The Endless St. John's River & The Death of Pink Floyd

The Endless St. John's River & The Death of Pink Floyd

Just got back from Jacksonville the other day. There is a place on the stretch of road we take to get there where the foliage on the side of the road abruptly opens up and you can see the St. John's River in all its glory. It's just a glimpse, only for a moment, but it lets you know that you are back. I moved to Jacksonville, Florida a couple of years after I graduated from high school in Southern Illinois. We had a river there, too. Even though it flowed through Illinois, it was called the Ohio River. I love creeks and streams, but rivers are something else. Full of mystery and surrounded by folklore and superstition. Once I had heard that there were catfish the size of Volkswagen Beetles near the lock and dam. Nobody swam in the Ohio River, except deer crossing from the Kentucky side to Illinois. Coal barges traversed the river frequently. I once thought about jumping off the bluff into the river after my mother's schizophrenia had taken a particularly bad turn. As it happens, that was very close to my graduation in 1992.

I worked at a McDonald's in Harrisburg, Illinois to help put myself through community college. I had Pell Grants and JTPA assistance, but the job at McDonald's helped cover extraneous expenses. A few of the coal mines had shut down and others were laying off workers at the time, and jobs were hard to come by. I had to have someone put in a good word for me just to get hired as a burger flipper. Southeastern Illinois Community College was a particular mix of freshly graduated high school students and coal miners looking to get retrained for other employment.

I was a young man at the time with ideals and ambitions and so blissfully unaware of how vastly the game was stacked against me. Fast food was beneath me. I was a writer and a musician and an artist and most definitely not a fry guy. I soon grew depressed and bored and was working on the grill one day when one of my co-workers noticed me flip a burger - leaving half the meat stuck to the grill. I’ll never forget this moment as it has informed the way that I approach things even to this day. He told me that he understood that I didn’t want to be there doing what I was doing, but that since I was there doing what I was doing - that I should be the best. He said that the only way to move up from a shit position was to perform like a professional. “If you have to pick up garbage on the side of the road” he said “be the best garbage picker.”

I took his advice to heart. In a short time I was appointed crew member of the month. Not long after that, I got to attend the McDonald’s rally in St. Louis - a much needed distraction from the provincialism of rural Southern Illinois.

More importantly to me, I began to be able to do my job in a way that left my mind free to engage in creative pursuits.

I began to sing.

More specifically, I began to sing Pink Floyd’s “The Final Cut” from beginning to end. Yet another commonality with the fellow (Mike I believe his name was) who had taken an interest in my life’s trajectory.

So when I sang “TELL ME TRUE - TELL ME WHY - WAS JESUS CRUCIFIED…”

The other Mike joined in with “WAS IT FOR THIS THAT DADDY DIED…”

I do not remember how many Big Mac’s I made, or how often I stirred the McRib sauce, or even how many batches of dehydrated onions I brought back to life, but I remember falling head over heels profoundly in love with one of the greatest progressive rock bands ever. How they helped an awkward kid transcend the doldrums and think and dream. Most everyone knows “The Wall” and “The Dark Side of the Moon” but to find someone who knew “The Final Cut” was a revelation to me that I was not alone in searching for cool stuff along the fringes.

Some People say you have to be high to understand “The Wall”. Poppycock, I say. I saw it at around 13 years of age and understood it immediately. I understood it because I lived it.

Let me explain…

Not the existential rock star angst or the descent into drugged out madness, but the building of an emotionless barricade around yourself in order to save what is left of your humanity. My childhood was full of upheavals and traumatic experiences the likes of which would have destroyed most people. My mother’s schizophrenia caused her to flee in the dead of night heading to god-knows-where not once but twice. Both times she ended up in Southern Illinois where my long suffering father would have to come retrieve his son and mentally unstable wife. I don’t remember everything as I was very young, but I do remember some things.

One thing in particular.

My mother had somehow decided to shack up with a monster. My guess is that she ran out of money and had to attach herself to someone out of necessity. She had a habit all her life of attracting the worst kind of men. Any decent person was driven away. I don’t know all the details because my mother became defensive whenever I would try to talk to her about what happened. All I know was that I was sitting between the man’s elderly parents watching my mother being assaulted on the couch. I know that the man had broken his own father’s arm in an argument so the parents were afraid to interfere and tried to restrain me from acting. I believe that the man was trying to sexually assault her. Clothes were being torn off and he had slapped her and punched her and then… I threw a shoe. My shoe. My 5-6 year old shoe which sailed across the room and hit the man in the back of the head. He got off my mother allowing her to escape out a window. The man turned towards me with his fists raised and spittle dripping out of the corners of his mouth and his face as red as a burning log. Would he have killed me? I’ll never know. He was distracted by the commotion of my mother jumping out the window and fled after her into the darkness.

My mother returned after a time and we left in the car. I remember her sobbing all night long as she drove deeper and deeper into what seemed like nowhere until at last the pale glimmer of sunlight began to rise quietly over the horizon.

I remember her singing Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” as I drifted off to sleep.

I had one singular thought then that I have carried with me throughout my life - “I should have done more.”

It didn't go away when I pummeled her abusive husband.

It didn't go away when I saw the squalid conditions in which she died in Atlantic Beach on January 12, 2015.

The day she died I wrote these words: 

1/12/15

Here I sit on the couch. It's 11:48 pm. Gina is asleep in bed, snoring softly. Our cat is sitting under the tv on the one square of carpet left in the house. I am exhausted - yet unable to sleep.

My mother died today.

She was 57 years old.

I am listening to Brian Eno's "An Ending (Ascent)" from the "Apollo" album.

It will henceforth be inextricably linked to this particular moment. This heartbreakingly beautiful - exquisitely terrible moment in my life.

What comes bubbling up out of the dark secret estuaries of my memory?

Moments...

The Man From Snowy River - Eating so much popcorn during Jaws 3-D that I threw up - The snow in northern Arizona - The snow in southern Illinois - The Dark Crystal - My dog Buddy, long gone... - My first bicycle ride without training wheels - Tuna casserole - Crystal Gale - and flashes flashes flashes of her. A loving her. A dark her. A sane her. A cruel her. A sick her...

I remember running barefoot across the hot desert sand after she'd told me not to. I passed out and woke up in her arms and she was brushing the hair out of my eyes and carrying me.

I remember running after her car after a weekend visit when she had dropped me off at my Dad's. She didn't see me in the rearview mirror and I cried for the rest of the night because I wasn't fast enough to catch up to her.

Seems like I was always chasing after her but never quite catching up.

I remember coloring a mother's day picture after storytime at Barnes & Noble and writing "Happy Mother's Day" in crayon and one of the mothers noticed and asked me if I was going to send it to her and I said I would. I never did.

What dreams did she have yet unfulfilled? Why did she prepare me for so long, yet leave my brother so unprepared? 

On some alternate earth in an alternate universe, did she make different choices? Did she turn left instead of right? Did her better angels defeat her demons? If so, is she happy there... in that world? In that world that is so far removed from the cruelty and suffering and brilliance and beauty of this one?

I hope so.

God, I hope so.

My wife bought “The Endless River” for me as a Valentine’s present. I opened it the night before Valentine’s Day as we were travelling to Jacksonville the following day to check in on my brother Austin.

It is supposed to be the last Pink Floyd album. Ever.

How do I describe it. Elegiac. Sapient. Boundless.

Endless...

Like a river

that flows onward

along its dark and mysterious course.

To take the hipster-ish tact of dismissing the latest work by a great artist is unwise. There is music to ponder here. Do something profound while listening to this and you will see what I mean. There are hints and nods to the past aplenty, but the trajectory is clearly upwards and onward.

Sometimes an artist fights so hard and for so long for true independence that they fail to realize that some of the best art is created within the confines of restrictions and limitations and compromises. Take Islamic and Soviet art for instance. I am loyal to Pink Floyd in much the same way that I am loyal to George Lucas. Their work has colored my thoughts and filled my dreams with such possibilities that I will always love it for its faults and not despite them.

In 1995, I bought "Pulse" I was living in Jacksonville and I was engaged. On the side of the compact disk box there was a blinking red light.

I've thought quite a bit about death and loss this year. About how we must not use our grief to strike out, rather to transcend the limits of our existence by the one force we wield that cannot ever be extinguished - love. 

I revisited the music of Pink Floyd when this album came out.

The sheer magnitude of it all is formidable. I chuckle when I read about the so-called “Death of Pink Floyd”. Hell, I could listen to their music exclusively for years and never be able to take in the scope of it all.

I celebrated New Years (1997 or 1998) at The Jacksonville Landing. It was a glorious night, Jazz in the air, the light from the bridge dancing in the dark waters of the St. John's River. I hugged a random black guy for no other reason than the sheer ecstatic joy of the moment.

I left Jacksonville not long after that. I only returned sporadically.

I saw my brother and mother once during my time in exile. We went to St. Augustine. We went to the Ripley's Museum. We had dinner at The Milltop on St. George Street. It was a beautiful day. The white lights were strung in the trees. There was a breeze coming off the Matanzas. Marble lions stood sentinel on the bridge.

It was the last time I saw my mother alive...

I hugged my brother for the first time in years. 

In Jacksonville.

With the smell of coffee in the air and the St. John’s river flowing endlessly past, teeming with specters of things long gone. Of unresolved guilt and anguish. Of the chance to reconnect.

A month or two later, he wanted to repeat that St. Augustine trip. St. Augustine has always been a city of ghosts, and the memory of my mother loomed large and heavy over that day. It was in the back of both our minds.

I stayed behind the camera, observing, hiding between the folds of detachment, oblivious to how much our defense mechanisms only serve to magnify our fears and insecurities. 

The bitterest of ironies is the thought in my mind that I might not have the relationship I have now with my brother had it not been for the death of my mother.

But, is that such a bad thing? That something good should come from something so profoundly fucked up? It leaves me wondering what is truly meant by the end or the last or the finality of anything… or everything...

I sometimes lament how much has been lost in the labyrinth of memory or for simple want of a pen and a scrap of paper. Nevertheless, real truths come back to us in some form or other. Which leaves me with one simple yet contradictory truth - everything must end, but part of everything flows on forever.

Coda: Remembrance Day.