Chapter 19 Part 1: The Synthesis of Anthills

Back to Chapter 18

Chapter Nineteen – The Synthesis of Anthills

548

January 1, 2011, my year began to firecracker pops in the blanket absence of my new neighborhood.  The house next door was under construction.  The one across the street had a lot-sold sign.  This fresh territory was perilous and invigorating.  My neighborhood was replete with overgrown bumpy rodent lots in need of grading like sleeping Oz poppy fields straddling the train tracks. 

I felt like a glaring example of the failures of diversifying social risks.  I neglected to mitigate climactic disasters of spending too much time inside my head.  For everything I had ever known, I knew there was an exponential amount more that I did not.  I felt a gut wrenching totality of ignorance.  I was alone, as if on a kayak in a blinding ocean, preferring to hold solitude as unction, rather than bare deference to the idea that healing required an outside party.

549

Ashley enrolled Penelope in basketball at the Nottoway rec-center.  Ashley emailed a season schedule.  There was no request for consultation on single-parent availability.  

I went to Penelope’s games on Saturday mornings whether I had Penelope or not, just to see her.  Today was our day.  Penelope played defense, but was stricken with her father’s ball-handling limitations.  Final scores usually totaled around fourteen in a split of eight to six based on heaved lottery-catapults of string-bean feminine humeruses.

I felt a gust out of the nexus of lines converging in a synapse of my own anonymity.  All these Robertson’s and Hingle’s, Poche’s, Peevy’s and Bastion’s knew each other like riders at an evangelical biker rally.  The adults jeered and commented on the finer athletic prowess and referee short-comings of six-and-under girls’ basketball.

The orange orb dribbled and generated the germ of the idea for me to write a novel.  The 1970’s court lights blurred in 2011; I contemplated the mass of local Saturday festivities on how here became here.  This blueberry town painted board game results.  Her and his ideas passed the ball between first-graders.  Pony-tails drew no-foul calls.

The indifference of the final score sunk in at the buzzer.  As the sun set on sleeping patterns, partners and lines were drawn out on that court.  A little girl moved happily.  Tax dollars, the hick-town feed and seed and Tracer Robertson attorney at law were corporate sponsors that kept hoop-dreams afloat.  The rules were advertised on the back of my daughter’s jersey. 

I felt like there was a ghost sitting with his hand on my shoulder.  The apparition was like a time-traveling future doppelganger.  He was not there to vomit spoilers.  He came in the form of the most powerful unstoppable force, an idea. 

Maybe he was there to wake me to become capable of becoming the man that breathed in him.  Maybe the dreamer in me did not want to starve.  Maybe I no longer wanted to stack my encyclopedic emotions in my head.  I wanted to burn my city like Sherman sent Atlanta to cinders to form a more perfect union.

550

I felt a need to stare my former-life down like a mangy rabid wolf stalking the zombie-me.  The mammal had ripped flesh and sinew.  Everywhere in Nottoway the wolf was there whether I wanted to look at its filth-artery-greased face or not.  I had to look hourly to be here for Penelope.  My neck and eyelids were non-operational.  Each was stationary to a single setting like a plaster-cast mannequin to retain the remaining tissue that made me a father.

If I wrote to its core, about the blood on its claws, the yellow plaque on its teeth and the bib of crusted blood on the hairs of its throat, then the sight of the wolf might grow less-gruesome, less-viscerally magnetic.  Others could run north of the Mason-Dixon and hide in the caverns of corporate ladders or the bedrooms of women hungering for a man with options.  I stood until the incisors ground to nub molars gumming at my larynx.  I stare in verbal-silence and howl-back until the raw soul of me bests the non-soul of the beast reflecting off grocery store shelves and PTA meetings. 

The rabies in its saliva sunk into my blood stream in syllables of inoculated discourse.  Jonas Salk slip a batched squadron into me each sunrise.  I will be that bit more resistant by sunset.  Nottoway, I will be vaccinated beyond lycanthropy to abide within your perimeter of urine-painted assumptions.

I call out each of my healing non-platelet shape-shifter scars like an immunity victory; a yard earned an inch I no longer scuttle to defend, a strain of virus I can no longer catch, until the numb trumps the blood.  I will gaze until Nottoway no longer feels like hell. 

551

I wanted to view Main Street clearly and usurp Ashley’s gerrymandered political gain.  Penelope and me may dance for ourselves and pray for Ashley’s joys regardless.  I stare into the sun until beyond blind to see illuminated shadows like Marvel’s Daredevil braving a cow pasture-life.  My black ink smearing-char pupil fixation could win.  The yellow-glare sun may punk out in our game of chicken before I turn my head.  I look up like a crash-landed Icarus in a crater of molten wax shaking my fist in impudent fury. 

I see because I have no other place to look.  Why not let humanity bask at the sun I see?  I’ll stand here naked, so catatonic PTA mothers can protest.  My famished people can see a pale-skin sun-burned mirror alive and still standing.  I am still fucking here.  I expostulate with my substantive language while the sheep remonstrate my uncouth tone!

I will glare back at our sun honestly, middle finger up, rays reflecting.  I will write like my own therapy until I admit I deserve to be happy.  This choice, this self-interment may actually be detrimental to me, Penelope, everyone.  This escalation of commitment for this divorce war to prove my West Memphis Three innocence is lost and fallow.  One day I’ll plead Alford guilty before DNA gets to sweet sixteen for early parole and we’ll all be happier for it.  Fuck you Ethan, even when you’re right you’re wrong!

This purgatory is not a life raft for Penelope above this vomit.  By forcing her to not just bind with Ben-daddy and have me fade away to Oregon or Carolina, I am poisoning us all, simplify.  Should a widow keep a shrine portrait on her work desk of her deceased, a father of his child, a day that never comes on who was the murderer?  Who did it?  Think of the child!  Lynch mobs form to avenge dead white prepubescent bodies!

This love-sacrifice is a fallacy.  Penelope doesn’t need me.  She has a new dad.  I am the biggest fucking hypocrite, guilty of choosing my daughter over my own happiness and asking Elyse to do the opposite.  The contradictions make me hunger for nonexistence.  There is no median: abandonment or purgatory, kill him, raise her, kill me, kill her, fuck!  When will I grant myself permission to love Penelope and myself without feeling like I am slighting the dead?

Misery runs like sewerage in a Haitian tent city.  Principle or pride, damn the difference; the greatest principled act may be to appear to compromise these Sauron-ring precious rules for a greater good.  Give Nottoway the fucking ring.  Quit playing God, posturing to solve the world’s problems, because you feel so impotent to resolve your own!  Asshole! You God Damn Fucker! Find your balls!

552

If I am to stay in Nottoway, I will be no abashed werewolf or chagrined lycanthrope.  I will not transform to adapt my demeanor or report for your complaisant sense of comfort.  The indulgent illuminati have been pandered to enough.  The wolf is part of me too.  Tonight we both feed.  Howl! Howl! mother *******!  Ginsberg is on the road with Kerouac sobered up for the Prius go-carts, jazz-driven mopeds, harlequin Volts and holy pirogue rally.  We eatin’ lamb and zucchini casserole tonight.  Burroughs and Patchen are bringing the pot-luck on a wheeled in hospital bed buffet table!

If K’naan said “Poets are sculptors of sentiment.”  Well this book will be my sculpture garden.  It is not always pretty or fair to the eyes.  Medusa may be lurking, but it is mine.  I will be honest to the emotional nudity of these marble-flesh beings, my isolationist nature praying to fulfill this intellectual responsibility to forge a contributor.  Meander the context, but never the message.  Lying by its nature is a far more laborious task.

553

At the game, Penelope’s basketball coach handed me Ashley’s old cross that hung around Penelope’s neck as a dangling safety hazard.  The separation of the golden-chain collar was an impossible act.  Who knew King Arthur dressed in drag and instructed free throws?

That cross was put there by God’s commandment sealing in Penelope’s soul to a path that was potentially reprieved for six and under girl’s hoops.  “Mommy said I can never take it off.”  I slipped the chain in my bag and kept gag-quiet.  If Penelope would have asked, I would have returned the basilisk collar, but for now I saw my daughter un-tethered.  We rode home together.  I put the cross in the jewelry drawer in the marble dresser, not because of a faith I had so many questions about, but a mother I wanted Penelope to be able to breathe full breathes in front of.

(January 2012, another season, Ashley was the assistant coach with her eight month pregnant belly.  We still emailed schedules.  Her lap-dog Ben was omnipresent like a leashed ventriloquist dummy on a tampon string.  Closer hands ensured the collar’s reconnection.)

554

Time was open.  Maybe to the life of a mayfly, its one day alive feels like eighty years to the bug.  Just is the same for a two-hundred year tortoise or some thousand-year alien; we fit into the natural expanse of expectancy.  We parcel out into our evolved context.  When the expectation is truncated, we weep.

Sometimes I felt like a cliché, an overused, tortured artist-type, but without the drugs.  I was not straight-edge either.  I was this median boring fucker always complaining to himself about how he has no right to complain and incapable of being happy.  Hypocrites, pffhh, keep wrapping.  I slid myself into a parallel life, never submitting to the moment.  I missed everything around me for the sake of self-indulgent analysis.  All that was and was not became intangible.  Billie Joe, who wrote Holden Caulfield anyway?

All I needed was a notebook and ink to exalt the circus of my own thoughts.  A pen was my demon slayer.  The princess and her toadstool were figments.  There was no warp whistle or secret passage above this brick ceiling.  I had no magic plumber fist. 

I was shielded from nothing.  I launched my own catapults with boulders straight up in the air like New Years Eve falling bullets in New Orleans streets flattening me straight in the head with a useless mouth incapable of screaming.

I was infected with an inability to communicate at effectively the same level as my audience.  General English appeared to be a homogenized mass-produced albino mayonnaise.  The malaise creamed into plastic easy-squeeze tubes chemically termed Miracle Whip concocted for white-bread American language.  Then there was the mush I expectorated daily.  Was I speaking Mandarin in Buenaventura or English in Antarctica?

This word soup inside my head swirled to escape.  I saw connections, but did anyone else?  This remote dialect tortured me like a Napoleon in rags, begging me to reconsider conversing on his terms.  Pop star versions of Bob Dylan mumbled in thirty-second commercials to evict my derelict plans to be more main-stream.  What was the detriment of an overused thesaurus if nobody heard the tree fall when I caused such destruction with speech? 

Is anyone listening to anyone in this world?  Books, books, books are printed from cellulose pulp and never read.  Pages are leaves of answers sleeping in stacks.  Librarian mummies toil in this matrix Manhattan-Mogadishu on tap, but nobody wants to listen.  Everybody just wants to talk.  I am a guilty hypocrite on stage just painted under the guise of art.  I am most definitely deaf, Yasin Bey.

555

I decorated my builder-basic home.  I framed and hung collages of faces and words in digital photographs and printouts on every level of my walls like a spray-paint vomited gumbo.  Some were vagabond art from my former houses.  Others were made anew.  I wanted the walls to speak back to me and silence out the beige blanket. 

I hired a painter and coated the den and kitchen in crimson.  My bedroom cloaked in a cerulean palette.  Penelope’s room inked in pink and the bathrooms bathed in darker hues of royal blue.  The garage ended up green.  I let Penelope pick the verdant tone at Lowes. 

I framed pieces throughout my generic 1,900 square foot hovel slash Mogadishu mansion.  I patch-worked a wall of my remaining family, my out of state friends with airport-located Gen-X incomes, my poetry, musicians, the New Orleans jazz festival trio of posters of Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson and Fats Domino in Michalopoulos swirls, political revolutions, the Saints, a natural-foods alphabet, the digital cities of the world map of our planet, quotes from humans more intelligent than myself with photographs of their faces, digital four-by-sixes of the world’s masterpieces, flowers from rainforests to meadows for Penelope’s room.  Walgreens digital photo upload was my friend.  

These sights were serenaded by my iPod on shuffle as a symphony of sanity to break the silence from Miles Davis, Marley, Francis, Dylan, the Avett Brothers, Springsteen, Muddy Waters, Duritz, Simon, Guthrie, Strummer, Lennon, Billy Joe and Tim Armstrong, Reznor, Mumford, KRS-One, Fitzgerald, LaMontagne, Scott-Heron, Prine, Redding, Frederiksen, Wilson, Cash, Tweedy, Warsame, Hetfield, Ramone, Doughty, Mos Def, Vedder and the song writers in between. 

On my walls I had the words of Nietzsche, Emerson, Cummings, Edison, Lincoln, Gandhi, Twain, Einstein, Angelou, Roosevelt, Bukowski, Montessori, Adams, Mandela, Shakespeare, Lewis, King, Rand, Ginsberg, Borges, Kierkegaard, Mother Teresa and so many more staring back at me as I passed my hallway to fix breakfast and awaken my daughter each morning or to do my laundry. 

The food alphabet in my kitchen was a parade of photos of produce and tissue of what the Earth grows rather than what man concocts through Frankenstein fructose.  Each picture was a visual representation of food corresponding to the letter.  Penelope and I would sing together: apples, blueberries, cheese and dough.  I had pictures of my favorite New Orleans restaurants: the Upperline, Commanders, Dookie Chase, and Deanies.

I took the collages from my old football room salvaged from the Katrina house.  I made fresh ones of Drew Brees and the boys in a Superbowl reign.  I had happy-faced New Orleanians in venerated revelry.  I took the front page of the Times Picayune yellowed from sitting a year in Tim’s trunk. 

I framed the newspaper with a photo of the Superdome and the city under water, a picture of Henry Butler, a Catahoula, the foyer of the National World War Two Museum on Andrew Higgins in NOLA, a post Superbowl Bourbon Street scene of blacks and whites bleeding black and gold with a trumpet and second-line clothes.  I put the poem I wrote after that day about Super Sunday in New Orleans next to the gumbo-roux of life.

These words, this music, these hobbies, these contemplations in hilarious mathematics of human folly; these were my love-surrogates.  There are millions of songs, poems, aspirations encompassing on why love is so important to humanity.  I was not immune, yet reached for these sugar-pill and generic-cultured drugs to replace holding a hand, a cushion, a landing swan nape or an earlobe to whisper intimate.

I wanted to escape from the Biblical-logic of mirror-dictated essays.  Absent replicas glittered in slot-machine-sunsets.  My code emoted in the nuance of a Latin tongue in Prague.  People gossiped by babbling linguistic fountains in Mecca, Jerusalem, and Varanasi.  I concurred and nodded as if either side spoke the same language. 

I stirred insular as if I knew the difference between the chemical concoction of genuine science and a circumvented route claiming equivalent benefits, but arrived at by alternative means.  The generic pharmaceutical love-placebos were like Splenda-heroin full of aspartame and uncertain long-term consequences.  God gave us freewill for us to choose him.  Love is not love without the freewill chosen.

I wanted to see our Earth, our humanity in my home, even if it was a Nottoway home.  Our planet was in transition.  I saw the California wildfires burn and the Mississippi delta flood the levee nutrient claw-back.  I saw the Kenyan savannah storms re-grow fields of green in nature’s reclamation for the antelope.  Maybe this was my hope.  If I stripped my land, I could aid its longevity.  A man can hope or at least hope to hope.

556

How many days did I have to put a deposit in that bank of thought until “I really would rather not be alive” tipped the scale?  No matter what I did, I was a pariah-plague infected with the filth mange.  I was a hermit-ascetic drift-apart vagabond uncollected-check scavenging for a depositor.  I was currency obsolete, lira in the land of Euros praying for a translator.  There is no iPhone Ap. for this.

The point was lost depending on the day and a recycled tomorrow.  Some days rational contemplation was absent in a self stripped and naked of any purpose worth investment.  I goaded my ego to eat the barrel, eat the happiness like a Schiavo feeding-tube of rural nomenclature.  I prayed for someone to pull the mother fucking plug.  Yank the pronged chord!  Just take enough interest to end these nights and days caught in a fog of “what is the fucking point?”  Grant me my damn non-existence sorbet.  Laundering elementary school jumpers was miraculous weekly defibrillation.

I called out to music, literature, art, science and God for any bastion of refuge.  If there was a beautiful element under a rock, a mineral worth fighting for I would have licked a sewer rim to have some speck of magical-metamorphic in me.  I would eat the magma piss of a hell-fire dragon raining sulfur in a rocky crag of a volcanic damnation from a devil-reptilian scaly penis just to feel like there was something beautiful to salvage in me. 

I searched for an innately-valuable reservoir, unique or at least precious within my confines.  I wanted to unearth a secluded sliver that a partner would stand and testify to as integral enough to her day to wish to continue an interwoven reliance.  I wanted to be wanted and yet had no idea what being wanted truly felt like.  I had to value the gems in my own mineshaft before any of that was possible.

I got to where the only television I watched was on my digital video recorder via satellite.  I abstained from commercials and live events except during Saints games.  Fuck you advertising!  I was bypassing your pigeon-hole. 

557

I got a door-hanging chin-up bar and did repetitions of tens, then twenties.  The counts grew longer, yet what good were these arms?  This chest was no pillow, just a box with a pump and dumb valves trying to rev the throttle to register as active.  I would jog to chase the homeless ghosts in my half-built suburban enclave as the mice scurried in the un-built overgrown lots.

I rejoiced receiving credit card applications in the mail.  I would tear apart the outer envelope and stuff the contents back into the postage-paid-by addressee envelope.  I added pebbles, defunct-batteries, peanut shells or other junk mail to weigh down the package to make the credit card company pay more to get their fucking shit-mail back.  (Ha, ha mudder-fuckers!)

One Sunday night I laid in bed and put my hand on my bare chest.  I matted my mitt over my pectoral-slab to feel the heat of a palm against proposed opposing skin.  I pressed as if when I closed my eyes the variance in the surface temperatures could deceive my anchored reality.  Self-initiated CPR could commence in a flat compression in a pressure shift to assume an action in so much inaction. 

In my braided bed-sheets, when masturbation had lost its fun, the long view to some unnumbered tomorrow called out like a guttural “what the fuck is going on” haul.  The windows to my bedroom were frosted from the air conditioning.  The train came by again, whistling its horn down to New Orleans.  At least Treme was on HBO to watch someone else go to Mardi Gras.

558

My at-least-I-have-one job was a dead end.  Every task was meaningless.  At least I had my depression.   Sorrow was my confidant in silence.  I felt unworthy of his friendship.  I felt guilty for befriending him, but he listened.  Is there a greater indulgence?  In a way I loved him.  Sorrow gave me a playground on the inside, a world inside of the outer oblivion that was at least a lure for my interest.

Elementary chalk boards say, “Dream, dream big son for a declaration of who you are to craft your own identity and existence in the infinite options the blessing of continued successive breaths grant.”  The chalk is a perfume to draw you out into the colony of commerce.  The treasures begin to twinkle.

Money work, children, genetics, happiness, endorphins, sports, chucking, conversations are the obliteration of boredom and depression for the modern man.  These are fabulous times of vehicles, criminal tendencies, anarchism, political-rant vomit, indigestion, disagreement, information, demonstration, propagation for a faith in anything, to win an argument with an agnostic.

I felt like a debauchery-burdened drunk operated the buzzer in my alarm clock independent of such mandates as time zones and day light savings time.  The sot bastard was cantankerous, taking me away from my silence.  The alarm clock’s debate tortured me like a parched Tantalus in a rain of cinder blocks forcing me to venture and open my mouth upward to drink.  The routine just left one thirsty.

You can not go outside in that shit.  Umbrellas are feckless.  I tried to see my rainbow, but the cement in the cumulonimbus pounds a Verdi anvil chorus pocket-book propaganda-cacophony.  There is never any water, only falling rocks.

Life told me, “Your biggest mistake son was wanting something.  Sit down.  Do not try.  Do not covet.  Wanting is what started the rain.  The flood, the hurricane it all comes in tandem with the wanting.  Close your eyes.  Do not pray.  Do not wish.  Do not picture a face when you masturbate, only skin and parts.

The specific identification will lead to crushed toes under door frames attempting to wedge a suggestion before slam and a nail is uprooted.  Type, sort, do, button push, file, and trounce the bulging urge to want.

Commute, switch to autopilot.  Re-commute to the idiot box.

Ingest microbes, power down, revel in insomnia and repeat.  The aurora borealis is a laser light show of chicanery.  Enjoy the seventy-two hour work day.  You already had a lunch break!  Drown in the al dente savoring bite of ethics.” 

The flavors twanged with the seasons and in all was disdain.  None of this makes a God damn bit of sense alone.  Streets were on fire.  Burn me!  I don’t give a fuck anymore.  All the faces are meaningless, pointless, occupied.  I was lost.

I made a respectable, but “under what I made six years ago” salary.  When I left Dallas, my boss, Mr. Huckabee promised to make me back whole to what I use to make once I shifted his firm into a digital paradigm.  I brought paperless auditing to Nottoway to revolutionize his profit margins.  He kept the difference and claimed to run at a loss despite me designing his billing system with access to see the ironic accounting.  Huckabee knew the standard cry of rich men.

Huckabee was a man of sedentary thought.  If he had done something one way fifteen years ago, odds are that is the way Huckabee still wished it to be done.  Why learn?  Henry absolved himself of interaction and left actual work to subordinates claiming to be too busy to sabotage his time with such non-traditional behavior.

Huckabee was a true North American hunter of a business man.  His boardroom was covered in taxidermist-stuffed deer heads and elk mounts from his annual hunting vacations in Montana.  The man continually cried poor in his Larry the Cable Guy diction.  For the intermediate years of my employment I was naïve enough to talk to him about schedules and working together for a path to partnership.  I knew the electronic efforts and departmental overalls were allowing us to do more work than we had ever done with less staff.  Henry’s promises of correlated compensation fell hollow.

I imagined Huckabee stuffing those antlered fur-glued skulls on his walls full of hundred dollar bills with a secret little skin-flap on the bottom and popping out the glass eyes to mash the mazards with golden bills.  I did not know how to bond in a tree-stand or discuss the intricacies of dairy farming to appear congenially colloquial.

Huckabee was like an Alzheimer’s patient in a ward nauseous on data.  Data, data, data inducing vomit.  Blanked-out Boomers like Huckabee grabbed Excedrin, cocaine, or Viagra to slow the taxi to Saturn.  Give me my Social Security!  I can’t handle this shit!  I want my Ensure, my Lazy-Boy, a Pat Sajak facelift and a gun!  My urethra is clogged!  My sphincter is shut!  What the hell is the Cloud?  Pay me son, I’ve earned my spot.  Huckabee just avoided me or the software whenever he could for tee times and tree stands.

559

I had this one private entity oilfield client located a few blocks from Elyse’s house.  All the rest were governmental and nonprofits, but this one actually avoided taxes every chance they could rather than spend them.  The business’ accounting ledger had been mismanaged for three years.  The inventory system was dysfunctional. 

After eight hours there I could see the first legs of the solution; complex, arduous and months of work.  The answers were puzzle-pieces hidden in personnel, roles, software manipulations, corrections of errors in a ball of free market fishing string. 

Huckabee was at the client with me.  Henry took out paper and pencil.  He stared at the client’s software system, incapable of pulling out Microsoft Excel or interfacing the paradigm of today, but toyed with the idea of maintaining an impression for the client. 

Huckabee spoke to his sixty-plus-year-old client counterpart that allowed this train-wreck of accountancy.  I saw dinosaurs of green desk-lamps, visors and ledger-pads failing to adapt to the global climate change.  The owners were deer hunters who also owned their own deer breeding facility.  Huckabee had the ruminant mammal qualifications needed to survive in this Cro-Magnon cave-aged realm.

I left Huckabee to his stale stump-speech knowing the client had no clue what the emperor should be saying.  Who am I to say Huckabee’s nut-sack was hanging out?  I could see his pubes and his wrinkled bankroll-belly skin, but their controller was responding with, “I see.  That sounds good. Yes, Yes, I like what you have done here,” like a far-less sardonic geriatric Wayne Campbell.

The differences between technical and social aptitude were mocking me.  Huckabee had obviously passed rural-town Nottoway schoolyard.  I felt like I was back up in the New Orleans St. Baptiste library.  Huckabee had no interest in the computer end of our business.  Henry was close enough to skip to retirement without adaptation baring the precarious dangers of losing his Blue Cross self-attained ice bridge to Medicare.

How much of the world stagnates into a frustrating cluster-fuck bottleneck of operation because someone sank into the numb-complacency of age?  Refusing to learn anything new truncates living.  Huckabee had done enough.  No computer age, he had a health-care life preserver.  I was left to captain the oxidizing ship after the shifting tides washed away the work that sailed Huckabee into practical-obsolescence.  Huckabee chose to die alive and make us burn with his equity in hand rather than leap that bold hurdle of admitting he was naked shivering attempting to cross the Bering Strait.  

I missed teachers.  Nottoway slew my Obi-Wan to get me out of Dallas.  Yoda preferred Dagobah than this cow pasture.  I was on my own to haul this log, to raise this ship.  Everyday I forgot more than I learned.  I was in a quicksand of ignorance.

560

I paused and spoke over Huckabee’s stammers.  Like Pulp Fiction’s Winston Wolf, I said, “I got this.  Give me some time.  These are the first three steps we need to do.”  Huckabee backed away reprieved, but absent of any acknowledgment of what had occurred.  I should have left Henry to his own iceberg, but my diligence to actually accomplish something corporate as if Andersen was not so long ago overtook me.  How atrophied were these muscles from September eleventh to a Katrina-Dallas refugee camp to these oilfield inventory computations?  I was finally needed for an American task. 

After a few months and being about sixty percent through with the company’s inventory turnaround, I lead my third staff meeting with the oilfield company’s people.  Huckabee sat in the corner with nothing to emit.  The CEO of the company commanded everyone into a “No, I am serious” holding hands around the boardroom table in a prayer circle to Jesus to “get this inventory stuff right.” 

The CEO also funneled money from the company to donate to his Mega Church he evangelized on local cable for J.C.  Ayn Rand would be beside herself with this altruistic sabotage to this guy’s free-market woody commandeered by Jesus, but he was taking every tax deduction, so how pissed would she really get?  The CEO pointed me out to Christ as the guide for his contingent.  Huckabee held the shipping clerks’ expert hand.

Before the prayer everything was falling on me.  After the consultation everything was still falling on me.  I thought, “They all seemed to be into your impact God, so I am here waiting.  Give me the goods so I can help your people and this man’s tax return.  What’s that?  Use my brain and figure it out on my own.  If I happen to get in a wreck and become a vegetable on my ride home today you will create a miracle.  My boss will figure it out in my stead.  Now I see the divine plan!  Oh, it is so clear!”

(How many rich men claim to be God-fearing to avoid the guilt over their greed?  Show me you not deducting your contributions on your schedule B first then I’ll give you some props.  Hypocrite, Pharisee.)

561

Huckabee and I were different breeds of men.  Last November Huckabee came into my office and told me my Osceola Parish Spouse Abuse audit client had requested that I no longer be assigned to manage the audit.  Huckabee said the caller was anonymous.  It would be better not making a ruckus.  Huckabee made it clear that the caller communicated that the issue had nothing to do with my work performance.  Huckabee in his ostrich acquiescence to external drama informed me of the situation rather than ask any questions.  My opossum employer did not want to be in a conflict dynamic. 

Tracer and Clay Robertson were both on the board of the Spouse Abuse Program.  I had done the audit for three years.  The ramifications lumped in my throat in an amphibian crunch.  Tracer and Clay had the power to spread conjecture and rumor throughout every municipal district and board.  The Robertson boys could pariah-cast my ass.  I knew who it was.  I knew why it was happening, but what could I do?  I needed my job. 

I called Tracer.  He admitted to being the impetus.  Conduit Tracer felt that I was “verbally abusive” to Ashley based on Ashley’s account.  “If I wanted to push the issue” other contingencies would come into play.  I asked Ashley what she knew and if she would contradict these claims.  Ashley said, “I have nothing to do with that.”  The ironic assumptions of gender made emotional abuse transpose like the Red Cross bandaging the Syrian army.  Smash the uprisings.  Rivers always flow south.

562

I worked and went home lonely.  My job was an apathetic daily death by inane paper cuts awash in correction-fluid chloroform to go with the typewriter Huckabee insisted we keep around.  I battled being zombified by the loneliness, to mutate me into unfeeling as if I might just want things this way.  Fighting back was like trying to alter the chemistry of my flesh.  Dietary intake would be easier if I could eat my own brain. 

I was thankful to have a job.  I thought of “long-term” unemployed America.  These useless bottom-mid rung ladder-labor limbs grasping for air while robots assembled contraptions and disassembled their pleasant futures.  Terminator machines do not need pensions or liver transplants.  Human productive phalanges could grab where?  Do what?  Manual men were slain in a digital arena on sluiced conveyor belt floors.  Let the cattle blood drain.  Temple Gardin may have changed the paradigm, but now the sole breadwinner is in the slaughter-line instead of the heifer.  Where was Darwin?

Early century agriculture farm-hands disenfranchised by a tractor.  Late twentieth century factories were dehumanized by source code.  Now, twenty-first century bankers, accountants, and tabulators of summed assessments are staring at pixels in soon to be foreclosed middle-class homes instead of a cubicle.  What will humans do when we have “everything” and find ourselves feckless?  Rudie can’t fail.  What do we do with the bricks after we hire Halliburton to tear down the wall Mr. Waters? 

563

I went to the market of another one of Penelope’s basketball games.  Penelope recently returned from North Carolina on a skiing vacation over Mardi Gras with her mother, Ben, Lacey and Hilton.  (Penelope had yet to ask for the cross.)  Ashley’s whole clan except for Hilton was there, including Jeffery’s crew.  Jeffery’s wife was pregnant with their second child.  At the end of the game the Hingle’s swarmed Penelope. 

The day was my Saturday with Penelope, but boundaries were nonexistent with Ashley.  How could Penelope not want every second with her mother?  How could a hello or only three hugs be sufficient?  Only seven to ten compressions were adequate.

Amongst the greetings and goodbyes, “Auf wiedersehen’s” and “dag’s,” I stood on the sideline under the opposing team’s goal.  I saw Ashley hand Penelope this construction-paper greeting card.  Penelope called me to the Hingle’s to see the creation.  I stood silent.  I finally migrated towards my car with my daughter. 

Ashley and Ben followed us like pheromone driven ants.  Ashley buckled Penelope in her booster seat.  I bit my tongue.  Penelope had been buckling herself in for weeks. 

Penelope was still trying to stretch these reminiscent moments when her parents were together.  When I got home I read the card.  The two page bi-fold stationary displayed a picture of Penelope and her puppy Bella on brown construction paper.  “Cheer up, still sad, pull here.”  A tab with a picture of a bald no-bearded white man in a green shirt with the word Dad on top appears.  “Still sad?”  A fold out picture Ashley, which elaborately flips around to hold Penelope’s hand, and it says “Your whole family loves you.”

When I first saw the card I was not sure what to make of it.  I thought “Wow” for a moment that Ashley had tried to see the big picture from Penelope’s point of view.  Ashley was acknowledging to Penelope that, “Hey your dad is your family too and he actually loves you,” but then reality set into the orphaned logical part of my brain.

Several hours later while Penelope and I were eating dinner, I asked Penelope to describe what mommy told her while she was giving Penelope the card.  I cared more about how Penelope viewed the card than how Ashley intended it.

By Penelope’s assumption she saw the word dad and thought of the man drawn there as me without consideration of the alternative.  Penelope had displayed uncertainty on what to call Mr. Ben.  When Penelope slipped up in discussing events that happened when Penelope was with her mother, Penelope called him dad.  I later found out just how much this term of paternal endearment was engrained in Penelope daily.

In later days, I asked Penelope to call him Mr. Ben or step-dad.  I told Penelope, “You will always have one dad and one mom.  When Mr. Ben marries your mother this makes him your mother’s husband, not your dad.  He will be nice to you.  He can be your friend, but he is there for your mother, not for you.  That is ok.  I know that it is hard to understand.  If I got married that woman would not be your mom.”

I emailed Ashley asking who the bald man was on the card.  I never got a response.  Ben was bald and beardless.  I had prodigious upper follicles and a beard since 2011. 

I thought back to December 2009, and that Tracer Robertson billboard lawyer drive-by phone call, “Well they’re dating.”  Ashley’s rotary husband did not become engaged to be her ringed husband by accidental exposure.  There was no hypnotist crab stationed in Ben’s pubes.  It was no Gabriel-angel coincidence that the same month we lived apart to fill the three hundred and sixty-five day court with children under six requirement that Ashley started publically dating Ben.  Coincidences are for Bible stories.  Absent of allusions, I wonder what Jesus called Joseph.

564

Life was wheat bread.  Hope was Sahara water.  Ashley’s hypocrisy was nauseating.  I realized under the surface of me lived an anger of flesh, a beaten man slunk into dwarf-form, semi-limbed with platypus-reach, out of place, awkward, but potentially poisonous.  The beast conducted respiration with fear.

My being had mutated with no place to be, no relatives of explanation to exorcise this poltergeist or get this duck-billed, fur egg-laying quill-spike misstep-webbed infiltrator to depart.  There was no escape through these stagnant waters, knowing the Monday levee broke on a raised porch and yet, the gasps for air continued in this dumb hollow. 

I could not find the outlet to evolve this feeling being ill-mated with Ashley’s plastic deflected slurs.  I wanted my own return fire.  I never could pull the trigger and probably would never speak, but I could write to myself.   I was angry, but underneath the onion layer was the tyrannical fear.

I want you to know how much you hurt me, my parents, Penelope.  Penelope is not even on the precipice of knowing you behind your cake-grin and sugar-ant parade scents. 

This façade has no forgiveness reciprocated.  However much I want to forgive you, you give me no avenue, no portal of conversing.  This platypus will only die by eating the meal of our shared honest words, yet you perpetuate his life with your famine tongue.  You balloon his innards.  I must kill him!

This fruit you deny us to dine for an Exeter apple-parceled peace; by holding it in will infect your endeavors with cancerous rot.  No matter how you move a doppelganger platypus still lays her eggs under your welcome mat seething for your guilt.

This control-freak virus has bred.  This dirt-poor shame of your father’s threats to leave and his secret sins fermented.  The anger you can never express to this man is an inflated beach ball you have held under your backyard swimming hole for years.  Everyday you repress the distended bubble’s natural desire to elevate to an acknowledged surface.  Every second you attempt to control that shame by controlling the perimeter in your muck vat Nottoway Ocean by dunking your swollen buoy.  This repression is a surrogate coping mechanism for pretending to control the turgescent guilt where your authority has such a frail dominion.

Defile me no more!  I tried to suck out the vapid air inside that beach ball and replace the puff with oxygen like CPR-rescue-breathing.  You tried to asphyxiate me on a roadside halfway to nowhere.  I forgive you, even if you will not let me.  I let me.  I’m barreling over Australian road-kill tonight!

565

One afternoon Penelope and I were playing pirates with a map we made full of green islands on a blue sheet of construction paper and a yellow chest of gold.  We put the map inside a treasure chest (a shoebox full of Mardi Gras beads).  I said, “Well that is last place to put a map to a treasure inside the treasure chest.  That is the only place the map would be useless.  Unless the finder misread the map and assumed that there was an even greater treasure out there tricking him to ignore the glaring gold.”  Penelope said, “Daddy the best treasurers are in your heart.  If you want cuddle you have to give cuddle.” 

566

Back on Mardi Gras Tim, dressed up as Coffee man.  Tim was in a lagniappe impromptu group leading Zulu down its traditional New Orleans route.  Tim had a coffee-stained T-shirt with Coffee man printed across the front, a mug dispensing coffee with a hat with an affixed cup in the early hours of Fat Tuesday.  His band mate Q-Ray masked as Beignet boy.  Tim got to be his own form of Mardi Gras Indian.  Tim told me he was going to be playing this festival called Block Party in April with his band and invited me to attend.  I put a picture of Tim’s marching NOLA life by my company-only coffee maker.

I kept working on the oilfield client for Huckabee.  Every time I drove past or down Elyse’s interstate exit, I had to remind myself I was in love with a woman that did not exist or was at least eighty percent sure never loved the me I had to offer if she did.  Marie, Ashley, Elyse: were all self-made mirages. 

I still spoke to Elyse from time to time.  Marie was a pubescent lesson learned.  Ashley was the zenith into the depths of my nadir; from greatest love to an adjudicating assassin revealing her pity.  Elyse bartered a religious permission.  I chose Elyse’s freedom over my anchor crimes.  I needed time to barter with my misanthropic Bukowski allegiances. 

Elyse on some level will always be family to me.  However brief, our child existed; in each of us there is a part absent.  The part may be divergent with a common conceptual reference, but in context to our own vantage point is missing.  That aperture ate away at me like a wormhole into a parallel life drowning in rain trying to aerate the soil. 

Elyse sat on the under oak tree branch swing of my mind.  Elyse waited there for me to push her, to edge her life into a more enjoyable median.  This distance escaped me.  I saw Elyse sitting in the swing as this hybrid image of woman and girl, parent and child, mother holding child, father pushing child, pushing mother, swinging with smiles together then simply Elyse, moving and wanting my contact in tandem, my difference. 

Now the swing was barren.  My quiver was emptied.  The target was missed.  The urge to please Elyse, to bring her joys the way a productive man would abide was a punctured balloon of childish daydreams.  I was no ever-after.  I wanted a reason beyond my own palate to chop adult herbs and converse with an empathetic intimacy, but I saw our garden of forking paths beginning to bramble.

I had no place.  There were only broken arboreal travesties fallen in hurricane winds suffocating under blackened swimming pools.  The mosquitoes bred.  I had to vanish.

I kept grasping for that synchronized split in time, the second, the mili or the quasi parceled out Japanese parking lot where we could meet up to plan a mutual directed destination.  Vehicles kept in motion.  The only navigable Kyushu Island was to let go. 

I knew how easily Elyse could convince me, if she wanted this life I would try to give it to her.  I would pour my love like a lemonade pitcher, spring afternoon full of ice and breeze and dodge the sunbeams that bake her prison bar oven-walls in my suburban suicide.  If Elyse wanted, if she could tolerate the sour with the sugar, I would love her. 

If her ski-jump trapeze-air-elopes of flying free and never low, of seventeen-hundred Facebook-friends and still alone, if I had her heart for the better part, I would love her.  But to do so, I knew, I would be asking Elyse to cut her roots rather than her leaves.

567

On my way to and from my client I would pass Elyse’s street, but I would always keep driving.  We talked on the phone every once in a while.  We even went to the movies and dinner a couple of times. 

I remember “Timshel,” by Mumford and Sons came on my shuffled iPod while I was driving her back home.  Marcus Mumford sang “and you are the mother, the mother of your baby child the one to whom you gave life, and you have your choices and these are what make man great his ladder to the stars, but you are not alone in this.”  Elyse looked at me and asked me, “Do you ever think about it?”  I told her, “All the time.  That song is just not fair.”

I dropped Elyse off and felt the stutter shock.  The thought that we were for that slightest prolonged glance of speaking like a couple that existed outside my imagination; that maintained this lingering care for me reverberated.  I could register like a passing traffic camera lens aperture flash of a woman expressing need for me.  I could breathe like I was desirable on a level generating action, pull, and seductive incentive-laden internal acrobatics of want.  Elyse sat on that rare tree-swing of vulnerable; wavering in uncertainty that what if love was not coming in equal to or greater than going out; could she be a woman capable of that emotion? 

I sneezed and the folly was gone.  The thought was chased away.  That Adam Duritz-thought white-bread life would have been was so close like Michelangelo’s finger stretching on a ceiling and in the inches it never gets there. 

Thinking about Elyse reminded me of my horrid soul.  Elyse made me want to redeem myself by offering kindness, but also punish myself by rebounding the idea that I am forever undeserving of love.  It was a recycling form of masochism.

568

A month and a half later in our continued string of occasional correspondence I called Elyse.  I had to give my name for the first time for her to recognize the caller.  The verification was a demarcation.  I could have been another man.  Elyse said, “I am watching a movie, can I call you back when it is over?”  A week went by and a Facebook profile went missing and un-friended.  I sent an email out.

Elyse:  Maybe your life is turning a corner where the conations of whatever connection we once had are now detrimental for you to continue upon that spur.  Maybe you are trying to communicate a clear line in the sand of harsh reality that simple verbal terms can not be uttered with the same effect.  Maybe you are moving your life forward in a beautiful way and need more space.  If so, I am happy for you. 

I have had mixed feelings about ever calling.  I do not want to be an encumbrance.  I did not want to come across as misguided or anything other than genuine.  The idea that you would rather me drift into oblivion, than stay connected to my tangential perimeter, hurts.

I want you in my life as a friend.  If you need some kind of communicated boundary, than please talk to me.  Part of the problems I have always had is, I am ready to believe that the world would rather I never say a word, sit in a corner quiet and allow everyone else go by.  Every measure of interaction with me is a labored task.  There is always an alternative option more beneficial, productive or preferred over interacting with than me.  That is my own demon. 

If nothing else, know you matter to me, if ever you need a friend to be there, to help, for whatever, I am here.  You are in this club in my heart; there is Penelope, there is my brother Tim, there are my friends Michael, Justin and my parents.  There are a few others, but for those people you are with the “I will stop whatever I am doing and be there people.” With deepest regards, Ethan

I called and sent this last email.  The detachment anchored.  I never heard from Elyse again.  Facebook disengaged communication.  All these maybes ran marathons in my head.  Elyse was a bareback rider streaking with mane flowing and feelings peeled off of her like painted pin-stripes.  She was also praying on Sundays.  A man should never stand in a place, between a woman and Jesus.  J.C.’s abs will always win out on prom night.  I was a cactus. 

In the end I was merely a man in a train station passing on the other side of the tracks of the internet with an ill-timed watch.  Getting Elyse pregnant was an independent consequence of chance and science neither magnetizing nor repelling us, just data.  I felt in everyway a foyer, an atrium, a mezzanine of man.  I was reminded of my plainspoken mediocrity.  I felt entirely perfunctorily unloved, like a bus bench.

569

Elyse was my only hope of a phone call.  With her gone, there were no sounds emitting.  I shifted my phone to permanent vibrate to numb the difference.  A mute button toggled in either direction would have produced identical results.  Sometimes I thought about when Elyse said, “If you would have asked me to marry you, I would have said yes.”  I marvel and am confounded by those words.  Hope is such a maniacal opiate.

At times I think I murdered all I ever wanted, scripted in the fine print of a Willy Wonka ticket to a carnival we never got to ride.  Her and I played hide and seek with a detached shadow.  I am a Peter Pan-man asking on window stoops for fears and joys that I junked. 

I am naked and crying for an uncertain life I abandoned in some medical facility.  I was not permitted to step inside.  My shadow blends into the darkness of a locked dumpster.  Scenes play out in emails, texts, unreturned phone calls and a Sisyphus movie.  I just want to walk back home in my clown shoes and have a re-do at twelve years old.

Elyse was one of my only hopes of still considering my self remotely loveable.  My heart sank into another level of what alone meant.  I was at peace with losing my lover.  The bleak immediate muted estrangement fractured me reminiscently raw. 

My friend walked out absent of explanation or a goodbye.  I thought I had one of those forever kinds of people Eddie Vedder counts on his hands when he breathes.  Elyse was helping me count to five.  Now I was left rubbing my fingertips alone.  It was my fault.

570

Penelope’s life was a bit better, but still a game of red-rover.  Ashley stuffed a bulimia of miniature construction-paper notes into the outer coffers of Penelope’s school bag.  The subliminal advertisements had non-surprising themes of stick-figured dramas reminiscent of Ashley’s obsession of fold and crease collegiate communication.  I can only imagine the copious legion of folded tomes Ashley produced in grade school.  Now Ashley paid her lawyer to mail them. 

The most recent seed depicted Ashley, Penelope and Ben in his green shirt spelunking in a cavern adorned with mine hats.  “Let’s go mining for gems!  What do you think we will find?”  Inside there was a Martha Stewart-constructed pocket with a crayola-colored pickaxe.  The other side was a brown cave with three fold-out tabs revealing each respective birth stones, ruby, sapphire, and garnet, signed “Love, Mom and Dad.”

A blue note stated, “Baseball practice tonight!”  A sliding tab contained a baseball.  Dad could throw the ball back and forth with Penelope.  Ashley reclined in a lawn chair saying, “Go Peanut!”  Penelope’s school pouch overflowed with homemade Hallmark testaments to overcompensation.  Ashley kept packing the squirrel nuts. 

Cards paraded: a rotating-hand clock, yellow lion, miniature golf.  “We Love you! - Mom & Dad, a drawn picture triad, “Good Luck from Mom and Dad on your spelling test!”  A tiered Mississippi pier-house on the beach Hilton built, with three stick-bodies. 

There was a tear in the sweetness I saw my ex-wife provide to our daughter that I once fell in love with.  I saw a bizarre compliment, a mother who wrote other simple notes: “You are special.  I love you. You are prettier than a pretty flower.” 

Ashley made one for Valentines Day with an accordion-like construction paper pop-out heart.  When Penelope and I made each other Valentines Day cards out of old photos, construction paper and markers in 2011, Penelope re-constructed an accordion heart for me.  I have it hanging in my office.  I never noticed Penelope had not thought of the accordion herself until finding the original in her book bag weeks later.

At the crux, these notes made me face the Ashley I once loved and still admire in tangential perspective.  I never wanted to go to war.  I wanted to forgive, truce, and move.

Ashley designated that man as Dad in caricature.  Ashley requested Penelope to call him Dad.  These ordainments would never make Ben what dad means in Penelope’s purest of understanding, but the indignation rubbed raw like evisceration.  Ashley stampeded unabated.  No insinuation of an apologetic or empathetic tone for her impact on attempting to negate Penelope’s father from her daughter’s life or psyche.

Ashley packed little notes to suitcase along with Penelope to remind me of Ashley’s grand revisionist history and steamrolled future with her freshly minted Muppet-husband.  Ashley knew she could fuck a bald guy with her hand up his ass.  She never wanted to marry her dad.  Ashley wanted to be her dad.  Ashley wanted a guy who would facilitate her trans-generational trans-gendered transformation. 

571

I was long over Ashley.  I wished we could forgive, toast what was and peacefully fall forward.  I wished I could have my happy memories of Ashley back.  To be able to say to myself that at least part of my life was not a complete farce.  I knew any energy towards a hope for such an elixir was fallow.

I wish I could believe that my life was not some made up patchwork fiction for bystanders to gawk at where I had to jumble the image into a distorted Picasso portrait just to tolerate direct observation.  These sideways noses and Dora Maar perpendicular eyeballs stigmatized life.  I wish I would have understood what House was trying to tell me in high school.

I appreciated  the “I love you to Penelope” notes for how great a mother my daughter has in a blinders-on elementary school context, but my heart was cluttered with blackened ornaments.  I saw so much of Ashley in Penelope; this precocious enthusiasm, this vibrant over-stimulated child, gazing up at her daddy’s eyes subject to his approval in cascading irony.  In these days Penelope illustrated and captioned drawings of, “I love you dad.” or “I heart you Mom & Dad.”  Those were the only notes that mattered.

Parent’s night at Penelope’s school now included Ben regardless of words or my wishes.  I knew the ramifications of commentary on this bizarre world and chose mute.  Ashley must have wanted to be the father of her daughter as well or at least invent one filtered through her Henson-like puppetry.  Ashley could be a whole family in a single construction of sinew, ligaments and bones; a torn-up mash of her own parents, mother and father to a back and forth offspring and somewhere in there a self. 

572

Leading up to Ashley’s sequel wedding Ashley asked about her father’s deployed cross.  I thought I knew where the golden-collar was, but who knows maybe I had a forgotten it in a lost purse pocket or it had reverted to coal like other trinkets in my drawers.  I eventually found the gilded chain weeks later and returned the thing.

Ashley got married in March 2011, in Ben’s mother’s backyard outside a religious jurisdiction from Penelope’s flower girl account.  Some part of me felt like she was marrying her cousin in some rural secluded incestuous True-Blood Louisiana were-panther ritual after her spouse croaked.  Ashley married this guy and ended our marriage for a boy she knew at six years old.  I guess I should carefully study Penelope’s first-grade class picture, because my future son in law might be in the dozen.

In July they announced a pregnancy of a son named Gilligan followed by a BMW with the for-sale sign on the house still waiting.

Continue to Ch 19 Part 2