Levagood Legends

There was a park called Levagood in my high school days. As far back as who knows when, it had served as a starting point of those limitless nights for Divine Child kids - my high school. Many a high schooler had drank beers and smoked cigarettes in that parking lot throughout the 70's, 80's, and 90's. You could almost feel the spirit of youth past and present, lurking in that parking lot. As soon as dusk began to fall, cars gradually began to pull in. By the time the sky was pitch black as soot, a small congregation of high school vehicles had accumulated. All were in pursuit of the one desire of those high school weekends: how to find booze, and where to find the party.

Arriving at Levagood on those nights was like a choose your own adventure novel: you never knew who you might come across, or what party you might hear about, or where the night would take you. Some of the vehicles were people you knew, some were randoms from the public schools. Maybe someone had stolen a fifth of whiskey from their parents liquor cabinet, and if you knew them they'd offer you a swig or two from the bottle. Maybe someone had some weed, and gratuitously let you sit in their backseat and take a puff as REO Speedwagon hummed from the stereo. Maybe someone pulled in to let everyone know about a public school party going on, and our excitement peaked at the thought of non-Catholic school girls that we might find in the night.The seniors had their own corner of the parking lot, where they sipped cheap beer and smoked hookah in the bed of a truck; that seemed like the place to be, but to us the seniors were off limits, and we could only jealously wonder in awe what it felt like to be them.

We were young. Full of life, and night. We all came out to escape the prison of living under our father's roof, searching for our freedom in the dusk. As Bob Seger knew, it was funny how the night moved. We didn't have anything to lose.

Local legend in our small community of the parking lot had it that there existed somewhere a shady liquor store that sold to high school kids for a small charge. 'It's an urban legend,' someone claimed, 'it doesn't exist'. 'It's true, I know a guy who bought there,' someone else countered. It was a closely held secret, available only to that small corner of the parking lot belonging to the seniors.

Thanks to my friendship with the high school quarterback, son of a legend at my high school, I was invited over to that corner of the parking lot on one of those magical nights. 'You guys want a beer?' one of those seniors asked. Of course we did. I tried to look casual. Those seniors seemed so much older and so much bigger, as I watched them sipping beers and taking hits from the hookah. It looked like they had been doing it for years. It seemed like they had some sort of wisdom about how to live those nights.

Finally, we were told the secret about the legendary liquor store. 'Tell no one,' one of the seniors exclaimed in a grave voice, as if it were the secret of the Holy Grail. 'If anyone else knows about it, the guys at the liquor store won't sell to anyone'. We were in. My friend and I toasted our beers, smiling the smile of innocence.

Thinking back now, it's funny how insignificant it all seems. But for that night, we were kings. There were no bills to pay, no demons of our past to haunt us, no worries of the future and the uncertainty it brought. All that mattered in the world was living for the night, seeking out the marrow of the present night and all that it might bring. Ain't it funny how the night moves? When you just don't have as much to lose?

Re-Examining Springsteen these Years Later

"There was an old road that ran near the edge of my town. Out where the suburbs were still farms. I used to go there nights, that autumn of nineteen seventy-two. Sometimes I just wasn't ready to go home. That year, I traveled streets I'd never known before. I pushed against the limits of my suburban life. I had no idea exactly what lay ahead. All I knew was, I was running out of time. And I was gonna bust if something didn't happen, soon."

Summer looming, I've found myself with spare time to read again. I recently received a copy of Bruce, the definitive and mesmerizing Bruce Springsteen biography and I've delved whole-heartedly into it. Springsteen holds a special spot inside my soul. His role in my life, aside from family and close friends, is second to none. On a fateful autumn day in the fall of my senior year in high school, I had discovered a couple of his albums amongst my parents CD collection in the basement. That discovery - and specifically the notorious "Born to Run" album - couldn't have coincided with my youthful vigor for life at a better time.

Chalk full of midwestern angst, Springsteen's verses rang true in my soul. He captured in prose my youthful desire for the marrow of life, my itching for the world that lay outside the only streets I had ever known, and my growing knowledge that not everything under my father's roof could satisfy my wild oats. Baby this town rips the bones from your back, it's a death trap, a suicide rap, we gotta get out while we're young - Springsteen put into words teenage angst and my ever-increasing wariness of Midwestern, catholic school morals.

But it wasn't just the way Springsteen's lyrics echoed my thoughts. The discovery of Springsteen's lyrics were a springboard for my future endeavors. From Springsteen's lyrics, I discovered a whole new world in Bob Dylan's poetic lyrics. Springsteen's tales ranging from suburban restlessness to the darkness of murder in a Nebraskan night rekindled in me a passion for literature, leading soon to my discovery of Kerouac and subsequently the crucial discovery of On the Road, and shortly thereafter the discovery of Hemingway's northern Michigan world.

There was an old dirt road in my town, still unpaved and sheltered from the expanse of suburban life. I used to go there nights, that autumn of my senior year of high school. Sometimes I just needed to get out from under the roof of my father's house, a place that could no longer offer answers to all of my questions. Sometimes I just wasn't ready to go home. I was full of life, and night. 

The pine trees secluding me. The glow of the moon-colored floodlight at the school in the distance. The churning sound of driving over the pebbles on the dirt road. The amber waves of Jack Daniels in a glass cup in the console. Bruce's sincere, heartfelt melodies playing from the car stereo. And the leaves of tall grass waving over the baseball diamond field. I remember it all very well.

I didn't know it at the time, but big things loomed in my front-shield window in the form of the University of Michigan. But it's hard to grasp that better things await you at that age. I felt very trapped. I was tired of the strictures of high school life: I had a Catholic school disciplinarian constantly telling me to cut my hair, telling me to tuck in my shirt, telling me I needed to shave; I had priests teaching me that the Bible was the only way of thinking; I had football coaches telling me that there was only one way of doing things - these were the very ideas that my body repelled: the thought that there was only one way of doing things, that there was only one way of thinking about things. I abhorred the thought of a sheltered suburban life: it seemed to me then that all of my family throughout suburban Michigan had robbed themselves of what the outside world had to offer, that every neighbor in that secluded Millwood Village had willingly foregone the beauty of what this world had to offer for a prison on monotony in that dull neighborhood where nothing ever happened. I was wrong about all that, but I didn't know it then. 

Some day during that autumn of 2005 found me sitting with Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run album, a splash of Jack Daniels in a gatorade bottle, and seasonal change in the form of rust-colored leaves above me. The Springsteen, Jack, and autumn cocktail struck converged in hurricane fashion to cause a sea-change in my soul that night. Bruce said it better than I ever could:

Baby this town rips the bones from your back

It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap

We gotta get out while we're young

Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

It was as if Bruce was telling me that there is more to it than this - more than this sheltered suburban life, more than this high school routine that found me sipping whiskey just to create some variety on a Wednesday night, more than this family life that left me doing the exact same thing from week to week, more than your circle of friends who are all Catholic-school educated and sheltered by their middle-class upbringings. "There's something out there," Bruce was saying. "Something much more than your mind can comprehend". Bruce was right. He never told me that it wasn't all good out there, but he was right. Life as I knew it would never be the same.

Reading Bruce's story these years later has reinvigorated a youthful energy I had long thought gone from my body. Bruce lived his life with the same unbridled spirit that flows from his lyrics. The years since those nights parked on that old dirt road have left me jaded and grizzled by life's scars. My soul has been brewing with regret and shades of wintry grey for an extended period of time now, yet re-entering Bruce's world these years later has opened a hatch in my soul somewhere, letting in a glimmer of blue skies long since forgotten. 

I've been more the man in Springsteen's "Glory Days" or "Dancing in the Dark" as of late: living in the past while going through the moments of the present with weary eyes, seeing the world through a lens of grey and wallowing in the rut I've become stuck in. Springsteen's albums are full of men going through that fate: feeling like an old man, dwelling on older days that have long since passed them by. As it goes in "Dancing in the Dark": I ain't nothing but tired, man I'm just tired and bored with myself. You can't start a fire, sittin' round cryin' over a broken heart.

But opening the pages of Bruce felt like an re-opening of my soul to new light. You can't start a fire, you can't start a fire without a spark. Maybe Springsteen's spark is back in my life once again.

Battling the Bottle

"All that night by lamplight we sing and yell songs which is okay but in the morning the bottle is gone and I wake up with the 'final horros' again, precisely the way I woke up in the Frisco skidrow room before escaping doown here, it's all caught up with me again, I can hear myself again whining, 'Why does God torture me?' - but anyone who's never had delirium tremens even in their early stages may not understand that it's not so much a physical pain but a mental anguish indescribable to those ignorant people who don't drink and accuse drinkers of irresponsiblity - the mental anguish is so intense that you feel you have betrayed your very birth, the efforts nay the birth pangs of your mother when she bore you and delivered you to the world, you've betrayed every effort your father ever made to feed and and raise you and make you strong and my God even educate you for 'life,' you feel a guilt so deep you identify yourself with the devil and God seems far away abandoning you t your sick silliness - You feel sick in the greatest sense of the word, breathing without believing in it, sicksicksick, your soul groans, you look at your helpless hands as tho they were on fire and you cant move to help, you look at the world with dead eyes, there's  on your face an expression of incaluable pining like a constipated angel on a cloud. . .

I'm SICK" I yell emphatically to the trees, to the woods around, to the hills above, looking around desperately, nobody cares -"

Jack Kerouac,

Big Sur

Life and Loss with Michigan Basketball: Volume VI

Part VI: Uncharted Waters

Part I: Baptism in Dirty Water

Part II: The Fall from Innocence

Part III: Yellow Badge of Courage

Part IV (In Progress)

Part V: The Way it Was

"At some point you are not what you were, and then you are nothing. It's at this point people start putting themselves together, once you have had that year where you do too much of something - drink, play video games, feel sorry for yourself, brick threes, fumble - feel terrible after, and then do too much of that something again." - Brian Cook, via Mgoblog

It had been years since I had hugged my little brother. That night, though, ended with my brother and I instinctively embracing each other. It felt like that's exactly what I was meant to do that night, exactly where I was meant to be that night - a feeling I haven't felt in a long time.

Moments earlier Trey Burke crossed half court, the seconds seemingly ticking down on Michigan's best season in two decades and a glorious tournament run up to that night, as Kansas had spent the first thirty-eight minutes of the game picking apart Michigan's flaws in what appeared to be an onslaught towards an easy Jayhawk victory. Mitch McGary collided with a Kansas defender and tumbled to the hardwood. Canadian import Nik Stauskas could only watch from his home behind the three point line in the corner. Columbus, Ohio's own - another inconceivable story line in and of itself - Burke boldly stepped up from an improbable distance and launched a thirty footer. The orange ball seemed to hang in the basketball heavens for an excruciatingly anxious moment, Michigan's Final Four hopes and my heart hanging in the balance. The crowd fell into a ghastly silence. Team captain and symbolic victory cigar Josh Bartlesein anticipatorily jumped up from the Michigan bench as the ball hit its crescent, apparently having more confidence in Burke's thirty-footer than I, as my heart sunk gut-wrenchingly deep into my stomach. Indeed, that thirty foot prayer seemed to be sent from the heavens directly to me. The sports gods knew I needed this one bad, probably more than I had ever needed a basketball to drop through the net before.

When it did finally sink, it was hard not to think, at that moment, that Michigan's improbable comeback was explicitly tied to the comeback I had embarked on earlier that day. That the cosmos had somehow mysteriously aligned the events of that day with me in mind.

Five minutes of overtime later, Michigan was headed to the Elite Eight for the first time since 1993. Uncharted waters. Earlier that day, I walked into St. Mary's hospital with my dad and signed up for an intensive outpatient rehab program for alcohol abuse. The red flags had been there throughout the years, usually with me unwilling to notice them. Things had gotten pretty bad this year, though, and after a particularly bad bender the week before (of course it was losing the B1G title to Indiana in the closing seconds as I watched in the seats of Crisler that triggered this bender), I knew it was finally time to ask for some help. You just know when it's time to finally be honest with yourself. Uncharted waters indeed.

I went for a long drive after I left my brother's house that night. At one point I screamed in ecstasy alone in my truck; I felt happy for the first time in a long time, as if things had finally turned a corner for me. The events of the day were a lot to grasp between the hospital meeting and the miraculous Michigan comeback culminating in Trey Burke's all-out takeover of a game, solidification of his status as the National Player of the Year in college basketball. I blasted the country music and just let it all sink in.

It was all so improbable, from Michigan's win to my brother and I embracing. But I couldn't help but feel like it was all meant to be that way. As always, sports and life had converged in a moment all-too real to be coincidental. I watched the next three games with my brother at his house as well, and those were probably three of the best nights I've had in years. My brother and I had grown apart over the years just a bit - a lot of that probably due to my drinking and his not - so it felt like a new chapter for all of us concerned: my brother and I on a new chapter of our relationship, Michigan basketball on a new chapter as they annihilated the Florida Gators en route to the Final Four for the first time in two decades and then marched onwards to the National Championship game, me in the midst of beginning my own new chapter in the early days of my outpatient program.

Sometimes a game is more than a game.

Life and Loss with Michigan Basketball: Volume V

The Way it Was

Part I: "He Takes a Timeout. They Don't Have Any Timeouts!"
Part II: The Fall From Innocence
Part III: A Badge of Honor

"Yet another of those little sparks of optimism lit me up and led me to believe once again that if things could change for the team then they could change for me." - Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch


Things had started to turn sour for me that winter of 2011. College was somehow over in an instant and my friends were a long way away. The beautiful summer in the Petoskey woods with the girlfriend was over and she was a long way away, too. My Indian Summer was over, without warning. I was trying hard to navigate the post-grad world I was suddenly thrust upon - desperately trying to find a feeling of home in my new Chicago residence, a long way away from anything I had ever cared about.

I made frequent trips back to Ann Arbor that year, seeking the comfort of home I was unable to find in my new home, The Windy City. There are a lot of memories of late-night bus and train rides - usually including a pepsi bottle with a splash of whiskey - and in those memories my anxiety always seemed to dissipate the closer I got to my real home, Ann Arbor.

There's a walk I remember vividly from that time. I had taken a bus from Chicago, my then home, to Ann Arbor. I was on the trek once again to visit the girlfriend, who I was starting to become unhealthily and (ultimately) disastrously dependent on - though I didn't recognize that until years later - as my own depression was starting to rear its ugly head during those cold months. As the college sweetheart hit the books that Friday afternoon I went for a long walk through the streets of my former home.

During college, I often went for walks through Ann Arbor to clear my head, to get away from the roommates, to relax from studies, to walk off a hangover, to find some calm, sometimes just to walk. I guess as I departed my girlfriend's house that day, I went on that walk searching for that feeling of home Ann Arbor had provided me those four years of college, searching for a peace of mind I hadn't been able to find since moving to Chicago. The search for that home feeling failed, however, and the realization that Ann Arbor was no longer my home - no matter how badly I hated that fact - sunk in deep.  Down South University - the dividing line between million-dollar university buildings and dilapidated college houses; down South Forest street - where beer cans and patches of snow littered collegiate front lawns; through the Oxford neighborhood, where impeccably manicured sorority houses loomed; I felt homesick for Ann Arbor.  I desperately missed my girlfriend, my college house, my family, my college friends. Many times I had found reassurance walking those streets in my time in college, yet this one wasn't working. Instead, it only seemed to confound my confusion: how had things changed so fast?

I had lost my cousin in a snowmobiling accident a couple weeks prior that winter of 2011, a thought that had weighed heavy - like a cumulus snow cloud above me- on my mind over the past weeks. During that walk through Ann Arbor, as the wheels of that monstrous snow storm began to churn, I pondered the burdens weighing heavy on my mind. The funeral I had attended that short time ago left me lamenting the brevity of life, and life's precarious clock lingered with me like a sour aftertaste. As young deaths are wont to do, it left me questioning a lot of things: whether I had made a wrong turn somewhere down the road, particularly in regards to the career I had recently embarked on.

A phone call from a former college roommate interrupted that walk, and I headed towards the old college house in pursuit of a drink or two. This phenomenon was becoming a problem in its own right as I never cleanly transitioned from the hard-drinking college lifestyle to the adult world I was suddenly thrust upon. I once again abandoned the flurry of unresolved turmoil going on in my soul in hopes of drowning it all in a glass of bourbon.

Things would get much worse, and then worse again, before it got any better. But I have a particularly happy memory of that weekend. The mind is a funny thing, with an uncanny ability to suppress the negative memories and retain only the positive ones. I remember all those thoughts I had during that walk through Ann Arbor that weekend, but the defining memory in my mind is a basketball game.

The day after that walk, Zack Novak and Stu Douglass - the faces of the new direction of Michigan Basketball - led my Michigan Wolverines out of the tunnel and into the first NCAA Tournament game for Michigan in over a decade. I watched that game at Charlies, my old college bar, surrounded by my girlfriend and my old college friends. Novak and Douglass rained threes on the Tennessee Volunteers that day in a downright massacre of a game.

 Soon I would be back on a bus bound west for Chicago. But for those brief couple of hours and into that night, everything was back to the way it was.

Indiana

I sat in Crisler for a while afterwards. The only time I've sat longer in a sports venue was my senior year, when we lost to Ohio State in my last ever game. On the drive home from Ann Arbor, I started to think that it was me, rather than Michigan sports, that was causing this depression. I started to wonder whether the two were discernible. It seemed very real that the worst losses of the past year - Bama, this Indiana game - coincidentally synchronized with my worst nights. It didn't matter which it was, though. This was my worst-ever night.

"Home to Villa in the League Cup quarter-final replay was probably my worst-ever night, a new low on a relationship already studded with them. …

Part of it was my own latent depression permanently looking for a way out and liking what it saw at Highbury that night; but even more than that, I was as usual looking to Arsenal to show me that the things did not stay bad forever, that it was possible to change patterns, that losing streaks did not last. Arsenal, however, had other ideas: they seemed to want to show me that troughs could indeed be permanent, that some people, like some clubs, just couldn't ever find ways out of the rooms they had locked themselves into. It seemed to me that night and for the next few days that we had both of us made too many wrong choices, and had let things slide for far too long, for anything ever to come right; I was back with the feeling, much deeper, and much more frightening this time, that I was chained to the club, and this miserable half-life, forever."

- Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch

Life and Loss with Michigan Basketball: Volume III

Yellow Badge of Courage

Part I: "He Takes a Timeout. They Don't Have any Timeouts!";
Part II: The Fall from Innocence

"Why has the relationship that began as a schoolboy crush endured for nearly a quarter of a century, longer than any other relationship I have made of my own free will? And why has this affinity managed to survive my periodic feelings of indifference, sorrow, and very real hatred?"

- Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch

In sports, as in life, the low points are what make it possible to appreciate the highs that much more. Those seemingly never-ending losing seasons, the humiliating defeats at the hands of your arch-rivals, sitting in half-empty stadiums during the futile seasons, whiskey-drenched nights when you swear you're finished with the team once and for all: we fans take an odd satisfaction in these trying times; we wear those low-points on our sleeves like badges of honor - for our fandom had been tested to the limits and we had remained devout in our allegiances. For nearly a century, Boston Red Sox fans traced their entire identity to the pride that came with years of defeat and ground balls that trickled through first basemen's legs. It was easy to be a Yankees fan; but there was more pride in being a Sox fan, because they had stood on trial and never withered.

As the nineties gave way to the aughts and as I grew older, I began to grow more self-aware of my fandom. In turn, I began to realize that I had no badge of honor to speak of. My fan upbringing had occurred during the prosperous Lloyd Carr era, with few defeats at the hands of Ohio State or Michigan State to speak of; that, and my other team, the Red Wings, had experienced success unprecedented in the hockey world. I was not the Red Sox fan in this metaphor, I was the spoiled Yankees fan. And that didn't sit well with me. In this way an odd hint of jealousy snuck up on me. My fandom had come of age alongside my childhood best friend Steve, a Michigan State legacy and lifelong fan. Steve had gone through a fan's trial - the nineties and early aughts were not overly kind to Michigan State - and had come out the other side ardent in his loyalties. He seemed to have that badge of honor I desperately coveted.

The solution seemed simple, as Michigan Basketball stood in the shadows of Crisler Arena's dark ages. So I returned to Michigan Basketball after a period of indifference, this time more fervently than ever. In the subsequent years, my fandom matured as I was relegated to cheering for NIT Championships, as I suffered through countless beat-downs at the hands of Michigan State, and as I cheered in a sparsely populated and dilapidated Crisler Arena. But there were rewards. This was a relationship I had never felt with Michigan football. After all, it seemed everyone and their brother in Michigan could claim they were Michigan football fans. But I took pride - pretentious as it may have been - in being one of the few who truly cared about Michigan basketball.

By the time my senior year in high school rolled around, Michigan Basketball had become more than just a means to an end; our relationship had blossomed into something much bigger. Around this time I began to withdraw from the life corollary to the strictures of Catholic school life in what I perceived to be then a dead-end town. This is not to say that I ceased my social life, but things were beginning to feel stale; I was beginning to learn that there was more out there in this world than the shirt and tie routine of a narrow-minded Catholic high school. I spent many a night drinking whiskey, pouring over pages of Dylan lyrics, driving aimlessly down the streets of my hometown - sometimes I just wasn't ready to go home - growing more and more in awe of what lurked outside my bedroom window. But nothing represented my expanding world more than the Michigan Basketball student section.

I watched in awe of the Maize Rage that winter of my senior year. Here were students not much older than me dressed in silly outfits, cheering wildly, probably off to guzzle down a few beers after the game: they seemed liberated. I grasped that they lived in a world that had a lot more to offer than my small town ever could. I idolized that student section, watching them in my growing knowledge that not every road was going to lead home anymore. Soon I would be on my way, too.