Day 38 (cont): Wizened Roadhouse Wheels....

                                             

All I could think about on the phone that day while I was trying to validate the disputed corporate authenticity of the date of my birth was my late father.

The day after my father died the brick kiln of my mother’s house is clotted with relatives. Mom has been advised to go through my father’s closet and donate his clothes to Goodwill right away because if she doesn’t do it now, while surrounded by people she loves, she may never do it. Mother has told me that I should feel free to sift through the corduroy scented musk of my late- father’s attire and help myself to whatever articles of his clothing I like and that she will donate the rest in two days time.

Everyone is still stunned that he is gone. Everyone is psychologically muted. Everyone's face is ruffled with evaporated streaks of rivulets indicative of arid tears.

I can’t get the image of my father on his deathbed out of my mind.

His skin looks like a coppery flattened penny abandoned  that has been freshly urinated on. His eyes are completely sallow. His mouth is open and titled and he is fighting to exchange oxygenated particles.

In his room are his glasses that look like a folded checkbook (the glasses which he will later be buried in) and his wedding ring (which the funeral home will place on his clasped taxidermied hands during the open casket wake and then return it to my mother after the service). The house is full of meat trays. The living room has transitioned into an arboretum of fragrance and grief. Relatives are flipping through old   photographs of my father they will later array on a science fairesque mural that people will look at while waiting in line at the funeral parlor to pay their collected respects.  Humorous vignettes of my late father. The picture of him dressed up as Super Man at Aunt Jan’s annual Halloween party (he came claiming he wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want to dress up and then clandestinely planted my mother’s purse and claimed it was stolen and looked for it then went into a closet and popped out dressed up like Superman with my mother’s purse in paw). The picture of my father wearing almost Woody Allen goggles on the date of his wedding day. Pictures of my father clad in a late-seventies butterfly-collar spearmint t-shirt teaching young students how to read. Pictures of my family vacationing up in camp Arcadia. Pictures of my father playing the piano. The goofy picture that always embarrassed me of my father and Uncle Larry and Uncle Albert wearing pink underwear over their slacks circa Christmas ‘88 because it was some sort of a gag-gift.

My dad has been dead less than 24 hours and I am drinking a Guinness. His clothes are folded in trapezoids and pentagon-configured heaps. The phone rings and I answer it. People have been calling and stopping by the house all day bringing meat trays and plants and expressing their condolences.

   The girl on the other end of the phone has a daffy-high-pitched inflection itched into her voice. She sounds like she is from the Chicago suburbs and that her parents’ incestuously mated with rehabbing members of the Belushi clan. She asks if she can speak with Arthur Von Behren. From her voice it sounds like she is Polish and everything she says is punctuated with an effervescent question mark.

I ask whom may I say is calling. She says it is the Campaign fund at Bradley. She is a student at my Alma Mata, the same school where my Father attended.

She is soliciting alumni for money.

 “I’m so sorry. He’s deceased.” I say, looking at his glasses. Looking at the gilded oval and matrimonial socket of his wedding ring. Looking at my father's orange coin purse he always carried with him like a good luck talisman. On the front of the sylvan framed dresser that used to belong to my grandma I see my father’s wallet.

“Our records indicate that he is still alive, sir.” She says, asking me if I am sure.

I watched life leak out of my father’s visage less than one whole global rotation ago.

I don’t know what to say.

My father is dead. His wallet is lying in front of me. It is stuffed with insurance cards and identification cards.  There are notecards with bible passages scribbled on them that he was memorizing for his Sunday school class. There are awkward adolescent pictures of each of us his progeny in different stages of grade school development.

"No. He's dead. He's very much dead indeed." I tell her, thinking less of the word Kafkaesque and more of the word irony.  A carpeted bustle is heard one room over. Everyone’s eyelids and cheeks are stained with salty peninsulas from hours of crying. Everyone is wobbling as if with sea legs from complete lack of sleep. It is early February. The house smells like the botanical gardens after a light spring drizzle, the condolence botanical stem of choice being that of a Peace Lily.

My father has been dead for less than 24 hours. I can't believe the University I attended and dropped out of and will later return and owe forty thousand dollars to is asking for money.

I don't know what to say.

I want to erupt. I want call her a cunt. I want to bend her over her work carrel in Baker hall and forcefully undo the junior high locker combination of her belt buckle and zipper, sluice down her jeans in thunderous yank, manacle her goddam panties around to the caps of her knees and rape the hell out of her. I want to empty myself in guttural thrusts and  syncopated snaps, leaving braille-shaped teeth marks into the back of her neck. I want to empty myself of all the grief and the hurt and the pain and the moment i am ready to cum, herald out the syllables of my father’s name in a caterwaul of exclamatory grief, thinking that somehow I can bring him back.

I am thinking all this while looking at my father's glasses and wallets, sifting through attire that will soon be hung up  on wiry hangers at goodwill.

"Is there a problem, sir?" She asks.  Part of me needs to vent. Part of me remains reticent.

I take a calculated breath as if I am ready to wail into a brass mouthpiece.

"You know what? I was just thinking. The best part about funerals are the meat trays. I mean, when you really think about  it, the best part about a funeral are all of the meat trays and the potluck flavored dishes everyone drops by your house-- it's like finding a bassinet in front of the orphanage steps on Christmas morning. I mean, meat trays, that's really what it is all about, when you think about it. "

"Meat trays?" She says again, escalating her voice a nasal octave above completely annoying.

"The best part about funerals are the meat trays." I say again before hanging up. Before falling down. Before slamming another Guiness to feel the splotch of emptiness brimming inside my chest. Before planting my nose deeply into one of my father's beige colored v-cut teaching vests.

Before wielding shut the pigment blinds shuttering my eyes.

 Before I deeply inhale.

        

                                                                                 
                                                                              ***

 "Wielding a sickle, Cronus, the youngest and craftiest son of Uranus, the god of the sky, severed his father's genitals and flung them into the sea thus fertilizing the water and Aphrodite was born...she is primeval, oceanic in her feminine power. She is from the beginning of time and holds court at the bottom of the sea. In psychological terms she reigns the unconscious, symbolized by the waters of the sea. She is scarcely approachable in ordinary conscious terms; one might as well confront a tidal wave."

                                   --Robert A. Johnson, SHE




 

                                                                           ***

The best analogy I know for living a life in the arts is culled from the end of the movie FIELD OF DREAMS. In the movie Kevin Costner portrays a cracker barrel blue collar farmer who hears a voice orienting him to inexplicably graze his rural source of vegetative income and construct a baseball diamond in the middle of a bumfuck nowhere. In the middle of Iowa. In the middle of an arable land sea giving birth to knee-high green femurs that will one day resemble corn. Costner's character heeds the artistic call, poleaxes his prairie income, experiences mystical mavens clad in  exiled Cooperstown pin-stripes, dances with the late-night magic of his dream.

What is so compellingly right-on about Field of Dreams is the needle point accuracy in which it portrays the Visionary's quest. When the simple farmer hears a voice that no one else hears and feels led to serve the call he voluntarily sacrifices his income and his security. His marriage suffers. His farm goes into foreclosure.  He has no money.  He has given his identity to a cause  greater than himself, so great that it defies the linear vicissitudes of logic and borders on the erratic and the insane.

At the end of the movie the protagonist has given every narrative molecule of his being to the fruition of his dream when  the ballpark wraith invite iconic counter-culture writer James Earl Jones (who is JD Salinger's doppelganger in the novel) to explore  the inscrutable sheaths of corn and not Kevin Costner.

Kevin Costner goes apeshit.


                                         

The austere-lipped ballpark wraith just looks at him demurely, stolidly blinks, and, with and with an angular nod to his chin states one of the most profound mantras I have ever heard.:

"Is that why you did this? For you?"

One of the cool things about becoming a writer is that, out of every artistic vocation and intellectual inflection that I know, no one can physically show you how to do it. Major in music or performing arts and your instructor will place your fingertips on the frets of the guitar; show you which vowels to enunciate in Alexander-technique fashion while performing that stage soliloquy, critique the allegro of your brush strokes as you swath your painted brilliance onto the canvas of your choice.

When you dedicate your life to this craft of arraying letters into fumbling sentences of creative sound, you realize that, in the immortal words of novelist Richard Powers, "The loneliness of writing is that you baffle your friends (and family) and change the lives of strangers."  Your life goes on hold for a half-decade as you wake up three hours early to hammer out sentences before attending a job you more than likely loathe. You watch the proverbial one-that-gut-away-eh-there-son girl of your dreams marry a man, ("One dull man--dulling and uxorious with one average mind. With one thought less each year.") propagate a family and hurt.  You monopolize spilled decades of solitude. You diagram the coalescing narratives of the human condition in verbal-chromosomes seen only to you and you do it for a faceless reader you have never met, hoping that your laborious craft will be there for them in times of hurt and need


"Is that why you did this? For you?"
 

                                                                ***

It is ten years after my father’s death and I am on the phone in my apartment chatting with the supervisor of the SLP (Student Loan Phuck) who has never heard of Franz Kafka or Frieda Kahlo or apparently Financial Kindness when it comes rectifying the situation with my loans.  Six weeks earlier poet Kyle Devalk arrived at my house from the February frost of the Northern country simply to write. We have been hedonistic beyond all fathoms of fucks. The two of us usually kill about 35 beers a day between us. When we are not slamming beers while composing in our respective sanctuaries we are living at the Owls Nest or Champs West or the Getaway.  For about five hours every afternoon Kyle can be heard pelting stanza’s into his moribund late-seventies typewriter that looks like a diesel lawn mower engine. His sentences are greeted with plastic chomps emanating from my own keyboard one room over in an echoing tango of alphabetical quarks.  When Kyle left home he filched his mother’s credit card and we partied hardcore off it for three weeks. I’ve spent at least 600 bucks on booze.  We make a Jungian mandala from the diminutive doffed crowns once constituting the wonkavator on my kitchen counter while reciting  Kerouacian Koan’s of light .  We blast Leonard Cohen at high volume.  We make fliers for local poetry readings and pass them out to random strangers’ like unsolicited biblical literature. We have crazy riveting hedonistically-hyperborean roller-coaster literary conversations at all hours of the day pontificating the timelessness of poetry as we sip our PBR’s. We see Garrison Keillor up close, vow to fuck Heather Masse. Somehow Oliver Stone’s THE DOORS is always playing in the background and we find ourselves wading  in the chorus of NOT TO TOUCH THE EARTH several times a day.

Kyle is one room over typing. The supervisor comes on the phone and I explain that there is a problem with my student loan payment.

 “ My date of birth was just fine the last time I made a payment. It was obviously some snafu since I received a letter that the company I was paying my loans through is now going by a different name.  Whoever entered my data when you guy’s’ switched companies misplaced a digit. “

I tell the lady that I would like to make a payment.

The lady says that may be but she still needs a birth certificate or else she cannot accept my payment. She again addresses me as sir.

As much as we have poetically partied I still have 1000 reserved to make the overdue payment. It is all I have.

She tells me she could take a credit card. I tell her that I cut all my credit cards up. I tell her that I cut my ATM card up because I was always swiping it for frivolous expenses.

“You don’t understand. This is literally all I am worth on this planet. I busted my ass working sixty-five hour weeks so I could afford to make rent as well as to make this payment. I’m giving you all I have.”

My entire anatomy begins to oscillate as if on the iridescent petals of a psychedelic windmill. I am trying to refrain from emotionally venting while at the same time I am daintily endeavoring to discern why making an overdue payment for my student loans has to be so sentimentally scything, so psychologically wrenching, so physically draining.

Just so plain fucking hard.

If I squint hard enough I can make out the back of my head, my disposable trac-phone stapled and pressed into my temple like an electrode clamp from a defibrillator trying to revive a listless telephone pole in sporadic jilts.  I can see my auburn tresses dripping pass the blades of my shoulders in defeat. I can see my knees configuring into an inebriated curtsey before my shins and lower hemisphere topple into the carpet. I can see myself beginning to yelp in self-castigating staccatos.


If I squint hard enough into the sub-atomic neutrino valence that is time I can see myself almost ten years earlier talking with the lady in my father’s bedroom.

There is my father's wallet and his glasses and a heap of sweaters and he is nowhere to be found.