Y) ?

Y- ?

That room was cold as death, I wrote. A bad start. A freewrite is allowed to have a bad start. Who ever heard of combining a writers’ seminar with a meditation clinic? Stupid. It was stupid and a waste of time. Empty your head half the day into nothingness and the other half the day onto paper. I bit my lip and clamped my fist and continued, remembering the events of the previous day.

The room was cold as death. That is, it was air-conditioned to a fault. Seconds upon entering my teeth chattered. The crowd was light, each time the door opened a few more mournful people came in and went through the motions of cheerfulness and consolation. Then they talked in small circles about the weather, traffic, movies, books. Anything but the inevitable.

Tim’s half brother Johnny was tossing a football. Johnny was 12, I’d been told. Who told him it was okay to bring a football to a funeral? I guess it was his Dad. Why didn’t he have a right to hold a football if that’s what he wanted? Tim’s girlfriend Jamie was there, trying hard not to look seductive wasn’t working for her. The Bens were there too, dressed better than the rest. Ben Ease and Ben Manuel, both 23 years old were the founders and chief executives of Manuel Ease Co., a company out of Houston that handmade quality wood hand tools the way they’d been made a hundred years ago and sold them at exorbitant prices, as art really, to people who would never use them as they were intended to be used, people for whom labor wasn’t a verb but a noun, as in The Labor. The help.

Auger is one of my favorite words. I should find a way to use the word auger. Or misauger. Easy to misgauge the intrepitude of a word augered like misauger.

The director of the funeral home stood in the back of the room watching the little relatives chase each other in frantic circles across the deep green floral carpet, their tiny feet pounding. Laughing. Was it right that little children played at this, this-- what was it called? Open casket viewing? Their mothers turned away with tired resignation to talk to one another. Young, round and beautiful, rings on their pretty brown fingers. Tim’s mother sat looking exactly as I remembered her. Shouldn’t she be mournful? What does mournful look like?

The other writers crouched over their paper scribbling madly. They were so open to suggestion, this crowd. With their mechanical pencils and their plastic nametags reading

NAMESTE! MEERA NAM:

Jack

Tim's father, I realized, had inhumanly broad shoulders. Lying there in his casket he seemed to be built like a spade: no neck, but broadening from his shiny tipped toes all the way up to those two massive shoulders and then, plop, a tiny black head. I couldn't help but think football player but didn't say anything in case that might be racist. Hardly a time to be racist, at a funeral. Tim stood by his mother at the door. Having 'paid my respects' to the great man 'laying in state' I shuffled back over, past the appraising eyes of the flowers adorning the corner wall.

What does laying in state even mean? Did I use that term right? How exactly is one supposed to pay one's respect? Tim, solemn in a too-tight suit, was standing with his older sister and I suddenly became very sad. An intrusive nostalgia perhaps, or a cruel darkness coming over me. When I thought no one was looking I slipped out the door.

October in Houston. The massive sober clouds were doing something ominous. The sky was immense, terrifying, and probably full of aircraft bound for a trigonometry of projectiles. The air smelled damp and one could feel the pressure dropping with the onset of those dark clouds moving in across the flatness. Some gigantic coming.

I remembered the last funeral I’d been to, when it had been my brother and I standing against the wall, like Tim and his sister. A reel of memory set in motion.

When I first moved to Sante Fe I got a call from my father asking if I’d heard the good news. Seems my brother had written a novel, had I read it yet?

As filled with cliché as they get and still garnering rave reviews. Disenchanted left-wing mover-n-shaker leaves Washington on road trip to rediscover the real America, meets old girlfriend current socialista in Milwaukee, wind farm rodeo couple in too-much-love Wyoming, snake farmer in Tempe and beautiful film producer in San Francisco at a gay bar. In short, total shit. That fucker. There he was, smiling on the dust jacket photo like a child molester.

I know all this because I read it on the flight down here. Finishing the last fucking asswipe page as I looked to my left out the portal window to see tarmac blurred by clear gaseous exhaust from an engine draped to the underside of a wing. The airport was near empty. I could write shit better than that! Good shit too! So good and original it’d be almost unreadable and certainly unfit for public consumption! Ha!

Brainstorm: Story must have conflict and redemptive resolution: Man, afraid to talk to new people out of cowardice and a sense of misplaced guilty obligation to old abandoned college friends, spends 700 pages almost but not quite talking to people before deciding in a moment of hilarious clarity that it is okay to not ever say anything to anyone. Good, huh?

Probably been done.

The boys were discussing death and its attendant fear.

"Are you?"

"Little bit."

"Why?"

"Don’t know."

"Dead people are less frightening than live ones."

"Howdja figure?"

"If you had to be a snake would you be poisonous or of the non-poisonous variety?"

"I’d be a poisonous snake for sure, chimed in little Johnny."

"And why’s that."

"Oh," he thought about it for a shake, "safer I guess."

"There. Straight from the horse's mouth. Safer. You call that heaven? Safer?"

The boys thought about this. J laughed. Nothing makes people laugh better than uneasiness. I laughed too.

The funeral itself was short. Some people spoke. Tim was eloquently silent. The singing was magnanimous, a preacher read cryptically of bodies turned to dust and ash and I painfully yearned for a cigarette. He stressed the need to live purely and love each other. I thought of you. Afterward Tim approached as folks mingled outside the church.

"Come by the house later tonight, we’re havin’ dinner. Love ta have ya."

I stopped in town on the way. Walking in the tentative sun as anonymous as anyone. Looking at diamonds through the window of the jewelry store. Geese migrating stridently overhead. I held my hand up so my finger would reflect in the glass with a ring over it.

Stopped into a liquor store to secure the evening’s libations. A grocery list fell from my wallet in her handwriting, now overwhelmingly sad.

hair elastics, tube socks, panties, cream

Tim’s old neighborhood was quiet. Houses too close together in confusingly rounded lanes & roundabouts. I’d never driven here before, never before old enough to rent a car (Five days from Houston to Austin to College Station and back in a silver Acura Costs WHAT?). The last red rays of sun were ducking under clouds. Trees lacked conviction: as if they wanted not so much to keep shade on the lane as to curl up and go indoors and play Halo with the boys.

The boys laughed and cursed, all wrapped up in their own little virtual world. Basically neighing like horses. Jamie let me in and batted her thick long eyelashes at me. She wore a long black skirt and a lace top and my impulse was to corner her and ...

I scooched in around her and found Tim, pouring his mom a glass of juice and looking--- fine. Tim looked absolutely fine.

"Wan have a cigar?" Tim asked.

“Five minutes left.” Said Mr. Poot softly, clinically overseeing the freewriters, “Five minutes please.”

We stood out front in the gathering twilight of the quiet lane smoking medium-sized cigars and trying to make self-effacing jokes and ribaldries. Jamie skulked indoors around the glass patio door making vaguely menacing faces at us through the blinds.

"Ain’t many people can afford to act like you act," said Tim.

"Or to live like I live."

"Jamie, she’sa good woman. She understan’ me and I... well, I list’n to her."

"Hah!"

"Cigars excluded. I love her. And I tell her."

"Of course."

Tim inhaled a deep draw on the cigar and his shoulders rolled back as his chest swelled up. Then without a sound he let out a series of smoke rings until he was out of breath and blew the rest of the smoke out in a billowous gust. "My point being, without her, I’d jus fall apart right now. And you... well, you just gotta fin’ someone who’ll unnerstan’ you."

"And someone I’ll listen to."

"Right. And someone you love."

"All in one girl right?"

"H-hah." He coughed.

Later, cross-legged on a carpeted floor in a room wafted with incense and styled to be empty, I tried to make a sort of Kierkegardian half-leap, turn off the sour voice in my head while still listening to the effeminate Belgian man as he intoned:

"Our minds hold deep, unconscious layers of impurities and, breathe out, liberating ourselves from our own deep negative thoughts and habits cannot be achieved through relaxation," he said. I hated his voice. My head was like a radio. I felt sick. My spine hurt. What was the name of that— Dexter Gordon! Yes! I am an idiot who cannot even focus. Regret is not redemption.

"Clearing your mind takes work, and, breathe in, only by absolving your tendencies towards misery in silence and right thinking can one achieve the real inner peace and happiness that one craves..."

I wish he'd shut up. I shouldn’t be so hard on the guy, he's obviously a kind soul. Regret is not redemption. One must have faith as well as action. One has to. Did I have faith? Yes. I wouldn’t be able to write anything if I did not have faith. The young ones obviously had talent, yet I held to the idea that even though I had never been published I was good. Held to the idea. I was better than the rest in a way that was yet-to-be discovered. This was a faith I had gotten used to. This was belief contrary to observable evidence. This was holding on. This was the future.

"Let the constancy of your breathing dissolve the sensations which drive you to distraction. Breathe out memories, cravings, habits. All of these thoughts will pop into your head and you must remove them. Wave hello to them because they are your unique mind thoughts, then push them floating away and feel your mind expand in clarity as resistances sink into a tiny shadow of darkness, which we breathe out. And we breathe in a lightness which fills your body..."

Asshole cocksucker sonofabitch. Evil livid. Lion vile. Lucid lucky. Character name: Lucy Luck. Brainstorm: Lucy Luck wins the lottery and buys a lion, the lion eats her. Inside his belly Lucy finds a small boy named Levi who tells her the story of an African Prince who hunted the lion and Lucy finds the Prince’s magic dagger in the lion’s gut and cuts her way out and the Prince marries her and they raise Levi and save the lion and keep him as a pet in a cage of concrete… Concentrate! Concentrate! Concentrate on breathing. The ideal and delectable exhalation. Redemption breeds regret. It wasn’t fair that Tim’s father died and laid out in that room cold as death while we got to go back to Tim’s mother’s house and play Halo and drink astringent Corona and Tim lent me his computer where I sat long into the night typing instant messages rife with smiley faces:

SoHereIAmz: What will you be like in five years?

DMsqdMn17: A satellite.

SoHereIAmz: No. Seriously.

DMsqdMn17: Dunno. Like me. Only less. And more.

I am tired and in another day I will be tired and in five days time I will have centered myself and bought a tired $6 poster of a Tibetan Mandala which I will never hang on my tired wall. In five days I will finish a poem that is tired and almost finished now. The boys are playing Madden in my memory. Football is the dumbest sport. Tim has gone to bed and Sixty yards and six days to go. I type to the girl that I will see her then. She says good luck at the seminar and I feel doomed because I love her.

DMsqdMn17: There’s no one else like you in the world.

SoHereIAmz: I know.
DMsqdMn17: I’ll never meet anyone else like you.

SoHereIAmz: Nope. There aren’t many girls in the world who have both the letters Y and