Buggin' Out/One

Buggin’ Out One I spent last week at home. I wasn’t with my wife, my kids, my cat or my beach. I was in Portsmouth with my junkies, beggars, half-wits, holy men, rock stars, histories, lead based paint, ladders, marijuana and my grandmother’s ghost. Ever since mom went into the hospital there about a month ago, I have been spending lots of time in Portsmouth. Three to five days a week I will fire up the old Ford and push it in that direction. Dad wasn’t too thrilled when he heard I had quit the job here at the toy factory to drive the hundred miles each way to make more money and be near mom. He is a responsible man, always has been. He looks beyond my moment to moment justification of bare minimums and bottom lines, opting for the longer, well thought out options. He is certain that while in the short term I may be making more money, if I continue to drive so much the car will fall apart. I understand his point of view, but I have a bond with the machine. We have both agreed not to give up on one another. So we drive. There may also be some deep seeded issues of scruples and legality when it comes to my new employer and the residents of his and my childhood neighborhood. Now isn’t the time for that. My new boss is an old friend of mine, Chris Naples. He and his partner Santiago “Santa” Leon own a painting business called Buggin’ Out. Chris drives the main van which is plain white. Its chalky white really, an old Ford Econoline with everything extra torn out. The damned thing should be on the cover of a punk rock record. Inside there are tons of stickers ranging from “Jesus is my homeboy” to American flags…old bags of Mexican corn nuts taped to the wall, POW-MIA flags duct taped to the ceiling, various stickers from low end rock and roll labels and bands from across the U.S. and right on the front console area, below the radio and all that stuff an autographed picture of Dick Dale. The van itself is a character, documentation, a valid history lesson or timeline. The people that work or have worked with Chris and Santa make up a who’s who of friends, rockers, ne’er do wells and dead folks who each, in one way or another have touched my life, if only briefly. The most recent casualty was an old friend from childhood, Alex Brand. Alex was the most loveable dude on the planet. He could roll with anybody. Being from Portsmouth one must develop very early a sort of innate sense of humor and learn how to take insults and quickly dish them out. This is what we call love. Alex definitely had that ability. When I describe anyone in this crew, the prerequisite of love and the sense of humor of a whore are constants. This ability to roll with the punches and keep one’s head afloat gave us all the ability to shrug off any low end attempt to rile us when away from our hometown, in the game of life, but also equipped us with a short fuse. If we happened to be in Ghent, or Virginia Beach or Brooklyn or Williamsburg or Nags Head it didn’t matter; if someone wanted to start in with some form of mockery or incite a reaction from one of us we would generally exchange a couple of jokes amongst ourselves and then, with the explosive and unpredictable dance of a pack of hyenas, reduce the non-Portsmouth aggressors to a literal or figurative bloody carcass. We got kicked out of a lot of places for this, but so what. Being from Portsmouth was an albatross around the neck when I was nineteen, buy my early thirties it became something I joked about to tourists before taking them up into the plastic villages north of Corolla where a hundred or so horses run dying. Portsmouth seemed to carry with it a stigma. Tales of heroin, guns, habits, nuns, overdoses, d.o.a.’s, lawyers getting their peckers super glued to their stomachs while sleeping by their disgruntled wives, hustlers, shipyard workers and peanut butter factories were the claims to fame of that little highway town. Aside from Alex the other fatality in the crew was my brother and kindred soul Michael Poulos. Mike was in a band with Santa and another Buggin’ Out alum by the name of Barry Kay. Barry was born in Maryview Hospital the same day as Chris’ brother, so they say they have known each other all of their lives. Mike, like a few from Portsmouth do, had developed a habit. He liked the heroin. Chris would never put up with anyone working while using, and to hear him tell it, Mike was actually doing well right before the last shot. We talked about it the other day. Mike had died five years ago, overdosed, but a few hours before he had talked to Chris. Chris told me that he hadn’t been using; that he had just had one of the busiest weeks of his life and gotten one of the biggest paychecks. I won’t speculate on the rest of the night, I loved Mike, and I wasn’t there. He was at the height of his career and the band was getting play all over the world. He had been named the best punk rock guitarist in the world by Guitar magazine and to respect the feelings of the band mates that were left behind and all of his friends and family I will sum it up thusly; “that night some shit hole club was minus their thunder.” I was lucky enough to play in a band with him before the big one and one night he clocked a guy in the face with a pay telephone receiver. He was one of a kind. That band with Mike, Barry, Santa and Billy was a force, nothing like that will ever again rise from the haze that blankets that waterfront shipping hell we all call Tidewater. To be in the van now is just a reminder of how truly experienced we all are, to have just survived the aging process, the bronzing, the years and years and fucking years of painting and repainting things all the same color to maintain an historical appearance, or a Navy issue one…I have returned to Portsmouth, half full. This must have been the third day at it, and I had just left the van. I hid the metal cigarette that gave me a hint of spectacular and walked back over to my ladder. Scaling the thirty feet or so; slowly…carefully, I began scraping away at the layers of grey paint and rot on the two hundred eighteen year old monument to Portsmouth’s glory days. As chips and flakes of lead, color and rock and roll passed by my mouth and eyes, settling on my arms and clothes I thought about the silly significance of just how far back I had come. I was not living in Portsmouth, no. I wasn’t even there for a visit in the traditional sense, but as I hung on that ladder hugging the house I realized what I was in effect doing. Chris, you see, works for the City of Portsmouth’s Historical Preservation Department, and this house is on their little map of famous houses. Here I was coming full circle. I wasn’t just working with a cool old friend whom many other friends and legends had worked for; I was taking part as a steward for my city, restoring the vibrancy; the life to an old wooden hull. I was once again feeling the tug of an umbilical cord, and I felt like one of the millions of ghosts of the carpenters, freemasons, sailors and slaves that had come to do this work before me.