Chapter 27
We arrived at the Brady house late. Everyone was asleep when we got there, but Decky’s parents had left a key for him under the front door mat so that we could let ourselves in. Decky was one of five children growing up in this rural neighborhood in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, but now, his youngest sister Molly was the only one left at home. The rest of the Brady kids were spread out all over the country. Decky’s oldest brother lived in Washington State; his sister Maggie was the next oldest and now lived in New Jersey; Decky was right in the middle, then Megan who was a year younger and who we had visited in Denver, and finally Molly. On Taft Avenue there were bedrooms for each of us, and it wasn’t long at all before all of the lights were out. It was a peaceful sleep.
Thursday came. When we awoke in the morning, Molly greeted us as we came downstairs. She was the only one home now for the parents had already both gone off to work. Decky’s dad, “Crazy Legs” (I loved referring to him as this) was a chemist at Goodyear in Cleveland, and his mom, Bridgie, was a dietician at the city hospital. Molly sat at the kitchen table reading as we clanged around her. She was a junior at Ohio State, where we had just come from, but her semester and move there wouldn’t start for a few more days.
After breakfast, we ran for a few miles through the neighborhoods and tried to sweat away the ill feelings associated with several accumulated days of drinking. On our run, the houses on Decky’s street and throughout all of the area jumped right out of the ’60s at me; most were two-story Capes; it was like running through the Hollywood set of Leave It To Beaver for me. The housing development had been built for the families coming to Ohio who worked in the growing rubber industry back in the early years. We pushed for about three miles through the territory of the Cuyahoga (the name translated in Native American meant “the crooked river”). During our run, Decky reminisced about his childhood in these suburban streets with community quips and bits of nostalgia along the way with his narrative. He showed us the trees he used to climb and where they all swam at the Old Mill, and how they played tennis out on Wilhelm’s street all of the time. He spoke of endless nights of flashlight tag and the tale of god-awful “Rex’s erection,” a tall cement eyesore tower built by some guy named Rex that didn’t seem to serve a purpose but could never be torn down.
In the afternoon, Decky and Molly took us over to the Blossom Music Center. We went to the outdoor stage area and looked out from under the large overhanging roof toward a surrounding panorama of a belt of graded green lawn that served as seating. It went all the way back to the beautiful dark green tree line, the forest beyond encompassed nature’s cathedral. A group of stagehands were preparing the place for Cindi Lauper who would be performing that evening. Decky explained to us that because the stage area was wooden, it provided for some of the most superb acoustics ever heard in an outdoor arena. I looked out to the open area and imagined myself up there performing air guitar for the masses . . .
His tools are vocal jewels, he sings
A harvest, running springs
A band silhouettes the stage
A lion outside his cage
When lights come on
His symphony is born
“Are you traveling with the show?” Decky asked a crew member carrying extension cords to the stage.
“No, but he is,” the man replied and pointed to another bearded guy working next to him.
“Oh-oh,” the bearded guy said to the first. “Now you got me in trouble.”
We didn’t bother with him. We walked out from the stage area and passed a black, superfluous, curvy, marble sculpture inscribed with words that said something like “The Language of the World is Universal.” It was a clef symbolizing the gift of music. I at once realized that this inscription illustrated everything that I always believed the definition of music to be. Rock and roll truly was a gift to the world. I knew that. My poetry expressed it all.
And we would grow old
Before ever learning our lesson
If not for the sound
That soothes it all
It’s music that facilitates expression
“Burn it!” Luke’s brother Trent joked that these words should be burned into flakes of floating embers. “Let it blow away on the wind; that will be a true expression!”
From here we went to Virginia Kendall Park, a wide-open place the size of several football fields, probably like eight of them. At the edges, it was surrounded by a forest of trees. When we got to the trees, we followed a wooded path to the famous Ice Box Cave. On the way there, the beautiful sunlight came in from far above us, her light cutting through the dark canopy overhead in a series of individual laser beams angling to the earth, strings of a harp, evading the tops of the giant trees that struggled to keep it all themselves. There was the smell of dampness here; the faint sound of the nearby river provided a soundtrack for the changing season; the leaves showed with their colors that ever so gradually they wanted to change from greens to reds to oranges to yellows and rusts, for it was the end of their summer stay. Red leaves were beginning to collect on the ground around us, oak leaves, while acorns, green mosses, and lichens graced the rounded and cut rocks off of the path. These were the coral beds of the upper world, I thought, rising above the land ocean’s floor, slowly building on a foundation of past years that were layered over the cold earth. I looked upon these layers of decomposing matter, reflecting on all who had walked along this path. There were memories buried within the leaves from these pages of before. Small green plants and bushes covered the remainder of the forest floor, dwarfed by taller pines and oaks and all other things of a more simple and primitive beauty.
Wildflowers
Constant changes in our flora
The ever-changing aura
Fields of succession
Plants
Growing into leaves
Begetting taller trees
Fields of succession
Wildfires
Forests burning down
Embers on the ground
Fields of succession
Attitudes
States of mind
Somehow realigned
To justify one’s way of living
Over and over
Fields of succession
Thinking
Thoughts forever changing
Friendship rearranging
I am the rain forest
No longer the desert
Fields of succession
We walked to the base of the giant ledges; it was a monument of cut stone, with cliffs and drops between varying planes of elevation, all of it cut by erosion, the simple forces of water, water that flowed for centuries unheeded. All the way up, the rock was covered with moss and sporadic outcroppings of bushes and trees that sprouted up out of anything on the rocks’ surface that closely resembled earth. Sometimes it almost seemed that the bushes grew from the rock themselves. A chipmunk ran by, disappearing into a wooded hole in the ground, and the birds called out to the forest, warning nature of our rapid approach.
I felt alive as if I walked the very pages of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of The Mohicans, sensing life through the forest as Uncas had, drinking it in, imagining that this place in Eastern Ohio was probably very similar to the terrain of the early 1800s’ Hudson River Valley. We had so much to learn from the signs of nature, so much that others had known before us. It was crazy to think that we had left it all behind somewhere on the road to progress.
We walked down the last outdoor corridor to Ice Box Cave. There were thirty-foot granite walls on either side of us, with the sky still our ceiling, but the walls, like the initial separation of the continents, almost looked like they had been perfectly broken apart for our passage, one ledge the opposite three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle piece to the other.
Inside Ice Box Cave, the sudden drop in temperature was clearly evident and hence, explained the name that Decky called it.
“I wonder who named it,” I said.
“Had to be someone who was around when the Ice Box was invented,” Luke guessed, “I don’t know, 1800s?”
“I wonder what the Cuyahoga called it then?”
The mouth of the cave was about ten feet by twelve feet and once past the entrance, two narrow passageways cut back into the darkness.
Decky had brought a small flashlight with him from home and flipped the plastic switch on, and it at once brought immense light into the small space in front of us. The walls of the cave were full of moisture; the drip, drip echo into the few inches of water on the floor could be heard from all around. Fallen trees, laid down by humans before us, were there for walkways, and we proceeded deeper into the passageway on our right, pushing to where the walls began pushing back at us on both sides now. We were like clay in a vice. Decky put the light overhead and showed us the still twenty to thirty foot high ceiling in the cave, before instructing the last in line, Molly, to turn around and head out and around the corridor on the left.
“If there was an earthquake right now, we’d be gone,” Luke said.
“Gone and smack-dab into another life?” I asked him.
“Not me,” he replied.
“What? What do you mean?” I wondered why.
“I might not come back right away,” he laughed.
“Don’t you want to come back as a fat old lady riding in a big old Cadillac with Texas license plates? Like the one we saw in Colorado riding next to her husband?” I asked him. They towed an Airstream trailer through big old America and threw their McDonald’s trash wrappers onto that clean mountain air highway when we passed them. It made me sad, just like in the ’70s commercial when the Native American turned to a camera to shed a single tear when someone threw trash out of their car on the side of the highway.
“Naw, not anyone like that, although I don’t think it matters,” Luke said. “It’s just another physical experience.”
“Wouldn’t coming back as that lady we saw in Colorado be like taking a step backward?” Decky seemed confused.
“What’s the fun in coming back here anyways? I mean, to come right back to this space and time?” Luke answered. “I will probably go to another time and place way out there in the future!”
This was how our conversations sometimes would go. Poor Molly sat silent in the backseat of the Fairlane on our way out of there, looking out the window the whole time. I wondered how crazy she actually thought we all were. What had happened to her brother, and why was he traveling with these two lunatics? She didn’t utter a single word.
After dropping Molly off back at home, the three of us walked one block over from Taft Avenue to visit Wilhelm’s parents, Sadie and Bill Schmidt. Wilhelm was Decky’s neighborhood friend who had followed Decky all the way out to California but opted to stay back in Huntington Beach and not go on this adventure with us. His parents had heard from the Bradys that we would be coming through town and wanted to have us over for dinner. Out on the wooden deck that Wilhelm’s father had built, we feasted away on grilled steak, potato salad, and fresh-cut vegetables while Decky flipped through the pages of three photo albums that he had brought along with him. From the pictures on the pages, he chronicled our West Coast exploits with Wilhelm.
Bill Schmidt loaded our plates with steak from the grill. He was a retired buyer from Firestone Rubber. He told us that he had started as a mechanical engineer but had moved to the purchasing department many years back for the excitement of it all. O Ohio! The rubber she made that fed the great machine of Detroit, those turning wheels of progress, the great American auto industry, and how it now seemed with all of the jobs leaving such a bitter wreck! It remained a mystery if the jobs would ever return.
“Eat it up; ain’t no good warm!” he told us as he came by and piled the steak on our plates.
His own steak was already gone. He always ate his steak alone before eating anything else.
“The potato salad can wait because that stays cold all of the time,” he said.
Bill and Wilhelm had built the garage that stood off of the back deck to the right of where we sat. And sitting there in a moment of quiet observation, it immediately occurred to me that Bill had the same thirst for living that his son had, a blanket of hope for all of humankind. I marveled at how Wilhelm always seemed to be happy, taking anything that was thrown at him, and always spinning it positive. Wilhelm broke out in song and dance during the strangest of moments; he became crazy when crazy wasn’t allowed, screaming and twisting to “Incense and Peppermints” by The Strawberry Alarm Clock, a one-hit wonder ’60s band with their psychedelic tune whenever it came up on the oldies stations.
Wilhelm often threw his arms madly about him on his way to work at the circuit board factory on a Monday morning, falling to the apartment floor as he sang, and then he would calmly get up to walk out the door, just to make us all laugh.
“Wake up, people, it’s a new dawn!” Wilhelm screamed in Huntington Beach on the weekends, with most of us hungover under the morning marine layer fog, as he banged the kitchen pots and pans before making pancakes for everybody. This was Grace Slick’s famous scream during the Woodstock dawn, he told us, right before she and the Jefferson Airplane launched into a frantic rendition of “Volunteers.”
On the back deck at the Schmidt house, Luke, Decky, and I talked into the night about our crazy adventure across country. Three and one half hours later, we managed to finish all of Mr. Schmidt’s Stroh’s beers (at least two six-packs’ worth). Bill Schmidt had helped with this while his wife Sadie just laughed and laughed.
“Eat it up; ain’t no good warm!” Bill told us again.
By the time we left, there was thunder in the Cuyahoga Valley. How I had missed the thunder of the east. Those loud roars first started when we had crossed the great divide of Utah, and by the time we had gotten to Aspen, the thunder was everywhere, just like the thunder of my childhood. In another time, I would have imagined it was the voice of God himself. When I was young, my mother would freak out and unplug the television set during those New England booming storms. One grand storm she even herded us kids under the cover of the dining room table until it passed. Perhaps the Cuyahoga Valley storm would bring in cool rain.
Back at Decky’s house, we finally met his parents, Bridgie, and old crazy legs himself. Decky’s dad, Walter, ran track for Boston College. He was so fast going around that indoor field house track (they say his legs churned like bike pedals on a crank set) that someone had come up with this funny nickname that stuck with him. After school, Walter moved out west to Akron to work for Goodyear as a chemist. It was in Akron that he met the West Virginian girl of his dreams and began his family of seven. The TV rolled the whole time in Decky’s living room. Cheers, the Boston Bar-based sitcom, was on. From their armchairs, Walter and Bridgie invited us to have a seat, but the Cleveland night life awaited us, Decky told them. We really couldn’t stay; we had to get a move on, for Big Jim and his wife Elaine, old friends of Decky, awaited us.
Big Jim had a partnership in a landscape construction company in Cleveland, and Elaine was an accountant. They had been married for five years, had married during college, and lived in the country suburb of Boston Heights. When we pulled up to the driveway, Big Jim’s Massey tractor sat dormant in the driveway; it stared us down as we jumped from the Fairlane and headed for their front door. I wondered if the intimidating beast might even bark at us like Murphy had back in Topeka. Once we were inside, we all sat around another TV set with Hill Street Blues, the American cop drama on. No one seemed to be watching it as Big Jim and Elaine took turns ripping on Decky; they laughed at his crazy haircut. It just stuck up into the air like it was constantly charged with balloon electricity. All the while they blurted out the high school and college quirks and quips that were uniquely Decky’s own.
“Hope you win the big one!”
Things got so funny that Big Jim even decided to shut Hill Street Blues off and put on WMMS so we could listen to rock and roll. Luke, Decky, and I drank the Rolling Rock beer that we had brought, while Big Jim and Elaine stuck to their Stroh’s Signature brew. Jim and Decky talked about their Catholic high school geometry teacher named Clint Eastwood; he drove a Harley to school, held Hot Wheels 500 races in class, let his students use his dartboard, and even had a stereo system and funky modern furniture in his classroom. And now old Clint was a principal and the head football coach of another school, always living up to his name every step of the way.
“And in The Outlaw Josey Wales he spat on the dog’s head!” Decky laughed.
Big Jim told Decky about the people who had won state lotteries since he had left Ohio. There was some sort of TV special on that talked about what they all were doing now. Elaine and Big Jim bickered back and forth about the details.
“Most of them are in prison now for overspending,” Jim said. “Some eighteen-year-old, after winning, flew down to Florida to buy two kilos. Got bagged!” he said.
“Now that John Belushi had it all,” Big Jim went on. “He was really going places, but he blew it, too, literally! He was allergic to the stuff!”
“Yeah, such a pity,” I said. “At the peak of his career, right in that hotel on Sunset Boulevard, he overdosed, and just like that, he was gone.”
“He blew it in this life anyway,” Big Jim again said. “He’s probably in another dimension by now, who knows?”
Luke and I were aghast, surprised that Big Jim just said this.
“I’ve died before,” Luke said to Big Jim, testing Big Jim now for more insanity.
“Oh, you have, have you?” Big Jim replied, “Well, I’ll tell you there’s been many a morning when I’ve been so hungover, I’ve thought I must be dead too!”
Luke shrieked in laughter.