Rather than looking at the fiasco as an opportunity for growth and the chance to abandon a job I was miserable and treated unfairly at, all I could focus on was that I was broke. That I had no clue how I was going to pay rent. That I had nowhere to go.

During that time Uncle Mike and my mom were my best friends. I stayed with Mike in my old bedroom. I became paranoid every time a police vehicle idled down the street thinking that they were cruising for me.  When my  (disgusting) dismissal period arrived (maybe you are doing your job if they read passages from a pending manuscript they plucked in an  Orwellian manner off my desktop at work) Uncle Mike gave me his tattered Baha’i prayer book. He told me when I went into the room to act like Abdul-baha was in the room with me and to treat my enemies with kindness and love.  I thought a lot about Whitman’s quote, “Oh to struggle against great odds. To meet enemies undaunted.”

If you want to read more about the craziness of that time you can click here: It was a dark time and I got through it and within a  month landed a job where I reel in ten thousand more a year that gives me more opportunity to write. The job was located at the end of Heading avenue. Mike lived at the intersection of Heading and Sterling. I asked Mike if I could move in since it was closer. At first he said he didn’t think I could technically have my address listed at this domain since he was a caregiver for Anthony. A couple weeks later Mike informed me that it would be no problem and I was welcome to move in at my convenience.

When my lease expired I moved in.

Somehow it felt like I was back home.

                                                                         ***

Home it was indeed. It was family, Uncle Mike and Anthony and myself.  Mike insisted on cooking for us every night, a big sit down dinner, usually with tatters and gravy and steamed vegetable and meat entrée. Every Sunday he invited friend over for dinner. I continued to work around the house and keep the lawn and the miniature Chinese garden he had in the portico up to elegant par. I was worried about his health. He had trouble walking. He was gaining weight. His ankles were swollen to the size of twin softballs. He said it was fluid from the heart. Again he was skidding off the road when he drove.  A couple of times I demanded he pull over and I drove us home.

He kept staying active. He was feisty. He slept a lot. A few times I wondered how serious his condition was. What irked me the most was that he would howl and yelp in his sleep and when I would enter his room demanding if he was okay he would be asleep and claim not to remember that he had yelled anything at all.

Then, overnight, he changed. Sometime around Easter that year he lost forty pounds in a month. His ankles detumesced. He stopped yelling at night. He no longer needed his cane to walk. He looked ten years younger. He had his wit. I’ve never seen anything like it. He self-healed.

 When I asked him in June how he seemed to spontaneously recover overnight he smiled and said two things: “Prayers and you moved back in.”

I gave him a long back rub that night.

 

                                                                                ***

 

I wish I could tell you how I didn’t (deleted-expletive, Uncle Mike wouldn’t want me cursing in his elegy) up my second round living with Uncle Mike. I wish I could tell you that. I wish I could tell you that I went on the radio-flyer wagon and found peace and focused on paying off bills when the money from my new job  was hobbling in.  

I wish I could tell you that I did the right thing for once.

 I wish I could tell you that but I can’t.

I was making more money than I ever had. Rent was two hundred dollars less per month than what I had been paying at my apartment. I partied hard.  When I left my apartment on Bradley avenue I remember counting the aluminum beer cans and it numbering  close to hundred, all consumed in the last week, which was to be my farewell to alcohol and my hello to abstemious living.

I wish I could tell you that I gave my body a rest. That I became more spiritual. That I was able (yes fully able) to jettison the emotional flotsam keeping me psychologically fettered to the past.  I wish I could tell you that I aptly wrote down every Baha’i story Uncle Mike shared with me, some now lost forever. I wish I could tell you that I was able to take care of my body, tackle my demons head on and to grow.

 

I wish I could tell you all this. Only I can’t.

I moved my writing desk into the leafy foliage of the nuclear woods. Every morning after work I would walk down the path in to the Nuclear woods that led to Farmington road and purchase a few beers from Haydee at Casey’s. There was a bum who lived in the woods named Steve and I would buy him a six-pack  and we would split a joint. I would then lumber through he woods, deer abutting both bluffs, arriving at my writing desk,  thoroughly pummeling out sentences, heading back down to Casey’s on Farmington road around 11, buying more beer, heading back to my desk and passing out.

Inspired by the Peoria bar Review twice a week I would take my best friend Hale out  and we would find a Podunk bar in the middle of nowhere and get soused, driving around the dusty back arteries of Mason county, smoking cigars, always laughing. One night I passed out in the woods in  Bradley park behind the tennis courts and woke up fifteen minutes before I had to arrive at work. Another Sunday I got home from work and couldn’t sleep and started drinking and ended up partying the whole day, ended up passed out in St. Mary’s cemetery in West Peoria, being ferried to the hospital, informing the ETS that everything was perspicuous , leaving the hospital, going to work that same nigh, coming home in the morning  descending into the woods to crack open a beer before drifting into a pond of sleep.

 I started drinking what I call ‘canoe beer’ by the crates during the week.  Hamms, Schlitz, Old Stye, Old Milwaukee. Crates of PBR. Called canoe beer because it was cheap beer you would see your grandfather drink while going on a canoe outing in the boundary waters.  I would escort Uncle Mike to Krogers in Madison park, leaving the side door to his vehicle purposefully unlocked even though we were parking in ghetto terra ferma  and while he was checking out which brats to buy for the Sunday outing skulk next door to seedy liquor store and stock up.

 

I wish I could tell you that I didn’t have other addictions as well. I wish I could tell you that I didn’t use my addictions for a gauze to sop up all the menstrual blotches of the past

 I wish I could tell you that I did things differently the second time I was blessed to crash with Uncle Mike again in this lifetime.

Only I can’t because I didn’t.

                                                                 ***

Almost exactly a year before Uncle Mike’s death he was laid-off from Caterpillar although he was still receiving a healthy chunk of his paycheck. Thanksgiving 2010 he invited his family from Southern Illinois up to celebrate. He cooked. It was feast. He was in high spirits. A couple of days later he began to complain vertigo. He began slur his words. I told him to lie down and take it easy. He continued to go nonstop. I asked him if he was okay. I told him I was going to take him to the doctors. I had seen him much worse than he was. He wasn’t howling drivel in his sleep.

I honestly figured he would be okay.

At Christmas I cozened him from going down South for the holidays, insisting that he just stay home and rest. It had been five weeks talking as if there were helium balloon lodged behind his skull. He still cooked every day he needed help walking. He didn’t like to be told no,

When I came home from work he insisted he was going to Goodfield to take a local Baha’i family out for dinner I adamantly desisted. I took his car keys away. I told him to lie down.  I went upstairs and took a shower. When I arrived home from work the following morning I went into his room to check on him and saw that he was wearing a hospital bracelet. He wouldn’t tell me what happen. Finally I badgered out of him that he had found a spare set of keys and had gotten into an accident. He was still loopy. I told him to lie down. I kept on insisting that he would get better since I had seen him much worse.

 Two days after the accident I went into his room to give him back rub. I had been writing and drinking out in the woods. In the two years since I had moved back in with Uncle Mike I had grown adept into smuggling bushels of beer cans out of the house, the majority littered in the Nuclear woods like a chrome escalator descending into the gravel swath and graffiti’d hieroglyphics  of dry run creek.  Perhaps he was snorkeling in the ether. Perhaps he was wading between the breath of both worlds. I still harbored the belief that Mike would snap out and I would find him one morning after work cooking, being his ornery self.

While  giving Mike the backrub he twisted his head to me.

“Have you taken care of it yet?”

 I knew what he was alluding to but I still retorted with the perfunctory what.

 “The problem that you have been dealing with. Have you taken care of that yet?”

 I knew Mike was talking about my drinking. For a second I thought about how I told myself when I first moved in with Mike I would be attending an AA meeting a day for ninety days and instead I went out and partied and ended up in the hospital.

 Yes,” I said to Uncle Mike. Lying. Kneading my fist into the stiff dip of his lower back.

 

“I’ve taken care of it. Everything is taken care of indeed.”


                                                                 ***

 

Eight hours before Uncle Mike died I ripped a contact lens  over the bathroom sink and went ape shit. I had been in my bedroom writing. I had to work a split shift that day leaving for Springfield, coming back him at six and then returning to work my standard 11pm to 7am shift.

It was a new year. Haddad’s had just burned down. I was madly in love with a creature who curdled my heart and then abandoned me for a fellow ‘wanna-be’ writer (gross) in town. I was melancholic. I was always drunk. As I was leaving my bedroom I kicked the outlet in the upstairs hallway yelping vulgarities.  The outlet transitioned into plastic tri-forces. I hated my life. Hated that I always felt hurt and alone. Hated that none of my relationships seemed to come to fruition. Hated that Mike was all of a sudden loopy.

Hated everything viviparous and with a stolid pulse abiding on the lip of the planet.

 Mike was sitting down in his chair in the living room. I gave him a backrub. He asked me what was wrong.

 I told him that I was just worn out all the time and felt defeated.  

Mike told me everything was going to be okay.

I was en route to Springfield for work. I asked Mike if I could borrow twenty bucks to stop on the way home and get something to eat. Mike told me to grab 20 dollars and I told him I would pay him back when I got home.

I gave him a long hug. I told him to get some rest.

Seven hours later when I returned from Springfield I would enter the house and find the stove on, the water he had heated for dinner just beginning to sizzle. The television was on. He slouched over. His lips were rubbery.

When I went to touch his neck it was still warm.

                                                                   ***

In the ER that night I couldn’t get ahold of anyone. My cell phone couldn’t get reception so I held my cell phone in one hand gleaning phone numbers calling everyone I knew in the other. For an hour all I got was messages. I then went back in the room where my friend lay. Parts of his body were turning blue as cells exploded, presenting the vessel of  his flesh an encore firework display for the sixty-seven and a half years experienced on this planet.

Uncle Mike looked like scholar. An academician with his goatee. His hair back. The paramedics had removed his shirt in an effort to resuscitate him.

All I could do for the first hour was just massage his body. I massaged his feet for over an hour while my mouth filled with the taste of mucous and salt and every thing above my chin just seemed to dribble and leak. I kept telling him how great of a man he was. I kept thanking him for everything he gave. I kept telling him that one of the greatest privileges in my life was to have sauntered into the weird looking man at the end of High Street all those years ago.

I kept kissing his forehead. I kept squeezing his feet. I kept thanking him

 

I kept thanking him for being Gandalf to my Frodo.

 

                                                           ***

 

When I arrived back at the  Howard’s End on Heading Avenue later that night PARC came and took Anthony. The living room was dilapidated. The lamp overturned turned in a frenetic haste while the paramedics arrived still lying on its side as if aerobics, casting elongating shadows against the  geometric oriental flavor of his living room.  

Everyone was telling me that I shouldn’t stay alone in the house.

I told everyone I would be fine.

 I went into Mike’s bedroom and grabbed his thoroughly tattered Baha’i prayer book. I then went into the living room and, with talisman, a mystical lump of copper given to me years early by someone I love more than life, someone I had met through Mike, dropped down to both knees as if being knighted and began to prayer. Began to sob. Having known Mike for just under a pinch of a decade I knew there was one prayer he would pray over and over. He would break out and recite it at firesides. Whenever we passed a cemetery on one of our long drives.

On both knees I genuflected at the same portion of the living room carpet where two hours earlier I was blowing him,  futile trying to fill him with life. I clutched the copper and read the prayer over and over again.

I bled tears.

After an how I got up and straightened the lamp. I then went to his bed, took off my shirt and climbed under the covers.
I squeezed his pillow. I wanted to smell like him. I wanted the old man musk to envelope my entire body as I squeezed the pillow and drifted into the slumbering snow banks of winter peace.

                                                                           ***
                                                                       

O my God!  O Thou forgiver of sins, bestower of gifts, dispeller of afflictions!
Verily, I beseech thee to forgive the sins of such as have abandoned the physical garment and have ascended to the spiritual world.
O my Lord!  Purify them from trespasses, dispel their sorrows, and change their darkness into light.  Cause them to enter the garden of happiness, cleanse them with the most pure water, and grant them to behold Thy splendors on the loftiest mount.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá

                                                                     ***

After Uncle Mike’s demise I was still working 70 hours a week and I just wasn’t sleeping and I’m so indebted to my sister Beth and my mom (as well as Gary and Mark Anderson) for coming to the hospital that night.  I’m grateful to the outpouring of love from the local Baha'is and thx to Richard McClelland. Thirty years ago Richard had a sibling who died and Uncle Mike paid for the tombstone. Though he lives in Portland Richard paid for Mike’s tombstone and paid to have Uncle Mike’s obituary on-line ad infinitum. Justin Martin came all the way down from Duluth Minnesota and drove us down to Southern Illinois (riding the glacial surf of the worst snow storm to hammer central Illinois in 25 years. I can’t thank my brother David Hale for traveling down to the funeral with me or the local Baha’is for calling and checking up on me. My brothers’ (and now roommate) Kyle Devalk came down to Peoria with (the great) Roxy Reno came down and we gave an epic poetry reading. A week later my brother J moved in with me for the remainder of my time spent on the cusp of the Nuclear woods. Technically we were squatters, but I was so grateful for his presence and can’t thank everyone enough for really being there when I needed a friend in a time of dire need.


Three months after the funeral I moved out of Howard’s end a bevy of local hipsters moved in. They hosted crazy partied and always posted their pics on facebook ( I kinda feel that I christened it for them). Occasionally I would saunter into one at the Owl’s Nest and inquire about the house. There was at least five people living there and every time I inquired they replied that no, they never went into the woods.


 Uncle Mike has been gone for three years now. I continue to write and continue to drink perhaps more than I should at times. For a while I was burdened with the inevitable ‘if I had only come home minutes earlier he would still be here today’ bromide. But I feel Uncle Mike, in all his Gandalfian insight, just knew it was time for  the narrative tracks ferrying the freight train of his life to proceed to its next port. That the last months when his spirit was in a shamanic haze he was anticipating with vigor the inscrutable wonder the moment consciousness dips out of, as he always referred to it, this coat of flesh that is this body, peeling off layers of our prehensile and ontological perception orienting our limited periphery of this world to wade into the shallow end of the kiddie pool on splashes of what is to come. In an extremely anthologized collegiate commencement address delivered shortly before he died the late David Foster Wallace states that, “None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death.”

Whatever individual theology you adhere to—be it the gavel-duality judgment of heaven contra hell. Be it being reincarnated, poured into a different biological wrap of  epidermal and fur. Be it finding a utopia in the cumulus mist stretching beyond the fabric with a series of individuals adhering to doctrine similar was your own, one thing is certain. That all of us finding ourselves sip-locked and metaphysically marooned in this pocket of flesh for a an extremely terse quantum  drip of the cosmological egg-timer that is time and it is through vaulting over the vicissitudes branding the gravity of our ego—through love and kindness and caring and gestures and putting the needs of others in front of our own that we find peace and happiness in this puddle of reality, the prow of the planet we find ourselves sharing for a terse speck of time.

Uncle Mike exemplified these verities in his life.   Through laughter and unselfish gratitude and giving.  

Through making others feel perennially feel significant and loved for in the end we’re not here long.

 

                                                                    ***

 

Ten years ago Uncle Mike and I were returning from a Baha’i conference in Greenlake Wisconsin. I just met the creature who would later give me the copper. We spent six hours driving home listening to his crazy stories. When Mike dropped me off in front of my apartment I gave him hug and then squeezed his hand.

“Thank you for your friendship,” I told him.

He smiled back, that crooked lovely smile before telling me that we were going to be friends in this world and in the worlds to come.

The world to come which perhaps passing all finite understanding…

Allah-u-Abha!!!