It was the summer where I found Uncle Mike again in early May--the story goes like this: Little David (exhausted as fuck, sick of working extra early morning hours at the university where he graduated from and not getting any sort of pay differential whatsoever other than an "attaboy") works a gruelling 8pm-til-5am shift, stays up and writes for five hours, gets a couple of beers in his system to rejuvenate his vitality then at ten he decides to traipse back to the Student center at the university where he graduated from (and is still currently employed) to check his e-mail and make a payment on his forever draining student loan bills. When he arrives at the student center he inadvertently saunters into a janitor whom he doesn't see, or rather, the janitor is windexing the window of the transparent door he is currently walking through and when the janitor (who in all fairness was probably having a hard day too, but who, in all fairness gets paid overtime for his menial labor and did not graduate from/or take out a shit ton of student loans to attend the university where the two of us are now employed).... As I am walking through the door the janitor snaps at me, tells me that I should have seen that he is windexing the door and that I could have used the other door. I politely apologize, tell him that I apologize, tell him that I didn't see him. tell him that I am sorry. The janitor then snaps at me, recycles my apology back into my face like an irascible minor league coach arguing balls and strikes with the home plate umpire before informing me that I should watch where I am going, informing me that this better be the last time I accidentally amble into him.
Something then happens and I snap back. I've always had difficulty snapping. I have always had difficulty allowing the pent-up oppressed emotional magma to erupt through the Vesuvius of my lips. But maybe it was because of lack of daylight or the migraine of the relationship I was in at that time or the feeling of having failed, something welled up inside of me coercing my entire anatomy to transition into a pissed of exclamatory mark. I tell him that I dished out a laboring forty-thousand in arrears and that he just can't go off on alumni's (albeit ones who are broke) like that. I tell him that he needs to treat people with respect and that he is not going to talk like that to students again. The janitor continues to verbally chisel out harangues into my face and the next thing I know I reach out and strip his name tag off his shirt, hurtling it to the ground in disgust before vacating the building only to find myself minutes later bent over smoking cigarettes with the dwarf size MFA student who doesn't have any arms (hands sprout out of his shoulders like butterfly wings) crying, wishing there was a way to, as I did with the flea-infested furniture in my apartment, jettison all the anger and heartache and the hurt swilling below my shoulders like a see through the torso and tummy of a dirty washing machine.
I then walked around in a daze, catching a glimpse of the beautiful soccer mom who I made love to last summer as she idled her minivan at a light en route to picking up her progeny. I see my friend Tracy who was a dear friend of my late fathers and beautiful eye-lidded Karen who works with my mother. I had been up for at least thirty-five hours and was emotionally enervated when eventually I found myself saddled on the door step of the house I had left two years before.
When he answered the door the first word I said to him was Allah-u-Abha.
The most beautiful word I have ever heard.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Monday, June 23, 2008
Homecoming Home (pt.1)
It is a Sunday afternoon and I am all alone in my room reading Robert Frost. The day has a thick, blue melancholy feel to it. Church was earlier this morning where I helped Mike DeWitt tape the service. Europe was four months earlier. Occasionally I spot ‘Laina’ Wilson in the hallways, but it is never a contact greeting. I am all alone in my room, musing over poems, writing essays for Mrs. Mack, drinking very tepid coffee out of my purple coffee mug I purchased at Gloria jeans last year.
Beth comes to my door, the phone outstretched in her palm, telling me that it is for me.
“Hello,” I say. I have not dated anyone in over a year. There was snuggling and warmth with Jenn Wilson in Europe over the summer. There is the cute adoptive girl with shortly crisped bangs that smokes cigarettes at lunchtime. There is David Strickler and his girlfriend, Anne, who lives deep in the country in Brimfield, who I went to Brimfield’s Basketball homecoming with last year, where I was accused of pulling the fire alarm. There is Mark-Andrew, who has just returned back home form Prague, attending the University of Dallas. There is Harmony, in Spokane, scribbling me letters in cursive that looks like one continuous roller-coaster ride, telling me all about her pending collegiate experiences.
There is myself, alone in Peoria, with Paris becoming more and more of a memory everyday.
And there is a phone grappled in my palm right now. There is the moment the phone becomes a dormant object as I slowly hoist it up to my lips, suspecting it either any one of the Dave’s, but more than likely Hale or Strickler. As the words ‘Hello’, comes out of my mouth it is volleyed back with something soothing and feminine. A dulcet, high-pitched voice, whose lips I have touched before, when I was young, like a toddler performing botched balettic postures, trying to touch the slight half-rainbow of moisture that exudes form the top of a water fountain.
“Hi, Dave” The voice says, acknowledging me rather quickly. It is feminine but it is not that of Harmony.
“This is Renae Howard.” She says, identifying herself.
*
“Reane,” I say, very quickly. “Hey you crazy girl, how’s it going?”
Renae claims that it has been going good and well. For a moment I think that she is going to cuss me out for once again breaking up with her so abruptly two years ago. Fearing this, I try to institute more small talk, but her tongue leashes into a pair of scissors, snapping at me, informing me of the real reason she called.
“I have a question for you.” She says.
“Uh, yeah, sure, what’s up?” I respond, just a trite befuddled by the whole situation.
“Will you go to Homecoming with me?”
She spits out the question as if half-in-dread and half in panic. Her voice seems to rise up an octave at the end of her query. Having been squatting on the oak lip of my writers’ desk, I stand. My knees crack. Renae wanted absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with me a year and a half ago, when I tried to get her to pick me up and go driving around. Now, she has called me, out of the lachrymose melancholy blue of autumn, inviting me to escort her to her senior homecoming.
***
Two weeks earlier in late September, I drove past Manual, in the Prunemobile. Stopping in front of the school, slowly idling, I was still thinking about Lil’ Wilson inside, slowly dancing with John, a thawed corsage precariously dangling form both their collars. Two weeks ago, I was by myself, tears splashing down my cheek, staring pensively into the windshield blue in front of me, noticing how my reflection looked like a dejected clown whose unemployment check was printed on a rubber stamp and is therefore no longer valid.
Squinting through the ajar window, I see the crystal ball, the Home Coming chandelier oscillating overhead. Patches of pied lights; little variegated rotating squares casting pink and blue windows. I think about the outfit Little ‘Wil must be wearing. I wonder if her hair is down. I wonder what bitchy things she has found to moan about. Perhaps it is too cold in the foyer for her. Perhaps the meal wasn’t served at the right temperature. Perhaps she is afraid that maybe I might show up tonight and completely sully her first and only Freshman prom.
I press down on the gas, hearing the earnest snore of the engine as I automotively clamber up Ligonier, take a right and then a left, head down the dual strip of road that slices between Madison Golf course. I make sure that my blinker has been winking on the right hand side of the car for a good two minutes before I turn, on to Sherman, trying to sniff all the tears back into my sockets. Trying to clear my throat, trying to make it sound like I am not at all alone in the world. Trying to sound, after I put the car in P and verify that the headlights have been switched off, after I walk inside the house and doff my jacket, walking around the corner to my room, the place where I want to live; the place where I want to learn and want to write; after all this, I clear my throat and maybe blow a snot-loogie into my mother’s rock garden as I enter the house, trying to convince my parents that everything in the world is okay, as I brew another pot of coffee and listen to some Morrissey.
Everything in the World will forever be ok.
***
Renae has just presented her question to me. My whole body is stiff, erect with shock. Depeche Mode is slightly humming in the C.D. player. Mother is baking coffee cakes in the oven. The coffee I am sipping is Gevalia, given to me by grandma. The Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune lays scattered across my mattress. The Book section is open. The Nelson Algren awards were announced two weeks ago. I cannot believe the query Renae just presented me with. I pause. I take a deep breath. I thank God inside my chest.
“Sure,” I say, without hesitation “I’d love to.”
There is an awkward pause.
“Do you wanna get together first to see each other.” I say very quickly and then rephrase my statement, saying that perhaps maybe we should get together first to see each other.
“Sure,” Renae says.
“How about Monday. Maybe Monday we can go to One World and hang out or something.”
“That would be nice.” Renae says, before telling me that she is once again really busy this week.
I want to ask her what happened. I want to know where Lee is. I want to know when they broke up. I thought that they were still dating.
“We can go to One World.” I say. “I can pick you up and the two of us and go to One World, only we can’t sit in the smoking section because it’s Cross Country season.
Renae twists her lips in the same fashion as she did two years ago. Apparently the vice that has grabbed hear peers by their social labels has not baiting her yet.
“I know exactly what I’m going to have, too.” Renae says.
“What,” I say.
“I’m going to have a hot chocolate with lots and lots of whipped cream.” She says.
“Are you going to say it just like that?” I respond.
“Yes,” Renae says. “With lots and lots of whipped cream.”
“And a cherry, too.” I say, trying to paint a smile across her lips.
“No,” Renae says. “No cherry. Just cream.”
“The tomorrow night it is. Is six-thirty ok?”
“Yes.” Renae says, into the phone, my ear, immensely enjoying being massged by the warmth of her vocal resonance. “Six-thirty is fine.”
***
“You can go to the Doo-wop diner.” My dad says. I am seventeen and have only been driving independently for just under two months.
“The what?” I say, looking at my father as if he is trying to speak a dyslexic from of Sanskrit.
“The Doo-wop diner.” My father says. “It’s in Bartonville. It’s close to where she lives. You can just stop in and get a milkshake.
“No,” I tell my father. “I want to take her to One World. It’s where I hang out all the time anyway.”
My Dad continues to look at me. Every time he gives me advice about women I can tell that, although he is madly in love with his own wife, he is upset that he was not more of a ladies man back in his Varsity Tennis Jacket Big Daddy Arthur days. I splash cologne on both cheeks. Two years ago almost exactly Renae and I were playing the very King-and I version of Getting To Know You. It would be four-fifteen every night when our voices would coalesce over cyber optics like a DNA coil gradually shaped into a pulsating heart. My hair is still cut short, mowed very near to my skull in back. I slap on English Leather, the same cheap cologne I wore in Europe; the urine scented vial Hale gave me for eighth grade graduation, what seems like decades ago.
“I’m just saying David.” My Dad impedes his way into my room. “That if you go to the Doo-Wop diner and had a milkshake you wouldn’t have to criss-cross all over town.’
“Dad,” I say. “I’m going to One World. I won’t be gone for very long. Renae and I haven’t seen each other in a very long time and we need to catch up.”
I storm out on the porch, a wastebasket in one hand. I make sure that my car is impeccably clean. I drape an old afghan over the seat in the back to make it look both more comfortable and more intimate. I jettison old coffee cups and napkins both myself and my old man have left in the car. Around the neck of the rearview mirror, I place the necklace I bought at the LYE convention last year, at the Holiday Inn, in O’hare. I remember Mike DeWitt, asking the girls if they would like to dance.
“David.” Dad says my name, reprimanding me.
“Dad, I gotta go. I’ll see you in about two hours.”
“Take care.” Father waves his splayed hand in the air. I remember trying to compose the letter to my father two years ago, after he said that I couldn’t see Renae, partly fussed because Patrick left early with Amy and the car arrangements got all screwed up that night. That was two years and what seemed like decades ago. I remember Amy later calling me up and chewing me out, saying that the reason I broke up with Renae was because she didn’t have her drivers’ license, so as soon as she got it, in a matter of weeks, we would be able to see each other more. I remember calling Renae up and hearing her tears, her telling me that she didn’t want to talk to me right now.
The Prunemobile is nothing fancy. It was conceived in the late seventies, before I had even learned how to speak in complete sentences. The car is always in the shop. In the thick gusts of snow, and chiseled ice, the car takes approximately fifteen minutes to warm up and the often stalls when I am trying to make a right turn. Later this year, my junior year, in between multifarious visits to Doctor Breightmeyer and nights where I coddle the tears and wish that I was somewhere else, later this year, the aluminum stem, activating the blinker signals will fall off. Dad, in all his tackle box ingenuity would epoxy the blinker stem in, only to have it fall off every three days, leaving a wad of unattractive stale goo in its place.
I drive through the South End of Peoria. I drive past Manual, where I left practice two hours ago, having pushed my Acic’s through another Main Street Five. Third year at Manual busting my ass and still the neon rectangle monitoring time at the finish line has not lowered past Seventeen minutes. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to have been. I think to myself. I followed the rules. I prayed to God. I ran everyday. I was supposed to have already left my mark in the chlorine-stenched Hallway by the pool.
Driving near David’s Hale’s house, up Garfield, near Limestone. I find Lauder avenue. The pine tree still appropriates much of the neatly trimmed front lawn. In the window I see a stilt figure slashing past the window shades, a cordless object prodded into her left earlobe. From where I sit, inside the Oldsmobile, inside my car, I can tell that her blonde hair has been cut significantly shorter and now shortly abuts the lobed of her ears.
Looking at the slightly chipped cross dangling from my rearview mirror, I give the carved ivory a kiss, before thudding the door shut. I can make out Renae’s slender silhouette inside.
*****************************
The last time I saw Renae was either Monday or Tuesday, December 28th or 29th, 1992. It was at the Mall. On the upper level. Renae arrived with David Best, having both of their parents recently dropped them off. Laura Lane and Kristy Day were their as well. So was Patrick McReynolds, and, much to Renae’s chagrin, David Hale.
“Patrick I can stand.” Renae says, as Hale struts inside the door waring a Harely Davidson Bikers cap that looks like something a police officer singing for the Village people might Sport.
“He’s not that bad.” I say to Renae, slightly elbowing her, reminding her that, in the immortal sugar-coated words of Willy Wonka, a little non-sense now and then is relished by the wisest men.
“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” Renae says to me, her arms tightly braced across her breast as if she is cold.
Hale accosts us with his signature whoo-hoo, removing his cap as if tipping it at a ballgame to show us his surprise.
“Wow,” I say. Renae is still looking the opposite direction. Hale has completely sawed off any shred of hair that once attired the to of his head.
“Dave,” I say. “I’m impressed.” In a way Dave looks like a Pony League catcher who his teammates would call Moose.
Come on, I say to Renae, still wearing the Identification bracelet she got me. The bracelet that took me two days to figure out how to undo the clasp and put it on my wrist. I wear the Manual Jacket my mother made me, with the words 96 thickly stitched in the right hand corner in numbers the size of my splayed palm.
Our hands join. The last couple of times we have seen each other, our lips seemed simply to content in drilling our tongues deep into each others mouth. We walk, next to each other, gripping each other’s hand. Hale and Patrick talk about going down to KB Toys and scaring a bunch of little kids by firing fake guns at each other.
“Hey, Dave,” Hale says. “Are you going to be using the gift I gave you for Christmas today?”
On Christmas eve at Christ Lutheran Church, Hale gave me a thoroughly wrapped parcel, weighing in my palm at approximately five pounds. After using my father keys to sever the excessive amounts of tape, inside was a brass coin roughly the size of a Kennedy half. The front side of the coin showcased a very old and moribund woman who looked like she would have played bridge with Lydia Moss Bradley. On the back of the coin is a picture of an antique Coffee Grinder. The coin is a gift certificate, worth ten dollars at Gloria Jeans.
“Would you like something from Gloria Jeans, sweetie.” I know full well that Renae will say no, commenting that she can’t stand our fascination with cappuccino. Patrick will interject and say that before he seriously spills some hard-core imaginary guts in the toy store, would his close friend and soon to be former school mate mind treating him to a nice warm cappuccino, even though the boys always drink it cold.
Renae smiles, shooing the boys off. We hold hands again. Three times I have endeavored to staple her lips with my tongue and three times she has looked back at me and verbally insinuated that she does not feel at all comfortable making out with me while the two ogres Patrick and hale are around, but Patrick she can stand, mind you.
Everytime Hale gets a cappuccino he always takes two hearty swigs from it and then tells me to hold onto it for him, meaning finish the damn thing. I walk with two giant cap’s in each hand. Dave Hale ordered some sort of Extra-large Holiday eggnog induced peppermint syrup Carmel concoction. After having sipped it, I understand why it was that he only took two sips, yet, id cappuccino, and both Patrick and myself have tacit rules about wasting such a fine, delicacy.
“Let’s go in here.” Renae says, ogling the after holiday sale placards with giant percent signs on them. I walk into one store with her where Renae tries three outfits on. With a giant, extra-large cappuccino nursed in each hand (the holiday one, the longer it sits, looks more and more like Reindeer poop) I am asked by the store manager if this place looks like a food court. As I go outside the store to continue my hearty slurps, I can hear Renae’s voice from the dressing room, asking me if I will hold her purse for her. I accept, and, like a kiosk, stand in front of Dots, a large drink cupped in both palm, a leather purse from Wilson’s looped around the thrity-degree angles of my indented elbow.
Fifteen minutes later and I am still trying hard to finish the Santa Clause cappuccino Hale purchased on the gift certificate coin he gave me for Christmas and only took two swallows then abandoned. Renae comes out of Dots, kisses my cheek, addresses me as honey, tells me about this fabulous outfit she just found, commenting that her mom probably wouldn’t mind if she used her For-Emergencies-Only-Credit card just this once, even though she used it last week at Marshal Fields in Chicago.
I nod my head up and down. Reassure her that I’m happy because she’s happy honey. Prance my legs due to excessive caffeine in take.
“I’ll only be another minute.” Renae says, kissing the side of my cheek again. A guy walks past me and asks me if I just tied the knot, telling me that he used to be whupped like that before he learned how to put his foot down. Now the bitch knows who wears the pants in the family. I tell him that’s nice. He says that he has tapes at home he can loan to me. I tell him I’m not interested.
Below me, in the center Court, Santa’s contract insists that he stay till New Years day. There are kids cussing Santa out, claiming that they were too good this year, asking why they didn’t get the latest Video game. One kid even moons the camera when the obligatory contract oriented photograph is snapped. The Holiday tape is on a continual ninety-minute loop. I can swear that I’ve heard the first Noel already two or three times. The chipmunk song also reeks of squealed monotony. Renae exit dot’s wit three boxes she exchanged to me for her purse, slightly planting a pedal moisture again on my cheek.
If she was a year older and perhaps more experience, perhaps she’s say that the sole raison behind her shopping affliction is due in part to the fact that she dated David Best for a year and discovered that the only way to have a sustainable orgasm was through trying on close and monopolizing her father’s money.
Renae grasps my arm and begins to tell me all about this charming delightful object she just tried on. I nod my head and tell her that is nice. With my glasses off, the customers continue to shoot in every direction. Eric Bushman walks past me, with some girl from anther school, a girl who is not as cute as Renae. I nod my head in acknowledgement and he continues to walk, pretending he has never seen me.
“Oh Look,” Renae says, pointing to coliseum sign reading EXPRESS.” I nod my head as if agreeing with her at the name of the Store.
“Come on,” She says. “I’ll only be a minute.”
I agree and after thirty seconds I find myself being fiercely tapped on my shoulder by the store manager. Apparently they have some kind of policy where all the boxes and sac form other stores need to be X-rayed and checked. I say bosh to that and A minute latter, I am holding Reane’s stacked parcels, still sipping on Hale’s Santa Shittoccino. Renae comes back out, hooks her purse on my limb as if she is benignly placing a bulb on a Christmas tree, informing me that. Once again, she will only be a minute, claiming that they don’t call it Express for nothing.
***********
She opens the door before I knock. For nostalgia’s sake, I have the wrist band she gave me two Christmases ago handcuffed around my left wrist. If Renae has noticed it, she sure has shit isn’t saying anything.
“Hi,” I say. There is the customary embrace when old lovers see each other. The feeling of once, having shared some sort of inexplicable connection and, because of time and space and causality, because of greed and obsession, become sometimes, even when life throws us a curve ball and we hit it out of the park, it goes foul anyway. Sometimes, for no reason there is loss, but there is forever the embrace. We hold each other momentarily. I tell her that it is really good to see her smile again. She lets go of me with a shrug.
“So,” I ask her. “How’s life been treating you these days, Miss Howard?”
Renae lets go of another shrug indicative of mild-to-lukewarm. She is still tall and slender, a Virginia Slim with mascara. Her smile does not seem quite as luminous as it did two years earlier. As if the bulb behind her lips have been slightly dimmed.
“So,” I say. There is a pause. “I like your hair.”
“It’s short.” Renae says, lolling her head unconsciously like she is a rock star. “I love it short.” There is something phallic and almost disturbing in the way Reane says the word ‘short’ but I choose not to complement. Perhaps she is thinking about her ex-boyfriend.
“So,” Once again, I say, beginning my romantic interlude with the word ‘so’. “Where would you like to go tonight?”
Renae once again shrugs, making a grunting sound that is either I don’t know or I don’t care. Her house has a strange familiarity to it-I wonder if the giant black and white poster of James Dean is still displayed above her bed.
“Does One World sound okay for you?” I say.
Renae does the whole whiny grunting sound again, this time saying something like, yeah, I suppose.
“There’s the Doo-wop diner.” Renae says, a sourness forming to her lips. I nearly choke at the irony.
“Do you like the Doo-wop diner?” I inquire.” My dad kept insisting that we go there.”
Renae makes another fast gnarled grunt, saying that it’s okay, quavering her palm up and down near her covered navel.
“I used to work their, but only for a week.” She says.
“Didn’t like it..”
“Agggghhhhh.” Renae says, in another high pitched squeal. “Couldn’t stand the manager.”
“Right.” I say, before requesting that I borrow the phone real quick. Renae says the words ‘real quick’ to me, once again, as if she is expeceting a serious phone call at anytime. As was the truth two years ago, I imagine that she still does not have call waiting.
Not trying to be Jacob to his Isaac, I phone my dad, informing him, that I’m over at Renae’s right now and will go to One World, hanging up before he tells me that all that criss-crossing around town is totally unnecessary when there’s that blasted ill-named sock hop diner in Bartonville.
We leave her house. Renae locks the door behind me. We pass the giant needles of the pine. The leaves are slowly beginning to turn so that everything around us looks like the inside of a kaleidoscope. As we strut down the slight bump to the Prunemobile, I open the door for her, making sure that my TO DAVE: LOVE RENAE identification band is extremely visible. Still Renae doesn’t see it.
I slam the door behind her and rush to my side. After three motorized chokes, the engine comes to life. Renae is wearing very thick sunglasses. The expensive leather jacket she bought on sale and then was sullied by Hale’s cappuccino is worn. The stain hardly visible, thanks to the color of mocha.
I pull out of Lauder court driving. There is a tangible, stifled uneasiness to the silence that exists between the six inches that separates the passenger side form the Drivers side. Renae continues to warble out a string of syllables as if everything is really no big deal. She says a quick garbled ‘yes’ when I tell her that it sure is good to see her. She shrugs her shoulder’s like it is no big deal when I tell her that I feel extremely honored that she asked me to escort her to her senior Homecoming. Her shoulders jolt up and down, as if it is really no big deal. As if she could’ve gone with anyone, she just needed a date.
Inside One World, I keep on trying to make Renae smile.
“…with lots and lots of whipped cream.” Renae says again. I keep saying things to make her smile. Keep making remarks to make her blush.
“How’s the folks doing?” I inquire.
“Dad’s always drunk.” She says. “Mom kicked him out for two months. I don’t know why she continues to put up with his shit.”
“I always liked your dad.” I add. “I always enjoyed giving him shit.” I say, staring at the blue vase in the center of the table, and the slightly wilting Daisy with the bowed stem inside.
“He couldn’t stand you.” Renae says. “He always thought you were trying to get fresh with me. He always thought you were deliberately trying to pick a fight with him.”
“I was just being….jocular.” I say, utilizing an ACT voacb word of the week.
“Hemmm,” Renae shrugs her shoulders again.
“I think that’s the reason my mom liked you so much.”
“Really,” I say, a smile bending across my lips. Debbie was always a looker.
“Yeah,” Renae says. “The way that you always pissed my old man off, plus she always though you were cute.”
“Cute,” I say the word out loud and too myself. My last vivid partially blurred because of no glasses memory of Debbie Howard was her driving me home from HAMMERS at Renae’s father Christmas party. Debbie had her hair slightly puffed in front like foam gushing from the bottom of a waterfall. I remember staring at the back of her jeans, as she bent over, fastening Ian, Reane’s six year old cousin, into the front seat of the car.
“It’s a good thing you two are leaving now.” She says. “The only thing those boys are going to continue to do is to drink.” She says.
I reach out across the wooden strips of the table. Another pedal has slowly wilted and is falling down form the top of the daisy. A patron who skin is either covered with tattoos or metallic piercings sets our drinks down in front of us. I look at Renae.
“Is that enough whip cream for you?” I comment. She smiles. It was the similar smile when I groped her hand at SCHOOL TIES two years prior. It was the smile of recognition, the smile of somebody still seeming brand new to you even thought you have seen them in those boxer shorts over and over again; even though you know what color the carpet is underneath; you know what the pipes look like. Her burgundy blush was the color of love.
“Yes,” Renae says, as the smile slowly descends from the top of her forehead. “It is a lot of whip cream.”
***
On the ride home, I insist on dropping by my house to formally introduce Renae to my mother and father, once again. Renae seems to be rather in a hurry, but she capitulates to me request, saying let’s make it brief but sweet. Mom’s head lolled into her padded shoulder, he hands slightly clasped as she welcomes Renae into our house. Dad just seems to adjust his glasses several times and even (perhaps intentionally) drops his dinner napkin off of the table, garnering a good look at Renae’s tightly packaged denim ass before slowly exhaling. I show her my room, the room, downstairs, where the grand piano used to belong. The room I first composed the letter to my father when I was fifteen, telling him that I was in love with Renae. She smiles and nods.
“I need to get home.” She says.
****
In front of her house, on Lauder Court, there is no extended information to come inside and make out. I adjust the clutch and idle the Prunemobile, until I smell burning oil and then place the car permanently in Park.
“So,” I say, try to make chisel away the silence. “I’ll see you this Saturday.” I say.
Renae nods. “How ‘bout I pick you up.” She says.
“Okay,” I nod once again, stolidly with my chin, as if I am being mandating instructions for a dietary living at a Health Clinic.
“Don’t forget to pick up a corsage.” She says. “I’ll have your bouttinere, or whatever it’s called.”
I nod my head again, upset at the pulsating splinters I feel inside my chest every time we try to communicate.
“Okay,” I say, “Well, I’ll give you a buzz this week, making sure everything’s cool and all.” Renae nods, thanks me for the coffee. There is more awkwardness. More uncomfort.
“It was really good seeing you again, Renae.” I say. “I’ve thought about you a lot. This feels really good.”
Renae sort of sways her head back and forth. I tell her goodnight and she reaches for the side door just as my body gravitates towards her. Seeing that I mean to embrace her, she allows me to, but does not hug back.
“Renae,” I say, before she struts up the slight inclination of her front lawn alone.
“Yes,” She wails, once again, rather impatiently. I roll up my sleeve, push the fold of fabric to my elbow.
“Did you notice that I wore the bracelet you gave me tonight” I say.
“Yes,” Renae nods her head. “I noticed. I guess it meant something special at the time, didn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I say to myself, as she grants me goodnight again, informing me that she will call me later in the week to verify our plans.
“I guess indeed meant something at the time.” I say to myself, looking at my bluish reflection in the windshield, briefly wondering what Jenny Wilson is doing right now.
***
Every day after school I stretch out my limbs and run and every day I come home and brew a pot of coffee and lay on my bed, supine, with my hands cradled behind my nape in dyslexic prayer wondering if she will call. I listen to Tori Amos. I listen to Depeche Mode. I think about Europe last summer. I think about what my mother told me, about anticipating a sort of emotional low once I returned to the states, returned to my Junior year, return to the academic gutter; the genital wart I call Manual High School.
First hour is coerced smiles with manual singers. We still sound slightly off key. Billy Fortune sits next to me and tells me that we really need to get together sometime and meditate. I just look at him.
I think about Renae. I try calling her line once on Tuesday but hang-up when I realize that it is busy. Mother asks me if I am excited about homecoming. Like Renae, my supposed date, I offer a heartless, insouciant shrug. Because I am facing my mother, however, I smile and tell her that I am elated, proud of myself that I can recall another ACT vocab word.
Tuesday and Wednesday transpire without a buzz. I lay on my bed, trying to see if I can feel the world slightly tilt to the left, slightly rotating, orbiting around the mid-autumnal slashes of light that cut through my window sill at dusk. Finally, Friday afternoon, after practice, I arrive home with a note from my mother. A note, stuck on a post it on my bedroom door.
Call Renae. The note said.
*****
“Hey,” I say into the lower end of the phone. “How’s it going?” Renae lets out an exhausted sigh that sounds like she is practicing for her pending La Maze class.
“I just wanted to call and tell you that I’ll pick you up at five tomorrow night.” She says.
“Cool,” I say, before I inquire how her week was. She answers in the same monotonous drone, stating that it was all right but nothing special.
“I’ll pick you up, but we need to hurry. We need to be at Laura’s house. Her parents want to take photographs of all of us.”
“Totally cool.” I say, once again.
“We’re going out with Laura and Lonnie and Kristy and Timm. It should be a fun evening.”
Again, I nod my head, and tell her that I am looking forward to it.
There is another pause in our conversation.
“Did you remember to pick up the corsage?” Renae asks.
“Yes,” I respond. “My mother is going to pick it up at the Florists tomorrow.”
“I already picked up yours,” She said. “It’s a smooth peach color. I hope the two of ours matches.”
“I’m sure the two of ours will.” I say. “How about outfit. What should I wear?”
“Just wear a shirt and tie.” She says. “You’ll look fine.”
“I’m sure you will, too.” I add, realizing that it’s probably a good idea if I venture out tonight and pick out a shirt.
“So, tomorrow at five, I’ll be there.” Renae says, once again, in her fast monotone.
“I can’t wait.” I say, before hanging up the phone, but not before saying goodbye, before we even said hello.
****
That night I drive around by myself in the Prunemobile, wishing that I had something rolled and sweet between my lips to be sucking on. I slide my car in the parking lot of Northwoods, thirty dollars in my wallet, looking for a white shirt.
I walk inside the Penny’s and the first fifteen dollar shirt I see I pick up. The sale lady tells me that the shirt will not fit my neck. She measures my neck with a miniature ruler, as if preparing me for the guillotine. She then sells me a shirt that costs ten dollars more that the shirt I had originally planned on purchasing. I arrive home, standing in front of my full mirror. Two minutes later, after I have carefully removed all the pins from around the sleeves and collars like I am removing curses from a Voodoo doll, I realize that the neck is too tight and if worn with a tie, our homecoming photographs would turn out slightly blue, giving Renae the impression that she is dating a finely groomed smurf.
I tell my mother and she tells me not to worry. That we’ll go back to Penny’s tomorrow after my Cross-Country meet and exchange the shirt. I go back into my room and listen to Depeche Mode synthesized chimes and wonder heavily inside if the whole weekend will feel this tight, leaving it hard for me to swallow, afterwards.
******************
We exchange the shirt. Mother picks up and outfit for me to wear. That morning time seventeen minutes still flashed in implemented neon slashes at the end of the meet. As hard as I try to push myself, it seems as if I am still tumbling over my own foibles, it seems like I will never be able to live up to the times I have ordained for myself.
The outfit mother has coordinated herself and deemed that I wear is gray with a blue tie knotted around the bulb of my Adam’s Apple in posh literary Albatross fashion. I spend the afternoon lolling around the house, glancing at the time, waiting for her to arrive. Twice I pick up the phone and consider calling her, asking her if perhaps maybe we could just talk. Perhaps we could just like hangout and laugh and giggle and say stupid things that have no meaning to them whatsoever. But my ambitions stretch as far as the three digits and a numerical slash.
I dress. My contacts are steadily affixed in both lids. I blink several times. Dad comes in and helps me ties my tie, showing me how to tuck the loose silk non-visible end into my shirt like they used to do in the seventies. I nod and tell him thanks.
With my hair thoroughly gelled into a sprayed plateau. I look at the photographs on my wall. I look at the photographs form the music man, and look at myself, in the top row, bending over, trying to look at Ambra. I look at the autographed laminated Daivd Coperfield Aunt Jan gave me. I look at the Tori Amos and the Eric Johnson and the Harry Connick Jr. I look at the one photograph I have of Renae. The photograph that I used to ferry in my wallet. The photograph that I used to show people, pointing to the girl in the center of the photograph, saying that it was she who held my heart by the reins and kept saying giddy-up.
With corsage in paw I adjourn out to the cement steps, squatting, smiling, not knowing entirely what to expect. I wear Renae’s gold bracelet again, out of respect to the individual whom I am escorting. I think about what Renae said, about how it felt somewhat special at the time. I think about talking with Renae the summer after my first sojourn to Europe. I think about trying to cajole her into picking me up for a drive and how she was listening to Radio Head in the background. I think about how I asked her if she felt ‘so very special’ in accordance to the lyrics of the song.
“I am special.” Renae replied back to me. “I am special indeed.”
I abandon the steps and go back into my room, winking at the copy of Leaves of Grass reclining on the corner of my desk, hoping that maybe Uncle Walt can save me. For sentimental-as-fuck sake reasoning I have Depeche Mode’s SOMEBODY chiming in the cassette lips of my stereo. It is autumn and the planet is begin to transition into shades of copper and corduroy and the very next thing I realize my mother is stammering into my bedroom, a look of excitement squeezed into her lips, informing me that she thinks my date has just arrived.
(book o' Muses) October, 1994
Beth comes to my door, the phone outstretched in her palm, telling me that it is for me.
“Hello,” I say. I have not dated anyone in over a year. There was snuggling and warmth with Jenn Wilson in Europe over the summer. There is the cute adoptive girl with shortly crisped bangs that smokes cigarettes at lunchtime. There is David Strickler and his girlfriend, Anne, who lives deep in the country in Brimfield, who I went to Brimfield’s Basketball homecoming with last year, where I was accused of pulling the fire alarm. There is Mark-Andrew, who has just returned back home form Prague, attending the University of Dallas. There is Harmony, in Spokane, scribbling me letters in cursive that looks like one continuous roller-coaster ride, telling me all about her pending collegiate experiences.
There is myself, alone in Peoria, with Paris becoming more and more of a memory everyday.
And there is a phone grappled in my palm right now. There is the moment the phone becomes a dormant object as I slowly hoist it up to my lips, suspecting it either any one of the Dave’s, but more than likely Hale or Strickler. As the words ‘Hello’, comes out of my mouth it is volleyed back with something soothing and feminine. A dulcet, high-pitched voice, whose lips I have touched before, when I was young, like a toddler performing botched balettic postures, trying to touch the slight half-rainbow of moisture that exudes form the top of a water fountain.
“Hi, Dave” The voice says, acknowledging me rather quickly. It is feminine but it is not that of Harmony.
“This is Renae Howard.” She says, identifying herself.
*
“Reane,” I say, very quickly. “Hey you crazy girl, how’s it going?”
Renae claims that it has been going good and well. For a moment I think that she is going to cuss me out for once again breaking up with her so abruptly two years ago. Fearing this, I try to institute more small talk, but her tongue leashes into a pair of scissors, snapping at me, informing me of the real reason she called.
“I have a question for you.” She says.
“Uh, yeah, sure, what’s up?” I respond, just a trite befuddled by the whole situation.
“Will you go to Homecoming with me?”
She spits out the question as if half-in-dread and half in panic. Her voice seems to rise up an octave at the end of her query. Having been squatting on the oak lip of my writers’ desk, I stand. My knees crack. Renae wanted absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with me a year and a half ago, when I tried to get her to pick me up and go driving around. Now, she has called me, out of the lachrymose melancholy blue of autumn, inviting me to escort her to her senior homecoming.
***
Two weeks earlier in late September, I drove past Manual, in the Prunemobile. Stopping in front of the school, slowly idling, I was still thinking about Lil’ Wilson inside, slowly dancing with John, a thawed corsage precariously dangling form both their collars. Two weeks ago, I was by myself, tears splashing down my cheek, staring pensively into the windshield blue in front of me, noticing how my reflection looked like a dejected clown whose unemployment check was printed on a rubber stamp and is therefore no longer valid.
Squinting through the ajar window, I see the crystal ball, the Home Coming chandelier oscillating overhead. Patches of pied lights; little variegated rotating squares casting pink and blue windows. I think about the outfit Little ‘Wil must be wearing. I wonder if her hair is down. I wonder what bitchy things she has found to moan about. Perhaps it is too cold in the foyer for her. Perhaps the meal wasn’t served at the right temperature. Perhaps she is afraid that maybe I might show up tonight and completely sully her first and only Freshman prom.
I press down on the gas, hearing the earnest snore of the engine as I automotively clamber up Ligonier, take a right and then a left, head down the dual strip of road that slices between Madison Golf course. I make sure that my blinker has been winking on the right hand side of the car for a good two minutes before I turn, on to Sherman, trying to sniff all the tears back into my sockets. Trying to clear my throat, trying to make it sound like I am not at all alone in the world. Trying to sound, after I put the car in P and verify that the headlights have been switched off, after I walk inside the house and doff my jacket, walking around the corner to my room, the place where I want to live; the place where I want to learn and want to write; after all this, I clear my throat and maybe blow a snot-loogie into my mother’s rock garden as I enter the house, trying to convince my parents that everything in the world is okay, as I brew another pot of coffee and listen to some Morrissey.
Everything in the World will forever be ok.
***
Renae has just presented her question to me. My whole body is stiff, erect with shock. Depeche Mode is slightly humming in the C.D. player. Mother is baking coffee cakes in the oven. The coffee I am sipping is Gevalia, given to me by grandma. The Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune lays scattered across my mattress. The Book section is open. The Nelson Algren awards were announced two weeks ago. I cannot believe the query Renae just presented me with. I pause. I take a deep breath. I thank God inside my chest.
“Sure,” I say, without hesitation “I’d love to.”
There is an awkward pause.
“Do you wanna get together first to see each other.” I say very quickly and then rephrase my statement, saying that perhaps maybe we should get together first to see each other.
“Sure,” Renae says.
“How about Monday. Maybe Monday we can go to One World and hang out or something.”
“That would be nice.” Renae says, before telling me that she is once again really busy this week.
I want to ask her what happened. I want to know where Lee is. I want to know when they broke up. I thought that they were still dating.
“We can go to One World.” I say. “I can pick you up and the two of us and go to One World, only we can’t sit in the smoking section because it’s Cross Country season.
Renae twists her lips in the same fashion as she did two years ago. Apparently the vice that has grabbed hear peers by their social labels has not baiting her yet.
“I know exactly what I’m going to have, too.” Renae says.
“What,” I say.
“I’m going to have a hot chocolate with lots and lots of whipped cream.” She says.
“Are you going to say it just like that?” I respond.
“Yes,” Renae says. “With lots and lots of whipped cream.”
“And a cherry, too.” I say, trying to paint a smile across her lips.
“No,” Renae says. “No cherry. Just cream.”
“The tomorrow night it is. Is six-thirty ok?”
“Yes.” Renae says, into the phone, my ear, immensely enjoying being massged by the warmth of her vocal resonance. “Six-thirty is fine.”
***
“You can go to the Doo-wop diner.” My dad says. I am seventeen and have only been driving independently for just under two months.
“The what?” I say, looking at my father as if he is trying to speak a dyslexic from of Sanskrit.
“The Doo-wop diner.” My father says. “It’s in Bartonville. It’s close to where she lives. You can just stop in and get a milkshake.
“No,” I tell my father. “I want to take her to One World. It’s where I hang out all the time anyway.”
My Dad continues to look at me. Every time he gives me advice about women I can tell that, although he is madly in love with his own wife, he is upset that he was not more of a ladies man back in his Varsity Tennis Jacket Big Daddy Arthur days. I splash cologne on both cheeks. Two years ago almost exactly Renae and I were playing the very King-and I version of Getting To Know You. It would be four-fifteen every night when our voices would coalesce over cyber optics like a DNA coil gradually shaped into a pulsating heart. My hair is still cut short, mowed very near to my skull in back. I slap on English Leather, the same cheap cologne I wore in Europe; the urine scented vial Hale gave me for eighth grade graduation, what seems like decades ago.
“I’m just saying David.” My Dad impedes his way into my room. “That if you go to the Doo-Wop diner and had a milkshake you wouldn’t have to criss-cross all over town.’
“Dad,” I say. “I’m going to One World. I won’t be gone for very long. Renae and I haven’t seen each other in a very long time and we need to catch up.”
I storm out on the porch, a wastebasket in one hand. I make sure that my car is impeccably clean. I drape an old afghan over the seat in the back to make it look both more comfortable and more intimate. I jettison old coffee cups and napkins both myself and my old man have left in the car. Around the neck of the rearview mirror, I place the necklace I bought at the LYE convention last year, at the Holiday Inn, in O’hare. I remember Mike DeWitt, asking the girls if they would like to dance.
“David.” Dad says my name, reprimanding me.
“Dad, I gotta go. I’ll see you in about two hours.”
“Take care.” Father waves his splayed hand in the air. I remember trying to compose the letter to my father two years ago, after he said that I couldn’t see Renae, partly fussed because Patrick left early with Amy and the car arrangements got all screwed up that night. That was two years and what seemed like decades ago. I remember Amy later calling me up and chewing me out, saying that the reason I broke up with Renae was because she didn’t have her drivers’ license, so as soon as she got it, in a matter of weeks, we would be able to see each other more. I remember calling Renae up and hearing her tears, her telling me that she didn’t want to talk to me right now.
The Prunemobile is nothing fancy. It was conceived in the late seventies, before I had even learned how to speak in complete sentences. The car is always in the shop. In the thick gusts of snow, and chiseled ice, the car takes approximately fifteen minutes to warm up and the often stalls when I am trying to make a right turn. Later this year, my junior year, in between multifarious visits to Doctor Breightmeyer and nights where I coddle the tears and wish that I was somewhere else, later this year, the aluminum stem, activating the blinker signals will fall off. Dad, in all his tackle box ingenuity would epoxy the blinker stem in, only to have it fall off every three days, leaving a wad of unattractive stale goo in its place.
I drive through the South End of Peoria. I drive past Manual, where I left practice two hours ago, having pushed my Acic’s through another Main Street Five. Third year at Manual busting my ass and still the neon rectangle monitoring time at the finish line has not lowered past Seventeen minutes. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to have been. I think to myself. I followed the rules. I prayed to God. I ran everyday. I was supposed to have already left my mark in the chlorine-stenched Hallway by the pool.
Driving near David’s Hale’s house, up Garfield, near Limestone. I find Lauder avenue. The pine tree still appropriates much of the neatly trimmed front lawn. In the window I see a stilt figure slashing past the window shades, a cordless object prodded into her left earlobe. From where I sit, inside the Oldsmobile, inside my car, I can tell that her blonde hair has been cut significantly shorter and now shortly abuts the lobed of her ears.
Looking at the slightly chipped cross dangling from my rearview mirror, I give the carved ivory a kiss, before thudding the door shut. I can make out Renae’s slender silhouette inside.
*****************************
The last time I saw Renae was either Monday or Tuesday, December 28th or 29th, 1992. It was at the Mall. On the upper level. Renae arrived with David Best, having both of their parents recently dropped them off. Laura Lane and Kristy Day were their as well. So was Patrick McReynolds, and, much to Renae’s chagrin, David Hale.
“Patrick I can stand.” Renae says, as Hale struts inside the door waring a Harely Davidson Bikers cap that looks like something a police officer singing for the Village people might Sport.
“He’s not that bad.” I say to Renae, slightly elbowing her, reminding her that, in the immortal sugar-coated words of Willy Wonka, a little non-sense now and then is relished by the wisest men.
“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” Renae says to me, her arms tightly braced across her breast as if she is cold.
Hale accosts us with his signature whoo-hoo, removing his cap as if tipping it at a ballgame to show us his surprise.
“Wow,” I say. Renae is still looking the opposite direction. Hale has completely sawed off any shred of hair that once attired the to of his head.
“Dave,” I say. “I’m impressed.” In a way Dave looks like a Pony League catcher who his teammates would call Moose.
Come on, I say to Renae, still wearing the Identification bracelet she got me. The bracelet that took me two days to figure out how to undo the clasp and put it on my wrist. I wear the Manual Jacket my mother made me, with the words 96 thickly stitched in the right hand corner in numbers the size of my splayed palm.
Our hands join. The last couple of times we have seen each other, our lips seemed simply to content in drilling our tongues deep into each others mouth. We walk, next to each other, gripping each other’s hand. Hale and Patrick talk about going down to KB Toys and scaring a bunch of little kids by firing fake guns at each other.
“Hey, Dave,” Hale says. “Are you going to be using the gift I gave you for Christmas today?”
On Christmas eve at Christ Lutheran Church, Hale gave me a thoroughly wrapped parcel, weighing in my palm at approximately five pounds. After using my father keys to sever the excessive amounts of tape, inside was a brass coin roughly the size of a Kennedy half. The front side of the coin showcased a very old and moribund woman who looked like she would have played bridge with Lydia Moss Bradley. On the back of the coin is a picture of an antique Coffee Grinder. The coin is a gift certificate, worth ten dollars at Gloria Jeans.
“Would you like something from Gloria Jeans, sweetie.” I know full well that Renae will say no, commenting that she can’t stand our fascination with cappuccino. Patrick will interject and say that before he seriously spills some hard-core imaginary guts in the toy store, would his close friend and soon to be former school mate mind treating him to a nice warm cappuccino, even though the boys always drink it cold.
Renae smiles, shooing the boys off. We hold hands again. Three times I have endeavored to staple her lips with my tongue and three times she has looked back at me and verbally insinuated that she does not feel at all comfortable making out with me while the two ogres Patrick and hale are around, but Patrick she can stand, mind you.
Everytime Hale gets a cappuccino he always takes two hearty swigs from it and then tells me to hold onto it for him, meaning finish the damn thing. I walk with two giant cap’s in each hand. Dave Hale ordered some sort of Extra-large Holiday eggnog induced peppermint syrup Carmel concoction. After having sipped it, I understand why it was that he only took two sips, yet, id cappuccino, and both Patrick and myself have tacit rules about wasting such a fine, delicacy.
“Let’s go in here.” Renae says, ogling the after holiday sale placards with giant percent signs on them. I walk into one store with her where Renae tries three outfits on. With a giant, extra-large cappuccino nursed in each hand (the holiday one, the longer it sits, looks more and more like Reindeer poop) I am asked by the store manager if this place looks like a food court. As I go outside the store to continue my hearty slurps, I can hear Renae’s voice from the dressing room, asking me if I will hold her purse for her. I accept, and, like a kiosk, stand in front of Dots, a large drink cupped in both palm, a leather purse from Wilson’s looped around the thrity-degree angles of my indented elbow.
Fifteen minutes later and I am still trying hard to finish the Santa Clause cappuccino Hale purchased on the gift certificate coin he gave me for Christmas and only took two swallows then abandoned. Renae comes out of Dots, kisses my cheek, addresses me as honey, tells me about this fabulous outfit she just found, commenting that her mom probably wouldn’t mind if she used her For-Emergencies-Only-Credit card just this once, even though she used it last week at Marshal Fields in Chicago.
I nod my head up and down. Reassure her that I’m happy because she’s happy honey. Prance my legs due to excessive caffeine in take.
“I’ll only be another minute.” Renae says, kissing the side of my cheek again. A guy walks past me and asks me if I just tied the knot, telling me that he used to be whupped like that before he learned how to put his foot down. Now the bitch knows who wears the pants in the family. I tell him that’s nice. He says that he has tapes at home he can loan to me. I tell him I’m not interested.
Below me, in the center Court, Santa’s contract insists that he stay till New Years day. There are kids cussing Santa out, claiming that they were too good this year, asking why they didn’t get the latest Video game. One kid even moons the camera when the obligatory contract oriented photograph is snapped. The Holiday tape is on a continual ninety-minute loop. I can swear that I’ve heard the first Noel already two or three times. The chipmunk song also reeks of squealed monotony. Renae exit dot’s wit three boxes she exchanged to me for her purse, slightly planting a pedal moisture again on my cheek.
If she was a year older and perhaps more experience, perhaps she’s say that the sole raison behind her shopping affliction is due in part to the fact that she dated David Best for a year and discovered that the only way to have a sustainable orgasm was through trying on close and monopolizing her father’s money.
Renae grasps my arm and begins to tell me all about this charming delightful object she just tried on. I nod my head and tell her that is nice. With my glasses off, the customers continue to shoot in every direction. Eric Bushman walks past me, with some girl from anther school, a girl who is not as cute as Renae. I nod my head in acknowledgement and he continues to walk, pretending he has never seen me.
“Oh Look,” Renae says, pointing to coliseum sign reading EXPRESS.” I nod my head as if agreeing with her at the name of the Store.
“Come on,” She says. “I’ll only be a minute.”
I agree and after thirty seconds I find myself being fiercely tapped on my shoulder by the store manager. Apparently they have some kind of policy where all the boxes and sac form other stores need to be X-rayed and checked. I say bosh to that and A minute latter, I am holding Reane’s stacked parcels, still sipping on Hale’s Santa Shittoccino. Renae comes back out, hooks her purse on my limb as if she is benignly placing a bulb on a Christmas tree, informing me that. Once again, she will only be a minute, claiming that they don’t call it Express for nothing.
***********
She opens the door before I knock. For nostalgia’s sake, I have the wrist band she gave me two Christmases ago handcuffed around my left wrist. If Renae has noticed it, she sure has shit isn’t saying anything.
“Hi,” I say. There is the customary embrace when old lovers see each other. The feeling of once, having shared some sort of inexplicable connection and, because of time and space and causality, because of greed and obsession, become sometimes, even when life throws us a curve ball and we hit it out of the park, it goes foul anyway. Sometimes, for no reason there is loss, but there is forever the embrace. We hold each other momentarily. I tell her that it is really good to see her smile again. She lets go of me with a shrug.
“So,” I ask her. “How’s life been treating you these days, Miss Howard?”
Renae lets go of another shrug indicative of mild-to-lukewarm. She is still tall and slender, a Virginia Slim with mascara. Her smile does not seem quite as luminous as it did two years earlier. As if the bulb behind her lips have been slightly dimmed.
“So,” I say. There is a pause. “I like your hair.”
“It’s short.” Renae says, lolling her head unconsciously like she is a rock star. “I love it short.” There is something phallic and almost disturbing in the way Reane says the word ‘short’ but I choose not to complement. Perhaps she is thinking about her ex-boyfriend.
“So,” Once again, I say, beginning my romantic interlude with the word ‘so’. “Where would you like to go tonight?”
Renae once again shrugs, making a grunting sound that is either I don’t know or I don’t care. Her house has a strange familiarity to it-I wonder if the giant black and white poster of James Dean is still displayed above her bed.
“Does One World sound okay for you?” I say.
Renae does the whole whiny grunting sound again, this time saying something like, yeah, I suppose.
“There’s the Doo-wop diner.” Renae says, a sourness forming to her lips. I nearly choke at the irony.
“Do you like the Doo-wop diner?” I inquire.” My dad kept insisting that we go there.”
Renae makes another fast gnarled grunt, saying that it’s okay, quavering her palm up and down near her covered navel.
“I used to work their, but only for a week.” She says.
“Didn’t like it..”
“Agggghhhhh.” Renae says, in another high pitched squeal. “Couldn’t stand the manager.”
“Right.” I say, before requesting that I borrow the phone real quick. Renae says the words ‘real quick’ to me, once again, as if she is expeceting a serious phone call at anytime. As was the truth two years ago, I imagine that she still does not have call waiting.
Not trying to be Jacob to his Isaac, I phone my dad, informing him, that I’m over at Renae’s right now and will go to One World, hanging up before he tells me that all that criss-crossing around town is totally unnecessary when there’s that blasted ill-named sock hop diner in Bartonville.
We leave her house. Renae locks the door behind me. We pass the giant needles of the pine. The leaves are slowly beginning to turn so that everything around us looks like the inside of a kaleidoscope. As we strut down the slight bump to the Prunemobile, I open the door for her, making sure that my TO DAVE: LOVE RENAE identification band is extremely visible. Still Renae doesn’t see it.
I slam the door behind her and rush to my side. After three motorized chokes, the engine comes to life. Renae is wearing very thick sunglasses. The expensive leather jacket she bought on sale and then was sullied by Hale’s cappuccino is worn. The stain hardly visible, thanks to the color of mocha.
I pull out of Lauder court driving. There is a tangible, stifled uneasiness to the silence that exists between the six inches that separates the passenger side form the Drivers side. Renae continues to warble out a string of syllables as if everything is really no big deal. She says a quick garbled ‘yes’ when I tell her that it sure is good to see her. She shrugs her shoulder’s like it is no big deal when I tell her that I feel extremely honored that she asked me to escort her to her senior Homecoming. Her shoulders jolt up and down, as if it is really no big deal. As if she could’ve gone with anyone, she just needed a date.
Inside One World, I keep on trying to make Renae smile.
“…with lots and lots of whipped cream.” Renae says again. I keep saying things to make her smile. Keep making remarks to make her blush.
“How’s the folks doing?” I inquire.
“Dad’s always drunk.” She says. “Mom kicked him out for two months. I don’t know why she continues to put up with his shit.”
“I always liked your dad.” I add. “I always enjoyed giving him shit.” I say, staring at the blue vase in the center of the table, and the slightly wilting Daisy with the bowed stem inside.
“He couldn’t stand you.” Renae says. “He always thought you were trying to get fresh with me. He always thought you were deliberately trying to pick a fight with him.”
“I was just being….jocular.” I say, utilizing an ACT voacb word of the week.
“Hemmm,” Renae shrugs her shoulders again.
“I think that’s the reason my mom liked you so much.”
“Really,” I say, a smile bending across my lips. Debbie was always a looker.
“Yeah,” Renae says. “The way that you always pissed my old man off, plus she always though you were cute.”
“Cute,” I say the word out loud and too myself. My last vivid partially blurred because of no glasses memory of Debbie Howard was her driving me home from HAMMERS at Renae’s father Christmas party. Debbie had her hair slightly puffed in front like foam gushing from the bottom of a waterfall. I remember staring at the back of her jeans, as she bent over, fastening Ian, Reane’s six year old cousin, into the front seat of the car.
“It’s a good thing you two are leaving now.” She says. “The only thing those boys are going to continue to do is to drink.” She says.
I reach out across the wooden strips of the table. Another pedal has slowly wilted and is falling down form the top of the daisy. A patron who skin is either covered with tattoos or metallic piercings sets our drinks down in front of us. I look at Renae.
“Is that enough whip cream for you?” I comment. She smiles. It was the similar smile when I groped her hand at SCHOOL TIES two years prior. It was the smile of recognition, the smile of somebody still seeming brand new to you even thought you have seen them in those boxer shorts over and over again; even though you know what color the carpet is underneath; you know what the pipes look like. Her burgundy blush was the color of love.
“Yes,” Renae says, as the smile slowly descends from the top of her forehead. “It is a lot of whip cream.”
***
On the ride home, I insist on dropping by my house to formally introduce Renae to my mother and father, once again. Renae seems to be rather in a hurry, but she capitulates to me request, saying let’s make it brief but sweet. Mom’s head lolled into her padded shoulder, he hands slightly clasped as she welcomes Renae into our house. Dad just seems to adjust his glasses several times and even (perhaps intentionally) drops his dinner napkin off of the table, garnering a good look at Renae’s tightly packaged denim ass before slowly exhaling. I show her my room, the room, downstairs, where the grand piano used to belong. The room I first composed the letter to my father when I was fifteen, telling him that I was in love with Renae. She smiles and nods.
“I need to get home.” She says.
****
In front of her house, on Lauder Court, there is no extended information to come inside and make out. I adjust the clutch and idle the Prunemobile, until I smell burning oil and then place the car permanently in Park.
“So,” I say, try to make chisel away the silence. “I’ll see you this Saturday.” I say.
Renae nods. “How ‘bout I pick you up.” She says.
“Okay,” I nod once again, stolidly with my chin, as if I am being mandating instructions for a dietary living at a Health Clinic.
“Don’t forget to pick up a corsage.” She says. “I’ll have your bouttinere, or whatever it’s called.”
I nod my head again, upset at the pulsating splinters I feel inside my chest every time we try to communicate.
“Okay,” I say, “Well, I’ll give you a buzz this week, making sure everything’s cool and all.” Renae nods, thanks me for the coffee. There is more awkwardness. More uncomfort.
“It was really good seeing you again, Renae.” I say. “I’ve thought about you a lot. This feels really good.”
Renae sort of sways her head back and forth. I tell her goodnight and she reaches for the side door just as my body gravitates towards her. Seeing that I mean to embrace her, she allows me to, but does not hug back.
“Renae,” I say, before she struts up the slight inclination of her front lawn alone.
“Yes,” She wails, once again, rather impatiently. I roll up my sleeve, push the fold of fabric to my elbow.
“Did you notice that I wore the bracelet you gave me tonight” I say.
“Yes,” Renae nods her head. “I noticed. I guess it meant something special at the time, didn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I say to myself, as she grants me goodnight again, informing me that she will call me later in the week to verify our plans.
“I guess indeed meant something at the time.” I say to myself, looking at my bluish reflection in the windshield, briefly wondering what Jenny Wilson is doing right now.
***
Every day after school I stretch out my limbs and run and every day I come home and brew a pot of coffee and lay on my bed, supine, with my hands cradled behind my nape in dyslexic prayer wondering if she will call. I listen to Tori Amos. I listen to Depeche Mode. I think about Europe last summer. I think about what my mother told me, about anticipating a sort of emotional low once I returned to the states, returned to my Junior year, return to the academic gutter; the genital wart I call Manual High School.
First hour is coerced smiles with manual singers. We still sound slightly off key. Billy Fortune sits next to me and tells me that we really need to get together sometime and meditate. I just look at him.
I think about Renae. I try calling her line once on Tuesday but hang-up when I realize that it is busy. Mother asks me if I am excited about homecoming. Like Renae, my supposed date, I offer a heartless, insouciant shrug. Because I am facing my mother, however, I smile and tell her that I am elated, proud of myself that I can recall another ACT vocab word.
Tuesday and Wednesday transpire without a buzz. I lay on my bed, trying to see if I can feel the world slightly tilt to the left, slightly rotating, orbiting around the mid-autumnal slashes of light that cut through my window sill at dusk. Finally, Friday afternoon, after practice, I arrive home with a note from my mother. A note, stuck on a post it on my bedroom door.
Call Renae. The note said.
*****
“Hey,” I say into the lower end of the phone. “How’s it going?” Renae lets out an exhausted sigh that sounds like she is practicing for her pending La Maze class.
“I just wanted to call and tell you that I’ll pick you up at five tomorrow night.” She says.
“Cool,” I say, before I inquire how her week was. She answers in the same monotonous drone, stating that it was all right but nothing special.
“I’ll pick you up, but we need to hurry. We need to be at Laura’s house. Her parents want to take photographs of all of us.”
“Totally cool.” I say, once again.
“We’re going out with Laura and Lonnie and Kristy and Timm. It should be a fun evening.”
Again, I nod my head, and tell her that I am looking forward to it.
There is another pause in our conversation.
“Did you remember to pick up the corsage?” Renae asks.
“Yes,” I respond. “My mother is going to pick it up at the Florists tomorrow.”
“I already picked up yours,” She said. “It’s a smooth peach color. I hope the two of ours matches.”
“I’m sure the two of ours will.” I say. “How about outfit. What should I wear?”
“Just wear a shirt and tie.” She says. “You’ll look fine.”
“I’m sure you will, too.” I add, realizing that it’s probably a good idea if I venture out tonight and pick out a shirt.
“So, tomorrow at five, I’ll be there.” Renae says, once again, in her fast monotone.
“I can’t wait.” I say, before hanging up the phone, but not before saying goodbye, before we even said hello.
****
That night I drive around by myself in the Prunemobile, wishing that I had something rolled and sweet between my lips to be sucking on. I slide my car in the parking lot of Northwoods, thirty dollars in my wallet, looking for a white shirt.
I walk inside the Penny’s and the first fifteen dollar shirt I see I pick up. The sale lady tells me that the shirt will not fit my neck. She measures my neck with a miniature ruler, as if preparing me for the guillotine. She then sells me a shirt that costs ten dollars more that the shirt I had originally planned on purchasing. I arrive home, standing in front of my full mirror. Two minutes later, after I have carefully removed all the pins from around the sleeves and collars like I am removing curses from a Voodoo doll, I realize that the neck is too tight and if worn with a tie, our homecoming photographs would turn out slightly blue, giving Renae the impression that she is dating a finely groomed smurf.
I tell my mother and she tells me not to worry. That we’ll go back to Penny’s tomorrow after my Cross-Country meet and exchange the shirt. I go back into my room and listen to Depeche Mode synthesized chimes and wonder heavily inside if the whole weekend will feel this tight, leaving it hard for me to swallow, afterwards.
******************
We exchange the shirt. Mother picks up and outfit for me to wear. That morning time seventeen minutes still flashed in implemented neon slashes at the end of the meet. As hard as I try to push myself, it seems as if I am still tumbling over my own foibles, it seems like I will never be able to live up to the times I have ordained for myself.
The outfit mother has coordinated herself and deemed that I wear is gray with a blue tie knotted around the bulb of my Adam’s Apple in posh literary Albatross fashion. I spend the afternoon lolling around the house, glancing at the time, waiting for her to arrive. Twice I pick up the phone and consider calling her, asking her if perhaps maybe we could just talk. Perhaps we could just like hangout and laugh and giggle and say stupid things that have no meaning to them whatsoever. But my ambitions stretch as far as the three digits and a numerical slash.
I dress. My contacts are steadily affixed in both lids. I blink several times. Dad comes in and helps me ties my tie, showing me how to tuck the loose silk non-visible end into my shirt like they used to do in the seventies. I nod and tell him thanks.
With my hair thoroughly gelled into a sprayed plateau. I look at the photographs on my wall. I look at the photographs form the music man, and look at myself, in the top row, bending over, trying to look at Ambra. I look at the autographed laminated Daivd Coperfield Aunt Jan gave me. I look at the Tori Amos and the Eric Johnson and the Harry Connick Jr. I look at the one photograph I have of Renae. The photograph that I used to ferry in my wallet. The photograph that I used to show people, pointing to the girl in the center of the photograph, saying that it was she who held my heart by the reins and kept saying giddy-up.
With corsage in paw I adjourn out to the cement steps, squatting, smiling, not knowing entirely what to expect. I wear Renae’s gold bracelet again, out of respect to the individual whom I am escorting. I think about what Renae said, about how it felt somewhat special at the time. I think about talking with Renae the summer after my first sojourn to Europe. I think about trying to cajole her into picking me up for a drive and how she was listening to Radio Head in the background. I think about how I asked her if she felt ‘so very special’ in accordance to the lyrics of the song.
“I am special.” Renae replied back to me. “I am special indeed.”
I abandon the steps and go back into my room, winking at the copy of Leaves of Grass reclining on the corner of my desk, hoping that maybe Uncle Walt can save me. For sentimental-as-fuck sake reasoning I have Depeche Mode’s SOMEBODY chiming in the cassette lips of my stereo. It is autumn and the planet is begin to transition into shades of copper and corduroy and the very next thing I realize my mother is stammering into my bedroom, a look of excitement squeezed into her lips, informing me that she thinks my date has just arrived.
(book o' Muses) October, 1994
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Symphonic cycles and the sip of her forever smile
It was four years ago and the author is seated twenty feet from where he is currently seated now at this precise moment in time space, pelting out the shapes and sounds that will form the anatomy of this blog--four years ago, when Barrack Obama was little known outside of the terra ferma of Illinois running for the United States senate. Four years ago when the United States populace as a whole, hungover from the heartache of 9-11, still believed that the purported possibility of weapons of mass destruction warranted the massive Invasion of Iraq by US troops which would later spawn innumerable causalities, international bruises bandied with emotional political welts on the global skin of this planet--a planet we still haven't learned as of yet how to share.
Four years ago when gas was, to put it mildly, cheap as fuck.
Four years ago when your avg. Ipod resembled the early NES pond scum-screened gameboy and was roughly the size of my outstretched palm. Four years ago when G-mail was sending out invites to recruit spam sullied yahoo accounts into the legion of frenzied googlized groupies. Four years ago when Brittney still wore her panties in public and the appellation Paris Hilton meant a five star resort you opted to stay at while touring France in lieu of a hostile. Four years ago when facebook and Myspace and Wikipedia were all cyber-embryos and Youtube had yet to be conceived.
Four years ago when nearly all of my daily literary rants were saved via hundreds of vestigial pre-school windowed shaped floppy drives and the (Shit, HOW pricey and how many scores of pages lost never to be recovered) Zip drives.
Before Katrina baptized the Big easy into a puddle of pain and loss. Four years ago, John Kerry was trying to lasso the political sway of the voting American cognoscenti. Four years ago to the day the quarter million lives snatched away from the the day after Christmas Tsunami were still living, still breathing, still here.
Four years of laughter. Four years of loss and failure. Four years of wondering who the fuck you are.
Four years ago when you were allowed to smoke inside bars. Four years ago when people recycled a lot less and the terminology "going green" meant that you were looking to score some pot. Four summers ago when I still busted my ass to make ends meet. Four summers ago when I just returned from a cursory tour of the highways of the Midwest, scurrying through the hallways of the prestigious Iowa's Writers Workshop, slipping autographed journals in which my work was showcased under the doors of esteemed faculty members and fellow writers I admired, before I found myself alone in St. Paul MN, looking at my literary mentor, Garrison Keillor, on stage.
Four years ago I was listening to the Yeah Yeah's and Liz Phair all the time.
Four years ago I was staying in the apartment with a aged Psychic who had told me three years earlier when I first entered his apartment for the first time to look around because I would be living there someday. Four years ago to the date when I blogged scribed the stanza's... "When the spotlight's illuminated cone captured her vibrato the entire audience (including her brother) fell in love. Is that why I left early and cried. Hoofing home, through the park late at night. So proud of her...wishing my father could have seen his daughter. Pissed off that the wound of death hasn't completely scabbed over. Raking up scattered leaves of family remorse sifting inside my chest, wishing I could set the crumpled heap ablaze and start new, which of course, will happen over time. Life isn't a unicycle (Thanks arya). Nor is it a motorcycle. Geez; my analogies are so lame and cheesy this morning that even my witticisms are subject to mold...."
It was four years ago when I started blogging, oblivious that this daily on-line dry erase board I chose one summer to employ as my creative kiosk would bless me with sprinkles of eternity, the feeling of oneness,the best moments of my life.
When you are kissed with comments of encouragement on a daily basis there is no end to what an individual will achieve. I can still see myself, four years ago, if I squint from where I am seated now. I can make out the back of my head, the pony tail (hair finally growing long again) like a honey-flavored handle sprouting out from the back of my skull--can discern the silhouette of my shoulders pivoting in exclamation and in joy as the fenestration of sentences spills open into a fellow bloggers pasture of words as my vision skis across a fresh paragraph authored by "lady Benz" or "mara-arya" where my lips, now as was the case four years ago, boomerangs into a smile.
Four years ago. The summer we swam with cycles, skinned lizards and doused demons with the narrative copper of our collected souls. The summer we danced in a single shared dream and were blessed enough to have the metaphysical skills of Ace to decipher them. The summer when growth was tangible and tinged with golden longing of all mankind.
Over the next week or so I'll try to resuscitate a few of the bloggs that I wrote four years ago but that were never posted. Writing (as a career, as a fiction writer) can be a lonely spiritual vocation at times. I look back at that summer four years ago not remembering a single blogg I wrote, but I remember with the gratitude of angels every reverberating vowel the twin hosts who invited me into this glorious gala fraught language and longing decided to share.
Four years. Shit!!!
Four years ago when gas was, to put it mildly, cheap as fuck.
Four years ago when your avg. Ipod resembled the early NES pond scum-screened gameboy and was roughly the size of my outstretched palm. Four years ago when G-mail was sending out invites to recruit spam sullied yahoo accounts into the legion of frenzied googlized groupies. Four years ago when Brittney still wore her panties in public and the appellation Paris Hilton meant a five star resort you opted to stay at while touring France in lieu of a hostile. Four years ago when facebook and Myspace and Wikipedia were all cyber-embryos and Youtube had yet to be conceived.
Four years ago when nearly all of my daily literary rants were saved via hundreds of vestigial pre-school windowed shaped floppy drives and the (Shit, HOW pricey and how many scores of pages lost never to be recovered) Zip drives.
Before Katrina baptized the Big easy into a puddle of pain and loss. Four years ago, John Kerry was trying to lasso the political sway of the voting American cognoscenti. Four years ago to the day the quarter million lives snatched away from the the day after Christmas Tsunami were still living, still breathing, still here.
Four years of laughter. Four years of loss and failure. Four years of wondering who the fuck you are.
Four years ago when you were allowed to smoke inside bars. Four years ago when people recycled a lot less and the terminology "going green" meant that you were looking to score some pot. Four summers ago when I still busted my ass to make ends meet. Four summers ago when I just returned from a cursory tour of the highways of the Midwest, scurrying through the hallways of the prestigious Iowa's Writers Workshop, slipping autographed journals in which my work was showcased under the doors of esteemed faculty members and fellow writers I admired, before I found myself alone in St. Paul MN, looking at my literary mentor, Garrison Keillor, on stage.
Four years ago I was listening to the Yeah Yeah's and Liz Phair all the time.
Four years ago I was staying in the apartment with a aged Psychic who had told me three years earlier when I first entered his apartment for the first time to look around because I would be living there someday. Four years ago to the date when I blogged scribed the stanza's... "When the spotlight's illuminated cone captured her vibrato the entire audience (including her brother) fell in love. Is that why I left early and cried. Hoofing home, through the park late at night. So proud of her...wishing my father could have seen his daughter. Pissed off that the wound of death hasn't completely scabbed over. Raking up scattered leaves of family remorse sifting inside my chest, wishing I could set the crumpled heap ablaze and start new, which of course, will happen over time. Life isn't a unicycle (Thanks arya). Nor is it a motorcycle. Geez; my analogies are so lame and cheesy this morning that even my witticisms are subject to mold...."
It was four years ago when I started blogging, oblivious that this daily on-line dry erase board I chose one summer to employ as my creative kiosk would bless me with sprinkles of eternity, the feeling of oneness,the best moments of my life.
When you are kissed with comments of encouragement on a daily basis there is no end to what an individual will achieve. I can still see myself, four years ago, if I squint from where I am seated now. I can make out the back of my head, the pony tail (hair finally growing long again) like a honey-flavored handle sprouting out from the back of my skull--can discern the silhouette of my shoulders pivoting in exclamation and in joy as the fenestration of sentences spills open into a fellow bloggers pasture of words as my vision skis across a fresh paragraph authored by "lady Benz" or "mara-arya" where my lips, now as was the case four years ago, boomerangs into a smile.
Four years ago. The summer we swam with cycles, skinned lizards and doused demons with the narrative copper of our collected souls. The summer we danced in a single shared dream and were blessed enough to have the metaphysical skills of Ace to decipher them. The summer when growth was tangible and tinged with golden longing of all mankind.
Over the next week or so I'll try to resuscitate a few of the bloggs that I wrote four years ago but that were never posted. Writing (as a career, as a fiction writer) can be a lonely spiritual vocation at times. I look back at that summer four years ago not remembering a single blogg I wrote, but I remember with the gratitude of angels every reverberating vowel the twin hosts who invited me into this glorious gala fraught language and longing decided to share.
Four years. Shit!!!
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Morning begins with her smile or
the reflection of her face
into my face
a globe of handicapped
continents, land masses,
mountain ranges
vast prairies spilled
beneath the lunar-lit
arboretum of lips,
slight magnetic
shock of white
brimming over the
horizon of cheekbones,
brushing into the angular
slants of her chin
This is how morning
splashes its vision into
the winking copper
tint of dawn
The moment when
you find your body
outside of your body
bouyed into the
upsidedown pond of dreams
a suspedned chandelier
showcasing your
every failure and loss
a tear prism of her smile
and the promise of yet
one more day
alone
dvb07
into my face
a globe of handicapped
continents, land masses,
mountain ranges
vast prairies spilled
beneath the lunar-lit
arboretum of lips,
slight magnetic
shock of white
brimming over the
horizon of cheekbones,
brushing into the angular
slants of her chin
This is how morning
splashes its vision into
the winking copper
tint of dawn
The moment when
you find your body
outside of your body
bouyed into the
upsidedown pond of dreams
a suspedned chandelier
showcasing your
every failure and loss
a tear prism of her smile
and the promise of yet
one more day
alone
dvb07
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
It was the perfect moment in time
Space when I saw you baby the moment when
I somehow found your fingers curled in my hand like
Some sort of bulb the moment I wanted more than
To be myself being more than myself
Sloughing out of the limp raincoat of flesh
The moment where I wanted to kiss dance skip
Seek flounder sprint off the discourse of the page
It was the moment when I was free
The moment where after all
This time I didn’t have to worry any more
The moment when I turned around
And you were somehow
Above my body
The ventilation of your lips
Giving birth to upside down
triangles and limp treble clefs
In the copper of autumn
It was that moment
You plucked from me
The moment I slipped
Inside the puddle of your eyes
A blink swatting everything I have ever wanted
on this continent of being in front of me
It was this moment here and now
that moment I swear to god
I’ll fucking get it back again
dvb07
Space when I saw you baby the moment when
I somehow found your fingers curled in my hand like
Some sort of bulb the moment I wanted more than
To be myself being more than myself
Sloughing out of the limp raincoat of flesh
The moment where I wanted to kiss dance skip
Seek flounder sprint off the discourse of the page
It was the moment when I was free
The moment where after all
This time I didn’t have to worry any more
The moment when I turned around
And you were somehow
Above my body
The ventilation of your lips
Giving birth to upside down
triangles and limp treble clefs
In the copper of autumn
It was that moment
You plucked from me
The moment I slipped
Inside the puddle of your eyes
A blink swatting everything I have ever wanted
on this continent of being in front of me
It was this moment here and now
that moment I swear to god
I’ll fucking get it back again
dvb07
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Watched the lunar eclipse tonight--the moon transitioning into a wild chestnut sphere, a brown leather orb lobbed in the high west of a frigid late February night as if the one-eyed moon itself were taking a moment simply to close its eye meditating in winter prayer admist a frosty chandelier of stars. Went back home during my break at work to observe the hour long lunar wink on my back porch while downstairs frat boys drank cheap beer and played poker and smoked grass, unaware of the silhouette their solar address was casting on the nearest galactic cue ball.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Finish line....
So I made it through the
end of the week only imbibing
six beers!!!! Three 12 ounces
(an IPA, Pale bock and Pale ale
respectively)one seasonal sumptuous
Samuel Smith festive winter ale
and two 24 ounce PBR's can, which
the liquor store conveniently
began to ferry for only 1.49....
sixty cents cheaper than my
daily starbucks venti pickme up....
Off to cartwheel into an alcoholic
cycle of oblivion this weekend
In all confessional candor six beers
between sunday and Thurs is about
20 less per week than I've been
consuming. The goal is to only
get blitz on the weekend and to
be more focused on my literary
pursuits and not use alcohol
as a panacea to life's
solitary problem....I'll keep you
posted.....
end of the week only imbibing
six beers!!!! Three 12 ounces
(an IPA, Pale bock and Pale ale
respectively)one seasonal sumptuous
Samuel Smith festive winter ale
and two 24 ounce PBR's can, which
the liquor store conveniently
began to ferry for only 1.49....
sixty cents cheaper than my
daily starbucks venti pickme up....
Off to cartwheel into an alcoholic
cycle of oblivion this weekend
In all confessional candor six beers
between sunday and Thurs is about
20 less per week than I've been
consuming. The goal is to only
get blitz on the weekend and to
be more focused on my literary
pursuits and not use alcohol
as a panacea to life's
solitary problem....I'll keep you
posted.....
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
the kingdom will not come by expectation....
There's something about the year 1844.
The Millerites believed
that 1844 would be the return of Christ circa
March 21st, 1844 ( nothin' beats a thief in the night)
The event was known throughout many sects of North
American Christianity as the "great disappointment"
The first telegram using Morse code would be sent
on May 24th of that year by Samuel Morse, the inaugural message being
that of "What hath God wrought" (numbers 23:23)....one day before
in Persia a messenger of the light revealed himself
as being a GATE to the metaphysical continuity
and spiritual evolution of mankind. The fact that
Morse's message was promulgated hours after the
heralding genesis of a new age
demarcating mankind’s spiritual odyssey
in the discourse of the net of time
serves as a modern day star of david
quietly looming over the
housing projects in a run-down
Bethlehem, a few shepherds familiar
with the noisome scent of sheep shit
pointing their question mark
shaped spears in astonishment at the
sight of a beaming orb
wondering just what all of this
could perhaps mean.
indeed, 1844, the German astronomer Bessel noted
that Sirius, the most ebullient star in the night
has a companion star next to it.
A month later Joseph Smith, founder
of the latter day saints, was lynched.
1844.
The date I notice
when my mid-day ambrosia
pick me up was christened
in a working class blue collar
stable in Milwaukee, breaking
my quest for five day
alcoholic celibacy.....
but hey, if you had to pick a year.....
The Millerites believed
that 1844 would be the return of Christ circa
March 21st, 1844 ( nothin' beats a thief in the night)
The event was known throughout many sects of North
American Christianity as the "great disappointment"
The first telegram using Morse code would be sent
on May 24th of that year by Samuel Morse, the inaugural message being
that of "What hath God wrought" (numbers 23:23)....one day before
in Persia a messenger of the light revealed himself
as being a GATE to the metaphysical continuity
and spiritual evolution of mankind. The fact that
Morse's message was promulgated hours after the
heralding genesis of a new age
demarcating mankind’s spiritual odyssey
in the discourse of the net of time
serves as a modern day star of david
quietly looming over the
housing projects in a run-down
Bethlehem, a few shepherds familiar
with the noisome scent of sheep shit
pointing their question mark
shaped spears in astonishment at the
sight of a beaming orb
wondering just what all of this
could perhaps mean.
indeed, 1844, the German astronomer Bessel noted
that Sirius, the most ebullient star in the night
has a companion star next to it.
A month later Joseph Smith, founder
of the latter day saints, was lynched.
1844.
The date I notice
when my mid-day ambrosia
pick me up was christened
in a working class blue collar
stable in Milwaukee, breaking
my quest for five day
alcoholic celibacy.....
but hey, if you had to pick a year.....
Monday, February 04, 2008
Four fingers left to go...
There were times in the last three years
when fleeting mystical serenity was obtained
employing the use of alcohol as my metaphysical
snorkel, upholding the amber baton of enlightenment
in grapple similar to that of a patriarch and a scepter
after a day of writing, looking out the nocturnal sockets
of my bedroom window, taking intermittent chugs and swigs
before abandoning the contents of the bottle into my body and
doffing the cap off another bottle, another 40, another IPA
another shot, another Guinness. My vision skips across
the inky continents of the novel I am currently treading through
and then high dives off the second story of my
apartment window, lost in an upside down umbrella of snow
showcased by the yawning spotlight of a streetlamp--
if I look straight ahead as I tilt back the
hue of my bottle lost in the evaporation of planetary
bubbles sledding into the area of my face just above my
chin before I swallow and watch (almost in slow motion)
as the crystal rocket reverses its trajectory from
the brim of my lips, the nectar splashing into every
abandoned cell hollowed out inside my chest as I smile
and look back on to the December white of a fresh page.....
"I wouldn't try going cold turkey all at once." My brother-in-law, who is a
doctor advises me. "With the amount of alcohol you consume on a daily basis
you'll start shaking and sweating every night."
There were times when I lived with the psychic on
Heading avenue when I would go out into the woods at two
in the morning, the sylvan fountain of trees attired
in a thin sheath of snow, the skies bejeweled with
a broken chandelier of thermonuclear pebbles
as I searched for Sirius and smiled, howling as
I floated into the shadows of the night
a Fosters special Bitter or Icehouse
cupped in my palm. During the day, often
spring and autumn, around the pinkish tint
of a pending dusk I would lower myself into
what I already immortalized in my book
as the "nuclear woods." The same woods
my best friend David Hale got stuck in
on Patrick McReynolds 13th birthday sleep over
and we had to get help....the woods I dreamt
about exploring when I was in jr.
high with the crimped bangs and late-80's
side ponytail
and numerical high school
digits stitched into the jacket of my girlfriend close by
feeling somehow the awakening of our bodies
mirrored the awakening of the planet
the newness of spring
the endurance of summer
the ash of a fall evening
and the splash of ovum baptismal white
of a winter melting into the continuous narrative that is nature
years later finding myself somehow living on the upper lip
of the woods I loved in my early youth
loafing on a the thick bark of a toppled tree
a bridge to some childhood innocence
loafing, smoking my pipe, pouring back
into the hovel of my mouths the
the taste of a sunset childhood
and the taste of what is to come
For Christmas my creative writing professor from college
presents me with t he largest bottle of Jack Daniels I
have ever seen. If placed horizontally it resembles a
southern crystallized blimp showcased at a late-eighteen
hundreds world fair of arabesque intrigue.
There's something about the hardcore image of A
writer being an alcoholic. Jack London died when he
was 40. Kerouac was 47. when Raymond carver
was 39 years old the doctor said that
if he didn't quit drinking he would be dead
in six months. He ended up dying young anyway
(fifty, of cancer) but he said that he was more
proud of staying off the sauce than anything else
he had ever accomplished in his life.
The quality of his prose and the manner in which
he feisty inhaled every molecule of the last
decade of his life attest to the poetry of his
sobriety.
But writers are addicted to truth
when your truth is sloshing around
the corners of your lips
one second and then
trying to find something to fill the void
left by something that you
once put inside the interior shafts of your flesh.
When I was at the store today I told Tiffany who scans barcodes
and swipes link cards for low income families that
somehow can afford better clothing and vehicles
than i ever could that I am giving up booze for the
upcoming week (she saw that my order was fraught with frozen
vegetables, plastic silos of Gatorade and rice and inquired.)
Tiffany is hard core working class, skinny as a virgnina slim
who loves cheap domestic long-necks and country music and dogs.
I can tell that she has been having a typical Monday in America
can tell like all the rest of us that she is struggling
to make sense out of all the shit--struggling to make ends meet
struggling to find companionship (she refers to her boyfriend
as "dad" whenever he calls) struggling.
"Why are you giving up booze?" She says.
I tell her that I am only giving up booze for a week
and that the ultimate goal is to cessation of all
alcoholic products during the work week.
Tiffany continues to check out my item.
When she bends over placing the items into the
stationary cart at Sav-o-lot I can make
out the color of her bra.
"But you seem happy." She says. "If it makes you
happy all the time it can't be all that bad."
I turn around and begin to pack my groceries in
a box once used for tuna fish before shooting
a smile back at my checkout friend, whose
place of employment is much worse than that of my own.
Sunday, February 03, 2008
Trying to go five days...
...Without orally ingesting the carbonated
copper liquid ambrosia of working
middle class americana
the elixir of youth harbinger of hopes
social lubricant of mankind, ingenious
marketer to the masses, liquid diploma
shaped entitlement gushing forth
icy froth of dreams vicariously
ferried into the snowy pasture
of mankind’s poetic longing
with each splash of the palette
QUASHING the existential shadow
of existence, the inevitable perils
of failure and loss
the ablution of possibility and being
a panacea for the integers found on pay-stubs
loan bills, credit card statements
a crutch to help the gnashed soul
continue through the world alone
a rod and a staff superseding
the image of God or the woman who
dumped your ass
a gauze for the broken-hearted
the amber pond of immortality
sluicing down the into the corporeal
enigine of the body
The feeling that you are here
forever and that you will never
die....
For this is why people get drunk or abuse various to substances
which may render lethal health imperatives come a decade time--
because more than anything else the substance is there for him
the substance is there to hold him,
is there to take him where he needs to go
is there to verify his virility and esteem
is there to make him laugh
is there to ameliorate his wit in public
is there to make him feel that he has accomplished something
is there make him feel that everything in his life has some sort of meaning
and the substance will do this in a way that no few Jesus's or
fuck friends
perhaps ever could because is does so with an intermingling
baptisim into the blood
while the substance is circulating
throughout the interstate arteries of his nervous system
there is no narrative too grand, no dream without reach
no story that cannot be spilled out into the gushing
current of language, much as my neighborhood
tap floods nectar out into pint glasses
After all, the raison d'etre of my alcoholism
is similar to why I come to writing
or why I come to fiction.
Why I want others to come to my miniature train cities
carved into the page in the shape of lower case shapes
being that I want to take the reader
somewhere they have never been before
and (maybe)
I want my story and my craft
to hold them when no one else on the
planet is there to do just that.
Over the last three years alcohol has been a part of my daily diet
Its the place i go to feel inspired, creative, alive
I wake up at weird hours and need a six pack to just
to crash for a few hours before heading off to work
anticipating the 24ounce cylinders I am to imbibe when I get
off eight hours later. Most weekends are a visual
cherry-oak haze of the interior of bars and ferrying
cube-shaped craft packs back to my apartment
from the liquer store, spending enough green
to send the Islamic owner on pilgrimage to Mecca....
five days..
over the last two years I've only ceased drinking
when I've been sick. Five days on my own volition.
Five days to try to bring forth that will
power, to sacrifice something significant
and to maybe, in the process
develop and grow into a human being
in a writer
something that has not even been imagine
copper liquid ambrosia of working
middle class americana
the elixir of youth harbinger of hopes
social lubricant of mankind, ingenious
marketer to the masses, liquid diploma
shaped entitlement gushing forth
icy froth of dreams vicariously
ferried into the snowy pasture
of mankind’s poetic longing
with each splash of the palette
QUASHING the existential shadow
of existence, the inevitable perils
of failure and loss
the ablution of possibility and being
a panacea for the integers found on pay-stubs
loan bills, credit card statements
a crutch to help the gnashed soul
continue through the world alone
a rod and a staff superseding
the image of God or the woman who
dumped your ass
a gauze for the broken-hearted
the amber pond of immortality
sluicing down the into the corporeal
enigine of the body
The feeling that you are here
forever and that you will never
die....
For this is why people get drunk or abuse various to substances
which may render lethal health imperatives come a decade time--
because more than anything else the substance is there for him
the substance is there to hold him,
is there to take him where he needs to go
is there to verify his virility and esteem
is there to make him laugh
is there to ameliorate his wit in public
is there to make him feel that he has accomplished something
is there make him feel that everything in his life has some sort of meaning
and the substance will do this in a way that no few Jesus's or
fuck friends
perhaps ever could because is does so with an intermingling
baptisim into the blood
while the substance is circulating
throughout the interstate arteries of his nervous system
there is no narrative too grand, no dream without reach
no story that cannot be spilled out into the gushing
current of language, much as my neighborhood
tap floods nectar out into pint glasses
After all, the raison d'etre of my alcoholism
is similar to why I come to writing
or why I come to fiction.
Why I want others to come to my miniature train cities
carved into the page in the shape of lower case shapes
being that I want to take the reader
somewhere they have never been before
and (maybe)
I want my story and my craft
to hold them when no one else on the
planet is there to do just that.
Over the last three years alcohol has been a part of my daily diet
Its the place i go to feel inspired, creative, alive
I wake up at weird hours and need a six pack to just
to crash for a few hours before heading off to work
anticipating the 24ounce cylinders I am to imbibe when I get
off eight hours later. Most weekends are a visual
cherry-oak haze of the interior of bars and ferrying
cube-shaped craft packs back to my apartment
from the liquer store, spending enough green
to send the Islamic owner on pilgrimage to Mecca....
five days..
over the last two years I've only ceased drinking
when I've been sick. Five days on my own volition.
Five days to try to bring forth that will
power, to sacrifice something significant
and to maybe, in the process
develop and grow into a human being
in a writer
something that has not even been imagine
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Eight year old short story, found, along with the crinkled origami of her digits in an empty Doc Marten shoe box....circa 1998
--It will come when it comes, she tells me, not a modicum before the moment is due.
It is intermission. The patter of palms taper off into golf claps as bustling men and women alight from rumpled seat cushions, elbowing toward the lobby. A serpentine line forms outside of the ladies room while men respectively smile and nod and stretch, popping knee-caps, loosening the knotted pentagon of their ties, grousing about the heat. Backstage you once again feel like a novice. You feel inept. You feel like no one in the house full understands what you were trying to say. There are the obligatory compliments and salutary sniggers from the company and cast who would swear on the Gideon bible that you are good. They say you are really good. They use the word verisimilitude in your review. They use the word superlative. They pat you on the back when you pass them by. They keep the ticket stubs from your performances thumbtacked on a bulletin board at home. People like you. Really, they do.
Backstage there is always warm Pepsi in Styrofoam cups and volunteers who look
like Keebler elves squeaking into the dressing rooms, holding up a splayed palm to indicate the dwindle of minutes, the lapse of time, the foil of your furlough. All around you the heads and necks of cast members hurtle in and out of costumes. Girls in bra's quibble over eyeliner and mascara. Males mired in a ring of collar sweat falter to put on their own makeup, unless, of course, they are gay which Dougie Shriner-the actor who portrays your best friend David Hale-obviously is. Every other Thurs day night at one am Doug doffs his boxers and dons his kleenex-chocked D-size brassiere and Lycra jumper to become Vanity, the Virgin Queen. Vanity rubs her taut ass and slouched surrogate tits in front of oglers— a bespectacled bevy of middle-age queers who fawn and foam at the mouth every time she lip's syncs anything by Macy Gray. Vanity once got arrested for peeing standing up in the girls bathroom stall at Perkins, an event which Dougie Shriner somehow regards as a personal violation on behalf of his own womanhood.
In the dressing room everything smells like hairspray, you think, as Vannie Hallmark,your on-stage romantic lead, swaggers past you trying hard to be noticed; arching her shoulders and curving her back like she an underwear model. Vannie Hallmark is very intelligent and very beautiful. She is a spume of blonde tresses and an oracle of intrigue. Her lips look like a Clinique hyphen and her angular features are origami delicate. Off stage she tells those who tip their hats and query that yes, it really was her on page twenty-two of the September Victoria Secret catalogue modeling the petite bra's that unbuckle from the front and are such a bitch for most males to get undone. Vannie's pallid countenance is highly reminiscent of a diminutive espresso shot-glass. Her nose is configured like a light-switch, beseeching Vannie with an eternal aura of unbidden arrogance and uppity pride.
In Act one, scene seven, your first tete-a-tete with Vannie, whose stage name is just V.,as in the Pynchon novel. The scene takes place in a rather lethargic looking college classroom at a private college located somewhere in the Midwest burrowed like a mole in a middle-sized town which houses minor league franchises and smells like pee. Both of you are falling madly-kicking-and-screaming-clicking your heals together-in love, which is rather unfortunate because the two of you study English at a school built for budding Engineer students and rich kids from Chicago who drive $20,000 cars, have short haircuts and wear Greek emblems on their chest.
You first descry her rapturous beauty in a writing class. She was Midas with a
ballpoint pen, turning ink into golden paragraphs strewn with bucolic beauty, ushering forth stories of her rustic upbringing and the perpetual loss of being both, alas, miserably beautiful and miserably gifted at the same time.
On stage you tell her that her prose is so beautiful that reading it gave your heart an erection. Off stage you endeavor to cozen a kiss, but she just sighs audibly as if expected, turns the other cheek and truckles to the vagaries of the director, whom you revile. On stage the Professor, who in this production is from India with a pearly smile, laughs at your erection witticism, commenting that it was duly-appropriate for his class session that her incendiary prose only made your heart erect and nothing else. The heads in the class room hop forward in laughter like kernels in an air popper. The audience is on the floor.
The first onstage kiss is performed in front of the backdrop known as the Silver
Vagina. The Silver Vagina is a ubiquitous stage backdrop since it towers directly in front of the C.D.library. Somewhere in his cliff notes on the origin of your script, the director has written that once a year, preferably between the months of November through February, a gaudy frat boy with short hair and sideburns ends up getting his tongue stuck to the metallic contours of the monument. The library staff always snaps a Polaroid before calling the fire trucks.
You should have told the director from the outset that there was just no way in hell
that this rapport would work out, even though by act two, scene '3 Vannie and you are
biting into each other like twinkles, groping beneath restaurant tablecloths, and yes, even talking about rings and receptions. The audience loves this- salivating like a Pavlovian Chihuahua at even the notion that sex would be performed onstage, publicly, in front of an audience whose programs tell them the real names of the cast members and what their hobbies are.
As the elfkin-pygmy holds up a peace sign in front of you, you wonder, just for a
moment, if any or all of this is real.
Backstage you amble through the curtains of mangy costumes searching for a moment of solitude, seclusion, and possibly a few puffs on a cigarette before the actress who portrays your on- stage Mother clumps into your shadow and charmingly chides your vice with maternal detriment. Your stage Mom is built like a milkjug. You stamp out your smoke and surreptitiously slush warm Pepsi around the inside your lips, swallowing when the penisu1a shaped dungarees of the director eclipses your imminent view. His gruffness is apparent and he verbally berates that on stage you were opaque and that your whole body delved into an asphyxiated stutter whenever the spotlight landed on top of you.
“It was as if the spotlight end-capsualated you rather than emancipated you, Da-vid"
He reams, once again exhibiting his proclivity toward double-entendres when he
pronounces your first name. The directors last name should be Lambaste. He says that you fucked up again. That your knee's knocked together like abacus beads. That your voice was reticent. Your solo, sour. He asks you if you are coy? Are you fucking coy? Did you know what you are, he inquires. Do you even know what role YOU are suppose to be playing?
Do you boy?
As Vannie's right-triangular nose struts past you on her way to stage left the Director tilts his neck to check out her ass and then smiles to himself shaking his head left to right once and makes an 'ummmm' sound. The pending act out Herod's Harrod when it comes to tumult. In this act Vannie will leave you and then come back. Then you will leave Vannie and then come back. Then eventually both of you will leave and you will get in a car wreck and almost die.
You remember once getting broadsided by a cement truck. You had monopolized the
semester slathered in a rueful dither, working third shift. You were an exhaust pipe of enervation. Your tank was always on E your debilitated and stressed vision was the color of a stoplight from fatigue and scholastic duress. You felt blessed beyond a collegiate measure if you got four hours a sleep a night. Crashing at Four a.m. and car pooling back to campus with your Mom at seven thirty. You remember lying supine in the stretcher while the ambulance attendant said the word extricate into his shoulder 'radio over and over again. You remember feeling manacled and marred by images of yourself wanting not to be yourself anymore. You remember wanting to unstrap yourself and leave. Just to leave. Your eyes drape shut and then sprout open. Your brain feels like a slot machine
whose eyeballs keep reeling blurred images of fruits into the back of its head. You wish you were situated in an antipodal location. In fact, maybe you are.
* * * * * * * * *
"When it comes, if it ever comes, I want to feel real. Mostly I just feel like a bladder most of the time. That's why I did it. I had to prove to myself that I was more than just a urinary emission. More than just a faucet. I wanted all the pain and loneliness to be accounted for something. I wanted to watch it drip out of me. I didn't think prozac was an opportune plumber. And going to school counseling and adolescent therapy on Wednesday evenings during Lent sure as fuck did nothing to cloy or clog my vacuity. I was nothing but a bladder. A hot water bottle. That's all."
"So this is why you did it?" Her voice is inquisitive, straightforward and sounds like ahandbell Your shrink has this annoying proclivity of raising her vocal resonance at the end of every sentence. She is trying to sound professional. This is what they taught her to do in grad school. They taught her to sound professional They taught her to sound fake. As if it were really somehow a possibility for her to empathized with you. To commiserate with your trauma. To just understand where you are coming from. You think that true empathy is impossible.
"I wanted my depression to be accountable for something," You tell her, not looking
into her eyes, "I needed a receipt for my sack of sadness. I wanted to see just what it was I had purchased and why the product wasn't working. I wanted to lash into my own investigation. I needed to unplug my item and look for impediments. With each
welt I was probing myself for errors. I wanted to be like every other product. I wanted to have a function. To have a purpose. I didn't want to be saddled down in my own deluded dystopia."
"David, what would you say championed your march into masochism?" she says
again, gesticulating with her arms, trying-to sound like she is on an afternoon talk show. You decide it best to humor her, after all she graduated from a prestigious University and dates a man who has one of those simple, forgettable one-syllable names and who flippantly peruses through every section of the paper except the Sports: and the funnies.
She knows every drug you have ever done and the name of every girl you have ever
written poetry for. She knows all about you. About your dyslexia. She knows how words
swim on the page and scatter like guppies in a fish tank when you try to :make sense out of them. She knows how, for you, reading is a quote 'motherfucker' -yet reading and writing is the one predilection you love above all else. How every word you encounter you bleed over, in one sense or another. She knows how books are your best friends. She knows that when you were sixteen you used to trundle beneath the glowering street globes which align Moss Avenue nursing a cigar and quoting 'The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock' by heart. She knows that in highschool you did more 'shrooms than a Mario Brother. She recalls the warmth in which you told her that, in high school every Saturday afternoon you would make it a point to lay on your bed and listen to the Texaco Opera live broadcasts from the Met. She remembers you telling her how you would fall asleep with the radio on and wake up harboring wet dreams of Cecilia Bartoli's succuelnt soporano-thinking that she may be the closest Dante-inflamed vision of the Beatrice you could ever experience. She knows that you lost your virginity on Bloomsday, 1997,on a rest stop off of 1-74 to a girl whose name was ironically Molly. She remembers the way you described. Molly to her. Molly was a bluestocking bandanna granola cruncher who wore ankle-length khaki skirts, sandals and studied philosophy in Urbana. She knew all about Derrida and Levinas and kissed with her entire face entering yours. She remembers the way you tersely recounted loosing your virginity. Not the act in itself, but what followed: How Molly closed her eyes and untucked her bottom lip and wailed O MYGOD O MYGOD O MY GOD three times in a row without a comma—her eyelids opening and closing the way a garage door opens and then closes. And how afterwards you held each other like how lovers in Rodin statues clasp each other ad infinitum. Then, chain smoking a clove cigarette, Molly told David that out of every human mating, every time a ovum is germinated by a sperm and fertilization occurs, that there were 53,000,000,000,000succinctly diverse possible fetus ramifications and that all of us are one out of 53 trillion (that night she drew the twelve zero's on his naked chest) different possible ferrotypes of what is possible.
All this the shrink knows and still she does not know much.
"When I was 16 I carved the word POET into my chest with the severed glass neck of
the Jack Daniels bottle I had recently smashed., like a captain christening a ship's maiden
voyage, on the lip of the porcelain sink in the bathroom. "
She says the word yes three times in a row and then asks me how it felt at the time.
"Actually, it felt good. It felt like I was letting something out of me that I had kept
cached in me for so long. It was not mawkish or maudlin-like how in high school I would
attire myself in black raiments, telling my teachers that I wore black on the outside because black was how I felt within. No, itwas more like-here, try this analogy. The mother in labor who suffers exorbitantly to deliver. She frees hersel£ in other words, so that her child, intrinsically part of her-will be severed yet nursed. Kept inside it will kill them both.
The silence in the room impels your lips to continue.
"I had felt like a thing for so long. Not a person but a thing. There's a difference. I
didn't know how a human being was suppose to feel. I knew how loneliness felt. Loneliness was being all the same and yet not. I knew what it felt like to feel-all alone. I remember in fourth grade cowering in the back of my closet hoping I would find my Cair Paraval But it was all the same. Like Narnia before Aslan. It was always winter and never Christmas.
"So I ripped into my own flesh with Prufrock Claws. I wanted to verify my validity as
a human being. I cut deep to assuage the loneliness-to assuage the fuckin' ennui. I cut to prove to my own self that my loneliness was different than the loneliness promulgated by producers and brought to you by yearly automotives and household provisions. I needed to unplug, rewire, and then plug myself back in with so much electrical force and frisson that there wouldn't be a doubt left in my mind about who I was or what I was. Just that I was. It's pretty profound if you stop and think about it."
“What else?” She interrogates.
She wants to know. Everybody wants to know. David, will you tell her? Will you be a big boy for once? Do you have the fucking balls?
Your chest is now a helium balloon that has lifted far from its stratosphere and is about ready to….
"When I was either six or eight, old enough to toddle down to the 7-11by myself and watch older boys play pac-man, I was sexually abused. His name was Frank. He was friends with Dad. Dad wanted us to call him Uncle Frank All of us did. Uncle Frank shaved big head every other day so it was bowling ball smooth. He had an earring and talked like he was black. Mom used to say he looked like Mr. Clean. Mister he was, Clean was debatable."
She nods her head like a hand puppet and gestures you to continue.
"He and Dad worked during the week at a factory North of town putting together
tractor parts and smoking dope in the break room. On weekends, when my sister Beverly
would relentlessly chase me around the house with naked Barbie dolls, Dad and Uncle
Frank would hunker in front of the RCA in their undershirts yelling at us to shut the fuck up, adjusting the Y-shaped antenna and guzzling case after case of Strolls Lager which they called ‘Regal Shorts' always snorting out a wheeze as if astounded by their sozzled ingenuity. Oh, and by the way, my parents still don't have a fucking clue about what spawn my lachrymose. So don't tell.
'Frank and I and Dad were all buddies. We were all pals. We were the guys. Men. We
would all watch football games together. We would an say the words' Aw shit' in unison when the quarter back was sac'd. Some days we would wrestle on the front lawn and on other days Frank would place me on his shoulders augmenting my height, enabling me to toss the ball over the brim of the hoop. Frank and I would arm wrestle on the coffee table and Frank would always let me win. Clutching his wrist in feigned pain as t discarded my
shirt, distended my biceps like Hulk Hogan and asked everybody in the house "What's ya
Gonna do?" doing my damndest to emulate Hulk's throaty inflection. I remember Frank
trying not to laugh when Dad called Mom a Pussy and said she had a Watermelon for an
Ass. Mom was attired in her mauve leotard and strawberry legwarmers counting to four and doing jumping jacks in front of Jane Fonda. Dad said that Mom looked like she was treading water when she exercised and Mom after Dad had passed out, went outside and emptied the air out of Dad's tires, blaming it on the Vice Lords down the street."
Good stories too often have no beginning and no endings….
“One Autumn afternoon-and I succinctly recall it being Autumn -Dad had long since
succumbed to his inebriated snore and Mom was showing Bev and Emily Zubar down the
street pictures of her homecoming dress and her high school sweet heart, who looked like
Ted Koeppel—I can't recall the year exactly but soda pop still came in the glass bottles with long translucent necks and Resees Pieces were the posh juvenile sugar rush . It was around the time my Uncle Larry got his arm caught in the elevator door at Sears. Around the time I overheard my Aunt Vera, who had a moustache and a birds nest perm, tell my Mom that she wouldn't mind giving Reverend Kopenski a blowjob during the epistle reading on Sunday. It was somewhere around the time Dad and Uncle Frank stopped drinking Strohs and started gulping Budweiser—giving me the moniker Bud Light Around this time, the year my Dad couldn't afford to get me an Atari for Christmas even though Santa said I would—the year Mom taught Bev to keep her legs crossed when she sat with Aunt Vera in church this was the year Uncle Frank would invite me into the bathroom to watch him pee."
“…..”
'It was what men who were Buddies did together. he said. I remember the way he
held his out in front of me. I remember not knowing what to think. He made a sordid and sick analogy about Gepatto and Pinocchio, which I'llomit here because even now, close to a decade later, I am still haunted by his advances. Can still vividly recall how his fingers felt like icicles beneath the button of my pants. How he would snap the elastic band on my underwear leaving rosemary patches on my skin. How he would smile a sandpaper smile when he did this. I can still remember him asking me sick questions about it. I remember wondering why his had a moustache and mine didn’t. I remember him asking me to pet his like Donna Lapis invited me to pet her hamster, Alfonso, who bit me. I remembered feeling scared after the first time this happened. I remember feeling dirty about out secret. I remember wanting to tell mom and dad but instead I hid in the closet with Bev’s naked Barbie clinging to it like a rosary. I remember crying. I remember feeling like it was somehow all my fault.”
She pushes out a breath and inquires how long it lasted.
“Years,” You say. “It lasted for years.”
The day my best friend lil’ Robbie Coover from west Moreland got hit by a Schwann’s truck while trying to cross the street on his pogo ball, Frank took me out for ice cream and then touched me. The day I set the school record for most accelerated reader points in the month of March, Frank stuck my finger so far up my ass that I bled. The day mommy and Dad came home from the bible retreat with shorter haircuts, cleaning out their liqueur cabinets in the name of Christ, Uncle Frank picked me up from Boy Scouts and took the long way home.
“On and off for five or six years, I would come home from Uncle Frank’s house with cum-stains the size of Kennedy-halves on my corduroys. I would cry. The world didn’t make sense. I didn’t want to have his phallic in my face. I didn’t want to have my squeezed like it was some kind of stress relief putty. I didn’t want to ask if I could take off my clothes while frank flashed shots at me. I didn’t want to be myself anymore. Eventually, I didn’t even want to be and after a while I simply wasn’t.
Somewhere else a Keebler elf flips you the bird without being vindictive in anyway, shape or form.
You ask her if she mind if you cry in front of her, just for a moment.
“It’s not that I’m weak, just tender,” you amend….
When I was 17 I got a job tutoring phonics at Common Place to little black boys with very white eyes who sang songs about black Jesus and wore one hundred dollar Jordans.
One day at lunch I went for a walk. The wooden telephone polls seemed to be a continuous stream of cyper-optical crucifixes. I saw him shadowed beneath the hung head of a hollow street lamp. He was withered and wore make-up. He was sitting on a bug stop whose placard was the color of a finger nail and flouted Dukakis and Benson in '88. He was drinking what I could only imagine to be a 40 of either Strohs or Budweiser wrapped in a brown paper bag. He looked off in one direction at nothing in particular. His limbs looked like a dead tree in Autumn. His eggshell eyebal1s blinked into the vacant avenues of the South Side. A GLAD trash bag stuffed with prodigal aluminum sat next to him. He looked exactly like how I felt for so many years. He looked all alone.
It will comes when it comes, she said to me. It will come when it comes.
And as I walked up next to him and sat down on the bench ( he didn't seem to recognize me-it had been nearly six year since the Union strike and Dad's Christianity) I wanted to tell him that I too was a Christian. As I put my arm around him. my palm on the shoulder of big tattered jacket, I wanted to tell him that all of big come-stains had been washed clean in blood of the Lamb. I wanted to tell him that what he did to me didn't matter because sin blinds everyone from the truth. As I marshaled my right arm around big waist reeling him now into my chest. I wanted to tell him that I had forgiven big icy gropes, forgiven the way he touched and tangled my formative body. Wanted to tell him that it was over. That it was all in the past. That I had grown out of it like the underwear I grew out of whose elastic he snapped.
As my arms now fully extended big cane-like semblance, I wanted to tell him that all
was right in the world and that I even loved him.
If only that was what I told him.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Sunday, January 13, 2008
....and never brought to mind: a tear smudged induced fugue of joy reflecting the puddle of a year gone lapse
It is the morning pink eye-lidded yawn of 2008, the green g-mail chat bullet of the planet still galatcically tethered and cosmically buoyed around a winking bulb of the nearest day star socketed inside the inscrutable fabric of the universe itself. The genesis of a new slate of January snow melting in tandem following the platter of stale new years eve confetti and exclamatory countdowns en masse that would make even the stoic collective chins of NASA salute in anticipation over the toppling descent of integers pregnant with the pocked sound of champagne hiccupping free from its emerald esophagus followed by a ricochet of corks followed by dry kisses and embraces and a round of old acquaintances being forgotten followed by the (interior writhing) realization of age and the encroachment of death, the cathartic gut-dripping insight that the allotted dash of seconds granted to us as a gift to thrive and create and love and give all on the fallow scalp of this planet--this viable arboretum of intelligence and life--and that you are here optically indulging in the phonetics of this experiment of pulse and breath--that you are here, wading knee-high through this experience of existence, this time, this place, the joy, the sorrow---somehow you are (for however tersely) a part of this global collective waltz--that you are part of this tear drop trickling down the cheekbones of the planet called humanity and that your voice, your persona, your song, indeed, carries with it the most fragrant chorus sprinkled with significance and wonder.
A ritual that my family has devoutly enacted since I was about the size of an errant good year tire was that, on New Years eve, after church we would host a new years eve gala where my aunts and uncles and cousins and friends would congregate around the oak mahogany of our childhood living room; week old needles on our Christmas tree still clad in a stuttering holiday phosphorescent glow. My family would configure into a circle of elbows and limbs, not unlike those found in creative writing classes in the upper echelons of liberal education while my mother would distribute candles to each inhabitant circled in the island of bodies. One by one, each member would light his or her respective candle and talk about how God had blessed them in the last year and what their hopes and individual ambitions were for the following year. With the house still garnished in a bright holiday hue festooned with cranberry ribbons, the pine heavy scent of emerald orchards nasally associated with the last week of the year glazed with icicles, tufts of froth, darkness sputtering across the horizontal windshield of the west, caking the planet with a dazed mid-afternoon tint--in our house on new years eve there were candles, each individual very simply espousing their gratitude for yet another year of life on this planet holding the white stem of the candle chin-high as if it were some sort of microphone. After each narrative the person would swivel clock-right alighting the wick of the person next to them until the room was aglow in a halo of candle light and spilled stories--the ritual often ending with a prayer of peace, a hymn for tomorrow, a wished-for song for the world to come.
So, with lighter and candle stalk in paw, allow me to illuminate the unsinged tassel of the wick and spill out the overturned jigsaw narrative of my heart reminiscing over just what the fuck happened these last twelve months:
It was the year in which my rattled third shift eyesight would optically snap out a poloroid of my Uncle Larry escorting my youngest sister Jenn down the slim carpeted arteries of the aisle. The year in which the integer of the trinity now heralds the numerical parking meter of my existence. The year in which I stenciled the number of pages composed everyday with a different colored marker into the white Gregorian decimal cube of the calendar above my desk at work.
The year I tell everyone that my heart is occluded in metaphorical tupperware as if awaiting a transplant from the broken cogs inside my chest to the inky footprints of a page seeded in pasture of emotional exposition such is the nature of my craft.
A year when I added nearly four hundred single space pages to a novel that is simply long enough.
The year of partying every Friday night with my dear friend Scarlet. Being snowbound the weekend of Valentines day and posting a thirty foot self-engendered mural entitled "INVOCATION TO THE MUSE" on the east side of my apartment wall. The mural consisting of app. sixty playboy centerfolds, flitted together like semi-glossy pornographic Lego's. Over the discourse of a snow-occluding weekend I would scribe the name of a different ex-girlfriend or transient lovers across the sheen of the paper. Watching the name of the woman I once proposed to, the proverbial one who got away; the high school sweetheart who now has a mortgage and an SUV and three progeny; the woman who broke my heart before I found myself nearly dead in an automobile accident the next day; the ravishing song of my spiritual companion, the pulse and color and fragrant hieroglyphs of her name, now collated in a glossy fresco--a thirty foot quilt bannered on the far side of my wall during the week of Valentines day.
By the end of the week long project I was lounging in my apartment, smoking an ONYX cigar when I witnessed my mural topple like maladroit stage curtains falling down at the end of a highschool thespian production of YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU.
It was the year of watching Devin Hester sprint and dance into the endzone in the opening return drive of a sodden Miami superbowl, calling up my friend minutes later and bating him to perform his signature disgustingly divine heterosexual male oriented Ric Flair WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
The year of hearing the radiant verbal chimes of Greta Enzer--a Unitarian, a healer, writer, actress, teacher of theatre and beauty to LA's inner-city wayward teenage age souls; a fellow wayfarer who (fuck) 14 years earlier I sat across from at a dinner-dance in Stratford-upon-Avon, the town of Shakespeare and listened acutely as she told me about her sister, who later, I would learn, would die in a car accident--the chorus of souls spilling out their every story in streams of wished for slants of winter sun.
Greta showing me her brilliant script about a woman who fucks her boyfriend while she is one her period before slathering the blood of her own body on her lovers face in post-coital feminist delight.
The year of Harold and Maud.
The year of 11 percent IPA's. Samuel Adams Brewmasters collection, Dogfishhead, JW Dundee craftpack, Hobgoblin, Deleirum, North West Microbrews, extreme beers catered from a Scottish Dean of alcohol at Rhodells, bitter, hoppy, stouty, eternal, lathering the box seats of my palette in a liquid coat of joy.
It was the year of WHEELS OF LIGHT and VIEW FROM THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE and Juice diets. Kabbalah. Hard core meditation with emphasis on the frontal lobe. Dream symbiosis. Deepak Chopera. Yoga. Getting off from work at three in the morning and running my fucking ass off across the arteries of the west bluff. The psychology of Carl Jung. The year of dalliances in shamanism and devotions in quantum physics--watching the metaphysical realization manifest itself in the appellation of her name perching like a half-open window sill or whimsical wardrobe in front of me, every stitch of her handwriting splashing into the shore of my poetic desire, her name, little waves, foaming and cresting across the sand barge deep within the swells of my soul.
The year of BORAT and RAMTHA and wondering what it would be like if they were both stalled downriver in a canoe.
It was the year I was humbly asked to be a visiting writer at the University I still owe thirty-thousand dollars to. The University I graduated Cum Laude from and have never opened up the manila envelope in which my diploma arrived. The university I know work third shift for--the university that (unbeknownst to them, but love the distorted irony) called up the house five hours after my fathers death and innocuously inquired for a Financial donation to augment their sordid trust fund.
A failed campaign.
My cousin Larry, the rock star, the brilliant beer-addled fellow black sheep of the wayward Bozec bloodline. Larry who was living out of his SUV and battling substance abuse. Larry who ran off over 2000 flyers to in early April protesting the (now intact) Illinois smoking ban: THIS IS NOT AFGHANISTAN:SAY NO TO THE SMOKING BAN!!!
Waking up in an aluminum nest of beer cans and cigarette butts in the peach-lining light of an early spring, sitting on my back porch with his guitar singing songs from ten years ago, breaking into a chorus of Jonny Cash tunes:
"Well I woke up Sunday morning with no place
to hold my head that didn't hurt
...And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad
So I had one more for dessert"
The year I was supposed to see Michelle again, at a wine tasting in Des Moines, but we failed to somehow find each other in the field of SUV's and license plates.
The year of chronicling dreams. The dream where I endured in the guest room of my mothers abode where I am watching my father die and asking Abdul'baha to save him, to which he stoically refused. The dream where I am attacked by a dog-like creature
in a county house by my girlfriends very Harry Potter Mrs. Weasleyesque matriarch--the country house I later was invited to move into with my brother Hale six months later.
The year in which I found myself wading inside the torso of a woman I blogged about two years earlier, a woman who is a breast cancer survivor, making love in the under a pocketed sprinkle of July stars, the pilsner moon and slashes of heat lighting accompanying us as if in applause.
There's no sort of sex like sex with a woman who inspires you and who has grappled death by the labels and told him to fuck off for a few more decades.
And trust me, nothing is fucking sexier than a woman who has trounced her fears and now cannot stop smiling and laughing at everything around her.
The same woman who pretended she didn't know me the night of her sisters bachelorette party. The woman who now wants nothing to do with me at all.
The out of body mediation where I find myself in reverence in a throne room telling an escort of God that I cannot bow before him alone if the person I feel one with at all times is not saddled next to me, bowing, worshiping, smiling in spiritual deference as well.
The year where my cool sister and Brother-in-law hosted a thirtieth birthday party and almost every relative showed up with a different microbrew or imported six pack in paw. My Uncle Larry giving me two glass steins and a 12 pack of sumptuous SPATEN, which I jested to his chagrin that he probably purchased at Aldis.
The dream where I go into the earth and find my father alive and crying and tears and where we embrace--the gruff scent of his chin and cheekbones pressing against the right side of my tear saturated face and simply hold him.
The year of opening day at Comiskey, casting incantations of peremnial impotency all season long as the White Sox bullpen continue to act like a Bengali whore on an american military base and "blow another one." Watching Peoria-blood and all American class act Jim Thome belt his 500th homer in indelible fashion before circling the slants of the south side diamond, fist clutched, arm alighted, circling in spumes of cheer.
My dearest Esme--the eyelashes that launched more poems than Helen did ships to Troy over a two week period in the early haze of summer, the lavender dusk of a June evening over the eye-liner of the west replete with (seasonal) seventeen year cicadas chirping out own anthropodal oratorios in the background. Esmeralda who met me at the bus station in Joliet with her hair pinned back and a kick ass green dress that slid over her cinnamon skin-limbs of her petite poetic frame like quarter notes skimming across a the lithe rungs of classical sheet music. The rich chestnut tint of her eyes blinking in unflinching curiosity, as if trying to sop up every quark of her experience on this vessel deemed earth one astonishing blink at a time.
Esme who knew more about me than I did her when she arrived suitcase clasped in the slender tips of her fingers on the steps of my apartment early last June, her last night in P-town, en route to demolish the social hierarchal configuration of the planet in South Africa. Esmeralda who told me she has a surprise for me, mandating that I idle in the marijuana-incensed hallways of Motel six while she took a minute to "get ready," and as I waited before I entered the hotel room with thirty candles and the B'52's blaring out of a laptop--the spilled hiccup of her smile wishing me a happy birthday. Still I remember sitting in the bathtub with our clothes on (our Garden State moment), resting with her head in the center of my chest, the arteries of my heart catching dreams as they nocturnally dripped from her forehead like metaphysical ambrosia.
The year I nearly (remorsefully riddled now in retrospect) gave a copy of IRON JOHN to a bum at a bus station who was drinking water out of a dirty 2 litre bottle of Mellow Yellow, clad in an old tattered military coat, living all hours at the greyhound depot, hoping that he would look up into the gaseous wing of the bus as it hushes open to espy the limbs of a woman who mysteriously echoed into the night two years prior. Every night, he shows up at the Bus Station, waiitng for her to perhaps return.
The year of multifarious can't-enough-optical-fucking-viewings of WHAT THE BLEEP:DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE. Two copies arriving as if from disparate quantum realms on my door matt (even though I only ordered one)--the author intuiting these dual metaphysical tablets as gifts, giving them to the two wayfarer he feels most would most benefit from their insight and glow.
The year when my best friend from first grade was found murdered in his SUV, a bullet
planted in his abdomen, his eyes stalled in unblinking trance.
The year of God bless the eternal soul Danny Dalquist!!! Watching the casket containing his earthly coat sail through the mouth of St. Marks cathedral, a wooden vessel levitating on the bony pillars of fellow pallbearers. The crimson clad shirts of the soccer team lined up in a plank of lower-chinned bodies as if playing zone defense against the inevitability of an ill-timed death--the sorrow of pain of the loss of a fellow brother. The six-figured university president doing her best ersatz Jackie O. imitation. The sight of my brother Drew wreathing the thick athletic slant of his arm around a teammates neck in a dire time of sober need and loss.
The year where a former student of mine was shot and killed, probably because of his sexual orientation.
The year where I was more or less drunk all the fucking time. A weekend past naught
where I failed to ferry a 12-pack cube of liquid scepters on the blades of my shoulders (sometimes two or three), as if the alcoholic Pharaoh of my psyche were instructing me to erect a great pyramid of hedonism while my life organs whittled and hardened into sand.
"If eternity is understood by endless temporal duration
The year of youtube: staying after work and watching lectures by Joseph campbell and Richard Feynman. Laughing my ass off to vintage all in the family. Dancing around my cubicle to the popped-syncopation of late-80 bowed out power ballads.
"But by timelessness."
The year where Doctor Wynn said that the results from my MRI came make negative and that I was a healthy young man and if there was something I was hanging on to from my past that was coercing me to spend all day worshiping Bacchus by pouring insidious amounts alcoholic libations through the hatch of my lips then I should really think seriously about seeking a psychological crutch.
The year of my brothers.
The brothers who always got my back. Year in year out, what a blessing to have healthy male creative coevals, semi-hedonists and fellow virile sports saturated lovers of life. Helping my brother John move to a posh Naperville apartment one late spring afternoon and endless male-oriented discourse over the wayward pursuit of sports in the city of Chicago. Throwing back amber gauntlets of PBR with Nick the writer, brother in the pursuit of all things literary and truthful in the swelter of early august. The year of dapper David Thompson, hearing his insight and pursuit of the aesthetic, the bacchanalian, the beautiful, the culinary, the eternal.
The year of Dave Hale always having my back. Picking me up when the skinned-knee of my spirits are low.
The year of fuck the chicago cubs going to the playoffs!!!
Through the tides of light combing into the shoreline of the planet in waves--the sight of a heavy sun in winter stranded in a sea of moonlit serenity.
All this and I still don't know what a fucking kiln looks like, Sarah.
"If you wanna sing out, sing...."
Though the highlight of December was watching your eyes close as I kissed
the light snow of your winter cheek and then wished you a Merry Christmas.
"then he who lives in the moment.."
"there's a million places to go just know who you..."
"Lives eternally."
This is my torch from the eclipsed 12 months passed to you dear reader. I extend the pangs and perils, my sin and my savior, to your outstreched wick. My request for your new year is simply: Make the life you are currently leading the life you feel compelled as fuck to live. Give it all and ask for no return. Pour everything of yourself out in an effort to strecth the lips of a perfect stranger out in a meadow of smiles. Dance as if there is no tomorrow.
And if you find yourself holding her in your arms. Never fucking let go.
Happy new year, my faithful readers. Make your life joyful and unique. Cause there's a million ways to go.
You know that there are.
A ritual that my family has devoutly enacted since I was about the size of an errant good year tire was that, on New Years eve, after church we would host a new years eve gala where my aunts and uncles and cousins and friends would congregate around the oak mahogany of our childhood living room; week old needles on our Christmas tree still clad in a stuttering holiday phosphorescent glow. My family would configure into a circle of elbows and limbs, not unlike those found in creative writing classes in the upper echelons of liberal education while my mother would distribute candles to each inhabitant circled in the island of bodies. One by one, each member would light his or her respective candle and talk about how God had blessed them in the last year and what their hopes and individual ambitions were for the following year. With the house still garnished in a bright holiday hue festooned with cranberry ribbons, the pine heavy scent of emerald orchards nasally associated with the last week of the year glazed with icicles, tufts of froth, darkness sputtering across the horizontal windshield of the west, caking the planet with a dazed mid-afternoon tint--in our house on new years eve there were candles, each individual very simply espousing their gratitude for yet another year of life on this planet holding the white stem of the candle chin-high as if it were some sort of microphone. After each narrative the person would swivel clock-right alighting the wick of the person next to them until the room was aglow in a halo of candle light and spilled stories--the ritual often ending with a prayer of peace, a hymn for tomorrow, a wished-for song for the world to come.
So, with lighter and candle stalk in paw, allow me to illuminate the unsinged tassel of the wick and spill out the overturned jigsaw narrative of my heart reminiscing over just what the fuck happened these last twelve months:
It was the year in which my rattled third shift eyesight would optically snap out a poloroid of my Uncle Larry escorting my youngest sister Jenn down the slim carpeted arteries of the aisle. The year in which the integer of the trinity now heralds the numerical parking meter of my existence. The year in which I stenciled the number of pages composed everyday with a different colored marker into the white Gregorian decimal cube of the calendar above my desk at work.
The year I tell everyone that my heart is occluded in metaphorical tupperware as if awaiting a transplant from the broken cogs inside my chest to the inky footprints of a page seeded in pasture of emotional exposition such is the nature of my craft.
A year when I added nearly four hundred single space pages to a novel that is simply long enough.
The year of partying every Friday night with my dear friend Scarlet. Being snowbound the weekend of Valentines day and posting a thirty foot self-engendered mural entitled "INVOCATION TO THE MUSE" on the east side of my apartment wall. The mural consisting of app. sixty playboy centerfolds, flitted together like semi-glossy pornographic Lego's. Over the discourse of a snow-occluding weekend I would scribe the name of a different ex-girlfriend or transient lovers across the sheen of the paper. Watching the name of the woman I once proposed to, the proverbial one who got away; the high school sweetheart who now has a mortgage and an SUV and three progeny; the woman who broke my heart before I found myself nearly dead in an automobile accident the next day; the ravishing song of my spiritual companion, the pulse and color and fragrant hieroglyphs of her name, now collated in a glossy fresco--a thirty foot quilt bannered on the far side of my wall during the week of Valentines day.
By the end of the week long project I was lounging in my apartment, smoking an ONYX cigar when I witnessed my mural topple like maladroit stage curtains falling down at the end of a highschool thespian production of YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU.
It was the year of watching Devin Hester sprint and dance into the endzone in the opening return drive of a sodden Miami superbowl, calling up my friend minutes later and bating him to perform his signature disgustingly divine heterosexual male oriented Ric Flair WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
The year of hearing the radiant verbal chimes of Greta Enzer--a Unitarian, a healer, writer, actress, teacher of theatre and beauty to LA's inner-city wayward teenage age souls; a fellow wayfarer who (fuck) 14 years earlier I sat across from at a dinner-dance in Stratford-upon-Avon, the town of Shakespeare and listened acutely as she told me about her sister, who later, I would learn, would die in a car accident--the chorus of souls spilling out their every story in streams of wished for slants of winter sun.
Greta showing me her brilliant script about a woman who fucks her boyfriend while she is one her period before slathering the blood of her own body on her lovers face in post-coital feminist delight.
The year of Harold and Maud.
The year of 11 percent IPA's. Samuel Adams Brewmasters collection, Dogfishhead, JW Dundee craftpack, Hobgoblin, Deleirum, North West Microbrews, extreme beers catered from a Scottish Dean of alcohol at Rhodells, bitter, hoppy, stouty, eternal, lathering the box seats of my palette in a liquid coat of joy.
It was the year of WHEELS OF LIGHT and VIEW FROM THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE and Juice diets. Kabbalah. Hard core meditation with emphasis on the frontal lobe. Dream symbiosis. Deepak Chopera. Yoga. Getting off from work at three in the morning and running my fucking ass off across the arteries of the west bluff. The psychology of Carl Jung. The year of dalliances in shamanism and devotions in quantum physics--watching the metaphysical realization manifest itself in the appellation of her name perching like a half-open window sill or whimsical wardrobe in front of me, every stitch of her handwriting splashing into the shore of my poetic desire, her name, little waves, foaming and cresting across the sand barge deep within the swells of my soul.
The year of BORAT and RAMTHA and wondering what it would be like if they were both stalled downriver in a canoe.
It was the year I was humbly asked to be a visiting writer at the University I still owe thirty-thousand dollars to. The University I graduated Cum Laude from and have never opened up the manila envelope in which my diploma arrived. The university I know work third shift for--the university that (unbeknownst to them, but love the distorted irony) called up the house five hours after my fathers death and innocuously inquired for a Financial donation to augment their sordid trust fund.
A failed campaign.
My cousin Larry, the rock star, the brilliant beer-addled fellow black sheep of the wayward Bozec bloodline. Larry who was living out of his SUV and battling substance abuse. Larry who ran off over 2000 flyers to in early April protesting the (now intact) Illinois smoking ban: THIS IS NOT AFGHANISTAN:SAY NO TO THE SMOKING BAN!!!
Waking up in an aluminum nest of beer cans and cigarette butts in the peach-lining light of an early spring, sitting on my back porch with his guitar singing songs from ten years ago, breaking into a chorus of Jonny Cash tunes:
"Well I woke up Sunday morning with no place
to hold my head that didn't hurt
...And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad
So I had one more for dessert"
The year I was supposed to see Michelle again, at a wine tasting in Des Moines, but we failed to somehow find each other in the field of SUV's and license plates.
The year of chronicling dreams. The dream where I endured in the guest room of my mothers abode where I am watching my father die and asking Abdul'baha to save him, to which he stoically refused. The dream where I am attacked by a dog-like creature
in a county house by my girlfriends very Harry Potter Mrs. Weasleyesque matriarch--the country house I later was invited to move into with my brother Hale six months later.
The year in which I found myself wading inside the torso of a woman I blogged about two years earlier, a woman who is a breast cancer survivor, making love in the under a pocketed sprinkle of July stars, the pilsner moon and slashes of heat lighting accompanying us as if in applause.
There's no sort of sex like sex with a woman who inspires you and who has grappled death by the labels and told him to fuck off for a few more decades.
And trust me, nothing is fucking sexier than a woman who has trounced her fears and now cannot stop smiling and laughing at everything around her.
The same woman who pretended she didn't know me the night of her sisters bachelorette party. The woman who now wants nothing to do with me at all.
The out of body mediation where I find myself in reverence in a throne room telling an escort of God that I cannot bow before him alone if the person I feel one with at all times is not saddled next to me, bowing, worshiping, smiling in spiritual deference as well.
The year where my cool sister and Brother-in-law hosted a thirtieth birthday party and almost every relative showed up with a different microbrew or imported six pack in paw. My Uncle Larry giving me two glass steins and a 12 pack of sumptuous SPATEN, which I jested to his chagrin that he probably purchased at Aldis.
The dream where I go into the earth and find my father alive and crying and tears and where we embrace--the gruff scent of his chin and cheekbones pressing against the right side of my tear saturated face and simply hold him.
The year of opening day at Comiskey, casting incantations of peremnial impotency all season long as the White Sox bullpen continue to act like a Bengali whore on an american military base and "blow another one." Watching Peoria-blood and all American class act Jim Thome belt his 500th homer in indelible fashion before circling the slants of the south side diamond, fist clutched, arm alighted, circling in spumes of cheer.
My dearest Esme--the eyelashes that launched more poems than Helen did ships to Troy over a two week period in the early haze of summer, the lavender dusk of a June evening over the eye-liner of the west replete with (seasonal) seventeen year cicadas chirping out own anthropodal oratorios in the background. Esmeralda who met me at the bus station in Joliet with her hair pinned back and a kick ass green dress that slid over her cinnamon skin-limbs of her petite poetic frame like quarter notes skimming across a the lithe rungs of classical sheet music. The rich chestnut tint of her eyes blinking in unflinching curiosity, as if trying to sop up every quark of her experience on this vessel deemed earth one astonishing blink at a time.
Esme who knew more about me than I did her when she arrived suitcase clasped in the slender tips of her fingers on the steps of my apartment early last June, her last night in P-town, en route to demolish the social hierarchal configuration of the planet in South Africa. Esmeralda who told me she has a surprise for me, mandating that I idle in the marijuana-incensed hallways of Motel six while she took a minute to "get ready," and as I waited before I entered the hotel room with thirty candles and the B'52's blaring out of a laptop--the spilled hiccup of her smile wishing me a happy birthday. Still I remember sitting in the bathtub with our clothes on (our Garden State moment), resting with her head in the center of my chest, the arteries of my heart catching dreams as they nocturnally dripped from her forehead like metaphysical ambrosia.
The year I nearly (remorsefully riddled now in retrospect) gave a copy of IRON JOHN to a bum at a bus station who was drinking water out of a dirty 2 litre bottle of Mellow Yellow, clad in an old tattered military coat, living all hours at the greyhound depot, hoping that he would look up into the gaseous wing of the bus as it hushes open to espy the limbs of a woman who mysteriously echoed into the night two years prior. Every night, he shows up at the Bus Station, waiitng for her to perhaps return.
The year of multifarious can't-enough-optical-fucking-viewings of WHAT THE BLEEP:DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE. Two copies arriving as if from disparate quantum realms on my door matt (even though I only ordered one)--the author intuiting these dual metaphysical tablets as gifts, giving them to the two wayfarer he feels most would most benefit from their insight and glow.
The year when my best friend from first grade was found murdered in his SUV, a bullet
planted in his abdomen, his eyes stalled in unblinking trance.
The year of God bless the eternal soul Danny Dalquist!!! Watching the casket containing his earthly coat sail through the mouth of St. Marks cathedral, a wooden vessel levitating on the bony pillars of fellow pallbearers. The crimson clad shirts of the soccer team lined up in a plank of lower-chinned bodies as if playing zone defense against the inevitability of an ill-timed death--the sorrow of pain of the loss of a fellow brother. The six-figured university president doing her best ersatz Jackie O. imitation. The sight of my brother Drew wreathing the thick athletic slant of his arm around a teammates neck in a dire time of sober need and loss.
The year where a former student of mine was shot and killed, probably because of his sexual orientation.
The year where I was more or less drunk all the fucking time. A weekend past naught
where I failed to ferry a 12-pack cube of liquid scepters on the blades of my shoulders (sometimes two or three), as if the alcoholic Pharaoh of my psyche were instructing me to erect a great pyramid of hedonism while my life organs whittled and hardened into sand.
"If eternity is understood by endless temporal duration
The year of youtube: staying after work and watching lectures by Joseph campbell and Richard Feynman. Laughing my ass off to vintage all in the family. Dancing around my cubicle to the popped-syncopation of late-80 bowed out power ballads.
"But by timelessness."
The year where Doctor Wynn said that the results from my MRI came make negative and that I was a healthy young man and if there was something I was hanging on to from my past that was coercing me to spend all day worshiping Bacchus by pouring insidious amounts alcoholic libations through the hatch of my lips then I should really think seriously about seeking a psychological crutch.
The year of my brothers.
The brothers who always got my back. Year in year out, what a blessing to have healthy male creative coevals, semi-hedonists and fellow virile sports saturated lovers of life. Helping my brother John move to a posh Naperville apartment one late spring afternoon and endless male-oriented discourse over the wayward pursuit of sports in the city of Chicago. Throwing back amber gauntlets of PBR with Nick the writer, brother in the pursuit of all things literary and truthful in the swelter of early august. The year of dapper David Thompson, hearing his insight and pursuit of the aesthetic, the bacchanalian, the beautiful, the culinary, the eternal.
The year of Dave Hale always having my back. Picking me up when the skinned-knee of my spirits are low.
The year of fuck the chicago cubs going to the playoffs!!!
Through the tides of light combing into the shoreline of the planet in waves--the sight of a heavy sun in winter stranded in a sea of moonlit serenity.
All this and I still don't know what a fucking kiln looks like, Sarah.
"If you wanna sing out, sing...."
Though the highlight of December was watching your eyes close as I kissed
the light snow of your winter cheek and then wished you a Merry Christmas.
"then he who lives in the moment.."
"there's a million places to go just know who you..."
"Lives eternally."
This is my torch from the eclipsed 12 months passed to you dear reader. I extend the pangs and perils, my sin and my savior, to your outstreched wick. My request for your new year is simply: Make the life you are currently leading the life you feel compelled as fuck to live. Give it all and ask for no return. Pour everything of yourself out in an effort to strecth the lips of a perfect stranger out in a meadow of smiles. Dance as if there is no tomorrow.
And if you find yourself holding her in your arms. Never fucking let go.
Happy new year, my faithful readers. Make your life joyful and unique. Cause there's a million ways to go.
You know that there are.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)