Lonesome Fury

The man looked like a Slayer song sounded. He sounded like a Slayer song sounded too — maybe injected with a little Suicidal Tendencies — acapella through his ceiling and my floorboards late at night when he couldn’t find the smack. You always knew when the jones was on. It started with a low, distressed vocal. Some sarcastic-toned response you knew meant the orchestra was about to start. It was quiet, but real; the way apartment walls let in those sounds you’re not quite sure about until you are, in the middle of the night when the neighbors wake you up fucking. One short grunt, just enough to make you curious if you had truly woken up to what you thought you had woken up to.

Another sleepless night in a piss-stained bed wasn’t exactly a dream come true, even at that age. I’d bet my allowance he was ready to drop the needle down on a crackly punk 7-inch on the turntable of his mind. Spin some drugged-out anthem no one in their right mind could hear.

“Just doze off,” I’d think to myself. “Probably just a cough.”

Not so lucky. My uncle Jon had dynamic range. Even hushed, he always controlled the room. That lone sardonic staccato could fade-in to a full thrash epic faster than Lombardo could kick-in a double-bass drum to get the mosh pit swirling. Once he started moving about the basement you knew it was on.

“Huh?” he’d say, ready to rip into a diatribe. “What did you say?”

I don’t remember hearing my grandmother saying much if anything in these moments. By this time, she had faded herself into the fact that she would never get her voice above her fear.

“Where the fuck are my keys?”

Jingle; “huh?” French doors open. Outside, my dad had built an impressively level boardwalk around the corner and up the hill, and Jon always stomped up the thing in his Doc Martin’s so the whole damn cul-de-sac would know he was headed to the driveway. His mom always believed he would kick the beast, so when he promised to come clean and keep a canning job in the mid-90’s, she bought him a Toyota pickup so he would never be late. It was worth its weight in drugs so it wasn’t around for long, but for a while, you could hear the truck start up, see the headlights hit the side of the house outside my room and listen to it chug a while. You’d always wish it would back out into the dead end, make its way up the street, and never come back.

Instead, he always lived with his mom, first in the old house and then in the basement of the one she had cosigned on so my parents could afford it. He had anointed himself head of his mother’s household sometime after his father died in ’88 and he never dropped the act. I don’t know if he ever saw a psychologist, but if he had, they would have explained to him how people who experience abuse as children often develop a profound mistrust of the people closest to them, and in many cases the violated child becomes, to varying degrees, an ashamed, violent adult.

I remember visiting their old house as a seven-year-old, and hanging with Jon before his addiction and two of his friends before theirs, trying my best to be as cool as they were, skateboarding in the long driveway beside the deep, manicured lawn in front of the house where he lived with his mom after his parents divorced. His only two siblings had come of age and moved on a decade prior, so it was just the two of them in this big house sitting restlessly on an acre or two.

The sun was bright and warm, but my uncle and both of his friends were dressed in black anyway — classic troublemakers. Under their flat ivy caps they all wore their hair short, bicced down to the skin so you’d figure they were on the same team. They must have used the same barber or gone in on a 3-pack of razors. They only had one skateboard between the three of them and my uncle let me try it out while they all looked on.

“Do an ollie,” he told me.

I wanted to so bad. If I did an ollie right now —

I jumped with the board under me the way a seven-year-old would jump on a skateboard if they had no clue the mechanics of the thing.

“You did it!” one of them said. They lost their goddam minds.

“This guy can’t even do that,” my uncle said, pointing with his thumb at the chubbier friend. He was really singing for me. He acted like I had done it, or maybe I had. Either way, I was as cool as two of them, and even cooler than one of them; that much I knew.

At that point, my uncle Jon was on his way to cementing himself as a skateboarding street-fiend, though no one could have recognized it at the time. The heroin epidemic of the 90’s was made of people like him, stressed out punks with nowhere to go but straight into the jaws of the law. In the late 80’s, a city ordinance tried to effectively ban skateboarding in our hometown — officials would levy 19-dollar fines on those who were caught, and confiscate the skateboards of repeat offenders for up to 90 days. Most of the skaters wanted to come up with a solution, citing the need for ways to stay out of trouble. Jon tried to organize a committee with skaters and business owners to convince city hall to allow skating after businesses closed, but city hall didn’t listen, so trouble it was.

Heroin use has a profound effect on stress and anxiety, and users tend to be people who want or need to suppress their emotional processing. Considering some of the vicious tirades that my grandfather had thrown down onto my grandmother and their kids in their younger years, it’s easy to imagine that relief from anxiety was a powerful motivator for each of them in their own way.

I had only known my grandfather from the few times we visited when he was sick with AIDS, north somewhere, dying in a house exactly as lonely as the one you would wish upon him if you knew the stories. Vaughn probably learned his violence from his own father; the generational trauma was too much for him to handle. These things aren’t created in a vacuum. Perhaps he had come into his lonesome fury via some out-of-control mechanism he had created to help him retreat, emotionally, when he thought he might be found out as gay. Maybe he needed something that would let the people around him know they were on their own too, just like him. Perhaps the daily performances in those earlier years had caught my uncle Jon, wrapped him in his affliction, and spit out a younger version of an angry man waiting around to die alone. Perhaps my own father picked up a little something too and handed a piece of it off to me.

Perhaps there’s no excuse.

Hours before the sun would come up, the smoke would rise from thin, blue, tattooed hands, across shaky, yellow fingertips. It would blow through yellowed teeth, across bloodshot eyes, around a crew-cut head of hair and gather around the ceiling that was stained with salad dressing from a bowl my uncle had thrown at my grandmother during one of his previous fits. You could taste the smell of stale nicotine sticking to the heating vents next to my bed as the doors below slammed open and closed. Jon would lead the smoke through the French doors, up the side of the house and back down again like an inverted sage ritual meant to cleanse the air of its positive energy. You could hear him hurl a flurry of pejoratives at whatever invisible something directed him through the basement all night, and ultimately into the bathroom.

Once the ceiling fan switched on, you knew the needle had turned up. Finally, the orchestra might fade, and an anxious house might sleep a little while — until the next refrain.

*

Jon’s pain must have equaled the pain he caused; may he finally rest in peace. He died alone, a few days before he was found on August 25, 2021.