I WENT TO A BAD PLACE

Mike McAdam said that the lessons you learn best are the ones you learn over and over again. More often than not in this life, I’ve found him to be right.

So I’ve monkeyed around, periodically, on this scam site called “Classmates.com” over the last couple or three years---maybe you’ve heard of it. They get you in touch with your old graduating class, and if you give them money and let them make you a “Gold Member”, you get to see who’s visited your profile and you get to communicate directly with these people---sweet stuff, I guess, if you care enough to throw the dough their way----my sentiments have always fallen short of a monetary contribution. Sorry, corporate exploitation….sorry, nostalgia machine.

I guess that, when I think of my adolescence, I think of Chelmsford, Massachusetts---my Dad was a Defense Contractor, and we went from a year abroad to Chelmsford. My parents had a rocky marriage. In late 1980, they finalized their divorce and we moved to Nashua, New Hampshire, two months into my senior year, and I graduated from Nashua High, mostly in a class of strangers.

I’d like to tell you the uprooting mattered a lot but I can’t say it did----I was a miserable, alienated kid, out of step with the out of step---I was bullied, intimidated and ragged on pretty consistently throughout the years---not going to bemoan my youth in detail---a lot of people I knew had it worse, and let’s face it---if we got a brownie point for our suffering, we might all be lined up around the planet, waiting for our goddamn Oscar.

I could probably run right up the cliché generator and characterize my teenage years as ones of quiet desperation—well, occasionally noisy desperation (hormones are a wondrous thing), but almost always desperation. Screaming Nerd-core before nerds took over the world. I couldn’t make it with the in crowd, I couldn’t make it with the out-crowd. I couldn’t make it. And when I left the halls of CHS two months into my senior year, I left like a ghost…I left without a word and it was as if I had never been there at all.

You could say Chelmsford left its scars, and you can ask the afformentioned Mr. Mike for verification. As friends, bandmates and co-conspirators we spent many late nights talking and driving aimlessly between southern New Hampshire and the greater Lowell area…there were nights when I’d take the wheel and he’d implore me, “dude, don’t go to Chelmsford!” Any time we wound up that way I’d cruise my old, darkened neighborhood and I’d rant and rave. It was a ghost town, all the kids I’d gone to school with, my enemies, had grown up and moved away, like I had…but somewhere in my head, all those ghosts were still walking around.

One of my big writing projects right now is doing up a screenplay of my first novel…if I were a Hollywood pitch man I’d tell the execs, “think Holden Caulfield meets Travis Bickle”---or “think ‘Better off Dead’ meets ‘Taxi Driver’ “. The story isn’t autobiographical, but I buried a lot of old demons in that piece of work.

Well, okay…mebbe I didn’t bury them entirely.

I’m not sure what it is about trying to reconcile yourself with the past that can send you in one extreme direction or another in an instant….all I know is, it happens. Not sure what set me off, either. Too much bad water under the bridge? Too much living out in the wilderness? Too much of my own trip to allow a sane bit of retrospect?

I had joined some Facebook Group, CHS Class of 1981. Don’t ask me why…I don’t know why. I’d like to tell you I’d “reconnected”, but I really hadn’t…..It was the ultimate Existential Scenario. Maybe some masochistic part of me wanted it---maybe no part of me wanted it. But like a moth to the flame….goddammit…..

I found myself on the site a week or two ago and plans were being made for a class reunion in 2011. Don’t ask me what Knight Errant in my Id was fired up when I got myself a gutful and wrote, “If we’re shooting for November 2011, can we bring our own firearms?”

Well, ha, ha. Mister Irreverent just couldn’t contain himself. The class of ’81 can blame the Boomtown Rats (Marilyn Manson wasn’t around at the time) and you can blame Child Psychology, but then I can blame the Class of ’81 and we can all feel a hell of a lot better.

My illustrious peers were none too amused.

The site’s administrator, an old peer I did not know personally, scolded me both publicly and privately, writing, “ hey C.F- I have to say that referencing firearms, with in the context of school, doesn't feel comfortable or funny at all. In fact it scares me, as an administrator in education, who hears constantly about the truth of rage and homicide in schools. Please consider the power of your statement. Thanks”

My first, knee-jerk response was to post, both publicly and privately, “I DID.” And I did, too….like I’m going to make such a loaded comment without realizing the ramifications.

At this point it was just pure confrontation for me. And anyone who knows me knows you don’t get me started on the subject of school shootings, because I’ve got very strong opinions on the subject. Kids were going postal long before Klebold and Harris turned it into a hot, hip, sexy trend, of course---at one point taping for “Abbey” back circa Columbine, my bro, Panda said, “when I was a kid, we didn’t go shooting up the school like they do nowadays…we just thought about it!” That off-the-cuff statement resonated, hard, with most of the adults I know. I wasn’t one of the kids who was going to go ballistic and shoot up my classmates, but I understood those who did. That was why, as a teen, I identified so strongly with movies like “Carrie”---someone had put on celluloid the gut-level wishes a lot of us alien youth were feeling. They tapped into a zeitgeist that a lot of people may not have been comfortable with…there it was, though---the sentiments were halfway socially acceptable because it hid behind the monicker of “horror”.

So, is this a taboo on the new frontier? I’m hard-pressed to give a shit, personally. On my own level, me and mine have done our damndest to improve things. We beat everyone to the punch with the “it gets better” trip by roughly a decade---at one point Shannon & I did our dead best to talk a kid down when we thought he might want to pull a Columbine. So, contrary to what some mental tubeworms want to say, I’ve never been “part of the problem”.

My friend on the website, though? SHEESH. “As an administrator in education, who hears constantly about the truth of rage and homicide in schools”?! She shows so much knowledge on the subject one might only surmise she’s read about it in the paper once or twice. And it scares her. Well, that she’s an administrator in education scares ME, and it makes me wonder if she could ever possibly help the situation, as alien as it obviously is to her. You could say I found a “teaching moment” in there, though, and tried to put some of this forth. By all means, open yourself up to the truth of rage, instead of just "hearing about" it. As an administrator, the "Truth" you hear might save your life....as well as those of others. She never responded and I would guess that it was a wasted effort…but most of my efforts back then were.

I needed to stay the hell away for a few days and clear my head. Shit like that always impacts me and I need to distance myself from it. Several days thereafter I returned to my class’s site…not only had the thread I had caused so much trouble on been removed----everything I’d ever posted there had been removed.

HUH. Well, to quote Groucho, I wouldn’t ever wanna be part of a club that would have someone like me for a member….rejection was a constant to me as a kid; As a writer I’ve pretty much claimed it as a big part of my life. So, plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose.

I went to a bad place mentally and emotionally…but that’s all excusable….because I went to a bad place called Chelmsford, Massachusetts.

The next day I was driving downtown with Heather, She asked me if anything was happening online. So I had to finally work up the nerve and tell her what went down…”you remember that whole business with my graduating class? Well, I think I got banned from the site!”

Sometimes a good wife can just do one little thing in an abysmal situation and fix everything, and no one’s better than she is.

She laughed and fist bumped me.

Life was good again.

Copyright 2011, 2015 C.F. Roberts/Molotov Editions 

THIS WEEK'S PLAYLIST:

Blue Oyster Cult-Tyranny and Mutation
Serge Gainsbourg-L'Histoire de Melody Nelson
The Flaming Lips-Transmissions from the Satellite Heart

Zoned Industrial and Then Some

Poem I wrote in 1996 or so, my last days in Nausea, New Hampshire....

THAT'S HOW THEY GETCHA

and so i'm slamming away on the
assembly line packing books in
boxes---i've got it down to a system,
now--fitting in configurations of five
like clockwork--it took me a while
to get the hang of it but here i am
slogging away for the next three
hours--wiley is falling behind after
showing me a few useful tricks and
i'm impressed by my increasing
level of success--rat in the
proletarian maze of industry,
hammering away on pointless activities run
by a clock--it gets boring, naturally,
so i turn it into a private game, exceeding
wiley's progress and as i get better and
better i'm thinking, i've gotcha, wiley,
you old fart, i've really gotcha, i'm
catching up to your slow old ass--then i
realize, hell, i'm a rube of the first order--i
fell for the game, hook, line and dead
brain cells---that's how you become
a cog in their machine;
that's how they getcha.


Wrote that while I was working for this fly-by-night temp agency that would ship us out on overnight shifts to this Book Binding plant in Westford. Mass. Not long afterwards I would move to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where I spent the next 11 years working in a wheel factory. That's another story for another time.....
       In those early days in Arkansas some of my closest friends were in a band that spent a lot of time rehearsing in a storage unit. I learned a lot about noise levels and zoning laws back at that time.
That time period had a lot of influence on a short story I wrote that was recently published in THE BIRDS WE PILED LOOSELY, issue #3.....check 'em out!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


https://birdspiledloosely.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/bpl-issue-three1.pdf

ENTRY

THIS POST ORIGINALLY CONTAINED THE SHORT STORY, "FAT CHANCE" “Fat Chance” (circa early 90s) was a tough sell....one editor told me she “couldn't with any kind of conscience” run such a story. I finally placed it in a beautiful German Journal called THE MOWER ('93? '94?) and they ran it both in English and translated into German, along with another story I wrote. It was a great journal----featured gorgeous color plates and a split 7” single with Clutch----and that was my first exposure to that band, whom I liked very much. Still do.

1957

1957 (Titicut Blues)

raymond you’ve been rotting away in bridgewater state hospital since

before i was born

i’m not sure if they’re force feeding you mush in a monkey cell or

if you’re finally taking the dirt nap out in the yard

apologies for not keeping up

not sure if anyone thanked you for mom and dad’s wedding present

singing castrati in the park trumps waterford crystal any day and

you made the news from whitman to niagra, top of the world, ma

growing up in your shadow was a bitch

afraid of loud noises, not playing well with others

liking monster movies better than football

my guesstimated palmistry led to singing castrati

expectations i caught hints of, expectations i couldn’t comprehend

a monkey cell with my name on it

hearing, “he’ll never have a normal life,”

hearing, “we have to keep him away from his younger brother,”

hearing, “keep him away from the neighborhood kids,”

hearing, “I had a cousin who was just like you.”

your shadow like a millstone, a suffocating blanket

because biology is destiny

because ignorance is morality

because some people can’t make the fine distinction

between high functioning autism and violent, homicidal pedophilia

raymond my childhood is locked up with you in bridgewater state hospital

thanks

and on the off chance that you’re still above ground

don’t bother writing back

Published in BARKING SYCAMORES 2014https://barkingsycamores.wordpress.com/

The first thing I tell people when they ask about 1957 is that it was the year my parents got married.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/07/29/50_years_ago_a_crime_that_spawned_center/

By Kerry Keene, Globe Correspondent  |  July 29, 2007

It was as horrific a crime as the city of Brockton has witnessed.
Fifty years ago last week, on July 26, 1957, two young brothers from Stoughton were reported missing after a summer outing at D.W. Field Park in Brockton. The nude, burned bodies of John, 12, and Paul Logan, 11, were found nearby the following day.
Their murder, and what followed, left its mark not only on the family and friends of the boys, but also on the region. Outrage over the crime helped create what is today the Massachusetts Treatment Center for the Sexually Dangerous in Bridgewater. And the state's sex offender laws were overhauled in the wake of events that day.
The Logan brothers had taken a bus from neighboring Stoughton to one of the swimming ponds at Brockton's 800-acre park. When they failed to return home that afternoon, a search began. All Brockton police and firefighters were called into duty to comb the area.
It was learned that the boys had been swimming that day at the park's Ellis Brett Pond. Initially it was feared that they had drowned, and the pond was drained. Other ponds were dragged as part of the search effort.
The worst fears were realized the following morning when Firefighter Robert Gould went to investigate smoke coming from a gully near Thirty Acre Pond.
There he found the charred bodies, bound together by rope. The boys had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest and abdomen.
Investigators found a house key, apparently dropped inadvertently, under the bodies.
Police took that key to the home of Raymond Ohlson, 21, of Brockton.
Ohlson was known to the police. He had been released seven weeks earlier from the Concord Reformatory, where he had been incarcerated since the age of 15 for a sex crime that had occurred in 1951 at the same park -- barely 100 yards from where the Logan brothers were found.
The key fit Ohlson's door.
Under police questioning, he confessed to the murders. Taken to the crime scene, he described in detail how he lured the boys away from the pond, then assaulted and killed them.
The crime outraged area residents, who pressed lawmakers to revise the law so that sex offenders would not be freed to repeat their crimes.
Ohlson had originally been sentenced in 1951 to 10 years, but a court decision in 1955 reduced his sentence to six.
"That particular crime had a tremendous impact," said Charles Correia, 72, of Taunton, who spent three decades with the state Department of Correction.
Correia recalled how reaction to the boys' murders fed support for a law authorizing the treatment center, which opened less than two years later.
It was specifically targeted, he said, at repeat sex offenders.
"The state started to focus much more on treatment," he said, "and added many mental health clinicians in an attempt to rehabilitate repeat offenders."
A state-issued booklet titled, "A Chronology of the Correctional Facility at Bridgewater" by Kimberly M. Urban, published in 1987, noted that the murders of the Logan brothers led to many revisions in the sex-offender laws, and supported funding for the Treatment Center.
The center today houses 559 patients and inmates, and its population in recent years has hovered around that number.
Nearly all of its residents have been convicted of rape, molestation, or other sexual assaults.
The center -- part of the larger Bridgewater Correctional Complex, which includes Bridgewater State Hospital and the Old Colony Correctional Center -- is seen as an important element in the state's correctional alternatives.
Ironically, Ohlson never entered the facility his crime created.
He was determined by the courts to be incompetent to stand trial for the murders, and was committed to Bridgewater State Hospital.
Ohlson spent the remainder of his life there, largely uneventfully, until his death in 2003.
"He was the most docile inmate. He almost seemed like he enjoyed it there at the state hospital," Correia said. "He blended in. He never created problems or got into any trouble.
"Some of these types of sex criminals almost know deep down that it's dangerous for them to be on the street."
Asked if it were within the realm of possibility that Ohlson actually planted the house key under the bodies so that he would get caught, Correia responded, "As crazy as that sounds, that wouldn't shock me."

© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.

ENTRY

THIS ENTRY WAS "The Great Tradition"

THE SHRILL

I enter the Crash Zone as if it's some sort of garden party, which is to say uninvited but accepted nonetheless----the whole process very democratic in nature. Quotas have become difficult to maintain and they are willing to spill anyone they can into their wastebasket.

It's a siren night and the sky is as ever endless pitch black yawning over downtown like doom. Neon wails hell in pink, blue, yellow and red, most of all red, and I hear my mother's voice.....

It's all nightscream manic beating delirium as usual on the weekend and the sights and sounds ring immortal...the Stagnant Brothers are on their day in day out shit the overalls rage in the punies' faces bender having raised their routine hell by the Soup Kitchen for supper and now they pursue their bully act by the railroad tracks—I saw them bashing---they had Johnny the Owl Boy trapped in their brutal circle and now he's screwed because he has no friends at his back----the Stags kick the piss out of him and once he's a ragged, unconscious moppet he's just no damn fun to 'em anymore and so they leave him there as if he were naught but discarded furniture---Old Ben and the Preach come along and hoist him vomiting and spitting teeth he is carried his poor sorry beaten carcass home and at one point they're literally having to peel his face away from the pavement-----

The bell in the faraway tower factory industrial clock bongs ten ominously the bloody scenes segue in and out an off-duty traffic cop appears, admonishes the lot of them drunkenly and then vanishes; I feel my wretched hands cramp up and icy pain inches up my wrists. The wigged-out Mariah in her funeral lace her hair flung wildly as she shrieks in terror---I watch her face redden, burn, then crumble like an overcooked, failed ceramic object----

Misbegotten and used up on the corner of Main and Atrocity there is a sexually abused childrens' choir all bruised and in mourning---they weep spring showers and a random co will pause every rotation to shake his club at them...their tears shower and river into the gutter into the sewer and tiny streams traverse the complex body-work of pipes around the underside of the city....the tears spill out amongst the piss and shit and bleach and waste of the whole population, curse the waste, damn the waste---tears flow down the solemn, violated river intermingle with the sewage and out east toward forever...

Meanwhile, topside, all lights blazing in storefronts flicker a tiny second and my eyes and my nerves explode. Broken glass flies and dances—my hair instantaneously goes gray and peels exitedly from my scalp and temples like porcupine quills of fable and all is a careening negative lightning image----

A child is running sideways and reckless up the street, pointing, “the angels are dying,” she yells, “the angels are dying!” I believe her. She and several hundred little friends charge up the street in careless flocks.

The whole street seems to tip diagonally and tons of garbage and paper and debris sail off along the axis to oblivion----cars smash left, right and sideways----

The huge crystal angel sculpture in the center of town explodes and sends itself everywhere in fragments---some several green bystanders are decapitated. Couples and stray dogs fuck and defecate wildly on park benches---quote one witness to the action, “it got real hard to tell the humans from the animals. All had shit all over 'em, but that was, like, beside the point.”

The great titanic angel figure shatters with a great noise and rains its silvery, ragged spore all a kaleidoscopic apocalypse where is my angel? Where is the cataclysm blizzard from whence it came? There is snow in the gutter and the cripple sleeps crutches by his side in an eerie, singing brick and snow revelation wonderland dream silent yet wailing out in the towering, menacing black----

I hear the choirs singing and buzzing off into nothing like transistorized flies emitting telepathic deathscreams. I can't stop any of it. Worlds, entire worlds snuff out under my eyelids and it is all too crowded too much-----in the oriental bazaar rope bridges collapse sending hundreds of hapless consumers plunging to their deaths the flimsy, ornate paper pagoda lamps floating down the ugly stream dampening and shorting out, the only sign that anyone had ever been there to begin with.

Everything's dying in a mournful, contorted collision---my head involuntarily draws on an old playground rhyme cartoon fairytale slice of imagery the stately loving angel I kneel before reaches over and draws a circle on my forehead....

Neon blasts and sparks and the black claims another mechanical victim and the fairytale sprites follow the angels all exploding into falling crystalline ash----

The bald woman yelps like a dog and tears down the street Olympic and hypermotivated because her ass is on fire. Her pillbox hat flies off and tumbles in the opposite direction.

Cletus storms past looking hatefully through everything. He kicks a child and spits at nothing in particular—up the street towards certain oblivion he goes surly in his muscle shirt and looking for a war. Good luck, Cletus---I'm sure you'll find a few.

I'm crawling the sidewalk, now, so low I can taste the ghosts of the whole town's shoes. If there's anything Christ alive in this place where is it? Can I touch something that won't draw blood? I grasp and clutch at singed air...I think my thumb is broken and there's a sharp pain in my stomach that makes me frightened to look down there. I gotta puke....

Ambulances and fire engines and cruisers scream by in a blaring cacophony—I can see the woman over there doubled over grieving---she's belting gospel lugubrious agony like a tortured Mahalia Jackson black armband shatter mercy poster child of woe----she screams in synchronization with every siren shrilling in this shit city---my mother often told me the sound of sirens distressed her; she said it always reminded her of the pain someone somewhere was going through and I know what she meant---the shrill makes me shiver in the strange, dark warmcold and I wish I could hide. My mother said, “God, how those sirens disturb me. They sound like people crying.”

Published 1993 in FAIRY TALES FROM THE URBAN UNDERGROUND (Yorkville Press)

VAGABONDS

https://www.createspace.com/5325844

Latest installment, here, of VAGABONDS: ANTHOLOGY OF THE MAD ONES. Check it out----this is a ballsy journal and my short story, "Shit Flavored Shit", is  a part of it.....

Here's an oldie, speaking of Vagabonds.....I'm ***PRETTY SURE*** this was run, back in the day, by an old zine called VAGABOND'S HOUSE.....

DISEMBODIED TIRADE #1

unceasingly, and what rips in my moribund headhell is the distant, lonely ghostyowl of the hound two towns over.....it raises cold, ominous, frightfully isolated in the stillhush of the sad night. You, dear, you ask when you finally reach that fabled edge, “what is it that you see?” I tell you I see the thing that makes the alleycats screech in the pitch----what brings on madness and sets the animal-men running, brawling---when no one is attentive and you're lurking and poking behind your curtain of false security, that gossamer-flimsy veneer slips, flutters, smashes into a million pieces. The Collective Soul rolls about snapping and drooling and shitting; it stares into me with predatorial alarm, caught with its proverbial knickers dangling---wander away, it growls, wander away, and it blunders to readjust its sloppy, disheveled visage. Revelation. And who has been raped, you or me? Knowledge is Trauma, and the

melt

copyright 1994 C.F. Roberts/2015 Molotov Editions

     The Disembodied Tirades were part of a non-linear "Novella" I did (and I put the word "novella" in quotes because it's not like it had a plot or definitive characters in it or anything----) called RED, WHITE, BLACK AND BLUE, back in the late 90s. Mostly just an insano word salad that said, "life is horrific and the world is run by and for terrible people and we're all screwed and we all crowd around the TV every night, watch it and love every minute of it". Simple, eh? One writer friend critiqued it and said it was probably, on the whole, too derivative of Burroughs, which is probably an apt criticism.  A lot of the chapters or subchapters did end up getting run in some small presses. The Tirades were just these little angsty interstitial prose blasts between chapters. There were about four of them, I think.