Day 38 (fin): Wheel-less wagons, fumbling finales and the gift of a wound that refuses to heal...

 

 

 “…a boy in early adolescence touches something of the Christ nature within himself but touches it too soon. He is unexpectedly wounded by it and drops it immediately for being too hot. But a bit gets into his mouth (psyche) and he can never forget the experience. His first contact with what will be redemption for him later in life is a wounding. The first touch of consciousness in a youth appears as a wound or as suffering. It is regrettable but necessary—if we are not cast out of the Garden of Eden there can be no Heavenly Jerusalem.”

                                                              --Robert A. Johnson, HE.

                                                                           ***

I am lying in a supine fractal-limb titter on the Persian carpet  in the room where I write.  I have just gotten the  Sallie Mae shit kicked out of me courtesy of the SLP who vehemently insisted that I don’t know the date of my birth and that I will continue to accumulate interest on loans I was coerced into taking out to foster my educational milieu and global perspective of life on this planet. Over the next three months I will endeavor to pay them six more times and they will refuse to accept my payment stating that they need a copy of my birth certificate because the date of my birth doesn’t correlate with the date of birth they mis-entered into their computer.

“You alright, mate?” Kyle inquires. Kyle calls everyone mate. It’s rather endearing at times. Especially when we are drinking copious amounts of beer and he’s about ready to beat me at Chess.

I swipe my head from fleshy berm of shoulder blade to shoulder blade. If I squint hard enough I can make out a nimbus carousel with various ornithological-caricatures fluttering in counterclockwise fashion where the vision of my father’s wallet appeared to me in sub-atomic pointillisitic static of time  moments earlier.

Kyle asks me again if I am alright.  

I tell Kyle that I need to jump track like Kerouac hopping a vacuous freight-car and majorly blow off some pent up literary-locomotive steam, slamming the front door shut in stunted applause. I  withdrawal the money I had been saving to pay my student loans and walk in Dunkin Donuts and purchase the Keurig coffee maker they have on display justifying my rash purchase that I worked three back-to-back-back sixteen hour shifts over Christmas and didn’t get anything I wanted in terms of materialistic manna from under the pine tree holiday heaven.   I stop at the liquor store and pick up a 30 pack of PBR and a 12 pack of Sam Adam’s winter variety pack. I am holding the 42 bottles-slash cans of beer while precipitously balancing the Keurig coffee machine.  When I arrive home Kyle looks at me like I am some sort of distraught holiday hungover magi .We brew coffee . We have been living  off of what we refer to as Bohemian Brew, i.e,  used coffee grinds  stuffed in a chrome tea-egg infuser my buddy J. left at the apartment and bobbed religiously in a pot of boiling water until anything resembling lightly taupe-colored caffeinated ambrosia appears.

 For the first time in a month we have quality java. We crack open the Sam Adam’s and double fist with PBR, brandishing both beers like flailing hickory drumsticks into the taut percussion tarp  of a snare drum. The more I continue to drink the less I feel of a financial fuck-up.

After we slam ten beers between us close to fifteen beers I cache a few PBR's in the holsters of my denim pockets like cap guns and

point towards the castle in the distance. I point towards Western hill.

"Where are we goin'?" Kyle inquires.

I tell Kyle that I ned to get something back; something that was taken from me a long time ago.




                                                                       ***

"The wound that hurts us so much we involuntary dip it in the water we have to regard as a gift. How would the boy in our story have found out about his genius had he not been wounded? Those with no wounds are the unluckiest of all. Men are taught over and over again when they are boys that a wound that hurts is shameful…Our story gives a teaching diametrically opposite. It says that where a man’s wound is that is where his genius will be…The wound is now thought of as a door.”

                                                                         --Robert Bly. Iron John




                                                                          ***

When I was in high school I was sexually molested. I just had some unspeakable shit happen to me and when I reached out for help it just wasn’t there. In a period of about four months I went from being an All-american god fearing golden boy with a fledgling athletic career to being unable to look at myself in the mirror. I would shake at night and sweat. My anatomy would erupt in palpitations and rashes. I would break shit in my bedroom. I would dress in all black. I carved the word POET down the center of my chest. I remember taking a shower and, for no reason, just screaming out of control in muffled yelps of wimpled lost, stammering and crying and breaking down and not being able to move. My parents sent me to Christian Counselors. I was placed on more anti-depressants than a registered fanbase attendance at a Morrissey convention. It was the mid-nineties and Prozac was posh so a lot of rich kids from Ivory league classrooms thought they were Elizabeth Wurtzel  and no one understood them anyway.
 

 I simply hurt all the time. It was a wound.

Through all the confusion and hurt and morose gloaming that seemed to escort me overhead everywhere I went like verbal dialogue in a cartoon bubble I started writing. I would arrive home after wading in aquatic existential haze that is high school and go up to my bedroom and brew a pot of coffee and listen to the Writers’ Almanac and just scurrilously attack the albino countenance of the page, filleting each sentence into a listless sheath of ruffled notebook paper as if with a scalpel, as if there was something burrowed beneath the ashen white thinly-blue lined veneer of each sheet that I had to archaeologically unearth, chiseling away in inky hieroglyphic blotches of stilts and swirls trying to convey everything that was neurologically jisming inside of my skull. Trying to makes sense of all this shit.

Trying simply to feel.

Trying to learn how to hold my breath underwater and scream as loud as I fucking can.

Sometimes the wound becomes a door and to turn the knob is to heal.



 

                                                                           ***

We skulk down the gravel gulch of Western hill past the aerie-fairy tale castle that once housed Jumers castle Lodge into the sociological swan song and lower-income litany constituting the Southside of Peoria. I tell Kyle that when I was growing up we used to traverse down this hill everyday to school or church and that there was something surreal about a Bavarian castle arched above dilapidated dregs and loose shingles of society.

Kyle surreptiously takes a swing from his beer. He seems dubious. There is obviously nothing like this where he comes from in Appleton, Wisconsin.

I tell Kyle that I feel at home here. I tell Kyle about how I used to walk down Western Avenue to Bogards in the late eighties and buy comic books. I show him the spray-painted frescoes delineating the graffit’d difference between the turf-christening hieroglyphics.of Vice Lords versus Gangsta Disciples.

I think about the run-down sunken visages of the corner taverns from my youth. Beer signs swiveling from rusty hinges from the  exterior heralding names like postaged stamps from the swill of yester year. Hamms. Blatz. Old Style. 

I publically take a swig from my beer, forgoing the courtesy of having a alcoholic receptacle clad in a brown paper when drinking in public. I let my hair down from the sling of my pony-tail. I feel like I am growing boobs. I feel like I am Demeter. I feel like I am descending into the Underworld in search of something that has been usurped and unfairly abducted from me that once retrieved will restore the seasons back into the narrative sheet music that is my life.

I look around at the over-turned carts in ALDI's parking lot and quote TS ELIOT turning to my friend and stating that he has a vision of the streets which the streets hardly understand.


 I am holding beer in paw as I amble down Western Hill. He asks where we are going. I tell him we are going to seedy bars. Bars where there are more tattoos than teeth. Bars with bad plumbing. Bars that look like the exterior sidings have been constructed out of used Brillo pads. Bars where there are always a hitching post of motorcycles neighing in front of the half-lit neon beer signs guzzling in collected snorts.

Kyle is looking at me like I am crazy.

There’s always a crackled oratorio of gunshots in the background compliments of the firing range behind Kroger’s but occasionally you hear rippled-plops that almost always come in wisps of three’s accompanied by the high-pitch pig squeal of a police siren and you know you are in deep shit. There’s still a working class asperity to the Southside that appeals to me.  There’s still good people who keep their lawns clipped and their gutters clean. There are families who drive from thirty miles out of town to direct choir and warm the same church pews they have sat in for over half a century.

There is the southside where I was educated. The beautiful Southside where something was taken from me long ago.

 There are triangular shards of shattered 40 ounces of Malt liquor glistening like iridescent canine feces inconveniently splattered in pyramidal pyres every four steps.  Everything smells like cheap weed and sunshine ricocheting off of wet cement. I tell my closest poetic cohort and spiritual brother how I want to go to seedy bars. I tell him how, at the end of traipsing through the Inferno, Dante and Virgil poetically plod through the center of the earth which incidentally is located on Satan’s left testicle and how, midway through the spiritual trudge, due to the centrifugal gravitational shift, they cathartically discern that they are not going down, they are going up.

 

Sometimes you need to go down to go up.  

 

                                                                              ***

 

When I think about myself in high school and how I hurt all the time I think about the faceless reader. The reader with a static visage and haunched over shoudlers. The reader with salt in her eyelids from all the tears in her chest. The reader who is gripping the spine of a novel reading the same dog-earred thoroughly annoated stanza over and over again because it provides molecule of hope, a quantuum life raft in an existential pond of the cosmos.

 Twenty years ago when I was emotionally naked and drunk and needed soemone to hold me and had no where to go writing was there for me. Fiction was there for me. Poetry was there me. It made me feel accepted and special and loved at a time when I needed it.

Somehow I’m always writing for that faceless reader who desultorily stumbles up on my shit and feels less alone in the globe. Somehow I’m always writing for that kid in highschool who simply has nowhere to go. Somehow I’m incessantly hammering into the brow of the page, julienning alphabetical peels of each letter into a the fresh slice of a well-crafted sentence that I pray can make someone I have never met before sharing the scalp of this planet with me feel less alone. To feel special and intelligent and cared for.

 

To feel loved.  

 

                                                                     ***

 

 

 

 

We go to Duffy’s on the corner of  Anotinette and Western which is completely run-down and has a gnawed bar made out of what looks like  abraded sandpaper which I love. Kyle gregariously acknowledges one of our fellow South Side bar patrons as ‘Mate’ and they just scowl at him funny. We go to Dave’s on Shelly which I have been before an always  have a good time. We go to Boa’s on Western and imbibe the legendary Boa’s Juice which legend has it is concocted from a portion of every liquor in the bar.

We leave Boa’s on half-fledged Dedalus wings. It is spring and the overhead sky is the color of Windex. There is trash all around.  I am a block away from Christ Lutheran, from the church where I was baptized, confirmed—the beautiful stainglass russet brick of the building constituting my spiritual nest, the shadows from the steeple flooding the sidewalks before us like a nylon sail.

      

Across the street from Boa’s there is a desolate parking lot that was a service gas station another lifetime ago. The gas station itself is completely razed, leaving only post-war terracotta cement litter in its wake, it’s only remnant being that of the service station’s sign standing in almost totemic fashion. On the bottom of the sign there is a ladder where one can only surmise the attendant used to clamber to change the digits heralding the price of fuel.

Without consulting Kyle I imminently begin to ascend the rungs. It’s like I am mounting the scales of the cross, taking a loin-clothed crowned thorned thoroughly battered Christ off the wooden plus sign and supplanting him with all my hurt instead. It’s like I need to bleed under the penumbra of the steepled cross where I was confirmed. It’s like I need bleed the past out of my wounds, bleed the gauze of alcohol out of my nervous system, coddle my Persephone and kiss the forehead of spring, enter the glory of the faith that is the world to come.

Kyle follows behind me. It is the middle of the day. There are cops all around. In a way we look like twin beatnik snipers.

  I take off my shirt and just start screaming, howling, cursing, Sylvia Plathing-out-of-control, casting imprecations of eternal impotency on the people I love who have really hurt me, the lovers who have abandon me, the friends' who have fucked me over, the makeshift nest of mistakes I have made. I scream for five minutes as loud as I could, a koan of sorrow and loss. I then had a beer and forgave those I had damned, those that I love. Forgave myself.



                                           


I start  quoting poems. I scream out the fourth canto of Whitman's I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC. I reference Shakespeare's Let me not to the marriage of True Minds admit Impediments and that Time of year thou mayest in me behold. Kyle is looking at me with nucelar intenisty.  As if choregraphed we begin to quote the footnoe to Ginsberg's Howl. Everything is holy. The name of Peoria is already referenced in the footnote but we start adding writers we admire and people we love stating Holy David Foster Wallace!! Holy George Saunders!! Holy Dave McDonald!!! Holy Roxy Reno!!! Holy Lorie Moore!!! Holy eternity!!! Holy peril of the past. Holy the life everlasting and the promise of the eternal breath of enlightenment, the pangs of the human condition!!! The hurt!!! The loneliness!!! The resilience!!!

The joy!!!!

                                                                   ***
                                                                       




They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios,

  tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American

  river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive

  bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood!

  Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!

  Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells!

  They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof to solitude! waving! carrying

  flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

                                                               

                                                                       ***

I descended from the pinnacle of the gas station cross that spring day and continued to drink until, a year later, in March 2013, I decided to philosophically investigate why I felt the unerring need to drink all the time. While my drinking waned, the accumulating loans and financial fiasco that were my student loans did not. I went to court, was threatened to have my wages garnished. On the morning of day 38 of Succulent Sobriety my verse were frayed bundle of jumper-cables clamped to the antipodal battery sign. I had another appointment to meet with a loan counselor later that afternoon. I felt worthless. I spent the night at my mom’s house and told her that I needed to drink. Told her I was sick of simply dealing with this shit. Told her I was sick of feeling like a loser every time I answered my phone or went to my mail box.   

I'm next to impovershied all the time anyway. If my wages are garnished I'll have nothing.

Mother drops me off and asks me what I am going to do.

 “I just can’t take it anymore.  Everything inside my chest feels like a damp cardboard pieces.

I feel like Mama Academia is menstruating utilizing my diploma as a sanitary napkin for her final period avant menopause. I’m sick of being broke all the time. "

 My mom is a spiritual. Ten years ago after my father’s demise we went through a period of two years where maybe I saw her maybe once outside of familial holidays. Our rapport has been the best its ever been. I go out to her house on my one day off and do laundry and mow the lawn.

 “You can do this,” My mom says. She tells me that I have made a covenant with myself and that I only have two days left. I spent all day working on a draft for what I thought would be the third segment of Babies in Avocados on day 38. I write the scene where tell Nina that I’m sorry that it just won’t work out between us because, of course, I am scared what would happen if she actually moved in and if we actually decided to give it a shot. I write about my spiraling romantic detumescence. I chisel out the scene where, after Nina finds me griping my side and unable to move (what would later be diagnosed as extreme dehydration and nerves) I visit Dr. Wynn. Dr. Wynn is a cool doctor from the Ivory Coast. He has the whitest smile I have ever seen.  I can’t get enough of his British accent. When he gives me the results of my MRI he sits  me down in the fashion of a little league coach and a closing pitcher and basically says, look, you're a healthy young man. Your liver and kidneys are fine. If there's something in your past that's causing you to drink all the time you need to deal with it because obviously your prostituting your own talents and gifts simply by feeling the need to drink beer all day.

I have the bulk of day 38 written and all I can think about is how much of a failure i am because I owe everyone money. I find myself the morning of June 6^th inside Walgreens on Western avenue, a six pack of Budweiser (because it was chilled) tucked under my arm like a lunch pail, a twelve pack of tepid unchilled thoroughly cost efficient Pride of Peoria PBR dandled beneath the antipodal  limb like a scarecrow at the post of a NASCAR affiliated racetrack. I have been clean for almost forty days. I have been in liquor stores almost every day to purchase tobacco and have refrained from buying beer. I have been in bars I love surrounded with human beings I acutely care about and adamantly refrained from a slinging a few cold ones back. I have been in this Walgreen’s nearly every morning to purchase my beloved New York Times and give cool Barb behind the counter a hug  never once having it pop into my mind to meander down the ersatz stem of the beer aisle and drool.

The moment I purchased the beer a metronomic-switch was flipped somewhere in my frontal lobe and I don’t hurt anymore.

I don’t feel like a failure.

I feel less depressed. I feel witty. I flirt with the two unassumingly naive white-trash girls behind me in line (which I readily assure you Peoria has no paucity thereof) that the electronic cigarettes they are smoking look like they are taking calculated puffs off a community tampon.  I walk home with a loping jig attached to my gait.  I toss the PBR in the freezer, doffed the  amber phallus of a Budweiser from the cardboard holster and gratuitously chug. In less than ten minutes I have already drowned three beers and am fishing for a fourth. In less than an hour I have seminally slammed around thirteen.

I am blasting music. I am feeling less like an artistic fuck up.

For the first time in over a month I unzip in front of the porcelain stump of my toilet with heterosexual male assenting horseshoe seat down and take a long-elongated beer piss, giving the virile baton of my anatomy a healthy shake before cracking open another cold one and slamming it into crunched aluminum oblivion following a gallant slurp. When I go to get more beer I saunter into a bum sifting through the dumpster behind the Get-a-Way looking for copper. I give him a twenty dollar bill and, in the words of George Carlin, tell him that the funds are to be used for beer and wine.


"Don't let me catch you drinking milk now out of a paper bag or anything like that."

 

 Within a week I’ll be pounding 15 beers a day.

It was like the entire month of May never happened.

                                         
                                                               ***
 

As if metaphysically scripted I bump into ol' Cliff while walking back from the liquor store. Cliff who drinks 20 beers a day. Cliff with no teeth who built a helicopter in his front yard. Cliff who can build anything yet lives in a house with no plumbing and drinks 25 beers a day

 His anatomy looks like stale peanut brittle.

I give him a beer and five minutes into the conversation her just turns to me.

"I read some of what you been writing. I mean, about not there drinking and all. I mean, I couldn't understand half of it but I could tell that it was really good and all."

I am silent. Bridely I wonder if ol' cliff assayed the essay about himself. 

"I just wanted to tell you that I'm proud of you. I know its hard and I know you and I both like to drink. But I'm proud of you for really giving it a shot, even though you fell a couple of days short." 

 I don't know what to say.

I go home and call up the Student Loan Phuck. I refrain from making any references to Franz Kafka. After an hour I am able to forgo having my wages garnished.

I take another sip of beer.

Finally this shit is resolved.

                                                                 ***

Even though I capitulated a block and a half before the finish line I still had my party on Saturday June 8^th at my favorite watering hole in West Peoria, the Tartan Inn.  Before I arrived I took my mom  out to dinner at Avanti’s and to see a play at Corn Stock,  MUSIC MAN. Music Man is a very special summer-sappy musical to me first germinal acting experiencing in CCT  back in the halcyon summer of ’92 where I portrayed Charlie the anvil salesman and had my first on-stage kiss and the ebullient director Miss Pam Tucker-White chided me because purportedly I tried to slip the tongue a seducing credential-waylaying Marian the Madame librarian, but more than that, when I was in Music Man the summer apres I graduated eighth grade with a bunch of kids culled from Tazewell county it was the first time I really experienced the world of art and how art can be used to connect and make an audeince feel less alone in the world.

 Before we arrived at the theatre mom informs me that she was pillaging through some old boxes in the basement and came across a box of my father’s belongings.  There was a beige sweater that my father used to teach in and I planted my nose in the musk scented teacher-lounge tweed and inhaled as if I were trying to snort crushed Ritalin.   As I did while looking at his glasses and wallet, listening to the money-grubbing soliciting carols of the daffy high-pitched co-ed requesting money, talking about the importance of meat trays in correlation to domestic grieving.

 The play got later than I anticipated and I arrived at the gala to celebrate my failed foray into sobriety almost and hour late.    When I arrive the Tartan Inn is agog and full of laughter and I am surrounded by people I love. Kyle devalk with glasses sans scruff- brittle beard looks like Harry Potter toddled into Lens Crafters with a prescription for a Nimbus 2000 and came out with a toppling pyramid of BEAT literature. He is reading a book of poems by Bob Kaufman.  Poet Megan Canella is seated at the bar a copy of Nathaniel West's MISS LONELYHEARTS next to her beer coaster. Inside the front cover  of the book is a poem that was so beautiful I told her I would publish  it in my blog:

The party commemorating my 40 days of self-discovery was a typical DVB bacchanalian fete. We drank beer and guzzled shots and closed down the bar and then adjourned to my apartment to continue to party and drink until the tangerine flavored sun squinted into the eastern overhead shoreline of my kitchen window.  It was cool partying with friends again. Cool having hot girls in my apartment once again. Cool hanging out with Louis the amicable neighborhood lush. Cool getting trashed and talking about books and hurling furniture off the deck of my back porch while having my friend take her top off and flash passing traffic skirting along Waverly avenue at 3:30 in the morning, all the while howling at the lunar bellow of the moon above.

 

But the highlight of the night happened maybe fifteen minutes after I entered the bar. In the corner by the new dart machine there was group of women drinking fruity mixed drinks, giggling with the manager cool Joe. They looked like they were at a bachelorette party. I am seated next to Kyle slamming a celebratory Guinness when Joe waves me over.

“These are your fans right here, Dave.” He says. I have never seen any of these women in my life. I thank them for reading. I buy them drinks.  The one in the middle has a beautiful shy hyphen smile and is in her early forties. She seems to no more about SUCCULENT SOBRIETY than does the author.

“I wasn’t going to talk with you. I was just going to take your picture with my cell phone.” She says, very demurely.

I look down in humility. I thank her for reading.

She then pulls me aside.

“I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable but I need to ask you a question.”

I tell her she can ask me anything she wants.

She asks me if Arthur Von Behren was my father.

 I nod and say yes.

“Your dad was my favorite teacher. I had him in sixth grade at Beverly Manor in Sunnyland. He would stay after and help me with math. He taught me how to play chess. He was just the gentlest, kindness human being I have ever met. I cried when I found out he died suddenly ten years ago.”

I look back at this woman who has unbeknownst to me been following my writing for the past month. She is looking at me with gratitude blinking in the petals of her eyes. I don’t know what to say.

I hold up one finger and tell her to wait here for a moment.

I run out of the bar. Two minutes later I am home and two minutes after that I return to my new found friend.

 

"Here," I say to her, handing her the sweater my mom opportunely gave me earlier that evening. The musk-scented beige sweater. The sweater that belonged to my father.

 

"My mom gave me this tongiht. It belonged to my father. I want to give it to you know as a thank you for knowing my dad and for reading my shit the past month. It means alot. Thank you."

 

She accepts the sweater. I tell her if she plants her nose into the sweater she can smell my father. She sniffs it like a bouquet.

 

While she is sniffing I swear, just for a moment, I can see what my faceless reader  looks like.

I take another swig of my Guinness. I think about my father staying after school making a student who struggled in junior high mathe feel special and loved.

 

I lift my chalice to the ceiling of the Tartan Inn and give my father a silent salute.

Somewhere if I squint hard enough I can make out the gruff folds of his gentle smile in the bar lights above.