Rock the Tree (of Life)

Never one to back down from an idea that has penetrated my consciousness, I now find myself toying with a new storyline centered around religion. It’s a tale of lost love, religion dismissed and the vapid presence of God someplace in the background.

My relationship with God has always been tenuous at best. It’s now playing itself out in a new movie script concept that is slowly leaching out of my brain in the form of vapid scenes, running dialogue and undercurrents of love smashing up against ingrained religious belief.

Rock the Tree (of Life) is a story of finding, losing, and rediscovering God in a whole new form-I think.

My disillusionment with God, religion, heaven, hell, the afterlife and all things religious began in Eighth grade. After eight years of Catholic indoctrination at the hands of those daughters of Christ and men of the cloth, I finally hit a Catholic truth I couldn’t accept. It was simple enough; the fact that unless one is baptized as a Catholic, one couldn’t get into heaven. That simply didn’t jive with my immature brain that thought if God is all knowing and all great, he/she would never dismiss my friends as unworthy of heaven simply because their parents were of another religion.

Further study into many other Catholic doctrines I’d been taught and I was gradually finding myself falling away from the confinements of my mother’s religion. That lasted through high school and college and a good portion of my ‘lost years.’

There was a brief return to the church during the Sixties when my friend, Susan and I, discovered the Newman Center on the University of Minnesota campus and their semi-hippie approach to God and goodness and fellowship. That feeling of fellowship and community continued with intense debates and honest discussion amid pitchers of beer at the old Triangle Bar on the West Bank.

It also initiated a plethora of soul-searching in the form of poetry and song lyrics as I tried to examine what I was feeling at the time.  That brief return of examining my faith left with Susan when another phase of life called marriage began.

Years later, the subject matter reappeared in one of my first story forms of a play/movie/novel called ‘Cafeteria Catholic.’ The core element of the story is simple enough. A man, devoid of any faith, meets a woman who is a believer. The plot revolves around their newfound love for one another and the challenges of one believer connecting with a non-believer.

In truth, the core structure and plot elements of ‘Cafeteria Catholic’ are now morphing into a new storyline call ‘Rock the Tree’ with added conflicts and more layers of love added in. The background setting is different but the core conflict remains the same.

It’s not as if I don’t have enough to write already. There are two completed movie scripts that still need to get under Hollywood’s radar and a plethora of other projects screaming for my attention. Yet, this question of the existence of God and all of its surrounding baggage is a subject matter I find fascinating. Garnish it with the warmth and depth of true love and there is a story inside just waiting to get out.

I have no idea if I will even begin this new writing project this summer. Yet the ideas keep coming out and snap me to attention deep into the midnight hour. How can I ignore a storyline as strong as that?

 

Ode to a Broken Down Palace

Everyone wants someplace to call home. But for me back then the house on Randolph Avenue had long since ceased being my home. After living in Europe it was simply a place to crash while I waited for my life to take some semblance of order. It was where I was raised but no longer belonged.

So finding that sad old relic of better times on University Avenue marked the beginning of another world I was about to enter. 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 collecting 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 apartment units. 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 help define who and what I have become…and strive to be.

That white ghetto came to represent 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.

That’s a lot of accolades to pile on a rundown hulk of a building in a poor part of town. When first constructed around the turn of the century the building was reflective of an expanding and prosperous Minneapolis. The huge structure was home to a prominent businessman and his growing family. By the time I moved in it was owned by a shady real estate investor from Saint Louis Park who would never dare venture into that neighborhood at night. I had to go to his ethnic enclave of real estate ‘bottom feeders’ to sign my lease.

My unit on the second floor had been carved out of a once spacious master bedroom. 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 building was, at once, a rundown hippie hangout, a nightly excuse for under-age drinking and sexual affairs and a sketchy abode for a wandering soul.

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. In retrospect, I think I was nuts to live in such a dump but it suited my lifestyle back then and my frame of mind. 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 left an empty field.

Three women encompassed my frame of reference for that period.

First there was Sheila who had moved on with her life by that time while I was still trying to find mine.

Then there was Susan who was seeking the holy grail of life’s direction just as I was. She needed focus in her life and together we helped one another search for that shining light. Susan and I used to sit on her creaky front porch and waxed philosophically about life and love and what the future might hold for us.

She was significant in my life for several reasons, not the least of which was that we were both seekers. It was a collision of my time and space with hers. For a long time we were in the same orbit, thinking and living life alike, and traveling that strange road to maturity. We were both hungry. And with similar family backgrounds, we both found ourselves struggling to grab a handhold on that slippery ring called a career.

And finally there was Sharon waiting in the wings until such time as fortune brought us together at KTCA; the Public Television station.

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. It was a sometimes conflicting confluence of attitude and interest, circumstance and focus, goals and objectives. And ultimately it led me to the stability I found in another human being who was opposite of me in almost every way.

Isn’t life strange that way?

I Found Susan's House

Ever since I posted one of my first blogs entitled: “Looking for Susan’s House,” I’ve been thinking about that early morning bike ride and my quest to find Susan’s place. The search was as much revisiting my past after forty-four years as it was finding an old rundown duplex in a sketchy part of town. 

The feedback to that initial blog was very positive. It almost felt as if my readers had also heard the same Sirens call as I did in that first blog. Of course, I have no idea what I would have said if I ever met Susan again.

“Hello, Susan, how are you? I’ve had a good life…I hope you have too.” 

No, I think I would worry about her answer. As resilient as she was and as much as attitudes were changing back then, it was still a tough road for many immigrants and Hispanics to travel.

So this fall, I returned to my meandering route through that neighborhood bordering the University of Minnesota. It was just part of a much larger circuitous bike ride that particular morning. There are still a lot of good memories lingering back there in the hood even after all these years.  Once there, I thought I’d give my search for Susan’s house one more try.

I was about to give up my search for a second time when I rode past an old red brick row house and immediately recognized it as the spot where I used to turn left to go to Susan’s house. Even after forty plus years, the memory of that trail marker still stood out like a homing beacon. Now I knew exactly where Susan’s house was.     

 

Only it wasn’t.

A large apartment building now took up a good part of her old block. Not surprisingly, at some point back in time, a developer had come along and put up an apartment building where Susan’s house used to stand. Any sign of Susan’s home or her neighbor’s homes had been erased forever. 

 While I didn’t find Susan’s house, I did find something more profound. Just as Susan’s house had disappeared under the guise of progress and development, so too had most of the other vestiges of my existence back in that neighborhood. Everywhere I rode, the old buildings were gone or had been refurbished into something else.

From my first apartment to my first job, my first second (volunteer) job and so forth, the old familiar was now gone. Even the venerable village of Dinky town, famed for Bob Dylan’s coffee house start, fraternity panty raids and late night romantic liaisons had morphed into something totally different.

 

Dinkytown (c. 1960s)

Dinkytown (c. 1970s)

What had been once a rundown artistic bohemian neighborhood had slowly evolved into a sad morass of fast food chains, a U of M t-shirt shop, a drug store turned fu-fu restaurant and a poor excuse for a coffee shop (c. 2013). 

 Even more development is now threatening to wipe out the last remaining vestiges of edgy urban living. All in the name of progress.

  I still have a great fondness for my first apartment building. That whole period in my life was really a preamble for things to come from career choices, traveling, friendships, writing and finally love and family. The building, like my apartment inside, was nothing to brag about but it provided me a place to sleep, a place to write and a place to experience life on so many different levels.

 My unit on the second floor of that rundown relic had been carved out of a once spacious master bedroom. One hundred years earlier the building had probably been someone’s elegant home on University Avenue. By the time I moved in, it was a chopped-up, divided, subdivided and probably illegal set of apartments for whoever could afford the cheap rent. 

 There was a group of Paki’s downstairs. They were all graduate students who were probably as suspicious of me as I was of them. I hadn’t been educated on race relations back then and that probably didn’t help my cautious nature either. I don’t know who lived on the other side of my living room wall but the nighttime noises indicated it was either Charley Harper or one of his protégés. The front of the building housed a strange assortment of folks who came and went with such regularly they might have been renting by the evening or weekend. 

Before

After

                         

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. In retrospect, I think I was nuts to live in such a dump but it suited my lifestyle back then and my frame of mind. 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 left it an empty field.

Having found the spot where Susan and I once sat on her creaky front porch and waxed philosophically about life and love and the future, I thought I would venture back on campus and find the spot of my first job after college and Europe. It was working as a writer for the Minnesota Department of Public Health. What a surprise, that too was gone. The old building overlooking the Mississippi is black dirt now and the operation has moved to the other side of campus.

Site of old Public Health Building

New Public Health Building

 My boss was Mrs. Ford. She was a warm-hearted cranky old woman who smoked unfiltered camels like a sailor and loved to talk about the good old days when her husband, a college professor and department head, was the big man on campus. Sadly for Marie, those days had long since passed and so she spent most of her waking hours reminiscing about campus events where she was one of the star attractions. She also wasn’t too fond of young men who had mustaches and sported longish hair. We got along well because I listen to her stories and she was always trying to make me over. 

The Newman Center on campus was the quasi-hippie hangout and folk mass center for those of us struggling with the residue of twelve years of Catholic education. We were a motley collection of wandering minds that were just starting to ask a lot of questions that the high-ups couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. 

 At mass, I was so cool in my pressed jeans, white turtle neck sweater, herringbone sport coat and love beads that Susan gave me. It was a little bit hippie, a little bit chic and thorough mod. The camaraderie, warmth and genuine friendship we felt at the coffee clutch after mass was some-thing I’ve never experienced in another Catholic setting ever again.

There was someone else in my life at that time. Someone who had captured my imagination, my mind, my sexuality and my sensuality. Rainbow images filled my mind whenever I heard her name. It was ‘Suzanne’ who took me down to her place by the river. But she had already been claimed by this Canadian named Cohen. So I and the others paid tribute to her every Sunday at mass and dreamt wonderful dreams about that mysterious woman. To this day, that song can make my toes curl. Another classic by Cohen ‘Hallelujah’ does the same thing to me.

New Newman Center

 It didn’t take long for the folk mass to gain in popularity before the archdiocese decided to move the entire operation off campus. With that move, they lost whatever magic they had in attracting those cafeteria Catholics like myself. It was never the same after that.

After a couple of months on at the Public Health Department, I ventured down Como Avenue to the studios of KTCA; Twin Cities public television. They weren’t hiring at the time but they were glad to use my volunteer services in the evenings. That worked for me. I learned the craft of television from the ground up. It became my first real job where I never felt like I was working and it was where I met my future wife. 

Old KTCA Television Station

TPT Television Station

 That building is now another local station and Twin Cities Community Television which became Twin Cities Public Television which became KTCA which finally morphed into TPT moved to their new building in downtown Saint Paul back in the late 80’s.

As significant as that old television building was in my life, even more prominent was a bar on the West Bank. That den of loud music, sweet-smelling haze and questionable characters figured prominently in my novel “Love in the A Shau.” On the surface the Triangle Bar was a rundown three-two bar with mediocre music, cheap beer and loud crowds that came to see, be seen and smoke a joint in the corner.

Triangle Bar (c. 1960s)

Former Triangle Bar Building today (c. 2013)

During its heyday, the Triangle Bar was the flash point for the 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. Not me, I either went there alone or with Susan.

But beyond the surface of that 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. The bar died in the 70’s along with the whole hippie scene.

That period in my life which I’ve euphemistically labeled my lost years encompassed a lot of lost real estate, friends who have come and gone, several women I truly cared about and ultimately marriage and a lifestyle that has sustained and nurtured me for many years. The loss of those buildings was probably the most visible manifestation of my own change and evolution

.

I never really had a goal in seeking out Susan’s house for a second time. It was just an excuse for exercise and a nostalgic trip back in time. It’s always interesting to wander back to that neighbor-hood north of Dinky Town and see the continuing changes there. But, like attending the Minnesota State Fair, traveling back there once every ten or fifteen years is just about right. 

Deep down, I never really expected to find anyone or anything there from my past.  Still, I’ve got a couple of pictures, fragmented memories and just enough foolishness left in me to think of it as a great period in my life. A time when I was young and dumb and poor. What better ingredients to fertilize the mind of an aging writer. 

Oh, the stories I could tell.