The Layoff

And so I was hurled into the shitcan, seeing briefly my parabola recreated in the chrome lid before it raised like a respectful cap to admit me into the cozy darkness of unemployment.

Waiting too Long to Eat

When you are hypoglycemic, waiting too long to eat is a form of intoxication. Both the experience of reality's gentle recession into that gray tunnel and its vivid happy return as you finally tackle your meal.
Perhaps you are in a meeting, putting in your oar, throwing in your tuppence, all the while in a certain corner of your mind you are perhaps dreaming of a certain tupperware containing a chilled salad -- of course you don't bring your lunch to work, that is too much trouble, but tupperware and tuppence must be thematically connected in your mind and you wrestle with this absurd problem while the conversation before you fades into the background. You take idiotic pleasure in batting away the balloons of hunger while solving impossible puzzles. You remember there is a latin phrase for "one of a kind" or perhaps "in a class of its own" but you cannot recall it. You begin to devise tricks and traps via which you can tease it away from your miserly brain. All the time you are conscious that most of your personality has left your control, and that at any moment you might say or do something absurd, or worse. You remember two incidents which fill you with delicious fear: once in a meeting you heard that a certain manager named Deborah was going to attend a meeting in the third-largest city in Texas and these elements fit into the title of famous pornographic film and despite yourself you uttered that title, were immediately suffused with terror, but nobody had noticed. And further back, in your schoolboy days, when you had missed lunch for some reason and then torn the top from your desk in a blood-sugar blackout and come awake under a ring of laughing faces, your hands held like claws before you.
That all of this madness, this tragedy, this grandeur, could be resolved with a baloney sandwich seems the best joke of all. And so you put that lunch off just a little bit longer...

SSRIs

I took SSRIs etc for a while. I never liked the side effects particularly that cottony sensation in the groin which no amount of stimulus could overcome, but I took them...
Goodness, I was a strapping young alcoholic back then and I cranked and flailed to the very limit of my strength but nothing resulted and I would be left starting down at that crimson cyclops, my own miniature Bartleby who despite the immense pressures I had brought to bear would still prefer not to.

Bernard's Problem

And now, as I a prepare to disrobe, I should return to an idea at which I hinted long ago; this malformation of my forelimbs, the twisted musculature of my forearms, had another significant effect on my development. As it was nearly impossible for me to grip anything tightly for more than a few seconds, as I was unable to sustain any task that required digital manipulation, I had always been frustrated in my attempts at self-pleasure and in consequence my penis, which is after all a muscle, suffered from arrested development. When the rest of the boys were putting their male organs through vigorous nightly workouts my penis lay there unmolested, pressing with timid, tremulous sensitivity into the sheets, seeking blindly someone to thrash and cuff it into a hot plash of surrender. I won’t go into the various ways I tried to pleasure myself. Some were quite ingenious. Fruits, bottles, lengths of hose, an electric motor from a belt sander, all of these and more were employed in my quest. I was occasionally successful, but the preparations were complex and I was in constant danger of discovery as all my methods involved the noisome and frantic thrusting of the hips into some stationary object. I walked through my days plagued by a double consciousness; on the one hand there was ordinary life with its breakfasts, lunches, classroom bells, homework, and so on. On the other, there was this constant sense of penile retardation. I fantasized about some insatiable whore who would put my member through intensive remediation with her quick hot hands. I cast jealous glances at the generous portions of hairy meat which my classmates spilled out before the urinals. Whereas their young, slack monsters twitched and spat at the gridded drain near the floor my alabaster nubbin, the size and tensility of a door stopper, fired its steam at a right angle to my body where it exploded against the ceramic; a shower of rebounding droplets tickled my hand (whose involvement was purely decorative) and wet my trousers.
I sometimes dreamed that my brainwaves could mash together a golem who would take me in her clayey clutches and grind me into orgasmic death. I pressed myself against telephone poles, the cool metal of hallway lockers, the rug on my bedroom floor. If longing, if absolute fixation, could bring some event into reality, then I would have been rescued by some quick-fingered angel, and, as life with its zest for a good joke will do, I was presented with what appeared to be this very deliverance. I was in the 10th grade. Standing outside a Taco Bell, waiting for mother to finish her meal – she’d developed an obsession with chalupas – when a sky-blue Buick Regal pulled up next to me, its engine chuffing, and a tinted window disclosed two middle-aged women in a haze of incense and alcohol fumes. They were still eating; the passenger was attempting to bring a stray shred of lettuce into her mouth. The driver asked me if I liked to “scrump” and when I began to stutter she laughed and told me to get into the car. My scalp prickled with terror and joy. I looked around, determined that my mother was still absorbed in her meal, and then dove into the leatherette backseat. I was given a wine cooler. Then the passenger, a big woman with long frosted ringlets, turned to look at me. She wiped her flat, purple mouth with the back of her hand and then, with a voluptuous sigh, thrust a stippled leg over the seat. In another moment she was on top of me.
“Do you like to scrump?” she said.
I could only nod my head. I am afraid my excitement got the best of me and I was finished almost before she started. This development prompted an explosion of ribald laughter inside that parked, smoky car. I feared that I would be put out. I begged for another chance and the woman, with a kindly, gap-toothed smile, shrugged and, after wiping herself with a Taco Bell napkin, remounted. The ladies – my date’s name was Roberta Brennan and her friend was Jolene Mattheson – declared themselves impressed at my stamina and said that very few men or boys could have managed to do that three times in less than ten minutes. I begged them to meet me again here at the Taco Bell or anywhere, I begged them to give me their phone numbers before they put me out of the car and Roberta finally relented with an indulgent smile, saying that she could meet me here in a week, same time. I came back for three months, rain or shine. I waited, but they that Buick Regal never returned. Even now when I see that model rolling down the street a hand squeezes my heart.

Sun and Shade

He started that screaming again, that nonsensical bawling which at first always makes me want to laugh, simply because the situation is as hopeless as it is absurd. Whatever I ask him to do, he wants to to the opposite:

Do you want to watch watch television.
No, I want to go to school!
Okay let's go to school.
No, no no! I want to watch television!

That last line delivered at an ear-shredding pitch and volume, his body twitching and flopping on his beanbag like an enraged pupa, his features already screwed into an expression of truculence, easy tears standing ready to burst forth in the inevitable next phase of escalation.

So I was driving him to daycare and he was screaming lustily over a series of outrages I'd visited upon him (putting on shoes, getting into the car, buckling the child restraints), soaring into new realms of keening aggravation, when I suddenly stopped the car and, turning to grasp his chin, said,

If you cry like a baby I'm going to treat you like a baby.

I won't pretend it was a great rejoinder on my part. But his screaming often leaves me so agitated that I'll talk complete nonsense, so this was practically a masterpiece of clarity. At least it had some bearing on the situation. And once I'd turned around the shrieks of anger turned to long, lusty wails of desolation, his mouth in the rearview mirror forming a plaintive rectangle, the lower lip outthrust and trembling, cascades of gem-like tears racing down those flushed cheeks. He wanted mommy now. Mommy, mommy, mommy.

Mommy. Is. At. Work, I said.

We turned onto the main road, out of our neighborhood. The marshes nearby gave the air a heavy sulfurous taste and the insects chittered in the grass. The sun, squashed against the horizon, glared at us between the long shadows of the trees and houses. The car was quiet. My son sniffled in this backseat, his little chest puffing and deflating in a long sigh. I reached back my hand and put it on his leg. He looked down, then looked away. I patted his knee a few times, then turned my palm upward. After a moment I felt his little hand slip into mine, and we drove that way, holding hands. We played a game where, when we rolled into sunlight, we said, "sun" and when the shadows fell across the road again we said, "shade." And that's how it is with him. Sun and shade. But that's love I guess.

Song List for Hot Slow Heartbreak

Lonesome Tonight, New Order
Different for Girls, Joe Jackson
Turquoise Boy, Sonic Youth
Sway, Rolling Stones
Lifeline, Doves
Digging in the Dirt, Gabriel
Life is Long, Byrne
A Case of You, Joni Mitchell
Beautiful World, Colin Hay
I'll Be Your Mirror, Velvet Underground
Throwing It All Away, Genesis

The Crushing Heat

I would write about the heat but I can't remember it. I think it has scrambled my brain. I was just outside lobbing the wiffle to my son and it seemed to hover and swoon in the soupy air. His red bat whooshed around at what seemed like a fairly decent clip but I was only able to put this together in retrospect. At the time it seemed as if the ball left my hand, I experienced the heat in a timeless thoughtless vacuum, and then I was congratulating my son (my voice sounding just as it does on tape, the tone harsh and the enunciation marked by the timid sloppiness of a tongue-chewer. As if somehow these words were exiting my head without vibrating the bones of my skull) and chasing after the ball as it ticked down the asphalt.

The sun grappled and grabbed, it pulled me out of the shadows and into another senseless struggle, it crept slowly around corners and had at me all over again. I felt my only hope was to outlast it, to let the turning of the earth's mighty shoulders wrest me from its grasp, but by then it might be too late.

And after lunch I'd read, while lying on the sofa in the study, about some artist whose name I can no longer remember who created works of such ludicrous uselessness that I wanted to laugh out loud, his concepts being the sorts of ideas that a thousand gutter punks in a thousand crumbling industrial towns holding in a thousand bong hits in two thousand lungs have uttered with in fits of glassy inspiration. And as I dozed I was conscious of this huge pulsating day holding the house in its golden grip. And I thought that there was no way I would ever be an artist. Because I lacked this man's courage, the courage to bring these horrible concepts to light, the courage to stand by my abominations with such firmness and conviction that others began to believe, too. And in the end the only ones still laughing where the sweaty and heat-addled dilettantes, twitching on old sofas.

After I woke I went to the park where I threw tennis balls to my son and he hit them with an old racket of mine, broken in a fit of anger but still serviceable. The sun had turned the tennis court into a lightless sun, radiating heavy heat up through the soles of my shoes, up the blooming legs of my shorts, into my nostrils. Drops of sweat leaped from my body as if from a burning building. And my son shouted and hit the tennis balls with a dull ping. He was fine.

I went to buy sunglasses at the surf shop but was so stunned from the heat that I fell into the clerk and we did a clumsy dance in the narrow aisle. He was a local surfer -- quite good, I knew him from the lineup, and I did not know how to apologize, so I asked him if he'd been out recently, and we had a conversation which I not only don't remember now, but in which I only barely participated at the time. Someone shouted "gangster rap alert" and the clerk/surfer ran to the counter to turn down a song in which, I now realized, someone had been describing a profane episode involving massive gonads, anal sex, the final stages of turning a girl out. Two young towheaded children stood at the counter, staring up at the speakers with awed expressions. The store was cool and the racks of t-shirts and wetsuits looked so crisp and colorful that I thought I might stay a while. I sat on the wooden steps leading up to the board showroom and waited. With heat like this, there was no reason to hurry.

And Then Comes the Longing and Regret

Take me out tonight
Oh, take me anywhere, I don't care
I don't care, I don't care
Driving in your car
I never never want to go home
Because I haven't got one, da ...
Oh, I haven't got one

And if a double-decker bus
Crashes into us
To die by your side
Is such a heavenly way to die
And if a ten-ton truck
Kills the both of us
To die by your side
Well, the pleasure - the privilege is mine

Oh, There Is A Light And It Never Goes Out

Up Early

The anklebones as I lay them on the floor crack like old branches. The belt buckle cling-a-lings. The house is dark, the ventilation system laboring in its sleep. I drink some water. Urinate in the darkness, seated, wiping my slack face. I drink some water, I sit down at the desk. I hope that the muse will reward me today. Just today.

It has been a struggle lately: missing data, fatigue, ennui, spasms of depression and rage, minor plagues visited upon me from within and without. Dreams of boils, of endless staircases, of vast logical problems designed not to yield a solution but to paralyze the brain, of glasses with drooping stems that hang from the face like overcooked spaghetti. Disease bubbling up from some vast reservoir within me. Well, I suppose I will work it all out on the page. I will push on. I refuse to be cowed by these guardians. If my understanding of mythology is correct I am on the verge of a breakthrough.

Data Separation Anxiety

I lost my data over the weekend, all of it. The various devices failed in succession, like one of those devastating combination blows that one sees on martial arts movies, one of those miracles of timing and choreography,the baddie in perfect position to receive, the hero sweating, bloody, swollen, but calling on his superior inner resources, calling on memories of his loved ones, living and dead, and in this way reaffirming even in close combat the idea of man as a social animal as he strikes home with a back fist to the sneering cheek, a wind-stealing hook to the gut, straight kick to the chest that sends the baddie groaning with sullen resignation, popeyed, through the bamboo walls of the pagoda and into fern-tickled unconsciousness.

First my laptop failed, and my calm, masterful retrieval of ERD commander, my determination to grab my data and resume writing, was foiled by the dreaded BSOD. Ah so. No way to boot the laptop even from a bootable CD. No way to recover anything then. Perhaps my hard drive was bad. This was certainly indicated by my frantic internet searches. And I hadn't backed up in so long! I spent the evening researching different methods of remediation. None quite answered my situation. I called my company's tech support and talked very earnestly to a bored Indian fellow whose grunts of affirmation came at odd times, suggesting a game of Tetris or Breakout in the background. I googled over and over, tried various bootable CDs. Finally, feeling dejected and fearing the worst, I went to lie in bed. There I remembered that I'd saved not only the latest version of my novel but a story that I really really liked onto a USB flash drive. So, I told myself, in the morning you'll have that. You can start with that. It was something. A comfort. It helped assuage to some small degree my creeping dread of being data-less, of starting over from scratch. I have not managed in my life to accrue even modest wealth, but I have been a consistent generator and collector of data and it gives me great comfort to be surrounded by all this hand-selected information. Now it was all gone. But there was that flash drive!

The next morning I went downstairs very early and put the flash drive into the computer, intending to copy the data to my RAID 1 backup device. I was going to back everything up religiously, starting now. The USB drive failed. It simply failed. Nothing could be retrieved. It was a this point that I began to look around, incredulous, waiting to hear a divine chortle, or for the camera crews to come bursting in and get a close up shot of my despair and disbelief. I think I began to mutter to myself. I know I pulled my hair quite a lot, and that I walked around shaking my head. Two failures in 12 hours! Who would have thought it possible? If only I, like the kung-fu villain, could be relieved of this burdensome consciousness, if only I could lie insensate on the forest floor! But no, I went on living every moment, one after the other, I went on with my metaphysical, paranoid speculations as to why, how, to what purpose, this had befallen me.

Bernard

There is apparently some disagreement between my hosts and myself about the purpose of this narrative, and after considerable debate I have decided to leave the issue to the side for the moment. Whether or not I am some poor deranged lunatic or the wrongfully captured star of a prog-rock band -- I assign us to that genre because it is the least offensive to our intellectual sensibilities, although in truth we have been called punk, garage, grunge and dance, as well as, in a Rotterdam scene-zine, a Beatles tribute act -- whether our band is a critical darling on the rise, just signed to play a series of European dates in support of our masterpiece or just the figment of my imagination, I will leave to the side for the moment. Of course, I know the truth. Genius is judged (and judges) by its own standard. I know that Embully and Lora, Mike the drummer, are already in Brussels on holiday (Lora no doubt dragging Embully on a tour of local guilds, trying as always via her endless speechifying and gymnastic blowjobs to bend his music toward some social issue). They will be expecting me aboard a flight no later than next week, so I do have a few days to humor these good people, to demonstrate my perfect composure, my sanity and rationality.

However I think my readers will find it difficult to distinguish between the confessions of a madman and the compulsory episodes in a rock and roll biography; I know well these stories of triumph and tragedy, of white-hot talent meeting opportunity, of practice sessions and drunkenness, of blood-soaked voodoo rags, of drugged withdrawal from the world, of dangerous spirals, final triumph before an adoring crowd, the apotheosis of commercial and artistic success rendering moot all judgments moral and psychological. Oh, how I devoured these biographies as a child, perched on my mother's chaise lounge in the little parlor off her room, a swollen white bookworm gorging himself volume by pulpy volume. The Beatles, the Stones, Iggy Pop, Sex Pistols, Roxy Music, Bowie, Zappa, Zepplin, the Who (the account of Keith Moon driving his car into the pool of our local Holiday Inn was a turning point. The gods of fame and fortune had visited our little town! I felt a dizzying double consciousness take hold as I looked down from fame's divine dirigible, below which the world lay open like a feast, in which one was endlessly served with mind-expanding drugs and sex, in which the heavy riffs and crushing drums made golden eardrums ring like church bells, I looked down and saw silent moldering Flint pass below while simultaneously I looked up to see the stately shadow of my imagined future pass before the sun. These two worlds, corporeal Flint and the iridescent bubble of my dreams, were passing so close that I felt time and space might collapse. A few years later, during one of my darker episodes I would try to recapture that rapture via a pilgrimage to that fabled pool, but the hotel, adjacent a failed factory, had been turned into a Days Inn and the pool was infested with screaming children and inflatable animals wearing painted expressions of mindless joy.), I have read them all.

And so I have no fear of revealing my life in all its details, both savory and otherwise, for the surpassing brightness which I eventually produced will more than offset any mild pangs of revulsion one might experience on reading these pages. If a little madness appears here and there, well, I won't hold it back. A tincture of madness only serves to dignify the artistic struggle, to give it weight, to rescue if from parody, propaganda, and delusion. Madness lurks in the grand parade of every artist's story, it juggles with the clowns, it feeds peppercorns to the sneezing elephants, it slips onto the stately floats and gropes the sequined beauty queens, but it is ultimately harmless, a stranger with whose vortical orbits are revealed on closer inspection to be a pair of novelty glasses.

I will start then with Formative Experiences, those moments of early promise and portent, and will move then without undue hesitation through the account of the band's origins and our early struggles. When I am finished I will have told my truth. So I will write it. I will write it, fear not. Even this experience, potentially humiliating, I will turn to account! I will have this manuscript bound (featuring the band on the cover, shoulder to shoulder, lean colored silhouettes), I will bound onto Oprah's stage with the hardcover in my hand, it will become a minor classic and its composition under duress in a certain Central Florida psychiatric institution will become part of its legend and in turn part of the greater legend of my life, which will continue to unfold in an endless chain of trancendences. I am only molting, my white-coated friends. I cannot be long restrained by your narrow attention to certain inconsistencies in my memory. Any moment I may shed this heavy skin and take to the sky. Do not be surprised to wake and find me gone, vanished, leaving behind only a faint sensation of melody and light.

Mine was not a typical childhood (but ours was not a typical band – as the reader will soon see). I was not poor although at regular intervals my father would be so overcome with self-loathing over having married money that he would be unable to sleep and could drink only cold coffee from a mug etched with a green spark plug. During these intervals he pored frantically over the biographies of military and business leaders and was excessively grim and gaunt. At dinnertime he would stand at the kitchen table, scapulae projecting through his suit coat, and subject mother and I to windy discourses on Order and Ethics while his mind cautiously revolved about, and sporadically illuminated, his utopian plan for a Culture of Accountability. It was important for every man and woman to find their Purpose, he said. They must heed their Calling. The must make their Mark. My mother listened with bright encouraging nods and wags, accompanying father’s most vehement outbursts with a few hummed bars of a Beatles song. Eventually father would exhaust himself and go haggard and miserable, his mania for order unsatisfied, to bed.

These episodes always culminated in some spectacular feat of austerity on my father’s part (cutting down every tree on our property, a four hundred page letter to the editor of the Flint Journal, a dehydrated collapse at the local police station) and the pedagogic imposition of manual labors upon my easeful childhood. Ergo, when I was in the fifth grade I found myself helping one Richie Moore, son of a company foreman, deliver newspapers. Richie had a sensitive face under a mop of russet hair and his couch-potato thighs were perpetually encased in designer denim. Prior to embarking on our route, we folded and rubber-banded the papers on the sunset shag of his living room floor. The console television was always tuned to MTV. After a few weeks in the Moore milieu my brain was a-whirl with the eyeliner whining of Duran Duran and my hands stained with news ink.

These manual labors were a terrible strain. I suffered from a certain mechanical defect that had driven me on occasion to near madness, and which turned any physical task into a labor of hercules. Now, the defect I am about to reveal is by no means the only flaw in my physique but it stands as the cornerstone of my suffering, it brought into being directly or indirectly all my other maladies and shortcomings. My forearms are excessively short. They are excessively short, these forearms. It is a structural defect passed down from my mother's side of the family, something carried over from snowy and gray-green Scandinavia, and it was only my ancestors' compensatory talent for acquiring and managing money that kept our line from dying out. The dwarven radial, the stubby ulna, these prevent one's musculature from forming correctly and so make it nearly impossible to sustain any task that involves gripping or manipulating. Farming, building, and fishing were all out of the question. Anything that involves what was once called “close work”, that is, any sustained digital manipulation, was impossible. Computer or piano keys, guitar strings, the three coquettish valves atop a trumpet, these mocked me, they lured me into worlds of pain and despair. Oh, I tried! You can only imagine how I tried, how I wrestled like a young lunatic with my toy pianos and xylophones, how I gripped and banged and howled, my toddler's head thrown back in outrage, the clotted muscles below my wrists twitching and cramping. Anyone who has ever struggled with a handicap knows that acceptance comes not all at once but results from the gradual accretion of failure in the mind. And yet, despite all the evidence, some part of one's brain goes on believing in a solution, one is constantly lured into ambushes of ineptitude and frustration. I could list here an endless procession of such moments, an massive collage of Bernard massaging his poor brachioradialis, recoiling from the jumprope, the belt sander, the breakfast spoon, as if from a hot flame. I could show you the present scene, where as I type this narrative I pause every few minutes to rest the flippers, contemplating that therapeutic plume of pressurized water that hovers above the stagnant pond outside.

In addition to the immediate complications which my membership in this short-armed and long-shinned tribe introduced, there were more subtle and more harmful effects which only revealed themselves in my teens, but I will have more to say on that later. For now picture me, a young boy, white and doughy from my sedentary and sportless life, conscious of my body, carrying about my father's opinion of me as a shirker, struggling against my own knotted forearms, my long and ironically elegant hands aching with each twist of the rubber band.

Richie and his family noticed nothing of this, and I betrayed nothing. I planned to do my time in this clapboard gulag and leave it behind me for good, however, as I represented the death of their American dreamlet, Richie’s family attempted to secure my goodwill via endless offers of Twinkies and bottles of Faygo cola on the presumption that all boys were keen, like Richie, to drive themselves to the brink of diabetes. Although I politely demurred, I was touched by their solicitude and I did fall half in love with that hot, cluttered house. Here there was no pressure to perform, no standard of excellence casting its shadows over one's hours. It was a carnival of kitsch in all its manifestations, torrents of schmaltz poured from televisions, pap oozed from radios, confections tumbled from the cupboards, and Riche’s father smoked voluminously, tamping his cigarettes into a little beanbag ashtray. These lurid stimuli glowed in my body while Ideas, nascent and malformed, flared and died in my brain. I felt emboldened in that house, possessed of vague powers. When I told Richie’s sister I was going to be a famous musician, that I was going to create works of nearly impossible difficulty and unutterable complexity, she laughed and rolled her eyes, biting back what was surely a scathing put-down for the sake of her father’s job. Later, however, as I was staggering under the weight of those accursed newspapers, she offered to help me raise my leg over the crossbar of my bicycle and in the process slipped a hand into my crotch where she gave my tender tripartite genitalia a bawdy squeeze.

When did I first know music as my destiny? Even I, with my prodigious mental powers, find it difficult to trace the thread of causality back to its origin; my cortices groan under the load of arranging in logical order the data which memory scatters though the electromagnetic wasteland of the brain, but perhaps it was always there, always within me, wired directly into the motherboard of my Bernardity.

Another Dream

This time I was in a hotel and knew the girl was in the hotel also, ten floors below me. Rides in the elevators and loiters in the lobby revealed her presence; she was coincidentally in the same areas at the same times as myself however we were forbidden to talk, and moreover I believed that she enjoyed and wanted to perpetuate this painful silence between us.

She was undergoing metamorphosis. Her eyes became tear shaped and deeply purple and her hair, which was brown and naturally curly, grew gloss-black and straight. She reformed along taller and leaner lines, her bodily contours so elastic and swaying as to suggest that she'd dispensed with her skeleton altogether. She had an air of obscure glamour; a kind of elegance that inspired intense desire and fear. Her outfits were made of silk, hovering in that twilight area between mint and beige and gray, adhering to her contours and then fading imperceptibly away to reveal long stretches of close-knit flesh.

I went to my room and resolved not to come out until she'd gone. Dream-time weighed heavily on my hands and I went mad after only few seconds' interment in that tiny plastered room. Sweating, anguished, I crawled through my doorway (contracting into nothingness) and rode down to her floor. The elevator opened on a vast plateau of glass and brass, long staircases leading to glass rooms through which one could see endless diminishing repetitions of this motif. There were vivid ferns and white furs. There were sudden cascades of warm water that ran down staircases to plunge in a white, foaming pool that underlay this terrain of cabled platforms. Her rooms were the last word, fulfilling the wildest dreams of 70's opulence. She appeared before me, at the towering window, wearing a formless shift made of that chromatically unstable fabric. On her wrist was a silver bracelet whose lines were interrupted by a metallic swelling which, when inspected, revealed a tiny holographic image of a clock. This was her way of telling me that it was too late. She had grown a dusting of fine golden hair which lay in sweeps and whorls against her skin. I turned around and began my search for the elevator, terrified lest I fall into that white boil below where, I somehow knew, she was floating at her ease.

Charming Domestic Scene: Electric Boundary

After six days of torrential rain the sun appeared yesterday, haltingly at first, peeping from behind long triangular wedges of gray and lapis which, sliding atop one another in a rapid shuffling motion, defeated the eye's attempt to find the sky. As the day wore on however sun's wan wan disc which lay so deeply ensconced began to blaze in patches of watery blue, and then the clouds, streaming up from the south, separated into long cottony furrows and the sun once again held sway.
I took the son to the beach and let him watch the surfers dropping into the big abrupt sections of gray glass. He climbed on the porous, encrusted rocks near the dunes, his little trouser seat wet with the seawater that had collected in their dents and pores. The sand was suddenly swarmed with tourists aggressively pursuing their long-delayed leisure, smearing one another with sun screen, throwing frisbees and balls, hurling their blubber into the molesting waves. My son grew bored, so we went to the the park, a shady, tree-sheltered place with tennis courts, basketball courts, swings, and slides. A pair of homeless men sat on the slides, absorbed in some earnest debate, their faithful bicycles wilting and dreaming against a nearby tree. Occasionally the men would pass a cup between them, savoring its contents, licking their lips, and under the heady influence of this elixir allowing their ragged voices to rise in passionate declaration. Then their summit was interrupted by my son's recreational shrieks and, with stares of blank disgust, they slowly dismounted the swings and wobbled off on their bicycles, leaving crinkling wrappers, empty cups, and a grimy cloth bundle on the swing set, a last memento of their debate. The anti-native Americans. Managing on every occasion, by dint of inculturation and ingenuity to produce some bit of trash. I wondered what it said about our society that even the lowest layer in our social strata pursued the production of waste with the same eagerness as the rest of us?

After my son went down for a nap I decided to bury the dog's electric wire. It is a simple but ingenious device consisting of a central transmitter into which a loop of wire is plugged and a collar which, encountering the radio signal sent along this loop of wire, will chirp in warning and then deliver an electrical shock from two metal posts. The dog, beside herself over the wildlife that had been evidencing in the wake of the rains, had already broken free twice and was hardly comporting herself with the dignity one might expect from a 10 year-old grand dame. Putting out the wire itself is no great trouble; it's getting the wire underground for the entire circumference of the yard that can be laborious and problematic. I drew a simple schematic, a simple plan describing the path the wire would take, and then it was time to get to work digging the two-inch trench into which the wire would go. I positioned my old, flat-bladed shovel against the sodden earth and pressed down with my foot. Nothing. I jumped a bit. Nothing. I jumped higher, landing violently on the top of the shovel, and was rewarded with the loud crunch of root. I'd forgotten that Florida grass is one big tangle of runners. Digging through this layer was like digging through a woven welcome mat. It would take one big push at a time, one shovel blade at a time. Two hours later, panting and dizzy, I was done with the trench. Then, crouching and sidling, I shoved the wire with my fingertips into the warm body of the earth, one small section at a time. When my legs gave out I would sit panting in the grass, watching the clouds slide and twist above me. I thought that if I worked hard enough I would get some peace, both within and without. I thought that if I could finish this task and demonstrate the working barrier to the dog, things would get better.

Charming Domestic Scene Regarding Aldous Huxley

Was recently complaining of no book to read, and so was given Point Counterpoint by Aldous Huxley. Hadn't read much by Huxley, like every other college student I'd devoured Brave New World and his essay on Perception, but I did recall a few years ago I'd picked up a volume of his short stories at a library sale and been appalled by their shoddy construction and pedestrian characterization.
Still, I had opened my mouth, and here was this book in my hands. So, I launched myself into Huxleyland, my spirits buoyed by a dust jacket that proclaimed it a "Modern Masterpiece by Modern Master", or something to that effect.
Imagine my dismay to discover that Huxley the prose stylist was even worse that I'd suspected, the worst sort of pedant! Here was an essayist trying to write fiction, which inspires in me the same sort of dread one might experience watching a nurse perform open-heart surgery. He blunders about, writing everything that comes to mind in hopes of hitting on a good image or simile. And he occasionally makes contact, but of course by then you're too exhausted to care. Just one example, and I won't get this exactly right, but paraphrasation will (trust me) suffice: An old laboratorious gentleman pauses amidst his beakers to capture a faint melody, identifying it as Bach, charmed, transfixed. And there's a passage preceding the precious groaner (which still I withhold), something about the melody tracing itself on the air, which is nice enough, but then Huxley follows with, "The hairs in the old man's auditory canal were washed about like seaweed in a heavy sea."

That's all I have to say. I rest my case. Anyway, suffice it to say I was not making very good progress on Huxley's opus, and it was suggested by the good lady who gave me the book that I found it distasteful only because it had been her suggestion. To which I replied (and humor me, poor reader, as I so rarely get the good lines, as I so rarely get the zinger): "I don't like it because it's a bad book."

One thing I didn't mention: Mrs. Dalloway (a masterpiece) was published in 1925. Huxley's book came out in 1928. Did Huxley (oh did you, Aldous?) get swept away by Woolf's genius? Did he fall prey to the anxiety of influence? I must know the reason for this book's grand ambition and monumental badness. It shows every sign of loving care, of immense devotion and grinding toil, all details lovingly rendered. This is not a careless book, just a horribly misguided one. How did it come about?

The Lighthouse

Recently changed the son's daycare to a place less than eight minutes away, a cute little place on the island that pops hopefully out from the backside of a curve and is denoted by sign upon which a smiling orange fish is followed by five multicolored minnows. It's a brand-new daycare run by two sisters and maintained by their vigorous retiree father who can always be found with some implement of mechanical remediation in his hand. The old man greets my son in the morning wearing the same forest-green polo shirt and wire spectacles, his gray curls in a state of dishevelment which he occasionally tries to address by dragging his palm across his forehead. He has the charming tendency, peculiar to certain grandfatherly types, of beaming with incredulous approval as my son hangs up his backpack and removes (with a wrench and a grunt) his shoes. The old man would clearly trade his wrenches and brooms for a chance to play games with the children, and conflict between duty and dalliance always leaves him a bit confused.
The two daughters, Masters of Education or Masters of Development (although I see the diplomas on their office wall every day I can never remember later the exact contents --the ornate font and the sunburst seal defeat my comprehension), are dismissive of "pop" and through the careful control of tone and glance direct him back to his list of chores before he gets himself invited to playtime.
The last week it has rained every day from sunrise to sundown and then on into the darkness, the quality of the precipitation ranging from prim gray slants to monsters of moisture that tried the windows with spongy hands.
I often ask my son, as we are driving to school, when he can see the lighthouse. At a certain stage in our journey it becomes visible over the treetops, and in response to my query he rocks in his child seat, craning his neck, struggling to see past the automotive obstructions. When he sights the lighthouse he is very proud. I then ask him what color is the lighthouse? And for the first sunny week he always responded the same way: "It's white and black and red."
This was true: white and black spirals running up its length, a red metal cap. However, when I asked him the same questions on a recent rainy trip, he (after the obligatory craning and rocking) said, "It's brown and gray and orange."
And so it was! Behind those gauzy curtains of rain, its stark coloration transmuted, the lighthouse screwed into the sky above the vivid foliage of the park. And then, as we rounded the turn that would bring Jonathan's daycare into our view, a trick of perspective made the lighthouse withdraw smoothly back into the treetops, as if it had never existed.
Sometimes just for a moment or two I imagine that I can see the world through my son's eyes -- massive, magical, infinite in power and promise.

Brett Settle

I like this name. It sounds like a coin spinning to a stop.

The Dream

A simple enough dream, really. Nothing too outrageous or illogical about the plot, this dream did not demand the extreme credulity of some (I am a fish, time is strapped to a spacial axis, powdered donuts with pulses and tender feelings), but played out in smooth, logical fashion: I was a member of the Detroit Red Wings whose success on the ice was matched only by my failures in my personal life. I was in love with a woman who, tiring of my inability to make commitments or decisions, had ceased to love me. Each time I went over the boards for my shift, the heavy syrup of this romantic disaster sloshed about in my limbs, gumming my movements. My skate blades hacked at the ice (the dull sound curiously isolated) to little effect, the hockey equivalent of dream-quicksand, as I tried to join the action.

Then, I woke. I think my son cried out from the other room. I'm not sure. Two cats were fighting in the street below me, and to my disoriented brain these sounds registered as police sirens, a party, a woman in prolonged ecstasy, a baby crying. I got up and paced, then came back to bed.

When the dream resumed the woman I had loved and lost was sitting in the stands, eating popcorn. I went over the boards and, stealing the puck at the blue line, glided in on short breakaway. I went high, the shot practically vertical and finding the top of the net just inside the post. The crowd went wild. My heart hammered in my chest as I scanned the roaring arena, looking for her, but she was gone.

Holy Working Man

Work van. Through the back windows one could see steel shelves loaded with various tubes and small gray motors. Spools of wire hung from hooks on the ceiling. Grizzled driver, paisley bandanna swaddling skull, sunrise illuminating the filamentary hairs that stood out evenly from his bare shoulders to his forearms. As he stopped at a red light the driver turned on the radio, then reached down and retrieved a bowl of cereal. Three quick spoonfuls, his rose-red ears flexing with each chomp, his head nodding to some song on the radio. The light turned green, the bowl was replaced with a last reluctant glance, and the van lurched forward, switching lanes so quickly that its payload wobbled and rolled, and then it shot forward with a carburetive hiss and was soon out of sight.
I thought to myself, "that man is having a good day."

In the Cabin

In that cabin of shellacked log, with Mary Jane Masters quivering below me, a certain diminutive glazed forelimb which had been heretofore camouflaged against those piney walls suddenly revealed itself as the missile of my ecstatic lust.

Katie

Oh, Katie, Katie. She of the baggy sweatshirts upon which Mickey Mouse danced, from which the airbrushed faces of her cats regarded the world with crosseyed suspicion, she of the pixie haircut and the practical sneakers with the thick soles, she of the pink doilies on her end tables, of the printed pajama bottoms which she wore tucked into her snow boots. Katie who meekly awaited her unalterable destiny. Her pinkness, her dewy eyes, her malleable limbs were all captivating but from the first Claude was aware of her haphazard construction, he had read in her lineaments the chain-smoking crone who yanked slot handles while rubbing, for luck, a picture of two grimy grandchildren, who crowded her house with collectible figurines. Katie’s shift from youth to old age would be practically instantaneous, dictated by genetics and the insalubrious lifestyle of her social class. However (Claude raised a mental and actual forefinger) she had the makings of a good mother.

Hall and Oates

We went to see Hall and Oates play the Saint Augustine Amphitheater this weekend. Before the show we had a quick dinner at a local restaurant that had moved all its tables outside to accommodate a small indie show.The fans were hanging about outside, waiting for the band to finish setting up, and were easily identified by their penchant for black and the orderly rows of small tattoos marching into their sleeves. They talked earnestly amongst themselves, snapped pictures with cell phones, and sometimes hopped up and down in place, their chain wallets jingling, their straw fedoras unsettled on their heads. A tremendously thin young man with black glasses and a mop of sandy curls held up a cardboard sign that proclaimed his need for a ticket. Later, possibly trying to carry of some subterfuge, he entered the queue only to be unceremoniously ejected when he reached the reception table that had been set up just outside the restaurant.

My wife and I ate our sensible dinner and felt very old.

We parked a few blocks away from the amphitheater and joined the rest of the crowd walking through the falling darkness. Ahead of me a was a gentleman wearing black pants pegged at the ankles, a mustard yellow shirt, his hair slicked with gel, his fingers smoothing a black John Oates-esque mustache. The crowd was a bewildering cross-section; gone was the stylistic uniformity of the indie show. Young louts in Slayer t-shirts mingled with mature ladies in nautical jerseys. Alcohol was carried and camouflaged in every possible fashion. One gentleman carried his beer bottle inside a sheaf of papers, raising the entire structure to his mouth when he took a drink.

Our seats were center right, perhaps 50 feet from the stage. Next to us was a group of Australian couples in their mid-40s. The ladies were dressed in a vague yachting style, with sweaters tied around necks, white pants, and boat shoes. They shrieked and waved their arms while the men, all sitting together, drained their beers without undue exertion. Then the crowd roared and the band came onstage.

Daryl Hall wore jeans, a black t-shirt, a leather coat, and sunglasses. John Oates work a snug jersey and a pair of black jeans. Gone was the signature mustache. They took their places on two stools while the rest of the band filed in. The saxophone player wore lavender suit, his long gray hair falling back over his shoulders in a ragged cascade. A percussionist in a short-sleeved turtleneck and dress pants picked up a pair of maracas, the drummer took his place behind the kit, and the band launched into one of their familiar hits. Several things stood out as noteworthy: First, Daryl Hall appears to have been living in a cryogenic chamber someplace, and his abilities with this technology apparently far exceed Michael Jackson's because he really does look, at least at a distance of 50 feet, precisely as he did in the 80s. The long hair still bounces and flows with the same shimmering elasticity as ever. The voice is pitch-perfect, absolutely assured, and so strong as to make you believe he's holding a gear in reserve, some special set of notes in a register only he could reach. He makes it look easy, flowing from one song to the next, hitting all the little soulful flourishes he built into his songs so many years ago and adding some extras here and there. It was somewhat disconcerting to watch him; one felt that somehow they were looking into a time warp, or witnessing the results of some Faustian bargain.

John Oates was not quite as faithful a replica of his 80's persona, but he filled the bill quite well. He's spread out a bit, gone somewhat egg-shaped, so that his arms seemed to rest against the bulge of his abdomen. The mustache is also gone, but the lid of unruly dark curls remains intact. He played the lead on many of the songs and showed his chops on several difficult solos.

They played all the hits, a non-stop onslaught of hits, from Maneater to Family Man to Sara Smile to One on One. The crowd was in raptures. All around the amphitheater one could see the ladies begin to rise, to flow into the aisles, to throw arms above their heads, to grind and shimmy. There was a collective sense of time rolling back, as if Hall and Oates's uncanny ability to hold the years at bay had been transmitted, via their music, to the dancing women. The ladies next to me were in ecstasies, holding beers aloft, whistling, singing the lyrics, making whoop-whoop sounds when the band entered a breakdown or a solo. The gentlemen in attendance were more subdued. Some approached their dates cautiously from the rear and pressed their hips forward in an awkward but unapologetic attempt to cash in on the sexual energy that had been let loose in the crowd. They were not rebuffed. The ladies didn't care; they were captivated by Daryl Hall's radiant presence and, without taking their eyes from the stage, they reached back to squeeze buttocks or ruffle hair, transmuting these awkward accountants and mechanics into the golden god onstage.

But there was nothing unattractive or disappointing or shopworn in any of this. The band was clearly having a wonderful time, every one of them. A cool breeze blew through the venue, forcing Daryl Hall to run his hands through that gorgeous hair. He smiled and blew kisses. The saxophonist strode downstage in his purple suit blew his solos at the stars. The percussionist danced as if he'd never danced before, and even the sober John Oates cracked a few wry smiles as the crowd bathed him in its lusty cheers. The songs held up well after all these years and the band's skill made them work beautifully in a live setting. This was no indie show. There were no important Ideas put forward. No earnest speeches from the stage. No long and challenging instrumental passages. This was all about having a good time, this was about raising the average to the sublime. And for two hours and two encores, Hall and Oates did just that better than anyone.

Cheese for Me

I was living in Atlanta at the time, in an apartment above a real estate office in midtown. You turned the faux-brass handle and entered a short hallway whose carpeting looked like the pelt of some malnourished cat. A pair of bedrooms on your left. On the right was the door to the bathroom and just past that the small kitchen. Beyond the kitchen was a tiny living room which had been turned into a third bedroom by dint of large sheets of pink Styrofoam that our third roommate had scored from a construction site nearby. The name of an industrial manufacturer was embossed diagonally at upon these sheets at 18 inch intervals. It was a small apartment, made smaller by the makeshift room, but well-supplied with views. Each of the bedrooms looked out on the city and the window at the back of the kitchen led out to a flat rooftop from which one could see the trees above Piedmont Park.

We took possession in October and by the middle of that month I'd found a dealer. I worked at a software company all the way out in the suburbs and each day I'd drag my drug-poisoned body through the clogged channels of the city to my job in the basement of one of those office complexes that are typically occupied by dentists and insurance agencies. I shared my cube with a software developer named Ernest Shanks. He was a saggy black man who favored shiny pants and shirts and who talked incessantly about all the money he'd made in his career as a consultant. His confidence was in sharp contrast to my daily terror of being exposed as a disinterested addict who'd lied on his resume. We had company meetings in a little boardroom that had been outfitted with garish carpet, a faux-mahogany table, and a bay window that seemed more suited to the hosting of pork-chop dinners or the reading of Christian Science literature than the machinations of a future software giant. Our CEO was a short man with a brittle comb-over who held himself very erect and who constantly swigged cans of strawberry slim-fast from a small paneled refrigerator against the wall. His speeches were accompanied by the refrigerator's contented purr and the loud gurgles of his stomach as the slim-fast established its laxative effect. Sometimes, with a slight wince, he would lean his fists on the table and then, after a moment's pause, he would hurry to the bathroom just off the conference room, pulling shut the hollow door with self-conscious firmness. We would wait quietly while the exhaust fan's roar was interrupted by a quick series of muffled explosions. Moments later the CEO would reappear, serene, contemplative, his tones softer, exuding confidence.

Autumn came on fast and the days were gray, the gutters overflowing with the brilliant pulp of fallen leaves. By the time I left work in the evenings it was already dark and as I drove back to that little apartment, just another set of of brake lights in a river of red, I was frequently gripped by a feeling of loneliness so intense that it approached a kind of ecstasy. The gray office towers floated like ships above the misty expressway, and as their countless lighted windows loomed out of the fog I felt my anonymity, my smallness, my lostness. It was easy enough for me to justify another visit to the dealer.

During the Christmas holidays my brother went to New Orleans to visit his friend, an avuncular lawyer he'd known since college. I was invited to go but declined. I knew they'd spend all day drinking and visiting blues clubs and I was not in the mood for music. Our roommate in the foam compartment went to South Carolina and was then scheduled to represent some obscure magazine at a political conference in California. I was all alone. This idea both thrilled and terrified me. I had become merciless with myself. I was at a great distance from my body and used it only as a vehicle for pleasure. I'd learned to ignore its protestations. I slept very little and ate only when it was necessary. With nobody about and no work to regulate me I was afraid I might overdose. To guard against this possibility I instructed my dealer to switch me, for the holidays, from heroin to cocaine. On the 23rd I began my new regimen. At first everything was fine. I deposited a yellow mound of cocaine on the office desk I'd rescued from the curb outside a local fire station. It had metal drawers and plastic top made to resemble highly varnished wood. From the desk I looked out on the sodden city, a field of gray in which red and amber lights twinkled. During one of my trips to the store for cigarettes or beer I returned with with an old issue of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. I vaguely remembered bargaining with the Pakistani behind the counter and of pressing bills up against the bulletproof glass to induce him to slip it into the bag with my sweating bottles.

I worked my way through the cocaine. The skin of my face felt loose. My eyes floated in pools of warm oil. My hair seemed to hover like smoke above my twitching scalp. I found a picture in that magazine of a girl standing among the rocks of a dry creek bed. The day was gray and a chain of small mountains brooded in the background. She wore rubber boots, a yellow bikini, and a brown sweater. She was looking back over her shoulder at the camera with an expression of painful shyness in which one could discern glimmers of enigmatic hope. I was fixated on that picture. It was not perfect. Her bottom overhung her long tanned legs in what seemed a most unflattering way. It was an unflattering picture and yet here it was in the magazine. It seemed an unflattering picture and yet I could not stop looking. And it occurred to me that some photo editor had perhaps anticipated my state of mind exactly, the dreary darkened apartment in an empty city, the mound of cocaine, the overflowing ashtrays, the feckless blob of sentiment and adipose moving restlessly about inside, waiting for a deliverance that would never come. It was a picture from the end of a world and perhaps from the end of my world. There was something there, in that picture. The sky was so cloudy, the terrain so forbidding. The girl must be cold but she bore it patiently. Her little bikini. It was not so unflattering. I could not stop looking. It seemed to me that if I could only focus long enough I would come to some understanding that would set me free. It seemed strange to me that the sight of this girl filled so perfectly the void in my heart. I held the magazine up to the light, I went to lie on my bed and contemplate it there in complete silence. Sometimes the girl would waver and disappear in a blaze of thick blue fire, only to emerge again with white boots and gray skin and a black bikini, her lips moving as if trying to tell me something, something.

I allowed myself to fall in love. I lay still and imagined our life together from start to finish. I began to talk to her, to tell her all, my fears and my dreams. I told her about my crazy fantasies of transcendence and easeful death. She listened to all with an expression that was at once fixed and mutable. I could see small waves of feeling pass across her face from time to time. I loved that face. I felt its lines were written on my heart and that I would never forget her. I cried and held her close when I became paranoid and could not sleep. Sometimes I would press myself up against the wall, tennis racket in hand, while I waited for the footfalls on the stairs to reach the landing and for the doorknob to turn. She did not like this behavior. She felt I was losing my grip on my sanity. I told her that I might doubt anyone or anything but never her. And I told her that if I could survive this time in my life I might become a decent man who could treat her with the care and tenderness which she deserved.

When my brother and his lawyer friend found me I tried to tell them everything. I'd written four pages in a notebook and was attempting to crack the code of my own nonsensical scrawl. They made me drink vodka and V8, and then they ordered a pizza. The lawyer took me out on the little back roof where he spread out a poncho on the wet shingles and, patting it with his hand, invited me to sit. He told me it was time I considered a change in my life's direction. The night was not cold. The sodden bare branches of the trees seemed to wind like roots through the darkness. The lawyer's face hung in the air nearby, glowing like a lantern. I closed my eyes and focused on the soothing vibrations of his voice and the way it relaxed my aching brain. When I came back inside they made me eat two pieces of pizza, cut into small pieces and softened in a bowl of beer. Then they led me into my bedroom. My brother had cleaned. The cocaine and the ashtrays were gone. The carpet had been vacuumed. The sheets were clean and the magazine was gone. I was very glad the magazine was gone. I didn't want to see the girl again; she'd left me heartbroken and I resolved to never think of her again, but when I closed my eyes she reappeared, twitching, shuddering, palpating her limbs like a crazy woman. A buzzing sound came from her mouth. She did not remember me at all.

Man on Street

As a general rule anyone walking along the side of a busy road is going to be interesting in some way although even here, two types predominate. Most common is the vagrant: faded eyes, lank hair, tattered clothing, an expression of lust and longsuffering. The other type is the accidental pedestrian: sweat-stained, clutching gas can, tottering through the grass with an aggrieved expression.

But the really choice subjects belong to neither of the above categories. The other day I saw a young man strutting along the grassy median, clad in black pants and a tight black shirt, wearing a black backpack. His head was shaved in a Marine Corps fade and his red, round face was twisted in an expression of disdain. He pumped his clenched fists with each stride, as if pounding the belly of some invisible victim. He was clearly enraged but with what or whom I would never know. He slipped into the rear view mirror, an anonymous black shape beside the endless river of automobiles.

The Dream

In a dream last night it had all come together. I'd figured it out. I was a successful writer. I had a following -- modest, but devoted. I was earning a decent income pursuing my craft. I was happy with my position.

I would never be popular: I saw that. I could not sway the crowd but I might appeal to a little circle of kindred minds. The English critics, perhaps, would recognize me as one of the Celtic school by reason of the melancholy tone of my poems; besides that, I would put in allusions!

Yes, it's true that my dream may have resembled Little Chandler's musings as he made his way through the streets of Dublin but by GOD Little Chandler never worked as hard or as long as me.

The Randy Gent

He belonged in another era, when randy gents of his type had so many outlets; starlets, prostitutes, charwomen. Trysts in hansom cabs, her pudgy hand framed against the slanting rain -- steaming horses, spasms of engorgement, satiation

Revolution Nein

Yesterday morning I took my son to the carousel park. We were early enough to interrupt a man working out amongst the playground equipment. He was in his mid-forties, wearing black from head to toe, and when he saw us approaching he frowned and exhaled violently through his nose. He had a strong but poorly defined build. As we timidly approached the swings he dropped to do a series of on one-armed pushups, then sprang up to the overhead bar where he executed a series of vigorous pull-ups, counting off a number somewhere in the 300s. He finished off this his creepy calisthenics by attaching plastic handles (which he’d secured to his leg with a black Velcro strap) to the chains of two swings and performing a routine that vaguely resembled the Olympic rings. The police were setting up a bicycle safety exhibition on the mulch and, as the fitness buff wobbled and groaned in his awkward flights, one of the policemen began to stare him down. The fitness buff finished his routine, re-attached the handles to his leg, and then ran down the street, only looking back when he’d crossed the intersection.

There were three officers. One older and bald, his once-powerful build gone to flab but still impressive in the leather-and-polyester of his uniform. He stalked around the tent, taking pictures with a digital camera. A younger officer unpacked bicycle helmets and the third officer, a tall and genial black man, filled out paperwork. Each of the policemen was accompanied by their preferred mode of transport. The older officer represented the police car, the younger the bicycle, and the black officer the motorcycle. My son was partial to the motorcycle. He asked to sit on the seat and when the big policeman reached down to shake his hand he gazed upward with undisguised awe. He was given a badge-shaped sticker which he patted now and then to make sure it hadn’t fallen off.

I took my son back to the swings while the policemen finished their set-up. The wind was blowing hard from the north but the sun was bright. Trucks and motorcycles ground through the intersection beyond the sleeping carousel. The policemen were talking about AIG. The older one rubbed his tan baldness as he scolded his younger colleagues for their anger over the bonuses.

“We’re shareholders in this company now. The taxpayer,” he said.

The younger policeman squinted.

“Which means we own this damned thing, and we’re letting these senators go crazy up there in Washington. This witch hunt, it’s driving down the value, don’t you get it?”

“You think we should just pay these guys?”

The older policeman took a sip from a soft drink, grimaced, and said, “You tell me. You think we can stand to have more failures in the financial system? Or you think we need to move on already?”

“People just don’t like it,” the younger one said.

“There’s lots of things people don’t like. That don’t mean it ain’t the right thing to do. Just pay ‘em and move on. It’s done now. You know what I’m saying? Let it go. It’s done.”

“There’s going to be a revolution,” the black officer said. “And people like you and me, man, we’re going to have to fight them back.”

The older officer pondered this, shrugged, and said, “I plan on being retired by then.”

I had come to this park a few months ago with my father and he’d told me, as we watched my son go up and down the slides, that things were bad in the heartland of America and that a secret movement was afoot to buy up all the guns available in preparation for a revolution. It would happen in the next five years, he said. Riots in the streets. Domestic terrorism. Lynchings. Currency collapse. Famines. Independent states. When I scoffed at this he only nodded his head and said it was always people like me who were caught unprepared and swept away in the tide. I’d put all of this out of my mind at the time. When you’re trying to raise a two year-old you don’t have much time to contemplate revolution.

But then last week I got an email from my uncle in which a Christian blogger predicted a rash of fires on the Eastern seaboard. God would punish us, the blogger said, by destroying New York, Boston, and DC. Of course, this fellow had been predicting the immolation of the east coast for the last 10 years. If he kept it up he was bound to be right eventually. And, I reminded myself, my father’s aggrieved and dramatic temperament had always been fixated on the overthrow of power. Still, it seemed strange to have heard the same idea from three independent sources. Would it really get that bad? Were we headed for total collapse? It made me tired and slightly sick to think about it. I had a little boy, after all. I wanted him to grow up in a stable and peaceful society.

It was a delightfully crisp morning. The sun sparkled on the backs of the slow-moving cars. My son kicked his little legs and yanked on the creaking chains, his solemn expression racing through thick lattices of shadow. It was a springtime morning and the world was pursuing the joy of rebirth, oblivious to our human problems. It was in this tangible, actual, and immediate world that my son still lived. He had not yet learned to substitute a collective human fiction for the simple reality of life. And standing there, pushing him, I could almost remember what it was like to live that way.

Higher Power

At the request of a friend of mine I will elaborate here on a line of thought which I have been pursuing for the last few weeks. It all started with a contemplation of the third step (never investigated the twelve steps? Congratulations, you're still in the gilded era of your addiction or you were born healthy), which says, "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the power of God as we understand it."

I've always had a problem with this step. I could never take it seriously. Oh, I would say the prayers but I didn't like them much, and no matter how long I "acted as if" my experience with my higher power just didn't seem to improve. I was still going it alone. After eight years I began to hear those recovery-blues whispers: "Is this all there is?"

A few years go I was in a meeting when a strange-looking fellow walked in. He had a red fleshy face, an unkempt mustache, and unruly hair which he slicked across his head. Dandruff lay across his shoulders like fresh snow and the buttons of his shirt strained against his expanding belly. He was always tugging at something: his nose, ears, shirt tail, mustache, blue jeans. He was one of those rare birds who appear unexpectedly in your meetings and who leave without warning: a mad scientist of recovery. When he spoke I experienced a sense of freedom and exhilaration which I'd come to associate with great works of art or spiritual truth. He told me to read Joe Klass's "Twelve Steps to Happiness." I did. Then he disappeared.

So now as I considered my situation I remembered Joe Klass's advice to always look closely at steps which are not working as designed. I thought about the second half of the third step: "as we understand..." and I remembered the conversation between Bill W. and Ebby in the kitchen. This is one of the canonical episodes of recovery literature. Ebby tells Bill to choose his own conception of God.

I really thought about this. I really considered it from all angles and decided maybe, just maybe, this was worth investigating. I was tired of serving an agenda-driven higher power. I didn't want to pray any more to a god who had some master plan into which I must fit. I am selfish. I want to be happy and get what I want. And the Gods to which I have prayed aren't very helpful. The more I thought about it the more I realized that my conception of God encompassed (and elicited) emotions like fear, loss, loneliness and despair.

I became convinced that I was not praying to God at all. As matter of fact, when considered dispassionately, I was praying to the devil, Satan, whatever you want to call it. I was praying to an unintelligent, disdainful, agenda-driven, penurious, punitive deity and asking it (soul a-tremble with fear and foreboding) to have its way in my life.

So I decided to create my own God. It was fairly easy. I just listed 10 characteristics of this deity in no particular order. I review these characteristics before I say my third step prayer. Things are much easier now. As a matter of fact the higher power defined below is in direct opposition to the one I used to have (and the one which unfortunately is hardwired into my brain, necessitating a review of these characteristics each time I pray). So with out further rambling, here are 10 characteristics of my higher power (whom I choose not to call anything).


1. Intelligent -- the smartest guy on the block. Reads the New Yorker, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Science Magazine cover-to-cover on Sunday afternoons while the neighboring gods grind away on their heavenly lawns. He can read Proust in the original and has read and understood all Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. You get the idea.

2. Wants me to live authentically, to be my true self and would rather I err on the side of directness and authenticity.

3. Provides me with talents for my enjoyment and thinks I am already pretty special. Wants me to use my talents fearlessly and joyfully.

4. Doesn't want me to think too hard about solutions. Is at work on solutions and will reveal them in his time for me to admire, like a chess master.

5. Loves me dearly, which really means that everything I do delights him and amuses him to some degree. When he goes to hang out with the other deities he takes a picture of me in his wallet and bores them all with it. And after the picture has made the rounds, he props it against the water carafe and glances at it while he's eating.

6. He will solve any problem that I bring him. No questions asked.

7. He loves my writing.

8. Doesn't mind a bit of a mess, and when he feels hemmed in by his books and papers he bids them alight and fly back to their perches on his shelves.

9. Has never hurt anyone, not even people who deserve it.

10. Rewards me richly just for being me.

Punk Rock Chicks

In the cold war era, when our biggest perceived threat was a Russian nuclear attack (after which we'd all revert to savagery and shamble about the hills on mutated appendages), nobody was very concerned with airport security. This was particularly true in Flint, MI. The airport there, which at the time was named merely Bishop Airport but has since become Bishop International Airport, had an observation deck which could be reached by ducking down a hallway and then climbing two flights of stone steps. There was a metal door, a glassed-in observation booth, and then past the booth another metal door which led to porch of sorts, tucked behind a wall and bordered by a steel railing. From there you could watch the jets whine and rumble down the runway and you could hear the desultory conversations between the semaphore men. You were hidden from view there, tucked behind that blank wall. If the observation deck was empty (as it was many nights) then the pursuit of your amorous designs was impeded only by your shyness or self-doubt. I had once come up on the deck to see a couple lying in the very farthest dark corner of the porch, his spasming back and her loosely draped legs making it clear that they'd abandoned themselves to their desire. But to encounter someone else on the observation deck was a rarity; most everyone watched the planes from the comfort of the glassed-in lounge.

I took girls there, punk rock girls in leather coats who wore safety pins in their ears and noses. They had colorful plumes of hair cascading over shaved napes and combat boots laced up on their calves and they mostly tasted of smoke and candy. They put their mix tapes into my cassette player as we rode to the airport and when we arrived at the observation deck they rarely bothered much with conversation. We kissed and groped. In the winter I let my icy hands roam free inside their leather coats. Nothing really important happened. Occasionally we'd actually watch the planes. You could see the pilots, erect and epauleted in the yellow cockpit, talking to one another or twiddling knobs. The punk rock chicks had a special hatred for anyone in uniform and the bolder ones would shout profanity into the deafening whine of the engine. This attitude struck me as brave and sad; most of the girls were, like me, from working-class houses and a uniform of almost any kind represented a step upward. But to these girls uniforms represented the abuse of power, nothing more.

After high school, however, their attitudes were modified somewhat. One of their boyfriends would enter the armed services -- out of economic necessity, via a court order, or with the desire to better himself -- and then these punk rock girls carried about with them a picture of some shaved Marine at attention before a powder-blue backdrop, squinting at the camera with a mixture of defiance and fear. When these boys came home on leave they were loved extravagantly by their punk rock girlfriends and once they'd ditched the uniform for blue jeans and combat boots, they looked like any other skinhead. By unspoken consent we all pretended their life in the army was only a dream. Nobody talked about it. And the punk rock girls loved them up on porches, in basements, and behind stacks of chairs at the hall shows. When leave was over the girls went to the airport again but this time they stood on the observation deck to watch an olive-drab figure cross the tarmac and disappear into the airplane. Perhaps they took a friend. Perhaps they shared a bottle with a friend as they waved the lumbering plane into the sky.

Mallards

This is going too fast. I thought that yesterday, on the highway, as I was driving little man to the mall for some shopping, and the more I thought about this idea, the more it seemed to apply to my life on a broad scale. I think you've finally deserted me as muse, which hurts more than a little and leaves me feeling depressed and disinterested in my writing. This is a problem. A significant problem. It seems like a decision is facing me, as if there's a rapidly closing window of opportunity for me to reorient my life around your calmness and devotion to scholarship and your happiness, to reorient it around you (hang on, the oven is beeping which is sure to wake the household via a wobbling domino effect, the dog, with her traumatic memories of that beeping shock collar she wore in our fence-less yard in Atlanta will get up and pace nervously and smack her lips which will wake my wife who will bang about getting ready to go run, which will wake my son who will then roll and rattle his crib and begin the process of discovering that he needs milk). And I want to reorient it around you. And this is what troubles me; the idea that a window is closing and that I don't have all the time in the world to make a decision. Some opportunities don't come a second time. And as they say, to not make a decision is to make a decision. And my wife believes, I think, that we've got the whole issue resolved and that she and I are going to stay together. And I keep telling her, as clearly and as unambiguously as possible that I am not sure I want to be here. I'm in that uncomfortable space between knowing and not knowing. And I feel that, more than anything, I need to slow down.

I was thinking about this as we disembarked from the car and moved through the walkways of the mall. It was a pretty day, sunny and mild, with a milky blue sky and a hint of salt in the air from the easterly winds. I had come to get shoes -- oh, who cares? I don't even care. I can't pretend to be interested in this drivel. It's my life. It's not very interesting, I know. But there's something here. Something I'm uncovering. So I'll push on.

I go to the store, I look at the shoes on the rack, I dither. A salesperson in a forest green polo shirt comes along and recommends a shoe to me. I ask for my size. The shoes are brought out. The place is crowded. Big screens showing a Sunday sporting event. People sitting on benches next to stacks of boxes. Tissue paper strewn about. A steel foot caliper, looking like the frozen splash of a giant's step in a puddle, peeks out from under the bench. I can't decide between a 12 and a 13. I suspect the right foot of being larger than the left. None of this is relevant or interesting yet. I decide to order the 12.5 size in this shoe online and we leave. My wife is having a blood sugar attack so we roll down the sidewalk in the milky sunlight past hot dog vendors and panting perfumed storefronts. My son has a red plastic baseball bat which he waves about, impacting the knees and thighs of the passersby. We go to the local vegetarian restaurant and sit outside eating our cardboard containers of rice and vegetables. My son eats a cookie and is occasionally inspired by a fit of magnanimity to press toward our mouths a piece which he's broken off. He is proud of himself for sitting in a big boy chair and he takes small satisfied sips from his cup of milk and gazes indulgently at his rapidly disintegrating cookie.

After the meal my wife goes to the stores and I take my son to a little park that sits in the middle of a rotunda. There is a small snack vendor set up at one edge of the park where people are queued, waiting. A squinting bald man, his dome gilded by the sunlight, comes away with a cup full of French fries, smacking his lips in anticipation. There are three ponds in this little park, two of which hold various common marshland fauna. A few turtles stacked up on a sunny rock from biggest to smallest, their droll feat of balance and one-upsmanship drawing the shouts and pointed forefingers of an endless steam of children. Two mallards, male and female, on a nearby rock, sunning themselves. A ceramic frog. In the depths of the adjoining pond the colorful opaque koi whirl dumbly about, shifting their ocular bulges surface-ward in the hopes of snagging a dropped crumb. Two pelican statues spit water into the pond through a tube in their beaks. A third desists, spoiling it for the others with his iconoclastic ways.

Two women on the other side of the pond are smacking their lips and between utterances they probe with their tongues for stray morsels. They are both thin and dark, and wear huge dark glasses. A woman and her blonde daughter are in the same cycle of mallard-admiration as my son and myself, traveling from pond to pond as the ducks bob and flutter and paddle about. The woman tells me not to worry, that they aren't stalking me. I laugh and say, not at all. She's not tall, blonde, with large Gucci sunglasses, fairly thin, but with a certain amorphousness in her midsection. She wears sandals. Red bits of toenail pressed into pillowy toes. Her daughter is dressed in pink. The woman tells me that her husband travels a for work and that she's got a two month-old daughter at home. I am kneeling before the mallards, one hand rubbing Jonathan's back, as if in some act of worship. The woman continues to tell me about her birth-agonies and the agonies of deciding to have another child.

"But I was turning forty, so I knew it was now or never. And once I decided, it was fine, let's do it, another baby," The woman says.

I want to ask her what she means by that statement, I want to delve into it and figure out why exactly she chose the second child, I want to make the components of her situation analogous to mine and so guide my own deliberations, but the woman does not look like an intellectual (she's carrying a Matrioshka bag, stores nested within stores) and besides, I become aware that my son has just pooped (he was standing there so quietly I should have known).

We go find a place to change him. There's nothing. No changing station. So I change him on the sinks in the bathroom while impatient and disgusted men jostle me as they pursue their hasty ablutions. And as I bring my son outside I understand that all these little acts, these diaper changes, these conversations with strange women, these sunlit strolls through crowded malls, they are all taking me further away from you. Once all my motion seemed to being me closer, to draw me more tightly to you, but now the equation has been reversed. And I think, for one absurd moment, that I will stop right here. Hold Jonathan tight. Hold my breath. Stop my heart from beating. Right here right now I can still see you, if only faintly, but the moment is coming soon when you will slip over the horizon and be lost to me for good. The world moves me on. My son wants to see the ducks again.

ZAMM

Maybe I did the right thing. I turned down that new company and their offer of a 15% raise. I still don't know why I did that. It feels like the wrong thing now, but I was trying to listen to my intuition. I am re-reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at the behest of a friend of mine who did a Tarot reading on me and found that almost every card looks like I'm stuck. She had an intuition that there was a book I needed to re-read, a book that I'd been reading when I had my first knowing about addiction. It was her theory or intuition that I'd missed something in that book, that I had been presented with a fork in the road and had chosen the wrong path out of fear. ZAMM sprang immediately to mind. I hadn't read it since I was 20.

Back then I was finishing up a long stretch of intensive whiskey drinking. The King and I had decided one night as we were locked in another hot game of Lakers vs. Celtics on the Sega Genesis (I playing Phoenix so as to control Tom Chambers, the ultimate weapon, he had that swooping and unstoppable double pump floater from the far wing -- seriously the most devastating video game move I've ever encountered. The only thing that kept me from scoring every time was my own capacity for boredom. What I ended up doing was trying to keep within striking distance and then coming back in a mad rally with Chambers scoring that floater from all over the floor, his pixellated blond shag knifing through the crowd, while the King mashed the buttons of his controller and stared at the screen with fixed smile of pure hatred) that we would continue to drink, for 90 days, exactly what we'd had to drink that night, which as it turned out was a fifth of cheap whiskey.

The end of the 90 day stretch coincided with my birthday. I remember Detroit was cold and dark then, buffeted by winds and intermittent thaws which left large patches of sodden earth exposed and the streets perpetually shining with moisture. I was so sick from all the whiskey that I could barely make it out of bed. I dragged myself to my classes, green and bloated, and then I dragged home to the whiskey and the King and another game of Lakers vs. Celtics. After we'd finally finished I'd take myself up the stairs and collapse in the bed. I couldn't sleep. I read more ZAMM. On my birthday I was lying in bed with a terrible hangover, reading ZAMM and it happened, it seemed that the world inverted for me and I became a ghost trapped behind glass and I lay there while wave after wave of fear washed over me. Eventually my fear of lying still overpowered my fear of movement and I got up and went to class in a daze. I remember thinking that something essential had broken inside me. I didn't identify so much with the antagonist in ZAMM, that is, I didn't feel that I'd fallen off an intellectual tightrope, but I did feel as if the some essential buffer had been removed and that I was grinding against the hardness of life. I understood the problem in the book on an emotional level.

Poor sap. What a mess I was. It was raining. I was wearing a thin leather coat. My professor stared at me with concern and kindness as I smoked a cigarette and babbled something about Kant (even in my outcast state I didn't anyone to think I'd had a breakdown over a pop-cultural darling like ZAMM. If I was going to lose my mind I wanted it on the record that I'd done so over some recondite work of philosophy, that I'd been devoured in some remote jungle of ideas). Nothing was real. Not even my own voice. The hallways echoed unpleasantly. The rooms were too large. The people buzzed like insects. I couldn't intellectualize it. It was in my body, in my ears. I drove home in a panic. It was in my hands. Whatever I touched became unreal. Even the dogs became unreal, they seemed like fiendishly clever constructions of stuffing and glass.

So I'm reading ZAMM again. And it's not half bad. And I'm waiting for the answer to come. The book posits that being stuck is a requirement for answers. Well, good, because I'm good and stuck. And I'm still not sure I should've turned down that job.