I stayed over at Jordan’s again with the same basic sleeping arrangement – sharing his bed but avoiding any actual physical contact. The next morning we went down to the big train station on Van Buren Street to get a train to Holland, Michigan. I think I might be messing up the timeline a tiny bit because we did go on one “date” to a Costa Rican restaurant called Irazu on North Milwaukee Avenue and I can’t imagine that happened on 9/11 or the day we tripped on cough medicine. I remember it because Jordan told me what he wanted and then I ordered for both of us – the way I would have done if I had been on a teenage date with a girl.
I’ve actually got a little story about Irazu that I’ll just stick in here because I can’t imagine it coming up again. There used to be a Colombian place on North Avenue called La Cumbamba. Real bohemian type place – outdoor seating in a tropical plaza with hammocks, mismatched dishes, flatware and furniture. William, the owner, was famous for his friendliness and generosity and seemed to remember every one of his former customers.
He was always driving around Wicker Park, Logan Square and Humboldt Park in his truck and would pull over and offer rides to anybody he recognized. He picked me up one day in 99/2000 but when I hopped out to go into Irazu I could tell he was a little hurt. I liked La Cumbamba but eating there was a bit like a bizarre theme park – shifting menu, forgetful service and prices made up on the spot according to William’s shifting moods.
Irazu was consistent and comfortable and I ended up going there a lot – I was also vegan and they had a bunch of yucca and other fried or boiled roots. When I’d see William’s truck approaching after that I’d step into the shadows of an awning to become invisible. I was always going to the other place but I was sad to hear that La Cumbamba eventually closed. It’s a bike themed bar and restaurant now where college kids eat with their visiting parents called The Handlebar.
Anyway I got way off track, Jordan and I arrived in Holland. I think this was the only time I visited South Michigan, there is an authentic Dutch Windmill on a little island there. We were smoking a lot of marijuana for the nominal purpose of helping me get off heroin but I wasn’t even physically dependent at that point in time. It didn’t give me crippling anxiety like it does now but I wasn’t crazy about it either – I only really liked smoking it if I was going to see a Sleep side project or other Doom Metal or Sludge band.
As soon as we showed up Jordan started behaving erratically. I suppose it could have actually been normal for him because I didn’t actually know him at all but his friends seemed taken aback and thought I was responsible for the changes. Things like taking liberties with people’s homes and personal property – really just a general obliviousness toward or disregard for any boundaries whatsoever. I was mortified and deeply uncomfortable but he repeatedly dismissed my concerns:
“I just don’t see why people even care about stupid things like that… We don’t!”
We ended up at his parents’ house although I can’t remember if we ever actually slept there. As parents will they wanted some kind of explanation of our relationship and what we were doing together. I remember desperately wishing that I could simply be swallowed into the ground – it’s a common enough idiom but this particular “parent talk” with a total and conspicuous absence of the art of merciful omission was the most noteworthy example I’ve had the misfortune of experiencing:
“He stole some over the counter cough medicine and we became psychically connected after overdosing on it and now we are life partners and no I haven’t really thought about whether or not that makes us homosexuals but I’m not particularly concerned with labels at the moment.”
I’m pretty sure this rendered both his mother and father completely speechless but their eyes were pleading with me in different but functionally equivalent ways to throw them some form of life preserver. I don’t think anyone could have actually verbalized what that would have even looked like. I was a total stranger and clearly the catalyst for these bewildering changes in their young adult son but they also must have recognized that I was essentially rational and empathetic in ways that Jordan at this particular moment was not if indeed he ever had been.
I actually vibed with his mother. The house was filled with framed reproductions of Victorian era needlepoint samplers that she had made a hobby out of embroidering from widely circulated patterns. They were mostly alphabets with the name and age of the young girl who had originally produced the piece in question with some floral motifs and decorative borders. I asked her why she didn’t just make one of her own with her own name and age at the bottom but I think I better understand now the appeal of working from centuries old models to feel a connection to youth and history.
His father was a different story but they also had one of the familiar forms of trouble that frequently springs up between fathers and sons and I wasn’t about to just magically heal their rift like a strange but unexpectedly wise outsider in a family movie. We had first shown up to an empty house as Jordan’s parents had not yet returned from their respective jobs and he had elected to open a bottle of wine they had sitting on top of their refrigerator. His father was unhappy that he had taken this particular liberty and thought it was significant that Jordan was not yet of legal drinking age.
I was starting to get sick of constantly feeling like I was caught in the middle of Jordan obliviously and unapologetically stepping on the toes of his friends and family. I was getting tired of constantly being stoned and feeling like I was stumbling in a fog and could never think straight. We had pooled our money and Jordan had decided to buy a second CD copy of the recent Radiohead album Amnesiac because he had left his in Chicago even though we were only in Michigan for two or three days.
I couldn’t really deal with how impulsive he was being but more importantly the mysterious spell that had thrown us together in the first place was starting to slip.
I had talked to Jordan about “urban shamanism”, counterfeit Greyhound passes and my more general thoughts on intellectual freedom and the outlaw lifestyle. I suppose these ideas, combined with my overall charisma and the mutual magnetism we had experienced upon meeting, seemed to present an opportunity to escape the aspects of his life that made him feel trapped. I started to realize that the transplant to the foreign soil of Jordan’s psyche had caused these concepts to mutate into more dangerous and chaotic forms when he came back from the bathroom on our return train to Chicago:
“I just flushed my ID down the toilet.”
“What?! Why on earth would you do that?!”
“It was just connected to a lot of unpleasant memories. Besides, it doesn’t matter. We can just make up new identities!”
I was raised in the cultures of New Jersey Jews and Arkansas farmers and therefore have a fundamental abhorrence of waste. This was more than I could take, the senselessness of it made me as nauseous as the thought of biting off my own finger. After a long beat he innocently asked me a particularly ironic question given the circumstances:
“By the way do you know how to cash a check?”
Back at his house we found ourselves playing music in the basement with his housemate Derek. Derek was on drums, I played bass and Jordan had a really nice acoustic guitar with an electric pickup. As jam sessions go it was sounding pretty good until Jordan decided to smash his instrument to pieces on the cement floor. I’m no fan of acoustic guitars but I felt like the gesture could have been saved for a moment that would have made more of an impact than two other guys in a basement.
I found out later the guitar had been a gift from his father and was no doubt connected to a lot of unpleasant memories. I couldn’t handle it anymore. I told him his erratic behavior was driving me crazy and I had to leave. I can’t remember where I went but I’m sure it involved copping dope and getting high.
I gave it a couple days then dropped back by to see what was going on with him. His housemates complained that he had turned into a completely different person – mostly that he was constantly taking or breaking things that didn’t belong to him and wouldn’t listen when they told him to stop. He was smoking a random mix of the flowers and herbs that grew behind their house and I told him he was being reckless:
“It’s urban shamanism! I’m trying to reduce my dependence on cannabis!”
I told him that if he hadn’t bother to research the actual plants and whether or not they contained harmful alkaloids the only thing it was was stupid. He wasn’t listening so I just left again.
I gave it another week before I checked back in. Derek came outside instead of letting me in when he saw I was at the door. He told me that Jordan’s behavior had continued to escalate until they ended up having to call his father to come get him. He had ended up in some kind of insane asylum. Derek told me that I shouldn’t be around there because a bunch of the housemates felt that the whole thing was my fault and they wanted to kick my ass.
I started to hear little things. That Jordan had gotten obsessed with a girl in High School and cut all of his hair off in a dramatic gesture when she didn’t reciprocate. I mean that’s not really much of anything, maybe there was something about him being on psych meds and not taking them. I didn’t pay much attention to psych meds at that point in my life except for maybe taking them to see if I’d get high if somebody had some.
As far as I know Jordan has been in and out of psychological institutions ever since. I heard somewhere that he got out for a minute and moved in with a guy named Goat but ended up trashing Goat’s house and getting committed again. The thing that always drove me crazy was imagining him sitting in a padded room somewhere staring at the window and fantasizing that I would come jumping through it like Peter Pan to whisk him off to a queer outlaw utopia like the ones in the William S. Burroughs Cities of the Red Night trilogy.
I never exactly felt responsible but I don’t think Jordan’s life would have turned out the same way if we had never met either. The Coricidin might have set things off but clearly there were underlying issues that would need to be addressed sooner or later. Hopefully he ended up with a diagnosis and some combination of therapy, medications and coping strategies that made his life more manageable. I haven’t really thought about this story critically in the last twenty years but obviously things must have advanced beyond the oversimplified dichotomy of whether or not he would have to live in a cage.
Regret isn’t really a thing that actually affects me. I wasn’t working with the information I have now when whatever it was happened so I either did the best I could, fucked up or was just being an asshole. I don’t mean for this particular story – just in general. I don’t necessarily believe in a higher power but something is at play when I have these kinds of cataclysmic encounters with people I’d just met – even if it’s only basic biology. It doesn’t always work out the way I would like it to but I can’t imagine being a person who would feel that kind of force and just walk away from it.
It did change my life. I realized that staying in Chicago and continuing to use hard drugs at the rate that I had been going would probably turn out badly for me. I moved back to San Diego and stopped using and went to college and started doing drugs again and stopped again when I felt like I needed to and eventually spent a few years as a homeless drug addict with my wife. I know that recovery is a popular narrative but it’s never really resonated with me. It’s better for me to not be using hard drugs right now but I’d be perfectly happy to find opportunities to use them in moderation in the future or not if it just doesn’t work out like that.
This story is actually about 9/11 and how it shifted things in America and in the Underground and the World. A big part was that you used to be able to get arrested and just give the cops a fake name and go to jail under that fake name then get out in a day or two and simply never go to the court date. It didn’t change all at once – the Greyhound scam continued to work until 2009 or so and my friend from Germany called me around 2008 because she had just gotten arrested and managed to pass a fake name because she doesn’t have an American SSN and she wanted to know if I thought she should go to court. I told her absolutely not.
Anyway it did change and it’s different now. The Pre-9/11 Underground was a magic place. We didn’t have things like social media to make connections so the connections formed differently – organically and unpredictably. A whole lot was happening in a short amount of time but a lot of that was youth and that’s a thing that still happens for a lot of people. This experience didn’t change me instantly but it did strip away some of my optimism and innocence. A few years later my friend Paul reminded me what I said when I called him after the whole thing went down:
“I used to break hearts, now I break brains.”
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 