Open Mic Night is a spoken word event on the first Monday of each month at 6 p.m. at the Ada, Oklahoma Public Library.

This Cloak of Darkness

by Richard R. Barron

“And in this cloak of darkness the world I will embrace…”

I listened to the Kansas song The Pinnacle for the first time in long while. That song became something of an anthem for what emerged as one of the least happy periods of my life, my sophomore year of college.

Let me set the stage with some thoughts about an odd freshman experience for me: It was a year that seemed to start well, with a high school “friend” Geoff, (who never really liked me) moving in as my dorm roommate without asking anyone (including me). That relationship soured quickly, which I felt was unfair, given that the arrangement, and his unkind judgements of me, were unrequested.

That ended at the start of the second semester that year when he flunked out, and his parents came and got him one January day and took him home.

From that point, a short, very upbeat period followed. I had the room to myself, which I converted into a nighttime-only darkroom.

I wasted huge amounts of time at that point in my life, staying up way too late, listening to music, and thinking, but not writing much, about life.

A snowstorm struck Monday, February 8, late in the evening, and I joined the very organic gathering of hundreds of college kids outside, building snowmen and throwing snowballs.

Journal, February 8, 1983: It’s snowing. There are hundreds and hundreds of people assembled in the courtyard, some in little groups, others in great big tangles of people, throwing snow at each other … it’s after midnight and yet they’ve appeared in droves. I think I think I’ll go outside and find out what I can. — Later — Well, that was about the most fun three hours I ever experienced.

A lot of music from that era hit on the ideas of solitary kings or heroes, in some kind of response to an over-arching unhappiness in the world in the 1970s and early 1980s.

A writing teacher, Clay Lewis, told me that semester, “You don’t think like a writer, you think like a thinker.”

Then, this delicate bubble of happiness burst, though because I was clinging to it so hard, it didn’t burst suddenly.

In April, my friend Debbie was killed in a car crash. In May, Geoff killed himself.

Once I was back in my hometown for the summer, my best friend Liam, who was also Geoff’s friend, and I were driving somewhere, or, like we often did, nowhere. After a long silence, he said, “When do you think we’ll stop thinking about it?”

Was that even trauma? These people were on the edges of my life. Geoff despised me. Debbie was only an occasional visitor.

In my journal, I tried to spin it in some kind of positive way, intellectualizing my ideas of emotion, freedom, and choice.

I turned 19 that summer. That’s my defense, my excuse. 19 year old kids. Shit.

In some ways, the often-depressing, often-self-important music of the day took part in dragging my attitude down.

Old and Wise by Alan Parsons, The Final Cut by Pink Floyd, It’s a Feeling by Toto, pretty much any songs on Hermit of Mink Hollow or Healing by Todd Rundgren.

The Kansas song that kicked off these thoughts, The Pinnacle, is musically complex, involving various chapters, bridges, dramatic pauses, solos, themes, and motifs, and the lyrics are over-the-top dramatic and self-important.

I’m not singling out Kansas for mid-1970s self-involvement. That’s just the way bands built songs then. There was lots of loneliness, tons of heroism, and mountains of martyrdom.

The Pinnacle lyrics sing…

“In all that I endure, of one thing I am sure, knowledge and reason change like the season, a jester’s promenade.” 

I know we all wanted to sound deep and soulful, but this is just bombastic and pretentious. Even so, those lyrics hit me at one of my most self-indulgent times, my sophomore year in college.

There was a “love triangle,” but it wasn’t really love. It was my possessiveness and competitiveness. I’d rather not say who Liam and I love triangled with, so let’s call her Triangula. It drove a deep wedge between Liam and me, and it was mostly my fault.

Triangula left for the second semester to study in Puerto Rico, but I kept that triangle alive for no good reason.

In a vision I consider dark and empty, I can see myself then, sitting at my dorm room desk, late at night, with my headphones on, blasting that grim, self-important music, Kansas or Planet P or Journey or Pink Floyd. I stare at a blank page in my journal. The pages are there before me. I have the right pen, the right light, and the right desk, but I am nowhere close to finding the right words the put on the page. I was as blank as the page in front of me.

But it was all about to get worse. A lot worse.

One key song lyric that I made my own was from the Pink Floyd song The Final Cut…

“There’s a kid who had a big hallucination
Making love to girls in magazines.
He wonders if you’re sleeping with your new found faith.
Could anybody love him
Or is it just a crazy dream?”

I wrote selfish, demanding, entitled letters to Triangula. She wrote back, and didn’t mince words about what a jerk I was being.

“How many times do I have to apologize that I am the way I am,” she wrote. “You worded yourself very carefully. Yes, I may have treated you like a pawn, and I am sorry.” I could taste the resentment in her letters.

Liam and I had gone from best friend confidants to strained strangers.

One day in April 1983, one of our circle of friends suggested we “smoke a bowl.” I’d never heard the term, but I correctly surmised it meant to smoke some weed. We all took a tall hit off of a tall bong. It was literally the first time I’d smoked anything, and if you’ve ever smoked weed, you know the first-timers always cough and cough and cough, which I did.

After a few minutes someone said, “That’s some good shit,” which someone always says at that point.

I tripped pretty hard for a bit. At one point one of the guys with the weed came out of the kitchen with what looked like a pound of ganja. Liam and I stared at it thought , “Holy crap, we have to smoke THAT?!”

When we found out it was a bag of raisins, we laughed and laughed that laugh you laugh when you’re stoned.

Back at the dorm, I fell into bed and went to sleep.

When the next time came to get high, Liam and the guys with the weed didn’t invite me. It felt like a huge “fuck you.”

Summer came, and Liam and I weren’t really on speaking terms, but we were both part of the same clique, so we were both still around.

As the new year approached, I realized that I should stop hanging out with these people. They didn’t really like me, and they got high all the time. I recognized at the time that it was entirely my fault for hanging out with them in the first place.

I left. We were never friends again.

With the pressure and drama of the love triangle relieved, I lost all romantic interest in Triangula. I had been just like a toddler who only wants to play with a toy because another toddler has it.

The nail in the coffin that sealed that awful period of my life was that I flunked out of college.

Even as I write this, I feel myself staring the thousand yard stare, dark and alone and, as the Kansas lyrics says, “Life is amusing, though we are losing, drowned in tears of awe.”