Kevin emailed us after his first performance on the Interlochen campus. He played a guitar-piano duo with his roommate at a coffeehouse, an informal evening venue. His message was filled with exuberance and wonder at all that was unfolding in his life.
Subject: !!
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 08:50:55 PDT
From: “Kevin Powers” <hoist@hotmail.com>
To: ropo@sover.net
Hey fam—
Well heres how the coffee house went. The Interlochen Jazz Combo went first and of course they were smokin’ and everyone went nuts, me and jesse [his roommate] went about 10th and played Equinox and a lot of people said we stole the show which is supposedly incredible since even having enough courage to play the first Interlochen Coffe House was in and of itself pretty amazing, not to mention being sophmores. There was pretty impressive talent and i guess even though I was not thrilled with my performance everyone loved it. I am still getting compliments so I’m pretty excited. Also the other big news is last night I met my girlfriend and her name is Ali, so theres another one of my missions accomplished. Whats new with you all? Everything is great here obviously. Talk to you later
Kevin
He had less than two years of sanity left.
Honoree’s message to Dean several weeks later, on the birthday that he and I share, offered a rare insight into the anxiety that she had kept under tight control throughout Dean’s ordeals. The anxiety, it seems, did not end with the judge’s decision.
Subject: Happy Birthday
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 05:50:37 -0500
From: Honoree Fleming <ropo@sover.net>
To: Dean Powers <junior_304@hotmail.com>
Well dear,
I woke up in the middle of the night again so I thought I’d get up and send you happy birthday wishes. I hope it’s a great one for you. Someday I suppose I will get beyond this dread and insomnia that I’ve been feeling. It will be nice when you and Kevin are home and I know that you are safe.
I love you—happy birthday.
MOM
As for Dean, his intellectual development, interrupted by the pariah status he’d suffered at Middlebury Union High School, flowered again at the Gould Academy. He had composed several perceptive, vigorously written school assignments on topics including Shakespeare, the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson, and—with bittersweet innocence—mental health:
Good mental health is important in anyone’s life if they hope to enjoy it. Someone who is mentally healthy can maintain a more positive outlook on things… People who maintain a balance of good mental and physical health seek intellectual stimulation, and human interaction, and make creative use of their time through work and volunteer activities. This promotes self confidence and an overall good feeling about themselves.
Stress is the punishing our bodies experience as we adjust to our continually changing environment… [It] can result in feelings of distrust, rejection, anger, and depression, which in turn can lead to health problems… With the death of a loved one, the birth of a child, a job promotion, or a new relationship, we experience stress as we readjust our lives.
Identify the causes of stress in your life. Sharing your thoughts and feelings with a family member, friend, co-worker or counselor can help you see your problems in a different way. Try not to get depressed. Depression can make you feel miserable…
Set short-term and life goals for yourself… Realize that drugs and alcohol don’t solve life’s problems. Develop a sense of humor and make time for fun. Schedule time for play and become involved in activities that make you laugh.
Near the end of his first semester, Kevin wrote to us about the breakup of his second romance. (We hadn’t known there had been a first romance.) But he wrote with his usual optimism, coupled with a sense of eagerness to get home for the holidays. He asked, as he always did, after his grandmother. In my response, I reminded him that he, Dean, and I had tickets to see the musical Rent in New York during their winter breaks in January.
Old Vermont and Old Maine, decked out for the holidays, enveloped Honoree and me as we headed east to Bethel along two-lane roads on the Friday before Christmas. In the early twilight, the farmhouses and large cedar trees came ablaze with colored lights, many of them surely preserved in newspaper wrappings and stored in cardboard boxes over the decades until the season. Styrofoam candy canes and giant plastic candles festooned the telephone poles of the small towns. Merchants had set up miniature manger scenes in their display windows. Wreaths decorated the lighted doors of the Congregational and the Catholic churches.
Arriving on campus, we were greeted by a smiling Dean. He led us to the auditorium and then disappeared backstage, and we settled in amid the other parents to watch the evening’s program. It included, besides Dean and some other instrumentalists, a robed boys’ choir that sang hymns and holiday songs. They sang with the timeless cherubic, O-lipped earnestness that seems the hallmark of school choirs everywhere.
Then the parents and their children filed out of the auditorium and got into their cars for the holiday drive home. Two nights later, one of the robed young carolers, an earnest and intelligent boy with soft round cheeks, walked out of the darkness into his parents’ farmhouse kitchen, raised and aimed a shotgun, and decapitated his mother. The boy later explained to a tutor who had befriended him in a Vermont jail, “I love my mother. If you saw what I did, you’d understand.”*
The four of us enjoyed a warm Christmas, and I took my sons down to New York by train for the early-January performance of Rent, as I’d promised them.
Dean had grown intensely interested in politics and the news in general:
Subject: Re: (no subject)
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2000 05:28:32 PST
From: “Dean Powers” <junior_304@hotmail.com>
To: ropo@sover.net
How’s it going Dad? You wouldn’t believe what Ive been doing the last few days, reading the newspaper. Ive been keeping up with the primary rhetoric and it looks like a religious race lately huh? Did you hear about all the Bob Jones U. stuff? Also there was another school shooting, in Michagan. I wonder how close Kevin was. did I tell you I been out riding snowmobile trails, Ive been out five times. I also have been ravin! RAves are a blast (techno music) I want to go to one in NYC or Boston. I got a band now and we’re jamming to alice in chains, and singing it sounds pretty good. I got exams this week then IM out I will see you this weekend. see ya - jr.
Several weeks later, an anguishing motif resurfaced: a renewal of the estrangement that had been growing between Dean and myself. The tensions seldom had an understandable cause. Dean would erupt in fierce anger, for example, over nothing that I could perceive. In hindsight, I believe that his edginess was being fed by the long prodromal stage of the disease that was slowly overtaking him.
In early April 2000, Kevin flew home from Michigan for spring break, and the two of us drove to Bethel, where Dean had lined up a gig on the Gould campus. It was the boys’ first performance together in front of a sizable audience, and it was a smashing success: hard-driving gutbucket rock ’n’ roll, with the amps all the way up to eleven. Dean had long dreamed of kicking it onstage with his phenomenal brother. He was almost giddy at the chance to show off Kevin’s gifts, and his own. The performance room was filled, and the boys did not disappoint. Kevin played with his usual intense, fiery brilliance, but kept his trademark poker face. Not so Dean. He laughed and shouted and his eyes sparkled and his dark mop of hair bounced and he leaped into the air as he hit his chords. I had not seen him in such a state of wild pure joy for years. The prolonged cheers and whistles and applause at the end would have awakened the Grateful Dead.
The joy did not survive the rest of our day together. The tension overtook it shortly before Kevin and I departed the campus for Vermont. I cannot recall the cause; there probably was no cause. At any rate, both Dean and I were seething as my car pulled out of the campus.
Back in Middlebury, after having crept home through a late-winter blizzard with Kevin wide-eyed in the passenger seat, I tried to repair things via email—which succeeded only in revealing my cluelessness and perhaps giving grim satisfaction to the demons that had lodged inside my son:
Subject: the visit
Date: Sun, 09 Apr 2000 18:05:22 -0400
From: Ron Powers <ropo@sover.net>
To: Dean Powers <junior_304@hotmail.com>
Dean,
Got home about an hour ago. Brutal snowstorm the second half of the trip, nearly a whiteout between Montpelier and Burlington; mountain routes out of the question. But we are safe.
I know how frustrated you are and have been with me. I know your feelings that I have not made a connection with you.
I guess I wasn’t ready for the changes that took place in you when you hit adolescence. Mom and other people have often said that you and I are a lot alike, and that’s one reason why there is so much friction between us. I think that you are an extremely good kid, and at your best you are nothing short of heroic.
I don’t want us to be at war forever, Dean. I look forward to us being friends sometime. There’s so damn much I want to talk to you about that doesn’t have anything to do with our problems. I hope that someday, when all this anguish settles down and you and I are both a little older and wiser, that we can make peace and enjoy one another’s company again. I love you, Dean. I would stand in front of gunfire for you.
Please believe that.
Dad
In spite of our increasing friction when we were together, I remained determined to keep up a friendly tone in my emails to Dean. He largely returned the gesture. Emails replaced the times together we had once enjoyed as a mode of friendship.
By May 2000, the first phase of their time away from home was drawing to an end. Dean had made his college choice: Fort Lewis College in Durango, a town of seventeen thousand that lay beside the Animas River and nestled in the San Juan Mountains. It boasted incredible mountain-and-wilderness scenery and five ski areas, which may have played a part in Dean’s decision.
Meanwhile, Kevin prepared himself for leaving Interlochen, if just for the summer, the dreamlike little universe that had embraced him and claimed his soul.
That summer breezed along in what I recall as a mellow haze of guitar music and dinners, grilled chicken and corn on the cob, with friends on our screened back porch, the Woods Tea Company in concert now and then. Our sons off in the Middlebury night with their friends and supposed friends. Someone in that group almost certainly was sharing marijuana, a substance that, as we now know, can gravely exacerbate the symptoms of schizophrenia. Several months afterward, we came to believe that the equally destructive LSD had been introduced into the circle. At the time, we remained innocent. A book that I had cowritten was published to good reviews and large sales, and the family financial crisis, acute to the point of credit-card juggling since Honoree and I had left the college, was over. It was the last summer of the old millennium.
In September, Kevin and I packed up his belongings in the family van for the long drive back to Traverse City. Honoree flew with Dean to Albuquerque. They rented a car and drove north to Durango, where Dean began his first year of college. Kevin was ecstatic to learn that he had been invited to join both the jazz combo and the larger jazz ensemble at Interlochen. A few days after that, we learned that Kevin was not only learning at Interlochen; he was teaching: acting as a tutor for some of his fellow students. Honoree and I drove to the academy for Parents Weekend. The jazz ensemble was to perform, and our son had won the first guitar chair. On campus, we joined the early-evening flow of gussied-up parents heading toward Corson Auditorium, past the Marshall Fredericks sculpture in front of the entrance, a bronze piece that depicts two bears resting back-to-back, one large, the other small. We produced our tickets and filed into the auditorium, a bright, curving panorama of nearly a thousand red-covered seats on a polished hardwood floor that inclined downward toward the stage.
The stage was bare. No scaffolded rows for the musicians to sit on. No microphones. Nearly a thousand of us looked into the empty brightness and curled and uncurled our programs and waited.
There came a rumbling noise. Part of the stage floor slid back. We heard the ensemble before we saw it: a muffled thump of a big-band number from the depths. The ensemble levitated into view, twenty young men and women, all in black, in stacked tiers, blowing and drumming and tickling the ivories and strumming and playing the hell out of Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train.” The lights made the trombones and the drum fixtures shine like gold, and there was Kevin, down low at stage right in his black tux and bow tie; the lights blazed off the gold trim on his black Martin, and turned his blond hair gold, as bright lights always did. Poker-faced, one polished black shoe resting on the arch of the other. Head bobbing just a little to the big-band beat.
He took the first solo. The band snapped quiet and Kevin’s notes went skipping and dancing all alone, through the amps and up the aisles and into the audience and then out again. They somehow got through the curved beige acoustic tiling and escaped the auditorium, and headed straight up and toward the early evening stars, and then on into deep space, joining all the other music ever played, coursing to eternity. The solo ended and Kevin ducked his head in a bow, and the eruption of applause startled him and made him peek upward a little before it burst clear and followed his music into the cosmos.
Kevin’s remaining years at Interlochen floated along on the ballast of that ovation, in an illusory haze of time suspended. He extended his mastery of technique and instinct until his teachers had little left to teach him. He directed a guitar ensemble in a memorable performance. He composed wondrous guitar pieces that seemed to blend rock and jazz and flamenco and other assorted artifacts of his musical memory. He and his bandmates performed at Stanford University and in Chicago. He tore his concentration from music to the classroom enough to earn reasonable grades in his studies—although he never tore away completely.
In late October I wrote to tell Kevin of an encounter Honoree and I had that reconnected us with his “creation story” as a guitarist:
Subject: Amazing incident!
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 23:47:47 -0400
From: Ron Powers <ropo@sover.net>
To: Kevin Powers <hoist@hotmail.com>
… It happened while Mom and I were in the Volvo showroom on Wednesday. We were talking to one of the salesman, a nice guy who has helped Mom in the past, when I noticed another salesman was looking at us. When there was a pause in our conversation, he called over to me: “Is your name Powers?” I nodded and he asked, “Do you have a son who plays guitar?” I said yes; two sons who play, actually. He said: “I met you 10 or 12 years ago at the Boathouse. You had your little boy with you. You guys sat right next to me. I remember that he got up onstage and played with the group. He had a little toy guitar. I remember how excited he was. And I knew he was going places, right then. I’ve followed news items about him in the paper. Where is he now?”
Is that not unbelievable? This guy was sitting next to us at THE pivotal day in your whole life’s direction, Kevin, and he remembered it—almost as clearly as we have. Crazy world, huh?
Take care of yourself. Write when you can.
Love,
Dad
When I picked him up at the Burlington airport near the end of winter break 2000, Kevin was in a frenzy to get to the parking garage. He was back home from a visit to his new Interlochen roommate, Peter, who lived in Jacksonville, Florida. Kevin had a surprise for me.
He dumped his guitar and backpack into the rear seat of the van, foraged in the backpack, then barreled into the front seat brandishing a CD in its jewel box, which he ripped open. I had hardly got the motor started when Kev shoved the disk into the car player and shouted, “I want you to hear this!”
I left the car in parking gear and we listened as the music started to play. Kevin turned up the volume and then peered at me.
The songs were punk. But what punk! Six driving pieces of blazing force and disciplined musicianship—guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. I had never been a fan of punk, but this was something else, something beyond. The songs surged forth, alternately seditious, playful, and charged with young-male defiance, typically toward a girl who’d thrown a young male over. “I won’t change myself for anyone,” the lyrics ran, and “Why do we pretend that we were made for each other?” and “Why did you lie to get your way?” (When Pedant Father suggested a few days later that she had lied to get her way to get her way, Kevin shot Pedant Father a sidelong you-are-so-out-of-it look, and Pedant Father kept himself out of advice-giving after that.) The lyrics contained the requisite quotient of alienated-youth trashmouth, yet the songs were not dark at all. The words seemed to be present mainly to provide a superstructure on which to mold the magnificent music.
The longest and best of the six pieces was an aural fireworks display titled “Epistemological Commentary.” Kevin took his longest solo in that one, and it was out of this world: an intricate display of fast scale-running, up and down and up and down again, but shaped into an exhilarating musical idea. Kevin shifted chords upward near the end, and his guitar turned into a calliope, tootling away in some celestial circus of joy everlasting.
I didn’t say anything when it was over and the disk slid out of its slot. I didn’t want to trivialize what I’d just heard with some inane boilerplate comment. I think that I ended up just shaking my head, and putting my hand on my son’s shoulder. The only sound was of the van’s engine humming in the chilly parking lot.
Kevin had his lopsided grin working. He nodded. He understood.
At sixteen, he had just lived out a kid musician’s fantasy: an all-night recording session in a professional studio. They invited a third musician, a young, dynamic drummer named Scott Shad. Scott was a member of Inspection Twelve, a Jacksonville band on the cusp of its national debut with a CD titled In Recovery.
On New Year’s Eve, as Kevin told the story, the trio entered the soundproofed room, set the volume and tonal controls, and began playing. They recorded and rerecorded and edited throughout the night—a detail that richly flavored Kevin’s fantasy-come-true. By morning they had nailed it. They ran off several copies of the master, with the intention of sending them out to record companies. And they awarded themselves a suitably macho punk band name: Booby.
They sent their CD off to several places including an emerging musicians’ go-to website, garageband.com. It took the site about four months to begin posting the songs.
Subject: The rave reviews
Date: Sun, 06 May 2001 07:52:35 -0400
From: Ron Powers <ropo@sover.net>
To: Kevin Powers <hoist@hotmail.com>
Kev,
I assume you’ve been checking out the reviews of “Epistemological Commentary” on garageband. They’re mostly over the top! I love the one that says, “I’ve listened to a heap of songs on GB and this is the best Punk song I have heard on the site thus far! This song rocks! That guitar line is so damn cool I can barely stand it…” and on and on. It must give you a tremendous rush to read this kind of praise. I also notice that you’ve made the Qualifying Round and that your Punk ranking is 100. I think you’re still on the way up, and next Wednesday should give you a real boost from reviewers. Pass the word to Peter—you guys are stupendous!
Love,
Dad
Kevin’s voice was leaden when he called home from Interlochen in March. Scott Shad, the gifted young drummer who’d sat in on that magical recording session in Jacksonville, was dead. Scott was a diabetes sufferer. On March 6, he’d been caught without a needed dosage of insulin at the worst possible time. While driving his car, he apparently had a seizure and succumbed to a fatal crash.
Honoree and I flew to Interlochen in late March to bring Kevin home for spring break. We made an evaluation appointment with one of his teachers, who told us, “Kevin is probably the most talented musician I’ve come across in my time at Interlochen.”
But then, in April, another death: my wife’s mother, Honora, at age ninety-eight, whom both the boys had adored. Both sons were stunned with grief. Kevin was tongue-tied during our telephone conversation, and soon afterward sent this post:
Subject:
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 20:19:34
From: “Kevin Powers” <hoist@hotmail.com>
To: ropo@sover.net
Hey dad
I’m sorry for my initial inability to say a lot, I probably sounded bitter but I’m still getting used to this and I’m so thankful for you and mom allways being there for me. I almost feel hardened though, it hasen’t sunk into me what happens when someone dies. I feel like I took advantage of people like grammy and scott allways being there and I never fully had the chance to spend the time or say the things I would want to before they were gone. I don’t know what it means that I can’t fully become emotional when something like this happens, I guess I realize though that for grammy this is what she wanted. I heard her say it and I don’t blame her she lived a full life more than 90 years. Anyway, thank you, take care of mom as I know you are and I’ll see you in a few days.
Love Kevin
Subject: Re:
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 16:35:53 -0400
From: Ron Powers <ropo@sover.net>
To: Kevin Powers <hoist@hotmail.com>
Kev,
Your reactions, believe me, are absolutely normal. Tears are not the only measure of grief. You’re in a kind of shock. I know you well enough to know how intensely you feel things. Your silence on the phone spoke worlds—you were deeply connected to the moment and your sense of loss.
As for “taking advantage”—no. You didn’t take, you gave. With Grammy you were always the picture of sweetness and tenderness and understanding. You always approached her in a searching way; you looked and listened for what was going on inside her head, and responded to that with amazing gentleness and good humor. The humor you shared with her was so wonderful. Whenever I think of the two of you together, I have this wonderful image of Honora’s face opening up, losing its guardedness, and then that deep belly-laugh she could release on occasion, when her whole body and shoulders would shake. You knew how to kid her, be a little outrageous, jolly her along. It was one of the things she lived for.
I agree with you that Grammy gave you something too. You and Dean. She gave you an understanding of the need to be tender. Living with her, adjusting to her needs and moods, helping her out when she needed it, like escorting her into the dining room or fetching her a blanket or a cup of tea—these are the little things that enrich human life and offer the deepest satisfactions. I think that the kindness she nurtured in both you and Dean is stronger than all the hatefulness and ugliness of this scary world. And I think that nothing you encounter out in that world will ever corrupt you because you will always carry a piece of Grammy in your heart.
Maybe when you wrote that lyric, “I won’t change myself for anyone,” that was partly Grammy speaking.
She loved you. Mom and I love you. You’re a wonderful person.
I can’t begin to tell you how proud I am that you are my son.
Love,
Dad
The world, which Kevin had embraced so buoyantly as a child, was by now showing its true nature to him. On the day of the attacks on the World Trade towers in September 2001, he wrote this to us:
Subject: hey
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 20:29:32 -0400 (EDT)
From: Kevin B Powers <POWERSKB@INTERLOCHEN.K12.MI.US>
To: ropo <ropo@sover.net>
Dad-
What a day in history… I am beside myself with confusion as to who would do this, and why. There are no words for something like this its safe to say that this will be one of the biggest events in US history but we will see. I hope the guys fighting for our country will make smart moves and I hope Bush takes cautious but advancing measures whatever they might be. Do you have any colleagues in that area? Well everything here for the most part is fine, I think some people will be affected by this more than others but I’m ok and I hope you and mom are doing well. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, and I will most likely call later tonight or tomorrow.
Kevin
I read his message and wished that I could drive to Interlochen to hug and comfort him. I could have, of course. In retrospect I dearly wish I had. But I wrote him this reply.
Subject: Day 1 of the New World
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 16:06:56 -0400
From: Ron Powers <ropo@sover.net>
To: Kevin Powers <hoist@hotmail.com>
Kevin,
I just got home from the grocery store, and Mom told me I’d missed your call, which we both had been hoping for throughout this sad, terrible day. (We were so gratified that Dean called in the morning—we really wanted to make contact with both of you.)
The funny thing is that I was thinking about you on my ride home, probably at the same moment you and Mom were talking. Thinking about the things I’d want to say to you. The most important of those things is to urge you to be brave, and to keep your optimistic outlook on life. That will be important for everyone in the country in the hard days ahead. The second thing is to savor the preciousness of life, every moment of it—but I think you do that already.
The third thing is to be aware of the contribution you can make as an artist to the healing of your friends, your school and perhaps someday even your country. Terrorists, criminals and evil people are always the ones who blow our world apart, and always it is the artists who put it back together again. We really need your music now. We need to hear the joy and power and hope that you generate with every note you pick from that beautiful guitar. We need you, and Peter, and the people in your combo, and the whole widening circle of musicians across this shattered society, to help restore our sense of humanity and the sweet flavor of life.
Play well, and with extra passion. As you always do.
With lots of love and respect,
Dad
And he did, for as long as he could.