My son...

Sally was pregnant when we got married……I didn’t know it, but would soon find out. My feelings on being a 'family man'? Ambiguity was the core principle.

Eric was born January 13^th (Friday) 1978 @ UCLA hospital. I wasn’t there, I had a gig that night on the Queen Mary (the floating ship in Long Beach) getting the news over the phone, “it’s a boy!”…I was out of the blue-thrilled, I whooped and hollered, surprising myself. With sudden pride announced to the audience. Got down to the hospital the next day.

A son, my son…wow. Eric Michael Evans, naming Eric after my best friend Eric Gothelf whom I played with in Cheeba, Eric G. was a significant reason I headed for California (along with my mother being there), he had left a couple of years before, joining the disco group “Hughes Corporation” …. “Rock the Boat, don’t rock the boat baby.” Eric had some success as a player in California (Wha-Koo), now a sound editor (ADR) for Warner Brothers. I played with him in a couple of local L.A. bands (Brass Knuckles). I loved Eric G. and was thoroughly envious of him. Sally and I gave Eric godfather status. It never took, Eric and Eric never bonded of which I had hoped for. Maybe because our collective joint-insanity of 'instant gratification' wasn't conducive to family bonds. SF, her first grandchild, was in it for the fun too. Many pictures and smiles and hoots and hollers but....nobody really cared...really.

Sadly, my dear son Eric would carry the same gene of schizophrenia that Susanna's sister Kathleen was stricken with. Not to mention all the other 'versions' of mental illness that my family served up and passed on.

He's now thirty one, struggles. A huge brute of a man with a heart as big as the sky and the courage of an African beast. He tries so hard every day...one day at a time.

Eric and Eric

Now looking back there was a subtle shift in me… although that shift was nothing like the seismic one that shook my core, eight years later when his mother would abandon both the kids...forcing me to place them in foster home. Twenty fours years later the aftershocks of my choices still moan and contort. I’ve done them the best I knew. I was whacked and wracked, as we all were...for generations! I have so desperately tried to make sense for many years…ill prepared for a life that I could see and feel but could never quite get-down for so long. As most of my familial skeletons can attest.

Eric made a family, I loved this kid.

This is very hard, trying to resurrect through the fog of broken fantasy…a spotty overview at best.

I tighten-up and rationalize with waves of that familiar denial. Why am I doing this?

It’s all that I have, I guess.