Sayonara, 20s

This is what I looked like.

Red Wine Blues and Rubber Duckys

[Location: Delta, CA during Wes and Jenna Highfield's Wedding, perched on a bar while loud drunken discourse swirled around me and a bridesmaid threw up on Wes' cream-colored rental vest, September 18, 2010; also somewhere between Redding and Portland, OR September 20, 2010]

The blind's blades broke like bankrupt bureaucrats. The visage of venetians parted for vomit in the violent night, with train's cogs humming, with pain's moans moaning. But to the urgent bar back, bellows heckled, chuckled, hucks and sour beers hung in harangues of a groove-jam din. The mess we're in, huckleberry, greenhorn, wiggles, digs... and every flutter bleeds in a burlesque ballroom bed. The ringing of the bells in our heads will echo, fleck, wreck our sunrise with choo-choo stirrings of sleep in the Lakehead Delta dust.

...And I wake from that train track reverie into the snaking vestibules of the Coast Starlight, writhing north in this familiar trek back home to Portland. The space-black Monday gives way in shifts, slides in a hiccuping projector as my eyelids shutter-stutter, half-an-hour at a time. The sun comes first in faint promises of pink, illuminating a low, low fog in the valleys beyond the pass between California and the future.

I'm seated next to a crocheting grandmother whose charm lies in her willingness to share everything she's brought along for the trip. Cupcakes, cookies, crackers, Boston Baked Beans, assorted other candies. I decline these with several variations of "aw, no thanks," but accept her offer to pay for coffee if I go get it for the both of us. But this is all after I wake up. When we first sit down, I ignore her as I do anyone else attempting to commiserate via railway ramblings.

"If you get cold, feel free to drape this blanket here over your legs!" she says shortly after we take our seats in the dark coach car. "It's much too big for little old me."

I'm too tired to respond, and as of yet unaware of her relative sanity. But in the morning, with the young hick country kids howling in the lounge car, strumming horrendous renditions of Slayer songs and "Dueling Banjos" - as well as jockeying in decibel position the loftiest tolerances for whiskey in bogus Larry the Cable Guy impressions - we begin to chat. The "where ya headed? "Looks like rain!" "You ever been through this country before? There's a great Chinese restaurant here...at least it used to be here..." It's the typical discourse for a long-haul like this, and a position I dread being put in prior to boarding but secretly enjoy while I'm mired within it.

"I can churn out about 50 of these hats in a week's time," she boasts, fidgeting with burgundy and white yarns. She's crocheting hats for homeless youngsters, a program set up through her church, the warmth they'll provide destined for an impoverished nation of cold domes she can't quite now recall. "One of the one's by Mexico, I think."

"They're beautiful," I say and secretly mean it.

"Well, here then! Pick one!" she offers, fishing a finished beanie from her stressed snack bag. She'd apparently started and finished one while I dreamed. This one's greens and yellows, mellow hues for me, the mellow man trying to forget everything nice about the world. This gift serves no dual purpose, no bribe, no hidden meaning at all. It's just a hat made by a wonderful grandmother, destined, now, for me, an impoverished mellow man.

I never once looked her in the eyes. Told her I was a writer as she old-lady swooned and asked me my name so she could brag if I ever had anything published outside of magazines or newspapers.

"It's all a drop in the bucket," I tell her and dread to hear my own negativity.

I'm such a fucking defeatist. I'm such an asshole.

"You're gonna be just fine," she smiles, happy lines webbing the corners of where I should be seeing her eyes but cannot. "I've got a feeling about these things."

Someday, I want to accept a gift, a compliment, anything, and not wonder what I did to deserve it. Someday I want to give someone something and expect nothing in return.

Trains, Trinidad, Try Not to Try

Though I tip-toed, tender into Trinidad, my books of atheism sprinkling the beach with denouncements of a deity, I mocked the majesty of el mar, sunk the Lost Coast black glass and swept the sand swoosh willy-nilly 'neath my sunburned toes.

And the seal pup baked in the sand, deaf to the barks of its worried mothers up the coast, who yelped in absolvent what-to-do? screeches for the shortcuts of solving the tides, of timing the rise of the foamy shore and the receding, cursed by the moods of a moon they barely know exists, as their pups grill steamy on the beach for the odorous whimsy of Newfoundlands, the bloodlust of giant sea eagles and the endless curiosity of passing children caked in sunscreen, clutching cameras, snapping photos.

Every new visitor sought your viscera, knowing the now-routine beaching of your kind, and the marine laboratory up the dune would soon cordon off your corpse with yellow tape, with orange-capped cones, with cuidado signs to study you and know why you were resigned to some cosmic abandonment.

And I thought you a shiny, sea-salty rock upon first glance, glistened by the mists of mortified el mar, deigned to act as perch for dumpy tourists' haunches and upon whose mounds would be carved the initials of fairweather lovers and the finite dates of a delusional destiny.

But the stink of your death had not yet plumed. We all guffawed.

You were hours earlier barking in the surf, looking for pups of your own, or arfing for the partner to bequeath them unto you.

Were those sunset woofs of worried mothers I heard up the coast all for you? Or is the whole world now sentenced to bark at the midnight mischief of the moon, flecked and filleted by no more caustic moans but for the collective malice of an absentee maker?

When fogs roll in, our dear, slick, dead, desecrated, sloppy brother, again, to sleepy Trinidad, you float away and feed forever in my fables of the ruse. I wake to hear you barking again.

Independence PDX

I tried to write a story once about the end of the world, of the disintegration of every breathing atom, of the unambiguous forever-spiral to the after. With every keystroke, and with every impression of the pencil on the page (half written, half typed to convey the essence of futility – failure – being the forging of the present on the past), I hoped it would happen.

I wrote, “And the sleeping mountains shaved their arboreous skins and melted their trails with awakened molten death, slow-cooked the swing sets, deep-fried the daffodils, skewered sleeping squirrels and dusted the sky with their cry,” and looked outside to the doomy precipice of Tabor and wished to see a swirling smoke give way to a landslide of magma on my room, like a thirsty baby wishing for the salvation of the slick nipple.

I typed, “All my blueberries turned to balls of heroin and I ate them to suffer the end of the world in a stupor, and the oranges turned to maces and punctured the throats of the greedy, and the moon cried tears of missiles and sent them to Jerusalem to settle the score of the war of illusions, and Mars bled red and cloaked Manhattan with an ocean of crimson and the sun winked a final coo to blot out the apples of our eyes,” and looked for fruit in my kitchen to see if it were true, and looked at my pupils in the mirror to see if their glow endured, and grumbled at their dilation.

I wrote, “The ground opened up fissures in the roadway, swallowing cars and licking the loamy Earth with whipping roots, like tentacles, snatching the scooters and bikes and eating the life of this world, re-devouring in fast forward the undeserved farmers of its dignity, of its ever-loving core,” and saw on the road a tar-scarred crack by the crosswalk and urged it to expand, to ingest the rumbling station wagon whose muffler burped along the street, coughing black through its tailpipe.

I typed, “Everyone was crying and screaming and drooling and dying, looking around for something to help, praying in the woods, looting for a last fix, setting things on fire, fucking, running, bleeding, eating, clogging the freeway to find the safe place not knowing they’d helped institute the demise of all safe places, petting their dogs, denying, raging, fearing, accepting, sleeping, finally, to death,” and lurked a family trotting in tandem down Division, linking arms by small lengths of twine, skipping, smiling, and I secretly wished their smiles were mine.

I orated, in secret inner-dialogue, “What good be the march of a man who so violates his womb the world? Who deserves the roundness of this orb upon which he both pines and pisses, to glaze his excrement to the lips of rivers, to spackle his spit on roses in the wild, to pave the deserts and build villages no one will live in? And when, oh, when will the Earth’s ruptures implore the furious ocean to spank our false cathedrals, topple every credit score, wash away our starlets’ makeup, make slanderous and vain every billboard on the freeway, and flood that freeway with starfish and dolphins gooped in oil, flopping and asphyxiated by the Brits? The Brits from whom a minority of us here descend in starving, panicked America, and from whom we now receive the ultimate fuck you. The payback for thinking we might be weaned from their loving breast, for dreaming in our infantilism of outlasting centuries of monarchies and the wisdoms culled from centuries of failure. Here, now, we endure the penultimate folly, finally recognizing the familiar reflections in the flashes of the pan.

America, whose beaches’ sands grow tired of our bitter spills, whose fingers point the blame in every direction except back at itself, whose sons and daughters have smelled death and known rebellion just by being born and who contrive to live the lie bequeathed them, whose opportunistic bents ingrained from birth prove both boring and lethal…

…to everything but us…

I opened the newspaper and saw pelicans trapped in a stinking oily hell, and guffawed at video streams of gushing black clouds erupting from the broken drills, and imagined the slow death of the Earth as being perhaps better than the quick. When we look in the mirror, we see our ineffable faults and keep them secret, and deign ourselves to dream that we can overcome. And lie to ourselves in every way, everywhere, always. And we kill all that is not us, in whispered sentimentality, by forgetting to give warning that we know not what we do.

I tried to write a story about the end of the world, and realized it’s already here.

Jupiter by Candlelight

I am the untouchable novice, wiggling, squirming, burrowing between the membranes and marrow and cells to the tissue-paper truth.

I am too small to see, too innocuous to ignore.

I riddle the ruse and strangle the sage, leaving loopy, rubber casts wherever the steady hides its hearth.

He was the ransacked flesh, sloppy, moppy, forgetting all the marble-columned pillars supporting leaky roofs.

He was too big to be, too gutless to abhor.

He fiddled with facts and lusted on love, coaxing coarse concrete bunkers whenever sun shone on his heart.

She was the unknowable fate, cruising, bruising, drooling through the chicken-wire barricade to reach the ripened eggs.

She was too false to flee from, too reckless to be real.

She sidestepped the savory and usurped the unique, draining every last rivulet from whichever lazy vessel she observed.

They were the oldest story ever told.

If You're Gonna Do It, Do It Right

(I will be self-publishing some work in the first half of 2010, as I'm becoming exceedingly disillusioned with the publishing world at large. I hope to learn how to utilize the scraping cogs of an ancient printing press, as well as a state-of-the-art book-binding machine in the next few months.
In the meantime, this is a two-part excerpt from a story that spans currently around 29 pages, double-spaced, describing the beginning weeks of a self-prescribed tail-spin stemming from two months of alcohol abuse, a city-wide power outage, a storm of apocalyptic bravado, a haunted theater, a suicidal dream, and a broken heart. It’s based in California, but I only used that locale because I was most familiar with it. It could have been based anywhere. This sort of thing happens everywhere if you know where to look.)

Eric

The sun plumb forgot to rise. I got a call from an associate of mine; he too, like everyone in town, was trapped in the midnight sash of the blackout. The bars had power, he told me. Everyone would be drifting to the nexus of the taverns to exchange stories of where they’d been when the flicker of the bulbs ushered in the flickering candles. And, of course, to drink. I grabbed a jacket – a corduroy patchwork number, blazer-heavy, silt-brown – to brave the winds and whipping garbage caroming into the sidewalks and abandoned cars along Main, and made my way.
The place glistened from a block away, a buzz of activity siphoning the silence of the powerless grid, like a string of Christmas lights with only one active filament. A steady drove of hysterical things gravitated toward its beacon like alcoholic moths to a wobbly flame, ants corralling toward the Twinkie, marching to a beat of Celtic promise, like Irish brigadiers must have marched, fueled by the lasting paste of potatoes on their tongues, or Scottish bagpipes whirling their whistle for freedom toward the crown of England. It could just as easily have been the methadone line in a Harlem alleyway, everyone itching and feverish to get a piece of power, a piece of comfort, something to soften the shivers.
Eric was already seated with a couple of hangers-on – old girlfriends who orbited him like moons. Pushing past the throng, we huddled round the teakwood table. Every “excuse me” and “pardon” created a Panacea shift in the brood, human tsunamis manifested toward the shore of the bar, swishing whiskey sours out of their glasses, imploring innocent patrons to expel meaningless apologies for the clumsiness of wayward elbows.
There was an annoyingly loud buzz of noise, divided between the nasal-twang of the Hank Williams tune on the jukebox, the hiss of the wind when the door would allow more lost, seething minds into the bar, and the general fizz of drunken discourse.
“Man, I didn’t have time to eat all fuckin’ day, then when I finally remembered that I had some tots in the freezer, I popped them in my oven. Fuckin’ power went off two minutes into it. Fuck it, I’ll just drink instead. It’s…”
“…sooo cold at my house! Ohmigod you guys! The heater doesn’t work either, and the cat pissed on all my blankets, so I was washing them when…”
“Goddamn it. This is the only bar that has power? I fucking hate this place. This shit would have never happened in SoCal. The way their power grid’s set up, each section of town is delegated equal…”
“Nothing like a depressing Hank Williams song to start off your night,” I hear myself say to no one in particular.
Eric looks at me like a caveman might have looked at fire for the first time ever, a dumbfounded film across his blue eyes, his jaw dragging into his bourbon. It always takes him a while to get that something has been said that may have some comedic value or even some kind of relevance to his life at all. Sometimes he executes these stares with no climax to speak of, just a quick Neanderthal bedazzlement followed by a swift synapse wave break toward whatever his last thought was, or an ocular return to whomever’s breasts he happened to be ogling before the interruption.
Luckily this time, a Hollywood grin infests his face, and he howls. He’s taken a keen interest into my spiraling dementia, the frozen-rope melodramas of my depression. He’s taken to calling my abrupt weight loss the “Big Dive,” and I secretly think that his ceaseless ambling of well-worn paths toward ex love interests is an attempt to cultivate a sadness for the purposes of deflating the girth of his own belly. Either way, he’s become a partner in tell-all drunken confessionals at the Tower, and made clear that his own limitations to function within the realms of society were to be as reflexive as they were self-prescribed.
Self-prescription being a brand new hobby of mine, I decided to take arms with the lug and bull-charge through the darkness, and the cold, and the sadness sipping my froth, which is precisely why I chose to meet him out in this mucky fucking weather at the snap of his pudgy fingers.
I sip the froth off my Guinness, and grab a stack of cardboard coasters.

Toby


Toby and I made small talk and he told me a story about the residents across the street, now stirring in their yard, staying up all hours of the night on their porch, drinking and being rowdy and trying to shoot the moon with a slingshot full of bottlecaps. He gazed at the men with their dogs, propped in tattered porch chairs, cans littering the yard and puffs of gray smoke billowing from their open mouths like spirits escaping for better ways to be.
Toby was on a temporary hiatus from boozing and had ordered a mystifying row of drinks to sate his thirst. Tomato juice, orange juice, coffee and water sat in a proud row waiting for him upon our return. He looked sad and pale and unhealthy, and seemed to know that no matter how hard he tried, he was the victim of a larger demon — a wild drifting phantom who may have gone too far in search of this truth and even to an extent caught wondering whether it was truth at all or just self-destruction. And if his truth was self-destruction, his skin and bones and droopy eyes did little to shield that fact from the rest of the world. And he wanted it hidden. Everyone knew it.
His serving gig at one of the more posh eateries in the city demanded he clean himself up a bit, at least for his five-six hour shifts, within each of which he'd pocket around 400 dollars in tips alone per night. On the job, he appeared a model of learnedness; astute in the culinary extravagances inherent in the world of raw fish, while maintaining a polite, if not irrevocable five-star visage and genuine respect for an affluent array of pushy diners.
At night, he fumbled slowly, sluggish into seedy corners, into the alleyways of the dankest dives in town. Sometimes we'd find him mumbling to himself, or to strangers, mimicking the high-pitched sopranos of heavy metal singers, with nothing in his eyes; nothing, it seemed, in his heart anymore. He stuttered out syllables that obeyed cadence, but neglected to string the proper letters together to create useful words - ergo tangible sentences - and often added interestingly hilarious character qualifiers to their conclusions, morphing inquiries as normally coherent as, "Where have you guys been?" to "Zuhfuck yerguys bin, trash?" What happened to Toby to create this monster is anyone's guess.
I snubbed my cigarette out early from the caving of pity and concern for him and his plight, and dared not ever tell him what kind of epiphany it had been for me, just then, to see his pain, to see him wearing his fears on his face in the afternoon air. I only know him well enough to indulge his stream-of-consciousness banter, not enough to confide in him or burst with my secret analyses. I snubbed it out and said, “Okay Toby, let’s go inside.”
The moment had passed.

Ode to Olaf

When the sun shines on Portland, the rainbows run away. I found that out easily enough this afternoon as I awaited the 35 bus to downtown. A fair-weather glinting ribbon half-arced the sky in blustery hues, seeming to land directly on top of the Plaid Pantry across the street, luring the Power Ball putzes toward its beeping entrance. "A pot of gold can come in many forms," I venture to myself, knowing full well that the gamble's in the gutter, not the gale. And with that, the wind picks up and whisks the sun, the half-sleeping moon, the promise of a mid-day respite from the frost-bitten throes of winter, and the rainbow all away with one big WOOOOOOOOSH.

Earlier - much earlier, in fact - as I awaited yet another goddamn bus at 6th and Pine downtown, katty-corner from the breakfast rush at the Downtown Chapel, I wince at the wind and the rain pick-pocketing my warmth, and am approached by a walking garbage bag, rooted by heavy black work boots. A little beanie hat bill peaks out from underneath the shiny cloak, and I can see he's just crossed Burnside from the Chapel, and is headed over to the bus transfer station, to convert two bucks fare into five hours of warmth. There's no better seat in town, and he knows it.

But the lanky vagabond is getting nearer and nearer, and I realize he's coming to talk to me.

"Hey, man, you happen to have an extra cigarette?" he asks.

"Uh, yeah, I do actually," I offer cautiously. I'm no stranger to good will, but I've also not had much practice in the subtle arts of speaking to enormous Hefty-clad transients, so I give him the cigarette, smile, nod my little "you're welcome" and swivel heels to get a view of something that didn't frighten me. The cross-street fountain, with its teasing geysers did wonders for a second, until I'm tapped on the shoulder by the immense, gloved paw of something much bigger than me.

"Dude," the bagged-bum begins, summoning a tone so rugged and low in the throat, you'd have thought his Adam's apple might be rotten, "you packed these smokes killer!"

I take a breath. He's friendly. A little dumb. A little pushy, but harmless in spite of the assumptions derived from his physical wealth. He gives me a grin. He's got a chipped tooth that makes him seem even more loopy, but he's not drunk. He's not on drugs.

"I've been trying to quit, man," he says, "but one vice at a time...I've been sober for a month and four days...or was it five?" he gestures to a far-less imposing sidekick.

The sidekick nods.

"Five days," he ends. "By the way," he begins again, "my name's Olaf. Olaf [unintelligible]."

I don't hear or understand the flippy-tongued last name, or whether it was a last name or middle name, or if the whole fucking thing was made up.

"Try to guess where my family's from?" he bribes.

"Uhhh, Germany?" I shrug.

"Yep, you got the first one; what's the second one?" he says.

"Ummmm, Beeeellllgiiiiuummm??" I trail.

"Nope." he says.

At this point I don't give a shit anymore. "There are hundreds of countries I've never even heard of, so why don't you just tell me," I think of saying, but then weigh the four-inch height difference, steel-toed combat boots and the fact that his name is Olaf into consideration. I shrug again.

"Norway," he boasts proudly. "This town is stuck on stupid," he then exclaims. Before I can take offense - which would have consisted of my abrupt departure via ANY bus that happened to open its doors at or near that moment - he clarifies himself. Luckily he's not talking about me. I swallow Mount Lassen down my throat.

"You hear about them stabbings down 'round here?" he asks. "I was minding my own business down at Sisters of the Road, try'n to get some food, and you see my bag over there?"

I look, and see a blue mini briefcase latched on top of another small piece of wheeled luggage.

"That's a Sampsonite," he lies. "Some guy, a black guy, comes over wobblin' 'round by my bag and opens a beer over my bag!"

I'm supposed to be feigning shock at this breach of the Hobo Handbook, but instead I choose for some reason to stare directly into his eyes without even a modicum of emotion over what he'd just said. Maybe I've just had too many beers spilled on my bags to care.

"I said, 'Sir, can you please not open up your alcoholic beverage over my bag?" continues Olaf. "And the motherfucker pulls out a knife and threatens to cut me with it!"

I reveal a slight look of surprise to him. The other public transit patrons are peering out of the corners of their eyes, silently reprimanding me for their assumption that I'm humoring this homeless man for lack of the stones to send him on his way. In reality, I'm starting to warm to Olaf.

"What did you do?" I ask.

"Pulled down my shirt like this..." he says as he pulls down his shirt like that. "I said, 'do it, man! Do it!' 'cuz I knew he wouldn't do it. He ended up leaving, but then two days ago, he came back to the same place and stabbed somebody. Fucker got picked up, went to jail, everything. I ain't about to get cut up, but you can't mess with a man's bags; especially a homeless man's bags, you know?!"

Olaf starts to giggle, revealing that chipped-beef tooth. I muster one of those lethargic "phew!" expressions to him and for myself, and we share a brief moment of camaraderie. He shakes my hand in his; like a salamander greeting an ape.

Even earlier that morning, before any bus had any business out on those roads, to pass Olaf and his nameless sidekick on the freezing streets, I was kept awake by dreams, stress, worrying about money just one year after I'd decided I could live without it. The fact that I'm making a little bit of it now is probably the cause. It's easy to say something is worthless if it's not around.

But talking with Olaf in the slick shadow of Big Pink, under the windows of some of the wealthiest citizens in the city, discussing the plight of a knock-off Samsonite's near collision with the foam of a dive-bar beer, the near-death experience he endured, and me with $700 bucks in cash ready to deposit into the bank to pay rent later that day; I could have cried. I gave him two more cigarettes; one for him and one for his buddy.

"Take it easy, Olaf," I said as I boarded my bus.

"Safe travels, friend," he returned.

I'd have felt better for Olaf, his sobriety, his somewhat genial disposition, had his optimism not seemed illusory. I came close to where he's at not too long ago. I held the knife a night, dared myself to do it. I can't pretend I'm better. It's a heavy feeling to know there's no more wisdom hiding under a warm blanket than under a garbage bag.

Safe travels, Olaf.