Celestial time

Monday, July 28, 2014

The rain came in an overnight gush of sound and fury, stirring me with its rumble and its early morning moments of doubt – that celestial time when the world is laid bare to expose truth like raw bone, the ache of it making it impossible to sleep easy. So then, the voice of God thundered in my ears as the fingers to the storm pried at my windows and I shivered despite the heat, waiting it out, not so perfectly safe since a part of this storm also brewed inside of me, and could not be cured with closed eyes and pretending all was well with the world when so much had been left undone and must be done again when I am officially awake – Sunday into Monday always bringing with it the old feelings from school days when I had not finished what I was told I must, and thus would face of wrath of nuns who would make me feel forsaken. At moments like this, the real satisfaction comes from knowing that I had not missed the storm, and would have felt worse had it passed me by unawares. I am always of the mind to believe it is better to see the worst as it happens than to hear about it later, and walk through the wreckage of disaster without knowing its cause. And having concluded this, and the list of things needed to be done when wakefulness returned in actuality, I fell back to sleep.

Watching the leaves change

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

I walked to and from the Hoboken office in what forecasters said was a milder day that typical for this time of year.

I started making this walk shortly after 9/11 when someone broke into my car – a three month ordeal to get the right part and to solve other problems that the break in caused.

Once I shifted the beat to Bayonne, walking became only an option on Tuesdays, when I had to go to the Hoboken office anyway.

The big challenge has always been winter, the slick walk there and back, up and down hills. While I would say summer was no sweat, in fact, it is much more, but easier to make the climb – even with the leg I injured two years ago when I fell off a curb.

The walk feels right. Unlike the arrogant bike riders who shove people off the sidewalk, strolling there and back lets me examine the world close up in a way that cars and bicycles won’t allow – a slowed down view that I hadn’t really gotten since I stopped jogging. Even then, the world slid by too quickly to fully appreciate.

This stroll, however, also makes me more aware of how utterly the world is changing, how even over the time I’ve spent in this place, how different it is, and how much more I crave the town I grew up in, where lack of opportunity reduces the intensity for greed, and so things remain much as they were when I grew up there, although my uncle and others fled from it because they feared great change that never occurred.

I even miss my digs in Passaic, which from my brief visits there, hasn’t changed at all since I left, a time capsule of feelings I feel again each time I walk those streets.

I shall go back soon to make our the visits I need to all the people who have passed on beyond memory of any place, to Peggy’s new digs in the graveyard just over the Passaic border in Lodi, and to the family plots just down the hill from the house I grew up in.

I’m still close enough to visit them and should get as much in before I move on, not the way they have (at least not yet), but to where my daughter lives and another relatively unchanging life in that part of the world.

Meanwhile, I walk and think and listen to old tunes on an mp3 player (I used to have to carry a number of tapes) and ponder the world, watching the leaves get green and then go brown, watching the distant water flow, as the river like me, passes through a changing place is has no control over.

Everybody loved Dennis

July 10, 1980

(Recollection of an event from June, 1974)

I thought about it all day – that moment when my new boss threw me the keys and told me to drive.

I blamed my old boss for getting me the job.

This wasn’t like before; when high I drove my uncle’s GTO down the middle of Route 80 at maximum speed, unaware of anything but the thrill of speed, or the putt-putt-putt of the VW van up on side of the Rocky Mountains and then a rollercoaster-foot-on-failing-brakes-ride down the other side.

This was a job. I was supposed to be responsible, and I didn’t like the idea at all, knowing that I was ending one job I knew how to do to start a new job on Monday that I didn’t.
The warehouse stuff I could handle; the pickup and delivery stuff, the traveling through crowded streets in somebody else’s vehicle, I dreaded worse than dying.

“And don’t forget,” my new boss, Donald told me during my interview, “You’ll be carrying tens of thousands of dollars worth of cosmetics.”

 Lock the truck and be careful.

This, of course, made me shiver even in the intense June heat.

At which point I thought about Dennis, and I stopped thinking.

I was in my room on the third floor with a crowd of people around me, all of whom alternatively looked at me and the very stiff corpse on the floor.

I had seen dead people before, in the hospital in the army, on the streets of New York, and L.A., but not one that other people thought I had killed.

“I found him that way,” I told the collection of police and others.

My room was a mess as usually, filled with boxes of papers, scribbled on in my desperate attempt to write. The room dripped with three different shades of green from the three different cans of paint Meatball had stolen when he had lived here before me.
The job and the van slipped through my mind like a memory I hadn’t yet had a chance to live, while I relived one night – that night – over and over again, about how hungry I’d felt after playing with my new tape recorder and how I had trotted up the hill from the house on Valley Road to the White Castle at the edge of Verona for a snack between tapings, and found Dennis there in the dirty white interior as if he had already passed away and gone to a tarnished heaven.

Everybody loved Dennis – even though he tended to be a loner. Maybe that’s what made all the women want to run their long fingers through his curly brown hair while their stared into his cute brown eyes, admiring the innocent face that hid what he was really about, he always able to melt the world with just a smile.

The world loved him; but here was there alone.

His eyes, however, lit up when he saw me and he made his way through the crowd to reach me.

But he seemed nervous and kept looking around.

When he got close enough I noticed how red and strained his eyes looked, the look I remember from one of my neighbor’s kids who was regularly beaten by his parents.

Around us, the beast fed, mean, street-savvy, brutal men for the most part, who glared through the thick glass of the serving window at the clerks, who in turn tried to fill the orders quickly so as to make the beasts go away. In the midst of these, I saw a few dreamy junkies who floated around, probably more lost than hungry.

Dennis greeted me but his voice sounded wrong, and I asked him if he was all right. He lied and said yes and asked me about my new job, and I told him I was scared.

The large detective in my room later demanded to know what I had given Dennis, meaning what drug, and how much, and did I know it would kill him.

Mike, my immediate neighborhood and a kid from my old neighborhood growing up, shoved the cop out of the way and told him to leave me the fuck alone.

All I did was offer him a place to stay for the night, I told the cop. I didn’t even know Dennis would show up until he knocked on my door.

The Doors were playing on my tape deck. I thought he was drunk, but then noticed the pink dots on the inside crook of his elbow.

The big detective told Mike to butt out of he’d go to jail along with me.

That scared me. I was already on probation. I already had some drugs in my blood. I hated the sound of the closing jail doors and the snap of their locks.

All I did was give Dennis a place in the corner to sleep.

I didn’t know he would never wake up.

The photographer snapped some pictures. The EMTs came in, lifted the body onto a stretcher, a body already very stiff, with a face that no longer looked like Dennis anyway.
The detective told me to hold out my hands. They shook as he snapped the cuffs on.  Many hours later, I got back home more weary than when I’d left, knowing that I would be in no shape to start the new job. And wondered if my new boss would read about me in the newspaper and decide he couldn’t trust me to drive tens of thousands of dollars of his cosmetics around.

I kept thinking of Dennis, and wondered maybe he knew he was going to die, and didn’t want to do it alone, and wanted me to be there when the end came, and for some reason, this thought made me feel better. I don’t know why.

Pursuit of love?

May 3, 1980

(Recollection from an event in 1976)

The Pieta sits on the table in front of the black and white TV. A coffee table book on sports sits open in the middle, long out of date with the image of Mickey Mantel, page edges worn from constant turning. I sit on the uncomfortable couch, crinkling its plastic cover – the only sound other than the voices coming from the kitchen.

“I know why you’re here,” the deep voice of the woman said. “You want more money.”

“I need it to live; to buy food; to get clothing.”

“Don’t be dramatic; I’m your mother, not your wife.”

“I’m not married; you know I’m not married, even though you want me married.”

“Getting a job might be a good first step.”

“I’m looking,” he said. “But I need money first.”

“I’m not harping on you getting married. I’m sure you’ll commit yourself when you find the right girl.”

“Which is another reason I need the money.”

“You mean to go out on this date?” she said. “Why don’t you ask your friend?”

“I’m not going to sponge off him all night. How would that look, him paying for his date and mine?”

“But it’s all right to sponge off your mother?”

“Nobody has to know about that but you and me?” he said. “You want me married, but you don’t do anything that’ll help me meet anybody.”

“I’m not sure the kind of girl you’ll meet tonight is the kind that would want to marry.”

“You’re just being mean. Either give me the money or say you won’t, my friend is waiting and we have to go.”

“All right,” she said and after a pause. “Here you go. Have fun.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said and appeared at the door of the room I’m in. “Come on. The girls are waiting.”

I stood and nodded, and moved towards the front door behind him, aware of his mother’s glaring at us both as we left, and again, her stare through the front window as we got into my car parked out front.

“What the fuck is bothering you?” he barked at me when I still hadn’t started the car.

“Nothing,” I said, and turned the key, thinking that this wasn’t going to be a good night, regardless of what we did with the girls.

The morning song

July 26, 1980

Birds chirp over the brown river with the rising of the sun, a strange music accompanied by the rumble of trucks over the Wall Street Bridge – a kind of rock and roll that makes me roll over in my sleep if not Beethoven.

It is far from harmonious, the steel and concrete moaning and groaning under the relentless lovemaking of rubber wheels, and I wake into the midst of it, adding to its confusion.

This is a morning when nothing said or done can make any of it seem real, and each breath I take comes with the assault of sound.

I roll out from the sleeping bag, leaving her warm body in its protected cocoon, sleep and dreams protecting her from the cacophony I endure.

It has been a rough night with only two hours of actual sleep. At age 29, I feel 69, and feel on the verge of dying, but it is living I suffer from, though in the back of my head I think that each day is one more baby step towards death – a chilling and depressing thought I put out of my head, letting my mind wander through the noise, putting off also the thought that soon she will have to make up her mind about what she will do and where she will go, and how the psychological distance we feel growing between us will soon grow into geographical distance, and our lives won’t be the same.

I have no place in her world and I know it, having already set my feet on a particular path she can’t or won’t step onto, her dreams are bigger dreams than my dreams our, her ambitions like unfolding wings that will soon soar to places I can’t go.

I need to learn to appreciate the moment we are in while we are in it, and not look too far ahead into the hazy heights of some future neither of us can predict. I need to savor these weekend mornings the way I do that first sip of brew, letting it shake me awake with gentler fingers than the racket the trucks make rumbling outside.

I crave coffee and the consciousness it brings, and the curtain it draws over these early morning fears, as sleep clings to me and I drag myself out of that world into the waking world, trying desperately to break free.

I am far less ambitious than she is. While I love to soar, it is more like a hawk soar than the rising of an eagle, a flight than lingers over the lip of the world, allowing me to gaze at what goes on, not a blind furious flight desperately seeking to reach heights beyond anything anyone else has achieve. I do not wish to be flying so high over the world that I forget there is a world or that I belong to it, and can’t see where it is I took off from or a place in the ordinary world where I can land again.

Sometimes I soar like she does in my dreams, seeing myself in some remote place, on some remote rock, a grand and powerful figure, but one that is quite alone, having soared so high as to leave everyone else behind, such heights scare me more than the approach of death. I never want to get so far up that I can’t hear the morning song, the rush of traffic, the gush of water, the other more ordinary birds chirping in my ears.

That one night

Thursday, July 17, 2014

This is not my birthday; it is the anniversary of the day I was conceived.
We celebrate birthdays because in many cases, we do not know the exact day when our parents came together to create us.
This is not true for me.

Although I do not know the exact time of day, I know it was at night on July 17, after all the wedding vows were undertaken, and all the rituals of cake cutting and first kiss done.

At some point on this day all those years ago, my parents found themselves alone, and brought me into existence.

Until a few months prior to my mother’s death slightly more than a decade ago, I did not know any of this. She kept this a close kept secret partly because my father abandoned her the next morning, taking off to Washington DC with $400 in wedding gifts to straighten out his dishonorable discharge from the U.S. Navy.

He came back broke and with VD, so except for that first night after the wedding, they never made love.

While I knew a lot about my father from my uncles, how much of a scoundrel he was, a drunkard, a womanizer, a flirt and such, I learned much more over the last few years that gave credence to my mother’s secret tale, and evidence to how hurt she’d felt by it all, and why I was so special to her since I was the best thing that came out of a bad situation, and why she dedicated her life to keeping me safe and whole, and perhaps as much unlike my father as possible – although I think in this last she failed, since it is difficult to know what goes on in the mind of another person, even someone as close as a son.

So ironically, this day becomes not just my parents anniversary, but the anniversary of single shinning, hopeful moment in my mother’s life, perhaps the soul moment of her existence, when everything seemed to come together for her, lasting one night she would carry with her forever.

Getting there from here

July 24, 1980

I wake up to the concept that I have to start all over again, struggling to repeat whatever successes I’ve had yesterday while avoiding the pitfalls.

Even writing these words is a chore, a retuning of this engine I had almost purring.

It’s a never ending battle to prove I can do as well today as I have in the past, if not better.

At college, some kids cling to one or two pieces of work they consider masterpieces, fearful that someone else might steal their ideas.

They keep asking about copyrights and other protections, and wonder why I do not care too much about someone stealing what I do, and I tell them because whoever steals from me obviously doesn’t have an original idea in the first place and knows quality when they see it.

But doesn’t scare you to think they’re taking credit for what you do, they ask?

Yes, it would hurt, if anyone actually did it.

But what pride is there in what they do as compared to what I do?

They are not me. My job is to make sure I can keep doing what I do, and repeat or do better, and in the end, if someone steals one thing, I will have hundreds of other pieces to replace what they took, and that poor fool has nothing.

The big fear is not being able to repeat it, and get stuck the way some artist are, with having only one thing to say in their lives, and once said, they have nothing to look ahead to.

I struggle with it all for a number of reasons. I never write anything that I don’t think is good or can be if I work on it hard enough. Sometimes I just put one word after another with the hopes that some future self (who has achieved what I have not yet achieved) can convert it into something worth reading.

I am a better writer today than I was a year ago, and if I’m not better a year from now or ten years, then it is my fault.

Another problem, of course, is the fact that I’m more interested in writing than publishing, and this leads to the inevitable frustration of not being able to make a living at what I love most.

Like everybody, I ache for recognition, to see what I do appreciated, and to perhaps earn a little fame – you know that guy campuses invite to come speak to their students, or gets on some radio talk show to explain what they meant when they wrote this or that, or to hobnob in some literary or even jet set social elite (only I would likely get myself thrown out for saying the wrong thing or telling one of those snobs what I really think of them).

But in the end, I ache to do something so well, to have some piece so well written, that it will out live me, fame or no fame, something that some future life soul I might come back as will gravitate towards, somehow knowing that the person in this life time is that person in a new life. I believe in reincarnation, and that we come back and are drawn to those in the past we have known or were us – I would like to think that I was Mark Twain in a prior life, rather than Shakespeare or James Joyce.

So I place word after word with the hope that it adds up to something, and that just by doing it, I get better at it, and like bicycle riding, I can pick up where I left off (or at least without too much loss) the next day so as to travel a little farther, making progress across this landscape we call art, and to arrive somewhere I want to reach, even if I’m not quite clear as to how to get there from here.