Clean slate. Time and bad timing had wiped me clean. Adrift with no anchorage and little sense of need or urgency. No family, my father the last to pass, a wife so far past the memory vacant as the heart she left behind. No way home, no address to recall, I stand two feet in snow with nowhere to go. A career fragile as a promise, gauze thin, blown away in the din of some whimsical wind. What’s left to ponder? Clean slate is the only response that echoes the empty halls of my core. What good is populating a planet when the planet would be better off without? Procreation only a recreation, prodigy only a propagation of self satisfaction, might, maybe, a few squirts in the night, soils on upholstery, linen and silk – the swimmers the one that win, but the prize is the guise of life that chooses to name itself humanity. Humanity a word, a series of guttural sounds called language, a series of meaningless icons called literature and gods whittled out of fear. Ideas in the grand scope – the grand universal force – only dust mites. The light dust of snow…my minds drift.
…drifts by the streetlights from here down to Catherine St. The cab arrives. The old house looms behind me. My father’s ghost walks the cold halls and peers out the dormer window at the top of the stairs. Host to the past. I won’t turn. It will fade back into the blackness, moaning as it shifts under the winter weight perhaps to tumble as it leans harsh to the right under the mass of a long past and a heavy snow blanket. This too will be a clean palette. A patch of ground to clear and plunder, a profit constructed to encase another life. It groans as I begin to shut the cab door. It calls. I look. He’s not there.
At the airport a child’s face lights and lightens my day. Deep dark eyes wise with the naive depth of brilliant innocent. A clean slate. DNA aside, a life to be defined in terms ultimately not of choosing. Little one so deep of life. Life so sweet as tears well up inside as a choke halts a cry.
Flight delays, a sign of the day. A system burdened under its own weight strains. The child and her madonna fly away. St Paul. My mind a camera as the churning waves of human forms pass this and that way somewhere to go, coming here from somewhere, hurried as they flow cell phone hellos goodbyes. Loud yap of business men plying their trade out in public for all to hear for all to appreciate most to fill the empty life trying to sell nothing really at all and to fill a need really not necessary. The age of immaterial commerce nonmaterial substances - Hopes gains and projections. Corporate. Technology only an illusion in the grand scheme but what does it Do? The hustle bustle thins as the night now deepened the rush suspends as midnight approaches and finally the flight happens, the lights on the plane quickly dim as the red-eye closes down.
Harsh the morning LA light, a rude taxiway awakening while lifting a shade to a blast too bright. Home to homeless ideals anything can happen and to someone it will, today this hour this moment somewhere here is hunted down another lost from the pack that never stops running in circles a loop of inane bustle. This is not home. They will not be missed any longer than a flicker of 1/24th's.
The phone rings I hear through the door but do not rush I take my time knowing it will stop and the machine will talk things I don’t really want to know. Who cares to hear earth shattering news when the earth has already shattered? Here to pack and go. This is not home. It will go unanswered.
Clear out. Baggage light, the heavier left behind. A ham and cheese on the road dry conveniences store fries and a six pack with four to go. This not the goal. Only a start. Sad start though it be, enough to get me going in a direction ill conceived to a future ill defined. My father’s illness and finally it killed him as It will kill me. In the end finally there is no home.
As men whittle gods from sticks. Entwined in fear. Wrapped in the hemp of human hair, beads, and glimmer shtick figurines cast in faith of that not understood. I buy one at a roadside attraction and deem it a place of holy countenance smack center on the naugahyde dash.
Christ has risen, Mohamed has appeared, surely the virgin mary beckons from within a tortilla found in a miraculous taco stand somewhere down the road. Buddha smiles down upon me from a Chinese food to go.
Anya Strout had just gotten out of female prison and was headed North to Portland to find work and a fresh start. Her third. Maybe her last. She did it and she’d admit it, no need deny.
There is nothing charming about a bitter old blowhard playing the cantankerous charmer role. It’s an illusion thinly masking despair and disappointment, with anger and hate. It’s a snarl, a snap, a bite, sometimes a deep bite. He’d left me bloodied. The fights.
Where do you go from here?
North. Portland. You?
...Sure, sounds decent.
What do you mean?
What do you mean?
Portland sounds decent....interesting... never been there. I can run you up and see what it’s like.
Just like that?
Yes
Why? Why would you? The price of gas…no obligations? Your life…
Then let’s leave it there.
I just got out of the slam and I understand staying anonymous …
Well put. Nothing personal
Why should it be?
That question hung in the air suspended by a long silence between them. Both focused on their beers or the TV sporthead without paying particular attention.
They aren’t going to find my body hacked up in the desert somewhere are they?
That is an excellent question from someone that just came out of “the slam”. Mind if I ask it in return?
I was in for shoplifting
Prison for shoplifting?
A lot.
Like Grand Theft?
Nothing on the ‘grand’ scale. A solid journeyman.
Career 289 hitter…made a couple of allstar teams…
But you’ve been caught…stealing.
But you’ve been caught…stealing.
We all make mistakes. Mistakes in judgment…baseball's a one-in-three proposition if you're good. Few odds are good.
Are we getting personal?
No. Factual.
Her demeaner shifted subtley into chill mode. She drew her mask back on, I don’t know…I think I might go my own way…
Her demeaner shifted subtley into chill mode. She drew her mask back on, I don’t know…I think I might go my own way…
Fine. Doesn’t mean I won’t make the trip anyway….for my own interest. Now I’m curious
Are you really that ‘adrift’? Next guy that walks bye and sneezes will have you going to Saskatoon.
If that’s where the road should take me. Working on my novel…
No don’t give me that …
No good reason.
Nothing nasty, no arrangements nor payback. No ass for gas, because I prefer being gay.
Sex? No. No misunderstandings. We drive straight through and I drop you off. That’s it. You buy the beer.
Done.
No sexual pretenses for either. We enjoyed the ride.
Days later, dozing off dockside, San Francisco.
No sexual pretenses for either. We enjoyed the ride.
Days later, dozing off dockside, San Francisco.
It was stubborn cold night on the wharf. Most are.
The boats banged rhythmically against the docks like knockers, over the shush of waves. the gulls gone inland for warmth. A tug's horn calls while she works her way back from the Gate, red pilot glow bobbing out in the haze of mid-bay. Desolate, cold on shore, pity the crew onboard. Hearty blokes…
This is when I felt the bottom, could just barely touch it with my toes, but it was there and there I would rest if I could not find a way to resurface. To lift myself up from my own depths and breath the air and light of Life once again. Or breathe out my last in this dankness.
Go ahead, shut it down. Face your own reality as you lay for the night. Morning would be a gamble to face when it came.
Of all the stupid mistakes I have made in life, the majority have centered around a woman. I know that is not necessarily an original thought. In fact, it’s god damn honky-tonk cliché, but one that easily could be expressed the other way. By the woman in question. I bring some bad luck with me, so she may get her share of loosing too. I just handle it wrong. I’m a “woman on the pedestal” guy. A poor sap not worthy of the poontang. Sex addict.
But once that honey pot been tapped,
It’s time to you find you another lap
The women go away but the mistake doesn’t. And the mistake is what haunts you, it’s not the woman. Can’t barely remember what they look like, it was so long ago. But that guilt come knocking nightly like it been there before.
“Open the door, Johnson, I know you in there.” So you do it comes rushing in and proceeds to haunt you in an all night guilt party. Most nights. Drink helps, but then sometime drink makes me blubber, too. By three AM, you realize it won’t help no more, and you alone with your demons.
Sometimes we end up with whomever it is we are stuck with. My first wife was one of those.
You know they say it’s always 5 o’clock somewhere, but what they don’t’ say is the hammer always come down at 3 AM, and it's 3 o'clock someplace, too.
