X- Exitstageleft

X- Exitstageleft

Part 6

I know I said that I was leaving…but

-Sinatra

Do you ever wish that when you were younger you would’ve done things different? Done different things? Broken out of your shell and taken risks? If I could go back and be 17 again I would probably take fewer risks that before I couldn’t wait to take. I thought I couldn’t wait to take them. The years shove past quickly, running over each other. So many stories to tell, so few stories worth telling. Life isn't a silver platter and we aren't special. I feel like I have to make up for the time I spent being myself. I feel like I haven't seen enough of the world when I feel old, and then when I realize that I’m still young I know that I’ve seen more than a lot of other kids my age.

There is no story that we have that everyone wants to hear. There are long distances between people and love is genuine hard thing to find. Hard to sustain. Leaning towers of sand that yearn for collapse. Life is staying up late to keep in touch with friends. Life is those moments when we find each other. Getting up early, brushing your teeth, shaving ripened unwonted hairs and putting on matching clean clothes. Being presentable. If there was a way to narrate redemption contrary to this I would write it but it always comes across unsettling. Untrue. There are no pilgrims-of-one in the Happily Ever After. Perhaps redemption is the story. Our cultural mythos, brought to you by DisneyViacomAOLTimeWarner tells us that compassion trumps intellect in the end, but of course there is no end. So far as I know, there are no active writers from beyond the grave, not really anyway. Max Brooks may come the closest. When we die, we die.

“You're just bitter,” she said shaking her head.

“Bitter is good.” I lay on her bed trying to coax myself away from her laptop on which I have been subjecting her to Randy Newman videos like I Want You to Hurt Like I Do. Youtube replaces all-request radio. Absence replaces presence. Tonight is the night she is leaving.

Leaving!? Leaving?!? Leaving you ask?

Yes. Hanging over the story of our entire summer was the knowledge that after her month in Utah with her family she would be returning for a week and then going back to school in Texas. I stayed for a few days and returned to prep the story. Now I was bitter, apparently.

“Are we going to the show or not?” she asked.
“Sure. Yes. I don't care. We go, we don't go. The show goes on.”

“I thought you wanted to go.”

“I DO want to go! But I want to write something today. I don't want today to have been a waste.” Pause. “Not that spending time with you tonight is a waste.”

“Bitter.”

“What if I died tonight? On the way
to the concert? So what if my loved ones will want to feel loved and special when I'm gone. I want to create something brilliant. Create a character that looks and sounds and feels real and put enough semblances of myself in him so he’ll last forever.”

“Yes, yes. You could call him Ozymandias. We could call him Dr. Huck Finn, and after he goes to school and gets his doctorate he could intern with House.”

“Something that hasn't been done before!”

“All your other selves are only you. It's almost 8 o'clock.”

“GAH!”

“I love you.”

“I …love! I can love! Are you implying I don’t love!? I love people the way that I want to be loved; I
leave them alone so they can write. Do unto others, right? That's Jesus! Jesus said that.”

“Jesus was a Capricorn. Come on! I'm all dressed up. Put your clothes on.”

I got up and kissed her. “What’s the name of the town where you’ll be?”

“College Station.”

“What’s the name of the town?”

“I’ll be in College Station.”

“The name of the town is— ”

“Yes.”

“Can I come visit?”

She scrunched her face distractedly. “I expect I’ll be busy. It is school, not vacation. Some of us actually work. At it.”

Ignoring the jab. “I’ve been thinking about going to a writers’ seminar this fall,” I said.

“That’s nice.”

“You still didn’t answer my question.”

“Sure you can come visit. Get your clothes on. We’ll be late.” I closed the laptop and conversation stopped.

The show was a
long-haired band playing a venue packed with hipsters whom she strode in
amongst, confidently and began dancing with abandon. Her arms in the air. My instinct was to plaster myself to the
wall. But plastering myself to the wall
was exactly the kind of thing that I’d been doing wrong since I was 15 years
old. Why not yield to abandon? Why not
give in to openness? Why not connect?

Why not unmask, man?

I snaked my way in
amongst the stinky undulations: the bearded boys in flannel and Converse sneakers,
the miniskirt girls in work boots. She
had garnered a following, two guys denoting their territory with gyrated hips
and flailing arms in her general direction.
She danced oblivious. I had to work my way in. Bumping into the guy at her back like it was a
free form accident. Not shying away,
which caused him to angry eye me. Scowl
and pivot, ass for an ass, the other guy soon got the hint.

I was dancing with
my girl, and she was dancing with the music.
The music thrashed and roared until our ears were ringing and our eyes were
tearing and our throats were soar from screaming and our hands were red from
clapping and she jumped and cheered and I put my hands around her waist and I
was happy.

I drove her home in the moonless dark. Listening to a pop song on the radio about Romance I heard the soft and potent breathing of sleep from the passenger seat, little snores from a girl curling into herself. I turned down the volume on the stereo until there was only the sound of her and the purr of the road. A bluish glow illumining us both. How often I think that moments like that are great metaphors for life. The road in
the darkness, leading back home.

“Tell me story,” she said without moving.

“I thought you were asleep.”

“I am asleep. Tell me a story.” She stretched her legs and redoubled them under her like a cat winding into a ball.

“You know— about that writers’ seminar this fall—”

“Waste of time.”

“It’s outside Austin. That’s close right? It’s also a meditation clinic. I think it
sounds perfect. October in Texas.”

“Austin’s two hours away. You don’t need a seminar. Or a clinic.”

“I know, but I’ve been thinking about all those stories I read at school. All those fresh sparkleface incomings trying to invent new ways to tell a story, and some of them even succeeding but
even the best of them the same old story. A high school relationship gone sour, or going sour, or worst of all: prevented from going sour.”

“Please.”....

“Its so cliché you know? Like writing about dreams. That drives me crazy! I don’t want to write about… dreams. Or love. Or change. I want a story that everyone wants to hear.”

“Don’t care.”

“No I— Okay.”

“A story.”

“A story.”

We were the third car to stop. I think it was a
Saturday but it might have been a Tuesday. The darkness was all around us. Jack
pulled over to take a look, “Maybe we can help,” she said, but I quickly saw
that we could not.

“It was an accident,” a man said.

“I bet they were drinking,” another man said. Of
course they were. What else was there to do but drink? The landscape was
desolate at best. Both vehicles were mangled, one half inside the twisted
other, upside down.

“He was going the wrong way,” another man said, my
legs were shaking because I had to pee.

Jack surveyed the scene, “see,” he said pointing,
“it was inevitable” and we crouched and sniffed.

There was nothing could be done. Police arrived
lights flashing. I snuck off to take a piss in the embankment. In the grass I
saw what appeared to be a hand reaching out and pointing limply. The moon was
dull. I stumbled back, feeling better, empty.

“Poor bastards,” she said and we all nodded, some
of us without nodding at all except with our eyes.

“I love you,” I said.

She was already asleep. I carried her inside and Dennis Rodman came up groggily to sniff at my pantleg. I set her in bed, tucked her in and drove home alone, not a little bit disappointed.

In the morning she would be gone. Alone, again I sat down to write the story of our summer together and realized that nothing really had happened. Time passes differently for different people. I was asleep. I woke up. The door opened. My grandfather returned from his summer hiking. He brought in the mail and left. I was alone. I got a letter from my college friend Tim, his father was dying. A month later, his father was dead. I was going to Texas.

W) The Western Lands

W- West

Part 5

Where seldom is heard

a discouraging word

Go west young man. These words echoed from our past, words carved in stones, in the wind tunnel of experience that led countless young men, myself included through many days and over many a lonesome mile. I had the window rolled down and the cold air fan turned up as the yellow line whooshed beneath the car passing through Los Alamos headed north remembering the significance of the place that birthed both the atomic bomb and Burroughs’ first boy love years before he would write of The Western Lands prompting me to discover it in an empty California Gold Country Library and begin writing the story which had gotten me published (or would soon) and into the troubled sojourn which I was now pounding on the accelerator in a desperate attempt to outright flee.

Go west young man. The words both encouragement and challenge. Had I been more sober when I’d made my way back home and packed a bag to go and see the girl I loved in Utah, I would have realized that the unideal route, the route I had in mind would actually bring me 7 hours primarily north, out of my way, but I didn’t care. West, after all, was a region, not a direction. A state of mind, not a coordinate course. I’d made my way home and a weary dog was patiently waiting with his head in his paws to be let in. When he saw me he jumped up and licked my face and I let him happily. It was nice to be seen. I wanted to be seen, not to run away. And to that end, I was running away.

Go west young man. Go west and become a man. The West as freedom and catharsis and solitude and redemption all wrapped in dusty uninhabited vistas of dirt, sage, and lonesome vastness. If anyone doesn’t like the grubby way I look or act or smell they can try and walk the 100 miles from anywhere of consequence to find me out there. The West! The dashboard covered in ash flakes like a mad internal snowstorm while the tape deck plays Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and I lean my right arm preternaturally across my chest to the open window in order to engineer a more even tan. We mustn't lose our vanity, oh western lands, we have girls to impress.

Two brown boys in sportsclothes standing idly in the brown median of the interstate highway system. I wonder what it is they are doing. Whatever it is altogether insignificant in the enormity of geologic time. I take a pill from my pocket and consume it. A woman drives by with absolutely no neck. Geometrically absent is any deviation in pitch from her chin to the protrusion of her chest. It takes all kinds. Big Country.

Go west and the land grows flat. My mind wanders like unto a dream. What was I doing? Another pill at the state border and a swirl of dust. A cloud enters my eyes. I become the dust of the west, sprawled out everywhere all at once, laying high and floating. I become myths of comfort and absence, present and all eddying. Edifying. Suppose she doesn’t really love me? Who is it she doesn’t really love? The Masked Man, my character? Why had he been masked for so long? What was it that he was hiding from--- that I was hiding from? Perhaps it wasn't me that was masked, but Time. I had expected time to enter my life suavely, to come in that way one day, smooth and cool and happy to see me, but the truth was that time was cunning and had come and gone, already, unnoticed, repeatedly. Like the help. Here I was, almost 30 and with what to show for it?

Stupid fucking Time. My adversary. My adversary who’s main objective had been to convince me that he wasn’t my adversary. I was going to see the girl. I was going against time. Tears of angel down my window. I pulled aside and turned off the car. Watching a rainbow precede the storm, which came and passed, happy I was not afraid of thunder anymore. I had spent storms like this cowering in gutters and dying thousands of deaths to become, who? What? Ancient? I felt old and young at the same time. Timeless. The rain stopped. I raced time by remaining still. Sat on the ground, leaned against a tire. Lit a cigarette, looked up at the stars. When it is dark there are stars.

So many stars. A shooting star too, two, no three. Such a misnomer. They aren’t really stars. To have some stars burn forever and shine whilst others extinguish in a momentary wishful flourish. Perhaps the name ‘shooting star’ was the result of a propaganda campaign by meteorites themselves, hoping to be categorized with their more talented cousins. Jealousy. I empathized. I felt crazy. The stars bent over me, burning, smothering me in their coldness. The only sounds were the squeeking chirrups of the crickets, a supple rustle of breeze, and a hollow train weeaah somewhere in the cloudy glowing distance. I huddled back into the car and drove on into the mad darkness.

Go west young man and become a vegetable driving a car. A vegetable with an erection unwavering away from all the bright lights of acceptance, fat throbbing phallic highway erection leading creosote lined and throbbingly aching for everything, hungry for anything mountained west. Drive away from any desire to be saved. Go deeper and deeper and deeper, deeper still.

Stopped at a sad neon diner for an extremely untimely breakfast where a big old man sat in the booth across from me as I fiddled with the sweeteners. I thought of talking with him. Hi, I would say. Or, Nice weather. And off we’d go. A man that size would surely have sizeable certainties to impart. He’d tell me something profound about existence like without repentance we’re all stuck pulling a life sentence in the prisons of our selves. But I said nothing, and he said “Git me mah use’ouhl fore I eat mah right arm” to sad eyed wolfish looking waitress. His double chin unshaven and fingernails greasy. Burnt scars on his knuckles, hair unruly beneath a faded cap which he removed when his food came. Perhaps we had ordered the same thing. No. He ate and left.

The orange sun came up slowly covered in mists that shined iridescent and slowly burned away, all the gray and purple darknesses of the world receding further west as the eastern sky got brighter, hotter. A beautiful slow heat that eventually saturates every blade of grass. As the sun rose the world rushed by my window. I was going to see the girl. My girl. The country lifted to the clouds and the clouds glided in to greet it. Brooding, overcast sky, low-lying marshmallows crowding a wide-open landscape ringing all things tighter together, manufacturing a momentary illusion of kinship between the car and me, the road, the land, and the sky. I drafted a letter to my ex in my head. The ex who I didn’t love but loved. This isn't meant to be a locus of indictment, it said. It's not your fault it's mine. I should have been happy and with you, not trying to be with you and trying to be happy.

I didn’t feel better, but I felt better. I felt exhausted and faraway. Wide awake I called an hour out to tell her I was soon coming. I could imagine the look on her face as the line lay silent. When I arrived she came up to the car and gave me a hug. A gorgeous house, far from everything. Her Dad walked toward me, I recognized him. I had forgotten in my haste that she would be surrounded by family. Jesus. Nervousness manifesting itself in meekness. I averted my eyes.

“Well now isn’t this a surprise. Hello son, we’ve heard a lot about you.” He stuck out his strong hand. “Come in, have a drink. Y’hungry?” The house was magnanimous, wide windows opening out onto a resplendent spread of mountains. She sat next to me on the sofa while the others busied themselves in the kitchen.

“Where’s Dennis Rodman,” she whispered.

“Left him with Bellamy. Where’s the rest of your family, I thought this was a reunion.”

“They headed out this morning. Reunion was only last week. The rest of the time it’s just us.”

Her father entered with a tray of iced tea. I thanked him, eyes lowered. He sat down looking relaxed and powerful. “I hear you’re going to school. What are you studying?”

I confessed that I didn’t know.

“Then what’s the point of school?”

“I was figuring I’d find something remunerative once I had a basic degree.”

He smiled and eyed his daughter. A reprove? The intricate silences of familial language.

“Well it’s a pleasure to meet you. A surprise pleasure.” Everyone smiled. Oh, her smile...

“We’ve sure got plenty of room,” her mother said, gliding in with a tall dark drink of unknown provenance. She sat demurely, ankles crossed exactingly, upright looking right at me and smiled the smile she’d given her daughter. “Do you ride horses?”

“Horses?”

An hour later we were horseback and gone on a dusty trail in the wilderness. Her mother, brother, niece, and I: feeling nervous and sick at first which gave way to the primeval rhythm of the thing and my mind began to chart off on its usual peregrinations. It’s not often anymore I sit astride a creature without breasts. Or this much hair… Good riddance. Horses, like most of the earth’s beasts do not lie. Save one, said Twain, or was that blush?

“His name is Tio,” said a little voice. The niece, but I did not hear. “Because he is the color of a tea.” I was daydreaming, the turn inward that only great western sights can bring about.

Such a nice red house. Such gorgeous country. Such a gorgeous girl, riding up ahead, her hair bouncing fluidly across her shoulders. She had given me a puzzling look but she didn’t ask me to leave. Although I had practically invited myself over. Perhaps it would have been rude to ask me to leave. Rude of me to show up like this. But I wanted to see her. Needed to see her. To tell her… what? Perhaps I was trying too hard. Perhaps this wasn’t right. I surveyed the hillside.

We rounded a switchback in the pass and the view beyond the heavenstretched branches of the cool fragrant trees reached towards the infinite west. High lonesome, they call it. Clear air and empty sky and I, staring into space in some private world of words. I could tell her about the story, my success...

When we returned to the house her brother and sister-in-law busied themselves banging pots and giggling in the wide kitchen, nominally preparing dinner. Her mother stole away muttering something about taking a nap. Liberation hits you when it hits you. Alone, together, down the narrow hall she pressed me to the wall with a soft thud and kissed me hard. I put my hand on her breast and she moaned in my mouth. We fall into a dark white room and she locks the door behind us and pushes me onto a yielding squishy bed. Imagine a smiling crowd waving happy happy goodbyes.

I slept better than I have ever slept. I dreamed clearer than I have ever dreamed. I was riding a horse with Burroughs and all the west was made of letters. We had written it. There I was, asleep young and beside the beautiful girl, and I was her father too, old and balanced, balancing, and I was the earth and the trees and the horse and Burroughs and he said “I’ll show them something to remember” and I woke with the morning sun filling the bedroom like a cathedral, and I remembered sad things far away from me, and went happily back to sleep.

Go west young man and see everything that you can see. See the clouds from above and the clouds from below and see the wonder of the end in sight and know that fear, it is the end. Don’t be afraid. Sometimes you know what will happen before it happens. You know?