Day 34: Cousin Larry

Cousin Larry and Big Dave tailgating Southside Style at my sister Jenn's wedding...they kinda look like Bartles and Jaymes don't they?  And we thank you for your support.... 

 

 Thinking about my cousin Larry in Chicago. Larry my rockstar cousin. Larry who my grandma Raymond with her beautiful Lipton –tea colored countenance would always comment, “Now David’s gonna be bored until Larry shows up,” whenever we had a family gathering at Aunt Denise and Uncle Bob’s.  Larry who was christened with the moniker of “Little Larry,” because his father was named Larry as well. Larry who I would always get yelled at with by one of the Uncle’s because we were always running around and wrestling even though all the adults were doing was just sitting around the table drinking coffee talking about somebodies damn gall bladder. Larry who introduced me to Metallica and my first Playboy (boy, being 12 years old and just listening to Master of Puppets while simultaneously being introduced to Miss March 1988 for the first time just doesn’t get any sweeter). Larry who chronicled my cousins' going to prom via the lens of a camcorder that just left everyone sea-sick because he kept swiveling around like a dervish while videotaping.

 Larry who is a DJ and a south side smart-aleck and is good with computers and who grew his hair long with a hint of Irish orange goatee and who kind of looks like Johnny Depp.

 Larry school and played in a kick-ass garage band called Back-in-Stride. 

Larry who is four years older.

Larry who is a recovering alcoholic and partier.

He who has always been a mentor.

 While I have eleven first cousins who are female (there’s so many females in my family we practically play ‘guess-whose-on-the-cycle,’ every year when Aunt Flo serves her traditional Thanksgiving  Cranberry sponge cake)  I only have two first cousins’ who pee standing up. My cousin Matthew on my dad’s side who is a Lutheran pastor and my cousin Larry on my mom’s side, who is a rock star. My cousin Matthew (whom my Gradma Bev always lambasted as, ‘Why Matthew Lloyd,’) hails from  Peoria and we grew up with my sisters’ playing Box Car Children beneath the wooden penumbras of the grand piano in the music room, my cousin Larry is from Chicago and I would see him maybe once a year around Christmas if I was lucky.






Cousin Larry and myself playin 'baseball spies' (note: Larry's rote South Side standard
sox cap) circa halcyon pre-kindergarten days of 1983...

Chicago in in the mid-to-late 80’s was a pretty in pink panorama of light, a fledgling sweet sixteen suburbia sprawling with bifurcating subdivisions and cul-de-sacs and coifed lawns, sleepy eye-lidded station wagons grazing a hymn to John Hughes; high schools with pretty boys making post-prom pacts over lunch trays and girls wearing braces, crimped hair, side pony-tails and shoulder pads shuffling album covers like floor tiles while monopolizing a phone that was shared by the entire household.      

A solid portion of what spirituality I have folded inside my flesh arrives like a Stork on full-moon from my mom. Growing up mom prayed. Mom comes from a big Polish/Czech family in the south side of Chicago and her dad was a bit of a drinker. To this day Mom will never drink beer because when she was young her father poured a little copper stream of beer into her glass of milk at the

dinner table and laughed when she threw up an hour later.                                                                   

My grandmother (mom's mom) started attending church and bible study because the Lutheran church in Argo-Summit offered free day care. Her youngest innocuous-eyed daughter Linda (my mother) becoming by far the most pious progeny in the household liter. I remember waking up in the morning and I would see Mom, in her green house coat with the optional monastic hood, sitting down with her feet bare and fetus-posture limbs hunched into her bosom, her thoroughly inky-annotated NIV bible nestled open in her lap like a shot dove.    

       

My biological grandfather was an alcoholic. In the early 70’s he physically assaulted my grandma when loaded and grandma left.  She got remarried to good man a few years later and the bulk of the cousins and myself thought that our step-father Frank was our biological grandfather.

 

I can make a peace sign with my right hand and count on the number of protruding fingers the number of times I saw my biological grandfather in my life.

 

“He could have done anything. He could make anything.”  One of biological grandfather’s sisters told my mom at a family reunion. Grandpa was a carpenter and he was just commensurately talented but all he did was drink. Mom has told me stories about hiding in the closet when he came home blitzed or my Grandma having to steal cash from his wallet so her five kdis could have food for the week.

“He was a good man he just had stuff he never dealt with and the way he chose to deal with everything in his life was through drinking.”

 

 

                                                                        ***

 



...the chi-town cousins' and sibling....clockwise, Larry, Michelle, sister Jenn, Katie, and Maria...
on grandma's basement steps...sorry about the crotch shot Maria...



These were my Chicago relatives. The cousins.  There is Gina and Coleen and Michelerella. There is Katie (Larry’s sister) and intellectually-riveting Eron who disappeared. There is Tammy and Maria from Wisconsin and there is Litle Larry who we also called ‘Lar (as in Dragons Lair). Good old Lar. Crazy Lar, Larry who got an Arm-a-Tron for Christmas in the mid-80’s and used the vestigial limb to dunk chicaken nuggets into Barbecue sauce. Lar who placed his Hal and Oates cassette tape into the agape mouth of my taupe-colored Fisher-Price tape player and we listened to being Out of touch and Out of time when my dad took us to Slides Park and we went hiking in the woods with his friend Bernie.   Lar with all the cool Star Wars action figures. Lar who I hid with under my Grandma Raymonds bed and watched as Uncle Rudy change into the Santa Claus outfit one Christmas. Larry and I who got yelled at by Uncle Bob because we were break dancing in the living room ( God love ‘em.Uncle Bob was always sipping RC cola all the while lovingly grousing about something extremely political and picayune).  Larry who, when we arrived at Aunt Diane’s house early one Christmas, was the only one home and offered my dad a cup of coffee before brewing a cup himself.

He was eight years old at the time.

Larry who was my mentor.  Larry who always had firecrackers and bottle rockets.

Larry who Freshman year of high school grew his hair long even though family member tried to cut in when he was sleeping.

Lar who could kick ass on the bass. Lar who always had a beer and a smoke in his hand and had a smart-ass southside snicker when he laughed, which was often.

Larry my only male cousin on my mom’s side who I look up to.

The first time I saw him get drunk he was sixteen. It was at my cousin’s wedding reception in a swanky Chicago suburb and somehow he was able to get served. I was in seventh grade, puberty-riddled and acne-ridden and Lar was walking around the lobby toting a beer like a scepter and smoking a cigarette. A hotel guard came up and nonchalantly asked him if he had i.d. on him and Lar, very nonchalantly back told the guard he was 21 and reached into his wallet, staidly handing a yellow sheet of origami-folded paper to the officer.

“You are 21?”I exclaimed. Lar nodded and handed the guard a yellow slip of paper.

The officer held the paper up to ceiling as if scrutinizing film negative before bartering the sheet back to my cousin informing him in a gruff voice that he looked kind of young for his age so he should just keep his drinking in the reception area.

When we got back to the reception and everyone forming human sentences electric avenuing on the makeshift dancefloor O told him that I didnm’t realize he was twenty-one.

Lar put his hand to his mouth as if he didn’t want any of the relative to hear.

“Here’s what you do,” he said, his voice always sounding a tad reminiscent of  Alex Keaton, always southside smart-ass, conducting with his chin. “What you do is, when you turn 16 and you start driving you’re gonna get a few tickets. It happens. You drive and you get pulled over. What you do then is you spray Lysol on the paper and place it on the radiator over night and the ink disappears then you write in you are of age.”

Larry took another swig and then toddled up to the bar and grabbed another beer.  He wasn't even a junior in high school at the time.

I looked back astounded.

 

 

                                                                      ***

 Thus my drinking relationship with my cousin began.  When I turned twenty we started drinking together. Larry, with long hair. Larry who always had his bass and a beer and a cigarette and was always doing something crazy with a computer. Larry who worked making really cool countertops then got the got a job testing fire alarms. Larry who was always writing songs and playing gigs.

Larry who always had a beer with him.

Larry who I was blessed was a real brother when my father died and represented my mother’s side of the  family by serving as a pall-bearer at his funeral.

Larry who went though a messy divorce which ameliorated his partying.

Crazy Lar who crashed with me at my Sister Jenn’s wedding and we partied.  Going out for three days straight. I was a daily beer drinker and could hold my own.   The more Lar would drink the crazier he would get.  The night of my sister’s wedding he almost got into a fight with two thugs and I had to be facilitator. We would drink all night, he would go outside, throw up,  come back in and start drinking.

 

He would pass out in the middle of my carpet next to his guitar. I would place a pillow under his head like a ring-bearer and continue drinking. In the morning we would wake up  pillage the apartment for quarters before hitting the beer machine three houses down. We would then sit on my back porch and Larry would start strumming his guitar, drinking beer, singin’ old Johnny cash songs brewing another pot of coffee, before getting a twelve pack and then, going out drinking, watching him get in fights, get crazy and then pass out again.                 

On one of our drinking ventures I brought a girl back to my apartment. Larry insisted that he the two of us have some privacy even though Larry was already two-sheets to the wind.  When he left I told him not to drive and just lie down and take it easy but he verbally bartered that he was fine.

Larry leaves and the girl and I have a quick fifteen minute make-out session before we hear him yelling up, to may apartment.

“David, I lost my car!!!”

“What?” I say, running downstairs as the barfly adjusts her blouse.

“Yeah, I was driving around and I got out of my car to walk around and have a smoke and then I  got lost.”

We spent about twenty minutes trying to retrace his steps and eventually found his SUV parked in the middle the of a nearby cul-de-sac, the keys still jingling in the ignition.

The girl left. Larry and I went home and passed out. In the morning we scoured the apartment for quarters, hit the beer machine again, sat on the back porch smoking while singing Johnny Cash songs before starting the same cycle over.

 

                                                        ***

There’s a story about how when my Granpa Bozec was in his late-teens he went down to Texas with some friends and got into trouble. Somehow he temporarily ended up in jail for a couple of weeks. He was with some friends’ and the friends’ all had parents who wired them money to bail them out.

My great- grand parents’ didn’t send any money to Granpa to bail him out.

Instead, all they sent him was a bible.

My grandpa Bozexc died the August after I graduated from high school. My aunt left a message on our answering machine and I was the first person to get the message. He had been in a car accident about a month earlier and had been in the hospital since. No one else was home and for some reason, even though I had only seen the man twice in my lifetime, I slammed the front door and just took off running. I had just gotten off of work at Barnes and Nobles and was wearing a tie and good shoes but I took off running even though I had no where to run too. I ended up outside Dunkin Donuts, close to the old LUMS on Western ave and called my girlfriend from a payphone (note: the phonebooths are still there saluting like urban fossils) I didn’t know what to say about the man who gave my mother life who no one really knew. 

"My grandfather's gone," I told her. "I guess somehow he always was."

                                                  ***

When Larry left my apartment that spring day he returned to Chicago, took a leave of absence from his job and went on a six month drinking binge.  He hit  bottom. He lost everything. He moved in with his sister. He started attending three AA meetings a day.  He got clean. He’s helped others. He became a really cool DJ and got his truck driver’s license.

He still plays a mean bass and writes kick ass songs.

He has been clean now for almost five years.

                                                   ***

 

Two years ago I was drinking twenty beers a day. I was working 60 hours a week. I was writing my ass off every night between shifts. I was exhausted. I hated my life. Hated that it seemed like I was living paycheck to paycheck for the last five years. Hated that my relationships always dissipated.  Hated that I felt the need to drink all the time because it was only when I was completely hammered that I felt completely loved.

I remember calling my cousin out of the blue.

“Larry,” I told him. “I drink 20 beers a day. I don’t know where to go. I just can’t stop.”

We talked for a long time, Lar sounding like his smart-ass Alex P. Keaton southside subruban self. He shared his testimony into sobriety. We talked about Granpa Bozec.

“Granpa could’ve givin’ us the gene for making millions of dollars. Instead he gave us the gene for neurological depression and acute alcoholism.” I said flippantly.

We laughed. Although there is some truth to it. Larry then told me something I’ll never forget:

“Do you want me to come down there?” He asked,  sounding pretty sincere even for Alex P. Keaton.  The last time he came down we drank for three days straight and he lost his car with the keys still in the ignition.  

“If you want me to come down for a few days I will. It’s no big deal bro. It’s really no big deal.”

Part of the reason we come to literature and art to live vicariously through a protagnist who erndures some sort of psycohological quaqmire. We want to live vicariously thought him. We want to witness change.

My grandfather, alcoholic and aloof, the man who could build anything, couldn’t change. He couldn’t stop drinking. He passed his genetic heritage and his propensity for alcoholic proofs down to my cousin and myself.  Part of the reason I endeavored to go on the forty days fast of enlightenemnt is because of the perils of complacency. Because, like it was for the grandfather who was never there for anyone yet could build anything, it’s easier to drown a twelve pack then it is to  face your own demons.

And if you don’t quash those demons in your lifetime, the remnants and emotional embers get passed down via blood and you end up ruining lives.

My grandpa lacked both the courage and the Bozec balls to tackle his own demons.

My cousin Larry has faced his. He has conquered fears that have held him back. He has sloughed the identity of the person he was and blossomed into the individual he was destined become.

And let me tell you, it has been a joy to witness.

So (in all emotional candor, from the little cousin who has always looked up to you) thank you, cuz.

Your growth has been a joy to witness.

 

...even Balki loves his Cousin Larry....



Yer my hero.

 

Lovya bro.