"Colfax Place" - A Piece of Non-Fiction about the Midwest

About “Colfax Place”

The following is one of the few non-fiction pieces of a personal nature that I will ever publish. Considering the nature of this collection, I felt it appropriate to include it at the end. It was written during my first summer of grad school where the focus was on the personal narrative, a thing I’d never explored much of until that moment; I always found fiction to be the far more interesting of the writing disciplines.

To be fair, memory is a strange thing, and often unreliable. While some dates and moments may not be the exact truth, they are the truth as I remember them and that is as much truth as I can provide. Many of the moments within are the absolute truth, specifically those of experiences during the latter part of my time in Oklahoma City. Earlier ones should be taken with a grain of salt…at least as far as placement in time is concerned.

Non-fiction always felt a little self-indulgent (to me writing about myself, not as an indictment of the genre), though I’ve certainly read plenty of it over the years (and enjoyed it). More often than not, the non-fiction I’m interested in as an adult revolves around the stories of favorite bands on the road (like Peter Hook’s biography “Unknown Pleasures” about his time in Joy Division and in New Order) or genuinely interesting people like Anthony Bourdain.

I’ve edited very little about this piece since its original writing. You get all the warts from early scribblings. You’ll notice that I don’t use anyone’s actual names, only their first initials. This is intentional. Part of the reason I don’t write non-fiction is that I find it to be something of a violation to include others in my writing without their approval; even with their approval, I’d still find it a little creepy. You get the initials and the stories, they get to keep their anonymity. I feel it’s a fair trade in the ways that matter.

You may get the feeling while reading that I had a terrible childhood; nothing could be further from the truth. As in my normal fiction, I simply preferred to focus on the darker moments as they hold the most amount of interest to me. The dark stuff contains a complexity to it that cannot be replicated, but is always fascinating to examine for the many facets it holds. If it makes you a little uncomfortable, then that’s all to the good. We should all be made uncomfortable now and then, especially as we age and settle into our immovable ways. Too easily we become predictable statues.

There aren’t always answers to be found in the dark. There’s not always a complete and total solution to problems that appear in one’s life, so I rarely have an issue with a story being open-ended at its finish. Sometimes it’s better to have more questions than answers as this forces the reader to mull over what really happened. Though many of my stories seem to focus on the concept of loss, I like to think that there is often a feeling that many things remain possible at the end even when people, choices, and times seem to be drowning in the dark.

• Adam “Bucho” Rodenberger

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Oklahoma summers came quick and hot, fusing sweat and rust colored clay to clothing in a dirty blood stain that never seemed to wash clean. Between puberty and the terrain, I’m not sure which one put more pairs of jeans to death during those strange, humid times spent in the red country where I had the sense of being punished for things I wasn’t guilty of doing (though looking back, I often was). I remember the crater in my backyard, the remnant of an above-ground pool I don’t remember swimming in; my first time mowing the lawn, as punishment, found me dizzy from both the heat and the accidental concentric circle pattern I cut, spiraling towards the center. From there I mowed to the back part of the yard, covered and dark like a secluded forest setting from a grim fairy tale. Heavy firs and massive oaks spread their wooded arms over the rotting brown posts that imprisoned the surrounding patches of dying grass. Sunlight sprinkled the ground in a few places, but was mostly choked out of existence by full limbs of leaves larger than a giant’s hands.

Brown gumballs littered the extensive root system poking up from the cool earth. They nestled between the skeletal limbs of fallen branches and on the rare occasion, the remnants of a small animal already picked over by ants and other insects. Years out of use, the rickety swing-set had acquired a thick coat of dirt and wore anemic vines like a thousand feather boas as if playing dress up for the backside of the house.

I was eleven years old when it happened. The front of the house gazed upon two fat, squat water towers standing guard over the neighborhood; one a tarnished and graffiti-scribbled silver, the other a newly painted beige. A kid had died inside the beige one some years previous. Curious and stupid, his midnight climb seemed like the right thing to do on a Friday night and his death kept the rest of us neighborhood kids from exploring too deeply behind high fences. For years after, every time I walked out of my house, I imagined his screams echoing off the black forever inside those metal walls until the dull thud of his body clanged at the bottom. One might think that this would have been the start of my own morality play, a cautionary tale of sorts, but I didn’t learn to behave until I was well into my twenties and even that is a statement worth arguing.

The towers sat on an awkward plateau that overlooked a deep valley-like area to the east full of baseball and soccer fields. That mini-valley and I became close acquaintances during my early years. It was the quickest path to my elementary school, and the gym where I played and practiced basketball in the fall. There were outdoor racquetball courts near the gym, rarely used and with their painted walls peeling back like dead or dehydrated skin. A small rivulet of a creek separated the gym from the courts and in peak season, would be full of tadpoles birthed from frogs fat on pheromones. One weekend afternoon I watched, dumbfounded, as a classmate delighted in picking up the pregnant frogs and flung them at the racquetball court walls with the force of angry adolescence. The new graffiti of stringed-eggs and frog parts pollacked on the wall made my stomach turn. I left him there and walked home, unsure of how to feel but knowing I was supposed to feel something close to disgust.

Our house was an older home with two stories, drab beige carpeting, and a checkered entryway wall of mirrors and corkboard. The porch was covered in mini-golf type Astroturf and was bookended by two large white pillars stretching from the lowly porch to the highest part of roof. I had believed them to be solid and secure, only to learn later that they were hollow and attached only to the roof as faux structures to give the illusion of grandeur and strength. One day, I caught my mother sliding the bottom part of the pillar out towards the grass. It wasn’t uncommon for birds to get caught inside while trying to build nests. I was about to ask what she was doing until several dead birds, long decayed and half-eaten, slid out onto the lush grass below. She glanced at me with a look that seemed to shrug and say ‘just another chore.’

I was always being punished for something, but it was almost always of my own headstrong and defiant making. One afternoon, for a reason long forgotten, my brother and I threw a shared tantrum against our mother after having been grounded to our room. We had acted our age and played hide-and-seek in the clothing racks at the mall. We were distractions to our mother and the reason for her cutting her shopping time early. Rather than stay “brothers-at-war,” we became “brothers-in-arms” and kick-stomped our way through the bottom of the flimsy bedroom door, creating a hole large enough for the both of us to crawl through. My ass has never been beat so hard since and the door itself eventually came off its hinges and was never replaced until we moved to Kansas City years later.

It was these times when mom felt she couldn’t handle us that she would call upon our father, a man who used to snap both sides of the belt together in this dangerous whip-like sound. When he got involved you slept on your stomach for days after. You could hear the snap from down the long hallway, thinking you were protected by the door, but forgetting that he was the adult who could do whatever he wished. He’d snap and snap, a lion tamer of children coming to turn pink hides blood red. It is a sound I will forever remember as being one of biting, stinging pain. If he broke out the belt, I knew I’d done something serious. My parents weren’t abusive, but my father recalls (with laughter, these days) that I was determined to be my own person even under the governance of parenting.

My punishment came in various forms and I remember my principal’s office well. I would arrive unscathed and leave with a slow, soft walk from the paddle that hung on the wall to his left. His desk was ‘standard educator,’ a boring brown and cluttered with pens in coffee mugs and an overlarge desk calendar helping him to remember when to punish the next child. A fake apple sat on the far corner of his desk like a family heirloom passed out along with every teaching degree in the country.

The first time I was paddled, I was more angry and furious that my teacher got to watch than I was hurt by the force of my principal’s swing. I would take the punishment purely to spite him, but screw her. Why should she get to watch? By the time I moved on to junior high, he and I were both on a first name basis with each other. No longer Principal S. to me, I stripped him of his title and simply called him R., or the shortened form, B., in protest to my being sent to his office. He was neither amused nor offended by this. I would like to believe that he understood my anger wasn’t directed towards him.

That year found my hormones in high gear, finally recognizing that girls were different from boys in that strange upper body way. Some girls had more, others had less, but my attention wavered constantly during lectures, and the need to impress or make myself the center of attention became more pronounced. I was incredibly awkward and decided that sports were a better avenue to impress women. In the seventh grade, I began training to be a track star.

Coach H. was a short man with a pepper black beard and a voice that commanded attention even when he wasn’t yelling at you. He had tree trunk legs and didn’t need a microphone to make himself heard all the way across the track. You were your last name. Your first name did not exist and he knew exactly who you were and what you were doing wrong from 200 yards away. We were pushed hard, first walking a mile or two from the junior high to the high school just to get to practice, then running two miles as a warm-up. Like a moron, I signed up to do several things, assuming that track meets in junior high and high school were the same as when you were in grade school.

They most certainly were not.

The pole vault, the long jump, and the hurdles. This is the torture I put my body through while it was already having issues with growth spurts and severe acne. I became incredibly good at the hurdles, much to pretty much everyone’s surprise, myself included. My first gold medal came with a near-speechless coach who couldn’t congratulate me, but patted me on the back instead. It was a trade off I took gladly.

The following week in practice, I was to focus harder on the pole vault as there were only four of us; two Bs, myself, and J., who was the upperclassman. The girls’ track team would sometimes congregate around the pit just to watch his muscles flex, relax, and flex again as he pulled himself up the pole and twisted his body into the laying position, falling into the mats below with an ease I never mastered.

The day I stopped pole-vaulting is one that burns still today. J., the senior, was showing us techniques to help get more lift off the thin runway, to get more thrust coming off the ground. We practiced and practiced for hours, sprinting down the strip with the pole held straight out in front of us, sinking it into the divot, and propelling us upward. A group of the senior girls eventually made their way around to our side of the track and J., like the predictable and obedient alpha-male that he was, wanted to impress. Somewhere between the start of practice and the sudden surge of hormones, he forgot his own technique.

Once his feet left the ground, they strangely found themselves firmly on either side of the pole (rather than the same side, as physics demands) and Justin crumpled to the ground hard. An astounding amount of blood ran down his thighs, pooling around into the pole divot. His brown skin had turned ashy and his breathing fluttered. Since I was determined to keep both of my testicles, I stopped pole vaulting and moved on to other events. Coach understood.

Hurdles are appropriately named and I have been slipping over many of them with grace from some unknown benefactor for much of my life, but the ones on the track simply took practice. Three steps, a jump, and a quick contortion of the body where the right arm covers the face and the left knee comes high enough to touch the elbow. Your body becomes a fluid parallel to the soft track beneath as the back leg folds up into itself and you feel the hurdle bare millimeters underneath, hoping your shoe doesn’t catch and trip you up. Land, repeat, land, repeat. For 110 meters (or 300, as I ran that as well), it is a Sisyphean process with an end and it is the longest minute one can ever experience. I broke records, I medaled, and I got the coveted letter to put on the overpriced, leather letter jacket. Women still would not take notice of me, but I enjoyed my times and the camaraderie that being on the track team afforded.

My final year in Oklahoma City, the strong-headedness I exhibited in earlier years melted into meekness as cliques and popularity became synonyms for exclusion. The girls I crushed on wore clothing I couldn’t afford and wore makeup that made them look old enough to drink without being carded.

For years, I lusted after one in particular. She was that mythical creature, made flesh, who was friendly to everyone she came in contact with, but still very much out of my anti-hero reach. Super blonde and with bright, blue eyes like opals, she walked by our table every day and my friends would say my name loud enough for her to hear; an effort to shame me into asking her out. I’m sure she caught on, but it took an entire afternoon many months later to work up the nerve to call her and ask her out.

The phone rang and rang. I was near hopeful that she wouldn’t answer as my underarms soaked my shirt up to the shoulders. Her twin sister (fraternal and not nearly as pretty) answered. M. came to the phone and I fumbled with the introduction I had written down ahead of time. My body shook nervously as I asked if maybe, possibly, she might want to, you know, go to the fair that weekend. She said she’d love to, and I found myself holding my breath waiting for the hammer.

“But I broke my arm this morning, so I can’t really do anything for awhile,” she said apologetically.
I told her I understood and if, when she felt, you know, up to it, she could call back and plan something for like, another time, you know, and I hoped that she got better soon. I put the phone back on the cradle and stretched the fingers that had white-knuckled the receiver.

I relayed the story to D., my best friend who looked suspiciously like a young Larry Bird. Good friend that he was, he convinced me that she hadn’t actually broken her arm, but that she was putting on an elaborate show. When I saw her on Monday, her right arm had been put into a cast and a sling.

“Totally fake, dude,” D. muttered as she walked by. “She’s wearing that cast just so she doesn’t have to go out with you. She’s too nice to say no, but not so much that she won’t pretend to be hurt.”

Crushed, I half-believed him, buying into the absurdity because honestly, we just weren’t cool enough to date girls like her – the kind who seemed to float through hallways and wore the genuine, permanent smiles of teenage royalty. Rattled more by D. than by the rejection itself, I wouldn’t seriously pursue another woman until my junior year of high school, but it was the beginning of a noticeable change in my demeanor.

My bus in high school had driven by one upperclassman’s house every day since junior high. His name was C. and he was a douchebag. He wore his hair in slick-backed black and a cheap gold chain hung around his neck at all times. He and three of his lackey friends were loading up his car with water bottles and tennis rackets as the bus rolled by one afternoon. D., who rode the same bus, screamed ‘faggots!’ out the window, believing that tennis was only played by the limp-wristed. The logic was severely flawed, but the early teen years aren’t known for their brilliance.

C. and his friends followed the bus to our stop. D. hadn’t thought this far ahead. “What should we do?” he asked.
I shrugged my shoulders and looked at him. “What’s this ‘we’ shit?” I asked. I left the bus, unconcerned about D. He had taken care of himself many times before as the scrappy David to many Goliaths in the past. C. was there outside as I exited, standing like a monolith in the shadow of the bus. He had puffed himself up and flexed his arms, intimating intimidation.

He pushed me to the ground. “If you’ve got something to say to me, bitch, say it to my face.” Several sand burrs stuck to the palm of my hand as I braced my fall in the grass. They pierced the soft flesh deeply and drew first blood.

I stood up. “I don’t have shit to say to you,” I said, picking the burrs from my hand while trying to walk by him. He put his hand on my chest and pushed me backwards, unraveling my cool. I threw my bag to the ground in frustration, tired of never fighting back when the moment required. It was the kind of moment one reads about, where the world turns a myopic red and anger is expressed through the wicked dance of fists.

“You look like you wanna hit me,” he said, smirking. “You wanna hit me, bitch?”

I grabbed the reins of the moment and rode it out for all it was worth. It took less than half a second to weigh my options, clench my fist, and swing as hard as I could. This opportunity would never arise again and I was absolutely taking it, consequences be damned.

It was the greatest right hook I ever delivered and it had to be the meanest black eye in the history of black eyes. He didn’t show up to school for a week after.

However… C. and his friends gave me a beating so brutal that my little sister believed I was close to dying when I finally made it home that day. My face was covered in blood and it took me half an hour just to find my shoes after C. and his friends left. My socks were torn and my feet bloody from the burrs that had helped rip the socks apart in the first place. C. and all three of his friends pounded me into the ground as D. stood by and watched, admiring the violence. When it was over, I limped home carrying my shoes in one hand and drank on the pain of every barefoot step, letting it build into an unquenchable thirst for some kind of payback. When I saw C. at school a week later, he smiled a Cheshire grin at me, as if he had done something great. I asked him if it was typical for four upperclassmen to beat up on one freshman. The girls around him laughed as he turned red in embarrassment. It was my own private “fuck you” and it felt fantastic. I believe this was the moment I began to wear a confidence I never had before.

August of my sophomore year of high school came and we were moving out of our home and off to Kansas City some six hours north. I walked through and around the house, taking one more lap and committing memories to memory so I would never forget. The red brick façade seemed old now, almost too comfortable. I heard the now familiar flapping of tiny wings inside the hollow of the pillars and pushed the bottom out gingerly. Two tiny birds hopped out onto the grass, shook their wings and took off without a thank you in my direction. I slid the pillar back, wondering if the new house would have a pillar or two.

The furniture was packed up and I mused on how small our bedroom looked, how tiny my childhood must have actually been. I thought there was no possible way my brother and I shared that room for so long without killing each other, but we had. This was the room where I discovered video games and read ‘Robin Hood’ by moonlight in bed. It felt much, much bigger with all of our stuff still in it, which was a strange revelation. The stains of spilled drinks and bloody noses were all the more visible in the unimpeded light fanning out from the ceiling.

I remember my brother and I would wake up some nights to slamming doors and muffled anger bubbling up from the master bedroom. It happened more than I think he or I would ever like to admit, and we still haven’t gotten the straight story from either parent, but those dark midnights were the closest times he and I would spend together.

Taking a cue from an old Western I had seen on television, I would climb out of the top bunk and press my ear to the thick, carpeted floor like an Indian tracking the heavy tread of buffalo on the dusty plain. I was hoping to hear more of the conversation boiling beneath us. Curious, my brother would join me, the top of our heads pressed together and our breath stifled by the tension. We felt we might have torn the house asunder if we breathed too hard, so we spoke in as few syllables as possible.

“Can you hear?” he whispered. I would shake my head no and press my finger to my lips. The fighting stopped for awhile, then heavy footsteps thumped up the stairs. The front door would slam shut as we jumped back into our respective beds. Much to their credit, this was divorce from afar and they did their best to keep it out of our young sights. It was their fight and had nothing to do with us kids. One of those things no one can come close to understanding until the end of their own first real relationship.

The basement seemed sad in its own brand of dark vacancy, missing the ping-pong table and the bookshelves and even the cobwebs that had hung so artistically in the upper corners for so long. A long dried-up wet bar built into the wall occupied the back corner by the fireplace and the dusty door leading out to the backyard. This was where we as a family had spent many nights listening to dad’s old comedy albums, most notably Steve Martin’s song “King Tut.” Dad would put it on repeat over and over, singing along each time trying to get as many laughs as possible out of us before putting us to bed. They divorced when I was eight, and while the song didn’t hold the same kind of luster after, the memories still kept and the song is still a nice reminder.

I walked out the basement door to the backyard, which had become a cleaner, more upstanding version of itself. The swing set was gone and grass had been planted, but the divot still remained like a constant crop circle. The tree limbs had been trimmed, letting in light that had been kept out previously. The back of the house had new, clean, white siding that served to lighten up the rest of the backyard when the sun shone hot and bright. The fairy tale scenery of my childhood had disappeared in favor of a more reality-based aesthetic. I loved it and hated it. Some kind of magic had dissipated with the home’s makeover; it felt like finality. I felt the real, tugging and separating me from the imaginary and like the rest of the family, I simply went along with it because I felt I had no choice.

I was never ecstatic about the move. My friends were in Oklahoma City and that’s where I wanted to be, but I was too young to be on my own and followed the family dutifully to a new home near a new school where I’d meet new people. I realized during the 6-hour drive that I now I had the unique advantage of completely reinventing the self I presented to other people.

My history would be the same, my ideas would be the same, but these people hadn’t grown up with me and would know nothing other than what I let them know. I could be selective about the story I told them, weaving my own brand of fable with an almost reckless state of mind and weed out those I didn’t care to know. The C’s and the M’s of Kansas City would have to accept me at face value, but I had also been armed with the knowledge that comes with rejection and defeat. More would come, I knew this to be truth, but I also knew that the effects would be less damning and my psyche less fragile.

Kansas smelled different. The countryside morphed from the pseudo-desert of red clay and dirt to the lush green grasses of paradise. The farmlands looked healthier, the air less dusty. I had my own room at the new house, one that faced the wide-open backyard that spilled out onto the highway a football field away. I slept with the window open that first night and fell asleep to the sounds of cars too far into the median, slumbering to their rhythmic th-thunk-th-thunk as they adjusted and moved back into their lanes.

There was no crater in this backyard, no ugly divot, and the trees did not block out the sun’s efforts to feed the grass. I never had to wake up in the middle of the night to put my ear to the floor in the hopes that I could decipher some greater meaning out of muffled arguments as the moon winked at me through the window. There is only one pillar on the porch of this house, but it is solid and secure, anchored to both foundation and roof. I’m sure I will go back eventually, but I have lost the taste of returning to the tales of the dirt red country, despite the stains they seemed to leave.