i need no flag to claim it
my love she sleeps tonight
and I finally realized this is my home . . .
Elkhart, Indiana stands almost exactly one-hundred miles east of Chicago. Interstate 80-90 runs through the northern part that borders Michigan. The land stolen from the Potawatamis and Miamis became a mecca for band instruments, Alka Seltzer, and more recently, recreational vehicles. It is still an industrial heaven and abhorrent to original thought. Conservative in politics and religion, it nonetheless spawns lots of misfits that break free and carve their own niche.
Lately I've been reading Kenneth Rexroth's autobiography. Another lost Elkhart-bred boy. His tales of hanging with his Native American friend and observations of the land and feel make me sad that those times are gone. Capitalists have long since changed the landscape almost completely, attracting an urban feel to a once quiet town. Profits over humanity. From all over the Americas people flood in, often penniless, to work in soulless factories, pounding profits and flushing away rights and dignity in exchange for a paycheck to survive, and for the privilege of modern consumer-culture indulgences.
I grew up there. The public school system didn't (and probably still wouldn't) know what to do with a kid who could read and write fluently at 3, play guitar with abandon at 7, and immediately challenge everything. The mold was slammed down on me early, and my family, silently or not, taught me to play the game. Here they rarely educate children to broaden the mind or enrich the soul, but rather to prepare the young for proper droneship. Sit down, shut up and assume facelessness.
I escaped once. Hollywood was at first invigorating, like a mad, happy dream. Lots of people from all over the world, many just like me, searching for a way out of something or a way to somewhere. I found plenty, oddly too much, of what was lacking back home. Insane, fiery spirits, wild speed music, intensely beautiful women, and hope. The future was mine. Grab on and hold on tight.
Ten years later the thrill was gone. When did the end come? The band broke up. My car had been stolen twice within a year while I was recording. I found myself again doing jobs for money in places I would never be seen in otherwise. A boss was making obscene phone calls at all hours to my house, probably in retaliation for my telling him to fuck off during one of his attempted power trips.
Some money showed up and I was gone. Back to Indiana. Home.
My parents were living in the same house I grew up in. My bed was still there. My father and I finally started talking man-to-man in brief wonderful moments. Less than two years later I watched him reduced from strength to defeat to a sneaking cancer that finally killed him. He died on May 31st, the same day his mother and father died. Six weeks later my appendix burst and I nearly died as well.
I lived.
After all this, depression set in. Life was slow. I wanted things that didn't exist. My thoughts of the past were glorified in my head. Memory easily reveals only what's comfortable. I was also reinventing myself and didn't know it.
I don't know when it was, but later, a cloud lifted. That ugly melancholy, that in hindsight I realize I craved, was leaving, and I didn't even miss it. I started to be comforted by the sight of the familiar arrangement of trees in a field near my home. The roads were also familiar and led anywhere I pointed the wheel. My family was here. It was somewhere that was mine.
Traditionally, Elkhart's history remembers those who assumed power and/or made freight trains full of cash: the businessmen, the politicians. Maybe some were indeed honorable human beings. The artists, poets, musicians that broke free and continue to walk the globe making noise aren't talked about here. And the silence is deliberate.
Right now, though, a light, beautiful snow is slowly falling down on the Saint Joseph River as I look out of a window of the 19th century house I lay down to sleep in every night. And that is just enough to remind me why I'm here.