Filmwalks With Bubba, '92-4

Childhood wasn't rife with Dad's Trips To the Ballpark, and fighting the neighborhood kids three times a day like a diet sucked balls. I spent most of my formative years dodging my father, not running to him. When we kids played in the cornfield fun became battle. We stripped hard corn ears from deep green stalks and threw the grain missiles at each other from various stomped out locations in the field. Barring that, we chased each other with baseball bats and pellet guns, basic white trash kid behavior. These weren't the easiest times. When they ended, I got to start over in a new town.

I was 15. At that time, I knew exactly two people, Bubba and Dave the Glam Kid, who is now a Photographer. He tagged along for the first night walk, to the Hillside Theater. I barely recall that walk, but it started a lifelong love of night walks and great stories that still covers my blood cells like the soft sick whisper of old addict memory. We saw Wayne's World, if memory serves.

Hillside Theater was once located on a frontage road that ran along the freeway, lining the viaducts up with exit ramps that end near Al Capone's grave. The theater was about a mile down the road from the cemetery. Evident construction squat in hollow storeys. I can't remember what we saw, maybe EVENT HORIZON, but we hung out in the shells of the future office buildings, me smoking weed while Bubba spun his newest ghost tale. That was the last time I recall us going to Hillside.

We also frequented the Oakbrook. The trip was much different. Over the freeway, cars not honking. The median on York Road that we used to keep from becoming fender fodder ended at a frontage road that cut into crowded forestation, no buildings profaning nature until a bank appeared in front of the mall entrance like a stern magnate. The rain sheen on the pavement glittered at night, stirring sentiment and hope. He told his ghost stories and I gave saucy details of my juvenile delinquent's exploits with the school stoners.

On the best of those nights, we saw SEVEN. Excited from the film's surprising  ingenuity--or what our 16 year old minds believed was ingenuity--I tried a free-running jump move over a park bench outside the theater. Back then, I had a body like a great avocado, and my size 12 caught on the wood, tipping me forward. I almost faceplanted myself. My gut saved me from a busted nose. And we roared with stupid, miraculous young glee.

Much has changed. He's a half-famous Bizzaro author collecting accolades from men who've made movies, and I am a recovering junky scanning fat notebooks bloated with half-legible street notes scribbled under bridges in Houston and in the Reno Community Shelter. How I wound up this Dark Half, I don't know. As with an addiction where one day you wake up sick, in midlife quandary one day you wake up slathered in sentiment and second-guesses.

I haven't seen Bubba in ten years, and I hate that. It's also my fault. I could have kept up with him in writing, but I chose to keep up with black mead. He stayed gold, a slicked back black hair chubby ponyboy making good with the status quo, staunch in moral fiber, no rule broken. Eyes cast stuck to the dawn of success distractions all dead and ignored. I flew south, licking a needle ignoring risk of anaphylaxis blood.

I, the manic tri-polar uber-snappy boy, often got carried away on these walks and couldn't help getting ahead of poor, panting Bubba. I'd stop and wait, lighting a cigarette with an adult's automated gesture.To my weird mind, our ghosts endlessly trip those roads in an unchanging dimension, a cosmic soup where everything that ever occurred continues on repeat.