573
Baseball
season came with Ashley’s signature.
Numeric seating arrangements were similar; one me and standard three to
six-pack attendance from the Ashley contingent.
At
the last game, I brought Penelope my brother Tim’s old baseball bag to hold
Penelope’s equipment. I promised to get
Penelope a purple sports drink. Penelope
expected the brew over water given her mother’s concession-stand version of
American pastime rituals. Before I could
even find a seat Ashley rushed in and brought Penelope a Gatorade. Ben was out playing first base coach. Two minutes later Lacey was in the dugout
“fixing” Penelope’s socks.
I
asked Ashley to step back after Penelope headed out to the field. I told Ashley about my promise to
Penelope. Ashley said, “My only concern
is Penelope,” in a fine print attorney-proofed maternal-indemnity statement.
I
told Ashley I felt sorry for her if she kept looking at the trees. Ashley never saw the big picture of how her
acts to reduce my role in Penelope’s life were an insult and diminish
Penelope. We each are a mixture of our
parental DNA. By insulting the DNA via
one of our parents it is tantamount to a psychological declaration that a
person should not exist.
I
never bought the drink. I did not want
Penelope to be the kid with two bottles, subconsciously having to pick between
her mother and father in marketed-electrolyte liquid form. Pure Idiocracy, “Brawndo, the thirst
mutilator, it’s got what plants crave.”
After
the game the parents stood around for the coach to speak. Ben started walking into the dugout to get my
brother’s old bat bag. Penelope stepped
to retrieve the sack. Ashley spoke a
foot in front of my mouth, “Dad’s going to get it for you.” This was Penelope’s life, split in one
sentence.
Dark
forest, baseball games were one tree.
Sadness sat like a cup of water on my counter that I chose not to
drink. Despair existed naturally; part
of what makes this planet, these bodies inhabitable. The choice was to drink simultaneous life and
death in a flaccid taste. Pessimism is
not always exaggerated wolf-cries; sometimes it’s a partner for perspicuity.
574
No
human contact I encountered satiated the thirst. I was aging into a much older man, bearded
with squiggly protruding gray hairs. My
muscles were exhausted. I spent my hours
in an Antarctica malaise. I ached for nourishment from what I was more
certain than not was an extinct organism.
Sometimes I wanted to pray to God to send help, some margin for error. I wanted a reprieve from mandatory. My people migrated without me.
Nottoway for me was like putting a swamp crawfish on an isle of Arctic
puffins. Adaption was too slow, the red
glared on the white, vulnerable. I
needed out, but chose. I was allergic to
the flock culture. Everyone knows
everyone.
Always
talking about their kids, harems of babies, whoring parents in talk-vomit of
manufactured selfish-purpose purported as God’s. Dance teams, county fairs, church, field
trips, little-leagues, birthday parties, Christmas formed a rural bulimia of
meals with everyone in everyone’s business with nothing better to think beyond
a pickup truck capacity. Volume set on
rabble, everything is dripping spew. I
am parched for isolation. I am immersed
in peripheral conversations moaning unnoticed like a ghost unable to leave.
How
was your holiday? How is that baby? How is it going? How has it been? How is your mamma doing? How is cousin Eddie? How is Ms. Joan? How did that surgery go? We’re praying. Where is Brucy at? Not to be confused with Big Paw Bruce or Broussard
or Bruce the third. Oh, John Bruce is in
rehab for blowing up his double-wide batching meth on a gas stove. Bobby Bruce is in Iraq. Bobby Sue was sleeping with Bobby Jim. Bobby Jill is marrying Bobby Bobby. We’re praying. Nothing changes, just more babies, more
meals, more prayers, more vomit.
Drink
the simple syrup: Genesis, what was, will be, troths, cattle guards, Cracker
Barrel truck stop souvenirs, pews like dominoes, check, double check the black
dots stay inside the white rectangle, flag tattoos and crucifix lawn ornaments,
the wretch is pandemic. The omnipresent
vomit is skin epoxy. Jazz got homogenized
by Toby Keith kickass and the zombie cult of Dale Earnhardt. Fuckers want to tattoo a three on me. (Bleeeeha!)
I have not said a word!
575
Attempts
at professional therapy were useless.
After a few sessions my windows and writing were better consorts and my
HMO quit covering it in month two after a corporate plan change.
Sometimes
I talked to my father. We got on the
history of Catholic priests. Dad told me
celibacy started in the 1200’s with European property rights disputes with the
church and progeny, the sons of priests.
No meat on Fridays started with Italy’s rotting fish by the end of
the week that needed to be sold.
My
father wished his annual retreats to Manresa
could be his own religion. My dad
thought, “Why can’t the Catholic church be this?” I think he loved sitting quietly alone in
contemplative meditation like in a deer stand.
What
if there is no hotel concierge St. Peter?
What if God does not judge, no culpability good or bad? Everyone is left to the same conclusion or
re-entry or re-start. All this is
irrelevant, immaterial. Justice thirst
is nonsense. Humans obsess over
why. Would we still abide? Would we be kind to one another for an
inherent rational? What is victory?
When
did I break? Was I born broken, teeth,
divorce, abortion, Christ? Sometimes the
question was like egg. Was it the yolk
or the shell? Was this rancid from
inception on the inside shielded away from the awful causation of the
fetor-inducing sun to spread the scent amongst the populace? Or did the face to the cement, the heart out
the chest through the Dutch door, the child to the vacuum tube, and the silence
shatter the shell to open a lovely truth that only darkness could
illuminate? Who sees the beauty of the
darkness?
576
When
I still went to church with Penelope, every week the congregation was asked to
pray for the parish’s capital campaign.
I would not pray to God for the collective will to pay money to a
religion to fund a building or a pedophile’s lawsuit. I did that by my own volition. I also refused to take a tax deduction when I
did on principle. No B.C. on insurance
coverage, but Viagra’s ok. Holy-ordered
penises outlaw sodomites in a panoply of Biblical high-ground.
Pope
Benedict XVI claimed priests were weak in immoral times of the 1960’s and
1970’s. Priests were in the sway of
people’s golden-calf debauchery and blamed the priest’s habitation in the
little boy’s sphincters on lax times.
According to him pedophilia only counts “if a child is under a
decade.”
Cough,
more conservative. Cough more
Latin. Cough, fuck you Vatican two! Do the de-evolution baby! When is a priest going to chant in a dead
language lift his dress and moon the congregation with a Gregorian, “Habitas
Testicas?” The Catholic Church had lost
me. House was laughing.
577
I
would see Ashley’s Ben tucked in her pocket at church, sometimes with his arm
over Penelope. There was very little of
the Beatles Rubber Soul, “Run for Your Life” in me. I felt sorry for Ben. Edmond Dantès’
eczema itch be dammed.
I
will never know when Ben’s penis first slipped inside Ashley’s vagina. The location of genitalia is such a silly
preoccupation. Who follows who, who was
who’s first; it is just a trite maze of evolution. Maybe Ben is one of Ashley’s former guilts
that she used to berate herself to Jesus for engaging in whatever whenever too
young was too young. Emotional betrayal
trumps physical anyway.
Credulity
is an impish mystical hermit hiding behind conjecture chasing naked truth to
crannies of contemplation. Lies can be
anywhere and nowhere befuddling a man’s mind.
The pondered lie could be but a blip compared to the awe-aching truth
one wishes they never discovered and so too the inverse. This was my twelve-year hunger strike in year
three waiting for Penelope to go to college.
No scabs here.
578
I
thought of Halloween in 2010. Penelope
dressed as Scooby Doo and went trick or treating with Ashley and Ben as Velma
and Shaggy on October thirty-first. A
week before I took Penelope-Doo to “Boo at the Audubon Zoo” in New Orleans with me
dressed as Freddie. Elyse never desired
to fashion into Daphne.
I
watched so many Scooby Doo cartoons with Penelope on the weekends. I was reminded of what most kids over the age
of sixteen observe and I called “The Pentagon of Scooby Doo Sexual
Frustration.” Velma has lesbian urges
for Daphne. Daphne wants to be ravaged
by Freddie. Freddie wants to hump
Shaggy. Shaggy wants to bestiality it
down with Scooby. Scooby just wants to
eat Scooby Snacks and have fun. Nobody
wants to fuck Velma. (I can’t be the
only one to see this.)
In
the end for Ashley there was a penis in a vagina. People are afraid to admit some things are
about sex and sex’s coursing power.
Certainly sex is a symptom of underlying fractures in divorce, but sex
does bear an animalistic dominion. This
was not just about parenting, or who I am, or what I did or what Ashley
did.
Some
things just end, do not work out. Humans
are meant to move on without having this grand why to connect the dots of
decision trees and one to one outcomes.
God has not a fucking Canon-compelled dominion over adultery or human
love. Sometimes metaphysics takes a
backseat to dick, vagina and a white-tiger clitoris.
579
Ashley
wanted another set of balls to hang on the rack above her bed, some dangly-dice
Nottoway-pair. Ashley got her a bald Nottoway supplicant on a leash. Ashley preferred an inefficacious man with no
aspirations to ever leave Nottoway or on his
own. Ashley found another Tulane graduate
of my approximate height and weight.
Apparently Ben is soft spoken and played Magic cards and sang Counting
Crows songs.
Ashley
went into her own “who is sitting there across the street” life and slipped
this convenient-invitation into her mail slot absent of postage. Ben was still living with his mother on a
farm road named after his grandfather.
Ben’s father is a man I only saw once drinking alone at the bar in
O’Malley’s restaurant when Ashley said hello to him the night we celebrated the
sale of our Katrina house. Ben was a
thirty-something that could have gone anywhere and yet he anchored to this
Bates-motel town living with his mother and his dog in the woods. The marketing campaign is just easier to sell
with me as a tyrant ogre.
Oh
these lives, these twisted-empathetic worm-coiled engines we fuel daily,
pumping out tiny replicated experiences in explanations to others as if we
understand a God-damn thing! This trifle
of a man I saw years ago innocuously alphabetically-assigned seated next to me
in an entrepreneurial management course, his last name a letter over from mine,
right there in H.G. Wells-machine semantics praying for editable fiction.
Ashley
did not even need to change her three-lettered married stationary. “Just go back in time and get together
then. Fuck, suck, lick, engage, and
leave me out from the inception. Say no
to the Dragon’s Den. Despise my shitty
poetry, speak up. Obliterate Penelope
from potential existence and have your own daughter.”
The
lipstick lettered belly was corroded with Chinese toy lead paint. Ben was a golf caddy. His seed was in Ashley’s womb now like a
decade-ticking M18 claymore.
Ashley
was making sure the real Ben, Ashley and me, never met. Everyday I faced my Nottoway
presence that neither Ashley nor I wanted, because Penelope did not know. Penelope did not deserve the pain of knowing
why.
I
would not release the daily phoenix that died in me at sunset like some
transgendered swan lake. Every wire
shook upon its flight into one more day of facing my Green Day “East Jesus
Nowhere.” Maybe some day after we danced
at sixteen in July or fourteen in between, but not until Penelope’s innocence
breathed its long breath past deciphered Santa Claus secret identities, not
until first kisses were made in normal adolescent hormone adventures. Penelope deserved the illusion.
580
My
life was a synthesis of anthills. The
indifference mounted. I dictated an
accumulated pile of words like a stenograph tape printed into spirals and
tomes. The legions of words were heavy
like a recycling cancerous mass in a distended gullet. The thoughts of regurgitated self-identity
laid me in a corner of writing, writing, writing. The real world was not this. My syllables were full of lymphoma and tumors
I wanted to vomit.
The
real world was a Roman realm of doing. I
was so Greek. My empire was in
bankruptcy, trying to trade poetry for wheat.
I was starving to brush my fingers over the shafts populating the fields
as the gossip in the grain rose up to stimulate the tangible. I was afraid to stare into the sun, into its
love. The equities of prayer were all
around me. My own inequities rendered me
blind.
Who
was going to understand the ant hill I had created for myself? All these tunnels, un-hatch-able eggs and
transported dirt, particles one by one intricately remembered were baubles of
hours I wanted to expunge, yet had no surface to forget into a mound. Sometimes, I just waited for the nuclear war,
the fire from the sky to burn the pile.
My
written rants were exercises in extermination; God damn poetry.
I am a man kicking over my ant hill catacomb
city. Destroy it with freedom, a
liberated fortress. Despots stripped of authority. I abandon regard for their pinchers. Fuck that.
I am an American old-school football soccer-style Mike Lansford barefoot
kicker ramming past these dead saints. Feast on my death-row metatarsal dessert!
I am armored in solace! The black army of words plots in evolutionary
cartography. Scurry off in an
instinctual chemically-driven brain to the queen. How can you bring her sustenance, a sacrifice
for the colony? I set these millions of
legs loose. I liberate loneliness
incarnate. I un-weld these boilermaker
shackle musts.!
Climb me nude.
I stand as sculpture with un-paralyzed arms free-willed to swing. Your venom is null to granite-skin, of
cracking mineral veins. I am flexible,
human, and soft as woman soft. I am
Iocane-immune to you! I am a Mr. Dread
Pirate Roberts!
Go tell Sister Prejean there is no blazing leather-strap
throne here to kill, to show those who killed that man that killing is
wrong. I set you free. This vaccine can be released. Vengeance dies on this vine. Sage Francis says, “Got to love the
li(f)e.”
I am in rehabilitation as a self-analysis junkie. Flush those white-powder words. I could rest in love without a Sahara of
supporting documentation; a Gobi of
explanation of why this does or should exist.
I can finally learn to just be; to live in that
slivered intention of vanishing now dancing boastful clarity of action, not
voice, not thought, but indeterminable aesthetic doing. I will thrust this butterfly stroke for air
and grasp with two hands side or not. I
will cull this water behind me in symmetrical synchronized force. I will live in the intoxicating moment of
breathing.
The rise to be joyous is an escaped convict from
registered offender status. I do not
remember the last time I was excited, where life felt innocent or exuberant. The mud is caked. Laughter is counter-weighted. Memories are vampires. The coffin is no regeneration chamber. Soccer games, Thanksgivings, airplanes,
meatloaf, picture frames, waltzes, progeny: all of it is poison, spoiled in
tainted context. I have no Mr.
Miagi/Tarrantino-Bride fingers for self-developed solutions at the moment.
Retiree’s walk in to get their taxes done from playing
golf. These flashy pursuits of retired
treasure troves, free time to spend. I
ask myself with who, to do what, with me alone.
This love is all but a sham. I
have no love.
I am void. I
see Boomers exiting this rodent maze corporate vat. Sage Francis pointed out the water-lunged
imagery of “lol.” I see a man drowning. Mogadishu, Beirut, Los Angeles, Tripoli, shoot these frail
dreams. Always could be worse, when in
doubt do good.
581
I
wanted to get out, to date, or to find some social outlet, a garbage can to
propel vomit. Anchor ironies chained my
ankles in bulging links. I had a
daughter bolted to an Indian town zoom in three times to get to push-pin on a
Google map. My logistics cackled and
regimented my opportunities like puzzle-piece concrete. I chose.
Damn us all!
I
felt a woman without a child would resent the trade off of having to move
here. No part of me desired a woman to
compromise her self to meet my inequities.
I could not break her into pieces to fit her through my Alice door.
A
woman with child was so often half-piloting the same moored ship, marooned in
some city isle. Even if I appeared as
this North Star, I was impossible to navigate towards. That for which I ask, was exactly that which
I could not give in return. I was a man
with a hand full of fool’s gold bargaining for fresh water with mirage-illusion
castaway women in a parallel archipelago.
These iceberg-logistical hypocrisies stranded me in the frozen fires in
which I would continue to burn until my frost-bitten fingers truncated pruned
to the ground due to lack of use.
Maybe
I was someone’s needle in a haystack of medical waste. I felt submerged with viral AIDS acupuncture
and polio pinpricks. Who’s putting their
hand in here?
I
wanted someone to perceive me as indelible.
I had no idea what it felt like to be missed, to have the inclination a
woman had after thoughts that she contemplated, “Shit, I fucked that up” upon
my exit. I had no concept of being
pursued or a batting average for reciprocated communication with something
higher than a point zero prefix.
I
had the logistical life of a forty-year-old man, wanting to find a
thirty-year-old peer without daddy issues.
I was a fear-filled platypus fuck.
I had to expunge the emotional shrapnel.
I bit into my skin to tear out the metallic from the viable until there
was nothing left spreading this sickness.
I
am a coward. I am not brave the way I
dream the thinkers I aspire to emulate appear.
I have done nothing and in most concrete-boot stoic mirror-confessions
believe I will die having done nothing.
Even if I did not have casket-shackles on my choices, I wonder if I
would be brave enough to face this world.
I
know nothing of this world. I am inside
painted bullshit cave walls barking blindly about God, government, and
relationships. It is all bullshit. I know nothing. I am the pied piper of fraudulent undertones,
metaphors and slunk-down hypocrisies of a man dying alone in the passenger seat
of his own existence pretending originality.
Sometimes
it appears easier to hide in this no-face, nowhere abandoning opportunity to
try, to sit in this library and not in the yard, to just drive home as a commuter
college kid and wonder, “What does everyone else do on outskirts of this higher
learning?” “Where do these young
professionals parade and discuss to dance beat tempos of having the funds to
let go?” I snubbed the folly of
contemplated bravery to imbibe praying for the glory of chance encounters in the
sheathed shadow of New Orleans bars stuffed with ghosts.
Piss,
eat, shit, sleep, work. The Nottoway rural pubs had pickup trucks lining the block
and Brandine’s flopping out doorways.
The Nottoway stench hovered over my
clothing like I was a denizen of a stockyard splattered with mush-fed
antibodies. I was smothered by the
proximity of that which I was so ill-mated slathered with this bovine cologne.
I
was six and then thirty-six, the Oreo cream of this middle did not come with
the cookie. I am a fraud holding on to
the pant legs of loves. None approached
plainly in my direction requesting my patronage. I am absent friends. I realize the pittance sliver of significance
I hold in any of their lives. I am
naked, broken, and infinitely alone. Love
is an investment of our accumulated sum of choices funded into another. We trade lumps. My pile was a rancid egg; all the world had
to offer was chocolate and mint.
I
made my lump. I was and am addicted to
being alone. Alone is my crucible. Nottoway or New Orleans the beast will track me like
Dracula. I am Renfield gorging on
solitude like spiders. Ashley knew. Elyse grew to know, even if she could not
decipher why. Therapy was feckless.
Any
human relationship I will ever have threatens that. By the natural dynamics of pair bonding, my
lover becomes my adversary by standing between me and my addiction. I will thrash in protest to sabotage contact
to retain my solitude. It is an endless struggle
between the safety and pains of loneliness. My child is dead from this. I wronged Elyse from this. I damned my debate to an echo.
I act
like a threatened animal. If I spend too
much time with others I go through withdrawals.
I become angry, disgruntled, and combative. Alone is my drug. I tried to detoxify. I was not there yet. I did not want the pitfalls of my demons to
rope me in fear. Insomnia cackled at my
frailty.
582
I
thought about Howard Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences:
logical-mathematical, spatial, linguistic, bodily- kinesthetic, interpersonal,
intrapersonal, musical, and naturalistic.
I felt like a moron. I was
logical at times. I was mired in
intrapersonal sludge. Linguistically I
blabbered to myself fairly well. I gave
myself two out of eight. I was no
artist, no athlete, no musician, no hunter, and lowest of all no other human
being and I had ever seemed to understand each other. I am an idiot in a tiered cake of
stupidity. All I can do is choose to
accept or move towards better, no complaints.
583
I
became a cafeteria-Catholic on a hunger strike of the fast-food side-dish
accoutrements except for the main course bicep muscle meat that God exists
independent of this circus Golden Corral sideshow. I left even the lamb shank Jesus at the
serving table.
All
I put on my plate now is God as a simple raw steak tartare slab. I use no utensils, just my “what I have left
teeth” to sink into God’s sinew. Even on
March Fridays I sit nude in my dining room, ass follicles smashed against a
yellow chair with two hands on God’s flesh soaking in stares, sharing what I
can.
I
learned to love myself. Letting go was
loving me. The lens of Nottoway-land as
an Ashley proprietary stomping-ground ended.
That skeletal-view was no longer tattooed on my biceps and calves
transfiguring the support structure of my cadaver into flaccid painted
abrasions of dampened muscle soaked numb.
That was no death with dignity. I
choose to say these words, to be here for Penelope and to be here for me.
“I
love me here or anywhere,” and in that thought I found breathing holes for this
leopard seal. To ask any woman to love
this hydrurga without reserving my own oxygen supply was mutual suicide. I could not ask the Elyse’s of this world to
walk the minefield of my hypocrisies I would not traverse myself.
Amputate
these limbs if you have to, but these words are my stamping steps. I will not immolate into a cinder of disaster
alone. I will march because I am home in
this body, this soul of sinew and skin.
This flawed flesh-bag is my own impregnable kingdom. I am the magistrate of my own vindicated
autonomy. Hail, hail, I blow the wind
that avails these sails! Howl, howl,
how!
To Chapter 20
To Chapter 20
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