Sorting Through The Past: Spring Cleaning

Three years ago, pretty much right around this time of the year, I got a call from my Pops. "Mike, I need you and your sister to come down and give me a hand with a project as soon as you've got a free weekend." Well, it just so happened that I had a free weekend, and so did Christa, so down to the hometown we ventured. As soon as we walked in, the old man sprung his project on us. We were going to go through the entire house and more specifically all of our stuff that was still down there, old toys, old clothes, sporting equipment books and what was known as by old friend, former NFL player Chuck Ferraro who owned the legendary Thirdhand Shoppe antique store in Price, Junque. In a word, stuff. We acquired too much of it over the years and a 1600 square foot house chock full of it was too much for one old guy contemplating retirement to have to deal with. Plus, the old homestead needed some work, new carpets, paint, and other assorted projects and our unorganized clutter was definitely in the way and taking up way too much room.

Stately Nickas Manor!

 "Keep what you want, but find a place that makes sense for it, or take it with you," he said. 

Now, granted there's a lot of that nature vs. nurture battle involved, but I firmly believe that there's such thing as a "hoarder gene." And while it never got to the point where she needed a television show to come in and clean up her house, my Grandmother up in Alaska definitely fostered something like it. I can't really blame her though, she grew up in Oklahoma and Texas during the Great Depression. When you don't have anything, you don't throw anything that can be of use away. And once her and my Pappy established themselves and had some space, that never really left her. It was a sad occasion, but one of my favorite stories concerns the day right after her funeral ten years ago. My mom, Aunt Amy, Uncle Didier, Aunt LaJuana, quite a few of my cousins, my sister and I were all gathered in her frozen house in Anchorage. On the TV were some old home movies, I believe showcasing my mother's sixth birthday. At that moment, we were also going through my Bamma's beautiful antique buffet cabinet. We found a pack of paper party plates buried deep in one of the drawers. The exact same package of party plates that were sitting on the table in the home movie that was shot 46 years prior! I also found some expired food in the pantry that I'd bought to cook my Bamma a meal the last time I'd been to Alaska to visit, six years previously.

Makin' a mess since 1978!

So yeah, I kind of understand the hoarder gene. And even though I'm fully aware of it now, I carried a lot of those same tendencies over the years. When I finally got my own bedroom in the house at age 7, the organization of my room tended to range from "random piles of stuff with a path to the bed, closet and dresser" to "just pulled the pin, tossed a grenade in and shut the door" with occasional periods of relative organization when buddies or that cute girl would come over to hang out. Those didn't happen very often. Thankfully, the adulthood gene overrode the clutter during the "Dorm Days." And by "adulthood" I mean that I was going to be living with and around strangers now and I don't want them to think I was slovenly in other areas of life as well. But, and you can ask anyone I roomed with in college, I was definitely kind of a packrat, taking basically everything I could with me to school. Only this time, I kept it organized. My dorm room was still the equivalent of cramming twenty pounds of shit into a ten pound bag. But hey, you never knew when you might need that thing. Whatever that thing happened to be even if it happened to be a copy of the Dirty Looks album "Blow My Fuse" on CD.

In 2007, after living in each of Westminster's "Apartment-Style" dorms and several different apartments and houses, I moved into my smallest place yet, a tiny little condo adjacent to the University of Utah campus. It was great to be able to get from bed to work at the UGC in about ten minutes flat, but the size of the place really forced me to downsize my life. A storage unit was my friend! And I either outright shitcanned or donated a metric ton of stuff. It felt pretty good, and I was able to sort of boil things down to the essentials. Which is to say, I still had way too much shit.

Still lost to time...

Anyway, back to my Pop's house, February 2013. We dive in to the old family room, which at one point was converted to a bedroom for the ten minutes my older sister came to live with us years ago, and has since become kind of a storage catch-all. It was an added-on room with no heat which is to say, we were indoors, bundled up, freezing our asses off and hard at work tearing through years of clutter. I had two things that I really wanted to find. One was the only poster I had on my wall when I was a really little kid. My dad was a trucker, along with my grandpa they owned their own trucking company and they'd always get sent these badass promotional posters from Peterbilt. Usually they featured some half-naked lady looking like the apocalypse just hit (picture the KISS, "Lick It Up" video) draped across the engine cover of a semi. But this poster I had just had the front of a truck with Johnny Cash standing next to it and the words "MIDNIGHT SPECIAL" emblazoned across the bottom. OUTLAW COUNTRY! The other, and this is pretty dumb, was a picture of me that my entire second-grade class drew of me and signed on my birthday. I always loved second-grade because that was the first time certain synapses finally clicked together in my brain and I started to learn to think critically. Sadly, the drinking I did during the Dorm Days destroyed the brain cells that helped me to remember names of classmates from that far back and I've often wondered what we've all grown up to be.

Yes ladies, I'm single!

I came across some great stuff. My very first paycheck stub in the golf business (a career now going on 22 years!) for $54.19 pre-tax! Thank god I make more now. Wait, what is that? Inflation? Shit. An unusually large collection of old mixtapes. If only I still had something to play them on. And what the hell am I doing putting Ministry and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons on the same mixtape anyway? At least they weren't 8-tracks. Those were in my dad's box.

I also found several boxes full of old notebooks from high school and college classes. I flipped through them and found all of my old class notes, and quite a bit of my old writing. While perusing these tomes, the only thing I could think of was, "Jesus Christ Nickas, if any of your teachers and professors ever saw an example of your note-taking, there's no chance any of them would have ever passed you." Goddamn, you could even see exactly the spots where I'd doze off (probably hungover) in class because suddenly my already shitty handwriting would get smaller and smaller and just end up with a line. My writing projects weren't much better! Hell, you're reading this right now, imagine how bad it was before I ever developed a style and a voice?! I barely have that now! I would've killed it though for my heavy metal band, Superman, Chicago Bears and New York Yankees logo drawing talents. I had that shit on lockdown. It was all garbage, and I couldn't believe I had saved any of it. Into the back of my Pop's Dodge truck they went.

1st Place in the 3-Legged Race: John Holmes

For all the laughs I was having, my sister was having a tough time with this. I had a pretty good idea that we were going to be doing this before we left Salt Lake. All this going through old shit. And I guess she kind of felt blindsided. She wasn't ready to do this yet, but she did it anyway, and I knew it was bothering her. In my dad's always gentle way, he explained that it would be "best to do this now and not after he was gone. If for no other reason that at least there's three of us." I didn't really want to hear that either, but it makes sense and it had to be done. We eventually finished the weekend putting a pretty sizeable dent in that storage room and the basement. I was proud of her. As Christa and I drove back up to Salt Lake, I got a call from our landlord. This was never a good sign, bad news was afoot, because for the third place we'd lived in a row, they had decided to sell the place. We were going to have to move again.

Lawrence Taylor obviously took a run at
Quarterback He-Man's Knees

A week later, we still had snow on the ground out at Rose Park (JUST LIKE NOW!) so I trekked solo back down to Price to finish the job, or come close to it. More un-needed treasure ventured back into my life in a flood. Old toys, ribbons and awards from as far back as my elementary school days, broken model cars, board games missing pieces, more shitty writing, bags of clothes and shoes. Memories of times past, good and bad, optomism and wasted potential passed across the table. And almost all of it ended up in the trash or donate pile. Ebay would've been an option if any of it was in any kind of decent condition, but years of neglect had taken its toll. At least some of the toys could still be of use to kids, and since that ship has clearly sailed in my case we donated them to the Children's Justice Center. Hopefully some of my old shit gave them some enjoyment, god knows, they needed it a lot more than I did. I hope it did some good.

I never did find either of my "holy grails." Those were lost to either time, my folk's divorce, or a forgotten previous attempt to do the very thing we had just done. But by the end of the weekend, my dad finally had a handle on things around his house and I had downsized most of my old stuff in a major way. As weird as it sounds, it was totally cathartic. The whole process was liberating. You'd find something, hold it in your hands, think a little about a memory of it, have a little flashback, and finally say goodbye. Driving back up "over the hill" to Salt Lick that Sunday night, I actually felt great. Like I'd finally cut the cord to the type person that I used to be and ready to embrace whatever the future was going to throw at me and be adaptable to whatever curve-ball life could throw at me.

Epilogue: We decided that last move was going to be the last one for awhile. So we bought a house. Now I've got a ton of space that I can't wait to fill with stuff!

Epilogue II: Only kidding.

Epilogue III: Mostly, I guess...

Blackout Summer In The USA - Another Dorm-Days Flashback

This week's Dorm Days Flashback takes us all the way back to the Summer of 2001. At the time I was working at a little golf course on the west side of Salt Lick known as Rose Park. Oddly enough, a month ago, I just started a new job at that familiar little golf course on the west side of Salt Lick known as Rose Park. Like a lot of things in my life, it seems like I take a long and arduous journey just to get back to where I started. But like I always say, it doesn't matter what happens to me as long as I get a story out of it. The story of how I just ended up back at Rose Park will be told at a different time, but to tide you over until then, here's a twisted look back to my first summer away from home.

"Blackout Summer In The USA"
(June 2001)
Originally posted to the old blog in February 2006

It was the summer of 2001, and it was a scorcher. During the summer the only kids still living on campus were people enrolled at least full time, or worked a campus job for ten hours per week. I had a job at a local golf course in Salt Lake, Rose Park, and really did not want to quit and return to Price for the summer. So I got Coach Connor to sign off on ten hours per week as a personal assistant to his staff, and got to stay on campus. VodkaRob, in a similar situation, didn’t feel like returning to his small hometown as well, so he kept his campus job. Without school and less responsibility than ever, could VodkaRob and I, the remaining members of Room 302, manage not to party ourselves to death over the summer? Could we avoid pissing off the administration and getting kicked out? Would we make some new friends? These are all questions hanging over our heads as we cruised into my favorite season of the year.

The administration’s solution, at least to the second question, was to split us up. They wanted to “keep an eye” on all of us summer stragglers, so they confined every on-campus resident to a new building, Residence Hall 4. VodkaRob and I drew different apartments on the ground floor of the new building, and each had five new roommates to get acquainted with. Rob, on the basis of his prior military affiliation ended up with a rowdy bunch of Naval ROTC kids. I ended up with a crew of hard partying, occasionally womanizing members of our Griffin Soccer team. I really can’t stand soccer, but these guys were pretty cool. And considering they were touring the country with various clubs and attending camps and clinics, I pretty much had the apartment to myself, which was a strange place in itself.

I ended up in the ADA compliant room. This meant that the cupboards and appliances in the kitchen were lower as were the sinks in bathroom. For the first time since I quit getting taller at age 13, I actually felt tall! But the best part of all was the bench in the shower, and detachable massaging shower-head. As sore as I’d be when I’d either return home from a golf tournament or unable to stay on two feet due to a few too many, at least I could relax a little bit getting cleaned up.

After returning home from a hard day at work with darkness falling over the city, happy hour would begin, and Residence Hall 4 would spring to life, people starting their own engines, getting ready to hit the town, or tying one on at home. VodkaRob and I along with whoever wanted to join us would load up a little mini cooler with various alcoholic beverages and hold court on a picnic table out in the main quad. While liquor was allowed in the dorms, it was pretty taboo to have it outside of the rooms. But this restraint was either lifted or overlooked that summer. It was like a little outdoor version of Cheers every night, as our group would shoot the shit and relax in the cooling evening air. Once in awhile we would drag out the electric guitars and do our best GN’R impression out there to the delight of no one in particular. Maybe that is what retirement will be like.

It was on one particular Wednesday night that our story takes place. I was deep in preparation for one last run at qualifying for the Utah State Amateur Golf Championship. The qualifier that particular year happened to be in my hometown of Price, so I was prepared to leave nothing to chance as far as getting in. I’d been practicing for hours a day the few weeks prior, before and after work, during my lunch break, hell, I’d even tap two foot putts in the hallway for an hour every night before I went to bed. I was ready, and that particular Wednesday I’d played in my final competitive tune-up, in an 8-man team match for Rose Park against our hated rivals from Mountain View at their home course. I fired a 3-under par 69 on my way to thoroughly destroying my opponent, the son of a Senior PGA Tour star going six holes up with five to play. I needed to unwind before I left town for one last day of preparation down home in Price.

I returned to the school at approximately 9:00 pm that evening. Now, the all new Residence Hall 5 was currently under construction on top of our usual parking lot, so we had to park all the way on the other end of campus. As soon as I got out of my truck I heard the concussive BOOM of an explosion in the distance and started hearing sirens. “Jesus, that sounds like its right in the neighborhood” I thought to myself, not noticing that the normally brilliantly lit up campus was much darker than normal. I grabbed my gear and started trekking across the school grounds. When I reached the dorm quad to find that the fellas had already started happy hour without me.

“A substation bit the dust homey! The power is out dude.” Mikey Hip-hop, a lanky, blond haired, blue eyed kid in a FUBU shirt, and one of VodkaRob’s new roommates hollered my way as I crossed the bridge with my golf bag. “It doesn't look like you boys are jammin’ tonight.”

“I guess not,” I said sorely, “Rob, you got any vodka?”

“Does the Pope shit in the woods?” He replied. I stowed my gear into my room, lit a couple of peach candles and hit the shower to pound a can of Fosters to warm up. It was time to unwind; we were getting seriously tanked tonight, in the dark.

I grabbed two of my commemorative Westminster College glasses, a quart of half and half, my bottle of Kahlua Especial, and a flashlight and picked my way through the dark down to VodkaRob’s apartment. I was currently in my The Big Lebowski, white Russian phase. But as usual I overdid everything. I preferred my stuff in a big glass. Mixing drinks in the dark is no small task, and these were pretty damn stout. We went back outside where pretty much the entire dorm was hanging out on the grass around the fire-pit. Somebody brought out a battery powered tape player and we had a little impromptu party in the dark.

After about two hours and several trips back into the dorm for refills (couldn’t let the milk spoil!), we heard the muffled sound of the generators kick back on and the lights flickered back on dimly. As I stood up, it hit me. My eyes blurred, and my legs felt like spaghetti. I looked at VodkaRob and slurred, “Man, I’m fucked=up. But I haven’t had more than I usually have.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you, all I had was Stolichnaya 120. It’s a little more powerful than Skyy.” VodkaRob said matter-of-factly as he downed the remainder of his whiskey sour.

“Great.” I thought as a bunch of us made our way down to Team Navy’s apartment. Rico, another one of VodkaRob’s roommates opened the door.

“Dudes, check it out, my buddy sent me some funny videos!” he said as he giddily dropped a DVD into the player in the main area of the apartment. This kid evidently was some kind of porno connoisseur, as about six of us dudes and three girls were treated to this sick bastard’s new favorite title, “Gag-Factor 8.” The women featured in this particularly degrading, yet humorously titled piece of verite’ seemingly enjoyed fellatio so much they would vomit during the process. Fucking heinous. But most of us were so destroyed that we just kind of stared blankly. The room started to spin, and I excused myself to use the john.

When I returned Rico and his collection had disappeared, and all that were left were VodkaRob, Mikey Hip-hop, and a couple of other guys named Chad and Jeff were talking with the lone remaining female in the room, some gal with frizzy blonde hair named Monique. “Sorry fellas, I think I passed out in there.” I said as I noticed that about a half hour had passed since I went in. I had blacked out.

“S’cool homey! We was just discussin’ some fly art yo!” Mikey Hip-hop shouted, maybe a little too loud as I snagged a beer and sat in the big chair.

“Oh really,” I said, suddenly interested in something besides finding the bottom of my bottle. I do enjoy art very much, especially the really weird shit like Van Gogh, Basquiat, The Dali’ and Picasso. Someday I want to be able to afford some good paintings, not only can they be an interesting conversation piece, but it’s one hell of an investment as well. Monique talked about some of the stuff she had done, and it sounded like it was up my alley. She specialized in canvas paintings with different materials other than paint. “Like what?” I asked. Hey, inquiring minds wanted to know.

“Oh, foods, cleaning supplies, biologicals.” She said.

“Biologicals?” VodkaRob inquired.

“Yeah, plant, animal, and human fluids. It’s been especially difficult getting approval for my latest project.”

“Which is?” I asked, my curiosity peaked.

“It’s a commentary on the misogyny of college age men and their attitudes toward any artistic expression of powerful females inside of the artistic medium.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Chad asked.

“Well, in layman’s terms, I’ve painted a female figure, and I’m going to get five college guys to ejaculate on the canvas and shine it under a black light.”

As completely obliterated as I was, it actually seemed like a sensible idea to me until I looked over and saw the horrified look on VodkaRob’s face. And then it hit me. There are five of us dudes in here right now; I think this crazy woman is propositioning us. When Hip-hop enthusiastically volunteered to do it, I knew it was a bad idea. “What the fuck are you thinking?” I asked myself, and then the room started to spin again. Time to bail. “Sorry folks, I’ve got a long drive tomorrow morning, it’s time for me to retire.” I like weird shit, but not that fucking weird.

I walked back down the main hallway to my apartment, and paused about halfway through and took a knee to gather myself. “Nickas, This shit is getting beyond out of control You better lock it up before you do something really dumb that will ruin your already less-than-stellar reputation.” I thought to myself as I willed myself the rest of the way down the hallway. I managed to choke down two large glasses of water without throwing up to lessen the hangover, and hit the sheets.

The trip home the next day was mostly uneventful; I had a tremendous headache and played like shit during my practice round. I shot a 7-over par 77 on the course I’d played hundreds of times as a kid. My dad and I went down to his old bar, the Savoy, for a beer after dinner. “You all right?” he asked, “you looked like shit out there today.”

“Dad, I think I’ve been living a little too hard lately. I’ve got to reel myself in a little bit,” I said, reluctant to get into specifics.

“You’re not doing any drugs or anything, are you?” he asked.

“No, but I have been drinking a little too much lately. It’s not messing with my job or the way I’m playing or anything, but I can see how things might get out of control if I don’t rein it in.” Unbeknown to my dad, I’d gone through a phase in my mid teens where I kinda lost it, and it seriously messed my grades as well as some relationships with family and friends. It took a lot of hard work in the years since to get things back under control and become the real Nickas again. “I just don’t want to do anything stupid.”

“Well, do what you have to do. You know what you want out of life, if it doesn’t happen, the only one you have to blame is yourself. Just don’t let it bother your schoolwork when that starts again, or then I have a problem too.” Things may not have turned out the way he imagined in his life, but as far as life smarts go, my old man is freaking Einstein. He did not say anything I did not already know, but just hearing it from somebody who had been there in his own past made me feel a lot better.

The next day I did not play especially spectacular. My grandparents and great aunt came out to watch my first few holes, the first time they had ever seen me play competitively. I stayed steady enough until the 18^th hole but I didn’t think it was going to be good enough to qualify, when one of the tournament officials asked each of us in our group where we sat. “I’m at 3-over right now,” I replied.

“Mr. Nickas, it would do you some good to get a birdie on this last hole.”

“Well, thanks for that. No pressure or anything.” I thought to myself as I stepped to the tee and crushed the piss out the ball, but pulled it a little left. It looked like it was about fifteen yards left of the green, but in the rough on the short, par 4. Everybody else in the group had laid-up off the tee with iron shots, meaning they played their approaches first. This gave me a little extra time to think over my own shot, a pitch out of a semi-buried lie in the tall grass. “Shot of your life dude,” I thought to myself as I drew the club back. The ball felt good coming off the club, it landed about halfway to the hole on the green and rolled smoothly over the ridge to the back pin location settling about twenty-four inches from the cup. I made the longest two footer of my entire life, and managed to qualify for the State Amateur by a single shot. Despite all of my problems, I had managed to become one of the 75 best amateur players in the state.

Qualifying for that tournament gave me something new to focus on. VodkaRob went to Oregon for a couple of weeks to see his lady-friend, which afforded me the chance to take a little break. Not that it was his fault or anything, it was all on me, but I had the chance to sink my mind back into my work and my game. That’s not to say we gave up the good times completely, but it never got to the point where I considered spunking on a painter’s canvas a reasonable idea ever again.