Coach Is Dead

He was the kind of endless student that wandered campuses throughout the 1970's, taking certificates, working on a thesis that was never quite honed.  People perfectly suspended between the liberal college admission policies of the post Viet Nam era and the innate laziness of a generation that had absolutely everything at the peak of The Me Years.  He was probably 8 years older than I was and had seen everything and done everything I was enamored of at the time--The New Journalism and The Old Psychedelics, to count two.  His mind, before his aperture narrowed, was very sharp.  He could be a lot of fun to sit around with all night, listening to King Crimsom records and making 3am runs to the pay phone at the donut shop.  Being around him was very much like being in a David Lynch movie. 

We called him Coach.  He was about 5'7", 130 pounds or so soaking wet, in absolutely horrible physical condition.  He had an almost pridefulness in how badly he took care of himself.  He kind of looked like a frog from a Disney cartoon wearing some floppy variation of army fatigues, Ray Bans day or night and the latest preppy look du jour.  The dark dark dark eyes behind the Ray Bans had taken in Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe and William Burroughs and Ken Kesey and Roman Polanski and Philip K. Dick and J. Edgar Hoover and he could spew back this exquisite cultural swamp in bursts of razor sharp wit and acid paranoid characterizations of the legendary local social scene.  He could not only explicate The Side Effects, he would sprinkle sparkle dust over the whole crowd for a price.  He was as important to the music scene as the lighting or amps.  Mind you, it turned out I could not keep up with him and carry a full load of classes, but education is experience if it is nothing else, oui?

One of Coach's favorite things to say was that he expected to be dead by the time he was thirty.  I think he was still saying it when he was 37, but the main point seemed to be that tomorrow didn't matter, you could bum the rent, make a deal, see what's happening on a Tuesday night downtown.  He would do things like stay up for three days straight, then come by our beat student house and finally fall dead asleep on the (only) toilet.  He subsisted on tacos, donuts, Marlboros, coffee, alcohol and any controlled substance he could get his hands on.  He was flat broke once and we agreed to pay him $20 if he would eat a complete jalapeno pepper and chase it with Amoretto.  He did, pocketed twenty for his tab, and promptly ran for the bathroom, tossed his cookies, and then returned to the table to snort dog knows what from atop the napkin dispenser.  The next buzz was the constant goal, and for a while there I bought into it hook line and student loan.  He was my Iago, pointing the way for my decadent dissolute undergrad indulgence.  "There is no such thing as paranoia," he would intone when things got bad, quoting Dr. Thompson himself.

Fortunately for me the money ran out and I left town with the whiff of scandal and quite an education, but not nearly enough class credits.  I escaped the gravitational pull of my college town and bumped along the school of hard knocks and night classes, ripped and read and spun vinyl records and wrote freelance and kissed some corporate ass and met a nice girl and made a nest and had a beautiful baby girl together and wandered down the long strange course I now find myself on.  Living large, time of your life kid.  I take those college town memories out of the box now and then and try to remember to keep the shiny side up and the greasy side down.

I last saw Coach back around '93, one fall Saturday when I went back for a football game.  He was working as a barker outside of one of the very rankest student beer joints in town, 11:30 on a Saturday morning waving kids in, shouting the beer specials like the ring-toss guy at the carnival, only darker.  I was with Bluefield Bob, and we walked up and I said "hey Coach, long time no see."  He looked at me with a wild-eyed glare,  seemed to recognize me pretty clearly and launched back into his beer selling babble louder than before.  I didn't view it as much of a loss.  We never spoke again. 

A mutual acquaintance from the weird old days asked me not too long ago what ever became of him, and not two days later I ran into someone who knows who told me Coach died last year, his sizzled system finally collapsing into itself.  "He pounded it pretty hard for a lot of years," my correspondent remarked, pausing to ask God to rest his soul. 

It could use the rest.

Did you ever have an enabler, a strong personality in your life, overtly or covertly malevolent?  Come close, children.   Tell me your stories.

Comments

[Art]

I think we've all known a similar sort of fellow. When you're 18 and first arrive at college you think a guy who's 30 and still can't decide what he wants to major in, and who has strong feelings about Led Zeppelin vs. Sonic Youth is cool. By the time you're 22 and nearing graduation you think, "What in the hell is wrong with that guy?"

[jack straw]

I'm amazed he lived that long. I liked Mark, but he ruined drugs for me.
I have blogged him and found a couple letters to the editor he wrote to a jewish newsletter up north. One exccoriated Geraldo Rivera, and the other castigated Ted Turner. One thing about Mark, he didn't like phonies.

[doctor flowers]

None that I can remember.

[Velociman]

Mark S?

[Dishonerable Schoolboy]

It's kinda like poker. When you think back and you can't remember a guy like that, it was probably you. I think it was for awhile.