11
F a t h e r F o d d e r / S e i z e t h e S i n s
The last flicker of conviction that we can do the job ourselves must be snuffed out.
We are completely helpless apart from divine help. The spiritual answer is the only true help.
Alan L. Roeck
Thought for the Day
It's time to pay a visit to my old pal Father Kevin at his Pentecostal parish. It's been a couple years and I'm curious to see what a man of such peaceful tidings might be up to during off hours. When I lived in Kensington Market, sometimes I'd wander in and start up discussions with him. Often before he arrived: "I haven't been doing so hot. What's it all about, anyway? Say, have ya ever met a real live Gideon?" I would just imagine what he'd say and respond accordingly. He always said his door is open, regardless of what state I'm in. He's a hell of a fellow.
I peer my head in through the slightly ajar door to his office in back of 'the stage', or the Rectory-rumpus-room, I think I've heard it called. He doesn't hear me as he's involved, quite feverishly it appears, in a kind of verbal battle with some Archdiocesan (ArchDionysian?) cat clearly his superior. Heavy and heated words are exchanged and waft like burned incense throughout. Evidently, the good father is being prepped to bring the word of God to some community in spiritual crisis somewhere in Algiers...or was it Marrakech? No, definitely Tangiers.
He's about to go off on a sort of international religious jaunt, an exchange if you will, but it's unclear from what I'm overhearing (it feels sacrilegious) just what it is the other team will be sending our way in return for my parsonish pal. I'm waiting for an opportune time to interrupt. They are prophesyi
ng, speaking of the message he will spread, of his goals and the various details that need to be worked out before such an undertaking can come to fruition. Let's see if he could be convinced that my kind of 'participatory journalistic clumsiness with a heart', coupled with my rarely used, uncanny knack for 'being able to tell Turks from Sheiks', might come in handy abroad; his trip really wouldn't be complete without an assistant to tag along and see that things get done. Though I could be getting myself mixed up with Lawrence of Arabia - or is that Peter O'toole? As I must confess, they're all just sweaty non-union extras in beards and sheets to me.
I sneeze five times loudly, the smoke from the incense catching me by surprise. I'm accosted, apprehended, Catholically-captured, by the taller of the two gentlemen, some large Phil Donahue-like fellow in Catholic cloak sporting oddly-shaped-salt-and-pepper-facial-hair. I'm given a good scolding, and am scalded by the upstage fire pit he dangles me over, while I scream promises to never, ever again, partake in what I learned the hard way, was one of the dozen or so Deadly Sins - Eavesdropping. (tf#16)
My new friend from God's kingdom sits me down and I confess to him briefly of my unholy, perilous adventures, of how I used to come by the church on occasion to seek out the good Father, and when he wasn't there, how I'd sit quietly wondering why God and I hadn't gotten along better over the years. We somehow get around to the fact that I'm no good and this gentle organizer of globetrotting faiths seems to also sense that I'm nothing special, once I tell him that I've never been baptized, so immediate plans are made for the episode, my initiation. After I relay more tales, he inquires, "Hey, you know that Ione Skye, what's she really like?" which was just plain weird. Is this what I'd been lacking I wondered; is this a spiritual cleansing? I had no way of knowing
The watery slip and slide downhill accelerates.
I'm scrambling back to the church for my allotted booking, and in an attempt to beat the clock, while bargaining with my Canadian Tire money at Wal-Mart, figuring I'd work it all out later. "I'm late, this is important, I need something, don't you understand?" These urgent lines sounding all too familiar, applied in desperate and worse situations, glued to my psyche.
Now, I would never willingly wear a Speedo of any size or denomination (abomination?), nor would I even keep something of such pukey, fuchsia-like dementia in my house even to polish furniture, but I had to make an impulse buy and a boy must do what a boy must do. While overseeing this near disastrous procession, it's clear that Father Kevin not only knows how to hold back laughter, but as a man of the cloth or the cloister, whatever they call it now, he's always prepped. He's run into this before. He disappears into his office, and reappears holding up respectable trunks: clean white cotton-boxer shorts with an embroidered gold cross on the bottom flap. I'm now outfitted properly, as if I were going to swim The 500 Meter for God's Team.
I couldn't help but be reminded of the flick where this kindergarten teacher kept a private stock of trunks in her bottom desk drawer for the downtrodden, for occasions when her wee students soiled their undergarments in one way or another. So I congratulate myself as it seems I'm eerily indistinguishable from the person I once was in nursery school, though possessing a minimally stronger hold on bladder control. And even then I'm teetering atop a wet and splintered see-saw, likely only a few good un-soiled years left to really get a handle on myself. On it, I mean.
I wade around in the sectarian turtle pool of angelical Anglican persuasion, the one part of this demented but whimsical process I'm permitted to have some say in: 'The Dunking Tank'. I've opted for the lesser of a number of evils they've got collecting dust in the storage room: Purple tigers intermingling with friendly, bubbly green pre-historic monsters. It's tough for me to feel much like an adult in the first place; this juggernaut of juvenilia, my murky and hellish turtle pond with left-over metal goldfish from some Sunday school 'unfun unfair' cutting into me, fails to move me any closer to feeling like the man I want to be. An audience of elderly Italian women (there only to drop off canned goods, breaded items, donatable dentures) crouch in the front pews and cheer me on as I fight to stay afloat, trying to juggle the offering of flavorless wafers, this watery-see-through-Last Supper-Christening: a failed communion, I felt. I shiver as the reading from the scriptures announced that I was now blessed, somehow ready for the world..
This cleansing, my baptizing, something that should have been done by my 'pre-teen' stage, whatever (whenever) that was. I guess my parents were too busy or figured I wasn't necessary. I mean, it wasn't necessary. It was good I'd got it done, I thought, and ticked the spooky tryst off my list, as if it were on my list of grocery item.
Before ejecting myself out of the All Mighty's house (and while the front row, who I now see have on corrective cleats and funeral attire, helped me dry off), I catch a glimpse of this theatrical troop that call themselves, 'Theatre Gargantula', or 'Tarantula' or something, loading up what look like their sets and lights and instruments (all the stuff that theatre folk cart around) into a van out the back of the church. Apparently, they use the great hall to rehearse in, either that or they've broken in and pilfered some Sunday School pageant's costumes and will lose their souls as a result. One of the young granolic-lesbianic-thespians tells me they're about to embark on some sort of Magical Misery Tour of Quebec. What could be worse than trekking through distant territories in the deadest doldrums of wintertime, visiting people who don't like your language to begin with, having to huddle in some U-haul van with busted heat, jostling from town to township, minimum-wage theatre in church basements, plying the craft on make-shift stages, speaking in unnaturally loud tones so that autistic shut-ins, shuttled in for the day, can detect some sort of novice performance going on around them. All this, too familiar for me, and should be shelved right up there with 'Kissing girls with extra-large foreheads, thin lips, meaty necks and head braces', not a very fun club to be a member of.
Thinking of this doomed and pretentious bussing experiment with their frosty lonely motel rooms, and all-too-typical larger-than-life-actor-ego-sickness left me tired, cold, and fearful of the world outside the church doors. I was scared to death one of the acting virus - bugs might jump off of her, bite me and cause me to take leave of my senses, thus developing a kind of a SARS fever making me into some kind of Do-Good-Unselfish-Zombie and help her out with loading up the truck. I wanted to run into Father Kevin's office and wrap myself in his robe for protection and other worldly solace. Though this would not protect me from future hells here on earth (afflictions) out there in the heartless scary world and ultimately would be short-lived, and come of as invariably really, really gay.
Please, God. Don't enlist me. I don't want to risk another wretched embarrassment.
I got roped into that kind of salty theatrical pilgrimage with this totally maniacal director a couple winters back, hob-gobbling around The Eastern Provinces, forced to travel by helicopter - "Ain't no way to get there from here," and had to use a war canoe to make it to a few
of the more remote villages, starved for entertainment, I guess. Somebody ended up tipping the cast probably out of boredom - "She'll never thaw out by show time." "Want to bet? Cripes, don't be so dramatic. Geez, you guys are no fun at all." Eight girls and me - all even further from being as sexy as it sounds. For the life of me I swear I cannot remember what my role might have been. Was I 'Rusty the Crustacean'? 'Kierka the Crusty Croatian', some Slovak-hyena pledging allegiance to some sea, and me never knowing what the motivation might have been, my performance ultimately empty, all crashing down around my audience of drowsy archaic-elders prepped with pockets of powdered beverages, soups and such, chomping at the bit for Intermission Feeding Time to commence - that is if they were still breathing that far along in the program: sleepy-eyed seniors with bleeding gums, their catapulted sets of false front teeth unfortunately landing too near my Size 10 clodhoppers, to miss unavoidable crunching and ultimate disintegration beneath my boots. They'd have preferred to be lurching, doddering off elsewhere, monkeying about, going to the bathroom somewhere (a follow-up survey reported) or calling grandchildren's telephone numbers from, like, three addresses ago, and me inevitably getting blamed for complaining, my not co-operating causing a commotion and a 'Romper-room-ruckus', the local papers subsequently called the ordeal. But you would have caused a commotion too, if YOU were entombed with all that constant cheap schlock and pointless prop-house antics. The rumours that made their way back home of my unexpected death, were only mildly exaggerated. "Toronto Actor's Death Unexpected in Sad and Lonely Theatrical Excursion". All this AND the lugging of hurtful and gargantuan pointy scenery - also demented and lame - mutating into some premature melodramatic autopsy, me on the edge of freezing to death. The 'Albatross Trucking Terminal' - NOT found anywhere in the union's scheduled syllabus for 'suitable' overnight accommodation, thank you very much...this, coupled with being kept from lunches that were supposed to be provided by this beautiful gauntlet guillotine production, nourishment ultimately nothing more than damp saltine crackers: "It'll toughen ya up, the world of theatre is one hard grind, it ain't all fun and games, Jimmy Dean, let me tell ya."
You don't say?
Being starved by this so called 'director', if that's in fact what he was - clown suit, my ass. I more often than not was faint of body as well as spirit, losing my balance, and during a couple of the more nerve-racking performances, stumbled into the orchestra pit, damn near breaking my neck and creasing my pajamas, just plain overwhelmed by the number of characters he had me playing at one time, to cut down on costs. Our hapless Hitler doted on the four hometown Liz Taylors who it appeared could do no wrong, but it was constant scallywag scolding for the four actresses 'from away' for smelling of city and the great unknown and especially for asking questions regarding their roles and breathing out of turn. My attempts at fitting in also were never encouraged. The improvised Newfie accent (wildly entertaining to some 9 year olds waiting for my autograph at the backstage door) didn't help matters any, as I was told to "...stop making fun of the locals". I submitted a script (tf#17) I'd been working on in-between rehearsals, 'Timmy and the Deep Blue Sea Monster', which evoked the ambiance of their watery city, a conceptual work in progress involving a massive underwater tank for which I provided detailed blue prints for construction. But funding for the project was not granted by the Arts Council there. There were artistic differences. How could I be expected to work with such erratic and conservative, small-minded people?
The tour ended abruptly. I stormed out of their town hall and, if I recall, shouted over my shoulder that they were nothing more than 'maggot-eating-fish-headed-safe-voting-plankton-pussies'. So I gathered up my spears, the leather goods made by the natives, and all the moccasins and moonshine I could fit in the canoe, and began paddling for home.
I exited the temple licking my spiritual wounds, but feeling somehow altered. I told myself this tale would make for a hell of a reminder to be damn careful what I commit myself to in the future.
*Also Note: pick up a new bible, and a professional talent manager...for next time around.
*
________________________________________________________________
tf#16: there are in fact at least 15 or 16 Great Deadly Sins (that I can remember)
1. Making Jimmy Dean eyes at your neighbors' wife.
2. Mouth to mouth with an unwilling animal.
3. Greed.
4. Moping and turning ones head completely around during Sunday Dinner.
5. Envy.
6. Stealing childrens' Christmas Parade costumes.
7. Eavesdropping.
8. Can't remember eight, but it was really bad and had something to do with eating more than your fair portion.
9. Lust with whores, regardless whether they can spell or not.
10. Dressing up as a Cat and singing. Anything.
11. Forcing someone to go sky-diving, promising it "will be good for them', "face your fears" -- all that.
12. Any acute unbiblical sex where you're both drunk on false images.
13. Holding on too tight, like not throwing out pens and markers that don't work: This is just pretty much unforgivable.
I wrote the rest down on the back of a bible I used to snort evil powders off. I sold it. "Christ, can we talk.."
tf#17: a play penned by me entirely in German. (Written in one evening on 37 cups of coffee). I was told the sets were too dark and smeary and my lead character, 'Evil Ice Cream Guy' who blared catastrophically-spooky-funeral hymns right out of a fucking Death-on-the-Beach-kind-of-Bergman-esque-bone-chilling-mufflerless monster-truck, would not work for a grade school audience. I came across evidence that suggested they were more than a little jealous, and had plans for me that would have led to a more catastrophic end than I would have imagined when just rewarded an acting part in a play.
*
12
P o c k e t f u l o f M o t h e r ' s B r o t h
The reason that she requires her son's undivided attention is that she is struggling with a hidden fear of abandonment.
In affect she uses her son as an anti-anxiety drug. The relationship soothes her because she knows her son is completely dependent on her.
Unlike an adult partner he's not going to divorce her or abandon her for another woman.
He is bonded to her for life.
Marvin Allen
In the Company of Men
We are in the breakfast nook where I'm writing everything and nothing down. "If you could only meet a nice girl." I start whistling, loudly, while mentally drumming up fiendishly original names for babies I will never have, with women I, more than likely, will never meet. CHARLOTTE is solid and would have a hell of a sense of herself. MADELINE is great, s
he'd end up with MATTY and those smart librarian glasses. LANIE and GRACIE would always announce risqué influence and class, especially if they were twins. Twin what? After my brief internal aria, Mom mentions that Ron left me some money, but since we both know I can't look after currency properly, it would just be better if she held on to it. This ammunition, artillery of sorts, proof I'm not ready to hold the keys to the kingdom of adulthood. "How do I know you won't use it for drugs?" This, a good question and I'm all out of promises. I frown or something, and I'm left playing stupid. Before I can offer a rebuttal, she's looking at Ron's photo on the mantel and reminds me, "It's a nice picture, huh?" She's sobbing now with a leveling grief, a kind I'm perhaps too familiar with, and at present, unable to respond to, to comfort her in any befitting manner. And, she by this time, is already doing her version of the 'Thorazine Shuffle' through the dining room and into the kitchen. Besides, she's probably right. About something.
I'm pretty numb right now, and I'm pretty sure I should be feeling something through most of this scene, but I can't hunt down which acting class covers this, was it Stern's book, or was it Uta's 'Respect For Acting?'
I'm kind of hoping I'm on the mend, but you never know, do you? Couldn't I just hold on to those caustic chips for a change, just pass off and out, not ante-up, or jump back into the fixed and ghoulish game? To even eat them would be a step up (the chips, I mean, not any of the more tasteful family members.) I run frenzied into the bathroom and reorganize the medicine-chest-behind-the glass, hunting for medication of any kind as I'm now orbiting 'Planet Abyss' - a scant galaxy away, a 'Starsky and Hutch' shoulder-roll over from 'Planet Distraught', a ghostly ravine most are lucky to avoid in their lives. To come across only 'Women's A.M. and P.M One a Day Vitamins' is a sorry tale. So I down some. I also discover chewable Vitamin C and Evening Primrose Oil. And there's no way in the world (not in this world anyway) that anyone really knows what any of that stuff does. It's just something else to swallow that doesn't cause noticeable damage or distress...right away. It should get lumped in the dunce corner with shark cartilage, zinc and other Periodical Peasantries of Tabled Elements, more than likely a mystery to anyone with DOCTOR in front of their Jetta-propelled, blurred and bloated, box-headed title - so again, back to the starting line of epic confusion. I ingest a large quantity - 'Burroughs' quantity - knowing full well this will do little other than arouse a more fragrant scent and a jaundiced colouring during my next outing at the urination troughs. The buzzing serenity of 'fortified bone structure' was not the desired effect, but the 'evening' in 'evening primrose' sure made it sound calming, like some sort of valiumy-valerion-root-like-soother, so I down those puppies, too. Tonight, I eat you all. I come across something that looks to be prescribed by a Doctor. Bingo! This could be gOoOd: Medroxyprogesterone and Conjugated Estrogens, some omelette of witchly womanhood, though nothing that might help the likes of me. I hear Mom on the other side of the door, "What are you doing in there?" I put the tiny bottles back in the medicine cabinet, obey my mopey mood, and it's off into the living room where the 100-year-old Steinway baby-grand piano sits. Now, that's an amazing piece of handiwork. Brilliant. Perfect. Mahogany, some kind of deep rich red, but not maroon. It was a part of my grandmother's house, the piano I learned on atop a hardwood floor that made it resonate wonderfully with an echo of ages. This, a remarkable way to be introduced to the passions of music. Hardly touched in years, as the strokes have left my mother's motor skills fragmented, discombobulated. And she's maybe a little jealous, since I have a say in how my left hand moves across the keys to play tunes she once could with one hand tied behind her back.
She tears up when I play this beautiful monster, that haunts her, and me, daily, for
reasons that are many, though I'm pretty sure I'd just be guessing at what they are.
I used to make my Mom sit at this instrument and play popular songs I wanted to learn, but, in retrospect, must have felt it unbefitting to take any kind of formal training to get to that stage of the game. It was magic. I'd put my hands on hers and say, "Go" and "Again" and "Is that it?" Blessed with an uncanny musical ear, the unique gift of improvisation and an aptitude to figure out just about any song. My style, self-soothing, suspended chord clusters, dreamy but sorrowful minor nines, my salvation at times. To live vehemently, vicariously through the connected strings, the pedals, all of it, on countless occasions all I'd have left, after spending all that I was.
Me the voracious skimmer...making the music my own
n o t e b y n o t e .
One day, it will be mine. Someday, my poor dear mother will die and it will be my turn to read some kind of awful sappy eulogy at her funeral, some W.H Auden poem I'll plagiarize, cut-and-paste along side my two cents. It will be a rotten hazy winter afternoon, drizzling sewage at some cemetery named St. John Wartz on the Hill, or something, as it was at my Grandmother's, that day they so callously lowered the coffin with Granny into the ground. That moment in time I stood squeezing my Mom's hand tight, holding on to her like nothing else ever mattered, while that same life was slipping away from me with every inch that Granny-Gretchen became one with that other place. I knew then I could never ever return to the old house down on Alvin Avenue, around the corner from that ornamental parkette, nearby the schoolyard with its purer sounds and my tennis courts, that were all ease and innocence. The gentlewoman who was all grace and under whose loving aegis I'd first experienced cards - double solitaire, and bridge as mysterious to me now as it was then. I like to think of her as just away, off in Belgium or some exotic, mystical spot, playing in some prestigious international bridge tournament that's gone into, like, triple overtime. She is needed there. They have to hold on to her temporarily because, well, she knows about stuff. Like exactly when to bring out the cut-up celery and carrot sticks, the green olives with the things in them. Oh yeah, and those Triscuits and Turtles Chocolates. She sets a pristine, profoundly welcoming table and knows just where everything should be. She has the best sense of humour I've ever met in any one over 50. So, I'll let her go for a while.
You can cling on too much with people.
I guess they'll be no more banana cake with that icing I'd beg her to make. An indelible impression she left on me, something I can't ever see going away, no matter what frame of mind I'll end up in. Granny's leaving, that ending, too final. Her, so irreplaceable. A loss so sickening. Take my see-through spirit, any purity of heart I've ever possessed you fucking invisible, all-knowing-ever-present-spirit that people say is with us. Why not take my body too, as I can't imagine what I'll be needing that for. And then, once more what plagues and taunts me, a screaming not so gentle, a feeling felt too many times, in this life:
"So what d'ya think you're going to do now, genius?"
*
You decide how long it is you
're here for,
just how long a time this is a home for you.
I get tired easily. I've noticed this a lot lately, and can't understand what to attribute it to. I don't mind talking, exploring, but what can I do to make it different?
*
Now that she knows I'll be sticking around for Halloween, she'll make a valiant effort to turn the ungodly hollowest of eves into some sort of 'Mother and Son Show and Tell of Sweets'. More bonding. Oh goody. Plenty of that these daze. ("Midnight in the Garden of Good n' Plenty: a chapter?) She's off pricing enormous, unhealthy bags of gooky syrupy glucose for ragamuffins and trolls, who'll no doubt be gathering in packs to mount an attack on the home fortress. She cases the market with feisty fervor and hardened eyebrows, casting dispersions and looking askance: 'Those greedy prick-bastards who come-a-calling in the night', this, her brand of affection, this, my imagination. I have no answer, no response for her anger, can listen no longer, no further, to her sardonic comments cast at kids who innocently only want candy - well in fact, I could muster many guesses for all this, if properly prodded with...mmmm, a pitch-fork? Pass.
*Note: I wonder how it would be possible to stay as consistently relaxed as David Dechovney looks. Is that an attitude I could adopt? Either way, it's immeasurably creepy, but completely compelling. People with those kinds of demeanors are attractive because you can't help but wonder what's brewing inside. Often though, there is nothing brewing inside.
*
The unyielding elephantine families hovering inside the Swiss Chalet slash Harvey's Diner are stirring. I imagine the echo of their stomachs, the grumbling, the crazed crying for meats of varied shades and inconsistencies to fill up their carnivorous minds. I don't want to be here. I'm only visiting this people petting zoo, thank God, to extricate a ¼ chicken-dinner-white meat for me and a chicken pot-pie for Mom from the take-out kiosk, all the while being careful not to meet with their ever-present rigor mortis eyes, these greasy fallopian-Philistines, for fear the small town hunger - part of their sickening stigma - will infect me. Rumours have it, that the crafty mayor is devising a troughing system of sorts for the daily big feeds. In retrospect I'm thinking I wished for this or dreamt lovingly of it. Fun, but either way, it solves nothing.
Today was errand day. We went and got a vast cargo from David Nichol's place. All right, Loblaws, and when we arrive back home, I get, "I'm not going to be buying all this food when you're just going to eat it." This, one of the cuddly and pleasure-packed apexes of the day where I look to the imaginary high 8 camera off to the side and say: "So how much do I do right here? This small a dose? Are you sure the spoon can't hold more of this crystalline death elixir? Can't we cook up more, cause this sure as hell isn't funny."
Also on the list was a trip to White's, a store catering to the deer-maimer in us all: knives, guns, flashlights, carcass-wrapping, you know, people who camp, catch pneumonia, hunt and kill while ignoring that there's a heated indoors less than a mile away: great Trojan, wilderness-soldiers with packed watercress sandwiches from doting wives.
"I'll have to phone the curling club, young Robbie and I will be living off the land for a good fortnight, Doris."
"Yes dear," the response bellowed from the basement, her giving the U.P.S dude a blowjob, a full mouthful of value and concern.
"Now don't you worry yourself into a dither-dather, we've done this sort of thing before."
"If you run into trouble, there's always the cell phone, dear." This, she manages to offer in-between gulps of savings.
Preparation for trips are important as you never know what to expect.
*
13
L o n e l y i s a n E y e S o r e
There's something appealing in being an outlaw,
moved by different forces than the straight world, but it's too confining too.
I don't want to be defined by any relationship to social groups,
much less by artificial physical cravings.
I want to be free
Richard Hell
Go Now
*Note: Double check if 'Triskaideakphobia' is a fear of Chapter 13.
My big trip out tonight is to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, my first in a long time. I've been kind of apprehensive about going. See, I've been vicariously spoiled by the vivacious energy of the alcoholic recovery kids in California. It's AA Central out there, with special youths on specialty teams who've lived at least three wild lifetimes by the time they're done being ripped-apart-teenagers. I saw it and it would change you too. Everybody I ran into was either in the program or tumbling their way there. The actual name is synonymous for being 'The Last House on the Block', meaning, that if you end up there, you've desperately grabbed at every other straw imaginable, most likely more than once. I wasn't going to push for any hidden meaning - my mother's big old homestead just happening to be the last house on Colborne Street West, but who knew and go figure.
There is an exact template in all community centers and churches in most every state, province and ghostly host town across the globe that offers itself up to these withering, drawn together folk attempting to get their lives back. There's the predictable stacked chairs and bad buzzing lights overhead, coupled with a hollow boom busted echo in these rooms (unavoidable when one speaks above a whisper), and of course the standard fare: Timbits, selected stales from the nearby coffee shop along with black beverages made by some caffeine-crazed-alky-wild-cat. This, their 'Commitment', the unpaid duty which might be keeping them alive. It's the accountability, I'm told, that consistency of providing caffeine to the forlorn (a position shakily held by unsure 'Newcomers', barely hanging on) which, at this very moment, is working somewhere, for someone. That's one less statistic, and that is very, very good.
I ducked down to enter the catacombs of self-revulsion, and just above my head was a neon sign that read *YOU ARE NO LONGER ALONE* (How did they know, I wondered?) Also weird and lonely was that these were precisely the sorts of places rented out for those meetings of the Cub Scouts, one of the few organizations I'd ever excelled in.
Sitting directly across from me is a very badly-aged Cindy-Loo Whoos-it. Yes, from Whoville. She still has that spark, it's dim now...you could see it was once there, maybe in the right light? (Actually not so much.) Yes, it's that gook on her eyelashes she's batting eerily in my direction. Now I see. Though probably early 40's, she's looking mid-50's and drained, exhausted from running, left dangling from this world. Somewhere behind it all, I couldn't help but picture her in little jammies, a cup of hot chocolate spilling onto her slippers, "Where are you going with all of our presents? And our tree? Stick around for a cocktail, Chubby?"
Cindy said she was 96 days clean (though I sensed she was not), that she'd been up here looking after her dying father for the last few months and was ready to blow. Or was it do blow? I didn't query further, as I was too concerned with what I was going to say, my turn quickly approaching. I spent a good chunk of the meeting mostly taking notes (more Participatory Journalism; I had no REAL business being there) and when asked, murmured, "Oh, I'm not really an alcoholic or anything, it's drugs I'm married to, and actually, I'm just here to enjoy the company, and the stories." I subvocalized the last few words, but would have said them aloud if not for my nose running like a sewer and the absurd amount of shakes I myself was working with. Once half-time came (the 7th inning stretch, I guess) I sauntered over to the refreshment area and poured myself another drink. Miss Loo came over to say hello. I swear I smelt brandy percolating. She whispered to me, "Drugs, booze, it's all the same, kiddo. Cookies and milk and a little nip are getting me through. I just haven't 'officially' quit yet, but I couldn't tell them that."
Guess not. She raised her one continuous eyebrow, winked with her good eye, vanished from the church, escaping her own resonating confession.
Pain and suffering is for sure but total misery is mostly optional .
A couple seats away from me sat another poor dear who had clearly just come from a 'Who-can-wear-the-most-blue-and-purple-gunk-on-your-eyes-and-still-see-out-of-them' contest. If I cracked even a smirk, I was a goner. I held solemn and true, and asked myself, "Since when have girls returned to using the hair iron?" Across from me there's a gal that looks like TOOTSIE. (Dustin Hoffman in drag) Beside her (him?) appeared to be Terrance Stamp with a botched face-lift who asked me if I knew what time Coronation Street would be coming on. This overcast bunch taking a whack at this cat called sobriety, had been run-over, had spun themselves down and out through the back lots of life and had come out the other side, just barely, and just in time, too.
The man who ran the meeting was skeletal, his thin skin spoke of depletion, starved of something, though I didn't know what until he sang his tune. I learned that companionship was what it was he woke most mornings crying for. He had lost a wife to cancer just the month before, and a lung some years before that. He missed them both.
The theme for the most part was 'Gratification': the tone seemed to go in that general direction, anyway. When my turn came 'round again, of course I'm the one complaining of being constantly irritated, joyless, maladjusted, unsatisfied, morose and sullen: overall just discontent and disgusted with myself, for missing some metaphoric boat. I think I may have also mentioned how I'd always identified with that great book, 'Every Man is an Island Unto Himself,' (tf#16) telling everyone they'd really missed out if they hadn't gotten to it yet. I went on and said that I really liked what one of the old timers said before the break, this sincere gentleman told a story of his 'inner calm,' of how he had reached an epiphany, of how he now is at peace.
I said that I wanted what he had... even meaning it too.
The people who are actually working a program, become honest, grateful, and lead simple but pleasurable lives, no longer absorbed in the self-indulgent pleasure-packed palisades that gained them entrance to this club, no longer creating wreckage but actually helping others, all of that. They're the happy ones who won't end up dead before their time.
Oh, and of course, Pat. She had just come from seeing her husband in the hospital. The doctor, two months ago, told him if he drank he would die. One more bout would just plain finish him off. He now needs assistance getting in and out of bed, also help in understanding why on earth he needs a toilet wheelchair, why his wife is visiting less and less and why he can't go home 'quite yet'. In layman's terms, he is done.
It's the toughest thing when all that comes naturally is agitation with everything and everyone that falls before you. Then again, someone once said, "Every passing minute is a chance to change it all around." I heard that in some French movie, though by the time it gets edited and translated from generation to generation, and once it makes its way around to English, and my mind, it sadly falls short. But it sure sounds splendid. Once again I, am lost in my own translation.
Oh, and it never fucken fails: if you catch a ride with one of the sober gang, they are invariably the ones who will be the last to leave. You tap your feet and endure half-baked chitty-chitty chat-chat with strangers when all you want to do is get the hell out of there. Not my idea of a good time, so I usually blow. "Keep Crawling Back," they told me. Maybe it was Coming Back. Either way, I picked up a workbook on the way out, and later that night attempted to re-memorize the steps-a-12 of the program. As I walked home alone in the frigid glassy air, I struggled in and out of sobbing about all this. Only then it made perfect sense to me. It wasn't just how loud the sadness of drink and solitude was in these folk or how horrified with themselves and their disease they had become; I cried more for the joy their smiles told, their 'not having checked out-ness': from out of nowhere, a reawakening inside me, brought about by being around people who were kind, loving, and eager to listen and assist - who had changed. Good for them: reaching out - trying something so totally foreign to them, knowing they would die otherwise - that's what I cried about. So glad that I went: loving souls, all of them. I should really go back sometime, check in and see how they're doing. It couldn't hurt. What did hurt was how hard the men shook my hand when I first entered the church, my welcoming into the fold as a 'Newcomer', less than thirty days clean. I suppose it was to let me know how strong they were. That stuff can get weird.
Before retiring, I shambled over to my writing desk and jotted down, from memory, some of the snippets conjuring the strict program guidelines. It had been a while since I studied that stuff but I knew it was important. The good book suggested very strongly to me that if I incorporated a good chunk of them (the steps) into my day to day life, it'd greatly assist me in my quest for completion and happiness, giving me tools for my 'life toolbox' for when it came time to creatively control sticky situations that are already out of my hands.
There's a section called The Promises (which I felt had nothing to do with God or 12 of anything) which reads "...Fear of economic security will leave us, we will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us..." and so forth. "...We will be amazed before we are halfway through." Trouble is, I always bail too early on, long before I make it even a quarter way through.
*
Step 1 - We admitted we weren't too powerful when it came to unmanageable life stuff.
Step 2 - Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves was a really spooky concept and pretty tough to grasp, but mostly should try to keep an open mind about it.
Step 3 - Made a decision to turn my will an
d my life over to something that wasn't me, once I found out what that was.
Step 4 - Made a list of a lot of really wild and difficult things that have gone on with me and made sure to keep them to myself.
Step 5 - Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another person the exact nature of what I thought should best be avoided.
Step 6 - Became entirely ready to promise myself to make it out to some of the meetings, in my area.
Step 7 - Humbly asked the Powers That Be to remove my shortcomings, the very worst character traits that have weighed me down, that materialize no matter how much I pray for them to go away.
Step 8 - Made a list of persons that I didn't act so hot around, and became willing not to hang around them anymore or not to win back their friendships with pathetic apologetic half-assed emails or empty-gestured memos or cards.(I added the last part, knowing full-well it wasn't in there.)
Step 9 - Made direct amends to people who I couldn't seem to dodge any longer, and prayed to a higher power, that if I ever did see them again, to not bother them in a similar sinister manner, the one they'd become all too familiar with.
Step 10 - Continued to monitor the program, pop in at meetings, make lists, and try not to ever be wrong.
Step 11 - Sought through prayer and certain medications to improve my conscious contact with God as I understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for me and the belief that everything will just kind of get better if I just keep writing about it.
Step 12 - Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these numbered tasks, we tried to carry the message to other addicts, alcoholics and people that clearly need this sort of thing, and to practice these principles in all our relationships and affairs.
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tf#16: the author means to quote the novel "No Man is an Island" by Thomas Merton, not 'Everyman is an Island Unto Himself' which, if that is what he thinks is the message that is being conveyed in that book, well, let's just move on and say it's not a very healthy attitude.
*
14
O n B e i n g ' A R a i d e r '
Death and a writer's work. Just before dying, he has his last work read over to him.
He still hasn't said what he had to say. He orders it to be burned.
And he dies with nothing to console him and with something snapping in his heart like a broken chord.
Albert Camus
December 1938 -Notebooks 1935-1942
We drive amongst many long silences, though there is prettiness in the day. After a while Mom pipes up, "So, you like driving?"
"Yeah, I do. I like it a lot," thinking she was going to query affectionately further, just how I managed to make it across the country in one piece.
"Truck drivers can make a lot of money." I sneer, maybe I wince. A grimace passes over my face and I numbly respond, with an answer I hope will put the whole silly business to rest.
"Mother, I'm a writer." Her eyebrows head downwards.
"A Raider?"
"What? A 'Writer', I said."
"Oh", she says. The support, unwavering. The inevitably deflating thought-bubble above my head poses a question to the tune of "Why did this tender instant need to end up being another unsettling exchange?"
Being a kind of writer, I in no way class myself with the likes of Dostoyevsky or Hemmingway, but if I was held up and frisked, asked Gross-point-blank by friendly folk with threatening meat carvers, I'd flounder at first, but would have to say I draw inspiration from the demented, warped and withered C.S. Lewis, maybe shrouded in Dr. Seussian overtones. (tf#17) What of these mentors and role models I've so adopted? I look up to The Elephant Man. Yes, a swaggering and fragmented chap but he turned out to be fairly well read, didn't he? Now, the foul odor I'm not condoning. Also unhelpful: the low grade Osteo-neurotic-psychotic-posture, making him less than popular with the ladies; his neurosis of the liver also not beneficial for social or bodily functions, but he was an original, I'll give him that. The motivational tapes he peddled door-to-door - "People are going to eat this crap up. Unhand me, officer, I know what I'm doing!" - also insured that he remain dateless for a record twelve years. But that couldn't be helped, the burlap sack over his head almost always frightened away female suitors while he innocently canvassed for pledges for upcoming Monster Mash Dance Marathons:
"10 cents a mile? That's highway robbery you freak! And Tony Robbins? Never heard of him. Now get off my porch, you circus side show Elephant boy!"
And even when he did manage to find a dame less concerned with outer appearance - surprisingly impressed by his sentiments, masculine prancing and jigs - ultimately things skidded downhill fast as any song he chose to croon in private performances for the lucky ladies, were muffled by gargoylish slurpy inhalation noises and obsessive sweating.
*Note: use the word 'Macabre' more often, it will make me sound more French. And just what did those 'Momenchantz' people think they were doing anyway? I bet it's not even a word.
Would there have been a special cleansing bar for the likes of him, I wonder? There must have been. Always for the uncleansed underdog I am. I feel my observations are relevant. Exactly to whom, they say I don't have to know, not right now, not in this Unpleasantville I'm King of.
I'm just another piece in the present puzzle, and once I've moved along they'll be more than enough adventurers looking to partake.
When I'm gone they'll be someone else running 'round shrouding themselves from the world, just like me. Is it interesting to stick around and see who's going to get the short end of the sack? No, no it isn't.
Mother responds to this whole Writer/Raider business with not exactly, disgust: I mean she's trying to be supportive, in her way, I think. And still on the hunt for a vocation that's suitable for me. But this is one of those defining moments that pretty much tells me she doesn't know to what God I bow, what drives or moves me...or anything, come to think of it. Some well-oiled comforting certainty, a confidence-building placating gesture of any sort could really assist, but you can't expect too much. Putting myself out there, leaving my heart unguarded, is business I withdrew from quite awhile back.
At least I'll never get disappointed.
Self-preservation has becom
e a just, well-earned and deserved thing, and a game I can play alone. I need to support myself. My directionless junkie bubble seems too heavy for anyone else to bear. It's a lot to ask, this I now realize.
This also, was one of those inflamed moments when I didn't know which conundrum to address first. Was she thinking I was in cahoots with the Oakland Raiders? Did she believe that I, on occasion, raid tombs, some manly crafty 'Lara Croft' kid out there saving the planet? And aren't those Indiana Jones-death-shrines only in horrible desert places like Egypt? (I hope that's not where my pal Father Kevin is off to.) Aren't they called Caskets here and really, what would I have to offer down in those dungeony-dunes and catacombs?
I suppose I have the Zest, the wherewithal to grumble about in rickety dank over-turned sacred-shrouds and dig up some kind of salary, but really, how long could I keep up with the charade before my full-time hooded profession took its toll and made me succumb to the title of 'Creepy Morose Funeral Homeboy'? Another branded Hard Core Logo I don't need. How could she think that was the playing field I hung out on? Mom, way ahead of me today in the non-sequitur-triple-entendre-mixed-up-metaphor-purposely-misheard-jolly-playtime contest I believed myself to be all alone in up here.
Or was it that she didn't want to hear the word 'Writer'? I figure it could be both, but things seem to change drastically from day to day.
C'mon, a Raider?
"Will you slow down, please? You're making me nervous! Pay attention, you're going way over the speed limit."
I fiddle with the dials on the car stereo hoping to magically turn Mom into some kind of non-speaking entity, but that doesn't happen. I speed up and something clunks against the car. All I can see is a sea of red, black and white. Now, I've either demolished one of God's creatures or flattened an Amish lady betraying proper cross-walk procedures, transporting livers and kidneys. Oh my. No matter, in an attempt to get that feeling of freedom I felt when I drove cross country, it's time to expand these restrictive parameters and disrobe entirely. Mom won't mind.
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tf#17: the Doctor's drawings depict animals with improbable numbers of joints; off-putting to say the least. And he was a doctor of what exactly? That's exploration time, baby, and there ain't enough paper. Dr. Seuss' real name is, was, Theodore Geisel and was born to this earth on 1904. After his last book - 'Arctic Google Kitties Frozen in Haunted Melting Igloos' - bombed, he sank into a deep, dark, yet animated depression. But, he did manage to pick himself up, dust himself off and go on to become a morning-drive-time-talk-radio-personality and began what would become a hugely popular weekly radio show entitled, 'Doctor Demento' (I'm fairly sure). Though, due to the late hour and racy material, it completely ignored the pre-teen audience he'd worked so hard to accumulate over the years. Ultimately a wack-a-doo, similar to one of his mentors and eventual colleagues, Dr. Sigmund Freud, he ended up shooting monstrous amounts of cocaine and going blind from too much bliss. Also, just what Hunter S. Thompson is a doctor of... no one seems to be able to come up with anything on that one. But he seems to have a pretty good thing going with the unabashedly-reveling-in-sloth thing plus possessing the mysterious talent of cajoling female interns to come to visit him for overnight 'reporting' at his fortress of sin. *Also, look into that 'God complex' thing that's mentioned in the book Dr. Dave lent me. Why would he think I'd be interested in that?
*
15
T h e C a l l
Stories pass the time with time and make it beautiful and interesting, if only by removing it from context,
where everything becomes interesting in its strangeness.
Hearing a story is telling it is to be implicated in it.
Richard Hell
Go Now
We pull into the driveway and I can hear the phone ringing, so I attempt a mad dash P.D.Q. I pick it up, expecting one of Mom's gorgon lady friends on the other end, inquiring as to when and where the next bridge game, town mob hanging or luncheon is at.
"Hello, hello?" I could tell from the scratchiness it was long distance.
"Ah, hello?"
"There ya are old boy, you are one tough son of a bitch to track down. I thought you said you were gonna phone once you got settled? Last time we were knocking around you were kind of in your own world, it seemed, what was that you were taking? Never mind. So, you have any comment on what's been going on?"
The term 'from out of left field' came to mind.
"Sorry?"
"Hey, my editor asked me if I could get you to say something about this business."
What editor? What business?
"Who are you again?"
"Look, if you wanna give 'No Comment', that's all fine and good, but there's gonna be questions, and a blasé attitude will make you sound uncaring, to be sure."
"I...see." I responded half attentively, so I could use another working part of my brain to imagine who this could be wanting a caring comment from me with regards to something I had no idea about. This would not be the first call.
"Hey, all that Chateau Marmont Belushi crap, was that really true? That stuff was great. If you can come up with some other stories, you know not too this, not too that, I got people who'll eat up that dark Hollywood behind-the-scenes shit, but look, this other thing, they're after some cold hard facts. Her parents are more than a little pissed, you understand, and who can blame them really? What do you say I just tell 'em that you were out of your head at the time, you know, I'll give 'em the 'something like this certainly wasn't your fault and you're sorry...' bit. Don't worry, I won't make you out to be some remorseful slouch, I mean we've all done things..."
"Right, yes well, of course" - (!?)
"...that aren't strictly 'above board'. But, they're going to want to get in touch with you, speak with you properly and all."
I said smartly in a quickly invented English accent, "Can I, uh, get back to you then, I...just came in the door and, oh shit, Mom's still out there locked in the car, and has got to be suffocating by now, so you'll understand if I..."
"Sure. Sure, sport. You do that."
*
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