The Epic Pheromones of Uncle Nick Russell- A Four n'the Sun Carol

Universal Truth in 2018: Like the green sludge at the bottom of the tidepool that they tell you is alive although you can’t bear to even rationally believe it, if you slouch at your desk long enough you start to attune yourself to the seasons of life, office life seasons that often go unspoken, unnoticed, probably for good reason, but all have their own customs, strivings and thrivings. Seasons like: fall color palette premiere, post candy workout guilt, pre-holiday layoffs, and soon, it will be time to watch the new year interns, and watch closely, as their souls freeze into shimmery facsimiles of human icicles.  Souls and bodies I suppose. 

Fok’in cold upinere.

Whereas, In Addition To: Slouch at your desk long enough and you earn a paid day off every once in a while in 2018, which is kinda neat, and which I did, thanks to an early morning doctor’s appointment.  There are two things that create magic in the brain of any adult, my guess is that they form new neuron connections,  and the first is physical activity out of doors and the second is any new experience.  You can grow without ever leaving your home, but it’s much easier to go to new places.  Our brains are built to love traveling, and I don’t necessarily mean another country, a picnic at the park will suffice.

Now Therefore: Plans were made.  See four friends, get out of the house, and by 7:12am a lot had already happened that day and love was disguised as an immediate sky full of sunlight

Nephew

    On Tuesday I had typed up a list of the special people in my eight-year-old nephew’s life, with pictures and quadruple spaced blank lines next to each person’s picture.  This was intended to help guide my nephew’s attention deficient mind so that he could jot down what he wanted to buy everyone for Christmas before we did our shopping, and then strike them from the list as we went out of conquered the shops.

    To get into the city I borrowed my friend’s truck and parked it in the unmonitored lot near the loading bay behind the Big Lots then walked the remaining 1.2 miles uphill.

    The crows are back in the square this week, I haven’t seen them all year. Gawk Gawk Gawk say the crows, menacingly.  At me, presumably, perhaps at each other.  They are intimidating to talk to and they dive down like they’re going to Hitchcock you only to veer up and phoosh phoosh phoosh their wings, it’s the same sound of opening up new garbage bags..  Where the crows’ve been all year I don’t know.  One feels that making inquiries of crows in a feat best approached with modesty and timidity. 

    Instead I call my nephew, to tell him I’m on my way.  He asks to not be called a child, simply a person of youth.  This is possibly one of the most politically correct things that he seems to argue for.  So I call him child.  He resounds with a serious kiddie fluster.  “Don’t call me that uncle.  I’ve told you.” 
    I asked “why not ‘a person without age’?”
     “Are you kidding?”
     “No you’re the kidding one here.”  Like Marlowe in Altman’s Last Goodbye, it’s okay by me.  Takes all kinds.   “I’ll see you in five.”

     Past the square where the brown tufts of grass squelch out of the pavement a truck is parked next to the homeless shelter in a red zone, two women unloading boxes to be distributed later.  Parked for some sort of Drive, I think.

    Past the not-yet-open storefronts, the guys in orange shirts picking litter and loudly joking in a language I don’t understand, past the bustling grocery with the red and white flowers in the window and the smell of cinnamon coffee sweetbread, the resignedly yearning dog tied out front to a $00.00 parking meter, and past the government building with imposing concrete steps with the guy sitting there with a broken wrist asking me for the time, and past the houses with the let-down shattered illusion of seeing strings of Christmas Lights in the daylight tied into the branches and down the little half block of houses to my sister’s place where my nephew was up and wearing Paws Patrol pajama pants.


    “Wanna play Legos?” he asks, when I arrive. My plans to leave the house are dashed as I observe the violent clashings of plastic bricks. “Now I have made a new Avenger named Robot Dinosaur and he is going to attack them.” He pulls me down onto the carpet and shoves some pieces at me, “Aaah!” he yells, his voice going higher like a tiny Lego person.  “Look!  See!  Now,” and his voice lowers in dramatically exaggerated announcer-voice fashion, “meanwhile on the moons of Jupiter!”
     Streaming from the kitchenette I sensed a murmuration. The idea to take him out today stemmed from my sister who, in moderately measured histrionics, admitted to me on Monday that her state of mind is deteriorating, from which I was led gingerly to the conclusion that it would be of the utmost beneficence to her should I allow her some time in alone.
     With depression, a person can really begin to crumble like petals from a dried bouquet: not only emotions, but also empathy, motivation, will, intellect, ability to plan, suffer.  With two promotions since September, and now a pay cut, she’s stressed, and not sure how Christmas is going to happen.  Since I read Science Magazines in the checkout line instead of the trumprags I know that prolonged stress causes the destruction of both the prefrontal cortex and limbic systems (the "houses" where will, motivations, and emotions live), and it violates the complex mechanisms of memory and literally tears the routine extraction of useful memories; breaks the connection of memory with emotions. 

    She waves a hand from behind her enormous coffee mug.  Do I stay here, I sign, motioning to the carpet Legos.  She shrugs.  His tiny piggy fingers point to me and draw a line in the air back down to the floor, a game where disarray is built in, and built away piece by piece.
“Let’s go out to the square,” I say.  Mild protestations follow for about 10 minutes while he dresses and I kuci uci u the cat.  We wave goodbye and walk up to the square, he doesn’t want to shop.  

    We watch the pigeons nip nervous quaffs from a puddle and imagine them to be ducks, hawks, World War I flying aces.  We decide to draw them in my sketchbook, I rip out a page for myself and we start in ignore distractions, elect to be present in the moment and expand upon it, fill the space with frames fill the frames with pictures and fill the pictures with words.
    “Now the king of the insect people is leading the attack on the bird warriors.  See, look, here!” Now a frigid breeze alights us.  Now the sun swells higher in the sky.

Natalia Sophia

    What precipitated this lunch meeting née date was a dinner meeting née date that we shared, ten days previous, which was a fine good time as usual occasioned by a few drinks, then a few more drinks on Main and then I tried to kiss her, which caused the current trouble clouding things ever since.  Thinking about it going in, sweaty palms on the steering wheel, it was trying to rationalize away the attempted kiss that this lunch meeting née date was aimed at resolving.  At least that’s what I  thought.
Sophia might have told you something different. 

    I arrive a few minutes early but see through the window that she is already there. Sophia has a fair mane of fairish hair, a longish nose, aristocratic bearing.  She does not stand to greet me, which I find a bit disappointing, catching myself in the act of thinking about that most beautiful curve of her, like the turn of a beer glass, thoughts like that get me into trouble here.

    “What they have good here?” she asks.  Her eastern European accent accentuated by my inability to read her lips behind the cardboard menu.
    “I was thinking seafood.  Clams, is it?  Scallops?”
    She orders a vinegar salad, and a Mimosa.  I order an ale and tell the waiter I’m not ready for food yet.  “You cannot stay,” she says, to me, her thick eyebrows arching with the challenge.

     I like the stimulation of being around her.  We have been friends since school, good friends, nothing more, but since she moved here to the city we see each other about once a month, and its become apparent to me that we are both making the effort to do this, equitably extending bi-lateral invitations for new ways to hang out, which I think is fantastic because she is, or was, or is, out of my league.  I know this on a deep gut level, and yet, the hope remains.  Perhaps hope isn’t the right word. 
    She is a scientist through and through.  I see phenomenon and try to describe it, to synesthize its color into words.  She however starts-in taking measurements, putting together experiments, and at times I see her examining me, in the microscope behind her eyes, but at other times, rarer times, she seems more like a normal foolish girl who seems to enjoy having me around.
     “What do you mean I can’t stay?”
     “I mean that I am to be meeting a work associate shortly.”
     “Why?” 
     “It is planned.”  She smiles while she apologizes, checking her phone, sipping  stubbornly at her straw, and then looking up and acting surprised that I am still looking at her.  “When you text to meet I already have this time plan.”
     “Why didn’t you say anything.” 
     “For to see you.”

     My self-doubting inner voice, which has been waiting in the wings to warn of rejection, jumps for joy at this small kindness. In autumn, after she and her married boyfriend finally broke up, again, this time for good, I went over to her apartment because I was going to pick her up for a concert and she texted as I was bounding up the steps that she wasn’t feeling up to it.  I knocked on the door anyway and it was decided we would stay in and watch a concerts online while we made soup.  Same feeling, the lurch of despair, the elation of free-fall.  Her apartment has a clean smell, and everything has its place, be it behind a door, on a shelf.  The contrast to my own dirty room couldn’t be more startling.  One would think that with a roommate to help with housework it would be easier, but things don’t clean themselves, no matter how many people aren’t cleaning them, and Sophia’s responsiveness to hospitable environs, even without someone to help was something I admired. 

    “Your week was good?”
    So that’s the play then? Ignore the almostkiss, tell me I am not welcome and then pretend that nothing is wrong and make small talk?

    I look her right in the eye for a moment.  I know her well enough to know that her mind is a multifaceted contraption I couldn't ever hope to figure out or explain ticking silently behind those narrow brown eyes, and rather than answer her with words I take out my sketchbook to show her the bird drawings and she looks deeply at them, studies intently as she turns the pages, scanning backwards to, I realize too late, the journal notes I’ve been making for the past two weeks.  Private stuff.  I say nothing, a reflected ray of sunlight on a fork blinds me.  I look away.
      She turns the pages slowly now.  I am not embarrassed.  She knows me well enough to know that I am not ashamed of my thought processes, it's one of the reasons I put them on paper to begin with.  I watch her reading and think it’s a shame that our written language in the west goes from left to right, top to bottom. Kerouac was right on the money with getting rid of turning pages, presciently predicting the cursor scroll.  Directionally we read down and in, which means our eyes are always sloping towards ourselves, our heart, and truly the road of experience leads outward the other way, so if we could change the written language so that we could all jump on the scroll and away we go, right to left, bottom to top… 

    “Sophia look at me.”  She looks.  A blank face of complete and total innocence.  A beautiful face.  A ploy?  “I like you,” I begin. 
    “Yes,” she cuts me off, “I like you too.  You are a good friend to me.”
     “But don’t you think, like, maybe we should—”
      Her food arrives, she notes with displeasure that there is eggwhite in the salad which she failed to ask the waiter not to include.  He apologizes, for what?  For not intuiting this? And he offers to take the plate back to correct the mix-up, a solution she agrees to, and we are left, my sentence still unfinished, my attempt to shake up the situation still unresolved and on the drawing board. 

    Not that I want to change who we are, as individuals per se, but the roles that we play, or chose to play, try to play, fail to play.  My role here is wind-up monkey, it gets a laugh at parties and once a year or so I spits out a story or a decent mix-cd, but I want to be more than that, and what I want to say is that we, she and I, seem to know things about each other, on an intuitive level, and we have for a long time, and that is a rare thing, and a gift, and why squander it?  It could be mined and exploited, there is so much potential.
     But her friend from work arrives then and says sorry she’s late and I am quickly made to understand by Sophia that I am now third wheel.  “Here is my friend, he who is just leaving.” and so I tell her I’ll call her later, feeling already like I no longer exist as they start talking loudly and animatedly and I take my ale twenty steps away to the bar to finish, alone, eavesdropping. 
    They talk about trips they have recently taken, trips they are planning to take. Hows such-and-such work project going.
    The waiter/bartender asks if I’d like to keep my receipt?  Yes I would.  I file it into the archive at the back of my billfold, one further entry into the ongoing saga of me.


Nathan

    I sit and write, try to write, killing time until 4 when Nathan said he’d pick me up to go out.  One thing we do when we can find the time is look at the city from unusual angles, we try to find beauty where it’s not customary to look for it. Concrete and hope.  At least that’s how I look at it.  Nathan, who has been described to me by I know who has ever met him as “kinda creepy,” calls this activity “cruising for chicks.” Whichever way you look at it, we’re looking for ways to go out and pump a little brain.

    Nathan is a big guy.  Not fat, but bearlike wide.  Almost 50, with graying curls, wide brown eyes, ruddy whiskered cheeks and a tendency to complain of headaches, today he cites a heaviness in his head, a feeling that he is drunk even though he’s been sober for 13 years.  This might be because he brews his Keurig coffee with Monster Energy Drinks instead of water.  He drives a Nissan Altima and burns an incense stick on the dash while the radio hisses and moans like something out of an exorcism bootleg.

    “Christopher moved to Florida,” he says, catching me up, “did you know that, and he's got cancer now by the way, but when I told Rick he said that it sounding like a man heading toward something instead of running away from something, and there's something to that.  I never thought of it that way.  He's done well out there, 'course he always could find the best in anything, even Florida.”

    On the side streets by the railroad tracks we eye the litter, take-out Styrofoam slushie cups and plastic bag ghosts, when you adjust your eyes you really notice how many of them there are.  We cruise accidental-like, past the scaffolded frames of the new commercial center, the faded apartment complex still up along lower Rosemont, the last of fall's foliage holding out against December nights.  At the intersection some teenagers are taking selfies by at the crosswalk button, waiting for the light to change.  Or not, as once the light changes they remain, taking still more selfies, all but one, who goes on ahead then notices he is alone, and doubles back.

    “How’s work going?” he asks, not waiting for an answer “mine’s been hell but I like it okay I guess.  Beats the alternative.  And plus it keeps me stimulated you know, after all these years.  I used to think how the hell could I go on with this past 40 but then 40 came around and everything just got more interesting, you know?”

    As the sun starts to set we follow the long crisp winter shadows out past the airport and park by a muddy embankment at the end of the runway, a grayness and darkness by 6 pm that is very atmospheric. The planes take off and land.  The whole city, in fact, from above must be gray and cowering from the absence of snow and light, a thought that, with a cough drop, I mull over, and it becomes delightfully fabulously gloomy.

    “You can doubt everyone you meet up and down but it doesn't help you get anywhere unless you give in to trusting some of 'em sometimes.  Took me twenty years to figure that one out, and then, guess what, I got a promotion.  Promotion is another word for more fucking headaches.  But you remember Cybil, Old Greg's widow, she needed help bad after Greg passed and she wouldn't let anyone in until the neighbors started to complain about the piss smell.  It's just not respectable, but whatcha gonna do?  Trust some young nurse born in 1997 to come in and charge you two hundred bucks to get to know you?”

    We deliberate over the merits of a few drive-thrus on the main drag just off the freeway, going back and forth until we settle on some chicken and we park at the mall where there’s an outdoor food court, the weather still favorable enough to us to eat outside, and we watch men shuffle in and out of cars and some women, “like a beautiful flower, that one” says Nathan, adding, a little less poetically, “mmm, that ass.”  with their children.  A sale at the Old Navy had a large crowd of people, and babies were wheeled in and out of the ice cream shop. The phrase surging mass of humanity stuck in my mind then.  A pair of headlights turned into my face.  Why don’t more people challenge the norms of this life? 

    There is talk of going to a party then, and although it's been pointed out to me that Nathan likes to have me along because then he gets to play cleanup wingman I had to debate the merits.  I like the guy, we're friends, but his perversions are definitive, and he makes no apology for them.  This is who I am, and if society doesn't like it then too bad, and while I respect that, it puts me in a bit of a pickle to be helping the guy out, even by just being there, although a party is a party. Yet it must be considered also that when Nathan says there's a party Christ who knows what kind of madhouse that could turn out to be.  I tell him we should go.  He already has the car in gear. 

    There’s a moment during a party, any party, unless it’s a really good party and then there are many of these moments churned together, in which spontaneity overtakes everything and the chaotic organism of the thing has its own kind of lifeforce.  I don’t know any professional party planners, only amateurs, but they confirm what I suspect to be true, which is that the conditions for this can be predicated, up until a point.  The decorations, the destination, the guest list, the playlist, the food, the drinks… all factors in whether or not the joint will ever really jump, but not the crucial ingredient, which is ineffable.  Making a party come to life isn't an unreachable goal, it's just that it takes more than man alone, and I don't mean by that to be dissing all male-parties in any way shape or form, not that this was one.     
The party was at a mansion, and the palaver of the insouciant wafted out over us two peasants coming in from across the lawn like a divine wind on a mule's ass.  At the hall door a brown man with long blue bangs completely covering his forehead takes our coats and the winking faces within  become visible.  Quite a hubbub.  I feel immediately that my flaws and weaknesses have been invited in as well, and they'll cross examine me as we all sit for tea.  I wish them well.  I tell my friend I must be leaving.  He doesn't hear me.  He dives in grinning, still alive to what to me looks already dead.  No heads turn when I turn around and go.

The Mythic Pheromones of Uncle Nick

My Uncle Nick hasn't woken up since two weeks before his operation, which was on December 13th.  I've been to see him twice now and it's hard to tell the two times apart except for one thing.  I remember flashes of faces, different doctors, girls in blue gloves, bleach-smelling staffers writing dates on the white board, making up word games using the letters of CATSCAN, . When he came out of intensive care, it was said that there was a hemorrhage in the brain, and something about blood in the ventricles - my spider senses say this is a poor prognostication. They say there isn’t much of a chance now, it's only a matter of time, they are very sorry, we should brace for the worst.

My Uncle Nick is actually my ex-Uncle Nick, my aunt divorced him in '96 or '97, but I still call him Uncle because my earliest memories of him were calling him Uncle and you can question tradition all you want but some habits I am happier upholding unexamined. 

He did not want to try the treatment.  He pronounced to us plainly, myself, my cousin, his mother, and his sister, that to be with family as much longer as possible was to be desired.  But when he didn't wake up he was denied this final wish by his sister, the medical power of attorney who told the doctors to go ahead and try.  Two weeks have now passed, and the worst has not happened, but neither has anything else. Going to visit him it's hard not to hold out hope, but time in there swirls like a gallon of paint. It's good that they tried what they tried.  A miracle could happen.  Actually, a miracle has happened.  It's something I cannot explain, it's the one thing that, devoid of any unenforceable hope pronounced by the professionals, makes these visits worthwhile, and I haven't talked to anyone about it and I'm not really about to, other than writing this down.

When he was conscious, when he was my real uncle, Uncle Nick was a a bit of a hound.  Ladies man, is it, Leon Sphinx?  Only, all joking aside, it's without a doubt the reason my family disowned him and my aunt moved back to Eugene, only I'm really not sure if even she knew the half of it.  Uncle Nick was old then, he was always old to me, but he's really old now. An old man, and though never exactly what I would describe as knockout handsome (what would I describe as knockout handsome?  Don't answer that.  Me!) the now shaveless-in-hospital snow white facial scruff and birdie pink paper gown aren't doing him any favors.  Nothing about his person right now suggests he is breathing, let alone has a pulse, and yet, taking time to come in and sit with him this month, in addition to myself, my cousin, his mother, and his sister, there have been an unending stream of women, women of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds, coming in to pay their respects by sitting with him too.

I've never seen anything like it.  Last week while I was there a tall matronly woman with white hair and a pantsuit came in and smiled at me, sat next to him awhile, and was relieved at his side almost immediately by a tiny Korean lady, not much older than me, then a blond biker chick who was like a pair of breasts stapled to a pair of hips with black leather, a woman who looked exactly like the actress Kathy Bates, an Indian woman who brought in prayer beads and spoke unintelligibly to him in a young voice for over 40 minutes, and as I was leaving there was a small line out in the waiting room.

We're not exactly talking about it this, although I did mention it to my cousin in a text and he confirmed that it was the same way when he was there.  A curly-haired farm girl, a grandma scrolling through pictures of her family on her phone and telling him all about them, a perfectly round Latin matron wearing a janitorial crew jumpsuit, they come in, sit with him for a bit, some cry, mostly they just hold his hand and kiss his head and then they nod and leave, some have said a bit to me, but mostly they haven't seem to even register that I am there.  On this night I start to daydream, glimmers and glimpses of a rolling green paradise which both attracts and repels me when I think back on it later, on the city bus back to pick up my friend's truck from where I left it behind the Big Lots.  Most of the time dreams are harder to extract meaning from than reality, but sometimes life throws you a curveball like Uncle Nick. 

My probably-won't-ever-re-awaken-Uncle Nick was a nice guy with a temper, he would spit and cuss, flail and strike, storm in and out, all on a whim like a microburst torrent of rain out of a clear summer sky.  I stayed with him once, at his house on the corner, when I was 19, for a night when I had nowhere else to be, and he took me out to eat, loaned me a hat I didn't give back for a year, and screamed at me so bad in the middle of the night that I cried because he heard me coughing and sneezing and he didn't want his spare blankets to become infected.  Generally I liked him.  He was an old guy, he forwarded me emails with corny dirty jokes in them, and he told me I was a good writer and should keep it up.  I hope he pulls through okay, but I doubt he will.
  When the bus pulls up to the stop before mine I put in my earbuds and crank up the Rare Occasions.  The sun is long down now, headlights racing at you until they don't, taillights stretching off forever.  These, the shortest days of the year are tough ones to be working the old 8-5 and never seeing any sun, much less feeling it on your skin.

And Finally: I leave you with a bit of mumbo jumbo to wrap this whole monkey up.  May you read poems of peace in interesting books and eat a stomachache full of tangerines which are easy to clean, in a world that never stops to wait for you may you keep moving onward and find your own stirring pangs of love within the temp job that we call life.