So, we're getting ready to move away from this house. Its the house Violet first came home to in this world; where she took her first bite of applesauce; where she first smiled up at my goofy grins. Its the house where we first brought home our youngest dog, Milo. And its the house where I became a stay-at-home Dad who thought it would be ok to eat peanut butter and cheese and spoonfuls of sweet crunchy sugar and then turned around a year later to find that I have long greasy hair and a pot-belly and I look like a dude sat down and shoveling fried rice out of a styrofoam container behind a case of rookies at a baseball card convention. Whatever.
Now, we move on. And with that comes new life/new ideas/less room/a mountain across the street. At my Mother-in-law's house we will save money; hopefully lots of it. We will save money and I will walk the foothills with my daughter on my back and my dogs running deer. Out there, in the scrub brush and sage, I will lead a Curious Regiment up and down old familiar trails, past waterfalls and silent leering wild cats, stepping over rusted discarded 20-gauge shells, and I will sweat away the pounds with the vigor and vim of an outdoorsy man in his late thirties.
There will be times, I know, when I get short of breath. There are steep unforgiving inclines down that way. But I will persevere. I will eat the pain, revel in the bizarre sensation of butterscotch syrup flooding into my chest cavity that comes when men like me stroll back into the town of Fitness after a year in the wilderness/in the snacks. There will be no stumbling at the precipice, no blurred vision spinning then thumping down into the dust jaw first. There will be no two black dogs circling their master, trying to revive him with pleading whines and tongue touches. And there will be no young little girl named Violet strapped helplessly to the back of her beached gasping Orca/Daddy. No, no, no. no, no.
No. Instead there will be me, rumbling back into my old self after nearly a year of marshmallows dipped in fudge laced with lard and fried in twice-baked butter. Me and Violet and Max and Milo and a busload of ghosts: Mountain Men and Fur Traders and Pioneers and Indians, all of us busting our ass to climb the climbs up to where the views are. Then peering down at the valley spilling out below us...the lake and the football stadium and the highway; the distant mountains to the west, imagining the mountain lions over there looking at our hills like we're looking at theirs.
Summer sweat dripping from my new shorter haircut. Violet saying a word or two. Maybe the dogs jumping some quail from their little hideaway in the slender shade. I'll look over at the mouth of the canyon a few miles down, and tell V about all the beautiful big trout that live in the river back up in there. I'll imagine myself, come Saturday, taking off early in the morning to chase them. We'll watch the setting sun while Mom is at work.
I'll think of pizza slices back in Brooklyn or South Philly somewhere.
Later, I'll make a Greek salad, after I put the kid to bed.
You find ways: to move through this world, through the unexpected moments/months of battered pride, so that you can come out the other end stronger and better, or at least convinced that you are. Life is a series of missteps rewarded with random far-flung glories here and there. I can convince myself of anything in this world.
And that's why I'm still walking around.
January 26, 2010
January 22, 2010
A Year In The Life.
We hold our hands up and snap eager fingers and call her name fifty/sixty times in a minute.
Its Violet's sweet attention we're after. Her careless gaze landing on us is the wafting opium on the breeze. And we are junkies/chasers of the rain and the stars, reaching out and trying to grab on to the old shirt-tails of jittery ghosts as they flit from room to room, forever turning corners just ahead of us. If the Devil himself waltzed on into this room, scattered cinders leaking smoke from his matted nest of hair, Hell Contracts crumbled in his resin-stained fingers(HASHISH!), a Bucca DiBeppo pen clenched in his teeth/grill: we would each sign without even looking...as we call the kid's name with one hand, scribble it all away with the other one.
Perfect point-and-shoot pictures of children and their cakes get taken from time to time and that possibility is enough for each of us.
Pretty soon the Birthday Girl is brought her cake. The dining room lights get cut and I carry the slab of wet cement in on the aluminum foil covered tray. Its a cake I baked myself, from a box, and that makes me a little proud but mostly I realize that Duncan Hines designed these things so that even prisoners deep in bad jails could cook a cake with just a cup of his own pee and a streak of weak sunshine. Either way, I made it for my daughter and that'll stand forever.
Monica encourages our daughter to blow out the candles. Then she encourages her to use her little hands to dig into my masterpiece, with gusto. Violet is a little hesitant at first as the elegance/class she gets from her Daddy hold her down in the face of the strong improper winds of Mom. But my ways/dreams/influence are simply not enough. I lose her to the hurricane blowing through the room. Before three minutes are up: a newer cake-ier Violet is born. Around five minutes in, the difference between the kid and the cake is minimal at best.
Flashes go off with popping corn speed.
"Violet, over here! Look at Momma!"
"Over here Sweetie! Look here! Look at me snapping!"
"LOOK AT ME SNAPPING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
"Violet! Look at Grammy!"
"VIOLETLOOKATMEFORCHRISSAKESANDSTOPBEINGSOSELFISHWITHYOURJOYANDYOUREXCITEMENT!!!!!" (Unspoken thoughts of a 12.1 Megapixel wielding Grandmother.)
"Over here, Pumpkin!"
"Put more cake in your ear, I missed it before!"
Through it all, one dog circles the small crowd, stoned on the action. The other dog stands twenty feet away, in the back of the Honda. He'd lost his poor mind in the midst of it all. Got crazy. Got sent to Siberia.
The First Birthday Party. We all see/feel/eat it in our own little ways. Its cake and pictures and Motown playing low on the portable DVD. Its cake crumbs down in the folds of the high-chair. Grandmothers angling for the shot. Dogs driven mad by the chanting of a single name, without pause or break, forever.
Its Mom and Dad, a year later, with hearts just fucking exploding in their chest cavities.
And its the kid herself, a year in, looking at the tiny stacks of icing on her fingertips; tickling it across her uncertain lips; tasting the massive sweetness for the first time ever. The Birthday Girl just feeling the rush of sugar bolt through her streams and sensing strange cool life sweeping her up in its imminent rush to take her picture a trillion times before the long day fades beyond the hills above town.
Its Violet's sweet attention we're after. Her careless gaze landing on us is the wafting opium on the breeze. And we are junkies/chasers of the rain and the stars, reaching out and trying to grab on to the old shirt-tails of jittery ghosts as they flit from room to room, forever turning corners just ahead of us. If the Devil himself waltzed on into this room, scattered cinders leaking smoke from his matted nest of hair, Hell Contracts crumbled in his resin-stained fingers(HASHISH!), a Bucca DiBeppo pen clenched in his teeth/grill: we would each sign without even looking...as we call the kid's name with one hand, scribble it all away with the other one.
Perfect point-and-shoot pictures of children and their cakes get taken from time to time and that possibility is enough for each of us.
Pretty soon the Birthday Girl is brought her cake. The dining room lights get cut and I carry the slab of wet cement in on the aluminum foil covered tray. Its a cake I baked myself, from a box, and that makes me a little proud but mostly I realize that Duncan Hines designed these things so that even prisoners deep in bad jails could cook a cake with just a cup of his own pee and a streak of weak sunshine. Either way, I made it for my daughter and that'll stand forever.
Monica encourages our daughter to blow out the candles. Then she encourages her to use her little hands to dig into my masterpiece, with gusto. Violet is a little hesitant at first as the elegance/class she gets from her Daddy hold her down in the face of the strong improper winds of Mom. But my ways/dreams/influence are simply not enough. I lose her to the hurricane blowing through the room. Before three minutes are up: a newer cake-ier Violet is born. Around five minutes in, the difference between the kid and the cake is minimal at best.
Flashes go off with popping corn speed.
"Violet, over here! Look at Momma!"
"Over here Sweetie! Look here! Look at me snapping!"
"LOOK AT ME SNAPPING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
"Violet! Look at Grammy!"
"VIOLETLOOKATMEFORCHRISSAKESANDSTOPBEINGSOSELFISHWITHYOURJOYANDYOUREXCITEMENT!!!!!" (Unspoken thoughts of a 12.1 Megapixel wielding Grandmother.)
"Over here, Pumpkin!"
"Put more cake in your ear, I missed it before!"
Through it all, one dog circles the small crowd, stoned on the action. The other dog stands twenty feet away, in the back of the Honda. He'd lost his poor mind in the midst of it all. Got crazy. Got sent to Siberia.
The First Birthday Party. We all see/feel/eat it in our own little ways. Its cake and pictures and Motown playing low on the portable DVD. Its cake crumbs down in the folds of the high-chair. Grandmothers angling for the shot. Dogs driven mad by the chanting of a single name, without pause or break, forever.
Its Mom and Dad, a year later, with hearts just fucking exploding in their chest cavities.
And its the kid herself, a year in, looking at the tiny stacks of icing on her fingertips; tickling it across her uncertain lips; tasting the massive sweetness for the first time ever. The Birthday Girl just feeling the rush of sugar bolt through her streams and sensing strange cool life sweeping her up in its imminent rush to take her picture a trillion times before the long day fades beyond the hills above town.
January 14, 2010
Morning People.
In the morning, in the dark, I walk back to Violet's room and I find her standing up, leaning on the rail with highly advanced coolness: like Mick Jagger in the video for Waiting On A friend. We can barely make each others grins out without any light, but we see enough. I raise her up to me, pull her to my chest, and put her nose or her ear in my mouth and buzz her good morning with my flappy lips. She smiles at that and sometimes she laughs.
Out in the living room, we hang out on the couch together. She squirms and tries to roll out of my arms. She doesn't think about where or why. She just wants to bust free. Let me go, she says without saying it. Let me fall on my head this morning. Let me get that out of the way already, this falling on my head stuff.
I keep putting her up on my knees though. With my feet up on the coffee table, I plop her up on my knees and blow a bit of air right into her eyes and her hair. That fascinates her every time. Little puffs of wind coming out of Daddy's face...you can see the puzzled look in her eyes as she tries to make sense of that. Later on, in a few years, she'll figure out that I do a lot of stuff purely for entertainment purposes. Dances. Songs. Robot beeps and shit. I hope she likes that kind of stuff when she gets a bit older. If not, I'm in trouble because I have already started doing things like that a lot. It would be pretty tough for me to just cut it all out all of the sudden. Even if I wanted to I can't say that I could.
After a while, I'll put V in her high chair and peel some banana for her. I squeeze the mega-ripe tree turd and small sections of it just break off the mother fruit. Then I use my fingers to pick apart even smaller bits, arranging them in a short round field down on the tray in front of my daughter. By the time I have a dozen or so set out, she is already three pieces in, with banana gunk mushed into strands of her hair, banana pulp damming up at the corners of her lips.
I make a squawk or a coyote growl sound just so she doesn't get all into the food and forget about me, my efforts over here.
She looks at me/takes me in/nothing has changed/she looks away.
I get the jug of apple juice out of the fridge and sing a caffeinated line or two about me doing that. This too, will only get me a swift moment of eyes fixing my way; little radars sweeping the kitchen, the world, they don't need to settle too long on the dude in the Jagermeister T-shirt and Jack Daniels morning pants to know that his falsetto attempts at attention aren't worth the effort, really.
Still, I sing.
Then, when I get one of the smaller bottles filled up with juice, the top screwed on tight even though I know its still gonna leak all over my kid's chest, I set it down on the counter and we do our little joke that we do.
I shake the big jug and the juice sloshes all over inside. Then Violet looks up from the three pounds of banana on her eyebrows and in her nostrils. She grins big, knowing its time.
I tilt the giant jug (lid still on) for her to drink from. And she clicks her possum teeth onto the plastic and pretends to drink away, right down to even swallowing invisible juice.
After a few seconds, I see her looking up at me like, "Can we be done now?"
And with that: I laugh out loud, a real Falstaff chortle, and let the jug down with one hand and with the other one I hand her her real bottle of juice so that she can have a sip already and just get on with the rest of her breakfast for Chrissakes.
Out in the living room, we hang out on the couch together. She squirms and tries to roll out of my arms. She doesn't think about where or why. She just wants to bust free. Let me go, she says without saying it. Let me fall on my head this morning. Let me get that out of the way already, this falling on my head stuff.
I keep putting her up on my knees though. With my feet up on the coffee table, I plop her up on my knees and blow a bit of air right into her eyes and her hair. That fascinates her every time. Little puffs of wind coming out of Daddy's face...you can see the puzzled look in her eyes as she tries to make sense of that. Later on, in a few years, she'll figure out that I do a lot of stuff purely for entertainment purposes. Dances. Songs. Robot beeps and shit. I hope she likes that kind of stuff when she gets a bit older. If not, I'm in trouble because I have already started doing things like that a lot. It would be pretty tough for me to just cut it all out all of the sudden. Even if I wanted to I can't say that I could.
After a while, I'll put V in her high chair and peel some banana for her. I squeeze the mega-ripe tree turd and small sections of it just break off the mother fruit. Then I use my fingers to pick apart even smaller bits, arranging them in a short round field down on the tray in front of my daughter. By the time I have a dozen or so set out, she is already three pieces in, with banana gunk mushed into strands of her hair, banana pulp damming up at the corners of her lips.
I make a squawk or a coyote growl sound just so she doesn't get all into the food and forget about me, my efforts over here.
She looks at me/takes me in/nothing has changed/she looks away.
I get the jug of apple juice out of the fridge and sing a caffeinated line or two about me doing that. This too, will only get me a swift moment of eyes fixing my way; little radars sweeping the kitchen, the world, they don't need to settle too long on the dude in the Jagermeister T-shirt and Jack Daniels morning pants to know that his falsetto attempts at attention aren't worth the effort, really.
Still, I sing.
Then, when I get one of the smaller bottles filled up with juice, the top screwed on tight even though I know its still gonna leak all over my kid's chest, I set it down on the counter and we do our little joke that we do.
I shake the big jug and the juice sloshes all over inside. Then Violet looks up from the three pounds of banana on her eyebrows and in her nostrils. She grins big, knowing its time.
I tilt the giant jug (lid still on) for her to drink from. And she clicks her possum teeth onto the plastic and pretends to drink away, right down to even swallowing invisible juice.
After a few seconds, I see her looking up at me like, "Can we be done now?"
And with that: I laugh out loud, a real Falstaff chortle, and let the jug down with one hand and with the other one I hand her her real bottle of juice so that she can have a sip already and just get on with the rest of her breakfast for Chrissakes.
January 12, 2010
The Moonshots.
I remember picking up a pizza box off the bed and feeling the discarded crusts inside scurry with the tilt like mice feet on the attic floor. And I remember stopping halfway to the trashcan and everybody shushing each other as the motel TV finally landed on the highlight we wanted. Seven guys or eight guys, all buzzed on beer, squinting through the stagnant cigarette smoke, watching hours-old tape of a summer evening seven hundred miles away.
And when the ball finally landed, three or four rows up in the upper deck, the room exploded with curses of awe, with masculine admiration. We were all dipped in magic for a few seconds again and it was a beautiful thing.
The Summer of 1998 was a good one for me. I spent it hurdling through farm fields and forests and ghettos and over legendary rivers. In the van, we moved across America, stopping only to piss/to get burgers until we hit the next stage, drank our free beers and played our hearts out as loudly as the local sound guy could stand it. For good hunks of the summer, we toured with The Bottle Rockets: one of the best bands I ever saw take a stage anywhere in my life. They were really good guys too, St. Louis guys. Each night they'd do this fantastic stunt where they all hit a note at the same time, repeatedly, until they landed on the number of home runs that their hometown Cardinals hero, Mark McGwire had launched up until that moment.
It was sensational. And if you took to counting their beats, as I did in my lager haze, you'd know that they were never off, ever. And by July or August of that season, the number was up there in the fifties at least. People in the crowd loved it. People love home runs and loud tight band hits and so if you found a way to combine the two, like those boys did that summer, well...then you were the best rock band on this planet that evening.
So, it didn't take long for our two bands to collide on certain nights when we ended up in the same Motel 6 out by the airport in Cleveland or Oklahoma City or wherever we were. And I still remember standing there, with a congealed slice of Domino's in my one hand and a cold one in the other, all of us laughing and chattering way louder than you're supposed to at 2:30 or 3 in the morning, until the ESPN highlights would land on McGwire, or The Cubs' Sammy Sosa...and the sudden hush would fall upon us until the moonshot fell back to Earth far far away from the wooden bat that had sent it into space.
That was my first summer ever touring in a rock'n'roll band and although I was a grown man by then, when you tour around in a van you're still pretty much just a heavier version of yourself at about thirteen. You're just a slightly confused excitable mish-mash of cheap junkfood and useless cum and longshot dreams balled up and baked up on Middle America's toaster oven stages. A gazillion miles from any real cares or problems, its no wonder that every single home run in a record-setting home run race made us feel as if we'd slammed it towards the far off evening horizon and into the distant bleachers ourselves.
Our excitement was so real, you see. Our thrills were genuine, every single one of them...stretched out for weeks, through a scattered forest of identical motel rooms on the similar outskirts of completely different towns. The beers were all very real. And the big dumb smiles. The pepperoni on the pizza, that was real.
I was there. I tasted it, savored it.
Our cigarettes were real and so were our salty tongues.
Our conversations, marinated in warm Bud Lite , they were all real as well.
And the Motel 6 bedspreads of the Summer of 1998: their blues and pinks and blacks all swooshed together like some baby's wild dream, upon which half a band of American man-childs spread out their weary bodies while another batch stood bedside, all of us staring wide-eyed as numbers 59 and then 60 and then 61 soared through the floodlit sky with all the animated grace of every shooting star that ever got skipped across the upside down river called Night...that shit was as real as anything ever was or will be again, in this world or the next.
And so now, years later, it is with older tireder hands, that I am here to step up and claim what is rightfully mine. Ours. The home runs. All of 'em.
No longer do they lie on the proverbial mantle-piece of the man who may have sent them into the hands of the commons in the stands. No more, I declare. For in the wake of their jolting by the hot cruel winds of time: them balls roll, one by one, down into the cupped palms of me and my brother and my band mates and my friends, and you and yours.
They were our memories too, you poor bastard.
And they're our home runs now.
And when the ball finally landed, three or four rows up in the upper deck, the room exploded with curses of awe, with masculine admiration. We were all dipped in magic for a few seconds again and it was a beautiful thing.
The Summer of 1998 was a good one for me. I spent it hurdling through farm fields and forests and ghettos and over legendary rivers. In the van, we moved across America, stopping only to piss/to get burgers until we hit the next stage, drank our free beers and played our hearts out as loudly as the local sound guy could stand it. For good hunks of the summer, we toured with The Bottle Rockets: one of the best bands I ever saw take a stage anywhere in my life. They were really good guys too, St. Louis guys. Each night they'd do this fantastic stunt where they all hit a note at the same time, repeatedly, until they landed on the number of home runs that their hometown Cardinals hero, Mark McGwire had launched up until that moment.
It was sensational. And if you took to counting their beats, as I did in my lager haze, you'd know that they were never off, ever. And by July or August of that season, the number was up there in the fifties at least. People in the crowd loved it. People love home runs and loud tight band hits and so if you found a way to combine the two, like those boys did that summer, well...then you were the best rock band on this planet that evening.
So, it didn't take long for our two bands to collide on certain nights when we ended up in the same Motel 6 out by the airport in Cleveland or Oklahoma City or wherever we were. And I still remember standing there, with a congealed slice of Domino's in my one hand and a cold one in the other, all of us laughing and chattering way louder than you're supposed to at 2:30 or 3 in the morning, until the ESPN highlights would land on McGwire, or The Cubs' Sammy Sosa...and the sudden hush would fall upon us until the moonshot fell back to Earth far far away from the wooden bat that had sent it into space.
That was my first summer ever touring in a rock'n'roll band and although I was a grown man by then, when you tour around in a van you're still pretty much just a heavier version of yourself at about thirteen. You're just a slightly confused excitable mish-mash of cheap junkfood and useless cum and longshot dreams balled up and baked up on Middle America's toaster oven stages. A gazillion miles from any real cares or problems, its no wonder that every single home run in a record-setting home run race made us feel as if we'd slammed it towards the far off evening horizon and into the distant bleachers ourselves.
Our excitement was so real, you see. Our thrills were genuine, every single one of them...stretched out for weeks, through a scattered forest of identical motel rooms on the similar outskirts of completely different towns. The beers were all very real. And the big dumb smiles. The pepperoni on the pizza, that was real.
I was there. I tasted it, savored it.
Our cigarettes were real and so were our salty tongues.
Our conversations, marinated in warm Bud Lite , they were all real as well.
And the Motel 6 bedspreads of the Summer of 1998: their blues and pinks and blacks all swooshed together like some baby's wild dream, upon which half a band of American man-childs spread out their weary bodies while another batch stood bedside, all of us staring wide-eyed as numbers 59 and then 60 and then 61 soared through the floodlit sky with all the animated grace of every shooting star that ever got skipped across the upside down river called Night...that shit was as real as anything ever was or will be again, in this world or the next.
And so now, years later, it is with older tireder hands, that I am here to step up and claim what is rightfully mine. Ours. The home runs. All of 'em.
No longer do they lie on the proverbial mantle-piece of the man who may have sent them into the hands of the commons in the stands. No more, I declare. For in the wake of their jolting by the hot cruel winds of time: them balls roll, one by one, down into the cupped palms of me and my brother and my band mates and my friends, and you and yours.
They were our memories too, you poor bastard.
And they're our home runs now.
January 9, 2010
Carl The Terrible.
Maybe it was the Corn Chex just before I went to bed. There must be something weird, some sort of dream-spark drug sprayed on those kernels somewhere along the endless road between dew-kissed farm field and the check-out counter at Wal-Mart. There's got to be. If all these quit smoking potions and hard-on pills and Pez for Pricks they hawk on television are occasionally delivered by Angels of Madness whispering in certain ears. Kill yourself. Shit yourself. Call yourself up on Skype. If these drugs are out there, well they then I gotta believe they occasionally find their way into the corn. And the Chex.
Or, maybe it was the large glass of wine I glugged after the cereal. Whatever. It's not important. What's important is that somewhere around 3;30ish the other night something hellacious kicked in and my wife added another husband to our family.
Ladies and Gentlemen, meet: Carl.
And let me tell you something, this fucking guy, Carl. Christ, what a Powerball Hit this guy is. My wife of five years, she shows up in my sleep with this guy and even I like him at first: cooking with sauces, power-sawing into the walls (don't ask...blame the CornDrugs), letting me watch as he kisses Monica deeply and passionately like some mythical Euro-Poet stoned out of his mind on his own cologne. I mean this whole situation was a bowling ball to the face. Another husband? Who does this? This is Utah. We add wives not dudes.
So, like dreams go, elephants appeared outside the windows and Violet was a Yeti, etc. Still, the gist was somewhat clear and by the time I cracked my eyes to the darkness and tasted my thunderous heart beats, I was a shaken mess. I lay there in the bed trying to figure out what just happened.
I tried to hold Monica, reach out to her in my time of need.
She moaned in a pissy way.
"I had a bad dream," I told her. She did not respond. Nothing. It hurt.
This guy, Carl, he'd tried so hard with me: To be kind. To let me down easy. To push my work-shirts and t-shirts to the back of my closet with a soft twinkle in his handsome eye, when he had to hang his own clothes up there in the front. I glared into the black of our bedroom now and distinctly recalled how ripped and bronze his arms were, how they rippled with soft Mediterranean currents, easy and clean, when he pushed my empty baby blue hangers to the back of the closet, into some forsaken void owned by spiders that live on dust and loneliness. And God, the smile he gave me when he was doing it. The meticulously warm grin; the "Hey Buddy" creases at the corner of his eyes; the gentle way he ignored my wife, OUR wife, as she dangled off one of his muscles like a some punk-ass park demon hogging the Jungle Gym.
Carl knew he had me. He felt the trillion savage volts cascading through his system, smashing entire villages of these weak peasants of doubt and vulnerability into the walls of his guts until all there was left was a paper-thin cloud of the newly extinct exiting his body as dust. And every time he looked at me, he blew a light wind it into my face without even trying.
Around then, I guess, is when I couldn't take much more. And so there I was trying to put some 4AM meaning to the horrific sideshow that is my dreams. So many questions. So much to consider. So many things that made absolutely no sense at all.
I mean, if my wife was going to add a second husband to our family, she would never pick a dude named Carl.
She just wouldn't.
Or, maybe it was the large glass of wine I glugged after the cereal. Whatever. It's not important. What's important is that somewhere around 3;30ish the other night something hellacious kicked in and my wife added another husband to our family.
Ladies and Gentlemen, meet: Carl.
And let me tell you something, this fucking guy, Carl. Christ, what a Powerball Hit this guy is. My wife of five years, she shows up in my sleep with this guy and even I like him at first: cooking with sauces, power-sawing into the walls (don't ask...blame the CornDrugs), letting me watch as he kisses Monica deeply and passionately like some mythical Euro-Poet stoned out of his mind on his own cologne. I mean this whole situation was a bowling ball to the face. Another husband? Who does this? This is Utah. We add wives not dudes.
So, like dreams go, elephants appeared outside the windows and Violet was a Yeti, etc. Still, the gist was somewhat clear and by the time I cracked my eyes to the darkness and tasted my thunderous heart beats, I was a shaken mess. I lay there in the bed trying to figure out what just happened.
I tried to hold Monica, reach out to her in my time of need.
She moaned in a pissy way.
"I had a bad dream," I told her. She did not respond. Nothing. It hurt.
This guy, Carl, he'd tried so hard with me: To be kind. To let me down easy. To push my work-shirts and t-shirts to the back of my closet with a soft twinkle in his handsome eye, when he had to hang his own clothes up there in the front. I glared into the black of our bedroom now and distinctly recalled how ripped and bronze his arms were, how they rippled with soft Mediterranean currents, easy and clean, when he pushed my empty baby blue hangers to the back of the closet, into some forsaken void owned by spiders that live on dust and loneliness. And God, the smile he gave me when he was doing it. The meticulously warm grin; the "Hey Buddy" creases at the corner of his eyes; the gentle way he ignored my wife, OUR wife, as she dangled off one of his muscles like a some punk-ass park demon hogging the Jungle Gym.
Carl knew he had me. He felt the trillion savage volts cascading through his system, smashing entire villages of these weak peasants of doubt and vulnerability into the walls of his guts until all there was left was a paper-thin cloud of the newly extinct exiting his body as dust. And every time he looked at me, he blew a light wind it into my face without even trying.
Around then, I guess, is when I couldn't take much more. And so there I was trying to put some 4AM meaning to the horrific sideshow that is my dreams. So many questions. So much to consider. So many things that made absolutely no sense at all.
I mean, if my wife was going to add a second husband to our family, she would never pick a dude named Carl.
She just wouldn't.
December 7, 2009
Peanut Butter And Jelly Vision.
I've been swiping peanut butter and jelly onto crackers, standing in the kitchen window, the final resting spot for weak beams of sunlight. Millions/Trillions of miles this stuff travels and in the end, its sometimes just me it ends up with. Other sunbeams find lions fucking under shade trees or just born babies writhing in their Mama's arms. Crystal rivers sliding through emerald valleys. Vast hidden mountain meadows of top-notch ganja. All of it desirable, most likely, for falling bits of sun.
But me?
What about the ones that slip through the junk trees in the strip of dirt by our driveway and coast down on to my arms and across my grinding peanut butter jaws? Is it still a good life? Is it still a good thing to have traveled all the way from the damn sun just so you could shine upon some SnackDude's fingers wrapped around a butter knife?
I don't know.
I don't know the answer. Probably, no one does.
=================================================================================
The other day I stared at the photo of The Falling Man for a long time. Like hours. It is a sad stunning shot. Maybe the hardest picture ever taken. Hard to look at. Hard to take. Hard to be in. Falling, upside down, mid-stride; just a moment in time when it seemed like maybe the fellow could walk his way down off the melting World Trade Center...through the air, to the street below. Maybe you haven't seen the picture. A lot of people are pissed off when they see it. It's too difficult. It burns.
Whatever. You have to see it to move beyond it.
==================================================================================
I have spent nearly all of my life narrating the scenes of my movie/in my head.
Here is Serge,on a cold salty morning, walking by the sea. Here is Serge at Kiddie City groping Boba Fett. Serge, what are you doing this for....drinking this beer in this barroom window? Everyone is looking at you, laughing at you.
Serge, lay off the fries. People are watching.
Serge-Man, don't be kissing the pictures in the Hustler magazine. Alright: one kiss!
Serge, you're walking down the aisle at K-Mart, past the Blue Light Special cart, past pizza stones and beach towels and Easter cards. Keep walking. Keep walking. Go past these shower curtains, man. Ok wait! Stop. Pick up that dvd. GLADIATOR! Ok, put it down right there in those socks...don't worry about it. Ok, walk on.
Who am I talking to? Who is all this narration for? What happens to the thousands of miles of tapes when I'm gone?
Will anyone be able to listen back? And why would they even want to? You have your own tapes to carry around. Your own walks through K-Mart to pick apart.
Its lovely isn't it? This madness of life. Talking to myself for 38 years. That's luck.
===================================================================================
There are the 911 calls too. I found them on YouTube but they're everywhere. Just a few lost voices still echoing when summoned. They've been picked over and listened to fifty million times by all kinds of people, living people in front of their computers, chins atop fists. Pulses quivering. They're voices from beyond now. Crossed over. If there's something else...they know now. But at the time: they didn't know. They were just scared like anyone would be.
The voices speak of smoke and heat. Of not being able to see much of anything. They ask if they might be rescued soon. They say Hurry. Please. It is hot. We're way way up here.
It breaks the heart, of course. To listen to them, through the scratchy static of bad connection. Through the buzz of Doom coming down the hall behind them. Yet, somehow when I do listen,I can't help but think of things I never seem to have the balls/brains to think about otherwise. Things like love. Togetherness. Dumb stupid smiles. The baby's fingers in my mouth.
I look over at my wife's toes poking out of the blanket.
Why can't I get certain shit right before I get cut down forever?
Sometimes the questions themselves are the answers.
==================================================================================
Maybe:
You don't go and stay gone. You come back, in the wind at night. On the backs of sunbeams. You ride 'em like buck stallions down over mountains of cobbled cloud. You smash across prairies of stars. Over the crests of distant hills you come riding hard and fast back down along the old familiar trails, dust clouds rising high behind you. Steaming snot shoots from your horse's face. You fire six-guns at the sky. And you ride and ride and ride.
People who loved you love you still. They eat crackers at the window. Unknowing.
You hurtle down the final slope and heave through their glass.
They feel you and smile and just like that you're gone. Again.
But me?
What about the ones that slip through the junk trees in the strip of dirt by our driveway and coast down on to my arms and across my grinding peanut butter jaws? Is it still a good life? Is it still a good thing to have traveled all the way from the damn sun just so you could shine upon some SnackDude's fingers wrapped around a butter knife?
I don't know.
I don't know the answer. Probably, no one does.
=================================================================================
The other day I stared at the photo of The Falling Man for a long time. Like hours. It is a sad stunning shot. Maybe the hardest picture ever taken. Hard to look at. Hard to take. Hard to be in. Falling, upside down, mid-stride; just a moment in time when it seemed like maybe the fellow could walk his way down off the melting World Trade Center...through the air, to the street below. Maybe you haven't seen the picture. A lot of people are pissed off when they see it. It's too difficult. It burns.
Whatever. You have to see it to move beyond it.
==================================================================================
I have spent nearly all of my life narrating the scenes of my movie/in my head.
Here is Serge,on a cold salty morning, walking by the sea. Here is Serge at Kiddie City groping Boba Fett. Serge, what are you doing this for....drinking this beer in this barroom window? Everyone is looking at you, laughing at you.
Serge, lay off the fries. People are watching.
Serge-Man, don't be kissing the pictures in the Hustler magazine. Alright: one kiss!
Serge, you're walking down the aisle at K-Mart, past the Blue Light Special cart, past pizza stones and beach towels and Easter cards. Keep walking. Keep walking. Go past these shower curtains, man. Ok wait! Stop. Pick up that dvd. GLADIATOR! Ok, put it down right there in those socks...don't worry about it. Ok, walk on.
Who am I talking to? Who is all this narration for? What happens to the thousands of miles of tapes when I'm gone?
Will anyone be able to listen back? And why would they even want to? You have your own tapes to carry around. Your own walks through K-Mart to pick apart.
Its lovely isn't it? This madness of life. Talking to myself for 38 years. That's luck.
===================================================================================
There are the 911 calls too. I found them on YouTube but they're everywhere. Just a few lost voices still echoing when summoned. They've been picked over and listened to fifty million times by all kinds of people, living people in front of their computers, chins atop fists. Pulses quivering. They're voices from beyond now. Crossed over. If there's something else...they know now. But at the time: they didn't know. They were just scared like anyone would be.
The voices speak of smoke and heat. Of not being able to see much of anything. They ask if they might be rescued soon. They say Hurry. Please. It is hot. We're way way up here.
It breaks the heart, of course. To listen to them, through the scratchy static of bad connection. Through the buzz of Doom coming down the hall behind them. Yet, somehow when I do listen,I can't help but think of things I never seem to have the balls/brains to think about otherwise. Things like love. Togetherness. Dumb stupid smiles. The baby's fingers in my mouth.
I look over at my wife's toes poking out of the blanket.
Why can't I get certain shit right before I get cut down forever?
Sometimes the questions themselves are the answers.
==================================================================================
Maybe:
You don't go and stay gone. You come back, in the wind at night. On the backs of sunbeams. You ride 'em like buck stallions down over mountains of cobbled cloud. You smash across prairies of stars. Over the crests of distant hills you come riding hard and fast back down along the old familiar trails, dust clouds rising high behind you. Steaming snot shoots from your horse's face. You fire six-guns at the sky. And you ride and ride and ride.
People who loved you love you still. They eat crackers at the window. Unknowing.
You hurtle down the final slope and heave through their glass.
They feel you and smile and just like that you're gone. Again.
November 25, 2009
Average Greatness.
Thanksgiving. After they called my Pop-Pop to the table for the fifth or sixth time the family would inevitably just give up. He'd show. We knew he would. And in turn he knew we knew and that gave him the distinct freedom to watch as much of the remaining few minutes of the first half of the game as he goddamn well pleased. He knew too, that we'd wait for him. Peering on at fresh steam rising off the creamed onions, gravy forming skin in its ancient china boat: we knew that he knew that we wouldn't be scooping or scraping anything onto our old clean plates until he limped on in and took his seat at the head of the table.
The cranberries, in their crystal vessel, would wait.
The supermarket bird, its long journey through years of hassle, of dim wittedness and epic never-ending crowds of tens of thousands of identical morons shoving to and fro, standing under some company farm's pavillion, everyone just waiting for the inevitable same exact death they had no idea was coming down the Holiday Pike; he would wait.
The fancy glasses, who'd spent the past eleven months in dust and darkness, now filled with cheap bitter refrigerated red wine, would wait. Were waiting.
Me, Mom-Mom, my Uncle Mike, my Aunt Connie, my Mom, my brother: Dave, sometimes old ladies from around the way who smelled like Bisquick and pie crust: we would wait. We could wait til John Madden and the Detroit Lions and 50,000 absolute strangers packed into a dome somewhere none of us had ever been said ok, the half is over. Go ahead and eat, Murph.
Then, the old boy would fist his half drunk can of Cream Ale, peel himself out of his recliner slow, and hobble into the dining room to set his bloodshot eyes upon the feast he knew was there.
"Alright! Look at that, huh?!", he'd exclaim. And it was genuine. He loved the look of it all. The food laid out on the special trays and bowls.
"Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah," he'd add, in a faux-high squeak. Then he'd look at me, at my brother. "Hungry,man?"
We'd shift in our seats, little grenades of anticipation exploding in our eyes. "Oh yeah! Starving, Pop-Pop!"
Then, he went to sit down.
But that one Thanksgiving, somewhere between pulling his creaky wooden chair out and landing in it, something weird happened. Some foreign wind blew through the dining room, I guess. And as we all waited patiently for the Patriarch to plop down, his world began to spin a little.
Now, don't get all "Oh No...its a STROKE AT THE HOLIDAY TABLE TALE!" No, no. That's not what's about to happen here. Nothing bad like that. No. See, what happened here, I surmise, is that Pop-Pop's Well-Deserved NFL Three O'clock Holiday Beer Buzz snuck up on the old vet when he least expected it. Right there when he was making his grand entrance into the vast hall of his own damn castle.
And instead of just sitting down, he stopped mid-air above his family seated at the table below him and began to totter. His right arm went out to grab hold of some old navy rope, but it was long gone. He clenched at stuffing flavored air instead. The world slowed down...seconds became hours, then days and weeks. My mouth dripped open as a look of bewilderment settled upon me. Upon all of us.
Pop-Pop was falling into the china cabinet behind him and this was gonna hold up dinner and maybe kill him, too.
The food quit steaming. It froze instead. The piping hot biscuits held their collective breath and turned into hard river stones. The mashed potatoes died inside. The sweet potatoes went sour. The butter shot back up into the cow.
Up in the air, my grandfather held his look as straight as he could muster. But, it was so hard. His eyeballs rammed from their wrinkled-edged sockets. Oh, the humanity. His left arm lifted now, from the back of his chair...the last of the balancing limbs. He was free falling now. Alone above his 18 pound Butterball and his grandsons and his wife of many decades and his children and his lukewarm can of beer, he touched the clouds of scent that had risen from the table below him. My Mom-Mom's face was pure prayer. My Mom's was curiosity. Across from me, my brother watched as if he were witnessing the first snowflakes of his life sifting down from the heavens above.
We were all, in our own ways, both mortified and enchanted.
Pop-Pop's arms flailed now. Like a drowning man in a sudden sea he found himself reaching out for phantom tree limbs or pieces of furniture that just weren't there. The mysterious wind shook him and swayed him as one foot lifted from the ground. It was as if a tornado was uprooting a silo...first a few cobs fly out/then dozens,hundreds/then the whole thing is just blown to smithereens.
All of human history packed itself into our small dining room to watch this knot unravel.
But something happened then. A Thanksgiving Miracle. And just as his tipping back into the chipped old china cabinet was a certainty, just as we were all witnessing it happen milliseconds before the occurrence: the wicked wind up and quit on him. Simply shifted direction, hauled ass, and split.
A look of calm touched my Pop-Pop's straining face. His fate grabbed his crooked body in her sweet strong arms. He steadied. The man caught himself falling out of the vast limitless sky.
His eyes had tears in them. To this day, I still swear on that.
Life kicked back in. Just like that: time swept back over us all. And the glorious steam started rising from the green beans and the potatoes. The biscuits let out their lungs, turned soft once more. The bronzed bird, roasted since dawn, accepted its dour demise and laid back down on my Mom-Mom's silver tray, happy....eager even, to be devoured by this fascinating family.
The butter shot out of the cow.
The stuffing released all of its sagey scent at once, drunkening the room with joy.
The creamed onions all shifted toward the side of the bowl closest to my Pop-Pop, each individual pearl dying to be slipped beyond the lips and onto the battered false teeth of the man they'd just seen save himself from temporary ruin with such average greatness.
Collectively, we were, each of us, overjoyed with the outcome. A family again, after all that had just happened to us, we welcomed Pop-Pop to the table as he rammed his ass into his seat at the head of it all. Just like we knew he would.
Just like he knew that we knew he would, eventually.
Happy Thanksgiving, one and all.
The cranberries, in their crystal vessel, would wait.
The supermarket bird, its long journey through years of hassle, of dim wittedness and epic never-ending crowds of tens of thousands of identical morons shoving to and fro, standing under some company farm's pavillion, everyone just waiting for the inevitable same exact death they had no idea was coming down the Holiday Pike; he would wait.
The fancy glasses, who'd spent the past eleven months in dust and darkness, now filled with cheap bitter refrigerated red wine, would wait. Were waiting.
Me, Mom-Mom, my Uncle Mike, my Aunt Connie, my Mom, my brother: Dave, sometimes old ladies from around the way who smelled like Bisquick and pie crust: we would wait. We could wait til John Madden and the Detroit Lions and 50,000 absolute strangers packed into a dome somewhere none of us had ever been said ok, the half is over. Go ahead and eat, Murph.
Then, the old boy would fist his half drunk can of Cream Ale, peel himself out of his recliner slow, and hobble into the dining room to set his bloodshot eyes upon the feast he knew was there.
"Alright! Look at that, huh?!", he'd exclaim. And it was genuine. He loved the look of it all. The food laid out on the special trays and bowls.
"Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah," he'd add, in a faux-high squeak. Then he'd look at me, at my brother. "Hungry,man?"
We'd shift in our seats, little grenades of anticipation exploding in our eyes. "Oh yeah! Starving, Pop-Pop!"
Then, he went to sit down.
But that one Thanksgiving, somewhere between pulling his creaky wooden chair out and landing in it, something weird happened. Some foreign wind blew through the dining room, I guess. And as we all waited patiently for the Patriarch to plop down, his world began to spin a little.
Now, don't get all "Oh No...its a STROKE AT THE HOLIDAY TABLE TALE!" No, no. That's not what's about to happen here. Nothing bad like that. No. See, what happened here, I surmise, is that Pop-Pop's Well-Deserved NFL Three O'clock Holiday Beer Buzz snuck up on the old vet when he least expected it. Right there when he was making his grand entrance into the vast hall of his own damn castle.
And instead of just sitting down, he stopped mid-air above his family seated at the table below him and began to totter. His right arm went out to grab hold of some old navy rope, but it was long gone. He clenched at stuffing flavored air instead. The world slowed down...seconds became hours, then days and weeks. My mouth dripped open as a look of bewilderment settled upon me. Upon all of us.
Pop-Pop was falling into the china cabinet behind him and this was gonna hold up dinner and maybe kill him, too.
The food quit steaming. It froze instead. The piping hot biscuits held their collective breath and turned into hard river stones. The mashed potatoes died inside. The sweet potatoes went sour. The butter shot back up into the cow.
Up in the air, my grandfather held his look as straight as he could muster. But, it was so hard. His eyeballs rammed from their wrinkled-edged sockets. Oh, the humanity. His left arm lifted now, from the back of his chair...the last of the balancing limbs. He was free falling now. Alone above his 18 pound Butterball and his grandsons and his wife of many decades and his children and his lukewarm can of beer, he touched the clouds of scent that had risen from the table below him. My Mom-Mom's face was pure prayer. My Mom's was curiosity. Across from me, my brother watched as if he were witnessing the first snowflakes of his life sifting down from the heavens above.
We were all, in our own ways, both mortified and enchanted.
Pop-Pop's arms flailed now. Like a drowning man in a sudden sea he found himself reaching out for phantom tree limbs or pieces of furniture that just weren't there. The mysterious wind shook him and swayed him as one foot lifted from the ground. It was as if a tornado was uprooting a silo...first a few cobs fly out/then dozens,hundreds/then the whole thing is just blown to smithereens.
All of human history packed itself into our small dining room to watch this knot unravel.
But something happened then. A Thanksgiving Miracle. And just as his tipping back into the chipped old china cabinet was a certainty, just as we were all witnessing it happen milliseconds before the occurrence: the wicked wind up and quit on him. Simply shifted direction, hauled ass, and split.
A look of calm touched my Pop-Pop's straining face. His fate grabbed his crooked body in her sweet strong arms. He steadied. The man caught himself falling out of the vast limitless sky.
His eyes had tears in them. To this day, I still swear on that.
Life kicked back in. Just like that: time swept back over us all. And the glorious steam started rising from the green beans and the potatoes. The biscuits let out their lungs, turned soft once more. The bronzed bird, roasted since dawn, accepted its dour demise and laid back down on my Mom-Mom's silver tray, happy....eager even, to be devoured by this fascinating family.
The butter shot out of the cow.
The stuffing released all of its sagey scent at once, drunkening the room with joy.
The creamed onions all shifted toward the side of the bowl closest to my Pop-Pop, each individual pearl dying to be slipped beyond the lips and onto the battered false teeth of the man they'd just seen save himself from temporary ruin with such average greatness.
Collectively, we were, each of us, overjoyed with the outcome. A family again, after all that had just happened to us, we welcomed Pop-Pop to the table as he rammed his ass into his seat at the head of it all. Just like we knew he would.
Just like he knew that we knew he would, eventually.
Happy Thanksgiving, one and all.
Turkey Blood Is Pilgrim For Dry Red Wine.
Hey. If you want, go ahead and leave a Happy First Thanksgiving message here for the very star of our tiny show, Violet. Tonight marks the once-in-a-lifetime kickoff to her very first American Holiday Season. I am extremely excited/effervescent for her too. I've been waiting for these days, pretty much all of my life. Now: they're here.
If you choose to leave a message, leave your name and maybe where you live too. Then, I'll read them all to her out loud and film her reaction (which will likely involve slobber). I'll post that little gem up as soon as she has enough greetings.
And just think, years from now, when you're in a nursing home with cranberries all over your triple chin and shirt front, and a little yam turd in your adult diaper, a grown up Violet will be able to take a break from her own Thanksgiving insanity to steal away and watch a video from long ago, when the world/you first welcomed her to the most wonderful time of the year.
EXTRA EXTRA!!!! Also: check back later tonight from wherever you are (barroom, plane, bus, your old bedroom still decorated with posters of the dorks you worshiped in Middle School still tacked to the wall) for a Thanksgiving thing I'm writing.
Thanks.
serge
If you choose to leave a message, leave your name and maybe where you live too. Then, I'll read them all to her out loud and film her reaction (which will likely involve slobber). I'll post that little gem up as soon as she has enough greetings.
And just think, years from now, when you're in a nursing home with cranberries all over your triple chin and shirt front, and a little yam turd in your adult diaper, a grown up Violet will be able to take a break from her own Thanksgiving insanity to steal away and watch a video from long ago, when the world/you first welcomed her to the most wonderful time of the year.
EXTRA EXTRA!!!! Also: check back later tonight from wherever you are (barroom, plane, bus, your old bedroom still decorated with posters of the dorks you worshiped in Middle School still tacked to the wall) for a Thanksgiving thing I'm writing.
Thanks.
serge
November 13, 2009
Santa Lays His Eyes On A Little Grassy Knoll.
It took a fucking while but I got it in the end. Twelve bucks. That's what I paid. For the Santa suit, for my daughter. I tried buying one last year before she was even born but that dashing waving Sweet Idea was assassinated in that front quadrant of the Babies-R-Us down in Sandy by Lee Harvey Monica. That was one miserable dude left standing there in all that proverbial Dream Blood, too. Flecks of Dream Scalp on my sweatshirt sleeves. Dream Brain hunks in my hair. Fighting back curse words if not tiny tears. Her words/her rifle's report hunk in the air around my face like summer cigar.
"You don't need that yet, Serge. Christ, the kid's not even born yet."
So?
What...you need to be "born" to have a goddamn cute-ass tiny Santa Claus suit bought for you in a future-safe size?
"It's on sale/LOOK!," I held out the price tag, meekly. I knew I was steering this little convertible toward her book depository. But this made sense to me. I'd been waiting all my life really.
"Put it back," she sighed. Bitch. She wasn't even looking at me anymore. She wasn't even thinking about the Dream. To her: the whole thing at been a chewed-up gob of Big Red she ran over in the Honda. No bump. Impossible to even notice.
"No," I garbled. I knew I wasn't getting it. And I knew I couldn't argue my case in any sane court. There was no such thing. Pregnant Lee Harvey Monica was a cornucopia of emotional winds, rational thought spread thinly over whole-grain fucking crazy. To push my case would be to dangle bacon by the cave entrance. To stare hard into a darkness that would sooner or later expunge a saber toothed beatdown on me: on my lack of money/my lack of family protection planning/my insatiable foolhardy need to buy costumes for the Unborn. I closed my eyes.
The shot boomed through my bones, though I knew it was coming. I kept my eyes closed and let the fat ropes of sweet death smoke curl up my nostrils. I didn't need to see the Assassin escape across distant streets/aisles. I knew she was going before she'd even goddamn gone. Before that hollow point Holiday Spoiler rammed home into the skull of my working man's vision. Sure enough, when I forced my eyes to take in the carnage, Lee Harvey Monica was gone. And the Santa suit in my clammy fist was limp and sagged and more dead than all the people in all the grave holes in all the world.
I hung it back on the rack and started looking at mini Chuck Taylors.
================================================================================
Saturday at WalMart, I put one in the cart. The suit. It was the last one in Violet's size and I wasn't taking any chances. Though, truth be told, there are probably people fucking making them out of the back of every single WalMart there is huh? Just sitting there listening to classic rock or Mariachi radio, sippin' Mountain Dews, making little Santa suits: Dollar-A-Mile felt and white flimsy cotton whirled at breakneck speed; fingers like lighters flicking; the snipping snapping immolated hummingbirds of industry.
Whatever. I wasn't taking any chances. I put it in the cart.
I was decked out in six suits of armor too, in case you're wondering. Six iron skins of Assassin-proof reasons why I needed to purchase the suit that day. I didn't need them though. I just used my oldest trick: Original Sticker Shock Denial. When Lee Harvey Monica appeared at the end of the aisle, something ominous poking from her long Columbine coat, I held up the suit with a weak-ass grin, feigning only partial interest.
"How much," she asked, warily, her words cooly sliding down the aisle past the feet pajamas and the discounted Halloween onesies, like bb's down tilted sheet metal.
"Thirty-six dollars," I whispered dejectedly.
"HOW much?," again.
"THIRTY SIX BUCKS," I said, louder. But still with hints of hopelessness.
She whipped out the rifle from under the coat, like Jesse James, aimed it over top our Violet sitting in the cart, and fired without blinking a lash. The shot rained deaf down on everything from purses to beer.
I stood my ground, the suit injured but undead.
I smiled.
"Psyche. Its just twelve bucks!"
I could see this, this very own bullet of mine, this peaceable nugget of undeniable information, as it waddled through the air, a fat duck drunk on confidence.
I watched as it whizzed around Lee Harvey Monica's bubbling mind, making laps around her denial. I saw her financial guard stick his handsome hot little fucking face out of her ear. And I watched my return bullet take his head off next to a rack of small mittens.
She looked away.
"Git it." She mumbled, the ice water in her veins rushing out of her eyes and nose, running down onto the filthy cheap tiles in raging rivers of lost reasoning, rising to our ankles/to our knees/ripping away the Assassin's rifle and ruining it with Holiday Flood. We were all three swept up and tossed about on the waves of a new wild storm. We managed to hold onto one another as we blasted past the frozen foods and the fake silk scarves and the huge cardboard forts of avocados, out through the automatic doors, over SUVs and pimped out Mazdas and work trucks, under the shadow of the parking garage roof we were swept over the once frozen land, now thawed by a melted heart hurricane of Christmas Spirit!
We somehow, miraculously, washed up on the roof of our own Honda. Sort of stunned.
Violet looking around/chewing on her jacket sleeve.
Me, holding the Santa Suit high above my head, screaming, screeching, through gumdrop tears," I'M THE KING OF THE WOOOOOOOOOOOORLD!!!!!!!!!!"
And Monica, wild haired and naked, wrapped around my muscular thigh, her bugging eyes picking apart that raging torrent, watching ever so closely for her lost gun.
"You don't need that yet, Serge. Christ, the kid's not even born yet."
So?
What...you need to be "born" to have a goddamn cute-ass tiny Santa Claus suit bought for you in a future-safe size?
"It's on sale/LOOK!," I held out the price tag, meekly. I knew I was steering this little convertible toward her book depository. But this made sense to me. I'd been waiting all my life really.
"Put it back," she sighed. Bitch. She wasn't even looking at me anymore. She wasn't even thinking about the Dream. To her: the whole thing at been a chewed-up gob of Big Red she ran over in the Honda. No bump. Impossible to even notice.
"No," I garbled. I knew I wasn't getting it. And I knew I couldn't argue my case in any sane court. There was no such thing. Pregnant Lee Harvey Monica was a cornucopia of emotional winds, rational thought spread thinly over whole-grain fucking crazy. To push my case would be to dangle bacon by the cave entrance. To stare hard into a darkness that would sooner or later expunge a saber toothed beatdown on me: on my lack of money/my lack of family protection planning/my insatiable foolhardy need to buy costumes for the Unborn. I closed my eyes.
The shot boomed through my bones, though I knew it was coming. I kept my eyes closed and let the fat ropes of sweet death smoke curl up my nostrils. I didn't need to see the Assassin escape across distant streets/aisles. I knew she was going before she'd even goddamn gone. Before that hollow point Holiday Spoiler rammed home into the skull of my working man's vision. Sure enough, when I forced my eyes to take in the carnage, Lee Harvey Monica was gone. And the Santa suit in my clammy fist was limp and sagged and more dead than all the people in all the grave holes in all the world.
I hung it back on the rack and started looking at mini Chuck Taylors.
================================================================================
Saturday at WalMart, I put one in the cart. The suit. It was the last one in Violet's size and I wasn't taking any chances. Though, truth be told, there are probably people fucking making them out of the back of every single WalMart there is huh? Just sitting there listening to classic rock or Mariachi radio, sippin' Mountain Dews, making little Santa suits: Dollar-A-Mile felt and white flimsy cotton whirled at breakneck speed; fingers like lighters flicking; the snipping snapping immolated hummingbirds of industry.
Whatever. I wasn't taking any chances. I put it in the cart.
I was decked out in six suits of armor too, in case you're wondering. Six iron skins of Assassin-proof reasons why I needed to purchase the suit that day. I didn't need them though. I just used my oldest trick: Original Sticker Shock Denial. When Lee Harvey Monica appeared at the end of the aisle, something ominous poking from her long Columbine coat, I held up the suit with a weak-ass grin, feigning only partial interest.
"How much," she asked, warily, her words cooly sliding down the aisle past the feet pajamas and the discounted Halloween onesies, like bb's down tilted sheet metal.
"Thirty-six dollars," I whispered dejectedly.
"HOW much?," again.
"THIRTY SIX BUCKS," I said, louder. But still with hints of hopelessness.
She whipped out the rifle from under the coat, like Jesse James, aimed it over top our Violet sitting in the cart, and fired without blinking a lash. The shot rained deaf down on everything from purses to beer.
I stood my ground, the suit injured but undead.
I smiled.
"Psyche. Its just twelve bucks!"
I could see this, this very own bullet of mine, this peaceable nugget of undeniable information, as it waddled through the air, a fat duck drunk on confidence.
I watched as it whizzed around Lee Harvey Monica's bubbling mind, making laps around her denial. I saw her financial guard stick his handsome hot little fucking face out of her ear. And I watched my return bullet take his head off next to a rack of small mittens.
She looked away.
"Git it." She mumbled, the ice water in her veins rushing out of her eyes and nose, running down onto the filthy cheap tiles in raging rivers of lost reasoning, rising to our ankles/to our knees/ripping away the Assassin's rifle and ruining it with Holiday Flood. We were all three swept up and tossed about on the waves of a new wild storm. We managed to hold onto one another as we blasted past the frozen foods and the fake silk scarves and the huge cardboard forts of avocados, out through the automatic doors, over SUVs and pimped out Mazdas and work trucks, under the shadow of the parking garage roof we were swept over the once frozen land, now thawed by a melted heart hurricane of Christmas Spirit!
We somehow, miraculously, washed up on the roof of our own Honda. Sort of stunned.
Violet looking around/chewing on her jacket sleeve.
Me, holding the Santa Suit high above my head, screaming, screeching, through gumdrop tears," I'M THE KING OF THE WOOOOOOOOOOOORLD!!!!!!!!!!"
And Monica, wild haired and naked, wrapped around my muscular thigh, her bugging eyes picking apart that raging torrent, watching ever so closely for her lost gun.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
