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.

Your New Genre

This, my friend, my fellow writer, is why I can't wait to see you write some YA (first person or not, I don't give a shit...) This right here is magical.

"I waited a long time to answer. I could feel the warm blood singing in my ears and I imagined that I was outside the car, running fast, leaping mailboxes and ditches to keep pace."

Waiting...

Sorry I haven't said anything sooner, but I wanted to say something about how much I was moved by your post below ("The Knife"). I was moved, haunted, floored by your honesty, the pain, how you took me right there, threw it up in front of me like someone ripping open his shirt and baring his chest. I felt like I was driving past a bad accident, horrified, but unable to turn my eyes away.


You have a gift, brother... I know you know that, and I know you struggle with that, and I know I struggle too. But don't forget, in all the craziness, that you have the gift. You do, motherfucker. You do.


So, I jumped in here to bitch and moan a bit before trying to glue my butt to the seat for a thousand words, and I saw your last couple of posts, and you humbled me, you bitch. Fucker. Goat fucker.


So... some bitching and moaning.

I am waiting. The wait swirls around in my body, mostly in my stomach and tight around my heart... an almost constant "fight or flight" feeling surges like I'm seeing police lights in the rearview mirror... sometimes it feels like I've got a fantastic poker hand and I'm about to go all in. But it's constant. It consumes me, invades my sleep, destroys any moment of serenity. Poor, poor me, to be in such a terrible situation. What a stupid, selfish mother fucker I must sound like.

Like most of my character defects, once again it all centers around not having complete control of the situation. I can't do anything about it (I can, but I've at least learned to stay the fuck out of it at this phase) and that drives me up the fucking wall. No control... all in someone else's hands right now... nothing I can do but wait, wait, wait.

I try not to complain, and I try to be mature, and I try not to lash out, and I try to use what I've learned in the program, and I try to hand it over to God, and I try not to go fucking crazy, but I do. I go crazy. I let the waiting consume me, eat me alive, take me every second, tie me to the ground and rape me...

Meanwhile, I try to work on my current project. I've finished the notes, some knock 'em dead characters, chapters outlined, ready to rumble. The characters are vibrant and alive and fresh and young and innocent and they wave silently at me from behind foggy glass, their eyes pleading with me to let them out... they've been in there for so long, for no real reason other than my childish procrastination, my neurotic need for validation... this sense that I must really, truly know that my career really has taken off before I can invest the soul energy to allow myself to be sucked into that world again. And I know, I know, I know that this is the wrong way to think, the wrong way to do. Surviving and continuing to work in this situation is where the real writers swim to the surface...

So I will try to swim... I try to do a little, a tiny bit every day, if anything just to keep the characters alive... otherwise their waving arms will slow down, they'll take out a deck of cards, or worse, plug into a video game, and when I'm finally down from my royal toddler throne, ready to act like I'm a real writer, they will have grown cold, distant, no longer interested in playing... they will have lost the magic, not even enough interest in me to look over their shoulders in disgust.

I will click "Publish Post" now and try to jump back in... desperately try to put one foot in front of the other... word by word, bird by bird... I will try to keep them alive, to nourish them, break the glass and let them free. They want so badly to share this world with us.

Hulking Up

Disclaimer: You must have, at a minimum, a passing familiarity with 80's professional wrestling for this to make any sense.

I need to Hulk Up. Remember Hulk Hogan? Not his Golden Hulk persona in Rocky III but rather the original fiction, the Hulk who wrestled in the squared circle for Vince McMahon and who now, so many years later, has a reality show where his look-alike daughter is attempting (what else?) a music career?

So back in the 80's Hulk Hogan had these wonderful wrestling matches that involved him and his opponent ricocheting off the ropes, hair flying, spangled boots raised to throats, bodies slamming canvas and then at a certain point, if this was one of Hulk's big matches, the script would settle into the most compelling stage of the Hero's Journey: defeat, death, finis. The Hulkster would be lying on the canvas or cruciformed on the ropes, or his back inverted in the dreadful "C" of the Camel Clutch (Iron Sheik nods and preens), his great blond head sagging, his musclebound corpus limp, those magnificent powerhouse-arms hanging slack from his shoulders. The referee, with a dubious and wistful expression, would grab one of those hands and, at the urging of the crowd, raise it skyward, and release. The hand fell back to the canvas with a wet plop. The crowd screamed for the Hulkster to wake up. The referee again raised the hand. Again it fell. Hulk's eyes were still shut, his heavy brow furrowed as if pricked by an invisible crown of thorns.

With a shake of his head, knowing it was hopeless but following the established protocol, the referee would raise the Hulk's hand one last time. Release. Fall. Full stop. Hand arrested before it touches canvas. Opponent's face distorted with rage and fear. Hulk's massive phalanges knitting into a fist. Fist pumping. Crowd screaming. Hulk's eyes open. He stands up! What ungodly power could've raised him to consciousness? The Hulk stands in the center of the ring and poses to restore his strength, supplementing his own power with the power of the crowd, whose roars he funnels into his ears with cupped hands. The opponent, terrified, is quickly slammed and piledriven into submission and now it's the Hulkster preening, with one boot planted on his opponent's chest, who listens to the three count.

Today I need to Hulk Up. I am pinned below a crushing weight but my spirit, like the Hulkster's, is soaring through the arena, gathering strength.

The Knife

The John Birch Society must've promoted my old man. We left the trailer park for Lafayette, IN, a college town about 70 miles to the southeast. My old man had rented us a house and I remember my brother and I chasing one another through the somber empty rooms. It was a shotgun house with a big cement porch and buckled hardwood floors with the bedrooms tacked along right side like an afterthought, three boxes connected by a narrow hallway. You entered the basement at the back of the house through a door in the pantry, down a cramped set of slippery stairs, past the cobwebs and the indignant spiders into darkness that was sweet with mildew. My brother and I helped carry the old man's metal boxes of weapons into the basement and then we helped carry the emergency foodstuffs and the radios and the other survival equipment. He'd picked this house specially for the basement which, due to a lack of windows and five feet of earth above its ceiling, was a perfect bomb shelter.

"It will see us through a long bad time," he'd say.
"If it comes," my mother would say.
"It's only a question of when."

I was doubtful that we could survive long in that cold cramped little room and at night I dreamed of white-hot mushroom clouds and of rustling stealthy spiders plotting to liquefy our organs, leaving behind our dessicated and web-swaying skins.

The old man felt good about the new house and the new town; he began to make the occasional grim joke about our nightmare at the trailer park. After a month he got us another German Shepherd. We named her "Madchen." He kept her in the backyard where she began systematically leaving, in glazed cups of snow, little piles of candied excrement. One Saturday my brother dared me to pick up one of these little logs and hurl it at him, but I was afraid to do so because I imagined that beyond the shellacked surface lay a warm and loamy center and that it would crumble apart in my hands. My brother, tiring of this game, went inside to finish his Alistair MacLean novel and I, drawn irresistibly as all boys are, drifted toward the street at the front of our house.

The old man's green Vega was parked at the curb, his body wedged at an uncomfortable angle, his feet projecting into a snowdrift. I did not like my old man and in fact to be near him made my stomach hurt but the dazzling emergence of the sun and the those comical protruding legs allayed my fears and I moved close enough to peer into the darkness of the car.

He was lying there with one hand clutching a pair of bright unruly wires below the dash. The stereo and CB were lying on the floorboards. Protruding from his side, just above his waist, was the handle of the short knife which he ordinarily kept in a leather pouch on his belt. The old man made rhythmic animal groaning sounds as his right hand clenched and unclenched around the handle of his short knife. I could see now that the black upholstery sparkled in the sunlight where his blood had soaked it through.

"You okay?" I said.
"Hi. Hi." He spoke in the peaceful voice of some past or future self. "Go get your mother. I've had an accident."
"What's wrong?"
He was very calm and patient. He waited until his groaning stopped although his hand continued to clench and unclench around the handle of the knife. "Go get your mother I've had an accident."
"Are you okay?"
"Go get your mother I've had an accident."

Later when they wheeled him out of the emergency room I admired him for his handsomeness and the crease along his temple where he'd been shot in the head in Vietnam and for his coolness when the knife was stuck in his side. He was wearing a shirt my mother had brought from home and one could see the bulky gauze pad below the thin fabric. My mother cried at intervals as the doctors explained the particulars of caring for the wound.

"You could have died."
"But I didn't."
"He saved your life." My mother was referring to me.
The car was quiet. My mother cranked the starter and the engine coughed to life. Madchen, wedged in the backseat between my brother and myself, flattened her ears.
"He wasn't obedient," The old man said. "I had to ask him three times."
"You can't whip him, you're full of stitches," my mother said.
"I appreciate what you did but I had to ask you three times did I not?"
I waited a long time to answer. I could feel the warm blood singing in my ears and I imagined that I was outside the car, running fast, leaping mailboxes and ditches to keep pace.
"Did I not?"
My brother punched me in the shoulder and frowned.
"Yes, sir," I said.

He gave what seemed to me a deep and contented groan. As we rolled along the frozen streets I came to realize that I'd lost a chance that would never come again and I cursed myself for walking toward the street when I could've picked up one of Madchen's segmented candies instead. My stomach began to hurt. The bare branches of oaks and maples flashed over our little car, an endless parade of switches with which little boys could be and would be whipped.