Welcome

Outside of commercially manufactured adrenaline rushes, the emotional toe-dipping lust for hot new skinny jeans or the fastest phone exists our increasingly rare genuine human experience. I sometimes struggle to remember that while life lives episodic, it is based on eternal themes. I hope that you are entertained by my exploration of this apparent dichotomy.

Saturday, March 31, 2012

January 21, 1978 (Part 8 of 8)

He wanted to disappear.  That’s what he usually did and that’s what he tried to do again.  He went home and slept and ate for two days and, except for calling in sick to work, saw or talked to no one.
            The only place he went that week was to Kerry’s wake at the Keg.  There Doran met Kerry’s brother, Tom, who was down from Ohio to take her home.  They talked for a while and he told Doran a little about her life.
            He’d assumed that she’d had it rough growing up.  Who didn’t?  But for her it had been worse than most.  Her mom had died when she was only two.  Her dad fell in the bottle after that and never crawled back out.  He’d managed to keep a job and a roof but that was it.  Tom, who was nine years older than Kerry, had done his best to raise her 
            “But,” he said, “I was just a kid myself and when I was sixteen, I got caught boostin’ a car.  Spent a year in juvie hall down at Alto.  She was only seven then and a guy grabbed her off the street.  She was missing for three days till she climbed out a window and showed up back at the house.  By the time I got out the guy was already in the joint.  Our old man wouldn’t talk about it to me.  Shit, to anyone.  He just crawled farther in his fuckin’ bottle.”  Tom took a pull from his beer, lit a smoke and continued.  “Anyway, I never tried to talk to her about it and she never mentioned it to me.  Just like it never happened.”   He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.  “The asshole got thirty years.”  He shook his head and looked down at the bar.  “She got life.  She was never the same after that.”
            They sat without speaking for a moment as Tom peeled the label from his beer.  A hesitation was in his voice when he continued.  “The guy, he got out, good behavior or some such shit, on the same day she did it.”   His breath caught but he continued.  “I don’t know how she found out.  She must have.  She didn’t need to know.  She was no goddamn overdose.  I know she killed herself.  Goddamn it, I know.”
            They sat silently together until their beers were empty.  Doran knew that no words could help this man.  The truth was as good as the lie to him.  She’d still be gone.   
            Doran finally got up to leave.  Tom stood, took his hand to shake it, and focused on him with eyes too much like his sister’s.
            “Anyway, I just wanted someone who knew her to know that stuff.  Maybe understand a little.  We didn’t really talk much, ya’ know, and all those years that she was out runnin’, you’re the only person she ever even mentioned.  She said you were good to her.  And, well I thank you for that,” he said and released Doran’s hand.
            Doran drove away thinking about what Tom had told him.  He wondered whether it changed anything he thought about what Kerry’s death meant to him.  While he’d felt a thousand things about it, the one thing that had never changed was admiration, his respect for the choice she’d made.  She’d left on her own terms and in his eyes her courage had transformed her.  And despite what she’d written in her note, he’d never felt guilt about it.  Instead he’d felt strangely honored that she’d chosen to spend that day with him.  She’d finally shown herself to him.  That meant something, right? 
            But now he wondered.  Had she denied her disease’s malevolence by running headlong toward death?  Or was she running from a past that wouldn’t stay in the past? 
            Running to or from seemed like the same thing.  In the end, it really didn’t matter.  He decided that she was a beautiful and tragic hero.

After the wake, he did disappear.  He didn’t go to Jeff’s or Rat’s or the Keg.  Work and home and books became his life.  And wandering around inside his own head.  He kept bumping into her up there. 
            A week later Jeff called and told him Donna was dead.  Donna had run with them until she got pregnant the year before.  She got clean till the baby came and she tried to stay that way.  For a while.  Then she just pretended to stay that way, trying to do right by her daughter.  But yesterday she’d gone to the drive through window at the bank to cash a check.  After she didn’t take the money from the tube for about ten minutes, with her car sitting and idling in the lane, the bank manager had gone outside and found her dead behind the wheel with the baby strapped in and sleeping in her car seat.  The coroner said cardiac arrest induced by an overdose of methamphetamine had killed her. 
            So he went to another wake.  Another funeral.  And tried to disappear again.
            Three months later it was Roger.  Roger wasn’t dead.  But he was a now a quadriplegic with an as yet undetermined amount of brain damage.  Roger had been Donna’s boyfriend and the father of the baby that had been taken by the state after she died.  Every since then Roger had been acting crazy, even by his own rather extreme standards of what qualified as crazy.  He’d finally gotten good and drunk and tried to beat a pickup through an intersection on his Harley.  It had happened right in front of the Keg so there were plenty of witnesses to retell the story at the bar.  He never had a chance.
            Doran visited the hospital where he was not sure Roger even recognized him.  But it was clear that Roger recognized the bottle of Jack Daniels that Rat had snuck up to the room and was pouring into his mouth every time he groaned.   
            Doran disappeared yet again.  He spent his time working and reading and wondering how his life had become guns and needles and drugs and all too casual violence and suddenly, all too common death.
            And he kept hearing her, “You ain’t them.  And you ain’t me.” 

Jeff eventually got a job on the oil rigs in the Gulf and moved to Mississippi.  Rat went to prison for armed robbery.  The Keg closed down after a third raid for selling booze to minors.
            On January 21, 1980 he sat alone in front of the fireplace.  He’d started college the previous fall and hadn’t seen a needle or gun in almost a year.  He put Petty’s “Refugee” on low and sipped a Jack.  He took a crumpled paper from his wallet and, reading it one final time said to the flames “I hope you found it, baby.”
            He tossed her note into the fire and let himself let her go with the smoke.

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Trisha's Rhyme

Fierce love fears not
What lies beyond the kiss.
For what is on a grander scale
Than when moments change a heart?

Fierce love takes its shot
And does not lament the miss.
A thing far worse thing than to fail
Is to never even start.

A fevered hush fills this space,
Your lissome touch a burn.
For wanting written on your face,
I cannot help but yearn.

Oh! Soft swell of your hips,
The quick need in your caress.
My kiss strays from your lips
To your clinging ivory breast.

Passion moves to cresting wave,
You take possession of my core.
Surrendering to what we crave
I crash, spent upon your shore.

I inhale your scented sigh, my love
And drink of your contentment.
A sweet new spirit’s born above
Two bodies, made one element.

Fierce love fears not
What lies beyond itself.
With want all days are fraught,
Until it’s found within oneself.

Saturday, March 24, 2012

January 21, 1978 (Part 7 of 8)

    He heard Jeff’s bike turn into the drive and pull up outside the door. 
    “It’s done.  Cops asked a lot of questions.   I don’t know her damn apartment number.  I just told ‘em there was someone dead and the name of the complex and that it’s the bottom apartment in the last building on the left.  They should find her”. 
    “Thanks,” he told Jeff sincerely.
    “That’s what brothers are for,” he said sitting and taking the bottle.  He took a sip and set it on the table.  “So you told me what happened but you never said where you got that much rock.”  He hesitated.  Then “You and Rat did it again, huh?  You know he’s gonna get you shot or busted or something.  You gotta’ stop doing that stupid shit.”
    “Yeah, I know.  And I’m done with it as soon as I get rid of this.  Don’t wanna cut it or divide it or anything.  Just want some cash,” he said and tossed the baggie onto the table. 
    Jeff picked it up and scrutinized it for moment.
    “How much is here?”  His Buck knife appeared from nowhere.  He opened the bag, dipped the tip into the powder, sniffed it up his left nostril and repeated the process for the benefit of his right nostril. 
    “Started with an ounce and a half, split it with Rat and gave maybe two to Kerry.  That leaves what, eighteen, nineteen grams or so?  Where’s your scale?” Doran took the meth and knife and repeated Jeff’s actions.
    Jeff got out an old style triple beam scale and they weighed it at just short of nineteen grams. 
    “Know anyone might want it?” Doran asked. 
    “No.  We can try Ailey though.  She’s been hanging with J-Jack lately.  He’s usually looking for something.”
    “I don’t like that son of a bitch.  What’s with the extra J, anyway?” Doran asked.  His head was clearing a little after that last bump. 
    “I dunno.  Jerk off, or something.  But I think they’re over there now.  Let’s go see.”
    They walked around the back of the house and up the stairs to her door.  Ailey’s place was above the portico and, like Jeff’s, was one room with an efficiency kitchen and a tiny bathroom.  Unlike Jeff’s, it had a lot of windows and a bright airy feel. 
    J-Jack’s bike was chained to the banister.
    Doran had known Ailey longer than Jeff, since he was maybe ten when Ailey and his sister had been friends.  Though it seemed he’d known her forever, they’d never been that close.  She’d always been pretty and she’d always been someone else’s girlfriend and she’d always seemed ditzy to him.  They just didn’t click.   
    Ailey opened the door at Jeff’s knock and they stepped inside.  J-Jack was standing there and didn’t say a word to them.  Instead he just handed Doran a burning joint.  Doran took a toke and passed it to Jeff. 
    “Hey, y’all know anyone wants to buy some crank?” Doran skipped the cordialities and jumped right in. 
    "Maybe.  How much?”  J-Jack asked as he exhaled a huge lungful of smoke.  He was a huge, tattooed, leathered man with bushy black hair and beard and a bushier reputation.  He was just plain dangerous.
    “Eighteen grams.  A little more, maybe,” Doran answered. 
    “Let’s see it,” J-Jack said.
    Under different circumstances Doran might have been more cautious.  Everyone here except Ailey was packing and J-Jack had done hard time for using his piece before.  But no one was gonna’ throw down in Ailey’s place over less than an ounce.  Doran handed the baggie to J-Jack.
     “Where’s your scale, baby?” J-Jack looked at Ailey as he took the baggie and rubbed the rocks between thumb and forefinger.
     Ailey produced a scale, identical to Jeff’s, from a cabinet and they all watched him silently.  After he was satisfied about the weight, he took a snort and almost immediately felt the grains knife into his brain, tasted them draining in the back of his throat. 
     “Give you two grand right now,” he finally said. 
     “Done.”  Doran knew he could get more, probably a lot more.  But he just wanted to be done with it.  He wanted to be done with a lot of shit right now.  He took the twenty Benjamins that J-Jack peeled from a huge wad and he and Jeff left. 
     “Gotta’ go,” he told Jeff and headed for his car.  Jeff followed him.
     “You OK, man?” he asked.  There was genuine concern for his friend on his face as he focused on Doran’s eyes.
     “Yeah.  I just feel like I got some thinking to do, you know?  I mean, it’s hard to say, but,” he hesitated.  “Just got some stuff to figure out.  Thanks, though.”
     “Sure.  Today had to suck for you.  I know you two had something, or could have.  Always wondered why you never moved on her.”
     “Yeah, me too.  She was kinda’ special.  But she needed saving and I can’t even save myself, goddamn it.  Later,” Doran sighed as got in the car and started it.  Jeff never questioned him when he said things like that, just took them in and understood.  Or at least he seemed to.  That was one of the reasons Doran loved the guy.   
     “Yeah, later.  Don’t just disappear again, huh?” Jeff said through the window. 


Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Reminders

I’m the rattle in your dash,
The stove that cooks too hot.
I’m that itchy little rash,
And the movie with no plot.

I’m the faucet with a drip,
And the bed that’s never made,
The workday that you skip
And the bill you never paid.

I’m waxy buildup on your floor,
And jeans that feel too tight,
The dog that barks all night next door,
That looks like he may bite.

I’m that call you can’t avoid,
The little voice inside your head.
I sound a bit like Sigmund Freud,
And whisper you’re misled.

I’m that noise the furnace makes,
The fuzzy TV when it rains.
And lately I’m the toothache
That brings you subtle pain.

I am the pebble in your shoe,
You could so easily remove.
So as you do the things you do,
What does my presence prove?

Sunday, March 18, 2012

January 21, 1978 (Part 6 of 8)

He drove in a daze, sipping the Jack from the bottle.  Autopilot took him out of the complex, out to Church Street and onto I-285 southbound.  He exited onto Memorial Drive, passed the police station where he’d spent occasional nights, and headed west toward the city. 
     He remembered nothing until he pulled into the driveway of the old house where Jeff rented an “efficiency” apartment, really a room with a kitchenette and a toilet and shower tucked into what seemed an oversized closet.  He wasn’t even sure why he’d come here. 
     He’d met Jeff at 13, when they were both freshman in a high school system that threw them in with 18 year old seniors.  They’d learned quickly that two little punks standing together were less inviting to older kids than one alone.  Together they’d learned to fight, drink, smoke, get laid and do dope.  They were as close as the brothers that neither of them ever had. 
     This place was a dump, too.  Worse than Kerry’s.  He assumed that it had been quite a nice mansion when it was built in the twenties, with a side portico through which a brick driveway ran and dormers with round windows, the whole gingerbread package.  But urban blight had started a few miles farther east in the city and was creeping along this main street like gangrene up a vein.  It looked as though no one had maintained it since the fifties and now it was just huge and dilapidated. 
     It was divided into three apartments, two efficiencies and one regular.  Jeff’s was on the left, Ailey lived on the right, and the larger apartment in the middle was rented by what Rat claimed was a lesbian couple.  But then Rat viewed almost any female that wouldn’t sleep with him as a lesbian.
     Bottle in hand, he walked around the side and saw Jeff’s 58 panhead Harley in the side yard.  Jeff was home or the bike would be gone or inside. 
     Giving a cursory knock, he walked inside.  Jeff was sitting on the couch reading a motorcycle magazine. 
     “Hey, man.  What’s up?” he asked looking up.
     Doran sat on the coffee table facing Jeff.  He said nothing until he’d taken a pull from the bottle and handed it to Jeff.
     “She’s dead.  Killed herself, fucking killed herself.”  He sounded like he didn’t believe himself.
     “Huh?  Dead?  Who?”
     “Kerry.  She…she…” he stammered, motioned for the bottle back from Jeff and took another drink.  And then he started talking, told Jeff the whole story pausing only to light a smoke and have another drink.  He pulled the suicide note out and handed to Jeff who read it quickly.  
     “Holy fuck!  You ain’t kidding?  You sure she’s dead?  And what the hell’s she talking about trees and caves for?” he asked as he read the note again, more carefully this time. 
     “That’s Nietzsche.  And, oh yeah.  She’s dead, all right.  Not breathing, no pulse, getting cold and a little blue around the lips.  Sound dead to you?”
     “Sounds like it to me.  You cleaned everything up?”
     “Yeah,” Doran sighed.
     “So where’d you call the cops from?” Jeff handed the note back to Doran who stuffed it back into his pocket.
     “Cops?  Oh, shit.  I forgot,” he stammered through the fuzzy warmth of Tennessee sour mash.
     He got to his feet and wavered a bit.  Jeff stood and steadied his friend.  “C’mon, man.  Probably don’t wanna’ use Ailey’s phone for this.  We’ll ride up to the store,” he said opening the door.
      Doran stumbled unsteadily on the threshold.  Jeff took another look at him and at the bottle still in his hand, and shook his head.  “Go on back in.  I’ll make the call.  You stay here and drink.  And read something useful like a bike rag.  Maybe learn how to fix your fuckin’ shovelhead.  Reading goddamn Nietzsche won’t help with that.”
     “Good idea.  Thanks,” Doran replied without arguing.  He turned, went back in and fell into the couch.  He heard the Harley roar to life and felt the bike’s percussion coming through the walls as Jeff left.
     Again he sat thinking.  The whiskey had slowed his mind down so he was able to make some sense out of his thoughts now.  Kerry was twenty-six years old but dope and booze had her looking older.  She’d always chased the next buzz, yeah.  And she’d laughed and lived hard while she was doing it, always seeming to have a good time.  But that far away look was always there, waiting for a quiet moment to show itself.  He’d seen it before.  Sometimes at 2:30 in the morning at the Keg.  Once, last summer at Stuart’s place they’d had a big barbeque.  She’d spent an hour sitting alone in the grass in the back yard.  He’d finally brought a beer out to her.  She’d taken it without a word and turned away, clearly wanting to be left alone.  She’d had that look then. 
     He figured that look was why she never slowed down.  She wasn’t chasing after a high.  She was away running from a low.  It was hard to tell the two apart.   
     He remembered sitting at the bar at the Keg one Saturday afternoon.  He’d been trying to explain to her how it felt when he’d caught his ex cheating, how anger and betrayal and insult had all converged in his gut.  Frustrated, he’d finally given up, saying “Most experiences are unsayable.”
     “They happen in a space that no word has ever entered,” she finished. 
     “Too fuckin’ true” he’d said startled.  He decided to push it.  “OK, so what about ‘My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach?”
     “I bet Whitman never shut up.  He was probably a real pain in the ass to hang out with.  How bout just saying some shit’s just too hard to explain?” 
     They laughed, tapped their beers together and the conversation moved onto something else.  But that was when he realized that there was much more to her than she ever showed the world.  “What the hell was someone who could quote Rilke doing at the Keg?  Or recognized “Song of Myself”,” he’d wondered.   They had a bond after that, but nothing changed in the way they interacted.  He just liked her a little more. 
     Now, as he was pondering that same thing again, he realized something, what she’d been talking about.  None of the other boozers, bums or bikers that hung at the Keg even knew who Ranier Maria Rilke or Walt Whitman were.  Hell, he was always saying something that seemed to just fly right over those clowns’ heads.  But not her.  She knew.
     OK, so, big deal.  He was aware that he knew more STUFF than those other assholes.  But knowing more stuff doesn’t necessarily equal smarter.  If he was, he’d be somewhere else.  Doing something else.  Still, he knew that he was different from them.
     But what about her?  She was too, right?  Yes.  So what was the difference between the two of them?  What always made her run way past that line between just plain wild and downright fucking crazy?

Friday, March 16, 2012

Unsure


She came to me in slow motion,
Docile soft and glowing beautiful.
Unsure under surrender,
Peering through a
Silken ballroom demi-mask of
Auburn falls into emerald iris,
She offered herself.
Unashamed uncertainty, questioned demand, longing’s bloom,
Tangled in searching eyes.
Folding her into me, onto me,
I knew that she did not know
Want from need.
And as her want found mine,
I knew again her confusion.



Wednesday, March 14, 2012

January 21, 1978 (Part 5 of 8)

     He pulled back into the same parking spot and grabbed what passed for groceries, feeling light and energized as he walked down the stairs.  He knocked on the door and heard the hinges squeak as it swung open in response to touch. 
     Something was wrong.  In this neighborhood you always locked up.  And especially when holding dope.  He stepped back, set the groceries down and pulled the .45 from where the shoulder holster cradled it beneath his left arm.  He thumbed the safety off and, drawing back the hammer, stepped quietly into the apartment.
     Kerry was lying on the couch, not moving.  He looked around the room and then quickly checked the kitchen area, bathroom and bedroom.  Finding no one else in the place he hurried back to her.  She had dressed again and seemed to be sleeping comfortably. But that was impossible considering the amount of crank she’d done with him. 
     His vision seemed to become a series of slow motion flashes- the belt around her arm, the syringe on the dirty carpet beneath her limp hand, the spoon, and the cellophane with only one rock remaining in it.
     “You did that fucking much?” he muttered to himself.
     He sat beside her and felt her wrist for a pulse.  Nothing.  Felt her neck.  Nothing.  Leaned his ear close to her nose.  Not even the lightest wisp of breath.  He tried all three again and found nothing.  Again. Again.  Nothing.  He looked around, feeling helpless.  The place rented month-to-month and came furnished, but with no phone.  And that was how she’d kept things.  Shit!
     Then he saw the papers neatly placed in the center of the coffee table.  On top was a handwritten note with his name on it.

Dear Doran,

I’m so sorry to do this to you but I know I can count on you.  I’ve not told anyone what’s going on with me but I went to my third oncologist last week and he said the same as the others.  I got cancer- everywhere, killing me, and I got maybe six months left, three probably.  And they tell me it’d be hell to last that long.  So no thanks. 

Take this note and medical papers and anything else that says you been here and leave.  Find a pay phone and make an anonymous call.  I’ll be just another OD.  Do it fast so Amy doesn’t find me. She’d lose it.  And please call my brother Tom.  216.555.5655. He still cares. 

Remember what I told you.  You’re better than this place and those people.  Thanks for today. 

                                                            Kerry

“But the worst enemy you can encounter will always be you, yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caves and woods.”

So no guilt.  I’d have found a way to do this without you.  Bye.


      He sat staring at the note for a few moments.  Then, for a long time, he just looked at her. 
     "Goddamn Nietzsche nihilist crap makes me want kill myself, too,” he muttered.
      Finally, numbly, tearing his eyes from her face, he looked around the room again and noticed the rest of the papers on the table.  He picked them up and read.  They were from various doctors’ offices and were filled with little boxes with check marks here and there.  He didn’t really understand most of it but he knew what words like lymphoma, metastases, chemotherapy and terminal meant.  He read that her lungs, pancreas and liver had all been involved.  It was everywhere, eating her alive. He tried to imagine how terrifying it must have been for her to read these things about herself.
      He heard a noise in the hallway outside and realized that he was sitting there beside her, this way, and the door was still standing wide open.  He set the papers back where she’d left them, went to the door and looked out.  No one was there so he stepped out and brought the groceries inside, closing the door behind him. 
      He felt a strange clarity of purpose that was way beyond anything the crank ever did.  He picked up his gun first and slid back into the holster, its weight against his ribs no longer reassuring.  He looked around the room carefully, deliberately.  Aside from the note and what he’d just brought in, there was really nothing there that would in any way point to him.  He found a paper Chik-Fil-A napkin and wiped the spoon and syringe of fingerprints just in case.  But she was right.  All anyone walking in here would see would be one more OD’d meth head. 
     He stopped, hesitating at the door and looked back at her one last time.  There were traffic sounds from the interstate.  There was noise from a television in another apartment.  A couple was arguing in another.  She was right.  This place was shit.  She’d been chasing what she saw as her only way out every since he’d known her, probably for years before that.  And when it came for her, even from so unexpected a place, she’d faced it with heart and dignity.  He could only hope for that kind of courage when his turn came. 
     As he stood there a thought came to him.  He took the bottle of Jack and a glass from the kitchen.  He sat again by her on the couch.  He took her hand in his.  It seemed even smaller in death’s cool wrap.  He sat like that, drinking and thinking.  The Jack went down easy.  His thoughts raced so quickly that he could only grab hold of impressions, words, the big words.  Life, death, sex, tears, violence, laughter, friends, family.  Futility.  Finality.  Her. 
     He finished the drink and gently lowered her hand back to its outstretched position.  He stood.  He bent and placed a soft kiss on her forehead and whispered “I hope you find it.  Bye”.
     He left.


Tuesday, March 13, 2012

The Weather Sucks

I’m not ready to talk about the weather,
Not with you.
‘Cause we talked a forever.
That ain’t true.

I’m not ready to talk about the weather
Not with you.
‘Cause while you won’t quite sever
You still withdrew.

I’m not ready to talk about the weather
Not with you.
‘Cause when we’re not together
My world’s askew.

I’m not ready to talk about the weather,
Not with you.
‘Cause now it seems you never
Had a clue.

So don’t you talk about the weather,
Not with me.
‘Cause I can’t take my measure
On my knees.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

January 21, 1978 (Part 4 of 8)

     They sat quietly for a few moments, sharing the last smoke while each was lost in their own thoughts. 
     “What ya’ think, baby?  Feel like sharing?” she purred and nodded toward where the meth had landed on the coffee table.  Some had spilled out and sparkled on the scarred veneer.
     “Sure,” he relied as he sat up.  He pulled the cellophane off of the cigarette pack and tapped two big rocks into it from the baggie.
      “Looks like a couple of grams or so.  Think that’ll hold you for a day or two?” he asked.
      She took the plastic and looked at it closely. 
      “That might do it,” she muttered.
      “Might do it?  Shit, that’ll do you and Amy both.  For a few days anyway.”
      She sat up and the shirt opened to again reveal her body.  She smiled at him. 
      “Yeah, baby, I know, I know.  Hey, I got an idea.  Why don’t you run get some more smokes and maybe some Jack Daniels?  We can just hang out here till…till,” she hesitated.
      “Till what?” he asked.  While the place felt right and so did she, he assumed she was only doing whatever she needed to keep him there as long as the crank lasted.
      “Till we’re done,” she finished.
      He looked at her dark tousled hair.  Her darker hungry eyes and the silken expanse of skin she showed.  He marveled at how this woman, so hard to the world, could appear so soft at this moment.  He thought for a moment and then realized that there was really no decision to make.  Sex?  Yes.  Good sex?  Hell yes.  But he could get that in a lot of places for a lot less dope.  Hell, for nothing.  But what he really wanted now was to understand the contradiction that she was presenting.  He’d become curious.  So yeah, he’d go get smokes and Jack.   
      “Got some ginger ale or Coke?” he asked as he stood and pulled on his boots, shirt and leather jacket.
      “Yeah, baby.  Got all that covered,” she said as she followed him to the door. 
      As he reached to open the door she grabbed him and pulled him close.  She hugged him tightly.  Burying her head in his chest, she mumbled something.
      “What’d you say?” he asked as he cupped the back of her head, felt the softness of her hair, folded her into him.
      She sniffled and leaned her head back to look up at him.  Her eyes were again misty.
      “I said to always remember what I said.  You ain’t them.  And you ain’t me,” she whispered and broke the embrace.  Pulling the flannel tightly around herself, she walked over and plopped back down onto the sofa.
      “Yeah, I got it.  I’m different.  You know you’re acting pretty fucking nuts, right?” he said as he closed the door behind him.
      Driving to the liquor store, he wondered why the hell this woman, so hard and self-contained, had revealed something so different and unexpected to him.  How?  Was this the same woman he’d seen pull Ailey out of some guy’s pick-up by the hair and beat her bloody with her fists, until the guy had pulled her off?  That he’d seen stare down unspoken challenges after she took someone’s money at the pool table?  Could this really be that same fearless creature that just happened to come wrapped in a female body?
      Not today.  Today she’d given him a look at something he’d had no idea existed.  Turned out Kerry might be a real woman, too.  One that was soft and scented and giving and demanding and, like so many of us, seeking at least the pretense of the domesticity that seemed forever out of reach.  He thought that somehow she even looked different today.  A mask of tense aggression had been removed.  It was a mask with pleasant features to be sure, with its high cheekbones, delicate nose and strong jaw line.  But the expression worn on those features had always discouraged all but the most brave or foolish from acknowledging them.   Her looks were just another tool she used to get what she wanted.  And in her circles, no one cared if she smiled or not.  Guys didn’t seem to notice her face while they grunted themselves to satisfaction on top of her.  So what?  They got laid.  She got high. A trade was a trade. 
      But relaxed and vulnerable, she was almost beautiful.
      Besides, today he sensed that she wasn’t just trading a pound of her flesh for a gram of meth.  No, today she’d opened a door and in so doing had shown him something… Inviting?  Confusing?  As sure as he was that he didn’t want to go through that door, he was also as sure that he wanted to see more of what was in there.
      He picked up a fifth of Jack at the liquor store and stopped by the Seven Eleven.  He grabbed some chips, hard candy and a carton of Marlboro.  And as an impulse he got two tins of those disgusting Beach Cliff Brand Fish Steaks in Louisiana Hot Sauce.  The sugar and salt were his cravings.  The canned herring, to which she always referred by its full name, was something that she craved for some ungodly reason.  Well, the protein was probably something she needed.
     The world seemed a much better place by the time he was headed back to her apartment.  Sunshine, a cold beer and loud music helped him decide that maybe this new part of Kerry was real.  And maybe he liked it.  Maybe a lot.


Saturday, March 10, 2012

Awake at Dawn (Again)

I’ve had several comments about “Awake at Dawn”.  Only one of these comments has been posted publicly (Thank you!) while most were not. (Why?)  Most comments expressed surprise/disappointment at the final line of the piece.  The line takes an otherwise gauzy feel and turns it upside down should one view the death as literal. OK.  So, here’s a re-post of the original along with a tiny rewrite that I hope some of you find more palatable:

Awake at Dawn

I awake, my arm draped
     across you in a tenderly twined spoon,
My hand trapped between smooth thighs,
     thumb pinched by your knees, 
     elbow to fingertip needles sting me.
I begin to pull free,
     let blood restore feeling
     when through my chest my arms through me, I feel you breathe. 
It comes out of you and into me and it comes in long deep rushes
     and it leaves in unnumbered bottomless sighs. 
Your hair and scent tickle my nose in a raven tangle of musk and makeup
     and sleepy sweet perspiration.
A month long smoking crave distracts me for a moment before
     dawn’s purple fingers begin curling
     light around the night.
Darkness outside your window flees into me,
     closing my eyes I surrender to morning and what
     I know is the death I’ve lived for.


Awake at Dawn Again
 
I awake, my arm draped
     across you in a tenderly twined spoon,
My hand trapped between smooth thighs,
     thumb pinched by your knees, 
     elbow to fingertip needles sting me.
I begin to pull free,
     let blood restore feeling
     when through my chest my arms through me, I feel you breathe. 
It comes out of you and into me and it comes in long deep rushes
     and it leaves in unnumbered bottomless sighs. 
Your hair and scent tickle my nose in a raven tangle of musk and makeup
     and sleepy sweet perspiration.
A month long smoking crave distracts me for a moment before
     dawn’s purple fingers begin curling
     light around the night.
Darkness outside your window flees into me,
     close my eyes, surrender,
     return to morning, to 
     the dream I followed to this place.



Friday, March 9, 2012

Gathering Denial

Ether thin soft soul drifts
Across the world’s face.
From the blue globe it sifts
The beauty of each place.

But none are diminished,
Rather all are enhanced.
By the time it is finished,
Each was gently asked
And danced.

Wandering towers of ice
Risen from black arctic seas,
Pure blue crystals sacrifice
And melt southward now in peace.

Where coral tossed azure besets
A sugar stretch of sand,
And surrenders wild tropic palettes.
Mangrove marshes fade to land,
And disband.

Desert burned empty places
Rudely littered by sand smooth stones,
Secrete and let drift a fragrance
Subtly rich in earth’s red tones. 

Golden lush grassed plains
Trembling with breeze born waves,
Contribute bronze of shifting grain,
And wildflower spray, its unsaved
Loving slaves.

Callous canyons wear swirling mist
With hardy small sapling trees,
Having not the strength to resist
Give up their timeless mysteries.

While the cover of the skies,
At once both black and blue
Offer up that perfect slice,
Dusk and dawn, where forever fuse
The two.

The gentle soul contains all of these
While all of these contain the soul.
Still, no matter what I plea,
It shares not part nor whole
With me.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

January 21, 1978 (Part 3 of 8)


She got up and opened the curtains again and stark winter sun filled the room with a seemingly much brighter glow than moments ago.  She stood in front of the sliding door, looking out at the muddy courtyard and bare trees. 

“Ya’ know, this is a pretty shitty place,” she remarked to the glass. 

“It’s not that bad.  Got heat and AC and four walls.  Hell, you could even cook.  If you ever ate,” he replied through a haze of smoke and a buzzing brain.

“I eat, sometimes” she snapped back defensively.

“Yeah, I know.  When Amy manages to steal some sandwiches from that fuckin’ Chik-Fil-A she works at,” he conceded.  Amy was her sometimes roommate.

“Got a whole goddamn freezer full of ‘em, if you can eat right now.  Besides, that’s not what I meant.  I mean this whole town.  It’s shit.  The whole world is shit.  Sometimes it doesn’t fuckin’ seem worth the effort it takes to deal with the all the shit it throws out,” she exhaled shadow smoke into sunlight.

“Yeah, but what ya’ gonna’ do?  We have fun, get high.  And what choices we got anyway?” he said lighting each of them another smoke from the butt of the one he’d just smoked. 

            She turned and looked him hard in the eye for a moment as she took the cigarette.

            “Some of us got no choices,” she finally said, her voice suddenly flat.

            “That’s the damn truth,” he commiserated.

            “Fuck you.  I said SOME of us.  But you do.  You got choices.  You got a decent job.  You’re good with your hands.  You’re the smartest loser that hangs out around here.  You know how to talk to the fuckin’ straight world, how they think.  And you still got family that doesn’t hate you.  They’d take you in, help you out, ya’ know.  Shit, you quit carrying that goddamn .45, stop spending all night selling crank at every fucking Waffle House in Atlanta and you could probably still do something normal.  Maybe even go to college”.  She stopped to take a drag from her cigarette and pointed at the crank on the table.  Her words were tumbling out now. 

“You don’t quit though?  You keep doing this shit…and robbing people at gun point and fighting whoever pisses you off and all that other crazy shit you do and, and…well, in five years you’re dead or sitting in a cell down at Jackson waiting for the goddamn state to make you dead.  That’s that piece of shit Rat.  That’s Virgil or most of those assholes down at the Keg.  But that ain’t you.  You aren’t like them.  Or me.  What the fuck you doing here, anyway?” she finished.  Her face had flushed and her eyes flashed.

“Huh?  Family?  College?  What’s your goddamn problem?  I like what I’m doing.  It’s who I am, anyway,” he asked stunned.

She stood looking down at him, her breath slowing and color returning to her cheeks.  She stubbed out her smoke and sat down beside him.  She looked long at him again, but different this time, softer.  Then she looked down at her hands.

“That’s just it.  I know it’s not who you are.  And you won’t say it, but you know it too,” she sighed.

“What are you…” he started.

“Just shut up for a little while.  OK?” she interrupted.

Then she turned, moving down and laid her head in his lap facing away from him.

He was truly confused by this move.  She’d never even really touched him before, and now this simple and intimate gesture.  He wasn’t sure what to do with his hands.  As if in answer, she took his hand, held it between hers and clutched it to her chest.  She sighed deeply and seemed to settle that way.  After a moment, he put out his cigarette and began tentatively to stroke her hair with his free hand.  He stayed that way, feeling the softness of her hair, the movement of her chest with each breath, the small warmth of her hands.  They remained that way as Tom Petty’s “Refugee” played.

After the song ended, she stirred, rolled over and locked her eyes onto his again.  But this time there was something different in hers.  They were moist, soft. 

Not speaking, she softly pressed her lips to his, as if asking a question.  Surprised, not by the question but in how small she seemed in asking, he returned the kiss.  Finding her confirmation, she pressed her body to his, her tongue probing his mouth. 

She took gentle control and made love to him wildly, passionately demanding.  Then her demeanor changed and she was now the gentle giver, seeking out what she sensed pleased him and taking her pleasure in that too.  At those moments, though he appeared to be dominant, he sensed that this was not the case, that this was a dance that she alone choreographed for her own purposes.  And he didn’t really care.

She finally collapsed on top of him, gasping for breath with her dark hair a tangle in both of their faces.  She giggled lightly and pulled back enough to look at him.  They were still joined together as she asked “Little bump, baby?” and ground into him.

“Why not?” he smiled up at her.

Holding on, she reached back and grabbed the baggie.  Opening it she dipped her little finger into the powder, scooped some in her fingernail and held it beneath his nostril.  He snorted sharply and felt the crystals edge into his brain.  He watched as she snorted.  He saw her drop the baggie behind her onto the coffee table without breaking eye contact with him.  The tingle was all over his body now and she was apparently experiencing the same thing.

This time they feasted, each devouring the other with no thought, no time, no anything.  All was here and now and no one was in control of anything.     

They finally collapsed, sweaty and struggling for breath. 

“Goddamn.  If I’d known you could do that we would’ve a long time ago,” she gasped, eyes closed.

He didn’t answer, just lit the last smoke from the pack and sat appreciating the smooth look of her skin.  He held the cigarette to her lips and she opened one eye to see to take a drag.

“What you lookin’ at?” she asked exhaling.

“You,” he replied as his eyes wandered over her body, trying to memorize the details that he knew he’d lose all too quickly.

Suddenly shy, she pulled her panties on and slipped into an old oversized flannel shirt that she fished off the floor. 

He handed her the cigarette and stood to pull his jeans back on.  Springsteen’s “Born to Run” teased his ears as sat back into the sofa and contemplated her sudden demure shift.


Monday, March 5, 2012

Street Scene: Little Five Points


I have a bird’s eye view of Atlanta’s thriving center of counter-culture from where I sit.  I’m at a patio table at the Brewhouse Pub on the corner of Moreland and Euclid avenues.  I can see a new age crystal shop, a palm reader and to the right is a second hand, no, make that vintage clothing store.  Across the street and to the left, a city police sub-station shares a storefront with a jewelry store.  The store is called “Fetish” and I ponder for a moment exactly where one might wear the sparkling pieces on display in the window.  A block east down the street is Sacred Heart Tattoo where a guy named Sean delivers amazing artistic individuality with needles and ink.  He’s a frigging genius.     

I’ve been sitting here drinking for a while now and my patio space has been shared by a changing cast in these hours. 

There’s the table right out by the sidewalk where five college guys guzzled pitchers in the company of a lone blonde girl.  She was not particularly cute, clearly someone’s girlfriend and the default designated driver.  They were quite loud until an amateur rugby team settled at the next table.  Then they seemed to intuit that their drunken sophomore sharp wit was no match for the sweaty testosterone cloud rising from next door.  They ended up leaving and sticking the girl with the tab.  She ended up sticking with one of the rugby guys.     

There was the twenty-something couple in the corner with the wirehaired puppy.  He was dressed in an expensive three-quarter length wool coat and tennis shoes.  She was wearing a knee length sweater, cut off short-short jeans, black tights and boots with crimson socks.  She should have looked atrocious but didn’t.    

There was the too-pleased-with-himself business type out for a faux biker weekend in leather chaps and Harley tee shirt.  He sat sipping single malt and smoking a cigar with his overly maintained and overly made-up upwardly mobile biker-mama-wife-not-quite wannabe.  

There was another young couple at the table directly in front of me.  They were both dressed in boots, jeans and hoodies.  His was green and hers was blue.  Together they shivered from some phantom and I suspect drug induced breeze.  I envied how they seemed to be the only two people in their world.

There were bicycles and backpacks and bums and a girl with a sousaphone.  There was an apparent African grizzled grey god in a gold and black dashiki with three hundred dollar Italian loafers and there was an undeniable Nubian princess with coal black eyes, a hypnotic smile and legs as long as a Georgia summer.

 Darkness doesn’t fall around here at this time of year. It creeps into the corner of your eyes just slowly enough that you don’t really notice.  At some point the sun’s light must have shaded to shadow, its warmth must have shifted to shiver. But when?  Rush hour is over in most of the city.  But here the traffic remains heavy, the glint of sun on chrome having morphed into blue halogen glare.

As I said, I’ve been drinking here a while now and evening has settled in.  The crowd has changed with the lighting.  Gone are the cookie selling Girls Scouts that shouted at cars and passers-by like sideshow barkers.  There are no more young parents pushing strollers or walking dogs and most of the khakied cultural voyeurs from the suburbs have also disappeared.

As amber warmth begins to envelope me, my eyes adjust and their dilation gathers in so much more than lost light.  I see that the college boys were visitors here.  So were the faux biker couple and the twenty-something guy in the expensive coat.  But his girlfriend who should look atrocious seemed organic here among the body piercings and tattoos and purplish hair and half shaved heads.  So did the shivering young couple and the African god and Nubian princess and the bicycles and backpacks and even the damn sousaphone. 

Here, disaffected sneers and guileless smiles mingle.  Hemp sandals and Doc Martins walk together.  Here is the disenchantment of youth still in possession of innocence.  And here is its not always youthful result, a counter-culture life that rejects the perceived suffocation of conventionality.  All is kinetic here and from this place the rest of the world seems only so much restrained potential.  But restrained by what?  Mortgages and careers and appearances?  I doubt the question is considered.  Here it simply seems that some amorphous consensus has been reached that conventionality is conventionally dull.   

So, as I said, I’ve sat drinking for a while now.  About nine o’clock I noticed someone else alone and not moving.  He was completely unremarkable with reddish brown hair, a three day beard and blue eyes.  He was dressed in jeans and a “Flogging Molly” tee shirt and seemed to have spotted an acquaintance through the glass that separated the bar from the patio.  What seemed like a dozen lightning quick expressions flashed across his face as he looked into the warm glassy glow.  I followed his gaze to the source of his turmoil and understood instantly.  She was tiny and shiny against a dark wood and leather background.  A silver ring on every finger, a pierced lip and delicate tattoos disappearing up her arm into a gauzy white shirt announce that she was in her element.  Yet she remained distinct, among but not of, pearl in oyster. 

Her green eyes fixed on something the neither I nor my surreptitious new friend could see.  My gaze switched continuously from lovely her to uncertain him.  He stood too tense, so focused that I wasn’t sure that he would be able to retain any semblance of composure when she finally spotted him.  Her head began to turn, a delicate jaw line and full lips forming a smile as my friend’s hand raised to a soft wave.  He began to move forward and then froze in half stride and half smile and half wave as another guy intruded into our private scene.  He, like this place, somehow combined dark heat and openness- an amiable and disjointed jumble of inexplicable charm.  He stepped smoothly between her knees as she sat on a barstool and gave her a light kiss and comment.  She gave him a soft smile and shined even brighter. 

As her life continues, my new friend’s slams to a stop.  I watch him closely, a vulture looking to feed on shock or disappointment or anger or disgust or loathing or ANY pain.  I wait but he stands there, frustrating me, angering me with his lack of response.  He just drops his hand and casually rubs his neck as if that’s all he was doing in the first place.  There is no scowl, no grimace or cursing under his breath or appeal to his god or even defeated scrutiny of the sidewalk before him.  My mind screams at him to do something, although I have no idea what.  And I don’t care what. 

But instead of defeat or anything else, I recognize the vacuum.  I see that he’s yet another that has found the switch, the ability not to feel when the only experience available seems to be pain.  He thinks that numb is better than pain.  He thinks that numb is not dead.  I see that in his blank expression as we watch some other guy’s darkness light her.  He turns and continues down the sidewalk. 

She should have hurt him.  Not intentionally or casually or thoughtlessly.  Just naturally.  But she didn’t.  She couldn’t.  He’s gone.  Perhaps one day someone will bring him back.

In the mean time, I like it here.  Think I’ll have another drink.

Note:  Sean's really good.  Check him out.
http://www.sacredhearttattoo.com/Artists/Little5Points/SeanRains.aspx

Saturday, March 3, 2012

Barista

She weaves a web catching stars
And dragonflies.
She flashes eyes breathing calm
Soft butterflies.

Fragile air-light dancing creatures
Of iridescence
Hiding, showing gentle features
Are her presence. 

Lips pursed tight, a smile restrained
Seems held inside.
Dazzling light she keeps chained,
To world denied.

Speaking stories of no words,
Some too light truth
As an echo almost heard,
Too soft to soothe. 

Sun will darken as she leaves,
And hasten slow dusk.
Truth crawls behind and grieves,
But an empty husk. 

Eyes adjust to a darkened world,
Black pupils dilate.
Yet once her banner has been furled
Truth will dissipate.






Thursday, March 1, 2012

January 21, 1978 (Part 2 of 8)


That was not the woman he saw now.  He looked into her eyes and saw her want, not the same as his, but close.  While they’d grown to what passed for close, the two never fooled themselves into thinking they cared.  She belonged to the next guy that could offer a taste of that special kind of hyper-oblivion.  That’s what she chased.  But then, in those days, so did he.

So he spilled it.    

“They had some crank too,” he remarked casually.

She leaned closer, “How much?”

He reached into the inside pocket of his leathers and pulled a baggie.

“An ounce.  Maybe ounce and a half.  Split it with Rat and that’s what’s left,” he said and tossed a sparkling zip-lock onto the scarred coffee table. 

She reached and grabbed the meth, breaking contact with him.  She stood and held it to the dim light coming through the curtains. 

“Son of a bitch!  When were you gonna’ tell me?” she squealed.

Unsatisfied with her view of the crystal powder she pulled the curtains across the back slider open and, for just a moment, stood in perfect silhouette.  Despite the hard look she cultivated, she really was quite lovely.

She pulled the curtain closed and turned. 

“Got some new works, baby.  Been savin’ em.  ,” she told him as she walked around the counter that separated kitchen from living room.

She tossed a bag of cotton balls, a spoon and a sealed bag containing an insulin syringe at him in rapid succession. 

Coming back around the counter with a shot glass of water she sat by him, much closer this time.  Her thigh against his, she pulled a piece loose from a cotton ball, kneaded it between her thumb and forefinger and dropped it onto the slightly bent spoon.  She ripped open the syringe packet and set it carefully aside.

All business now, she dipped her little finger into the bag of crystalline powder, withdrew a fingernail full and dumped into the spoon.  She hesitated briefly and added another scoop.  Then, just for good measure, another scoop went up her nose.   

He took one of the syringes, drew some water from the glass and squirted it into the spoon, dissolving the powder but leaving the all important rocks intact. 

He picked up the spoon and began cooking the mixture with his lighter.  As the rocks melted he withdrew the heat before the clear liquid began to bubble.  Setting down the lighter and the spoon, he took the syringe and, using the cotton as a filter, pulled the plunger back, filling it half way.  Fifty units of crystal meth now awaited a vein.

            On an intellectual level, they each knew that the other had plenty of experience in administering shots to other people.  Coke, crank, smack, whatever.  They’d both introduced people to the mainline.  So while they knew that they could trust each other, in their world trust was weakness.

            “Ladies first,” he said, offering her the works.

            “Lemme know when you find one,” she said as she slipped her belt from her waist and around her arm.  Looping it through the buckle, she tightened the strap around her bicep and flexed her arm.  It only took a moment for her scarred veins to bulge in the crook of her arm. 

            He held the syringe up, tapped it with a finger and pushed the plunger until the tiniest squirt shot into the air.  Air bubbles cleared, he handed it to her.

            She grabbed the belt in her teeth to maintain pressure, took the needle and without hesitation slid it into her visibly pulsing vein.  Delicately she pulled the plunger back just enough to see blood mix into the plastic tube.  Assured that she’d hit the vein, she nimbly moved her fingers to depress the plunger, slowly and steadily forcing the drug into her bloodstream.  She withdrew the needle, set it on the coffee table and released the belt from her teeth. 

            He watched her.  On cue, she drew a sharp, shallow breath.  Her eyelids fluttered above brown irises that drifted toward the ceiling.  Her skin went gooseflesh, the hair on her arms standing on end and her nipples suddenly tight against the thin material of her top. 

            “Shit!  Not bad.  Pretty fuckin’ good,” she muttered.  Her new smile seemed lazy, but her now sharply focused eyes darted and her voice was taut. 

            “Yeah, I thought it would be.  Lots of rock, lots of sparkle in there,” he said as he took the belt and wrapped it around his own arm.  Leaving it to dangle, he took the lighter, reheated the spoon and drew the rest of the liquid through the needle.  Once again he purged any air bubbles.  He pulled the belt tight, held it with his teeth and pumped a fist to raise the vein.  He gently inserted the needle into flesh, stopping only when he knew he’d pierced the flowing vein.

            This was it, always had been it.  The moment was his when the plunger was pulled back and crimson tendrils, delicate and tentative, curled into the clear liquid in the syringe. For some it was the poke, the moment when the needle made penetration.   The insertion is an intimate, impaling, piercing union.  It is somehow both sexual and not, this taking of something foreign into one’s body and allowing, no urging it to spill its heat within.

            For a moment he watched spectral red fingers of blood wrap around the coming rush and then pull it into his arm as he pushed the plunger.  Bottomed it out. 

            Withdrawing the needle, he set it on the coffee table and let the belt fall loose.  And waited…one, two, three.  He felt his breath catch and heat in the back of his throat.  He exhaled sharp and short and felt his scalp and skin tingle.  She was right.  The rush hit like a rodeo bull and he rode like a cowboy. 

“Seven seconds.  Shit, I’d go for an hour if it lasted” he said as words returned to me.

“What the fuck you talkin’ about?” she looked at him through cigarette smoke.

“Nothing.  Just thinking out loud.”

“Congratulation on the thinking thing,” she remarked as she handed him a lit smoke.

“Holy shit, you’re right.  This stuff is monster.  Crankenstein lives!” he said, tuning into his suddenly finely tuned powers of perception.