sign on the door iii
You’re, alone, I tell myself.
The objective is to seek out the familiar. Avoid the awkward. The ideal would be to find another observer. Someone who refuses to buy into the madness of these social activities, instead floating, orbiting the perimeter as a witness. An uninvolved participant.
Frivolous.
Watchers are too busy always watching. They don’t notice others watching. Someone always watches. Someone's always watching.
Panopticon. Big Brother. Little Brother. Reality TV.
We look but never see each other, watching for the watchers.
“You’d be amazed what you can google these days,” someone says somewhere. I hear it, but can’t pair voice with face.
This kid I roomed with during Orientation comes out of the kitchen, a fresh Sam Adams in his hand.
Eye contact.
Hear the slam of the fridge door.
“Hey!” The feigned excitement masks courtesy. “What’s up man?”
Gesture with my Budweiser, “Not much dude. Looking for the action.”
“Well, you’ve found it.” Suddenly, uninterested.
He looks around the kitchen and finds a bottle opener nailed to the wall, over the garbage pail. The beer pops and fizzes as he opens it.
He sees something in the living room. It catches his attention, drawing him like a magnet. Back, he flows from the conversation.
I ask if he's seen someone.
“Someone,” I repeat.
“Bedroom, I think,” he says and he’s gone.
or
“Bedroom,” I think he says and he’s gone.
or
“Bedroom,” I think, “he says and he’s gone”.
Nameless characters are the worst. The ones that don't matter. Obvious distractions, I’m sure. Refuse to offer course-changing opportunities. Orientation guy rejoins the princes of popped collars.
James? Jeff?
la faccia della luna i
Thanksgiving break. We have this extended weekend. Four days.
Most people go home and hook up with girls from their high school, whom have suddenly become attractive and easy.
Most people go home to their families.
I have no home to go to. God knows, I am not about to have dinner in that big, empty house where my mother lives, watching her drown her sorrows in expensive wine.
I refuse to put myself through another holiday like that. None of our other relatives will return her calls, especially on my father’s side. An outsider. A traitor. I’m sure none of them went back to the house after the wake like she wanted. They all see mommy-dearest as the one who abandoned her family, instead of my father abandoning us. They may have a point.
Most people go home and celebrate the things they are thankful for, but fuck it, who am I kidding? People go home to have their wallets refilled with cash and score some decent food for a change. Most people, like me, have nothing to be thankful for. Tons we’re greedy for.
I’ve already been home for my grandmother’s whole death thing and I think that’s enough. If I go home for Thanksgiving, people might start thinking that I like my family or something.
No one needs to think that.
So I don’t go home. I can’t stay on campus. School cuts everyone loose for the holiday. Closes the dorms. I debate hiding and trying to stay, but there are all those creepy notes I keep getting. They totally bug me out. So I make plans to split, escape.
I end up going with Andy to his house for a party. His parents are cruising in the Bahamas for a week. He plans to and invite some people we went to high school with. I’m not completely looking forward to the last part. I hated high school.
Andy lives in one of those ridiculously extravagant houses, the kind that my father would have sold. He might have. He has a flowing foyer with ¾get this¾ a working fountain. As soon as I walk in the door, I know I am far out of my element.
“Where’s Ben going to be this weekend?” I ask when I remember the incident that occurred between brothers not long ago. I really don’t feel like playing the peacekeeper for the next three days.
“Don’t worry,” Andy smiles confidently at me. “He went home with that slut of a girlfriend of his.”
“Oh yeah, what’s her name again?” I ask, examining some fancy vase on a table.
“Whore,” Andy states plainly. “Her name is Whore.”
“I see.”
Ben had stolen Whore away from Andy, three weeks into the semester. I laugh to myself while Andy puts my one bag somewhere.
Ben is a vulture. He picks off girls from struggling, unhappy relationships with other guys. The girls are unhappy. Ben is an excuse. He’s a predator.
What goes, comes.
Andy tells me, “Plus there’s that Kathy girl.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“You know her?”
“Yes.”
“They hooked up.”
“Who did?” I press for information.
“Kathy and Ben,” Andy tells me.
“Shit,” I say.
“And he’s still fucking around with Slut, Whore, whoever?”
“I know,” Andy says. “He’s a bastard.”
“A total man-whore,” I say.
We laugh.
“Poor girl.”
Andy leaves and comes back with martini glasses between his fingers and a tumbler full of liquor in the other hand. He sets the two glasses on the table and fills them.
“To the conquest,” He raises his glass and toasts.
“So last time I heard,” he’s saying, swirling a glass, “Jamal, Heather, Mike, Dee-Dee, Chuck, Brian, Kelly, and Allan were all on for attending our little shin-dig tonight. These are just the formal invites.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Our?”
Andy is all chuckles, “Well I couldn’t take all the credit.” He hands me a drink. “Plus your name is the one with all that star power. People are coming to see you, man.”
“Great.”
I’m starting to want no part of this. Nothing good can come from this, I remind myself. Nothing at all.
“Oh and Matthew, my dealer, said he would swing by with some party favors.” When Andy says this, the whole night looks salvageable.
It’s just what I need in order to face people from high school. I don’t know if this is me beginning to sound like an addict, but whatever.
Am I?
“Don’t worry,” Andy is promising as he downs his drink, “tonight will kick ass.”
“It just better not suck,” I correct him.
Andy takes me on a tour of his McMansion. The house has two floors with vaulted ceilings and skylights. It’s got expensive furniture no one ever sits on and trendy art no one really understands. We move to an atrium with a marble, spiraling staircase, which makes me dizzy for some reason.
This place is a hotel lobby.
At the top of the steps, a portrait stretches along an otherwise bare wall like a mural. It’s Andy’s family portrait. Men in suits, ties. Women who look like Hillary Clinton. It’s all very distinguished. As we walk past it and he starts to show me his room and then mine, I find my gaze persistently drawn to the painting.
There’s something strangely unsettling about the faces, staring back. They look happy, but not really. Practiced. The eyes seem sad, that’s what it is. They all have these vacant, soulless eyes. It’s creepy. A gilded family.
Andy sets me up in the room I’ll be staying in and then leaves me there, so he can tend to more pressing concerns. I wonder what he means by that.
I take a Xanax because it helps me sleep. Scored a few from Becky after a piss-poor hand job, the other day.
I need a nap and lately, it’s getting harder and harder for my body to rest. The sack in my chest cannot slow down. It’s weird but understandable. I’m probably dying. Big deal.
lullaby i
She hums merrily we row along and I ask her, “why?”
She looks at me.
“Why are you humming that?”
Anna replies, “My mother used to sing it to me when I was little.”
seventh circle ii
I see the girl I banged, a quarter hour ago in one of the bathroom stalls.
At the time, I walked in on her doing a fat line off the sink counter.
I’m not sure how exactly the intercourse began but it was some time after she offered me the rest of the line.
Standing with my jeans around my ankles, pressing the girl up against the filth-tiled wall of the bathroom, smearing makeup all over her face, our bodies drenched in perspiration.
She told me she loved me.
My libido almost flat-lined then and there but her gyrations kept me going, barely.
“I fucking love you too.”
Afterwards, I tried to convince her that this was simply a one-time thing and all she wanted to know was when she could see me again.
People pound the bathroom door.
It only gives me a rhythm to follow.
She didn’t want to date me, she insisted. It was only a kind of pure sexual love she felt for me.
“Friends with benefits,” she said.
We aren’t friends.
“People like me don’t have friends,” I told her.
She frowned but let me finish on her face. Her smeared makeup develops the consistency of paste. She’s unaware.
Clowns come to mind.
And then, she washes her face in the sink, saying, “But I am your new best friend.”
I pointed out we didn’t know each other’s name and she said she liked that about our relationship and
“Oh, my god, this water feels fucking amazing.”
She told me she wanted casual, no strings attached, hardcore meet-ups.
The color of her eyes, I don’t really remember.
My experience with fuck-buddies, that’s what we’d be, has been that one of the two involved always ends up developing serious feelings for the other.
Once that happens, everything is ruined.
“Well, it’s not me you have to worry about,” she told me. The girl chewed a piece of gum. I don’t remember what it tasted like, but it was in my mouth at some point. I was in her’s.
S m i l e .
“You think I’m going to end up falling for you?” I asked.
Her face went wide-mouth and teeth.
She said, “Baby, I think you already have.”
Now, I see her leaving, arms draped around a guy much taller and better looking than myself, and I’m considering whether or not I’ll ever get to take her up on that offer.
“Dude, she ate her tits,” Andy says with an excitement that worries me.
I drink another pitcher and listen to him ramble on a bit more before I head back to school.
It’s dark when I stumble into my room, back from the mediocre bar, hardly remembering the hours prior. A small red light flashes on and off like the lone beckon of a lighthouse, spanning across the sea of darkness churning in my room. My roommate’s answering machine indicates a single new message. Everything’s spinning. I press the button, playing the news from a tiny speaker at the phone’s base.
“Brittany?” a female voice asks while chomping down on what sounds like ice cubes. “Brit, if you’re there, pick up.” There’s a sigh that comes across the phone line. “Oh my God, Brittany, I just hooked up with a guy whose apartment smelled like turtles and urine. He tied me up and asked me to shit on his face! I’m freaking out. Where the fuck are you?”
I hear a little scream right before the message ends.
I delete it.
academia ii
See advisor lady.
She sent me a note, marked it URGENT and underlined the word three times. Advisor Lady is surprised I showed up. Happy.
Hear about her quest to save me.
Tell her that I’m fine and “Not in need of salvation.”
She insists: “You’re not. You do.”
“I know you’re not a kid,” she says, from behind her desk.
Her short hair is pulled back into a black ponytail. The blonde highlights make her look younger. The blue blouse is shiny, cut low.
I watch for bra lines as she breathes, speaks.
“I know you’re not a kid. I’m trying not to treat you as one but you are totally behaving that way.”
Her face is a stern pout.
Ask, “What way?”
Eyes roll. “Missing classes. You’ll flunk out.”
She tells me she doesn’t care how high my marks from Cross were or how much scholarship money is at stake.
“It’s being wasted.”
Can’t I see that?
Her questions are pleas.
Time to lie. Get her off my back.
“My mother is sick,” I tell her. “Real sick.”
Frown. Look worried. Try to believe it, myself.
Advisor lady, swallows. She seems unfazed.
We are playing Chicken. She waits for me to blink, crack, waver.
The clock on the wall ticks slowly. It is the only sound in the room.
“I can’t take it,” I say. “I’m cracking under the pressure.”
I wave this at her and adjust in the seat.
She tells me I’m so cliché.
A parody of parody.
I try a new approach.
Snarl, “How dare you.”
The lack of acceptance, understanding, angers me.
“Listen,” she starts.
“No, you listen,” I interrupt. “How dare you! My mom is fucking dying. Why can’t you people give me a break?”
Play the ace.
Advisor Lady tells me, “She's only dying if you see it that way.”
“What? You want me to lie to myself? Turn a blind eye to her?”
Words are chosen.
“Just because you think she's dying, doesn’t mean she's no longer living.”
“I don't prescribe to mythology,” I tell her.
She hears me.
“You'd just give up? How would your mother feel about that?”
I don’t answer. How can I?
Look for something sharp to say. Something stored away.
“The problem is,” she continues, “you've never learned the consequences of your actions. Until now, you’ve kept ahead of the fallout.”
Try to convince her: “I've been through some major shit, you know?”
“I mean, didn’t they tell you?”
“Who hasn't?” she asks. “Don’t you see? You’re not special. Don’t you see? You aren’t the center of it all.”
We're mad at each other, yelling, standing, leaning forward on either side of the desk.
She swallows.
cheat codes ii
Kermit’s conspiracy theories.
God is an alien.
People started covering this up in the 50s when aliens revealed themselves to world leaders after WWII.
This explains the rise of atheism.
Next.
portraits of people you never knew iii
I inhaled and then coughed with uncontrollable violence as the carbon monoxide ravaged my lungs. “Jeez man! How can you smoke these menthol things?”
Ryan shrugged with a total indifference followed only by a hard swallow of some Jack.
I spat. “It’s like smoking fucking eucalyptus or something.”
We both laughed, I suffered through the mint flavored smoke, and Ryan handed me the bottle to wash out the taste. As my cigarette slowly burned, Ryan slid his newly obtained running shoes onto his feet and inspected them carefully.
“BECAUSE” was sprayed, in rust-colored paint, upon the side of one of the cement walls. The simplicity of the message held my attention while Ryan laced up the shoes. I formed the word with my lips and thought, “Because what?”
“It’s almost over, man.” The words slipped past Ryan’s cigarette.
“What is?” I spat again at the concrete floor.
“This.” Ryan motioned with his hand at the surrounding office buildings. “You’re gone in a week and a half. You think it’ll be like this when you come back? If you come back.”
I didn’t want to leave. I stubbed out my cancer-stick and mumbled, “Of course I’m coming back.”
epiphany iii
Since reality is most likely a multiverse.
We are really looking not for god or aliens
or any other higher force.
We have been looking at ourselves.
For ourselves.
For that perfect version.
The best possible alternate of us.
What we can become.
Already are.
post i
Imagine. This huge new York party
This knockout in a red dress comes over to you.
She smiles.
Smile back.
Make with the introductions.
"What's your name?"
"I'm Becky."
"Really? Nice name."
She smiles wider.
Moves closer to the bar. Closer to me.
"Short for Rebecca?"
"Actually. It's short for Becca."
"Becky short for Becca."
"Got it," I say.
I do.
"Can I call you Becca? I think I like it better."
"Becky is fine."
"Hell of a party."
"Its a pretty good group."
"What do you do?" she asks.
"I'm a writer, actually."
"Really?"
She lowers her eyes.
Thinks something.
"Truth."
"What have you written? Anything I know?"
"Just two books," I say.
Blank and blank.
They're pretty big right now in the high schools. Some colleges. Publishers are pushing a YA slant. Which is cool because that's the big market right now. That's what sells. Did you know there are 70 million children in America alone.
"Becky, what do you do?"
"I'm an actress."
"Oh."
That is
really cool.
sign on the door ii
The kitchen is more intimate. People come and go. They fix drinks. Few stay. I debate setting up shop in here. Shot glasses line a counter top. Someone’s hunched into the open refrigerator searching. This boy and a girl make out in a corner. His hand slowly slides up and under her shirt. A frat guy from the other room cat calls through the pass-through wall between the living room and kitchen. He edges them on.
There are a bunch of quarters scattered on a table in the eating area. No one plays Quarters. The people at the table play Kings. The cards scatter between them. Face down. The group, five or six of them, disagrees about the rules. It’s something about what the Jack means. That one kid gets mad. Uneasy glances pass to and from others at the table. Empty Bud Light can pyramid on the tile floor from past games.
I’m out of place, here.
Overwhelmed.
There’s just too much. Have trouble focusing. Colors and sounds blur in the tailspin of sensory reception. Details wash over me.
The present is a wave.
It’s an impossible shot. Conceptionally.
I know.
The camera pans the room while I stand in the center. Coinciding first and second person point of view. See me. See what I see. See me see you.
I see you.
How do you do it?
The trick is to spin the room and not the camera.
I spin the room. This fake sound-effect of a record skipping plays from the phone of some guy with a popped-collar, gut spilling over belt. Hair buzzed. Sun-burnt skin in the winter, fall. The sound is the message alert on his smart phone. The gadget is smarter than he is. He plays it for a girl who is passed out in the adjacent loveseat. Her shoes, a pair of Chucks, are still on her feet. His bros, similarly dressed, all clap and laugh in appreciation. Another girl begins to write on her face with permanent marker.
And ok I’m a little drunk by this point I guess, though the feeling is marginal at best. A different kind of numb. I send a hand into the back pocket of my jeans. Touch the flask. It kept me warm, on the walk over through early November air.
Altered states: fourth wall breaks.
So, whatever is in the next room doesn’t scare me. I mean, how can it? The unfamiliarity of the whole scene makes me lose my mind and this is just my first impression. I’ve only been here for a couple of minutes. Maybe less.
Do I enter with a joke?
Is my entrance a joke, itself? Enough.
seducing the dashboard hula girl ii
I listen.
And I thought, well what if I try to use my powers for good?
I feel like you had a hard time hearing me earlier when I said you are great.
Well,
you are.
Regardless of the failings you see in the mirror, there are wonderful truths about you.
Bright spots you’ve grown blind to.
Always remember them.
I want to tell you because I feel like maybe I don't ever do that.
I want to
Now.
Always.
You are fiercely honest and freakishly intelligent. You understand things and get how they work. You always can look at the world and laugh. Your heart is so open and young.
You find beauty and mystery in the plainest of settings. You see the wonders of the universe in the eyes of a dog.
You have such a beautiful and unique voice and take on things.
People are better for having known you.
You are beautiful.
So incredibly beautiful.
Inside and out.
You have a crack sense of humor and can read any vibe, navigate any room.
You are protective and loving.
You are adventurous.
Dangerous.
And brave
You are never afraid. Not because you don't see fear, but because you see where others would be afraid and you overcome it.
You love your family.
You love your friends, truly there when needed.
You have a thirst for everything.
So question everything else, but never forget those things. Never doubt them.
conciling chris ii
Christian's younger brother, Ed, Eddie, visits and he recognizes my last name. He tells me he goes to school with Chris.
“You related,” he asks, before a group of us head out to the bar.
Tell him, “My cousin.
Later, drunk, he elaborates. He wants to know the deal.
“that dude is destined to take a fall,” he tells me and I don’t know why. “He’s destined to go down.”
I take this in, stew, boil. Get blind drunk.
Even later, I punch Ed, Eddie, in the face.
Imagine it. Pretend.
It doesn’t really happen.
Let it run through your mind.
I lean across the table and ask, “What do you know about destiny?” `
Through the blasting speakers, a song I don’t know, the kid yells apologies.
“He’s a cool kid though.” He tells me, “I mean, funny as hell. Just sort of tragic, somehow.”
In the middle of all of this, Christian sort of comes to his brother’s aid.
He tells me, “Maybe the details would be easier if you paid more attention,”
I look at him, unsure of what he’s saying.
“Maybe you shouldn’t drink so much.”
Let this go. Drink some more.
prank calls ii
I dial McCormick’s number.
The handwritten phone number on the back of the business card.
It rings twice.
A recording intercuts. “your calls may be recorded.”
Its said not however like the voice is offering its listeners permission but more like a warning. i dial 5807. the extension listed on the card. it resumes ringing. i disconect the call immediately at the first ring.
temporal ii
The door is still open and the light that washes the room hurts my eyes. I can see the sign on the door. The letters are backwards. Try to read it.
“No beer pong, for you?” she asks.
She wants to know why I stayed with her. She’s looking for validation. Connection. Camaraderie.
“I don't need games to get me drunk,” I tell her. “I can do that just fine by myself.”
“But you're not,” She corrects.
“Drunk?”
“Alone. By yourself.” Zoë says, “You aren't drunk either.”
“People like me don't get drunk,” I say.
A parody of a parody.
“Who are these 'people like you?’”
She puts up her solo cup, a red one, and slowly sips. Her eyes close when she drinks.
I tell her, “Monsters.”
“Monsters?”
“Yeah, crème de la crème.”
“And you,” she continues. “Intrigued.”
“Me, what?”
“Are you a monster, too, like them?”
“The mother of all monsters.” I mean it. I don’t. Whatever.
“Spooky,” Zoë says and this whole time, she moves closer to me, practically crawling across the small stretch of floor between us.
Her smile is the sinister one.
She’s in front of me, seated. Crossed legs mirror crossed legs. Knees touch knees, her bare skin against my jeans. She's serious now. She pushes hair out of her face.
“You hear about the professor here that raped his student?”
I counter.
“You hear about the professor who had the nervous breakdown in the middle of class.”
They sound like setups without punch lines.
“I was in that class.”
“So was I.”
Outside the room, I hear the celebration of a victory as a new team gets ready for their round.
Someone says, it’s a guy[‘]s voice, “Chug that shit.”
There’s words of encouragement go unanswered.
Applause.
I hear a girl giggle.
“I should be studying,” I tell her.
“Anatomy?” She flirts[.]
And I've never seen someone try so hard for something without pulling the trigger.
I think of Kathy, hung over, taking the test I’m going to sleep through tomorrow morning. Reed’s exam.
The questions: Name three examples of propaganda in post-millennial society which seek to shape cultural consciousness in favor of the establishment; What are Erik Erikson’s eight stages of development and which stage are you at and why; If you think it or feel it, why is it important; And of course, what is the point of the Matrix, but just the first one?
The lies I'll undoubtedly end up telling. I’ll have to kill my mother off, soon. The choices I make every single instant that go unnoticed. How I very frequently miss the point, the significance, of the surroundings.
“You want to play?” Zoë asks and motions with her head to the game out there.
“Not really.” A sigh. “It depends on the game.”
“Come be on my team.” She kisses me quick and shy as she stands up.
I'm semi-hard. Stoned and drunk and stupid. Young, stupid. My heart’s quick. I feel it, in my body. The heartbeat is my body.
Zoë only does this to get what she wants from me. Probably.
The computer screen wakes up as she brushes by it. The desktop background is an image of the word, because.
I don't know what she wants. But I could guess.
Turns out Zoë’s roommate really is in the other bedroom studying for Reed’s test with three guys from the varsity lacrosse team.
Some nights, I impress myself with how good I am.
God I am.
There should be awards for this.
failure iii
I go outside to smoke a cigarette. The air is cold and I shiver with each drag. Standing in front of the dorm, I see an ambulance’s lights flashing like slaps in the face.
Some guy is wheeled out on a stretcher. His quivering body has been restrained by thick straps that pin him down. A girl, who looks like she could still be in high school, follows franticly behind the two EMT workers that steer the stretcher. She’s probably his girlfriend. She sobs.
It’s an overdose; I’ll bet money on it. I’m guessing some bad acid or maybe ecstasy. Poor guy. His girlfriend’s pretty attractive, though. I’m trying to remember the last time I’ve gotten laid. I count out on my fingers.
Jack comes outside and bums a cigarette off of me. “I thought you quit,” he states, lighting up.
I shrug, “I’m trying.”
Jack blows smoke. “Aren’t we all?”
Jack asks me something. There’s a light drizzle. I’m really not listening until he asks another questions. Looking for audience participation.
After I nod in agreement, he asks, “So where have you been, man?”
I have to think for a moment. “Beer pong in this girl down the hall’s room.” My lungs hurt, tonight. I stare at the cigarette and secretly curse it.
“Kathy?” he assumes without confidence.
“That’s the one.”
“What do you think of her?” Jack seems suddenly interested.
I scratch at the stubble sprouting on my chin. “She’s a cool girl, I guess.”
I’m not overly interested. Been there. Done that.
Jack’s now nodding too, “Yeah.” There’s this pause before he casually informs me, “I think I’m going to try and hit it.”
I cough. The way he’s said this, something about him sickens me. Some people will stop at nothing. Kathy’s a nice girl. She at least deserves better than Jack.
He’s a womanizer.
He’s an alcoholic.
He uses people.
He has no respect for girls, whatsoever. See: Womanizer.
He’s just like me. We are all the same. This self-discovery pains me. I’d like to believe that I was a couple of steps above Jack, but he’s probably a better choice than I am. He’s not quite at the same level of asshole.
“I told her that I’d teach her to play the guitar,” Jack’s still talking.
“You play the guitar?” I ask surprised.
“No,” he says, “but chicks dig musicians.”
I laugh. “But you don’t know how to play.”
“Right,” Jack doesn’t seem to notice the flaw in his plan.
“What are you going to when she comes over expecting you to teach her the guitar?” I’m still laughing.
“Have sex with her.”
I stop laughing.
That son of a bitch, I think. Why tell me that?
“Brilliant,” I lie as I stub out my cigarette.
“Thanks,” Jack boasts proudly. “Feel free to use it any time.”
It’s classless. The worst part is I will use it.
In the elevator back up to my floor, I can’t help but think about the kid in the ambulance from before. His face, a cold shade, shakes in my mind. And then his girlfriend: her face was wet and mortified, hurt and afraid.
It’s in her face that I find what it means to actually care for someone else. It’s fear. It’s that fear of losing some one that brings this feeling into focus. It’s a focus that only fear of death can bring. And it’s a pity that it could only be that way.
I could go to sleep, but it’s still pretty early. I decide to play another game of beer pong in Kathy’s room.
One game turns into five or six more. I think at one point it becomes vodka pong.
In the morning, I wake up lying in a bathtub on another floor. I can’t find my shirt anywhere and have to check to make sure I still have both my kidneys.
I do.
And I guess that this is failure.
portraits of people you never knew ii
The roof was empty like one of those zombie movies, where no one else is left alive. Apocalyptic.
“No one ever parks up here, Joe,” Ryan mumbled, “and besides, these mall-going vampires hate sunlight.” He popped the trunk and unlocked the doors. “Don’t mix metaphors.”
“So, what are we doing here?” I asked. Out of the car, I stretched.
“I say, mix drinks.” From the open trunk, Ryan grabbed a plastic bag. “Sort of like a last supper.”
“A little early for dinner,” I joked.
Ryan smiled. “I know, man.”
In the black bag were two bottles of Jack Daniel’s and three packs of Parliaments: two blue and one green. I thought of the ocean.
“Looks like a party.” I grinned and snatched a pack.
The bottle passed between us. The sun hung high and bright. White clouds spotted the sky like scattered sheep. I don’t remember the last time I looked up at the blue above, without even the slightest fear that something was going to fall from it. Warm beneath that summer sun, I picked the dead skin of week old sun burn. It came off my arm in thin flakes like tiny pieces of tissue paper.
“It’s the end of an age, man.” He lit a Parliament and took an endless drag. In his smoke, I smelled mints. Ryan tossed me his Zippo and a Parliament from his green pack.
eulogy in fragments
See a child.
A little boy who holds a hand of each of his parents. He walks between them.
They walk the sidewalk.
They make a M.
I am looking at the future and it sounds cliché, maybe, but only because we have lost sight of that simple truth.
The children are the future.
"That song is a fuckin' rally cry. "
As children we think we can do anything
and we can.
We tell our children
they can.
In some strange way we can.
We tell them that they’re special and they are.
They are, but then we watch.
As adults we have been beaten into submission by a system we buy into unless we realize we can't and that's earth-shattering.
“Shattering,” she repeats.
We start to value not what we want to do but what we have to do and know.
We forget what we know.
Our children are the hope. Hope that they will remember and not forget. Hope that they'll resist our mistakes. And stay sane amidst the madness.
This is why people have babies. To fix the past.
“What do we do when our hope…” She trails off, unable to bring herself to say something. “when the cycle... ”
Fails and then repeats.
Madness. human history is just the a continued existence in a state of constant madness. There are so many rules. Things we’ve excepted without realizing we have even given a choice.
“There a moment and u can see in only on the outside. The moment you realize that someone has crossed over. You realize that you’ve lost them.”
This kid with his parents will grow up. They’ll live. They’ll all die one day. Simple as that.
To the they and no longer us-es of the world.
“And you’re mad kind of a little. At them for changing, growing. At yourself for not realizing the treachery sooner.”
“You want to know what its like to lose a child? Betrayl. That’s what. A complete betrayl of love.”
The vision, the voice, the memory is gone. As are the family of three. I’ve forgotten what I was doing before I saw them.
mortality i
"I'm really upset."
She tells me.
"I found out a good friend from high school died last night.
“Oh no,” I say. Death shocks me numb. “What happened?”
“He fell from a rooftop.”
“Are you serious?” I ask.
“Truth,” she says. I believe her.
“You ok?”
She nods.
“Shell shocked.”
She bums a cigarette and lights it.
“It’s so surreal.”
“How'd he fall?” I ask.
“Apparently, he was having sex.”
Stare. Wait.
“He and this girl were drunk, coming back from the bar. They went up on a nearby roof top. Somehow got in and up the 5 flights. I guess he lost balance, during. And they fell.”
“She fell too?”
“Both of them. Both dead. Naked on the pavement. No one found them until morning.”
There's a building stretch of time. I can see she thinks about it.
“Who was the girl?”
“Just some girl. It's stupid you know. A great guy. He really was. It fucking sucksAnd now and now.” She drifts again.
“Splat,” I say.
She chortles a laugh.
“Splat, yeah.”
“Fuck.”
And I know. I can see some kind of history, here.
There is a larger back-story. One I will never know. I can only guess.
“Well,” I tell her. “It's certainly a good way to go, I guess.”
“Yeah.”
I shrug. “Its quick and you're so happy you’re getting laid that you don't even realize.”
She contemplates and smiles. Stif.
“But hey, I’m running late.” Kathy says. “Jack is picking me up.”
“Ok,” I say. “Cool.”
“It’s good to see you.” She smiles.
“Yeah,” I agree.
“And hey, Kathy, if you ever need anything. Ever need to talk
I'm hear.”
Here
Hare
Hair
She hugs me.
“I know,” she says. Kathy kisses my cheek as she starts to pull away and go.
“See you around.”
“See you,” I say.
Things feel right. I feel like me.
Batteries charged.