Life is real: Chapter Two: Author hopes his story lives on through his poetry
Published: February 22, 2009
Modified: February 23, 2009 at 8:24 am
Modified: February 23, 2009 at 8:24 am
Jim Chastain receives a hug from his grandmother during his birthday party at Full Circle Books in Oklahoma City on Dec. 10, 2008. Photo by John Clanton
There’s a place where love
and tears meet and meld,
where love actually becomes tears
and each teardrop holds years,
no decades, of vivid memories.
(from “The Place,” by Jim Chastain)
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They complimented me on how well
I looked. I laughed. Exaggeration was
an inevitable part of this. We avoided
the grim, the sad, the what-ifs, vowing
silently to celebrate this rare day
when we gathered as old friends do.
(from “Seven Conversations,” by Jim Chastain) “He was so mean.” The words slip out as if they’ve spent the past 38 years rehearsing on Cindy Crosslin’s tongue. Ask Cindy what her brother was like as a boy, and you get a litany of childhood injustices. “He knew that I had this thing about germs,” laughs Cindy, who is seven years younger than Jim. “I hate drinking after anybody. He used to sit across the table, and he’d say, ‘Hey Cindy,’ and he’d pretend to spit across the table into my milk. I’d sob, and I wouldn’t drink it.” Other times, he’d climb up the laundry chute leading from the basement to the upstairs bathroom of their Bartlesville home. He’d wait for Cindy or another sister to walk in before leaping out of the chute with a shout. He was, in short, a brat. One outrage, in particular, lingers in Cindy’s memory. Jim and some friends were downstairs playing a record of scary noises. As Cindy crept down the stairs, her brother’s head popped into view, eyes wide with terror. A monstrous hand seized him and began dragging him into the closet at the base of the steps. Jim struggled, trying to resist, but screamed as he lurched backward, disappearing into the shadows. His voice cut off abruptly. She wailed. As much as he tormented her, Jim was her brother. She loved him. And she’d just watched him die, killed by a monster. Monsters were real! Then he and his friends began laughing, and she knew she’d been fooled again. That creepy hand? Just her brother's hand covered by some pantyhose. He'd pulled himself into the darkness to frighten her. He was so mean. I turned and walked away,
leaving that tree swing of my childhood
still swaying in the autumn breeze.
(from “Passage,” by Jim Chastain) Looking back on it, Sharon Chastain can smile about the spray paint incident. Wasn’t always that way. It’s hard to grin when you get a call from the cops telling you that your son, the light of your life, the star of your firmament, is a criminal. A vandal, thank God, not a robber or something worse, but still — it’s not as if she dreamed, during those long months of pregnancy, of birthing a baby boy who’d grow up to be a vandal. Yet here she was, sitting beside her husband as they drove toward College High School, the scene of the crime. Tomorrow, Jim would begin his senior year at Sooner High School, the rival school on the other side of Bartlesville. That is, if they let vandals go to class. Jim wasn’t exactly Mr. School Spirit. Smart, funny and popular, he made good grades without trying very hard. He’d played football, basketball and baseball, so he’d been part of the school rivalry, but he wasn’t about to start a pep squad or glee club. If anything, he would’ve shot spitwads at the pep squad, then openly laughed. So why in the world had he done this? Earlier that evening, Jim and some of his friends armed themselves with spray paint. They snuck onto the grounds of Coll High, as it was commonly called, and painted “Sooners #1” across the facade. What their plan lacked in cunning it made up in stupidity. The boys hadn’t waited for full dark. Their painting party was easily visible. “Of course, the neighbors saw it,” Sharon says now. “And he got caught.” Sort of. The neighbors called the police. An officer drove past the school with his bubble light on, and the boys scattered, fleeing on foot. Somehow Jim was identified as one of the culprits. Jim’s parents were notified; they headed for the school. At some point, the Chastains found Jim, the criminal, walking down the street with one of his conspirators. They took Jim into custody. The punishment fit the crime. Jim and the others had to paint over their handiwork, using materials they paid for themselves. But if Jim learned a lesson from his scrape with the law, it didn’t stick. Before Sooner High and College High merged into Bartlesville High School after Jim’s senior year, “he stole the Sooners flag,” Sharon says, a touch of exasperation lingering in her voice after all these years. “We still have it in our closet upstairs.” I’m like the high school kid no one remembers
friends and family phone from long distances
but there are no familiar faces nearby
no one to touch or hold or send a smile my way
so for now I sit looking out from the window
while time’s clutch remains stuck in neutral
(from “From the Window,” by Jim Chastain) By the time Jim started college at Oklahoma State University, Weird Al Yankovic was on his way to becoming a household name. “I Love Rocky Road,” Yankovic’s parody of Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock ‘N Roll,” cracked the Top 40 in 1982. Over the next several years, Weird Al grew into a pop culture icon, appearing in videos, TV shows and a movie. No coincidence that Jim began parodying pop hits, too. “Evenings and weekends, he and ... another musically gifted guy would pick their guitars, crafting clever and usually smarter than Al Yankovic type lyrics to existing popular songs,” says Scott Petty, who first met Jim at OSU’s Delta Tau Delta fraternity. “It was not unusual for the guys in the house to pick up on those lyrics and, during a social function or when a song would come on the radio, chime in with the Chaz version.” Chaz, short for Chastain, changed relatively innocuous tunes, such as Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” into hilarious novelty songs so obscene that he and his classmates will not repeat the lyrics for outsiders — even though they still know the words. “Most of them were lyrics you could only sing among the guys,” says Don Greiner, Jim’s big brother in the fraternity. “Not all of them, but most.” When Jim was a junior, he and some fraternity brothers put together a song-and-dance number for the Varsity Revue, an OSU talent show. What song they performed and how far they advanced seems to change depending on who you talk to, but two things remain constant: Jim was one of the lyricists, and he and LeAnn met as a result of the show. Their romance didn’t bloom until later, but the Varsity Revue was a turning point. In years to come, they’d marry, have children, earn higher degrees. Jim would turn his language skills into a lucrative career as an attorney, and he’d moonlight as a movie critic, poet and author. He never earned a royalty check from any of his twisted lyrics. He’s not as well known as Weird Al. Still, Jim’s songs live on. “To this day,” Greiner says, “my wife will get on me because I always sing Chaz’s lyrics to songs, and she can’t remember the real words.” They soon gained a musical
reputation, and former friends
looked on from a distance,
not wanting to be tarnished.
(from “Playing the Harp,” by Jim Chastain) Barreling along the edge of a precipice in a battered Mercury sedan, Nathan Brown, Jim’s partner in poems, thought he was going to die. Death had quit being an academic matter several miles back. Now it was a real possibility flirting with an upgrade to probability — and not in the long run, but soon. Perhaps any second. From the passenger seat, he could only watch in terror as his buddy, the one-armed poet, drove them higher into the Colorado mountains on a narrow two-lane road with few guardrails. Rain poured down, obscuring the signs that warned of falling rocks, and the edge of the road opened onto space. He was acutely aware that Jim was new to driving with one hand and that he could activate the windshield wipers only by pushing his hand through the wheel and steering with his forearm. “I was looking out the windows down and down as far as the eye could see, trying to see how far we had to fall,” Nathan says. Yet he was laughing. So was Jim. It was the absurdity of it all. If they slid off the road, they would literally die for poetry. Could they be any more cliché? Jim and Nathan met at a Baptist church in Norman. They became close friends in 2003 when they bonded over shared literary interests and decided to work together to break into Oklahoma’s poetry scene. Over the next two years, they hit the road together, reading at the same gigs and establishing their bona fides. This journey in July 2005 was part of their poetic mission. They were making an 860-mile pilgrimage to Ouray, Colo., for a workshop taught by Pulitzer prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn, whom both admired. When they swept past Billy Goat Gruff’s Beer Garden, they knew they’d arrived safely in Ouray. Nathan’s knuckles filled with color as he relaxed. They’d survived something together, laughing all the way. They made a memory — one that didn’t involve cancer or hospitals or grief. “We’ve had a couple of teary moments over beers in tiny Mexican restaurants,” Nathan says now, “but for the most part, with Jim and me, it’s poetry and writing and performing and going after it. It’s sort of an in-the-meantime thing. You know. Cancer’s coming, but in the meantime, we have stuff to do.” Fifteen hours in a Mercury
with the preacher’s kid
heading west by northwest
in search of poetry.
Over the course of that
conversation-packed day, as
the cool Oklahoma morning
was overwhelmed
by a thick Texas heat,
which later succumbed
to the thin mountain air,
we saw it all.
(from “Driving to Ouray,” by Jim Chastain) Dorothy Alexander can’t look at Jim without seeing another man, a younger man, the one who broke her heart. “I can’t tell you how much I love him,” she says, and for a moment it’s unclear whether she’s talking about Jim or about her son, Kim Alexander, who died in 1989. Jim and Kim. Two names separated by a single letter; two lives joined in Dorothy’s heart. When he was 36, Kim learned he had AIDS. A Vietnam veteran, he’d suffered for years before being diagnosed at Oklahoma City’s VA hospital. By then, the disease had demolished his immune system, leaving him with bleak prospects. Dorothy, an attorney in Roger Mills County at the time, rented an apartment in Oklahoma City. She clung to Kim as he grew weaker, trying to find an escape clause that would allow him to live. She’d tried the same thing years earlier. Dorothy opposed the Vietnam conflict, and she saved enough money to finance a move to Canada if Kim, a pacifist, got drafted. His number came up the first day of the draft. She was ready to leave the country, but he refused to run away. He served four years as a medic. Fighting for his life, he again refused to back down. He told Dorothy it was pointless to search for a loophole. He was going to die. Best to deal with it. Somehow, it seemed their roles had reversed. He’d become the parent. She was the child. He died of complications from AIDS on Dec. 17, 1989. Dorothy thought she’d failed him. About 15 years later, Jim entered her life. Cancer had already entered his. By then, both had become voices in the state’s literary scene. Dorothy ran Village Books Press in Cheyenne. Jim contacted her for an article he was writing about poetry in Oklahoma. “I love books,” Dorothy says. “I loved the smell of them even before I could read. Jim is that kind of guy. He loves everything about books.” They became friends. She published his poetry books and kept in constant touch with him through his long cancer battle — all the while feeling a connection between him and her son. “They didn’t look alike,” says Dorothy, 74. “But they were both roughly the same age when this happened. They’re both kind of non-macho types, you know. They’re gentle and ... sensitive. And Jim, he’s very kind to old ladies and dogs. A lot of people can’t see old women. They’re not on the radar screen. People look right through you. He’s not that kind of person.” As the end of his story draws closer, Dorothy hopes she’ll be stronger now than she was 20 years ago. “This is like another chance to get it right,” she says, “to do better this time than I did last time with Kim. It’s become sort of a personal thing for me, a mother thing.” She loves them both. Oh, how she laughed there in her chair,
rocking back and forth with one bare foot
sticking straight out across the foot rest.
During a game of cards, the laughing
never stopped, as if all of life was laughter.
But there were tears too.
No one loved her man more.
God, how she cried, wailed even,
when he left this earth.
She despaired the coming years
of loneliness.
(from “Song of the Matriarch,” by Jim Chastain) Jim closes the poetry book, steps back from the podium. For a moment, there is silence and time enough to take him in. He is beaming, transformed, looking healthier than he has in weeks. His skin glows. His face has filled out. Somehow he is more than he was before the reading began. Shades of all he is and all he used to be are collected here in one small man. Somewhere in time, he’s teasing his sisters, breaking the rules. Somewhere he’s driving through the mountains, blind to the danger. Somewhere he’s seeing so clearly it makes a grieving mother cry. Applause begins, not slowly but all at once. Jim disappears into hugs and handshakes.
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