THE NON-RETURNABLE TELEPHONE CALL TO HELL

And now I understand:

You leave with everything.

You leave with everything I am.

Memories?

--Courtney Love--to Kurt Cobain

Interesting fact: When my mother was a little girl, she fell into a well. Heavy boards fell around her like dangerous bombs. All she had been doing when she fell through rotten wood, she says, was chasing a beautiful tan cottontail through the high grass. As she recalls this traumatic event, she says she called and called and called. All she had to hold on to was a slick, mossy, metal pole. The water was cold, she tells me. I think she was six years old. I don't have any complete connection to this to recall, however. All I remember is being a small child at the swimming pool of the Bear Creek Country Club in Denver, Colorado, swimming into the deep end as a six-year-old myself, interesting coincidence, calling for my mother--look at me! I'm a dolphin!--the overly thin woman in the pink plastic bathing cap and the rose-colored one-piece smiling a tentative, somewhat shut-down smile as she watched me from the shore: To this day, she is afraid of water. Even putting her head under the surface, I can only imagine, is enough to bring her back into that sad old well on property that is now the Philmont Boy Scout Camp in northern New Mexico. I've never known her to take so much as a bath, possibly because showers apparently seem so much safer to her.

Luckily, as my mother hovered in dark water close to drowning, someone heard her. It was a farmhand of my grandfather's, probably one of the Navajo Indians who had long before befriended the Las Vegas, New Mexico family. Isn't it strange how often small children are so lucky like this? Someone answered her calls. Within the short space of a few moments--I can only imagine the panic my mother felt, her hands slipping against the rough but mossy stone walls of that well--a hardy New Mexico farmhand, good and strong, rushed to a nearby toolshed, fetched a tough rope, returned to the scene of the accident and slowly raised my mother from possible doom. She remembers: She had gotten so cold in the mountain well her body temperature had plummeted. She shivered in the man's arms as he raced to the nearby ranch house, covered her with heavy wool blankets and prayed.

She recalls that as she called, her voice had weakened. Her throat had filled with water. Would I have begun to panic in such a situation? Being as she was only a small girl, she held on as tightly as she could. When she tells this story today, something she politely avoids, she remembers the air rushing out of her because help had arrived.

I bring all this up from the bottom of a well because I have a problem with communication myself. It's as deep as that well, too, and no matter how intently I've tried working it out in my mind, the problem persists to this day. Yes, I've felt that same panic. I've called out to people many times, my voice somehow weakened, my message never comprehended outside the silly fears and indignancy of the modern day world of Be Afraid; Be Very Afraid.

Help, as I said, hauled my mother on horseback to the ranch house. She coughed up well water, she says. But she lived, just as she's lived with enough tragedy to send anyone less strong straight into bedlam and the madhouse. Perhaps this gives me courage: Your own mother as your greatest hero. And some nights, when it all gets too much to take, when the pain I'm given sends my head under water, when I cough it up, remembering here for convenience a girl I once loved who ended a horrible addiction with the experience she laughingly called "choking up charcoal" in the Parkland Emergency Intensive Care Unit after a lackadasical overdose on a combination of heroin, cocaine and ecstacy, older pain emerges. I have to be brave when this happens. I've got to remember the courage of my mother, drowning, a six-year-old in a New Mexico mountain well.

Here, we flash forward many years, moving from the early years of the Great Depression to the fearful days of the Days of Rage: Vietnam War protesters bombing the United States Capital, Black Panthers murdering their own, soldiers gunning down students at Kent State University in Ohio. Actually, I'm not sure when what I'm trying to cough up really began. All I really remember is that, from a very early age, I was quite aware that my father, a big loving man, often didn't come home from work in the evening. All I really knew is that I'd panic: My mother in tears, pacing the floor, calling and calling my father's office, slapping the dinner onto his plate, covering it with tin foil and slamming it into the oven. Where was he? God only knows. Sometimes, he didn't come home for days; other times he'd call from jail; once the Dallas Police discovered him naked and unconscious in a stranger's house, and how he got in there no one really said they knew; other times he'd return late--two or three in the morning--so drunk you could smell him the instant he hit the front door. But before that--there's where the trouble for me began.

You know, your father, especially when you're a small child, is like a god to you. You listen to whatever he says: If he curses, you learn to use that word; if he slaps your mother, you unconsciously decide that "this is love," and possibly a generational cycle of abuse either begins or continues; if he hugs you when you've been good, you remember that. You pick up on it all. And so my father sometimes didn't come home. I'd lay there in my bunk bed in a panic. Why didn't he return? Where was he? Why doesn't he love me enough to come home from work? What have I done wrong? Sometimes, I'd be so crazy with panic and anxiety I'd not sleep--something unhealthy for a growing kid. Other times I'd feel my head spin as if I was hurtling through space. One of my earliest memories of coming into consciousness of the meaning of all this is a mental picture of me, 10 years old, a cold January, standing against the metal door of White Rock Elementary, waiting for the door to open. I hadn't slept all night. I'd listened to the fights, the shouting, the hateful and angry talk. Black circles had grown around my eyes, and the kids called me racoon boy. I hated being alive at that moment. And the door? It was closed, steel, red steel and cold. I remember shivering. Would someone ever open it and let me into the warmth of the school? But even there, I couldn't concentrate: I was in trouble with the teachers and the principal because my reading comprehension had dropped significantly in the space of only three months. All because my father hadn't returned.

But I couldn't say that to him. I probably would have been told to go to my room. In fact, there was a code of silence in our family; although we later learned that the entire neighborhood could hear the raging fights, we presented a picture of a pretty family--good kids, kids who went to church, kids who worked to keep their grades up, no matter what happened.

As I became a teenager, and those hormones began kicking in, the family discord of which I speak here escalated. I can't help but believe that my sexual awakening, a powerful force, somehow rhymed a discordant rhyme with the discord in the house. It's such a confusing time to be sure. Young girls were visiting all the time, yet sometimes I was so depressed I simply couldn't respond to the good intentions abounding in the house and on the front steps. What was in my mind? The arguments sometimes became actual fights. My sister would scream, cowering upon the pretty bed in her room like some queen in a fortress under attack, all in her room, hysterical, crying, "Shut up! Shut up!" I'd try to protect her, but I too was frightened. And worse, my father began talking of suicide. He began letting me down, disappointing me, promising me things and then breaking the promises, working hard, I later understood, to make me hate him--because when the bullet hit the bone, he seemed to be thinking, he wanted to insulate me just a little.

Eventually, that bullet rang out through the Flagpole Hill area neighborhood. I was 16--sweet 16. I can still hear the ambulances racing through the neighborhood like a mystery as I sat in my high school mathematics course that morning. I remember looking at the clock: It was eleven in the morning, a Tuesday.

I won't go into the grevious details. Suffice it to say that I'd been pushed deep into a well of blackness. After my father took his own life on September 29, 1970, I remember waiting for him to come home--just as I had for years. The pattern had been set. Sometimes I'd even call my father's former office, listening to the telephone ring and ring. Would he come home? Would he return when I called to him? For years, I'd listen for the car to come up the street--late at night, complete silence, the nearby horses in a neighborhood boarding stable kicking their stalls, stuck in the middle of bad dreams of confinement. And I'd wait for him. This was only part of grief, I know now. But at the time it seemed both so real and so unreal.

What was the result, the practical result, of this? If a friend was coming by, I'd expect that person to be at my door either before or exactly on time. If that didn't happen--and often it didn't--I'd have a panic attack. My skin would blanch. I'd begin to shake. Sometimes, I'd be so upset I couldn't sleep for a couple of days. And if I ever called someone, and if that person, for whatever reason, didn't return my telephone call, I'd go crazy. And this has never really left me. And let me tell you: I hate telephone message machines. I need the human voice, the vox humana of living experience. Of course, the panic I used to feel has reduced its intensity as I've learned its causes, but it's never really left me.

Two years ago, I talked to a young boy who claimed Courtney Love had somehow murdered the generally-acclaimed Seattle martyr and songwriter Kurt Cobain. She was a bitch, she said. She drove him to do it. What a loud-mouthed bitch. But I think I understand the panic that comes when someone you love has become so alienated it's impossible to reach him. What panic did Courtney Love feel in the months, weeks, days before Cobain propped a shotgun against his head and pulled the trigger? How hard had she tried to reach the unreachable?

I remember a series of telephone calls I made in panic several years ago: A woman had abandoned me, had begun to avoid me, all because I'd told her I had "special feelings" for her. I had no money that summer afternoon, only a few dollars. And I didn't have a telephone either. But I remember marching to a nearby pay telephone to call and call and call--just as my mother had called when she held on for her life in a deep and cold well. And I was in a well, too. I'd get the telephone message, beg the woman to pick up her telephone, then I'd panic, I'd scream, just like the screams in my childhood household. Finally, I'd go home and cry.

It got me into a lot of trouble. The woman accused me of stalking her. It's amazing of the prejudice humans perpetrate in the name of ignorance and the lack of care thereof. So many people in this world, claiming they care, yet not caring. What is wrong with the picture? I had nothing to take to heart but imperfect information. All I really wanted was to understand why she wasn't coming around me anymore. It's completely illogical, I know, but this was a little like my father not coming around anymore--an unconscious association of sorrowful and panicky proportions. But I got to be treated like a criminal for something I couldn't understand yet. What could have been done? I really don't know, but I don't trust people who claim to be compassionate or keenly aware of social justice when they've never done anything in their personal lives to prove it.

I know nobody cares about this. These are private thoughts: Me, coughing up charcoal. Some woman somewhere, wearing yellow ribbons, looking away from me. And I'm sitting in a room, alone, thinking about Courtney Love and her great big bad rap. She's heard the phone call. She's tried to return the message so many times. The non-returnable telephone call from Hell, even now, raises its head from that well--and I believe in generational memory--and yet I'm calling, I'm calling, calling.