I’ve got a pocketful of Lemonheads, just in case. A carton of cigarettes, a case of triple-distilled vodka, three bottles of Nyquil, and enough Oxy to sedate something prehistoric.
My heels are on the floor and against the foot of the bed both. If you were hiding under the bed, if there was room for you there, you’d see a pair of filthy socks behind the torn black canvas of my shoes where the rubber heel supports have shredded and worn. These shoes, when I first got in to town, they weren’t the only thing to set me apart, but sitting on a sawdusty stage at Micke’s Saloon and Tackle, tapping my feet to the rhythm of my Ovation 12-string, they’re the first things that get noticed.
People here, the locals, they wear Laredo boots with twisting rows of stitching through tough, tanned leather. They’ll tell you how you can tell the quality of a boot by the rows of stitches holding the inlays in place. They wear wool-lined rubber boots still stinking of saltwater and shellfish. They wear hip-waders and steel-toed Carhartt’s. They don’t wear tattered Chuck Taylors with mismatched laces.
In a mom-and-pop motel in a town with a name you don’t pronounce, I’m not alone. He’s there in the corner, his fingers tangled in a cat’s cradle. He’s grinning through skin like leather boots, gray whiskers stitched in twisting rows across his cheeks and chin. His fingers, playing the loop of string like a marionette, they’re all knuckles and yellowed nails. In case you’re wondering, his feet, they’re not wearing shoes or boots or waders of any kind. His bare feet are curled beneath him. And he’s grinning.
Light another cigarette. Pour another drink.
Even the music doesn’t make sense anymore. All the songs were about her anyway. In some way or another, they’re all about her. With her gone, what’s to make sense of? When the chorus goes, “doo do doo do doo do do,” it’s just what it sounds like.
She’s the kind of girl who makes all the others before her just another bit of useless trivia. Another answer to a game show question. Karen Whatsherface for $200, Alex. Bridget Somethingorother for $400. Who is the past? Who is nobody?
She’s the girl who turns everything upside down. She’s the one who makes today better than yesterday and tomorrow too terrifying to dwell on for long.
Like a good song, a great song, at first she’s a lot of unsteady beats and a melody you can’t quite remember when it’s over. After that, every time you need to hear a little bit more. Just a little more to remember how it goes. What was that rhythm? Did I hear that right? Every time she’s more and more a part of you. You can feel her inside where all those notes, all the harmonies and scales, they’re more than music. You can feel her where it all makes sense.
Pop another pill. Pour another drink.
His eyes are focused on nothing. His pupils never moving, not seeing anything. Not watching his fingers move. The string, it’s an insinuation. It’s a symbol of foreboding. It’s curled around, under, through, and past. It’s telling me what I don’t want to hear.
The smile, it’s an hourglass. It’s each little fine grain of sand pouring through the gap between his rotten teeth. It’s the ticking of a clock. It’s a decrescendo. It’s telling me what I already know.
And the chorus goes, “doo do doo do doo do do.”
When you first see her, she’s too skinny, too tall, too pale. There’s not enough or too much of everything. But every time after, she’s more of everything right. She’s the perfect height, the perfect weight. She’s the new paradigm. She’s beyond the symbols and the metaphors. Her eyes are the color of eyes. Her hips are the definition of hips. Her legs and fingers and mouth, without them as a model, there are no legs. There are no fingers. No mouths.
I was never much for dancing. I could never make my body move with music. I could tap the beat with a foot. I could strum in perfect time, but for dancing, that’s another language. To see her dance was something else. To watch the way she moved. The way her body toyed with the air around her in an endless motion. A perfect circle, she moved with no beginning or end.
Sip a little Nyquil. Pour another drink.
In Italy, there’s this dance called the tarantella. Centuries ago, if someone was bitten by a tarantula, they’d start to convulse and shake and go in to fits. The way they cured this, they played music to the rhythm of the convulsions. And this person, the victim, they’d dance for sometimes days. Filled up with poison, dancing in fits to the music playing to their dance. Music as a cure.
Now, if you’re bitten by a spider, all filled up with poison, they just shoot you up with more poison. Now poison is the cure.
I’ve got a little orange bottle of Percocet with one refill left. I’ve got Morphine in an old bottle of eye-drops. I’ve got some acid in another eye-dropper bottle and I can’t remember which is which anymore. I’ve still got that Ovation 12-string under the bed where there’s no room to hide. I’ve got poison and music. I’ve got the disease and the cure.
And all the while he’s still there, crouched in the corner, telling me what I don’t want to hear. What I already know. He’s all a bunch of symbols. He’s a dripping faucet. He’s a dial tone. And he’s still grinning.
And the chorus goes, “doo do doo do doo do do.”
Like a great song, she challenges you. She dares you to listen closer, look deeper. She’s always changing. Always another layer under layer. She never slows down. Never stopping. Always dancing. Always moving.
You want nothing more than to just sit with her. Just listen. You want to be the only one who understands, or at least the one who understands most. You want to be tied to her the way a great song needs an audience.
The way she moves, she dances. You just want to play along. You pray you can keep up. Spinning, always spinning. She makes you dizzy. She makes you feel good and bad in all the right places. She’s the poison and the cure.
Choke down another pill. Another eye-dropper. Another drink. Another cigarette. Another pill. Another capful. Another drink. Another pill. Another pill.
And that’s when he stops grinning. That’s when the string and the teeth and the yellowed nails, that’s when the grains of sand, the dripping faucet, the decrescendo, that’s when you know it’s all over.
And that’s when I pull out the guitar and start playing a cure.
And the chorus goes, “doo do doo do doo do do.”
And the chorus goes, “doo do doo do doo do do.”
Sunday, April 20, 2008
"A drug-addicted musician must escape from a lunatic in Alaska."
Saturday, April 12, 2008
"A vampire tries to reunite with her family in the suburbs."
Little Dougie Parks slit his wrists with an exacto knife that he used to build model airplanes. When he came home from the hospital, his mom gave him a Playstation 2. You know, to keep him busy while he was "recovering."
The day before she took her ACT's- well, she was supposed to anyway- Carla Phoebick took twelve vicodin, washed it down with a bottle of Maker's Mark and chased that with one of those baby-blue, plastic compacts of birth control pills. The whole thing. Who knows why? Anyway, after she got her stomach pumped and after the charcoal stains around her mouth finally washed off, well, her uncle pulled a few strings and she got in to Carleton after all. She didn't even have to take the test.
Then, and this is the real kicker, my brother Paul, all he had to do was mention to Doctor Webb that he was planning to park his new Corolla in the garage with the door closed and he got to skip his second semester and live at home, rent free for the whole ten weeks. It was like a total vacation. He just bombed around the house all Winter watching Law and Order re-runs and made sure to look extra mopey whenever mom was around.
My mistake, I guess, was where Little Dougie, Carla, and Pauly failed, I succeeded. So, yeah. I didn't get a Playstation or a free pass or a hot meal every night in bed. I didn't even get a funeral, really. Not with the casket and flowers and all that. Because they never found my body, all I got was a crappy memorial service. I figured they'd at least put up one of those oversized portraits with a silk ribbon across the front, but I peeped out the church after everyone left and nothing. Grandma Barrett, that's mom's mom, she put a locket on my grave marker, but it left a toxic, green stain all over my middle name.
And if that wasn't a bad enough, guess who's living at home again, rent-free with all the leftover turkey sandwiches he can eat? Poor, distraught boy lost his little sister. Christ. I've got half a mind to rip his throat out. I bet I could still taste mom's chicken kiev flowing through his cry-baby veins.
The big joke about the Chasers is, they always ask what death feels like. And the big joke between us is to say, "Come a little closer, sweetheart and I'll show you." It's the boys more than the girls who ask. Boys always want to know. If I was real honest, I'd say that dying is like waking up on a Saturday morning and just watching the same channel on tv straight through Sunday night. But the Chasers, they want romance and mystery, so you tell em it's cold at first, then you get real warm and your nipples get hard and tingly. You tell em it's scary, but then it's like the best sex you ever had. You tell em every time you feed- they like it when you call it "feeding"- when you feed, it's that same feeling again. Like the best sex you ever had.
The only rule with Chasers is that you don't turn em. Just like you don't let a groupie sing back-up or call some shirtless drunk out to pitch the ninth inning. It's just not done. You do that and all the mystery is gone. The other Chasers, they get a good look at how it really is and all that fantasy fades away. It won't live up to how they pictured it in their heads. It can't. It's just death. Boring, stupid death.
My problem with all this is, the Chasers are pathetic. They're like Little Dougie and Carla and even my big bro. Forever chasing after that elusive unknown, but too shit-scared to go all the way. But the ones like me, they can be worse. They really play in to that elitist sort of thing. Without the Chasers following em around, they'd just be a bunch of cold, dead bodies. So they feed off that superiority thing as much as the blood and all that.
For me, even in death I don't fit in. It's still all a bunch of follow the leader bullshit. I just want to go home.
I should clear up, before you get all, "Careful what you wish for," that I never asked for this. That's the same mentality that makes guys think a girl is begging for it just because she looks good in a spaghetti-string tank top. It'd be a funny story if it weren't true.
Funny because the thing with the big feeds is that it's more like a dance than anything else. Like a big dance, but no one brought a date, so everyone's dancing with each other. We can't die anymore than dead, so sometimes things get crazy and everyone goes home with a few bite marks here and there. No big deal, unless you're not one of em and you get caught in the middle of their big, bloody dance-orgy. Funny because I've always been pretty fair-skinned and even though I was sick as hell, I'm a sucker for Jill's big, doe eyes and went out all cold and clammy anyway. Funny because it's the same mentality that makes guys think a girl is begging for it in a spaghetti-string top, but there I was, pale as a ghost, shivering cold, and sweating. I fit right in.
The other thing they all ask is what's it like to feed for the first time. You tell them it's spiritual. You tell em your heart jumps when the blood begins to pump through it again. You push your hair over your ear, bite your lip, and you say, "It's so..." and you just let it hang in the air like that. You say it all to keep the fantasy alive. Maybe as much for yourself as for them. Maybe every time you say this, you're tricking yourself just enough to keep going. Really, though, you can't even remember. Do you remember your first taste of stewed carrots?
It's only been six months, but already I'm sick of all this. Sick of the Chasers and all the false mystery, sick of all of us feeders and our stupid inside jokes. I'm sick of playing monster. I'm going home.
I hopped a bus from the city on a Saturday morning. If dying is spending all weekend on the couch watching an endless stream of infomercials and fishing shows, this bus ride is like being reborn. I'm watching office buildings pass like birch trees, the sunlight strobe-lighting between them, stinging my eyes and I'm feeling nauseous. The crosswalks, taxis and billboards thin as the bus carries me away from the city and on to the four lanes back home.
In the seat across from mine there's some kid staring at me. I can tell he's tall even beneath the hooded sweatshirt, slouched shoulders, and scruffy whiskers. His drowsy, upside-down smile eyes are fixed on my mouth. I can tell because he doesn't blink until I bite my lip like I'm about to deliver my line.
"It's just so..."
That's when he pulls the headphones away from his ears, leans over kind of slow and he asks me, "What's it like? You know, being dead."
The sun is strobe-lighting again, only now it's flickering between power lines, water towers, ten-acre reserves stocked with Balsam Fir and Norway Pine.
At the next stop, the kid stands and says to me, "Another time then," and he plugs his head back in as he shuffles to the door.
Another 12 blocks and we're passing Little Dougie's old neighborhood. The next right turn leads to the pharmacy where Carla Phoebick picked up her mother's prescription. I know the next stop is a three-minute walk from the garage door that my poor, big brother mentioned he might leave closed.
The brakes make that sci-fi movie door opening sound and my stomach really drops for sure. An old woman holding a glass dish covered in tin-foil, she leans forward and pats me on the shoulder with a shriveled-up hand that looks deader than mine ever will. She says, "Go on, dear."
Outside the bus, I feel the sun on my cheeks and nose, on the outside of my eyelids, for the first time in weeks. The Chasers would always ask, "Don't you ever miss the sun?" To keep the fantasy alive, romantic, we're supposed to say, "In death, the moon is warmer, brighter than the sun ever was." To ruin it all, you could tell the truth. You could say how, for us, the sun isn't really all that dangerous. It's like when you were a kid and to get to the car on a winter morning you'd have to walk through a cloud of exhaust, so you'd hold your breath and puff out your cheeks real big and run through it real quick with your eyes closed.
This morning, I'm standing in my parents' driveway with my eyes open, staring in to the sun. I'm not holding my breath. My cheeks aren't puffed out. I'm breathing exhaust, just to see what it tastes like. To see if what Paul mentioned he might do to kill himself, I could do to live again.
I'm so caught up in all this living and dying and being reborn that I don't hear the garage door open. I don't see my dad in his cut-off sweatpants, old high-top Reeboks, and "Watts Up?" t-shirt that he won at his Bodin's Electric company picnic two summers ago. I don't notice him faint and trip over the lawn mower either.
Paul sits with his elbows on the table, sculpting a mound of rice in to a perfect replica of his Corolla. For the first time I can remember, Dad hasn't touched a bite. Mom, she just stares at me, her eyes all full of tears. I don't know if it's because she finally has four plates to fill again or if it's the third glass of wine, but she's strangely giddy.
Poor Paul. He's pissed because that free room and board is as good as gone now. "So, what? You just faked being dead? That sounds pretty shitty to me. Mom?"
Mom, still staring at me through those eyes swimming in tears and Merlot, she says, "Just eat your rice, dear. Before it gets cold."
It feels so good to finally say something honest about myself, so I tell them everything. I tell them about the feeding orgies and how they're like big dances where no one has dates. I tell them how eating people, well, it's really no worse than killing chickens and I hold up a big fork-full of Mom's chicken kiev for emphasis. For Mom's sake, and Dad's, I tell a little white lie and say how being dead isn't all that bad. It's peaceful, I say. I tell them the truth and say how sorry I am that I took this long to come around.
I notice Paul's mouth spreading in to a sly grin, but just as soon, he works up a pathetic frown and says, "Mom. I can't go back to school like this. Not with a sister who eats people, Mom."
Little Dougie Parks slit his wrists with an exacto knife and got a Playstation. Carla Phoebick emptied a medicine cabinet and got in to college. My stupid, big brother almost could have maybe taken a nap in his car and didn't have to grow up. They chose to flirt with death and got their consolation prizes.
I'm choosing to flirt with life.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
"Feuding neighbors discover a shocking secret over the Winter."
He's the kind of guy likes to hold hands, Jimmy. Saturday nights, Rose and me, we're eating dinner and there they are walking on the street out front, holding hands. Rose says she thinks he gets a lot of ear infections because he's always digging at his ears with his pinky finger. Me, I don't think about that at all. Pretty wife, though.
He could be my son. He's age appropriate, I mean. I bought this house at 32 years old. That was back in '68 and houses were cheaper then, even. So, a couple summers ago, I'm working out back and I hear this beep-beeping like a truck backing up and when the beeping stops, out of the cab hops Jimmy with a big grin across his face. Shit-eatin, if I can say that.
Rose tells me I ought to go welcome him to the neighborhood, so I invite him over for a beer and show him my workshop. Instead of a garage, I have a woodshop. Spend the winters making furniture in there now that I've got the space heaters. The look on his face when he seen it, though. Priceless, they say. Looked like he was trapped. Like a scared rabbit or something.
Robert? We got off to a rough start. Look, I don't want to sound arrogant or anything, but he's old. Okay? I don't know exactly, but old enough to have fought in wars. That's plural. It's not that it's a problem or anything, but when we moved here, we're just looking for a nice neighborhood to raise the kid, so it could be worse. The last apartment we lived in might as well have been a college dorm with all the noise and everything. So, it's not that the age is a problem, but I know Heather was looking to meet some other younger couples and this neighborhood- well, it was like going from a college dorm to one of those old folks communities like you see in Florida. Just wasn't what we're expecting was all. To be honest, it didn't bother me all that much, though. I work in the city, sixty hours a week minimum, so coming home to block parties and baby showers, I could really care less.
The woodshop was something else, though. I know how it sounds, so don't take it the wrong way, but you know in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre when they go in to the house and there's that room all full of animal bones? Like squirrel skulls and armadillo shells all over the place? That's the way it feels when you go in there. Humid and the air's thick with sawdust. And everywhere there's circular blades and router bits and all kinds of half-finished parts of chairs and tables. It's like furniture skeletons all over the place. Creepy, in a way.
I tried to be neighborly and humor the guy, but like I said, I work so much, when I get home I just want to grab some dinner and a spot on the couch. I don't get to see the wife and kid much as it is, so listening to this retired old fart talking about lathes and belt-sanders all night, I just didn't have much interest. Look, I'm sorry if I offended the guy, but I've got a 30-year mortgage. I want to enjoy the place a little bit, you know?
Parents anymore, they don't let the kids out to play in the summer. Afraid of every little thing. I'd see him out in the yard once a week or two, mowing the lawn or taking the dog for a walk, but that was it. Good hunting dog by the look of it, but I never saw so much as an air rifle in his hand. Point is, at my age, I got the bad knees and the arthritis and I'm out there taking care of the garden and thatching the front grass. I told Jimmy once about thatching the grass when he asked why mine was so green and his all yellow and he just looked at me like I'm speaking French.
I guess when you've got the fancy car and a job in the city, you gotta have a big TV and all that to go with it, but all I'm saying is kids need to get out and stretch their legs. Learn baseball with a bat in your hands, not on cable tv. When we was kids, the old folks in the neighborhood, they were the shut-ins. Now, things are switched up, I guess. Different generations.
That third-acre he's got and the one behind it, those were part of my land back then before the city divided it all up. Just a shame to see it like that after all this time. Back then, this whole area was forest and good hunting land. I've walked from here to where Kentucky Street is now and back more times than I can remember. Used to be good land. Now it's just dirt for all these air-conditioned boxes to set on.
Don't get me started with all that. The guy hasn't worked a full-time job for a decade, at least, right? So of course he's got all the time in the world to thatch his yard and prune the trees and everything. And I'm supposed to feel bad that I don't have this manicured lawn? Look, back when he bought his house, it cost what, thirty-thousand? Tops? Even with inflation and salaries back then, you could pay that up in ten years. I paid 210,000 dollars for this house. I'll be lucky to retire at 65. So, no, I don't feel bad about it. Things are different now.
And I grew up in a city, to be fair. This is the first house I've ever lived in. I didn't even have a lawn mower when we moved in. I bought one third-hand from a garage sale and it took me an hour to get it started the first couple of times. I offered him thirty bucks to cut it for me if it meant that much to him, but I think that pissed him off more than anything. What can you do?
Well, when we first heard about it, Rose and me was finishing up dinner and it came on the little tv in the living room. Said some girl from across the river went missing. They showed that picture of her on the news every night for the rest of the fall. I kept telling Rose it was morbid, putting her picture up like that. You see it all the time these days. Every day some kid's got himself kidnapped and everyone all over the place gets all worked up about it. Then one day you stop seeing that picture anymore and they've got a new one. No one ever says what happened to the last kid. They just find another grade-school picture of some poor, smiling, young thing and they move on.
I spent a lot of time indoors that fall cause of my fingers here. See how they don't straighten out all the way? I was working out in the shop and had my mind on something else I guess and then, zip. Just like that. Cut across here and that tendon just went right back up in to my wrist. This one here, doctors said I just nicked it, but the fingers don't straighten out all the way, like you can see. Had to give up the woodworking for the whole rest of that fall and in to the winter. So, I saw the picture of that little girl every night for weeks.
I've got a dining room set that still isn't finished.
Yeah, the fingers. I saw him a couple times that fall and every time I see him he tells me the whole story again. I could tell you the doctor's name that did the surgery. Did he tell you how it went back up in to his wrist? "Like a rabbit zipping back in to its hole," he told me that on at least three separate occasions. I felt bad for him, sure.
The first time I saw the girl, Heather told Eric to go get ready for his bath. She didn't want him seeing it on tv like that and asking questions. He's a sensitive kid, so stuff like that really gets him worked up. The whole state was looking for that little girl, so there wasn't much we could do to keep it from him. I guess it's sort of ironic how it all turned out. I remember seeing that picture on the news, though, and I didn't really think too much of it at the time. I try not to watch the news because it's always something. Kidnapping, rape, war, gas prices, hurricanes. It's just too depressing. I just stay away from it. Pretty ironic, I guess. Looking back at it now.
You see those Dateline shows where they catch the child molestors in the act and at first, you think, well maybe that will be some sort of deterrent, but they run that show every week, so I don't know how much good it does. It's more like entertainment than anything else. Just another cop show or tabloid journalism stuff. Dateline is locking up pedophiles, Extra is doing their top-ten celebrity nipple slips. It's all the same. I hate to say it, but they gotta sell ad space to Colgate and Pepsi or whatever. So, as long as the predators are after the kids online, Tylenol is going to keep selling aspirin.
About the only place to get real news anymore is ESPN. At least they stick to the facts. Scott Baker went twelve and eight with a 3.86 ERA last season. Try and get facts like that on channel 11. They can't even tell you who won the election.
I heard him yelling is why I went outside in the first place. It was cold as ever and he's out there yelling at nine in the morning like a crazy person. I thought he cut his foot off with a snowblower or something, but when I looked out the window, his driveway was still white, so I got my coveralls on and went out to see what all the fussin was about. When he said the dog run off, I chuckled a little and he didn't like that much, but I offered to help him look anyway. I hadn't got out much that winter cause of these fingers here, so I didn't mind stretching the legs a bit.
The dog, he says, isn't ever off a leash outside. Runs off, he says. I thought to say, "No shit," but we went off looking anyway.
He looked more lost than the dog until I showed him how to follow the tracks. We followed those tracks for about twenty minutes through the snow and the whole time he's hollering. I tried to tell him to keep quiet and listen instead, but damned if he was going to listen to anything I was gonna tell him. When he's not yelling for the dog he's going on and on about the dog. Saying how he never wanted the damn dog in the first place, but the wife and kid talked him in to it and how upset they're gonna be if he comes home without it. I try to tell him how a dog like that needs good training so they don't run off, but he wasn't hearing that neither.
I saw her first, I guess. We followed the tracks across the new highway they're building up behind the house and followed them down towards the creek. I barely saw her with the way Robert was yammering on about everything, but she was there by the side, just her arm and her face. The rest of her was all covered up by the snow and ice. It was just horrible. I kept seeing that picture of her on the news, smiling with a ribbon tying her hair up in to a ponytail and those white, square teeth. But here, she's got a blue-gray arm across her eyes and her lips all chapped and bloody. I'll never forget it. I guess that's an understatement.
I wake up every morning at three o'clock now. Most of the time, I get back to sleep, but I still see those chapped lips behind my eyelids. Except now it's all darker and kinda blurry. That day, it was so stark and clear. But now, when I wake up, it's hard to make out her skin from the snow. It's all just murky and dark, but I know it's her. I'll never forget the way she looked.
It was like a nightmare. The footprints went right up to her and I could tell the dog had found her before we did. The way the tracks circled around her, you could tell the dog had sniffed at her. A dog with good training would have stayed right there with her, but I'm guessing he found a squirrel or something and run off again.
I have to say I didn't recognize her right away. I saw that picture on the news every night, just like everyone else, but I still didn't recognize her. I've seen more than a few dead bodies during the war, but never a child. Never a little girl like that. I just had to think how I hoped that her parents never would have to see her like this.
The worst part was, you could tell from the state of her that she hadn't been there long. It was like she just went to sleep there the night before and never woke up. It's the worst part, I say, because they stopped showing her picture on the news over a month ago. I hate to think where she'd been before that.
I left my phone back at the house, so I couldn't call right away. I had to run back, so I left Robert there with her. I'm ashamed to say I was relieved when I turned around and started running back. I just wanted to be as far away from there as I could be and I didn't envy Robert for having to stay there with her alone.
It took some thirty minutes before the first car came. The red and blue lights were flashing on her face and her arm and everytime they flashed red, the blood on her lips disappeared. When they flashed blue, her skin looked right again, but the blood would come back. Every flash hid something and revealed something. If you could get them lights to flash red and blue at the same time, maybe she'd look okay. Maybe she'd look like that little girl on the tv again. Blood. Cold, blue skin. Blood. Cold, blue skin. Everytime I see a squad car on the side of the road now, my stomach drops and I get sick.
Jimmy comes out of the car with a couple police and leads them over the hill to where I'm standing with my hands on the back of my head and my fingers are getting stiff and cold.
That was the last I saw of her. That was the most I could bear to see her. I don't watch the news anymore. I know they'll be showing that picture again and much as I don't want to remember her that way she was in the snow, I just can't bear to look at it again.
After that, Heather and I talked about selling and moving on. It was just a horrible thing to have happen right there and for a long time neither of us could sit at the dinner table like a real family. Sometimes she'd start crying and put dishes in the washer before she'd even had a bite.
I'll see Robert out in the yard from time to time, thatching the grass or cutting limbs off the tree out front, but he spends most of his time inside or in his woodshop.
Last week he brought over a rocking horse for Eric. Beautiful piece of work. We didn't say much between us, but I thanked him for the horse and asked him how long it took to put it all together. He sort of just shrugged and said how he hoped Eric would like it. I told him he would.
Heather said we should put the horse in the basement to keep it safe. She thought how it'd be a terrible thing if Eric broke it playing too rough, but with all the work the guy put in to it, I thought it should be used.
We decided to stay, after all. It was mostly a financial thing, I guess, but if you really stop to think about it, these days there's not a lot of places you can go where stuff like this isn't happening right in your backyard, so to speak.
They're good people. Just young. The wife, she'll bring over a frozen lasagna a couple times a month and Jimmy collected the mail when Rose was sick this Spring. I think the house feels different for them now. I think it's not the same as when they moved in.
Every once in awhile, Rose will see them walking on a Saturday night and they're holding hands. For awhile, they'd walk with the little boy, Eric, holding hands between them. More these days he runs off a little bit ahead and they hang back, but Rose says their grip isn't as tight as it used to be. She says it's more like they don't want to hold too tight in case the boy gets in trouble and they have to run after.
I've seen a lot over the years, but something like that- well, it's just hard to talk it out of your head. I guess that's all I got to say.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
"A dejected geek acquires the ability to read minds after he loses everything."
"What a putz."
"My little boy."
"We're playing Detroit tonight. Cabrera's on the DL. We could win this one."
"He looks so alone."
"I can't believe he's wearing an X-Men t-shirt."
"He used to smile so much. He never smiles anymore."
"If you're gonna blow your brains out, at least iron a shirt. For Christ's sake."
"He should've stayed home. He was safe at home."
"That nurse is out of this world. I would lick her asshole. I swear to god, I really would."
"Just three more hours. Three more hours, my shift is over, and I'm out of this hell-hole. I can still catch American Idol."
"Fucking cry for help bullshit. If he survives this shit, I'm going to kick his ass. Braindead or not."
"It's all my fault. I coddled him. But he was my baby. My little baby."
"If I miss us clinching the division, I will kick his ass."
"Three more hours."
"All those comic books. All that music. He used to smile so much."
"I bet that ass is tight as shit. Where'd he even get a gun?"
"Shit! I left the chicken in the freezer. Who am I kidding? I was going to order a pizza anyway."
"It was that girl. He wasn't raised like that."
"He went out with a bang. I'll give him that. I'm going to hell."
"If she loved him so much, where is she now? Tell me that."
"Poor kid. Has a good family and everything. Just breaks your heart."
"She took him away and now she's not even here when he's hurt."
"These nurses see so much fucked up shit, I bet they're down for anything."
"I don't know how much longer I can do this. Every day it's something else. Some poor kid all messed up."
"He would tell me, 'Mommy, you're the best mommy ever.'"
"I just need a hot bath. Three more hours, Pammy. Pepperoni, green peppers, and a hot bath. You can do it."
"And that FaceSpace or whatever he called it. You don't meet girls on the computer."
"Pre-game show is on in ten minutes. How long are we gonna stand here? Not like he's gonna wake up and start dancing around."
"Computers. What's wrong with the grocery store?"
"Three hours, then a hot bath."
"He would tell me, 'Mommy, when I'm big, I'll come cut the grass every week.'"
"He looks good with a shaved head, at least. Tough, kinda even. Ha. Tough."
"Uh-oh."
"What's that mean?"
"Three more hours. That doesn't look good. Shit. Pulse ox is down."
"Why isn't she doing something? Is it supposed to be beeping like that?"
"Whoa. I hope mom didn't see that."
"Okay. Pulse ox is down. Tremors in the lower extremeties. EKG showing normal, but- No problem. Just page Morris. Tremors. Tremors."
"She looks nervous. She should call a doctor. Call a doctor. My baby."
"I should get mom out of here. She doesn't need to see this. Little prick. Selfish, little prick."
"Come on, baby. You just stay with me. Please."
"You're gonna get through this, guy."
"Tremors."
"You stay with me."
"Oh, mom."
"He needs epinephrine. Where's Morris?"
"You stay with me!"
"We need to go."
"...thrombolytics. Separate the sub-fascia from the the epidermis. Oh, great."
"Morris."
"Hang in there, buddy. Just- hang on, okay?"
"I need to stay here. I need my baby."
"Okay, epi."
"I need my baby."
"You broke her heart, you asshole."
"Pulse ox is down."
"I don't want to-"
"-three-"
"-hang in-"
"No response. Tremors."
"-lower extremeties-"
"-bald-"
"O negative."
"-brainless, fucker."
"-hours-"
"-baby-"
"-such a nice family-"
"Shit."
"That's it, were out of-"
"My baby."
"Three units."
"-a nice boy-"
"What a putz."
"-need a new-"
"-never going to make it. Too much-"
"-just stay-"
"-just-"
"-kick your ass-"
"Where is she, now?"
"-too much."
"That's it."
"-twenty-two."
"-home."
"-love you."
"-just-"
"-gone."
"-love-"
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
"A researcher of deadly viruses goes on an ill-fated trip in a run-down apartment complex."
Remember when you were a little girl? When Mom made you a cup of hot cocoa and warm brownie and said, "Baby girl, you can be anything you want to be." It was a bad day to begin with. Rachel McPherson said you were too short to be a famous Hollywood actress. Cody Gatenby said girls aren't any good at math. Even Mrs. Walling, the music teacher, she said you'd be better for clarinet than a big old bass drum. You didn't have rhythm. But, mom, she said, "Anything you can dream up, you can achieve," and on a white plate with green circles looping around it in endless orbit, she served up another fresh brownie.
"You can be anything."
Well, I turned out to be Candace. Someday, Dr. Finnick. But, today, just Candace.
In an old, run-down project on Chicago's south side, I'm on the third floor with one more to go. Already I've passed two rats, yellow-ochre vomit stains that would make Jackson Pollock blush, and a bucketful of ancient cockroaches with thick, brown shells on their backs like little armored cars. I've got less protection. Just a thin, blue coat and a pair of sensible sneakers that Mom said would be good for me, what with me being on my feet all day long.
When the call came in I was halfway through an Italian sub. Salami and pepperoni on white bread with extra cheese and lettuce. The guy at the deli, Marco, he always fills the au jous cup all the way to the top and smiles like those extra half-ounces of broth are all adding up to something more. The voice on the other end of the line was Kevin, sounding panicked and tense as always. He's sweating something. Who knows what. The PT-3 reports are full of false positives, the autoclave is jamming at the end of its cycle, the Blackhawks lost in overtime last night. Can I believe that shit? This time, though, there's fire as well as smoke.
County Hope admitted 13 patients over the last 12 hours. Every one of them came from State and 111th. They presented with distended abdomens, pustules, and upper-respiratory inflammation. An 8-year old girl with braids and a Hannah Montana t-shirt died at 11:18 this morning. She vomited 3 pints of blood before the tremors came, then called for her mother and went in to a coma.
No one said, "It's like nothing we've seen before," but I got the impression all the same. It's not unusual, these mini-epidemics. Tuberculosis, Meningitis, Staphylococcus. You pack enough uninsured people in to a drafty, beat-up old building and one cough just leads to another.
I broke a sweat on the third flight of stairs. Between the 90 degree heat and a massive humidifier called Lake Michigan, it's not a day for cardio. What's worse is the paper mask on my face. The sweat stings your cheeks when it collects around the elastic band pressing tight and pulling at your hair.
Remember when you were in high-school and Carol Petersen said Andy Richert was way out of your league? She laughed. "I don't think you're fat," she said, "but you know the girls he dates," she said. So, that night you skipped Mom's baked chicken and passed on the brownie. You spent the rest of the night flopping around your bedroom floor, fumbling through as many pushups as your flabby arms could bear. You told yourself that knee-pushups aren't necessarily girl-pushups. They still count if you do enough of them.
You broke a sweat for sure that night. When you woke up the next morning and your hairline was thick with tiny pimples breaking out everywhere, well, you decided that a few extra pounds might be overlooked, but a face full of zits was a death sentence for sure.
At the top of the stairs, my knees are aching. I gave up my quest for a Victoria's Secret stomach before my last year in med school. I traded the yoga mat and ankle-weights for a hand-me-down love seat and the wonders of high-speed internet. But now, with my breath coming in heaving gasps and my feet groaning inside my sensible shoes, I'm thinking maybe a little exercise might not have killed me after all.
The hallway here makes the dorms at Pritzker look like a work of modern art. Of the six light-bulbs lining each wall, only two are responsible for the dim light. A window at the far end would do its part were it not for the thick tape holding it together. Most of the doors are in various stages of open, like individual frames of a stop-motion animation, but all rearranged. A lighter path of wood panels running along the center of the floor makes the thick grease and smoke caked along the hallway edges that much more apparent. A good forensic doc could tell you how long ago the super got tired of the constant vacuuming and just ditched the carpet altogether.
It's now that I'm secretly thanking the voice on the phone for insisting that I wear this cheap, paper mask. Anything between the stench of week-old vomit and my nose is a welcome addition to the wardrobe. Not its intended purpose, but just knowing there's a barrier, thin as it is, is at least a small comfort.
Somewhere near the broken window, in one of the apartments, behind one of those stop-motion doors, a faint cry tells me I'm not alone. Now, my heart's beating fast, but not from the cardio. Now, I've got a new goal.
"Hey." "There's someone here." "No." "I don't know." "I'm looking." "You said the place was clear." "Well, yeah, I know that, but-" "I don't know." "Okay." "Ten minutes." "Right."
Remember when Jason Burke told you he loved you? He called you and begged you to let him stop by. When he got there, when you opened the door and saw him there, swaying in the hallway of that work of modern art, you told yourself not to let him in any further, but five minutes later he's following you around the place. Two steps behind and closing fast, he's telling you how he's sorry for what he did. He says that you were the best thing that ever happened to him and he was just stupid. An asshole, he said. He called himself an asshole and he said if you'd just let him back in, he's a whole new person. After tonight, he said, he's not drinking anymore. He didn't really have all that much to begin with. He's a little buzzed, but not like that night. She just made him feel "okay", he said. He never felt good enough for you, but she wasn't like you. She's not special like you.
You told him to go home and sleep it off. He said, and for real he really said this, he said, "You know how I know?" "You know how I know that I really, for sure, love you?" He said, "All that time when we were apart. All that time, I couldn't jack off without thinking about you." "I couldn't even get hard," he said. No shit. This time, you laughed. Not because it was funny. More like a "I can't believe this is my fucking life" kind of laugh. Nothing funny about that.
You led him to the door by the wrist and wished him luck. Wished him a good life.
You went to class the next day and all eyes were on you. These people, the ones you secretly called your "crew" because you wanted so badly to just be a part of something good for once. These people who represented all the hard work, all the late nights studying those painfully boring textbooks. They're all staring right at you.
Over coffee, after class, Dave Redmond told you what all the fuss was about. He apologized. He took long sips from his paper cup and his chubby fingers trembled when the words finally came.
Jason told everyone. Well, not everyone, but he told Karen Phillips and that's the same thing anyway.
Three months ago, you told Jason you were pregnant. You were so angry and you really let him have it. All that work to get this far and now you had to deal with this too. How could he be so stupid? How could you be so stupid? You asked him what he was going to do. He said, "I slept with Katie." Fucking asshole.
You got the abortion that Friday. You slept all day Saturday and all day Sunday. On Monday you took a shower and put your books together for class. You walked to the door, but when your hand touched the knob, it was like it was electric. From your fingers, through your arm, and down your spine, it dropped you to the floor and you cried. On Wednesday you went back to class.
That's what he told Karen Phillips who told everyone else. That's what was up with all the stares. Fucking asshole.
I check the door on the left, near the window. It's a shit hole for sure. I can smell the tangy punch of something cooking in a frying pan not long ago. Lamb, probably. But the place is empty. The toilet is running. Has been for who knows how long. I stop to lift the cover off the tank and free the chain. By the time I reach the door, I'm back in the hallway, the tank is full and that god-forsaken water has stopped running.
Across the hall, I push the door open and step through. I know I've found the right place when the cries get crisper, not louder, but clearer. I'm getting close. I've pulled the mask down around my neck and I say, "Hello?" I say, "I'm with Chicago CDCP." "Are you okay?," I ask.
Of course she's not okay. No one in this place, no one left here could possibly be okay.
In the apartment, in 312, the floorboards seem to sink with every step. Every step takes me another quarter-inch closer to the street. Another quarter-inch closer to being out of this place.
The living room is empty. The television is playing a Law & Order re-run, but the sound isn't right. It's music I'm hearing now. Christian rock, I think. One of those compilation cd's you see advertised on basic cable at two in the morning. Some thiry-something Canadian is singing about "His light" and "saving grace."
There's a bookshelf in the corner. "Hello?" Dan Brown novels. "Are you in here?" Vince Flynn. "I'm a doctor." Three years worth of National Geographics. "My name is Candace. I can help you."
I pull my mask back over my nose and mouth and push the bedroom door open. She's there on the bed. She's clinging to a stuffed giraffe and rolling back and forth, her fingers pulling at her bottom lip. I see her stomach, bloated and round. Her cheeks are hot red and wet. She lies on her right arm, but I can see her left is thick with blisters. Her eyes are bloodshot and swollen.
"My name is Candace."
Remember the day you graduated from med school? It wasn't one of those Hollywood graduation scenes. It wasn't outside. It wasn't a beautiful late-Spring afternoon. You weren't tall enough to be a famous actress. Your name was called and you stood up from the cafeteria table where you'd sat for the last hour and a half listening to Chris Derrick talk about the future and being "anything you want to be". He talked about the next generation of doctors, scientists, the future, healers, saviors, samaritans.
Two years ago, Chris Derrick drove his new Toyota Land Cruiser across a double-yellow line and sent a 4-door Mazda forty feet in to a ditch. The driver of the Mazda lives two blocks west of Pritzker now at Chicago's Lady of Peace. It's an assisted living building where they organize book fairs on Friday afternoons.
After graduation, you followed the "crew" to O'Halloran's on 16th and Wabash. Chris and his pals were playing shuffleboard and throwing back vodka-tonics. Dave Redmond was there, of course, sipping Michelob from a bottle. His chubby fingers wrapped around the label so all you could see was "chelo".
Dave followed you around all night. He tried to hang back and keep to himself, but everywhere you went, he was there. When you looked in his direction, he looked away. When you moved away, he followed, always a few steps behind. When you were alone, he gathered up his courage and offered to buy you a drink. You showed him the glass in your hand, but agreed, stupidly, to another. Someone paid fifty cents to hear Brian Adams sing "Everything I Do," again.
There, with his Michelob, and you with your two seven-and-sevens, Dave told you how he always had a crush on you. "Silly," he called it. He told you how he always liked you. He said you were beautiful. How he didn't think all that stuff with Jason was such a big deal. He told you how you didn't deserve all that. He was sweet, you thought. You thanked him for the drink and patted his hand like you did the old folks and invalids at The Lady of Peace.
I'm on my knees beside the bed. I comb my fingers through the girl's dark, matted hair. It's greasy with sweat and stuck to her cheek in spirals.
"My name is Candace."
She looks past me. Something on the ceiling. Over my shoulder, by the door frame, a crucifix holds vigil over the bedroom. Over the whole place. "Are you alone?"
She whimpers and pulls at her lip. I see her thumb, slick and coated red. Her gums are white and blistered. She wheezes and gnaws at the air.
"Kevin." "Yeah, I found her." "I don't know." "Six, seven maybe?" "I don't think so." "Ten minutes?" "Okay." "No. I know."
She strains to hold the giraffe up for me to see. Its fur is bare in places so I can see the cotton mesh below, yellowed and brittle. Even from here I can smell the sour tang of blood and vomit. Her chapped lips part and tremble. "Morris," she tells me. "I like him," I tell her. "He has a long neck, so he can eat leaves from tall, tall trees," she says.
Outside, the sun is in the west. Flecks of dust, dead skin cells, and mites hover the air, riding on a beam of light that ends on the girl's bare leg. I tug at my paper mask. The elastic band presses deep in to my cheeks.
Remember when your mom told you could be anything you want to be? Remember when you skipped baked chicken and brownies and forced yourself through as many push-ups as your flabby arms could bear? Remember when Jason Burke told you he loved you? Remember graduation? Remember everything you'd suffered and overcome and suffered again? Remember all that?
I'm seeing Kevin at the end of the bed. He's standing so still and rubs his nose with his fingers like it might go away. I'm seeing my mother talking to a white-haired doctor by the door. Her fingers count rosary beads. I'm seeing Jason swaying in the hallway. His fingers testing the air. I'm seeing Chris in a maroon gown and hat. His fingers grip the podium on either side. I'm seeing Carol. Her fingers twisting her blonde hair in to curls at her collar.
I'm seeing little Barbara Peck through the reinforced glass by the side of my bed. Her fingers clutched around the long, bare neck of a smiling giraffe. She looks at me through swollen eyes and holds the grinning animal up for me to see.
Remember any of this?
Friday, January 25, 2008
A Totally Gay Love Letter.
I've been lucky enough to know and love just a few people over the course of my 26 years. My pal Stephen is at the top of that very short list. And this muddled collection of flowery words is all about him. So, if you're at all squeamish about hot man-on-man action, now's the time to click back over to Youtube to watch dogs riding skateboards or people getting hit in the nuts with all manner of objects, cause it's about to get filthy up in this bitch.
Stephen's been a member of my "family" for going on 15 years now. We grew up at opposite ends of the same street. A snaking little suburban road that followed alongside the Mississippi river and connected our homes by the front doors. For the remaining pre-driver's license years of our youth, the trip could be made in under a minute with a pair of rubber tires and a set of handlebars.
Since our first meeting, we've had ups and downs (and ins and outs. See? Told you it would get dirty) and extended periods of estrangement, but Stephen is the one guy in my life who I know will always be there. And when we get together, we always pick up right where we left off.
He's one of only maybe two people on this planet that I can do absolutely nothing with and still call the time well-spent. He's an endlessly fascinating human being and not a minute passes between us that isn't well-populated by deep laughs, good conversation (sometimes intelligent, most times not so), and a subtle awareness that the good old days are in the here and now.
We can talk about anything, the two of us. Movies, music, and money (our lack of it) are the usual hot topics, but we're just as likely to riff for an hour on foreign policy as we are to scrutinize the decision-making process that went in to designing a bag of potato chips. Or dissect string theory and time travel for 45-minutes while the movie that spawned the debate sits on pause in the background.
Every conversation has the potential to probe depths of the unknown (dirty) or wallow in the minutia of the mundane, but either way, you know you're in for a challenge. Stephen is one opinionated motherfucker and he'll defend his position with all the conviction and tenacity of an innocent man on trial. I say this, of course, with equal parts admiration and frustration as I've, more often than not, found myself on the losing side of those parleys.
For a guy who holds so dear to his view of right and wrong, truth and fiction, it's absolutely amazing the way he's managed to accept me for who I am no matter which curve ball I lob his way. I was terrified, at 18 years old, that the guy would read me the riot act when he caught me catching a quick smoke outside his apartment. On the contrary, he confessed that he too had enjoyed a cigarette from time to time and I threw myself at him for a big, clumsy hug. Not because I was thrilled by the potential bonding we'd share over lighting up together, but because I had been guilty as fuck about it and, as usual, the guy made me feel better about myself just through his acceptance.
It's not to say that he allows me to stumble through life recklessly, though. He's never been afraid to tell me just how big an asshole I've been and like a disobedient mutt, when he swats me on the nose, I listen up. I listen because I know that with him, there's no ulterior motive. He's looking out for me and sometimes that means an angry e-mail or one of his patented snide comments that stings like a bitch, but makes the point loud and clear. When I confided in him that my relationship with The EX was circling the drain, he hit me with the truth and it sat in my gut for a week. But I knew he was right and when I finally called it off, it was the confidence he had in telling me the truth that comforted me in knowing I was doing the right thing.
Stephen stuck by me through the "Jennie Years." I was shacked up with a woman who had never said a kind word to him over more than 6 years and still he had the strength of character not to dance around in front of me, celebrating his victory when it ended. I still don't think I've heard him speak the words, "I told you so, dumbass," though it's got to be killing him.
Because that's what being a true friend is. A lesson I've learned from the man himself only just recently. He tells me when he sees me headed down the wrong path, then waits for me to choose. Whether I pick the right path or the wrong one, doesn't matter between us because either way we're meeting up on the other side and though I might hear a little grumbling, I know he'll still be there when the next fork in the road starts breaking the horizon.
Really, most of everything I've learned about friendship, I learned from Stephen. And believe me, I've had a lot to learn. Truth be told, I've been a shitty friend. Flaky, unavailable, selfish, lazy...the list could go on. He's taught me the value of friendship at its core through his steadfast honesty and support.
For a guy like me, whose mood turns on a dime between manic restlessness and destructive depression, Stephen keeps me grounded. His relatively calm nature keeps the world from tipping too far in one direction or another. Last week, I dropped in on him after work for a play date. On the way to his apartment, I was neck-deep in the foulest of shit.
The Ex had recently dealt me a staggering blow by talking to our five year-old daughter about our impending "divorce" without first discussing the move with me. I was heartbroken when, during a study session at the kitchen table, the blonde toddler said as matter of factly as toddlers do, "Daddy, what kind of house do you think Mommy and Acey (the beagle from hell) and I will have?" It was like taking the fat end of a Louisville to the chest. When I confronted The Ex about it, she blew up, calling me every four-letter word she knew, attacked my parenting, and did it all at a volume that the kid would had to have crossed state lines to avoid overhearing. The pain was still with me that night on the drive to his house (though another amazing friend helped me through the initial impact with all the beauty and sweetness she displays in everything she does.)
Anyway, on the drive there, I was sick in my gut and strongly considered calling off the man-date and retiring to my basement couch with a bottle of 80 proof whatever. I knew he'd give me a short bit of hell for canceling, but I've got a long history of flaking out and I knew we'd still pal it up later. Maybe it was the dread of walking back in to that house with The Ex still looming over everything or maybe I just couldn't muster up the energy to call him with the negative RSVP, but I showed up at his front door twenty minutes later, still feeling nauseous and all kinds of salty.
We climbed the three flights of steps to his apartment, during which I related the tale of The Ex's offense as well as remarking (unnecessarily) on the poor state of his jeans, shredded and thick with road salt at the ankle. We discussed my pain for as long as it took to breach his door and drop my coat over a chair at his computer desk. That was all it took.
I watched him roll through a video game for about 15 minutes before we launched in to a viewing of a ridiculously bad action movie. We sat in swiveling office chairs as the movie shamelessly exhibited 90 minutes of absolutely abhorrent filmmaking. Anywhere else, I'd have sunk lower and lower in to my putrid mood and gone home feeling worse than ever. But, as I sat there, totally uninterested in the flick, I was happy to be where I was. We quipped about the movie throughout, chain-smoked, and sucked down sodas and that was all I needed to start climbing back out of the trench.
Throughout the years when The Ex was The Current and then The Sorta-Is-But-Really-Not, I missed the dude. The nature of my "relationship" with the Ex prohibited contact with anyone, male or female, of whom The Ex did not approve. Stephen, as you might have guessed, was on that list as well. Sitting in that chair was when it started to hit me, shamefully 6 years late, that I had risked losing someone whose value to me is irreplaceable. I'd forgotten, or perhaps resisted remembering, the joy of bullshitting with my oldest friend.
A guy whose sweetness is usually shrouded beneath a quick-wit and sarcastic streak, but there all the same. A guy who is almost always the first and most enthusiastic audience for anything I write, sketch, or create. A guy who I once kicked out of my house as a child for disagreeing with me over the original color and design of a superhero's costume. A guy who told me, at 17 years old while were sitting in the back of my pick-up truck, that he was expecting the first of his children. A guy who probably wanted to knock my teeth out four years later when I told him I was expecting mine with The Ex, but refrained. A guy who still remembers what "playing Sega with Candy" means.
What I'm trying to say is, if I had to fuck a man. Gun to my head and everything. I'd have to fuck Johnny Depp...or maybe Brad Pitt (what can I say, I like the pretty boys). But when it was all over and it was time to cuddle, I'd have to go with Stephen.
The Glorious Wreck.
It’s surprising how easy it can be to lose yourself. At 26 years old now, I’m finding it hard to get a clear picture of myself at 15, at 19, 21, 23. I’ve lost myself, you see. And so I figured the best way to find myself would be to look back and figure out where I was headed back then. What were the motivations? Where was I going? What have I learned over the past decade? And how the fuck did I end up spending the past 5 years sleeping on a half-eaten olive drab couch in the basement of a house I can’t afford?
I suppose, for the uninitiated, a brief re-cap is in order. At 21 years of age, I saw the birth of my one and only child through a pair of gushing eyes. I watched as the nurse carried her to a plastic tub and gave her the once over. For the first time, I saw a placenta, in radioactive shades of purple and blue, splash on to a section of tiled floor I was occupying just an hour earlier. I saw the hands, feet, nose, and chest of the little girl I’d been waiting months to meet. I clumsily snipped away at an umbilical cord at the good doctor’s request and counted the first of my parenting failures when he finished the job.
Ever since that late-evening, everything has been a blur. And not in that romantic, parenting-is-beautiful way. I mean, it’s honestly been a blur. I try to remember specific things. Try to get my brain to focus on an event. Something to get a hold of. But it ends, always, in frustration. Like trying to re-live, just for a moment, the joy of riding bikes with your best elementary-school friend or trying to hear your favorite song again for the first time. You come close. You can almost feel it. You stretch and focus and concentrate all your will on a brief voyage back in time only to be wrestled back to the harsh, violent reality of now. Present day. Where nothing’s romantic in the least. Where looking back should be the least of your worries when you’re having enough trouble keeping up with the here and now.
But that’s the reason for all this, isn’t it? Those who ignore the past are doomed to alcoholism, emphysema, and a table for one at Denny’s, right? So, not yet willing to resign myself to that dismal fate, I close my eyes, take a few deep breaths, and stare as intently as I’m able in to the past to find myself 10 years younger.
Sixteen years old is a pretty good age for a boy. I mean, sure, okay, I hadn’t actually gotten past the heavy petting stage with a member of the fairer sex yet, with the exception of a few (very brief) blowjobs, but as long as we’re being candid, the following ten years wouldn’t bring a bounty full of booty my way anyway. And as long as we’re being painfully candid, I’ve never been much good at the actual act itself, so it was at least a blissfully ignorant period. But I could drive, buy myself lunch on the meager wage I made delivering flowers after school, and spend the rest of my time lazily dreaming about the fabulously wealthy, ultra famous, sex-god I was sure to be as soon as that high-school diploma was signed and sealed.
We’re not here to lament days gone by, though. Oh, no. We’re here to figure out where we’re going. Our little trip back in time is just an unfortunate necessity. To figure out how to move forward, we have to remember where our destination was in the first place, remember?
So, besides bodily contact from the opposite sex, what did 16-year old me want? The easy answer. The simplest answer, I guess, is to do something great. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been looking for validation. For someone to say that what I’ve done is valuable, unique, or at the very least worth the effort. Which isn’t to say that I’ve been neglected that. My mother has always been a booster. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that the very idea of being “great”, of doing something truly special, came from the woman herself. She never allowed my sister, or me, to accept failure for lack of trying. She’s a psychology nut, my mom. Big in to the self-love. She analyzes everyone. Tries to break them down in to chapters from her community college psychology textbook. God bless her, the woman loves a good diagnosis. Uncle Dave is autistic. The Ex is bi-polar. I’m a garden-variety manic-depressive with abandonment issues and an addictive personality.
Anyway, when we were kids, mom was riding a serious guilt trip over the divorce and thought she’d head off the emotional distress by involving my sister and me in her psychoanalytical voodoo. We sat at the foot of her bed and were encouraged to look in to a vanity mirror that spun on an axis like the chalkboards you see in movies where you can flip it over at the center. Mom, she’d have us look in to the mirror and repeat, three times, “I love myself. I love myself. I love myself.” It was only by sheer luck that we avoided being hooked from behind by Bloody Mary or the Candyman. I have to think that was the genesis of it all though. Some kids, they grow up not expecting much out of themselves because no one ever expected anything out of them in the first place. Me? Shit. On a daily basis, between waffles and hopping on the bus, Mom would say, “You can be anything you want to be.” A nice sentiment, but after too long it starts to sound more like an obligation than a suggestion. It starts to sound a lot more like, “You’d better be everything you want to be.”
And look. I know how this is all coming off. I know we’re all thinking the same thing. “Oh, boo-hoo. Your mommy loved you, encouraged you, cared for you. What a rough life you’ve had.” That’s not the point of all this. I love Mom. Who knows what kind of wreck I’d be without her guidance and support and I’m thankful every day for what she’s given me. We’re just looking for clues, all right? We’re just trying to figure out where I am. Where I was then and where I’m going.
Let’s jump back to the nearly-present for a few minutes. I’m thinking now that maybe where I was then maybe isn’t as important as where I’ve been recently. So, we covered the birth of my child. What we haven’t covered yet is THE EX! Capitalized for dramatic impact.
The Ex is like… well, metaphors elude me. Let’s put it out there, plain and simple, out on front street where it might as well just be. The Ex was a fucking band-aid. All that validation we talked about earlier? That was The Ex. That’s what I got out of the relationship, as long as we’re being honest. You take a 19 year old kid with abandonment issues and crippling self-esteem problems and give him his first apartment and his first real sex partner and you’re building a bomb, brother. If it weren’t for my uncharacteristic fear of drugs and alcohol at the time, there’s every chance I’d be reduced to giving tug-jobs in an alley for coke-money right about now. So, that was it. There I was. A 19-year old kid, living in my first apartment in the city, still quietly dealing with all that “why did Daddy leave us” bullshit and along comes a little, fake-blonde firecracker with a nice body and no hesitation for bedroom dirtiness and all of a sudden, our hero feels like, finally, someone appreciates him. Doesn’t matter that he hasn’t done shit yet. It’s easier to find someone who’ll settle for your meager accomplishments than actually work towards accomplishing something.
So, that’s how it began, I suppose. The relationship itself is a topic for a whole other story, but here’s the gist of it.
I’ve learned that losing someone from my life is a big problem for me. Not because of the loss itself, but the implications involved. Implications that, I imagine, only someone afflicted with my particular brand of abandonment-phobia would understand fully. You see, the end of a relationship isn’t a parting of two individuals who just don’t connect. It’s a direct affront to your character. It’s the harshest of all judgments. It’s a public declaration that proclaims your inadequacy. Because two people don’t separate for any other reason than that Participant B (The Ex) has found a more suitable companion than Participant A (yours truly.) The only logical explanation for the dissolution of the union is that Participant C (heretofore referred to as, Fuck-Ass) is a better lay, pulls a heftier salary, makes with funnier jokes, has a bigger dick and knows how to rock it, etc. Up here in Crazy-Town, that’s how it is. It’s barbaric, infantile, and embarrassing, but that’s it.
And the point of all that is, of course, why we’re here right now. Why I’ve spent the last 7 years with a woman I never loved, really. In that, “we’re family now” way, sure. But not real love. Not the, “I can just sit quietly with you in a car for 6 hours while we drive cross-country and hold your hand, perfectly happy,” kind of love. The reason we’re discussing any of this is to focus on how I got here. And the answer, I think we’ll all have to agree, at least for now, is fear.
What a pathetic, fucking schmuck. What a wretch. What a weak, scared, despicable fuck. Who spends years, fucking years, sleeping on a couch in the basement just to avoid the pain of abandonment? Who convinces himself that 18 years of dysfunction is preferable to one minute of isolation? Who justifies it all with the righteousness of martyrdom?
So, we’ve got the diagnosis. Mom would be proud. We’ve evaluated the symptoms and identified the affliction. All we need now is the prescription. What drug could possibly cure this ill? Let me tell ya, right now…a mirror and a catch-phrase from a community college text-book isn’t going to cover this one. Right now, a liter of rum is doing its part. A pack of Camel Lights every 24 hours fills in the gaps. That can’t last forever though. Eventually, I’ve got to figure out which direction I was headed 10 years ago and make a decision. Can I be anything I want to be? Must I be everything I’d dreamed? Or is it too late? Maybe the cure will be the end. The impressive failure. The glorious wreck. I guess time, as they say, will tell.
As for me, right now, my fingers are getting hard to control and my face is numb. My legs feel unusually warm and my whole head is tingling, feeling full and solid. I need a cigarette and a good night’s sleep.
Til next time.