#2-4 (beauty unparalleled)
"the closest thing to heaven for a sinner: november's concrete grey and nicotine withdrawal"
My new employer tells me secrets and in the back of my mind I wonder if he means them as some kind of test, just to see my reaction. I don't want to betray his trust so I'd never repeat them anyplace, and none of them are so terrible that I need to contact the authorities or make a promise not to contact them anyway, but they're still things no one would expect someone to tell after four days’ acquaintance: the various skeletons-in-the-closet that all of us have to whatever degree and would do our best to hide were we running for public office, or the things that manage somehow to "trip our trigger" (how we put it around here) even though they're probably not supposed to. When my new employer makes these confessions he bores his eyes into mine, like he's searching for something in there and to be honest, so am I sometimes, and I'm always the one who looks away first because I need that split second to compose and come up with something funny yet encouraging, some way to remain honest while still holding onto whatever cards I have.
I'm really not trying to save face; the plain truth is that I don't have any of those weird things that trip my trigger. I'm not even really sure I have a trigger at all. Nobody has to tie me up and beat me with a cat-o'-nine-tails. I don't need to dress up like Little Bo Peep and have hookers throw cream pies in my face to alleviate myself from the stress of everyday life. Maybe everything would be more fun if that were the case, I wonder about that, but probably not. There are a lot of things I like about the opposite sex but they're qualities that every woman has to some degree, all the many varied combinations that make them feminine and somehow in their presence, at the same time, make me feel that much more like a man. But it feels inappropriate to wax poetic about the soul of a woman and the divine qualities of such a partnership while my boss is showing me an .mpeg of models/porn stars in provocative yoga positions, glittering with heavy-metal guitar backdrop playing on the 57-inch flatscreen monitor in his office.
The problem is, I can't relate, but I'm trying to fake it the best I can because with the way things have been going the last couple of months I feel like that's my only chance. After being swindled out of thousands of dollars, seeing so many friendships atrophy and die away, and going through so many episodes of just stupid bad luck my view of the big picture has changed, maybe permanently, I don't know. It feels like all the good and simple things that I like so much don't even matter, they never did, and the only things that do are money and getting people to like me only long enough to get whatever can be had from them.
It's a dark view of the world and one that will get even darker the more time I spend dwelling on it. Even I'm aware of this but slipping into it feels so easy as to almost be undeniable. I guess the only way to not let that happen is to unlearn the lessons that I've been forced to learn, and I try, but I'm struggling, and I don’t know if I can really do it. By my own nature it's hard for me to not take something away from an experience. I've always said things like, "there are two kinds of people in this world: those who learn from their mistakes and those who don't, and they are doomed to repeat them until they do."
How is it, then, that there could be three?
In the spirit of good faith to my new employer I have shared subjects like my own drug use back-in-the-day (pot and some acid and some ecstasy) and being arrested a couple of times for stupid shit (nothing I've ever done any actual time for) and how many different women I've slept with in my life, which beats his total about five times over even though he's older by about fifteen years. I don't think he believes me just like I don't think anyone else I've told really ever seems to. I don't come off as that type. It's never meant as that I'm some kind of gigolo and it's never a fact I like to wear on my sleeve. I don't attribute that grand total to any real amount of trying on my part except for simply being at the right place at the right time; it's so many years of confused people stumbling along and sometimes they will just stumble into each other. That’s always all it’s ever been.
I rationalize, as usual: my flowered rhetoric, my excuses. He looks at me like a man who got married a couple of years after he graduated high school and had stayed that way for almost thirty years. He's poker-faced, seemingly unaffected. But as to whether I pass or fail his little tests, I think he senses that I'm trying, at least.
Not long after, I'm usually left alone in this small office of a small-town insurance agency and that's when any actual work gets done. He goes off to Rotary Club luncheons or to hang out with his buddies for two, three hours and I feel the nicotine leaving my system like pouring out a jar of honey, but I've stopped smoking and quit smoking so many times that the sensation of needing one in itself manages somehow to be comforting. And all the stories behind all the anecdotes I've told my employer weave themselves together like a warm afghan, too, something I can wrap myself around in and nurture my cup of coffee and look out the window at the stark yet peaceful November gray outside, still manages to make me smile a little, and in spite of everything it still makes me feel excited about whatever good times out there for me that could remain.
I never seem to be too far away from a world of memories, just past the periphery, or in the corner of my eye. It doesn't take much, maybe a movie, a certain stretch of road, or a song:
It's true that the only way we can really go is forward but, four lifetimes, it feels like sometimes. Or five, or is it six. All with their own beginnings and initial incidents and turning points, then conclusions. Complete with births, deaths, and it's hard to make myself not look back. I miss a lot of people that I used to see all the time, whether it be those I haven't seen in years or those I used to work with not long ago at NAIT. I miss being able to tap into that boundless curiosity that I used to have about going out and finding off-the-beaten-track places and telling my friends about how cool they are, being able to go out for sushi or Thai or Indian whenever I felt like it and finding somebody to go with me, being able to let myself fall in love.
I’m coming back, though, in whatever form “coming back” can take. My new employer, the one who ended up giving me a chance after I literally just walked off the street, is going to pay for me to get my state insurance license (something I had wanted to do at the old corporation but the old corporation wouldn’t let me) and be partners with him in a business that’s done $300,000 on the books so far this year. And maybe I shouldn’t really talk about that in public but, finally, it’s some good luck for a change. Actually it’s really dumb and amazing luck; like the kind that probably shouldn’t happen to real, flesh-and-blood people. It happens to me, however, and coming back is something I can feel in the pit of my stomach too, the way the mornings aren’t filling me with despair any longer and the nights are more now than a desperate need to curl up in a ball and escape for a few hours. It’s opening up the windows and letting the fresh air come in, even if it is cold, cleaning my apartment and finding some dollar bills I didn’t know about in a coat pocket I had put away the year before.
Still, after long lost, I’m not sure what it is I’m coming back to now, if anything that was once familiar to me should still remain. Or anybody, for that matter. But it’s something I know I need to find out.
My new employer tells me secrets and in the back of my mind I wonder if he means them as some kind of test, just to see my reaction. I don't want to betray his trust so I'd never repeat them anyplace, and none of them are so terrible that I need to contact the authorities or make a promise not to contact them anyway, but they're still things no one would expect someone to tell after four days’ acquaintance: the various skeletons-in-the-closet that all of us have to whatever degree and would do our best to hide were we running for public office, or the things that manage somehow to "trip our trigger" (how we put it around here) even though they're probably not supposed to. When my new employer makes these confessions he bores his eyes into mine, like he's searching for something in there and to be honest, so am I sometimes, and I'm always the one who looks away first because I need that split second to compose and come up with something funny yet encouraging, some way to remain honest while still holding onto whatever cards I have.
I'm really not trying to save face; the plain truth is that I don't have any of those weird things that trip my trigger. I'm not even really sure I have a trigger at all. Nobody has to tie me up and beat me with a cat-o'-nine-tails. I don't need to dress up like Little Bo Peep and have hookers throw cream pies in my face to alleviate myself from the stress of everyday life. Maybe everything would be more fun if that were the case, I wonder about that, but probably not. There are a lot of things I like about the opposite sex but they're qualities that every woman has to some degree, all the many varied combinations that make them feminine and somehow in their presence, at the same time, make me feel that much more like a man. But it feels inappropriate to wax poetic about the soul of a woman and the divine qualities of such a partnership while my boss is showing me an .mpeg of models/porn stars in provocative yoga positions, glittering with heavy-metal guitar backdrop playing on the 57-inch flatscreen monitor in his office.
The problem is, I can't relate, but I'm trying to fake it the best I can because with the way things have been going the last couple of months I feel like that's my only chance. After being swindled out of thousands of dollars, seeing so many friendships atrophy and die away, and going through so many episodes of just stupid bad luck my view of the big picture has changed, maybe permanently, I don't know. It feels like all the good and simple things that I like so much don't even matter, they never did, and the only things that do are money and getting people to like me only long enough to get whatever can be had from them.
It's a dark view of the world and one that will get even darker the more time I spend dwelling on it. Even I'm aware of this but slipping into it feels so easy as to almost be undeniable. I guess the only way to not let that happen is to unlearn the lessons that I've been forced to learn, and I try, but I'm struggling, and I don’t know if I can really do it. By my own nature it's hard for me to not take something away from an experience. I've always said things like, "there are two kinds of people in this world: those who learn from their mistakes and those who don't, and they are doomed to repeat them until they do."
How is it, then, that there could be three?
In the spirit of good faith to my new employer I have shared subjects like my own drug use back-in-the-day (pot and some acid and some ecstasy) and being arrested a couple of times for stupid shit (nothing I've ever done any actual time for) and how many different women I've slept with in my life, which beats his total about five times over even though he's older by about fifteen years. I don't think he believes me just like I don't think anyone else I've told really ever seems to. I don't come off as that type. It's never meant as that I'm some kind of gigolo and it's never a fact I like to wear on my sleeve. I don't attribute that grand total to any real amount of trying on my part except for simply being at the right place at the right time; it's so many years of confused people stumbling along and sometimes they will just stumble into each other. That’s always all it’s ever been.
I rationalize, as usual: my flowered rhetoric, my excuses. He looks at me like a man who got married a couple of years after he graduated high school and had stayed that way for almost thirty years. He's poker-faced, seemingly unaffected. But as to whether I pass or fail his little tests, I think he senses that I'm trying, at least.
Not long after, I'm usually left alone in this small office of a small-town insurance agency and that's when any actual work gets done. He goes off to Rotary Club luncheons or to hang out with his buddies for two, three hours and I feel the nicotine leaving my system like pouring out a jar of honey, but I've stopped smoking and quit smoking so many times that the sensation of needing one in itself manages somehow to be comforting. And all the stories behind all the anecdotes I've told my employer weave themselves together like a warm afghan, too, something I can wrap myself around in and nurture my cup of coffee and look out the window at the stark yet peaceful November gray outside, still manages to make me smile a little, and in spite of everything it still makes me feel excited about whatever good times out there for me that could remain.
I never seem to be too far away from a world of memories, just past the periphery, or in the corner of my eye. It doesn't take much, maybe a movie, a certain stretch of road, or a song:
- The same song that plays on the alternative radio station today, but on that special morning "Resurrection Sunday" program but was brand new back then, Joe Hubbell and I spontaneously moshing to it in my car parked outside the shopping mall, for no other reason than just being young with no hang-ups, no baggage, not yet. We so long ago with our long hair, our jeans with holes in the knees, necklaces of wood beads or hanging pewter dragons.
- Jumping out of a damn airplane attached to that damn skydiving instructor, because the law says a would-be skydiver needs to jump in tandem a few times before he can be trusted to have the wherewithal to do it alone. I remember the complete and total vertigo of hurtling towards the earth at such fierce velocity, I remember that I couldn't imagine the parachute really being able to slow us down at this speeds, my ears rang with the most deafening roar it had ever known but despite it all I could still hear a small voice deep inside, wondering if I was going to have a heart attack and die in mid-air, because if I am actually in mid-air then why couldn't something like that happen too. But so fucking what, I answered, and then I screamed like a little girl riding her first rollercoaster.
- Every Saturday as a kid my grandmother would give me an allowance of five dollars, which was a big deal back then. After cartoons were over my dad taking me to Eddie's Books to dig through the boxes of antique comic books and to spend what remained at the video arcade. I didn't realize it back then but, he never complained. He never had anyplace else he needed to be. He never kept glancing at his watch, wondering when I was going to be done. I remember him standing there, just looking at me, fully aware of the fleeting nature of the youthful moments of his very own son unfolding before him, and there's a part of me that wishes that I knew how that feels, and an even bigger part that wishes I could go to the bookstore with him, one more time.
- High as hell with my then-fiancé, as usual, we had too much money so we bought a car and because neither one of us really needed to work for a couple of months and we had been stuck in Kansas City for too long, or so we decided, we hit the road. Eventually in Reno we wander into an International House of Pancakes, for some reason so full of big and burly leather biker-types that we had to wait for ten minutes to get a table. We were the only two people (other than the staff) that didn't look like a Hells Angel. I can't remember exactly what she ordered but from experience it usually had something to do with chocolate-chip pancakes while I was more conservative, a short stack with the standard maple syrup and butter would do me fine. And coffee. Oh yeah, lots of coffee, you might as well just leave the carafe here if that ain't an issue. She sitting in the booth part and I on the other side in a stand-alone chair.
"We are in an International House of Pancakes," she whispered, like a secret, "in Reno. Surrounded by bikers. Higher than a motherfucker."
"And I love you," I said. - Rob Chastain and Jason Simanowitz and so many people, and then me, trying to push along an old-model Volkswagen Beetle using a different car that worked and not even any chains or rope, on the backroads between Desoto and Olathe, Kansas (a distance of about ten miles), because we heard about a guy in Olathe who might be able to fix these things, and it was necessary to get it fixed because, like, Rob and Sarah only had one car and like Sarah had a job and Rob really needed to get one, and it was just sitting there in her driveway anyway. Maybe if there was money left over we'd get food, and if there was still any money left over after that we'd get some alcohol. It took about two or three hours, the guy in question wasn't even there that day, and we all ended up eating pieces of deli fried chicken on the curb in front of the Dillon's Supermarket on Santa Fe. Actually every moment that involved both Rob Chastain and Jason Simanowitz between about 1995 to 1998.
- Day three of the ill-fated trip to New Orleans, for Mardi Gras, the cramped 1987 Mustang found its way to a cold beach in the town of Waveland, Mississippi and I was looking at the ocean for the very first time in my life. While my friends rolled up their pant legs and played about in the surf I sat there in the sand and stared at the horizon for a very long time. They yelled at me to come over to them, to play, but I didn't hear them.
- A Sunday in Autumn two years ago, by myself, driving around Platte County trading off listening to Camera Obscura, Nickel Creek, and Magnolia Electric Company over and again through my iPod's FM transmitter. I eat Twizzlers and drink an iced mocha from Starbucks. I drive by cute apartments in the old part of Parkville for rent; I get out and peer through the windows and write down phone numbers to call later, addresses for reference. I have money that represents the plastic card in my wallet and enough gas in my car. I mused that life really can be good by myself, that maybe I don't need that huge and bombastic love of my life after all because maybe that love is already there, inside of me. That instead of waiting around for everything to get better, everything already has.
- Hermann Hoff in Missouri's "wine country", and yes there actually is one, the somewhat-regionally-popular Oktoberfest they have there. The night before we joined an impromptu tent city set up in the park in the middle of town, and in the morning we woke up, had a little campfire breakfast and headed to Stone Will Winery. By noon I had already drank two bottles of wine. By about one or two, and it's hard to say because time had kind of ceased to exist by that point, some older lady had bought me several Dixie cups of lager and then I realized that my friends had disappeared a long time ago. I excused myself as gracefully as I could with my blood-alcohol content of %0.6 and left the biergarten to catch back up with them.
I remember the vertigo through the unfamiliar streets and then, later, me lying in a field outside of town. I checked my wallet, which was still there. I looked at my watch and then at the sky and I wasn't sure if it was six o'clock in the morning or six o'clock at night. I stood up and brushed away the hay and the grass and went over to the woods to relieve myself, and I figured it was a good idea to continue my search. I staggered back into town, following the faraway sounds of music and revelry.
It was Sarah Hayden who found me first. They had been looking at me and she, quite drunk, running up to me and giving me a great big hug. "We've been looking for you everywhere," she said.
I hugged her back. "So was I," I said. - At the risk of sounding melodramatic it feels like I've always been a foreigner, in the wrong place at the wrong time despite what my birth certificate states, and to finally be alone in a different country feels fitting like it's a role I've been preparing for my entire life. I've been to Mexico before but never by myself, and I would probably never do that anyway, it being a place where the slightest wrong turn, no matter how innocent, can spell lots of trouble. But walking past the Niagara Falls from New York to Ontario, going through the turnstile and thinking to myself, "Hey I'm in Canada", deciding I needed to exchange my American money if I wanted to buy something, and then just getting coffee and sitting on a bench for a while in Queen Victoria Park, was beautiful, it was nothing more or nothing less than that.
- It's never the big things, even though there have been a lot of those, too, many of those have been bleached away in my own memory by the ability of now-hindsight, all that what came after them. So many of the big events are like spending big money on that huge rocket for the finale of one's own Fourth of July backyard fireworks display only to discover once the fuse is lit, and it should launch away into the air, it's a dud, it doesn't. Usually it's been the simplest of moments that I've enjoyed best, subtle and often deceptive with their profundity. The big moments are like that guy in your group of friends who just won't shut up and who lords over any conversation, interrupting everybody else. The quiet friends in the corner are often the ones who are most eloquent and those who actually have the most important things to say, who are always away from the spotlight, smiling along and looking at the rest of the group but really looking at something else that can't or won't be seen.
It's true that the only way we can really go is forward but, four lifetimes, it feels like sometimes. Or five, or is it six. All with their own beginnings and initial incidents and turning points, then conclusions. Complete with births, deaths, and it's hard to make myself not look back. I miss a lot of people that I used to see all the time, whether it be those I haven't seen in years or those I used to work with not long ago at NAIT. I miss being able to tap into that boundless curiosity that I used to have about going out and finding off-the-beaten-track places and telling my friends about how cool they are, being able to go out for sushi or Thai or Indian whenever I felt like it and finding somebody to go with me, being able to let myself fall in love.
I’m coming back, though, in whatever form “coming back” can take. My new employer, the one who ended up giving me a chance after I literally just walked off the street, is going to pay for me to get my state insurance license (something I had wanted to do at the old corporation but the old corporation wouldn’t let me) and be partners with him in a business that’s done $300,000 on the books so far this year. And maybe I shouldn’t really talk about that in public but, finally, it’s some good luck for a change. Actually it’s really dumb and amazing luck; like the kind that probably shouldn’t happen to real, flesh-and-blood people. It happens to me, however, and coming back is something I can feel in the pit of my stomach too, the way the mornings aren’t filling me with despair any longer and the nights are more now than a desperate need to curl up in a ball and escape for a few hours. It’s opening up the windows and letting the fresh air come in, even if it is cold, cleaning my apartment and finding some dollar bills I didn’t know about in a coat pocket I had put away the year before.
Still, after long lost, I’m not sure what it is I’m coming back to now, if anything that was once familiar to me should still remain. Or anybody, for that matter. But it’s something I know I need to find out.