by Dean Kuipers
They drove south. The truck drove itself right to the property. It’s about a two-hour drive south from the Manistee, and they could camp there for free and fish the PM or the Baldwin. Scott wanted to see it because it was Joe’s place, and that made it worse for Joe because it obviously wasn’t his place. It was supposed to be his family place, but he was exiled.
They rolled onto the camp in the middle of the day. The travel trailer had been dragged out of there, but the sandy knob where it had sat had been flagged for excavation, the site where Dad was putting the new cabin for the Kuipers Hunt Club, which is what they’d taken to calling it. Since Dad was a contractor, building the cabin was his job. It was obvious from the truck tracks and the stuff lying around that the local builder who was subcontracting the job was there quite a bit, and Joe was nervous someone would drive in any second. He and Scott didn’t set up a tent, but laid out their bags on moss-covered sand under the new pole the power company had set up to run a line in from the street. They had a dozen fresh cans of beer.
“We gotta build a fire later,” said Scott.
“No fire. Drink this beer,” said Joe.
The day was warm and they wanted to explore, but Joe told Scott to stay away from the new cabin site.
“Don’t even go over there. We can’t get boot prints around it.”
“What?”
“If they see boot prints I swear they will take pictures and make me show them my boots. They’ll call the sheriff and launch a whole thing.”
“Joe, I gotta say: Fuck this. We’re grown men. With lymphoma. All we’re trying to do is camp and fish and be in the woods. That’s what hunting camps are supposed to be for.”
They walked over the pine litter so they wouldn’t leave footprints and climbed up in a maple tree that looked down on the yellow sand of the cabin site and drank their beer.
“I can’t believe you put up with this bullshit,” said Scott, throwing a can down.
They stayed up almost all night with their eyes turned upward to the star-spackled black. They walked out into a five-acre field that was the first opening you encountered coming in from the road so we came to call it First Field. It was pure sand covered with a crust of reindeer moss and ant lions and one or two dried-up sticks of grass. The men lay down there and looked at the sky. The place called to both of them, and they wished they could cut wood or shovel sand or do something to earn their keep. Being there made you want to do something.
To the northeast, the Big Dipper hung in the sky because summer was coming.
“The big, fuckin’ … chair. It looks like a chair,” said Scott.
“The Big Chair.”
On May 24, 1990, the Redwood Summer organizers Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were car bombed in Oakland, California. I was still living in New York but had been talking to a group in Berkeley called Seeds of Peace, whose members were gearing up to provide the support camp for the summer of resistance. Bari and Cherney had just left the Seeds house that morning on their way to Santa Cruz to play a concert to recruit activists when a motion-activated pipe bomb wrapped in nails exploded under the driver’s seat of Bari’s Subaru wagon. The bomb shattered her pelvis and shot nails through her body and left her hovering near death, and blew out Cherney’s eardrums. The first authorities to reach the car, before Oakland PD or an ambulance, were the FBI. That was odd. Bari said later, “As though they were waiting around the corner with their fingers in their ears.” She didn’t die, but the environmental movement all over America took notice: singing funny songs about habitat would now get you killed.
That story became my priority, but I had a few assignments to finish first. I was working down in the coastal Louisiana town of Morgan City, a depressing place where they built and manned the oil-drilling platforms that dotted the Gulf. I was doing a story for Spin about oil-field workers who had become pirates, dismantling and selling oil equipment on the black market. I had ridden my beat old BMW R100 motorcycle down there from New York City, and I drove out into the Atchafalaya at night to listen to the roar of insects, frogs, and birds. For about a week, I lived in a disused van in the yard of a crawfisherman I had befriended until his neighbor got stabbed to death by his wife while they were on a drunk about fifty yards from where I was sleeping, and everyone decided having the press around was just too freaky, so they asked me to clear out.
I called Joe from a pay phone but didn’t get him, then got Mom at work. She said Joe was punching holes in the walls in the apartment and was doing his best to disappear into them. He’d dropped into a new, swirling depression, she said, and I had to get up there. So I turned away from California and headed toward Michigan.
I drove into New Orleans. I stayed one night with some friends, planning to head north in the morning, and we all went out to a place on Bourbon Street where one of them was tending bar. We ordered one pitcher of beer between five or six people and then it was about twelve hours later. I woke up feeling great and had no idea what had happened. “You are a total asshole,” said my former friend, who evidently had stopped being my friend during the night. I had blacked out, which had never happened to me before, and then gone mobile, trying to jump from one convertible to another while we were driving, making enemies, puking on one bar or another, breaking off the key in the elevator and waking the whole building by ringing the alarm.
I was asked to clear out again and walked down Magazine Street looking for my motorcycle. I was scared my brother would die, but I guess no one would know that because no one was talking to me anymore. I threw up next to a fire hydrant, and as I was bent over at the curb a car went off the road and smashed into the hydrant, and all I did was pull my hand off the top of the hydrant as the car’s bumper crumpled on it and kept on puking.
I found my bike in an alley in the French Quarter and my helmet bowled down to the end against a house. Evidently I had driven it there. I packed a few things into the hardbags and then got on I-55 and lay down on the gas tank, sick as anything, and didn’t really look up again for fifteen hours and a thousand miles.
My then girlfriend, Anne, had been with me on part of this trip and flew home to work, and my vomit-flavored hangover cracked open my general feelings of morbid guilt. I had thought of myself as more successful than Joe, more together, but I was probably worse. I was cheating on Anne with one of the editors at Spin. I had been trying not to think about why. What the hell was wrong with me? Anne was fierce and soulful and real as a mountain and I was honestly in love with her, so the idea that I’d sneak into this other woman’s bed filled me with self-loathing. Endless fields of calf-high corn ripped past like a roaring belt sander of righteousness and tore away what remained of my self-respect. I understood more about Dad in those hours than I ever had before. I didn’t want to be like him. He had abused and degraded my mother, and driven her almost to the end of her sanity. I wasn’t like him—I didn’t have any kids; I wasn’t married. But did that matter? I couldn’t be like him because I fell deeply in love with my girlfriends. But then I thought: Maybe he did, too. I had never thought of that idea before, and it sickened me. Maybe he was not only using women to cloak himself in a reality he didn’t have or couldn’t feel, but he simply fell hard for anyone who paid him any attention. That was desperate and weak. I was like that. People in New Orleans didn’t like me anymore. I looked down at the pavement drifting by at ninety miles per hour inches beneath my feet and saw the easy way out. I thought I should just pick up Joe and head north, into Canada, see how far we could get before we were both dead in a ditch and covered in flies. I stopped sniveling about this after a couple of hours, and when I pulled into Mom’s apartment in Texas Corners I had nothing but tape hiss in my head.
“Well, you look like dogshit,” Joe said when I got there. My long hair was dirty and wind-whipped and still had puke in it. My leather jacket, helmet, shirt, and neck were plastered with bug splatter. The pipes on my bike plinked and tinked as they cooled, the smoking-hot metal warping through rainbows of decal
escent color. The fields beyond the new little fourplexes smelled of hot briars and crabgrass the way summery old corn-sand will.
“Yep,” I said, sitting down on the outside steps. “How you doing?”
“Oh, you know.” He sat down next to me and lit a cigarette.
“Me, too,” I said. How was I supposed to help him get his life together? I was a total fraud. We were quiet. Huge grasshoppers snapped and scissored over the field of briars. I’d been home all of a minute and we’d already said most of what we were going to say.
Mom called me in New York a month or so later, in July, and started in crisply, “Well. I just wanted to let you know,” and I knew Joe was dead. I had never seen or heard my mother cry, ever, and there had been lots to cry about, so I knew when that call came she’d be crisp about it instead of blubbering. It was just her way. So the crispness folded my legs up and I slunk down against the wall in my apartment and sat on the floor.
“Joe’s in a hospital …” she continued.
So he wasn’t dead. I had my hand in my armpit and started shivering like I was freezing cold.
“… a psychiatric hospital …”
She talked for a while and said stuff I couldn’t hear, and then I tried to stop my stomach from shaking and said, “So, physically, he’s okay?”
“Well, that part will be okay, I think. But he is not okay.”
A few nights before, Mom had come home late. Her new beau, Tom, was sometimes around, but he had his own apartment and wasn’t with her. Mom walked in and found a framed picture of Joe shattered on the floor and glass everywhere. Joe was out on the porch outside his room raking a big glass shard down his forearm as rivulets of blood ran out on the floor. He wasn’t saying anything, but Mom said she could see he had regressed, like a child.
“So I talked to him like a mother to a small child,” she said. “I said, ‘Joey, Mom’s going to help you, okay? Put this wet towel on your arm. Come inside. Come inside, now.’”
Joe crawled into the apartment and lay on the hallway floor in the fetal position, like he had done many times before.
“‘I’m going to call Daddy now, okay? Daddy’s going to come.’”
Dad rushed over there and on the way he called a psych hospital that some church people had told him about. He was the first guy we knew to have a car phone and had had one for years. He scooped up Joe and Nancy and drove them all at one hundred miles per hour, which was how he always drove anyway, straight to Grand Rapids. Where Joe was committed and the door was locked. Nancy didn’t know much more.
A few days later, Joe called me from a pay phone inside the place after they’d moved him into residential care.
“I really love you, brother,” I said.
“I don’t deserve it.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“I know, but that kinda makes it worse. It would be easier if you were faking it. Because how can you love me when I don’t? That means something’s wrong with me. I look at myself, I see a piece of shit. I don’t have what it takes to not see that. I’m missing a gene or something.”
“When did you last actually feel good?”
“On the river with Scott.”
“How’s Scotty?”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t want to die.”
“How is it in there?”
“This place? Oh, it’s all right now. I’m pretty happy to just hole up in my room and sleep.”
“Anybody come see you?”
“No. I don’t care. I don’t care who knows I’m here or not.”
“You remember I was up at Holland Hospital when I was going to Hope College?”
“I know something happened. As usual with our family, Dad was so ashamed of it he pretended it never happened. He never told us a goddamn thing.”
“Well, I had to take a little break.”
“What happened?”
“I wanted to quit that school, and I couldn’t figure out how to do it.”
If you were in the Christian Reformed Church, you attended either Calvin College or Hope, and quitting that school, for me, meant quitting the religion. I needed to do both. In my freshman year, I bought an old Kawasaki KH400 and drove it to Chicago, then climbed the fire escape on a high-rise along the Gold Coast and sat near the top, swinging my legs and looking down at the dark, cold lake. It would have been a lot easier to die than to face leaving the church, but I climbed down and went back to school. The break was already in me, though.
I never had to leave the church; they threw me out. I did leave Hope in my sophomore year, and a few months later I got a letter from the consistory saying, “Your membership has been terminated.” The letter was signed by the nice dad of a nice kid I played football against. The CRC doesn’t have excommunication, per se; they called it “disfellowship.” Not a single church member contacted me to ask what was going on. I figured Bruce simply told them to kick me out.
The only way to leave Hope was to decide I didn’t care. I spent a week or so in the psych wing at Holland Hospital not caring.
I was in a locked ward with about a dozen other people, and we had all these group therapies. It was torture because one or two of the people were actually nuts, and when you heard them talk you just knew they would kill themselves the minute they got back on the street. I felt like I was in there to keep those people alive. There was a woman in there from my biology class at school. The campus was only a couple of blocks away, so when people bugged out this is where they came. She asked me what was going on, and I said, “I think it would be called a ‘crisis of faith.’” Since it was a religious school, she understood. “You can’t take that stuff so seriously,” she said. She was totally sane.
Mom and Dad were in Maui on a business trip, but someone got hold of them. I was going to leave the school and a couple of administrators came to see me, and the iffy looks on their faces made it seem like they were happy to get rid of me. Finally my folks showed up, and they brought me a whole beautiful pineapple from Hawaii. The staff said I could have it, so the woman from biology and I went in the little kitchenette and carved it up. They gave us some kind of plastic knife and we hacked away at it, just talking and sawing until we had eaten the whole thing. Pineapple is crazy acidic and we just chomped it down, carried away by how exotic it was—“Wow! Yum! So good!”—without noticing that our mouths had started to bleed. We never felt it until both of us had paper towels jammed on our faces to stop the blood from pouring off our dissolved lips.
It was good to feel that stinging and smell the iron-and-ozone of blood. When I felt that, I knew I wasn’t crazy. I just couldn’t explain to anyone in the church or its school that human minds were partly made by rivers and fields and that rivers and fields could be driven insane. I figured I better keep that to myself.
“Send me a pineapple,” Joe said from the lockup. “I want to try that.”
“Naw, see, I already ruined it by telling you it makes your mouth bleed.”
“But it’s real. Bleeding is real.”
There was a long silence from somewhere in Grand Rapids.
“They put me in a Christian rehab, man,” said Joe.
“Oh shit. Really? Is that going to be okay?”
“I can’t tell yet. I just want to be a real person. Somebody has to agree that I am here, that I am flesh and blood and I don’t feel good and that it’s not because God thinks I’m a bad person or some lies like that. I drink because I don’t feel good. If they start telling me Jesus wants me to do this or that, they’re going to have a corpse on their hands. I want what’s real.”
That day I mailed him some things I had in the apartment in New York. My dog-eared copy of The Nick Adams Stories. Some promo cassette tapes of music that hadn’t come out yet in stores, by Jane’s Addiction and some other bands. He didn’t tell me this until years later, but up until that point in his life Joe had never actually read a whole book. He was almost twenty years old. But he read that one.
This was late July
1990, and I just couldn’t be anywhere except with Joe. So Anne and I packed up our apartment at Third and A in the space of a week and we were gone. We were headed to Michigan for however long, and then on to San Francisco for new lives.
We rented a big truck and put the motorcycle and all our stuff in it. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I did think of this as a way to remake my relationship to Anne. I knew that Dad always did this and that it never worked, but there had to be some good to come out of all this insane stress. Straight out of high school, Anne had been managing bands and running punk and dance music labels, working at Factory, Rough Trade, and Blast First, but she’d decided to move on and she had already enrolled for the fall term at UC Berkeley, where her father was a world-renowned mathematician. So we just moved up our departure date. Spin very quickly made a position for me as their West Coast editor, and my first assignment there was to look into the car bombing and Redwood Summer. As we rolled West, I prayed that Joe would be all right, that Anne and I would be all right, that all of us would survive the summer.
The day we left New York City, my nose stopped bleeding.
Brett and our family friend Mike, whose folks had owned the Texas Take Out, were on their way to see a rock concert in Grand Rapids and decided to stop at the rehab. Joe had been tangled in a life-or-death struggle for so long that Brett was ready for anything that might bring some positive change, but the locked doors did make it clear that there was some chance our little brother might cark it. For that reason, Brett wasn’t planning on staying long. Too much exposure would just wreck him.
On some level with which he was not really in touch, Brett was angry at Joe for making a fuss about his life and causing everyone to be in a panic about him cutting himself and beer-bonging vodka and eating fistfuls of acid and being a selfish turd. Brett was twenty-one years old and deadly practical, and his obvious solution was that Joe should just move away from Dad and live his life in the wilderness somewhere. Brett wanted Joe to be okay, but he’d done a lot of two A.M. rescues and he needed an end to all this acting out. Like me, he’d been dreading Joe’s death for so long that he was worn out. He hoped this rehab place would work. Joe couldn’t just go on demanding everybody’s attention forever.