The Three in the Photo.

A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.

-Diane Arbus

We did a tour. It was long ago now, before I had three kids. I had two then. And in the picture I have from the day we were leaving, they are in my arms, sagging in my grasp. It is a photo I hadn’t seen in such a while that I had forgotten it existed. With photographs you either are looking at them or you aren’t. And if you aren’t, then the memory is probably faded or even gone. But this one showed up in a clump of old junk and I stood there in the late afternoon slowness looking down at the girl, Violet, and the boy, Henry. And the man, me.

Back when I was younger.

Back when you were younger too.

_____

Days gone by have left me more bewildered than nostalgic. Back when I was not yet a father or a husband or anything really, I used to suspect that later in life I would be able to sit on some old creaky porch rocker with a lemonade or maybe a whisky and stare upon a photo and everything good would come flooding back over me. The happiness. The joy. The sensations of a time when your children are small and fragile before you. They would hang there suspended forever in my manly embrace, I thought. Pictures would come down in which I tended to them in real time/ goofy smiles on my various faces/ real delight on theirs/ hoses spraying streams of water now frozen in time.

But back then I thought I would think they were flowing cool and fast, slapping down on the yard, slicking the blades of grass up and the kids darting in and out of the treat of it all. Something so exhilarating and unusual, they would have been thinking. Their childish brains still so undeveloped. Their eyes locked into a world that was pure and tempered with nothing but sweetness and racing hearts and real exhaustion.

I guess me writing all of that means I still think about it that way sometimes. Or that I wish it was all that there is. It’s not though. The years have changed me, made me rough both inside and out. To be honest, I laugh at the idea of a lemonade on the porch now. It would seem spurious as hell. I don’t want that. I’d rather sit with my own shattered remnants of something good that maybe hurts now. Or leaves me hanging. It’s better that way, I’m certain. Lying to the world is one thing. People do that to paint themselves in softer lights than they ever actually walked in. But lying to your own self is ignorant and foolish. No life story should be retold as to appear more palatable.

I know people who do that all the time. It’s a purple ribbon scar on their face. Just under an eye. And you can never unsee it again. And you never want to anyway.

_____

I was thinking as I stared at the three of us that afternoon in Hublersburg, where we lived at the time. I was wondering what my kids might remember of the day. Probably nothing at all. But if they did, if there was maybe something, one thing even, carved into their bones to be discovered by accident some day long after I’m gone, what might it be? Selfishly, inexplicably, I hope against hope that it might be a musk. A stink. My impossible scent lingering. Years later, across so many miles that they will have run by then, I dream of it as a wisp, outside somewhere, starlings in the sky. Returning to them they are thrust into a memory that they had long forgotten. And I am reborn. Reinvented. Reconstructed from some kind of random ass honeysuckle breeze.

I celebrate it even knowing it is unlikely to happen that way at all. But still, to imagine my own return in such a gentle way fills me with bird song and fresh blood and breath. My smoky hair. My nervous spring sweat. Last night’s Rioja slipping from my pores. Like my dad once smelled to me. Looking at this old picture now, I want to believe that I ended up giving off my own scents, little traces of this and that floating out of me and into my kids that day. Up into Violet’s delicate curved-up nose/ up into Henry’s smile/ his tongue all curved into a U/ gently poking through his smiling lips like a baby bird over the edge of a nest.

Dad is back, Henry whispers. Not poetically or with a teary eye or whatever. He’s just back. Ten minutes ago he was nowhere to be had and now look at this, He is here.

Oh yeah. I smell it, Violet (Milo) responds. It smells like dark chocolate farts.

Henry just grins, his tongue poking gently from his lips.

_____

I keep my own dad hidden now. I store him away in my own dank cellar/ his own smoky locks/ his silver tooth sunshine flash/ I keep it all hidden away inside me. From everyone and everybody.

My dad died in a bed alone, ravaged by who the hell knows what. Pneumonia, they call it, but pneumonia is code from the universe, don’t you know? When they say a man dies of pneumonia what they really mean is he died from the laughter stuck in his heart valves. The childish giggles he had forgotten completely, they came back to thrash him down with the pummeling force of ancient warriors.

My dad choked to death on me and my brother running through Dutch Wonderland so many moons ago. He died understanding, at long last, that no man is ever a tried and true man at all. We are nothing but lame trimmings. Nearly every young lad ever cut from the branch doesn’t even exist anymore. There are no Hercules left. There’s only pictures, and only if you’re lucky. Or only if you give a damn.

_____

I didn’t want to go. The tour would be some kind of attempt to salvage something I knew even back then was gone. Bands, music, it has a shelf life, and if you abuse that by insisting it doesn’t exist then you ultimately destroy a lot of what you had once nearly died trying to create. In the photo on the porch of the rented house in the tiny country town, I wear my bandana and my loose cowboy shirt with the snap buttons. I had put on weight by then. Dad life, a dispirited marriage, returning home to Pennsylvania from a life in the west, it had all caught up to me.

In the photo I see Violet’s look away as tenderness, although there is every chance that it was more autism than love. I am not certain that they really were sure what was happening. Not because they weren’t invested in my presence everyday, but more because they had never known a world where I wasn’t there in the next room, at least by dinner time. Her eyes fixed on a distance and I yearn to know what she felt/ how she saw me/ where her mind was at. I can never know that stuff, of course. Only they could tell me and maybe they might if I ever show them the picture. But at the same time, I think it’s not really something I have a right to go digging for.

Her world is her own.

But god, I did not want to leave her. Or Henry. I remember the promises my brother and Christine made. This amount of money if you do the tour. It will be great. We will have fun. I was out of shape though and there were missing band members now and it all felt so forced and not like the old days. Philadelphia/ our years there and the city in our blood/ it all seemed such a long lost planet to me by then. Being immersed in what had made us/ our white boy amped up soul/ our comic book grit and our endless mega-desire to please you with hard labor upon any stage, upon every stage: it felt compromised that afternoon. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, I guess. People are such fools, me included. No one wants to say goodbye to the things that define them. Ego, distorted old hunger, and the ever lurking chance for American poor people with unsmashable dreams to make a little loot: it all caused us to cling to something that wasn’t even there. Now I understand that, for some people, the past is all they have. And letting go of it is impossible to fathom. Until one day the winds change and what was once so scary crinkles up and blows down the street. The chittery sound of a Coke can rolling down the block. You finally just let it go.

I wanted to tell them I wasn’t getting in the van right as this picture was being taken. I wanted to tell them that I wasn’t going on the three hour drive to the airport in Philly and I wasn’t going on the overnight flight across the Atlantic to Spain and I wasn’t going to Madrid or Barcelona or any of the other towns because I wanted to stay with my two kids more than anything in the universe right then.

Can you see that in my eyes? Can you look at the photograph and notice me begging you to come rescue me from the songs and the miles and the loneliness and the drinking and the meanness and the drama?

I wasn’t trying to stay as a husband. My wife at the time would have likely been counting the minutes until I was off that country porch, completely gone from her eyes for several weeks. But that was grown-up nonsense/ our cold dumb prison/ a tiny spark on the ground I could put out with a piss. The real fire was the one in which I was burning to stay home, to stay right there with the two in my arms, as a dad. Not in some heroic style either, though I wish I could tell you that was it. It wasn’t tough. I wanted to stay because I felt safe with my children in my arms. I felt grounded with both children at my face. I felt alive and well and untouchable with my baby son and my toddler daughter right there in my path. Their elfin heads at my nose/ mellow intricate meadows of love/ their righteous scents/ day in and day out/ rolling through across my prairie/ pushing through my skull/ into my tale.

My dad never needed that as far as I can tell. I hardly think he even knew it was a thing available to him as a man in the moments of his life unfolding. To have embraced a kid in the style of a pussy man probably would have made him uneasy. I wonder about all that sometimes. I know I can’t speak for him or for anybody, but there is little left for me if I don’t at least try sometimes. This is me, after all. Me, my writing. Here comes my memory miasma sliding out across my landscape like the 6am mist slipping out of the cornfield down by the movie theater parking lot. My mass of ghost. My earth cloud blues.

And you know what? I think of all these people from my past. I see them again, standing before me in a dream. What they smelled. What they thought. What they desperately wanted to accomplish or achieve or eliminate or express back when we were only a few feet apart, our lives smashing into each other with reckless abandon.

_____

_____

summer grasses –
all that remains
of warrior's dreams

-Matsuo Basho

_____

It could be I only have myself to blame. Rock-n-roll bands start out so lovely green, with so much raw pure potential. But like a lot of things that we wish we understood but never can and never will, there came the smell of wires burning in the wall. That back of the throat plastic melting, I whiffed long before that one late spring afternoon, that day I knew I should have stayed home just like I was telling you before.

_____

Get this. They ripped me off at the end of the tour. You believe that? Goddamn bastards. They stiffed me a 1000 bucks right to my face/ kept it for themselves so they could drink their heads off and make shoofly pies and pay their overdue heating oil bills. You don’t forget that sort of double-crossing from people you are supposed to have all these ‘special artistic bonds’ with. It stays, the menace does. You can’t erase how they handed you the envelope of cash and it had a way different, lower figure than the one they had promised you so hard when they knew you didn’t want to go away. When they knew that they had to have you to get what they wanted but in order to have you they’d have to entice you beyond the kids and the gut feeling you had. A number written in blue pen that was much less than the number they’d assured you. I was so upset. I had gone willingly and let my fat ass on those stages, so why screw me over?

I was shocked/ angry/ hurt/ betrayed. But they acted as if it was nothing.

Take what we give you, they told me.

And be happy you got that.

Years later, I look back and think they genuinely believed that they were both this kind of pure essence of rock-n-roll. Smoking, drinking, fighting, struggling to make ends meet: I suspect they assured themselves- and each other- that I was a necessary component only because I’d been in on the thing since early on, when the face of the band was being formed in the fan’s minds. They tried to convince themselves that even without me they could win crowds over every night. But prior to that/ the times they did try that/ umm/ I don’t think it went as well as they envisioned. It pissed them off maybe that I was required. Or MORE than required, even. I was Marah as much as anyone ever could be. My stage presence and my ways with the songs and the people in the audience weren’t disposable. They were impossibly required for the authentic dream to unfold in the club.

So I sense those two really wanted me to know my place at the end of that messy tour. Even if they were lying profusely to themselves.

They always wanted me to believe that they were the real thing and not me. The tour had been weird from the start, plagued by two dueling, entitled, booze-fueled desperados who were probably planning on robbing me and my bullshit family train thing long before we ever said goodbye to Violet and Henry, climbed in that van, and aimed it far, far away.

_____

Still, if I hadn’t left and traveled and missed my little world, I wouldn’t have the photo, huh? And I wouldn’t have felt the loneliness slicing down through my man tits, cutting my heart out, as I smoked another Marlboro Light on some square in Zaragoza or wherever the fuck.

_____

Both kids in the picture have been challenges for me at times, just as I’ve been a challenge for them. It’s just the nature of love between parent and child. We are hinged together by bone broth and a vast wilderness of DNA and all of the dead who came before us. And even by all the unborn yet to come if you really think about it.

But Jesus, the power of their bodies next to mine so many times back then. Rare to get many hugs from them now but that’s how these things go. Some men manage to keep the tender kisses and all going right through their kids’ teenage years, but I’m made of something else it would seem. Although I would give anything to have that kind of unabashed affection from Milo (Violet) or Henry these days, I know that it is largely impossible. Not entirely because of them or me either, although some of it could be pinned on us. It’s more because of so many of the ancestors and so many of the not yet born that we dance around our love the way we do.

There are signs that it is there. The love from them for me, I mean. I still tell them all the time. I have no shame because I sense that my time is gonna come, and then what? I will stand in dusty corners watching them through impenetrable walls of time. Me, long gone Daddy-O, knocking tchotchkes over in a STILL immature fit of raging at the complexities of love. Even in ghost mode, they will surely find me embarrassing and strange and hard to gauge. It’s fine though. Just as long as they find me.

_____

In any photograph ever taken in the history of the world we are presented with one of two possibilities. The first possibility is that they are random people who mean nothing to us unless we are inclined to study their scene like a painting. Nothing wrong with that at all, but you get what I’m insinuating here. You and the people in the photo will never connect beyond a certain realm.

But in the second possibility, you glance down at a picture of someone you know or knew or someone you are related to or, if you are among the luckiest of them all, a person you loved deeply, perhaps even a child of yours. This scenario is a whole different museum. I know you know that, but it’s worth being reminded sometimes. The art and form of photography might change soon; there seems a strong likelihood that fake images will flood the streets before long and when they do you will suffer the consequences. We all will.

Even so, we still have this. This fleeting moment in time. Our ephemeral heyday when we can look at family photos and fall into them like glass. Down into the shattering, down into all this sharp and jagged unfathomable. Watch yourself seeing yourself while you can. Clocks are ticking all over town.

_____

We all yearn to have everything when it comes to love. Family or band or marriage or fandom, it all gets unraveled over time. Nothing ever stays the same and if it does then it cannot be real. Don’t you wonder sometimes, like me, how we manage to ever even get as far as we do in this life? Do you ever contemplate how random and unmanageable nature truly is and then feel awe struck by the mere fact that we have been able to survive this long?

Sharks. Floods. Lightning. Cancer. The slicken’d roads under hapless drivers. How have we outrun them all? Then to factor in our fellow man/ our people and their people and also all the many people we never know or care about. They all could have killed us dead at any moment. It’s the truth. They often thought about bashing you in the side of the temple with a brick. They just never said it out loud. Or the ones who did… they were the safest, it turns out.

Why us though, you know?

Why you?

Why me?

How did we manage to feel all the immense feelings we have felt and not end up with a bloody brick in our own fist? Or our own heart for that matter? I would have bet good money by now that I would have died from all the savageness I’ve seen and known, not to mention the mighty doses of mad dog froth I have injected straight into the veins of the arm of all this living myself.

Don’t you think we ought to hit our 50’s and begin to see things more clearly?

Don’t you think we all deserve to grow old gracefully, with a couple good pictures to look at/ all the pain and fear and sadness we have known turning into something good? Something echo-y and true?

_____

Dude.

Don’t you think that’s what this fucking essay is?

How do you always, always, always miss so much?

_____

I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.

- Nan Goldin

_____

I found what I found. This picture that I’m telling you about, it might never get looked at by anyone ever again after this. There is no telling. Iwo Jima will crinkle and burn. Lincoln’s taut wrinkles will be lost to all. That desperate child burning up in napalm, those crazy overcrowded beaches at Coney Island, and even The Babe swinging for the fences one sweltering Tuesday afternoon long ago in the Bronx… they will all go. Even when we think it impossible now that any image might ever disappear, trust me when I tell you, they will go. They will evaporate, like the people inside them. And when they do, they will not return. Like me and you.

What savage beauty all the cameras captured. What eloquence and charm. What magical mistakes. No one hardly knew what they were doing with the lens. It was all drunks at a party firing corks at the ceiling. But what breathtaking glimpses of sad eyed children. What illuminating portraits of love living and dying at our feet.

I held two kids in my arms once upon a time. I had to leave them both but I didn’t want to go. I didn’t wish to travel from my son and I didn’t wish to stray from my daughter. There was this low blue feeling I had that I might not make it back. That is the worst kind of feeling you can ever know. It’s all shot up with darkness. And it’s forever like space.

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Hello, my peoples. I am super glad you showed up at Thunder Pie this week. Thank you for taking the time to read my words/ I hope they connected somehow. Please become a paid subscriber if you can swing it. $10 a month or $120 a year. There is an extensive back catalog of essays from the last few years for paid subs to enjoy. And I write a new one that I send to you every single Friday morning at 9am EST. The money is worth it, I swear. I’m a good deal.

Thanks a lot! Have a great week!

Serge

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Thunder Pie is edited by Arle Bielanko

Art: SB

Subscribe to Arle’s Substack here: Letter to You

Etsy.

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Things I Liked This Week.

• Made my first bbq of the so-called summer on Memorial Day. Cheeseburgers and hotdogs. I only do charcoal. I got the grill up to 700 F with a small amount of Kingsford Match-Lit charcoal. I never had fire like that before. I had to take the burgers off and put them, half raw, back onto a big platter until I could get that puppy to cool down. Oh well, it all worked out in the end, I think.

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• Arle has been selling her art and creations at pop-ups around our home county for the last two or three years. Lately I have been tagging along as a fellow vendor, setting up beside her with an array of vintage stuff and used books and records. It’s been a lot of fun but what I like best about it is being able to meet people and talk to them alongside my wife. We haven’t been able to do that together too much, what, with kids and crazy busy lives. So it’s a refreshing break from the status quo. Plus: we are both SO FUCKING GOOD at socializing! Who knew??!!

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• This song, Happy, by Bruce Springsteen is one Arle sent me the other day. I have lived inside the Tracks box set for stretches of time in my life but somehow I don’t even recall this tune at all. Bizarre. That said, it’s kind of lovely and moving in that way that only Bruce can manage to write and pull off. The big synths, that enormous frailty, the many scattered shreds of other songs he’s written before they were released: it all makes this unknown track something powerful, moving, relatable, and true.

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• Our kitchen sink became a total disaster scene a couple days ago when our sprayer hose sprung a little leak. The whole kitchen started vibrating and there was water shooting all over the place down there in the dark beneath. It took me a day or so to round up the necessary replacement parts, but then what I figured would be a relatively simple job ended up eating huge parts of my soul. I’m never getting them back either. I was pissed/ cursing and banging wrenches off my head/ my vision for a day of corn hole and yard life replaced with a nightmare Mr Fix-It Sucks scenario. Luckily, Arle finally had enough of my bullshit and told me to go upstairs to take a break, which I did because I knew she was right. I needed to chillax. And then a half hour later she texted me and said it was all fixed, she had got the job done. Ugh. Fucking asshole. ; )

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• We started watching this series from Vice TV from a few years ago called Tales from the Territories. It’s all about the pro wrestling leagues that have always existed below the giants like the WWE or the WCW. Let me tell you something too, even if you don’t really get pro wrestling (because you are a pretentious dick), the first two episodes of this show are some of the best documentary style TV I have ever seen. Made up of mostly southern vets of the Memphis wrestling craze of the 1970s and 80s just swapping stories, I ended up with my jaw on the floor over and over and over again. Fascinating tales from the last of the real American barnstormers. Just so freaking entertaining and crazy and good.

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  bye.