Breezes Unhurled

Something made him mad.  I assume it was something hidden deep, he certainly didn't have any tells, that is, he never told us what it was directly, just lots of shouting.  Turns out we only caught the one-foot waves from the deeper Tsunami.  When his wife turned herself in for blowing his chest out she was blacker and bluer than one of those endangered Japanese monkeys, and she had half a pool stick stuck in the side of her thigh.

When Kevin's older brother asked her about it later he said "she smiled like my Vegas Aunt."

This memory wafts in over breakfast, hot oatmeal and hardboiled eggs.  I like my eggs sliced evenly.  Kevin is there, reading up on this inexhaustible spectacle of a president.  I want desperately to be out of the country.  I had finished work at 3 in the morning.  All day one big long strategic assault on my senses, like a sloth boxing Mayweather, and to drive home without a horizon meant that at three I usually fell into bed.  But today I had looked at the tablet - not sure why - seen the numerous unread emails and texts of the last day - and about an hour into them I looked up feeling that only seconds had passed and decided to make breakfast instead of sleep, remembering having been told as a child that there was nowhere that God couldn't see you and hoping it wasn't true, thinking God was like my little sister who one constantly suspected of sneaking up on you but if you could only distract her with her shows for long enough you could tiptoe out and escape to a secret place. 

A cold morning.

"Wanna go fishing?" Kevin gives an alchemic smile.

"I don't know nothing bout no ichthyology."  A flock of birds showers out of the woods, followed closely by a hawk. 

"If your father never did you won't either."  I think about all the people I've chased out of my life, accidentally and on purpose. Out our windows crammed with paint jars low clouds crowd out the higher clouds, a mad mosh pit in the sky. The sun had yet to even take the stage. 

"What was that guy's name," I asked.

"Who, Ted," guessed Kevin, referring to the guy who vanished after the first round of layoffs.

"No, that guy from the Horseshoe, the one that died." 

"Dunno, why?  My brother would know.  I wonder whatever happened to Ted."

"Could be almost anywhere by now."

We run out of coffee so we squinch into my Mazda. I stash the carton of Pall Malls into the glove box so Kevin can swing his bony popping ligaments into the low seat, and we coast in neutral down the hill to the Starbucks while a guy on public radio reads out the names of fake-sounding soviet era government bureaus.  "The Central Reserve of non-Existent Premises," he intones. 

The wind howls as I park, three wide open spaces out front saving me from having to parallel. I miss the organic democracy of parking in unmarked gravel lots.  

That nutty aroma inside is so dense I feel diminished by it.  The smallish early crowd bridging all the gaps between the Americas, anglo and hispanic, black and white, rich and poor.  An old man by the window shares a table with the two small school-aged girls, imperfectly prim little pixies, puckering his whiskered cheeks to whistle at the rising cup of steam.  A woman is talking to her friend on the phone.  I crane my head seeing that she is older than she sounds.  Ahead of us in line, a short dark man in African vestments orders something, thick, like his accent.

"Manolo" a barista barks, placing a drink on the counter.  An old hunchback nun clutching her knuckles into fists emerges from the restroom.  Red and white flashing lights appear down the street before the sirens can be heard.  An ambulance rears past around the corner.  "Carmen!"  the barista calls.

We take our coffee to go and after I have drunk it I go directly to sleep, Kevin to work, I wake myself an hour later with my snores, I open my eyes and continue to dream, feeling that old electric fervor, the  rootless angry howl.  The apartment is mine all day so I forage in the fridge and walk around naked, seeing this new version of myself in multiple reflections and remembering how it used to look, the original incarnation, the ole' band lineup as it were.   Are there connections between who that person was and who I am now?  I used to be a guy trying to live in a mythical construct and now I'm a guy obsessed with destroying that myth.  My gut had broadened and my chest sagged, I still had my hair but the lines had all changed, standing up as tall as I could I thrust my hips a bit. So like, you know, well yeah.

I hold my breath.  Take a hot shower until the manic panic subsides and my palms are wrinkled.  As I towel off my phone buzzes.  The day takes a whole 'nother direction.

She said to meet her at Caruso's at noon and I didn't protest.  Since the breakup we've been crawling toward better things, is what I tell myself.  But what things?  The inner sky is still overcast, it might snow.  

I pass the Horseshoe there alongside the freeway and see a rowdy guy I know from work braced cowboy style out front, what did we even see in that place?  He's a salesman, the nasty pushy type that I despise, I watch the road and hope he doesn't see me but I fantasize that he does see me and the next time he comes up to talk to me I can let some of my hatred toward him boil out.  That'd be a good way to get fired.  I'm all hot air.  The man on the radio said "In ancient Egypt, the servants of the Pharaohs were coated with honey so that the flies would not disturb the rulers themselves."  I switch it off.  The tires roar across asphalt, like crinkling cotton balls in my ears.

I don't see her car and so it feels conspicuous walking into Caruso's, like she's going to pull up behind me, but when I turn around to look she's gone.  What I had wanted was to be her slick secret, a cavernous tunnel into which she could disappear, but she burrowed down and then didn't like it,  she cut me deep, coming up for air and in the process uncovering my insides, I'd been bleeding ever since.  Less cavernous than gaping, less slick than sickly. People like me who hide their problems until they can find no solution except to kill their darlings probably shouldn't be allowed to procreate.  Maybe that's why I pushed them away.  I thought about Trish.  I often do, though we were only together for a short time.  You can never control the thoughts, never prepare for them, they rush in unimpeded, I open the door to the restaurant accompanied by a gale, a loud chime rings.  Be right with you.  I think about her when they interrupt the music at the grocery store to announce a sale, when I'm dialing a client's phone number at work.   Two please, two minutes ‘hun.  I think about Claire, that sweet secluded girl I wooed relentlessly but couldn't figure out how to give any pleasure so I gave up and got mine instead, twice, before she blew away too.

A woman's hand on my shoulder.  Hi.  Nicetoseeyou.  We sit by the window where its slightly secluded but cold.

"Things are good, nice... odd, I guess.”

“Be more specific,” she says.  Her voice has a texture I could wrap myself up in.

She wears glasses because she'd “slept with these contacts in, again.” Her face looking older in glasses, not old, more adult, elongated.  I stretch my legs until they hit the metal bar under the table. I resist the urge to reach across the table and remove her glasses, rub my knuckles against her temple.  I also resist the urge to jam a fork through my dorsal filaments whilst simultaneously pulling away from the table at a sprint, instantly ripping my hand into a Y. 

We order tea and water.  Real big spenders.  She asks some pointed questions, trying to show concern, I think, trying so hard not to look at me askance, that sad emphatic skepticism, that I feel bad for her feeling bad for me.  Why are we even here?

“And how’s your family?”

“My Uncle Russell died,” I say.

She arranges the packets of sugar and sweetener, each in amongst its own kind, bottom to bottom, top to top.  “I’m sorry.  I just…”

We let it hang there.  The waitress returns with our drinks and we drink them.  She checks her phone, giving it more attention than it deserves.  Just like me.

It's been a year," she says at last.  No wonder she asked to meet me.  "I just thought, I didn't want you being too hard on yourself.  There's no formula to this, no spec sheet, it's just, it's hard enough to let yourself love anyone, flaws and all, and then to have all these layers of the past holding you back every day.  I just...”

"Layers," I repeat.  A hint of burning bread wafts in from the kitchen, like a piano with the A^b out of tune.

“Do you know what I mean?”

I nod without looking at her, almost smelling the perfume, or imagining I smell it, her transparent reflection in the window says that this is hard for her.  I should have known.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m okay.  Are you okay?”

"I’m empty as a pocket."

"Who said that?"

"I dunno,” I say, “I might’ve come up with it myself.  Y’know, I am pretty clever."

"Paul Simon," she says, putting her phone back in her purse.

She has to go.  Rather than cavil about the bill I say goodbye.  We don’t hug.  I don’t get up.  I watch her.  I watch a young woman walk in, with tan legs, and when she scooches into her chair across the room her skirt flashes up a bit and my heart leaps at the bareness of the upper thigh.  I blush, imagining the regions I cannot see, all flayed and warped into torrid sexual positions and I laugh out loud at what a joke I have become.  When does it all stop?

Never.  It never stops.  The ego, the pent-up anger, the wandering eyes, the bottomless lust - all together they just might be the breath of life, inhale, exhale, what else is there?

I thought we'd been doing a good job of being inconspicuous but now I suspect that I was wrong.  Too many eyes are looking at not me.  I wish I was a chameleon.

Carrying myself out into the fresh air like breezes unhurled.  Walking back to the car I cast no shadows.  Better get some more sleep before I go back to work.  The sky is a glaucous dome.  Maybe I’ll stop by the Horseshoe.  My stomach gurgles like a man trapped at the bottom of a well.  “There’s no escaping.”  I say.

What was that guy’s name?  It’ll come to me.

Home Stories

It started with a gun to my head. Most things do around here. Our endings are our beginnings and The Dude I live with chooses to define his seminal moments by directing firearms at them.

"Is that thing loaded?" I ask.

"Maybe," he grunts, "slacker. What, are you afraid?" He nudges me off the couch and towards the door.

"Hey! Hey now! But I live here!"

"Not if I lock you out."

"I have a key."

"And I have a key. To your despair..."

"Ha! Hey man, that's pretty poeti--" and he locked me out of the house.

So I went for a walk. There's a kind of release instigated by the mechanical movement of legs on pavement: A freedom in the bipedal perambulation, as it were. Yes, yes, I know I have a penchant for the melodramatic, but one has time to craft sentences of gold when they are in the zone of introspection that a constantly shifting landscape over a long period of time creates. The sun bore down. The afternoon waned.

I walked down until I had crossed the railroad tracks, and found the old house. The other dude I lived with introduced me to an old man named Frank about a year ago. His unofficial caregiver, I'd come along on a grocery delivery and enjoyed the company so much that of my own accord I'd been back many times since. Frank lives in a low-built ranchero home bounded on either side by vacant lots where at one point sad houses identical to his pooped out splintered families that have since gone to dust and taken the adjacent lots with them, in one case replaced, on the south side, by squatters with a trailer home.

"Hows things Frank!" I hollered into the sweet smoky confines of his cave, slipping around the screen door. Floorboards creak, something crashes to the floor in a dark room. If voices were made of wood Frank's would be oak, hardened by a decade of methadone and a lifetime before it of Godknowswhat.

"WHOSIT?" Frank gurgles.

"It's me!" I reply, impersonating my own voice and fingering the dust off a portrait of St. Clare, listening to his shuffling footsteps approach from the darkness.
“Well get th’fuck outta here. Who asked you?”

“Nice to see you too,” I said as sunlight, slipping through a crack in the dusty vinyl curtain, illuminates the holy figure framed on the wall. “Who is this is portrait of?”

“That’s Saint Clare,” he booms, suddenly standing right behind me, “Now get lost.” Hanging up his cane and pouring himself a drink, he continues to himself, “My lil’ Clarissa I call her. Patron saint of seein’ things how they are, dirty laundry, and little lost girls an the pedophiles who find ’n love ‘em. What’ll ya have.”

“G & T.”

“That’s a golfers drink,” he rebuffs. Pouring the drink slowly, ever savoring life’s lesser pleasures, one gets the impression that he has seen many go soft and burn out by getting too much too fast.

Franklin Hellfire Hagan was born May 17, 1924 somewhere in western Europe but raised in St. Louis. The H. stands for Hellfire, but don’t ask why, he doesn’t know. His father named him Hellfire and he but appreciates the mystery of “my middle name, dead center of my identity, and like most people I find, its what’s at the center that’s something you’ll never know.”

He dumped 3 long years into the Pacific Theatre and returned with a broken nose (still bowed to this day), a limp in his left leg and a vow to never again set foot in a jeep as long as he lived; a vow which has since come to include all automobiles. “I keep th’ windows drawn at night,” he says, “all those prowlin’ red demon eyes…”

I’ve never been able to get a straight answer out of him as to why. He can be a bit eccentric.

“Starvation can do that to a man. Makes you shrivel up into yer own skin and call things for what they are. Eccentric personalities have always served ta unmask the mechanisms of control,” he once declared to me over a flourish of Queens and Aces, “you should work on that.”

“What? Control?”

“No. Unmasking.”

Frank’s wife died, out of five kids two sons are dead and only one of the remaining ever visits. He estimates eight grandchildren and a few great-grandchildren, but isn’t sure anymore. I imagine myself to be his most frequent companion.

“How long have you lived here, Frank?” I ask, getting out my pen and notebook and taking a seat across from his bucket-seat box of a chair.

“Not long,” he grumbles, settling into the fold in the cushions, “the house was built’n ’60. M’wife died in ’70 an I moved out here from Vegas in ’81 figure.”

“What were you doing in Vegas?”

“Getting’ fucked over.”

He has a grizzled white beard that stumps out of his chin, and softly smokes a fragrant pipe which lends the house its distinctive aroma. “I owned a casino,” he tells me, reigniting the bowl and conversation, “but the bills stacked up over my head so high I’s drownin’ in ‘em so…” blows out a perfect smoke ring, “at any rate I cashed out my chips and settled. Like a scab in this disease ridden patch of country.”

“That’s poetic.”

“Fuck you!” he shot back. “How’s that drink?”

“Best I’ve had all day.”

“As Ray Milland said, ‘One is too many, and a hundred ain’t enough.’”

“Well I’m only here for the one. The Dude’s got me locked out of the house.”

Frank scratches his head and looks at me obliquely. His pale eyes as porous as a clear morning sky. “Who?”

“The Dude. The Dude I live with.”

“Huah!” he laughs, “Listen ta you, Mr. big writerboy. Mr. ‘I am that Masked Man’. Mr. ‘The Dude I live with’. Mr. drinks at ‘The Place I Go.’. Who do y’think you’re protectin’ with all this? Everythin’ in your world revolves around YOU. Nobody cares.”

“But I like the anonymi—--”

“No! Nobody cares about anythin’ in this world ‘cept themselves and whatever they cn’get their grubby hands on. Least of all about you an yer runnin’ around wearin’ a mask. Anonymity is fine. Hell, I fuckin’ encourage it! But get the fuck over yerself first. Jesus.”

I waited a beat and then finished my drink in one swig. Frank set down his pipe and reached for his cane.

“Stay fer dinner?” he asked.

“No thanks. You need anything before I go?”

“I don’ need shit!”

“Would you tell me if you did?”

“Would you?” he asked. I got up and headed for the door. “I’ve put shit in my body an treated m’self like a pin cushion fer years but ain’t never let nobody walk allover me like you’re always doin’.”

“He held a gun to my head.”

“Tell ‘im to fuck himself. He was probly just fuckin’ ‘round anyway.”

“See ya Frank.”

Back in the pearlglintz glare of setting sun I squinted and sweat my way home and when I got to the house the door was unlocked. The Dude, sitting shirtless on the couch was watching reruns of Home Impovement while fiddling with an open bottle of beer.

“Slacker. Where’d you run off to?” he asked.

“Places,” I said.

“What kind of places?”

“Places you’re not invited.”

“I own the world,” he boasted, “I’m invited everywhere.”

“Then somewhere you’re not welcome,” I said. I joined him on the couch to emulate the Tool Time studio audience laughing at Tim Allen’s hijinx.

“Sorry about earlier,” the Dude said, “I didn’t mean to give you a hard time.”

“You gave me a hard time earlier?”

“I was just feeling shitty about… oh, well if you don’t think it was a big deal then nevermind. I retract my apology.”

“Good. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Our endings are our beginnings and the sun set. Heavy winds blew from the west. I went to grab a few more beers from the fridge.

“I ordered pizza,” he said, “hope you’re hungry.”

“Starved,” I said.