My entire drive home I was trying to place whether it was seventeen or eighteen. In my gut it seems that eighteen would be more in the right. At this point all of my friends had finally graduated from high school. They had that sort of shimmy to them, I probably had it too, but mine was all burnt up and buried in the side of the hill. Nineteen seems a little too gone and seventeen seems a bit too young. So for the sake of the story, or at least the way my mind remembers it, we will say I was eighteen years old.
(after some more careful consideration, it was definitely age eighteen as it was the summer of two thousand and two)
Somebody I knew had mushrooms. Around the time, I was a car transporter. One of the particular trips we had to make involved approximately seven miles of highway between the towns of Sidney and Piqua, Ohio. I remember on this particular afternoon of bringing the cars back to Piqua, a deer attempting to cross the highway as we were driving on the other side into Sidney.
(maybe it’s different nowadays)
After getting back and waiting to get paid, which usually took no more than a few minutes, I’d popped over to a friends house and set about the evening. I had taken traditional acid before that. Or what I consider to be traditional. It was probably just a watered-down version by 1960s traditions. This more or less promised that I knew what I was in for.
Again, I can’t recall anything specifically, and it’s probably for the best considering. There was a semi truck that had gotten in its way. It more or less exploded. The semi was a Volvo and it was red. That, and driving back a Ford Tempo, which would eventually belong to my sister and then me, but that is an entirely different story.
God help me if I could ever begin to consider who that person actually was. I can barely tell you who I was at that time. But someone had the mushrooms. We had turned to drugs a lot at that point. All varieties at that point. Not like being fourteen or fifteen and simply into smoking weed.
The highway ran in the middle of basically nowhere. Those two things and the way it sort of exploded were basically all I can remember from that trip. I’d never factored the afternoon into the experience though.
This is probably good advice, ask your brother.
They knew regardless of what they deemed acceptable and unacceptable, teenagers would still be teenagers. My parents were very good at being the nonjudgemental type of hosts.
Eventually though, at some point, my mind came back to the highway, to the red Volvo semi, and to the deer. It made the electricity pour out of my body. It was like a spiritual sentencing. Something beyond the county jails and hallways I had known before.
Usually they were never nice cars. All you were ever bound to see was corn or deer or both. Occasionally a coyote I’d say. If I’m not blurring this with one other one, my dad had actually eaten some too. A bit of proactive parenting I suppose.
The buzz wore on. Did all the typical mushroom stuff. The walls, wallpaper, chain smoking and enlightened social commentary. Yahtzee. Typically they were older and heavily abused.
Rode hard, as they say.
It was an easy enough job. I would move cars between dealerships that other dealerships had bought off of each other. It had no real set hours and paid a flat rate. All of which are things that suit the life of a teenager very well.
This had made me turn to my mother. She had told me a few stories about death that she herself was familiar with. About relatives and animals and both taken right in front of her, and even on down the street as well.
It was late at that point. She was in bed. If I can remember nothing else about my teenage years aside from that, that will again and forever be enough.
I was thinking
about you againlate
last night, my
legs drawn apart by
the magnetics of anempty room, always
reaching
for refashioned memories
that unwind muscles(so tight)
through the ebb
and through the flow;through the shadows
of anothermoon.
there is no barrier
between vintage and
old
I remember you
there were tears while on the toilet
and we argued with each other
about love
and I sat clutching the wall between
the floor and the shower
there was always so much
hair in the drain
you just sat there on the toilet
crying
tearing and streaking across the
walls
there was no love left inside of
you or maybe there was no life
left inside of you
or maybe there was both
and both were gone
I remember you
no barrier left between
the vintage and the old
after the wall I left for the trail
and walking along with headphone
eyes I played myself a song from
the past
I came back and you were gone
retrospect says you were probably off
with him then making what sense
you could of how you had changed
I was still on the floor then
between the floor and the ceiling
debating just how one gets off the rock
in such a fever
I remember you then
by the time we were back
neither of us were crying
there were no tears left to run away from
we sat there and said our goodbyes
on a basic
and months later through a sorrowful
minute of sex and the customs officers
both of which led me to the donut shop
and I was there alone for six months
until the call
then you left
went off on some highbrow dream
of seeing the ocean
the one we always lived around
the barrier between vintage
and old
On gin nights
when I fade from awareness
like a dial turned
slowly to the left,
the dreams shake me.Our limbs separate
from us, and go hard
like widow children
throwing rocks into
abandoned buildings.In bed we make a Civil War
portrait, pale and damp
with blue-gray jackets
to protect us from the rain
that falls sideways across
concrete walls,
as if it were wax
dripping off communion lights.The admirals give us
brass crutches
so that we can return
from the long battle
to sit drunken through
an absent mass, singing
praise for those foreign daughters
we worship when
we fear the price of true faith,
or the weight of years
we have yet to live.For half a night we drift
in and out on cracked pews
and wake when the morning sun
pierces Saint Sebastian’s mosaic
with happy arrows.There is a sudden prism
invading the stained windows,
and the dark with all
its precarious pinions,
so that it is impossible to tell
whether this thing is moving
nearer, or getting farther away.When all the dead dogs trot in
from their divine alleyways
to impregnate the room
with naive light, the hands
on your brow are not your own.Worry flutters crookedly
at your bare feet
like a tiny mechanical bird.How many more days
should we wake to
the piles of baby teeth
that collect on the floor
beside our sodden boots?Why is she giving them
all back to us now?Sebastian, with the stink
of old gin heavy
on his flaccid tongue,
reminds me that every hero
must grant the evil admittance
if they ever intend
to put it down for good.Sebastian, with the water-
whistle of chapel breath
blowing through the
cavity in his breast—the closer
I get to you, the more
immeasurable the distances
become.I tug on your blood sleeve,
ask that we return
to that empathetic bed,
and let the sheets armor us
for the well-intentioned war
that we will start.Toy soldier, I think it’s
high time we trade in
this pink kid-skin
for a costume
far more dastardly.
It was my luck.
A couple of beers in
and in walks the man
of my dreams.I’m coy.
And I’m never coy after
a couple of beers in,
so I buy another drink
thinking it will
loosen me up
some.But there’s this
hold he has over me,
his confidence, somethinglaughing, something missing
and I stare
(but it’s more like I’m
There is a shadow
on the wall now
where grandfather’s clock
used to hang.In February
the keys stopped winding
and the hands were made
absent by the hourless chimes
that gasped from
the wallpaper
like drowning men.In my head I hear
every false tick
like a phantom limb
and feel gouged by the minutes
that just aren’t there.
The repairman estimates
another two months,
maybe three, but it’s hard
to tell how long that really is
when there’s no face on the wall
making eyes at me.See, when you sit and think about it
every second is a mere degree
of how far we are
from the sun—an arbitrary
measure.
It’s God’s answer
to the age old question,
are we there yet?“Well, kid, I really
don’t know.
I guess we’re there
when you decide
that we are.
But I’ll give you
a little tip: telling time,
it ain’t hard to learn.
All you gotta know is,
you’re too damn late
if you’re already burned.”
Cheer up, honey (Double Echo Toilet Version)
so
s o o
s o o o
s o o o o o
s o o o
s o o
so
v
e
r
y b o
r
i
n
g
Sunday mornings, she’d stand
in the lighted doorway and ask me
how I’d take my coffee.I remember this, like
many things that haven’t happened;
the image is yellow, and curls
at the edges, like a burned
scrap of paper.In the spring she was afraid
to drop in on me far enough
that I could see beyond the silhouette
that teetered on the wall like
an open flame, beside the hutch
with the porcelain elephants
and the photographs of fathers
that we never knew.They were soldiers. Some of
their raiment was green, but the others
were brown and wet
with the liquor that spilled out
through their open flasks, as they slept
in concrete trenches, the soot
tattooed on their listless mugs—bastards.
All of them.I saw the black ceramic shake
from her hand
on the wall like a stuffed canary
fresh from the coal mine,
when she asked me, Milk? Sugar?
and counted the length of each breath,
waiting for her to slink back
into the other room. Confusedbecause the kitchen was the shower
was the bathroom was the mausoleum
where I had lain in bed
and watched her washing herself
the morning before.Intimacy, then, was the off-white down
and the curve of her sex shifting
under her panties, as she scrubbed
the rouge from her cheeks
until the skin chaffed off
in pale, wintered flakes.The snow on the windowsill
that morning was ash, though
it was April, and I knew
that I had never really been
in love with her.I kept thinking that all lies
are really just promises
that somewhere went wrong.But since she painted
the window in the bedroom shut,
a thought has never been
more than a suggestion.
It’s too stuffy in here for that.So I tortured myself instead
considering sunny days
in the suburbs, when the cages
where stucco but smelled
just like home, and we spent our summers
dodging traffic and vomiting
our government rations in
the busy street for a laugh.Our faces had already crooked
from perpetually settling on
the next best thing. Everything was
gawdamn this and gawdamn that.The whites of her eyes were never
quite as fluorescent as they were
back then, when she’d crawl in
through my busted window and
move over me in the dark.
The first couple of times, I tried
to put a light on, but
she always stayed my hand.
It was much easier not to see
the bruises, even when we knew
they were right there, splayed
over our baby fat
like poorly hatched Rorschachs
teaching us all the things
about ourselves
that we never wanted to know.They taught me that
I had always really been
In love with her.I got up to open the window
just enough to let the dark out.
It was night and then it was day,
and then it was some strange memory
in between, and I replied,
Just the sugar, baby, but
she had already gone.
This is part of an ongoing series…To read from the beginning, click here.
The country of Awesome was founded on a random night in 2001 by a bunch of drunken punk rockers when we decided the few acres of land we were occupying for Jackie’s grandparents had attained sovereignty. We didn’t always call it Awesome, but once we came up with the name, we realized it had been hidden in our collective unconscious since the day Jackie had moved onto the property and had been waiting for the right moment over another game of all-night dominoes to fully realize its namesake. The Crackhaus was our castle because our nation was an anarchical monarchy (I know, it makes no sense) and more importantly, a hedonistic commune for unshowered musicians. Like any other commune, we all took turns being kings and queens. Still, we let Jackie be president (again, I realize our political structure was perhaps faulty, at best) since, after all, her grandparent’s did own our sacred soil. Our revolution was fueled, like everything else in our lives at the time, by a dustbowl cloud of weed smoke and by a few cases of the freshest Lone Star Tallboys in town. They tasted so crisp because we purchased them every day at Cheri’s, and we even sold them out a couple of times a week so we were always drinking the brewery’s latest batch on the store’s next re-up. Cheri’s—just over our Southern border—was a drive-thru beer barn housed in the lot next door to our living quarters. It would become our supply depot. The living quarters, which housed quite a few different roommates, and different couch surfers, at different times, Jackie the only constant, was half-way in-between our castle and our supply depot. Over our northern border was an abandoned house that belonged to a pack of hell hounds. The owner—Satan’s bride reincarnated in the form of a redneck woman named Rose, with creepy slanted eyebrows—no longer lived there, but dropped by a few times a week to drop a few full bags of dog-food over the loosely constructed chain-link fence of what was once her backyard. The fence was the only barrier between us and an incestuous and blood-hungry pack of man’s least favorite friends from childhood who grew up to be scary gangsters and broke out of jail a couple of times a week to come visit. The beasts would travel through our Western pasture, once a five-acre plot of farmland, to terrorize the two dogs, three cats, two chickens, seven rabbits, and potbelly pig—Jackie’s pets and her homage to the farmhouse tradition of her family. The Eastern border was Shaver Street, a busy highway comprised of a bunch of used car lots and shitty ice houses. Basically, we were almost alone in the nether region between South Houston and Pasadena, in the asshole of Texas, where the oil refineries made the air smell like one of the farts I would let out after eating half of a greasy and correctly-priced Super Burrito California from Taqueria Arrandas (generally good for two meals on four bucks). Luckily, our one neighbor was an ally. Mitch, the mechanic, who lived in a trailer across the street, only requested of us that we be done “practicing” by 11p.m on weeknights. We followed just that one rule because we didn’t want him to turn on us and bring about any unwanted invasions from enemy forces, the South Houston police department. Mitch also asked that if we ever needed any car work done to come by and see him. He said he’d give us a good deal. Once, when he serviced my 1987 Maroon Buick Park Avenue, and told me to change my oil more often because my engine “sounded like two skeletons fucking in a trash can,” he didn’t realize he was giving me the perfect metaphor to describe what it sounded like inside of my head.
