My story is an ode to black thought

This thesis is written in a style that is directly addressed to Tariq Trotter, an emcee for the hip hop group The Roots, who goes by the stage name Black Thought. The Roots are a prolific music group in the hip hop genre. After a decades-old career in studio recording and touring the world they became the in-house band for "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," on NBC. The address is in the form of an extended thank-you letter, detailing the lived experiences I have had and the ways that my life has been affected and influenced, throughout, by the music from the genres of hip hop, rap, soul, and R&B. The account is given autobiographically and begins at my first Roots show, then transitioning to my earliest formative years, up until the night before The Roots played Salt Lake City at the Twilight Concert Series. Each section is named after one of The Roots' song titles. The content contains much about my experiences with having bipolar disorder and the relationship difficulties resulting from living with a severe mental illness. The script was originally only two or three pages. Over a period of years, it grew to be more of a memoir manuscript over a hundred pages long. It has been drafted numerous times (more than I can count) and edited by my Honors Thesis mentor, David Hawkins, Associate Professor in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah.

MY STORY IS AN ODE TO BLACK THOUGHT by Adam Hall A Senior Honors Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The University of Utah In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Honors Degree in Bachelor of Arts In Peace and Conflict Studies & Writing and Rhetoric Approved: ______________________________ David Hawkins-Jacinto, PhD Thesis Faculty Supervisor _____________________________ LuMing Mao, PhD Chair, Department of Writing and Rhetoric _______________________________ Maureen A. Mathison, PhD Honors Faculty Advisor _____________________________ David Derezotez, Phd Honors Faculty Advisor _______________________________ David Derezotez, PhD Chair, Department of Peace and Conflict Studies _____________________________ Sylvia D. Torti, PhD Dean, Honors College ABSTRACT This thesis is written in a style that is directly addressed to Tariq Trotter, an emcee for the hip hop group The Roots, who goes by the stage name Black Thought. The Roots are a prolific music group in the hip hop genre. After a decades-old career in studio recording and touring the world they became the in-house band for “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” on NBC. The address is in the form of an extended thank-you letter, detailing the lived experiences I have had and the ways that my life has been affected and influenced, throughout, by the music from the genres of hip hop, rap, soul, and R&B. The account is given autobiographically and begins at my first Roots show, then transitioning to my earliest formative years, up until the night before The Roots played Salt Lake City at the Twilight Concert Series. Each section is named after one of The Roots’ song titles. The content contains much about my experiences with having bipolar disorder and the relationship difficulties resulting from living with a severe mental illness. The script was originally only two or three pages. Over a period of years, it grew to be more of a memoir manuscript over a hundred pages long. It has been drafted numerous times (more than I can count) and edited by my Honors Thesis mentor, David Hawkins, Associate Professor in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ii 1. “Champion” 1 2. “Popcorn Revisited” 4 3. “Don’t Feel Right” 12 4. “I Remember” 17 5. “The Dark (Trinity)” 21 6. “Baby” 29 7. “The Next Movement” 31 8. “Livin’ in a New World” 35 9. “I Remain Calm” 36 10. “Swept Away” 42 11. “Adrenaline” 48 12. “Sleep” 51 13. “Atonement” 54 14. “Rising Down” 57 15. “Tunnel Vision” 60 16. “Rising Up” 63 17. “Act Too (The Love of My Life)” 64 18. “The Seed (2.0)” 68 19. “The Unravelling” 72 20. “Doin’ it Again” 79 21. “Return to Innocence Lost” 86 22. “Walk Alone” 91 23. “Somebody’s Gotta Do It” 98 24. “Thought @ Work” 103 25. “The Roots is Coming” 108 1 1. “Champion” I first met you when I was nineteen or so, after your show during the Phrenology Tour at the University of Utah. I showed up early so I could be as close to the stage as possible. My knees were pressed up against it and I laid my palms onto it while you performed. I’d never seen so many talented instrumentalists and artists on stage, all-together, in the heat and sweat with the crowd and the craft. The meaning and purpose of the songs and the music demonstrated in front of a bunch of white folks on a dance hall stage under a crystal chandelier nestled into the rocky mountains was as profound and ironic as it had to be. I was a bit surprised that world’s most famous, human beat machine, Rahzel, was absent, Scratch in his stead, and you were wearing what looked like a platinum chain and medallion around your neck that night, and an ostensibly expensive sweatsuit, but I was sure you had your reasons. I just had never seen you that way, pushing up mainstream in your styling from the underground. You played like champions for hours, and left the stage graciously in front of an uproarious audience. I had dragged my roommate Kyle with me. We’d met and become best friends during a four-month stay in the state mental hospital after a long bout of bullying, breakups, bipolar depression, overdoses and suicidal obsessions. I was high on music, and 2 could not shut up about how incredible it was to have actually been able to see you play. He, as an erudite new metal head, had to agree, despite himself. We drove down from campus to the nearest 7-11 to grab a Gatorade for the ride back to Provo, and pulled up, in front in a front stall under exterior fluorescence, next to a white Ford Astro, extended van. When I looked to the right, couldn't believe my eyes! There, right in front of me, was ?uestlove, with his giant hair touching the ceiling, sitting in the very rear of the van. The whole band seemed to be sitting there too, but you and Kamal had headed into the store to get yourselves something. Kyle and I were right there, in your presence, and I couldn’t resist the urge to approach you. I was a wiry, squirly looking, white kid, with a copper, ribbed turtleneck covering my huge Adam's apple, and my friend was tall, pale, with a stained and ratty, white T-shirt, bald head, and dorky square glasses. Kamal gave me a funny look with raised eyebrow from across the aisles as I scrambled up to you at the refrigerator glass doors. I was manic and completely unaware of myself, having lost all sense of decorum. I could hardly contain myself and started gushing word vomit praise at you. I remember saying, something banal like, “thank you so much, that was amazing,” literally phrasing aloud, "you are my heroes!" You smiled graciously and shook my hand, express- 3 ing appreciation. I clasped your hand, relishing the moment, probably seeming overly sycophantic. Then you said, "we have a new album coming out next month," and before you could finish I emphatically replied, "oh, I already got it!" Dead silence. The room became apparent again and I started to become aware of myself. What I had exclaimed was not well received. You stood there in front of me, looking at me, somewhat surprised. Slowly, the implications of what I had actually said to you began to dawn on me. I didn’t know what was going through your mind but an otherwise dynamic interaction had come to an abrupt halt. My response to your album promotion had been an undeniable faux pas. I was speechless, unable to compensate for myself to rescue the moment from the awkwardness I had just burgeoned forth. What I meant was, I had already planned for a pre-order and couldn't wait, but that's not, exactly, what I had said. What I said, seemed to indicate that I had somehow pirated your new album on Napster, or something. I immediately recognized that, froze in place and felt my guts twisting up. You made a straight face, kinda cocked your head back, then smiled and said, "okay man, have a good night," and waved goodbye. You left the convenient store with Gatorade in hand and Kamal following behind you. I stood there fixed for what felt like minutes, feeling so stupid for messing up that 4 encounter and saying the wrong thing. You guys weren't traveling in a limo, you were traveling in an Astro van, still idling with ?uestlove and the rest of the band in the parking lot, the kind of van I once drove as a delivery driver, and I had just seemed to suggest I was stealing your very pains-taxingly-made music. So dumb, having blown that. My friend consoled me a bit, and then I think I put in Things Fall Apart for the drive home, which was the album where The Roots became the greatest in my mind, while inarguably changing the musical direction of history. I couldn't sleep at all that night, listened to my new copy of the Jazzyfatnastees 2nd Lp, music made by two Black sisters I could never make or represent myself, yet it spoke to the core of me. As the sun came up, hot-like, the disc stopped spinning, and I went to work. I was changed. It was as if something I had imagined, alone, for years and years, had come full circle. In actuality, I had no idea. It would be more like an “Anti-Circle.” A constant attempt at becoming whole, the directional line toward the goal refusing connection. 2. “Popcorn Revisited” I had first heard “real hip hop” in Junior High, on a late night drive in Jimmy’s car, the 18 yr old brother of my friend Garret. Jimmy had jerry-rigged a 300 w amp and 5 dual 14 inch subwoofer tube in the trunk of his Honda CRX and you could feel the bass reverberating through your kidneys when sitting in the back seat. It was "Trouble in the Water" by De La Soul, off of a DJ Honda mixtape, that first caught my ear from his CD case. Garret then played through All Eyes on Me and after that “ATliens" hit the subwoofers— and I was hooked, even though I knew, culturally, and in relation to family norms, I wasn't supposed to be. My parents had a particular disdain for all music rap and believed strongly that it was one of the most corrupting forms of media on the planet, right up there with the baneful pornography stuff. Like many others, my first loves in music were Micheal Jackson, The Beatles, and more-so Marvin Gaye (wearing his brown T-Shirt right now). I will never forget the first time I heard "Whats Going On" on a long drive with my family to the desert wilderness of southern Utah as a five-year-old while watching the mountain landscapes pass. It was that rich and full, deep, soul sound I was yearning for all of my young life. I felt like Marvin was singing for me, and in many ways, he was (though what I didn't know yet that we also shared the same bipolar disorder and that the sickness would completely ruin both of our adult lives). 6 I was born in 1983, when the sound of contemporary music was not so sound, and I became a kid of the nineties living in Utah Valley. There was so much of the cliche angst amongst my generation, and I dabbled with it, but it didn't resonate with me. Alternative music was all the rage, and Rage Against the Machine was at the top of my list, while my friends listened to Korn, Marylyn Manson, Smashing Pumpkins, the shit-list goes on... Okay, Nirvana was alright but nothing really cut to my core like the music I had learned to love from the sixties, Jimi Hendrix, Zepplin, Floyd, the Doors, etc., and all of Motown(The Funk Brothers), which made my tastes, sometimes very unpopular with the majority of my peers. The aesthetic of those sounds were just more dynamic, more virtuoso, more appealing to me. My father introduced me to classic rock and my mother had always loved soul music and disco, hence, Marvin Gaye, hence, me. As a Mormon mother of 6, she did not take very well to the "parental advisory" stickers that were indelibly pressed onto my less than stellar Sublime and Smash Mouth CD cases, which I snuck into the house and stashed anywhere I could. Somehow, amidst all that "satanic" stuff, all of "rap music" was lumped in amongst the common Christian's understanding of modern media from "colored people" as "of the devil." But hip-hop was only then known to be rap, or gangster rap, of course, and as Dope recently recycled, the 7 cliche remains, parents just don't understand. I began dedicatedly meandering through a more prolific musical odyssey. From De La Soul and the Beastie Boys I found A Tribe Called Quest, and my family was deluged with “Left my Wallet in El Segundo,” “Can I Kick It?”, and all that jazz from the Low End Theory. Then, another shift happened. A picture was forming in my mind about a cultural experience that was entirely foreign to my own. My mother kindly purchased me a new CD with a holographic cover from ShopKo called Beats Rhymes and Life, and it changed the sound of the thing called music, hip-hop, and my whole, little life. Something with Tribe had REALLY changed, so I delved into the liner notes. Someone named James Yancey was now getting involved and changing the sound of hip-hop in a way that for me was THE WAY. I think I found Common and the Roots in there too. So I went looking for your albums, and Common’s. I found Resurrection and One Day It’ll All Make Sense, while listening to Organix, Illadeph Halflife and Do You Want More?. Then dropped the dynamite ‘Things Fall Apart'(my English professor didn't know you had named one of your albums that because she only knew of the Achebe novel), and it became the greatest hip-hop album of all time, in my view. The production was uniquely inventive, highly artistic, almost psychedelic at times, with deeply poetic song titles, the profound cover and insert, the guest artists, and 8 the anthem “Act Too(Love of my Life)” were my sentiments, exactly, with Common shoring it up! I began memorizing the verses, and solidified “You Got Me,” as an extremely wise love story. I scoured Okayplayer’s website for all the information I could get. I wasn’t just a fan, I was a fanatic. I was always meticulous about the liner note reading and paying close attention to the omnipresent shout outs. It worked on me. Then Like Water For Chocolate broke and it was a revelation! Liner notes again. Yup: Ahmir Thompson, Yancey, Poyser. Badusim, Untitled, same deal. Everyone was in the mix. Collaborations were creating the best music I had ever heard, the fullest “Golden Age” of hip-hop, in my opinion. Now I was memorizing all new verses, The “Sixth Sense on repeat,” “The Light” and “Ghetto Heaven,” with D’Angelo down pat, learning about Assata Shakur and being touched by more of Pops spoken word. I even sent Common (when his website had the Like Water… motif) an email from my high school’s writing lab about how remarkable I thought the album was, but never got a reply. That’s alright, though. I didn’t need it. I was just feeling grateful for being so uplifted and blessed by all of it at once, because “music is a gift that is sacred,” and I was growing to it. For me, as with all us kids, everything was changing (I think Coates’s The Beautiful Struggle influence is in here somewhere). I was growing up, moving around, and un- 9 beknownst to myself, becoming chemically imbalanced with that undiagnosed, early-onset bipolar type one and OCD, and whatever else it was gonna be labeled as. My manner of dress changed from nerd who would wear a “My name is Steve” Urkle T-shirt, to thrift store hippy, to what my classmates derisively referred to as “winger” (the term always makes me cringe) and I was constantly maligned by my parents and my peers for my obsession with hip-hop and street style. My father hated my baggy apparel, dual earrings, sideways baseball caps, and would not allow me to forget about it. When the camera was out for family pictures my parents would avoid taking photos of me when I was dressed how I wanted to dress. He would ask me in private, “you really wanna look like that, huh? You know this rap stuff is all just a fad. You’re gonna look back at this and regret it someday.” I would brush off his criticisms without argument in full confidence of how I wanted to represent myself. In the hallways at school people would ask questions and make comments about my appearance. One day after school a complete stranger came up to me in the hallway and confronted me in public about the hoodie I was wearing. “You know FUBU is for Black people only, right?”, he said with his cowboy accent. “For us by us! For Black people by Black people! You Black?”, he sarcastically asked. I told him I didn’t know 10 that. I thought it meant for the culture by the culture. I didn’t know it meant for Black people by Black people. I guess I was biting-off (Fires in the Mirror) but I didn’t understand that. I was just trying to emulate the people who were my idols and helping me become a wiser, more informed, overall better person. My father got a job as a health care administrator for IHC home hospice and an opportunity opened up for him to manage central and southern Utah State. When we moved again, to a hick-town in southern central Utah called Spanish Fork, Utah County, my once forbidden obsession was in full swing, along with my mood shifting and depression and bullying by douche-bags and modern cowboys for being a “faggot,” or just a generally skinny kid. On one occasion my friends older brother Rhett dragged me out to his van and slammed my coat in the doors leaving me dangling there as he drove around the high school parking lot in circles at lunchtime for all to see. On another occasion a kid named Chad Harwood pulled my sweater vest from off of my body and told me he would give it back at the end of school. Once school ended I begged him to give it back but he wouldn’t, pushing me around, saying, “You’re already wigger enough. This is mine now.” Eventually another friend of mine, Jeff, with a long-time grudge against Chad started a fist fight with him demanding the sweater back and ripped it off him, but it had become 11 stretched out and ruined. Sometimes kids I didn’t even know would just locker check me for the fun of it. These kinds of experiences were commonplace and the name calling was a regular experience, even from random passers by. My parents were building a house in Fairview without contractors, in a very small rural township, raising six kids with little time. My father built that house in the countryside, with his bare hands. We stayed at my grandparents house in Covered Bridge Canyon during that time, living in the basement. My grandparents had satellite TV there, and I discovered BET's Rap City, Tha Basement. I lived for it, and would rush home after school to try and catch it. I used to VHS record the better music videos as they played along. The first time I saw the video for “What They Do” I was laughing my ass off at the clever irony. I saw Erykah do a full interview special during the Badusim years one night, as I continually focused on the only TV channel I would ever pay attention to, BET, given my obsession with hip-hop, R&B, and soul. I had heard Mos Def, a declared member of the “Native Tounges” on the Stakes is High album, and then saw him and Talib on a BET special where they were interviewed about working at a locally owned Brooklyn neighborhood bookstore, simultaneously forming the trio called Black Star. Somewhere, I have a VHS recording of their first live BET show to a small studio crowd. Instantly, they be- 12 came my new number ones. I memorized “Definition” and “K.O.S.” and put it into my friends ears, promoting the music all over my high-school campus, as I tried to turn mainstream rap listeners onto something with higher quality content, and purpose. It was all around us, and no one knew. Except, in my locale, that is, me and my close friends. We lived for the music cruise, sober as could be, high on music and friendship and just being young and alive. 3. “Don’t Feel Right” Hip-hop was the only thing that made any sense to me. Raging against the machine sounded fair, but it provided no solutions. Nothing, to my ear, seemed sincere or timeless anymore, except hip-hop, somehow becoming, for me, "America's" new brand of a true form of folk music, while the majority of "American's" in the early aughts either saw black people as a “fresh” novelty, nuisance, or a grave threat. I was hearing our nation's true story through my Disc-man headphones, on the daily, and no one around me seemed to be paying any attention. I kept telling my parents how important the music and the messages were, and how compatible it was with their true values, but they wouldn't fully hear it. My father repeatedly said it was merely a passing fad, and would wear itself 13 out. They were very concerned for my “spiritual” future and felt hip-hop was in the way of it. I respected their religious priorities as their foundation but not as my reality. I didn't want to go to church or take piano lessons to play hymns. I began using the piano as an instrument to create songs. It wasn't quite a rebellion, I just didn't understand music their way. Their inability to understand me, and the “African diaspora,” became a big part of my depression, and sadness for our nation and the state of the world. Military recruiters hit my campus on the daily, and three of my close friends ended up enlisting even though I begged them not to join. The focused political rhetoric on the news alert cycle was shifting from the “war on drugs” to something new called “radical islamic terrorism” after the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Kenya. If I knew the government at all, I knew they were cooking something up, and this recruitment push was no coincidence. It appeared they were making preparations for conflict. My friends brushed me off, thinking I was being alarmist and that everything would be fine. Most of my high school peers were becoming drug addled, with prescriptions and weed, and then came home the enticing, "our generation can handle it," heroin, that would eventually kill or cause to be killed three of my friends. One was found floating down the Provo River, killed during a drug deal gone wrong. Another close friend over- 14 dosed just two weeks after getting out of rehab and yet another overdosed a few months later. I stayed away from drugs, mostly, though I smoked my first joint in the tenth grade before school in a parking lot, and walked into French class high as fuck. But mostly music was my addiction and I was running out of options for consumption. No internet, not enough cash. I was fifteen and took all the part time jobs I could to try and get as much money as I could to dress well, and of course, listen to ALL the new, and classic hip-hop music. My obsession became a bit more of an addiction, and I resorted to shoplifting CDs once I ran out of options to purchase them. I became quite good at being a “juvenile delinquent.” The irony of all of this though, was that I felt a crucial part of my growth, education, and development as a person must come from hip-hop, because I was surrounded by so much falsely educational bullshit everywhere else. Hip-hop instructed me as to a marginalized history of the people of the United States and the history of racism that was rooted in the struggle of Black and brown people. Nowhere in any history class of my young lifetime was I being exposed to anything about the racism of the founding fathers or the positive things that the Black Panthers did. Common’s “Song for Assata” talked about the story of her wrongful conviction, her escape from prison, and her bravery. I 15 heard about the overwhelming disenfranchisement of Black people from Tupac, Black Star, The Roots, and countless others. I learned about the predation of law enforcement in Black communities from N.W.A.’s “Fuck the Police,” KRS One’s “Sound of da Police,” and Goodie Mob’s “Dirty South.” Hip-hop exposed me to all of that history buried from mainstream consciousness. I was only exposed to the supposed brilliance of the founding fathers and the greatness of American democracy and economics throughout school and church. My parents would regale how the founding fathers were inspired by God and how blessed all were to live in the United States at every opportunity, a completely whitewashed history. Eventually, I felt guilty, told my mother I had been stealing CDs and wanted to repay the owner for them. I am not sure why but that sense of guilt of frequently robbing record sales had started to become overwhelming and I realized I had a problem with my budding new music obsession, so much so that I had resorted to many recurring thefts. I went with my mother and some of my siblings to a shopping mall to confess to the proprietor of a Sam Goody what I had done, feeling nervous and a little ashamed. I approached a woman at the counter and requested if I could speak to the owner, who hap- 16 pened to be her. I asked if I could talk to her in private and she took me and my family into a back office, leaving an employee to tend the cash register. I told her about the five albums that I had stolen and then offered her the money for them, in return. “Here is the 80 dollars I owe you,” I said. She broke down in tears when I told her my story and she told me hers in reply, that she had recently been assaulted by a teenage boy while trying to stop him from shoplifting in her store. She recalled, “He grabbed me violently when I tried to stop him, hit me, and pushed me down. I was very afraid and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.” She told me I didn't fully understand what I had done for her, personally, by confessing to her my transgression, how much it had meant for her, in her tears and smiles. She said, “I have just been losing hope in people after that but you have helped restore my hope. Thank you for being willing but you don’t have to pay me back. Pay it forward.” “I can’t do that,” I responded, but she said, “No, you keep it. It’s okay. What you have done for me is enough.” It was completely unexpected for me to get such a reaction when confessing my crimes. I left the shop feeling relieved and glad for her relief and my mother felt proud of me. I guess it was the right thing to do because it turned out that she personally owned 17 the shop. I hadn’t heard “Don’t Feel Right” yet to know that I should snatch it if I didn’t have the scratch, but probably only from corporate outlets, to be fair. 4. “I Remember” The depression hit heavy when I was fifteen, but thoughts of suicide started when I was only in the second grade. I was being bullied so badly that year that I didn't want to go to school, one morning, and refused. “I don’t want to go to school today,” I told my mom who was sitting in the family room. “I feel sick.” “Well, how do you feel sick?” She asked. “I feel sick to my stomach,” I told her, which was more from nerves and less from illness, but I did not let on. “Let me feel your head,” she demanded, and reached in to touch my forehead with her cheek. “You don’t have a fever,” she said. “If you stay home from school you’ll have to stay in your room and you will be grounded from all TV and video games this week.” Fine, I said, and went up the stairs to my bedroom. I felt punished for wanting to avoid the punishment from peers at school on a day that it seemed I just couldn’t take it anymore. On the way to my room I called her a “bitch” under my breath and felt so guilty about it that I went to the kitchen to grab my fathers fishing knife. I snook it upstairs to sit down and hara-kari-kill-myself as I had seen in the black 18 and white movies, for what I had done. I think I knew there was something definitely wrong with me from a young age. My uncle Steve Christensen, was murdered via mail bomb, over money and a document forgery dispute, by some asshole named Mark Hoffman, when I was four. It was a high profile double-homicide that opened a federal investigation and it led to a number of books and documentaries about forensics. The media was having a field day in Utah since the Mormon church was somehow implicated. My Aunt wanted none of the attention. She's even been offered movie deals. But it was not that kind of a tragedy, for her. She had four kids with him, and six younger siblings in a large “Romney” family. No one of us could ever be the same again. Luckily, my grandmother Lucile was a veritable saint and helped them and us through it, all along the way. Steve was my favorite uncle and the shining pillar of an example in my family. My most pristine memory of him was when I was four, and at a family gathering one evening, at his house in Centerville. Because he had helped co-found Franklin Covey, and his Father was pretty established as the "Mr. Mac" suits seller made-man, they had a lot of money and all of the commercial toys a kid could want. That's how he had the money 19 to spend on buying old historical documents that turned out to be forgeries. My family was poor and struggling to get by while my father worked his way through college. That night, as I was investigating all of the cool Star Wars toys my cousins had, my cousins became protective of their property and banished me from the play room. I walked through the kitchen where the adults were talking and sat on the staircase in the dark, alone, trying not to cry. Steve noticed me, left the adults in the kitchen, and without a word unwrapped a Mickey Mouse shaped chocolate popsicle, and he handed it to me through the banister. "Are you okay?”, he asked me. He was just that kind of guy. I didn’t really know him much at the time but because of that gesture I came to see him as an exceptionally sensitive and caring adult figure in that moment. His kids are fans of yours, as well. My grandmother's side has a lot of tragedy and death too. Her five-year-old brother was run over in the street as he was running after her to play and she was trying to escape from him to play with the neighborhood girls, alone. She was nine, I recall. She never forgave herself. Her sister, Murray, contracted a brain tumor and had surgery in the seventies, but the surgeon cut a nerve and she became quadriplegic, with five kids, requir- 20 ing a breathing tube for life support for over a decade. She passed on, as her husband, who was having a clandestine affair with one of her nurses, forgot to refill her oxygen tanks. She couldn't speak but could mouth words and look right into my young heart with her kind eyes. It was always awkward for me to be in the room with her, because I felt so badly for her, permanently fixed near the glass door to the back yard, and see her there, helpless, the TV always on in the corner. I will never forget that as well. My father's mother never recovered from her brother's death, being left by her first husband for a man, and the loss of her sister. She had clinical depression, as well, and two gay sons in a Mormon household who were both diagnosed with bipolar depression, which made her even more depressed. She was my best friend and confidant when I was a young teen, but after becoming half paralyzed in old age herself, and watching her husband deteriorate from Alzheimer's, she took all of her anger and depression out on him as he became more like a child again. I could barely stand to be in her company up until the end, because of the bitterness she held toward life, which included, to boot, bipolar depression. It is in the genes, and it was passed along, to me. But she was the type-two, type, and I lucked out with the type-one. 21 My mother, OCD herself, and hurt and scared by the murder, would try to control my wandering nature with stories of child murdering clown cannibals and rapists. I was frightened and sickened by the ideas that were being placed in my head about the lurid side of human nature. One positive influence I had was a biography about MLK that I checked out from the elementary school library. I read it cover to cover. My father, always had a fascination with history, war, and social politics when I was young. If I wanted to be with him when he was off work I had to be were he was at doing what he was doing. That being the case, I was watching concentration camp footage and the murders at Mei Lei, and Cambodia, and the horrors of Rwanda throughout elementary school. He thought I could handle the reality of the world. I am grateful for that. Death and human conflict as the nature of humanity became cemented in my mind as young as I can remember. As it would turn out, perhaps too deeply. “I shall proceed… 5. “The Dark (Trinity)” Back to my teenage years: I was bullied so heavily and often, though well liked by even the ladies sometimes(which was probably why the bullies were so intense), that I became extremely suicidal at fifteen. I had formed a very close bond with my youngest 22 brother who was thirteen years younger than me, while babysitting him and engaging with his newfound interest in all things Star Wars, but my mental health continued to deteriorate. One lonely, morose night, I had held my fathers pistol to my head in tears, only stopping because I knew of the hell it would pay to my family to find me that way. I didn't know that I had an extremely compounded chemical imbalance undergoing and coming on more strongly, which was genetically bipolar. After three involuntary hospitalizations in high school, as I sought help from adults for my suicidal feelings and depression. All along, I had hip-hop, and it "nurtured me, cultured me" (Saul Williams). I memorized more of my favorite songs, especially if the lyrics were included in the liner notes. I remember being happy that ‘Aquemini’ had all the lyrics inside, and did everything I could to try and stay positive, like K.O.S. was inspiring me to be. “Umi Says” most definitely lifted me up, but the depression hung on me like a proverbial millstone. I was determined to become a lawyer from a young age, in order to get some sort of revenge on the kind of man that had murdered my uncle, or perhaps to help reform the justice system that was preying upon young black youth, as I had learned through hiphop, and would stay up late into the morning, alone, watching Court TV and Forensic files to prep for my litigious future. I thought I merely had some insomnia and was 23 putting it to good use, but I was actually very manic and filling my brain with hours and hours of grisly murder accounts and imagery of bloodied corpses. Once the mania would crescendo the depression sank in. Some kids at my school, calling themselves the trench coat mafia, had threatened to shoot up the whole school, even before columbine. I was becoming very disturbed and could not get all the violent imagery out of my mind. Columbine happened, and I was devastated as I read everything I could to try and understand. It felt so close to home, and I couldn’t stop thinking and dreaming about people killing people. It was overwhelming to me, I couldn’t escape how pervasive it had become in my psyche. It was so severe, that I began to think my own death was the only was to stop the horrific thoughts lodged in my imagination. One Saturday night, I asked my parents to take me to talk to a mental health professional about it, and in concern they took me to the emergency room. I spoke to a crises worker, and he decided I needed to be checked in, which I refused, but my parents agreed. I felt abandoned and it was jarringly painful and not helpful at all. The staff were doing their job to ensure I was stable, but they were not understanding, and misunderstood that it was not rebellious obstinance that really my problem, but a sever chemical imbalance. They forced me to take anti-depressants, which cause mania for a bipolar per- 24 son. That was my first stay. There is way too much to say about it. I never wanted to go back. Things intensified with my mental illness and the bullying when the captain of our wrestling team, while “dragging main,” seized on me because he thought I had flipped him off as I waved, mistaking his truck for someone else’s, passing by, one night. He confronted me in a parking lot for a beating and chased me in his truck up the canyon toward my house, where the kid in the passenger seat passed us on the left and shot a handgun over the top of our music-listening-vessel to intimidate and frighten my friends and me, and I wasn't having none of that. When I got home and told my father about it, I called the police and reported it. The cops found the gun recently fired in his glove box and he was already on probation for violent offenses. I had gone and done it, through the waving of a hand. The entire wrestling team was in the truck that night, and they were about to take the state championship. Now that he was expelled, I'm the target rat bastard that took our school down for reporting it. I was nervous around every corner, awaiting the next locker check, gut punch, or push to the ground. I went to the assistant school principal for help and told him about it, and he essentially said to me, next time, don't be a snitch. See, the assistant principal was still angry with me that that they weren't going to 25 win that wrestling state-championship anymore. I stopped going to school, and ended up back in a mental hospital. Being in mental hospitals as a teen puts you around the wrong people where you meet the wrong girlfriends. I met one during my second stay who thought she was in love with me. Crissy loved my “bright” look, and was trying to be cool and gobbled up all the music I had in my repertoire, most of which she hadn’t ever heard of. I think she fell in love with Erykah’s “Green Eyes,” A couple months in, she asked me to take my braces off for her, because they were “embarrassing,” and given my juvenile mind in need of love, I did. Weeks later, she cheated on me with a childhood friend of mine, before breaking up with me in front of two of her girlfriends while they laughed at me and kicked me out of her house. I really liked her mom and dad, we used to listen to Billie and Ella and Nina together. I was completely humiliated and betrayed and again felt severely suicidal all over again. Some friends picked me up from her drive way, and not knowing what to do with my tears, dropped me off near my great grandmothers grave across from the American Fork rec-center. I wept there with her remnants and decided I needed to try and kill myself, for certain, to avoid all this pain from not belonging in the everywhere I could not escape. So, I went to collect-call my ex girlfriends father from the rec-center 26 and talk to him to thank him for everything and ask him to protect his daughter in case she did become suicidally influenced after my death. While I was on the phone with him having a tender, man-to-man talk, was the first time I got roughed up by cops and arrested, simply for concerning her parents with it. It was my first interaction with police. I was there on the phone crying to her dad when they came in behind me, without a word, from behind, banged my head against the metal frame surrounding the payphone I was on, cuffing me aggressively and pushing me into the carpet burning floor for a wrist-wrenching cuffing, pushed me into the first set of doors to get through them, then into the second doors and onto the grass, where they picked me up by the cuffs, threw me into the back seat of the squad car, dropping the cap my father had bought me from his business trip, leaving it in the gutter when I asked them to grab it for me, then took me to the ER. I had another long stay, for almost two months, where I was transferred to a residential facility in West Valley. It was miserable there. All the kids despised me as the freak I was, especially this tall and handsome black kid who was there. I always sat alone for meals, and no one there would allow me to befriend them. There were these cliques which were formed before I got there. During one particular group therapy session, the aforementioned fifteen year old black kid waxed negative about his situation with his 27 “baby momma,” and said that he was hellbent on ruining his life and potentially killing himself as soon as he got out of there. I hesitated for a second, understanding the difficulty he must be feeling with his situation and also being Black in a place like Salt Lake Valley, but couldn’t hold back. I piped in and said I disagreed, that I saw a lot of potential in him, and that I knew he could choose a different route. It infuriated him and he stood up yelling, “fuck you, you don’t know me!” Maybe it wasn’t my place, but we were in group, and that’s what you’re supposed to do in group, communicate thoughts and ideas about each others situations. He resented me for it though, cause I had called him out. We went back onto the unit and the posse started playing a raucous board-game I was excluded from. I couldn’t take it anymore. I went to my room and yanked out the drawer to the desk there, which had a pointed metal railing attached to the side. I would wait for the uproar of the laughter to swing the drawer into the plate glass window as hard as I could, and then wait for the next flurry of squeals and jubilant cacophony. I hit that window maybe over a hundred times before it cracked in one place. As I was about to swing again, one of the nurses came down to check out what the banging sound was, and saw me there, drawer raised into the air. Her jaw dropped open and she said, heightened, “Put it down, now!” I smiled at her and softly said, “nope,” before hitting that splintered re- 28 gion with such force that the window exploded into pieces. She ran to grab security, while I cut myself scrambling out the small window. I was on the second floor, so I had to hop a pointed metal fence to get off to the edge of the roof, and then jump off. I ran to a nearby building from across the parking lot, barefooted, and hid between a wall an some thorny bushes. Three cop cars came squealing in and scouted the premises, but they never found me. I just laid there and watched them, feeling victorious. I laid there for hours. It was dusk, and night fell. The cops had left so I came out from the bushes, crossed a highway, and found a local gas station, where the elderly and kind but slightly confused Indian cashier allowed me to use the phone. I called my parents and said I would tell them where I was on the condition that they would allow me to come home. I waited another three hours for them to come pick me up, anxiously thinking about everything going on in my life, and the world. I had seen so much teenage suffering in these lock down facilities. I was overwhelmed by it all. When my parents arrived, they had child-locked the back seat doors, and drove me to another hospital, where security was waiting outside. I spent another month there at Primary Children's hospital, where I met more damaged young people, and befriended this sweet waif-like, bulimic girl, who had wasted away to bones, and had eroded her front teeth into black nubs from all the purging. It was 29 heart wrenching. The clinical therapist there reported to me that, as it turned out, I had scared a lot of the kids from the other hospital with my escape, and especially that one guy I had offended in group. Surprisingly, he felt really bad about the whole thing. That was of some consolation. Plus, I had a new diagnoses: Bipolar. My parents rejected it, because they didn’t want me to turn out like my gay bipolar uncles. I got out again, and with all the bullying and the missed school due to weeks of hospitalizations, I dropped out and sank further into my depression hole. My parents had little time for me cause they were building their house and raising five kids younger than me so mental hospitalization seemed like the only thing they could so. I used to feel ashamed for not being the shining example of the big brother archetype, but I have forgiven myself now. In retrospect, if I'm honest, it was all I could do to keep from ending my life. 6. “Baby” Straight out of my fifth hospitalization, I met my real first love, Lindsay, with who I would lose my virginity. She was a pretty girl who moved here with her mother and brother to get away from her alcoholic father. I taught her everything I knew about 30 soul and hip-hop, and she liked me all the more for it. It was a big part of why we got together. We used to cruise around in her newly leased coupe and listen to my exhaustive cd collection. Once when were looking for a place to park up the canyon, we found a spot next to another couple in a jeep, and I blared “Let's Get it On” as we chuckled to ourselves. As a gift, on release day, she brought to my house the first Reflection Eternal album and Phife Dawg’s first solo project. We were extremely moved by “Four Women.” We were both out of high-school and had nothing but time, music and sex on our minds. I helped my father where I could with the construction of his house in Fairview, but I didn't have his framing and carpentry skills mastered at that age, so there was only so much I could do to help with the process. I had a lot of time, unsupervised, to be with my new girl and we took all the time we needed with young love, hip-hop and soul. Tragically, later on, her niece and her friend would be killed by a train that crosses the same tracks we used to drive over to my Grandparents cabin. We were so in love in the moment, and while our parents worked and did their things, we spent months making love and listening to music. She turned me onto Their Eyes Were Watching God and I turned her onto jazz, Sade and underground hip-hop. We kept turning each other on. 31 It was those lighter times that I felt I didn't have a care in the world, but for her. It was teenage selfishness, sure, but it was real for us, as it always goes. With that car we had, we could scoot about wherever we liked. Her mother was always hospitable toward me, as she knew I loved her daughter, but her mother also knew something was wrong with me. When my family left Covered Bridge for the last time to move an hour south to Fairview, she came up to see me and hold me and led us out of the canyon in her car. She wanted to marry me, she thought, but she knew an hours distance would drive that wedge. She stopped her car on the side of the road on the way down, sobbing. I rode with my parents, and we saw her stopped there, I asked my father to stop so I could get out and talk to her. I kissed her snotty lips and told her everything would be okay, but I knew, deep down, it wouldn't. 7. “The Next Movement” We stayed a couple for a few more months, but she had that car and a new job as a hostess at Wingers, and new, older tattooed, coworker "men" were around her, eying her down. She was well-to do, and I was no match for their masculinity. I was once dropped off at her workplace by my parents and spent an entire evening shift of hers waiting for 32 her in the entryway to the restaurant just so I could see her, and spend the night with her. It was that night I would meet the older, more handsome man that she would cheat on me with, and eventually marry and have kids with, or so I have heard. “That’s the breaks, that’s the breaks.” We aren't in contact. The breakup was humiliating and brutally honest. I watched her makeup-prep topless one night for a night out with her "co-workers." It would be the second to last time I would see her, as she would end up with him. Ironically, the last time I would see her was related to how I used to give her shit about always doing her mascara in the rear-view mirror while driving a stick. She was a country girl, and she thought she was the belle-of-the-ball at multi-tasking. Weeks after my earth-shattering breakup with her, my father and I were driving south, toward home, and saw her crunched vehicle tossed onto the side of the freeway with her standing, somehow, relatively unscathed, in a pink tube-top and ponytail with air-bag burns all over her face and torso. The police were already there and she was in shock. We pulled over and I got out and walked over to her, calling out her name. She saw me, ran and embraced me tightly and wept in my arms, on my shoulder, until her mother arrived to pick her up. That would be the last time we would ever look at each other. 33 I mention her, especially, because we shared such a close bond over music, and she was my first true love. I was completely isolated in Fairview and was not about to go back to high school in an even more rural high school. There was nowhere to work down there, for a teen guy like I was, and I was picked on by strangers just for walking down main-street in the nearest township. I didn't have my GF or my BET anymore, but I had a monthly subscription to VIBE magazine and that extensive collection of albums to select and play as I plastered the walls of my bedroom with the images from those pages I devoured as I tried to keep my demons at bay. But with nothing to do, and nothing but heartbreak and holding back tears, they would catch up with me. I got a graveyard job at the local Walmart as a shelf stocker, and my parents paid for a room in a house near Snow College campus that I could walk a mile to work from. The graveyards messed with my sleep schedule, so I just stopped sleeping in the daytime, isolated in the bedroom my parents had rented from my student-stranger roommates who thought I was weird and went back to work, where they would lock us in all night to stock those damned shelves. I could only handle about a month of that before I felt the need to check myself in for the first time. I remember on my sixth hospitalization that the 34 group therapy was horrendously unhelpful, but in the daytime they let you watch TV. I saw an episode of Oprah with Will and Jada Smith about being in love and successful as a couple and found it inspiring, so I felt I could leave in a weeks time. Despite the elevation the depression well was not through with me. The only other job I could get at Walmart was as a cart pusher in the dead of mountain winter in December, and it was frigid to the point of dangerous. My thoughts went deeper and darker, and I constantly obsessed about suicide. I finally went home with my parents and begged my mother to take me out to town where I could find a police officer to assault and try and get him to shoot me. I told her I was going crazy, missing my ex, and was overcome by obsessions of the violent images constantly flashing in my mind, wanting to end myself to escape them. I told her I was worried I was becoming a maniac, and would grow into a psychopath or something when I got older, the kind of lunatic that would hurt a little boy like my 5 year old younger brother sitting next to me, that the only solution to insure I wouldn't lose my sanity was to put me out of my misery. She took it as a threat to his life, and I ended up in handcuffs again, completely misunderstood, back to the hospital. 35 8. “Livin’ in a New World” This time, they would take me to the mental health court and have me committed to the State Mental Hospital. There was nothing I could say to explain away the miscommunication. They thought I was a liar who had threatened to murder my little brother, and bound to teach me a lesson, they locked me away there for four months. They misdiagnosed me as “major depressive with psychotic features” and put me on the anti-depressants that would only wind up my manias further. It was there I learned my deepest life lessons from becoming a little family "unit" with the most fucked-up beloved human lives imaginable. The things these people had seen, the mental diseases they were afflicted with, were irrevocably humbling, and I would grow to love all of them. Even the schizophrenic Viet-Nam veteran who would beat his fists into my cranium once when he hallucinated that I was a queer who wanted to "rape his ass.” On that occaision the techs ran off in cowardice to find security to let my fellow patients try to stop him from beating me in the back of the head as I stood, face against the window with my hands in the air. I could write an entire book alone, about that place, and will spare you the details, except for to say that it was there that I witnessed real human individuals of all sexes and races living within a constructed, living human hell. One of the hardest things for me, 36 personally, was being locked in all winter, 2001. Not that I would miss the winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, but Common and Black Star at Park City during it! I would've given the old arm and leg to have been there, again, early, front stage. But a month into my stay, borderline self-inflicted-burn and deep-knife-cutter patient Kyle would show up, and we would form a lifelong friendship there. We would get out, get a joint BYU campus apartment together with a bunch of gamer nerds, fall in love with Radiohead and marijuana, and end up at your show. I finally got him to concede that Saul Williams was more intelligent and deep thinking than Maynard from TOOL, to my delight. He still never understood my obsession with hip-hop and soul until I took him to that Roots show At the U of U. That night, he got it. My connection to you and Common, Talib and Mos (probably my favorite) Erykah, D’angelo and Del and Tribe remained well intact. I was still listening to Amel Larrieux and wondering if Infinite Possibilities could be talking about someone like me. 9. “I Remain Calm” Fortunately, I found a job doing construction framing, and made okay money. I worked full-time, and would spend around half of all my paychecks on buying stacks of 37 hip-hop CDs. A few months in I was fired for being, “too weak and slow,” which was untrue, cause I hustled my ass off more than anyone else on the crew. They were just very conservative hometown boys, and didn’t like me since I didn’t fit their cultural understanding. I sunk into depression that followed the most ramped up mania I’d ever had, but luckily I started walking off my manias with my Discman in my ears and walked around Provo and Orem applying everywhere that I could. I eventually got a job at a local aftermarket clothing outlet run and operated by a trust-fund business student who was addicted to Adderall, and he made me the stockroom manager. I organized and catalogued the shit out of that place while listening to music all day. Full-time, eight bucks an hour employment! Six months in, as his over-indulgence in college kid speed and inextricable anger intensified, my boss would have an outrage at a minor disagreement we had and fire me before losing his fiancé' and his business due to his amphetamine abuse. However, it was all for the best, because it led me to the Barnes and Noble store with a better resume. My last boss still gave me a reference for the job and a couple weeks in I was made the music department manager, which was a pretty big deal for me, without even applying for it! Twelve bucks an hour, and I was surrounded by music and movies all day! It was there I became a real film-buff, discovering the Criterion Collec- 38 tion, Akira Kurasawa, John Cassavetes, Jim Jarmusch, Iranian film and classic European cinema and Spike Lee for the first time. I added to my obsession with music an obsession with cinema, and studied the films I would collect, paying for them with my store discount from whatever was left over from my rent check and living expenses. Whatever I couldn’t afford to purchase I checked out from the local library. Film replaced any gospel, or religion. With no friends, to speak of, foreign film became my new venture, and I would travel the world with my eyes through the lens of the camera in those years. It was also in that bookstore that I discovered Noam Chomsky's Profit Over People, Howard Zinn's The Peoples History…, and Solomon Northups, Twelve Years a Slave. I watched Between the Color Line on PBS with Henry Louis Gates Jr., who I would come to revere, and bought the DVD to share with friends and family. It was a time of enlightenment and mental stability, and I went on long walks while keeping to myself most nights with a cup of tea and a book or a film. I was sober and responsible. I registered as a student at UVSC as a music major and did only one semester, as it proved too much for my part time employment. It was in those times that I first found myself stable and functional, managing my mental conditions by managing the right kind of work, work about selling other peoples work, out and around other people. I was so 39 meticulous with categorization, especially with a superficial knowledge of classical and jazz, that certain changes I was requesting in my own department were being implemented corporate wide, and I found myself in the good graces of a very stern female district manager. She was grooming me for future development to be put to use with the company. I felt flattered, yet the corporate nature of the job started getting to me. We had to push the exploitative Barnes and Noble customer discount card on every person that made a purchase, or our jobs were on the line. The most likely to buy the thing were those lonely, return customers who hung out in the bookstore just needing someplace to go. The rich housewives who spent hundreds and thousands a year there and would actually save money with the discount wouldn’t usually be bothered with enrolling. One of those people who I was forced to push the card onto was a squat, and slinky, bald-sheen, cock-eyed, round spectacled customer, a beauty of an individual who was a peculiar, lonely, gentleman whom I had known for years through conversations and special requests at the music department. I sold him one of those cards, almost wishing I wouldn't have. A month later, he came to me and looked me in the face with one thought on his mind. He said something to the effect of, I trusted you, and you sold me a scam and wasted my money, shaking his head and walked away. I never forgot that because it 40 cut me to my core. I knew I needed out, and started thinking of a way. I found a job actually working at the state mental hospital rather than being a resident, and put in my two weeks notice. The district manager was very upset with me and angrily tried talking me out of it, saying “the grass is always greener.” Maybe she was right. I was living at a house with some BYU students at the time, and met some of my best friends of all life at that time, one of whom, Fuminao, a Japanese transfer student, even kinda became a part of my extended family by coming to holidays and family vacations together, for years. My entire family adores him and we still send Christmas packages every year. Jardan, one of the very few close "black" friends I would ever have, and a few other BYU zoobies, as we called them, all gelled very well together. It was at this time, that I started becoming interested in guitar and piano again, and began crafting my own songs, alone. I really liked them, and didn't quite know where they came from or what they were. I just did it for my own edification. I bought my first digital keyboard and both acoustic and electric guitars. I discovered Jeff Buckley and Bjork, and changed my outlook on musicianship again. 41 There's a small deviation here that I will omit much from, but around this time I went on a fateful evening hike in the rain with some friends, when I encountered something exceedingly creepy that can only be described as being, perhaps paranormal? It didn’t fit my secular and atheistic perception of the world. I don't know what it was, and neither did they, and likely we never will, but we all experienced it and we all became very spiritual, each individually becoming Mormon again and going back to church, without one another’s influence, coincidentally. We had been terrified into superstition by something unexplainable and it shook us each out of friendship together and back into religion. Nuff said. All, the while, I had my Roots. What I was starting to learn at this time, was that something else had been cooking up for years, somewhere else. Something called the Soulquarians had been taking formation, with a bunch of certain special somebodies, and this really unique, innovative vision from some guy called Jay Dilla. Wait. That sounds a lot like, Jay Dee, aka James Yancey from all those liner notes I was reading back in the day. Had they all coming together to stay? Were they uniting their collective powers? Could it be? The intrigue… 42 10. “Swept Away” It was 2003, and I started to go out to live shows more often, and found myself at a local venue to see a traveling indie project called the Microphones. Standing there at the doors early, as I was accustomed, I met a lovely, delightful lady named Laura who would later become my wife. Man, she was so adorable, and actually paying attention to me and asking questions, and sitting by me during the show, and giving me her number afterwards? I didn't know what to think. It seemed too good to be true. We went on our first date rowing a canoe on a lake at sundown, and she was so smart and a little religious but also pretty artsy. And so cute! Why was she interested in me? I kept going to my job, and then started going to hers to hang out, cause she worked graveyard shifts taking care of disabled adults living in apartment housing. That's how we first dated. It's how we fell in love. It's where we watched the films I had been seeing myself, and checking out from the library. We grew to love those guys, and each other. We talked about everything throughout our lives, and our belief systems. I told her how I thought capitalism and our government was completely corrupted and with what little economic knowledge I had, I implored her to understand that the real-estate bubble 43 was doomed to collapse our economy, as too much power had been consolidated in the plutocracy that constituted our banking and investment firms. She hadn’t really thought of things like that before, and her crush on me flourished as she embraced how differently I thought about the world. My feelings for her were so strong that I hesitated for many months to even begin to let her know. We didn't even kiss until two months into it, after staying up all night again together. It was very innocent and sincere. It's probably why we got married. But if I was gonna marry this person, there was some shit I was gonna have to change. First: hip-hop. I tried showing her even the most tame of songs by Black Star and Blackalicious, and she still thought it was too dark for her. It was a bias she had been inculcated with by her strict conservative, religious family. Many months into dating, she took me to the record store while she was on shift with her dudes and asked me to sell all my hip-hop albums with those troublesome advisory stickers, "lewd content" and "strong language." Reluctantly, I sold hundreds of CDs I had spent fifteen to twenty a piece on for a buck fifty to two. I had spent thousands and thousands over the years. I was pretty dejected. But, I thought she was worth it. I really did love her, and thought I could show 44 her, though I must hold onto my Tribe and De La, though she thought it was still distasteful. Second issue with me: I was not "temple worthy," meaning, living like a Mormon does. Had to fix that. I had already been seeing church leaders about what had happened in the mountains and was sober. Pretty ready to be “worthy.” I had only been sexual with my first love Texan teenage girlfriend, and had a couple other flings, so I wasn't that “unclean.” Technically, according to the official Mormon church standards, they should have made me wait, but I was sincere about it all. I told them, “Look, I don't know if this is true or not, but after all I've seen, I'm going with it, and doing it for real, their way,” because of the fear, death and pain I had witnessed to the contrary. I was fully devoted to acting on it. I didn't jack off for over a year! Which was about as long as my soon to be wife and I had dated, only, ever "making out." Maybe a little “continuous grinding,” or “Levi loving,” as the BYU expression went. Gawd. We even lived together for six months, in the same apartment, sleeping in other rooms, and somehow never slept together until our wedding night? What? I don't even know. But the wait wasn't so bad. She was worth it. Her family, on the other hand, always hated me, from the get-go. 45 The first conversation I had with her mother was a virtual-social-travesty for her. She and her son had been listening to the worst of conservative radio, and were so very upset that those ungrateful Iraqis were not taking to our nation’s foreign occupation. She asked me what I thought. I responded, calmly, "I don't think starting a war with a country on false premises, bombing its infrastructure, killing innocent people, and then expecting them to be grateful for it is very reasonable." She stood up from the kitchen table shaking her fist at me, and screaming, "you're the future Bill Clinton's and John Kerry's of this country!" There was nothing I could do to please that woman, and through so much drama, that I won't mention, I managed to keep an even temper. That was always the worst issue I had with being with my fiancé, up to that point, and in many ways, my girl was trying to get away from her family by starting one with me. But as my father told me a week before we married, you're marrying her family too. The conversation felt like a kick in the balls. I almost didn't know if I should go through with it, when he said it like that, but I talked myself into believing she would definitely choose me over them. To my misfortune, it was a warning of things to come, though I couldn’t accept it, at the time. How could I back out, simply out of fear of her mom and siblings? The engagement photo's 46 were already taken, the event scheduled and planned. I couldn't back out at the last minute. A year into our relationship, we finally got sealed and married in the Mormon temple, and went on our honeymoon. The honeymoon was magical, at first. Until we went to the temple. It was one for my record books. I told some dude inside that I had some decaffeinated green tea for breakfast and inquired as to whether or not that was acceptable for the established doctrinal rules. He went from resuming a beaming-smile-jolly-green-giant to raging lunatic, gruffly dragging me around the temple by my arm to find the temple "President." He was so flustered he even dragged me out into the foyer in front of a bunch of wide-eyed kids wearing my elaborate temple costume. He resorted to taking me to the basement, putting me in a room with no windows and swiftly closing the door behind. I sat the a chair where he made me wait for quite a while for the temple “President” and my new wife to come down. The “President” annoyingly explained that I shouldn't ask questions like that in the temple, and should rather take them up with my “Bishop,” and that I was free to leave. I went and got changed into street clothes, and was becoming enraged. I was on my fucking honeymoon just trying to do what I had been instructed to do to the best of my ability! I didn’t need that shit! I met my new wife out- 47 side and got in the car and started driving, cursing a blue streak about what had happened, and bemoaning the entire culture of white conservative males. I don't think she had ever heard me say fuck, before. It was our first fight. She was so disappointed in me. We ate our packed picnic lunches on opposite sides of a park, and drove home in silence. The marriage would not go well. She had more of her mother in her than I had known before the honeymoon, and I was only a bipolar person in remission when we met, which she didn't quite understand. The marriage was sexless, for the most part, as she had been molested by her older brother and had never been with anyone else, sexually, but me. I wasn't what she was hoping for. I believe her words were, “too big, veiny and red?” Fuck me! It wasn’t how I thought it was gonna be either, but I kept trying, and so did she, as dedicated we could be to a youthful promise, while we incrementally grew apart. After four months of the state hospital gig, I couldn’t stop bringing the mental hospital patients pain home with me, and started looking for yet another job, finding one as a delivery driver for a local wholesale company. I was becoming almost entirely manic, most of the time, dealing with her incessantly dramatic family dynamic while working a new job as a delivery driver and getting back into listening while driving all the time. I 48 would listen half the day to NPR, a little while to conservative talk radio demagoguery, and then to music. I was a glutton for information. Still am. I also put the kibosh on that no, hip-hop shit, and went to buy all of my favorite hip-hop albums all over again, mostly from all the Soulquarians. Wanting a break from my intensity, she allowed it, and learned to love it, too. She particularly liked Black on Both Sides and Blazing Arrow. I found a copy of Chapelle’s Block Party, and gleefully watched that story unfold, with her by my side. We watched When the Levees Broke and became incensed and inspired. When I showed her Donuts for the first time, she was inducted as a dyed in the wool, true-blue hip-hop fan. 11. “Adrenaline” Sadly, my manias would not subside. I went seeking professional help again after going through a number of doctors and medications to find the right fit, I was officially diagnosed with bipolar type one with old, going through a number of doctors and medications to try and find the right fit. I was becoming a real nut job, to my dismay, and went seeking help from multiple doctors. They found I had been completely misdiagnosed in the state mental hospital, and had gone not just untreated for over a decade, but treated in 49 an adverse manner as a result of being forcibly put on the kind of MAOIs that worsen bipolar. The unfortunate reality was I had actually been bipolar type one all along, leaning toward the most severe variety of manias, “rapid cycling, mixed states.” With mania comes that incessant dopamine and adrenaline dump, and the tendency to lose touch with reality, preceding the depressive “crash” and neuro-chemical saturation with that nasty stress hormone cortisol coupled with the complete depletion of dopamine and serotonin. It’s debilitating business, especially when you’re uninformed about what is physiologically going on with your mental condition. When Dilla passed it broke me up inside, which no body else around me could comprehend the depths of. Game Theory was released and I think I had it on repeat for a month. It was real-world dark, with Dilla production, Malik B was back, Mercedes Martinez of the JazzFats and Radiohead samples? Wow. It became my favorite record of the period. What a masterpiece. Helped me process my own life, the world, Dilla’s passing. It was just what I needed. It may not have been a solution for full blown-mania, though it truly helped me through in all the ways that it could. The mania got worse and I would go on an hour or two of sleep a night for weeks at a time. To cope, or to redirect l the unrelenting brain turning, I would go on weird, ob- 50 sessive spending sprees, like one time purchasing and returning eleven TVs from Best Buy because I couldn't get the right picture for my film collection, or buying twelve hundred dollars worth of Dungeons and Dragons merchandise for my younger brother to try to heal all the damage that I had done in my alienating, suicidal, teenage years, or driving all night while my wife was sleeping to Evanston Wyoming to buy porn magazines in order to quell my unrequited sexual desire for her (since we didn’t have the internet and selling porn is illegal in Utah. Yet, Utah happens to be the highest consumers of porn subscriptions, statistically? Hmmm…). I didn’t understand this at the time, but my psychiatrist had me on Prozac, an SSRI, along with my other mood stabilizers, and for a bipolar person, taking SSRI’s is like having an IV of stimulants injected straight into your limbic system. During one manic episode, I drove to a strip club for the first time and watched some woman dance. I found myself disgusted by it, and drove home freaking out and crying to my wife on the phone in confession about how appalling I thought the men were treating the dancer while having flashbacks to footage of Rwanda and the gory detail from book I had been reading on the subject called Shake Hands With the Devil. She tried to be understanding, but justifiably, she resented me for it, and would punch the shit out of my face. What can I say? I deserved it. 51 We went to counseling. We both read books on the subject of bi-polar and she got involved with a local chapter of NAMI, though I was forbidden from attendance. She was doing it for her own sanity. She worked at a an LDS garment factory nearby, so she could provide our insurance coverage, mostly to take care of my mental health expenses. It was grueling for both of us. I can't imagine how she felt. She was a good person, my best friend, but a bit condescending at times. I had tried many different medications, somewhere around twenty, and went through a few different doctors, and her family dynamics were worsening. We finally decided to bring the molestation to light, as it had been bothering her, and everything exploded. I got blamed for putting false ideas in her head. She didn't quite defend me to them as she was displaced by their rage and infighting. She did all she could to be with me, I like to think. I remember often considering the meaning behind that R Kelly song, “When a Woman’s Fed Up.” There was nothing I could do about it, as I had become accustomed to. 12. “Sleep” Three years into it, I was managing at the floral wholesaler and working sixty to eighty hour workweeks for the two weeks preceding Valentine's Day, which was when 52 then company made almost half of their yearly profits. All that work in a row was driving me manic, and I was working off my mania with work, and thinking of her at home, and how I was going to make it better. On my last shift I planned to go home before the holiday and cook her spaghetti dinner, hoping to just talk about what she was feeling and thinking and what was up to while I served her. I drove home excitedly, I think I was listening to Slum Village Fantastic V2 on my way, and I walked into our basement apartment with a spring in my step to greet her after a long week of work. She had an expression I had never seen before, a look in her eyes of dispassion. She calmly told me she didn't love me anymore, that I she was leaving me that night to drive to her parents, and that there was nothing I could do about it. It hit instantly. I was gobsmacked. There was no hesitation in her voice. I was in a state of befuddlement, though immediately I knew she was for real. My mind began racing into what would happen, and I flashed back into what I knew what would happen with my depression and that I knew I couldn't live with it. She saw my face change, I think, and as I went for the pills in the cabinet, she went to stop me. I stopped her and held her back, where she stood, yelling in tears, "You go and do what you need to do, and so will I!” She fled out of the the apartment, and I swallowed hundreds of pills from five different prescriptions that had just been filled with 53 gulps of water and without a second thought. Once the pills were ingested, I put on Sigur Ros (), laid down on our couch in what I felt was our impeccably and lovingly decorated apartment, and looked at our wedding photo hanging on the wall. I started to think through what was actually happening and going to happen, and I realized that if I wanted my overdose to be successful, that I would have to leave the apartment and walk to a nearby park to lay under a tree, or risk being discovered there on the couch before I would pass. What swayed me was the thought of my little brother having to live with my suicide without a goodbye. So I decided to stay in the apartment and allow what may happen to happen. The paramedics came quickly and walked into the apartment. I couldn't walk at that point, and my vision was fading. They lifted me into the ambulance and pulled me onto the stretcher. The last thing I remember seeing was the wind blown rustling of the leaves of the of the tall oak trees outside our place while the paramedics were trying to get me to swallow charcoal as my tunnel vision, turned to pin-hole vision, to blackout. I woke up three days later in the ICU with a breathing tube down my throat and my family standing around me, crying. My wife was glaring at me, enraged. I was gasping for air and couldn’t get any so I tried to pull myself up. My wife stood at the end 54 of the bed, glaring at me. I was struggling to remember what had happened. They tied down my hands and put me out with some sedatives to subdue me. 13. “Atonement” My wife stayed with me for another six months, but only out of guilt. The day she walked away for good, she waited for me to get home from work and told me she was leaving, again. She paused for a moment to look back at me, casually saying, “I know your life is hard, but it doesn’t have to be mine,” as she flipped her hair and turned her back on me to walk away. After we officially divorced, I couldn’t speak, eat or sleep for eight days, and just laid in our bed, crying, my mother abiding me for much of it. I was beyond devastated. I wanted to work it out so badly, but I just couldn’t see that we weren’t right for one another. She needed her family, and though my family embraced her, hers were never going to stop hating me for being liberal, a sinner, and crazy. Meanwhile, she had been crafting an essay for This I Believe on NPR called “I Believe in Hip Hop.” She made it onto the spot, and officially recorded her name using my last name, though we were already officially not married. She opened with an excerpt from Black on Both Sides, “all over the world hearts pound with the rhythm…” and wrote 55 about the “struggle” she felt as a factory worker and wife of a severely bipolar man, but neglected to mention how she had already divorced me, that I was destroyed by it, that I had introduced her to everything that she knew about hip-hop, and about how she initially asked me to sell off my entire hip-hop collection in order to be with her. It was unbearably humiliating to hear her on National Public Radio misrepresenting the fact that she had left me, and her self-declared struggle with me. It took everything I could do to stay alive after that. I was fortunate enough to have some great friends who fully supported me, some who chose me over her after the divorce. I went into music and film production, jamming and collaborating with many local musicians and working on multiple local features in sound and as a producer for a feature out in Massachusetts, and later made a short with a mutual Norwegian friend of my ex-wife named Magnus. He had sent me a script called GUTSY(embarrassingly, it’s on Youtube) and needed help to make it in Utah. I was his guy, he said. He flew out and stayed with me and my grandparents as they put five hundred dollars into the project. We poured our blood sweat and tears into that thing as producer and lead actor for his long awaited short. We produced the short for a month and a half because it was so elaborate with props, locations, extras, auditioning talent, and finally he asked me to be the lead 56 actor because we couldn’t find anyone else. I had produced that thing with all my heart and soul, so I felt reluctantly obligated to take the role. I then arranged a council meeting in a small mining town called Eureka to ask them for their permission in shooting the film all around the small town. They gave it to us, and said they would facilitate it in any way they could. We got the whole community involved, especially the kids. It was hard work, but a blast. We shot it over the course of three days, though I couldn’t turn out the performance he wanted. After a grueling production schedule we finished the shoot. He was unpleased. Unfortunately, I was too depressed over my divorce to play it the way he wanted, like a Napoleon Dynamite or something like that, he said, and was virtually just being myself on camera according to script, but he felt I was trying to be “James Dean.” I felt hurt and then he started feeling the old guilt. He then confessed to me that he knew immediately why I had tried to kill myself, because he and my wife had been seeing each other behind my back for those two weeks when I was always at work. I had absolutely no idea that had gone on, and just broke down crying to him saying, “I just want her to be happy.” I really do. I don’t think I ever really got over her, somehow, even though it wasn’t right for us to be together. There’s a lot I can’t remember about us together because I think I lost it from all the trauma. 57 14. “Rising Down” Months after the divorce, I first learned how to binge drink, and was smoking lots of weed on the daily. There were a lot of those nights. Rising Down was the soundtrack to my d-day situational despair. Randomly, I met a guy who was actually hitting on a girl I was casually seeing when we began laughing about it, and consequently got into a hiphop discussion together. He could freestyle like a mad-man, in that west coast way. We became fast friends. He was from the Compton/Watts area. He told me some things that are not repeatable here because it involved his lifelong tragedy of the killing of his brothers, the retaliatory killings he would commit, and the untimely death from cancer of his mother. He really confided in me. I cared deeply for him. I lost touch with him after he moved to Texas and lost his cell phone. I hope he’s okay. I still hope he will reach out to me again someday. Around the same time, still reeling from the divorce, I was confronted by a stranger at a party and he wanted to take it outside with me. I was mostly sober, as I had only had one mixed drink, but deflated and indifferent, I obliged him. He proceeded to bring up some gossip he heard about my ex-wife and was berating me about it. It was like 58 being given flashbacks from a total stranger about my life. I couldn’t take it. I pushed him into the air about ten feet back and then walked away down the block, screaming nothings into the sky as a guttural sort of primal release. He followed me, now scared and concerned for me. I tried running away from him as fast as I could. I kept howling at the moon, for some catharsis, and someone called the cops. They screeched up five minutes later, and an officer with his greeny (an officer in training) jumped out and had me on the ground with my face in the asphalt and his knee in my back, cuffs twisted on, and in the back of the car in less than a minute. I asked him on what charges, he was arresting me, and he said public intoxication on meth. I told him I was bipolar, and he said, “yeah I know about that,” and slammed my foot in the door. I knew I wasn’t getting out of it so I decided to play nice. His dry cleaning was hanging in the back of the car so I commented, “they make you do your own dry cleaning?” That doesn't seem right?” The cop said, “Well, I can’t go to work naked can I?” The greeny turned around and winked at me, saying, “you’d like that wouldn’t you?” I responded, “so you’re gonna make gay jabs at me? You’re gonna start with the faggot talk now?” It escalated from there. They took me to booking and started a whole “we are all Republicans here,” haranguing of me, cuffed to the bench, six on one, headed up by the new guy, mocking me for two hours, while they 59 are supposed to be on duty, and spouting off a bunch of shit about Obama and liberals, (it was 2008). I guess it was my longish hair and tight jeans. I finally got wise to the new recruit with little man syndrome, and said, “Oh, I know what this is about. I can fuck your wife better with my eight inch cock than you can with your four.” Guy went even more pale faced than he already was, totally speechless. The other deputies grabbed me, furiously, for a takedown. I didn’t resist, whatsoever. My body was limp and I moved in compliance. They took me down violently in solitary, smashing my face into the ground, twisting my appendages and wrists, digging their knees into my back, choking me with my hoodie, the three to four hundred pound cop grinding his knee into my temple, into the cold, concrete ground. I could feel my skull flexing, and I still have migraines to this day from the aftermath. They stripped me to my underwear in the cold, and left me there for twelve hours, no Miranda rights, no evidence, no piss, no blood, no field sobriety. I paced in that cell all night, talking to myself, trying to walk off my headache. The next morning, the head deputy came to my cell, and apologized to me, choking up and telling me, “I have a bipolar son, this is not how I run my precinct. We are gonna get you out of here.” They took me to the hospital and dropped all charges. I have so many stories of police assaults, none for probable cause, just the bullying of a skinny guy in general, the 60 charges always being dropped for lack of evidence. In my experience, cops are out there to profile and harass, which we know to be true. I also am sure that with all the abuse and trouble I’ve seen from such random abuses of power, that if I had been a Black-bodied human for those events, I probably wouldn’t be here right now. “That’s the truth, Ruth.” 15. “Tunnel Vision” As I got used to being alone again I continued trying to collaborate with other musicians and film makers and eventually met someone new. Pamela and I had a good run for a few years, but she had a hard time staying committed. There was so much lying for years, and she so liked the attention of other men. I often wonder if it was because she had been grotesquely sexually molested by the uncle who baby-sat her for five years of her young life. Still, I had the The Ecstatic to memorize and I had everything from my Soulquarian history to draw back on. She wasn’t a fan of hip-hop, except for Jay-Z and the last OutKast album, which slightly pleased me. She simply tolerated my interest, and facilitated my songwriting. After a little breaking in, she started liking when I would play hip-hop to clean the house, or whatever. She started paying attention to the lyrics. It never 61 fully clicked, but I breached her indie, hipster barrier, and she gained a taste for the underground. I was put on federal disability in 2011, so I could then focus all my attention on my music and reading while housekeeping. Both of us put her through hair school as she worked there, part-time. When I felt alone or we were fighting, so many times I could find the right songs from my catalogue for the right moment to get me through. She tried to stay with me, and I wanted to be with her, so I did some research and decidedly went through 17 rounds of duel hemisphere ECT to try to fix it, to no avail. There was some alleviation, but afterwards I found I couldn’t focus like I used to. I had developed severe deficits in short term memory and focus. The ECT doctor told me there would be no lasting side effects, except for temporary memory impairment. They were dead wrong. I was naive. I went to see a neurologist after the effects stayed present. I couldn’t focus anymore and reading had become a struggle, which it had never been. My new neurologist was very concerned and underwent extensive testing. Though I was rating in the top ninety-fifth percentile in terms of intelligence my attention and focus scores were in the bottom tenth and fifteenth, or the geriatric range. The neuro-rehab specialists says it may be permanent. I hope it’s not. 62 The first break-up with her resulted in me determined to try to overdose again, she caught me with my satchel full of pills and wrestled it away from me to flush them down the toilet, kind she was, and I finally let her do it, both of us crying and wailing, becoming so desperate and despairing that I flung my favorite guitar against the wall in our music room/study. I was arrested for that one for domestic violence, spending a week in jail on the floor in a polyester velcro strapped dress within the suicide prevention “turtletank” (I assume you’ve heard of such things). She felt bad and tried to stay around a little longer. Regardless, things with me and my new tentative-fiancé were not going to last. Her parents were also conservative Mormons, would blame all her problems on me for our lifestyle of “living together in sin,” and strongly encouraged her to leave me because my bi-polar was “dangerous.” Her mother and grandfather even sent her an email about how dangerous I was and compared me to some guy in Oregon who killed himself by blowing up his house with his kids in it. She felt traumatized by it all and the lack of support and stories from her family sunk into her psyche. There was nothing I could do to keep her there with me. Gratefully, I survived an ill planned overdose and botched hanging attempt after the breakup, to emerge once again into hope. I did some of my most in- 63 tensive reading, most cleansing crying, and wrote some of my best writing and most cherished songs out of that relationship. 16. “Rising Up” After Pam left, I went through the grief cycle again, and found a ketamine study to help with the depression. It was the most beneficial treatment I’ve ever had in my life, but the problem is the relief is only temporary, as your system builds a tolerance to the drug, so it would not be a permanent solution. Through all my reading and obsession with geo-politics, I became very concerned about climate change messaging and went back to school again. This time, to live with my parents to attend the aforementioned Snow College University. It was a perfect fit for my contemporary mind-state. I started as a natural resources major with an emphasis in hydrology, switched and took some classes from the music school(I didn’t get the theory) for one semester, and switched back. I excelled and enrolled in the honors program, taking all the courses I needed to expand my comprehension of the world. It was there that I encountered the brilliant scholar and well travelled, Professor Rachel Keller. In her Intellectual Traditions of the West course, we last read Things Fall Apart by Achebe as a class. I realized that was where you got the title of your 64 fourth album from. It was emotionally devastating as a work, and that the subtext went way over the heads of many of my classmates, who felt, “those poor Africans, living in sin, what a terrible loss for them.” How discouraging to ache for the realities of the story, and find so many of my classmates not getting it. Okonkwo and Ikemefuna will always be some of the most bittersweet and cherished characters, for me, from any novel, ever. 17. “Act Too (The Love of My Life)” While going to school full-time and getting those grades, I continued with a friendship with a female acquaintance from a relationship before. I was twenty nine at the time and Emily was seven years my junior, and very interested in me. I needed a friend, especially a female friend. I was still really hurting from the last breakup. She thought I was brilliant and hung on my every word about the state of the world and my past, my interests. She was starved for intelligent conversation and information. We fell in love to Nina and Billie, Amel Larriuex “Don’t Let Me Down,” and Erykah, especially, “Green Eyes.” That song is a masterwork. Oh this ladies eyes were so green, as I once described them, pale green nebulas. I slept in her bed for two months before we first made love, even walked away from a shower invitation once because I wasn’t sure it was the right 65 thing for me to do, her being so young, me “still be missing my ex,” (Common). The whole friendship was very innocent and pure, which is why I think we both fell so hard, and this is where things became the worst part of my entire life. I could write an entire book about this one relationship. This young woman, who would become the deepest love of my life and my greatest source of trauma, would change me irrevocably in ways that I almost wish I could take back more than anything because the scars are so visual and irreversible, except for the fact that I learned so much more about the dark side of life from a woman’s perspective, what parts of it I have, anyway. I showed her Slam for the first time to try and impart a modicum of my understanding of what Black America faces and to indulge in my love for Saul and she got it immediately, though she had never thought about it like that before. I mean, how can you not be impacted by Slam. We saw 12 Years a Slave together in the theater in Provo on a Sunday night with a singular group of five or six older folks, and she clenched my hand as I bit my lip through the tears provoked by the sickening whipping scene featuring Lupita Nyongo. Ironically, I asked her to watch the film, Irreversible with me in the nascent parts of our relationship, to learn from the fictional travesty together. She closed 66 her eyes and just listened through the rape scene. I cried tears of empathetic misery in witness, once more. Don’t think I’ll ever watch that spectacle again. I digress... She was slow to her personal confessions. All she had known was trauma. She was raised in poverty, in chaos, moving from place to place, mother’s guy to mother’s guy. Her father was such an extreme abuser that he fled the state to avoid felony prosecution to prison the third time he beat her mother into a coma. She was the only one there that night to witness the fight, and says she watched her mother, unconscious, being kicked in the head by her father, praying that angels would save her from his wrath. Her memory recalls green wisps of light that came and calmed him. This is the legend of their lineage, that her mother reminds her of and of which she now rejects. On top of it all, she was anally raped by her “returned missionary” baby sitter when she was only four, and at the time she thought she actually liked it because she thought he was her friend. There is so much to that story. It is done now. She took a liking to me and pursued me, and careful as I tried to be, she came to eclipse everyone else for me. She was so smart, so eager, so relatable, quite innately sexy. I would share with her the classes I was taking, that she had no funding to take herself, and she was very interesting in all of it. She made me feel like a man in a way no woman 67 ever had. It took a year of friendship to form a tenuously (on her end) committed romantic partnership. And from there, it was utter chaos and madness. Her family was living in Oklahoma, on a very tight budget. She had no insurance for mental health care, no support structure, and she had her own demons, the depths of which I will never know. But we were connected, and I am loyal to my committed loves. She was wild like a force of nature, the scattering gales of a hurricane. I was enrolled an hour and a half away from her trying to get those grades and she was waitressing trying to maintain her little life and her own sanity. We had that long distance relationship thing and whenever she was here at my parents house we were never allowed to sleep together, so we would have to find other ways around being intimate. It was kinda fun. We had some great times. But often, when we were not together on the weekends, there would come another of her crisis, and I would rush to her aid to try and save her. Too many details to elaborate on her philandering, arrests, mental hospitalizations, and suicide attempts. She was clinging to whatever semblance of stability I, myself, had, holding on for her own dear life, and she had no one but me and her equally desperate little brother who also lived in Provo near her, growing up in his own way. What followed would be the harbinger of catastrophe and the most traumatic thing to ever touch my world. I knew, I just knew, that I couldn’t really 68 trust her to take those little colorful pills she could barely afford. What I didn’t know is that she had already had one miscarriage she hadn’t told me about and something even more heavy to tell me. She got pregnant. 18. “The Seed (2.0)” After we found out, we went through all the motions. We talked about our options, and had very few. My mother was livid with me and said she would not allow us to live there and raise the baby. There was no way I could handle my full-time semester and the full-time job required to support us without the help of my parents. She hated herself for being so mentally unstable and becoming what she thought was a fuckup of a young woman, that her family would be ashamed of her and reject her, and told me she wanted to kill herself to escape it. Adoption would drive her mad, she thought, always knowing for the rest of her life that her child was out there somewhere. She felt abortion was the only option. I agreed, and offered to spend all of what little I had in my account to pay for it even though privately it didn’t feel right to me. I wrestled with it for two months. I took a night to myself and decided to take a bag of mushrooms I had tucked into my sock drawer that my friend had given to me the year previous. I took that trip alone in my 69 room that night and saw a lot of things I found inspirational and grounding. I did my own form of talking to the universe or a cognizant creator or whatever reality is and meditated deep into the most inner parts of myself. And then I knew I could do it—I knew I could be a father. The next day, I called her and asked her if she would be willing to have the baby and let me raise it, even if I had to do it alone. I told her she wouldn’t have to stay with me if she didn’t want to, that she could come and go as she pleased, but that I really, truly wanted her and the baby and I had no doubt in myself that I could do it. She slept on it, and declined. She was at the end of the first trimester; we were running out of time. We drove to the only appointment she could schedule at the last minute. It was two days before Christmas at 6:30 in the morning at a clinic in Salt Lake, and we took that early morning drive in the worst blizzard in recorded Utah history. There were more than 100 accidents before noon that morning. Utahans don’t fucking know how to drive! We went to the appointment and waited for what seemed like forever. She was summoned to have her litigiously mandatory sonogram taken of the fetus and forced to wait two hours before the procedure to think about what she was going to do. We drove to a local diner, ordered a meager breakfast, and sat in the booth looking at the black and white image of the little peanut as the heavy snow poured from darkened, charcoal skies outside 70 the window next to our booth. We held hands and she asked me to tell her what to do. I told her I had told her that I wanted the baby, but that the decision had to, ultimately be her own, and I would support her, regardless. She took some time to herself in the bathroom and decided she had to go through with it. We arrived back to the clinic on time and waited for the inevitable. The nurse came to fetch her, and she asked if I would like to accompany her. I did not hesitate to join her. We went into this poorly nineties decorated room to a gruffly tempered, hunched over doctor with the most terrible bedside manner I had ever seen, and I have seen a lot of doctors. It was his last appointment of 2013, and he was anxious to have it over with. There was no being delicate. No patience. They had not prepared us at all for what was going to happen. Blood splattered onto her thighs as she writhed next to me, clenching her jaw, tears streaming down her face. I watched her in horror. He was so swift with his movements I was wondering if everything was okay. It was later found by an OBGYN that he clipped her uterus during the procedure. I cannot begin to explain the feeling I felt there, witnessing her and all of it, eyes wide. The doctor quickly finished suctioning her uterus, and left the room. Ugh, that sound. The nurse, who was standing there, wiped her off, gave me a pained smile, and left us. She laid there, clutching the bedside. She became nauseous and started dry heaving, so I reached 71 for the trash receptacle and pushed aside the stopper. What I saw inside was a bloody, chopped-up mess of I don’t know what but I knew it was the remnants of what would never be. I helped her dress, and then waited for her in the recovery room. We left onto the freeway, and drove two hours in the slush to the pharmacy for her pain meds, and then another two to my parents house for the Christmas holiday. She asked me not to tell them what she had decided, so we kept it to ourselves. The next day, on Christmas eve, my younger brother handed my mother her Christmas present. It was a small rectangular box. She flipped it over and saw a photo attached. There, taped to the wrapping paper was the sonogram of my brothers firstborn daughter. My father bit his lip in tears and left the room. My love and I gripped hands and fought back our tears to try and smile for them. There was so much joy throughout the family as we suffered internally. When the jubilation and hugs subsided, my mother opened the gift. It was a hand vacuum. A sucking hand vacuum. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The first thing that came to my mind was, my brother and I would’ve had our first kids within a month of each-other. I never uttered that to her. We spent the holiday week there with my family, stealing away to watch Netflix, hold each other, and cry through it. We could hardly speak. I don’t know if Christmas will ever mean anything to me again but what 72 that was. Ruination. For the record, though it hurts everyday, I remain pro-choice, and always will. 19. “The Unravelling” She got a part time job as a dish washer near her apartment that spring, and I half moved in, going back to school, full-time. We maintained our relationship, I hit those books hard. We supported each other. I left her for two weeks to go on an academic agricultural tour of Guatemala that semester, which would open my mind even further to reality and of which I could write another book, but I worried so much about her while I was gone. Her depression worsened, and she tried to overdose while laying in bed with me one weekend. I rushed her to the ER that morning and while she turned purple. She made it, but spent three days in the ICU as her kidneys rebounded. I attended my classes in the day and held her hand by her bedside at night. Now I was on the other side of this vicious animal called suicidal depression, learning so much about myself and of unconditional love. School wrapped up, and I got one extension for a final paper from gender studies. I had my own raping to work out in that research paper, and it took three months of research and three days of writing. My very difficult to please for essay grading instructor 73 gave me a hundred points for it. I stayed there with Emily then, always, in her apartment, even when she worked. I would walk to her work to see her for lunch, and meet her for her walk home. I was so in love, more than ever before. She was heart broken over the abortion. We both were, and her hormones were going crazy post-pregnancy. We read old books together to sooth her, she did stretches in the evenings, we cuddled and cried and loved and avoided her roommates as much as we could. But something inside her had shifted, away from me. Over those few months she came to realize that she surely never wanted to be a mother, and that I needed a different kind of woman, so she broke up with me. We stayed lovers for a month, and stayed living together, but she wouldn’t change her mind. I went back to my parents home for the summer, destitute, and she went out drinking and fucking almost every night with more than twelve people over the course of two months, all the while holding me on the line as her “still best friend.” I was always worried about her, but she barely gave me the time of day, unless she needed to talk. I was hoping it would work its way out of her system, but it just got worse and worse. I got her a copy of Beasts of the Southern Wild, to try and inspire her. By the end of the summer she had quite a reputation going for herself, and I went back to school, all the while 74 fighting back my personal demons. I listened to a lot of Bowie then. The Next Day somehow fit my mood, before that great one passed on. I enrolled in another semester, and she kept doing her thing, getting a job serving at a bar, to make matters worse. One night, as I was hanging out with one of her new male room mates, she was brought, rather lifted, into the shared house in shaky tearful stitches by her female roommates, and one of them, Sadie, someone who I had introduced her to, came to me with a very serious concern. She asked me, “Does Emily lie?” Don’t I know it. “What do you mean, Sadie?” I said. She pleaded in a hushed tone, “Does she lie?” Later in the morning Emily came rushing downstairs. She fell into my arms and started crying, rambling unintelligibly. She walked me to a park, and we watched children play as she sketched scrawling in her book. I laid on her lap thinking maybe she had come out of it. We started walking back to her house and I asked her what was going on with her. She shouted at me, “How am I supposed to explain to you that the baby we aborted wasn’t even yours!” My heart almost stopped. She ran back to the house and I chased after her. When I caught her in her room I was in for it. She sat me down and told me that the man who raped her when she was a child had been living in Vernal, and that she had been having an off and on affair with him since he tracked her down when she 75 was seventeen and her family was living in Alaska. She said, “Every six months, he comes around and I am powerless from him. He has three kids and a wife at home, but he always comes for me and I can’t say no to him. The reason I had to have the abortion was because she wasn’t sure the child was mine or his.” I was dumbstruck. Then she continued, “one of the brothers of another girl who was molested from her neighborhood had made a pact with her to end this sicko, so they coaxed him out into the woods for a camping trip near his hometown and ended him.” She looked me dead in the eyes and said, “I saw the body. It’s done.” She told me that Sadie and Myself were the only ones who knew. I almost started vomiting. How could this be real? It couldn’t be. She was being believably sincere! I didn’t know what to think so I resorted to a panic attack while weeping and she held my head and then started making love to me again for the first time in months. I left there in solemnity, and she swore me to secrecy. I was shocked. I asked her room mate, Sadie, if it was true, and she confirmed it. The following fall semester was the semester from beyond my worst nightmares. I could barely function at all. I would go to class, work on my homework, and in my downtime, lay still in my bedroom since I had covered the window with a thick blanket, to keep out the light as much as possible. My mind and senses were overloaded. There was 76 only silence in darkness in my solitary hours. My psychologist was with me every step of the way, and even he didn’t know what to think. I could talk to hardly anyone about it. I had a lawyer friend of mine look up the guy by name and city, and he actually existed, in the appropriate age range. It was him, her childhood sex abuser. Chuck Rasmussen. I had to tell two of my closer professors who I considered friends as to why I was seeming so disturbed and dysfunctional, and they didn’t know what to think of it all either, but they were understanding. They cautioned me to cut her out of my life, one professor told me to listen to the song “Let Her Go Into the Darkness,” but he knew I couldn’t do it. I still truly loved her. She didn’t have anyone else who knew her like I did. For two months that went on, me thinking of a premeditated murder and that the baby I had been mourning being was actually her childhood rapist’s seed. If I thought I had wanted death before, I never knew what was in store. One weekend, she called and asked me to drive to Salt Lake to pick her up with a mutually stranded friend, so I did it. I needed to talk to her about this evil, what she was going to do with it, what I was going to do with it. It was eating me alive! When I arrived at her locations, she told me about how she was to be starring in a short film written by her co-worker’s wife about a nymphomaniac prostitute who could see into the spirit 77 world. Her friend got in the car and the conversation ceased. We drove back to Provo, and my car broke down on the way, so another friend had to come and pick us all up. We went back to her place, and I still needed to talk, but a group of her friends came by to get stoned. I just laid on the bed in the bedroom and stared at the ceiling. When the group left I went to find her but she was gone. I needed to take a leak but some guy was in the bathroom. I laid on the floor waiting around, and out she walks with that guy, sporting fullblown sex hair. I stood up and looked her in the eye and said, “How dare you do that to me!” His eyes went darting and he scuttled away down the stairs as she confronted me: “Don’t make so many assumptions. You wanna know the real truth? The reason I wanted to name the baby Whitaker if we would have had it was because I already have a son with him, and he took him away from me!” Wait… I know every inch of her body. She doesn’t have stretch marks. I know some women don’t get them as badly, but she had “the body of a dancer” (Common) and oh, how she was one. That was where the doubt scales tilted over. I could no longer believe her, but I still wasn’t sure whether it was true or not. I spent the next few days pacing and thinking about what to do with this. I ended up praying on my hands and knees one night, and then told my parents everything. I told them I was going to call the police and report it, whether or not it was true. My father was 78 so done with the whole thing that he started yelling at me, shouting, “Either you do it, or I will.” I called her one last time to tell her the jig was up. She started in about the drunken crazy weekend she had, how she got in a fistfight with one of her lovers when a few of them found out she had been sleeping with all of them behind their backs, and how she was so over the “bro-code,” and laughed at how she got onto a roof and fell off of it, not hurting herself, somehow. Then she started saying to me, “You know, I don’t care anymore. I hated Chuck for so long but maybe now I’ve become just like him.” I stopped her there and said, “You know, that thing about you having a kid? You don’t have any stretch marks. Now I don’t know if your story is true anymore, or if it isn’t, but I’m not going to be complicit in a premeditated homicide, even of a child rapist. You have ruined my life! I have been in hell for months! And all I do know is this is the definition of evil, so if you did do it, they’ll go easy on you because of the prevalence of insanity in your mental health history. But if you made it all up? I hope you get everything that’s coming to you cause it’s all coming out.” Surprised and caught off gaurd, she responded, “How could you do this to me? I loved you!” I said, 79 “This isn’t what I call love,” I told her. She screamed, “I’ll go to prison!” but I told her, “That’s not up to me.” She screamed, “YOU’LL NEVER HEAR FROM ME AGAIN YOU SELF RIGHTEOUS SON-OF-A-BITCH!” Click… I called the police in Vernal right away and asked to talk to a detective. I told him the whole story as it had been told to me. I gave him names and approximate dates. He said he would look into it and get back to me. Sadie texted me and asked me what happened, because Emily had left in her car saying she was disappearing cause I was calling the police. I told her I did, and that it felt horrible, but I had to do the right thing. She disagreed with me, but respected my position. Emily came back later that night, and confessed that she had made it all up. The Vernal police never got back to me. 20. “Doin’ it Again” I was finishing my semester, and Emily got kicked out of her place. One night I got a phone call from jail, and it was her weepy, hysterical voice. I hadn’t spoken to her in a month, but I took the call. She had been arrested with a drunk driving friend. She had a warrant for unpaid speeding tickets, and would be spending over thirty days in jail. My lawyer friend decided to help her case, pro-bono. She was a mess. I still loved her, and 80 felt bad for her, so I paid for us to talk every other day for ten to fifteen minutes at a time. I spent over two hundred dollars over the month on those racketeering inmate phone calls. I was kind to her and she seemed humbled. She told me some of the inmates were going to try and get her a job at a strip club in Salt Lake. That seemed to me like the worst possible thing for her. My lawyer friend picked her up from jail, and she was allowed a week to pack her things and move out. She asked me for help with fixing her cell-phone, and I did. She really seemed like she had been humbled and changed for the better, and she got back under my skin, like she intended to. We got a hotel room for one night at the Marriot, and she asked me to call her “Mrs." with my last name. She was giving me everything I always wanted, saying sorry for what she had done to me. She got hotel vouchers and we lived together in hotels for drug addicts for weeks. We squatted at my grandparents cabin for a few days in the dead of winter and it was magical again. The sex was better than ever. I informed my therapist about what was going on with her and he thought that if we worked together with him, she could get the mental help she needed. It started to feel right again. We got back together. We stayed with my gay uncles over Christmas at my grandparents old house. She found a job working at a care center for mentally disabled children and adults, and she loved it. She worked her ass off. My car 81 broke down during a deep freeze, my family helped me fix it. We stayed with the uncles until I was sexually assaulted one night by my uncle’s black-out-drunk partner. We had to get out of there, so I asked her if she would take the leap, try couples therapy with me, and move in. She said yes. We found a really old, charming but crumbling home wrapped in ivy on the poor side of Provo. When we went to look at it a couple days before Christmas, a Family with three kids from Uganda had been living there, and said they needed out, very badly. With my credit score, I could barely get enough before maxing myself out for the first and last months rent. We moved in with no furniture and boxes full of food from the food bank. We lived on the floor, danced in the front room, watched Netflix on my computer, made love like we were new. We scraped up enough money to see Selma in the theater, and we were both glued. I already knew much of the history presented, and she asked me many insightful questions. It seemed like she was getting educated through exposure and was liking my tastes in hip-hop more and more. A month and a half into it she asked me if I would marry her. I told her I would think about it. My parents helped me move all my stuff into our house again, those darlings. We bonded and healed and everything seemed like it would turn out. We went on walks and talked about everything. We were so happy. 82 We went walking and ring shopping at antique stores, and found the perfect victorian engagement rings with her birth stone. We found a pearl wedding ring at a shop next door. They were unique pieces, but so were we. I figured, twenty-two hundred for the engagement and wedding rings isn’t too much or too little. I determined that bipolar and alcohol don’t mix so well, and I started pursuing an intensive, bi-weekly outpatient sobriety program with her as my partner. We met some great people. It seemed like everything would change. Maybe they could. Things were tense, and I was jobless, with only my disability and her small income, so I still wasn't sure if it was the right time to fully take the leap. We kept up with couples counseling and went shopping for her wedding dress, one afternoon. That night, we went out for one last drink before fully committing to sobriety together, and we ran into one of her old pals. An hour later, she tried to get with him, walked out in a hurry when he declined and when I tried to stop her to ask what was wrong she punched me in the face and jumped into a car full of Saudi men, leaving me there, rattled. I stood there for a time, stunned into inaction. I went home alone, pacing around for hours while the world and my whole history came down on my head again, so I swallowed all my pills, once more. Later that night, she and some of our friends came in and found me incoher- 83 ent on the floor. She spent the next two days with me in the hospital. They called it a codependent and toxic relationship. I didn’t know the half of it. All I knew was I was in it, while she was in it, off and on, and I loved her more than anything I ever had. One sunny day, while she was at work, I went out and bought the rings we had looked at. I researched the historical meaning of the birthstones and the pearl from Steinbeck's novel. I bought them and told her I had, and told her we would wait until we finished our sobriety course together. That seemed like the right idea. Then one night, I went to see my brother and his new baby, and then I had to go to group. She didn’t meet me there and wouldn’t answer her phone, so I knew something was afoot. I went to the bar, and there she was talking to two strange men, wearing my hat and my satchel. I walked over and said, “hey, what’s going on?” She went into this sobriety is bullshit diatribe, and how marriage is bullshit, and how we were through. I asked her if she needed a ride home. She said no. I left and drove down the block and called my mother for support and advice on how to handle it. She came drunkenly down the street and dropped all of her stuff right in front of where I was parked, sitting there on the phone. I ended the call and went over to pick up her things and she said, “I was gonna call for a ride but now I don’t want one cause you're such a little bitch!” She walked over to my car and kicked the dri- 84 ver door panel in, and kept walking away. I drove down a few more blocks and parked. It had started sprinkling and I lit a cigarette to take the edge off. She came down the block five minutes later and as soon as she saw me, went into demolition mode. She kicked in my bumper, then went around and kicked in the front panel and passenger door; stomped like wreckage. Then she started kicking the window and I went to stop her by touching her shoulder. She punched me in the mouth and screamed, “Don’t ever touch me again!” Some people outside of a house came outside and yelled, “Get out of here or we’re calling the police!” She started crying and they backed off and let me escort her back to the car. I drove home and she started screaming at me that I had raped her. I had no idea what she was talking about. She was screaming so loudly that my ears were ringing. I told her I was fucking done with it, and she could either go inside the house, or I was calling the cops. I got out of the car as she did and she walked up and punched me again. I followed her out to the corner and she head-butted me, splitting my lip, and then head-butted me again and spit in my face. I stumbled back, dazed and holding my mouth. I let her walk. I was going to call the cops but I couldn’t find my phone. I went back to the bar to look for it and, and sure enough, it was there. I sat down to order a drink, and as soon as I did she walked in, and sat down the way from me to order a herself another drink. She 85 talked and flirted with some guy next to her and I just sat there, nursing my beer. I texted Sadie to try to get her down here for help, but she wouldn’t respond. She didn’t need any more of that. When Emily had her fill, she asked me to drive her home. We drove there in silence. She went upstairs to fall asleep on the floor. I finally snapped out of the shock and realized what had just happened and started throwing her books off of my shelves yelling “Get out, get out!” I collapsed and cried myself to sleep on the bed. She came down in an hour or so, and snuggled up to me. The next morning, I called her mother for support, but there was really nothing I could do. My mother came to check on us and opened the door and saw after seeing what Em had done to the car she just said, “You guys are retarded,” shaking her head, and walked away without another word. We hung on for another week or so, but once we went to couples therapy and I told my therapist what had happened the therapist said, “I can’t condone this relationship anymore. Emily, you need help. This needs to end.” After our session we walked out of the office and she stared out the windows near the elevator, into the rain. I told her I hadn’t given up on her, but she had already given up on herself, and me. Soon, one tense morning, I caught her messaging an old guy friend, and gave her my final ultimatum that I had had it with her saying she was committed and 86 doing the opposite. She became angry and said she needed her space. I gave it to her and left to rotate our tires. While I was gone, she called me to tell me that we were through and she was moving home to Oklahoma. It would take her family weeks for a plane ticket but I knew what weeks would mean for us living together in her state of mind, so I begged my mother for the money for her plane ticket home. We found a flight the next day, and my dear mother drove us to the airport, stopping for Thai as a parting meal. We didn’t say much. As she was about to walk into security, I hugged her and slipped one of the engagement rings on her finger saying, “Think about all this, and what you really want. If you decide you truly don’t want me, send the ring back in the mail.” We teared up, and she kissed me. I waited and watched her through security, she looked back at me as the elevator to the terminal lifted her out of sight. 21. “Return to Innocence Lost” I was left alone with all the rent and all the suffering and trauma of the last few years. If I could find a dollar, I would drink it. I could barely eat daily meals. I made great friends with one of her friends, Micheal, and we bonded like I’ve never done before, with a male. He taught me how to karaoke, which I had always thought was appalling, but he 87 would come drag me out of the house to have a couple drinks and sing a couple songs. I finally got up the gumption and it felt kinda nice. He was from South Carolina, and also loved hip-hop, and had met Big Boi, once, on a shoot. He memorized the Big Boi parts for “Ms. Jackson” and I already knew the Andre 3000 parts, so we could sing it on stage. It’s one of our party tricks, cause he’s short and southern and I’m taller and lanky with a semi-flamboyant manner and longer hair. We kill it every time. I even learned to mimic Erykah on “Didn’t Cha Know,” which creeps people out cause I can actually do it some justice. I always get compliments on that one. I do “Superstitious” by Stevie Wonder, and “Heroes” by Bowie. Sometimes “Lotus Flower,” but seriously, who wants to hear a karaoke version of that? He and I went camping as often as his schedule would allow. We witnessed so much majesty wading in rivers and watching the sunset. Went to see Ben Howard at Red Rocks with his Kuwaiti pen pal, Lujein. What a trip that was. So blessed. She was an exceptionally kind and bright individual. I will never forget her. He and I shared everything we had ever been through that seemed pertinent. I showed him all the Soulquarian stuff cause he was more into southern rap and Tech-9, who is alright, in his own way, But not of the same quality as y’all, so I played more of the good Okayplayer 88 and Rawkus stuff, and he slowly took to it. We fully got to know one another. He was going through a breakup too. That bond will never be broken. I tried to fix Emily’s car all summer for her but I am useless as a mechanic so I got one of my friends from sobriety group to help me figure it out. It took a lot of work, but we got it going for her. I drank too much to self-medicate, and slept with too many people who would fall into my lap while we were out. Emily and I maintained contact over the phone while she took care of her nieces and nephews. She said she was missing me and that she was wrong, that she wasn’t looking to be with anyone else and hadn’t been, that she was wanting me back, which is what I wanted to hear, of course. I would read books to her at night, like we used to. She wanted to hear, All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy and I would read her to sleep. She kept me hanging on. When she was planning on coming back to get her stuff that she had left over the summer, always a painful reminder of her absence, she was looking more beautiful than I had ever seen her look in my life. Then she came to me with another secret. She had got a job at some po-dunk Oklahoma strip club to experiment with her sexual issues with men. Oh, how I wanted to save her. I told her I would support her in any way she chose, but that I knew it would not go well for her to get into that scene. Staunchly, she disregarded 89 me. It was like another nightmare come true, and she still had to come back to get her stuff the following week. I picked her up at the airport, and she was wearing a summer dress, looking more beautiful than ever. We stopped at a bar in SLC for one drink, and then drove back to the home we used to share. She had one week to spend out in Utah, and I invited her to stay with me, to try to pull her out of that salacious mindset. I wanted, so much, to influence her away from her disasters because I knew there was still a really good person in there, somewhere. When we got to the house we fell right back into it. For that week it was probably the most furtive and healing portion of our entire relationship, until, one morning, I saw her phone text bling next to my head in bed one morning, “I miss you baby, I need some more right now,” and I knew she had been lying to me about not seeing other people while she was out there in OK. We talked it out and she apologized. Then she wanted to go out. I had been drinking wine at home, so we went to the old hometown Provo bar. Bad idea. Two of the guys she had been fucking the summer previous were there, and it was really awkward. We stayed for a single drink, and some random woman came up to me and struck up a conversation about how hard it was for her that her cat had died. I listened, and Emily became upset about the awkward vibe, so we went back home. She was angry that I had 90 tried to talk to people and have strange conversations, and I didn’t understand all the nitty-gritty details of all that had happened between her ex fuck-boys. She was mad again, and Full-House style, went upstairs to be alone. I felt like I had done everything I could for her, and tried to understand for her and still couldn’t fully process what was going on with her. I was completely drained by then, barely hanging on myself. I tried to do the dishes to calm down but I shakily dropped a glass and broke it to shards, as it refracted metaphors about my entire life into my brain. I snapped and threw another glass into the sink. I went for some wine we had bought for a dinner party and drank so much that I think I drank a box and a half of box wine, right into the worst black-out-drunk of my life. I only have slivers of memory of what happened after but apparently in the morning I threw her out of the house, in that blackout mode, and when her step-dad called me to ask what was wrong I was like, “Your daughter that is living with you is a stripper, that’s what wrong. I can’t deal with it anymore.” She packed her stuff, as I briskly brought her handfuls of it. We had to have friends come over to jumpstart her car again, but finally, she was off on her way. There’s so much more to it, in those devilish details, but I’ve gone on for far too long already. 91 I held out a faint hope that she would change, that something about the stripper scene she was so interested in would repel her, but it was her perfect little playground. The seedy place was seriously called, “The Playhouse,” or something like that. She started sleeping with many of her strip club “clients,” and I felt tortured by the reality of it all. We maintained a tenuous phone friendship for a while as I pathetically and desperately clung to that hope that the love she had shown me in the past was real and worthwhile. She had little time for it, but kept me on the line. I asked her to listen to “Misunderstood” with Nina Simone, Common, and Bilal, though I don’t know if she ever did. I wanted to die so badly. I have now been diagnosed with severe PTSD to on top of all the other mental maladies. In desperation to escape my fate, I bought two handguns and had them taken away from me when I worried people with my goodbyes. I was hospitalized again. I couldn’t keep the house I was in without some of her income so I had to move all my stuff back into a storage unit and move back in with my parents, again, again, again… 22. “Walk Alone” So, that’s where I’ve been at. Back alone, sometimes at the house my father built, in isolation. My only consolation has been my vinyl collection, and I went deep into Bil- 92 lie and Nina, once again, old Tribe stuff, Common, Kendrick, Bowie too, and so much of Mamma Yancey’s late Dilla releases. It is how I maintain any grip on my sanity. I know that I am a dedicated man, to anything and anyone I commit to, but losing out so much and so often makes me feel more like a princess than a soldier. I am aware that I’m not alone in this but in my loneliness, the election was absolutely maddening and my speculation (wont go into it here) that Trump was going to win was scoffed at by some of my professors and kindly dismissed by others. I did not mean to convey that prediction it in an arrogant way, I just followed the right more closely than most of my left-leaning associates and I knew they were unified and had a voter strategy, among other things, while the identity politics and divisions on the left would undoubtedly ensure low voter turn-out. It wasn’t all that complicated, I just paid attention. Maybe too much. I felt completely unwanted, useless, unheard, abandoned, alienated. When he won I was not dismayed, only extremely depressed, even more than I already had been. I trudged along through school, and was serendipitously invited to become a part of the Ethics Bowl team at Snow College. They said, they couldn’t do it without me, and asked me to add the extra-curricular time to my already full-time schedule, so they could compete. I had nothing much else to do with my lonely free time, so I went with it, and 93 did it with diligence. We flew out to Baltimore to compete at the nationals and we actually won! That night, we went out to eat at this seafood restaurant upstairs, I can’t remember the name but there were a bunch of celebrity photos on the wall downstairs, mostly of rappers I was familiar with, and we were seated upstairs between a group of over a dozen men in one corner and over a dozen Italian looking businessmen and blue collar dudes and young lackey looking in black leather jackets wearing gold necklaces in the other corner. It was like a scene straight out of The Wire, I shit you not, sandwiched between what appeared to be a dinner meeting with Yakuza and organized Italian crime. Our hotel was right across the street from the juvenile detention center and police station in a rough part of town, “Where them outsiders gettin’ popped for they wallet at.” I’m sure I sound positively naive, but it was my first time in that part of the country, and I minded everything I had learned from what little exposure I had to it. I got to see D.C. for the first time then, and the reality of it hits me like a ton of corpses. I wanted to go to the new African American history museum, but we hadn’t prescheduled so we couldn’t get in. Of course, there was some old white guy there in the same predicament, who walked off pissed-off because of his perceived entitlement to get in at his personal convenience while the mostly black procession of ticket holders behind 94 us had planned, in advance, and travelled for the solemn occasion. Instead, our ethics bowl team saw the holocaust museum, as per my request. Surely brings all that knowledge home in a way that cannot be unwitnessed. I felt ambivalent at the national monument, the Lincoln and Viet Nam memorial sites. There are no words I can articulate about it right now. It all came down on me even heavier, the weight of what I already knew. Looking at the Nam memorial was conflicting. Sure, the black, granite wall has sixtythousand plus veteran’s names on it, but what about those countless 3.8 million Vietnamese, two-thirds of them civilians, women and children, killed in that pointless conflict? How fucking tall would that wall be? The Lincoln Memorial was most powerful to me while thinking of the Million Man March, of Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, and John Lewis. That made the effort for the competition all worth the while. And while we rode the train out at dusk, we saw the squalor, the graffiti, the poverty, surrounding the nations capital. How could this be? We know how it can be. The evils of European colonialist white-privilege and the subjugation of all people of color in order to make it possible. We flew out and stopped in Detroit. Like I’ve said many times throughout this writing, I will never be the same. 95 The next semester, the ethics bowl team competed in Dallas and we lost badly. No matter, because we got to travel. I saw downtown Dallas, and stopped for dinner at a gumbo spot. Out back, I ran into a guy who asked me for a cigarette and inquired as to where I was from. I shared my story, and him told what little I knew of Dallas I had heard through Erykah. He informed me I was standing just blocks away from the old neighborhood where she grew up, across from the overpass. It was a reverent kinda feel. Then, later on that night, I had a fortunate encounter with a dreadlocked hotel manger named Mark, downtown, there, at the Hyatt. He was arguing with his new hire about how modern hip-hop was terrible, as the young man talked to me and asked me questions about myself. I was at the bar, grinning at their banter, having a gin and tonic. At first, the manager was leery of me, but I chimed in about what I thought about hip-hop. I started with, “first of all, fuck Eminem. I know he’s a technical genius and everything, but his content is deplorable. As soon as he stuffed Kim into a trunk with his daughter, I was offended. When he slit her throat out in the forest, I was done. It is a shame that he was the bestselling artist between 2000 and 2010. Says a lot about the state of our country.” Now I had his ear. He defended Em a little bit on the grounds of his technicality, which I agreed is undeniable, but still superficial, and then I was like, naw, fuck it. Let’s talk about the 96 greats. KRS, Rakim, he mentioned the Fugees, because he hailed from Jamaica. Then he brought up Eve. I was like, “oh, yeah, Eve. I first remember her from the Roots single from Things Fall apart, “You got me.” I said, I think that was her debut, she killed that verse. He was like, “Oh, really, what song was it?” I was like, “You know, somebody told me that this planet was small…” and proceeded to lay down your first verse and then hers. Now he was impressed. He started buying me drinks, we talked until his shift was over, and then we just hung out, smoking cigarettes, talking about everything in our lives until the sun started coming up. I think I made a lifelong friend, that night. We made plans this summer for he and his whole family to fly out to park city and see Lauryn Hill and Nas at a festival, but work got in the way, so they couldn’t. Instead they managed a family trip out to the Caribbean islands last month. He sent me pictures. He is such a good man, has been working in the hotel hospitality industry since he was 19, and now he’s in his later thirties taking care of his kids and his wife's kids. She seems like a beautiful person too, from what I can tell. We still shoot each other old school Youtube videos of our favorite emcees just to send the love and give the pound. I really hope we keep in touch. 97 I have been working on music projects alone again, while volunteering with an artist collective that hosts events in Provo, called the Boxcar. It’s located in an old warehouse that hosts 6 artist studios and also functions as an event space for music, socially experimental demonstrations, and other events. The proprietor of the Boxcar, Jake Buntjer, is one of my best friends, such a good man and has three kids as a single parent. I love all the artists, there. Micheal works there too, doing the set construction for art productions. We have had touring bands come through, and local bands play. Jake also does art direction and set design for commercials, comedy venues, and film. We have recently made inroads with Sundance and the Redford family, so we want to do all we can to make this production house something exceptional. All we can do is keep working and hope the right people discover us. This summer, I was really financially destitute and finding myself suicidal, with a new, more certain plan to use a helium hood this time, so Jake let me stay there at the Boxcar as a grounds keeper and supporter of the artists. I lost myself in service and stewardship for the vision we have to unite a community of people that are disenfranchised by the Utah status quo. I have listened to mostly nothing but hip-hop all summer, which starts to annoy other people I am around, but “I can’t help it.” I am obsessed with Be be- 98 cause it’s what I need to hear to fight the depression that caused me to lose twenty pounds of muscle mass from sleeplessness, poverty, and lack of appetite. Memorizing “Love Is” brings levity to my weighty depressive episodes, I’m usually depressed in the summer and manic in the winter. New Amerikah pt 1 & 2 seem more timely than ever. More than anything, I really have to learn to find my own How I Got Over to get through all this. 23. “Somebody’s Gotta Do It” Emily’s younger brother shot himself this summer, and it wrecked me. I used to mentor him, we were tight once, but there was nothing I could do to save him once we lost contact. I can’t help but feel some guilt for that. I hope she is okay, as they were very close. I have watched one of my bandmates lose his mind to meth, and another brilliant poet friend of mine, from MIT in Boston, has been given the prognosis that his liver is developing cirrhosis at thirty-four and he will likely be dead within the year. I can’t save any of these people, though I have tried, in futility. All I can do is mourn their loss and own the compounded depression that comes with seeing your loved ones and compatriots fade away. A part of me wishes I had watched who I trusted more, but you love who you love, and I have learned immense things, the hard way, through all of this. 99 Over the summer I started a weekly film night at the Boxcar, and on July the 3rd, we screened Do the Right Thing for the largest audience we had all summer. I did a brief introduction paying homage to those innocent black lives lost in police shootings, and we rolled the intro with Rosie Perez gyrating, gesticulating, undulating and punching at the camera to Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power!” I sat at the back of the room to watch the reactions of the crowd. We provided cheese pizzas and popsicles to accentuate the mood. It was so damn hot in that warehouse, and all we had was a large industrial fan to cool us off. The setting was perfect, and all of these people who hadn’t seen it before were about to get a real treatment. I had in mind that we had lost Radio Raheem this year, and with all the police acquittals and shooting deaths of Rice, Castille, Grey, Martin, excruciatingly too many to name, I cried quietly for the final thirty minutes while I watched those reactions of those who had never seen it before. The film was more poignant than I remember it being the last few times I have seen it. It felt like something relatively small but extremely positive had transpired, and that many of the people there, from all walks, walked away impressed and humbled. The reaction was just what I was hoping for. Last week, I asked my father and sister and her husband who are living with us to have a documentary night together, which they agreed to. I screened Ava DeVurnay’s, 100 The 13th and we all watched silently. My sibling and her husband left three-fourths of the way through, but my father stayed until the end. He said he was glad we watched it, and that he agreed that the justice system is oppressing Black bodies, but then turned his focus to gang-banging being a paramount issue and we got in an argument about it. We have argued often about the topic, and while we agreed to disagree, these conversations are so difficult to have and some people can’t see how connected it all is to white privilege, nationalist hyper-masculinity, and ongoing pervasive systemic oppression of “people of color.” I was glad my father took the time, but disheartened that it didn’t truly sink in. I once read him the lyrics to Kendrick’s “The Blacker the Berry” censoring the fuck words, and he just got mad about it saying, “See, this is part of the problem!” It just went over his head. More disappointment, the name of the game. I got to see Solange a couple weeks ago and talked with my friend Kaneischa, who has some social clout and runs a venue in Provo when I ran into her there about how I wanted to host a TED-talk-like event with a Q&A afterwards, juxtaposing the intentionally provoked shooting of a heroin addict in Draper, UT, by officers who were so kind and gentle with him, who also just happened to be the son of one of my fathers co-workers, with the ghastly treatment Tamir Rice had received in the same month. I knew that if 101 we could give a screening of the two, back to back, no one in the audience could possibly deny the tragic injustice that happened to the innocent boy, and still let slip off of their tongues, that repulsive “all lives matter” fuckery. She wasn’t sure it would make any difference, but told me she would think about it. I understand her reticence and criticism, and it is totally justified, but we cannot give up the fight! I’ll make the event happen, somehow, some way. Jake tries to juggle everything he can to keep the Boxcar afloat, but we just had a severe blowback. Micheal, his GF and I just took a last minute trip to Jackson Hole for the eclipse. It was one of those really frustrating situations that was harder than it had to be. His GF is really into animals, works as a veterinary assistant, and is trying to raise two baby raccoons into maturity so they can be let loose in the wild. The trip was pretty fly by the seat of our pants, and really frustrating for me, but I kept my cool. When we finally found a secluded camping spot in the desert sagebrush of Wyoming, no tree cover, by a reservoir, I pulled out my copy of Between the World and Me and again brought myself to read and finish the last chapter. I wept solemnly as I closed the book. After page 112, it gets really devastating, as I’m sure you know. Reading in the emptiness of the desert almost brought it to bear in a more impactful way, as the wind ushered a calm 102 sense of wonder at how deeply communication can touch our minds in that way you know you’ve been brought into a more complete consciousness. First reading The Beautiful Struggle, I felt like I knew the man, almost as if we were cut from the same cloth, despite our vastly different opportunities and lack thereof, completely different locales and social circumstances, and was further educated by the realities of doom and disparity he faced that I will never understand, while our hearts seemed to yearn, fundamentally, for similar hopes and values. For a truly impactful, effectual change, a salient resolution to oppression, that will only come when majority white America demands and legislates it to be so. I have also been reading a Baldwin collection all summer too, who Coates turned me onto, consuming The Fire Next Time, and other essays, feeling a bit ashamed of his essay about white people who love black culture. Those two have become the most inspiring writers I have ever read, in content and styling, along with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who I consider to be the next, and better, Hemingway, in a sense. My friends went off to play with their animals, while I sat next to my dog and all I could think of was Common’s line, “While white people focus on dogs and yoga…” We made it to Jackson, saw that consciousness-expanding, anciently primordial full eclipse, 103 with the Grand Tetons behind us and the Jackson Hole River in front of us. It was mindalteringly beyond words for those three minutes, to contemplate planetary time and space in relation to geological and human time. We made the long drive home to beat the traffic, and the stress was high, we couldn't really talk to one another. We made it back safe, and the following day, my best friend Micheal’s mother from South Carolina died, without warning, while he was stuck here, working. He flew out, but left the business strained in his absence, so everyone of the Boxcar kids tried to pick up that slack. It has been so unforeseen and painful for him, that he has barely reached out to me, only to tell me it was too much, and I’ve given him his space. “Thought @ Work” I spent the last weekend trying to help at the Boxcar, and to help out with the situation of this woman I’ve been seeing for two years. She has a half black child with an abusive, mentally ill father who recently kidnapped one of his own daughters and keeps threatening to her son away from her. The boy is so precocious and bright, and really craves the attention of a male, though his mother isn’t so sure I am the one. I try to be a positive influence, cause he likes to listen to the new Trap stuff sometimes, and the 104 Weeknd, and pop acts like that. Every time I get the chance, I try to put on some classic hip-hop for him to hear, but he’s into the new stuff. But that doesn’t mean that he and his little sister don't like the dance parties we have when I am the selector. I did turn him onto Black Panther though, as he was asking me about superheroes and who I liked the most. I showed him the new trailer, and a Youtube video by Coates about the graphic novel, and he instantly decided he wanted to be Black Panther for Halloween. So sweet. That little kid tugs my heart strings. Her roommate, another single mother, was having a hard time that night, chain smoking, and openly stating she was feeling like doing some self-destructive things like getting wasted and finding someone to have meaningless sex with, while chain smoking on the porch, so I sat by her side, commandeered her iPhone, and put on Mystic’s “This Life,” Talib’s “Get By,” and “Ghetto Heaven” ft. D’angelo. She calmed right down and said, “Okay, you’re my DJ now.” That’s about the time that I couldn’t contain myself anymore, and felt inspired to reach out to you. I do that music sharing move all the time. Someone has a problem in life, I dig into my mental archive of uplifting and truth baring soul songs, and I make specific offerings of them to whomever will listen. It happens regularly, and it works. People are grateful to me for it, but really I am simply grateful to you. 105 That’s the thing—all of this music, all of which is now a part of me, inspired me to write to you now. On Sunday, I began. Wanted it to be a short letter but as I kept typing I realized there was so much meaning in memory connections to convey, so much catharsis in letting it out, that I couldn't stop myself. I’ve been writing tirelessly between classes and responsibilities to try and get it to you before you come here tomorrow night, because I am ecstatic about the show, and it would be the highest honor to shake your hand again and feel the presence of a shining pillar of this music culture. Meeting you, way back in the day, made an indelible impression on me, and I still kinda brag about it, though no one I know really gets how much it meant to me. It was none other than an indelible impression. I want to be a part of the movement. I am finishing my associates degree with one last stats class, “Cause I did not do [my] math.” The education system, or should I say, the ultimately failing-education system, has been my last ditch effort to try and be someone who van help facilitate a change. I feel like I am fairly aware of how things really are, but I want to be more aware. There’s so much more to learn. I haven’t got around to my copy of The New Jim Crow or read deeply into Dubois, but the books are on the shelf waiting for when I have the extra time. I have changed my major from Hydrology (at the 106 request of my geology professor who knows I am horrible with math and has encouraged me to write) to Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Utah, with an emphasis in Social Justice and a minor in natural resources. In the meantime, while I lurch through the meat grinder of formal education, I have to do more than that. I yearn to do more than only that. This is why I’m reaching out here, to build that bridge, make that connection, for when the time comes that I can be of influence and service in anyway I can for the cause of social liberation and justice reform, at all echelons of society. Like anyone, I don’t know when time will catch up to me, but right now I want to set the world on fire with the love that can heal the divide, even if it costs me my life at the hands of hatred. I know where I stand. It is with you, and with all disenfranchised and voiceless people in this country, on this planet. The world is undergoing the worst refugee crisis and famine in Subsaharan Africa, and no one pays attention because of the bloviating buffoonery coming from the White House, amplified by mainstream news outlets. Something’s gotta give. I am a thing, and that thing can be me. It will only happen, “When We Come To It,” as Maya Angelou so eloquently put it, and we can’t come to it until we put the work into it. 107 If it wasn’t evident, you and your family of musicians who are examples of light in a dark world have saved my life, over and over again. I would not have made it through it all without the support of the healing through my eardrums, hard-wired now, into my memory, “Whether things are good or bad” (Mos Def). I know you are unendingly busy, and I am very happy that you found a lucrative gig holding down the Tonight Show, though we all know it seems a bit beneath your greatness. But I understand, you’ve been touring for decades, and this is an opportunity to be recognized by more people than ever before. It is mission to keep spreading the word, and if there is anything you can teach me, I would graciously hear any of it. The main reason why I wrote to you, specifically, was because you seem to be as the wise and quiet sage, unconcerned with fame and accolades. You seem to be the head of the Soulquarian family, alongside ?uestlove, and I know you all know what’s coming and what needs to be done. You always seem to. If there is anything I can do, anything at all, I want to do it. I don’t really expect you to read this book I have written you, but I had to try to reach out in appreciation. It was all I could do with myself, this week, stuck where I’m at. I want to be a “dedicated soldier.” 108 It is so lonely being me, containing all this inside while everyone around me seems blind to it, and the messages fall on deaf ears. But I haven’t given up. When I wake up wishing I hadn’t, “Im still looking for a great day in the morning.” We need to “Shed some light, into the darkness,” now as much as ever before. And the time is now. I am not perfect, but I am ready, earnest, and willing to do whatever has to be done. I just have to find a platform to lift my voice from, in your example, to spread your message and the messages of your brothers and sisters, and tell everyone I know to listen to you. Even those who are now deaf, and need just that spark to ignite what they already know is true, deep down. It is undeniable that the justice system is broken, the education system is broken, the health and mental health care systems are broken, the financial system is broken, the military industrial complex is a scourge, the body politic has always been a sham, offering only a semblance of equality, and things are falling apart, to leave the most vulnerable, as always, buried in rubble. “It’s scary like hell, but there’s no doubt, we can’t be alive in no time but now.” 25. “The Roots is Coming” 109 I have no relationships with my extended family, and my immediate family is busy living their lives without me. In their stead, you all have become my extended family. I can have that connection every time I put your music on to speak truth through speakers, or recite it to myself off-the-top, to keep my mind in the right direction. Mental illness is a struggle, but that cannot compare with the adversity and struggles others without my privileges face, and I never forget that, allowing me to hearten myself that I can follow those footsteps, and boom baps, into transcendence. You gave me my first real education, opening a window to psychological freedoms that were inaccessible in the morass of the ignorant and homogenized culture I came up with in my youngest woolgathering years. I feel it that way, to the core of who I am, the childhood self that remains constant, and it edifies me everyday that I search it out. I cannot express the immensity of my gratitude for that, because I know, if all this music of love and mindfulness, of the macroscopic and intrinsic human condition, had not been in my life, I would not have survived. I am just one little life, yet your family saved my soul. So, simply, my most humble thank you, to you and all yours. I often wonder what it must be like to watch you all work in the studio, or to watch Dilla in the pocket, in his element when he had it. I have seen you, Talib, Mos, De 110 La, twice, Blackalicious, and Guru, the month before he died from cancer. He played for three hours at Urban Lounge in SLC, all the while with a smile on his face. I danced next to him, right aside the stage, so hard I had blisters, and mouthed the verses I knew under my breath, as he gave us more than we ever gave him. I remember that with a hallowed reverence. To be to someone so talented, before his time, respected, and so close to the other side. I have always missed out on Common and Erykah, but there’s still time. I wonder if I will ever be able to cross paths with any of you, and make a small personal connection that may be furtive to something in the future. Common helped raise me like an older wiser brother, as did you, Black Thought. I am a little in love with Erykah, but who isn’t. Plus, I feel like Kanye and I could have a straight talk about mania, and what not to do with it. “The Roots is Coming!” I am planning, tomorrow, to be on the bar, reciting and jumping up and down with all of you. I can’t wait. Thank you for being willing to come out to such a strange place from your busy schedules to allow us to rock with the best. See you tomorrow night, even if you don’t see me. “Once again,” thank you for saving my life in the darkest and most hopeless, solitary times. Your work was for me always a source of timeless meaning that made it bearable to be a lifelong pariah and outcast. I 111 know I don’t need to explain to you what you already know about its importance. “It’s all in the music.” 112 Name of Candidate: Adam Hall August 2021 Copyright © 2021 All Rights Reserved