It’s a balmy 77 degrees this morning, expected to rocket into the 90s within a few hours. There’s alot going on in the area but chances are I’ll skip most of it. The heat, the crowds, and the hoopla seem to have much less appeal with each passing year. There’s a Sopranos marathon being shown on A&E and something tells me I’ll probably be watching it off and on and reading up on writing screenplays until after sunset.

Memorial Day to me, for whatever reason, always comes with a combination of optimistic Summer expectations and a hint of reflective melancholy for simpler times and those who couldn’t be here. Of course there are marches here and there to honor the fallen vets but what I never hear about are the other casualties of war — some of the vets who returned psychologically and emotionally scarred from putting their lives on the line and their families and marriages that ultimately paid the price.

I think back to Memorial Day weekend, 1975. My father was a Chief Petty Officer on the USS Belknap at the time. He was in his early 30s and most of the guys under his command were in their late teens to early 20s. That weekend he decided to have a cookout and invite all his friends, my adopted uncles and aunts, and his guys. Everyone partied like, well, like sailors. Blow-out afros, women wearing shorts and skirts with pretty legs, and dudes with open-chest shirts with most of the buttons undone. Funk, Jazz and Soul music seemed to be everywhere I went, inside and out. Beer and booze was flowing. Anything that ever had feathers, fins or hooves ended up on the grill.  There were even a few people smoking joints here and there, including enlisted men and a couple of people I’d swear were officers at the time. As some of the guys got nice and wasted, they began to relive sea stories about their collective adventures while on shore leave in different countries. I remember that in more than a few of the tales there was a drunken brawl of some sort and my father would end up jumping into it to pull his guys out of the fire, get them safely back to the ship, or in some other way scramble to pull one of them out of trouble. By that time they didn’t care that I was a 6-year old kid hanging out listening to the unadulterated mayhem of grown folks, although anytime my mother or father walked up on a conversation they’d send me to my room. Once they were gone I would sneak back in to listen to their stories, and they had no problem telling them with me around, almost as if I was a little brother in some strange way out of respect for my father. The next morning I remember walking downstairs to watch PBS, the only pre-cable TV source of children’s shows on a Sunday, and discovered that most of his guys had just passed out wherever they found a spot — on the floor, on the couches, in chairs, in doorways, and even on the patio.

I don’t remember whether it was days or weeks later but the next thing I recall is the Belknap heading back out to sea for what seemed like it would be forever. Unlike today where there’s instant communication through the Internet, I remember we, as in Navy families, were lucky if we could speak to our loved ones once every month or so. Since a 10-minute international phone call was more expensive than some utility bills, letters were the cheapest way to go. The seasons had gone from Summer to Fall. Thanksgiving was a few days away. My mother, little brother Jason and I were over at Aunt Montrose’s house. Jason and I were downstairs playing and watching TV when a news bulletin flashed across the screen, something involving the Belknap. I didn’t fully understand what was being said but it also involved The John F Kennedy and I could tell by the news anchor’s expression that it wasn’t good. When I ran upstairs to tell the adults they thought I had seen one of the “Bicentennial Minutes”, on which the Belknap was supposed to be featured at some point. I kept repeating that it wasn’t one of the Bicentennial Minutes and that something bad had happened. My adamant attempts to get them to take me seriously were brushed off as the mistaken musings of a then 7-year old boy. The problem was that I didn’t catch all of news cast to repeat it verbatim. Had I remembered the word “collision” it would have put everything into perspective.

As it turned out, the U.S.S. Belknap (a guided missile cruiser) and the U.S.S. John F Kennedy (a supercarrier, the largest of the aircraft carriers) had collided just off the coast of Sicily, Italy. A few days had passed before we got confirmation that my father was alive and well. Soon after that all the men were flown back to one of the local Naval bases. I was the first to run up and jump into my father’s arms and, somehow, that was the first time I’d sensed that he wasn’t the same man he was when he left. In the days and months to come I learned that it was my father’s men were on watch that night and were the first to begin fighting the fires when it happened. They also comprised most of the seven casualties on the Belknap side, many of the very same faces that had been partying at the house that past Memorial Day.

These days, the doctors probably would have diagnosed my father and many others from that fateful trip with some form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder shortly after they returned home. I’m almost positive of this because my father was never the same after that. Without getting too deep with the family dirty laundry, a few years later my parents separated, the beginning of a long ugly divorce and my brothers and I growing up alienated from our father for years. Echoes of those times constantly remind me that every military casualty has collateral damage, sometimes that carries on for years, the kind that is rarely acknowledged at the parades.

My father rescued the Ship’s Bell from the wreckage, smuggled it back stateside, had it acid-dipped and re-engraved, and placed it inside of a custom-made maple cabinet. Along with the court marshal of Captain Shaffer, the Navy searched high and low for the bell amidst rumors and speculation. As far as I know, the missing Belknap bell is probably among one of the US Navy’s longest running unsolved mysteries. Outside of maybe answering a question or two about the incident itself, my father never talked about the fires or his lost comrades again. Their memories reside in the bell cabinet, beneath the bell in his last Belknap yearbook on a memorial page for the seven Belknap casualties and one on the Kennedy.

So, for this Memorial Day, I also dedicate my thoughts and prayers to the families and friends who were forever affected by loved ones who were lost or wounded in the U.S. military in service to our country.

“Keys to the Moon”

I opened an email today,
a part of my past with a few
photos that shined,
a first of its kind,
memories on ice thawed
as her cocoa brown eyes
tuned my heart into songs
I hadn’t heard since
Ferris Buehler’s Day Off,
Mandela still slept in a cell,
Wall Street had no ceiling,
Reagan & Rocky fought the Russians,
computers were still for nerds,
bills were a grown-up myth
& MTV only played music videos.

Back when our pack
kept chaos in our pockets,
& chased everything we couldn’t catch;
laughs fueled our upside down nights,
Pepe Lopez style
spot to spot, party to party,
beaches & clubs &
gettin’ laid or passin’ out
on someone else’s lawn
none of it mattered
because we were full of lava
with keys to the Moon;
Time never needed a clock
every day was the middle of June
& the whole world was
five minutes from last call…

I leaned back &
glanced around my office,
adrift on a slow Merry-Go-Round
recounting dreams
the world had sold long ago:
laughter & tears,
careers & pallbearers,
ex-girlfriends & near misses,
garterbelt catches at weddings,
where I woke up one day an Uncle,
inherited my grandpa’s gut
& a few gray hairs –
haunted by echoes
most only hear
a few lifetimes later.

Her email opened a lens,
a missing link to happy times
& forgotten sins
I pondered if Love for a friend
overruled what-ifs & old Lusts
best left unsaid.

Either way,
I clicked reply
thankful she was in my life
again.

– Max Nomad

> What was/is the motivating factor that caused you to begin to write?
(from a question originally posted on BWRC Collective)

There were three main factors that caused me to start writing seriously as a form of expression:

• At the age of 7, I discovered a love for Art and had begun to dabble in comics and cartooning by the age of 9. I loved the concept of telling a story with illustrations. By the age of 10 I had applied for (and received) my first Copyright.
• At the age of 12, my father had brought home one of the early personal computers, an Apple ][+ (circa 1981). This gave birth to my love for Computers and led me off into a world of programming as well as doing rudimentary graphics (programs like Photoshop didn’t hit the market until 1988 while I was in college).
• Sometime before my 14th birthday was the first time I had ever been questioned by the FBI. Because my parents didn’t fully understand what all could be done with that computer, their idea of “parental supervision” was being secure in the knowledge that I wasn’t out running the streets. Instead, my friends and I had become computer hackers and almost all our mischief involved a keyboard and monitor. By the time I was 18, if I had been arrested for all the computer crimes I’d committed I would have been in prison until my late 20s or early 30s.

The stunts my friends and I pulled during our teen years in the 80s were borderline the kind of stuff that most other people only saw in movies. Granted, the computers weren’t as flashy and the closest we ever got to a Pentagon computer as a “SAC” newsline, but the thrill was just the same, especially once I got my first laptop and went mobile. Even a decade before most people had ever heard of the Internet my friends and I were already communicating with other hackers on global computer networks and there seemed to be no end to what exploits awaited us. For me, it was like living in the digital equivalent of the Wild West, and between the stories I lived and the stories I heard, they were better than fiction. During my freshman year, among the books I’d chosen to analyze for English Lit class were “The Price of the Ticket” by James Baldwin and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” by Hunter S. Thompson. Baldwin spoke to my deep craving to explore and understand all the facets of being Black in America. Thompson spoke to my inner social commentator and the unpredictable, often freewheeling cyber-criminal misadventures I was usually getting into at the time. Together, both authors spoke to my understanding of being an American, an African-American and my Love (sometimes Love-Hate) relationship with this country.

The resurgence of my need to write as an additional creative outlet was born from that — and it has yet to go away. Today, Writing, along with Art and Computers, make up the creative triad that keeps me going, career-wise and on a personal note.

The Bamboo Chronicles, as a book concept, started sometime in late April 1989 while I was in college. That’s when I was first introduced to the members of Verbal Threat, a local Hip-Hop group. It was nearing the end of the semester and I was just shy of my 21st birthday; the rest of the bunch was about the same age or a few years older. Following the advice of some older musicians, the group put together the loose beginnings of a tour that covered parts of Virginia and North Carolina. Over those next few weeks I became part of the group’s management (if it could be called that). Back then I always kept a black bookbag with me that contained a Toshiba 1200f, an early model laptop with dual 3.5″ floppy disk drives as its only form of storage. Along with being brought on as a co-manager and wearing many hats, one of the things I did during my downtime was to start taking notes. Because I was getting a minor in Writing and a huge fan of Hunter S. Thompson, I had been experimenting with short stories using a style akin to Gonzo Journalism. My early notes with Verbal turned into a journal of sorts, haphazardly maintained from the Spring of 1989 to the Fall of 1991 with the goal of being the one to document the group’s rise to fame.

During those years my journal entries accumulated on floppy disks and ended up being stored in a makeshift archive in one of my dresser drawers. In 2002, about a year after I started BGP and was working on a book concept dealing with the various concepts of Freedom, I was inspired to dig up those old journal entries. Originally I thought they would work well for being a source of “coming of age” stories for that book. Since those stories grew to be larger than the sum of the book itself, I ended up splitting them off entirely into their own work. Throughout those times, particularly on the summer tours, aside from the music and the shows, the common thread that seemed to tie all the memories together was Marijuana. Among Rock, Rap and Reggae musicians, smoking weed to them is like Coffee and Donuts to Cops — both a bad stereotype and a lingering truth at the same time. Thanks to a heavy New York Jamaican/Rastafarian influence within group, most of the time the guys referred to any kind of rolling papers as “bambu”, thus the choice to package these stories as “The Bamboo Chronicles”.

Originally I wanted to use the word “Bambu” instead of “Bamboo” but the former was also the brand name of a rolling paper. Concerned about possible trademark infringement, I contacted the company and managed to reach the owner on the first try. She was an older lady with a phone demeanor that stoicly pleasant with a hint of suspicion in her tone. I figured she was probably an ex-hippie-turned-businesswoman., prone to be sympathetic enough to give her blessings to a small fish like me working on his first novel. She was okay with it — but her attorneys wasted no time telling her otherwise. The next thing I knew I receive an email saying “No” and an explanation about their releasing some new brand of blunt papers. After that I couldn’t even get a returned call.

(more later as these things come to me)

– Max Nomad

(more thoughts on issues I’ve run into while writing The Bamboo Chronicles)

As anyone that has ever run with musicians knows, there are many unwritten rules and truths but only a few that are somewhere between the two. One is that Crime and certain styles of Music seem to run hand in hand.

Prohibition-era Jazz and Blues bands played at Speakeasies run by mobsters. Crooners like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin were buddy-buddy with mafiosi like Chicago boss Sam Giancana. Every major music legend with an addiction from Billie Holiday to Billy Idol always had a connection looming somewhere nearby like one of the many moons orbiting Jupiter. For decades, the tastes of the listening  public were secretly guided by rampant payola to get records on the charts.

The Crime and Music relationship has been such a convenient plot device in so many books and films that I’m not sure if it’s a case of Life imitating Art or vise versa.  While going through some of my journal entries and deciding what to include in The Bamboo Chronicles, I realized that both Crime and the Music had become characters unto themselves, almost sentient because their demands seem to have just as much of an affect on the ensemble as any other characters in the stories. I didn’t want to write a memoir but, instead, tout it as fiction “based on a true story”. I figured that changing some names and places would be enough to allow me to incorporate some events I witnessed without worrying about any repercussions — and then I learned otherwise…

In early 2006, shortly after I decided to take on the Next Stop manuscript as BGP’s second book project to publish, I met with the author, Ivan Sanchez, after work for a few drinks to discuss particulars that were going to affect which editor I paired him up with. My biggest concern was that he had used real names and street names for almost everyone in the book, including  some of the more nefarious characters. It was a toss up because by treating this book as a memoir we would have been within our legal rights to tell the stories as they happened, names and all. The trick would have been to make sure everything was 100% accurate but not disclosing so much that it would invade anyone’s privacy. Even with all that I knew we were still at risk of being sued. My thinking was that if anyone filed a lawsuit I’d simply start cranking out press releases using the shock value of the lawsuits as a means to drum up publicity for the book. On the other hand, there was at least nine months of editing and prepress work ahead of us; I figured we had plenty of time to change the names if necessary. Ivan and Jada (the editor) were so deep into the editing/revision process and I was busy with other design projects that the subject didn’t come up again. After reading the stories over and over again I even had a few nightmares about some of the murder victims, a sign that I might have grown too close to the project to maintain a pragmatic perspective. Against my normal business sense and tendency to avoid liabilities, the idea of changing all the names had become almost sacrilegious — some of the stories also served to memorialize those who were slain. It seemed like the right thing to do and worth the risk.

December 16th, 2006 arrived, the day of the Author’s Release party for Next Stop. The turnout was fantastic, everyone enjoyed themselves and we sold almost half of that first shipment of books, all of which made the event one of the greatest nights of my professional life. Once word of the book spread back to the Bronx, the next 15 days ushered in something neither of us had predicted — over a dozen phone calls with threats on Ivan’s life. The young fledgling gangsters in the stories had grown up. Some of them had been in and out of prison and still running the same criminal hustles they were doing over a decade earlier. Others had grown to become kingpins in their own rights. All were pissed that the book had hit the streets for a variety of reasons, including the fact that one or two of the stories connected some people to certain unsolved crimes with no Statute of Limitations.

The calls weren’t from some anonymous jerks. They were very real. They made sure Ivan knew who they were. We didn’t have to worry so much about the callers. They were all about his age and the ones that weren’t locked up for the next few decades were still on the street, deep in the game with too much to lose. The likelihood of one of them showing up to do a hit was slim. Instead, they would’ve handled it much like the older gangsters back in the day — scope out a couple of 14 year old kids tryin’ to get a rep, slap a wad of cash and a couple of burners in their hands, give them a map to the target and tell them don’t come back till it’s done. The big difference is that the kids today have things like Tom Toms, Mapquest, iPhones and Google; even Jimmy Hoffa could be tracked down with the right keywords.

With the intention of protecting himself and his family, it wasn’t until Ivan attempted to obtain a concealed weapons permit did things take another turn. Apparently there was still a case on his record that had been open for almost 17 years; all charges against him had been dropped but it was still on the books. Since he had recently made contact with the Virginia Beach Gang Unit with the intention of being part of a community outreach program, he mentioned about the need for protection and asked if they could help find out what was going on. Ivan gave a copy of Next Stop to each of the officers. One happened to let his supervisor take a look at it who, in turn, made some calls to the New York Police Department and the NYTF (New York’s equivalent of the DEA) to see if this stuff was real. Suddenly Ivan was under investigation again. Once the word got out that the cops were checking him out, all the death threats ceased. After a few weeks of nerve-wracking waiting and wondering if Ivan (and possibly myself) would end up in legal hot water, nothing came of the inquiries. In a roundabout way the cops proved the authenticity of Ivan’s book.

When I finally got back around to working on Bamboo, I realized that I had some more tough decisions to make.  My dilemma was that I had been privy to some illegal activities that were so outrageous they were better than anything I’d ever seen on television — reality far better than any fictitious spin that I could’ve written. Some of the gangsters I wrote about in my journal entries had been in and out of prison since I last saw them. In one case, when the DEA finally took down the Big Man, all the young guys he had on the street went to war over his territory and some of them became kingpins themselves. In all cases, my biggest concern wasn’t whether or not they would read Bamboo and see themselves. I never saw most with a book in their presence unless it was a ledger or an old family Bible on the table for show. The threat was from someone else reading the book, recognizing one or more gangsters and their crimes, then letting the rumor out about them being in my book. Some of them might have been flattered about being “famous” while others might have been ready to give me a one-way ticket to the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay.

I finally came to a conclusion: when it comes to a book — whether its a book I’m writing or a book BGP is publishing — Life is much easier as a writer if you treat Reality as a Choice and learn to walk the fine line between Defamation, Disclosure and Distortion. If you play it too safe, you lose the impact. If you play it the other way, the risks may not outweigh the gains. Either way, if you don’t play it smart there’s no telling how it will play out. Reluctantly, I started going back through everything I had already written, marking every illegal act that was harsher than smoking a joint. At times even today I’m still double-checking the liability factor behind some of the most interesting passages. It’s better than being an author whose book forced me to walk around strapped with a gun.

– Max Nomad

####

Late June, 1994. Virginia Beach.

I’d been invited to a garden party, the kind where everyone seemed to know that Mozzarella goes with a Chianti Riserva, Gouda goes with a Riesling, and anyone that didn’t know at least had the foresight to memorize which wines matched their favorite cheeses. A friend of the family was about to announce her candidacy for City Council. And even though the scene was very diverse, I felt out of my element. I swallowed my pride and did the smiley mingling thing, complete with empty compliments and forgettable small talk, until I encountered a white-haired old man sitting off by himself under a nearby gazebo. He reminded me of a Dick Van Dyke after one too many shots of Jägermeister. I noticed he was wearing a Polo shirt, khakis, sandals, and studying a small plate of chipolata sausages as if they were from Mars. Somehow, I knew this guy wasn’t a typical wine-n-cheese snob.

During our introductions I never caught his real name. At first I thought he was sloppy drunk because of his slurring until he revealed that he was still recovering from a major stroke. When he learned that I had recently graduated with my design degree, the conversation moved onto common ground. He sounded like he had dreams of becoming the next Paul Gauguin if he hadn’t been pulled into the family business. Although he now owned several large hotels at the oceanfront, he talked about them like most people talk about a relative that just got arrested again for being drunk in public. He did most of the talking. Slurred and tangential at best, he always seemed to make a point and, for whatever reason, that point always had a connection to Art.

“Every now and then you meet folks who truly appreciate beauty in the world,” he said as he stared off at some distant, unspoken memory, “but the truth is, most people love junk. Garbage.” Give them a T-bone steak entree, grilled to perfection, and they will add ketchup without tasting it. Give them a cup of fresh brewed Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee and they will dump cream and sugar in it before taking a sip. Make the Perfect Martini and they will claim it’s weak unless it was made with some harsh rotgut vodka. The list goes on…

Over the years and many clients later, rarely has a week gone by that I haven’t been faced with the truth of that conversation. As a professional Graphic Designer, whether you’re doing print, web, or mixed media, you secretly have to determine which type of person you’re dealing with in order to have a chance at making that client happy. The only limits on creativity are the ones we set upon them — project by project, budget by budget, and within the boundaries of what that client will and won’t understand about beauty and function.

– Max Nomad