Ticking

It’s amazing how fast the weather cools in Buffalo at the start of a school year. It almost never fails. It's that stark reminder that things change and change sometimes before one is ready for it. September 1982 was no exception. I just began my second of three sophomore years, this time at the University of Buffalo. The leaves were still a month from changing yet, a cool Canadian wind whisked through the sublime oaks planted eighty years ago on the original college grounds, the name recently changed to the dis-affectionate,"South Campus". My typical September bewilderment had begun as I found myself walking behind the massive old and gray Parker Hall, in "The Quad", and in a quandary about the assignment I had just received.

I was taking an introductory English composition course to satisfy my business major requirements. It was a class specifically designed for non-English majors and the perfunctory math-heads and analytically talented students surrounding me proved it. I felt out of place for a reason I had not yet discovered. The energy in the room was nearly void; no one, it seemed, wanted to be there. The teacher was actually a "teacher's assistant", a young woman working on her masters not much older than the rest of us. She clearly felt obliged with a heavy burden and she introduced the course to us almost as rote; monotone, with a seeming reluctance or even slight intimidation. As she spoke, she seemed to be controlled by the atmosphere of a left-brained,"let's-get-on-with-this" contagion that enveloped that old Hayes Hall classroom. It was bad enough that the class was temporarily housed in the building for architecture and engineering, but now the reluctant "T.A." was tasked with making creative writing a low spark within methodical minds.

Despite this air of indifference she managed to passionately provide us with her motives and aspirations for the class. As she spoke, she gained confidence, finding her own passion in the face of apathy. She dared not ask questions or delve into the personal meaning of literature or writing amongst this class, instead she offered her first assignment; a burden that was to take up the rest of the short class and the next.

We were to write about a personal experience as if experiencing it from outside ourselves yet retain it as a first person narrative. It was to remain anonymous in its authorship and then, at the beginning of the next class, we were to exchange our essays and have them read aloud by another student. The assignment was clearly designed to challenge the focused mind, blowing out the boundaries and forcing these engineering, business and math students to find another path. I watched as each classmate walked out of that old musty room with either far off stares of bewilderment or cynical contempt toward these envious English majors on their way to a low paying career.

I was equally flummoxed. It had been drilled into my head by my father that the arts were a fine hobby but nothing that would sustain me, putting neither food on my table nor money in the bank. I knew early on that I was creative yet shovels of dirt were thrown on top of that idea burying and suffocating it and leaving me to discover some apparent obliged passion in a vocational, money making, lifetime pursuit. However, as I sat in that classroom listening to the assignment, I felt the familiar temptation, a literal skin tingling sensation that I dare not even reveal to myself. As usual, upon that feeling, heaping mounds of logic buried the temptation and left my mind dizzy. I walked out in the cool near autumn. I could smell winter in the air.

I walked to the bus stop and took the bus back home, to my newly acquired third floor west side "attic" apartment, kissing my wife-to-be and laying my book bag on the chipped Formica top of an old kitchen table. The kitchen smelled of pine-sol and cigarettes. I sat at the table and told her of my class. As I did, the temptation awakened within. She was on her way to a work meeting so I was to be alone for a while. I decided, as I kissed her good-bye, that I would keep the spark alive and begin my assignment. As the door shut behind my fiancée, I opened my book bag, pulled out my writing tablet and pen, stared upward at the kitchen clock...

...and it was gone.

The spark was extinguished and the temptation nowhere to be found. I sat there, staring at the clock, listening to it tick on the kitchen wall as the secondhand reluctantly moved forward and my thoughts fell further into an abyss. As the clock continued to tick, I chased those thoughts like one chases a shadow. This has not been the first time for me. It has been a constant these past three years, even since leaving high school. I've taken so many courses in my stinted college adventure, designed to eventually make me piles of money, goading me into a productive career and each one has left me emptier than the last. And yet, when a creative course...designed to give the productive worker bees "exposure" to the arts, much like checking off the box on a required list...came my way, I felt euphoria and at once, dismissed the euphoric high in an instant. My father trained me well.

Both types of courses failed me and I failed them. Here I was, sitting at a kitchen table, almost four years into college and still in my second year, watching those who graduated with me in high school about to get their degrees and venture forth as productive workers...with families, "well-done" raises, obligatory corporate ladders and early retirements...and I was sitting at a kitchen table watching a clock tick, paralyzed yet again. My mind raced as I saw the future and envisioned the"I-told-you-so" look on my father's face, the same face I saw when I announced my engagement to Renae; done with a shaking of the head and a look down as if, "what's the use". All of this raced into my mind as I ran after the shadow and watched it run away.

The clock ticked.

Almost on cue, my ritual of discouragement began. I Put the tablet and the pens back in the bag, got up and went to bed early. I had to get up at eight that evening so as to go to my job as a nightclub disc jockey. I put on my tired face and disappeared under the covers, in the womb, protected from the thoughts as sleep rescued me from the clock I could still hear ticking in the kitchen.

I awoke later the same way I went to sleep, remembering I lived in the abyss. I pulled the covers off and felt the chill on my warm legs. I shivered a bit and planted my feet on the cold, cheap Linoleum. I walked out to the adjoining kitchen and could hear the television in the living room. Renae was home now. Next to my book bag on the kitchen table was the mail she picked up on the way in. Amongst the mail was the latest box of records I receive on a monthly basis from the"Western New York D.J. Association". For a small monthly membership I received a bevy of records, usually twelve-inch remixes of the latest music. Most of them were dogs but every now and then a pearl emerged.

I felt the tingle arise within once again.

Being a disc jockey, albeit at a glorified gin mill, was for me a creative and even artistic endeavor. I found a loophole in the "law of logic" that allowed me to live vicariously through the recordings, entertaining dancers and listeners and controlling the atmosphere so as to create, as if it were canvas of sort. This was of course lost on me back then so the tingle I experienced was almost subconscious. Still, I hurriedly ripped open the cardboard container and pulled out the records. New vinyl fragrance filled the air as I looked over the contents. Yes, I discovered almost nothing. Then I found a non-descriptive, plain white album. The hole in the middle exposed a plain white record label, "For Promotional Use Only". It was by a group called "Squeeze". I knew this group. I recalled that though they had the affect of a white soul group, their arrangements and harmonies reminded me of the Beatles who of course were gods to me. This song had been out for a few months and though it was infectious, I really never paid deep attention to it. The fact that it was put on a twelve inch intrigued me a bit so I put it on the top of the otherwise useless lot of vinyl and decided to play it in the rotation that night. For some faint reason I actually looked forward to it though I was stunned to figure out just why.

Thoughts of my assignment were dead and buried as I felt the nightly ritualistic excitement of soon being in the sound booth and creating a seven hour experience of sound designed to leave people drunk and happy. It never occurred to me that my reason for being at that time was not within the realm of an old college campus but instead, in the stale-beer aromatic atmosphere of a small dance club in Eggertsville, N.Y. It never occurred to me the significant almost epic disappointment I had every September, as I walked within that college campus full of amazing energy that invigorated my being, ensconced me in a universe of mental treasure, only to then come up against this massive wall of a self imposed prison, slamming a door on that richness in favor of trying to earn a degree to become a cog in the wheel. Being in that bar each night gave me my excuse to find some bit of creation, even if it was borrowed,even if it was marginal at best, and even if the only people who somehow realized it would forget about it along with a massive hang-over the next morning. I loved my pathetic job because it was the only artistic canvass I was allowed to possess; after all, it funded my "studies".

At nine o'clock I walked to the bus stop and took the bus to University Plaza,across from the campus. I then walked the beautiful tree lined side streets  amongst older homes and manicured lawns, three miles north to Eggert Road and"The Eggertsville Inn". The energy within me grew as I walked those old sidewalks. For a small bar it had a great reputation as a dance club and amajor venue for the top bands in the area. A local concert promoter owned it soon weekends we had the best acts in Buffalo. I played between sets and often my sets were equal in popularity to the bands.

God I loved it!

During the week I had the entire night to myself, entertaining both bar flies and dancers alike with a mix of music ranging from rock and roll to funk. I worked hard on my "DJ voice" and loved to banter between songs trying as hard as possible to sound as professional as the most professional voice on the radio. I got it down to an art. This night I decided to wait until later to play this new "Squeeze" release and that decision proved to be life assertive. That decision is what prompts me to write about that experience now, thirty years later.

Alcohol consumption in quantity has terrible effect as we all know. By one o'clock I was on my third picture of beer; gifts awarded to me from grateful drunks who actually enjoyed the night rather than sulking in the corner of the bar about their miserable lots, drinking on a weeknight and weaving their car home only to forget where they were the night before, then repeating this ritual the next day.

In an inebriated condition, there exists that short period of time just before the toxic effects ruin your soul in which your inhibitions are released and you momentarily have laser-like focus. As that moment arrived, I became acutely aware of all that troubled me, especially my school assignment. Instantly as I put my record playing and announcing duties on "auto-pilot", I remembered my existence within that deep pit, not knowing what to write though it existed and screamed for release. In an ironic twist, alcohol removed the barrier and allowed me to explore what I dared not explore soberly. As this occurred, I absentmindedly removed the "Squeeze" record, from its plain white jacket and placed it on one of my two turntables, a "Technique's Sl-1200mk2" model, the "godfather" and quintessential Disc Jockey record player.

As the bass drum hit and the keyboard began its haunting soulful melody, my mind became transfixed on the music. My uninhibited thoughts and confessions coalesced. Suddenly I was the listener rather than the aloof music provider. I honed in on the lyrics and did something I never did before. I listened.

Every word in the verse made sense to me. Having not yet passed the point of "drunkenness", I was rational enough to understand, not just the story but so much more important, how it was presented. Suddenly, words that I ignored now for so many months on a song that I could have really done without resonated in my soul. The narrative spoke to me and awakened an idea in my semi-lucid brain cells.

I knew what I was to do.

As the song played, I grabbed the pen I used to write down requests and scribbled; the words flowing from my brain, onto a bev-nap. A narrative poured out of my mind as the words to this song guided me.

"I bought a toothbrush, some toothpaste
A flannel for my face
Pajamas, a hairbrush
New shoes and a case
I said to my reflection
Let's get out of this place
Past the church and the steeple
The laundry on the hill
Billboards and the buildings
Memories of it still
Keep calling and calling
But forget it all
I know I will..."

I was on a journey and this four-minute time frame lasted hours, days, within. Instinctively I stopped. I snapped out of it with three sentences on a wet napkin just in time to grab any record I could find and throw it on the second turntable, moving the sliders just in time before hitting dead air. I then  stumbled across that line from the last vestiges of lucidity into the dizzy world of being drunk. The rest of the night was forgotten as was the long backseat ride home from the Lance the bartender cheating on his wife with the miserable lost soul barfly he picked up sitting too close to his side in the front seat. Lance meandered all three of us back to the west side yet again somehow avoiding the police for another night.

The next night came and went in the bar as I forgot about my assignment. Now it was Sunday afternoon and my deadline fast approached. Renae was at her mom's house so I sat alone in the kitchen, my tablet opened, pen in hand, staring down at blank paper. As I looked at my empty tablet, the clock above came back into my consciousness. The second hand ticked. The ticking grew loud in my brain and it evoked the same thoughts I had and have always had. Time was creeping along like that second hand, stopping and starting but moving forward unrelenting. I was twenty-two years old yet I envisioned myself thirty years later, sitting at this table, children yet to be born, adults now, my middle-aged face gaunt from years of paralytic stopping and going, like the second hand of a clock, moving forward but ending up in the same place. It was real to me and it was terrifying. It was also inevitable. I could never break from the idea that creativity was an absurd way to make a living. Yet I could never make a living as a worker bee, finding a vocation... a trade...that turned me into an obedient servant pretending to be free within as my master encouraged me with ever increasing amounts of money and toys. I knew that I would never be able to fool the artist within that I was "happy" in some chosen trade when in fact it was a splendid prison; full of everything one may desire yet missing one's soul. I knew I could never be in that place, yet I also knew I could not live as a pauper, creating art for its own sake and hoping that someone would find it worthy enough to allow me to eat.

Yet, the clock ticked and my assignment was due. "Was this to be yet again another class in which I just didn't show up?"

I looked at the clock, and then I looked back down at the tablet. The blank whiteness reminded me of the stark white plain record label I stared at two days before at that very kitchen table. Suddenly I remembered the song and most importantly, I remembered the lyric. It came back to me from beginning to end and its narrative hit me as hard as ever now. It was the way the story was told. It described the mundane, the seemingly trivial but within it, it spoke of a struggle, an unspoken angst that everyone felt in a different way.

"What did I do with that bev-nap"? I screamed at no one.

It mattered not, I was on to something. "The narrative", I said again to no one.

Quickly without pause, I wrote about that incessant clock. I wrote about the very angst I was experiencing, my torment of not being able to create, about why it existed. It contained, in a narrative, that hated clock above me, the small claustrophobic kitchen in which I sat, it spoke about my paralyzed existence...all of it...under a clock with a second hand that marched on. I used my triviality like the song used its own to deliver a message that meant so much more. Within the trivial came the substance and it was brutal and it was honest. And then, while the sentences became rich and heavy, the trivial came back as a sudden release; a narrative as mundane as any ordinary day, yet with the backdrop of deep drama. I pulled the reader where I desired, much like the dancers on the dance floor at the club, changing the tempo and willing their emotion to my command. This pursuit of the trivial inspired by the mundanity in a pop song eased the tension but made it more suspenseful as well. As my writing continued, time vanished. The clock was silenced in my head.

When I was done writing I edited and then I read. And it shook me that I wrote what I wrote. I couldn't believe it came from me. It was as revealing as it was cathartic and it was me completely. It juxtaposed the inane with the insane and yet it made perfect sense. Somehow, I knew that others would understand.

"How would I know that?"

I didn't know, but I sensed it and knew it was right. I was able to read it as if another person and when I did it shook me to the core. It was so much me that I immediately stood up, eyes wet, knocking the chair to the floor. I grabbed each page savagely with both hands, crumpled them into the tightest angriest ball and I threw it away. I tied the trash bag with a vengeance and I marched the bag down the three flights, out the back door and buried it in the maggot filled garbage can.

The emotion was gone suddenly. I walked slowly upstairs without my soul inside me, went into the kitchen, took my shoe off and with no real emotion threw it at the clock destroying it instantly, pieces of it spread rapidly through the kitchen, the red second hand lay at the foot of the bedroom bent and now still. The ticking had ceased. I walked over it and fell into the bed, buried my head within my soft pillows and cried myself to sleep. No one heard. Not even me.

Some dreams were meant to be forgotten, and such was that night of torment.There would be other nights that I would remember, and those would be nights with sheets twisted around my legs, damp with sweat, eyes opening suddenly and staring at the ceiling turning minutes into hours. This was such a night yet I recall not remembering any nightmares. There is a God because he found mercy in me and erased them from my mind; the only evidence was the twisted damp sheets and a vague idea that I had at some point stared at the ceiling.

The next morning Renae woke me. I was late for class. She assumed I stayed up late and went to bed with my clothes on. She asked about the broken clock. I had no time to reveal nor did I wish to what happened. "Oh, it fell". As I untied my legs from the sheets, trying to remember my nightmares, ironically I felt alive and energized. It made absolutely no sense. Something within screamed, "get out of bed...go!" And I did in a flurry of excitement. I didn't bother changing my clothes. There was coffee made so I splashed it into a cup and bolted for the door. Just why I had to make it to this class, I have no idea. This is when I normally skip the class, take the incomplete and continue to be a sophomore forever. As I reached the bottom of the back stairs I realized if I was actually going to class I have no completed paper.

It makes no sense that I ran down the three flights of stairs, opened the backdoor and took the lid off that foul smelling trash can, picking up the plastic bag as the maggots fell off twisting grotesquely on the ground. It makes no sense that I opened the well sealed plastic trash bag and recovered a tight ball of lined notebook paper, still damp from the heavy ink scrawled upon it. It makes no sense that I would run as if my life was in danger toward the bus stop, just making it in time without an ounce of air left in my lungs. It makes no sense that I would miss my statistics class and use the time to re-write my story on clean paper.

Yet, I've always been this way.

I've always zigged when told to zag, even when I did the telling. Here I was about to go to a class and turn in work that terrified me.

"Would anyone get it".

"Would such a telling, such an explosion of seemingly vomited self-absorption be read let alone allowed for a class full of math nerds and would-be engineers?"

Suddenly, adrenalin surged through my veins.

I entered Hayes Hall with butterflies churning rapidly in my stomach. I concentrated on my footsteps loudly echoing on the old tile floors and off the tall thick plaster walls, mingling with other footsteps and murmured conversations. I merged with my classmates near the entrance of the classroom. It was the height of an adrenalin rush...like that of being a disc jockey; entertaining an entire room full of partiers. I walked boldly into that old classroom, found a desk in the back and waited for the anonymous exchange of stories.

It was no surprise that some few failed to complete this assignment and their reasons were extremely understood by everyone except for the instructor. Still,the exchange went on. Soon each one of us rose and read the story of some unknown person who was in that very room.

My hands were drenched in sweat. I felt as if I was soon to be paraded naked in front of the room doing some bazaar dance.

I stood up and read the story of another and I honestly could not pay attention to what it said. I felt terrible as I used my D.J. experience to feign interest and actually make it sound like I understood every word. The fact that I felt terrible in my selfishness, distracted me, easing my anxiety and for the briefest moment I forgot that someone held in their hand my own story and they themselves would soon be subject to the embarrassment I was about to experience.

Three more stories were told and then a woman stood up and began reading very familiar words. I remember feeling like I was falling into a bottomless pit. It's that feeling one gets sinking in a fast moving elevator. I studied her. She was older than the rest of us, near thirty I suspected. She had the unmistakable, yet undefined maturity of a housewife, a mother and not a student. In fact she had many of the qualities of my mother, the former ballet dancer, a caring ambiance that seemed creative, delicate and maternal. She spoke rather eloquently in her heavily nasalized Buffalo accent. She spoke the words almost as if rehearsed. She seemed genuinely interested as she continued but that did nothing to ease my terror.

I wanted to die.

I had no temptation to look around the room. Instead I stared out the window and removed myself...or tried to. I studied a large oak tree standing majestically in the quad and again, I felt a moment of solitude. Suddenly she reached an important part of my story, one where I ceased my narrative descriptions of the innocuous and instead revealed my being. I looked at her and her eyes began to well up. Her voice shaken, she read on and suddenly any paper shuffling, coughing or rumblings within the room vanished. Stillness enveloped the room. Her voice quieted a bit as she uncovered my soul and though I was frozen in horror, I remember seeing, out of the corner of my eye, the teacher step backwards, leaning now against the blackboard. I dared not look that way. As the older woman read, her hands, grasping my essay, shook and mine followed. I slowly buried my hands under the desk terrified that someone noticed and again looked out past the over painted old window panes and out to that massive oak tree, watching birds congregate and wondering what it would be like to sit on that branch right now amongst the flock with no mind, only that of self survival, eating and procreating and not having to torture one self with a conscience.

"Please dear Lord, make this end".

When I wrote it, I finished my story on spite, ending it abruptly. I cynically knew that anyone reading it would want more and it worked. For the longest moment there was complete silence, then the teacher spoke.

"Go on", she whispered.

"That's all there is", the reader replied.

Again, there was dead silence. Remembering it now, objectively, it was but a few seconds but then at that moment, in that classroom, the silence lasted forever, then suddenly; a cough.

Our teacher then said, "I'm breaking a rule right now. This was to be an anonymous assignment but in light of that story; who wrote it?"

There wasn't going to be an answer.

I did what everyone else did. I looked around the class. I didn't like what I saw. I saw wet eyes and blank looks, the kind of looks one may see at the scene of a terrible accident or when a magnificent rainbow engulfs a deep blue sky. Other students who also looked around sometimes paused at me. I did my best acting and continued to look innocent. I cursed myself within for having written it. "I definitely over did it". Unbounded embarrassment now relieved my terror as I concentrated on reflecting on my own face the same looks that I witnessed from the others. The teacher then realized no one would fess up.

Somehow, she got the class back on track and we finished the day talking about the meaning of the assignment and how important it was to tap into the creative when pressed.

As the class ended and we began to exit, I walked out with the others. Again, I oddly concentrated on the echoes of footsteps in that old building.  It sounded ghostly, as if spirits walked amongst the students. Deja Vu infected me as I recalled why I kept coming back, year after year, every September. The massive oak trees, the octogenarian buildings, the musty smells and the echoes that resonated within those uselessly tall hallways spoke to me and I was filled with the same spirit that threw me out of bed that morning and down the stairs. I suddenly paused, turned around, and walked back in. Upon my reentering, the young teacher's assistant realized why and smiled.

"It was you wasn't it?"

I looked at her, raised an eyebrow, then looked away and nodded.

"I only wanted to ask you, why you're in this class?"

" I don't understand", I said.

"What I mean is, why an introductory class for non-majors, why aren't you in within your own realm?"

"I am", I said defensively.

"You're not an English Lit major?"

"No".

She paused and took my hand which made me very uncomfortable.

"You have a gift, why on Earth are you not using it.?"

There was no way or time to explain it to her. That was thirty-three years ago and I still don't have the time.

Yet a deep old soul speaks to me after all these years, my gaunt middle-aged face looks in the mirror. Maybe now, it is time.