Dad was a stoic veteran.  So it was no surprise that he didn’t offer me much marriage advice.  He knew such parental guidance usually fell on deaf ears.  The most Dad told me was, “Never marry someone unless you’ve camped in the cold rain with them.”

Of course, this sounded very silly and strange when you’re blissfully and blindly in love.

Years later, I know the experienced wisdom of those words.  Adversity reveals true character.

I’ve just repeated that advice to my daughter who is contemplating getting engaged.  Alas, she is just as in love, and just as deaf.

Bill Diamond lives in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and writes to try and figure it all out.

Jesus didn’t save me, Lester Bangs did. When Creem put Kiss on the cover in August 1977 I stole a copy from the 7-11. I studied the text like runes and felt the scales fall from my eyes. I carved the words on my heart, especially the ones I didn’t understand; I wanted everything. After that I never missed an issue. While other kids were getting baptized I got a new name. Kids called me gay, ugly, gross. I called myself punk. They didn’t know what that was. I was ten.

It was starvation season, the middle of nowhere (Lubbock, Texas, check a map), long before the internet. The chain stores didn’t carry the records and radio stations didn’t play them. Most of the bands I loved I’d never heard.

I didn’t find a house of worship until 1980, when Ralph’s, a used record shop, opened on University Avenue. My first time there, and my second, I stared drop-jawed at records I’d only read about, never seen or heard—the Slits, Big Star, Sex Pistols and Clash bootlegs. The punk section at the back became my place of peace; I spent hours meditating on the sleeves and reading the fine print.

Ralph’s was a place of hope, rows and rows of hope, thousands of records, each one a chance for joy. It’s where I first found records by Television and Patti Smith, Richard Hell and the Velvet Underground, bits of guitar like shards of glass and voices that made me feel, not whole, exactly, but less alone.

Ralph’s was where I’d spend my last dollar after buying weed before I realized I could tuck records up the back of my shirt, under my jacket, and walk out with them. Ralph’s should’ve gone bankrupt on my thefts alone, but somehow it survived. The old location was razed years ago; now the shop carries on in a strip mall south of the Loop.

Out front, the lot’s empty. The odor of neglect, dust and mildew, greet me when I go in. The space feels cavernous, hollow, absent even ghosts. Behind the counter, two clerks watching football don’t acknowledge me. Besides the clerks I’m the only one there.

Three walls of shelves are packed floor to ceiling, too tight and suffocating. I pick a likely spot and begin. R—Reed, Ramones, Rolling Stones—and find nothing. I jump around the alphabet and search through hundreds of albums, straining for the ones above my head. I’ve never seen so many records in one place. No Kiss, no Thin Lizzy, no T. Rex, not even Bad Company, but countless records by Chicago, Kansas, and Three Dog Night. It’s a gathering of the unwanted, like any record with dignity fled long ago.

An hour in I find something, a Johnny Thunders twelve-inch. A quarter of the cover is ripped off and the vinyl’s exposed; it looks unplayed, pristine. On the cover, Johnny is dressed to kill, his expression forlorn.

A man walks in and heads for the counter. Do they have “Little Wing”by Jimi Hendrix? One of the clerks walks down an aisle and grabs a greatest hits CD. After the sale they go back to the game.

One says, “We need a coach who wants to be in West Texas.”

As if.

I hate this town.

My heart aches for the records. I save a handful—Johnny, the Kingsmen, Burt Bacharach. Back home in Austin, I wipe the dust off their jackets and add fresh inner sleeves. I hold them up and read the liner notes. I listen to each one through and file them alphabetically.

Robin Storey grew up hearing “Hitler was right” at the dinner table. She ran away from home and was adopted by a Black spiritualist church, where she spent the next decade. When it became impossible to stay, she had to find her way alone in the world.

Brian and Allen were brothers but they didn’t look it. Only separated by a year, Brian was short and skinny and Allen was tall and fat. Like I had been at the time, Allen was intent on becoming a priest. They had a corner lot with a yard that wrapped around their house on three sides, like a cupped hand holding an egg which would have been the house, only the house was of red brick, one story with a basement. I played with Brian, throwing an undersized kiddie football. We played a simple game where each of us tried to make the other drop the pass by throwing as hard as we could at close range, maybe fifteen feet, each targeting the chest, daring the other to let the ball slip through hands into the body. I didn’t have a good arm, but for a small kid Brian did. But I had beautiful soft hands, and caught pass after pass from Brian, frustrating him no matter how hard he threw, until he threw straight at my face in an effort to intimidate. My hands, however, proved impenetrable, perfect. Not a thing could get beyond them. I dreamed of being an NFL tight end, catching passes from Bart Starr, when I wasn’t blessing my congregation, or presiding over the miracle of transubstantiation. I had the body for either, long arms to raise the Eucharist and a thick trunk for blocking linebackers. I threw a little off balance, maybe two feet to the left of my target, and Brian tipped the pass incomplete, then accused me of cheating. “No, no,” I said, “I won. I won.” Allen popped his head out the screen door and invited us into the basement. “It’s time for Mass,” he said. I didn’t know what he was talking about.

            In the basement, he’d set up an altar, complete with a tablecloth that hung down over each end of the fold out table and a chalice he’d decorated himself out of a goblet. His mom had made him a vermillion vestment that he pulled over the top of his head, and with his long sleeved t-shirt, he did indeed look like a priest as he set about his interpretation of the sacred ritual. At the end of Communion, he drew actual hosts out of the goblet and placed them on our tongues. Where he got them I’ve no idea: They tasted the same, looked the same, broke the same. He must have asked our pastor or bought them from a catalogue or from the Diocese. For the wine, he used grape juice, and he drank several times in between invocations, the way he’d seen Father Ray do after the distribution of the hosts. He said we could do this whenever we wanted, but I never returned to his basement. I still consider it sacrilege.

            There was a kid who lived a couple blocks away, more Brian’s size, shorter, thinner. I’d go over to Brian’s house and his mom would tell me he was off playing with the new kid. She instructed me to go to the new kid’s house. I finally went and found them rolling marbles up a sharply pitched driveway up toward a crack that was their target. They were playing Old Fashions with irregular clay marbles, spotted and of various colors, first one into the hole got to keep the opponent’s marble. But Tomas, the new kid, wouldn’t let me play, said he didn’t like me. Walking home, I thought of Brian. Why didn’t he stand up for me, insist I played, at least give me a chance?

            One night over the Summer I heard that Brian and Tomas were heading off Okauchee Lake to fish. I said a prayer over and over. I closed my eyes and wished as hard as I could for God to intervene. I thought of the water, of sharp winds, perhaps a storm. When Brian came home, I heard Tomas had been underwater for twenty minutes and been shipped off to the Emergency Room. Days later we learned he had died.

            I didn’t tell Brian about my prayer, but when I asked him to play catch in his yard, he refused, said he didn’t want to play with me anymore. Years later, after we’d both grown and started dating a pair of twin sisters, he explained to me he’d been offended because I’d started calling him Brian the Brain. Apparently he didn’t think the transposition of letters had been clever at all. I remembered Tomas and my prayer. The stigma of God’s intervention still played upon my conscience. Was I responsible? Had God granted me the accident and the opportunity to experience shame? I knew I hadn’t caused Tomas’ death but had willed it, willed it when my own insensitivity, not his intervention, cost a friendship. I resolved to have a place for selfishness, inside the box in the basement with the ghost that wanted to kill me, the ghost I’d met when I was six, who chased me in and around a white maze in my dreams. Every six months or so when the box got too big from the ghost beating on it from the inside I’d shrink it down once again inside my head to a pinhead size and hide it in the corner of the basement where the floor was broke out in the dirt among my fears. After thirty years we moved away and I forgot about it and the ghost escaped. But by then I was too big. The ghost couldn’t smother me. I smothered the ghost, and the shame I consumed, digested and incubated into respect, forgiveness and remembrance. I remember Tomas now and wish him well where he may be.

Mark Putzi received an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin — Milwaukee in 1990. He has published fiction and poetry in numerous small press magazines including The Cape Rock, the Cream City Review, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Meniscus and Griffel. He lives in Milwaukee and works as a retail pharmacist.