I didn’t go to Spain alone, although sometimes it seemed that way. I went with Mike Sweeny – a friend from high school. He went to Steubenville College, a Franciscan school in Ohio. We were friends, sort of close, in many ways not; we shared the same politics in a conservative white catholic high school; we were the ones that liked Bergman, Fellini, Godard, the so called new wave film directors from Europe. Actually he didn’t like them; he just liked telling people he liked them; who knows maybe I was the same. I probably wouldn’t sit through many of their films today; but at the time, they were cool, out of the box stuff. Everyone else thought they were simply weird.
About the only place you could see those films was at the Pittsburgh Film Institute, they showed them at the Pittsburgh Playhouse on weekday evening. The weekends were reserved for plays. The Playhouse is on Craft Avenue in Oakland at the end of the Boulevard of the Allies, across from Magee Woman’s Hospital. Mike and I would walk it. I think we spent most of the walk laughing and making fun of everyone we thought were stupid. We were kind of arrogant shits – very elitist, in a hairy freak kind of way. At the time I didn’t want to have anything to do with the word ‘hippie’ – we were freaks – it was edgier. We weren’t big fans of the peace, love, stick a flower in the gun barrel crowd. They were a little too unreal – too ‘the world is a psychedelic daisy’ for my taste. Although I think I still have the conscientious objector letter Mrs. Cafaro, my high school Spanish teacher, wrote for me. Fortunately, I never had to use it.
A philosophy professor at Saint Vincent that epitomized the Tim O’Leary hippie, Joe something or other, anyway, he had the look, the shit eating grin, fuzzed out hair, salt and pepper scraggy beard, tie-dye shirt, vest and string tie pants, hippie haut couture. I remember him in the hall of the philosophy department offices trying to get one of the student’s children to come over to him. The kid was a toddler, somehow his voice terrified the child, and he screamed bloody murder. Of course that could have happened to anybody, but for me it was symbolic. They were so soft spoken and gentle that they left the real world – they seemed fake. Kind of ‘body snatcher’ like. He was one of the few that actually had his PhD at Saint Vincent, but by that time he was over the hill – addicted to peace, love , and hallucinogenic's. He taught metaphysics – you know. ‘Is a rock really a rock?’
I didn’t take him until senior year – too old to be sucked in. He trolled for freshman – they became acolytes for life. A few are friends, Baz, Ed Felinski, Pete Blair, the philosophy of gentleness, raising your voice disturbs the harmony of the universe – I’m much too ethic to live with that philosophy. I still have a fleeting contact with them. Pete’s a poet with a couple of good volumes published. He teaches at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte not far from Neil and Robin’s house. The last time I saw him he was teaching part-time at Georgetown, we had a coffee at the Star Bucks at Dupont Circle. He berated me for not reading Beowulf to you and Andrew in the original English – hell, I didn’t even read it to you in normal English. You guys were stuck with Rolling, Rolling, Rolling… and Flying High. Baz and Ed are both psychiatric nurses, working god know where. Ed lives in one of the river towns on the Allegheny and Baz is working at some prep school in New England.
But back to Sweeney, that’s the story you wanted to hear. Mike and I didn’t hang with the same group in high school, I not sure we hung with anyone, but even after we went to College, I can’t remember going out with him and my College friends. Regardless, I told him that I was going to Spain – it must have been on Christmas vacation, and he invited himself along. I wasn’t thrilled, but what could I say. I don’t think I thought him smart enough to be a good traveling companion – see I told you I was an arrogant shit. He had some trust money, so he was funded, I planned on school. He planned on spending the trust money set-up for education. Mike was a big guy, slim but big boned, red hair, about 6’ 1” or 6’ 2”, pale, freckles, the map of Ireland on his face as they say. His father was a prison guard at the county jail. His mom was the typical Mount Washington catholic housewife. His aunt was the mistress of the head of the Hilton Hotels and also the source of his educational trust.
So in May, we were off, just a week or so after I finished my sophomore year. A flight to New York’s Kennedy and then on Icelandic Air, with a stop in Saint John’s Newfoundland and Reykjavik, Iceland before touching down in Luxembourg. After a few hours and a stroll we boarded a train to Paris. From Paris it was a 24 hour train to Madrid. It’s odd but for some reason I don’t remember traveling with Mike, at least, not until we got to Madrid. I can remember us getting off the train in the morning and being famished. We wandered around until we finally found a restaurant open, deserted but open. We had a good meal, but I almost choked when the bill arrived so much for the next two weeks budget.
Mike did go to language school with me that summer. I’m not sure it helped a lot but we did meet the Swiss girls. I dated Claudia, the sedate one, he dated the redhead. Not to follow stereotype, but Mike and the redhead had a louder relationship than even my ethic sensitivies would tolerate. They were au pairs, in Spain for eight months to take care of the rich Spanish kiddies. Pretty much Mike and the redhead (I can’t remember her name) and Claudia and I went our separate ways, but the Swiss girls are another story.
I’m really not sure what Mike did with his time, he didn’t travel; he wasn’t going to school. I guess he wandered around town. I was busy with school six days a week. He was around the apartment at night; we would meet to go to the American Embassy for burgers and chocolate milkshakes every week. I think he hung out at the American library; I guess he spent his time with the Swiss girl. I met other foreign students at the University, mostly Europeans, some American, a couple of South Africans – Afrikaners, blond, blue eyed; this was all before Nelson Mandela was freed. We went to the student parties, found a couple of room mates for our apartment, drank a lot. I was bound and determined to read Don Quixote is Spanish, that was a laugh, I think I developed tennis elbow going between the book and the dictionary.
Eventually it was time for me to leave, I had been living in Spain for over a year, I had to get back and make some money before school started in the fall. I planned on working in the one of the steel mills; the money was great. Mike had decided that he wasn’t going to return to school; he wasn’t sure what he was going to do; he still had a flow of money from his educational trust and through the university parties a German girlfriend. She was in the same school that I was, La Facudad de Filosofia y Letras, sort of hiding out; she claimed some political problems resulting from some student demonstrations in Munich. She was a full blown communist with a capital ‘C.’ She attended meetings, the whole deal. By that time the Communist Party in the US was pretty much irrelevant. I thought of it as obsolete, something for the old bull unionist. The McCarthy hearings and Khrushchev banging his shoe on the UN podium and threatening to bury us had ended the Communist parties hold on the US intelligencia. Anyway I didn’t take her seriously. I still can’t understand why a German communist would hide out in Franco’s Spain; hell, communism was very much illegal in Spain at the time, but I guess there was still a fairly active underground party, remnants of the Civil War. I can’t say I gave it much thought; she was Mike’s girl friend.
I never found the job in the steel mill that I had hoped for, it was the early seventies in Pittsburgh, the city was depressed, homelessness was becoming a real issue in the mill towns along the rivers. The Japanese competition and anti-pollution laws of Allegheny were too much for the old mills of Pittsburgh. The best I could do was late night job in a greasy grill on Forbes Avenue in Oakland, but it was a job. But it was good to be back.
I hung out with the Oakland contingent of Saint Vincent and drank Zubrowka with Andy Blasko, Linda, Ryan and Mac.
One night in late August, a few weeks before I was scheduled to go back to school I got home late, around two, my Mom was waiting for me. She broke the news, Mike’s body was found at the bottom of a cliff on the Moroccan coast. She asked me if she could do anything. I told her no, and she went back to bed, and I sat in the dark.
So that’s the story of Mike Sweeney. And once again it is time to say goodnight. And remember…
Love you, miss you, and take care down there.
Dad
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