On the day that Wes was born, Dad's band, "Sweetgrass," was playing at the Village Country Club. It was at the beginning of the Dallas "singles" period. Single men and women flooded the massive apartment complexes of what was then North Dallas. Not all of them were single, but all of them said they were. The Village Country Club was a meat market, and to this day people in their mid-fifties are wondering how they got away with the excesses of their youth. You'll wonder about yours later.

That night, Dad rushed to St. Paul's hospital and watched Wes make his entrance. Center stage. Loud. Purple. A definite presence. At that time, there was no Gypsy Tea Room, no Bomb Factory, no Deep Ellum, period. I like to think that Wes and Tim and Mark brought all that with them.

Wes spent the next three years playing naked in the yard of our apartment. Mothers brought their two year old daughters to watch. Nah, strike that. Now days, some asshole would call the Baptists, and loud sermons would be heard throughout the land.

Sweetgrass played five one-hour sets six nights a week. Seventy-two songs every night. People danced. Men lied to women and asked them what their sign was. Women lied to men, saying "of course they're real!" (Discussing Unicorns, of course.) Couples would tryst behind pickup trucks in the parking lot, and scorch themselves in a flame that would be ashes by morning.

Dad was relatively free during the day, and when Wes and his brother were old enough, they went every day to the woods surrounding Ash creek, looking for (and finding) a menagerie of snakes, frogs, turtles, lizards, crawdads, and once a possum which we somehow got into a box and brought home. The crawdads became possum food, and we caught minnows to feed the snakes.

Wes started school at the Montessori Children's House when he was four. For the first month he didn't budge from his chair or participate in any activity. That was the last time Wes was ever shy about anything.

When Wes' brother got too old for Montessori, he was enrolled in a Dallas public school. The kids there bought and sold drugs on the sidewalk in front of the school. Wes was still in Montessori, but we decided it was time to get out of Dallas. We moved to Cedar Creek Lake, and promptly found that we now lived in the Drug Capital of Texas. It was, nevertheless, if only for a brief time, Paradise.

Our first football game was against the small town of Trinidad. Mom and Dad sat on the top row of the bleachers. The night was warm and the weather was perfect. Behind us was a pasture with cows grazing away and talking to each other. Beyond that was the last hint of light in the sky. The sun had gone to California, as it does every day.

Malakoff Tiger cheerleaders came to our house by night and put up a sign that read "A Tiger Lives Here." Those girls are now moms, holding their families together, and keeping their husbands from giving up. They are the true Tigers.

Mom got a job as a dental hygienist. Dad was a royal fuck off for a few years, having never adjusted to not working as a musician. Then Mom came home one day, and the electricity had been cut off. Then Mom and Dad got divorced. Shit happens. The divorce was "friendly."

We brought soccer to Malakoff. Wes and his brother brought the big city with them. Wes' brother made friends with a BIG kid named Tim, and any of the boys who might have been tempted to initiate Andy into the culture gave it up as a bad idea.

Nobody wanted to mess with Wes. They just wanted to be with him. Mom had bought a tiny Alpine house by the lake that was always full of Andy and Wes' friends. Full! At that time, Mom got another job, but it was in the Dallas area. So she was only busy about a hundred and fifty hours a week. (Lazy bitch!) Would have killed someone normal, and probably has, but Mom is not normal. Mom and Dad should have switched roles right after the "I DO." A little divorce humor.

Dad was able to see the boys after school (soccer practice) and on weekends (football games). Wes thought that football was too extreme, and so he became a drum major. Wes' picture is in the dictionary accompanying the word "strut."

We did lots of camping at Atlanta State Park and Tyler State Park. Lots of Rambo and fishing. Lots of hot dogs and beans and scrambled eggs. Lots of competitive farting. Lots of Dad snoring in the back of the van. Whenever possible, we went to concerts in Dallas. (Tripping Daisy would tour with Def Leppard ten years later.) The boys would festoon their jeans with bandannas, thumb their zippos in unison, get woozy on concert smoke and come home with T-shirts. Always a stop at a Dairy Queen or McDonald's, making enough noise to break the municipal code.

Mom was everyone's mom, and Dad was everyone's dad. We should have gotten married. More divorce humor.

Wes had a lot of interest: the Tiger band, guitar, his dirt bike, his friends, fishing and a girl names M-. Wes' best friend was his brother, Andy. Followed in no particular order by Roger, Wayne, Bone... and on and on. Wayne and Bone are twins. Wayne is the oldest, and it will be a very cold day in hell before he forgets it.

Malakoff Tiger Band had a director and his assistant. The director died of a heart attack, and the assistant took over. Wes and Andy were very close to both of these wonderful men. The previous director has done the music world a favor by becoming a junior hight principal. Another case of someone becoming a principal without any teaching experience. Usually it is coaches and counselors who become principal. A fine Texas tradition.

Andy played football and was in the marching band. At half time, he changed uniforms and appeared on the field with his trombone. A true Renaissance man. Wes refused to play football, and became instead Drum Major, strutting his ass off and acting as band director on the field. God, how he loved doing that. God, how everyone loved him doing that.

Wes had a green Kawasaki dirt bike which his mom bought for him. Dad would take him and a friend to a track near Van, Texas. The kids would pretty much disappear into the woods after having run the track a few times. Wes was serious about becoming a pro rider at that time. He was also serious about having his own Bass Fishing Show. He was also serious about M-. None of that worked out. The guitar was fated to guide his destiny.

When Tripping Daisy was still touring in a couple of vans, they would stop whenever they spotted a likely stock pond, climb the fence and throw in their lines. Tim and Wes remained serious fishermen until the muse caught a virus. The virus being a white powdery substance.

Wes and Andy both graduated as Valedictorian. Dad is bragging, but so would you. Admit it. Andy got a scholarship to Austin College, from which he later graduated and attended medical school at U of T Southwestern Medical School. Wes held off on the academics. The muse was not yet infected, and Wes was unable to really focus on anything else. Eventually, however, he attended UNT where his bike was stolen and where he was arrested by the campus police for taking a chair from the dean's office so he would have some place to sit in his dorm room. Wes met Mark at UNT. Dad was there one day when they were jamming, and that was the day he knew that Wes wasn't going to go for a degree. Instead he enrolled in Kim Dawson's theatrical studio. It was there he met Julie, the girl Tim sang about in Tripping Daisy's first hit, "I got a girl."

Tim had a small studio in his backyard, and he and Wes and Mark plugged in and started Tripping Daisy.

Tripping Daisy was an instant attraction. Tim De Laughter is a complete "stage presence." Wes is Wes. He once told Dad that some of his friends ragged him about not getting enough exercise. "I jump around on stage for an hour and a half with a thirty pound guitar around my neck," he said. "What the hell do they want?"

Dad told Mark Pirro that if he had a bass player of Mark's caliber, Sweetgrass would still be kicking ass. Awful thought. Old guys dreaming of The Village Country Club.

Incidentally, Mark's Dad, Tony, has a band called "Flashback." There is no band cooking who couldn't learn from these guys.

Within a few years, Major labels were doing the Tripping Daisy drool. One of the labels flew them to the Super Bowl in Los Angeles. Wes called Dad that night. "Guess where I am," he said. He was in a stretch limo touring Beverly Hills.

Tripping Daisy didn't sign with that label. They wanted full artistic authority. Later they signed with Island Records. They were treated like royalty. They went to New York to be on MTV. Dad things that's about when the muse came down with an incurable infection.

RANDOM FLASHBACKS

Before Datsun changed its name to Nissan, we had one. A little two door with a number for a name. Mom bought it from Wes' godfather, Frans Albert. Mom had flown to Phoenix, and we went to join her for Christmas. We drove in that little car, following the famed "Trail of Tears." First of all, driving from Dallas to Amarillo is an act of faith. You have to believe you're actually going to get there, even when the road signs indicate that you're a hopeless dreamer. you leave Dallas, and twelve Dairy Queens later, you're still a birthday away from Amarillo. Helium is mined in Amarillo. Everyone there talks in an incredibly high voice. (Here's something every musician has done. You're on stage, and helium filled balloons are part of the decor. You grab one, and suck deep on the content. Two seconds later you're talking like a Munchkin. "Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen. Helium is the ultimate high."

Sweetgrass became popular, and income was stable. Not spectacular, but stable. Mom and Dad partnered with a studio guy and bought a farm northeast of Dallas. The Berggren family went there every Sunday morning and spent the day doing farm things. Largely, that consisted of watching grass grow and cows shit. Wes took an interest in the indifference with which cows crapped in front of every other animal present. Cow pies were everywhere. Some fresh and steaming, some advanced to the status of cardboard. Wes picks one up and says to Dad, "I will lick this cow dooky, Dad." Which he promptly did. Did not kill him. Nothing white and powdery about an old cow dooky.

We're at the farm. We have four cows. Why? Couldn't tell you. Couldn't milk them. Couldn't sell them to McDonald's. (They all had names.) Our partner had five or six other cows. Damn near enough for a cattle drive, whatever that is. The cows checked their watches every evening, and like a flock of blackbirds, turned as one toward the barn. Happy hour, don't you know. A friend of ours explained that there is always one cow who is the "lead cow." Dad asked him if the others were "rhythm cows." A little guitar humor.

The Berggren family had an 8 millimeter camera. Mom is a picture junkie. (In her defense, every time any one of us picked up a camera, Wes instantly materialized like the Ghost of Hamlet, wearing a toothsome Hollywood smile. The kid loved to be photographed.) So Mom trains the camera on one of our cows taking a crap. Very "noir." Later, we played the film backwards. You haven't really lived until you've seen a fresh cow patty jump off of the ground and disappear into a cow's ass. Eat your heart out Monty Python.

Late Sunday. Driving back to Dallas in our VW van (What else?) As if obeying some obscure law of nature, Wes would torture us with "Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall..." We had to sing along. Something to do with parenting skills. When we got finished with that last bottle of beer on the damn wall, Mom and Dad and Andy would heave a sigh of relief. Still twenty miles to go before we could see the "X" building in downtown Dallas. Then a little voice from the back... "Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall..." We'd love to hear it now.

The Berggren family did some semi-serious camping. We saved a million turtles who didn't realize that there is a fraternity of truckers who will actually compromise all eighteen wheels just to help a turtle make the great transition. We brought home so many turtles that while they disappeared from East Texas, Dallas became overrun with them. The Dallas City Council had to call a special meeting. It should have made the papers. "Explosion of turtle population overrides Council's concerns regarding rapes, murders, potholes and thefts by DISD officials."

We had a turtle named Norman. (That was the turtle's stage name. We never found out the name he was born with.) If you name a turtle, you have a serious relationship going. He wouldn't come when you called him, of course, but why would you want him to? The turtle was with us for almost two years, longer lasting than anyone's first crush and most marriages. When we moved from Dallas, we took Norman to White Rock Lake and released him at the water's edge. Norman was supposed to slip into the lake and disappear from our lives forever. But evidently he took our relationship more seriously than we did. As we turned to go, he simply followed. Picture this: Mom and Dad and Wes and Andy running away from a turtle. It felt like a small betrayal, but who knows. Wes' ashes are scattered in the woods by the spillway, and turtles live a long, long time.

We're driving to Atlanta State Park. There is an overpass a mile ahead. Wes tells Dad that the clearance is 16'4". Tells Dad that he can read these figures posted on the overpass. Dad can't even see the figures, much less read them. A year later, Wes admits that a mile or so before any overpass, there is a small roadside sign that tells the clearance figures. Who things about clearance driving a VW van?

Another trick. Dad was sort of a Jungian freak. Jung defined intuition as the highest form of knowing. Mom is driving. Dad has a deck of cards. Cuts the deck and asks Wes what the card is. Wes gets it right four times in a row. Dad is freaking out. Eventually Wes admits that he was reading the card by the reflection from Dad's sunglasses.

Wes grew up listening to bands practice in the garage. Some pretty iffy musicians were trying for a career jumpstart through Dad's non-existent connections. Whenever one of the White Out sniffers got a little impressed with his chops, Dad would bring him into the living room, and hitting a note on the old piano, would ask the sniffer, "What's that note?" "I'm supposed to be able to tell?" they'd reply. Then with Wes around the corner in the kitchen, Dad would hit another key, and ask Wes to come into the room and to hit the same key. Which he always did. A little humility is a good thing for someone who things White Out is the key to happiness.

Talent night at Malakoff High School. Wes has his first band. Covered some Bon Jovi. The kids loved it. The junior high principal, who had once been the band director, stood from his seat, plugged his ears with his fingers, and left the auditorium. In full view of everyone, Dad turns purple and follows him out of the assembly hall. Very bad words followed. The principal retreated in a yellow glow. Later, his daughter appeared on stage playing a flute solo. Some kids laughed. Andy and Wes were blamed and scheduled for a paddling by the high school principal. Dad got purple again. Andy tells Dad to "back off... it's no big deal," he says.

Q: Is "style" learned or inherited?    A: Neither.

Okay, this is Dad, again. Oddly, this is my first trip into the site. I've avoided it because I'm afraid of what I cannot confront. It's been over four years since Wes crossed the Rubicon into an existence where time does not exist. Don't ask me to explain about the "time" thing. I know what I know. Take it or leave it.

I was going to write something about the Tripping Daisy years, but it turns out that everyone knows more about those years than I do. So, I'm going to philosophize.

First of all, life goes on. Never having been able to definitively explain the meaning of "life," humans nevertheless love to say that life goes on. But when you think about it, so does death. They run together in a muddle, until imagination refuses to separate them, and only religion keeps them apart. My way of saying that Wes has been a definite presence in my life since two roads diverged in his and he took the one less traveled by. I've heard from many who have heard from Wes. Many who have seen him. If that offends your reality, stand up and explain yourself. Then go to your room.

What an impossible mixture of joy and sorrow did I experience in reading this site's forum. I knew that Wes had many, many friends, but I didn't realize what smart little whippers they were. (Almost everyone is a "whipper" to me since accomplishing my last birthday.) I suppose it's a digression to comment on the style and intensity of those who wrote, but I couldn't help noticing. Ever try laughing and crying at the same time? Gets kind of wet.

I have, from time to time, picked up Wes's diary and tried to visualize the life behind the word. I have concluded what a lot of Wes's friends already knew: There was always less than one degree of separation between the heights and depths of his life. If his humor was ribald, it was also profound. If it was profound, it was also transparent. If it was deadpan, it was only a short delay before falling-on-the-floor laughing.

Fifteen or so people celebrating in Andy's brand new apartment. Neighbor peeks in the door. " Which one of you is moving in?" she asks. "All of us," Wes deadpans. A beat. Riotous laughter.

Wes lived in a cave. The ceiling was a parachute draped from the overhead light fixture and pinned to the four corners. The walls were festooned with sentences scribbled to capture a moment's thought or a profound realization. There was an "ode" memorializing a friend, Robert, a dedicated lifestyle, ("Poor Man's Food") and a cat named "Free." There was a grocery list on the wall above the sink: "Beans, Dogs, Beer, Toothpaste..."

But more and more, the cave was for sleeping off tour fatigue, and indulging in hard to find introspection. I cannot share Wes's diary with you for obvious reasons, but many who contributed to the forum on this site would find stories about themselves. Names named, etc.

Question: Why should we remember Wes? For that matter, why should we remember anyone? Answer: Because of love. When you free us from greed, envy, lust, insanity, war, George Bush and Jay Leno, Love remains. Love inhabits memory like fire ants in Texas. And, when you consider how we have allowed the fiction called " time" to enter the formula of our lives, memory can be kind of like solving for X. (And you thought math was your enemy.)

The matter of death by chemicals is always on my mind, and I have conceived many histrionic means to put a stop to it. I remember Nancy Reagan's precious little intervention, "Just Say No." When I first heard that phrase, I was deep into the semi-spiritual pleasure of a beverage bottled in Scotland. Ah, the mystic flavor of charcoal, the essence of iodine, with just a hint of Cherry. Just Say No, my naked butt. But knowing what doesn't work is a cosmos away from knowing what does. So, here is my advice to any of you who are considering the option of death by chemical: First, go kill your parents to spare them the agony of your descent. It's the right thing to do. Then isolate yourself as much as possible from everyone else that loves you, so that they won't have to watch the flame die. Then, hey, what the hell. Go for it. Just say, "Fuck off, Nancy."

Sounds like I'm mad at Wes. Not mad, furious. And when I see him, he'd better have his wings.

What I'm going to do next is take random bits from Wes's diary, and I'm going to elucidate the mystery that makes a bridge into Wes's current existence. Think I can't do it? Watch me.

First, there are other matters to attend to. Other people I love. Thanksgiving. Christmas, Moving to Canada. That sort of thing. I'll be back in January, 2005. God, who thought I'd live this long. Something's not right. I should be the one with wings. Wes would do a better job at this than I would. Bye for now, and remember, just say "Fuck Off, Nancy."

P.S. The packages from Scotland don't come to my house anymore.