In No Particular Order: A Memoir

Preface

Somewhere along the way, maybe it dawns on you that you’re not living the kind of life that rates a memoir. At first it’s a hard pill to swallow. Have you been spinning your wheels all these decades, excelling only at underachievement? Have you been a cautious wallflower, steering clear of the risky business that popular memoirists all seem to write about? Have you been living under a rock?

The truth is, most people’s lives don’t add up to a narrative that would interest many readers, partly because readers of memoir are basically looky-loos at the scene of an accident, getting their vicarious thrills out of your tragedy — or stupidity. They like the feeling that they’ve actually been fortunate in life.

But as my sixtieth birthday loomed a few months ago, I started thinking about the life I had lived up till now and realized that it has been full, fun, and sometimes even remarkable. It’s composed of thousands of incidents, which, when put together in vignettes, make it seem if not memoir-worthy at least worth a good browse. Even the famous and infamous aren’t living rough and tumble all the time. They have their slow days. But when you stack up all the interesting things that have happened to you over six decades, turns out there’s plenty of great reading material there.

I started posting personal memories on my blog, What The Hell, more as a way of memorializing them for myself than of attracting an audience. But the response was positive, many of my readers asking for more. Soon I had enough material for a small book — so here it is. My life in a series of Ektachrome slides.

All but one of the pieces here were first published on the blog in no particular order — hence the title of this collection. I’m presenting them more or less chronologically as they appeared on the blog to show how memory works — with no rational pattern at all. Our minds dance from decade to decade like a bee lights on random flowers, producing on any day of our lives a tour of fifth grade gym class humiliations, your first romantic breakup, and the day you saw a famous actor in a Mexican restaurant. It’s the worst filing system ever conceived, but entertaining as hell.

I’ve edited these pieces only lightly since their appearance on the blog, mostly to remove references to photos I included there but also, once in a while, to throw in a detail or two that had escaped me at the time. Memory at work again. And for some reason this feels like it could be book one of a series… since I’m still seemingly alive and having experiences every other day or so.

I hope you enjoy my sometimes tart reminiscing, but I also hope you let these memories lure you into your own past, where things stored in the old mental attic are just waiting for rediscovery.

Everybody has a least one book in them. The book that is their own life.

Kevin Brennan — June 2017

I’ll never write a memoir

As far as I can tell, my first memory of my father is from when I was three or younger. I know this because of the flat we lived in at the time. I see myself in a small room, in bed, in the dark – but not complete darkness. There’s light coming in the door from a hallway. My bed is up against the wall and I’m lying on my back, picking my nose. I must be making some noise or crying, because into the room comes a man and somehow I recognize that man as my father. He’s tall. His head appears to rise above the upper jamb of the door, in fact, until he comes to the bed and sits, and he bows low to kiss my forehead and comfort me. He notices that I’ve been picking my nose (I can’t breathe! I should have told him), and then he sees that I’ve apparently been spreading my crop onto the wall beside the bed.

That’s where the memory ends, but my father never failed to remind me that I was a booger spreader. Never failed to bring it up in front of a girlfriend either, or, indeed, a wife. You ought to know what you’re getting into with this guy, he’d say. Not only does he pick his nose, he spreads it on the walls!

I do not!

Well, you used to.

When I was an infant, for Christ’s sake!

Be that as it may…

He also liked to tell of the time I sent a stream of urine up into his face as he was changing my diaper, which is so youthful a crime that I can’t be blamed for it. Or the time I did a two-fingered eye poke on him, like the Three Stooges. He had a litany of my bad acts always at the ready.

I did it because you killed my hamster, I said more than once.

I didn’t kill your hamster. Your hamster committed suicide. Under my foot.

Poor Sparky.

What was he doing out of his goddamn cage anyway?

Now that I think of it, it wasn’t my hamster he killed. It was a young rabbit we’d found outside, probably separated from its mother at a construction site nearby. (Memory finds hamsters and bunnies interchangeable.) I think we had trouble keeping the bunny in a shoe box, and he must have jumped out with the piss-poorest timing any creature ever had. He was exploring the living room just as Bob came downstairs, ready for work. It was over right away.

I cried and cried. I loved that little bunny, though I didn’t even know him yet. I wailed, prostrate on the sofa, and I have to think this display of emotion colored Dad’s image of me.

Things weren’t the same after that. Or so it seems decades later, anyway.

Temporal distortions

Proust was on to something. Lost time, indeed.

I stumbled onto a blog post yesterday about my hometown, St. Louis. For whatever reason (and everyone who doesn’t live in their hometown gets this from time to time), I was filled with a gooey nostalgic feeling that prompted me — unwisely! — to think about my past.

It’s unavoidable, I guess, but by and large it’s something we should avoid. Thinking about our past. If the Cardinals had won the World Series this year, maybe I wouldn’t have fallen into the trap quite so easily…

Anyway, it hit me. Some of the most important, formative periods in my life were only a few months long. At the time, they felt like — my life — but it turns out that they were mere blips, moments, snapshots. Yet they were crucial in making me the person I became. Am.

Consider the intersection of Euclid Ave. and McPherson Blvd. in St. Louis. I lived in that block of McPherson when I was twenty-two, and as The Weavers would say, Wasn’t that a time. A small group of friends and I worked in the neighborhood, and because we got off work at midnight most of the time, we’d hustle down to Llywelyn’s Pub on McPherson for a couple of cheap Pabsts before last call. We talked about the things that were important to us. That is, Everything. We’d gone to high school together and, though we didn’t know it, we were in the act of jettisoning our past, like rockets approaching escape velocity. The neighborhood was our new turf.

I came out of that period thinking of myself as a writer, so of course it looms large.

Two other key moments were just that: moments. I lived in Newport News, Virginia, for less than a year when I was eleven. My family was fine going in but didn’t survive the leaving. It was my Huck Finn year, I guess you could say, when the grip of childhood was loosening but I wasn’t fully aware of what the adults around me were going through. I was in the woods, oblivious.

Then there was my year of college in London. It was sweet and painfully short, so I went back for the summer a year later. Both flashes in time were pivotal for me, and over with in a blink.

But are those times really lost?

I don’t want to have to read Proust to find out…

Memory believes before knowing remembers

In 1977, at just about this time in August, I hopped on a plane to London. (Elvis had just died.) It was going to be the fabled Junior Year Abroad, and, boy, was I stoked. I was twenty years old and had spent the entire summer poring over a big map of London and reading Sherlock Holmes stories.

I’d be living and studying in Bloomsbury, just a block away from the British Museum, at 7 Bedford Place, which was the London campus of a small college in Iowa. Four of us who’d been on the same plane shared a cab in from Heathrow, and when it pulled up in front of No. 7 we were all thrilled. The air smelled of diesel exhaust. The din of traffic echoed off the old brick facades. Our cabbie reminded us that a tip was not included in the fare.

We entered our new home and were immediately — well, disappointed is not the right word. It’s just that the place was a little worn out and maybe in need of some paint and new carpet. And when I entered my temporary room (which turned out to be my permanent room after a two-week stay with an English family), I was stunned to find four sets of bunk beds there and hardly any room to stow my suitcase. Eight guys in one room? I felt like I’d stumbled into a Dickens novel.

When we returned in a fortnight, I found I’d been paired with just one roommate. Things were looking up. He turned out to be something of a misfit, just like me, and we became life-long friends.

In fact, he’s the one who forwarded me a YouTube video of a tour of 7 Bedford Place made by another alumnus who’d gone back to revisit the old dump, as he puts it, in 2001. It was still pretty much the same as I remember it. With this short piece of cinéma vérité, he sent me back thirty-six years through a wormhole, and I’ve been basking in memories of that year for days now. In fact, the way the video is shot is a lot like my mental flashes of the place, with odd perspective and lensy distortions — something like dream images — but what it awakens inside is timeless.

A cautionary tale

I’m starting to worry about getting older.

My mom could be a harbinger of what’s to come for me, unfortunately. She just turned seventy-nine the other day, and though she’s doing fine, she does have her senior moments. Like this one:

Opening a fresh tub of premium ice cream one day last week, she noticed something odd about it. Something was in there. Something foreign. She poked around a bit, probing, digging like an ice cream archeologist, until she figured out that there was a chicken bone in her premium ice cream! A chicken bone, with meat hanging off of it!

We’ve all heard the stories of people finding horrible things in their packaged foods, and Mom has heard more than her share of them. She watches all the alarmist cable TV shows. Headlines in the grocery store magazine racks have not failed to catch her eye. Lamb fetuses, pig’s eyes, monkey paws — they’re always turning up in frozen lasagnas and sacks of mixed veggies. It was not out of the question that a chicken bone with meat hanging off of it might show up in her premium ice cream. In fact, at her age, the odds dictated that it was about time something like this happened to her.

She couldn’t stand it. She would not be cheated. The next day she took her tub of premium ice cream back to the grocery store and demanded to see a manager. At the service desk she pushed the tub toward the well-meaning manager and growled, "Look what’s inside this