Knockin' On Heaven's Door

Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door--Brian Corneliess

                I slammed the car door shut behind me and stepped onto the blacktop laughing.  “Yeah Chris, that’s a really great skill.  You should put it on your resume, you douche.”  He stepped out as well and I saw him crack a smile from across the roof of his sea -green Honda Accord.  “You know what? Maybe I will.  I can see it now.  I’ll put it under extraordinary skills:  Uncanny Ability to Operate Motor Vehicles While Under the Influence.” 

                I opened the rear door, expecting my friend Rich to step out.  Instead, I heard “Guys iss too col out there.  I’m stay here, iss warm.” 

                “Ah, Rich, you always were a lightweight.  Get out of the fucking car, its May.”  I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him up onto his feet.  He shivered.  “Oh, stop it, you pansy.”

                I paused for a moment to gaze up at the stars.  I love the stars when I’m drunk.  Unfortunately, it was a very cloudy evening, or rather, early morning, so there wasn’t much to see.  The plan was to have a few more beers and cap the night off in the playground across the street with Lauren my good friend and Chris’s romantic interest of the last few months. 

                I turned to Chris, “You guys go ahead; I’m going to give Lauren a call.  Watch Rich too; he’s pretty hammered.”  As it turned out, it wasn’t Rich I needed to be worrying about.  I took my phone out, and walked a few paces away.  Leaning up against the wall of the synagogue whose parking lot we were using, I found Lauren’s name and dialed.  It rang and rang.  After about thirty seconds, I expected to hear some message about leaving her a voicemail, but instead I heard a very different sound. 

                At first it seemed like an explosion, but as I recognized the high-pitched tapping of shattered glass hitting the ground, I knew exactly what had happened.  I ran back around the corner to see Chris standing next to a broken window, holding a large wooden piece of a picket fence.  He stood wide-eyed, and all he could muster was, “Woah.  That was loud.”

                A few hours later, the three of us sat handcuffed to the wall of the holding cell in the Rockville Centre police department.  Rich had long since passed out, and Chris seemed to think the whole thing was rather funny.  “Well, there’s nobody else in the world I’d rather be sitting across from right now, Corn.  I figure this had to happen eventually, after all the shit we’ve pulled.”

                I cracked a smile and looked up at him, shaking my head.  Chris had been my best friend since the first grade; we’d had a lot of fun together, but we weren’t exactly upstanding citizens.  I lost my train of thought, and my smile, when an important looking man threw the door open, looking angry.

                “Well, well.  Good morning boys, isn’t it?  You know, at first, I was pissed I had to get up from my nap to come deal with you punks, but now I’m excited.  You wanna know why I’m excited, jackasses?”  I shot Chris a nervous glance.  “Well, I’ll tell you anyway.  You see, right now we have our whole station down at the synagogue you fine young men decided to break into, and if we find so much as a marker or a spray paint can that shouldn’t be there, we’ll bring all three of you up on hate crime charges so fast it will blow your mind.  Three white boys from private catholic schools breaking into synagogues at 3 AM?  I can see the headlines now.  You boys try to get some sleep now, you look like shit.”

                My mind was racing.  Hate crimes?  HATE CRIMES?  Hell, even if we didn’t get convicted they’d still probably throw me out of school.  My head collapsed into my hands, and I thought about what it might be like never being able to find a steady job for the rest of my life.  Hate crimes?  How could things have possibly gotten to this point?  Three hours ago, I was just a normal suburban kid.  I went to a good school, I had good friends, and life was pretty good.  Now all that hung in the balance.  It could all be taken away from me.  Everything I had had going for me for 19 years could be gone in a matter of weeks.  I’m still not exactly sure how things ended up getting to that point, but I’m pretty sure I know how they started getting there. 

                As, I started to fade into sleep a little later, the image came rushing back to me, just as it had so many times before.  I was just a small boy, sitting in the very first pew of an intimidating cathedral.  The year was 1996.  I couldn’t bring myself to watch what was happening on the altar, so instead I studied   the cathedral’s odd ceiling, some two hundred feet above my head.  As I squinted, I couldn’t help but hear a familiar sounding voice begin to speak from somewhere in front of me.  It was Mike Agovino, one of my father’s buddies.

                “Glenn was my best friend.  I loved him like a brother.  I’m going to try to share a story about the day I realized what kind of man he was…”  The ceiling was checkered off into little squares of very distinct colors.  “…I had worked with him for a few months, and we had always gotten along very well.  But this particular time, we were on a business trip in Cleveland, heading home…”  I remembered hearing somewhere that the tiles were colored the way they were to accentuate the stained glass windows.  I didn’t get it.  “…Our flight was boarding, scheduled to take off in five minutes.  But he was nowhere to be found.  I ran all over that terminal until I finally found him at a pay phone…”  It reminded me of something, seeing the tiles like that.  I couldn’t quite place it.  “…He refused to get off the phone with his young daughter, Caitlin, who was explaining to him why she had received her first ‘B’.  We missed the flight because his daughter’s grades in school were just that important to him…”  A Rubik’s cube.  That’s what the ceiling reminded me of.  If you flattened all the sides of a Rubik’s cube, it would look like this ceiling.  “That day made me realize just how much Glenn valued his family.  And that’s how I’ll always remember him.”

                When the funeral was over, we got up and I held my sister Caitlin’s hand as we processed down the aisle towards the exit.  Just as we passed the last pew, I looked over to my right and saw my Uncle John watching my younger brother, Patrick.  He was down on all fours, perfectly content to be playing with plastic dinosaurs. 

                I awoke back in the holding cell.  I couldn’t have been asleep for very long.  It isn’t easy to get comfortable when you’re handcuffed to a wall.  They never really show that on CSI, that handcuffs genuinely hurt.  I’d never realized just how much I move my wrists until I couldn’t anymore.  I sat up and rubbed them a little before I realized that I really didn’t care about the bruise. The reality of my situation came crashing back down on me like a wave tossing little kids around in the ocean. 

                I couldn’t stop thinking about the idea of being convicted of a hate crime.  The words stuck in my head.  I just couldn’t believe it.  Me, convicted of a hate crime against Jews.  I’m Catholic, but I have Jewish friends.  I don’t have anything against Jews.  Hell, I was at Auschwitz just last summer!  I witnessed first-hand all the atrocities of that place!  I couldn’t possibly commit a hate crime! Could they really be putting me in the same boat as Hitler? 

                Unfortunately, this wasn’t the first time I had ended up in trouble with the law.  The summer before my senior year of high school, when I was 17, three of my friends and I took a road trip down to Hersey, PA to see Dave Matthews Band and OAR play a concert there.  We had gotten a hotel room for the night, and it all seemed like it was going to be a great night.  We had picked up four twelve packs and a three bottles of Long Island Iced Teas for the trip.  We arrived at the hotel around two or three in the afternoon, and the concert wasn’t scheduled to start until eight.  So, like any group of teenage kids left unattended for the night, we started drinking.  Heavily.  After a few hours of beer pong, the twelve packs were all empty, and we were all drunk. We decided to grab a cab and start to head over to the concert grounds.  When we got there, we met up with some fellow Long Islanders who we happened to know in the parking lot.  They were tailgating and invited us to join.  We sat in the backseat of my friends Honda Odyssey and started working on the LITs.  About then, my memory started to get fuzzy, but I do remember successfully sneaking the rest of the booze into the concert.  It was a huge stadium, full of drunk and high teenagers wearing polo shirts and flip flops.  The last thing I can remember is OAR coming onstage, and beginning their first song. 

                Next thing I knew, I was in the back of a cop car.  The officer was in the front seat, filling out forms.  He turned around and said,  

“Oh, you’re awake.  Here you go.” He reached back and handed me two sheets of paper.

                I mumbled something incoherent in his direction. 

                “Yeah, kid, I’d get out of here before you get yourself into anymore trouble.”

I was so drunk that I quickly lost the papers, but I found out the next morning that they were tickets, one for public drunkenness, and the other for underage drinking.  Apparently, I had passed out on the ground, and someone had brought me to the nurse’s station because my friends were too drunk to help me.  I had to pay over 300 dollars in fines, and my license was suspended in the state of Pennslyvania.  I’ll never forget the disappointed look on my mother’s face when I arrived home the next day.  She just shook her head and stared at me.  I would’ve rather been screamed at. 

                 The memory of that night was fresh in my mind as I began to drift off to sleep again.  Suddenly, in my head, I was eight again.  This time, I was sitting in a doctor’s office.    It was about two months after the funeral, a very gloomy March day in Baltimore.  My mom had insisted that we travel so far from home so that we could see the best doctors at Johns Hopkins.  Ours was named Dr. Dietz, and he finally came into the room after we had been waiting for about twenty minutes.  He was a strange looking man at first, he was balding, but had thick grey hair on the sides of his head, and he wore his glasses at the very tip of his nose.  I didn’t like him at first, but I warmed up to him once he started talking. 

                “Sorry to keep you waiting, guys.  My neighbors just called, they found my dog running loose again.  I’m telling you that girl is smart.  We have those electric fences, and if she gets close enough to it, the collar will start beeping at her to warn her, but it won’t shock til she crosses the border.  So she creeps up slowly to the fence, until she’s right up next to it and the thing starts beeping like crazy.  Then she lies down there, and takes a nap, until the damn thing’s battery runs out and she can run free.  Damn dog is smarter than I am.  But anyway, on to you guys.” He cleared his throat and took a quick glance around the room.  “I’m afraid I have some good news and some bad news.  Which do you want first?”

                My mom grimaced and, closing her eyes, said “The good news first.  Please, I hope its good enough.” 

                “Well, the good news is that Caitlin has a clean bill of health.  Her aorta is perfectly well within the normal range, and she shows no signs of inheriting her father’s condition.”

                “Oh, thank God.  And … the bad news?”

                “Well, I’m afraid the same cannot be said of the two boys.  Their aortas are dilated beyond the normal range.  If we left them alone, their aortas would continue to grow and grow, until they simply burst, like Glenn’s did.”

                My mother gave an audible gasp.

                “However, we caught it early, and it is certainly treatable.  I’m going to start them both on beta blockers.  500 mg twice a day.  That should keep them under control.  They should be able to lead very normal lives.  However, until we can get the boys’ aortas back within the normal range, they’re going to need to refrain from certain activities.  To avoid putting stress on their hearts, we need to keep them away from any kind of heavy lifting, and they’ll have to stay away from any sports with lots of running or heavy contact.  So no football, lacrosse, basketball, or soccer.  I’d say that baseball and swimming would probably be OK.  And I want to see them once a year to check in and see how things are going.  I know this is a lot to take in, but I really am glad we caught this early enough and the boys should live long and healthy lives.” 

                I can remember thinking that I wished he had just stuck to the story about the dogs. 

                I awoke once again.  A check of my watch told me that amazingly it was ten o’ clock in the morning.  Chris and Rich were awake as well. 

                “Is it really 10 AM?” I asked. 

                “Yeah, man.  We’ve been here over seven hours.” Chris answered.

                I let out a long yawn, and was trying to think of what to say next when first cop entered again, the one who gave us the speech about getting him out of bed and hate crimes.  He looked almost disappointed. 

                “Listen boys, we didn’t find enough evidence to support charging any of you with hate crimes.  We’re wrapping up the paperwork right now,” and pointing one finger at Rich and one finger at me said, “and charging you two with Misdemeanor Trespassing.  Chris, you get Misdemeanor Trespassing and Criminal Mischief because you went into the building.  We should have you out of here within an hour.”  He was gone as quickly as he had come.

                My mind was finally able to relax, if only just a little.  The waves of despair had finally begun to let up.  I could think clearly for the first time all night, about something other than how my life was over.  My name was not going to go down in history with Hitler’s.  Misdemeanor Trespassing?  That didn’t sound all that bad to me.  Sure, there would be hell to pay at home with my mother, but it would be nothing compared to what I would have faced with a hate crime.  For the first time all night, I let myself rest peacefully. 

                Once more, I was a small boy.  It was December 11, 1995.  My father’s last birthday, and his 39^th.  We had just finished an intimate family dinner in our home in Rockville Centre, NY.  We have a quaint little brick house with a fireplace and all on a dead-end street.  We were outside in the brisk air, and my father was pitting my sister against me in a very spirited game of touch football.  He got down on one knee and pulled me in close to him. 

                “Ok, tiger, do you know what a button-hook is?” 

                I looked back at him, befuddled. 

                Laughing, he drew a route for me to run on the football with his finger as he explained, “Ok, I want you to line up on the right, over there, and run real hard forward for seven steps, and then turn around really fast and the ball will be there waiting for you to catch it.  She’ll never see it coming.  You ready?”

                We ran that play so well that I could’ve sworn I was Jerry Rice to my father’s Steve Young.  I scored a touchdown, and he was on me in seconds, spinning me around and around on his shoulders.  I felt truly loved.  But mostly, I felt safe, like nothing in the world could ever take this amazing feeling, this primal joy, caused by the simplest of games, away from me.  I never could have guessed that all it would take was an artery, less than an inch wide. 

                Later that night, after Patrick had been put to sleep, the four of us sat in front of a warm fire in our living room.  I lay down on our thick, ugly yellow carpet and watched the shadows of the flame dance across the ceiling.  Just as my eyelids began to feel heavy, I heard the high-pitched voice that my sister only used when she was trying to get something she really wanted. 

                ‘Pleaaaaaaseeee, daddy.  Just one song, and then we’ll go to bed.”

                My father was a musical man, he always had been.  He worked as a disc jockey on the radio in New York City, and played a pretty decent guitar himself.  Our house was filled with old vinyl albums and a few scattered song books.  He was a huge Bob Dylan fan.  Back then, I never understood why. 

                “OK, little girl, I’ll play one song. But go put your PJ’s on and brush your teeth first.  Take your brother too.”

                “Come on, Bri!”  She grabbed my hand and the two of us practically flew up the stairs.  We went off into our separate rooms, and I was careful not to wake Patrick up.  I picked out my favorite set of Mets pajamas.  At that point the pants only had three holes in them.  I found my sister back out in the hallway and gave her the universal “Shhh!” sign with my finger over my mouth as we crept back down the stairs. 

                As we rounded the corner, I saw my father as I would always remember him, even years later.  He sat Indian style, in front of the fire.  Through his thick glasses, I could see his eyes were closed as he gently rocked his head back and forth, trying to get the tuning just right.  His old Gibson acoustic sat in his lap, and his fingers ran up and down the fret board so smoothly, it seemed almost to be just another part of his body.  The man and the instrument both found homes in each other. 

                Caitlin and I sat on the couch directly across from him, and cuddled up comfortably with our mom.  We waited patiently, until he finally opened his eyes and we all knew he was ready.  I watched carefully as he began to strum ever so slowly with his right hand, while the digits of his left moved gracefully along the guitar’s strings, stopping in each place for only a moment.  The twang of the individual strings blended together beautifully as my father again closed his eyes and began to hum, summoning his inner Dylan.  Slowly, he began. 

                “Mama take this badge off of me … I can’t use it anymore … it’s getting dark, too dark to see … I feel I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door.  Knock-knock-knockin’ on heaven’s door…” 

                Someone was shaking me.  I let out a moan and forced my groggy eyes open. 

                “Corn, come on man, get up.  They’re finally letting us out of this place.”

                As I sat up there were three officers in the cell.  One of them uncuffed me, and the six of us walked around to the front of the station.  It was around noon.  We were all officially charged, and given documents ordering us to show up in court two weeks later to be arraigned.  None of the information really hit home with me.  I just needed to get out of that place.  Finally, I signed some papers, and we were all free to go.  I stepped outside, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath of fresh air. 

                “You need a ride home?” Chris offered.

                “No man, I think I’m gonna walk.”

                “You sure, dude?”

                “Yeah, I’ll give you a call later.”  He shrugged and walked around of the back of the station to retrieve his car. 

                I had a lot to think about.  I stuck my hands in the pockets of my shorts, and started walking in the opposite direction of my house.  I’d spent a lot more time thinking about my dad during the previous night than I had in a long time.  I thought back, trying to figure out what had happened to me since then, since my father’s death, and wondering why it had hit me so strongly on that night in particular. 

                For years when I was a kid, I avoided the topic like the plague.  Mom sent me see a therapist once a week for awhile.  But she always asked me what I wanted to do, and we played a lot of board games instead of talking about death.  I think that lasted about two months.  After that I think I started becoming numb.  I didn’t want to feel the pain anymore, and I think the only way I knew how to do that was to stop feeling anything at all.  So I went numb.  I never talked about it to anyone.  Not even my family.  They tried to get me to talk about dad, but I did as little as possible. 

                I was never one of the most popular kids in school, and I had very few close friends.  I never talked to them about it either.  I was pretty smart, smart enough to get by without ever caring too much or trying too hard.  In fact, I’m not totally convinced that I’ve ever truly applied myself fully to anything.      Then, when high school hit, I discovered alcohol.  I drank and drank, and got myself into trouble more than a few times.  It was a slippery slope that had led me straight here, to handcuffs. 

                In that moment, walking down a street in my hometown that I’d walked down a thousand times before, I knew something new.  I knew my father was looking down on me from somewhere, ashamed of his son.  He was the best person I’d ever known.  And I’d been letting him down for most of my life.  I knew I had to change.  I had no idea how or where to start, but I knew I had to change.  And I think that was enough.  I turned around, headed back home to my family, and started humming a familiar Dylan tune.