Day 150

I don’t know what it is. Perhaps it’s the fact that Brian showed up to class today with his new chef’s coat tucked into his checked pantaloons, or the fact that his dullard nature has him three paces behind everybody else. Maybe it’s because he calls the consommé raft a sofrito, or that he can’t figure out a three-sink system, moving sautiers from soap to sanitation without so much as a rinse. Maybe it’s because Junior is the only one laughing at his own insipid story about catching a homeless gentleman taking a shit behind the Walgreen’s dumpster; or maybe it’s because Junior acts the Philistine and quaffs his finished consommé from a mug instead of spooning it with the savor it deserves: “Fuck! I can taste it so much better this way!”

I lend him a napkin and sigh.

Me: “Just don’t keg-stand the stock pot, Junior.”

I don’t know what it is. I woke up this way, so lend my fellow students grace—they’re just add-on to my irritation–not the source of it–though their front-brain proclivities and tardiness to the kitchen unseat me at times. (On the contrary, I always beat Chef to the school, twenty minutes early being on-time, being on-time too late; and when it comes to using the old gray matter in the kitchen, I don’t use the pour spout when seasoning a velouté, nor grab the sherry bottle when a recipe calls for a dry white. I take myself way too seriously). These are just kids and I’m at present their current ages combined. Junior can’t even legally buy a drink; I’m in sober living with an advanced degree in transgressivism, my curriculum vitae espousing multiple stays in San Diego’s various detox facilities and one fated night atop the roof of my house (I digress).

No, it’s not Brian, nor Junior, or the particular manner in which they people a kitchen with youthful unconcern. I’m just wizened, not necessarily wiser–wizened. To wit: I used to think Bronte’s ‘Wuthering’ was actually a misspell, so were I a novel right now I’d be ‘Withering Heights’, a languishing tale certainly, and one featuring a Byronic hero gripped with ennui. Step aside Heathcliff; there’s a new broody dude to take your place. And appropriately he’s in funereal black beneath all the chef’s whites.

We are dicing onions. Junior is openly weeping—he’s in fact retreating to the kitchen sink every two minutes to rinse his hands and splash water on his face, lightweight—but I’m the one with the undefinable lump in my throat. It’s been stubbornly there since my 1 a.m. dorveiller, when taking a cigarette outside Amethyst I am hit with a kind of midnight melancholy. Usually I’m what I call a ‘Starry Nighter’, homage to Van Gogh who quoted “For my part, I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.” He also said “the night is more alive and richly colored than the day” and I’m inclined to agree. But at 1 a.m. I feel the first rising of an as yet unborn sob, stuck in the passages somewhere. It’s night and I’m far from starry.

Junior: “Goddamn! Aren’t you crying?” Junior is furiously scrubbing his hands of onion juice again.

Me: (drily, and while chopping planks into batonets): “Just on the inside, Junior. Just on the inside.”

” April is the cruelest month”—I say it all the time in deference to T.S. Eliot’s ‘Wasteland’—and historically speaking, the beginning of spring marks the end of my ‘Mad Season’, when I seasonally—and like Van Gogh—switch out moods in obeyance to my bipolarity. Winter, I fly high—I am something Icarus, something sky-bound—but by April I can crash a mess of spent feathers and melted wax. There is a price to pay for flying too close to the sun, or, in my and Vincent’s case, too close to the stars. I wonder if that’s what it is today, my body acting on a particular muscle memory of a now dormant manic-depression. It’s been three years since I felt the euphoric rush of my Mad Season, but maybe there are vapors still. My sleeping habits have been closely mirroring those of my old manic self: first sleep, dorveiller, second sleep—maybe five hours en todo. Still I am not somnolent during the day, a nap is not necessary. Go, go, go until I force myself into Nod. Let the fulgurations cease. Be still.

The surface of the stock pot is itself motionless, the barest of bubbles marking the beginnings of a simmer and Brian is champing at the bit. He is poised with nutmeg because Junior is too, Brian not having an original thought in his head, and their collective choice of spice is questionable if not downright Philistine. Even Chef gives them a weary look as if to say, “What fucking now?”  But not one to dampen their pioneering spirit, he just asks, “Nutmeg? In tortilla soup?” before leaving them to their own devices. I have Mexican oregano in lieu of epazote, which the recipe originally calls for, and am secretly hoping Brian and Junior over-season their creations (as they are wont to do) considering nutmeg is a kitchen poison in large amounts. Just a tablespoon straight up will give you a myristicin high, with norepinephrine flood gates wide open. I would like to see Brian on hallucinogens. It would make him at least interesting. Like a Dali clock or something. As is, he is the class dullard, a taupe paint chip of a person, done up matte. I try and give him the benefit of the doubt, but he gets lost in a room of only three workstations, often times grabbing my knife in error else my finished demi-glace, the latter of which is inexcusable and deserving of a fillet knife between the ribs. We are supposed to be a team, but lately I’ve been unapologetically spelling ‘team’ with an ‘I’. As in ‘I’ am saving myself. Junior’s already rifled through my knife set looking for his misplaced blade—and you never touch another man’s knife set, Bourdain famously saying, “Your knife is your cock”—and Brian is (he thinks) secretly weighing out my mise en place for reference when he can’t break down a simple recipe. ’32 divided by two is sixteen, Brian—it’s fucking sixteen. Now hands off my me-see.’

No, it’s not even Brian that’s having me awry. I’m just off-kilter, I seemingly have absorbed the askew nature of the Culinary Institute’s environs, both in and out. The Institute is located in Barrio Logan, once San Diego’s poorest and most crime-ridden neighborhood, now an epicenter of gentrification what with the explosion of microbreweries, restaurants, and art spaces. This used to be where Mexican cartels would send scouts to pick up nortenos for their bloody street gangs, now it’s a great place to buy a taco (Las Cuatras Milpas FTW) and check out the latest installation at the Soda and Salt. Thing is, the CCAI is on National Avenue, which—like a magician’s tablecloth—has been picked up by the corner on its south side, then whisked away for all to clatter into place, detritus to the north side. We’re on the north side. Outside the Institute walls is a tent city, a homeless enclave in between the Barrio and downtown’s southeast center. The vainglorious Petco Park is in view as is the Central Library and the Transportation building. What lies in the middle is everything that has otherwise been displaced. Ten dollars? It’ll buy you a pint at the Park else a hit of meth on the street. To pay for either generally involves psychosis and, indeed, the avenue outside CCAI is full of angry zombies in crystal heat. Loud voices and displaced aggression. Drunks can be amiable, hotheads on meth vapors not so much. I steer clear of the tent city, though it’s only a stone’s throw away. The closest I get is the café table next door to the Institute where I take my cortado on the daily in avoidance of Brian and Junior at breaktime. It’s across from the blue tent where I believe a homeless man of importance lives. His blue canopy is much trafficked. I just drink my espresso and watch the comings and goings of the randos, think of later when I will be going to Jenny’s.

I miss Jenny, and maybe that is what is setting me off. How to describe. I don’t know, but my room at Amethyst bares her imprint. It’s a practiced devotion, but not slavishly so: I know she’s gone and I’m not wallowing. Still, her picture is in no less than four places. Jenn by contrast has erased me from her apartment, reduced me to one photograph which is in her ill-used kitchen and on the side of the refrigerator (wouldn’t it be good, I think, for the kids to have pictures of their daddy?  I say nothing). We have established, me and Jenny, that there has been inequity—and I’m loathe to use such a pecuniary term but, sadly, most relationship words are—there has been inequity both in and outside of our togetherness. I sometimes lacked presence, erupted in fits of frustration; she sometimes lacked sentimentality, always needed to fix. I was the poet whose poetry was not needed and she was the begrudging muse who needed fewer words, more action. Still, we communicated so often and so well, that it is a wonder things were left unsaid, and unresolved. I used to love to sit on the rim of the bathtub with a cup of coffee while Jenny did her daily ablutions, staring at her adoringly while she practiced her mirror face and applied her foundations, did up her lustrous hair. I will never run out of words to describe her.  But somehow, I think all conversation ended a long time ago.

Him: “I think I love you more than you love me.”

Her: “I think you’re right.”

(Followed by the inevitable throwing of objects, which admittedly didn’t help his case any).

I recently got a tattoo for Jenny on my upper arm. It is a print by Egon Schiele who is renowned for his lascivious lithography—sometimes bordering on the pornographic—and it is inscribed with Jenny’s name. Brian says, “Someday we’ll know what Thom’s tattoos mean…” Luckily the Schiele is on the bicep above the rolled-up sleeves of my chef’s coat. Brian nor Junior will not see it and they, being of a diminutive age, wouldn’t understand it anyway. They do not know that the man who carries such confidence in the kitchen and who is punctual to a fault, is in fact a broken mess. I can cut a 1/16^th inch brunoise with ease, but there are hundreds of as-miniscule cuts which make up my heart. And speaking of cuts, I am also keenly aware of the Angle of Luis, which begins below my mandible, crosses the throat, and ends above the opposite collarbone. It is the imaginary line the executioner envisions to guide the guillotine for the cleanest severance possible (severance: another pecuniary word).  I was severed in two on October 13^th, left to my own devices, some say left to die. One applies alcohol to a wound, and I obligingly absorbed all things antiseptic. I could’ve died, and not just figuratively. The second and final death. I could’ve tattooed crossbones over the ‘;Amor fati’ stamp on my left wrist and just drowned in my thinking chair.

Listening to songs like: “You didn’t see me I was falling apart/ I was a television version of a person with a broken heart.”

No, Brian and Junior will not know this, my brokenness, nor see my Schiele. The tattoo depicts a male lover resting on crossed arms in a woman’s lap, she nude-save-for-stockings in genuflection over him. He is subordinate in his pose, kneeling before her, and the woman’s hair cascades over his crown. Her eyes are closed and her hands disappear beneath his crossed arms to rest in between her thighs. It is a highly sensuous drawing–not necessarily sexual–and I am subordinate to Jenny in the manner the tattoo depicts. Sometimes I’m even damn near placative so as not to upset any extant intimacy between us. I have worshipped Jenny far more than she ever will me. It is the truth. I have to accept that. She is her own person after all, but– goddammit–she was *my* Dulcinea. Dulcinea and ‘dulce’ share the same root—‘sweet’; I ink my flesh, I keep Jenny’s pictures, I relish this, the sweet honeyed pain. In my way, I practice the perverse devotion of the abandoned, the love in which some who have been abused love their abusers. “Batter my heart” and all that.

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

I am quoting John Donne here. And ‘Amor fati’ is Epictetus, Dulcinea is Cervantes. Brian will never know what my tattoos means let alone understand them, and the less he and Junior know of me, the better. They do not know that I’m soon to be an ex-, that my current state is ‘broken’ though Jenn forever tried to fix me. People have always tried to fix me. When I was a child, the doctor wanted to twist my scoliotic backbone into a brace and correct me. When I was a boy, the doctor wanted to break my jaw and rewire my mandible into something more presentable. People have always wanted to fix me.

But they always proposed breaking me further first. Every. Fucking. Time.

I still love. Does that make me fixed? Even as I am broken? Jenny says she doesn’t believe in ‘broken.’ But.

In ancient times, the Chinese used to mend broken pottery with gold so as to make the pottery more precious in its damage. In the kitchen, if you break a Hollandaise you can fix it by whisking in an extra egg yolk, enriching the sauce. The latter I tell Junior as we work in pottage and mother recipes. He doesn’t know I am working in metaphor, and not just in Escoffier.  

Me: “The added yolk helps the emulsification.”

Junior: “Wait—why not just add an extra yolk to begin with?”

Me: “The sauce has to break first, Junior. Only THEN can you fix it. Get it?”

‘To fix’ necessitates ‘to break’, and ‘to break’ engenders a fix. The snake eats its tail and so on: that old orobouros again, which, to think of it, my Schiele tattoo somewhat resembles. So Brian, if you must know: my Schiele tattoo represents me and Jenny, my Munch tattoo represents my ambivalence in its particular Madonna/whore fashion; my ‘Amor fati’ stamp represents my love of fate despite its inherent hardship. My Picasso penguin? Well, it’s just a fucking penguin. You know, sometimes things are just what they seem.

‘Sometimes things are just what they seem,’ this I tell myself as I drink my cortado in the shitty part of the Barrio in avoidance of my fellows, in my attempt to be solitary though the tent city is a bustle with meth-heads and the trafficking of wares, the air staccato with junkie complaint: I am just a broken man with a lump in his throat on a cruel April day, and it’s just like the three and reticent days prior. That’s it. THAT’s what it is. I needn’t think any further. I need only think that later I go to Jenny’s where I will be thankfully divorced of Junior and Brian and in the company of my loved ones. I will inevitably check the refrigerator to ensure my picture is still clipped there and, if buried behind other papers, I will move it to the front; I will inevitably watch Jenny apply her ablutions as I once did on the daily, but now as she prepares to go out for her every-Tuesday night with the girls; and I will watch her change from a backless number into a dress that better suits her, with a neckline that plunges to an empire waist, her decolletage on display and the sideways crescents of her breasts; and I will inevitably tear up at this, all this lost, things being as they are, and I will maybe feel a lift just being close to her despite her most likely being far away; and I will remember her in her best black outfit, the one with the particular rouching, and in seeing that how I used to know her beauty and know that it was in part mine and know that everything and everything would in the end no matter what be all and forever ok.

“April is the cruelest month”—Day 150 of sobriety  

Day 130: Papers

“And why are you holding on to those…carrying them around so long?” and Alex, she gestures to my satchel, which is discarded against the armrest across from me. A ‘First Class’ delivered envelope, 8 1X2” by 11” is, by now, dog-eared and protruding from the haversack. It is bordered with green triangles somehow signifying its importance. It remains unopened.

I pause. The room smells of some essential oil—surely a eucalyptus blend—and, unlike other therapist offices I have resided in, Alex’s is more cluttered, less…hygienic. There no bland inoffensive abstracts on the wall, no damask. Certainly, the walls are the typical Taupe no. 11—maybe ‘Cordova Cream’ or ‘Tomayo’. The couch is a dangerous white above which hangs a wood print: ‘It’s OK to Not Feel OK’.  I feel ok, at the moment at least. I’ve been able to sustain some joie de vivre, and to me that’s problematic. I shouldn’t be feeling ok; fuck happiness. It was supposed to have left October 13^th when the door closed on the Hygge home forever and Jenny left me cadaverous in the orange leather chair. An otherwise blithe spirit dispirited. No, joie is not what I should be feeling. I’m stuck on ‘should’ as in ‘I should be miserable’, ‘I should make use of these rocks in my pocket and just walk into the river.’ ‘I should exeunt.’ I should, I should, I should.   I instead feel ok, which is blasphemous right now, and I learn to shower every other day and God forbid bake cakes.

Light the candles, it’s my goddamn re-birthday.

“I don’t know Alex,” and forever the poet, I seek the right metaphor. To use words to describe other words. I’m in once-remove.

I go pedestrian. “Well, it’s not like I won the fucking Publisher’s Clearing House or something. I’m not endorsing a check. I mean, to just SIGN on the line—I can’t do it. This is an existential receipt, not a Point of Sale.” I pause. “Ever see Sideways, or read the book?”

Alex gives a pursed lip smile in apology and shakes her head. Her face is fairly unlined. I’m suddenly aware of her age without her usual COVID mask. My beard, it is white.

“Well, the protagonist—Miles—he’s a frustrated author. Lovelorn. Giamatti plays him. Typical suffering artist, but he’s also a wine aficionado. In his possession—” and I remember this—“Is a 1960-something Chateau Cheval Blanc. He aims to drink it only when the time and place is appropriate. When the time is right. Like when he finally lands a book deal or gets married to Maya—she’s played by Virginia Madsen—or something.” I trust Alex is understanding where I’m going with this, but I choose another example as a slight detour.

“Look, it’s like the meme I saw the other day with a miserable woman sunk in a heart-shaped bathtub. It goes: ‘I listen to the same sad song on repeat to ensure it does enough damage’.”

Alex doesn’t break eye contact but says, “You’re punishing yourself.” She says it blandly. I can’t tell if it’s a question. I look at the satchel. I scan the room. There’s a photograph of a toddling child on the wall and she’s maybe two. Alex is off next week; she’s probably going on vacation with su hija. The papers, there they are. And WE used to vacation.

I raise my eyebrows, then lower them just as quickly.

“Sure,” I acquiesce. “Like a ritual. Needs ceremony.” This is not uncommon. There are purification rites: walking on knives; piercing one’s corpus with skewers, being dragged by chariots. Having a bleeding heart ripped out of one’s chest like in ‘Temple of Doom’. The bleeding heart one–that sounds about right.

“Let’s call it that. Rite of purification. Or incorporation. Something. I dunno—ask Margaret Mead.”

We’re off topic. We were supposed to be stuck doing origin work, as in: “Tell me again about Hermann Kafka leaving Franz out on the balcony? You know, tell me about your father, your mother. Tell me where this fuckery all started.

“Tell me again how your Mom told the 5yo you that you would one day hurt your wife. Tell me. Here’s some bilateral stim.”

But I’m talking about Jenny, and now Alex has diverted me to the papers. I placate her to change the subject: “I’m probably gonna sign them today anyway. I have a plan”, which is genuine and I have my favorite Sakura Micropigment 01 pen in my pocket to prove it. Alex and I—we go back to origin stories.

(It is true: I hurt my wife. Fuck if my mom wasn’t right. Just 40 years too soon and because I was throwing a fit over a Lego design gone awry. But I digress).

I walk home. Amethyst is about two miles distant from where ‘It’s OK to Not Feel OK’, and I have a stop to make on the way. A place to feel decidedly un-OK, which I’m masochistically looking forward to. Kinduv like the other week when I read authors’ suicide notes to feel better. Anne Sexton’s “I am like a watercolor. I wash off’ was my platitude of the week and it lent me some gorgeous pain. (They say misery loves company but I do a fine enough job when left to my own devices. My Curriculum Vitae includes ‘advanced degree in Ruminative Studies’. I get the job every time).  I have my phone queued to Jens Lekman because the devil’s in the details; I feel rather than hear the near-soporific swell of strings, which begin the song:

There will be no kisses tonight

There will be no holding hands tonight

Cause what is now wasn’t there before

And should not be.

There’s the ‘should’ again, its requisite twin ‘should not’ and I should not be thinking as I do, with the bougainvillea blossoming purple about the Girl from the City of Twelve Bridges who decorated the cakes at our wedding with blue and purple sepals—I should not be thinking about that, it’ll ruin the delicious dour—and I remember instead my last kiss with Jenny outside the Park Blvd. farmer’s market, and how I even texted her a ‘thank you’, that I would cherish it like I cherished kissing her and loosing the freesia from her hair in our wedding night suite. She was in a drawn bath and I was kissing her, her and her sunburn, which was in the shape of the bridal dress; I remember our almost-first-kiss—more fondly even than the actual first—when we leaned against each other on the Grape St. Suspension Bridge, lovers swaying eighty feet up in the air then, this before the suspenders would snap, heads touching in fond affection.

<The tom-toms rise>

And I will never kiss anyone

Unless it burns me like the sun

But I remember every kiss

Like my first kiss

Like my first kiss

Every first kiss—and I’ve had less than ten—has been something of helios, much like Jenny’s wedding day blister, red and raw, hot and shiny. And every first kiss has a place emblazoned in memory, its own sensorial address. To wit: the patch of gravel in the pitch-black cul-de-sac, too much lipstick; chlorine blossoms and wide mouths in the sauna; back supine on the beach, pushed down with breath-taking force, oh Jesus fuck; tobacco and wine, a single crowded barstool, the husband watching; lips sweet and wet like broken fruit, sweet and wet, eyelids closed to it all and that sacral warmth, Svadhisthana omigod.

I know I’ve broken hearts I understand

Some firecrackers blow up in your hand

This is torturous thinking. I relish it. I’m a half-mile to home and the streets have crossed Avenues, all the tree-named streets in a row—Quince and Redwood and Spruce—traversing Fifth and Sixth. A building towers upward and this is the edge of Balboa Park, a nondescript senior living residence like some extinguished lighthouse above Uptown. Balboa Park sprawls southward for the most part, eucalyptus like the fragrance of Alex’s office, groves of it down the length of Sixth. Also, the mismatched conifers—firs mainly–and you would think the hydrangeas would bloom pink beneath them in this, the acid soil, but—no—the hydrangeas are purple like Jenn’s wedding bouquet and like the sepals that garnished the cakes the Girl from the City of Twelve Bridges had hand-decorated.  The sepals are vibrant. It is March, the blossoms haven’t yet faded or been overtaken with hoarfrost. Purple, too bright to be a bruise, the bruise is my heart.

I could’ve gone many places, really, but Alex is right: I’m punishing myself and why not the mother lode? I’m interested in the main vein, not the subsidiary offshoots, like the Cliffs: that was an option, the bluffs high above Black’s Beach where the sedge grows in the winter, sharp enough to cut your hand, and where softer things grow in the spring. Fireburst aloe and sea fig and shoulder-high grass. “There will be lots of memories here,” my friend Ryan said when I introduced him to this spot near thirty years ago and, indeed, along the fingerling ravines, the sandstone and basalt, the panoramic vistas of the Pacific, Jenny and I spent our moonlight days here, half-clothed above the ocean spray in deep embrace, making fervent love a hundred feet above the beach. Across the way a palladium of a house, torch lit, and it was Barbara Streisand’s, can you believe it. Talk about misty water-colored memories, the way we were, and how we would pile back into the car with sex-warmed cheeks, hair tousled with smiles white in the moonglow. We would drive past the UCSD campus, where I went to school; I had the art studio code and there were nighttime walks here, too, beneath the creaking eucalyptus trees threatening to drop their limbs, and we would sneak into the painting room and lay on the floor among the half-finished canvases, pretending cinema in a tangle of discarded coats. Something sfumato like the charcoal sketches and conte drawings, our bodies gradually shading into one another.

This, though—all of this—the Cliffs and art studio, the foot lit tree we named Margaret at Cliffs’ egress, these are capillary places and things our bodies visited in halcyon days, before Jenny’s mother died, before we were wed, before my family dissolved when my brother was arrested one August night. These are capillary places and things, not venal. No, not venal; I want to open my fucking wrist.

“There’s something deeper here,” Alex says, “We need to go back.” And Alex has disrupted me from talking about Jenny again—about a recent argument we had over these goddamn papers—and I sigh.

“These are recent things, which is why you feel more inclined to go there—the memory is fresh.”

Of course, Alex is right. I am momentarily frustrated, but one must visit the origins. Thing is, I’ve had twenty-six years with Jenny, and that to me seems origin enough—twenty-six years ago when I really began, when Jenny, prim hostess of her bedroom kingdom, introduced me into her life. Being codependent as fuck, I am stuck to that silly girl who drinks pink tea, the girl with the thrift store A-lines, and burgundy hair. Also, her blonde-headed ‘now’, my new Bohemian; everything else seems momentarily irrelevant. I’m immutably her, or she’s immutably me, or something; but, yes, let’s talk about my mother.

“Sorry. Just devouring the hurt.” I’m eating my pain and I’ve forgotten the aperitif. I’m suckling at the wrong breast. I’m milk-drunk on Jenny’s tit.

“Thing is, Alex,” I return to the subject of my childhood, “You ask me to rate my traumas—give them a numerical score.” This is classic EMDR method, and I’ll be palming a bilateral stimulant any session now, I’m sure. Using both sides of the brain, which I already thought I did. “You ask me to rate them, and nothing seems to register the 7-10 like you specified. I mean, I HATE getting in trouble—why as an adult child I’m repulsed by authority—” I emphasize ‘repulsed’ while meanwhile hating people who are not to blame. “Every time I’ve been in trouble, it rates the same as when—I dunno—like we talked about: that my mom predicted me hurting Jenny before I even fucking MET Jenny. All those times I was lectured in Sunday School—when I’d ostensibly black out mid-reprimand–those times I projected my wrongdoings on to some other fucking kid: they’re all, like, the same.”

 I’ve failed my homework. Apparently, I’m a malfunction. Shit, authority really screwed me to the wall, but I could be eating crow as easily as pheasant here. I don’t taste much of anything. Except that I’m not OK in the grand scheme of things besides feeling okay now, among the ‘Cordova Cream’ and white pillow cushions.  I think to later. I’m gonna make another re-birthday cake tonight. Olive-oil scented buttercream. Chiffon. Meyer lemon. Wait—what?

Alex: “You may not find the moment just yet, and let’s make it sooner than later—” no pressure—“Because that will help you diminish the Negative Belief you have of yourself.” Alex is textbook here and I again remark the evenness of her face. I think, cynically: “there’s nothing an old soul hates more than a new soul acting on borrowed wisdom.’ I wrote that once. About Jenny. How sneer. Maybe now about Alex, too; perhaps I’m a dick.

I nod while looking at Alex’s shoulder. I know we’re racing for the prize here because I’ve intimated enough about the rocks in my pocket, and that’s how Virginia Woolf went in her mortal swim. I nod twice. I feel the Sakura Micron stab my side momentarily as I readjust on the couch. I need to affix a signature. I need to find the mother lode.

It’s 12:30pm and I’ve stopped at the senior residence, that concrete observatory, at Balboa Park’s entrance. In the leeward side of the tower is Eighth Avenue and there are Irving Gill numbers here, Requas and Drydens: I know my San Diego architecture well. I light a cigarette before going further.

And I will never kiss anyone

Unless it burns me like the sun

But I remember every kiss

Jens sings while I meter my draws. You’re not allowed to smoke inside of Balboa Park. It’s ordinance and I’m not looking to break laws, just break my heart. Upas is the tributary into Eighth and I remember driving it that June day, partially cloudy, in Ryan’s parents’ Tiger roadster. It was a tony detail—that roadster—me in a wedding suit with hydrangea-purple tie, sprawled in the cockpit while Ryan confidently drove. “Lookit you, so fucking cool,” Ryan remarked, “Totally relaxed.” My hands dangled in my lap, the cockpit had my legs outstretched and riding low. I WAS relaxed. I had the assuredness of a man completed, or about to be, and I was in want of nothing, not at the moment. A man waits his life for this; I was a quarter-century old and the preterite tense would be benumbed in lieu of a forever present.  Jenny and I would exist instead in the ‘will’, the future perfect. As in: we will retire to a shared park bench at the age of 102. As in, ‘we will always be in love.’ We were already sfumato, having fucked on the studio floor among the unfinished paintings; we were already and also chiaroscuro, a complement of light and dark, she ebullient and me her shadowed other. Yin-yang. Ouroboros. I was relaxed, so certain, and I never doubted a thing driving the short segue of Upas. All we needed was a rite of incorporation; we needed to affix signatures. Like I need to affix one now. I extinguish a cigarette, the preterite unwelcomely present.

(“I think I love you more than you love me,” I iterated an argument for Alex. “And Jenny, she says, ‘I think you’re right.’”

“That’s a ‘ten’. Alex. That’s a fucking ‘ten’.”)

The Marston House sits at Balboa Park’s north-most extremity. It has an Eighth Avenue address. The House is a classic Craftsman, steep-roofed and gabled, just more of a celebrity than the other Craftsmans north of Marston Hills. It features a formal English garden, a serpent-mouthed fountain. There are trees lining the eastern border, some of which bear fruit, and in the modern day they serve to block the coursing traffic of the 163. There is a low thrum regardless, an insinuation of cars, but otherwise the acreage is quiet, idyllic even. This is where on June 9^th, 2002, Jenny and I wed. This is the mother lode.

 I am increasingly aware of the Sakura Micropigment ‘01’ in my inside breast pocket; it’s just above my heart.

“Alex, you know what?” I am talking about ‘Sideways’ again. “Thing about Miles: he winds up opening that bottle of Chateau Cheval Blanc, just in a fast-food restaurant. Some fucking McDonald’s or other with yellow plastic benches He’s got the wine bottle brown-bagged and he’s pouring into a red plastic cup beneath the table. I mean, his book deal fell through, Maya’s essentially told him to ‘piss off’, but *this* is the moment he chooses.  That’s why I carry the papers. Who knows: I may wind up in a Jack in the Box somewhere. I may break my sobriety, sign the scrip, drink a fifth or something! Hell, that’s what got me here, right? (That and my charming milieu of mental offences, plain fuckery I tell you). That—that–is why I carry the papers.”

Except Marston is not the Jack in the Box unless the residence has exchanged its historical status for a business permit. Cheeseburgers al fresco in the English garden, pommes frites for everyone.  No, Marston remains Marston, and I am not Miles today. I’m Thomas Daniel Hofman—that’ll be my Hancock—and I’m here to hurt.

Jens is replaced by David Byrne. Our song: ‘This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)’. On our first Christmas, Jenny gifted me with the ‘Stop Making Sense’ CD featuring this tune. We celebrated a humble holiday, our diminutive tree stretching to its tallest height by virtue of an available end table—it was maybe all of five feet this tree, makeshift stand and all—and we exchanged few presents. I remember Black Oaxacan figurines of birds from the Mingei. The CD. Maybe one or two other niceties. We kissed though bereft of mistletoe and listened to The Heads sing:

Home is where I want to be

But I guess I’m already there

I come home, she lifted up her wings

I guess that this must be the place.

It could have been our wedding song—that would later belong to ‘In My Life’, which now never ceases to underwhelm me. It just doesn’t hold the weight of Naïve Melody, the latter’s image of a winged woman singing into a man’s open and receiving mouth something of simple gorgeousness. Jenny, she wore wings; my lips, they were parted. I received it all.

These days, though welcoming and invitingly orange, Amethyst is not my home. I have no home. Jenny’s not there. We don’t share the same space. She’s not next to me, we’re not holding down the mattress with our paired weight, she’s not underneath me in the throes (how I miss making love—I haven’t so much as touched myself in five months); her wings are neatly folded in between her shoulder blades, at rest for now and I am loathe to think they will unfold again for someone new. It is my least favorite thought, though I know it an eventuality, and I hold a double standard: I’d fuck anything that moves to pretend being whole again. I need le petit mort to parry the bigger death. I need to take myself to the point of release and shiver spasmodically into someone. The Girl from the City of Twelve Bridges, I knew her halfway, and I’m halfway to contrition.

I’m just an animal looking for a home, you understand. I’m sorry.

The Marston House is in view and I remark firstly the giant firs which stand sentinel at the parcel’s entrance. I have a photograph, the large one you have blown up when purchasing wedding pictures, and it sits at the foot of my bed at Amethyst. In the photo, I am insouciantly leaning back against a tree, cradling Jenn’s forearms as we share a kiss. Her bouquet is in hand (the day’s welcome trespasser had been a lady beetle, which’d found home among the sepals) and—the camera caught this perfectly—there is a light from the morning sun, our heads enveloped in some Byzantine corona. We are a gold leaf fresco, something Justinian. We are a contrapposto. She leans into me and I accept. I accept, and in remembering, I touch the available fir, which is reddish and scaly; I turn my back to lean against it, just like in the photo. The space is empty in front of me—I see the expanse of Marston’s front lawn where we had also taken pictures: Jenny in the grass, then me pretending handsome with hair cut too short. I remember the photographer vaguely: we wound up on her gallery wall, and she cried during our ceremony alongside her husband, her assistant. Love was in the air, a contagion, a stubborn lady beetle descending and holding onto the day’s floral offerings. I remember this. Jenny’s dress had hand-embroidered butterflies; we released Monarchs like spent and gilded leaves. We had such a lovely day.

Something is wrong here. I take pictures of the empty fir with my phone, with my eyes, which are stubbornly dry. I feel okay. I feel okay: that’s what’s wrong. I want to feel ‘not okay’ and immediately. I want instant gratification, an instant DISsatisfaction. I want to be empty, I want to be a room without furniture; I want my heart to know its hollow. My Cheval Blanc needs to be opened and I want a fifth of New Amsterdam, rather I want to want one. I am in the cathedral after all. I’m paying my tithes and I have been penitent this whole time, these past six months, so why is it I feel nothing? Make my re-birthday cake mean something tonight. Olive oil buttercream will be nice. I’ll use the fancy Oleamea. I’ll light a votive. Fuck.

“Alex,” I am telling her something original, “My best friend died when I was young—I was thirteen, remember?—and you ask me what does my adolescent self feel.

“Jason—you know I talked to him the day he died. Well, actually, I talked to his mother Judy. And she said Jason was receiving morphine. That they were making him comfortable. He was on the living room sofa—I can picture this—with his one remaining leg, one stupid leg left. And I hear Jason in the background, right? I hear him. He says, “I love you, Thom,” and he can’t muster the exclamation point, but it’s there. I was fucking thirteen. I used to explore the sewers with him, play Dungeons&Dragons all night. We never said, ‘I love you.’ I mean, we were too young for that and we were too busy—I dunno—doing Boy stuff. Girls and spiders and RC cars. I certainly didn’t know how—it wasn’t said at our house. I hung up the phone and I didn’t say, ‘I love you’ back. I didn’t say it back.” I pause.

“Anyway I sat in the back of the car later that day—my parents were grocery shopping and I was in the Nissan Stanza with my brother. I was playing with some cassette tapes my mom and dad bought for me that day—this consolation prize—and my brother, he says, ‘Aren’t you supposed to be sad or something?’ I remember putting on a frowny face—I tried to look all sullen and shit. But it was fake. I mean, two cassettes! Score! Alex: I didn’t know,” and I gesture with an errant hand, “I didn’t know. This was all too big for me. Like staring at the night sky and feeling afraid because you know it goes on forever, and I didn’t want to think of Heaven or Jesus or eternity—all these things scared me. I just didn’t know.” I repeat: “I didn’t say ‘I love you’ back. You know?”

And you love me till my heart stops

Love me till I’m dead

“Jenny.” I whisper her name to the fir. This is affect. I’m trying to conjure something. The memories are intact, but the feelings attached are once-removed. I am staring from six inches within my skull. Perhaps deeper into the cathedral. That may work. In the meantime, it’s not okay to feel okay; I wish for the opposite, because the haversack is surprisingly light and my pockets are empty of stones. “Oh, Jenny,” I repeat her name as I’ve done the past six months, sometimes upon awakening. Where is the accompanying somber, that palpable feeling of loss? Is this my consolation prize, my two cassettes in the form of a comfortable numbness, a lightness even? I don’t want it. I want something venal; I want to leave a red handprint on the tree. I want more than anything to cry at least. ‘I’m not okay’, I try and convince myself. I can’t be, I say, walking deeper into the Marston lot. I haven’t been. Two weeks ago, I was searching for some miracle of magnanimity from anyone, from Jenny even, when the feelings were so low as to be mortal. And now I want them back. I need to affix a signature.

I’m beneath the gable, and this is where Jenny and I had our first dance. Again, it was ‘In My Life’ and it’s not worth even changing the song playing over the headphones. I remember not remembering the song as it played that June day. We had a cantankerous and diminutive guitarist, hair like a toupee, unnecessarily feathered with a classical guitar near half his size. At last minute, we had asked him to perform ‘Autumn Leaves’ instead, but he flatly refused claiming lack of advance notice. So Beatles it was. There IS the line ‘I loved you more.’ I think to that. I think to that godawful exchange:

“I think I love you more than you love me!”

“I think you’re right.”

 And I hurled a book across the room out of sheer impotence–‘The Language of Letting Go’ maybe, how appropriate would that have been—a kinetic act to direct something, if for a second. Something smashed and it was also my heart. I threw a book because an old soul hates nothing more than a new soul guided by borrowed wisdom.

 I’ve told Alex this story; I tell myself now. Jenny was Isolde to my Tristan, but then there was the proof of inequity and I feared abandonment in a way that pitted my core.

(“A ten, Alex. It was a fucking ten”).

Except I don’t feel a ten now. I’m benumbed. I pragmatically take pictures, for there are details I remember:

1. The old window awnings, red and white striped, sagging swaths of canvas above pebbled glass panes.
2. The supporting walls and their stone templates, the overhanging soffits,
3. The brick inlaid porch beneath our feet as we danced cheek to cheek, eyes closed.
4. The window formed by the supports, the place people stood as we shuffled our embrace—people I did not even notice until coming to after the last chord was played.

I may as well be inspecting the house for termites, photographing the slow decay; the act of photographing is just an exercise and I’m like a crime scene photographer, shooting door knobs and corpses and spent shells. I am documenting a static thing and there is no inner movement. I’m as dumb as the support beams, six feet of corpus, and hollow. I move on.

Lastly the garden, an Imperial affair beset with rows of rosebushes. In June they would have been deadheaded, I don’t remember. I just remember orange flowers, which the Monarchs took to upon release and the chevron of hedgerows which Jenny and I navigated together to reach the aisle. We marched arm in arm, we were inseparable and there was no pomp of groom walking first, bride walking last. We held hands as we stared straight ahead toward the mouth of the serpent fountain, the wall inlay that served as altar. We walked slow, and I retrace the steps now, just as purposefully. Surely this will loose something, my chest is tight and wanting of release. Spring forth flowers of romance, all your dying petals and incumbent thorns!  Explode my chest, turn me inside-out. I stop at a large urn planted mid-lawn. It overflows with tendriling flowers, yellow-orange, and Jenny and I had paused here, too. To separate hands would have been ill omen, but we had our protective spell at the disposal: “Bread and butter, bread and butter,” we whispered. Bread and butter never separate—there was the fact of us and, even with fingers trailing either side of the urn, momentarily unlinked, we were inseparable. Forever would be.

“Bread and butter,” I whisper now. “Bread and butter, bread and.” I don’t say the last ‘butter’. I pass the urn into the mouth of the serpent; I stand where I stood that June day, in view of the gardener’s house and its archway. I could pass through it, but I think—I think– I’m done. I feel nothing. My Sakura is capped, will remain so for now, and rests close to my unmoved heart. Fuckit, I’m okay.

Postscript: I write this on March 26, 2022. I am in Jenny’s apartment tending to the Boys while Jenny vacations in Idylewild. She will be gone for three days; meanwhile I sleep on our old couch, rather I do not sleep. I write. Jenny has sent me a photo of her atop Idlewyld Mountain this morning and I inexplicably cry. I have just written the words ‘bread and.’ No ‘butter.’ I cry, and text Jenny as much. There is no reply, but she doesn’t know I’m writing this. She doesn’t know this is in fact the mother lode, the Chateau Cheval Blanc. I miss her. I sob, but quietly, so as not to alert Cayde. I’ve baked a cake. Happy re-birthday. I uncap my pen.

Six months from today, Jenny and I will be divorced. She probably doesn’t remember this, but I first told Jenny I was going to marry her on March 30^th, 2000. We’ve been together for 26 years. Bread and butter, bread and butter.

Bread and.

A Balboa Park Story

Dearest…

That day I had written a letter to the Girl in the City of Twelve Bridges, which I would never send and still have not. It doesn’t have to be; the words became manifest of themselves as if by some conjuration of the pen. Imagine unfolding a paper crane to find within its creases the word ‘yes’.

Come nightfall, the moon was full and there was the fact of trees. “This is the center of gravity” I had written before slipping out the gate. One may make lesser predictions, lesser proclamations. Simply: a round object dimples a swath of fabric. There is not a pull, not a push, but a weight.

The violinist played in between two eucalyptuses. He was rosin and sonor and I was accidental witness: the night had taken me deep into the grove where earlier I had written my cantilevered somethings. “Dearest, that’d you’d know me among the cables, the winged walls, the dozen and beautiful expanses.”

The violinist was a Chagall, floating in the moonlight. I stood hands in pocket, listening, and could there be a moment of greater gravity, I of any greater resolve, poetry would simply rest its nib unwritten.

I made my leave before the player stayed his bow. I walked home as if on vapors, which I would do again, later, petals in my mouth this time, the night a wine-soaked answer to those as yet unsent words. This is the language of gardens, of their accompanying trees, the perhaps tower: it is a language of reply. It is the shout into an empty portico and the voice, different in its return, resounding the desired ‘yes’, and—oh—the ‘yes’ again.  

The Guilt We Harbor (pts. 1&2)

Brother:

It’s been a long while since I contacted you.

“Where are you?” you may ask, though you have my mailing address and I have yours.

I ask the same question most every day. Not out of geographic curiosity.  I know where you are and I’ve an idea of what your walls may look like: the beds, the barracks. The sea of prison blue. I know you’re situated in the middle of King’s County with a sky that must be devastatingly incredible.

I’ve driven the 5 a few times over in the time you’ve been gone and have seen the tired pistoning of oil pumps; the ruminative cattle; and the white, white haze which seems to jump senses into whiter noise.

“It’s my family.” I sat on the stoop, shoulders with Maggie, attempting to tell her, exactly, why life had, through the course of one phone call, suddenly changed.

“Family? When is it NOT family,” Mags said in return, shaking back her sleeves and lighting a cigarette.

Twenty hours prior, we had exchanged surprise at the fifth of Amsterdam Maggie had secreted in a potted ficus, yet somehow forgotten during the course of a mutually attended wedding reception. Like goldfish we had disremembered our aqueous surroundings: our friend David’s wedding was on the water, and Maggie and I were aquarium drinking.  There was a photo of us taken on a short pier, me and Mags seemingly in deep philosophical discussion, but most likely discussing the particular economy involved in sharing a surprise fifth, we smoking with abandon, our last cigarettes.

Maggie wore black to David’s wedding because although David remained one of her favorite ‘Goys’, to Maggie weddings were on par with Shiva calls. She always wore Onassis sunglasses, especially when ‘I do’s’ were said, a widower’s affect despite not being a widow. She drug around her ex-husband’s last name, though, as if holding on to the dead like an odious and ill-expired pet, taxidermied and talismanic in the corner.

This is not chosen.

Maggie was herself seemingly always sitting Shiva, her own divorce something of funereal gloom and requiring shrouded wedding photos; since the divorce, funerals and weddings were all the same to her, attended with equal distaste and with equal aperitif of vodka. All vows were requiems; all requiems were ‘Well, thank God that’s over’; life was just the something in-between.

She was the first person I called upon receiving the news.

I’m writing this letter. I need for you to hear me, or at least the story of the past three years–those you spent within labyrinthine corridors of concrete. Consider me a conduit. When lightning strikes a tree, its fires are shot through a thousand tissues and limbs fall in beautiful wreckage and the ground crackles a hundred feet around. In the end, the tree bears a scar and it continues wrapping rings of growth around its most blackened parts. The tree keeps growing but it will always have, coiled in its history, proof of its damage.

‘Hang in there’ was something Mags would never have said to me, and God help me were I to ever say as much to her.

‘Hang in there with what—a fucking noose?’

 Maggie reserved her gallows humor for any day the executioner’s hood threatened a particular and existential menace. By this metric, her bed may as well been built over two trapdoor flaps, headboard at their join. Every day she wore black in presage of a coffin and the billowier her shroud the better—like Death, just pret a porter and without the scythe.

 “My brother was arrested.”

“Ok.”

Maggie smoothed out her dress, a Guatemalan print still wrinkled and maybe half-dry.

“Ok,” she said again, her Sag Harbor accent more prominent this time, and she leveled out the lap of her dress until it was in a neat triangle across her knees.

“Does he have a lawyer.” Maggie had placed her cigarette to the side, needing two hands to fix her skirt; she recollected her American Spirit from its perch on the stairs. We were sitting outside, the same stairs she had mounted just minutes earlier with crossed-arms and ever-present dark glasses.

It may have been the odd first question, not a query into the nature of the arrest, or an inquiry into my wellbeing. Was I upset? Else perversely vindicated of any criminal excess I had participated in over the weekend?  Mags and I were both still riding vapors of the night prior, the effluvium of surfeit vodka seemingly present and, back inside, my bedsheets were colored by a night’s worth of near malarial sweat. Maggie had more to drink than I did at the wedding, but by contrast was already properly coifed and perfumed, tight curls dried to her forehead like a magisterial wig.   

The last time I sped through King’s County was with Bradley in a U-Haul truck. A trailer shimmied behind us bearing a vintage car and three bristling, sleep-deprived cats. The cab smelled of Kamel Reds and spent coffee cups. By mid-morning, just beyond the King’s County HP Station and directly beyond the rutted half-roads which finger out into the farmers’ fields, I felt I couldn’t concentrate any longer on the highway lines. We pulled over and slept on the grass beneath these wispy clouds that promised an unerringly still, cricket-shivering night. Brad slept on the trailer rig and, when he awoke, pointed out that I had slept in the grass beneath a sign reading: ‘Dog Lawn.’

“Does he have a lawyer,” she said matter-of-factly, and not as question.

Maggie and I both knew, contrary to American judicial practice that we were all—and without need for trial—guilty of something. Innocence was reserved for children and cats. Maggie’s Talmudic learnings plead otherwise, (and she herself was a social-justice warrior—her collected poems speaking to that end) but Maggie was wizened, jaded, fresh off a nasty divorce. To her, life had become unfair and only explicable if everyone shared in a free-floating and collective blame. You couldn’t exactly call Maggie a nihilist; still she wore black to weddings.

And she knew that what everyone needed sometimes was just a really good fucking lawyer.    

“I don’t know,” I said rubbing my eyes. “I just found out. He was probably in the back of a police car when Dave was cutting the cake.” I borrowed Maggie’s cigarette and took a draw.

“My mom called,” I said exhaling, “Which means my brother’s already past his jailhouse phone call.” I handed the cigarette back. I still hadn’t showered.

“I mean, I’m sure Mom wasn’t the first one he called upon being brought in. Probably the last person he wanted to talk to.” I crossed my arms while waving away the smoke. “I’m guessing he’s out on bail.”

I thought of you arriving at Avenal, looking up from your handcuff-fisted lap, and seeing stark blue lights against a long-ignored landscape.

Maggie finally asked: “What’d he do?” She looked straight ahead, having worked backwards from her initial question. Mags was the barrister in reverse and, with her black robes, presumed judge, too. I stopped my hand from stupidly waving and inserted it into an armpit.  I turned to her with one eye squinted.

“Mom said he thought I’d have known.”

“Known what?” Mags wasn’t impatient, but rather soft in her questioning, dissolving me of complicity before I could place my own self in manacles.

I didn’t answer, not directly. Instead, I turned again to look straight ahead, parallel to Maggie’s’ gaze. I changed the subject.

 “You know, I finished ‘American Psycho’ this morning. Ain’t that some fucked up timing,” I snorted. We stared at the street while Mags extinguished her cigarette. A jogger labored past, out of breath.

“Is your brother a psycho?” Maggie deadpanned, still working backwards with her line of questioning.

“Naw. But he is American, so there’s that.”

We’ve both ushered that fire into the ground in different ways, but both bear darkened rings. We’ve both been conduits and have had the lawn throw up sparks beneath our feet. We’ve both had fire run through us, and wait for the ground to speak its response.

Maggie allowed a half-smile. In her less sober moments, which were many, she’d throw on a Clash record and shout along with Joe Strummer: ‘I’m so bo-ooored with the USA!’, just replacing ‘bored’ with ‘scared’. These words she’d shout with expatriate gusto as if her garden gate was border enough to keep out the America she sometimes forswore.

Mags was a raucous rabble-rouser, yet still privately scared of her own rebellion. She was convinced her phone was tapped and that the FBI had a file on her six inches thick. “Fuck the police!” was one of her war cries. “Fuck the Man! Fuck a duck!”

“My brother hit a woman over the head with a rock, Maggie. On a greenbelt. He wanted to drag her into the bushes and—” I couldn’t finish.  I scratched my head and blanched at the words. I widened my eyes to rid them of disbelief.

I borrowed Mags’ smoke again. She had lit a second one already.

“Then again, Maggie, I dunno. Maybe he is psycho. On top of being American.”

I’m damaged. You are damaged.

Maggie simply nodded and placed her hand reassuringly on my knee as I blew smoke.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Maggie and I lived in North Park, perhaps a mile apart, and though San Diego spans a 100-mile stretch of shoreline, there are islands in the median, one of which Mags and I inhabited. We were just shy of Balboa Park’s arcaded museums. and regardless of our proximity, we drove cars to see each other. It was like living in Los Angeles, this automobile existence of ours, but without the accompanying road rage.

The first and last prisons built in California reside on the US-Mexico border. If the federal penal system could extend its reach into the Tijuana pleasure-lands, it would, depositing prisons like unwanted cargo just past the border checkpoints. As it stands, San Diego is where Father Junipero Serra built the first Presidio before heading North, waving judicial crucifixes at ‘savages’ and proselytizing others.

Since Serra days, the penal state has extended a thousand miles north, then back, so that at journeyed loop, there lies the last presidio, Donovan Correctional Facility. It is a concrete structure, Class III-IV, parked above CA on one face, MX the other. It can’t go further either way, and bulldozers scape the face of the hill where Donovan perches tenuously. There’s a watershed amphitheater down the canyon to one side and a landfill on the other. A mile distant is an amusement park.

Donovan holds Sirhan Sirhan, a Menendez Brother, also one of the Toolbox Killers—all Los Angelenos with varying and gruesome psychopathy, all somehow housed in the same penitential block. The lot are three hundred miles away from their respective crime scenes–the Toolbox Killers’ gore-theater in the Cleveland Forest being in my opinion the worst—and now all are granted concertina views of Mexico here in California’s fairest climate, an imperfect justice at the end of the Golden State Penal Road.  My brother almost wound up there.

Maggie’s boyfriend Christopher—her ostensible boyfriend as the two had only pressed palms against bulletproof glass, else talked on jailhouse phones—resided meanwhile in Corcoran State Prison.

Christopher had been serving time in the Hole—an extended stay—for having too many postage stamps on his person (!). This in a facility where, across the yard, Charles Manson lived in a lush solitary all his own, free to write as many lettered manifestos as he pleased, relative to his notoriety.

Maggie’s boyfriend, Christopher, meekly ran a poetry press from his cell. He was made medicinally servile by the lithium he was prescribed, weakened as well by years of meth abuse up and down the Southwest Sudafed Highway. He was a three-time loser, owlish in his spectacles and with jaundiced eyes; slight of frame; and pompadoured like a jailbird Elvis.  When the volume of Christopher’s correspondence became suddenly suspect, he was kicked to the Hole—this somewhere roundabout the time that Mansons’ third—fourth? —parole hearing was being televised.

In the Hole, precious bodily fluid can’t be wasted on postage stamps, so Maggie—by default—ran Christopher’s press en absentia, dutifully licking envelopes and resuming correspondence where Christopher had left off (Christopher’s Rolodex certainly less impressive, less shambolic than Manson’s). It was never talked about that Christopher may also have been dealing drugs during his Corcoran stay. It was easier to just imagine his crime involved going postal, so to speak.

Maggie poured the scotch and we’re sitting on the back porch, which a friend of hers had fenced in with cheap lattice-work lumber, all to hem in the cat and otherwise give the ipoema a place to root, violet flowers sinking into wood, providing cover, but reducing everything to splinters in the meanwhile.

“What is this?” I jogged a pill in my hand, white and nondescript.

Maggie rearranged her limbs to approximate queenliness. She had a crack in her glasses.

“A downer, I think?”

“Percoset?”

“I dunno. Let’s try.”

I shrugged. Mags had a boom-box playing a bluegrass version of Pink Floyd. I swallowed the pill with a hit of Dewar’s.

“Why—Mags—are your glasses cracked?” The Prayer Flags behind her were aged, evaporated with either over- or underuse, and there were two Guatemalan dresses left to dry in the evening air. Big purple blossoms broke the lattice-work balcony, blue in the evening-set, and ‘Comfortably Numb’ played, uncomfortably, on fiddle.

“I was so depressed today; and I got a second psychiatrist. I was prescribed something new and I literally hit the wall.” She shook the rocks in her drink. “I mean, I fucking fell down.”

“Do your psychiatrists know about each other?”

“By name—shu-ure.”

“You really shouldn’t be mixing your meds,” I said, irony train neatly docking into station. The downer coursed my system, leaving behind a shivery wake. I fingered one of Maggie’s poetry books, which lay discarded on the patio table.

“Mayakovsky clutched a rivet, only the rivet metamorphosed into a gun pointing straight at his heart: Art”.

Maggie literally wrote poetry to save her life when life was an otherwise confusion of conflicting meds and medicated conflict.

During Maggie’s divorce, when existence was the figurative wall she crashed into, and not the literal one that cracked her glasses, she wrote a book called ‘7^th Circle’. It is a slim-spined collection of poems about suicides; she had sublimated her pain into researching and writing various pieces on Mayakovsky, Jean Seberg, George Trakl, Diane Arbus. It won the San Diego Book Award for poetry.

Despite having narrowly avoided the Seventh Circle herself, she still says: “I can’t fucking take it anymoire.”

“I know Mags, I know.” On cue, ‘Comfortably Numb’ stopped playing.

Maggie slept with a gun in her handbasket next to the bed, paranoid, anxious; she had a confusion of prescriptions, but always a neat handle of scotch in the pantry. I knew because I unpacked it for her when I helped her move. Also, we hit it often when communally writing poetry, else editing other poets’ work. She was a mess and I was fast becoming one, all this speed and slowness, the cigarettes and pills; the walking into walls.

Maggie called life ‘Continuous Performance’, and that’s what it is, that’s what it was.

Brother…

Sometimes I spent the night at Mags’ when the gun was too present in the handbasket, when she was drunk and scared; when I would sleep chastely in her bed, wrapping my arms around her, she the Maude to my Harold, the tobacco present on her dressing gown. I’d lie awake and smell her lavender and love her to sleep.

She had a boyfriend in prison; I had a brother in prison, and we’d fall asleep lotus-eaters, shot through with pathos, rocks settling in the bedside scotch.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

I remember when Christopher was released for a brief time and how he held forum at Maggie’s house in front of an ashtray. He was smoking a long and almost effeminately thin joint. Which was “safe” he confided, because “California only looks for uppers in my system.” His hands were strange deep-sea jellyfish, fingers not unlike wavering tentacles. “California is a river of blue, ” he said tapping out an ash, “It is punctuated by a braking of bus wheels and penitentiary-blue lights.”

A wave of the hand, a drag on the tightly-rolled cigarette. “California is blue.” He looked pleased because, above all, he was a poet.

This all happened before and after 9/11. On 9/11, Maggie and I traded a bottle of wine back and forth on her bed and watched the news, saw the Trade Centers fall in occasional time-elapse, like films of flowers speeding to the ground.

“I always hated those buildings,” Mags said, handing me back the bottle of wine, but with tears in her eyes. She was a true New Yorker. Christopher had yet to emerge from the Hole and my brother was just skulking the greenbelts in practice-walks for his later crime. Maggie had vases of yarrow on her bedside, and rosebuds. We were both fiercely against the New Cold War and fiercely into drink.

I don’t know who said: “We deserve this, don’t we?”

And it may have been a personal revelation, on a duvet, in a house with a TV and with buildings falling down, or it may have been a revolutionary statement.

As Maggie wrote:

‘A Gestapo agent pointed to Guernica and asked:/ Did you do this? /No—you did’

We may have had Mexican food that night. I vaguely remember. I just remember falling down in the restaurant and saying, “It’s all my fault” like a building crumpling, like a spent flower.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Christopher was released from the Hole before my brother rode the sea of penitentiary blue. Christopher attended my wedding even—eight months following Tower One’s collapse—as Maggie’s date. And my brother was there, too, hands folded in lap in some premonitory idea of manacles, while my wife and I released butterflies into the June malaise.  Both Christopher and my brother would soon ride buses to penitentiary—in Christopher’s case, for the fourth go-round—near the same time.

Anyways, I thought of Christopher there on that dog-piss grass: I saw him last in the SD Jail. Maggie sobbed in the periphery of the visiting room and I took up the phone that lay unceremoniously on the steel-grey table. I picked up the receiver and looked at Christopher behind the glass–he was all slicked-back hair and waxed moustache; he wore a tight-lipped expression. By his admission, he was on a diet of heavy metals and liver medication. He wore thick glasses, which made his eyes look disproportionately huge and wallowy in the otherwise context of grey brick and cold, cold light. Maggie sobbed, and she sobbed. I held the phone to my ear and didn’t know a goddamn thing to say. “Take care of Maggie,” Christopher had a habit of saying during his brief foray out of penitentiary, which I should have taken as premonition.

Christopher was picked up outside a house in La Jolla Farms, high on meth, having attempted to break into a house with clearly lit home burglary system alarms. He was seated calmly on the sidewalk in front of the estate smoking a cigarette in laconic fashion while flashing lights and a waiting pair of handcuffs coursed his way.

My brother, meanwhile, was found with blood on his shoes, walking in a daze after his victim had successfully fought him off. He had an unworn ski mask and a pair of scissors. He wielded other accouterments, too, he later told me, but he never revealed what. The full inventory must be recorded in some police ledger or stenographic receipt somewhere but I don’t have a transcript of his trial: I just don’t know, and some details are superfluous anyway.

To wit: I wore a black suit with a red shirt the only time I visited my brother at Avenal. I had IHOP for breakfast: buttermilk pancakes, black coffee, and two Vicodin Maggie had lent me for the occasion. Everywhere there were oil pumps in various stages of deterioration, piston heads slumped in mechanical inebriation, disused, rusted, their heyday sup of premium crude having long since been polluted with brackish transudation, a great and rusted machinery stopped. The fields were fallow and run through with weed-choked irrigation ditches. The suit which I caught sight of in the IHOP plate glass was the same I had been married in. My shirt was an otherwise feint at insouciance, a vintage find with a large collar worn unbuttoned at the neck.

I was being an asshole. My visit was not so much out of compassion, and I hedged on it even being an obligation. No: I had come for my brother’s birthright. He was the eldest, the forever good son, and I had always been the black sheep—as evidenced even by my choice of black gabardine that day. I wanted to prove that after years in second place, my mere existence outside prison walls won me the favorite son pelt: I was Jacob, and my brother in his stupid penitentiary orange was Esau. Maybe he wore penitentiary green. Again, some details are superfluous. I just remember my brother ate from the vending machines in the visiting room, fingers childishly stained with orange Cheeto dust, and I felt a snarling superiority. My fingers were clean, my shoes unbloodied. “Free, white, and 21,” as Maggie would always say, free in the sense I had virgin wrists, unlike my brother and Christopher whose wrists had been defiled by the snapping of cuffs, their hands literally tied courtesy of the penal system in the great and golden state of Californ-i-a. 

I first met Christopher on the phone 3(?) years ago when he corrected my pronunciation of Greek poet Yannis Ritsos. And here we were again–on the phone, but face-to-face. “Thom, take care,” he said. “Take care of M.” I took care of Maggie by kissing her in some hopeless manner on the cheek, and leading her out of the Piranesi-inspired civic building, phone hung-up and Christopher disappeared.

In jail as in prison everything watches you. Elevators only open up to narrow corridors, there are mirrors everywhere. In penitentiary, there are gates upon gates, like steel sentinels, and guards finger their clubs. It’s a matter of guilt by association. Like Maggie said: ‘Everyone needs a good fucking lawyer,” even if there’s no blood on your shoes or if your system is clean of what the system says you can’t have. You’re just guilty for living, guilty by association, even if you haven’t been tried and accused of anything. We’re all guilty, and sometimes we sit on a curb waiting for the guillotine of justice to drop while waiting outside a burgled house, high on Sudafed, or wandering a greenbelt with spatters of Type O negative on our boot-tip.

We’re all guilty. We’re all guilty.

At the Poetry Awards, Mags gripped my arm with nervous strength. A crooked arm flexed.

“I doin’t know,” she said, unsure if she should be here, there.

I kissed her cheek.

“Of course you should be here.”

We drank white wine and hid behind the junipers. When she was in her married house, citrus hedges hemmed in the home, and the wood was dark. Maggie always hid. Her current house was of a strange snail-shell design, her bed in the middle of a coil with an incongruent sunroof, briars out front. She decorated her windows with velvet draperies to hide in midday dark. She hid behind damask and dark sunglasses and drink.

“You ok?”

“Just noivous.”

She shouldn’t have been. She won. Maggie Jaffe for ‘7^th Circle.’

I run too fast

I fly too high

I hit too hard

Too wide my eyes

Too full my heart.

Too deep the pain.

In the bathroom of the SD Jail I held her. She was in front of a mirror, red-eyed and cursing. There were so many cameras and squinched-in seats and phones and iron-greys; so many cramped elevators and narrow corridors and convex watching glasses; so many forms and disparaging looks; so much free-floating guilt.

She hunched over the counter with red-rimmed eyes, hands trembling, and her shoulder blades were butterfly-like when racked with sobs, pumping like wings.

“I just can’t take it anymoire,” she cried, jaggedly, and it was about being watched while simultaneously watching over, this curious opticon of prison existence where everyone is assumed guilty and no one is innocent.

“I just can’t take it.”

“I just. Can’t take it.”

“It’s alright, Mags. Let’s go home. I’ll drive.”

I’ve not seen Christopher in a long time—he’s above the law, I think—but while traversing King’s County, a short drive away from the tired city you’ve called home for the past few years–I thought of you arriving at Avenal, looking up from your handcuff-fisted lap, and seeing stark blue lights against a long-ignored landscape.

Maggie–she once told told me about Mayakovsky: how he left his wife because an admirer had, at an intellectual’s party, recited–word for word–the full extent of his 900 line opus. Mayakovsky left his wife to embrace this young admirer. Still–a few years later, he took a gun to his head and left the girl with 900 lines of regret.

As I mentioned, Maggie wrote ‘7^th Circle’—a poetry cycle on famous suicides—to stave off her own ideation. I never knew how she planned to do it, whether her ideation was of the passive variety—wanting to just never wake up—or something of greater tenacity: a ravaging of the ulnar, a bullet to the corpus.  It’s said a book is more satisfying if one knows its end before its beginning, in which case Mags may have found the thought of a premeditated death preferable to the sturm und drang of life’s opening chapters.  Regardless she persisted, never mind her self-annihilative bent. The scotch was always quick to empty, the ice cubes retaining right angles in depleted tumblers. Following Christopher’s departure into the seeming ether—a skipped bail, an assumed return to his home state of Arkansas—Maggie grew more despondent. Then her mother died.

“And now my sister wants to fucking sit Shiva!” Maggie said, slamming her tumbler down on the counter, the amber having been drained.

“My fucking sister!” Maggie pulled on yellow latex gloves to scrub the dishes, which looked ridiculous relative to the pima of her Peruvian dress.

Maggie balled these dresses up in lingerie wash bags, then hung them up still wrinkled to dry off on the back porch. The back porch, despite Maggie’s best efforts, was overrun with morning glory and brugmansia. Poison blossoms, she remarked— “Like a fun tea!” (She was at Woodstock after all).

“Shiva! My goy sister!”

And Maggie furiously scrubbed a dish, which was barely tainted by her lunch. A faux scampi, and sesame-crumbed seitan. Clean food, clean plates.

I held her cat while across the room and glanced at a bulletin board Maggie had constructed. It detailed what birds she’d seen, and where. That sapsucker in Slovakia, the ravens in DC.

“The fucking nerve!”

Maggie scrubbed her ashtray, even after two cigarettes, and placed every clean plate in the dish holder beneath the kitchen window.

“My mutha never worried about me, goddammit. And now I’m supposed to sit in a goddamn room with towels over the fucking mirrors, because now my goddamn sister—my fucked up oldah sister wants Shiva for the mom…for my mom…” She slumped at the kitchen counter.

Despite everything, the cat purred. He was a Norwegian Forest Tabby and preferred clutching your shoulder versus remaining curled in your lap.

“It’s ok, Mags.”

“I’m just tired of being the responsible one, Thawm,” she cried, “Look what happens when you’re the one who was supposed to be ok.”

“’S’alright Mags. I love you. Want me to water your plants?”

I put the cat down, his padded feet thudding on the hardwood floor. He walked away pretendingly nonplussed, the way cats do with ears still held back.

Watering the plants would only encourage the morning glory, but the offer stood. Maggie sobbed, not for the first time or last, while I unraveled the hose from beneath the back stoop and made sure the door was closed so that only I—not the cat nor anything else got out.

Brother–we’ve both ushered fire into the ground in different ways, but both bear darkened rings. We’ve both been conduits and have had the lawn throw up sparks beneath our feet. We’ve both had fire run through us, and wait for the ground to speak its response.

Fire begets earth as everything fire touches is reduced to ash, ash which in turn becomes dirt. Maggie was fiery, but never a phoenix. She was too splenetic, earth her resting spot. She was to never resurrect, never fly away in a theater of flame. Like my brother in his cold expanse of cinder block, her humor was of a bilious nature, black, and she was forever trapped in between a particular melancholy and an autumnal light, a sun eternally setting in its low arc. Leaves crisped around her; the handles of Dewar’s seemingly disappeared themselves. I never knew Maggie not in a prison, whether by tumbler or tumble. Occasionally she’d pretend free, laughing with her head back, making a coyote howl at the ceiling: A-Wooooooo! Then she’d sigh her customary refrain: “Well, fuck a duck,” this her version of ‘and so it goes.’

And so it went. Mags and I eventually parted ways. I had a box of our small press poetry stolen out of my car and scattered to the four winds; some of the poems were returned by a Good Samaritan who collected them from gutters and crosswalks, irreparably marked with tire marks and asphalt grime. Maggie was displeased.

“Why the fuck were they in your CAR in the first place?”

(We had been behind in our correspondences and my apartment couldn’t house all the boxes of manuscript—my trunk doubled as a portable attic).

I was contrite—to a point. Maggie hadn’t done much of the editing work and, having succumbed to a melancholia and alcoholism rivaling Maggie’s, I followed her implied stage direction: <exeunt>. My exit corresponded with my brother’s exit from the penitentiary, surely a swinging wide of gates beneath the glare of cold cathodes and a winking sun; I imagine him a blinking thing, stock still—bovine in repose—staring incredulously at the blue sky. Free. Free save for the guilt, that pernicious guilt we all harbor.

______________________________________________________________________________

“It’s weirdly beautiful,” Maggie remarked, hand clutched around the bottle of Alexander Valley chardonnay. “Never did like those buildings,” she sighed handing the bottle to me. The TV flickered its reports, the World Trade Center towers at first whole, then leveled upon next report.

Maggie was sad. I lifted the bottle to my lips without wiping the neck. We were side by side on the bed, linens bundled at our feet. The cat was a study in indifference.

“Mags?”

“Hmm?” She was falling inside of herself, I could tell. I just rest my head on her shoulder.

We resumed watching the buildings go down in a wreck of dust and concrete, the papery aftermath of dossiers and fax sheets floating light despite the heaviness of everything—this stupid stupid detritus, which caught the sun when you wished to God, you wished to God, things didn’t look so beautiful in their descent.

Maxine “Maggie” Jaffe made her last descent on March 5, 2011, succumbing to a tenacious form of cancer. She was 62. She is the author of ‘Continuous Performance’, ‘How the West Was Won’, ‘7^th Circle’, ‘The Prisons’, and ‘Flick(s): Poetic Interrogations of American Cinema She is missed.

My brother is alive and well, living in the Midwest with his wife and daughter. He is fully reformed and dedicated to his current line of work helping others.

Sponsor (Simon, but no Simony full version)

A WORD TO THE SPONSOR who is putting his first newcomer into a hospital or otherwise introducing him to this new way of life: You must assume full responsibility for this man. He trusts you, otherwise he would not submit to hospitalization. You must fulfill all pledges you make to him, either tangible or intangible. If you cannot fulfill a promise, do not make it.

–Dr. Bob Smith, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, 1938

Hannah leans over the counter and, proffering a demitasse, whispers conspiratorially: “Do you want an extra shot?” And not one to pass up on an opportunity for café collusion, the barista after all being a sweetheart and why not four shots of espresso in my Americano, I raise an eyebrow and say, “Certainly.” I drink coffee alcoholically these days as is, so Hannah is unknowingly being an enabler, but we enjoy a harmless relationship, me and the barista, and the coffeeshop is better a Friday hang than what could be a hangover. Hannah winks and places a finger to her lips while she pours the espresso. My sponsor waits outside.

The café still smells of Christmas, a sparsely decorated pine in the corner, and the gathered patrons are either stuck on 52 across or deleting e-mails. No music plays—this is not Starbucks—and music shouldn’t be played at a coffeeshop anyway.

I’m in a good mood, which a quadruple mathematically compounds, and my sponsor has picked a table in the sun because he, despite twenty years expatriated from Seattle, still chooses to wear shorts in forty-degree weather. Chris is my sponsor’s name, either short for Christopher or Christian, I don’t know; but were it the latter, it would be ironic, seeing as Chris has made a Jefferson’s Bible out of the Big Book, striking all miracles from its pages and replacing words like ‘spiritual’ and ‘God’ with agnostic lexis more appropriate to his skeptical bent. He has twenty-one years, so his sobriety is of drinking age, long enough, he professes, that were science to one day accomplish a cure for alcoholism, say some magic pabulum or pill, he’d forego the cure and stick to his monastic ways. He even uses the word ‘monastic’, which, again, is ironic, as deism is something he finds of nuisance—blah blah blah, he’ll say, with a dismissive flip of the hand—but monastic it is, fitting as he lives a caustral life with his cats in a studio apartment, as long without a lover near as long as he’s been without a drink. But ‘we are not a glum lot’ the saying goes, and Chris always exudes the air of a man at ease with himself, down to the ever-crossed arms behind the head and a chin tipped upward just enough to reveal when he’s been lazy with the razor. I don’t get the sense that he is lonely; regardless, I know I’m good company for him. We’re both happy with the red pens as evidenced by our respective Big Books, and both examine rhetoric as through a jeweler’s loupe, happy sometimes with a particular turn of phrase, other times not, this discernment necessary when wading through a text that less than coquettishly flirts with dogma. Bill W., after all, was not exactly a shrinking violet in the grand posy of things.

Despite similarities, Chris and I differ in one marked way: we are very dissimilar drinkers, and it shows in the manner that I veritably osmose my Americano while he takes his cup like a gentleman–he could very well extend a pinkie—and you wouldn’t have guessed that he’s the binger of our lot, whereas I’m the marathon imbiber; you also wouldn’t have guessed, though, by our disparate ages, that I’ve got ten years residence on him when it comes to dwelling at the bottom of a glass (albeit with occasional changes of address). This accounts for his impressive lack of relapses, also the fact that his disease never had the chance to graduate with honors to the so-called middle stages.

“I quit after only four months of nightly drinking,” he informs me, “So I never experienced withdrawals,” and he says this last part with a hint of reckoning, as if remarking, ‘can’t say that I have’ in response to a casual query. Withdrawals, of course, are as casual as a cotillion, which is to say they’re not: they’re what happens when alcohol stops making you sick, but the lack of it does.

“I’ve had a bit of PAWS the past few days,” I offer, “Sucks.” Except for today, I’m sure to add, because it’s a refreshingly crisp day even with the sun shining, the coffee is strong, and the sidewalk-goers outside the café are like Christmas ornaments on the tree inside, wrapped in Yule-colored sweaters and still merry despite the holiday passed.

“You know, I never heard of that until recently,” Chris confesses, “Came up in a meeting the other week. Like I said, I never had anything resembling withdrawals. What’re they like?”

PAWS is post-acute withdrawal syndrome, which is essentially the body collecting its dues for past and injurious behavior. Symptoms can show up in Whack-a-Mole fashion, a carnival of ugly heads playing popcorn in the body, ping-pong: hypoglycemia, malnutritive disorder, cortical atrophy, autonomic nervous system dysfunction, brain amine depletion—the laundry list which, though syllables long, and originating in the corpus, can best be described in simple emotive terms.

“Ennui, Chris. I get irritable. Depressed.” It’s a serotonin thing. My blood chemistries are within normal limits—it’s testament to how well the body heals–and I am fresh-faced just two months abstinent. But my head still resides in Purgatory, and there’s no indulgence for that–not even the errant dollar bills in the meeting collection plates impress the angel who guards entrance to Limbo.

“Ah.” Chris nods and looks at me sympathetically from behind wire-rimmed glasses. He never has to adjust his spectacles, they seem soldered in place, while I’m constantly punching at my nose bridge as if tapping out Morse code to some unseen—or unseeing—third eye.

“At least I know what it is I’m going through,” I concede. “I mean, if I didn’t…” and I trail off, because this is where physiology and psychology get confused, there being the intermittent phenomena of craving; what if this means there’s an insufficient adaptation on my part, on a symbolic level, to an otherwise alcohol-free life. The mind despairs while meantime the body repairs. Suddenly all the needlepoint samplers on the walls of the Alano clubs make sense: ‘Easy Does It. First Things First.’ I take a swig of coffee, in the abstainer’s version of a heady quaff and—“Excuse me, Chris—you’ll get used to this”—I excuse myself to the restroom for what’s probably the first of many times. I mean, four shots of espresso.

Hannah’s still at work behind the counter and, being a Friday, the gran turismo that is the espresso machine is at an idle, Hannah instead tending to the accumulated utensils her work necessitates, the portofilters and compressore tamps, whisks and muddlers, and it occurs to me how alike her job is to that of a mixologist’s, the Torani syrups with their quick pour spouts the virgin equivalent of varied liqueurs, espresso being the antemeridian workhorse spirit. How it is we begin every morning already under the influence. Hannah is party to this, she looking very much like a cocktail herself, with hair dyed a curious shade of curacao, and tattoos like vintner stamps. She smiles again, my caffeine conspirator, and the café with its distressed wood is instantly less distressed as I pass through the back hallway toward the restrooms.

A picture of Billie Holiday hangs just inside the door above a small decorative stool. It’s an old photograph, when Lady Day was still young and singing in nightclubs, this before the state of New York took away her cabaret card for heroin possession in 1947. Ms. Holiday was an alcoholic, too, hers a painful life which, many have remarked, is obvious in her voice, disillusioned yet still childlike in its intonation. Sad as her life was—and it included rape and prostitution, needles, drink, and the slammer–the saddest thing, and I think about this every time I see the coffeeshop photograph, is that she had her record player taken away from her when she died. Billie Holiday, singer of arguably the most important song of the twentieth century—‘Strange Fruit’—died in a hospital room cleared of all flowers and all well-wishes cards, her record player too, because when she was admitted to Metropolitan for liver and heart problems, she had heroin on her person. Authorities placed her under arrest on her death bed, drug possession charges, and she left this world by way of empty room, with empty veins, most likely in withdrawal, with no music to guide her home. She had forty-four cents in the bank, and another 750 dollars strapped to her leg.

The photograph at the coffeeshop shows her smiling, famous magnolia blossom pinned to her hair, when she was alive and vital in the nightclubs. It was said that when Billie sang, men stopped drinking, something she herself never did. Her addictions sadly, robbed her of her freedoms: when her cabaret card got taken away, she was disallowed from singing at the NY jazz joints and, although she was to later grace Carnegie Hall, it was the club scene that was her life blood, not the lavish venues. When her literal life blood was coursing its last, Billie victim to the ascites and edemas of late-stage cirrhosis, her liver a diseased orange from years of acetaldehyde abuse, there was an armed guard posted outside of her hospital room—an armed guard!—to insure her arrest was lawfully overseen and that every last iota of freedom Billie had belonged to the state of New York.

“It’s freeing,” I tell Chris upon returning outside, this time to a table in the shade where the glare is less and the traffic more subdued, “Despite.”

“What is?”

“Well there are a few words that show up from time to time in literature. One, ironically, is ‘arrest.’”

“Opposite of freeing.”

“Right, but it comes up in two manners.” Chris readjusts himself, interested, which always entails readjusting his Big Book too, turning it sideways, else flipping it upside down. Rubber-banded to his book—always—is the recent copy of the NYT crossword. He, to my satisfaction does the puzzle correctly, by which I mean in pen.

“Listen,” and I point to me and him. “We got this shit.” And I pause for a second, because that’s actually hard to admit.

“We got this shit, right?” I dip my finger in my drink and it’s tepid. Fuck, I want it hot; fuck I want it alcoholic.

People walk by on the sidewalk and there’s the sudden sense that we are not in a safe space, but that, really, any place can be one.

“We got this shit, Chris. And it’s arresting for one.”

This cannot be exactly new to Chris, were we to play with words, or review criminal files from one score and a month ago; Chris had a DUI, and through the magic of deferment came to realize he was arrested before the handcuffs had even been slapped on his wrists. A few months in the Program is what it what it takes, sometimes, to see that images in the rear view are truer than they appear.

“We’re arrested. Done-zo. Ka-fucking-put. It’s the most maddening disease on the planet: our livers can’t process what we deliver, the body likes the side effect, and our brain—oh our brains,” and I talk out of mine in defiance of my own—“Says wrist-cuff me, please.

“Just, dammit.”

My coffee is cold.

I look up. “I’m arrested, Chris. Even when I’m not drunk, I’ll always be under the influence.”

“…”

“…”

“What’s the second definition?”

“What?”

“The second definition?”

“Oh. Um. 61 Across is ‘sortie’ by the way,” I tap his crossword, pausing.

Chris smirks. “Smart ass.”

“Would you rather me dumb? That’s what people already think. Allow me to quote: “If hundreds of experiences have shown him that one drink means another debacle with all its attendant suffering blah de blah blah” I floof the air in fake nonplus.

“You bothered by that, Cowboy?”

“Who fucking wouldn’t be?”

“What’s your second definition? You were saying.”

I draw my coat in, and can’t imagine Chris is not cold, but he’s not, and Christ he actually left his apartment today which had a minor fire leaving him without heat and he still wears shorts.

“Restare,” and I say it with all the vowels.

“What’s that mean?”

“One thing you’re gonna learn about me—besides the fact that I go to the bathroom like every five minutes,” I say, “Is that I look up every word in the dictionary to see where it comes from. Restare. Rearrange the letters. It’s ‘arrest.’ Means either ‘to remain’ or ‘to stop’.

“Ok.”

“Not OK, perse. We’ve already acknowledged we have exactly 100% retention with regard to this disease and–yea!” I tap Chris on his shirt-sleeved shouder, “We win! We retained everything we learned!”

“So that’s ‘remain’…”

“Yeah. And the second definition is ‘to stop.’”

I sit back in my chair and fiddle with my scarf. “Yea,” I pretend cheer, “We stop.” I twirl the end of my scarf like a wet rally flag.

“We stop.”

“Yup.”

My coffee cup is empty, but I lift it to my lips out of habit anyway.

“We stop,” I say superfluously, “We stop we stop we stop.”

“Cheers,” I salud, “Aaaaand fuck this shit.”

61 across is ‘sortie’. 52 down is ‘sari’. ’Sari’ appears on most crosswords and so do other words that don’t have their fit in everyday life, as if life weren’t a puzzle already. ‘Fuck this shit,’ by the way, does not satisfy 4 down nor 14 across.

It’ll get better,” Chris says, and he rearranges his Book again. “Listen, you could go home, be by yourself,” he passes his hands over an exaggeratedly sad face, signing rain with his fingers, “Or. There are alternatives. I mean,” and he scratches his throat–he missed a patch with the razor again—“This Higher Power thing: me engaging with this book, me talking to you. Oh, people say God all the time, blah blah blah, and I have to say, ‘Listen, ‘God’ can’t be used as a placeholder term, because it’s pretty specific. But engage with something—anything—outside yourself—by definition, it’s a higher power because it’s ‘one plus whatever’ equaling something greater than—” and Chris passes his hand over his face again—“Just this.”

“What if I’m a negative number?” I counter.

“I don’t think you believe that.”

“I was just testing your math.”

“Nihilism doesn’t become you.”

I flick my coffee cup. “And here I was, being so clever.”

“You ok?”

“Oh, nothing. Pink cloud is gone.”

The door to the café opens and the smell of the Christmas tree drafts outward; where we are sitting, it is in view of a liquor store and a beer bar under construction. I could so easily seed my cloud, were I normal, but—no—I flick my coffee cup again. Hannah comes out to sweep.

“There’s this quote,” I clear my throat.

Chris has cats to tend to; he has pictures he’s sent me, and they are white little slips of things that like his feet, the fact of which entertains him, even today when he threw his laptop against the wall because an electrical fire scorched his kitchen and fucked up half his studio; and he’s at odds with his landlord about it, he could seed his cloud too, but he’s got twenty-one years and somehow—somehow—he’s found one+one all these lonely days.

“There’s this quote, Chris. ‘Grass grows by the inch, dies by the foot.’

I pause when packing my bag.

“There’s no reason I actually said that, Chris,” reconsidering. “Sorry.”

I scratch my head.

He says: “Sure there wasn’t”, smiling.

This is a very critical time in his life. He looks to you for courage, hope, comfort and guidance. He fears the past. He is uncertain of the future. And he is in a frame of mind that the least neglect on your part will fill him with resentment and self-pity. You have in your hands the most valuable property in the world — the future of a fellow man. Treat his life as carefully as you would your own. You are literally responsible for his life.

–Dr. Bob, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, 1938

Hannah pours the coffee again, and I’m not telling Chris, but I’ve relapsed. I’ve ordered a sandwich—I always hold the lettuce, count the avocado as my greens—and the awning is dripping in that just post-rain way, and I’m not telling him. Which is anathemic to having a sponsor, a therapist, too, actually, this fact of not telling. But I couldn’t.

At the meeting, I lead, and offer up my sort of truth.

“My name is Thom. I’m your alcoholic leader for today,” in case you wanted to know how meetings start, and they end with the Serenity Prayer, which is better than the Lords’ one, really, and I begin.

I have a book with me, it is not AA-approved but what if that book were my Higher
Power I can sneak it in: “It’s called ‘A Trip to Echo Spring.’ Echo Spring is reference to Tennessee Williams, ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ and it means taking a trip to the liquor cabinet to ‘get the click.’ All my heroes were alcoholics or suicides, or both. I continue:

“My story is unremarkable. I’m a writer, I should have a fascinating drunkalogue.” A drunkalogue is that amusing term AA has come up with to replace a fisherman’s ‘Big Fish’ story. As in, “I started drinking in Florida; I came to in a Chicago hotel room—luggage intact, thankfully—but,” cue David Byrne, “How did I get here?”

“Yet I don’t,” I admit, to my lack of drunkalogue, “I don’t have one. I drank after-hours, on the couch, and bloody hell confessed everything on paper, my ambivalences about life. Depression: yes. Anxiety: yes. A child with special needs: check. It was REAL. And people responded to that.

 So that fueled my trips to Echo Spring, inevitably. Click, click, this is real. Click, click again to Echo Spring. Except I never confessed to my drinking, which was the unreal part. Alcohol is cunning, baffling, and powerful; and within its clutches, for those with the disease, one is grandiose, wings fucking out. Baby, we’ll be fine; I’ll charge my pockets with quarters, get a swig, and confess without having to thumb a Christ. Truth, Baby, truth! En vino fucking veritas!

Except what was once ‘En vino veritas’ now has to be ‘En veritas veritas’, no ABV allowed.

Thing is, in these Rooms, I DO confess my drinking now. I confess: it’s a goddamn bitch to be anhedonic, that you can’t feel when you stop and the click doesn’t happen and you can’t take a trip to Echo Spring and that you’re stuck, you’re fucking stuck in the morass of an incurable disease, this Styxian River, and all you’ve got to get to the other side is the 100% step, the first step: I’m an alcoholic. I’m an alcoholic I’m unmanageable but need to be.

I wrote about the last time I stopped and how I took a hike with my son: I said “You’re the love of my life.” I also wrote how I didn’t feel a God. Damn. Thing.

Berryman felt the wind in his beard the last time and threw himself off a bridge.

Hemingway went for a last fateful pigeon-shoot. Said he knew he would go like his father.

Let’s not talk about Zooey Fitzgerald and how she went, or F. Scott’s wet brain letters about the madness of insomnia.

Tennessee Williams choked on the cap of an eye-dropper, paranoid till the day he died.

Lady Day died veritably bankrupt sans music.

“I had a rough day yesterday,” I venture, “Maybe we can talk about ambivalence or something, or PAWS or just getting through.”

 You should be able to judge if a man is sincere in his desire to quit drinking. Use this judgment. Otherwise you will find yourself needlessly bumping your head into a stone wall and wondering why your “babies” don’t stay sober. Remember your own experience. You can remember many times when you would have done anything to get over that awful alcoholic sickness, although you had no desire in the world to give up drinking for good. It doesn’t take much good health to inspire an alcoholic to go back and repeat the acts that made him sick. Men who have had pneumonia don’t often wittingly expose themselves a second time. But an alcoholic will deliberately get sick over and over again with brief interludes of good health.

–Dr. Bob Smith, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, 1938

“Well,” Chris says, “First of all my name is Chris and I’m an alcoholic.” Chris is shaven today and, because the Alano club provides it, is eating popcorn. He has his ever-present Coca-Cola to complete this illusion that we are somehow in a movie theater, when in fact we are in The Rooms. I get a preemptory stirring that he is certainly dry, but not necessarily sober. The glasses soldered on his face suddenly seem plastered on, in the way that we are not plastered.

“I’m Chris and I’m an alcoholic and well WELL.”

DFW hanged himself; Sylvia Plath toasted her head; Bukowski, Amy Winehouse, Mickey Mantle, Ginsy, Kerouac, Veronica Lake.

“So,” Chris begins, and he outlays a palm as if he were he suddenly Episcopalian. He’s annoyingly eating popcorn.

“What if,” he pontificates, “Your cousin, perse, were to drown in two inches of water—drunk, I might add—“Chris shuffles his bag of kernels—“While deciding to be sober.” He smashes a few corns. “Let’s have a pizza.”

“What if,” he furthers, mouth full, “Your BROTHER stabs his girlfriend in the neck with a pencil while high. Let’s,” he flourishes, “Have a pizza.”

“What if your car breaks down, or gets wrecked, or let’s say you have an apartment fire. Pizza. Let’s have a pizza, Thom.”

And he says my name like an epithet and I’m taken aback and want to say ‘sorry’ when really ‘fuck you’ should pass my lips freely, like an exorcised spirit, but I get quiet and instead look at the clock. Rules are, there is no ‘crosstalk.’ I have been violated, and I have forty more minutes to lead. I adjust my jeans, tug at the unfilled crotch of my pants. People are rolling their eyes and cell-phones have surreptitiously been drawn. I black out, as if were still on substance; forty minutes later, after shares, Chris texts. I’m still at the table’s head, but sneak a look at my phone: “I’ve left,” Chris snorts, “I’m so over people misinterpreting what I had to say.” I look back to where Chris was sitting; he’s still there, eating popcorn.

The awning water is dripping on my sandwich, and there is the truth of my relapse, the truth of rain water on my sourdough. The weather is still crisp, like the absent lettuce on my sandwich, and Chris naturally wears shorts that expose his knees to the cold; we have coffee, which is the prescribed drug of AA. I smoke, he does not. The chairs are of the utilitarian variety, wire, and the simulacra of café seats from Rue de Montmarte, or that VanGogh painting of a coffeeshop. AA prescribes coffee and sweets because it was written in 1939, and doesn’t understand hypoglycemia. I didn’t relapse bad, so I’m avocado instead of agua dulce.

I don’t want to be by myself; I believe in Chris’ higher power, that to ‘restare’ one must not, essentially, be alone. One must not deal with these things by themselves. But we’re not having pizza. Fuck that.

NOW YOU ARE ALONE. When you go to the hospital with typhoid fever your one thought is to be cured. When you go to the hospital as a chronic alcoholic your only thought should be to conquer a disease that is just as deadly if not so quick to kill. And rest assured that the disease is deadly. The mental hospitals are filled with chronic alcoholics. The vital statistics files in every community are filled with deaths due to acute alcoholism.

–Dr. Bob Smith, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, 1938

“So.”

“So.”

“I’ve been thinking of ‘The Doctor’s Opinion’, I say. “We doctors have realized for a long time that some form of moral psychology was of urgent importance to alcoholics—but its application presented difficulties beyond our comprehension.”

Chris has a copy of the Big Book wherein he has scratched out ‘moral’ and replaced the word with ‘ethical’. Tomato, to-mah-to. He leans back in his seat and touches two hands to either side of his chest. He scratches his nose.

“The appendix to the Big Book talks about this being an educational experience, and not—blah blah blah—God-conscious whatever.

I flip to the appendix. “Educative, Chris. It says: ‘educative’.

‘Educational’ and ‘educative’ are different, though incredibly similar. Fools even the thesaurus.

I decide to not tell him.

There are confessional booths and they are dark, with veiled screens, slatted doors, etc. The priests have robes which are black, I guess, because they absorb the sins like sun-rays and are warmed by the attention.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

“Go ahead.”

“I was really mad, Father, and depressed. I’m not sure what’s going on. I mean, I got my 60-day chip.”

“Go on.”

“I drank. I felt something again.”

“OK.”

“I wanted to feel.”

“…”

“Even though I know the grass dies by the foot, I know.”

“What…did your sponsor say?”

“He recommended pizza.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t fucking either, Father. Excuse my language.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Not entirely.”

“Well…”

“Thank you, Father. Hey Father?—

“Simon was the listener in the Bible and then there’s all that simony shit. What happens when Simon just doesn’t help with the cross?”

“My son…”

“Sorry—just angry, Father. He did, though, just have one job.”

Lady Day has this song called ‘Riffin the Scotch’ about jumping the frying pan into the fire, oh Lady, and your scotch; what pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization that you leapt into the fire, and what must have it been like on that hospital bed slipping immortal asking for a listen please, both to your absent turntable and to the person who never, properly, said, “I’m right here, baby. I’m right here.

Yes?”

What My Tattoo Means (Amor fati)

“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”

–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

 

I have Amor fati tattooed on my left wrist, prefaced with a semi-colon. The left wrist is where I once tested a chef’s knife to see what it would take to cut the ulnar artery. The nurses have always loved my veins; they are prominent and quick to bleed.

I was left with a scar for a few months, which has since faded. A semi-colon replaces the knife-mark. The semi-colon tattoo is reserved for those who have had suicidal ideation, or indeed, have attempted to quit their life altogether.

Two things stayed the blade. I thought of Ernest Hemingway, who eerily said, ‘I will go like my father’, he a son of a suicide. Both Hemingway and his father ultimately died during “hunting accidents”, the final flutter of dove wings and a gun’s report, but there was that one time Ernest tried to drown himself off the back of his beloved Pilar. He sank a few fathoms before thinking of his brood, and he exclaimed, “My sons!” through a mouthful of expired air. He swam to surface and gasped mightily, to live for a few more years.

Second, I thought of the Golden Gate jumper who, in a millionth of a chance, hit the water at the right angle so that his organs were saved rupture, and his lungs allowed the fortitude to breathe again. He speaks now against suicide on high school and college campuses. He is unfailingly asked, “What was your thought as you leapt?” He replies soberly: “This is a mistake.” I imagine him falling at 200mph with that his purported last thought.

I didn’t want to bleed out, close my eyes to the world weakened by a broken artery with a feeling of ultimate regret. I didn’t want to leave my sons with a father-sized hole. I chose to live.

I choose to live, amor fati.

From Marcus Aurelius: “A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.”

From Epicectus: “Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to; rather wish that what happens happen the way it happens: then you will be happy.”

From Friedrich Nietsche: “That one wants nothing to be different, not forwards, not backwards, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it…but love it.”

When the knife blade sliced into my arm, I was sure I was done living, that I couldn’t live with or without alcohol, that I was at the jumping-off point. I bled, but I didn’t bleed out. I wrapped my wrist: “This is a mistake.” I calmly stopped the flow and let the wound see air. I would later be in a hospital for a dual diagnosis of depression and alcoholism, receiving the help I desperately needed.

I am a migrating moon, a panoply of phases that come and go. “This, too, shall pass” is wisdom for my nomadic self, tugged as it is by the pulls of my head and heart. Even the New Moon, however invisible, is beautiful, as much as is the Full Moon; I am cycles of life and in my mortal cycling, love every minute.

I did a gratitude exercise: I visited my grandfathers in their respective mauseleum crypts, knelt down before the names on the walls, and whispered my thanks to them both, for my alcoholism. For my manic-depression. Through the passing of their genes, I am who I am, and having the wherewithal to accept what it is that afflicts me makes me a more intact human being. Intact comes from the French, integrite. Whole.

Amor fati. May you love your fate, too.

 

The Guilt We Harbor, pt. 1 (for Maggie and my brother)

Brother:

It’s been a long while since I contacted you.

“Where are you?” you may ask, though you have my mailing address and I have yours.

I ask the same question most every day. Not out of geographic curiosity.  I know where you are and I’ve an idea of what your walls may look like: the beds, the barracks. The sea of prison blue. I know you’re situated in the middle of King’s County with a sky that must be devastatingly incredible.

I’ve driven the 5 a few times over in the time you’ve been gone and have seen the tired pistoning of oil pumps; the ruminative cattle; and the white, white haze which seems to jump senses into whiter noise.

 “It’s my family.” I sat on the stoop, shoulders with Maggie, attempting to tell her, exactly, why life had, through the course of one phone call, suddenly changed.

“Family? When is it NOT family,” Mags said in return, shaking back her sleeves and lighting a cigarette.

Twenty hours prior, we had exchanged surprise at the fifth of Amsterdam Maggie had secreted in a potted ficus, yet somehow forgotten during the course of a mutually attended wedding reception. Like goldfish we had disremembered our aqueous surroundings: David’s wedding was on the water, and we were aquarium drinking.  There was a photo of us taken on a short pier, me and Mags seemingly in deep philosophical discussion, but most likely discussing the particular economy involved in sharing a surprise fifth–an odd number to split on the even—and she, smoking with abandon, her last cigarettes.

Maggie wore black to David’s wedding, because although David remained one of her favorite ‘Goys’, to Maggie weddings were on par with Shiva calls. She always wore Onassis sunglasses, especially when ‘I do’s’ were said, a widower’s affect despite not being a widow. She drug around her ex-husband’s last name, though, as if holding on to the dead like an odious and ill-expired pet, taxidermied and talismanic in the corner.

This is not chosen.

Maggie was herself seemingly always sitting Shiva, her own divorce something of funereal gloom and requiring shrouded wedding photos; since the divorce, funerals and weddings were all the same to her, attended with equal distaste and with equal aperitif of vodka, a bottle of which she carried in her clutch to mediate her more dour tendencies. All vows were requiems; all requiems were ‘Well, thank God that’s over’; life was just the something in-between.

She was the first person I called upon receiving the news.

I’m writing this letter. I need for you to hear me, or at least the story of the past three years–those you spent within labyrinthine corridors of concrete. Consider me a conduit. When lightning strikes a tree, its fires are shot through a thousand tissues and limbs fall in beautiful wreckage and the ground crackles a hundred feet around. In the end, the tree bears a scar and it continues wrapping rings of growth around its most blackened parts. The tree keeps growing but it will always have, coiled in its history, proof of its damage.

‘Hang in there’ was something Mags would never have said to me, and God help me were I to ever say as much to her.

‘Hang in there with what—a fucking noose?’

Maggie reserved her gallows humor for any day the executioner’s hood had any particular and existential menace. By this metric, her bed may as well been built over two trapdoor flaps, headboard at their join. Every day she wore black in presage of a coffin and the billowier her shroud the better—like Death, just ecumenical and without the scythe.

“My brother was arrested.”

“Ok.”

Maggie smoothed out her dress, a Guatemalan print still wrinkled and maybe half-dry.

“Ok,” she said again, her Sag Harbor accent more prominent this time, and she leveled out the lap of her dress until it was in a neat triangle across her knees.

“Does he have a lawyer.” Maggie had placed her cigarette to the side, needing two hands to fix her skirt; she recollected her American Spirit from ash-headed perch on the stairs. We were sitting outside, the same stairs she had mounted just minutes earlier with crossed-arms and ever-present dark glasses.

It may have been the odd first question, not a query into the nature of the arrest, or inquiry into my wellbeing. Was I upset? Else perversely vindicated of any criminal excess I had participated in that weekend?  Mags and I were both still riding vapors of the night prior, the effluvium of surfeit vodka seemingly present. If not present, at the very least coloring the bedsheets I’d left unmade back inside, me having been near malarial with sweat. Maggie certainly had more than I did the night prior, but by contrast was already properly coifed and perfumed, tight curls dried to her forehead like a magisterial wig.

The last time I sped through King’s County was with Bradley in a U-Haul truck. A trailer shimmied behind us bearing a vintage car and three bristling, sleep-deprived cats. The cab smelled of Kamel Reds and spent coffee cups. By mid-morning, just beyond the King’s County HP Station and directly beyond the rutted half-roads which finger out into the farmers’ fields, I felt I couldn’t concentrate any longer on the highway lines. We pulled over and slept on the grass beneath these wispy clouds that promised an unerringly still, cricket-shivering night. Brad slept on the trailer rig and, when he awoke, pointed out that I had slept in the grass beneath a sign reading: ‘Dog Lawn.’

“Does he have a lawyer,” she said matter-of-factly, and not as question.

Maggie and I both knew, contrary to American judiciary standard, that we were all—and without courtroom session necessary—guilty of something or other, no need for trial. Innocence was reserved for children and cats. Maggie’s Talmudic learnings plead otherwise, and she herself was a social-justice warrior—her collected poetry spoke to that end—but Maggie was wisened, jaded, fresh off a nasty divorce.

To her, life had become unfair, or at least only comprehensible if everyone shared in a free-floating and collective blame. You couldn’t exactly call Maggie a nihilist; still she wore black to weddings.

And she knew that what everyone needed, sometimes, was just a really good fucking lawyer.

“I don’t know,” I said rubbing my eyes. “I just found out. He was probably in the back of a police car when Dave was cutting the cake.” I borrowed Maggie’s cigarette and took a draw.

“My mom called,” I said exhaling, “Which means my brother’s already past his jailhouse phone call.” I handed the cigarette back. I still hadn’t showered.

“I mean, I’m sure Mom wasn’t the first one he called upon being brought in. Probably the last person he wanted to talk to.” I crossed my arms while waving away the smoke. “I’m guessing he’s out on bail.”

I thought of you arriving at Avenal, looking up from your handcuff-fisted lap, and seeing stark blue lights against a long-ignored landscape.

Maggie finally asked: “What’d he do?” She looked straight ahead, working backwards from her initial question. Mags was the esquire in reverse and, with black robes, presumed judge, too. I stopped my hand from stupidly waving and inserted it into an armpit.  I turned to her with one eye squinted.

“Mom said he thought I’d have known.”

“Known what?” Mags wasn’t impatient, but rather soft in her questioning, dissolving me of complicity before I could place my own self in manacles.

I didn’t answer, not directly. Instead, I turned again to look straight ahead, parallel to Maggie’s’ gaze. I changed the subject.

“You know, I finished ‘American Psycho’ this morning. Ain’t that some fucked up timing,” I snorted. We stared at the street while Mags extinguished her cigarette. A jogger labored past, out of breath.

“Is your brother a psycho?” Maggie deadpanned, still working backwards with her line of questioning.

“Naw. But he is American, so there’s that.”

We’ve both ushered that fire into the ground in different ways, but both bear darkened rings. We’ve both been conduits and have had the lawn throw up sparks beneath our feet. We’ve both had fire run through us, and wait for the ground to speak its response.

Maggie allowed a half-smile. In her less sober moments, which were many, she’d throw on a Clash record and shout along with Joe Strummer: ‘I’m so bo-ooored with the USA!’, just replacing ‘bored’ with ‘scared’. These words she’d shout with expatriate gusto as if her garden gate was border enough to keep out the particular stars and stripes she eschewed on her own freak flag.

Mags was a raucous rabble-rouser, yet still privately scared of her own rebellion. She was convinced her phone was tapped and that the FBI had a file on her six inches thick. “Fuck the police!” was one of her war cries. “Fuck the Man! Fuck a duck!”

“My brother hit a woman over the head with a rock, Maggie. On a greenbelt. He wanted to drag her into the bushes and cut off her panties as trophy.” I scratched my head and blanched at the word ‘panties.’ I widened my eyes to rid them of disbelief.

I borrowed Mags’ smoke again. She had lit a second one already.

“Then again, Maggie, I dunno. Maybe he is psycho. On top of being American.”

I’m damaged. You are damaged.

 Maggie simply nodded and placed her hand reassuringly on my knee as I blew smoke.

 

__________________________________________

 

Maggie and I lived in North Park, perhaps a mile apart, and though San Diego spans a 100-mile stretch of shoreline, there are densely populated islands in the median, one of which Mags and I inhabited, just shy of Balboa Park’s arcaded museums. Regardless of proximity, we drove cars to see each other. It was like living in Los Angeles, but with greater sun-bronzed apathy. The coastal architecture was made up of disused naval ships instead of gantries, and culture less varied than one would expect from a border town.

The first and last prisons built in California reside on the US-Mexico border. If the federal penal system could extend its reach into the Tijuana pleasure-lands, it would, depositing prisons like unwanted cargo just past the border checkpoints. As it stands, San Diego is where Father Junipero Serra built the first Presidio before heading North, waving judicial crucifixes at ‘savages’ and proselytizing others.

Since Serra days, the state has extended a thousand miles north, then back, so that at journeyed loop, there is also the last presidio, Donovan Correctional Facility, a concrete structure, Class III-IV, parked above CA on one face, MX the other. It can’t go further either way, and bulldozers scape the face of the hill where Donovan perches tenuously. There’s a watershed amphitheater down the canyon to one side and a landfill on the other. A mile distant is an amusement park.

Donovan holds Sirhan Sirhan, a  Menendez Brother, also one of the Toolbox Killers—all Los Angelenos with varying and gruesome psychopathy, all somehow housed in the same penitential block and classified equally despite the disparate sufferings of their victims. They’re all three hundred miles away from their respective crime scenes–the Toolbox Killers’ gore-theater in the Cleveland Forest being the worst—and now all are granted cinder block views of Mexico, in California’s fairest climate, all imperfect justice at the end of the Golden State Penal road.  My brother almost wound up there.

Maggie’s boyfriend—her ostensible boyfriend—as they’d only pressed palms against bulletproof glass, else talked on jailhouse phones, resided meanwhile in Corcoran.

He’d been serving time in the hole—an extended stay—for having too many postage stamps on his person; this in a facility where, across the yard, Charles Manson lived in a lush solitary all his own, free to write as many lettered manifestos as he pleased, relative to his notoriety.

Maggie’s boyfriend, Christopher, ran a poetry press from his cell, and was made medicinally contrite, weakened by the lithium he was prescribed, otherwise ravaged by years of meth abuse up and down the SW Sudafed Highway. He was a three-time loser, owlish in his spectacles and with jaundiced eyes; sleight of frame; and sporting slick-backed hair.  When the volume of Christopher’s correspondence became suddenly suspect, he was kicked to the Hole—this somewhere roundabout the time that Mansons’ third—fourth?—parole hearing was being televised.

There are no flashbulbs in the Hole, no video cameras, and precious bodily fluid certainly can’t be wasted on postage stamps, so Maggie—by default—ran Christopher’s press en absentia, dutifully licking envelopes and resuming correspondence where Christopher had left off, his Rolodex certainly less impressive, less shambolic than Manson’s. It was never talked about that Christopher may also have been dealing drugs during his Corcoran stay. It was easier to imagine his crime involved going postal, so to speak.

 

Maggie pours the scotch and we’re sitting on the back porch, which a friend of hers has fenced in with cheap lattice-work lumber, all to hem in the cat and otherwise give the ipoema a place to root, violet flowers sinking into wood, providing cover, but reducing everything to splinters in the meanwhile.

“What is this?” I jog a pill in my hand, white and nondescript.

Maggie rearranges her limbs to approximate queenliness. She has a crack in her glasses.

“A downer, I think?”

“Percoset?”

“I dunno. Let’s try.”

I shrug. Mags has a boom-box playing a bluegrass version of Pink Floyd. I swallow the pill with a hit of Dewar’s.

“Why—Mags—are your glasses cracked?” The Prayer Flags behind her are aged, evaporated with either over- or underuse, and there are two Guatemalan dresses left to dry in the evening air. Big purple blossoms break the lattice-work balcony, blue in the evening-set, and ‘Comfortably Numb’ plays, uncomfortably, on fiddle.

“I was so depressed today; and I got a second psychiatrist. I was prescribed something new and I literally hit the wall.” She shakes the rocks in her drink. “I mean, I fucking fell down.”

“Do your psychiatrists know about each other?”

“By name—shu-ure.”

“You really shouldn’t be mixing your meds,” I said, irony train neatly docking into station. The downer coursed my system, leaving behind a shivery wake. I fingered one of Maggie’s poetry books, which lay discarded on the patio table.

“Mayakovsky clutched a rivet, only the rivet metamorphosed into a gun pointing straight at his heart: Art”.

 Maggie literally wrote poetry to save her life when life was an otherwise confusion of conflicting meds and medicated conflict.

During Maggie’s divorce, when existence was the figurative wall she crashed into, and not the literal one that cracked her glasses, she wrote a book called ‘7^th Circle’. It is a slim-spined collection of poems about suicides; she had sublimated her pain into researching and writing various pieces on Mayakovsky, Jean Seberg, George Trakl, Diane Arbus. It won the San Diego Book Award for poetry.

Despite having narrowly avoided the Seventh Circle herself,  still she says: “I can’t fucking take it anymoire.”

“I know Mags, I know.” On cue, ‘Comfortably Numb’ stops playing.

Maggie slept with a gun in her handbasket next to the bed, paranoid, anxious; she had a confusion of prescriptions, but always a neat handle of scotch in the pantry. I know because I unpacked it for her when I helped her move. Also, we hit it often when communally writing poetry, else editing other poets’ work. She was a mess and I was fast becoming one, all this speed and slowness, the cigarettes and pills; the walking into walls.

Maggie called life ‘Continuous Performance’, and that’s what it is, that’s what it was.

Brother…

 Sometimes I spent the night at Mags’ when the gun was too present in the handbasket, when she was drunk and scared; when I would sleep chastely in her bed, wrapping my arms around her, she the Maude to my Harold, the tobacco present on her dressing gown. I’d lie awake and smell her lavender and love her to sleep.

She had a boyfriend in prison; I had a brother in prison, and we’d fall asleep lotus-eaters, shot through with pathos, rocks settling in the bedside scotch.

 

___________________________________________________

 

I remember when Christopher was released for a brief time and how he held forum at Maggie’s house in front of an ashtray. He was smoking a long and almost effeminately thin joint. Which was “safe” he confided, because “California only looks for uppers in my system.” His hands were strange deep-sea jellyfish, fingers not unlike wavering tentacles. “California is a river of blue, ” he said tapping out an ash, “It is punctuated by a braking of bus wheels and penitentiary-blue lights.”

A wave of the hand, a drag on the tightly-rolled cigarette. “California is blue.” He looked pleased because, above all, he was a poet.

This all happened before and after 9/11. On 9/11, Maggie and I traded a bottle of wine back and forth on her bed and watched the news, saw the Trade Centers fall in occasional time-elapse, like films of flowers speeding to the ground.

“I always hated those buildings,” Mags said, handing me back the bottle of wine, but with tears in her eyes. She was a true New Yorker. Christopher had yet to emerge from the Hole and my brother was just skulking the greenbelts in practice-walks for his later crime. Maggie had vases of yarrow on her bedside, and rosebuds. We were both fiercely against the New Cold War and fiercely into drink.

I don’t know who said: “We deserve this, don’t we?”

And it may have been a personal revelation, on a duvet, in a house with a TV and with buildings falling down, or it may have been a revolutionary statement.

As Maggie wrote:

‘A Gestapo agent pointed to Guernica and asked/:Did you do this?/No—you did’

We may have had Mexican food that night. I vaguely remember. I just remember falling down in the restaurant and saying, “It’s all my fault” like a building crumpling, like a spent flower.

____________________________________________

Christopher was released from the Hole before my brother rode the sea of penitentiary blue. Christopher attended my wedding even—eight months following Tower One’s collapse—as Maggie’s date. And my brother was there, too, hands folded in lap in some premonitory idea of manacles, while my wife and I released butterflies into the June malaise.  Both Christopher and my brother would soon ride buses to penitentiary—in Christopher’s case, for the fourth go-round—near the same time.

Anyways, I thought of Christopher there on that dog-piss grass: I saw him last in the SD Jail. Maggie sobbed in the periphery of the visiting room and I took up the phone that lay unceremoniously on the steel-grey table. I picked up the receiver and looked at Christopher behind the glass–he was all slicked-back hair and waxed moustache; he wore a tight-lipped expression. By his admission, he was on a diet of heavy metals and liver medication. He wore thick glasses, which made his eyes look disproportionately huge and wallowy in the otherwise context of grey brick and cold, cold light. Maggie sobbed, and she sobbed. I held the phone to my ear and didn’t know a goddamn thing to say.

“Take care of Maggie,” Christopher had a habit of saying during his brief foray out of penitentiary, which I should have taken as premonition.

Christopher was picked up outside a house in La Jolla Farms, high on meth, having attempted to break into a house with clearly lit home burglary system alarms. He was seated calmly on the sidewalk in front of the estate smoking a cigarette in laconic fashion while flashing lights and a waiting pair of handcuffs coursed his way.

My brother, meanwhile, was found with blood on his shoes, walking in a daze after his victim had successfully fought him off. He had an unworn ski mask and a pair of scissors. He wielded other accouterments, too, he later told me, but he never revealed what. The full inventory must be recorded in some police ledger or stenographic receipt somewhere but I don’t have a transcript of his trial: I just don’t know, and some details are superfluous anyway.

To wit: I wore a black suit with a red shirt the only time I visited my brother at Avenal. I had IHOP for breakfast: buttermilk pancakes, black coffee, and two Vicodin Maggie had lent me for the occasion. Everywhere there were oil pumps in various stages of deterioration, piston heads slumped in mechanical inebriation, disused, rusted, their heyday sup of premium crude having long since been polluted with brackish transudation, a great and rusted machinery stopped. The fields were fallow and run through with weed-choked irrigation ditches. The suit which I caught sight of in the IHOP plate glass was the same I had been married in. My shirt was the otherwise feint at insouciance, a vintage find with a large collar worn unbuttoned at the neck. I was being an asshole. My visit was not so much out of compassion, and I hedged on it even being an obligation. No: I had come for my brother’s birthright. He was the eldest, the forever good son, and I had always been the black sheep—as evidenced even by my choice of black gabardine that day. I wanted to prove that after years in second place, my mere existence outside prison walls won me the favorite son pelt: I was Jacob, and my brother in his stupid penitentiary orange was Esau. Maybe he wore penitentiary green. Again, some details are superfluous. I just remember my brother ate from the vending machines in the visiting room, fingers childishly stained with orange Cheet-o dust, and I felt a snarling elitism. My fingers were clean, my shoes unbloodied. “Free, white, and 21,” as Maggie would always say, free in the sense I had virgin wrists, unlike my brother and Christopher, whose wrists had been defiled by the snapping of cuffs, their hands literally tied, manacled, courtesy of the penal system in the great and golden state Californ-i-a.

I first met Christopher on the phone 3(?) years ago when he corrected my pronunciation of Greek poet Yannis Ritsos. And here we were again–on the phone, but face-to-face. “Thom, take care,” he said. “Take care of M.” I took care of Maggie by kissing her in some hopeless manner on the cheek, and leading her out of the Piranesi-inspired civic building, phone hung-up and Christopher disappeared.

 In jail as in prison everything watches you. Elevators only open up to narrow corridors, there are mirrors everywhere. In penitentiary, there are gates upon gates, like steel-braced grimaces, and guards finger their clubs. It’s a matter of guilt by association, like Maggie said: ‘Everyone needs a good fucking lawyer,” even if there’s no blood on your shoes or if your system is clean of what the system says you can’t have. You’re just guilty for living, guilty by association, even if you haven’t been tried and accused of anything. We’re all guilty, and sometimes we sit on a curb waiting for the guillotine of justice to drop while waiting outside a burgled house, either high on Sudafed or with spatters of O negative on our boot-tip.

We’re all guilty. We’re all guilty.

At the Poetry Awards, Mags gripped my arm with nervous strength. A crooked arm flexed.

“I doin’t know,” she said, unsure if she should be here, there.

I kissed her cheek.

“Of course you should be here.”

We drank white wine and hid behind the junipers. When she was in her married house, citrus hedges hemmed in the house, and the wood was dark. Maggie always hid. Her current house was of a strange snail-shell design, her bed in the middle of a coil with an incongruent sunroof, briars out front. She decorated her windows with velvet draperies to hide in midday dark. She hid behind damask and dark sunglasses and drink.

“You ok?”

“Just noivous.”

She shouldn’t have been. She won. Maggie Jaffe for ‘7^th Circle.’

I run too fast

I fly too high

I hit to hard

Too wide my eyes

Too full my heart.

Too deep the pain.

In the bathroom of the SD Jail I held her. She was in front of a mirror, red-eyed and cursing. There were so many cameras and squinched-in seats and phones and iron-greys; so many cramped elevators and narrow corridors and convex watching glasses; so many forms and disparaging looks; so much free-floating guilt.

She hunched over the counter with red-rimmed eyes, hands trembling, and her shoulder blades were butterfly-like when racked with sobs, pumping like wings.

“I just can’t take it anymoire,” she cried, jaggedly, and it was about being watched while simultaneously watching over, this curious opticon of prison existence where everyone is assumed guilty and no one is innocent.

“I just can’t take it.”

“I just. Can’t take it.”

“It’s alright, Mags. Let’s go home. I’ll drive.”

 

 

The Proof of Comfort

In the back alley, a lady is skinning a discarded leather chair as if it were a felled leopard, albeit a pink one, with an X-acto knife and a determination to beat the rain which is fast coming. I wonder what she plans to upholster with her fresh kill, if she is going to wrap herself in a Naugahyde coat or create a sailboat in her living room, maybe make a new skin seeing as the material is pink and—once cut from its staples—revelatory of a skeleton beneath, uncomfortable lumber and gauzy stuffing that, when the rains do come, look like wet cobwebs. The skeletal chair reminds me of a buffalo carcass I came across in Wyoming with rib bones and teeth; a persistent and clinging fur; and an altogether odd pathos, the idea of something either suddenly, or finally, stopped.

And I took pictures of the buffalo, feel compelled in some urban fashion to take pictures of the spent Barcalounger, too, as if they bore matching sentience in some strange continuity—I’m wholly ridiculous–but I do it anyway. The cheap frame, the remaining skin where there are knife cuts: funny how furniture is so comfortable. Cut away the external and the insides are unkind.

Mark Twain is attributed with the saying: “A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval,” also “The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself” both essentially speaking to that elusive feeling of being content in the trappings of your own skin. How difficult that is when on the flip side of flesh is bone-sharp bone, and feelings which jag the insides like rusted box springs. Still, there can be comfort as in: a pink chair when not torn asunder, and a buffalo, that before dying laid down in the shade of a sycamore tree.

I was having coffee with Jason the other day, whose chin is a juniper bush of a goatee and who has wire-rimmed glasses that remind me of James Joyce. He always wears a Patriots ball cap, drinks his coffee left handed.

“So what’s the hole you tried to fill, Buddy? Does it have a name?” I have been in the hospital many times.

“Validation?” I proffer, knowing that’s not the right answer, though that would provide minor comfort at least. All we want sometimes is to be seen, and heard.

“But it’s no business of mine if people think well of me or do not,” I already know, and because Jason’s a Stoic, I angle Epicectus: “Plus if you live a value-driven life, that should be its own reward.”

Jason raises an eyebrow and sits wholly relaxed in his chair. He’s the kind of guy who hugs out of utility, and is unswervingly confident in himself, a man comfortable in his own skin.

“No one’s opinion is gonna matter in the end. That’s expecting too much out of people.”

I almost say, rote: “And expectations are resentments under construction.” Jason smiles.

I think back to our conversation while the lady flays the back alley lounger, exposing the fact that a chair really has a lot of empty space: a frame, some stuffing and then a lot of nothing there. But still getting to that negative space involves hacking at some stitchery. I have a moment of esprit de l’escalier, that perfect thing I should have said to Jason, as I photograph the cryptal remains of the chair, the stuffings of the lounger not yet wet because the rains are still horizon, but which are instead sphagnum-hanging from the butchered chair legs.

The hole has no name. It could be designated with an asterisk. If spirit is the seaming together of the head and heart, then the gap is the hole in between. Just like the upholsterer has to close in negative space and draw a leather skin to hold it all together, so must one stitch together the equal and sometimes opposing elements of head and heart to suture a spirit; draw, then, a skin around that, and hope you’re comfortable within it. Or, better yet, approve your comfort, like Twain said, and be satisfied with your stitchery.

I think of the gaps between the rib bones of the felled buffalo, and the now-stupid lumber that sits in the back alley, its framework exposed, both things skinless and—in their amusing and profound ways—both having been comfortable. When the rains finally do come, I retire to my spot on the sofa, with my cat, the orange and mustard pillows, a view out the panes of the encroaching storm, and I am at peace.

 

 

Bill

“If you need a rooftop, Buddy, I’m your guy. Game recognizes game.”

Bill is cooly draped over his chair, lengthy limbs like tributaries of an oceanic torso, oceanic in that it is at once broad and seemingly charged, and he is wearing an athletic Henley which emphasizes his swimmer’s build. He is sixty, but a Paul Newman sixty, just with a longer face, lips drawn over his front teeth in a manner that suggests he’s wearing a mouthguard at all times, a pugilist in repose, and to that effect, he dons a beanie drawn low over his brow, which he wears indoors, his eyes beneath something of perambulation while he is thinking, the chair he sits in too small for him or he too tall for it, and everything looking like he is about to speak.

“Game recognizes game,” Bill repeats in a genteel fashion that betrays his Southern roots. He shifts casually, legs crossed far away and at the ankle. Absently, he scratches his left pectoral and leans back in his seat, mouth puckered in self-satisfaction, nodding. The way Bill speaks: there is an antebellum quality to it, vaguely rhotic, with an emphasis sometimes on first syllables. His vowels are glideless and how people end their interrogatives with a rising intonation, Bill seems to end every sentence in an almost evaporative fashion, his words like dissipating steam. He gives the constant impression that he is marveling something, the way his exclamations are half larynx, half lung.

“You looked like you were mad-doggin’ me from across the room,” Bill later says, chuckling, and it’s true that in group session I often try to telepath William from my own position in the circle, there being something unspoken between us, a matching vulnerability, and he always catches my eye without ever looking at me directly–neither indirectly for that matter. We share a tacit acknowledgement regardless. It’s said that plant roots sometimes speak to each other in subsonic intimations, what exists underground amounting to a subterranean Babel, but the language Bill and I share is more altitudinal, far and above the ground, why Bill mentions rooftops. When he was a kid, Bill would climb a tree to its highest point, the point being to just sit as high as he could, ignoring his mother’s entreaties to come down. As an adult, the trees could be overhead waves twice his swimmer’s skillset, or speeding white river waters, and I don’t know if he’s a billy-goat but I’d imagine scarps of mountainous basalt, too; insurmountable things made assailable, else reckless situations he’d simply reclassify as ‘adventurous’. These look-God-in-the-face type undertakings–‘status quo’ he’d call it–constant elevation with the sidewalk unfamiliar.

“I haven’t had a rooftop recently,” I confess—we hug—and it’s true, the stars are recently far away. It was last year when I knew what Bill knows, and I knew it in a noradrenal way, not an adrenal one, were one to consider the brain a cloud and the volley of neurons flashes of coruscation, unlikely and all-directions lightning. I talked too loud then, I talked too fast; where Bill’s voice is soothing, long in the vowels, mine was rapid-fire, my decisions as fast, impetuous.  Sleep was an inconvenience: I’d have missed the light show where the fulgurations of brain-sparks were like a million wax candles encapsulated in tiny glass globes, my own Rue de Montmartre of serotonin street lamps. It was all light, in luminescence and in velocity, wattage and speed. Every day was the best day and how could I close my eyes? The light show, after all, would still have been there—it existed behind my eyelids.

I texted my friend one night imploring him to look at the stars, ‘John Oh my God the sky’, and were it the fact of the sky I don’t know, or simply the great sheet of the universe acting as a convenient mirror to my synaptic goings-on, but I felt compelled to fold myself into the velvet divinity of the moment, if the sky a cathedral ceiling, one that I could touch with outstretched hand. The stars, however, were frustratingly distant, our prescient connection interrupted by the inopportune placement of a heaven between us. I placed John in my pocket and looked around the backyard. A rusted patio chair appeared suddenly as makeshift Jacob’s Ladder and, with caution something of an afterthought, I mounted the back of the chair to hoist myself onto the garage roof. I half-jumped from the backrest and found handhold on the tarpaper shingles, legs dangling and chair toppled backwards. Elbow by elbow, I pulled myself onto the roof, maybe a mere eight feet off the ground, quixotically but somehow satisfyingly closer to the stars. I flopped onto my back and tucked myself close to the attic, soon the constellated sky and the insides of my eyelids one in the same, a communion of pinpoints where the fireworks of my brain matched the cosmos, me asleep, smiling, with the moon on my chest. I set to snoring.

“No—I haven’t had a rooftop in a while, Bill,” I admit, and in saying so, feeling very much like a burnt match. “But I heard you in meeting today,” and I pull out my phone. “Even wrote it down: ‘Anxiety is the bellwether.’”

“Ho-ho-ho, Thom,” Bill’s eyes widen, “That’s right. The surf advisory is up and let me just say”—he nudges me with a shoulder—”my affairs are in order.” He claps his hands and rubs his palms together. He giggles, too, which always seems odd counterpoint to his sighing drawl, not quite a blemish but a fleck in his otherwise mahogany.

Bill intends to go swimming, and it’s the kind of water that demands a skillset, which he—in his broad chest—seems to encompass, still it’s the anxiety that is enervating and which, more than the machine of his body, is better part to his adventurousness, the ‘bellwether’ as he puts it which indicates the ocean is his for the taking. “I’m not reckless,” he always clarifies, one finger extended, “I’m never reckless.” What Bill knows is that anxiety is chemical twin to excitement, and when given to invulnerability, you answer every call.

Bill, mind you, is not an adrenaline junkie. Bill is not a thrill-seeker. Bill just knows that once you’re running at breakneck speed down a mountain, dodging skree, without looking at your feet, that it’s impossible to fall. This is not looking to feel alive—this is simply being alive, how it is. There’s a difference. Existential. Chemical.

Bill leans in, conspiratorially: “I’ll tell you what,” and he pronounces the ‘h’ of ‘what’ like a celluloid cowboy, “You weren’t here last week, but the counselors got on me, said I should maybe be seeing someone, medications—y’know the whole lot, like they was needing to take down a charging elephant.”

I think of the blue pills I’ve been taking the past half year, the ones that took the stars away. “Well, all that’s needed to stop a charging elephant, Bill, is for someone to stand stock still in front of it,” I say. “Elephants respond to fearlessness.”

“I like that, Thom, I like that,” Bill muses. He leans in close again. “They don’t get it. This is the reality, the status quo.” Bill smiles self-assuredly, and I envy him. The brain is a restrictive organ, the manuals written on its workings necessarily more restrictive, and to be like Bill in this minute, to counter what could be considered an episode—“I’m bipolar as fuck” Bill has told me—to own one’s mania as preferred and higher conscience, is to not so much be a charging elephant in need of the takedown, as to be one in need of the letting alone. Bill shakes God’s hand on the regular; it would be anathema to shake out a daily scrip. Bill’d lose God’s address.

I think to a doctor I recently had, we were seated side by side in utile chairs, no office, the only two people in the hallway of a residential facility, and it was a long way from the rooftop, an even longer way from the stars.

“So,” he said, reviewing my chart, “You’re on a mood stabilizer, but no antidepressant.” He stroked his beard in doctoral fashion while helicoptering his pen over the paper.

“The last psychiatrist wanted to treat my hypomania,” I offered as explanation. The hallway was appropriately sterile, purposefully washed of color, nothing too excitable and everything suggestive of interior. It made me feel similarly taupe, were I myself a color. This was probably the intended effect, but when, however, you’re used to feeling orange or gold or yellow—any Crayola more vibrant—taupe may as well be proof of your erasure.

“When you were manic,” the doctor asked, “Did you go on massive spending sprees?”

“No.”

Engage in reckless sexual behavior?”

“No.”

“Endanger yourself regularly?”

“No.”

“What were your symptoms?” he asked finally.

I thought about being a charging elephant crashing through the savannah; the fact that momentum increases given greater mass, greater velocity; that I could endlessly multiply myself by operating in the forces at my disposal, by merely moving in transfer. I thought about exploding my own environs, the way the elephant kicks up the ground in four-legged run. I thought about being comfortable, hurtling forward, in my own bulletproof and elephant skin. But I said nothing to that effect.

“I was happy,” I finally settled on. “Every day was the best day.”

The doctor leaned back in his chair and clicked his pen. “Well, he said, clipping his ‘l’s in a Punjab accent, “There’s nothing wrong with being a little happy from time to time.” He took momentary pause, then scratched out a line in my chart.

“I think we can find something more agreeable to your situation.”

Bill dons an upholstered vest on his way out the door, with a fur lined collar that is faux angora—he sometimes wears this with shirt sleeves, which is wild—and, as is custom, dips his shoulder slightly when exiting the room. It’s as if he’s displacing the universe necessary to his departure. He wears flip-flops.

“Game recognizes game….”

I follow shortly afterwards, drafting Bill as it were, though without as much brio, my ensemble consisting of spent match black and sensible shoes. I walk out into the parking lot where the lights are the kind that leach the color from the cars. The stars are barely perceptible, and even were they present—face-of-God present—I can’t find the matching cosmos in my head. I close my eyes momentarily and hope that the nothing I see is just intermissive rest, that the light show will 3-2-1 restart, and soon. But my eyelids refuse to act as screens, and instead return to being the simple shutters they otherwise were. I shrug, and, Buddha on a biscuit, it’s all I can do in the minute. The sky, after all–as the parking lot lights serve to accentuate–has presently gone out.

Oh, Bill, I smile as I get into my car, my genteel friend. I imagine him following the bellwether tomorrow, he cooly acting out his magnificence, and were that bell available to my ear,

I’d probably not pursue it to his lengths, but our affinity is there, and if ever there a rooftop to share with the sky begging a need closer, I know the guy who happens to have God’s address.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No Simony; But Simon

Hannah leans over the counter and, proffering a demitasse, whispers conspiratorially: “Do you want an extra shot?” And not one to pass up on an opportunity for café collusion, the barista after all being a sweetheart and why not four shots of espresso in my Americano, I raise an eyebrow and say, “Certainly.” I drink coffee alcoholically these days as is, so Hannah is unknowingly being an enabler, but we enjoy a harmless relationship, me and the barista, and the coffeeshop is better a Friday hang than what could be a hangover. Hannah winks and places a finger to her lips while she pours the espresso. My sponsor waits outside.

The café still smells of Christmas, a sparsely decorated pine in the corner, and the gathered patrons are either stuck on 52 across or deleting e-mails. No music plays—this is not Starbucks—and music shouldn’t be played at a coffeeshop anyway, James Taylor’s Greatest Hits being reserved for those simulacra of cafes, where Baudrillard could scribble busily in the corner.

I’m in a good mood, which a quadruple mathematically compounds, and my sponsor has picked a table in the sun because he, despite twenty years expatriated from Seattle, still chooses to wear shorts in forty-degree weather. Chris is my sponsor’s name, either short for Christopher or Christian, I don’t know; but were it the latter, it would be ironic, seeing as Chris has made a Jefferson’s Bible out of the Big Book, striking all miracles from its pages and replacing words like ‘spiritual’ and ‘God’ with agnostic lexis more appropriate to his skeptical bent. He has twenty-one years, so his sobriety is of drinking age, long enough, he professes, that were science to one day accomplish a cure for alcoholism, say some magic pabulum or pill, he’d forego the cure and stick to his monastic ways. He even uses the word ‘monastic’, which, again, is ironic, as deism is something he finds of nuisance—blah blah blah, he’ll say, with a dismissive flip of the hand—but monastic it is, fitting as he lives a caustral life with his cats in a studio apartment, as long without a lover near as long as he’s been without a drink. But ‘we are not a glum lot’ the saying goes, and Chris always exudes the air of a man at ease with himself, down to the ever-crossed arms behind the head and a chin tipped upward just enough to reveal when he’s been lazy with the razor. I don’t get the sense that he is lonely; regardless, I know I’m good company for him. We’re both happy with the red pens as evidenced by our respective Big Books, and both examine rhetoric as through a jeweler’s loupe, happy sometimes with a particular turn of phrase, other times not, this discernment necessary when wading through a text that less than coquettishly flirts with dogma. Bill W., after all, was not exactly a shrinking violet in the grand posy of things.

Despite similarities, Chris and I differ in one marked way: we are very dissimilar drinkers, and it shows in the manner that I veritably osmose my Americano while he takes his cup like a gentleman–he could very well extend a pinkie—and you wouldn’t have guessed that he’s the binger of our lot, whereas I’m the marathon imbiber; you also wouldn’t have guessed, though, by our disparate ages, that I’ve got ten years residence on him when it comes to dwelling at the bottom of a glass (albeit with occasional changes of address). This accounts for his impressive lack of relapses, also the fact that his disease never had the chance to graduate with honors to the so-called middle stages.

“I quit after only four months of nightly drinking,” he informs me, “So I never experienced withdrawals,” and he says this last part with a hint of reckoning, as if remarking, ‘can’t say that I have’ in response to a casual query. Withdrawals, of course, are as casual as a cotillion, which is to say they’re not: they’re what happens when alcohol stops making you sick, but the lack of it does.

“I’ve had a bit of PAWS the past few days,” I offer, “Sucks.” Except for today, I’m sure to add, because it’s a refreshingly crisp day even with the sun shining, the coffee is strong, and the sidewalk-goers outside the café are like Christmas ornaments on the tree inside, wrapped in Yule-colored sweaters and still merry despite the holiday passed.

“You know, I never heard of that until recently,” Chris confesses, “Came up in a meeting the other week. Like I said, I never had anything resembling withdrawals. What’re they like?”

PAWS is post-acute withdrawal syndrome, which is essentially the body collecting its dues for past and injurious behavior. Symptoms can show up in Whack-a-Mole fashion, a carnival of ugly heads playing popcorn in the body, ping-pong: hypoglycemia, malnutritive disorder, cortical atrophy, autonomic nervous system dysfunction, brain amine depletion—the laundry list which, though syllables long, and originating in the corpus, can best be described in simple emotive terms.

“Ennui, Chris. I get irritable. Depressed.” It’s a serotonin thing. My blood chemistries are within normal limits—it’s testament to how well the body heals–and I am fresh-faced just two months abstinent. But my head still resides in Purgatory, and there’s no simony for that–not even the errant dollar bills in the meeting collection plates impress the angel who guards entrance to Limbo.

“Ah.” Chris nods and looks at me sympathetically from behind wire-rimmed glasses. He never has to adjust his spectacles, they seem soldered in place, while I’m constantly punching at my nose bridge as if tapping out Morse code to some unseen—or unseeing—third eye.

“At least I know what it is I’m going through,” I concede. “I mean, if I didn’t…” and I trail off, because this is where physiology and psychology get confused, there being the intermittent phenomena of craving; what if this means there’s an insufficient adaptation on my part, on a symbolic level, to an otherwise alcohol-free life. The mind despairs while meantime the body repairs. Suddenly all the needlepoint samplers on the walls of the Alano clubs make sense: ‘Easy Does It. First Things First.’ I take a swig of coffee, in the abstainer’s version of a heady quaff and—“Excuse me, Chris—you’ll get used to this”—I excuse myself to the restroom for what’s probably the first of many times. I mean, four shots of espresso.

Hannah’s still at work behind the counter and, being a Friday, the gran turismo that is the espresso machine is at an idle, Hannah instead tending to the accumulated utensils her work necessitates, the portofilters and compressore tamps, whisks and muddlers, and it occurs to me how alike her job is to that of a mixologist’s, the Torani syrups with their quick pour spouts the virgin equivalent of varied liqueurs, espresso being the antemeridian workhorse spirit. How it is we begin every morning already under the influence. Hannah is party to this, she looking very much like a cocktail herself, with hair dyed a curious shade of curacao, and tattoos like vintner stamps. She smiles again, my caffeine conspirator, and the café with its distressed wood is instantly less distressed as I pass through the back hallway toward the restrooms.

A picture of Billie Holiday hangs just inside the door above a small decorative stool. It’s an old photograph, when Lady Day was still young and singing in nightclubs, this before the state of New York took away her cabaret card for heroin possession in 1947. Ms. Holiday was an alcoholic, too, hers a painful life which, many have remarked, is obvious in her voice, disillusioned yet still childlike in its intonation. Sad as her life was—and it included rape and prostitution, needles, drink, and the slammer–the saddest thing, and I think about this every time I see the coffeeshop photograph, is that she had her record player taken away from her when she died. Billie Holiday, singer of arguably the most important song of the twentieth century—‘Strange Fruit’—died in a hospital room cleared of all flowers and all well-wishes cards, her record player too, because when she was admitted to Metropolitan for liver and heart problems, she had heroin on her person. Authorities placed her under arrest on her death bed, drug possession charges, and she left this world by way of empty room, with empty veins, most likely in withdrawal, with no music to guide her home. She had forty-four cents in the bank, and another 750 dollars strapped to her leg.

The photograph at the coffeeshop shows her smiling, famous magnolia blossom pinned to her hair, when she was alive and vital in the nightclubs. It was said that when Billie sang, men stopped drinking, something she herself never did. Her addictions sadly, robbed her of her freedoms: when her cabaret card got taken away, she was disallowed from singing at the NY jazz joints and, although she was to later grace Carnegie Hall, it was the club scene that was her life blood, not the lavish venues. When her literal life blood was coursing its last, Billie victim to the ascites and edemas of late-stage cirrhosis, her liver a diseased orange from years of acetaldehyde abuse, there was an armed guard posted outside of her hospital room—an armed guard!—to insure her arrest was lawfully overseen and that every last iota of freedom Billie had belonged to the state of New York.

“It’s freeing,” I tell Chris upon returning outside, this time to a table in the shade where the glare is less and the traffic more subdued, “Despite.”

“What is?”

“Well there are a few words that show up from time to time in literature. One, ironically, is ‘arrest.’”

“Opposite of freeing.”

“Right, but it comes up in two manners.” Chris readjusts himself, interested, which always entails readjusting his Big Book too, turning it sideways, else flipping it upside down. Rubber-banded to his book—always—is the recent copy of the NYT crossword. He, to my satisfaction does the puzzle correctly, by which I mean in pen.

“Listen,” and I point to me and him. “We got this shit.” And I pause for a second, because that’s actually hard to admit.

“We got this shit, right?” I dip my finger in my drink and it’s tepid. Fuck, I want it hot; fuck I want it alcoholic.

People walk by on the sidewalk and there’s the sudden sense that we are not in a safe space, but that, really, any place can be one.

“We got this shit, Chris. And it’s arresting for one.”

This cannot be exactly new to Chris, were we to play with words, or review criminal files from one score and a month ago; Chris had a DUI, and through the magic of deferment came to realize he was arrested before the handcuffs had even been slapped on his wrists. A few months in the Program is what it what it takes, sometimes, to see that images in the rear view are truer than they appear.

“We’re arrested. Done-zo. Ka-fucking-put. It’s the most maddening disease on the planet: our livers can’t process what we deliver, the body likes the side effect, and our brain—oh our brains,” and I talk out of mine in defiance of my own—“Says wrist-cuff me, please.

“Just, dammit.”

My coffee is cold.

I look up. “I’m arrested, Chris. Even when I’m not drunk, I’ll always be under the influence.”

“…”

“…”

“What’s the second definition?”

“What?”

“The second definition?”

“Oh. Um. 61 Across is ‘sortie’ by the way,” I tap his crossword, pausing.

Chris smirks. “Smart ass.”

“Would you rather me dumb? That’s what people already think. Allow me to quote: “If hundreds of experiences have shown him that one drink means another debacle with all its attendant suffering blah de blah blah” I floof the air in fake nonplus.

“You bothered by that, Cowboy?”

“Who fucking wouldn’t be?”

“What’s your second definition? You were saying.”

I draw my coat in, and can’t imagine Chris is not cold, but he’s not, and Christ he actually left his apartment today which had a minor fire leaving him without heat and he still wears shorts.

“Restare,” and I say it with all the vowels.

“What’s that mean?”

“One thing you’re gonna learn about me—besides the fact that I go to the bathroom like every five minutes,” I say, “Is that I look up every word in the dictionary to see where it comes from. Restare. Rearrange the letters. It’s ‘arrest.’ Means either ‘to remain’ or ‘to stop’.

“Ok.”

“Not OK, perse. We’ve already acknowledged we have exactly 100% retention with regard to this disease and–yea!” I tap Chris on his shirt-sleeved shouder, “We win! We retained everything we learned!”

“So that’s ‘remain’…”

“Yeah. And the second definition is ‘to stop.’”

I sit back in my chair and fiddle with my scarf. “Yea,” I pretend cheer, “We stop.” I twirl the end of my scarf like a wet rally flag.

“We stop.”

“Yup.”

My coffee cup is empty, but I lift it to my lips out of habit anyway.

“We stop,” I say superfluously, “We stop we stop we stop.”

“Cheers,” I salud, “Aaaaand fuck this shit.”

61 across is ‘sortie’. 52 down is ‘sari’. ’Sari’ appears on most crosswords and so do other words that don’t have their fit in everyday life, as if life weren’t a puzzle already. ‘Fuck this shit,’ by the way, does not satisfy 4 down nor 14 across.

“It’ll get better,” Chris says, and he rearranges his Book again. “Listen, you could go home, be by yourself,” he passes his hands over an exaggeratedly sad face, signing rain with his fingers, “Or. There are alternatives. I mean,” and he scratches his throat–he missed a patch with the razor again—“This Higher Power thing: me engaging with this book, me talking to you. Oh, people say God all the time, blah blah blah, and I have to say, ‘Listen, ‘God’ can’t be used as a placeholder term, because it’s pretty specific. But engage with something—anything—outside yourself—by definition, it’s a higher power because it’s ‘one plus whatever’ equaling something greater than—” and Chris passes his hand over his face again—“Just this.”

“What if I’m a negative number?” I counter.

“I don’t think you believe that.”

“I was just testing your math.”

“Nihilism doesn’t become you.”

I flick my coffee cup. “And here I was, being so clever.”

“You ok?”

“Oh, nothing. Pink cloud is gone.”

The door to the café opens and the smell of the Christmas tree drafts outward; where we are sitting, it is in view of a liquor store and a beer bar under construction. I could so easily seed my cloud, were I normal, but—no—I flick my coffee cup again. Hannah comes out to sweep.

“There’s this quote,” I clear my throat.

Chris has cats to tend to; he has pictures he’s sent me, and they are white little slips of things that like his feet, the fact of which entertains him, even today when he threw his laptop against the wall because an electrical fire scorched his kitchen and fucked up half his studio; and he’s at odds with his landlord about it, he could seed his cloud too, but he’s got twenty-one years and somehow—somehow—he’s found one+one all these lonely days.

“There’s this quote, Chris. ‘Grass grows by the inch, dies by the foot.’

I pause when packing my bag.

“There’s no reason I actually said that, Chris,” reconsidering. “Sorry.”

I scratch my head.

He says: “Sure there wasn’t”, smiling.