I thought it had begun in third grade, but thinking back, I can remember an earlier crush.

Every summer, my dad would sign us up for the swim team. He and my mom had spent their formative years as hippy surfers on Padre Island doing what kids do, which is mostly just kick back and relax in the river of life, just watching it mosey by. My dad had always been a believer in sports. He coached high school basketball and track for a couple of years in Kingsville, the girls’ teams — I always thought that was odd.

But, the coaching job, football in high school, and a firstborn son had him dreaming of a robust, active youth he could talk about over beers, in elevators, courthouse annexes.

So, every summer, he’d sign us up, me and my sisters, for the neighborhood swim team. We lived in Northwest Park and swum on the Stingrays, a venerable aquatics organization with depth, enthusiasm, and an awesome coaching staff.

Wendy was the coach for a long time. Kayla was her assistant coach. I remember when I was five, craning my head back to take in the full figure of her six-foot plus height, too young to appreciate the length of her legs. But craning up, the sunlight creating a halo that was accentuated by her blonde hair, I could’ve sworn she was an angel.

Some people just have a certain way with kids. Not like they’re on the kids’ level, but like they don’t believe in that level. They believe that kids are on the same level, or at least that’s how you feel, and that’s how they seem. That’s how I felt. Though probably half her height, I wasn’t taking scrubby handfuls of buttercups to my coach or an angel, or even some kind of adult. I was taking them to the woman I was determined to have as my girlfriend.

My friend Josh was just as bad. We’d purposely violate some rule just so she’d come over and pay more attention to us: cheating on sit-ups, holding onto the wall instead of swimming the full length of the pool. That was our favorite trick. She’d come over in pink flip-flops and step on our fingers. We’d grin big as rats and move our hands out of the way just in time. Still makes me grin. And we’d grin then, craning back to look up at her haloed face.

I think that’s where I learned to be cute. I can remember her squatting down in yellow shorts to look me eye to eye, accepting the wilted bunch of pink buttercups, tousling my hair and saying I was so cute, thanking me profusely for the flowers. That’s the kind of person she was. She wasn’t patronizing me. She was on the level. It wasn’t hard to have a crush on her at all.

And she’d trained me. Cute gets attention. I never really thought about it, never really sought it out, practiced at home in front of the mirror, but it stayed with me: my mutant cute power. I’m not as cute anymore, mind you. Taking life’s hammer repeatedly to the upper torso for many years tends to tarnish the smile a little. You move a little slower. You’re less inclined to just be funny and make people laugh. But every once in a while, someone I don’t know very well, someone for whom I haven’t even the slightest intention of performing for, will tell me to stop being so cute.

With Kayla, it got me her attention, but I should have learned, it didn’t get me the girl.

Her name is long gone, lost across crazy memories and a distance wrought by a sense of self-preservation, but God, she was beautiful. Dark cat eyes, the sides drawn out into exotica, that would pierce you with such intensity you’d look away. She was boundless, whether huddled to herself, her head buried in her arms shouting obscure quotes from obscure books, or strutting around a packed room of young men in a Holiday Inn wearing nothing more than a grimy t-shirt and a pair of panties.

She had one of those crazy smiles that hinted that she was always sharper than she needed to be, always a step ahead, and always a few steps off the beaten path. Her life during these times was bent on making new weirdness, constantly. Midnight rides to San Antonio just for a bottle of Pace picante sauce. Sneaking onto dormitory roofs and shouting at a world blanketed in sepia tones of sodium street lights.

Once on Riverside, she stood up through the sun roof, arms outstretched, shouting at the traffic, flying in East Austin. It was a scene stolen from a coming of age movie, and I remember wondering where I was. Did this mean those movies accurately reflected the lives of young adults? Had we seen too many of these, or were we just crazy enough that it was our story now.

It was her energy that was so beautiful. She was invincible. Perched on a rooftop corner four stories up exclaiming she could fly. Watching her bang out Rachmaninoff. Rachmaninoff was a good metaphor for her: dark, fiery, intense. Her head bent towards the keys, her black hair hiding her face, crazy gymnastic digits attacking the piano keys. And when she was done, you had that smile. Innocent. Mischevious. Beautiful.

But when she was ugly, she was ugly. Foul. Screamed epithets for a Taco Cabana boy twisted her face into something demonic. Cruel, cruel words for a best friend; a slap in the face; shouting, pushing, and dragging you all the way from her room to the dorm lobby where screamed some more in front of the desk and passersby before demanding the RAs throw you out.

She was scary intelligent, and when her darker moods came, she used it all to dissect you into the tiniest most worthless bits possible, telling you truths that not even you knew, literally digging out your heart and explaining, in detail, what defecation it was.

And then she was sad. Sobbing tears barely drowned out by the blanket she was smothering herself under and the Pearl Jam she was blaring. Black Black Black was all she ever played. And then the restrained sniffling, wiping tears away, the smile, thanks for being such a wonderful friend, yeah, she was ok, we’ll have lunch tomorrow, thanks. But you’d get that call at two in the morning. Slit her wrists in the shower, again. Her roommate had found her unconscious, foaming at the mouth, and vomiting from all the pills she’d swallowed.

Have you ever seen a psychiatric ward? They’re anti-septic like an orthodontists office. Soft, dark colors. Muted lighting. Generic furniture in the waiting room for friends and relatives. A nurse has to buzz you in, and someone else walks you down to the room. I wouldn’t be surprised if they keep the doors locked, but she wasn’t going anywhere. They had her tied down, anyway: thick white straps wrapped around her wrists. She was drugged, disheveled, groggy. But buried beneath all the sedatives, she was still there, brighter than she needed to be, a few steps ahead.

She said something funny about the nurse being a cock-sucker or something. We all laughed. It was funny. It was really funny coming from someone restrained and drugged and locked down. She was beautiful again.

She never dated any of us. I don’t see how. Too much crazy. Too much beauty. Too much everything, too fast. People like her live life in a way the rest of us can’t even imagine. At the top, they are life. They’re everything, on speed, conduits sucking it all down and spraying everyone around at full force.

I ran into her a year or so later in a video store in Austin after they’d gotten her medication right. She was doing pretty well. Living with a guy somewhere near Duval. Her last suicide attempt had been six months ago, but she’d been fine since. She was different. Her fire’d been reigned in with constant chemicals. She wasn’t as beautiful anymore. She was almost plain. Just another Austin girl looking through the cult movies.

I don’t know where I’ve been, or what, exactly happened to me. Used to be all my words were poetry. Baudelaire said “make everything you write poetry, even your prose”, and I lived those words.

It wasn’t just my words. It was every part of me. All I had was want, and all I wanted was beauty.

Baudelaire also talked about the magic of words. The power. We’ve all got the power, but how are you using it? What worlds have you created? What wrongs have you righted? What of your love has conquered any of the hatred that’s blighted this place?

How much hate can you take? How much power you got just sittin’ there?

All it takes is some faith…

A couple weeks ago, on a chance whim, hanging with Jade, I hit Beats for Peace, a benefit for KPFT I resented benefitting. But I believe in fate. I was there for a reason: a poet so fiery, so powerful, his rapid fire words nailed somethin’ in me. Reminded me about our magic. Our power. My power.

How long has it been that I’ve been walking alone and weak?

Used to, I’d hit ultra hip poetry mics and slams weekdays in Austin, always staying too late to make class in the morning, but the worlds I’d see…

I heard Thom the World Poet, a guy who’d backpacked the world with nothing more than some pen and some paper and the kindness of strangers who believed even, just a little, in his poetry. Poetry was his life. And he lived off his poetry, crashing in kindness beds and eating scraps from the tables of those who simply respected him, even if they didn’t entirely believe.

How much respect you got just sitting there, wasted?

And I heard another man who limped from polio with stories that started “once, I’d been doing some Mescaline” who read fierce fever dreams that tore at the doors to every heaven. Terrible demons fleeing mankind’s cold, cold hell.

All it takes is some passion.

I remember this one open mic, volume too high, the top inflected vocal range ringing on the PA. Poet after poet after poet. Simple sonnets and landscape poems. Exuberant invectives, and sexual adjectives that made me cringe at the young woman’s frankness. And then the MC stands and calls up this disheveled looking man. I think when he walked he leaned to one side almost as if he’d spent his life leaning against fate’s gale-force winds.

And I say disheveled, but that doesn’t say much. Have you ever seen the underground literati terrorists stalking obscure Austin mid-week poetry open mics? They crave disheveled. They live disheveled. A cast-off thread-bare and faded, forest green button-up sweater is like a treasure, and they casually toss these things on like rich men disregardin’ expensive vodka in their drinks.

But this man was disheveled. A cast-off thread-bare man, faded youth and buttoned-up resolve. And he leaned when he walked, almost obsequious to a fault, as if he’d spent his life kneeling against fate’s cold gaze.

I can’t even remember his name.

But he had this friend. Some homeless man, just like him, if that’s what you call walking between squats in Boulder and Austin and back again year after year after year.

He rambled on about hittin’ the road. The cops in Dallas are assholes, and its a looong empty step through New Mexico and how back in the day they rode the trains unless the railroads kicked them off and then they just walked the tracks.

Thom the World Poet musta’ been proud.

He talked about his friend’d sing for change strumming an old beat up guitar. All the songs he wrote on all the roads he roamed.

It must be tough walking from Boulder and back. Let’s be honest. He didn’t have a name. Didn’t have a face. Didn’t have a job or a place of his own. No family to speak of and no friends, neither. His friends didn’t have the same names he didn’t. And when they find you keeled over in a squat, dead in West campus, you don’t get no funeral. No obituary. No ceremony.

His friend was dead and this was his friend’s eulogy.

Nameless read some Melville. Some Shakespeare. But you could tell he wasn’t supposed to be there. Here he was, a man without a life commandeering an open mic without a single self-centered, misspent word worshipping some golden idol called poetry. How dare he. A heathen choking back tearful blasphemes: words with purpose that slowly carved away at the hypocritical beats.

Man, the MC got nervous, signallin’ time, sure this intrusion wasn’t right. But Nameless just kept goin’. “Just one more quick thing”, a cast-off thread-bare voice, buttoned-up tears and a faded resolve. And he seemed weak when he talked, almost anxious as if he’d spent his life fearing fate’s cold, cold voice.

That night he sang a song his dead friend had written a while back, sittin’ on some sunny, summer, Texas sidewalk. And I can’t remember everything he sang, but he pulled out his harmonica and let loose an ooold blues riff and a cast-off thread-bare song, buttoned-up blues and a long faded pride, almost as if he’d spent his life singin’ to fate’s deaf ears:

My soul’s in hock,
My soul’s in hock,
Oh Lord, What I’m gonna do
when the interest comes due,
My soul’s in hock

Those words have power.

More power than any of the self-righteous crap that kept creeping up on that mic night after pointless night. More tuth than the useless manifestos shouted and applauded by the revolutionaries who’d never fight for anything more than their cast-off, thrift store, thread-bare and faded, forest green, button-up sweaters.

Soft-hearted liberals who never had enough change, never had enough time for Nameless and his eulogy, the last grasp at some sort of pride, some sort of honor in a world where the only place he could go to be heard was an obscure, Austin, mid-week, poetry open mic.

The MC intervened and moved Nameless off the stage.

The poets rustled up their bravado, paging through the shit they’d brought to read. The next guy droned out some misplaced homage to Emmerson or Thoreau: soulless nature poems from someone who didn’t have a soul. But at least he had a name.

And suddenly I’m wondering who it is I haven’t been listening to. And what words I’ve got with nothing to do. Thumbing through my Baudelaire wondering where all my power’s gone. Wondering what’s left that’s good. Lookin’ for words to give names to all those things we never, ever, acknowledge.

…and we spoke about souls. I grasp only two things:

First, what some view as strength in themselves, others view as weakness, and what you see as weakness in others is seen as strength.

Secondly, I believe in soulmates and compatible souls, though the two are different. I’ve met many compatible souls. Not so many they’ve no value, but enough to give me hope of meeting more.

Whether you should settle for compatible souls in lieu of finding a soulmate, I cannot say, but you cannot wait forever, and once you have chosen, you have taken their skin, you’ve become their skin, even if the skin doesn’t fit you as well as you’d like, it’s your skin.

You cannot cast off your skin lightly and at a whim. It holds in the whimsy of your soul. Cast off your skin too often, and your soul will fly away.

“Pussy rot,” triggered a look of reverie on Katy’s face, as if some stank snatch from her past oozed pleasant memories. Jill was blathering about alcohol. That girl is always blathering about alcohol, and knowing what little I do about her home life, it’s possible she’s self-medicating. Isn’t that what we’re all doing? Self-medicating?

We’d ended up at Bennigan’s because, allegedly, Katy and Jill could both drink there without being caught. Of course the manager bid the waiter to take their drinks away. “I only had one sip,” said Jill. “I only had two,” said Katy. Common ground tactics for underage drinkers involves hastily consuming any alcohol you’ve been given. They should know this. Bennigan’s was where we’d ended up, but not where we started.

I picked Katy up from work after another long week at work. Work’s not so bad. It’s the going home and working some more that’s so bad, and really, that’s not so bad either. I enjoy my job, or I wouldn’t go home and work so much.

I’ve been growing selfish and curmudgeonly, never hesitant to say “no”. I say “no” at work all the time now, and look at them real smug-like. That’s the way to show how much you despise them, real smug-like. Say “no” and then go home and work some more.

So, after a long week of working at home after long days of working at work, it’s Friday and I don’t want to do anything. Katy convinces me to sneak out of the den with the promise of maybe we’ll go see a movie, and Lord knows I love watching movies.

But when I pull up in front of the steak house where she works, my movie had been nixed in favor of going to Woodrow’s to drink. Not that I’m against drinking, I was just looking forward to the movie. Besides, Katy said I’d “feel young”.

“You’ll feel young.” This the day after I’d been told I looked old while dancing to Alien Sex Fiend, and maybe, just maybe, I’ve been thinking about growing old with grace and exactly what that means. Seriously. Does that mean you stop dying your hair, or does that mean you start, or maybe only the colors change? Do you stop making stupid jokes in bed? Or maybe that’s what defines elder congress. I don’t know, but when told I’d feel younger if I wandered to Woodrow’s to drink with a bunch of younger twenty-somethings (I’m sooo old, an upper twenty-something), I took a couple of minutes to ask myself if the graceful ager would go drinking with all this… this… this Youth. Is that respectable?

Of course the answer is I don’t know, and it didn’t really matter because: one, Katy’s female, and I’m notoriously unable to tell someone with a vagina “no”; and two, because Katy is young, and I’m notoriously unable to tell someone young, with a vagina, “no”. So we went to Woodrow’s.

Woodrow’s sounded familiar. I told Cindy that I’d been there, back in my younger days. And sure enough, after we pile into a caravan of cars and ride to Woodrow’s (on Bellaire near Academy), remember a wildly debaucherous night I had many, many years ago. Not that I’m old, mind you.

Many years ago, I used to patronize this bar called Dickhead’s. It was a great place. I’d just moved to Houston, knew no one, and my dad had seen fit to introduce me to all his drinking buddies, skeezes, assholes, whores and alcoholics that drank at the bar just down the street from where we lived. This is also where I learned the absolute importance of knowing the bartender.

Knowing all the skeezes, assholes, whores, alcoholics, and a few drinking buddies of my own, I drank there a lot. In fact, with a $12 dollar an hour job and guaranteed 10 hours of overtime every week, and only car insurance to pay, I was consistently amazed at how much money I did not have. And it’s not like I could’ve spent it at the bar. The majority of my drinks were free.

This is how it goes when you know the bartenders really well and have become a professional barfly. The bar starts kicking idiots out around 1:30. At 2:00 the bartender locks the doors. You can probably get them to refill your drink at this point, but you have to catch them as they scurry back and forth wiping down the bar, mopping the floor and generally spiffing things up. Usually they’re done a little after 2:30 and you do a shot or so of the good stuff. For the road, you see. Then you hop in the car and drive to some other bar.

Bartenders are like faeries. Every once in a while, they’ll meet in secret in some secluded grove to dance and cast fae magics, except usually they just meet at some bar, drink, play pool, and compare how much they made that night in tips.

And that’s how I first ran across Woodrow’s.

I’d been drinking at Dickhead’s. My protestant upbringing chafes against the phrase “drinking”, but there was drink being had, and as was typical, drink was being had with a fellow the name of Big Mike (and this was not the Big Mike many of us now know). As one might guess, Mike was Big, and being as it was typical to be drinking up at Dickhead’s with Big Mike, you could assume he as there all the time. He was there before I got there, unless he was drinking somewhere else, and on nights I didn’t close down the bar, he was there after.

So we were drinking, and Big Mike liked to live life Big, so obviously the party had better never stop. The bar closed. Charae, the bartender began wiping down the counters, cleaning the bathrooms, counting her tips, etc. I’m pretty sure Big Mike and I were finishing off just one more drink. For the road, you see. And then Charae invites us to go hang out at Woodrow’s.

I’m still amazed at the gall. We pull up to Woodrow’s, it’s 2:30, maybe 3:00 in the morning, and the parking lot’s packed. But the door is locked. You can hear the jukebox and chattering and glasses and the general sounds a bar generally makes when it’s been invaded by a small guerilla squadron of professional drinkers and drink servers. This was Special Forces bar-hopping: alcoholic black ops.

Like most nights at most bars, interchangeable at most and indistinguishable otherwise, the night came and went in an unmemorable collection of what must have been drinks and boasts, the bartenders chittering about girl bartender things, and maybe some games of pool. Big Mike related a story about this girl he met at some fancy shindig at a country club. Most stories guys tell, in bars, about girls, end up in the dirty on some end, and his ended with him eating her out — “real good,” he said — and I couldn’t help but wonder, despite Big Mike’s disarming charm and honest-to-god cherubic disposition, why some hot young thing would leave a swinging party to wander a golf course in the dead of night to let some large, sweaty man eat her out on the edge of a sand trap, “real good”. It’s possible she was self-medicating. Isn’t that what we’re all doing, self medicating?

So finally, Big Mike and I leave. I’ve got to get home ‘cause I’ve got work in the morning, or by that time, in a couple of hours. Don’t think the party was over, ‘cause it wasn’t. By the time 6:00 am rolled around, a few folks had shambled home, but several stalwarts were determined to open the place back up. That’s what responsible drinkers do. They don’t just close the place down; they open it back up, too.

As I pull up next to Big Mike’s car, he’s trying to convince me that we should grab a cooler of beer, borrow someone’s boat, and go fishing. I’m always up for craziness, but if I’m squinting at a rising sun after drinking all night, you’ll be hard pressed to get me to do much. My excuse was I had to go to work. Of course, I got home, felt like shit and had them worse and called in sick.