Zombie
Here comes the walking dead, one of my ex-best friends, freshman year of high school, cutting his wrists over girls who never loved him, no matter how hard he tried. With the pools of blood on the linoleum, the white bandages with the rose-petal patterns, the ambulance rides the one or two times he came too close, all those weeks spent in hospitals for observation, the Velcro shoes and the five-o’clock shadows, he never even came close to getting what he wanted from these girls. He wanted a companion, a force of two as one, a tenth-grade bride — no traitors allowed. He’d haunt your days with scars, reminding you of your betrayal, if you ever left him. He wanted you for life, something to stuff and put over his mantel, into his head, a laurel, a trophy, a model of your car, the last thing you touched, the one he followed home in his fantasies, driven into his heart with the sharp point of obsession. It wasn’t about love with him, really, nor sex. I think more than anything all he ever wanted was a little piece of a life he could try-on, lace-up, and call his own, even if it wasn’t and never would be that simple. Resistance was the only common ground between what he really wanted and what he wanted even more. One time I asked him to go ahead and tell what’s wrong, because I could tell that something was wrong, you could see it in the shadows under his eyes, but he just stood there blank-faced, mouth hung like a trapdoor, a hole full of dirty tiles in pink mud, and nodded. He couldn’t control his lips, just as he couldn’t control those girls and their bodies, and they quivered, his breath carving sculptures of everything he’d ever felt, seen, remembered, and dreamed into the folds of the wind. All he had to do was breathe.
Reading into Things
My intro to serious literature, sixteen years old and freshly dropped-out of high school, was The Picture of Dorian Gray. It was fine, I liked it okay, and then I forgot about it like it never happened. A few weeks later, I sat down to watch TV with my dad. I was disappointed with his choice, totally bored, and wanted to turn the channel. But then my mind snapped into place, focused in, and I was fully taken in by a young, attractive Angela Lansbury. She mesmerized me. It was the movie adaptation of Wilde’s book, the old black and white one, and of course Lansbury was striking in every human way. She looked so pretty and innocent, but at the same time she looked as though she’d lived, had understood the hard times in life and come out the other end. I watched the whole thing, no commercial breaks, from start to finish, didn’t even take a breather to piss or sneak a cigarette in the upstairs bathroom.
I thought about her a lot after that, especially at night while I was trying to become a writer. A few months later, I bought a book of poems by Jim Carroll. To my surprise, there was a poem in there that said something about Angela Lansbury sneezing under the ocean, signaling the whales or some sap-shit like that. I can’t tell you why, but I thought it was one of the greatest things I’d ever read, at the time, and thought about her even more after that. She visited my room at night, an obsession. I thought about how my mom used to watch Murder, She Wrote and bite her fingernails into nubs, just shy of literally sitting on the edge of her seat, when I was a child, and how the old woman on the TV was the same person I’d once thought about sexually as a teenager. They weren’t even the same person anymore. The older version was even better.
Vacation
Arkansas in late July is like being wrapped in cellophane and stuffed inside a tanning bed. We are staying in a cabin near Beaver Lake. Everybody is swimming down at the pool, but I stayed behind to give my muscles and skin a rest after a long day of canoeing on the White River. I have burns all up my legs and down my arms. My face looks raw. I’m out on the deck, drinking a can of orange soda and eating chips. It’s getting dark, but it’s hard to tell because it’s always darker in the woods. The branches creak in the heat. I’m waiting for a creature to come out of hiding and be discovered. Nothing comes. Thirty minutes later, still nothing. Sometimes nature cheats you in that way. There are plenty of bugs though — spiders the size of the palm of your hand and flies as big as jelly beans. The bugs are thick, like walls. I get to thinking about things, while watching these bug-clusters, and I’m still thinking about them now. I’m thinking about all the things my life accumulated to a certain point. Let’s say the point right before I met my wife. All before her, all of it, seems like just a bunch of shit I can throw out there and tell for the sake of telling and at the same time it’s all so much more than that. I’d like to say that none of it matters, but these are the things I had to experience to experience myself as me in the now. Throwing them out with such carelessness would be like pimping out my past on Maury, but forgetting, that would be even worse, like keeping my skin on a coat hanger after pawning my bones for a few scraps of meat.
Twenty-Five Books
Crime and Punishment—Dostoevsky
Nausea—Sartre
Ham on Rye—Bukowski
Green Eggs and Ham—Seuss
The Journal of Albion Moonlight—Patchen
The Loser—Bernhard
The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories—Hemingway
The Easter Parade—Yates
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute—Paley
The Lover—Duras
Malone Dies—Beckett
The Catcher in the Rye—Salinger
The Immoralist—Gide
Cannery Row—Steinbeck
Tropic of Cancer—Miller
Wise Blood—O’Connor
The Stranger—Camus
Anti-Oedipus—Deleuze and Guattari
The Satyricon—Petronius
The Passion According to G.H. — Lispector
Miss Lonely Hearts—West
The Sickness unto Death—Kierkegaard
Airships—Hannah
Closer—Cooper
Ficciones—Borges
~ ~ ~
ad astra per aspera
Sister, Sister, Sister
My sister’s seventeen and dating a guy with a pitchfork tattooed on his chest. He has blue eyes and prep-length dirty-blonde hair, plays the guitar, mostly old hair-band rock from the eighties, and looks a little like a child molester with that little tuft of hair above his upper lip. He smokes Marlboros and plays the occasional game of pool. I went with him and my sis to the Bingo Palace one night. An old lady with curlers won the first round. As for the second, I wouldn’t know; we left before they even started, and when we got in the car, I could smell liquor on someone’s breath. Whether it was hers or his, I’ll never know. But this boyfriend of my sister’s, he’s in his twenties. She met him in rehab. Now she’s six months pregnant, working at Sonic, and driving around town in an old Chrysler New Yorker. He’s a junkie, alcoholic, and soon-to-be father who works at the Casey’s General Store out in Maize. Everybody is really scared about what the future holds for them, my sister and her beau, especially my parents, but I’m happy about the news. I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. There’ll always be time to worry, won’t there? Can’t we do that later? But damn it, I’m worrying now — and it is later. The baby was born seventeen years ago. The baby’s in high school now. He’ll be driving soon. In just a few short years he’ll outgrow me. He’ll be a better man than me. He’ll open my eyes, pour in the 3D pinks and blues, and show me how he turned out is all the ways I should’ve been.