Curious Mark

Joe Dimeck
Apr.27.2008

On a Thursday day night in February, Mark Nastasi carried a cup of jelly beans through Nectars in downtown Burlington, offering a handful to whoever was willing to accept. Most refused, paranoid about the bearded man with unkempt long hair, who was dressed in a tan duster jacket with a military vest over it that had a Grateful Dead patch on the back.

He looked like a shell-shocked vet, trapped in the misery of war—flashbacks of friends’ deaths haunting him—but once you talk to him you’re surprised. He’s coherent, he’s not crazy by any conventional standards—but he’s different.

“On some nights—the bad nights when I don’t make much playing music—I’ll just take the change I make and buy the jelly bean thing out and give them to people,” he said.
Mark ended up in Burlington after hearing that a friend knew a glass blower in the area. Ever since he was a kid, Mark had this affinity for glass work.

“You’re taking particles of sand and you’re turning them into this complex and complete object,” Mark said.

This fascination with the idea of taking scattered pieces of matter (such as sand) and melting them together to create one unified piece could stem from a childhood that was anything but cohesive.

As Mark tells it, when he was 3 his mother cheated on his father with a mafia-connected mechanic. The act prompted Mark’s dad, Joseph Eugene Nastasi (also a mechanic), to leave and cut ties with his family.

Mark spent his childhood living without ever knowing his father, and the man who had the affair with his mother became Mark’s step-dad.

“It went straight from my father to being with my stepfather. From the age of 3 years old to just about 12 years old we were living with him. He’s my younger sister’s and my younger brother’s father.”

But Mark remembers his stepfather as an abusive alcoholic, who would come home drunk and beat him, his mother, and his siblings.

This childhood abuse would effectively deny Mark a normal childhood as it robbed him of the innocence and naiveté many children have—traits that shield them from the unpleasant realities that adults know all too well.

For Mark those realities were known from a very young age. “My mother left me to myself because I was independent—she knew I could take care of myself.”

However, being forced to be self-reliant from such a young age created all types of stress for Mark, and he admits the first time he ever felt happy as a kid was when he smoked pot for the first time at age 15. It temporarily removed the fear and hopelessness that he was constantly living with as a result of his familial situation. Mark also mentions that kids at school treated him as an outcast because his way of thinking and operating was not the same as theirs. After all, most of the kids who went to school with him didn’t have to deal with the chaotic home-life that was the norm for Mark.

Talking about his stepfather, Mark said the following. “I despised the man. There was very little about my childhood that was good because of him, and the only parts of it that were good because of him were because we had money growing up. He was a mechanic , and plus, he had his fingers in mob business, so we had money coming in all the time.”

Mark explained the various hardships of his youth. At age 11, he was diagnosed with depression and institutionalized after trying to strangle himself with a lanyard. At 17, he left home and went off by himself. By 19, he was institutionalized for roughly 4 days after being picked up by the police because he was walking around trying to get hit by cars.

It was around New Years Eve 2005 when Mark was in Oneonta, New York. He was there because he was on probation and couldn’t go anywhere. He had just got out of jail for stealing a steel pipe, a night he called an “eye-opener” and a “stupid story for another time.” Nevertheless, he knew he couldn’t be in Oneonta anymore and had decided to leave.

“I couldn’t stay in New York anymore. I kept getting in trouble,” said Mark. “I was having problems with trying to find a place to stay and work. The same kind of troubles that plague me a lot of the time, but I was going to be 21 soon, and 18 years without knowing my father—without ever having spoke to the man—I was getting sick of it: having to go on what everybody else had told me about him.”

***

While partying with friends on New Year’s Eve, Mark said he met a guy from Flagstaff, Arizona, whose name he doesn’t recall.

“I’m so horrible with names, and it was 5 years ago. I meet so many people, you know?”
According to Mark, the guy from Arizona offered to put him up for a few days after hearing that Mark was trying to head out to Arizona to find his dad.

“I knew my dad was in Arizona, but I didn’t know exactly where,” Mark says. “My mom told me a few times that was the last place she knew he had been.”
Mark decided to break his probation on New Year’s Day and hitchhike west in order to finally meet the man, who’s genetically responsible for his existence, but never actually made an impact on his life besides not being in it—an impact that might have been more severe and life changing than if he hadn’t left and raised Mark instead.

“It took 28 days to get there,” Mark says. “A lot of rides, a lot of zig-zagging around, a lot of stay over a night here and over a night there, a lot of sleeping in tractor trailers with truckers.”
Once in Arizona, he got together with the guy he met in Oneonta, who offered him a place to crash.

“I was in Flagstaff chilling with that guy, he took me to a party, I met some girl at the party, hung out with her for a couples days—her name was Daisy, she was awesome—really nice girl.”
After hanging in Flagstaff for awhile, Mark said the same guy he met in Oneonta introduced him to other people who were also wandering around. From there, Mark happened to find his way to a drop-in center for the homeless. The center serves as a resource for homeless people and other transients, providing them with information on local shelters and social service programs.

“At the drop-in center, they had a poster board up and on the poster board was the information for a halfway house,” Mark said. “I called the lady and she told me it was $90 a week.”

At the time, Mark said he was working as a day laborer—essentially odd jobbing for whoever could pay him that day—and figured if he kept it up he could pay the $90 a week. However, after telling the lady at the halfway house (whose name he can’t remember) that his sole reason for being in Arizona was to find his father, she told him she used to be a foster parent and would help him out.

“All I had was his name and his birthday—not much at all,” said Mark. “She was able to find his phone number, and give him a call. She called him and told him I was there so it wouldn’t be so awkward me just showing up on his door step. Which is kind of what I wanted to do, but at the same time it might have been a different situation if that is what happened.”

***

Instead of ambushing his estranged father, Mark said his father picked him up in Flagstaff. They spent the day together, first getting breakfast, but mostly driving around and talking. His dad eventually asked him to stay with him, and Mark took his dad up on the offer.

“It took some time before we could actually have discussions about why things were the way they were,” says Mark. “And still, I think there’s a lot left to be said, but nobody wants to talk about it.”

Mark admits it didn’t take long for his dad, Joseph, to figure out Mark was using drugs—mostly pot.

“It was pretty obvious,” Mark said.

He attributed a lot of the early issues and conflicts his father and him had to Joseph’s opposition to the lifestyle he was living.

“My drug of choice is pot, and it’s not that big of a deal in my opinion, but it was a huge deal to him because it’s illegal still. And I had the cops looking for me for leaving New York to go to Arizona. He wasn’t about that—and other things as well—because he doesn’t do anything illegal anymore because he’s had his run-ins with the law and doesn’t need that kind of attention.”
However, the monotonous routine that Mark felt his dad was living wasn’t what he expected or wanted. For the then 21 year old, he wanted to be going out to parties or bars—not to drink since Mark doesn’t really care for alcohol—but his father was never up for it, hindered by his own bank account.

“My dad’s always very much about saying, ‘We don’t have the money for things like that,’ and I’m the kind of person who believes you don’t need money to have a good time.”

According to Mark, it was this difference of opinion that created tension between him and his father. Mark was expecting to bond with his father, but sitting in his apartment watching movies as he unwound after a day of work wasn’t what Mark had wanted.

“My father’s not a very social person,” he said. “That’s part of the reason we have such a hard time communicating. My father’s really just angry about a lot of things.”

***

Mark recalls the day he met another tenant at the apartment complex his dad was staying in. They got talking, both realized they liked smoking weed, and became friends.

A little bit later in their friendship, Mark learned the kid also was a user of crystal meth. In fact, most of the apartment complex had plenty of tweaked out residents.

“We were living in an apartment complex where a lot of the kids in there used that shit—a lot of people in Arizona, in general, use that shit.”
Mark said he eventually tried meth, and consequently, became addicted to it. His reasoning for doing it was because the kid, who introduced it to him, seemed fine. Mark said he didn’t seem like someone whose life was in shambles, but in hindsight, Mark realized how stupid the drug is.

Once his dad found out, Mark was asked to leave. He headed out to San Diego, where he slept on the beach for what he feels was 3 months. The problem, according to Mark, was that he had cleaned up and got off meth before heading to California, but it didn’t take long before he met people who used the drug.

“That drug makes you lose connection with time and reality,” Mark says. “It’s a very dissociative drug. It makes you not yourself, and there were times where I wasn’t sure if I was living on the beach for 3 months doing that shit or only a month. I’m pretty sure the span was 3 months, but there’s times when I was awake for 4 or 5 days on end with zero sleep, 150 plus hours zero sleep, delusional—completely out of my mind, not sure if I’m even part of reality or if I’m just the manifestation of somebody’s thoughts—like really crazy, tripped out ideas.”

The breaking point came when Mark said he almost hit a guy with a shovel after being severely tweaked out for a few days. What caused Mark to snap was the theft of all his belongings—the loss of everything he had. Only one person, Mark says, had known where his things were stashed, and when Mark saw him he grabbed a shovel and charged him before being subdued by his friend.

“I snapped out of it and was like, ‘Get me out of here.’ I started crying, and I’m like ‘I’m tweaked—I am a spun fucking duck,’” Mark said. “Over material possessions, too, and I try not to hold myself too much to material possessions because you don’t take anything when you transcend.”

He had to get as far away from meth as possible, and that’s what he did.
At first, he said he tried to joined the military, but when he told the recruiter about being institutionalized, he was turned away. Mark said he returned to Arizona, clean and sober, and took a job at a car wash. He was living with his dad again, but as Mark put it, all the car wash employees smoked pot, which led Mark back to his weed habit. And just ass before, tensions grew between him and his father.

“What it boils down to with me and my father having so many problems is the whole money thing. He obsesses about not having the money to go out and have fun, and that I shouldn’t be smoking pot.”

So Mark said he picked up and returned to California; this time to Fresno. While in Fresno he learned of the inheritance check his grandma had left him when she passed, which had been sitting and building interest. Mark returned to New York to get his birth certificate in order to claim the check for $176,000.

“I lived off that for a few years in New York,” he said. “None of it’s left. I loaned some people some money. I gave my mom $10,000. The girl I was with for awhile, I bought her a car. I bought the Jeep I have now…I bought a lot of pipes since I have this obsession with glass.”

In fact, the last of the inheritance money went to glass blowing classes at the Bern Gallery in Burlington, where Mark continues to crash in his car or on people’s couches. While he has returned to visit his dad in between, he’s not sure if they’ll ever have the kind of relationship he imagined they would.

“He took care of me the best he could, but it was kind of too late for him to be my dad. At the same time, he probably felt like it was his right to be my dad. And that’s another issue. You gotta remember, if you’re meeting your parents for the first time after a long period of time, they will still feel like they’re your parents and that they can tell you what you can do.”

It was that possibly instinctive paternal response, which made it hard for Mark to connect with his dad. In regards to forgiving his dad, he had the following to say.

“A lot of people told me a lot of bad things about my father for a long time, and I wanted to believe they weren’t true. But don’t do that to yourself. Don’t have false expectations,” he says. “I have more negative feelings towards my mom than I do my father. Because my mom cheated on my father. Maybe that’s why he’s so angry.”
One thing about Mark, which is surprising—given his past—is how positive he is about the future.

“I think it’s every generation’s job to break the negative cycle, and my negative cycle is that I didn’t have my father growing up. So if I ever have kids I’ll never leave them. I’ll raise those kids to be better than I am.”
Mark also offers the following advice for those in a similar situation to his.

“If I could give anything to any person like me, where you have no connection with your father or haven’t for a very long time, try to have a very open mind about the situation. Try to see things from their point of view…I can sit back and look at the situation from when my father told me what happened the day he left and understand why things happened the way they did.”

But for now, Mark is enjoying his time in Burlington, Vermont.

“I love this place,” he says. “I think this is where I want to settle down.”

Mark said he recently met a man, who is letting him stay in a cabin about an hour and a half outside of Burlington. He continues to take glass blowing classes, and is proud to have finally made a piece he can smoke out of. For now, Mark is attempting to take the pieces of a shattered and scattered life and create something whole out of them.

“I know I was meant to do something great with my life cause I wouldn’t still be here if I wasn’t,” he says. “After all the crazy things I’ve been through.”

What that is he still doesn’t know, but his attitude is one focused on being better than the people who shaped his adolescence. His generosity and willingness to talk to anyone has made him a fairly well known fixture on Main St. in only about 2 months, but there are times, he says, that he feels the same hopelessness and anger he felt as a kid.

“I just have to remember that only hurts me,” Mark says. “I have to remind myself not to be anything like the people who made me feel that way—I have to keep positive.”