Ode to a Broken-Down Palace

What goes around, comes around or so they say. For me, it was an invitation to join a poetry reading at a local bookstore in downtown Saint Paul. Subtext Books was hosting a poetry reading by Greg Watson and Patrick Cabello Hansel, two well-known and respected poets in the Twin Cities and regionally. I was asked to join as a third member.

It seemed a fitting ‘coming home’ after more than eighteen years of wandering the vernacular jungle. Beginning in a rundown hovel in the mid-70s, the exploration of the written word in its many forms had begun as a second life/side gig/closet passion and held me fast for so many years. Poetry and songwriting had become my moniker; that hovel, my writers’ nest.

Everyone wants someplace to call home. For me, it began in a house on Randolph Avenue where the trials and tribulations of youth were hidden in the stale air still lingering there. Then, after living in Europe after college, I was looking for a place to crash while I waited for my life to take some semblance of order.

Finding that sad old relic of better times on University Avenue marked the beginning of yet another world I was about to enter. I joined a cauldron of cast-offs and bottom feeders which accurately reflected where my head was at and where I was going…in no particular order. Disheveled, messy, chaotic and rudderless yet always angling for a better direction.

The Twin Cities has a long history of nesting enclaves of immigrant families and other bottom feeders who haven’t yet assimilated into modern day society. This apartment building was just such a place. It was Swedes Hollow, the Bohemian Flats, Little Italy and the West Side Flats all wrapped up in a half-dozen, squalid, cut-up apartments. As time progressed, that area around the University of Minnesota, especially around Dinky Town and the West Bank, became my own microscopic version of Greenwich Village.

And as the song lyrics go ‘most of my changes were there.’

It’s become part of my lexicon now. Not because of some foolish notion that it represented my ‘glory days’ or the ‘best years of my life.’ And hopefully not because it might sound like the musings of an old man. It was, instead, a moment in time long since gone but still captured in a few faded photographs and dusty vinyl jackets which help poke probing fingers of inquiry into that slowly fading memory bank cached inside my head. For those places and people and events all helped define who and what I have become…and strive to be.

From 1967 through 1970, the Palace became my safe abode where I could spill out my thoughts and ideas on paper without the threat of criticism. That relic of better times came to represent, among other things, all those individuals I knew and loved and lost touch with over the years. It was the silly and foolish things I did and thought. It was all those wild aspirations and stumbles I took in the right direction. It was accidents that didn’t happen and a few that did. It was all those seemingly innocuous events that changed my life and laid the groundwork for a lifetime of story-telling in one form or another.

So, while some oldsters may lament their sometimes checkered past or lost years, I choose to embrace them as a reflective exercise. While some may scowl at rekindling the past by saying ‘it’s best not to look back’ and ‘let the past be,’ it is for me very personal.  It was a time of my ‘lost years.’

The building had been chopped-up, divided and then subdivided into probably illegal apartments for whoever could afford the cheap rent. There was a group of graduate students from Pakistan below me and odd assortments of humanity in the other units who seemed to come and go with the seasons. The overall mantra of the place seemed to be “Say Hi,” don’t ask questions and ignore what’s going on unless you think the place might burn down. I thought of my place as bohemian chic. Visitors might have had a different impression. Shortly after I moved out, they tore the building down and put up a parking lot (seriously).

After a couple of months working/writing at the Public Health Department, I ventured down Como Avenue to the studios of KTCA. They weren’t hiring at the time but they were glad to use my volunteer services in the evenings. I learned the craft of television from the ground up. It became my first real job where I never felt like I was working.

As significant as that old television building was in my life, even more prominent was a bar on the West Bank. That den of ear-busting music, sweet-smelling haze and questionable characters figured prominently in one of my first novels entitled “Love in the A Shau.” On the surface the Triangle Bar was a rundown three-two joint with intoxicating music, cheap beer and loud crowds that came to see, be seen or just smoke a joint in the corner. Beneath the surface it was my baptism into another life.

During its heyday, the Triangle Bar became the flash point for a burgeoning music scene centered on the West Bank. Since they didn’t card, the bar attracted a lot of U of M students. I’m guessing the term ‘jail bait’ was first coined there.

But beneath that surface melting pot of hippies, junkies, college drop-outs, undercover cops and other assorted flotsam from civilization came a wonderful collection of lost souls and seekers. Every night brought another stimulating conversation with some colorful character who usually gave a false last name, lied about their background but presented fascinating suppositions on life and love and war and college and our future in general. It was a true college education outside of the classroom.

They’re all gone now. Removed like push pins off a bulletin board of icons long since dis-appeared. My apartment on the avenue, the Triangle Bar, the old Public Health Department building on campus, crumbling Dinky Town, Newman Center with its folk music, the Grandview Theater and its foreign films and a dozen other sad-eyed structures all razed by a bulldozer called time.

So, I guess I’ve come full circle now. Re-reading poems that were written more than fifty years ago. It's still a sometimes conflicting confluence of attitude and interest, circumstance and focus, goals and objectives. Back to crafting thoughts, ideas, emotions and moods out of jumbled words tied together with a string of imagination. The focus is on song lyrics, really poetry in disguise, that I’m trying to capture once again.

Interestingly enough, the grandkids came down for this poetry reading, listening to Papa reminiscing and recollecting when I was just a little older than them. One generation sharing with the next. Isn’t life strange that way?

And wonderful.