Status: It is May and it is exactly four years ago
Physiology: and everything is perspicuous although
nobody seems to know the definition what that word means. It is spring and you
are lying down in supine posture in St. Mary’s cemetery in West Peoria and you
don’t know where you are. There is the clover-minty scent of freshly mowed
cemetery grass inhaled at ground level attacking your olfactory senses with
hints of opening day ballpark nostalgia and there is a grisly sepulcher twenty
feet to your imminent right and there is the girl who must be all of eight
years old riding a pink bicycle with training wheels on a Sunday afternoon and
her mom has a cell phone pressed into her ear like she is trying to hear the
thrash and furl of the ocean. From your periphery lying face-up in the grass
the mother and daughter look like church steeples in a children’s pop-up book
about accepting death around Easter time.
“Are you okay?” The solicitous lady says to you the
way solicitous people talk on afterschool television specials, still holding
her cell. You despise how people can’t take a shit without consulting their
fucking cell phones.
“My daughter saw you over there and we were worried.
We thought you were dead or had been shot or something You were just lying
there motionless and we couldn’t tell if you were breathing.”
“I’m fine,” You tell them everything is
perspicuous.
The West Peoria fire alarm siren was beginning to
ache into an ear-splintering neighborhood caterwaul as if presaging the arrival
of an impending Nazi blitzkrieg. The sky is the color of windshield wiper fluid
and the last thing you remember was trying to get a handjob from the emaciated
girl you met inside the nicotine cumulus of the Owl’s Nest who wanted to meet
someone in St. Mary’s cemetery to get what she kept referring to as “powder.”
The solicitous lady is looking at you like you are
some sort of doe that got caught in a bear trap. Her finger tips are splayed
and she is pressing both of her hands down against something invisible telling
you just to go ahead and stay put now. That help is on the way.
You stand up even though the lady is telling you
just to stay where you are and not move. A small herd of human beings attired
in weekend shorts and polo shirts and visors who look like they have premium
dental insurance have gathered near the front of the cemetery in an octagon of
shoulders of limbs and they are pointing. When you left the Owl’s Nest you took
your beer with you. It is a Budweiser and it is still half full and somehow you
had the foresight to plant it behind the tombstone before you passed out.
Normally you don’t drink Budweiser but the moment you entered the Owl’s Nest
sexy Rachel just handed it to you from behind the bar gratis.
“I’m fine,” You inform her. You have an apartment
near Bradley put you have been staying down the road on the corner of Heading ave and Sterling.
As you get up you look back and peripherally espy
the amber-stem of the half chug Budweiser saluting like a miniature flag on
Memorial day from behind the tombstone you were using as a surrogate pillow.
The lady continues to blather and you smile and gesture you fingers in the same
exact manner as if mirroring her antics.
“I’m fine,” You tell her. “I’m perspicuous.”
“You’re what?” She says, sounding like she is from
Chicago.
“I’m perspicuous. Everything is okay.”
***
It all started nine hours earlier with Tecate and
the Nuclear woods.
You got off of work at 7am this morning and you meandered
through the nuclear woods, down past dry run creek, the trees still possessing
a hint of autumn, branches resembling arthritic limbs trying to raise their
hands for a glass of water in the back of the geriatric ward. It feels peaceful to be in nature, and a month
from now the woods will be a vernal nest of chlorophyll, but for now it is
peaceful and you are killing time until 8am when the liquor store opens.
The liquor
store used to be a convenient store twenty years’ ago when you were a kid and
there used to be Take 5 dance studio across the street where your parents’ made
you take tumbling because you were a clumsy kid who wore thick glasses and was
always bumping into things. After tumbling you go across the street with your
friend Jason Ayres and purchase Garbage Pail Kids with change you generously
usurped from a vase in your parents’ bedroom. One day while purchasing Garbage
Pail Kids your friend Jason Ayres points to the magazines behind the counter.
“Those magazines—inside they have pictures of naked
girls.” He tells you.
You don’t
know what to say.
Dual decades later you find yourself in the same
Convenient store, only now the bulk of the establishment is dedicated to
bottle-brimming aisles containing hard-core alcoholic proof. Perhaps thinking
of Cinco de Mayo you purchase twin Tecates. You get a 40 of Ice house and an
Oil can of Foster Bitter. It is Sunday morning. As you walk down Bradley Avenue
you can hear the bells of St. Mark’s chime in beckoning falsettos. You ferry the beer in a plastic bag fraught
with sudsy beer bliss the way yuppies carry plastic bags in their free hand
when they walk their dogs. It is spring and all is right in the world even
though you are exhausted from working third shift the night before.
En route home
you smell flowers that you are sure no has named yet.
When you arrive to your apartment on Bradley Avenue
you sit down at your writers’ desk and begin to drink. You watch the patrons
enter St. Mark’s church across the street. You straddle your chair, sit at the
same desk that once belonged to your late father and begin to drink while pecking
sentences into the egg-white shell of the page hoping a metaphor will hatch
You once had internet access on your desktop
computer but once you super-glued the USP portal shut (‘I gave my desktop a
hysterectomy,’ You tell your befuddled friends) because instead of writing all
you ever did was phuck around on facebook and look at copious amounts of porn
before returning back to the cyber-visage of her face, brush the arrowhead
cursor across her forehead, across the auburn tresses of her hair, wondering if
she ever thinks of you from time to time.
Sometimes when you looked at her profile status you
get pissed off because you think she is back with him.
You continue to drink. You comb through your novel.
Your baby. You use to always refer to your novel as your ‘illegitimate
daughter.’
When you first became a writer you wanted to be
David Foster Wallace. You wore a bandana and glasses to your first creative writing
class taught by the great Thomas
Palaekeel at Bradley University. You’ve read Infinite Jest anywhere between 20
and 40 times. You wanted to write novels like Ulysses and The Recognition. You
think parts of Gravity’s Rainbow is just seriously overrated and that Pynchon
was just getting away with post-modern pedantic blather and that he just gets
away with shit.
You want to write a large cement block tome where
the reader can move in with emotional baggage and furniture containing what in
the words of your mentor DFW, “What it feels like to be a fucking human being
vs. a rather sophisticated mammal.” At
last count your ‘ illegitimate daughter’ weighs in at 1146 single-space pages
or, 377, 780 words. You have made surgical cuts with a grammatical scalpel. You
have bleed over each line. Three years ago it was 700 pages and you used to
refer to your daughter as your fat four old. Now she is portly eight and kind of looks like the bee
girl trying to do a pirouette in the
Blind Melon video destined for greatness.
You look at your novel and smile. Across the street
priests clad in billowing robes of white are shaking hands with exiting
parishioners. You look at her picture
again, her red hair, the LETTER TO MY LOVER t-shirt she was wearing just for
you. The picture that her sister took while she was in partying in Chile and got drunk and thought about you.
It is ten in the morning. You realize you are out of
beer. Without locking the door to your apartment you leave the building and
walk down Bradley avenue again, in search of something to drink.
***
In St. Mary’s cemetery the police officer is asking
if you are okay.
“I’m fine. I’m perspicuous.” You tell the police
officer, who has short hair and looks like he votes republican.
“You are what?” The officer inquires.
Jesus, you think. Perspicuous. It means limpid dumb
fuck, It means lucid. It means everything is translucent and clear. It means
removing streak free cutlery from your washing machine in your kitchen after a
dinner party where the steaks were served medium-rare. You want to rip badge and call him an
illiterate fuck and tell him you would have given your left-testicle to have
gone to his high school. To have lived in the area code of down where kids
didn’t feel like a statistic all the time.
You want to tell him all this but the only word you
can think of is perspicuous.
“I’m perspicuous. I was just drinking at the Owl’s
Nest and I think someone might have doctored my drink.” You tell him,
prevaricating the truth.
The officer
could easily ticket you for public drunkenness but instead he looks like he
believes you. For the most part every in West Peoria is family except for the
thugs who modulate up from the southside and start shit. The police officer
continues to nod his gruff countenance as if listening to music on a i-pad. You
are thankful that you had the foresight to spike your beer in a secluded cove that
isn’t visible from where you are standing right now.
Just as you think he is going to let you go an
ambulance arrives.
“You might want to
talk to these people.” The officer says.
***
You arrive back at the liquor store on Western
avenue less than three hours from your last purchase. The middle-eastern man
behind the counter who you always talk about international soccer with smiles
and makes a joke and asks if you are back for more. Judging from the amount of
beers you have inhaled so guzzled from various aluminum oz. far you have drank
anywhere 8 -11 beers in a three hours period. Your plan is: Buy some more beer.
Go home and write at your computer. Pass out around three in the afternoon.
Sleep until ten. Go to work and continue writing.
Keeping with the Cinco de Mayo theme you purchase
two more 24 oz. Teacate’s and a six pack of Negro Modelo dark.
As you walk home you think that everything is right
in the world. You know longer hurt all the time when you are drinking beer.
Once a week you have been sneaking a cube of Sam
Adams’ sampler blend into the woods in Bradley park and you sit in a secluded
spot in the foliage of the gulch behind the tennis courts where people play
ultimate Frisbee and drink beers and smoke. Some days you quote poems by Walt
Whitman from memory. Poems about the body electric. Poems about being with
someone you love as being enough. Poems about love being unreturned.
You drink beer. Sam Adam’s Boston Ale (not to be
confused with Boston Lager). Sam Adam’s now defunct Heffeweisen. Sam India Pale Ale.
Some nights you pass out in the woods and wake up
around 9:30, a spring tint blanketed the exact spot of the waning sun.
As a rule you always pee outside in nature marking
your territory as if shaking a bubble wand.
Two Springs’ earlier you hung out with the
red-headed girl of your dreams in this park. The first time you kissed was near the chain fountain of hole 9
on the Frisbee golf course. You lifted
her up and enveloped her bottom limbs around your torso as if being mandated by
a neon emblem to fasten your seatbelt during turbulence on an international
flight. You hoisted her up and swiveled your enjoined torso and then took a
step back. You lifted her on top of the picnic table, groping her upper thigh
below the seat of her denim jeans. You lie down facing upwards as if counting
clouds and plant her looking into you above you.
You want her on top of you. You want her to straddle
your limbs and dry-hump the hell out of your thoroughly battered heart.
Like beer, you think drinking from the draught of her lips will heal you.
You are thinking about her and before you realize it
you have finished four Negro Modelo’s and one Tecate. You refrain from writing
and unplug your computer because you don’t want to
monopolize the entire day looking at her picture again. It is now past noon and
the liquor store that is closer to you apartment in campus town is open. You walk
into campus down, slap down a twenty and purchase Sam Smith’s Oatmeal stout, a
24 oz. PBR and another 24 oz. Tecate and a pack of cheap Santa Fe grape tasting
cigarillos.
Your plan is this: Go home to your apartment and listen to music loud and drink beer until you pass out and then go to work at 10pm. It is nearing one in the afternoon and you have drank around sixteen beers. As you walk past St. Mark’s parish the last mass is exiting. A Hispanic family looks at you holding the see through bag of Tecate and nods.
Inside your apartment you blast music and continue
to slam beers. Last week you found two albums in Goodwill bin close to where
you live. Listening to music on the crackle and purr of vinyl is like listening
to music for the first time. You put on Tom Petty’s FULL MOON FEVER. You start
crooning as if a coyote and a crescent moon when Free Fallin’ comes on. You
start dancing in almost native American pow-wow fashion during YOUR SO BAD. For
some reason you grew up thinking that song ‘I WON’T BACK DOWN was called, “I
WANT THAT DAME,” which kinda of makes sense due to the equine nature of Tom
Petty’s countenance. You feel no need to crash and continue dancing and twirling in dervish fashion
around the book shelves of your apartment. When Dancing at the ZOMBIE ZOO comes on you start yelling at college girls walking past your apartment.
All is right in the world. You take off Full Moon Fever and put on a Journey album you found. Singing along to the lyrics of Only the Young survive. It is two o'clock in the afternoon and you have already drank 24 beers. In two hours time you will find yourself trussed on a gurney in the back of an ambulance and they will tell you that there is enought alcohol in your system to kill you but for now, you are here, you are immortal.
You are drunk. You no longer hurt.
Right here at this pocket of time and space you are dancing like Shiva and the vinvyl scratches of Journey is blasting and you are happy.
You are perspicuous.
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