Only You Are Invisible

I give up. It’s true. I have been running around trying to figure out life for some 46 years now and I’ve come to the conclusion of what my problem is: I’m invisible. You are too. Imagine it. Really think about it. You have the ability to look at people and have a general idea about their states of well-being. You can almost figure them out at first sight. Perhaps their eyes are sad or they’re old or they’re young and sprightly. Whatever it is you can get a general sense of who they are just by looking at them. You can’t know everything of course, but you needn’t really give them much more thought than a glance provides to prescribe a host of possible cures. Fat? Exercise. Poor? Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. But you yourself? You look out and what do you see? Everyone but yourself. In a roomful of people, you are the invisible person in the room. You. And there is nothing that you can do about it. Yet they are invisible to themselves too. We walk around invisible yet act as though we are not simply because we can be seen by others. But what clues are we given about the most important person to us in the room? Nothing, memories of what we have thought ourselves to be, something that changes every single minute it seems.

I suppose that you then have to guess about who and what you are, but your theories are as vast as the world’s seas. Now that I see this way I am free to let me be me. Hell, I might be a Unicorn-like beast to the world. Thoughts are definitely flitty. They fly. Vroom. Whisk. Go by me like a meteor. What was that thought? What did it have to do with me? Should I grab it by the tail, squint my eyes and pretend that this thought is what I look like to others? Anything goes. A lot of people say they don’t care what other people think about them. What they are saying is that they have accepted that they are invisible to themselves. The thoughts and feelings are strong enough inside of them that they never question their ability to be surrogate to the them they cannot see. They rely on the million-winged thing inside of themselves as though it is who they are on the outside too. This is a leap of pure faith, but it seems to pay dividends. People who do not question reality can charge through the world as though they are the stronger more positive thoughts that they carry within them day to day. Us questioners, which is a good many of us, are left with the images and the stubbornness of the thoughts which we believe must be connected to something else which must be connected to something else… The more that we educate ourselves, the more that we see how intertwined the world is. We want to be fair, moral, right. We don’t want to accept the flitty world as who we are for fear that if everybody acted this way then the world would be chaos. Guess what? The world is chaos, but figuring out how others can act without a sense of morality and justice is just another vast plain which we float into and away from knowing ourselves through pure faith. We think into spheres of thought that take us higher and higher, lower and lower, out and around until we have to accept a spiritual view of who we are. All because we can’t see ourselves, can’t take a cue from our expressions as to which way we should go.

I guess I’ve been a bit of a stone-face lately. I gather this because of my thoughts, which have been anything but hopeful lately. I have been going into myself deep, trying to find the bottom, in a way. I thought that I had it the other day. I was lying in bed looking up at the bunkbed above me, the top of which I use as a desk, envisioning emptiness (a spiritual state) without considering it that. I had simply come to the place where I had lost all faith in the flitty world inside of my head to bring me to a conclusive answer as to who I am. It would go on forever, I surmised. I could follow threads of thought until the end of time, but without a sense of the whole, enough to fill my very limbs, I would never be able to gather sustenance from the world of thought. I often think about what it is that I need to know, that I’ve forgotten and have to go back and relearn to get somewhere that I was years ago. That ever turning wheel, like a hamster wheel, that gets you absolutely nowhere, is like a false promise by everybody who has ever tried to teach me in my lifetime. Remember this, they say, and let it sink into you and you will rise until your soul will be level with your eyes and you will be able to look out proud as though you could actually see what you look like in a crowded room, as though you could not only see everybody else, but you could see yourself. And it wouldn’t be through ego either, which is a false sense of yourself to make up for the fact that you are invisible. It would be true. You would know that you are what you are supposed to be by the reactions of others around you and there wouldn’t be any danger of falling or being whisked away into the “truth” of another thought that you must first address in order to be “true.” I guess being true is what it is all about. You don’t want to be false, but that is what being lost in the whirlwind of thought and resultant emotion portrays to others. So often the idiots win. You find that you envy the idiots, the ones who never listened to those who told you things about the world that sounded true and that you therefore wanted to integrate into your being so that you could be true.

It all gets pretty complicated, I guess. Back to reality. In the few minutes it’s taken to think these thoughts, abbreviated in my mind, of course, I’ve made sixteen sandwiches. Six of them have been Porky Porkins. Four of them have been the Garden of Eden. Two of them were Royal Cluckers with cheese, three The Mountain and one Ruben’s Reuben. Mario is to the left of me, 19, Diane to the right, 18. My boss is Sheila, 28. She’s nice. Three more on the line include Adolpho (cutting), Roberto (condiments) and then the assistant manager, Dave, 23, putting the order over to the new girl, pretty, about 20, charging people their money and giving them their cups. Oh yeah, Natalie, in her fifties and from Australia, is taking the orders behind me, punching them into the computer where they show up on my computer screen. Her husband is an American trucker and she prefers Australia.

I went to college. I’m pretty much the cautionary tale that everybody’s father tells them not to be when they say they want to become a musician or artist or, God forbid, poet, like I told my father. He ranted and raved, slung his jowels this way and that, but there was nothing I could do about it. School had been telling me that being a member of the literary class was one of the finest things that you could do with your time here on earth. I spent my late teen years with my poetry books and notebook sitting under trees in parks, my station wagon parked in the parking lot, looking up into the limbs, through the trees at the passing clouds and wondering, hoping, dreaming and believing that if I could just translate it into words that I would be accepted and loved by others with the same belief in the value of the loftier of thoughts. Of course I learned over time that it was all tied to concepts such as soul and spirit. This sealed it for me. There was another world up there. Out there? In there? Hmm. Where was this other world? The questions, I admit, inhabit me today, although this new wrinkle about our being invisible because we can’t see ourselves is interesting. I guess it may be the closest I’ve ever gotten to being able to be the dream promised me by the teachers and the mystics over the years. Or maybe I just think so. I figure this too shall pass. I’ll forget that I’m invisible eventually and go back to hour after hour of looking up at my bunkbed/desk wondering what the hell it’s all about. But if I can’t see myself or have mock faith in myself like others can, as though they actually can see themselves, then I can’t be all bad. I’m flying blind. Somehow this feels good. Blind is somehow good. I know that I don’t know who I am to those around me who ultimately dictate the kind of life that I am to have in the “outer” world. I won’t have to pull thoughts out of those unremembered lessons “learned” to present my best “face” so as to advance. Where is there to advance to? What happens to the faces that I present? General belief is that if it is a smile then you are doing okay in the world. So you try to smile as much as possible around here. Laughter is good. But what am I doing here? Why am I making sandwiches at the Sandwich King at forty-six years of age?

Very good question. It seizes all urges to make my cheeks tense in a positive manner so as to be relieved that at least I am not ugly. Non-smiles make one ugly and unpopular. I know this even though I can’t see my smile. I’m not stupid. But I can’t smile all the time and in the times I am not smiling I go so far down? Up? Around? Through? the world that…

“Put mayo on that one, dear,” Natalie is next to me now. I’m the lead. The best there is around here. When we first opened, the place was brand new and I wanted to be a dishwasher. They told me that I would be better on the sandwich line. I got a promotion right away. I learned that little Mexican men would always be destined to be the official dishwashers at the King, but I did it anyway before this precedent was set. If there were any dirty dishes I would wash them which put me inside of a halo for the bosses. At one point they wanted me to join them, but I never fancied myself a lifer in the sandwich game and said no. It felt good though that they approved of me, that I did not have to prove myself, that I wanted to wash dishes in the first place so taking what they perceived as the extra step played in my favor. It feels good when your bosses actually like you. I’m a good worker. Simply put, that’s the way it is. I’m a team leader, although not officially. It’s just my age. I don’t get caught up in the webs of adolescent drama during the eight hours I’m on the job each day like others. You got the lazies, the haters, the aloof, the innocent, the “biding their time” people, the quiet grateful Mexicans. You’ve got the guy who is good at cooking the sides of beef and says he owns eight houses which he plans to sell soon. Too much time in the upkeep.
“Just the one or both?” I ask, for clarification.
“Just the first.”
“A clucker with Mayo,” I say clearly. They use mustard on the Clucker, a special sauce and people dig it, but now and then you’ll get the mayo people a little upset.

Could Natalie see me? Obviously, she could see me. She squeezed my bicep, the one I damaged by trying to hold up a house once. Long story, not worth going into. I sometimes forget whether people can see me if I can’t see myself. Of course, they can see me. They can’t see themselves, that’s all. Each of us alone are the invisible ones. Everybody other than we ourselves are as visible as day. I’m doing it again. Trying to hold on to something that I thought that I learned in order to end thought once and for all. It just takes up way too much of my time. Do I regret that I went into the sensitivity to all thought game? You bet. Regret it with all of my being. Regret that I had a mother who believed that I “am a spiritual being on a human journey.” I was a good student and a good kid. Moral as hell. Very important to be moral if you are to make a difference in the world. Never thought of joining the dark side. Always honed my metaphorical moral light saber skills throughout my life for the day when I would slice away evil forever and ever amen. I’m still waiting for that day. In the meantime, everybody else has families, money and true laughter. They go home to nice abodes whose lights I contemplate as I drive home each night at eleven o’clock. I imagine them in only one way: happy. Their living rooms are warm. Their children curl up into their laps. The couples smile at each other and coo and the next day they do their routines warm with the knowledge that this loving scene would once again be played out behind their solid doors and glowing windows once again and then again and then again. Forever.

Yet I find it difficult to trade it all in. Of course my logic is askew. I have avoided corporate responsibility my entire life so that I could be alone with my esoteric meanderings of mind in search of the true other place in the spiritual realm. If I had done what my father had suggested, and their had been a lot of suggestions: advertising, publishing, writing (as if I hadn’t written enough poems to last several people several lifetimes), business (in general. Do Something!), I would be happy right now, especially now that the charm is just about worn off. To be Thoreau now would classify me as a bum. To be Emerson I would have to play a much more complicated game, one that I didn’t have the social skills (the invisible overcoming inclination of faking it) to accomplish. Everything other than what I have done, contemplated, seemed like a waste of my talent and my talent itself was not even a talent. It was more a proclivity, a willingness to bend into the silence to capture a flitting dream, one of beauty, but one that I found as I aged loses its luster as my body loses its luster until I am just another ugly middle aged man with no kids and very little hope of “making it.” Obviously, I should have put myself into a monastery at a very young age so as to have had a framework that was respected for what I was trying to do with my inner world, the only world that I had come to respect. But I didn’t. I ended up at the Sandwich King.

I can feel it. It’s here now. The dark place. It’s back. Concentrate. Concentrate. Sandwich after sandwich. Pile it on. More, more. Pile it higher. Cost the King a few extra pennies, but just pile it on. Keep them coming back. Save the company by giving the people a filling sandwich, not like most of the others who stayed close to the company guidelines and made sandwiches that I would not buy twice. More meat, more lettuce. More sauce. A better sandwich. More. Once again, filling up the world with the stuff of the world as though recognition that the world existed in plenty would remind me that I was not invisible and at the mercy of the thoughts in my head which had, as of late especially, been pressing down on me. What tool for good was I when I was scattered in a million directions? Only the focused made a difference in the world. Those of us who entertained thoughts were too spread out to make much of a difference. Who cares if we wanted to be right so that the right thing could be done instead of the expedient which often led to chaos and disaster when played out on a grand scale. Look at the world. Wars, famine, cheating, lying for gain. An honest perusal of the inner world would provide the world with an honest answer that would guide it into a place where that spiritual world promised by my mother would then be able to step forward and all would be well. That was my job, to push the world a little closer to that other world where it would then be able to simply step into place, into Holy place, I guess, and, like I said, all would be well. But then I would look around me and realize that it was all taking place inside of me. It was imprisoned inside of me rather. Not even the actuality, but the thought of a better world. I could tell that nothing I actually did mattered. The sandwiches mattered. I would have to get through that to get to the other. I would have to make the best damned sandwich in the world for a little of the dream imprisoned inside to be released into the world. If I spoke all would be lost. If I wrote it would not be read (nothing of mine has ever been published except in a college literary review). All was pretty much lost to the whirlwind inside which, I imagined, may have been guessed at by others through my eyes at times or my silence among different circles than work. Nobody told me how hard it would actually be to be heard when your choice of “career” was to be heard.

I made another 200 sandwiches before I left. I first took off my apron. Semi-filthy. Stunk of food. I made my way out the back door. Nobody ever said goodbye. It was like we had relegated ourselves to being automatons. When the machines took over they would simply be switched off too. Entrance was the same way. You simply showed up on the line and you had to guess that they remembered who you were. A new pair of hands to pass a sandwich to. I made my way to the parking lot, into my car, which I won’t tell you about, and on to the road. Through ten, fifteen lights, never counted, into my studio apartment on the outskirts of town and into my bed and slept. I woke up and went to my coffee house where I read the paper and wrote into the computer that was still working after all these years after my father bought it for me. He’s been dead seven years now. Had it upgraded recently and lost roughly 200 poems. I stamped my foot in anger and hurt my heel and am still smarting from it. I have an extra heel pad for work, but it doesn’t totally alleviate the pain. Inner pain translates into outer pain. Pain is a network. The last poem I wrote there was a guy who looked like the lead singer of the Killers with his family at the next booth. I had to look twice and wasn’t sure if it was him or not. If it was I prided myself on being seen, as though that would make it so that I could actually see myself, that I existed in some way that was remarkable, but then I sifted back down into myself, into that soft twilight, that hazy gray of me and searched for thoughts that would explain everything that was and everything that would be, how I might get out of this thing alive, perhaps find love (ten years gone) and be “somebody” again, before the true lessons of my life took away the true mover of who I was, my younger, more naïve self. I guess back then I didn’t think too much about such things as being invisible to myself. I thought a lot, erratically, crazily, poetically, mystically, but self-identity and the back side of the track were not as pronounced. I guess I fear that as I decline the mysterious within me will decline also, that everything before was a result of my youth and not real truth, as though it was blood of nerve and brain that was the real commander of philosophy and spirit and therefore “God” would just one day fade away, or was perhaps already gone, just a joke of naivete.

At the coffee house, a truly suburban affair that would generally not host a rock star, but perhaps has, I saw a woman holding a toddler to her chest as though it were a bumper on a car, a group of old ladies who apparently meet every once in awhile, the manager in street clothes, a red golf shirt and golf cap, apparently on the links that day and just coming in to see how things were going, the regular help. A most unremarkable display that you are relegated to seeing day after day because you don’t live in New York or Boston or Paris or London or anywhere else that is remarkable. Because it is somewhat nice, although somewhat commercial, you wonder about the levels of success of the people. Then you tire of it. You want to write. You don’t. I don’t. I am the you of which I speak, but it is nice to consider myself a you. Makes me feel like I am there. Reminds me that I can be seen when I can’t, at least not by myself. I may represent an alien with three snouts to these people, but I wouldn’t know it, because nobody really looks at you. This is good I guess. I’m not an alien. Perhaps I look successful to others. I dress alright, white pants, cream really, although there are oil stains on the left pant leg.

What they can’t see is that I have absolutely nobody anymore. You can sometimes gauge a person’s aloneness just by looking at them and the people who work here have probably gauged me as pretty much alone, but you can fool everybody else, make them believe that you are substantial in some way. My computer helps, I guess. I look at the New York Times a lot. Write poems. I try not to look too hard at the news anymore, because it seems as though the country has abandoned its moral base in favor of making more money. After the Republicans took over Christianity it all just sort of went to hell. Now Christians believe in all sorts of non-Christian things like starving children in their own country, killing children of other countries, lying to put more and more money into the pockets of their employers who own just about 95 percent of the country already. Dishonesty is the name of the game anymore and it’s easy if you’re rich. You can get all sorts of “think tanks” to come up with scientific surveys that say that people prefer to be destitute and in the street as long as the richest one percent do not have to dip down into fifties of billions instead of the sixties of billions. It’s easy to fool us now. We are an easily fooled people. I thank Jesus for all of this, rather, his “followers” who aren’t really his followers, but paid public relations men posing as his followers. The real Jesus said “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven.” The new Jesus drives a benz. I try not to think about this. I try to push it away, but it’s hard.

I once wanted to write fiction, but found that I had no plots in my life. I know that people want plots in their fiction because they are also like me with no plots in their lives. Where would people get plots? All people do every day is arrange their day so as to avoid plots. Having no plot means having no drama and nobody wants drama, nobody wants plots, so they open books to get the excitement, the plots, that they don’t want in their real lives. So I used to sit there and try to imagine plots, or drama, that I could give to people so that they would read my work, buy my book, and I wouldn’t have to make sandwiches. But I always end up going back to my poetry which doesn’t require plots. The reader of poetry has come to terms with the fact that they have no plots in their lives and are willing to ruminate on what they do have, namely, existence. Good or bad, they have existence. To understand that existence is the one thing that they feel that they can do as they go about their days, their jobs, through the lives of their loved ones. Once you realize that you will most likely have very little real plots in your own life you can relax and consider what you do have which is the moment, now, expanding outward from inside for its base is inside of you. It starts the moment you open your eyes and realize that you are invisible, if you ever realize it, and then attempt to live life anyway. The world within is you and feelings that come from the images and thoughts make up your day so you have to make the best of it. You have to arrange things, make sure that things don’t get out of control. Those without plots live as I do, a totally insular existence. We feed on what we have and take sustenance from where it may come which is often spirituality, study, rumination through artistic endeavor. But there is no set rule as to what we are exactly doing. What are we doing? We are born alone and we die alone. In the middle we dance with the things within our minds.

A woman walked in and sat down at a table about three tables down. She was eating alone. She didn’t look at me, but she was old enough to do so. I went to the library to get a movie the other day and as I walked to the movie section I had to pass the internet section where people get free internet use. The oddest thing was taking place, every single person on the net was a middle aged man just like me. All were poor. You assume that when you use the internet at the library. I walked faster realizing that I was just another one of those poor middle aged men, no longer able to attract a woman and love, relegated to use the free library services. When I got into the movie room there were more of those men, all middle aged just like me, one reeking of alcohol. Of course, he would be. Why not? But he looked somewhat respectable as though the alcohol hadn’t wrecked his life, as though he fancied himself a poet just like I did me. The sameness of it all. The sameness of me. The woman never spoke to me and after awhile I went home and slept and the next day I was back at work making sandwiches, trying to stretch my face to smile and even laugh, but the laughter was becoming harder to conjure. Being invisible, alone and middle aged was becoming too hard to deny. Something would have to be done. But what was there to do anymore? Standing there I realized that it had been two months since Maggie had called. She always called even if it was to just chastise me for not being a success and having a no can do attitude about life which wasn’t really that, but rather a yes can poetize attitude that nobody could understand. I’m sure I have written as many poems as Wordsworth and he wasn’t considered a troubled failure like I am by those who know, knew me. It’s not really fair. I did my time in college studying a subject that the teachers claimed was the highest calling and yet when I got out I was told that I was a failure as a human being while the partiers who never contemplated a higher thought in their lives rose in the ranks of success simply because they chose their college major according to how much money it would provide them. Who cares that they would end up bilking their own fellow Americans. They were successful doing it and success was all that mattered ultimately. Monetary success. The other kinds were jokes and cover for basic infirmities of mind, heart and soul. I was a child who cared, a teen who cared, an adult who cared, but without monetary success all was a ruse. Now I am simply an un-ambitious lazy person who makes sandwiches at forty-six because he was actually quite “off” his whole life just as everybody suspected. He was going to fly high, was shooting for the stars, but in reality, he was just a dreamer, a bad kind, not even the romantic kind really. The lazy kind. The wrong kind. Had I been able to…which brings us to complaining.

Everything is seen as a complaint. That’s how Maggie sees me too. I try to explain my lack of will to strive for the dollar, to make active plans to bank off my poetry, to try at least. It all seems like business to me. Business is okay, I guess. I would love to be able to thrive in business, but I can’t. I can’t muster the will to do it. I have no passion for it. So a lot of my time is spent contemplating ways to succeed in my own entrepreneurial endeavors, but once it comes time to put the “plans” into action I don’t want to move. I simply don’t care. I then write a poem or ten and feel like I am doing what I am supposed to do. This is outrageous in this day and age. But this is what all of the great poets ever did. They simply wrote and wrote and wrote. They sat under trees. They walked in the woods. They lived in their garrets. They thought and they wrote and they observed until they were one day recognized as actually having been doing something during all these times. But for every poet recognized there are a hundred thousand left unrecognized. What if the recognized ones had not been recognized? Would their work, which would have been the same work had they not been recognized, been any less great? This bothers me a lot. How do I know that what I do isn’t much more important than anything I could be doing in the realm of business? If I move off on a different course my unrecognized poems would perhaps not be written and although I may forever be unrecognized their merit would remain – unseen, silent and hidden away never to be seen again. But what if they are deserving of the same praise as those who had been recognized? If a tree falls in a forest…

So I try not to talk about my work. Nobody I know really thinks of me as a poet. When asked what I do I tell them that I work at the Sandwich King. Their eyes light up. Oh? They say, as though it were a proud thing to be working at the Sandwich King. They have to stifle a lot of negative thinking to keep their eyes bright and alive as they talk to me. It is instant non-credibility as a human being and I accept it, smile a little bit. Then I tell them that I also write poems. Of course, that’s wonderful. My point is that even I myself explain what I do first in the realm of business. Only then would my other interest be revealed, a pithy little hobby that most likely I took up because that is what you must do to make up for being such an unsuccessful person. You get used to things. It’s sad, but you do. Melancholy becomes just another emotion. It is the ending of pride.

At work that day there are a lot of customers. I’m good at what I do. I make a good sandwich. A good beefy concoction. I don’t skimp. It helps business. My heel hurt of course and I wondered about Maggie. She said she was going to have cheap sex with a friend if he didn’t want her for any other reason. I accepted it as I was supposed to do. I don’t know why she calls me. We had love many years before and held on to it for a long time even as we broke up and I went on to other relationships. I don’t know what she was doing while I was doing what I was doing. I figured we were broken up, but she was the only one of them that ever truly loved me and I couldn’t get over that. After awhile I gave up on the whole game and all I had left was the love that Maggie still held for me, but by this time I was too ashamed to go back. I was also afraid that I would hurt her again. Youth. When you get to a certain age you realize how stupid you really were, but then it is too late. You’ve made your bed as they say. Two months later I tried not to think of the bed that I made for her. Where Maggie was is simply a big sad hole now. Her disappearance represents our true split. I am now truly alone. My brother and sister don’t love me, well, if they love me they don’t really have much time to show it because they are off on their own middle class America raise the children fantasies. Poor Peter. It is in the margins of every communication I have with them. Poor Peter. The youngest who was so foolish. Of course he would fail. He was the baby. The baby is always supposed to fail. It is expected. I couldn’t disappoint. I think us babies fail because we are usually the dreamers of the family. All the important stuff is taken up by the elder children. They must learn to be responsible. The baby has a lot of help so spends more time in the dreamworld. He never really leaves. The poor baby who must play and play and play. Poor baby. Last born, most likely first to die. Sad. Sad. Sad. Sad. Sad.

I never bought into this, of course. Dreamworlds are praised by our educators by insisting on our studying art and literature and music. It’s all dreamworld and the babies are usually pretty good at it because of their practice being the baby. Freedom. This leads to higher aspirations, spiritual aspirations even, but don’t ask us to put a car together. Don’t ask us to figure out adult responsibility stuff. It’s not that we can’t do this. We can when we grow up, but the elder children will never believe it. Adulthood to elder grown up children for the baby is worthy of a chuckle only. A baby will always be the baby especially if he or she chooses a dreamworld profession like I did. Profession. The dreamworld doesn’t have professions. It has states of existence only, a fact that the others can’t then won’t understand. The baby is the baby. I’m the baby.

So I’m the baby and it shows. I’m forty-six and I make sandwiches at the Sandwich King. This is a good baby career. I wrapped up my shift at the Baby King, the oldest baby at the King, and made my way home. Through the lights again. Cold outside again at night, eleven-fifteen. Back to the old studio apartment that I can just barely afford and hit the bed hard. I dream almost as soon as I hit the pillow. My unconscious state has been like this lately. I seem to dream even when I am awake. I saw a movie on my day off, one I got from the library, where someone asked someone else in what language did they dream. This was odd for me because it never occurred to me that there were words in my dreams. I don’t remember the dream or the words, but I was aware for the first time that there were words in my dreams. Odd. My dreams have been very literate lately. Sometimes it is almost as if I am writing in my dreams. Words being formed as though I were writing a poem or even a book. Where do these stories come from? It makes no sense that I should dream people I have never met into situations I have never encountered. It makes me wonder about the nature of novels. These novelists write all these words and sometimes the sentences are put together so well and with such insight that it seems they are watching the words instead of thinking them. It seems like dictation. Perhaps it is. I can write in my dreams with a complete absence of conscious thought. So Shakespeare possibly just dictated his plays out of some powerful literary dreamforce in his own head. And he was called Shakespeare. The great Shakespeare. He could have been chomping walnuts, really getting into them while his other hand magically penned Hamlet. This seems to be true to me concerning the nature of great literature. There is a little brain inside of the brain of the named person’s brain that is really doing the writing and maybe it has to do with magnesium levels in the blood or lack of zinc or whatever. Life is life and it will pour forth from where it pours forth and just don’t get in its way if you want it to arrive. But you don’t believe in this because you are taught to believe that magic doesn’t exist. But it may just well exist. Maybe.

Which brings me to the idea that I think we should all go through life as though blind. I told this theory to a person I know. (I don’t know very many people anymore because relationships are decided on first tics anymore and they are plenty and deep and adults cannot talk to one another because they are too smart and feel pain too easily, but that’s another story.) I told this person that we should go through the world blind after he told me about a philosophy of someone he knew. Psychological theories are interesting to me, but it seems to me that you can’t keep them in your head, so you must go through the world blind. I wasn’t sure what this meant. I hate when I say something and then assume that I know what I mean by it after I say it. It may actually take years to come to a true understanding of something you proclaim. We are so wise when we are young, but when we get old we realize that we didn’t really understand. We could see the principle laid out before us, but it wasn’t truly within us. Only time can let certain truth infiltrate you. You only know what you know when you are ready to know it. Maybe this is what living blind is about. Forget about what you think that you know and live what you have at the moment. Use the thoughts that have infiltrated you. Let them be enough. Don’t try to fill your head up with knowledge that there is no way to access until it accesses you. Go blind. Even with this attempt at explanation I feel as though I don’t know what I mean by living blind. Keep things out. Don’t get caught up inside thoughts because there will always be another thought and then another and then another. In the meantime, breathe… Or something like that, I suppose. I really don’t know what I mean, but I feel what I mean and that means it is trying to enter me. Some higher truth is trying to invade me and this is what I want. Actually, this is what I have always lived for, to open myself up to these truths. In a way I threw away my life to keep myself open to this process. I went to the worlds of these truths and studied the words that at times symbolized them and gathered them up like a farmer gathers his crops. But truths don’t open up for you until they want to. In the meantime you should do what you should do. I should have married and had children. I believe these truths would open up and inhabit me not a moment sooner anyway. But I didn’t look at it this way. I had to be ready. In the meantime I wrote all the truths down. Poem after poem after poem. Gathered them close and sat with them. Not unlike a mother hen sitting on her eggs. Incubating dreamworlds.

(coming…part 2)

Published in: on April 27, 2013 at 7:00 pm  Leave a Comment  
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Just Past the Purple Mountains

Would you just go away from the one you love because she thinks that you are an asshole? You don’t know who you are so why do you keep telling everybody else who they are? Why do you insist that I am wrong and “in error” when you cannot even see where you will be the next second? Was Jesus crazy when he said” judge not lest ye be judged?” I quit the debate. That’s my answer.
I will live or I will die. Which one it will be I don’t know. I’ve ridden more miles on a motorcycle than I care to remember. Fell asleep on my Road King in 93 not knowing if I would wake up or not it was so cold. When Barbara left me for that asshole Sayers I knew that I wouldn’t care where I slept after that. Haven’t been back to Sydney’s Hole in ten years since then. Barbara married and divorced the asshole, but not before he gave her three kids, the third one with leukemia, no less. Fuck assholes. They’re everywhere dressed like anybody, like you or me, like the dentist, the dentist is an asshole and you have no way of knowing. He’s doing something with your wife probably or somebody elses. Assholes are only remedied by Harleys and a lot of time on your hands. But what’s time if you got a Harley? I guess I’m wrong.
I feel sorry for Barbara, but what am I going to do? She didn’t want to be with me. I rode from Sydney’s Hole, Oregon to Portland, Maine in three days after that. Why Portland, Maine? Because it was as far away in this world as I could think of going on my Harley and remain in the United States, because I do, after all, love this country. I was in Portland, Maine for that winter of 93. I got out of Sydney’s Hole only to go to Portland. I think now that I was thinking of just going up north a few hours to Portland, Oregon, but got pissed and went to Maine. I’m glad I did it now. I left everything: my horses, my other Harleys, my six trucks all with ladders. I could give a rats ass anymore if Henderson Electric bit my scarred, old ass. I gave it to Johnny Two-Time, Ray Pierson, and said take the keys. Johnny sends me a check whenever I want it. That’s Johnny. I guess I’m lucky. I guess.
In Maine I rode a sportster with studs in the tires when it snowed. I stayed six months there at a ski lodge called Mersheau. We’d get ladies up from New York City who wanted to rollick in the snow with somebody other than their husbands. I was only too happy to oblige. Or if they came with their husbands, a lot of them would lose them. I knew that was true because they’d tell me. We’d sit up in bed afterwards and tell me what an asshole their husbands were, how their husbands were screwing their secretaries, just like in the movies. Everybody screwing everybody else. For the record, though, their husbands would leave after awhile at the bars with their buddies, because gangs of people would come up. Those gangs were the strangest social structures I’ve ever come across. Wives would sleep with husband’s best friends. Virgins would give it up, even to me. I wondered whether the loss of morals had something to do with all that snow everywhere. Maybe it was the cold, the icy freeze on the face and the way it made a person’s face look all red and needy-like, as if somehow those faces were ripe and what was ripe was good to take at the moment. A chic is sexy as hell standing there in ski boots sipping hot chocolate with her friends. She’s like a prize that nobody can take just yet because you never know where the emcee is standing waiting for his cue only in this case his cue doesn’t include giving you the girl, but includes punching your lights out. Everything was done on the sly. Everything. The coke, the weed, the ecstasy. Little college girls from Brown would ask me up to their rooms and I would snort coke off their bellies. It was what they wanted. It was what I gave them.

That’s what happened after Barbara. Come springtime I was the hell out of there though. Three states away I checked myself into a clinic and got off coke. It took me three weeks, but at least I knew what the hell was wrong with me. My eyes sunk down into my head and the whole time all I could think of was Barbara. I remember sitting there looking outside at my Harley parked in the parking lot, thinking Barbara would be happy to see me in a place like this. I talked to this guy named Stan Willis who was an alcoholic and had been having really mean flashbacks. Stan told me all about flashbacks, even LSD flashbacks. I’d never had one, except for the face in my sleep of Barbara, her eyes black with hate for me for something I didn’t even do. She looked down and hated me for not keeping her after she slept with somebody else. There’s no logic to that. When I left her she beat the shit out of me and I let her, I let her hit me in the face over 20 times and didn’t lift a finger. Christ, what the hell did I do. It really made me think. Christ. I still think about it. I can’t figure out what I did except for this: nothing.
I didn’t do nothing. I thought that to be married you just didn’t have to cheat on her. I never did, but it wasn’t enough. It’s the figuring of what you did that hurts. That’s what I did when I was in the hospital with my coke addiction like a sword with Barbara’s face over my head. The simplest thing I can think about the reason why she came to hate me so much was my Harley. Christ, I hate to blame anything on my Road King, but I think I’ve decided that my marriage broke up because of it. I try to reason everything through every day, but I can’t reason much anymore. My Road King was more beautiful than Barbara. But it’s not even that. It’s more like woman herself was in my bike. A man can’t ride, can’t fly on his own. He needs a woman to carry him over the hills. My bike became more than Barbara and I guess I was out of the house too much and when I wasn’t I guess I wasn’t quite there anyway. Sitting there looking at the ceiling wanting more coke, I had a lot of time to figure it out.

My bike was sitting outside the entire three weeks without once having been started. Marvin, an old black caretaker at the clinic jumped me. I dusted her gas tanks with my hand and rode off until I found a car wash and I washed her good. Checked all her fluids and all that. She was good. We rode about 600 miles that day until I could barely tell what state I’d gotten into. I knew where I was headed though. I’d called Barbara from the hospital and told her I was coming. She said she didn’t want to see me. I told her again, rather, I informed her that I would be there and she would listen to what I had to say. She hung up on me. I didn’t care. I was feeling okay, not wanting any more coke, smoking a little weed and about a pack of Winstons a day from on top of my bike and whatever rest stops I took. It was like I woke up in Nebraska. The hospital had made me a little pale. I felt like I felt when I was a kid getting out of the hospital after having my appendix out. I’d been fed sherbet and meatloaf for way too long. I wish I could talk about those six hundred miles of forgetfulness between the clinic and Nebraska, but I can’t, at least not well. I’d imagined whole conversations with Barbara in that hospital. We’d talked about everything, how it felt when Sayers dick was in her, whether she liked, what her feelings were when he was inside of her knowing she was still married to me. We got over that in the hospital because we talked like grown-ups. I told her I’d once kissed a girl who I took for a ride outside of The Pit where we’d go for Buds on Friday nights. She didn’t care. She just sort of told me that she loved me then and it probably wouldn’t have mattered all that much if I had or hadn’t. What worried her was when she was needing to be with somebody else. That meant I wasn’t there even though I was. That’s what she told me and I believed and knew that I blew it and that was why I needed to come back, come back right away. I needed to apologize for the way I wasn’t there for her anymore, the way that I would wake up in the morning and light a cigarette and blow smoke on her while maybe she needed a little love or something. I’d forgotten how to love and in the hospital when we sat there, her face above me, me trying as hard as I can to make sure her face stayed real and didn’t drift into becoming somebody else’s face, her mother, her sister, that chick I kissed on my Harley, I remembered that you have to remember to love and because I’d forgotten to love its very simple, the remedy I mean, the antidote to forgetting how to love is remembering how to love. That’s something I couldn’t do when she was with me. I forgot everything about her that I loved. That’s what ten years does to you. Ten years makes you think that everythings fine when in actuality everything is being torn away from you slowly, in little particle chunks, but chunks just the same. So you got to remember. When you look at her and see the face you’ve been seeing every night for all those years you’ve got to remember that that chin you used to kiss at the very beginning belonged to the same soul as you knew now. The body changed but the soul didn’t and when you marry its to the soul and if you forget that you become a liar because when you marry the preacher expressly asks you if you will love and hold and cherish forever this person and he doesn’t call her “soul” but you know that’s what he means. You know that if you don’t know that he means soul you might as well bail out of there, do Maine thing as quick as you can because otherwise you’ll be waking up with a stranger.
I won’t go into Barbara. I’ve said “soul” too many times already. Her soul was guiding her body when she went with Sayers. That’s strong. Coming home I didn’t want to fight it. She hadn’t married the guy yet and I wasn’t looking to get her back exactly. I don’t know what I was looking to do I just knew that when I got there I would know. I wouldn’t know if Sayers would be there. I could bitch slap him down in a heartbeat, but I didn’t want to do that. I really just wanted to go and observe what was happening to Barbara now that I was supposedly gone out of her life forever. I did Colorado, Wyoming and Nevada in a haze. I took to smoking pot while riding on those long stretches when no other cars were around doing 90. I don’t know what happened in that stretch. All that open space kind of relieved my mind from worry. I didn’t think so much anymore on the weed. I just sort of let everything go and hoped I wouldn’t die like I deserved or worse, kill unwitting family with my bike. The mountains in Nevada held me in a force stronger than anything I’d known. I hadn’t known Nevada was so beautiful, but it was Nevada that they meant when they came up with the lyrics in that song “purple mountain majesty.” I was keenly aware of road signs with distance numbers on them. I considered each mile to Oakland a pregnant moment that I needed to savor, but not let get to me. I was in a dream, the same dream I think I dreamed when I was a kid wanting to go out on that road with a Harley or an Indian or maybe a Triumph like my dad had. I was remembering those early rides, too, especially the ones with my dad, Hank, my dad, Hank.
I thought about him there, too. I remember when he showed me how to ride he sat behind me and held the handlebars on his 53 Triumph, his tattoo right there on his left arm for me to look at and wonder at as we rode. Annie, it said, blue type inside a red heart, the name of my mother. We rode out into the mountains. We lived in Redding then. I’m a hill boy. The red hills and towering pines went by and the cold air felt good with my dad being there and I felt safe. I hadn’t felt safe like that ever before and ever again. But riding through Nevada I felt that way a a little bit because I’d let Barbara’s face float away from me, sort of like placing her in the sky to take on the role of a star. She was there, but I didn’t know where. I sort of wish now I hadn’t lost sight of her on that last stretch towards Oakland. Maybe I would remembered how ugly she could be and it would have prepared me for what I came home to.

Published in: on June 27, 2012 at 8:45 pm  Leave a Comment  
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The Four Corners of the World

The Four Corners of the World

I saw a strange thing the other day at the Department of Motor Vehicles where I was re-registering my scooter. I stood on the orange line, this, of course, being the longest line of the day every day for the past 20 years. I was about 4,000 people back, my headphones on my head, listening to Led Zeppelin’s The Ocean when this woman came up behind me pushing a baby stroller.

Inside the stroller, of course, was a baby; cute and dimpled as babies are. She looked Hispanic and so did her baby. For some reason I consciously connected the mother and the child. In my mind, I intertwined their beings making the baby part and parcel of the mother so much that it seemed somewhat odd that they were separate at all. I said to myself, looking at her, “that’s the baby’s mother.” Well, no shit. I smiled to the mother about the baby and she smiled back, knowing why I smiled, but not knowing when I turned away that I was saying to myself “sure glad it ain’t mine.”

Let me try to stay in a straight line here. Even this orange line seemed crooked, and this story isn’t one to be told out of order, unless you don’t get why I find it important to tell it at all. About twenty seconds after the Hispanic mama pulled in behind me in the world’s most interminable line, another stroller was rolled into the arena. This woman and her baby were proud African people, she wearing tight leotards and dangling earrings that made me think of totem poles and taboos for white people who might want to cause her grief. She was frankly very pretty, with soft round red lips that accentuated just right that little something that sometimes you see in women of color, that something in the eye that says that she’s got it all going on. Sometimes you see black women with eyes like this whose eyes are green and that sends you to another realm altogether.

I was thinking this when my tape skipped briefly and then stopped. I rushed to my cassette player and pulled out Zeppelin. It had only re-wound a little bit. Luckily I had a little Rush in the other pocket, Hemispheres, I put it in and forget about the black lady’s lips for a moment, turning completely around, facing the direction I was supposed to be facing. Before I turned around, though, I did get a glimpse of the baby.

He was looking at the little Hispanic baby, reaching out to it. The Hispanic baby just ate it’s own fingers. The black baby was a boy. It had a Chicago Bulls cap on. The other baby was a girl, dressed in a light yellow sweater with a plastic yellow bow glued on to her head, it had to be, because I didn’t see any hair on that toddler. Why I mention it is that apart from the color they both had this same sort of ability to correspond without speaking native only to the infant population of the world. Who cares, right? Let me finish.

It was interesting that two women had come in and stood right behind one another in line with babies. Interesting. But it approached fascinating when not a minute later a third woman came into the DMV and got in line behind the black lady, she too pushing a baby in a stroller. This one is just your average white girl, kind of overweight, the kind of girl you might think would be a welfare mom because of both her age and the stringiness and thinness of her hair, the kind of hair that teenage pot smokers grow. But she doesn’t look stoned or anything. Her baby is wearing a white bib with yellow stains all over it. There is still a little bit of yellow on his mouth. Peaches baby food apparently or apricot or some other gooey recipe that produces adequate and proper stools. You can tell this one doesn’t want to be here. The girl, the young mother, takes her place in line and sighs out as she looks ahead of her at the wait.

By this time the other two mamas had been making small talk, their babies still reaching out for each other. When the white girl came in both of them looked at her and smiled, obviously showing public amazement at this babyfest at the DMV. It was odd, I like to admit, the kind of thing that just for a moment renews your faith in mankind. Babies do that. They’re symbols of renewal. These mothers, I’m sure, felt a kinship with one another. They would go through the same problems at the same time for the rest of their lives because of these as yet infant people. Everybody in line was watching the spectacle of the baby parade. People from further up in line would chirp in comments to the mothers. The line, ten, eleven thousand people long, it seemed, collectively softened at the story being told by the presence of these mothers and their progeny. The line was disarmed briefly and, I admit, so was I. Here was a brazen accounting of the reason for existence forced together by a God who always seemed to be wanting to re-assure us that we are all his children. Now, truly, it seemed we could not deny it. But here’s the kicker…Just when the warm feelings had seemingly hit their highest pitch, in walked the last mother. She was a little Asian woman who pushed a little stroller with a little Asian baby that looked just like a bear cub. She nestled beside the white girl in line and the crowd was briefly hushed. Awe could be described as the emotion running through the group and rightly so. Here was a miracle. I, a true non-believer in just about everything, was standing right beside a miracle. Four infants in a row at the Department of Motor Vehicles. And there was more. We had almost every continent represented here, every color: black, white, yellow and brown. America had truly taken hold of what it had originally prescribed for its own health, to take in the poor of all lands so that each may find happiness and fairness within their day to day lives. This miracle was as much a testament to the foresight of the founding fathers in their belief that all men are created equal as it was a simple and beautiful coincidence which represented to me, and everybody in line, a disarming, a peacemaking sign given from, dare I say, on High. But then something happened.

When the Asian lady came into the line the other mothers naturally opened up a space for her, as if they had been waiting for her, so that within the boundaries of the blue rope the women and their carriages made a quaternity symbol no less impressive than that of the cross itself. Asia looked at Europe and Africa at the Southern American hemisphere. I strained my very brain to detect some symbolism in this thing that was happening which couldn’t already be explained just by looking at it. The Trees were blasting in my ears, Rush’s own rock symphony extraordinaire, and yet I could gather no more knowledge than what my eyes perceived. Then I remembered about a story I’d read concerning the four corners of the world, each assigned a color and a wind and in the middle of it all was an open space where I could only gather that the mixture of the four would materialize into a miracle or at least a symbol of some sort, one of, if not rescue, one of hope and salvation and acknowledgment for its accidental placement within the elements of direction, time and supernatural forces.

That’s the kind of thing that students of philosophy think about. That’s why they wear headphones in the DMV and crank Rush. Otherwise they just think too goddamned much for their own good. I turned down the music a little bit and listened to the ladies speak to one another. They chatted about this and that, how cute each others baby was, how many months. The black lady blushed a little bit when she asked the Asian lady where she got “him” his outfit. The Asian lady replied that “she” got her outfit at BabyLand. This chit chat lasted about five minutes. I had already turned around and had turned up the volume again. The ladies had settled in cozily. The black and Asian ladies and their babies were side by side behind the Hispanic lady and even the white lady a little bit. One of the strollers bumped up against my leg as the line turtled along. I turned and smiled, but didn’t want them to do it again. Next thing I felt was a little hand beating my calf. I turned around again, and smiled again, this time at the little white baby who was doing the pummeling of my extremity. Cute. Not. Then we moved a couple inches again when from behind me a roar was released, a primal scream and I turned around to see which one it was. It was the Hispanic baby. There was a red ring on her lap, one half of a pair of rings belonging to the white baby. Of course, the one baby threw the ring at the other and made it cry. Simple enough. Let it go. But the Hispanic woman was angry. She bent down and comforted her child while holding the ring in her hand. As she did so, almost as an afterthought, actually without seeming to think at all, she threw the ring back into the stroller of the white baby, quite hard I thought. Unfortunately, she somehow managed to make it a perfect shot right into the baby’s eye. The white baby screamed in pain and I got scared a little bit and moved forward out of the way on instinct only, not because I was afraid of being beat up by an infant. The white mother kind of looked like she was in shock. She hadn’t seen her baby throw the ring at the other baby. She looked like she couldn’t believe that someone would throw something at her baby. While she soothed her crying baby, she picked up the same ring and threw it, just like her darling son had done, back at the Hispanic baby. This sent the Hispanic mother rocketing. Her face went red with anger. I thought she was going to swing on the white girl, but she didn’t, but only because she didn’t have time. Her anger made her forget where she was at, in the confines of a line at the DMV. She took a step backwards, perhaps in preparation to accost the white girl, and made the mistake of forgetting that the Asian lady’s baby was right behind her. She stepped on the wheel of the stroller and I watched in amazement as she fell backwards, her butt landing inside of the carriage where the little Asian bear cub sat up staring sadly at the world. The Asian lady went nuts. She wasn’t waiting to find out why the Hispanic woman sat on her child, but instead started punching the back of her head with such vicious blows that I got sick to my stomach. The Hispanic girl, all she wanted was to get up off of the baby and beat up the white mother, but she couldn’t because by now the Asian lady was trying to pull a clump of hair out of her head easily two inches thick around. Finally, the Asian lady succeeded. Then she fell backwards past the black lady’s baby, but not without first accidentally kicking the black lady’s baby in the face with her foot. She held a clump of black, Hispanic hair in her hand. That’s a weird sight, you know? The Asian lady had nothing against the black lady’s baby, but the black lady, taking care to protect her own child, inadvertently placed him in harms way by pulling him back just as the Asian lady fell. It was a complete mishap that the Asian lady’s black sneaker kicked the infant in the head.

I looked at that little baby, its Chicago Bulls cap on his head, and it seemed that he looked at me for a second, asking me somehow whether now it was alright to cry. Of course, I thought it was, and a moment later he let out the biggest wail of any of the infants heretofore. Above his eye was a red and bloody gash. When the black lady saw this her face went ashen and she just turned and went for the Asian lady who was now flat on her back on the cold white linoleum of the DMV. She started punching on the Asian lady, hitting her and hitting her and then kicking her, but the Asian lady was full of surprises. She actually rolled about five feet to get away from the black lady and when she came back she kicked the black lady, full on Kung Fu, I shit you not, in the head, using some technique that seemed to allow her to kick twice with the same extension of the leg, once from each side of the foot.

I couldn’t believe it. It was something I’d only seen Jackie Chan do before. She was soon beating the living hell out of the black lady. I knew then that I had to do something. I had to stop it, but I was so much just in shock that I, like everybody else in the room, could do nothing but stare. I mean, this all happened in a matter of seconds. I turned my head and watched for a moment the white and Hispanic mothers rolling on the floor, the Hispanic girl’s ear in between the teeth on the jaw of the white mother. This was, undoubtedly, the second most vicious girl fight I had ever seen, just after the one I had watched ten seconds before. All four babies screamed at the top of their lungs. For a moment, a moment that I term a “moment of clarity,” just before I jumped over the rope and grabbed the white girl to keep her from ripping off the Hispanic girl’s ear, I realized that the baby strollers had all been turned in upon one another by sheer accident. The Asian mother’s baby had switched places with the white mother’s baby in line. The black mother’s baby had switched places with the Hispanic mother’s baby in line. All had been turned to face each other, each baby facing another baby across what I noticed was, once again, a true quaternity symbol. The odd thing that I noted was that I was standing in the very center of the four babies and that’s why I’m telling you this now. I need to understand what it means that I filled the center place, me, but all the babies were crying.

Published in: on June 24, 2012 at 1:47 am  Leave a Comment  
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Modern Friendship

Donny is making sure that everything goes right with his new job. His last one was less than stellar, which was surprising seeing that he came out of a good school and could have gotten any job that he wanted. It’s funny when you see things like that, makes you feel pretty good about yourself, since your own job is only so-so, you didn’t come out of a good school so that’s the way it goes. Of course, you never really see him doing anything with the old gang since he lives so far away. He probably has a whole new life that he couldn’t even begin to explain to anybody the proper functioning of. Terry wouldn’t have asked him about the way that he still snow boarded a lot, even after the recession, had she not known that he probably did. It seemed pretty obvious that Donny was going to be one of those guys who would always snowboard, as long as his knees didn’t give out on him which a lot of the time people’s knees did. I guess it’s not really our job to predict what will become of our friends. Sure, we worry about them, but what are we going to do about them. If I were to tell Donny to do this or to do that, he wouldn’t really know how to take my advice because he doesn’t really know me that well anymore. We all change so much over the course of the years so that to talk to someone is sort of like taking a shot in the dark as they say. What are the odds that my vantage point will even be anything close to one that the new person would respect? Not likely. It’s not like we could all still be at school together or on the same job together. Like, what is the story with Tre’ who moved to South Carolina. He was always scared of the south, or at least he said, racist, “they’d kill you down there.” But then he got that job with that communications company and the next thing you know he’s going to Panther games and playing golf. Fear keeps us all down. I hope he makes it. I’m sure he will. Why wouldn’t he? See, I take up the worry for him even after he lost it. That was where we were at when I last saw him and I guess that’s where we will always be. Haven’t seen him in awhile so how would I know how he really is? Mary is having her second baby. That relationship with Tre’ was always the oddest thing. I always thought that they would make it. Went out for four whole years, but sometimes the black/white thing doesn’t work out. Still four years is still pretty good. They were going to have babies together and Tre’ was going to be a sportscaster, but he didn’t. You never know though, he might still end up being one. He is in communications. But he strayed and then she revenge strayed and you know how that sort of thing goes. Always a failure. You can’t hurt someone else to bring them back to you. Mary told me once that she thought that the world was like a vampire, it sucks the life out of you just when you think it’s the greatest thing. I guess she meant that vampires are handsome then they bite. I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter, I guess. She found Clay not six months after Tre’ and she broke up and he was the right kind of guy for her, a cop even, perfect for a girl who was really insecure. She’d make it a better world if she could, become a peace activist or save the whales, but she just raised babies with Clay now and what do you know, they got another on the way. The way things change. April will make it one day, that’s for sure, Smart as a whip. She’d sing songs to her boyfriend asking him for his opinion and he told me one time that he couldn’t take it anymore. He said she was good, but she was too good. The fact that she really could make it in Hollywood made it hard for him to trust the relationship. Why? I asked. It was obvious. Because compared to what she would become he would be a shlep. He would always be a shlep. They were both medical students then and she never stopped and she never went to Hollywood and they’re happy now, but I wonder about it a lot. Will she someday have to just leave and chase her dream? I couldn’t see how she could just stop all that like that, just for a guy, but she did. Still, she was always smart. What I mean by “make it” is that she will make it in the way that she always dreamed of making it, life as a really good thing and happiness as a standard thing, no regret. She’ll make it even though she will never be Brittney Spears or whoever she used to want to be. Tom, on the other hand was like this lost cause after he didn’t make it as a catcher in the big leagues. He became a P.E. coach, but his wife Beth who I got to know a little while later when Tom foisted her on all of us like a consolation prize for not making it in the big leagues always seems a little upset, not upset, I would say, but a little disappointed, like the guy she married was the baseball star and the guy she got was the middle school P.E. coach. Not that that’s a bad thing to be. They have a kid now, a baby boy, and he dresses him up in Yankee caps. He’s a big Yankee fan even though he’s from Baltimore. Go figure. Anyway, they’re going to make it too, but you can’t help being a little saddened when you start to sense the luster coming off of somebody else’s American dream. Clliff never let that happen. He went on to actually work at NASA after getting out of the Army. He was some sort of electronics specialist of some sort and now he’s a full on electrical engineer pulling down two hundred grand a year I figure even though I’ve never really asked him. He says that he is a robust example of the superiority of the American dream. His words. He came from a really poor family. I didn’t know him back then, but he said that he would share bowls of soup with his siblings and have to go without heat in the wintertime. Luckily, he grew up in Arizona so that wasn’t such a bad thing. The last time Cliff had anything to really add to our sense of community he showed up at a wedding between Tammi and Dave in a clown suit. This was an inside joke between he and Dave that they said came about after a night of heavy drinking. Whatever that was. It was funny. After that he was mostly all business and now it’s obvious. You point to him in conversations whenever you want to keep it light and happy. Still a bachelor. Living in a highrise apartment overlooking the ocean in Miami. Envy there, boy. Big time envy and always good for a smile, Cliff. I wonder if it was real. Always so happy. Probably. Not like Karen who fell off of a bridge in Alabama. It wasn’t that high, but it was high enough for everybody to worry about her. She landed good and a little bad so that now her spine is a little whacked. She got lucky. She was horsing around with the kids and boom. Over she went. She said that she thought one of them was going over and she ran as fast as she could. The kid had climbed to the other side of the rail and when she got there she tripped and plop. Over she went, landing in a dried out creek. Such tragedy. She’s lucky she’s alive. Karen was always the slow one and now this. She wasn’t slow in that she was slow physically, but slow mentally. Glasses. You know, not cool, whatever. Too bad. It makes me think of my own family, our own tragedies. The way that my aunt got sick with some disease I can’t even pronounce the name of. The way that Dolly, who was my mother’s other sister, died in a car crash when she was 21. Can you imagine dying at 21? What a shame. I’ve been lucky in my life. No major tragedies. Ken was lost in a snowstorm for a week when he went to Montana. One of his fingers got frostbite and he had to get it cut off. Always the adventurer Ken was, but that sort of thing makes you re-think things. Now he’s a dentist. Can do it even without that fingertip. You can make do with anything. People learn to write with their feet when they lose their hands. Abby was going along fine and then she got divorced. Big change. Sudden and real and the next thing you knew she wasn’t Abby anymore, but that single mom who needed help and what could you really do? She never needed help before. She would never have told you that she needed help but you can tell these things just by their tone. Who could ever really hide anything from anybody anymore? We all seem to be getting really really smart. They talk about the hive mind. Doesn’t everything seem to be like that? We all seem to know so much about what other people are feeling. Our responses seem to be so obvious that we almost feel that we don’t need to respond. Just go and look it up in the book! It’s there. The way that we are. Punch in the code, stay silent, and your response will be registered and duly noted. I guess that comes from just seeing so much of each other. We all know everything. We are all extremely wise and knowing. It’s too bad too. As we grow up and learn more and more about each other the bad comes up with the good until we’re thinking about people like Karen and what it must have felt like falling off that bridge. Not good, I suppose. I knew what Karen was thinking. She was thinking “is this really what my life has come to?” She had a couple of seconds to think that and that’s probably what she thought. What a letdown that something so stupid would be the cause of the ending of her life. Thank God she was okay, that’s all I have to say. When Freddy got that job working on those telephone poles in Boston we all thought he was crazy. He could have become a Karen any second every day of his working week, but so far so good. Sometimes everybody just looks at him and sees that smile and wonders how that smile could be attached to someone who goes up into snow and icy poles in the dead of winter, but there it is. Not a bad luck kind of guy. He’s keeping up a good face on the whole divorce thing. Amber said something about Freddy that I thought was cool. She said “anybody as crazy as that deserves to be as happy as Freddy seems.” True. Someone puts their life on the line so that you can watch T.V. or whatever deserves all the benefits in the world, all of them, not just the financial ones. He deserves a happy marriage, money and an innate ability to smile through any hardship. Others, like Craig, or Tony or even Renee would just as soon give it all up on the first curveball thrown at them by life. They were always slightly downward smiled. I don’t know if that’s a phrase, but it describes them. You know the type, a little bit of something too serious in their eyes. Everybody understands what I’m saying. Not a lot of friends. Renee seems to be okay, though. She’s back with her family after the trouble she had in Kansas with her ex-husband. He beat her. She never talks about that, but everybody got that feeling from her. It was in the hatred that she seemed to talk about. Not so good. And Tony was just serious from the get-go, a philosophy major. Not many people would give Tony much of their attention in the real world because he didn’t want it. He’s doing pottery or something, but I don’t hear from him much. Something like two years have gone by since he gave up the job in the billing department of that department store chain. He spent ten years there. Can you imagine? A philosophy major in the billing department of a major corporation. Enough to drive you batty, I would think. He said that Thoreau said it was better to sit on a pumpkin then to sit on a throne if you’re not happy. So he started making ceramic pumpkins, I guess, and sat on them and I suppose that it made him happy. One of those down mouthers who were able to graduate up to being a straight horizontal lipper, or something. Whatever the proper thing to say is about someone wwho probably just doesn’t know what it means to be happy. Doesn’t have the equipment. Maybe from childhood. Maybe I’m the same way. Can’t be happy. I feel like I can be, but then again, I don’t know. I haven’t talked to anybody in years, not really, not even on the phone. I’m glad that we can keep in touch though. I’m glad that I’m still a part of their lives. Sometimes I get lonely, I guess. The past is the past and you should let it go. Most of them are becoming like little cartoon characters though and it disturbs me a little bit. I sometimes think that maybe we should all have a reunion, but in the meantime I’ll take what I can get. But now I’ve gotta go. I’ll check in with my friends later after I get back from helping mama.

Published in: on June 4, 2012 at 3:18 pm  Leave a Comment  
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Session (cont.)

So how’s the philosophy thing going?
Not good.
Why?
Well, you just run out of it too much. You’ve always got the internet to go to in order to remember what it was, but then you get a little confused about what mattered and then you realize that there is too much anyway and to fuse it all into some sort of meaning would take a supercomputer. You could give a little bit of your own synthesis to the populace, but where would that really get you? It’s just a small thing really, to be a writer today, everybody reads, but meaning doesn’t seem to have a place to rest and sit still.
Are you bored with thought?
Yes.
Why?
Because.
Hmm?
You want me to answer whether I am bored with thought by giving you a thought that I would be bored giving you. Do you see? It is never ending. It’s perpetual swirls in the air that dissipate soon after.
So you strive after creating swirls that will last forever?
And how do you do that? How can your thought last forever? Will you have changed anything? Everybody gravitates to what they can touch, anything they can stomach or sexualize or raise them over another for longevity and survival sake.
But don’t you still have spirit?
Yes, I do. I have spirit, yes I do, I have spirit, howbout you!
Hmm?
High school cheer at football games. What’s so big about spirit? At a certain age you’ve failed enough that you are not locked down into anything in the world that really matters, the baser animal needs, you just have spirit and thought. The rest is dirty looks and people’s intuition steering them away from you because you have a tinge of death about you, once again, because you never locked anything down. After awhile you don’t even want to play anymore. You just want to quit.
How do you quit life? You don’t mean killing yourself?
No. I don’t believe in that. I would walk the earth first.
Then what?
I don’t know. Sometimes just quitting the whole thought game seems like the best thing to do. You’ve got the Buddhists who believe that this is the only way to go and they’re pretty sure about it, but if you yourself do it you feel like you are losing all of the mental work you have put in up to that point. A part of you believes that you should just go on thinking these thoughts that are getting less and less exciting for a prize that seems less and less real. I don’t know. I don’t want to quit and being a Buddhist would probably be a good thing for me, at least in a little way, not all the way. I’m not going to get a robe or anything. Thought betrays you after awhile because while you’re thinking something there is another part of you that says that you blew it in the past and now you’re just playing the game. You’re not successful at 46 in the standard way and you take that as failure as everyone else takes it for failure and you feel like you’re just trying because if you didn’t at least try you would look like a human corpse. Nobody wants to be a human corpse. Can you sense the energy running out of my very words? What’s underneath this lack of energy? Doesn’t seem like much. Who knows. Maybe there’s a whole new world there and I’m just holding on to the old one. The intellectual world when I’m supposed to give myself over to the spiritual world and see where that takes me. So, I’m always half going forward and half stopping. I’m on the fence as to what is important in life. All I can think of doing is calling it quits. Go day to day as I age and the philosophy fits me more and more.
Sounds bleak, like you’re giving up.
Giving up, what? Thought? Why not? Look where it’s gotten me. And caring too. I don’t have much energy anymore for either of these. I’ve had enemies and they’ve trained me that everything I attempt will be countered for the sheer joy of sadistic manipulation of another. They like this when a person has high ideals like I had. On the other end of the spectrum you have that endless ladder that you must climb to make it among these animals whose favor you seek. Who knows what sort of word or phrase you will use which will turn those with power to give you credibility against you forever? Who cares what other people think? I do and I want to stop forever.
Walk the earth?
Yeah, walk the earth. Stop caring, but still exist. Maybe I will be able to write one or two words that matter, maybe not, doesn’t really matter because they’ll just be taken up into the other Billion billion words being put out there on the internet that don’t matter either. I thought I would make a living off using my mind, but now, after failure at that, I don’t have the energy. I simply don’t have the energy or care to do it.
So what are you going to do?
I don’t know.

Published in: on June 3, 2012 at 12:51 am  Leave a Comment  
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Filth

Dee rose. Half there. Half not. They couldn’t tell if he was all drunk or if he spit up on himself some other way. The stuff coming from his mouth was blue, but the bottle was still in his hand. Conscious? They supposed so. Fuck it. It was going to happen anyway. Dean was there, the guy from the paper, or was it the magazine. He lisped around and talked about how he too ran with the angels. The Hells Angels. Right. Let him write. Dee sat back down and took off his pants. His dick was limp and there were bitemarks on it. He looked up at everybody and remembered. There. There. There she was finally, at his command, and then she bit and he figured, oh well, fuck it. Lucky she didn’t bite it off. She screamed something about how he held her head too tight or something. Dean was on his haunches. His camera was down and for this he was grateful, although it didn’t really fucking matter anymore. Stanhope gave him the drug and he didn’t ask. It wasn’t heroin, but something else. Fuck it. Who cares. It was going to happen anyway, this blue stuff, this stuff that would be blue at some point in his life, like death, it was, and that was what it was for, wasn’t it?

In ten minutes he remembered and he looked up and saw the anxiety on several people’s faces. They knew better, but they were talking to him, and he knew, he remembered, and he stood up and he let them take him and finally, he made it to the stage, pushed out there, by Renee, physically, who hated his fucking goddamned guts even though he paid her to be his slave. The rebellion was complete with that shove and she knew she wasn’t going to get fired because he knew there was nobody else in the world who would dare shove him like that, like he was an asshole, which he was, a fact he was fully cognizant of even while letting the blue foam take over the sides of his mouth and the stage lights sock him in the eye like a hater. Renee. He reminded himself to fire her, because it was the first time that he thought a shove is a shove is a shove and fuck all that.

In an hour and a half he was on his back speaking into the microphone about the world as a thermonuclear blanket laying itself over everybody, and nobody was exempt. He talked about the shit in his ass. He talked about the girl, Cynthia, who he fucked the night before and whose boyfriend sat by, with a thousand dollars in his hand and a dead relationship to boot. Another test. Another reason to be considered an asshole. So be it.

William Welkins of Southampton was dead to his family by this time. His mother forgot about him. When she saw his picture in a magazine she told the ladies beside her that he should have been aborted. She hated him that much by the time he was piling it into his veins in the name of love and art and swag and culture and making motherfucking ends meet. But success is funny in certain games and the blue foam which had a pink tinge under the light was a byproduct of that success. Had he really signed on for such a ride? He didn’t think so, but it was there. It was easy too. All the frustrations in his life to be screamed out at other madheads like himself. They pay me for this, he thought once, and laughed. It was actually while talking to Dean, the scrawny wannabe who can only write and nothing more. No fucking. No partying. Nothing for Dean, but that goddamned notebook, tape recorder and look of understanding interest in his eye. The fact that Dean at least smoked pot with the crew was his salvation from total nerdhood, that and the look in his eyes, the slit eyes that had something killer and I don’t give a fuck about them. Dean, who went to journalism school, never fucked his life up for want of some ethereal something else that ultimately could be had just through destruction. Destruction of the vessel. Just like in Bible school. The vessel. And that’s how he thought of it out there as he lay there and went into the fact that his shit was better than everybody else’s. That he could fuck a hamster and do it right and fuck all you people who find that fucked. Fuck You! And Dean would sit there and scribble. He would get his book out of it. Shit, megaplatinum without selling out like the shits. Time would end. Time would end. This was for sure. Time would end. And the blue would leave and the new drugs would come and the ending, the pleading in other people’s eyes would go away. Some people wanted him to be a square, man, a square, but he knew it was not possible because of the screaming in his head that had to come out. Was he insane? He fully believed that to be the case when he pierced his wrist with a large safety pin. He was going to pierce his eyeball, but Mary stopped him. She was the makeup lady. Dee and the make up lady in life threatening situations. About par for the fucking course and Dean scribbles and scribbles and where is mom in all this? With her letter, her ostracization, the disgust. And dead dad? What would dead dad think? And Leila of love and time gone by and hope lost. What would she say now, sitting in the town square with her brood and her good man and never straying into the memory of the filth that he actually was. Nothing. She told him to die. Good enough. The record company is good with it too. Eveybody on board? Everybody want to play the game? Shit. Here goes and there is blue foam as friend and the lights go down and when the ambulance comes it is sorry, but there really is nothing that it can do and the job was done and the show was complete and never had there been a greater performance with such an ending that more people secretly wanted than they let on. In the paper he was turned into a monkey and years later he’d entered the realm of a god. But he’d always known what he was. He was filth. Pure and simple. Filth – and people loved him for it.

Published in: on May 10, 2012 at 3:16 am  Leave a Comment  
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But a Glimmer in the Eye

Under Alex’s skin was the dullness again. The sound came from outside. Kids playing their tunes probably, little nothing sounds unaware of themselves that ruled anyway. He went to the window. Not kids, he realized, but the neighbors, people he didn’t like because he didn’t know them and they didn’t know him. By now, after seeing one another for two years, no one cared to bridge this gap.
He closed the window. There was that man who always walked his dog, talking to a woman with blue veins on her temple, a talker, her, one who spoke of things like friends and who gave little notices via her eyes about real meanings that had no importance whatsoever in the world of thought, of ideas, the things that Alex prided himself as having embraced like a lover. He had closed the window so as not to hear the tinny music that the lady always carried with her when she walked. The man never walked, but stood and watched his dog. He was old, too. There was no way to know about them, except that he was not a talker and she was. Did he put up with her as Alex had put up with her briefly before closing the window and going back to his computer? He had 134 Facebook friends. Yet nobody ever called.
He remembered the laughter of the woman. Over the many years laughter seems to lose its luster. It seemed fake to Alex, too loud, too loud to be real, for very few things caused so much laughter to occur unless the person wanted laughter to occur. You could not have real laughter through mere want, he knew. He looked at the happy people on Facebook, hoping that they were not as happy as they seemed. He hadn’t posted in several months and had considered getting off, but his computer was too old now and it wouldn’t let him. He was a slave to Facebook and friends who didn’t write to him, formerly good friends, friends that mattered. All avoided him and his only solace was in thinking that they avoided everybody else, too, that they were philosophically against Facebook so were off doing something else. They probably hoped the same thing concerning him, if they remembered him at all.
Alex had recently quit reading the newspaper in hope of gaining a little bit of solace. He had taken up reading again, novels: J.M. Coetzee, David Mitchell, Russell Banks, only the best of modern writers. He was going to inject the best of thought into his overly worked brain from now on. Everything else had somehow failed him. He had been like those Indians whose sole purpose is to make sure the sun goes from East to West every day. By reading the news he was a watchdog. Nothing too horrible could happen if he was on the job. In the end, he realized, this was a false notion. He had written letters to editors and politicians and had never gotten a response. He had protested the Iraq war. They killed anyway. Everybody does everything anyway, he realized. He had zero impact upon the world by fretting over it. Besides, now that he had let the world go, there would be more of a chance that it would hasten its own destruction and he would be forced to move on, to Argentina or Ecuador or the southern tip of Spain. The nuclear bombs probably wouldn’t go off in these places.
Alex could no longer hear the tinny music of the woman who laughed like she didn’t want to. Janie Frieberg was doing lunch with her sister and she was really excited. He couldn’t put Facebook away just yet. He kept going back to it. Janie was the only girl he had ever dated who remained his friend afterward. She seemed so dull to Alex, viewing her life on Facebook, so much so that he wondered what he had ever seen in her. When she left him, she had been talking about spirituality and politics and religion and sex. When she walked she would sometimes twirl. She was bright-eyed and ambitious, but when she saw him it always seemed like she was looking around him, like she was looking to see if there was something better than Alex. This eventually led to the inevitable breakup. One knows when one is not loved.
Now Janie was married to a man named Styrong. Alex couldn’t place the nationality of that name. Perhaps he was Asian or Scandinavian. It would have fit Janie to go after an international type. She was a romantic. That’s why they originally clicked. She went by Janie Frieberg Styrong on Facebook, proud of herself and her marriage. She was a regular gal now, wasn’t straying that far, was capable of being married and having kids while keeping her individuality which was always very important for she and Alex way back when. She looked better now than she did then, but Alex figured that was just because he still missed her. He loved her then and he loved her still, but now he had to face, everyday, that it was an illusion, that their relationship was a brittle husk at best while it was going on and now was a visible memory anytime he went to the computer. She was making vegetarian tacos for the kids. She got a new shawl that was wonderful. Does anybody else care that meat is murder?
Everybody on Facebook had become a caricature of who they really were, but that was all that he had of them anymore. He had no way of going back to them. He was a failure in this world, living on food stamps, nursing a painful tooth badly in need of a root canal, working at a job that had no interest in his Bachelors in English Literature with an emphasis in Poetry. Poetry. It had failed him. The words had not been enough. The world didn’t want them. After awhile the bitterness seeped into him like the rot into his tooth. More than once he cursed the gods of poetry, those same gods that he saw in the eyes of Janie, that he heard in the music of her voice. He knew what mattered and he was forced to question himself and his choices. Had he majored in poetry because he was lazy? Was he a failure in the world because the inner world really was not as important as the outer world? Had that been a lie? Why did the guys who never bothered going to school do better than he did in the minute intricacies of life? They all got married. All had children. All made upwards of 50 to 100,000 dollars per year. Alex realized that it was willful ignorance and lack of introspection that had saved them. They had not tried to trace the intricacies of God’s grand design and the universe rewarded them for it, like a bunch of Adams before the original thought.
Alex went down the row: Stan Villon, now a professor in South Carolina. Stan was a friend during his post-college days in Chicago. A guy who reminded Alex of Gandhi, Stan had been a student at the University of Chicago. Of course he would now be a professor. Alex sat with these University of Chicago students in old houses while snow fell outside, drinking coffee while reading to each other. They were equals there. Nobody cared that Alex had graduated from a small state school in California of little significance. He sat and listened mostly, always somewhat in awe of the intelligence of his fellows. They liked his poetry, but he always wondered whether he could ever be an intellectual peer to them. They had been vetted by the system and they could take that with them anywhere they went. He had gotten into college easily, for all that had been needed was a C average in high school. Everybody got into his school.
He had watched as these diverse human satellites in the world of the University of Chicago pulled in close just briefly and then veered away into their proper orbits. These orbits were distinctly different from his. Their orbits allowed them to be paid for subtle thought simply because they had also been practical. Many had been groomed. Now he felt that he had simply been allowed to view the subject matter. Nobody ever had any intention, he felt, of letting him also thrive by concentrating on the barely visible truths, pulling them up further and revealing them for the good of all man-kind. He thought of going back to school, a graduate school where he could study philosophy and psychology and poetry and fiction and write essays and treatises and be listened to. Perhaps that was what was needed, to be allowed to be one of the vetted ones, to push it forward, get the title behind his name and just go to work, get paid, get a family, a home, a life. But the brain was dulled by now, at 38, too dulled to forget the pain that he had experienced holding on to a dream made of vespers and silence. He had come to know the realm of poetry, but by this time, the sadness of getting there had chased him away. Half of him no longer respected something that could keep someone from having a family through its virtual insistence upon poverty in order to stay true. This rebellion pushed him back to Facebook. He scrolled down.
A slew of faces, some of them from his time attempting to solidify a weekly poetry reading that fell through. Once again, the real world trumped the inner world. He found that there was petty competition even in the realm of high spirituality. Life always seemed a balance between the animal and the spiritual and the animal always won. God Sex ruled, of course, perhaps because of the spirituality involved on some deeper level, but with it always came the baser power structures, the evil little victories, the savoring of the defeat of others. Once again, the poetic ideal was corrupted by two little things called hope and belief. There was Roger Milens and Fay Disiwala. They were good poets and went on to be in a theater company. He never really knew what they did with the rest of their lives, but they drove nice cars, had mates, were nice people, but aloof. Everybody was aloof. Poetry was about intimacy with others. You could play it, but Alex found that few wanted to live it. God Fun was really the key here. Fun was the ideal once people got together. The urge to laugh became a sort of religion. Perhaps if people couldn’t laugh after every sentence then everybody would have to cry. Everybody would just break down and cry. As people age, the idea of tears became the enemy. No matter what everybody was doing, no matter what a group believed in, the idea of fun always reigned supreme. It was the same on Facebook. Everybody was putting on their perfect face. In the meantime, nobody communicated anymore. Nobody cared anymore. They had all virtually laughed themselves to death.
Brent Helow, Slim Fawaskawa, a Japanese dude who was really funny. Another one Alex didn’t really know. Slim was one of those guys who was in and out. He had an invisible wall around his head, a perpetually smiling head, a mouth of perpetual wit and glee, but a wall nonetheless. He was just another who came out and then went back in where Alex could not go. The death of intimacy, Alex thought. Facebook was becoming a symbol to him of the death of ever being able to connect on a true level with somebody ever again. All of his friends were on it. Every friend that was listed he now knew did not want to know him anymore. It would have been better had he not initiated contact at all. They would have been better off left in the warmer clouds of memory. If left there, there would have been a hope of contact once again, real contact, and it would have held surprise and the memory of the more authentic moments of the past, the true laughter that had simply had to stop. Alex understood having to move on, but he couldn’t quite understand coming back in such an impersonal way. All reunions had been wasted. He would never have a reason to really see these people ever again. They were Facebook friends after all.
Julie Lowe, a model and actress, a stranger; Giselle Luidi, an intellectual from college who laughed like a hyena but behind her glasses possessed one of the finest noses he had ever seen. She was a beauty that didn’t know it who became a business-type, he thought, wasn’t sure, stocks and bonds. Smart girl. He had re-united with her without a word, a simple acceptance of the other’s existence, an acknowledgement that the one is happy that the other is not dead. They had once found themselves alone together for four hours, and talked about everything from politics to the Miami Dolphins. There had even been a chance at love, but it fizzled. Both held back. Both had a feeling about the other, that it just wasn’t that way. They were right. A hello without a hello was in order. Strike Giselle. Tom Julienne, Ty Uflado, a true laugher, a big smile, outdoorsy, probably not at the computer that much. Alex envied him. Jim Lowry, Hillel Lowenberg, Gail Stormer, the list went on and on. All happy. All knowledgeable of him, always would be, none of whom really cared. He hadn’t gotten a personal message by any of them in over eight months.
Alex closed the lid of the computer. Perhaps he could go to the library and use one of their computers to cancel Facebook. He would do it soon, but there was always a waiting list at the library. Outside he heard more laughter. He went to the window and a couple of middle-aged women had joined the dog watching, radio-listening group, whiling away the hours with innocent banter. The middle-aged ladies were loud. They were big lunged laughers who found everything funny and yet had nothing at all to really say. This was the way of the world. People as they aged had gone back to the placid non-thinking of who they really were after all of the bravado of having to be the hero to insure themselves food for their gullets in their old age. At a certain point the hero is let go and the simple, gurgling stream is taken back into their hearts and minds; simplicity and laughter and mere feeling of presence without any impulse to dream forward a finer existence, a more poetic existence, one that magically transforms others while transforming oneself. The idea of a spiritual utopia had been replaced with a toaster and cream cheese reality.
Alex watched the group talk below him for a little while and then went over to the dresser and opened his book. He had picked up, once again, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. After only a moment he closed it and picked up a pen and a small personal journal. In it he wrote:

Ever long the day
Not knowing then
That I would never know
Having sought solace
Where solace dare not dwell
I roam still ever inward
All the people gone
A few old faces
Remembering me -
A flicker
Before all – we fly

#

Published in: on December 16, 2011 at 11:38 pm  Leave a Comment  
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Eastside All-Star

I lost the game. I lost the fucking game for ‘em. Jim Buckley came up to me and said it best: You lost the fucking game, Chatworth, and he was right. I lost our team the championship.
Five years later I was walking around the high school hallways all stoned like I usually was and I ran into this kid named Ripley Knox, a bigger stoner than me. He showed me what he had in his bag and I told him I had two bucks and he said that was enough to get a little buzz anyway so we went to the park, just ditched school like we did all the time anyway and sat under a tree and he lit up a joint and we passed it back and forth and when I tried to give him the two bucks he said fuck it so we enjoyed the joint together on this the first sunny day of three weeks when I finally said to him,
“Ripley, you remember that game I lost for our team back in the majors?”
“Yeah, what of it?”
“Well, it just don’t seem right that one person can lose a game for a whole team does it?”
He looked at me all stoned and shit and just nodded and then said,
“Yeah, why not?”

I agreed enough with him, but I was suddenly angry that he would believe something could be so, then thought again of it, and remembered that day and how it was all my fault. There was no question about it. But I wanted to ask Ripley now that we were more grown up and shit. Ripley played right field more than me back then so he would be honest with me. His mother grew his pot. So I say to Ripley,
“Yeah, I guess so.”

I know so, but I say it that way. Sometimes one guy can screw it all up for everybody. He had me at second base because Ricky Tynesdale was out with the flu. Ricky was good, consistent, but he wasn’t the star of the team. Right off this kid hits me a grounder. It goes through my legs. That’s cool. Shake it off they tell me. But I could see that the coach was pissed. That kid finally made it in on a triple hit by another kid. 1-0.

Then we got a rally and tied the score. We were doing good when I get up to the plate and take a walk. That’s good. That loads the bases and this kid named Kenny was up who wasn’t too bad, but batted seventh. There were two outs and I was leading off a little bit when I see Cindy Miller. I’ll never forget the moment. Because just as I stepped off that base there was Cindy in her little junior high cheerleading suit bopping up to the stands. I think her brother played on the other team. I just got a real quick look at her tits when all of a sudden I hear “bam!” and this kid playing first base just smacks me right in the chest with his glove and then sticks his hands up in the air and gives out the biggest “yeaaaah!” I’ve ever heard. He was like some sort of Viking warrior or something. We all trotted in and I sat down on the bench. Nobody said anything to me except for one kid. Vincent Trollo. I think his family was in the mob. I don’t remember what he said except that it included the fictitious name “Wackworth”and it was a direct allusion to my own name of Chatworth.
I went back to second base and prayed nothing else bad would happen. But God had taken a little vacation for those two hours I would soon learn. Another ball did come to me which I fumbled. That man on base did score so that we lost our lead. The next kid up hit it to center field and he got on first. The next kid hit it to the shortstop who lobbed it directly at second base because he was unable to call it back after it left his hand. He had just assumed I would be there.

For some reason and to this day I still don’t know why, when he hit it to our shortstop, Randy Valasquez, I knew, I mean, I really knew where I was supposed to be at, but the trouble was that I was right in the running path of this kid going to second and I jumped back because I was scared and he passed me. The next thing I knew I was trying to beat this kid who had been running hard for a good three seconds. There was no way. When Randy threw that ball to me I wasn’t even close to the bag yet and it bounced on the ground and this kid just kept running. I couldn’t believe it. He must have thought he was like the big running guy on that team so he just kept running and finally I threw the ball to our third baseman, Vic Green, but the goddamned ball just twisted or something and I threw that thing about ten feet over his head and this kid just kept running all the way home. The kid who hit the ball made it to third and then someone knocked him in. When we got back to the bench I sat down like usual and didn’t say anything. Vincent Trollo was all belligerant then.
“You oughtta take that glove, Wackworth, and whack with it because it ain’t doing none of us any good out here.”
Then the coach cut in and told Trollo to shut up and sit down. I wasn’t afraid of Trollo. He could kick my ass, but first he’d have to kiss it. It didn’t matter much. The coach took me out for a few innings. The score was five to three. I was involved in every one of their runs and every one of their runs shouldn’t have been a run. I was ready to give up sports. I was twelve and soon to be thirteen. My big brother smoked cigarettes and I would too. He told me about this girl who he made out with in the back of his Blazer. How her tits just popped out of her shirt and then just sat there bouncing around and around like a couple of water balloons. That’s what I’d do. So I sat there and waited for the game to be over and for me to be thirteen and then fourteen and then maybe fifteen and by then I’d have watched more water balloons bounce around than Trollo or anybody on my team. But sitting there thinking those thoughts, trying to rescue myself from my low opinion of myself, I knew I’d just about lost the game for us and I prayed the coach wouldn’t put me back in. Then came the fifth inning of a game of seven.
“Chatworth, right field.”

I was back. I was back in right field. Nobody hit the ball to right field. They took out little Jimmy Grove, a kid whose hand was backwards so after he caught a ball he would take it off, place it on his backwards hand and throw it. His good hand was his left one, but I think he was a natural righty because where Jimmy would throw nobody would feign to know. He once threw a ball behind himself, over the right field fence. Before anybody could tell him not to climb over to get it he had already done so, failing miserably yet in an original fashion because on the fall to the other side his belt got caught on the chainlink and the umpire had to unhook him. The kid who hit it to him got a home run. Our coach protested, but he lost the argument. It was just not worth pursuing really. It’s one of those arguments that because it had to become an argument at all we all stopped and thought about what we were doing out there in the first place. It was the most absurd thing we’d ever seen, any of us, except perhaps for the day when I lost the championship for us.
So I was in right field. The fifth went by. No problem. Then came the sixth. We got a run. They didn’t. Then came the seventh and we score two on a home run by Vincent Trollo. I was closer to being able to go home. It’s six to five. Us. We get up again but we don’t score. It’s the last at bat for the other Tigers. My team, the Giants, hadn’t won the championship ever as far as anybody can remember. And that’s how it was, but then I saw Ripley lighting the roach and thought to myself even if it was my fault it couldn’t have been completely. We were a team. The other guys could have hit more or done more of something good but they didn’t. They just didn’t make as many errors as me.
“You believe that, Rip?”
“Yeah. You lost the game for us, man.”

“And you didn’t? You only played two innings before your dad came and got you.”
“So. At least I didn’t make any errors.”
“You didn’t play, man!”
“I played.”
“Right field.”
“Yeah, but I played.”
“I just don’t know anymore, Ripley.”

It’s not that I wanted to vindicate myself to Rip. Rip was always a bigger loser than I was. I was ten times better than him and there he was sitting all smug smoking the last of his joint like he was Mark McGuire or something. This little runt made me sick. But, you know, I couldn’t shake it. He was right. I made too many errors and therefore I had to take blame for the loss. I remember it differently now than it actually was. After so many years you turn events into happenings. It’s like your first kiss. You remember every moment. Every sensation. Unfortunately, that ball was like that. That ball was like a big sailboat floating over my head. I remember my hand reaching out for it and then suddenly realizing it was easily ten feet away from me. Why I reached for it I don’t know. I can imagine what I looked like as if my memory of the situation included a camera angle from the benches. I saw that thing up in the air so high and I started running in. I was running in because I was going to catch it. It was hit so high and I would get that thing so I ran and ran until I started feeling this weird something in my limbs. It was like my limbs were calling me stupid or something. I didn’t feel right. I felt like I was being torn in two because I’d run way too far in and I was suddenly aware of this ball coming back down to earth behind me. I know I should have run sideways, but I didn’t. I started running backwards as fast as I could. By this time Tim Rowe had started running for it and he was calling me off but I couldn’t tell where he was so I just kept running backwards as fast as my waddling little legs would take me until I plowed right into Tim and our heads knocked together and I knocked him out. Swear to God.
I remember seeing that ball rolling away from Tim and Tim’s eyes sort of rolling up in his head a little bit. I remember turning around and looking at that kid running those bases, heading for home and then back at Tim and then back at the ball which had stopped. Vincent Trollo was running out to right field from first base so I knew I was going to be in deep shit, but I still didn’t go for the ball. All I could see was Tim’s little white boy face, the nose all upturned and red and a little snotty with those eyes half open and his arms spread out to his sides and suddenly I didn’t care about that little ball standing there in the grass like it was. I understood better the absurdity of the game, why God would make a child like Grove, with that one arm, want to be equal to the Vincent Trollo’s of the world and I thought just for that moment that if that ball never moved again then the world would be a better place.

Then David Rice got it from left field and threw it to Vincent Trollo who was about two feet from me and he threw it way high over the catcher. The kid had gotten his home run already. It was a waste of time. We’d already lost. I remember Vincent Trollo then. It was like he wasn’t even aware that Tim was knocked out cold. He comes up to me and pulls me up by my shirt and looks in my face and calls me the worst thing a person can call another which I won’t repeat here. And I look at his ugly face and the next thing I know I’ve spat in it and he’s on top of me hitting me and me looking over there at Tim all knocked out as I tried to block the punches from my face and then the coach stopping Vincent Trollo and a bunch of people trying to revive Tim, including Ripley.

“You were there,” I told Ripley.

“I know.”

“You know what happened.”

“Yeah. Tim got knocked out and you got beat up and you lost the game for us.”

“No I didn’t.”
“Yes you did.”

But I was through arguing with Ripley. He’s just like everybody else in this world who thinks that winning is the only thing in the world that matters.

Published in: on December 1, 2011 at 5:29 pm  Leave a Comment  
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Bus Route 270

Bus Route 270

The mind is a vast sea, her turbulent waters formless, yet there is form. The road there, his hands there on the huge bus steering wheel, the twelve people sitting behind him on this lonely-ever ride from East Taylor Avenue all the way to Stearns Mall and back. Clive was only 33, but he felt 40. He was too fat for 33. He had found solace in food, and the sitting, of course, led to 150 pounds too many. The solace he sometimes found was a gift, seeping in from the edges of life. Then there were his nightly bus dreams, so random. Half the time he was at ease but then he would flit into a tense and shaky world.
Had there not been a barrier between he and those four million people he knew that he would have lost it long ago. He wouldn’t have been able to control yelling at the masses that do the stupidest things: bring cigarettes on to the bus, become belligerent, or do things like talk uncontrollably while hordes wait to board. Stupidity was so prevalent among his riders that he gave thanks to the Almighty for the barrier. The payment system was automatic and flawless. The only ones he had to worry about were those who didn’t pay, but most paid. Few feel that they can scam a city bus and get away with it. The bus driver was always right there.
But Clive wasn’t right there, not really, for he was too much aware of life. His thoughts were his burden. He could not pull himself from feeling the wracking yet silent storm that doctors call the unconscious. While others go through their lives in basic, outward ways, Clive lived as a true introvert. He made friends with moments, friends or enemies, that is. Unlike others who looked forward to the future while holding tightly to the present moment, those heroes, Clive’s present moments were always things that grabbed him, or perhaps he them, and he was whirled upwards, this way or that, or even all the way down.
Perhaps he was bi-polar, an ex-girlfriend had told him that, but she had been angry with him. He didn’t think so. He was a man who felt as deeply as any woman. He just couldn’t stop feeling the show, the movement of the inner realms. He never made a show of his inward confusions or expansions. Never rambled or raised an eyebrow. He betrayed nothing, but he traced and remembered every colored mood, often perplexed by how things he didn’t even know he was thinking about made him feel.
“You’re too sensitive, Clive. Why don’t you be a man about it,” once said Nancy. Nobody had ever taught him about this unseen ocean inside. He had never sought help. He was simply its chained perceiver, living in an unlikely way, dismissed by most as emotionally void, as day traded day. He didn’t like it, didn’t like living in what he once thought to himself, driving the bus down 12th, a “poetic” fashion. If he could communicate what he felt people might sympathize with the death of his upward mobility, his petrified potential, but they wouldn’t understand him. No way would they understand him. It would be like a foreign language to them, nothing but symbol and fateful, invisible causes; hurts and answers all wrapped up in a cloud.
He couldn’t help attempting to follow the logic of his personal chaos. Sometimes the unconscious river would rise and he would feel a certain emotion that would provide an explanation pointing at actual forms, reasons for his existence and state, like a bottle suddenly visible bobbing on top of the placid movement of the water. These realizations could carry him if only briefly. It would perhaps be a discovery concerning something somebody had said; a relative in the past, perhaps an injustice recently survived that would give him peace and a sense of forward movement that he felt might possibly lead him away from hopelessness, which was the number one thing that kept him driving the bus and not taking chances.
The flow went on and on as he drove these manic streets and he knew about it mainly through his moods which he studied like a scientist, hoping that some final redeeming, life-giving truth would be released and end the process once and for all. He hoped, and there was a lot of hoping, that he would be allowed in on the true story of the process of what he was, because it held secret promises of safe and happy dreamworlds into which to escape and rest.
To live in dream, to bathe in fantasy, with its smooth edges and lifting truths, was the only thing that would budge him out of his chair into a better future. Non-interruption of the dreaming flow could provide the initiative to find more practical truths, things you can take to the bank, like finding that first bit of gold in a giant unseen vein beneath you. To live in dream would be to live easily without first having to wade through those fetid emotions that Clive ducked like incoming fire.
He turned on 7th again and then scratched himself under his thigh ferociously. The itch was a spike, as though his body were revolting suddenly. When he turned he noticed the woman sitting there. She sat on the side seat reserved for the elderly, of which there were none, and when he turned he found that she was staring at him. He smiled faintly and then turned back to his job. The feeling of the woman stayed with him. She was also an African-American, 30-ish just like he was, and pretty, much too pretty for him, but plain enough that he entertained the idea of halving the window down and speaking with her, just for the hell of it.
He felt her while he avoided looking at her. Once again the feeling led him directly to all things past and present, the whole morass, necessary to deal with first in order to attain some better future. The process, so only his, frustrated him. He hated himself. He thought of Nancy and her way of being that was so other than his, then the way that she looked when he first met her at the bar on Tally Way back in Swiss Township, Maryland, where he grew up. Always Nancy, at first, then at last, for Nancy loved him and then ceased to love him.
Already this woman was painted with the color of Nancy so that she was really only half woman to Clive, half stranger and half Nancy, and therefore the mere idea of her was already polluted by the million thoughts that he knew he would have to endure if he were to actually pursue her. He pushed the dream of a new beginning away by snorting out through his nose, a push of air that he tried to cover up by wiping his nose as though he had had a natural impulse, a little sneeze. Aware of his odd reaction, his head naturally turned to the side and back at the woman. He was already tagged when their eyes met. She was still staring directly at him.
Perhaps she wasn’t staring at him but was only looking in his direction. Of course this could be the case. He turned nonchalantly and looked, this time straight on, just to answer the question for himself. She smiled at him and then lowered her eyes. My god, he thought, she likes me. She likes Me! But then he clammed up. The engine roared as ever. Of course, she doesn’t like Me! He quickly reasoned it away. When he looked again, she was no longer looking, but staring out the window just like all the others, watching the city go by, probably feeling what he felt every hour of his day. Of course she had disappeared. He wasn’t sure, but he had perhaps furrowed his brow. Or it would have been the distance that he could put between himself and another in a millisecond without knowing he was doing it. She was probably just like him, he thought. Life was here and now and if we cannot get away from the ugly and dull realities by making our lives better, then we are simply left with ourselves. But he doubted that she had ever gone as far as he could. He couldn’t conceive of such a thing by another, for Clive felt that we are left hanging by an unexplainably strong thread over a million-foot drop. What skill can keep you safe from the unseen world that wants to take you as its own, use you as its sustenance, yet lives unmolested inside in the guise of a perpetual flow of questions, beliefs and fears? We fear the silent monster of who we are behind our eyes, under our skins. In that space that made up Clive’s monster there were too many variable truths swirling and floating and begging for release. We humans, Clive felt, were here to provide that release, but the release is not for us, it is for it, the monster, the sleeping monster whose body is thought buried and pain unrealized yet fully anticipated. It is a ghastly thing, but Clive danced with it anyway, like dancing with a skeleton even while he knew that a woman would be a better dancing partner.
He had no other choice but to abandon her immediately. Nobody but he knew about the battle and, to be honest, he didn’t either, for he didn’t have the words, but he felt it, always felt it, and his belly grew fat in an attempt to appease it, his belief in it ever going away diminished with each passing day. For this reason, Clive had the feeling that he was on the way down. Although still relatively young, he was going down and away from the sweet oblivion of innocence and would soon be saddled with a knowledge that was not knowledge, but only ferocious reality, pointing only to the death of things, the end of things, the reality of hard social stratifications, the idea that there truly is nowhere to lay your head. He could not do harm to such a pretty woman and he knew he wouldn’t talk to her.
The woman got off of the bus without looking at Clive. She hadn’t liked him. He knew he had made sure of that. He did not have the energy to take on such a thing. Why would you go out there and find someone else not down here, the monster inside seemed to ask. Why would you try and escape the world that is more real than any other real because it is a part of you and the other is not? Why do you think that you could escape my knowledge ever? You must come back down and rest. All of everything inside of you will float you forever, take you from here to there. You will be pleased to be with me because I am what you would call “no more.”
More added complexity and confusion. No more gave hope that things would simplify, that Clive’s sensitivities would shrink. He would man up. It was this shrinking that he actually sought, but to go there just fed the monster in that it was also the reason he had put on the pounds. With the daily giving over of himself to the monster he had tried to replace himself with food. Unconsciousness seemed too much like death and he filled in this gap by eating as much as he could.
The incidence of food was perpetual. He ate a big breakfast, a bigger lunch and, of course, a huge dinner, a buffet if possible; The King’s Corner or Madame LaWang’s on 17th street. In food there was once again color, lightness and substance that seemed to bring on forgetting. It was a tangible act that reminded him that there was more inside than just a dark, swirling cloud of need. Hopelessness was briefly stayed. It was a clear marker of where the future actually lay, a real truth, physical. The future became the moment the food hit his tongue. The chewing sent the pleasurable real form into a pleasant real place that allowed him to revel in his body. He ate fast, he ate hard, like a man. He ate with style. It was always good form. But he also only ate alone, ever.
The thought of Madame LaWangs was pulsating inside of him now. It was 4:53 in the evening. In seven minutes he would wrap up this day’s work and someone else would get on the bus and take over for him. There was 9th to 15th left and he had a pretty full bus. The thought of Madame LaWangs eased him. He always got a little bit anxious towards the end of the day as the bus filled with people going home from their long days of work. There was more stupidity on the other side of the barrier toward the end of the day too, maybe because he had less tolerance for it, but still he believed it to be true. He would hold the angst inside of him and try to contain it at this late hour, but he knew it would only exit once his feet hit the pavement and he was on his way to Madame LaWang’s Buffet.
This day was like most others. There had been a few problems where he had to open the window and speak to someone in a tone he despised. He would slam the window shut and it would be gone, but it would have been an extra something to add to the swirling world inside that owned him. Clive knew that he would have a heart attack after awhile if he kept on this job. He understood about stress and its deleterious effects on the human body, but he had no choice. He was a bus driver, fat and too old to do much else anymore. There was 13th Street. Eight off, six on. Of course, he wasn’t too old, but he had accepted the notion that he was.
Nobody knew how much Clive felt relegated to what he did, how he himself insisted upon his career without wanting to, how the monster inside insisted upon it. Nobody was going to cut him a break anymore. He had lost his beauty and his personality, given them up willingly for a paycheck until he perceived himself as everybody else did who got on the bus, as one of the unfortunates in the world, someone whose existence was relegated to going round and round and round on the same track day in and day out not unlike a rat in a cage.
Clive knew he was an object of pity, not scorn, he didn’t warrant that, but pity was just as bad as scorn. It is something that you cannot address with your fellow man. It is one of those things that people live with silently until they break down and cry silently to themselves, usually for other reasons. Tears are for when the monster gets too big and in order not to kill its host allows a venting of steam. A dead host equaled a dead monster. The pity of others was one of the things that made Clive want to melt.
He saw the last stop. He would get off here and take the system to the restaurant and then back home. He didn’t have to pay, of course. He just got on across the street, transferred once, and the next thing he knew he would be outside Madame LaWang’s, and then, after that, his apartment complex at 28th and Fairfield.
He pulled up to the last stop and there was Rachel, also African-American, who once opened her window and threw her shoe at somebody. She was aiming for someone far at the back of the bus, but instead hit an old man sitting in the third row. She had lost it, gone crazy, been suspended for six months, but returned because she was really a charmer, a really nice girl, and the bosses liked her. That’s Rachel, they all said, but that man in the third row wasn’t thinking that when that shoe hit him in the face. Clive made the stop, but did not open the door. He then motioned to the customers who wanted to get on that there would be a change of drivers. When Rachel was at the front of the row Clive opened the door and she got on. He quickly closed it.

Hey, Clive, the demon-children out today for ya?
Nah, not too bad today. How you doin’ Rachel?
I’d rather be on the French Riviera right about now, but I think I’ll do this instead. God, I hope they’re nice tonight.
They’re okay today. The full moon of the last few days not got them riled up about anything too much.
The moon don’t know how to act during the day. You got the sun. Them people sing songs to themselves in the daytime. That moon you talking about is on my shift, the moon and a bottle of Jack.
You deserve a medal then. Remind me to get you one for tomorrow.
A medal? Shit, I need a shrink. Once Robert’s settlement comes in I’m cutting back. Waaay back.
Maybe I should try and get a settlement.
You wanna have a bad back for the rest of your life? Shit, I’d still take this crummy job. He cries out in the night sometimes. He’s earned that money coming to him.
Keep her light, Rachel.
You too, Clive.

Clive stepped out of the bus and waded through the people all the while saying “excuse me.” There was only one thing on his mind and that was Madame LaWang’s. Being on a bus all day is like living in a rolling cage. Once Clive got on the ground things changed. The monster inside of the cage with him shrank a little bit, disappeared a little bit with the power of its host suddenly surging forth. That’s why they named these buffets fancy names about Kings and Madams, because when you’ve decided to go there you are in a position of power, you are tossing caution to the wind since too many instances of eating at buffets can kill you, and you, for a brief moment in time, stand up for what you want and go out and get it anyway. After a hard days work there was no hesitation. It’s the poor man’s simulation of a rags to riches story.
He got on Route 62 and made it to Madame LaWang’s in fifteen minutes. It was different as a passenger on the bus even though he was still in his uniform. People see you more as a person than an unfortunate automaton. There was a nice elderly couple sitting side by side in the elderly seats in front of him. They smiled at Clive briefly. A quick smile to someone on the bus was like a pot of gold. You would think that it would happen more, but it was really a rarity. Most smiles on the bus were defensive, but then again, you never know who you’re smiling at and Clive was no different than anybody else. This was a different plane and Clive relished it. To sit in the drivers seat is to sink into a vortex and do all that you can from going all the way down. Here was calm flight that made him know that the day’s battle was over. He had won another day’s pay. It was a small victory, the only kind he knew.
He got off of the bus a block from the restaurant and walked the rest of the way, passing a motel and a Circle K. The place was hopping. Clive forgot it was a Saturday evening, which brought him down a notch, because he used to plan every Saturday night by the middle of the week. Now Saturday had all the panache of a Tuesday. He went inside and the young girl just inside the door, Chinese, smiled and took him to a table. He didn’t wait. He went to the buffet line and grabbed a plate. First it was a little salad, a little thousand island, egg. Beside it was the Jello, which seemed wrong, but he knew he would come back for it. He moved on and went straight for the meats: chicken and noodles, beef and broccoli, chicken on a spear, beef on a spear. He piled it up on his plate beside some rice and then smothered the entire plate with sweet and sour sauce until he had to wipe the edges with his fingers and then embarrassedly lick them there in line.
He went back to his table and ordered a soda from the waiter. The waiter was good and quick and Clive drank a good portion of his soda before digging in to his food. It felt good. It was right and good. There was a God. When he finished the first plate he went back and got some of the things he had neglected the first time, the pot stickers, a little cheap sushi and some more barbecued pork, chow mein and rice. This would be it except for the Jello. He devoured the second plate almost as fast as the first. By the time it was clean he knew that he was done. He wouldn’t go back for more although he felt like he wanted to. The eyes are bigger than the stomach they say. After sitting there silently for a while, nursing his soda, he got up and went for the Jello. They had green and red, as always, and he grabbed the red for the hell of it, no other reason. He went back to the table and sat down and that’s when he felt the first pain.
He thought it was from sitting down too hard, but there was a dull yet distinct pain just underneath the rib cage on the right side of his body. He pressed his fingers into his belly right there and tried to relieve the pain by diverting his attention from it more than anything, but it did not go away. It was dull, but it was real. He couldn’t figure it out. He’d never gotten food poisoning before, ever. He put the Jello aside. He wouldn’t eat it. He’d had enough. He stared down at the remnants of his feast. Both plates still lay on the table. He studied the outlines of the plates and even the knit weave of the white tablecloth, something, anything, because this pain was growing stronger and stronger. After ten minutes he knew he was in trouble and he got up and paid the check and left. Outside, he went to the bus stop again and waited for the 270 to come and take him home. He would get in bed or take a bath and then watch TV in bed.
“Goddamn,” he said to himself, pressing down into his side, feeling for what was going wrong inside of him, but not knowing what he was feeling for, not knowing anything, but that he also sort of wanted to vomit now, too. Two minutes later after making this realization he did just that, sending a healthy Chinese dinner into a monstrosity that somebody working for the city would have to clean up with curses on their breath. Nobody was at the bus stop but Clive. For this he was grateful, but soon a young girl, about seventeen, white, walked up to the bus stop, also waiting for 270. Clive was in obvious pain now, but the girl said nothing. They stood there for a few minutes when she spoke up.

“Are you alright?” she asked him.
“No, yes, well, no, I’ve got the worst side-ache of my life. I just ate Chinese at Madame LaWang’s and I think they were trying to kill me.”
“Where is it at? Your stomach?”
“Yeah, sort of right here,” he pointed at the spot.
“Yeah, that’s your gallbladder. You got gallstones. My dad’s got gallstones and when he has an attack he’s curled up on the couch for hours. He says that taking a hot shower sort of helps, but really the only thing that works for him is pot. You got any pot?”
“No, I can’t smoke pot because they test me. I drive a bus.”
“Oh. Then take a hot shower. I don’t know if the gallbladder can bust or anything. I don’t think so. I think it’s your gallbladder.”
“Okay, thanks, my gallbladder. Jesus…”

They stood there quietly for a while as Clive moved from here to there, anything to keep the pain away. The girl said nothing more, fully comprehending the severity of the pain, her father after all. All Clive could think as he looked for places to press on his body that he hoped would trigger some sort of pain relief was “why?” Why me? Why now? Why not some other way that wouldn’t have led to a defective gallbladder, gallstones, whatever this girl thought it was? Why would God put all this fat on my body? Why wouldn’t God just tell me to stop it all, to stop the torture, the permanent ruminating over things that are real only if you allow them to be so? Why would God be invisible so that we all think that invisible things are good things, powerful things, things worth listening to? Why? Why? Why?
The bus came for the crowd. There were eight or nine of them. Clive got on last, gave a brief hello to Shari who was driving, but nothing more, and went and got a seat in the back to be alone with his pain. Everything was luckier than him. All of these people lived their day to day lives so sweetly. They lived in another world because they did not have the pain that he felt. They were rich and didn’t know it. The pain had escalated to twice what it was when he first felt it. It grew steadily, getting worse and worse even when he thought that it could get no worse. He considered going to the hospital, but he hated hospitals. It didn’t sound like it was life-threatening according to the girl whose dad gets rid of it with hot water and a bong hit or two. He’d ride it out. Besides, something inside of him was taking a whipping and the feeling, akin to anger, was actually somewhat delicious.
The monster that lived inside of him, lived on him, feasted on him, was screaming in pain just as Clive wanted to but didn’t because of the people on the bus. Lost questions were instantaneously asked, sudden deeply embedded angers were thought of and expressed through quick movements disguised as pain. His hatred of the inner world that had come to control him was gaining an upper hand through this painful episode and if he could, he would have killed it completely. He would have made it so that he never thought about his thoughts ever again. Then he would walk through the world proud and strong, and do only things that he was called upon to do, things that only had their place in the outside world, and he would gain traction and be bolstered where it counted and he would be a hero because his enemy would not be inside of him anymore, but out there, a simple place really, a place where the eye can see the situation and the brain can tackle it. No more full-body angst, wordless questioning, wordless answering, eye movements that are furtive because totally uninformed. He was sensing just how he was controlled by a million past experiences that had all sunk down deep into him and formed a coalition to resist ever facing the open day ever again. These were Clive’s failures. Clive’s. And Clive knew it now.
The dialogue within was a one-sided conversation about every failure that Clive had ever known. School, where he dropped out. He was going to be a doctor, yeah right; Nancy, a failure, because she loved him and yet he wanted to go out on Saturday night and bag a few blondes while he was still filled with his youthful vim and vigor; work, where he was afraid that the corporations he could have joined at one or two junctures would never let him become what he wanted to be, one, because he was black, and two, because he was uneducated, although everybody told him that he showed real aptitude at what it was that he had the opportunity to do; to be a psychological aide. Who knows, he might have become a psychologist. Instead he called it poetry and it almost killed him, but no more.
This poetry was being confronted with a steely gaze now by Clive as he sat in the back of the bus quietly boiling over with anger. It was all self-directed, an acknowledgement of his pitiful state, the monster he was realizing that he just perceived as “God.” He had never really done that before. Had he been wrestling with God every day in his cage of the bus? Could it have been that it was God that hated him so much, needed him so much, that he had lost any semblance of his former self? Once again, why? Why would God do that to me? What did I do? Then, where will I go? He knew it now. There was no way for him to stay. The pain was getting unbearable. He decided that he would go to the hospital. He screamed out.
“Hurry up! Hurry the fuck up!”
Shari looked crossly at him through her mirror.
“I’m not going to hurry up and you, of all people, should not be yelling at me from way back there. I’ll come back there and kick you off the bus and report you. You’re an asshole, Clive, I never liked you!”
“Yeah, why don’t you shut the hell up, man. Leave the lady alone.”
It was a long-haired hippie type sitting just in front of him wearing ear buds and reading a book. He was standing up for something. Here he was, in pain, dying possibly, not really, but it might as well have been since he had been dying slowly these last six years anyway, and this college kid was telling him to shut the hell up.
“You don’t know who I fucking am, do you?” said Clive.
He relished the way he said it. It was unlike any way that he had ever spoken anything before.
“No, I don’t know who the fuck you are and I don’t care. That lady didn’t deserve your shit. You’re just drunk anyway.”
Clive stood up and immediately started hitting the kid on the back of the head with his fist, just his right fist, over and over, a clumsy punch from an overweight man who wasn’t anything near to being a fighter.
“You don’t know nothing! You don’t know nothing! You don’t know what I got in me! You got nothing! With your book and your white lucky skin! You know what I got in me! I got God in me! God! God!”
Upon this realization, coupled with the fact that he was watching his hand hit the curled up young man’s covered head over and over, Clive began to melt. He sat back down. The pain was just about gone or he’d forgotten about it. He knew he was crying in front of everybody now.
“I got God in me. That’s what it is.”

#

Published in: on May 6, 2011 at 10:23 pm  Leave a Comment  
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A&P Now

The language of blue meep meowed for living. Food lines were shorter and we had less to choose from. Cheeses were cheeses and everybody thinner and the non-competition, contrary to what we all thought should be the case was better than competition except in the death scheme of things which we knew little about from day to day anyway.
There was no post-modern for everything was modern and of course all literature was simply something others did who didn’t know about warm carpet and doorways and other rooms. We talked to the girls who would later become ugly or mean or old and they talked to us and we wondered if by our talking to them they would become nice later. Those who were nice then are nice now and those who are lost then are also lost now for still, everybody has to die.
As we age we get more words and more thoughts, but everything stays the same. We meet those who gave birth to our icons and they ask us for imput because we seem wise. We can’t draw yet, only think, so we offer a promise of help, but don’t understand the primitiveness of their calling cards. M&M’s have phone numbers to rooms above you. Hotel rooms that may promise anything from sewing to massages. Fat people you knew are thin. There are fewere butters and fewer breads in the supermarket and you see an original Buddha, the one that you lost that says “The Gold Coast” on the bottom, but is on the desk in the supermarket next to the artsy people who are paying for their food, waiting in a slow area for food while others move around the rest of the supermarket which is just as slow, but not quite.
There is no fear here of disappearing. You remember the girl who stopped you as your car was parked outside of the one family who aged. You forgot to bring in the fifty cents you needed to get a soda out of their soda machine. They are all in the pool like always and when they see you they are not happy to see you. They are ashamed. So you go back out to your car and pull it into a better place beside a trailer whose occupants you don’t know. Then you pull it up further to be avoid being splattered by a rain bird. They they stop. Two girls. Hispanic girls and they stop in front of your car and start talking like they are stopping for you to look at them which they are. They are young and have make up and small tits and they talk and you are interested until the black girl comes out and she starts talking directly to you. She says that these houses are all in and of themselves (or something like that), like “***** are you up there fucking?” And of course, she says, she is. And sure she could go out and do whatever she likes, but it was the jealousy and all that (or something like that) which made her stay with her boyfriend. She had a bright pink face and lips very large and red and she wasn’t pretty, but she was young and although her own future seemed bleak, being big lipped and saucy and therefore ignorant he hoped for the best for her, at least until she disappeared, which she did of course since she was black anyway and he was white.

But the main thing was that there was less in the supermarkets back then and that was a good thing. There was less to choose from and therefore there was less excitement. Everything was calmer. The good looking one said something ugly about an ugly job. You can hear the bitterness but when you attempt a joke, your brother and friend Hendrick beside you, Hendrick much thinner than he is now, of course, you find you smile widely, a real smile that you don’t remember being able to smile in a long time and she beams and all of the ugliness that you thought, or would have thought now would be impossible to remove, fell off of the pretty girl’s face (who had the body I forget to mention) and she smiles back and you know that you’ve made a connection, but there’s no way to reconnect so you walk a little bit faster and perhaps you’ve reached the sprout where Hell may be if Hell still be possible which it isn’t since walking on is of itself proper and right and therefore Heavenly and sane.
Hendrick had earlier pushed the shopping cart of a lovely and tall girl who he could never push the shopping cart for now and when he was done they hadn’t said nary a word when she went on pushing the shopping cart herself and they’d had some sort of communication which didn’t need anymore depth. I had taken to smoking the three joints all at the same time by this time, but after awhile I needed them to go out and they were all lit and when I put them in my pocket I hoped they were out completely which they were.
But it was the slowness of the day that mattered. The little inside of the store. The fact that I was aware again and nobody demanded anything of me like they do now. Since then the animal that we call society had grown long, mean, tentacle-like arms with fingers. Each tip had a smile and a reason to buy something else which you did or else be strangled by philosophy which stated: Buy me or seek another way of living. Of course, nobody would consider seeking another way of living so we would buy and buy and buy. But there bread was bread. Buddhas were Buddhas. Light orange wrappers. M&M phone numbers. Young men not surprised by it all. Thin friends we hadn’t seen in years. Artists creating 80s phenomenon cartoon characters.
And as we wind down our belief in anything other than the way that we are now. As we remember our breaking bones and newer smells, our failures and our hopes, and the way that we think we must buy in even further to the world of more breads, more Buddha’s, we learn that we don’t learn as we age, but we forget and if we are wise we learn that to forget is the antidote to less warm aisles and girls who never regain the ability to smile. And we forge ahead and a crust of ten years doesn’t seem too bad, but the crust of 20 seems interminable and irretractible and all simply because we have known of our histories, felt the warm butter of life on the bread of colored and fading carpets of warmth, walked the linoleum seas whose lines were still etched with black tiger lines, and looked around at awe at all the things that were no longer in the supermarket, and unless we did something about it, would be.
But to dance and not apologize for the loss of the tippy toes until we find them again when they’re not in ourselves, but within the thought of them and the thought of them is locked inside another place because we can’t be in the place where the original thought originated and instead we become a loner and we create a new product for the shelves that reminds us of something that is wonderful and new and something nobody’s ever had before and by the time it is over and done with the shelves are covered with such like ideas and when we go to the store all that we see are faces of people who had failed to find that one thing that they were looking for.
Then they go home in their cars and stand in traffic and see the new styles of cars in front of them. The exact style of car when they dreamed of cars as children and other children were dreaming of cars as children and then all of the children grew up and the smarter of those children realized their dreams thinking if only they could be on the highway then those other children who dreamed of the same cars would love them and respect them and play with them at recess, but by the time recess came along there was no such thing as recess, only class differentiation, and the children who didn’t make the cars went to work elsewhere and none of the children ever played with one another again so the dream was a waste of time and vision ultimately and didn’t produce the required result because of the ten thousand realized dreams keeping the other child from their bread and butter at home.

And somewhere the mechanisms for making all of the money must stop and when it does we will think to ourselves that the end of the world is at hand, but in reality it will only mean nameless bread and re-valued Buddhas. We’ve let the monster grow ten million hands, 100 million digits with 100 million faces on each which now scare us. They are our masters. They used to call it keeping up with Joneses. It is simply and actually perpetual motion. We’ve relegated ourselves to the position of the ants.
And to do this our pride must die, but it is through pride that some of us only know how to receive love. We do something well we are to feel proud and receive smiles from significant others. We feel proud so we do more things well. Needs become opportunities to contribute to the good, but as the world spins up out of control and we all lose our footings and become weightless inside of gravity, bolted only to our roads and our jobs, we start to wonder, we start to philosophize anyway until something hits us, be it dreams or memories, and we know again we have feet and we remember the way others used to have good, heavy, weighted strides in the supermarket where we would buy things, but only what we needed and then go home through the desert or the hills or even the city and live, our eyes wide open, our ability to connect intact, everything about us welcoming of advancing age, but feeling none of it and nobody insisting upon it under the guise of forever.
I push my cart and I see you.

Published in: on January 26, 2011 at 11:47 pm  Leave a Comment  
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