invasion of america - the hardest post of all

Kansas City

I have family in this part of the world. This is where my roots are deepest and all of my talent is rooted. This soil is sacred to me and it bears the remains of all those who have come before me and made ME possible. Most of the long story of my past I don't even know having come along to late in the game to meet those with all the stories to share. And now with most of the major cast long gone, I doubt that I ever will know. The tales that I do know were all given to me by a tiny wine-soaked voice over a period of hundreds of endless afternoons at my grandmother's house. My grandmother - The closest relative that I have ever known and the one great presence of my life. She is my greatest memory of my life, the greatest love of my life and the greatest failure of my life for which I can not forgive myself... And here I am, standing at her grave 8 years after her death without a thing to say.

This garden of stone is filled with the names of my relatives; Virginia; Dudley; Charles L; Charles D; Helen; Alberta. The names just stretch far across time and I can not be here without feeling completely humbled and more than just modestly ashamed of myself. It's here - and only here, that I feel that I truly stand in judgment for my actions. Any other place, any other person, any other reason - it means absolutely nothing to me. Here, amongst the names that have come before me - I am judged. Am I worthy of this? Have I deserved the chances that they have provided for me? Is this the life that they wanted for me? Have all their efforts and all that lived and suffered and died for, been worth what now stands before them? Do I honor or shame their memories?

It's a cold September morning in Knob Noster, Missouri. The sun is as bright as it can be but it offers no relief from the chill in my bones. The howling, bitter winds that blow across the cemetery is all that I can sense around me as my eyes never waiver for a second from the names carved in granite before me. I loved my grandmother completely, and somehow I can not forgive the actions taken in my youth when I abandoned her in her last years. Tearful phone calls that begged me to come see her. A tiny voice that had lost all its pride when it shamelessly said, "I'm lonely". I disregarded her statements... And ridiculed them... I brushed them off and explained them away. Then they stopped coming... And shortly thereafter... She died. I never fully realized what I had done to her in those final days until years later... When I was on a cross-country bike trip... And standing on her grave - Lonely and desperate to see her just one more time. I would give absolutely anything to spend one more endless afternoon with her. Anything. The more I think about it, the more my heart sinks.

Kansas City has been a hard place for me to reconcile with for many years. I have fought for so long with my past that I have actually convinced myself that I am not even from KC and that it has had no bearing on who I am as a person whatsoever. Each time I return or come back for a visit, I am quick to brush it off as a dark and ugly place that is filled with nothing but dead-ends and hollow dreams. Kansas City, as I have said many times in the past, is nothing more than a vacuum where all good things are sucked into nothingness.

I was born here. In Research Hospital in Raytown, Missouri(made famous by the sitcom, Momma's Family in the eighties). I was the second son of two teenage parents. They were suburbanites, the second generation that America ever knew. As for me, I would be a third-generation suburbanite and I would grow up just across the state line in section of Kansas City, Kansas called, Shawnee. I went to the various malls around town, hung out at an all-night Perkins restaurant with a cast of over 40 like-minded souls that were themselves left with no place to go. I drove around at all hours of the night doing nothing and I had a ball. I knew every street in the greater Kansas City metropolitan area and I must have traveled each one a million times. I went to a mostly white school, and graduated early without much fanfare. I had long hair, listened to hair metal, smoked cheap cigarettes, thought I was cool and loved sex.

HOWEVER, I was also brought up in a rural logging community in North central Washington state. I was raised with a lot of conflicting beliefs between these two geographic locations. ( I wrote about this in a previous post regarding my two fathers and I won't rehash it now) And this made me very aware of what I had in my KC lifestyle. At the time, I didn't like rural mountain living and KC offered me, what I thought at the time was a chance. There were options.

I always felt my time in Kansas City was a time of nothing. It was time spent stupidly doing stupid things. It was the suburbs and most of us in the middle class felt that we were never going to get a break. We were too rich to get aide and we were too poor to buy a future. It seemed that the only thing you could do was what was offered to you and that only seemed to be a life right back here in the suburbs. There were limited outlets and no one really wanted you to go, so you stayed put and just hoped and prayed that life came to you. That somehow the doors of opportunity would open and you would somehow just be swept away to happiness. It's sad to think that most of the time I spent in KC is lost. My memories are washed clean of most of it.

Then I rolled into town on a motorcycle.

The streets had changed. The houses of my past had changed. I was able to find them without any hassle, as I knew I could. It was automatic. But when I finally turned down the streets and saw my grandmother's house or my house in Shawnee, I was lost. They were repainted and ugly looking. The houses themselves seem to sit differently in the rows of houses and they looked smaller and further away from the road than I remember. The trees in the front yard were larger and they blocked my view, but what I could see was hard for me and I am glad that my visit was spent just on the outside. I'm not sure that I could have handled going in.

I was able to spend my time in Kansas City with my ever faithful friend, Adam (who, it turns out wasn't dead after all) and another friend of mine from my late night Perkins days, Angie. I hadn't seen her in 8 years and it was great to see her. She's all grown up now and owns a home and has a real job and bills and has new anxieties, just like everyone else. It seems we replaced the "What am I going to do" fears with "What am I supposed to do now" ones.

The Perkins where I hung out all those nights with my friends, was gone. Leveled so they could build a parking lot. The great Oak Park mall was reshaped. Gone were the theaters inside of it that gave me The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Betelgeuse and New Jack City and Romancing the Stone and blah, blah, blah... There wasn't the faintest reminder that a theater was even there. Wiped clean. I was personally offended.

My high school was reshaped to accommodate for the more paranoid present day educational experience. In my day there were just tornado and fire drills and signs in each classroom that told you what to do if one should occur. Now there is also a sign for a "Code Red" which is code for a school shooting or a weirdo Republican child molester on the school grounds.

The endless fields of grass and trees and bushes and crickets and poison ivy were all gone. In their place, as far as the eye could see, were houses. Millions and millions of houses. All modestly painted and occupied with modestly interesting families, much as mine was twenty years ago.

Gone were the video game arcades. Gone were the pool halls. Gone were the diners where my father and I spent countless hours together in the middle of the night. Gone were the unique-to-Kansas City shops that made it worth living in. Gone were all the faces that made me want to stay here forever. Gone was the feeling of endless amounts of time to get anything done.

My friends and I drove around for days; eating, laughing, remembering, revisiting and rehashing the old stories, remember-when's, what-ever-happened-to's, and I-don't-remember-that's!. It was a great time. I have never been so overwhelmed with emotion in all my life.

The darkness and emptiness that was the Kansas City of my memory was gone. In it's place was my soul's playground. Built by nostalgia and a finer appreciation for what I actually had. A bigger part of who I am is found in those stories and those moments and I have learned on this trip that all you really have IS the memories. That the world around you, for all its attempts to preserve the past, can not capture the time, the place, the moment or the people. The importance of something lives solely in your own mind. This entire trip I have SEEN things. Truly seen things for what they are. I have visited over a 1000 historic places, monuments, memorials, graves and little known corners of time that have made our world "interesting". I have seen a nothingness that has eaten up parts of it and I have seen another unknown entity preserve others parts. Who makes the decision over what stays and goes is unknown to me, but I think I am beginning to understand both sides of it now. Studio 54 wasn't meant to last because it only meant something to those people that went there, or tried too. It's not there anymore because it didn't mean enough to anyone. The people that went there can walk by and stare at the sidewalk or the building and their mind will offer them all that they will ever need.

Kansas City was a hard three days and the greatest three days of this trip. It was the pinnacle... It was the complicated step in the puzzle... It was the lesson that I had to learn and the key to this riddle. It's been a hard traveled road and it was meant to be.

I left with a heavy, heavy heart wishing that it wouldn't end. I wanted to stay and be with my friends again. I wanted to enjoy the nights again. I wanted to hear their voices and laugh and pile into beat up cars and go anywhere again. But I know that I have to go.

This is my past and from it I can not run. I can not redefine it, or share it, or explain it and I do not have the power to save it. I am cursed to forget some things and I will lose some things, but other things will remain strong in my mind and with the help of those that were there, perhaps I can occasionally day dream about the dark days, while I am riding on my bike or sitting around my house, and I will smile. Perhaps I will laugh, or cry. Whatever happens, I'm glad I have the memories and that help me to understand who and what I am today. That way, if another faint voice on the phone cries out in desperation, "I'm lonely", I will know why I go it's side. Even if it does mean that someone is going to pee on my car seat. At least I know.