I was sitting in a church basement with donna last week, fidgety and
distracted. it's been a rough stretch lately, I sort of feel like I'm
coming out of a cave but there's an impermanence about it all...
everything in life so far has been an acceptance, failure,
accomplishment, what have you - but this is like early recovery. up
and down and up and down and fine and on the floor and almost fine but
whoops not really and the phone calls are mounting and you can't not
go to work... and then back to fine. whatever the fuck fine means
these days.
so I'm sitting in that musty basement, with a chalkboard behind the
people at the front table, leftover from some church camp or youth
group or sunday school nonsense. from what I can gather, it's things
you can do besides get drunk or have sex or all those other sorts of
immoral things, and instead, it's how to go find jesus in your
everyday. go to bed at night and snuggle with jesus. look for jesus in
walmart. a child's hand drawing of a cat, meowing, and something and
something and jesus. it's weird, and it's been on that chalkboard for
months and months. like it was forgotten about, or maybe they just
don't meet in that room anymore.
so I couldn't sit there for one more second, listening to stories of
drinking too much, drinking on boats, drinking and losing the
sportscar, drinking and tarnishing the family name at yale. I tell
donna I can't sit there for one more second, and she suggests a walk.
funny thing is, I've been planning on going for a walk the whole time,
since before we even got there, but as it turns out, I would have
wound up going anyway, even without intending it.
it had just gotten dark and we've been smack in the middle of blowout
summer days, too hot to go to the beach almost, with ninety percent
humidity and a general lack of functioning throughout the cities and
towns. dog days, or whatever. I leave the church and head to the right
down the sidewalk, past the house we always thought was haunted, where
I swore I saw a shadow in a an upstairs room I couldn't tear my eyes
away from. with quicker pace, past a few nondescript suburban mini
ranches where I went trick-or-treating with my father and sister years
ago, the podiatrist house, and the house that looks like they should
be near the beach with lots of stuff hanging up outside, and a big
window with a big dog staring through, and in the daytime a pleasant
older woman fixing a boat or a lawnmower in the driveway. past the
house before chet's house, and chet's house. chet died a while back, I
don't remember much of him but his old man-ness out in the yard and
the massacre of christmas carols from my youth (chet's nuts roasting /
on an open fire...). I tear up a little at this, because people loved
him, his family loved him, and now I'm walking past the glimpse of the
brook that ran behind our houses where we used to splash around,
overgrown and buggy in the heat. the sidewalk ends abruptly before it,
and the dewy grass makes me slip around on my flip flops as I come up
to my old street.
it's been years and years since we lived there, fifteen or sixteen at
least, if not more. more, I think. and things have changed but it's
all the same underneath the home improvements, but still, thinking
about it now and remembering the snapshots my whole life, it's like it
happened to someone else. like I'm looking at pictures in an album in
a living room of a friend of a friend. quaint, unfamiliar, the time my
sister kicked me in the face by accident when I was crawling over the
back of her sticking out of a fort I wasn't allowed in, and the gush
of a bloody nose, and my father telling me to put my head back, his
handkercheif on my face, the almost nauseating taste of blood down the
back of my throat. the bumpy patch of sidewalk just past our old place
where I jumped up to catch a frisbee and landed on the wrong part of
my foot, the gravel stuck in my knees and the scars that ensued.
there's not really much streetlights, one or two that weren't always
both working at once, and in the post-dusk darkness, not all the
lights are on in the houses and it's gloomy.
I've just passed our old house, with the ground cover and bushes out
of the front yard, long gone, and the front door you had to go down a
few steps onto a little dip of a cement porch to get into. the big
picture window where the piano sat, where I can see a huge reprint of
the hands touching from the sistine chapel I think, and strange
flowered curtains and a white pressboard hutch in the background where
there should be nothing and a glass dining room table that's not there
either. I stay there, where the stump got pulled out of the yard,
where the two feet of sidewalk was grass instead, the newer mailbox,
the time I left my house drunk and came here, slurring, asking to use
the phone because I used to live there, calling jay miles and how he
came and picked me up and laid me out on his bed in his apartment on
canner street and lit candles and did this thing to my head with his
hands as I fell asleep, and he set off to sleep on the floor or the
couch or wherever, and the raging technicolor dreams I had, that I can
recall like it was a moment ago, that I've written about before...
frustrations carved into an arm in a room at a camp with wood
paneling, and sitting in the car on a rainy day with robert on an
absurdly small little lake that the car is towering over on a little
rock jetty, strange, and none of it is scary but it's all just right
there. the same porch where we held puppet shows, sitting on the
driveway, squatting behind where you walked down, socks and bags on
hands in the summertime.
just as I pass that part of the sidewalk, bumpy, still unrepaired, a
huge buzzing junebug summertime beetle that felt like it was the size
of a sharpie bumps into my face, and I'm a flurry of hands waving and
duck-and-cover. a few more steps and it's lesley's old house, right
next to mine, and it starts to get worse. sad turns into rundown,
almost a nightmare it seemed, I wasn't afraid but it was all so wrong
and unkempt and like a distorted version of something I once knew. the
bushes all pushed out into the walkway, random branches grown a foot
up that no one had bothered to trim, and a japanese maple left to run
wild. I can still see her father out there, taking care of everything,
and the shabby state of the yard made me want to cry. there was a
shitty car in the driveway and two guys in the upstairs window, in her
parents' bedroom, with blinds with one of the slats broken, standing
shirtless poniting at something in the room. I wanted to tear into the
backyard, box tunnels and brook crossings and rabbit hutches and the
rope swing and the rock lesley fell over and cracked her head on. the
back deck where we smoked cigarettes when nobody was home. that one
great party we had when her parents went away, and the snapshots of
dreams I've had over the years suddenly coming to life. all behind
that wooden gate to the back.
I almost walked up to the front door two more houses down, where the
old couple lived with the ships in the bottles and the big three-way
tins of popcorn and stories and a big window to the backyard and
everything was different from our house. I think I saw them recently,
but then I wondered if one of them had died, that it would be strange
for me to be standing on the porch. I always liked their house, going
to say hello, leo the lion in the next driveway that we really didn't
know so well and the crazy white trash people with the shotgun after
that. coming around the cul-de-sac, just fancy for a dead end street,
the italian family across from lesley's with mary on the halfshell in the
front yard, in the exact same spot, where we sat on the steps in the
summertime trying to figure out what to do with our days. the red
house across from ours, where I learned to tie my shoes and roger and
his brother (who we all couldn't stand) would bring over lettuce and
stuff he grew in the backyard.
my mom and my aunt with lawnchairs in the driveway, drinking michelob,
washing the dogs with the garden hose on the super hot days. my first
kiss in the back of a suburban playing a board game, and how I had to
card him a million years later at the package store, with his shitty
fake ID I let him get away with. being embarrased in the back when the
whole neighborhood was over in the pool, and I was too old to be out
in the pool in underwear and a frilly nightie tank top, and I was
anyway, and I was embarrased to death about it. garden snakes and the
dog run and passing barbeque condiments from the kitchen window to the
back cement porch where we sat when the weather was nice. the day my
dad shaved his beard off to work for the limousine company. mom
sleeping on the couch. dad punching the wall in my room. pooh bear
curtains, nightmares every night and the lights on, screaming my head
off because I was afraid to pick up my bear from the floor, afraid of
what was under the bed, and how my sister always came, and how I did
it every night, and how I called out mom a hundred times but my sister
always was the one.
hurricane gloria and branches hitting the upstairs window, my mom
sleeping, bored, waiting, the family room and when the dog got too old
to walk and she lived in the garage with the space heater for the last
few weeks so she could eat and go to the bathroom and hobble around
and not have to go far. all of this, standing back at the driveway
now, and a car comes down the street and pulls in right in front of
me, and two kids are standing in the driveway as I walk away, looking
like they're about to roll a blunt or that they weren't supposed to
have the car out or something. all of this, racing through my head,
all these paragraphs in under three minutes, dark, mosquito bites and
wet flip flops.
it was like a bad dream that wouldn't stop, and it still is, sitting
here, writing all of this down. typing all of this down. I walked back
up around the corner, past chet's and the beach people and the
podiatrist and the haunted house, past the church, wanting to be
alone, desperately hoping to be found, finding solace on the front
steps until a few minutes before nine and the end of the meeting, the
safety of the car, the familiar of the apartment that I wish was home
but just feels like another place I'm staying at, except for when raf
comes home from work and I'm here to have dinner with him. no one came
looking for me on the front steps, sobbing into my knees held pressed
to my chest, knowing my underwear was probably showing out from under
my skirt and trying to cover up and not caring all at once. the shine
of a clasp made to hold on one of those beige cloth wrap bandages
sitting there on the steps, thinking of the old people who must have
been there the day before, getting home, wondering where the clasp
went. it made me remember my dad and the big bag of those wraps we
always had in the bathroom and never seemed to use.
donna said it was good to feel all of that and to let it all out.
I suppose I agree, but it all still seems like a movie of a bad dream
that someone else had.
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