The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

Now that I think back on it I realize that I wasn’t in my right mind. I realize now that if I stopped the drug I could start my way home to Moxy. Whether or not she would have had me back at that time, this was during our longest separation of almost two years, was the question.

I finally took that step, but the journey towards it was such a one that to speak of it is to put yourself into a predicament, because when you go where I went you put yourself outside of the normal realm. Time stops. Months turn into years. It’s like being in a perpetual dream, but then, after awhile, your dream starts losing power, you don’t have much to think about.

Having forsaken the idea of the future your desires wither, the outer edges of your universe start to crumble and burn. You whittle yourself down to the bare being and at your core you realize that the netherworlds that you belong to are claiming you, that you are mortal becomes a deep seated feeling until you sometimes dream that you are withering, that your face could peel off, that you are already skeleton, that you are already dead.

It is that sense of having reached the point of no return that keeps you within your isolated, protected world. At some point you stop blaming, too. I stopped blaming my mother and even my father for dying. I took it all into myself and realized that I was just a weak specimen of human being. I had lost all will power. Any good thing I had had in my life I had forsaken, like Moxy. When I sat there and thought about these things it was like the thoughts were doing battle with each other, but in some far distant galaxy. The night in which they belonged was peaceful, though, so I tried to look away, but I could always hear them. I could always hear the gods of war clashing high above me, but they became tinny and I would look away again.

I know now that these were the sounds of Moxy calling me. But she demanded so much. She wanted me clean. I wasn’t done at that time, not by a long shot. I felt I was on a journey of discovery. It’s like I was a child playing dead, like I was hunkering down close to the grave so that I could hear its meaning, soak it up. Moxy was all life. We’d taken to two different roads. I was the seeker getting more and more lost. Moxy lived in the real world. I had begun to melt around her, felt inadequate, and yet had determined that my purpose was not wrong, but only different and of the utmost importance. I was simply seeking, trying most of all, I realize now, to find the meaning behind my father’s death. That really fucked me up. I responded to it the way that Moxy responds to the world, but she doesn’t respond out of a sense of tragedy, but a sense of adventure of never having bowed down to an enemy, to always having faced her fears. I thought I was doing that by saying fuck you to the world. And that’s what I did. I said fuck you to the world and I was a bad ass mother fucker for a long time, but when I got the heroin going into my veins full time there with the lady, I started to wither, the defenses that I had made me who I was started failing, they were like muscles that I had spent years building up and then, one by one, they started withering away.

I remember sometimes shooting up and then when I was peaceful enough to go outside, stepping into the sunshine of Harlem and actually having the sunlight frighten me. I couldn’t look anybody in the eye. I felt like I was surrounded on all sides. I was a scared doe, wrapped inside of my leather jackets and behind my shades. I would walk and feel like I wished I could lift up off of the ground and float above everybody else. The soles of my feet contained questions about the meaning of each step. I was jittery and hollow, but I kept up the facade of worldliness so never got hurt. Anybody could have squashed me like a tick.

So that’s where I lived, in incense filled and darkened rooms, the Lady in her negligee beside me, our dancing in wild delirium together to sitars and synths, falling to the floor in each others arms, having tantric sex, just holding each other and staring into each other’s eyes for hours and all the while Moxy in New Jersey, me hoping through all of it that somehow I was just in the middle of a bad dream, that this ecstasy that I thought I was finding with the Lady was just a side excursion and that Moxy’s memory would fail and she would forgive me when I finally got back to her, which, oddly, I never doubted I would even though all signs pointed to the very real possibility that I had fucked things up with my wife for good. No, this wasn’t a possibility. This was a fact. I’ll never understand how facts can become lies. Moxy should have been gone forever. And Teardrop should have been dead. Once again, angels.

The world’s fear is our fear. Our fear is the world’s fear. Let’s not get too fearful. Comfort your neighbor today, no matter who that neighbor happens to be. As long as we don’t give in to the fear we will be okay. We must all lay down our arms, or at least set up a system to know if we are close to getting our head blown off. We must all respect the other’s ability to blow ALL of us up at any time.

We must hope that the world will not fail today. We must pray for longevity and we must rejoice for sanctity, for those us of who are trying to find peace. You can arrest 200 fans of Widespread Panic for drugs, but you can’t take away the prayer that they’re saying for your soul. You can’t forget who holds this world together; the dreamers, the Christs, the Gandhis, the Martin Luther Kings, the people who stood for something. Well, those people who stood for something all got killed too, didn’t they? Well, maybe we ought to thank God for those who have come before us and if we ourselves suddenly get plugged, then let us say: It is a good day to die today. Today, it is a good day to die. The world is alright today. Today the world is alright.

What world’s then? What worlds then? What worlds then if we let this one be blown into bits so small that even the gods fairies would fear to pick them up? What world’s then, if the world is so destroyed through hatred of oneself first and then the mirror reflection of oneself, better known as “them?”

We need a doctrine of love. Pick a religion. Pick one. Jainism. Can’t go without a mouth covering for fear a live being, an insect, would go inside and die. Didn’t want that dead insect. Didn’t want it in his nostril or soul or heart. To him that thing was a human life. Do you see the beauty of a true religion’s way? We are taught first and foremost not to kill other things. We must obey the commandment.

Why do we as a nation kill in order to avoid being killed? Why must we kill in order not to kill? Some would say an alternative would be impossible. Well, would it? Think about it. Would it? If I decided I didn’t want to kill you and realized it would be easier to work with you, then I would. I don’t want you dead. No matter who you are. You’ve got a family. Maybe your mother still loves you. What world’s then if we all blow everything up because we can’t stand our image in the mirror? Don’t we know it’s seven years bad luck if you crack a mirror? Seven years! That’s a lot of years, but anyway, the way I see it is if Diana was going to say one thing before she died, she would have probably said, and I believe this, to “don’t fight.” Don’t fight. Don’t fight, everybody. Everybody. Don’t fight. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love everybody. Everybody love. Love. Love. Everybody love.

I got the feeling he was looking at me on the up and up, a valid customer and not a cop. I was a white boy and maybe, like Jed, a golden customer, one with a lot of money as I’m sure Jed was. My courier took me through a pink door with the word “Boo” written on it in black marker. Sometimes you know when you shouldn’t be in a place no matter what you seek, no matter how important it is to find it, because you know that if you were in any way different in makeup and ability you could melt into the atmosphere and disappear, lose your personality, and be glad that you did. This was such a place of sin.
The first thing I noticed was the girl. She had no clothes on and she was sound asleep on a red, crushed imitation velvet couch. Somebody had strung a banner of Jimi over the couch. Color didn’t seem to matter here. The girl was white with a little nose and strawberry blonde hair. She wore a strand of pearls and when I walked by her I noticed a little blood came out of her vagina. On the same couch was a strong looking black man, also asleep, but who woke up when I walked in. He wore only shorts. I didn’t fear his noticing me because, like everybody else, he had become a ghost from whatever it was that he had taken. Others sat around. The smell of chemicals and marijuana filled the air.
“Wait here,” the kid said.
He went into a back room and disappeared. I stood there, not knowing what to do or say or where to look, with a sick feeling in my stomach. I looked from face to face to face. Four black men, two white women, two black women, three Hispanic men, one Hispanic woman, and a white baby being held by an old black woman in the corner. The old woman motioned to me, so I walked over to her.
“Don’t you do this, baby. This is my home and I don’t allow no drugs in my home. I want you out of here.”
The kid turned the corner out of the back room and his arms went wide.
“Bitch, you don’t live here anymore. Shut the fuck up and don’t mess your diapers no more.”
“You kids ruined our neighborhood.”
“You just an old, sagging bitch. Sorry bout her, man. She’s the mama of the Lady. Speaking of whom, will see you now.”
He motioned a goodbye to me by raising his fist and closing his fingers onto his thumb so that his hand formed a sort of teardrop. Then he bounced it a few times a couple inches above my own hand. I just stared at him as he walked out the door. A blue light came out of the room where the Lady was.
The Lady lay on a huge bed. She wore a white dress, but it looked blue with the black light bulb in her unshaded lamp beside her. Her arm was still wrapped with a rubber hose.
“Sit down,” she says.
I sit.
“You don’t fly do you?”
“I do.”
“No, no, honey. You don’t understand. You don’t fly for smack?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You know, take it up the ass.”
“No.”
“You don’t share needles?”
“No.”
“You seem sweet then. Why don’t you come over here.”
But I couldn’t move. I knew what she wanted, but I couldn’t give it to her. I could hardly see her for the light in the room was so dark. But there was this glow in there too. Is it possible that there are little electric particles in the air, and when someone is too close to who they really are their aura, or something about thems interacts with these particles and lights up a room? I saw an orange glow coming from this woman’s head. Orangish blue, really, and it was eerie. I’d never seen anybody so blended in with their environment. It really scared me. I mean I looked around all dizzy-like thinking I just had to get out of there. I’d never seen anybody like The Lady in all of my life. I wished the black boy were back in the room to guard me from this woman’s eyes. I remembered the story of Perseus, right away, and how he wasn’t supposed to look into the eyes of Medusa. I understood. I did not look at her again, but kept my eyes on her feet where her robe ended or on the box of heroin samples laid out to her side next to the clean syringes just sitting there waiting for someone like me. I would let her think anything she wanted if she could tell me where Jed was.
“I’m looking for Jed Jones.”
“Jed’s dead, baby,” she meowed. “Jed’s not coming round here no more. We buried him yesterday. I watched him fly away. His spirit just up and flew away. That’s what I’m here for, you know. I help people get to the other side.”
“Jed’s not dead,” I said.
“I’m sorry, baby, but Jed is dead. I watched him go myself. Became an angel.”
“What does Jed look like,” I asked her.
“Jed looks like everybody who comes in here, baby. Jed is Everyman.”
“Then you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You said Jed. I only ever knew one Jed and he was a southern white boy, if I remember right.”
“You fuckin liar. You said Jed’s dead.”
“I may be a liar, but with Jed I’m sure. Hot headed, aren’t we? I know who you are, baby. You the baby brother. Jed lay on this bed for more than two months one time. You think there any better place to go when you in the state Jed was in? I don’t count on Jed being alive any more than I count on that old woman in there being alive much longer.”
“Then where is he?”
“Little policemen all lined up in a row! Aren’t we dictatorial with our questions?”
I just shook my head and looked at her. All the fear was leaving me as I looked at her and saw her for what she was: an aging, heroin-filled whore. I looked at her like I had been looking at aging, heroin-filled whores my whole life, like all I’d done up to that point was look at aging, heroin-filled whores.
“Fuck you, you cunt,” I said and I meant it.
“Get out!” she screamed. “If you don’t know where Jed is then you don’t know Jed. What do you think the Priestess was about? You think Jed stayed on with me after he met her? Fuck Jed. He didn’t know what was good for him. He didn’t know who cared about him. You find the Priestess and you’ll find Jed.”
I had talked to the Priestess, Helen Capowitz, lead singer of Moxy Priestess, the Jewish American Princess who hadn’t done shit in the entertainment industry since the breakup of the band. We talked to her a million times when we first got panicked, but she always denied she knew anything. But she and Jed were close, and now this woman was saying something new, and I appreciated it.
“Sorry, ma’am,” I said.
“Boy, just go find Jed and bring him back. You want some?” she motioned to her stash.
“Nah, ain’t got time to screw my life up. Screwed up enough already.”

Nobody talks about the lulls. It’s the lulls that screw everything up. You got a girlfriend and you’re happy one day and the next the lulls come in like some kind of fog and take her away from you or take you away from her. One thing the lulls are good at doing is taking people away from each other for no good reasons. I hate the lulls.
I’ve got em now, though. Moxy is in town with Minnie, and Albert is off somewhere. I can see out in the yard a few chickens pecking away. My guitar’s with me here in the corner, but I’ve got too much of the lulls to pick it up. I’ve stopped doing marijuana because of Minnie. I don’t want her to go in that direction. I’ve got to be more careful than that. So I sit here at 38 looking out the window in my home state of Tennessee thinking about nothing, how nothing always creeps up on you slow and from the inside and makes you do things because, well, it’s like a noise, like a thudding you can’t hear, but as if your ears had emotions you could hear, and your emotional ears are just about blown out because of the noise, but you can hear the dog barking up the way and a few birds and you wonder whether some bastard child of fate is on its way to tell you that you’ve lost out on love or happiness as you expected you’d have it when you were young and dream-filled. I guess I’m a little down.

Moxy told me the other night that she wanted to go home to her parents for a little while. She’s going in a month or so, maybe earlier. It makes me feel like there’s something in my throat whenever Moxy hints that maybe she ain’t cut out for living on this mountain. I’m not done here. I can’t go back east. Those ghosts are too scary, and talk about emotional ears, out there I’ve got ears, emotional eyes, emotional nose for smell and a lot of fear which means a lot of crap that I just can’t handle. Moxy thinks Minnie needs to spend time with her grandparents, “let them turn her a little bit Jewish” she says. I say to her she and Minnie should go, but the fear in me, the same kind I had when my father passed away arises a little bit even though I know they’re coming back. This feeling is weird.
I’ve been alone my whole life, but this one is weird in that, one, I’m not stoned so it matters and, two, I don’t feel strong like I did. Don’t have that meanness or vitality that I had when I was younger. Don’t feel like Superman anymore. Feel like there’s cryptonite hidden somewhere on the ranch and I don’t know where it is and whenever I think I want to go find it to go get rid of it I stop because I know it will make me even weaker to go that way. So I figure the cryptonite is just the other side of the cliff, hung up on a bush, not too far and not too close, making me tired, but not too tired, but also making it so that I can’t reach out to nothing. I can’t reach out to Moxy in town by driving down there. I can’t reach out to my mama or my brother whose always ready to talk to me about Petals, but since I’m on Coconut Jerk Chicken, a happy song full of dancing teenage girls who work at a margarita bar in California, which was the same place I once ended up in an emergency ward for shooting too much smack into my arms, I find that I’m hiding even from him just like that hamster of his whose cage just gets bigger and bigger and bigger thanks to Habitrail and a brother who truly believes, as does Minnie, that life is just a hamster cage. Seems Albert’s making his as comfortable as possible too. I tell Moxy I want to get a hamster and she just looks at me like I’m crazy and that just makes me sadder because I think she doesn’t understand me anymore.
I’m not like Albert though. I don’t know how to fantasize my way out of the hamster cage. When I look outside I see nothing but wind in the trees and earth. I’m stuck on this mountain, rooted you might say and it seems that that’s okay. There’s a lot to think about. There are a lot of memories to re-hash, things to think about that I did a long time ago that might still somehow have lingering effects, long fingers picking at my family life today. I don’t know what a relationship with my mama would have been like today if I hadn’t gotten so fucked up back then. We have a pretty good one. She likes that I’m back and I do too. She loves Minnie. Loves her. You can’t help but love Minnie, with those brown eyes of her and that cap Moxy gave her that makes her look so cute. But there hasn’t been that spark in my mama’s eye that I wished I could return to it. Sometimes life makes you old and when you’re old others see you and if they’re old then they recognize the one thing they don’t want to see, so they stop wanting to see you, getting it all mixed up in their heads.
But the fact of the matter is that old is all a matter of the mind to hash out. Thirty-eight ain’t nothing to eighty-three, but don’t tell that to a 38 year old watching his hairline fall back into oblivion. We don’t any of us really know what we’re doing here on this earth. Some of us, like Albert, get caught up in the idea that we can know the unknowable. But there’s always a little black space of shadow there where we can’t see nothing good.
So when Albert saves the world for all the love he wants there to be, thinking that’s something worthy of shooting for, just after I say “he’s right,” I’ll say take a break Albert there’s more wars coming that you’ll never ever know about. But I’d rather go out of this world thinking that I was saying something good instead of something bad. Because if there is a heaven then I’d like to go. If there’s not I don’t want to be sitting around down here telling people there isn’t even if there isn’t because one or two of those people might really need to believe that there is. And who am I to say?
We’ve all got our endeavors. We all got the times we get pissed off at the ones we love most or we get tired of them and we look around at the world and everything we see suddenly is something we wish we were having, but don’t. Sometimes I want to run away with one of them little girls down there in town, maybe a nice 20-year-old blonde or something, thinking that Moxy isn’t doing it for me anymore. But then I take a break, used to light up some Bob Hope, now I just go for walks and listen to the streams.
I heard a story out here when I was a kid, some other kid named Bobby something or other told it. He said that there were three old witches that lived in a cabin not far from here, right by Brierson Brook. One night his elders, because this happened a long time ago, while out shooting for quail, heard something. They all stopped what they were doing and listened and just over the sound of the water of the brook you could hear it, a distinct and chaotic cackling. This cackling was unlike anything any of them had ever heard and they brought their weapons close to their bodies while they slowly investigated. They came around a corner and just over a little cliff was a house, the ladies house where three sisters lived, all three of which were, supposedly, bona fide witches.
I only tell this story because It always reminded me a little bit about what I thought was inside every woman I ever knew and that made me scared of ’em a little bit. Women to me always seemed like they had that something in their eye which would allow them to protect themselves in a way that I can’t even begin to fathom. The closest I can come to describe it is by calling it witchcraft, but even a young girl has got it somehow, even Minnie has got it. It’s a way of looking at you and not saying nothing, but letting you know that the answer is there and obvious, but only a woman can see it.
To this day I don’t know what it means that these women can see things I can’t. I do believe, though, that it has something to do with their protection. It’s the truest image of woman I’ve ever conceived. Moxy Priestess is the epitome, but the Priestess, even though she sounds witchy, wasn’t all that witchy. The only hocus pocus we ever tried was mixing narcotics. Don’t believe we ever chanted anything out of the way of pass this or pass that category of pill or blow or whatever. But let me finish the story. These guys went up to the door because they were curious. The door was one of those glass kinds where you can see in through a little bit of a rainbow shaped window. The witches were howling now as though they knew these men were out there. If it had been me I would have been out of there a long time ago which is another reason I think this story was made up. But anyway, this kid told us that these witches were in their kitchen cackling and cackling and sitting up in a pot plain as day on the table was a little girl without any clothes waiting to get cooked. The kid said they said they all ran away thinking they ate that kid. I just think this is the funniest thing I ever heard.
Annabelle was always running off said the reports down at the museum. She had light brown hair and loved animals and people and they even say that she would put on a little civil war era rock and roll show for everybody if her mother asked her to. If there was a little girl I have no doubt that little girl was Annabelle. She’d probably strolled into their yard all dirty and they took her in and cleaned her up and fed her before taking her home. I don’t imagine anybody up here back then wouldn’t have known their neighbor to some degree.
But the story is that the witches ate her, that she was in a steaming pot and the witches danced around her. That’s a good one to keep going for awhile longer because it lends something else to the power, the same power that the Priestess had, namely, the power of the woman to do the most atrocious thing imaginable or, to be more concise, to let the world think she’s capable of it when she’s really no more capable than me or any other man I’ve ever met. I think we’re all equally capable of good or evil and what you’ve got between your legs don’t matter. I just find this little mechanism for protection the Lord gives to the women of the world ingenious.

My husband was a good man. He gave me Jed back in the 60s. Albert came along ten years later. I have always tried to be a good mother. I haven’t always succeeded. When Tom died in 1970, just before filling me with what would become Albert who we named after his father as planned, I thought that I would always have a man. Well, I did. I had two men after he died. Jedediah which was my father’s name and Albert.
But then Jed left us when he was 17. I’m not angry at my boy. He came back eventually as I hoped he would. Albert brought him back. There is so much love in the heart of that younger child for the older that I trusted him when he said he was going to find him. I trusted that he would be okay. Albert’s my baby, but he’s grown up possibly better and stronger than most any man I’ve ever met. Albert is a big boy and very smart, much smarter than his mother. If I have any intelligence about me at all its in the way that I understand the meaning of color. I’m a painter. I painted Albert’s poster for his play. I wish him the best of luck.
When he was in New York he told me he had a meeting with Andrew Lloyd Webber, as though I didn’t know who he was. I knew he didn’t have a meeting with Andrew Lloyd Webber. But he was out looking for Jed when everybody in the world thought Jed was dead even me. And he found him and for doing that he became my hero and Jed’s and I think even Helen’s to some degree. The baby loves him just because she does.
I remember a mule that Jed owned after he moved back here to his house on Annabelle’s Mountain. Teardrop he named it. Well that mule got stolen or something or lost and finally found its way home to Jed and Helen’s, but not until after it went through some horrible, horrible conditions on that mountain. I saw that mule and it was almost dead. It lay on its side for a week and we called the doctor in and he gave it a good chance of living and it did. Albert’s a lot like that mule. I thank God every day for Albert because without Albert I never would have believed that Jed wasn’t dead. When I saw Jed for the first time in so many years, he was holding a baby in his arms. Of course it was Minnie. Oh, I laugh when I think about her, that baby, born in New Jersey but who has spent most of her life on Annabelle’s Mountain. We go up there a lot because its so pretty, as much as we can, me and Albert, Albert more. I like to set up my easel right up there where they call it Angel’s Peak and do landscapes. I did that portrait of Diana for Albert, but I really love landscapes and I’ve got a whole lot of them in my house hanging on the walls and Jed’s got a lot of them on his walls and Albert just keeps the one of Diana in his room.
Minnie is cute as a button. She looks a lot like Jed. Jed just about broke my heart. When he left he put a needle in his arm to say goodbye. I could have died from grief just then, but I didn’t. I remember when Tom, well, I guess it was the last time I spoke to Tom… He told me that my paintings were just getting prettier, just like me. Then he went off to work and not three days later, after a fishing trip with Jed, a man was beating his wife up and Tom helped her and beat up that man and then that man came back and he shot Tom and he shot the girl, too, but only the girl lived.
That man, Steve Merrick, is still in jail for killing Tom and he ain’t never getting out. I don’t hate him, but it fills me with grief to think about him, I mean, I never wanted anybody else and have never been with anybody else and then the way it effected my oldest, Jed. Sometimes I think God sent Albert down like a modern Moses to pick up the pieces of our lives that shattered because Steve Merrick killed the father of my boys. My husband was an extraordinarily good man. It’s a shame really now that he was such a good man because Jed had been highly influenced by his goodness more than anything else. Jed shut up like a clam after Tom was killed. He didn’t talk to nobody. He just played Tom’s guitar, but he played it in a way that was different. I used to watch him play that guitar and it almost made me cry. He would linger down low on those notes as if he were trying to juice out colors or something and not just sound. I painted that boy playing that guitar. I’ve got over twenty guitar pictures in my basement right now of Jed playing those guitars and a few of Albert listening until Jed got too old to have me look at him play and just went off to his room, sometimes with his little brother trailing behind and him not really seeming to mind that much which is ultimately what I think saved his life because I don’t think I had enough male energy in me to give to Jed and I think he took some of it from Albert’s just being there.
He wasn’t going nowhere, Jed. He was disappearing into his music, but I couldn’t take away his guitar. What was a mother to do? I didn’t want no other man, but I tried briefly, but it didn’t work out. Jed just hated him and that was only because the man was really worth hating. He was a jerk. A drinker. I stayed with Rusty almost a year and its the only year in my life that I truly regret living, I mean living, I mean actually being alive.
Jed was thirteen. I’ve apologized to him for it, but by then he was already drinking and the guitar made him cool to girls so, well, I think he lost his virginity right around then. I can’t help but feel that I am the world’s worst mother. I can’t help it, but deep down I somehow know its not true. Albert used to be the only thing in the world that kept me alive it seemed. I even started smoking pot a little bit to see if I could understand Jed, who started going to his room every day, I mean, every goddamned day stoned until I said he could just smoke it in there. Albert told me he once got stoned with him, but he’d never, honestly, never done it again. I don’t know if I can believe that, but I do know that Albert isn’t a drug addict and Albert is truly an artist. I don’t know if he got that from Jed or from me. He never knew his father. I’ll never know. It seems Albert is the greatest artist of all of us in his own way because Albert’s always been the peacemaker. I don’t know if he can write or not like he says he can like he’s some kind of hero. I imagine most people would say that Jed’s got the artist’s soul and I suspect nobody has ever really looked seriously at my own artwork. All I know is that Albert brought Jed back to me and in so doing he gave me Minnie and Helen and I’m obliged to him for those things.
But I worry about Albert. Jed’s got a family. Albert lives in the back of the house with his computer and his hamster. He had a girlfriend for a long time, but she broke with him because he got too crazy about his rock operas. Mmmm. I don’t know. Sometimes I just don’t know. Jed is back home now and everything is alright, but it doesn’t mean that I understand anything. I don’t know why Tom had to die and I know that I should try to be happier than I am, but I can’t seem to do it. At least not well. I go to my clubs and my classes and my job which is all good for me, but I can’t seem to shake this feeling of nothingness inside of me given to me by a Lord who provides all needs and some wants, but seems to do it in a manner too slow for me as I get older and start to understand what it means to be a matron, as I lose forever, watch as the years take them, the workings of my innards that could make me a mother once again. Yeah, I remember that mule just wanting to get home and sometimes it seems to me that I’m like that mule. Sometimes when I get so sad that I don’t want to go on any further I think about how that mule made it home, how that mule simply made it home because that’s where he wanted to be and nowhere else. Albert’s like that too and so is Jed and so is Helen in some way. Minnie’s an angel yet, a little angel, she’s new and when I think of her I think about when Jed was new and then Albert and it makes me want to remember when my marriage with Tom was new and how, even further back, my life as a girl was new, with a new body and pretty hair and smooth skin and that makes me want to remember my own mama and daddy and how new they were when they were young, much younger than I am now, with me and my sisters in town the both of whom have moved away to Nashville and yet I can’t go any further than that.
And that’s what makes me sad. I can’t stay long with my memories anymore. I used to dream of having Jed back with me, but now that he’s back I have nobody else to dream for, to long for to return except for myself in a way I can never be again. Tom’s dead. I thank God that Albert is still here, but I can feel it. He’s moving soon. That boy’s got big dreams and I think he’s got talent too like he’s always telling everybody. I think Albert will be good in Hollywood. I think he’ll just go wherever Petals takes him.
So I guess my hopes are the same as they were after Tom died, that Jed will take care of us, won’t let us fall away like he did. Now that he’s back, Jed must return to what he was: the man of the house. I thank God he lived long enough to have Minnie. I love my boys very much.

I became a dot at 7:32 a.m. I watched the dot enter a rectangle in Tennessee and move slowly across the nation, slowly, through green fields, by stores and lives totally unaffected by Jedediah Jones, but probably not untouched by Moxy Priestess. I watched the dot get off of the rectangle and move through a sea of other dots as if in a maze. The dot bumped and moved, bumped and moved forward, never stopping once to consider its dotness. Slowly the world began to become more real to the dot.
Night fell and the dot entered a large, cement square and disappeared. When the sun arose, the dot went outside of the huge square and joined other moving dots. Moving was good. All the dots agreed. Moving was all anybody had in this city. When the dot became a non-dot was three days later, three days, the same number of days that it took Jesus to climb his way out of hell to get to heaven.
Slit was a fat black man I met in a club called Sizzle in Harlem. He was like a black Michelin tire man. He came at you like he was going to run you over, but he stopped moving in that way when the bartender explained to him that I was the brother of Jed Jones.
“Shiiiiit, you da brotha a ol’ Jed? Don’t you know Jed dead, baby?”
He turned around and said “shiiiiit” again, then laughed, looking at me a little bit as I disappeared inside myself completely, because I believed him for that moment utterly. After watching me looking like this he said, “Now don’t go believin’ everything you hear me say, boy.”
“Well, where is he then?” I asked, mad he was playing with me.
“Jed’s been gone from this neighborhood, three, four years. Dat boy was hittin’ her hard, too. He’d take it any way he could get it. Say he was a rock and roll star, but Jed was nothin but a junkie.”
“You don’t know where he is then?”
Slit lost his humor.
“I told you that, boy, now get the fuck outta here and quit policing me.”
I turned and was almost out the door when Slit spoke.
“555-4298,” he said.
I went to a pay phone just outside the bar and dropped in a quarter and a dime. No answer, busy signal. Everybody on the street was black, but they didn’t notice me. I tried again and stood by the phone for awhile, then again, but it stayed busy. Night was falling. I had to go.
The dot went underground and then came up into night. It found its way back to the huge cement square and didn’t re-appear until daylight.
I called every half hour from the phone in my room that night, but it stayed busy all night long. The next day I tried the number again with no luck. I went back to Sizzle looking for the fat man Slit, but he was gone, and nobody would say how to reach him. When I stepped outside I didn’t care anymore. I had no leads, had been in the city four days and had shit. I roamed and talked to pimps and doper sellers and hookers and musicians and drummers in Washington Square. A few remembered Jed from the record stores. I went back to Sizzle and stood around. I figured since Slit knew him then there might be others in the neighborhood who did too. I walked right up to a black kid standing by an alleyway, obviously waiting to sell some dope or hookers or something. I didn’t care. All the better for what I wanted.
“I want some smack,” I told him.
“I wouldn’t know about dat, man,” he said.
I pulled out my wallet, fat with cash, and flashed it to him. I made sure he saw the knife I kept tight in my belt in case of emergency.
“Well, motha fucka might be talkin the right language to somebody round here. I’m just going my way. Wanna hang out?”
“Sure,” I said.
So I follow him down the street. He saying “hi” to everybody he meets. Whassup. Whassup. Yo. Homeboy. Yo. Whassup, nigger. Whassup. Yo.
Me, a ghost, followed this ghost. The other ghosts passed through each other on the way to nowhere and entered squares and rectangles, making no changes to the walls they passed through by doing so. I walked three floors up some dark, dank, urine- smelling stairs, following the the ghost who had taken to silence and floating. I stayed a good ten feet behind him. I think he respected that opinion, especially knowing I carried a knife that I made damn sure he believed I would use. I didn’t give a fuck. I was going to find Jed.

There are people reserved for the people who come to the place where they can’t take another step. Moxy is one of those people. So is Albert. Me and my mama are those people, I guess, for people who are truly those people, me for Moxy, mama for Albert. Me for Albert, too, I guess. I guess when you think about what a family is and what it’s for there is no one person designated for any other. You’re all thrown in together like some family stew. If one dream you have concerns one particular family member you can rest assured that you’ll have another one about a different one. I think that’s where Albert is wrong with his rock opera. He thinks that one person deserves all the glory for having loved- Diana. But that’s not true at all if you look at Diana’s family. Look at William and Harry. These are two lovable kids. Each one of them deserves a rock opera too, but Albert only wrote one and I’m not about to make him write another one for William and another one after that for Harry. Knowing Albert’s salvation complex he would probably try to do it too.

Starting off on this journey of an account of my life I thought the power behind my story would go on forever, but I’m just about out of words to describe a story that doesn’t have much of a plot. I can’t trace the places that I’ve been because like I said those fifteen years are just as good as gone for me. I don’t want to dwell on them because they went by without me really there except in some strange, dream-like way. I’m not bitter at myself for having done what I’ve done, but I am a little bit disturbed over the time I’ve wasted. If it could have been possible that I would have met Moxy and had Minnie fifteen years ago I would have done it, would have stayed at the supermarket like Albert did. But I can’t go on thinking like that. Lost years can’t be made up. If I miss the story that was never written about them I can’t cry. I’ve got a story that is just as good, but sadder concerning where I went. Mine is a history of the needle.
But if this is such a history then I must use the language of mythology to describe it. As my mind wanders over the people in my pantheon I divine the depths of my drug addicted sorrow only from what they have to say to me now. If I were to go back to some of the faces that I stared at while high and let them be my storytellers then I would just as soon as die. For I’m away from there now. I don’t play rock and roll anymore except occasionally and for what I’m doing for Albert. I’m not mad at it. I’m not bitter that it took me into dope harder than I’d ever thought I could go when I first started experimenting. But I’m not one out to gather pain. No reason could there be for me to recount the scum that I became to you, to purge something in my soul as though my families prayers had not been enough.

So let me tell you more about my family. I know there’s no real story here, but I think there’s some meaning that could get through, something that might relate a thought to you that will remind you of a story that will take the place of my inability to remember things well about how things happened, their order in the universe and all that. You do that. I will concentrate now on what I want to, namely, the look in Minnie’s eye the other day when she got so mad at me for lying to her. We were talking about heaven. I don’t know why. Minnie said to me,”Daddy, if angels ain’t got no wings like Albert says, then how come they can fly?” I wasn’t sure if this was a Minnieism or not. I thought about it, wondered what it was exactly that Albert told my child, gathered that it went much deeper than I could ever imagine therefore giving Minnie the upper hand already. I thought about calling Moxy in, but Moxy would have been in the same boat I was if she chose to be. She wouldn’t. I take everything that Minnie says as important and it’s not because I’m a new age dad either. I just do. So I sat there with the girl on the ground where she played with her little toy of sticks of some sort out on the sand and I thought about it. I thought about it. I thought about it. And I thought about it. Then I said, “Angels are spirits, baby, they fly because God didn’t give them a body like you or I got.” Minnie says, “Then they don’t fly. They more kind of float.” I say, “Okay.” Then she looks at me, looks me in the eye real hard the way she does and she twists up her face and puts her little wrist on her thigh, the palm facing up. She’s suddenly this little Marilyn Monroe but with an attitude much saltier. She looks at me and says, “Daddy, you never seen God have you?” I said, “No.” She says, “Albert has.” Now I’d thought a lot about God by then. I thought I’d seen him a couple times too, I mean, really seen him. I knew I shouldn’t have taken it on, the challenge of showing my little girl the truth as I know it, but I was tired by then of being a hero and I thought that maybe some day my daughter would love me more for not being one by, at least, attempting to tell her the truth even if it wasn’t within my power to do so. So I thought about Albert and what he might have said, again. I thought of my brother Albert, working in the market, writing his stories now that I’ve taken on the work of doing his music for Petals and waiting for me to finish. And I thought that if I never finished he would keep waiting for me as long as I promised that I would finish. Taking into account this and the fact he came for me and the fact that, well, somehow, the fact that Minnie’d seen Teardrop lowered into the ground and I had yet to understand completely the look on her face as we done it to her. Taking all this into account, I thought the best thing to say to my baby was that I’d seen God and God’s angels all have wings and even though I didn’t lie, that they are spirit, spirit is just a powerful as flesh when it comes to being real. So, yes, I told her. Angels fly on wings of spirit, flapping away, making sure little kids don’t fall off mountains. But I shouldn’t a told her that. “Annnabelle fell off the mountain,” she said. “I know, baby.” And she didn’t say anything to me, but she looked down and away the way you don’t want your baby to look ever because it seems like her mind is too close to a truth and inwardly she might be dying a little bit or, maybe worse, growing up which is, I guess, both.
I don’t think she was angry at me, but she didn’t want to play anymore so I went into the house and talked to Moxy. Moxy was always busy doing this or that. She still had dealings in New York. She was a producer now and sometimes when she could get me to we’d go into town and to Vincennes Pizza and they’d let us set up and she’d sing and I’d play and a guy named Rick would play the drums for us and a kid named Ian would play bass and we had a little band and we’d draw a crowd without any advertising except for Albert who was good enough to be his own public relations firm if he chose to be, because, I guess, people remember Moxy Priestess. And now and then someone comes up to me and shakes my hand and looks me in the eye, usually someone about my own age who played guitar once. I never deny a soul an autograph. Somehow its like denying them a breath. I know that sounds egotistical, but you don’t want to say no to someone whose heart is still beating. It’s like saying no to the idea of their heart beating and since mine almost stopped a couple of times I respect it just like I respect Minnie’s looking away, there being that something in her head that made her think of something, know something, rather, even though I didn’t want her to.

10  wrecking ball, anus freeze, Tom’s boy. Breathe.
9 ain’t seen Jed for awhile, bullet or shot?, in or out?, dead or alive?
8 ain’t seen. That’s three thoughts since I shot. In or out?
7 glad I got here. Glad when I wake up I can still see. Don’t want any more pain. In or out? They say when your daddy is a good man he don’t die he just goes to heaven. Getting heavy to believe in angels. Down corridors now. Angels go wherever they want to go. Go. Can’t spell oxy’s name anymore. Oxy. No more M. M’s disappear. Never rely on an M to stay in a name cuz they’re like flying carpets m’s.
6 ain’t. Fives ain’t fours nor threes nor twos nor ones nor negative ones, nor negative twos nor negative threes nor negative fours nor negative fives.

5 thoughts. Six. Breathe in and out with tongue slipping out touching air like some snake dying. With tongue slipping out like some snake dying to its own way of doing. Like some snake dying to its own way of not having arms, of not having heart or soul, of having only cold blood. No fours. Could magic carpets really be eyelids that fall down with death?
3 Bah.
2 Albert and mama. Millsville, Tennessee. The Lady. Forgot the o. xy. No mo Mo. Only xy. I gotta go.

Jed! Jed! Jed, you hear me? Jed! It’s Isabella, baby. Jed? It’s The Lady. Feel me. How soft The Lady is. Jed!

1 Go.

Jed! Goddamn you, Jed! Darryl, Jed’s leaving!
Get out of my way, Daryl.
Man, don’t do this to yourself, Jed.
Get out of my way, man.
Darryl, stop him!
I’m sorry, man. I’m sorry.
You son of a shit. Darryl, you shouldn’t be touching me.
Darryl, what are you doing! Stop playing with him!
Lady, he can fight!
Don’t let him go! Jed! No!
Sorry about that, Lady. He’ll be alright. I just planted it between his eyes. I’m trained. I’m trained. I gotta go. MO!

I haven’t talked a lot about my mom. Mama said when we were kids that, well, when I was a kid, Albert wasn’t around then, that I would grow up to be a big strong man like my father. Only trouble was that my father died when I was ten. Did I mention a man took a gun to my dad because my dad didn’t like people picking on women. So my dad was a big strong man, but he got killed for it. I didn’t know what to do about some guy picking on my dad, killing him. When Albert was born just before my dad died I promised nobody would ever hurt that kid. And I promised that nobody would ever hurt my mama and I promised that nobody would ever hurt me. Turns out I hurt all of them myself eventually. That’s what growing up means, learning that you’re often times your own worst enemy.

But this philosophy of being the man in the house only made me mean. It also made me pick up my father’s guitar so I’d have some sort of peace in my head. Then it made me start drinking booze with the other junior high kids, then weed, then speed, then coke, then heroin. Then something like fifteen years went by and it all just became a matter of picking up the pieces.
I don’t know where to go when I talk about that period, the heroin years. I don’t feel like using metaphors for something so real. My mind goes back to Teardrop trying to make it up the mountain. Teardrop knew. It’s like looking at the place where you know isn’t there anymore, like a house that you grew up in that burned down. It’s like being non-existent to yourself. It’s like slowed time. It’s like using your nerve-endings as soul when all you’ve got is heart left anymore. It’s the look in my mule’s eye when he turns around and questions whether or not there is a God at all, but he knows that he’s got to keep moving forward. It’s like a single teardrop falling into the sea.

But this same philosophy made me a tiger, too. It gave me something that I still wouldn’t trade away for anything in the world except for pure unadulterated love. It made me what I am today, a man who survived. The same thing that almost killed me, the same trick of fate which seemingly was put forth by the very hand of God, the killing of my father, was the thing that I took with me so that I would survive the killing hand of fate. To blame me for running scared my whole life is unfair. Show me a man who doesn’t and isn’t running scared in some way as we speak and I’ll show you a man who isn’t a whit afraid of death and dying. That’s a hard man, but it’s a true man if he’s still got the skin on his face. He’s lying, of course. We’re all afraid of the big black hole where God may or may not be living. We’re afraid because we’re afraid of the unknown. So it’s true what Minnie says about hamster cages. I just wish I’d been able to come up with that one myself. You got to make due with what you got. If you live in a hamster cage, you gotta make it the most comfortable hamster cage you can or else you’ll go down like I went down, alone and afraid, into the bottom of the cage under all that straw and never come up again like I didn’t think I ever would. I was even burrowing away from Moxy after awhile, but then Minnie came on the scene and I just felt stupid, felt like a hamster, like a ratty old hamster with a baby and Moxy all clean cause she’s licked herself every day knowing why she was put on the earth and Minnie all red and meowie and meepie like a baby is and then Moxy coming over to me and helping me to stand up so I could help her care for the baby, then Albert coming along like God sent him, literally like God sent him, which might just be the case, I don’t know, and me coming home with my baby and giving her over to mama like it was the only thing I knew I could hand to her that would allow her to forgive me for shooting up in front of her when I was seventeen and dead on my feet and hating the sight of anything that reminded me of the fact that some bastard killed my dad and left me to be the man, a job I just wasn’t cut out for and I proved it. Minnie did all that for me and now I’m just proud and humble at the same time working on Albert’s rock opera like I wish I was writer enough to have written but aren’t.