One of the first times I watched MTV was at my grandmother’s house in St. Louis. My Uncle Donnie had just killed himself. We were in town for the funeral. I rode in the back of a pickup truck for eighteen hours. Borrowing my friend Vince’s cassette recorder, the kind you used in speech class or borrowed from the library, I planned to hedge the wind and boredom with some music. I had two tapes-One was Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell” and the other was a comp of Otis Redding, Def Leppard, Black Flag and other little, poorly recorded nuggets. Over the ride, I remember sitting semi-prone and semi-fetal, a hybrid of both poses, really. My rear was numb by Greenville. By the time we hit the Knoxville traffic, I couldn’t feel from my neck down.
So over and over I listened to these tapes. I still know the sequence and every lyric to the Billy Idol record. The mix tape seemed short, like it ended too abruptly. During a break on the ride, for some reason, I recited the entire screenplay to “Stripes” outloud. It was comforting. For some reason. Don’t ask me why.
Pulling into St. Louis is like the beginning of any tv show, there’s the cruddy bridges and the hood, the huge factories and stripmalls. Of course, there’s the obligatory Gateway Arch montage, compounded by the rapping of the grates on the bridge as you cross into the seedier part of town, from where my ancestors rained. Eventually, we found the depressing street that my grandmother’s house was on. It was the kind of street where the dogs looked desperate and the kids looked old. All of the adults in the neoghborhood just seemed empty, like life was still waiting to happen for them, almost in a sad way.
My grandmother’s driveway was long. It was made of chubby gravel, a clean, bluish gray stone. My face was windburned and chapped. I wished for two days of sleep.
My mother told me I had to clean up Uncle Donnie’s house. I don’t know why. I remember some scuttle about the other adults in the family. I remember my grandmother hugging me, in the driveway. It was a long hug, the kind where you think about things other than the hug itself. I tried to smell her. I noticed that lupus, or what I was always told was lupus, was starting to win. She was worn. But still, I remember her as my grandmother, the lunch lady when I was a first grader. She gave me and my retarded friend Darryl extra tater tots and we thought we’d won the lottery. As I stood above the moving, rubbly rocks, I told myself to record that embrace, to log it in the book of my mind where special hugs and caresses are stored. She asked me to go look after Donnie’s place.
This part gets gross. Its even harder to try to relate as I never have really spoken about it.
I took the Buick over to the house. I had some cleaning supplies and mops. I even think I had gloves with me, for the blood.
I opened the door, tore the tape off the jamb and stepped in. There across the floor, in the center hallway, was a mural of blood. It was a huge violent spraying canvas of redness. The main fulcrum of the sanguinity was on a cubby-type shelf, where the phone stayed.
It was sad to me. There I was sponging off a wall, trying to delete the last moments of my uncle’s sadness. It was his transubstantiation into oblivion. There was no reason for it. He could have stayed. Instead he shot himself in the head and bled to death alone.
I never read the report or anything official. I just remember what my grandmother told me as she made me a pizza really late that night from one of those chef Boyardee kits.
My Uncle had walked in the house and found his wife with her boss. He freaked out and left. A couple of days go by and my uncle becomes more erratic and distraught (this was his high school sweetie). She took the two kids, time has erased their names, forgive me. Heck I cant remember her name. So Donnie comes home from a huge bender, high as a kite. He somehow gets his wife, my former aunt, on the phone. He also has a gun to his head and is threatening to kill himself. I think what happened next is pretty obvious. She broke his heart and he checked out. I thought about it as I tried to clean the mess. I’d never seen blood, except my own cuts or when someone ate a rare steak. This stuff was dried and hard to remove. I worked and worked on the spots, trying different concoctions of chemicals. The fumes were dangerous I am sure. Blood is different when you are handling it, dealing with it as a scourge. I can’t really elaborate more on what I did or saw. I do remember my knees hurt from scrubbing. Also, I threw away the clothes I wore that day as soon as I got back to grandma’s house.
My uncle was a low level weed dealer and a repeatedly unemployed guy. He was nice to me, though. I remember he came to see me in the hospital. His big beach ball afro scared me.He was a music nut. I liked when he played air instruments, be it guitar or drums. It was all about rock for him.
I remember my uncle playing the Velvet Underground for me. He told me Lou Reed was as cool as Ultraman. My uncle once met David Bowie on the Ziggy tour. He would sneak me Kiss trading cards. He even told me that punk was going to save my generation, one day. It was hard to get to know him over the years, other than little snapshots of things. I know I was usually afraid of him, with his stache and his weird odor. My mom always told me he was on drugs and that scared me. I was frightened of drugs. Its funny now, because I realize that the only sober, straight people in my life were other kids at school. Everyone I knew or in any position of authority was polluted as a routine of normality.
Thinking back to Donnie and his last minutes or seconds, I wonder what the soundtrack was. I wonder if he was playing anything. I bet he was. Sabbath? The stereo was always on when he was awake. I know it was a few feet away from where he gave up. Iggy? I like to think he was listening to something soothing, something comforting, like Neil Young or one of those Eric Clapton records he liked. I don’t know. Grand Funk Railroad? I guess I am just riffing myself, I mean, what was he thinking? I know he was depressed and freaked out by his lot in life. Who isn’t? He gave up and I think that was strange. He didn’t seem the type. When the Talking Heads show was sold out and he couldn’t afford to scalp, he got in. Same for Blondie. Ditto on the Allman Brothers. He took me to see some bands, boy howdy. I saw all the great facial hair of the ‘70s. He was just learning to dig “new wave” and subsequently turn me on to it.
I hate that he wasted his life. I bet we would have argued about music when I got older. I think he would get the joke that I have a job in the business and he would see the hilarity that I am in charge of a large rock band. I bet he would laugh. I never imagined he would do what he did. And I cleaned it up. I think about that all the time. Or at least when I let myself.
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