21
U p   a n d   O u t   B e f o r e   i t   a l l   G e t s   G o i n g   A g a i n

Lady Heroin speaks to me at moments that are convenient for her. "It's clear, we're going to get along...." This voice, eerily familiar, chants lyrics from musicals when her throat is not obstructed from swallowing the devil's semen. She's grown up, a real lady, but still has a home nestled inside of me. My maddening hurtful Medusa screams daunting hymns even though she's tone deaf, but to tell her so becomes a drawn out ordeal. So, just shutting up and taking part in the drizzle parade seems the path of least resistance, and again I'll make the most of it. This alarming siren has no business singing (her deathly job) because she is out to hurt everyone who comes close to her. Nothing seems to be able to stop her. If somebody else could just control the volume on her, then maybe I'd have a shot at listening. Because it is kind of beautiful.

It is difficult to imagine how I'd lived through the adversity and chaos, now a muddled confusion I haven't sorted out, on or off drugs, it's chilling to realize there will be much more of this life business to get through. The old haunts, well, that's exactly what they are, assaulting me at each turn - unable to assist with any info of how my hand plays a part in ripping me down.

I know I should really save this money for that movie I've been meaning to see later tonight, but all of that goes out the truncated window when I spot that guy who holds the possibility of well, you know. He doesn't even speak any friggin' English, thus his nickname, 'No English'. He's kind of an old timer, but with this creepy child-like pansy, sort of Tatum O'Neil-ish skin. Both have the same mole but he's way less cute, and probably isn't married to John McEnroe. I don't understand it, or him, not really. I mean, all that time running around the market, he'd have to pick up at least one word of English in his hunt to pick-up? Wouldn't he?

And she's still singing.

He motions to me to sit down and gives me his mop to hold. I'm thinking it may have been stolen since it's still in a plastic bag and has a tiny orange price tag. Right off the bat, I am 'Hardware Boy Accomplice.' Between my fourteen dollars, and whatever we can get for my throwaway camera, and his mop, we could probably be looking at... well, not much of anything. He does say "Fee mini," which comes close to sounding like five minutes (this, or a further fee for a swift game of mini-put). I'm on board, and hoping that magically, by some bizarre happenstance, someone owes him, or he's getting it fronted and I'll be able to partake. In some capacity. The sad thing is I'm busy grasping at irrational and slight possibilities, lying with wait and hope.

She's still singing.

I should really call my friend Michelle. I should really drive back to her house where I've parked my ass for these few days in the city... should stay on good terms so she doesn't feel like I'm just using her, which come to think of it, I kind of am. But that's a longer more uninteresting story, (or is it more interesting?) So let's get back to how I should be doing a lot of things I'm not.

Eventually, I get up and leave, as sitting in that crappy Chinese mini-mall begins to make me feel swampy and sluggish - oh, and stupid, real stupid - so I bail. I didn't want to, especially with the thought of a nice smooth morphine sandwich so close by, but it was one of those times when something was telling me to cut my losses before the damage really got going, and someone would to end up having to post bail.

There's moments like this one where I really can see and feel and almost touch the gloom and murky Nowhereville of the market. Just whose eyes am I seeing all this stuff through anyway. It's skewed and I know it. But I can't help myself. I'm drawn. Drawn to the sickest hurtful parts of life and don't know why. After a couple arduous hours of intricate application of these brilliant such indiums, I figure it best to toss the 64 cocktail napkins I used in the trash on the way out the door, figuring, well, the ole adage, 'doesn't amount to a hill a' beans things came up, how can I make a change the 'what's the difference' thing, the apathy thing creeping in, the pendulum of such importance, feeling of having something true and new to offer to the others, and that just being outweighed by heavy sand sending it flying. All the things I thought I could do and be lost to blinding disappointment and heartsickness and an inability to pick myself up at those times that mattered, those were times that count. These moments I see through all the nicely stacked fruit and pristinely displayed bins of nuts and raisons and the fresh bakery in special order so the passer Byers will be intrigued, the guitar strummers punks in the park by the kiddie pond, the flowers and granola type denizens of the market, who may have even been harmless... whatever hex grabbed hold of my mind at that second was the one that said. "It's all dirty, the same drunks and derelicts are still here and no one will move on from this place that smells of flowers but reeks of despair and longing. Too many police cruising around. Something was going down. There's always something going down, you just have to peel back the skin, and a good chunk of the time I don't want to examine the hypocrisy too closely for fear I'll forget the sweet things. Sometimes the things that you want to be all curly and wild and safe just aren't and there's not a gaddamn thing you can do in your own lifetime to switch those lifeless lymph-notes around.

Here, I make a note to pray tonight.

Still, she's singing inside of me, but she is a little quieter now. I escaped, this time, unscathed but undeniably less wholesome, but up and out before it all got going again.

*

22
W a k i n g   U p   J e s u s

It is difficult for a non-addict to understand the almost religious quality of addiction; to someone enmeshed in
the drug and the drug sub-community, heroin is an absolute, something that transcends utilitarian calculation.
Every conceivable aspect of life becomes translated into the heroin equation. It is beyond rational cost accounting.
A choice between heroin and anything else is no choice at all.

Erich Goode
Drugs in American Society

"...and please lord, don't let this man go through terrible withdrawals, yes I be certain he has sinned but he is here to repent, to do your work..."

Why has a sullen mourner got his hands wrapped around my ankles?

Why is another creepy stranger flicking shards of water over me?

These mustachioed, toothless gentlemen appear to be praying at the foot of my bed, and giving me a redundant Baptism. Why does this keep happening to me? This isn't right. I'm still half-dreaming, drool on my cheek, dope sick on some top bunk bed, the rank fumes of burnt coffee amidst too many men in too close proximity. It reminds me of what I think Sun City must be, just less African. Out the corner of my eye I see clothes falling out of milk-crate drawers and a poster of Jesus.

"Where am I?"

"Why, you're at The Ranch."

"Ranch?"

"God's ranch," they say, grinning in unison.

Oh no, this doesn't sound good at all. I'm dodging my own racy thoughts (and a mixed-metaphor mania that plagues me) Hold on, I was in San Clemente yesterday - I mean last night, or was that the day before? I recall that Bea, the 100 year old Swedish lady I'd been renting that room from, said something about her pastor friend having some kind of retreat, or it could have been a ranch?. She'd sensed I had certain... dilemmas. Could this be what she had in mind for me? I seem to recall a van, and a lot of my belongings getting packed...

Wait a minute.

"Am I in San Clemente?"

"No siree, you sure ain't; that's a couple hours 'way down through the canyon, at the devil's ocean. You're in God's country now my son."

Another one interjects: "It's good we've got you, you didn't look so hot last night when they brought you in." His twang already entirely irritating.

Sweating profusely, I tumble out of the top bunk, disoriented, and manage to demolish a man's candlelit shrine to some Hindu. Somebody else's frankincense decanter is on fire. A weird interlude of recorder and ukulele, some sickeningly sad Jesus jam, accompanies my catoppling.

"Oh god, shit, I'm sorry. Christ, let me help you with that."

"Don't bother, brother. It's all beautiful in Gods' world."

Brother? I hate that.

This pad, some sort of home on wagon wheels, it's makeshift to be sure. And the gerbil-chip-scent adds certainty to my conjecture that this sure as hell ain't no 'Ranch'.

Now I remember.

I seem to recall, of all things, Bea mentioning that this is where Betty Ford kept her cattle and various other recovering 4 legged barn-dwelling creatures. Seems everybody (Everything?) has to be treated sometime. When she said her friend had a ranch, I'd pictured horse riding lessons, thick Porterhouse steaks, rock saunas and steam baths, Jon Voight being flown in to teach aerobic classes, scantily clad wolverine-like Brazilian Coppertone sex starved castaways, eager to massage me out of my grief. But, this was really bare bones. This biblical Shriner-fez-camp-for-end-of-the-liners dedicated to the lord was wildly bereft of medication AND entertainment, something I had not prepared for. There was no way this was going to work. No way. Also, there seemed to be no way out, as I had been taken, again Catholically-captured, kidnapped in my sleep and driven to this ungodly ranch of perverse loneliness.

I counted about 20 Jesus worshippers in total: all cooped up in this brown and yellow portable-on-bricks, just like the kind you'd find in out near the parking lot of cheap grade schools, men in the process of redemption or running from the law. I learned this at a rotten scrambled breakfast, some 3 hour prayer session I snuck out of, fleeing flustered talk about Leviticus; free range eggs being the devil's work; militant discussion regarding Hecubus' sugary breakfast cereals - all hazy though. The place smelled horrific. We were right beside this pepper farm in the middle of nowhere, in a locale that fell short of making it to a map. It wasn't even in a real town. I only know this because a few hours later, I bargained with some chap whose daily assignment, his commitment, was coveting The Yellow Pages - "Dante's Heretic Scrollings." - I'd tried to find it on a map so I could tell the cab driver exactly where to come and get me - it was off some garbage Lake Elsinore. That was a good one. Some overgrown sewage septic-system-with-human-bilge tank that reeked to high heaven, and being it was Sunday, the world's day of rest, I guess, it was no easy feat getting someone out there to collect me. "It'll be another $50 if you want our driver to come up there, Mack." That $150 cab ride ranks right up there as one of my all time indulgences. Thank god I was able to find my bank card and that someone in the program had responded to my begging and had deposited first and last on a room because the Swedish Jesus lady was cramping my style; our lifestyles mismatched and conflicting, her not so in sync with my wayward-crossword-skanks spending the night, or the 4 in the morning rummaging through her fridge for European chocolates, the necessary rearranging of her prized bridge parlor... other things. One of the qualities that makes a good addict is a great willingness to venture into territory most others probably would not go near. But this wasn't funny. And there was no chance that this community was going to put up or even try to understand my circus of fancy words. The kind of sympathy I needed wasn't to be found here. I figured only the unsophisticated were safe to roam here with the herd, others would find more suffocating, devastating places.

I distracted one of the guards by asking him just how many sharps were in the key of F played earlier in the morning hymn. I stumped him. Dum-dee-dumb-dum. He was thinking about it so hard I thought he was going to fall backwards, and this gave me the time I needed to rummage around the pig shed where the fanatic underlings had stored my stray belongings, costumes, scripts and such. I managed to escape before anything really irreversible could happen to me. Not having a home of any sorts to go back to, I thought to seek out some support from other kindred folk who knew what was up with me. Misery longs for familiar company.

*

23
W a k i n g   U p   J e n n y

Somehow, lodged in my memory still, was the telephone number of my old partner in crime. So, seconds after taking out everything I could from the ATM at the 7-11, I shouted into the pay phone for Jenny to meet me at this dive hotel out in Santa Ana. More of a drug buddy then a 'Bonnie and Clyde' type crime scene, us, pretty harmless to unsuspecting bystanders; the most heinous heists involved driving to Nordstroms in the druggy-spook-mobile-convertible-coffin to help her return counter samples of pricey make-up she'd stolen just hours before.

Now that I knew I would be saved, I was a burst of gleeful energy, a bit of the old obnoxious spirit rising, and I proceeded to tell her how I'd awoken in this god-awful rural dwelling.

She had this beautiful laugh, and I'd really missed it. Endless and comforting. So, I explained to her how I'd really given it my best shot, the good old college try, had made a valiant attempt at fitting in, integrating into God's team - 4 hours was surely ample - and how it just hadn't looked like I could adapt. Her dangerous energy, and intense understanding (and whimsied condescension!), was apparent through her giggling, saying the whole thing was hilarious while sensing that another one of our fun (but deadly) child-like liaisons was now in the works. Actually, she was pretty hysterical.

A similar nightmare had befallen her a few months back, so she knew how I was feeling: baffled at just what to do, her parents carted her off to some brain-washing, clean-up your act, unthrilling cult type farm. Of course her waking up in another country occurred when she was under the influence - if I remember right, it was a hell of a story, her escape from all that. "Please come get me, Tim. I'll do anything. These girls are so freaky. I'm scared. And sick." Funny how things get spun around.

Now I remember.

"My treat, sweetheart," I recall saying to Jenny as I hopped out of the cab and threw my arms affectionately around her, so happy to see someone who didn't want to put the word of God in me. I unloaded my boxes that smelled of God's salad-daze seasoning, still from The Children of the Pepper-Corn farm, and we got busy. Here was where I would begin to completely lose any sight of sound mind. The thing I can't remember so great, was just how I wasn't more worried about where all this was going to end up. I'm kind of thinking I had played so many games with myself by this time - adapting and all - along with knowing which situations to go numb in... maybe not too much was hitting me the way it should have, me already bruised internally for eternity, all of that. I'd hit another soul-throttling bottom, yet again - and even bottom was murky - that unparallel bar conti nually dropped by the insane judges and life referees keeping tabs on my madness; my balsa casket gaining speed, lowered further and into the ground.

We stayed up all night: phone calls to far off places, walking late in the dark parking lot, laughing about Jesus, dressing in each other's clothes, sniffing and shooting stuff that my dealer had given me, him so grateful to see me again, worried where I'd been the last 48 hours, and so happy that I had any money at all - me often begging to pay "Next time."

Jenny tells me of her recent life capers: her stripping and of how she'd once danced, of old boyfriends, her crazy L.A band stories, then me telling her how I'd moved out here, and met Carrie - us asking at the same time, "Just where is everyone that got away from us?" - people in the program and our experiences in the Sausage-grinder of getting straight, of just trying to get cleaned-up for more than a week at a time: the hospitals, the sterile centers, counselors, the Musician's Assistance Program place in Pasadena... ironically, or is it co-incidentally? she had been the one to tell me about that place, the one I breezed through.

Once we ran out of stuff to do, I think we were going to have a bath together 'cause we thought it's something we should try since, well, I'm a boy and she's a girl and we're in a hotel. We were pretty enthralled with our own manic energy and altered states so the filling up and draining of the tub just became another task, a distraction in-between the main event of getting high. We never got into it. We did order up more HBO movies we weren't going to watch though. We figured we were doing much better as desperate but resourceful junkie-fiend buddies, anyway. Why screw it up with sex which never seems to work out the way you'd want, or thought you'd wanted. Our sexual churning and sex synapses burned out ages ago, I think, love liquids which had swum with a conjugal syntax, now depleted, now uncharmed, and the tassels of attractiveness beckoning in the syringe before hand. So high. The drifting in and out of consciousness, in and out of each other, time standing still. Or did it move so wildly through us, with lightning speed 'til we just said "Fuck it," and chalked it up to one of the thousand things over which we had no control.

She had some video camera, too, that she'd borrowed. I think we even taped some stuff, not sex stuff, just silly, character, pretend dumb fun stuff.

"Let me just set this tri-pod up properly so I can get in the shot, would you hold on."

"How does this look?" she said, parading around our suite, draped in the shower curtain, the rings clipped to her ears and nipples.

We sure could entertain ourselves.

"We're here in this wickedly downscale motel/notel in Santa Ana, California in a sort of drug testing lab. We've put these two young urchins in this cage for a period of two days and given them every drug they want. Will they come out of it alive? (I've got this kind of twisted meshed-together-Peter Jennings-and-Chuck Berris type thing going now) The winner gets a set of clean syringes, steak knives, a case of bottled mineral water and a book on how to improve your relationships. Let's catch up with Jenny, one of our contestants, a twisted ballerina who's ingesting substances that should have put her under hours ago. Her tolerance? Well, it's downright staggering AND entertaining! She's a vagrant-celebrity-on-the-rise but doesn't want any involvement in that whole Hollywood star system, so... "

"Shut up, you're a completely moronic goofball!"

Before injecting ourselves down the merry path of sin once more, we talked through tears of joy, smiles of sorrow, about how happy we were to see each other alive and well, both having thought we'd got lost somewhere through the lines. She was a wild card by nature, troubled and naughty, yet I'd never pressed her beyond her revealing to me how she had a predictably crippling relationship with her parents. Things get buried. And corroded. And sometimes never rise again to the surface.

The aloofness of this sweet girl possessed me and penetrated through me. Some people just have a magic effect on you. It's rare. It's special. I can't say I pretend to understand it. I just know it's one of the few things in the world worth welcoming and respecting. Jen could have been a Cheerleader For The Damned if they'd bothered to put together a team. My beautiful frightened ballerina, morally vacant, an emotional train wreck always running for and catching a ride on the latest L.A man to treat her like shit. This had become the ongoing joke with us, when phoning each other we'd confess to yet another of our predictable and all-too-typical and impetuous attempts at lustfully productive romance, the ones always ending in regret. Prepped with either of our two stock resonating phrases "What was I thinking?" or "So, what am I going to do now?" Familiar fiascos, whomever we lanced into. Those poor people.

We sought sleep to escape, drained entirely from our low-budget reality show that no one would ever see, but could feel the nightmares readying themselves. I must have gone to sleep at some point. I remember having horrible dreams, the nightmarish hurtful ones which invariably rush in on the nights I am most Carrie-less in whatever bed I make mine for the night. I dreamt Jennifer overdosed. I didn't know what to do. I'd seen things in Pulp Fiction-ish movies but all these unhelpful stupid everythings came racing in at once, and none of the images were realistic or helpful in this real-life application, just what should be done in a non-fiction emergency. I tried calling out on our phone, but it had been cut off by the skeezak-jughead-prick at the front desk, him suspicious of us not paying for our long distance and pay-per-view flicks, I guess. I tried slapping her across the face, mouth-to-mouth and finally dragged her to the bathtub and dunked her underneath the water.

But she wasn't waking up.

I thought she might be trying to put one over on me, she was that enthusiastic about playing pranks and all. She'd been known to take jokes pretty far, if they were good...but no one can stop breathing like that, go limp like that, and still be alive. Not with that color blue flushing her expressionless face to pale: she turned the colors of the flag...red to blue to white. Surrender-flag white. I saw Jennifer swinging at the end of my mind's tether, long golden locks flowing, her thin to the point where you might wonder if she's all there, flowing with lace and smiles, swaying on the rubber tire from the tree and killing my heart, multiple breaks each time she swooped back and forth, hitting me with what could have been pleasant and sparkling recollections steeped in hope and innocence, but which only scalded me with blistering torment and longing - the feeling of being without, missing everyone and everything. She was a pale princess to begin with. Strange how she brought to mind my funny Baptism with Father Kevin, being under water like that, so peaceful and white, her incandescent once-laughing-face so still now. The claw-footed trough held on to us at different intervals, having to visit her every couple hours once our bodies screamed at us "Enough". Her speckled veiny vessels on her eyeballs spoke of depletion, of not getting enough of something. We tried to monitor each other but fell down our own shattered and broken shafts, victims in this Dionysian feast of ourselves.

That night, we shared some pivotal moments, even some cathartic talk that could have turned the sinking ships we were, into a better plan. I was deserted by her in the morning, but she was to have a devastating effect on me, much in the way characters in a favorite painting can are mesmerizingly-vivid, how they stare into you from inside the canvas, Munch's scream at you and jump into your world. Unforgettable. Scream Scream Scream Jesus fucking Christ!

Smash and Blow.

By the sting of morning, my earlier joy had melted, along with the seriousness of things which startled me hard.

I'm trigger happy with triggers, the grief still on board. I attempt to skip to and fro with multiple coffees and Greens Plus in cranberry juice liquidating to quicken my near-mad remorseful mind but unable to block out the disgust of wanting, wanting, wanting, even now so fucking anxiously to return to that never-ending-struggle to call, and wait, and cop: the promised arrival of something that had stopped being fun long ago. I throw what's left of my life into the car: old things, cassettes, half empty bottles of water, maps smeared with chocolate, shirts donated to me from that Charlie Street drunk-tank place, a tennis racket with busted strings, my life trophies, Henry Miller's Tropic books and Bukowski paperbacks - all too dog-eared and soaked in sun-tan lotion to sell to any second hand store, and drove off.

*

24
C l a s s y   C h a r t s   &   G a m e s
(A Quick Nod to the Long and Confusing Youth  -  ' A Q N to the L & C Y ' )

Part II

They lived in a cave when the weather was cold, And they Did, and they Didn't Do, what they were told.
Good Bear learnt his Twice Times Three—But Bad Bear never had his hand-ker-chee.
They lived in the Wood with a Kind Old Aunt, And one said "Yes'm" and the other said "Shan't!"
Good Bear learnt his Twice Times Four—But Bad Bears knicketies were terrible tore.

A.A Milne
Now we are Six

Sometimes I reminisce over school days, just what went on, to force my head away from present disasters. I can never remember how I exactly felt. I mean I can remember events, but even that's kind of vague. This and more I'd ponder during bouts of more desperate screaming junkies grabbing on to my car door, half in and half out, me wondering just what class might have covered these proceedings.

What is it like to have a center cortex? (vortex?) Which Lost And Found did I leave mine in? Maybe some other kid got it, and has been wearing it this whole time. Let's just say I wasn't in strict attendance for many classes; I'd fizzled out in phys-ed, missed much math, and quantities of Quantum Physics passed over to often just plain passing out. I also got teased for playing that weird skipping game during recess, the one where you hop around on one leg and scream stock phrases ('Hopped up Bunny Scotch 'n Soda'?) It's hard to recall exactly, something with a beanbag, maybe dice... definitely yelling - face cards may have been in there too. Another horrific outing the bigger kids would rope me into: if I got tossed at the wall and landed on the wrong side (or an uneven slant) then I wouldn't be used as a tetherball. Weren't they supposed to be using hockey cards instead of humans? Was I striped or solids? If I landed upright, relatively unscathed and still breathing, I got to go home with minimal internal bleeding. This game was called 'Whoopsy-Daisy-Skull-Smash'. The hockey teams I rooted for; The Washington Capitols, Kansas City Scouts and California Golden Seals never showed up in my defense, but I swear they were part of the NHL, that they existed, though I still to this day can find no evidence to prove this. God, what a blur. I missed many lectures, one of them being the explanation of The Table of Periodic Elements. Short form, lofty critters with initials, who'd pop in and out with protons and electrons, making up stuff, I could only assume, as I was bereft - barefoot and bloodied from the confusion - me, them - both unsubstantiated. I long for the gold, the platinum, but I seem, still, stuck and screwed, my ass nailed to the wall with some single-digit anniversary tin, manganese or nickel, gypped, feeling chiseled, not knowing how to mine properly (To get my property?) And what is rightfully mine? What am I entitled to, if anything, and who keeps track of such things? More drunk officials undercover and on lunch, I assume.

Make mention of BASE METALS / PLATO'S BANANA REPUBLIC / MYTH OF THE Metals and how they all tie in together.

*

Mom tells me she feels as if she's in a terrifying dream she can't wake up from. My trampled heart goes out to her. Somewhat. I'm plagued with my own marked deck of multiple concerns and get thunderstruck all too easily. As far as which one to address first leaves me aghast. Some days I feel as though I've become my elusive pal, The Three-Toed Sloth; classed under the unsparkly category of 'Ravenous Klingon-like unkind and uncuddly'. I'm made an example of, behind the glass, on display for sticky fingered kids fresh from parade floats to point at, running nervously, dragging their parent past me and my exhibit (told not to pet or feed me) fearful of growing up to be like me. Never will I grow into that special someone who wears fetching slacks, plays polo, cricket, or any other civilized contest involving lemonade and referees who keep tallies, whilst pontificating and posing poolside. No synchronized swimming. No Parcheesi or Bridge pour moi. No mingling-under-mistletoe amidst mai-tai-merriment. And certainly no invitations from the yachting set to arrive at the club, "Not a dang second past eight, you, it's Kell's first big bash since getting home from Brandeis!" None of that.

* A Quick Nod To Giving A Shit And Then Getting Stalked By Perversity *

I did receive a grand scholarly offer some time ago from a paltry school of lowly support, St. John Fisher College in Rochester, NY. An empty gesture though, I felt, as it was offered over cocktails late into the evening - this, just hours after I had defeated the hometown heroic 14 year old hometown hero at a tennis tournament down there, just before my dad died. I never did see a proper offer on paper - scholarship, my ass, "A Jack Daniels and coke and what do you want? A blowjob? Are you crazy? I'm 15 and I'm a fucking guy, coach!" Ah, mentors. I bet it wouldn't have held up - the offer, not the coach's cock. Dad and I held up a busy video store on the way out of town, needing money for what must have been gas, licorice and Chiclets, clean maps and lollypops. Funny the kind of command an unloaded water pistol (and compromising pictures of seedy coaches) warrants. They owed me. My university experience ended up being a good six weeks attendance at Bennington, where I majored in 'Spiritual Befuddlement' (with a minor in Magic Tricks and Comedy Routines) until I got shown the door - disappointed again! - the all girl academy not looking to expand their roster, or make exceptio ns to their strict curriculum, as helpful as I thought I was being. I was awarded a scholarship, though if I remember correctly, it was designed specially for me under the condition that I never set foot on the premises again.

My education has seemed to have been more about getting up in the world's face, falling down and accumulating a mountain of misperceived memories. Big deal, so I've got some experience. I've always just wanted to be a part of something that was special and respected, where I didn't have to make excuses, or apologize. Where I could feel good about knowing I had found a place that wasn't made out of doubt. Where did I put those chocolate-flavored maps, anyway?

*

25
" D i d   t h e y   n o t   i n v i t e   y o u   b a c k ?   "
A f t e r n o o n   o f   t h e   D e p e n d   A d u l t   U n d e r g a r m e n t

Shuffling through coffee-colored snow, retreating from the retirement home across the street; my friend who tagged along with me for the afternoon mumbled she can't watch or listen to any of that morbid, old-age-home Vaseline-and-pudding-cup-Christmas-drizzle without weeping. I however, cannot partake in any of that without drinking.

I'd had visions that this occasion could be an act of faith, an attempt to involve myself in something partially unselfish. I thought it would be admirable to volunteer to play some tunes for the elderly, spread some cheer, though not likely, my repertoire riddled mostly with mopey, morose gloomy-Gus melodies.) When I arrive home from the doomed sanctuary, the offering from the mother character could have easily been, "I'm sure you did fine," or "I bet they appreciated it."

B u t   n o .

"Did they not invite you back?" A long silence - hoping a simple 'No', might put an end to it. Why couldn't she have commented on my charitable offer? Why couldn't the focus be on my being 'of love and service': no payment (or jacket) required, filling in for some Sam who regularly plays, my visit being a 'one-off' Christmas-time party thing, though I was not asked back, or to ever return, having been told to "not play it again, Sam..."

The supervisor, some head-cheese nurse, also recommended I "learn some up-beat, sing-a-long tunes" for the candy-floss-haired, brittle-grey-toothed residents, the farthest thing from what I do. I play my own compositions: minor nines and suspended chord clusters, a brand of thick nostalgic narcissism, intensely passionate and pretty, moody prose spoken through keys and pedals. It's pure death to scrape up 'Yesterday', 'Piano Man', or 'Mr. Bojangles'. I might cringe through 'Send in the Clowns' or 'Somewhere' from 'West Side Story' – and even manage to unveil the evil Value-Mart elevator-ludeness of 'Memory' from Cats. BUT, only because you're ancient and in a last stop crematorium and I want to feel good about myself when laying my head down on the pillow tonight, tucked away nicely in a room that doesn't smell of Vicks Vapo Rub and regret, knowing I did something that was tough for me to get through. BUT, I'd have to go to the washroom immediately after and do my imitation of a back stage bulimic, as I feel I'd be awakening the merry-go-round of monkey-like-cholera, the carnival freak-show, the 'Wind-her-up-wind-bag play-for-peanuts' kind of schlock I pride myself on not partaking in. So you choose the program.

I admit I am a less dashing, less remarkable Fabulous (tf#21) Baker Boy. Yes, much like him. Them. I don't feel a need to change my attitude in that boyish department (the fitting rooms, left unattended far too long, now shabby, musty and distasteful beyond recognition.) That part of me is me. Misunderstood. Notorious. Black of spirit. Brooding. Munchy. Misanthropic. Irresponsible, often unaccountable. Fearful. Talented. Leary and well, all right, a little toxic. An epidemic unto myself? Maybe. Bruised. Misdirected. Inconsistent. Scattered. Unfathomably spontaneous. Unfocused. Fearful. Bereft of subtleties. Did I say Talented? Terminally Lonely. Terminally unique? Troubled. At the end of the day, when I'm all sad and done, after a gross and overly magnified microscopic examining, coupled with an unhealthy cyclical and cynical courtship... with myself
I still end up with me,
    and so much of the time
        my best is still not good enough.

I need involvement in this Charlie Brown Universe. But look what happened to him, (tf#22) and just what type of project or production am I supposed to throw myself into anyway? Most of the times I've applied and made the commitment, I end up wishing I hadn't left my bed in the first place. Aren't we all just much taller, hairier versions of the babies we once began this as, just with an unexpected amount of shoe laces to tie and forms to fill out? And even now, concerned with just who's going to baby-sit me and 'What kind of pretty' she'll be. Not really, but kind of, at times.

"Yes, well, I certainly apologize for him. I'm sure he didn't mean anything by it. And yes, he does need a shave and a haircut. I tell him all the time!"

Mom is on the phone to the retirement home supervisor making excuses for my less than interactions and, well, inability to perform properly. It's immediately following my show (magic tricks with flaming whiskey bottles, seniors underpants and soiled rabbit mascots), and standing there in Mom's orderly kitchen, everything in its place - me too - I imagine nurses and staff fielding questions from the mostly embalmed stony-faced group, "Just how might one go about making a proper noose from a shower curtain?, a formaldehyde and rum cooler and "Can we die now?" But then, maybe that's just me.

Clearly I should mosey on over there in a few days and give it another shot.

*

I still can't get any kind of sleep pattern happening here, so I end up going over everything I've ever done, and beating myself mentally into submission. The drug dreams most nights kick me harder than when it was all going down, feel more real than when it was actually happening. And I still can't control how I'm getting cut up. I scream into my pillow like I'm suffocating underwater, it's just how I say my prayers: the embarrassing regretful moves, the grizzly before and after-math's, the gut wrenching disharmony, my unsuccessful 'Geographics' and who, if anyone, was along for the ride, where they might be today...those nights I've drunk so much coffee, swallowed so much candy, trying, as if tomorrow was the last day of my life. So much, I recall, that my face bled, just trying to tap into something that is really there or that I'm making up.

And who cares anyway; sometimes there's nothing to do except put pen to keyboard.

Those w o r s e   a n d   w e i r d e r   times, like last year out west, when my partner in crime, Jenny, peace be with her, had to revive me from the ultimate sleep, as she says I was way, way, past blue. She was frantic over all that.

I couldn't have been  c a l m e r .

There were a couple times in her apartment, she told me, after awakening from the dead, apparently, how I had just gone out, how she turned around from sewing a dress or something, and minutes had gone by and I was just lying there, blitzed, past my prime, and sprawled out grinning. I can't imagine what I must have looked like. I used to get so excited about going out and scoring for us. It made my day, if you want to know the truth. And you want to know what's crazier? Thinking that I could have accomplished anything during those months. Thinking I could have meant anything to anybody that cared about me, past just praying for me. I told everyone I knew just what I was doing. I was on self-destruct-mode and even I didn't even want to be around me, but you can't see that kind of stuff when you're glossed over, shiny and self-important. I still have my rationales and justifiers and they tell me it wasn't that bad. But it got bad. Rationalizations and Justifications, a lot like masturbation... screwing yourself every time. And just as lonely and obscene.

Sometimes when I pray, she, her image, the thought of her, comes up, presumably because she's the most desperate and unsatisfied person I've ever met. A dancing crystal corpse who inexplicably sunk into me. On stranger days, I'd watch Jennifer rehearse her deathly pirouettes, while menacingly high, her reasons for killing herself so continually, I never got let in on. She'd had opportunity and people who loved her: we sometimes get spoiled and irreparable inside, and arrive unwillingly at places we can never come back from. Anyway, I just hope she's managed to stay alive through her stories since I saw her last. I should go and try and find her. There's a lot of people I should go and find after this is over.

I'm overwhelmed as there's too much to read, to research, all endless. There's apologies to make, letters to write and send, tapes to make and mail, excuses I don't want to own. There are pictures to sift through, maybe some to mail out, old girlfriends to look up, maybe they still give a damn. So much wasted love, who's to say if there's any healthy light left, any sort of blazing effulgence still on the planet, a luminescence that could amaze us all and take the shape of a positive glow. In all this, I've taken myself sorely for granted, and am losing all the best places that were once inside me, finding it tougher and tougher to tap into anything I, at one time, could always count on, could always come up for air... but

now, in the jarring bell, unable to get any of these damn things to chime the way I'd like.

There's nothing worse than a drug addict, except maybe a reformed drug addict. Your old friends most likely will be fearful of somehow setting you off, and will always identify you with self-destruction, hysterically repetitive plans for the condemned. And don't even talk to me about the trust factor. New people who break on to the scene, once they find out, are going to see you some distorted way, so everybody's going to get uncomfortable. That being said, any suggestions?

Because I'm all out of ideas.

*

"You are the most wasteful boy."

She's been through her own convoluted hell which I probably couldn't understand if I tried, (which I can't). But as she is my only Mother, I must love her regardless; so whatever she wants, however twisted, however profoundly bizarre, we'll all try and comply. What works for her, and the world she's made - this, a most revolting confusion staring at her daily now. Why not just take part in the attempt to make her happy?

Oh yeah, now I remember: because it's never quite right and there's always something else. I forgot.

________________________________________________________________

tf#21: not to be confused with that reptilian copycat note-taker, Stephen Glass, who wrote "The Fabulist." What a flagrant-Lieutenant-phoney-pants he turned out to be.

tf#22: Mr. Brown ended up a toothless but soulful singer in the inner city of Chicago area. Often I'd see him with his booze-hound-buddies huddled around a crackling flame from a garbage can. Still with that yellow and black squiggly shirt, holding on to the past through nauseating sweater sets, the metallic hypnotic stench of rock cocaine in the air, the oversized head, disfigured genetalia and Irritable Bowl Syndrome all led, understandably, to an irritating sulky disposition keeping him from the love and acceptance he so sorely sought through his more animated youth. We must take action if we are to change patterns.

*