It's a long one, but worth the read. Very heartfelt.

* * * * *

My father was in and out of the hospital for six weeks this winter. He had pneumonia.

He's always suffered from maladies of the breathing kind, sinus problems and the ensuing headaches, addictions to nose spray, a case of bronchitis he picked up waiting in cold cars for his daughters to finish dance practice, ski club, etc. He's forever snoring, hacking, snorting, blowing gobs and gobs of snot into hankies. He's always got a tub of Vicks at the ready. It seems he can never breathe fully and deeply to the bottom of his lungs.

It seems [he] can never breathe fully and deeply to the bottom of his lungs.

I've used that sentence before, but to describe me. That's commonly how I felt growing up. I just couldn't breathe. I couldn't relax and take in air. I couldn't get enough oxygen, no matter the time, season, day, etc.

I just felt so...choked.

Choked as my mother's spirit as she came home from work at The Post Journal each day at 5:12 pm.

Choked as my father as he lay in bed--chest slimed with Vicks--and hacked, snorted, and blew gobs and gobs of snot.

This place I've taken respite in, it's weird and wonderful. It is a place the "seekers" go to climb high and ask the pilings of rocks the ancient Indians once considered gods, "Who am I? What am I meant to do? Where am I meant to go?" The rocks in turn have inspired hundreds of artists to make masterpieces. They've compelled people to seek more spiritual, kinder lives. They've helped innumerable souls suffering from identity crisis to find their shadows--which, I'm pretty sure is why I've come here, not to commune with a quartz crystal skull "made by aliens."

The people here have espoused the new theory that the earth is a living organism. They say, just as the human body has its healthy spots and unhealthy spots, so does the earth, and this place, at its apexes, is a healthy, healthy spot on the earth animal. Not just it's people--long, lithe, kale-eating people with ample tans and low body fat--but it's energy, it's vibration. It's essence. There's no crime here. No hate. No indigenous cancer. No fear. No violence. No bias.

In short, this is a place where I can breathe.

There's never any sunny days in Jamestown. Typically three a year. It was another dreary one the day my mother tried to give the Wilson girl a ride home from summer league softball practice.

The Wilson girls went to school with my sister and me. They were stunning girls; they probably had the prettiest blues eyes between them of anybody in town, and they were pleasing and sweet too, very much unlike my loudmouthed way. The Wilson girls were nice. Everybody liked them and their family.

"Are you sure you don't need a ride, sweetie?" my mother asked.
"No. My mom's on her way. She's just late," said the Wilson girl, the older one in my sister's class, her enormous blue eyes worried under her baseball cap, meant to hold hair back more than shade eyes from sun. What sun?

She stayed behind another twenty minutes to wait with the Wilson girl and the team coach, a gaseous individual named Fred, and then headed home for dinner. Fred escorted the Wilson girl home, where she was greeted with the news that her mother was missing.

Over the next sixteen months, the Wilson girls' mother would continue to be missing--having been last seen in the Falconer Quality Markets buying groceries--until her remains were found in the woods near Lander, Pennsylvania.

The word Chautauqua means "bag of wheat tied in the middle." It is the term the indigenous natives of the area used to describe the shape of lake that slices through Chautauqua County. It looks...like a bag of wheat tied in the middle, you could say, or a "bag of wheat choked in the middle" or even a "gallbladder sickenenly asphyxiated in the middle."

Jamestown sits at the posterior of the lake. The Chadakoin river drains from it's rear, the gray water reaching the end of its American journey at the Gulf of Mexico.

The Chadakoin river used to be a strong one until the Swedes pulled up the great trees that lined its banks to make furniture. Now it trickles, shallow. Some days it is but a few inches of weedy water, crayfish, garbage and slippery rocks. During winter it freezes over, and the bridge that crosses the canyon the once-mighty Chadakoin cut, slicks up with ice too, making the trek from Lincoln Junior High School to Pace's Pizzeria an interesting one.

It was seventh grade. A boy crazy grade, and I was the craziest of the boy crazy. I had danced all evening to Bel Biv Devoe and Ton Loc in my tightest ripped jeans, my hair crusted into shape with a half can of Rave, my face crusted into pallor with an inch of Clinique pressed powder. Quincy Turner and I had won the dance contest, mimicking Kid N' Play's gonzo update of the Charleston to much aplomb. Now I was walking in a gaggle of boys to Pace's Pizzeria, where I would drink seven Dr. Peppers, flirt voraciously and laugh at the class sociopath--a boy often expelled from classes for becoming instantly and violently erect--who would often walk across the bridge on the slippery pipe that topped the railing, wobbling in the wind, caring little about the consequences. "What is he deal?" we asked in a valley girl type lilt. He didn't seem to take note of or care about the hundred feet between himself and the iced-over Chadakoin, the pavement of the streets below and the few shabby roofs of houses perched along the frozen water, houses we girls were explicitly warned to avoid after the owner of one was brought to trial for Kathy Wilson's murder. He was never convicted due to lack of evidence. No one ever has been.

"What is his deal?" we asked, mockingly. He was such a weirdo; we knew that. We didn't know sociopaths don't care about anything. Shit, we were just kids.

Next year, at a birthday party, he will pull me by my hair into a coat closet and shove his hand on my crotch. It won't be all that big a deal. Kids are weird in Jamestown. They drink and smoke a lot. They set fires. They have problems. They're very, very unhappy.

On June 1st of this year, the local paper in Jamestown, New York--The Post Journal--printed the following:

Victim Named In Area Murder; Police Continuing Search For Suspects

ELLICOTT -- Ellicott Police continue to search for three people they think are responsible for a Friday night shooting that killed a Jamestown man.

On Saturday, Ellicott Police confirmed the victim as Quincy O. Turner, 33, of Jamestown. In March, Turner was implicated as a co-conspirator in a drug ring...

Quincy O. Turner was always in and out of trouble. Not serious trouble. He'd mouth off a lot, and maybe get into a fistfight with some of the other boys every now and then. He detested "Hammer Pants" and often pantsed any member of his gender he caught wearing them. He once started a food fight in the cafeteria. That was probably the biggest of his offenses. He was mostly a nice boy, and unlike the majority of the seasonally affected kids at school, he was always laughing. Always happy.

My name being "Tyler" and his being "Turner," we sat in front of or behind each other--depending on the way the alphabet wound a snake of desks through various classrooms--from sixth grade to senior year. It was because of this close proximity to each other's heads, that we became experts on each other's follicles. Quincy had a hightop fade he was often creative with. Sometimes I designed the pattern of razor marks in it for him on a piece of notebook paper. He was forever critical of my penchant to fuck with my long locks the way girls with crises of identity often do.

"Grow it! Grow it out," he always said. "Don't mess with it and grow it out. It's fine just the way it is." You could say, "Just be you" was what he regularly told me. Great advice when you think about it.

Though I was in the gifted program and Quincy took the regular classes, we sometimes shared an elective, a study hall or a gym class. I taught Quincy and a few other boys how to draw a caricature of Hitler in study hall, which Quincy committed to muscle memory.

We didn't always get along. I once fell asleep with my head on my desk, got all loose in the cheeks and farted in his face. He told everybody in school, and because of this, I didn't speak to him for weeks [there was once a time I was ashamed of my active colon]. In the ninth grade, he looked over my shoulder while I was opening my locker, and told everybody my combination number was 34-24-17. I found all sorts of interesting things left among my personal items for months. I was pretty mad at him for that. The worst thing he ever did was to throw a bottle of water on my chest at the band picnic when I was wearing a white shirt, but that's just naughtiness, you know?

Truth be told, I saw him last at our mutual graduation from high school more than ten years ago. It took a great while of thinking about the boy to recall all these memories--good memories, certainly--but we had most assuredly lost touch, and so I have to say I'm perplexed about the ending of Quincy O. Turner at the age of 33 [actually pretty sure he was 31 like me] in a drug related shooting.

Really? Quincy Turner? Into drugs? Cut down in a maelstrom of bullets in the prime of life? It doesn't seem possible. Or reasonable. Or in any way just.

The crews that dig up the sides of the roads in the hippy town I've gone to are inept. It is quite a joy to watch them. They argue over proper procedure, drop flags, break equipment and plug up the roads so that the major arteries coming into or leaving hippyville are stopped up for miles. Miles and miles of fuming yuppies. Honking. Pissed off. HONKING. They want sculptures. They want shopping at Chico's. They want reiki. NOW.

Hippyville is not run well. Considering it has quadrupled in populace in twenty years, it will need a good, expeditious crew to double the capacity of its roads, which are being torn from the root and replaced anew. From what I see, it does not have this crew. It has a crew that smiles and laughs a lot, and always gives my dog a treat when she struts by.

Jamestown summer road crews are much more efficient. We girls used to watch them patch up the surrounding streets--not my street, as it was one of the only sans-brick founded streets in my neighborhood--during our almost-daily roller skating parties. The summer road crews are mostly full of young, surly boys in jeans, shoveling asphalt to make a few dollars over break. All tan and rippled with muscle, we girls were more than willing to watch a Jamestown road crew patch a street, even if it meant watching hot boys spit wads of watery cope. That's how I became fascinated with the process.

It goes like this:

The majority of streets in Jamestown are made of brick. Most of them have been paved over with asphalt. Now, asphalt doesn't stick to brick, and during the winter, when water seeps into the cracks in the asphalt--freezes and expands--the asphalt breaks into bits causing great potholes in the streets. When spring comes, the road crews set out to patch all the potholes. They seam the road back together. The following winter, the water expands and creates an even bigger pothole in the exact same place. It requires almost twice the asphalt to repair it the next spring.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "If the brick provides such a crappy foundation for the asphalt, why don't they just rip up the brick? In the long run, it would be far less costly than hiring a slew of boys to patch and repatch the roads with net tons of asphalt every year."

I really don't know the answer to that question, philosophically-speaking. I guess you'd just have to see it to believe it. Each year. Without fail, it's the same.

You could say the "sameness" is the important thing.

Sally has come to Hippyville to die.

That's sad, I know, but she wants to be in a warm, sunny place when cancer finally overtakes her very tired body. Her polarity therapist, my neighbor, tells me this as she sobs. She can't sob in front of Sally. That's not right.

I know just what to say to my neighbor friend. I know, because my mother has lost half her friends to breast cancer in the last five years. In Jamestown, they drop like flies.

Some people say it's the water. There's no conclusive evidence. Some say it's the breezes that blow the industrial waste laden air from Detroit across Lake Erie and into the rainwater that drops so frequently over Chautauqua County as to make it obscenely and beautifully green. Roswell Cancer Institute refers to the area as "the corridor of death," citing the cancer deaths, not the numerous unsolved murders.

The people of Hippyville would say it's simply a negative place, an unhealthy sore on the living organism that is the earth. They would pray for the people who live there, who are forced with the task of breathing unhealthiness as far into their lungs as is possible, which isn't very far. A tenth the way down into the organ, I'd speculate.

They wouldn't call it dying from cancer. They'd call it a "slow asphyxiation."

Approximately one third of the Jamestown Police Department is on suspension.

Now, it is a small police department, so that's probably only these three people: one officer dismissed for being "an asswipe" who called the chief's wife "a cunt," one officer dismissed for spitting in a bag of marijuana found on a proposed local drug dealer to make it heavier--smart, because nothin' says "I didn't do it" like a billion particles of your mitochondrial DNA--and one officer dismissed for twelve counts of sexual harassment--only twelve?--and a suspicious relationship with a local woman named Yolanda Bindics, a married mother of four whose body was found in the woods in September of 2006, and no, the body was not alive.

No one is certain who killed Yolanda. No one truly knows who killed Kathy Wilson either. Here are some other interesting local flounderings to chew upon (from a web site run by Yolanda Bindics' family):

UNSOLVED--On December 6th, 1983, a homicide victim was discovered in a ditch along Rt. 17, the Southern Tier Expressway, now Interstate 86, in the eastbound lane, in the Town of Ellery. The partially clad body was found by utility company employees at approximately 8:30am. The victim had been shot once in the back, twice in the chest, and once inside the mouth.

On April 20, 1984, a 23-year-old woman was punched several times and thrown into her car by a stranger who then got behind the wheel and sped away. Two people saw the apparent attack and gave chase, but they broke off their pursuit when they spotted a parked police cruiser. The pair reported the incident to the officer, Bruce Carlson, who promised he'd "call it in." According to court papers, Carlson--then an 81/2-year police veteran--finished his shift without telling anyone about the report. The car with the woman and her assailant was able to drive for more than 30 minutes on two main roads to a hunting camp on the outskirts of Jamestown. Again, according to police and court records, the man severely beat the woman, raped her three times and left her for dead overnight in the trunk of her car. Brian Blanco was convicted of kidnapping, rape, attempted murder and robbery in Chautauqua County Court and sentenced to 22 years to life. Carlson left the Jamestown police force soon after the incident. He was not charged with wrongdoing during an internal investigation of his actions the day of the attack.

UNSOLVED--May 18th, 1988, Kathy Wilson disappeared around 12 pm from the parking lot of Quality Markets in Falconer. Sixteen months later, her body was found in a wooded area along Lindell Road near Lander, Pa. To date, no new suspect has been located, and the case is still unsolved.

UNSOLVED--On July 30th, 1989 the decomposed body of a woman was found in a barn in Warren County's Sugar Grove Township. Warren-based state police said the body has been tentatively identified as Carol Lambert, 38, of Jamestown and Sugar Grove. An autopsy was scheduled to determine the cause of death.

UNSOLVED--On December 13th, 1990 the body of Rebecca Nicholson was discovered in her home in Westfield, NY. Nicholson had been shot and killed.

UNSOLVED--On January 20th, 1993, the body of Melinda Juul, 32, was found at 4:30 am by a police officer on patrol. The body was lying along Marion Street near Foote Avenue, about two blocks from a residence for the developmentally disabled, where she worked. A police investigation determined that Mrs. Juul, whose husband and four children were home at the time of the slaying, used a bank automatic-teller machine at Southside Plaza after she left the Resource Center's Immediate Care Facility on a break. No motive for the killing has been established. Police said that they were still looking for a black car seen in the neighborhood but were not sure whether it was connected to the homicide.

UNSOLVED?--On June 1st, 1995 the death of a Jamestown mother of three has been officially ruled a homicide. The Erie County medical examiner's office said an autopsy on Melissa M. Case, 23, of 103 Cooke Ave. showed she died of blunt-force trauma to the head and neck. Chautauqua County Coroner John Sixbey issued the homicide ruling. Ms. Case's body was found on the floor of their home. There were no visible wounds. The victim's boyfriend, David J. Fie, 31, with whom she lived, called 911 and said he stabbed himself. Police found him in a pool of blood with several stab wounds to his chest. "We have listed no person as a suspect as yet," Detective Lt. Randall Present said. "I know there will be inferences drawn, but at this point we would like to stay away from that."

UNSOLVED--On June 7th, 1997 Lori Ceci Bova, her husband and her sister went to dinner at the Red Lobster restaurant in Lakewood, New York. She and her husband left the restaurant at approximately 10:30 pm. Her husband told authorities that Bova went outside to smoke a cigarette and disappeared. She has never been seen again. Attorney Joseph Latona immediately wrote a letter to the Lakewood-Busti Police Department, stating he was representing Tyrone Bova, the husband of Lori Ceci Bova. Bova has not been charged with any crime. Mrs. Bova, 26, was last seen in the early morning hours of June 8, 1997.

UNSOLVED--On August 25th, 2000 an unidentified man's body was found floating in the Chadakoin River. Police said the body--that of a white male believed to be between 35 and 40 years old--was found by fishermen about 8:20 pm near 50 Harrison St. The dead man wore wire-rimmed glasses, a black knit shirt, blue nylon shorts, white socks and Fila sneakers.

UNSOLVED--May 22st, 2001, Richard M. Alicea Jr, 19, told cops that drug dealers had threatened him for stealing $80,000 and 100 pounds of their marijuana. He provided details about the major players and their operations. A day later, Alicea was a dead man. What at first appeared to be a deadly traffic accident in this rural area was classified a double homicide by the Chautauqua County Sheriff's Department. The bodies of Alicea and a friend, Johnny Houston, 22, were found in Alicea's vehicle in a ditch in the rural Town of Gerry. Both were shot in the head.

And, of course, the yet--though recent--unsolved murder of Quincy O. Turner, shot dead at 33 [31] years of age. That's a lot of bodies, and not a lot of justice.

Between my freshman and sophomore years of college, I met a girl my age named Jenny Marshall [pseudonym], a girl you could call "The Town Pump," "The Village Bicycle," or "A Big Fucking Whore."

Jenny was, of course, promiscuous, and being of a strong personality, I took to her with my own weak, almost completely unestablished one like fish oil to a yuppie. "That's it!" I declared. "I'm a whore!"

Jenny told me she was fucking many married and engaged men: a cop, a teacher and the much-revered boy who Quincy Turner and I had watched from the "T" section of our graduation ceremony get a standing ovation and scholarship to college for showing up every day without fail from kindergarten to his senior year--showing every day to put in a mediocre, sometimes remedial effort at his school work. It was the showing that mattered, the doing of the same thing every day. He was cute and tall, and Jenny Marshall liked tall boys. What she liked most, was messing with tall boys' heads. Women can play these creepy power-games too, and often do in Jamestown.

"He's engaged to the nicest girl!" I protested.
"Oh, don't worry," she said. "He got all emotional and started crying when I told him I wasn't all that interested, so I told him to stop coming over."

I would go out with Jenny Marshall quite often, to drink and debauch in ways that were considered wildly inappropriate, and then crash next to her in her silk-sheeted bed, a bed that likely contained enough misspent sperm to populate a planet. It was on one of these debauched nights that Jenny and I heard banging at her front door. Really loud banging.

"Who's that?" I asked, as if Jenny knew.
"I don't know."

The banging was aggressive. Frightening. The kind of banging a tall boy whose head had been messed with might throw at a door. Not BANG BANG BANG, but BOOM BOOM BOOM!

"Jenny, who the fuck is that?" I asked, suddenly quite annoyed with my new friend.
"I DON'T KNOW!" she yelled, pulling the covers up.

The banging stopped, and then there was a loud whisper at the window.

"I know you're in there, you fucking whore. Is there someone in there with you? Who is he, Jenny? I know you're home, your car is out here. You let me in, you fucking whore."

I whispered to Jenny, "Who the FUCK is that?"
"I don't know."
"Is it the teacher? The cop?"

"You better let me up there, you fucking whore, or so help me, you'll be sorry."

I slid off the bed, quietly as I could, and crawled between the window and the mattress. Jenny went to find her telephone, held her finger on the dial button and then crawled to the other side of the window. It was a dark night. There was little to be seen, as the man was short, too short to be any of Jenny's tall boys, but we heard plenty from the fucker.

"Jenny, if you don't open that fucking door, you fucking whore, I'll fucking come up there and make you sorry, you hear that, you fucking bitch? Real sorry, you whore."

The voice ceased. A minute passed, and the banging began again. It continued on for a few minutes more, and then we heard the sound of a car door slamming, and wheels screeching on a brick street.

Jenny went to bed. Perhaps she was used to this sort of thing. I didn't sleep all night, and when the sun came up, I left Jenny's house, never to spend the night there again.

I still don't know who it was. I shudder to think it was a teacher, or a cop...

When I was a student at Jamestown High School, one of my teachers asked me to take my top off. Another one chased me around a desk in order to "tickle me."

These kinds of things happened quite frequently. Many kids my age reported sexual experiences with their superiors. Reported, that is. I'm not certain how many actually took place, but accusations of sexual battery could have been made against quite a few faculty members, two of which have since been excused, one of which has been sued and ordered to pay his victim a six-figure fine...the one who asked me to take my top off.

It's a self-selecting pool--people who seek to have power over children--and you could say that there are as many well-meaning souls who strive to change kids' lives for the better as there are ill-intentioned ones, seeking out an extreme sensation of superiority through egregious acts against minors. I had a great many wonderful teachers. I had to put up with some assholes.

But a self-selecting pool of individuals, already selecting to reside in such a negative and toxic environment as Jamestown, a place that slicks over it's shoddy foundations, it's toxic soil, it's murders, and it's troubled children with a pathological urge to create "sameness" leaves the asshole side well stocked, and often unquestioned. They have tenure, and tenure is akin to sameness. SAMENESS!

In my senior year, a new principal was hired to take over the high school. She was an older, single lady--read: lesbian--intelligent and musically accomplished, and she swooped in with an unwelcome load of positive energy and "new fangled ideas" meant to alternately inspire and sort out all the trouble with the faculty.

She was--you could resolutely say--kicked the fuck out of town.

Last week, my father came to visit me in Hippyville and told me many things I was glad to hear. This first part's a little scary, but it gets better:

While recovering from pneumonia, he decided it was time to check his Blackberry and run through weeks' worth of work emails. While checking these emails, his stomach began to lurch. His gallbladder exploded, expelling gallstones once held back by the small circumference of his bile duct into his internal organs. Splaying them, you could say. He was rushed to the hospital, where he had emergency surgery to remove them. Hundreds of them had been choking his gallbladder--for years--and it was such a blockage, his doctors believe it was the cause of a great number of maladies he secretly had. None of us knew about them, of course.

I watched strange things happen to my parents when we moved to Jamestown in '84, this secret-keeping being a prime example of the strangeness. Mostly, they became negative. Everything was wrong. Everybody sucked. There was no goodness, no hope. No possibility. They stopped running, skiing, hiking. They stopped believing in themselves.

He told me of his intestinal misadventures as we traversed a canyon outside Hippyville. At the top of the canyon, where the sides met, there was a gaggle of hippies giving each other reiki, or energy healing. "Oh, I just had the most wonderful vision," one man said. My father said, "What a crock of crap."
"Quiet," I replied. "They're just trying to feel good."

We sat under a great rock, drank water and watched the birds eat bugs on the other side of the canyon wall. One by one, the hippies left and we were alone in the canyon.

"This is a very different place," I said. "It's supposed to be one of the healthiest places on earth, so it's good that you came here, considering the winter you had."
"I told work I'm retiring next year."
"Yeah, you told me that. It's wonderful."
"Yeah, my organs exploding was sort of the last straw. It's this or retiring."
"I'm glad you listened."

There was then silence between us, and the strange feeling of our insides being warm like we'd shared a bottle of wine. Except there wasn't any wine.

Whenever I saw the LAPD in the Los Angeles Starbucks I wrote within, I bought their coffee. I figured it was the least I could do. They get a bad rap. They put their lives on the line, work hard in a city that's tremendously unsupportive of their efforts, and they're always professional when I need them to help me. What's a cup of coffee cost me? Not much, and its something I like to give them. I back the blue.

The LAPD blue, that is. And the CPD. And the NYPD.

Last summer, I returned to Jamestown to see a good family friend--a wonderful girl--get married to her high school sweetheart. A day before the nuptials, my mother, sister and I decided to go to a local bar and throw a few beers back. My mother--being a diabetic--abstained from drinking, and she acted as sober driver while my sister and I got plowed, as per usual.

While driving home, flashing lights, red and blue, popped up in the rear window of my mother's Subaru. She panicked greatly pulling over for a routine stop.

"Oh no," she exclaimed.

The cop sauntered up to her window--like John fucking Wayne--and immediately accused her of being drunk, in quite the fresh tone, I'd say, for I've had my share of dalliances with members of police forces the nation over, and I knew a fresh tone from a police officer. I've got naughty friends.

"Have you been drinking?" he boomed into her window as she provided him with the necessary paper work.

What an asshole.

"No," she replied, submissively.
"Yeah right. I smell alcohol."
"Um, that's me," said my sister.
"Yeah, and me too." I added.

He gave my mother the "follow the flashlight with your eyes test" a test we knew she would fail, being diabetic. She failed.

"Listen, I haven't had anything to drink," she pleaded. "I'm a diabetic. My eyes shake. I can't help it."
His response was to say rather ominously, "Get out of the car."

My hands were shaking with anger as this bastard made my stone-sober and frankly terrified mother--a woman who finds it immoral to change lanes without first signaling, who would rather die than cheat on her taxes--go through violently-guided motions of a fucking field sobriety test. This is a test she couldn't pass with her uncoordinated ass on the brightest of afternoons, the brightest of afternoons in a place the sun shines. What's worse? He patently adored the act of forcing her through it all. He lapped up her fear. Ate it. Look at all that power I've got! I could see that sentiment on his cocksucker face. Smug. Arrogant. Mayberry motherfucker. I wanted to get out of the car and rearrange his features. My hands shook wildly.

He wrote some bullshit down on his bullshit Mayberry clipboard, giving pause before telling her she had failed the test. He then boomed, "Don't move," and left her at the side of the road bathed in red and blue flashes of lights, to get his Breathalyzer from his car. It was while he was procuring the Breathalyzer that my mother's face pinched up, and she shit her pants from fear.

"Oh my god. She just shit her pants," said my sister.

She blew into the tube, a .00 blood alcohol level because her eyes shake from diabetes.

It was a smelly ride home.

"Who was that? WHO WAS THAT! What was his fucking badge number?" my sister and I insisted. Protested. Needed to fucking know. Instantly.

"Oh stop. They're all like that around here," said my mother, accepting the situation. "Don't have any time to catch killers, but by God, don't be a nice, law-abiding citizen who has a beer with dinner."

Wilmer Valderrama--the cute foreign exchange student from That 70's Show--is supposed to be part of the festivities of the Lucy Fest, a big festival held each year in honor of Jamestown's own Lucille Ball.

Now, Lucille Ball ran away to Hollywood in her teens. She was still quite emotionally appreciative of the place she was reared within, writing local landmarks such as the Bigelows department store--I remember from the early eighties--into her "I Love Lucy" plotlines. The store has since been turned into a parking lot. Lucille Ball returned once to Jamestown in the seventies, during which time she ate at the Mexican restaurant across from city hall, the restaurant that displays the memorable check as well as her address on the Los Angeles street "La Cienega," in its hallway. The Jamestownian call the street, "La see ah nay ga." Emphasis on the wrong vowel. It's okay. They don't know.

But Lucy Fest is a big freaking deal, and that is absolutely wonderful. This is a place that doesn't take kindly to new ideas, and a festival inviting strangers from far away places, is a new and frightening idea. It's a wonderful idea, too. Tourism. Money. New people. Fresh energy.

Wilmer didn't say anything about going to any Lucy Fest when I sat across from him in a coffee house in Silverlake a month ago. I wish he had, for it was an entertaining coincidence. He only talked about meeting Barack Obama--awesome--and his love of the preternaturally gifted dog trainer, Cesar Milan. He did a spot-on impression. I must say, this paragraph makes me sound WAY fancier than I actually am. He's merely an acquaintance of an acquaintance and we share a boxing trainer.

It struck me as rather odd when I heard he'd be going to Lucy Fest to celebrate Desi this year. But then, it struck me as wonderful too. Jamestown needs a little spotlight. A little catalyst. Something to get it moving. It has potential.

In the canyon, my father and I sat in total silence for an hour or more. When you think about it, two people who haven't seen each other in almost a year, sitting silently for that length of time is quite strange. We didn't find it strange until we left the place. We were under a spell of sorts, a wonderful spell. Our insides vibrated. No annoying bugs landed on our arms or necks, which were sweaty enough to attract them. There was only the two of us, the sun, the sacred pilings of rocks and the sensation that just about anything we wanted to do with our lives was possible.

"I want to always write honestly," I finally said. "I want to find out exactly who I am--odd as it is--and accept it, and always write from my true self. I want to help people who don't know who they are. So many people email me, and they're so very sad."
"That's wonderful," my father said, in a startlingly positive way. "You know what? When I retire next year, I want to do the same thing...only not with the writing or anything. I just want to be myself, whatever that is."
"Really" I asked.
"Yes. I have big plans for your mother and I."
"That's one of the most wonderful things you've ever said, daddy."

As we walked out of the canyon, my father took a million digital pictures of it, stopping every minute or so to snap them. He captured the fauna, the flora, the sky, the rocks, as if he never wanted to forget what it felt like to be there.

When he drove off for the airport--he told me--he bawled like a baby. I wondered how much of it was because he was leaving me, and how much of it was because he was leaving behind the feeling of positivity, possibilities and the notion that he could do whatever he put his mind to.

Which begs the question, what is this difference between a place like Jamestown, and a place like Hippyville? I could go on about the new notions of value-adding DNA popping up in institutions the world over, the death of power addiction, the rise of the concept of attraction by positivity, but that's a much bigger piece for a much later date.

I'll just say this:

Jamestown is a place full of creepy-crawlies, yes. But it's also a place I've met wonderful people, people who treated me with great kindness. Perhaps it's an unfortunately toxic place people stay within because they don't have the energy to leave--good and bad people, like any place. Perhaps, if you live there, and you're not very vigilant about remaining impervious, it poisons you too.

Hippyville is a place that invites you to come to it by being absolutely wonderful, and treating you right while you're there.

My father can't forget it. He has called me every day and said, "God, it's amazing! I should've felt like an old man, but when I was in that canyon, I was tripping the light fantastic! I felt like I was twenty again. I could breathe so deeply! Unbelievable."

I wish Quincy Turner had considered Hippyville instead of drugs (if he was even involved with drugs to begin with...no one will ever know for certain). I think he would have liked it here, and it would have liked him. I send my condolences to his family, and I'd like to express that you raised a wonderful boy I have terrifically fond memories of. It is a tragedy that he is not still among us.

Posted by The Bunny at 11:49 PM

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