Chapter Fifteen – Olive Oil Spills

Chapter Fifteen – Olive Oil Spills

(Chapter Fifteen is spoken through the words of a second narrator, Shelly.  )

1

I was born Shelly Holloway in an olive oil slipping glistening home birth in 1978.  My mother Rachael Castellano was a thirty-four year veteran hailing from Charlotte and so I was born green-eyed within the same jurisdiction.  As in technicalities of femininity the egg that generated me was in my mother, which was in her mother on the day my mother was born.  Daughters are connected in such parades.

My father Albert Holloway was a tall man of good stock, standing six-foot four.  His parents Drew and Adeline were married forever and are now deceased.  He was a brother of two and a son of an English chef and an American waitress.  The Holloway kitchen plated three children.  Herman is an arrhythmic alcoholic insurance-salesman who among notable achievements has been married three times including cheating on his second wife after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.  Constance paired a second course as a sitcom Rosanne-Bar-looking adult education night school G.E.D. instructor.  Third and in no way regarded as dessert was my father. 

My dad managed the First Bank and Trust of Matthews North Carolina as a Duke Graduate funded through the G.I. bill.  His bipedal-operating structure was engineered with suitable stature to fend off wolves and other intermediate-sized mammalian predators.  I saw him as a paragon of confidence like a man that carried around his own pool cue.  He knew what to do and he was not afraid to advertise it.  Dad kept a Beretta in his nightstand and monitored the house in his dreams during my elementary evolution in constant vigilance against all potential and actual assailants.  His sperm although sacred by Catholic standards was processed for creation earlier in the day of my mitosis.

First through twelfth grades were spent in Charlotte pubic schooling at Matthews Elementary, Crestdale Middle and Providence High School in successive fashion:  Yellow Jacket, Lynx and Jaguar.  I was raised as the third of four Presbyterian children, two sisters and one brother.  The oldest to youngest consisted of Adele, Brooklyn, me and eventual champion carrier of the family name Alexander.

As with all families we were cast into roles on some random Monday after which the crucible of our identities were defined.  Adele was the nerd, Brooklyn the cosmopolitan artist, Alexander the trudging zombie and I was the somewhere in the middle.

I grew up in love with my Rainbow Brite-streamer bike, a yearning to play hide and seek and climb trees in high-heels, preferably as a pirate or as Jem.  I had a healthy competition to outsell Mary Alice Hennigan’s lemonade stand on Clover Street.  I adored my father’s Harley Davidson with his big V handlebars.  My father promised to let me drive the machine when I was old enough.  I was also fond of our camping trips spanning America from Wyoming, Montana, Arkansas, and Tennessee where I developed a sense of man’s place in nature.  

2

My dad was a fan of Kubrick, Dylan, Mozart and Fellini films.  At eight and a half, I decided I would rather make rules than follow them, so my father encouraged me to become a lawyer, rather than inhibit my sense of humorous delusions of grandeur.  At eleven my father took me to the opera to see Don Giovanni and it was most wonderful.  I was born feisty, bursting from most horse corrals during my impetuous years. 

My mother is a fan of Broadway.  Viva La Boheme and Madama Butterfly.  Puccini is her favorite.  We even visited Tuscany my junior year of High School, the Uffizi Gallery, the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, and visited Toree del Lago.  The wine was before my time.  I had my first saffron sauce.  The basil-based pesto, the spreck, down to the ribollita sparked my epicurean tendencies in my own kitchen today.

I have had demure red hair my entire life, no Clairol-numeric-coding with the exception of one brief high school social experiment.  I have natural auburn undertones and hues, easy to spot in a crowded train station at five-foot one.  I am always off to somewhere in my mind destined for philosophical conversations and inebriated acknowledgments.

My sister Adele lives out in Kansas, in a quest for an existential comprehension of wheat grains and grist ground down in the etymology of what it means to fall in love with a country-boy in college.  Adele Sullivan as she is now called, majored in botany and now works for ADM, saving America’s nutritional systems through 401k plan employment.

Adele became obsessed with bees and would routinely stop strangers in the supermarket, gas station or church to inform them that seventy out of one hundred of our foods involve pollination.  Adele was fascinated by permaculture.  Adele would say, “Einstein gave us four years of inhabitation of Earth without bees.  No bees, plants, animals, humans.”

Brooklyn is a dancer in New York, proficient in her sissonne’s and echappe’s across the stage.  I use to tease Brooklyn that Dad fingerprinted her to end up there with her name from her recitals growing up.  Brooklyn was into painting, but always relished movements.  Brooklyn lives alone with her Pomeranian, Betsy on the west-side of the city.  She skipped formal institutional instruction for try outs and ekes an existence as a rent-supplementing barista with her room mate.

Andrew is in Tutwiler prison down in Wetumpka, Alabama.  Andrew took a knife to the face of his fiancée and his son Jeremy.  Andrew only avoided murder charges based on the location of a toaster within reaching distance of his ex Lisa’s flails to convert the bagel-heating device into a Billy-club.  The assault landed Andrew in the system for attempted murder in year eight of an initially-decreed decade sentence.

Knife skill ran in the family, my great-grandfather Constantine was a left-handed butcher who got his dominant arm amputated to a nub fighting for Italy in World War One.  Constantine came home to Gavorrano feeble and an inadequate cripple, incapable of being a manly provider.  Replacement limbs were not affordable or available for on an unemployed butcher’s HMO of the day and to my mother’s recollection, the disability led to a career in crime and public destitution including multiple arrests for public urination. 

I love my family and without them I would probably be either horribly depressed or exuberantly and blissfully ignorant to all their trappings and histories molding me into this black-swan attempt of a woman growing from Barbie castles, through elementary and however I got to now.

3

During eighth grade I challenged myself to wear at least one orange article of clothing or accessory to my wardrobe everyday of the year.  I accomplished said goal and have the collection of baubles, hair clips, socks and sweaters to show for the campaign. 

Although, I do not care much for the color today.  Blue swindled my attention to my mother’s homeland with Italy’s 2006 World Cup victory.  Azurri!  I was pondering a proposal from Gianluigi Buffon, but alas Alena Sredova can suck it.  I just thought about Gianluigi while I was making love to my boyfriend Holden at the time. 

In high school, I was assumed popular.  I talked to all the circles, smiled and befriended more people than friends.  The ambitious scholastic-hyperopic visionaries, the marijuana-farmer marketers, the cunts with the snob complexes training to be manipulative wenches, the flop it on the table and measure jocks, the sparrows of idle rumor tweeting in pre-tweet byways with beaks full of gossip and the handful of people who actually knew me.  I got around and kept my vagina to myself.

My box of crayon friends: Charles was into Dudgeons and Dragons and playing guitar like Kurt Cobain.  We made out in his father’s LeBaron junior year.  Veronica was into Kavu handbags and mountain biking.  We went on treks in the spring and whitewater kayaking when the water was up.  Jacob was a backup wide-out on the football team and milked this one touchdown catch against South Mecklenburg into getting drunk and having sex with Bridget McGovern who Jacob had a crush on since fifth grade. 

I no longer talked to this asshole Zeke after he made a VHS video at an end of junior year party of this misunderstood kid ass-crack naked sitting at a desk doing impressions of our sixty year old female English teacher.  That shit went viral in conversations and selected VCR viewings in pre iPhone, you-tube days. 

Sharon Proust was a blunt-tree sort of girl in the lower percentiles of attractiveness and intelligence.  Physically Sharon resembled Chief from Kesey’s Cuckoos Nest if Chief wore too much rouge and eye shadow, but still kept quite.  Sharon had that plank-walk angular incline of feminine-tallness that relegated her to such imprinted status as future prison guard or WNBA-prototype absent the coordination or inclination to actually enter or dominate such lesbian bastions.  We would talk at lunch about Sharon’s obsession with Eddie Vedder, horticulture, and Cosmopolitan magazine’s latest advice testimonials.

4

The high school hallways were always over-filled goldfish bowls to me.  Everybody was trying to simultaneously show off and hide in the swarm.  The ammonia emitted got toxic after a while and so many faces just blurred. 

I was a stealth sardonic member of the debate team.  I enjoyed the point counter-point and was naïve and outspoken like a sophomore Erin Brockovich absent the dyslexia.  Whenever I was nervous I would get flippant in a thesaurus Montgomery Burns condescending-way by uttering vociferous quips like, “Your indolence is inefficacious,” when describing my opponents preparatory skills.  I died my hair brunette, from my typical red to appear more poignantly-pedantic for my junior-year debate tourney.

I also made the cheerleading squad and resigned due to political differences in a grandstand against female on female bullshit when Mike Dinton “accidently” tried to finger my crotch on lifts for the third time at practice and none of the other girls believed me or backed me up.  I also questioned the pragmatism of cheer spelling.  So that career was short-lived.  Dinton is now a city councilman.

I played field hockey for two seasons.  I was not a prodigious flicker or scorer, more of a role player specializing in coordinated socks with rogue hair accessories to assert a small sense of style in my pre-tattoo years.  I enjoyed the contact of playing fullback and earned my share of yellow cards. 

5

My best friend and first love was a guy named Adam Carmichael.  Adam was simple in the moments that had me fall and infuriating in the ones that had him break my teenage heart in unexplainable cravings for what was not.  My collar bone or pancreas or some seemingly one-hundred percent equity-owned organ or skeletal component, which was assumed mine was reluctantly found chained to Adam in a travesty of adolescent abduction staring at me from across trigonometry class.  Part of me hopes that we all remember our first loves; even if things end with some other girl in a green dress riding shotgun in a Dodge Charger.

Adam took me on dates to indie films and shows at the Belk and the Visulite Theaters to jump out suburbia.  Adam’s dad’s car always smelled like cigarettes and Old Spice, because Adam would cheese it on to cover up the ashtray smell, but I didn’t care.  Adam had short spiked black hair and a chin blunt like a George Washington quarter. 

Adam was sweet, but swollen in his biceps from working on his uncle’s horse farm.  Adam had a young man’s nature of reins and stirrups in the way a girl did not feel forced into a corner, but happily pursued leaping equestrian jumps in a classical dressage.  I did not know why, but I assumed his competence in the way I looked up to him.  I always felt safe, tended to, and cared for as much as any high school girl could, yet still me.

Adam and I were friends throughout school.  My senior year we started dating after homecoming.  Adam asked and we danced and dated our way through six months of into the night conversations and comingled friend revelry.  His Labrador Onyx no longer barked when I came into his parent’s living room.  In April some other girl went to prom with him, because Adam felt we had our number of moments and my count was up, graduation was approaching and college was divesting social lives like frogs in formaldehyde during Biology laboratory.

At prom in 1996, I danced with some dartboard boy who asked me.  I left in a summer of mismanaged agendas.  I worked as office-help at my father’s bank and waited to head off to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a half scholarship, half loan voyage.  As a Tarheel I walked the pathways of Silent Sam statues and Di or Phi clouding the background of my pre-law escapades of majoring in literature with Bronte, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, with a side-pocket for D.H. Lawrence.  The meal plan sucked.  Privacy was non existent.  I use to read on the benches in the quad to carve a moment to think. 

6

I had six sexual partners during the length of my matriculation, all of which I maintained a dearness for a duration longer than our days of shared space with the exception of two.  George Butler was a recalcitrant hirsute snot Anthropology major who never wanted to do his reading.  I learned a bit too late that George’s assumed guise of picking my brain for a lack of preparation for class was not just to spur a context of conversation.  George failed out that freshman semester and went back to his parents in New Haven. 

Samuel Joyce veiled into anonymity almost as soon as consummation took place in his Deeke fraternity house.  I was a stupid cliché and vowed to never feel like a used tampon again.  Bentley lasted four months until his affinity for Mormonism trumped my desire to forgo my sanity.  I believed in a God, just not his God and after a certain point preachy trumped six-foot two, two-hundred and ten and a broad-shouldered doctor-to-be smile. 

I met Isabel Arenal at a dance club.  Isabel was about five-foot ten from Colombia dressed in a sporty demurred-down subdued femininity.  Isabel was studying epidemiology on campus.  I was smitten for the evening.  The friends I came with caterpillar-marched off with drinks.  I sipped and slipped into a cocoon for a few weeks of something softer and different conversing in neutered grammar.  Isabel knew where to touch, but the daze was off in months.  I guess that makes me bisexual.  I have never been with another woman, but if I ever fell into the inclination I know there is a girl some where in Buenaventura who can do amazing things. 

Saul was a Senegal slave descendant from Biloxi.  Saul was a momma’s boy all the way with a voice like an oboe.  I could only take huddling him under my wing for so long, before it got irritating. 

Then there was Nathan who I met in law school.  Nathan was five-foot eleven, clean cut Mathew Modine-looking “part down the middle” brown hair with a type-A personality.  Nathan was the kind of guy that I rarely took interest, but his pursuit of me won my favor after spending time in a study group on constitutional law my second semester.

My retort was apparently flawed in my ability to overcome his blue eyes and well placed participles legislating common ground.  Nathan’s family was from Richmond.  His father managed a pharmaceutical company.  His mother was a rank and file at Dominion Resources.  Nathan was down to Earth, hedging that masculine plateau of enough to help me feel secure, but with a level rate of incline to not alienate the independent parts of my feminine nature to come across as arrogant.  Nathan was a natural born lawyer.

Nathan volunteered at a local soup kitchen once a month.  I started going with him on occasion.  I met this woman Gertrude who told me over Jello how she fled her apartment after her boyfriend stuck a gun in her face when his cocaine went “missing.”  The lady was a bit out of it and seemed to need some psychiatric care.  I felt sorry for her, but all I could really offer was an extra dinner roll.

Nathan was not a “just look at the box” kind of man.  Law school was so engrossing that studying was just as much of our relationship as afternoon sojourns on Nathan’s couch.  Nathan and I were each other’s relief from the pressure of the system.  Nathan loved the Simpsons, impromptu games of Frisbee in the quad and discussing random intellectual precipices as God, the Beatles, and George Carlin jokes.  I loved manufacturing my own time to relax eschewing Dickens for brain-dead TLC television programming about wedding, baby, teenage drama stories or somebody else’s life I never saw or was not ready to commence.

7

First year of the Juris doctorate program was sort of like high school.  All my classes were chosen for me, with the same courses with the same people in the same building.  We had lockers and lunch cohabitating an environment well positioned to develop a stat sheet of student strengths and weaknesses to steal and exploit.

Law school was a battle of insects dwelling in the same mound capable of morphing castes depending on the success of individuals asserting themselves in value to the group’s instructor.  No one knew where they stood until the semester was already over.  Unlike undergrad, my entire grade was dependent on a final examination, which was graded anonymously.  So even the most elucidated argumentative thesis-points annotated, untangled and bravely presented in a paper essay were still potentially subject to a side-rail formality of political name-bias as to require absolute anonymity.

Every class, every semester was taking notes, then outlining notes, followed by study, study, study, erupting in a Vesuvius three-hour exam.  Some professors allowed you to bring your notes to the exam, others did not.  Organizing was paramount, prepare or perish education.  Law school professors used the Socratic Method.  The ant kings and queens called on drones to summarize a case we were supposed to have read the night before.  The targets were then peppered with bullet questions to gauge our ability to reason facts and circumstances.  This dogmatic axiom of law school life was intended to teach us to think, breath, and gestate through a pubescent awakening of the lawyer inside or abort our own tragic failure in trying.

Most of the first semester stress was waiting to get called on in each class. Sometimes there was “legal writing.”  Some arthropods camped out outside the professor’s office trying to get him to divulge if the attempted assignment was “right” before submission.

Due to the vice-grip three-hundred and sixty degree pressure environment, subgroups on this legal savannah evolved.  Gunners were the grades at any cost types.  Gunners always had their hands raised to answer questions.  Gunners tended not to study in groups, because they did not want to share their knowledge like Pollyanna smile-to-your-face Gollum’s underneath.  Gunners attempted to subvert the curve with their precious self-attained knowledge.  As if anything, anyone has ever thought of is truly novel.

Most of us thought the gunners could go fuck a chipmunk.  The rest of the happy hobbits in the Shire figured that it was easier to ignore the fact that the classes graded on a curve and help our fellow denizens.  We stuck our heads in the sand of a vision of pastoral law school bucolic life.  School was more pleasant converting potential enemies into allies.  That was how Nathan and I became so close, all the studying.

I remember thinking prior to my first semester of law school my father gave me advice on the cutthroat nature of the process.  I read these law school idiot’s guides to law courses” which just amped up the anxiety on torts, contracts and civil procedures.  A lot of people told me things like, “just what the world needs another lawyer.”  This only bothered me when a tattoo artist said it, while I was getting my Auryn symbol from the Never Ending Story inked on my upper arm.

Nathan and I would get together with random rotations of other students sometimes all day until eleven at night devouring old examinations, wrangling and caviling responses to the seventh degree of neurotic dissection.  I usually felt like a five-year-old trying to explain how electricity works.

Exams were a “turn over the trash can and shake the bottom out” brain-dump.  After the egg timer demanded pencils-down and the last respiration for potential knowledge harvesting was completed, the pandemic panic-attacks set in across the student populace.  All the kernels of factoids and nugget datum that were left plastered to the spider web corners of a cranium and unable to be ejected in written test material were incessantly over analyzed.  The self-flagellation began even for the atheists in the room. 

The demarcation in who tested well and who did not was entrenched early.  We were all ranked.  I made it out alive, but I understood why nobody trusts a lawyer.  Nathan and I were able to work together under pressure.  We rotated on who was the better student and miraculously our urge to survive out bid the call to out do each other, sort of like the early weeks of Survivor.

8

My dad died my second year of law school.  I was completely devastated, stumped to a centimeter-high staring up at the world in a land of giants.  I spent a whole week just listening to the arias from Don Giovanni, and it only made me miss him more.

My father was a young sixty-one, half of something else.  My mother Rachael was a bed sheet tearing in front of the entire family for a series-seam of years.  The middle of the mattress was cleared.  All my mother wanted was her left side by the bathroom door. 

My father Albert was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer my freshman year of college in a single tumor.  He had treatment for this predominant feminine scythe of Damocles that arrested the issue to a corporate-determined resolution in 1997.  The health insurance company denied his claim for a PET scan.  Aromatase inhibitors were non-applicable.  Chances are what could be done was done.  My dad was not too proud to wear pink-shirt protocols. 

I remember going to the hospital to visit my dad.  He tried to make everyone else feel better, even his roommate.  My father’s roommate James was a kid who battering-rammed a piece of lumber sticking out the back of a parked pickup truck into his forehead while he was riding his bike on the sidewalk.  Inches of differences: the wood could have hit James’ eyes balls.  James could have gotten lucky and been smashed in the mouth and only lost his teeth.  God could have made James taller and been close-lined in the throat and died with a crushed trachea.  James was somewhere in the middle with a cracked skull and still under tests for brain damage. 

My mother tried to help my father through the bureaucracies of modern cancer remission.  Appointments, phone calls to figure out what percentage of coverage based on negotiated deductible sub-procedure classes computed when balancing a checkbook and series of reminiscent sunsets. 

Brooklyn had a scare with leukemia when she was six.  Brooklyn had bruises on her legs that would not seem to go away.  My mother took Brooklyn through the stages of blood drawings only to find out pondered leukemia was just an allergy causing inner ear problems that were disrupting my sister’s balance.  Supplements and a year solved the falls causing the bruises.  Bone marrow got to stay buried.

For my father six years later the cancer spread.  Blood tests and low costs scans did not detect the infiltration until a lump in his neck erupted in a face-shaving recognition where the razor surface rover rode a convex lunar hill alongside the nape.  A biopsy and an argued-for Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scan that Blue Cross still did not want to order recognized my father’s true death. 

My dad, Albert, never smoked.  The cancer was like a transit system through his chest and lungs.  The drugs were thousands of dollars a month and in the end the threshold of what was not covered over what was impoverished my parents.  “We can’t help you.  Payment denied,” filled the mailbox.  Funeral on and dad was gone.  Alexander never even got to say goodbye.

The funeral was on a Monday.  Everybody flew or drove into Charlotte.  Mom made dad’s favorite eggplant parmesan with the tears in the sauce.  Uncle Herman was there with his new wife and Aunt Connie, as we called her, was there with her date Jonathan Smithers.  Brooklyn set a painting she created next to the casket.  Adele and her clan helped my mother with many of the logistics: the calls, the finances, everything, but the eggplant.

Brooklyn painted my dad a portrait before he died of her and him at one of Brooklyn’s first dance recitals growing up.  Brooklyn was so upset, because she fell.  My parents did not know it was the allergies masked as something darker.  Brooklyn painted a picture of her and our father sitting with Brooklyn on his knee on the side-stage of that recital hall keeping her going.  The painting hung in the hospital cheering our dad on and now keeps my mother company on the left side of her bedroom.

9

Getting back into the rhythm of law school was arduous, perilous in the wavering question of, “What did I want for me?”  My father was such an inspiration, a conduit to propel me to be my achiever-self, my follow the rules and life will abide and provide student-self.  Life did not seem so accommodating in that interim.  Nathan was there.  We grew closer, almost prematurely-comfortable accelerated by the departure of the masculine gravitational force in my consciousness.  I focused on business associations, income tax, secured transactions, trusts and estates.

I was not pushing forward for him, but I knew my father saw me.  When I prayed sometimes I felt like my father was closer to me deceased than when he was alive in some other bedroom some number of miles away occupied by life’s other financial allocations.  I felt like in whatever division of heaven that his soul imparted to reside, it was capable of universal attention to all of us.  Not that my dad did not think or love his children or his wife while living, but now maybe he had the freedom to let the senseless complications of rudimentary biological and monetary survival flitter to a dust of nothing and could relish us whenever and however much his purview desired.  That thought, that what if, made me smile.  Maybe I was not quite so alone.

I made it to my third year of law school.  I did an externship for a federal judge and my rigorous writing.  I studied family law and trial advocacy.  I volunteered at a hospice, but the time and the emotional memories made it hard.  Nathan even offered to come to make the experiences more palatable, but it was something I needed to try to do for myself. 

10

A few weeks before the end of our last semester in 2003, Nathan and I went out to a French Brassiere with escargot and cassoulet with perfect wine pairings.  The crackle in the bread was exquisite as a back tickle.  The mood was set to a candle’s glow and a wilting wick like the time right on the verge of a kiss.  We walked over to Nathan’s friend Jerald’s gallery a few blocks from the restaurant, which was having a private showing.  Nathan held my arm step in step.  We talked about the time we went fishing up in Virginia and could not catch a thing.  We laughed about the phantom trout and cuddled by the fire at his parent’s cabin. 

The gallery held wine tastings every Saturday night.  There was a group of Kandinsky-looking abstract-style paintings mixed in the rows of the Melberg Gallery.  Second from the rear of the building was a piece behind a curtain with a small throng of high-heels and wing-tips clinging moscatos and chardonnays.  Gerald came out and announced a new artist was here tonight to present his piece.  The curtain moved and behind it was a cerulean blue background with swirls of yellow, green and violet mixed in a pedestrian abstract-style, but in the lower right hand corner were orange letters, “Will you marry me Shelly?”

My heart sank.  Nathan got down on a single knee in his original interrogative platinum-banded diamond in hand.  My eyes started to tear.  I took Nathan’s hands up to my chest as Nathan’s question towered over me.  I whispered in Nathan’s ear, afraid to crack his life like an ice-house disbursement thrust into a vampire-sun.  All that should be rightly affirmed was not temperate for the fruition Nathan envisioned. 

I was not ready.  Nathan was.  I was not in love.  I know he was. I wanted my lifetime to grow.  Nathan wanted to move to Dallas where he had this great job offer.  Monetary support structures aside, there was a part of me that knew we were not right for each other.  Nathan was type-A and I was type-B or J or L or something other.  Law school had assured me of the slotting. 

I could not say yes.  So we stepped outside.  I broke his heart in solitude.  A cracked egg yolk on the side of the street, we walked back to Nathan’s car together.  There is no going back when one person pushes an all-in love and the other rejects the baton.  I cried  for him, for me, for what I knew would be naïve to please Nathan and bet that I would feel differently in some other stack of months or years. 

11

After graduation, I got a job at Moore and Van Allen as a first year in Charlotte.  Nathan moved to work in Dallas at Haynes and Boone.  Nathan asked me to go with him, to take a step backwards in time, but I was not in love.  Nathan wanted to build this life, but I had to preserve my sovereignty.

I moved back to Charlotte and set up my little two-bedroom apartment and dreamed of my favorite things satin sheets, wood floors, rafter ceilings and an aloof loan officer to accidently obliterate my no longer deferred collegiate debt.  This was my first place.  I had an iron mountain of one hundred and thirteen grand of post law school debt.  The admissions departments did not highlight that enough in the brochures.  The bar tab for the inebriated litigators sot for indentured servitude.  I was Salle Mae’s bitch, over-educated and spinning gold on a wheel in a thirty-five story building for hours and hours deposited into a bottomless stomach of a piggy bank for my employer and the Rumpelstiltskin financiers.

I decorated my apartment in fill-in slits of time.  I got crimson red paint on my pants in a few all-night roller sprees.  I was forgoing sleep and other pursuits for my job.  No relationships were contemplated just writing, research and billable hours checked in six minute tracked-units.

This guy Otto in my office asked me out, but I turned down the date because the palindrome asking finished his sentence with a preposition.  I was not a grammar lunatic, but I sometimes carried a red Sharpie to correct public signage and mourned proper punctuation and grammar.  Besides I was not ready.  I liked to make up excuses to bide the hours, but I knew I needed the space to get over Nathan and own my choice.  My time was so precious.  I guess I could use my woman’s prerogative to be fastidiously persnickety about my social adventures.  If I was going to try to hurdle such metamorphic expanses I wanted someone who would pay attention to details. 

Work was like cage-diving with sharks.  I could see all the movements and the circling reactions in this big corporate law firm full of elevator-cart-moved paper, Lexus Nexus research and partners who billed out my monthly take-home pay in a lunch hour and a tee time.  Cases dragged.  The firm advanced cash to plaintiffs pilling up hours and hours for inevitable settlement payday windfalls.  We were like oil prospectors researching hidden salt mounds on the ocean floor for probable reserves beneath, but instead of being engineers probing petroleum-indicator sodium chloride deposits we were sniffing for exploitable fact patterns for financial payout reservoirs warranting our drill-bit neck ties and power-shaft suits. 

12

Sometimes I escaped to a spinning class at a twenty-four hour fitness center a few blocks from my apartment.  I worked up a sweat to raise my heart rate.  I pushed the endorphins of all the frustrations and pent-up competitions of the office into beads trickling down my forehead and pulses through my thighs in minor victories to expel the inevitable toxins of corporate litigation.  I often would remind myself to be thankful for having one of these lotto-salary jobs.  I knew quite a few of my class mates were clerking at Best Buy and Home Depot or back with their parents.  Stairmasters were a small sacrifice.

On June 21, 2004, just before sundown on a Monday I left the fitness center parking lot.  I saw a roaming traffic panoramic-picture pass from right to left in front of me.  The road was a divided four-lane highway with a turning lane in the middle.  I was waiting to turn left to head west into the setting sun.  Leading the pack of vehicles from the east was an easy rider long-handled chopper with his arms up in a V.  The bearded Vietnam-vet-looking man straddled forward obeying the speed limit wearing a no-barred helmet.  He was the eagle-jacketed image of a scarred-up American white man.  The biker and a Range Rover SUV passed as I pulled out behind the pair. 

A spruce-green Mercury Grand Marquis was ahead in the median bearing an AARP bumper sticker and a handicapped tag.  The Marquis pulled out of the median into the left lane in front of the biker as if the biker’s metal frame were empty air.  The biker pirouetted one hundred and eighty degrees on his seat and unfurled a middle finger flag in the middle of the road to the oblivious olds. 

To side saddle the passenger seat window of the Marquis the biker jutted abruptly to the right to avoid contact.  As the Peter Fonda stunt man adjusted his route the Range Rover in trail position merged in an over correction to the right as well.  I slammed on my breaks to avoid the cataclysm. 

A twenty-something man was walking on the conservative side of the highway in a Duke T-shirt into the sun.  I saw the glint of the Prussian blue in a flash as the wild-rover plowed him over smashing the SUV into a guard rail.  The S.U.V. driver was a lawyer, Joy Wilkinson from our firm and a mother of one with a car seat not-fully latched in a three-point harness.  The seat dislodged and the sixth-month-old child was killed on impact.  The twenty-two-year-old pedestrian was a visitor to Charlotte, in town for a comic convention walking alone.

The sirens came.  The mother was distraught, shocked into a panic of ineffectual action.  The child was a lost cause, soft of skull and incapable of repair.  The Wolverine-fanboy was a student at Duke, just starting his MBA.  I called 911, got out and saw the bodies, the olds continuing to drive off into the sunset, before eventually pulling over.  The pack behind was gathering, the lights were going down.  I ran over to the body of the X-man.

The guy was only a few years younger than me struggling to breathe with crushed bones and probably a mashed potato bag of internal organs.  His mangled body was flung like a gum wrapper down with the assorted cigarette butts, ant hills and grass clippings of the roadside. 

 13

I knew he did not have much time.  I brushed my hand in an s curve around the side of his face and blocked the sun with my back from beating down on him.  I held his hand and he said, “Tell Sidney I love her.”  I told him, “I hear you.”  I vowed I would find some way.  I crouched there with him until the paramedics arrived.  I later found out the guy was Ezra Bingham. 

Joy was screaming clutching her daughter about ten yards away.  I remember looking over and seeing red-smeared blood on her suit pants.  Before I could help her the paramedics did.  Joy was jetted off to Mercy hospital while I was left to talk things out with the police.

I put the eventual resulting facts together from what I saw, conversations with the authorities, talking to Joy a few weeks later, and watching the news reports.  I was also called into to testify later on and met the Bingham family who told me about their son before the depositions.

On the night of the accident Ezra’s parents were called and conversations were made based on the heart organ donor sticker on his license.  The Bible-belted father wanted the shell of his son flown back to his home in St. Petersburg, Florida in tact.  He relinquished to the will of a wallet-declaration of independent bodily tissues.  His son was dissected like a formaldehyde frog.  Random lives were saved and his was destroyed.  Mr. Bingham wanted to barter with God and trade places, a rejuvenation of justice of unbreakable bones to give his son, but there were none.

Normally such donations were anonymous, but given the severity and tragedy of the accident making the news, timing of lives saved and word disseminating at the local hospitals.  Top of the waiting list candidates of similar size and blood type were patted on the shoulder with that graceful reprieve: one heart, two pancreas, three liver and four lungs.  Edward Carter a black grandfather of two, Jonathon Durden a white father of one, Haitham Kahlil, a Saudi father of none, and Brandy Hollings a daughter of two. 

In the coming weeks through the use of motivated local journalists, insurance company legal obstacles were bypassed in the name of better press.  A reunion was called.  All the faces met the parents of Ezra Bingham, a twenty-two year old black kid from St. Petersburg Florida first in his family to college, no longer enrolled at Duke.

The Bingham’s came.  All they had to take in were words of “I love your son.”  They invited me to come and share in the day.  I saw the clouds of survivor’s guilt whip around the room over those who lived from the man who died.  They posed a photograph.  I imagined the mantles in each of their parallel homes of such a random savior son missing from the photograph in God’s apparent plan for their congregation. 

Joy Wilkinson and the olds were sued.  I had to testify in court.  What this came down to was, “How do you throw an eighty-year-old grandmother in jail for having the wrong sticker on her license?  How much is her independence worth against all these un-intentions?  Who is going to want her flesh-bag organs now?  What generation pays for the generosity of her freedom?” 

Joy’s life was confined into a walking coffin.  She took a hiatus from work for six months.  I tried to keep in touch and let Joy know I was available to talk if she wanted to, but we only spoke once.  That is when Joy told me about the car seat after the trial.  How does anyone know what it feels like to know you basically killed your daughter?  Maybe Joy was in a rush.  Was she punished enough?  Joy ended up getting divorced and moved to San Diego.

14

I got a phone call from my mother.  Alexander killed a man in prison, manslaughter.  Alexander was probably facing some approximate life sentence.  Legally my degree was about as helpful as praying to a Blue Cross.  From Alexander’s account it was either the other guy or the Holloway family name going down.  The mortally opposed was in on a marijuana distribution charge fronting for a gang.  The confrontation created an impossible to de-escalate and maintain-face equation.  Alexander deserved punishment, but this was one rooster attempting to assert a sense of permanence in a human cock-fighting pit.  

I was not working in criminal law, but I studied and had been around Alexander enough to know sometimes people fall off the edge.  My brother had run away from home three times.  There were no sewer pipes to escape through in Tutwiler prison.  Alexander was trying to work back towards a post-prison life; and flushed it away in the wrong fifteen minutes.

I read this anonymous blog on the internet, about all sorts of stuff.  The guy could have at least put up a Kierkegaard-pseudonym.  I thought the writer made some points, but some of his or her stuff was pie-in-the-sky naïve rambling.  At least the part on prison systems seemed to talk about a humanism I could relate.

Alexander was not headed-off to anywhere, but the same facility for an additional bullet clip of hour-dispensed years.  I went to visit Alexander, but nothing was ever the same.  Alexander was a two-x crossed over the eyes dead-troll man stumping alive in a purgatory with no hand to hold.  Alexander did not want to see any of us, just to be left alone cantankerous and ingrained as a might-as-well murderer. 

15

I spent the next few years focusing on civil litigation work and perfecting the perfect courtroom presence and matador mentality to make my monthly loan and rent payments.  Appearances were prioritized.  My priority appeared to be work and to manufacture a secondary social life with whatever was left.  I rode work like a panacea mail-order vibrator to keep me company.  The toil in the mine hummed with faulty logic, but I was building for other days by bypassing my God-given ovary eggs for research skills and well-oiled scrambled briefs. 

I tried a few side hobbies.  I was a vegetarian for six months.  Vegetables are still a predominant component of my diet.  I made friends with chickpeas and a vitamin supplement corresponding legume and vegetable chart that I kept on my fridge.  When I later watched, “Food Inc.” in 2008 and “Fast Food Nation,” the films opened my eyes a bit more.  I shop for my local fruits and veggies whenever I can. 

I got an old-school Polaroid camera and took pictures with a random stranger every day for a month.  I made a collage for my bathroom wall.  My favorite was a guy in a trench coat that reminded me of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.  I was a tad timid he might have been a flasher given the initial get-up, but I was the one asking random strangers if I could pose.  I guess that is one of the benefit’s of being female.  The guy is always assumed to be the creepy one.

I always had a soft spot for those 1940-era black and white classic movies like Casablanca, Notorious, Citizen Kane, and Mildred Pierce.  Bogart, Grant, Bergman: the images escaped to anywhere before color came and bled these page-turner people into just other “could be anybody you and me’s.”  These hobbies became my make-believe social life because I did not have time to dedicate to anybody real.

16

During the summer of 2005, I wrote fictional stories about people needing emotional saving.  I stowed the imagined adventures in message bottles and left the canisters in public places.  I wrote sarcastic tales of a recurring character who was physically trapped by a sexually-harassing female boss named Marcia.  I had a man launder money at video rental stores for the mafia.  Letters were random like how to make vegan burritos or hang sheetrock.  I wrote whatever I found interesting on the internet.  I would learn something new and share the words with little expectation of a response.

I enjoyed the weirdness.  The pleas were always vague and referenced my post office box as a return address.  Occasionally I got flippant, “What the fuck, are you serious responses?”  Others would be heart felt and try to make me feel better.  My social experimentation was a hybrid ruse-advice column.  I enjoyed the randomness of who would choose to stop and intersect paths.

I wrote a letter about turtle shell growth patterns.  A University of Maryland graduate found it.  She could not get over the destiny of being a Terrapin and also having red-eared sliders as her only pets in her one-bedroom apartment.  The lady’s name was Marie.  Marie went on about how she had just got a role as Cecily in “The Importance of Being Earnest.”  Marie wrote back with all sorts of questions asking for further advice as if the letter was destiny and I was Saraswati.

17

That August Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.  I started to rethink my life.  After six months of deliberation and a few letter bottles left around Charlotte I decided to move to New Orleans when everybody else appeared to be moving out.  I took a job with Adams and Reese, a law firm on the Mississippi River. 

I volunteered to do legal aid work with AmeriCorps and the New Orleans Pro Bono Project on the side Adams and Reese helped me split my schedule to make the logistics work along with other attorneys in the office. 

Everybody was in insurance, FEMA, medical care, and housing hell.  I helped file claims and listened.  Bankruptcy paperwork, that comes with ten feet of water sucks. 

Everybody I worked with or came across in New Orleans was so resilient.  People were happy to be heard, to share their stories and have somebody optionally listen and care even if there was little that could be done about distraught insanity rowing amuck half a year later. 

18

After the storm people were in survival mode.  I heard stories about people with weapons kicking in doors to loot food, electronics, or drugs.  The jail was in revolt to get prisoners out in a disorganized lost school bus Diaspora clogged on the elevated interstate.  We took a few cases of people arrested on petty offences that got mixed in with prisoners charged with murderer for weeks, because the police could not get anything sorted.

I was not there.  I did not know what to believe or if sometimes I wanted the more fantastical version to be true or not.  Drug addicts and psychiatric patients with disrupted-fixers morphed into roving zombies.  Navy seals popped up from flooded streets to take out renegade crazies that had lost all trust in humanity or the system in a matter of days. 

People were hunkered down and twitchy eating family pets and contemplating neighbors.  Other people refused to evacuate at the risk of being forced to leave their dogs behind.  NOPD looted Sewell Cadillac downtown and left the rest for the public.  The Superdome and Convention Center toilets backed up and the stench fermented into Kevin Smith-shit-Dogma monsters and paraded down Canal Street.  There was a 20,000 member herd of mostly African humanity amassing at I-10 and Causeway for a week with no place to go.  Humans were stranded in the sun like a migration at an impasse to get through a river of crocodilians. 

There were heaps of exaggeration, rampant with hyperbole and fear.  What do you say when you have lost everything?  What does anybody believe?  Does it matter what really happened or what got cut on the editing room floor? 

New Orleans was a place of faith.  Faith was a prerequisite for rationalized persistence.  I think that is why I loved being there.  Life was not simple or cookie cutter, but alive.  I think I owed my father to make a bigger difference than my Charlotte life.

19

In the spring of 2006, I was out at Lucy’s, a bar near my apartment downtown, and met a guy named Holden Guthrie.  Holden was a contractor in town from Austin, fixing roofs and gutting houses.  Holden bought me a vodka tonic and a seat under midnight shadows.  Holden was quiet, to his self and all together handsome, clean-cut with callused hands tenured with two-by-fours and blunt tools. 

Holden and I went on three dates, not counting our initial meeting: Rock and Bowl, Tipitinas, and a barbeque in the courtyard of his apartment.  We had sex while the briquettes were still glowing with the magnolia air pouring in filtered in the one time of the year New Orleans had a breeze. 

I was half in-love and half-knowing things were not going to work out.  I wanted to imagine they would, but Holden was haunted by his stories from Austin, who he was and was not.  We dated for four months and I finally had to call quits. 

A year and a half before, Holden’s pregnant wife of five months died in a small plane crash flying to Montana to visit her in laws.  Holden stayed home half for work and half for a Longhorns game.  The child was six weeks along.  A year after the crash Holden had to get out of Austin.  He was not expecting to meet me.  Our time was beautiful and I think cathartic for Holden, but there was a detachment that lurked in Holden that would always prevent us from affirming a next step until he had more time to emote over the surface to cauterize the wound. 

The recycled conversation would come up in hovering contexts: a drink order, a bicycler passing the road, a news blurb about surfers, the bass pluck of a Johnny Cash song.  These little slips twitched his recollections to a three o’clock shadow across his face that was obvious when it occurred.  Contemplating living with such a predictable sundial-of-melancholy from a comparison angel was intimidating. 

I could only imagine Holden’s yearnings and pains.  Holden played them down, acting tough, man-like.  Holden never knew the gender of his unborn.  I think Holden was hoping for a little girl to name Sue like the song.  I miss Holden sometimes.

20

That summer my apartment swarmed with Formosan termites.  Little winged-buggers crawled through the sills in globs of black-beating thorax-pulsing air.  Formosans were not like Australian or African mound termites.  Odonto’s built open chimneys or vent holes.  Macrotermitinae lived in a completely enclosed world of workers and soldiers spitting black corrosive salvia. 

Tunnels and caverns of life were sequestered to the reproductives.  Formosans are subterranean termites dividing labor amongst castes like their African brethren.  At least New Orleans could have wooden telephone poles.  I had an infestation in my walls, which buried down underneath who knows how deep.  I moved out and left the hole to the land lord.  I guess worrying about the paint color rather than what was behind the sheetrock was one of the benefits of renting.  Between the New Orleans cockroaches and the termites I still get freaked out when I see anything crawling on the counter.

21

Adele called me from Kansas, “Did you hear about Aunt Constance?”  That form of Adele’s question lead to all these what could be’s: cancer, a late life pregnancy, lottery win.  Aunt Constance was divorced with two sons.  The oldest Marcus was at the University of Pittsburgh.  The youngest Jacque was still in high school in Charlotte.  Marcus and Jacque’s father Joel was ushered out of our family slide-shows about four years ago after a mutiny of affair accusations with bloodlines painting the sand for Joel’s departure. 

“Aunt Constance is gone.  Jacque is with mom.  Aunt Connie is in Gainesville,” Adele emitted.  “What the hell?” I sputtered.  “Apparently after talking with mom and sorting stuff out over the next couple of weeks.  Aunt Connie had been having a relationship with that guy Jonathan for several years, probably going back to when she was married to Uncle Joel.  Aunt Connie decided to leave Jacque behind and run off with Jonathan. 

Jonathan was now Janice according to what Aunt Connie told mom.  He was dressing all six-foot whatever of him as a woman.  I did not know what surgeries were coming.  I did not know what the fuck was going on, but Marcus and Jacque needed our help.  Aunt Constance was telling everybody, “This is my new life and if you don’t accept it you are out of my life.”

This was my Godmother.  We were not close.  I remembered flashes of how we rallied to Aunt Connie’s side during the divorce and railroaded Uncle Joel out of town.  I imagined images of this transgendered Jonathan man conversing with Aunt Connie about making the bottom match the top.  Maybe they conversed about eye shadow application tips since Aunt Connie use to sell Avon cosmetics. 

Jacque sat up in Charlotte working on sophomore biology experiments.  I did not know what to do.  I phoned Jacque a couple of times, but my life was in New Orleans now.  What do you tell a kid in that situation?  My dad would have known what to say.

22

Winter of 2007, I entrenched in work.  I was volunteering, but I was also involved in a class-action suit over a leaking-chemical train derailment.  The case was five years old.  I was reinforcements for the never-ending appeals battalion defending the railroad.  I felt like I was working for Taggart Transcontinental.  The other end of my days were spent following up with State Farm, Allstate and the City of New Orleans to help people get their houses fixed or lives salvaged two years post Katrina.

23

Another one of my clients had her mobility destroyed by a cement mixing truck.  The concrete plow-beast rear-ended her on interstate ten heading out to the airport to fly to Paris.  The woman became a paraplegic.  Her passenger riding shotgun walked away. 

The story reminded me of a childhood camping accident I was in with my dad and my own gratitude for alternative outcomes.  Our truck smashed into a deer.  I was knocked unconscious and ended up ok.  I am pretty sure the deer died.  I always felt bad about the death because the collision was my fault. 

I was talking my dad’s ear off about Susie Cummings at school and how Susie liked everything I liked.  Susie kept copying me.  I was so into my own little world that I grabbed my dad’s arm, posing the question, “Can you believe that dad?”  My father glanced in a gravitational shift towards my words.  We must have smashed into the deer. 

My client was in her own veiled Frida Kahlo-painted body cast for weeks.  Now she can not even use the bathroom or wash herself.  That truck driver pillaged her dignity.  I guess I am glad that deer was not some kid running for his football from his campsite.

24

My father’s parents passed away in the February and March of 2008.  My grandmother Adeline went first.  My grandfather Drew careened twenty-nine days later.  They were wealthy from my grandfather’s tobacco business.  The couple held every material possession a family could want by the time my father and his siblings were fully grown, home, vehicles, and health insurance.  The last twenty years that I knew of my grandmother’s life she went off the reservation with no real disease but a deteriorating Swiss cheese of a brain from prescription drug use.  My grandmother Adeline had given up the practice of her Catholic religion, but not the condescension of condemnation of others claiming to be too weak or in pain to go to mass over the last fifteen years, prompting my grandfather to venture alone dedicated to the cause. 

My grandmother was on a variety snack-pack of pain killers she kept in daily Ziploc trail-mix baggies, none of which included the Eucharist.  Adeline was lucky to recall limiting intake to once a day.  My grandfather’s intervention was her only hope for commercially-dispensed sanity.  According to Adeline she had not slept in thirty years.  The thin-frame-exoskeleton survived on a diet of orange dreamcicles and Ensure. 

Adeline was in and out of nursing homes over the last decade constantly claiming recovery.  In-home nurses were hired to use up my grandparent’s savings in order to be fully-impoverished at the finish line.  They paid around $7,000 a month just for her in the last few on top of the insurance.

Over the years my grandfather cycled through at least five motor home purchases and return of purchases a few years later, which were barely if ever used.  The major exception was when my grandfather would hide out in his driveway or to go stay at the local state park to escape my grandmother.  Drew always dreamed of traveling the country, but never left my grandmother’s tethered charms.

I could tell my grandmother was verbally abusive.  Later in life the physical abuse was more obvious.  A few years ago, Adeline called Brooklyn and my grandmother nonchalantly mentioned my grandfather was laying face-down unconsciousness in their bathroom.  Brooklyn hung up and called the paramedics.  Apparently Adele had whacked my grandfather over the head with her cane.  Who knows what else she did to the man when no one was looking. 

Back in the 1930’s Adeline started to go nuts in depression after a miscarriage subsequent to Uncle Herman and before Aunt Constance.  The baby was supposed to be named Keith.  Keith would come up in one-on-one passing conversations rarely, but I got the sense losing the baby really broke a cog in my father’s mother. 

25

My grandfather Drew was a quiet man who was raised by his aunt.  His aunt married his father after his own mother died when Drew was four years young.  Drew had his own mother issues that he could never let go.  The idea of a man being a single-father back then was so unfathomable that it was a plausible remedy to enlist the nearest available female relative into a fresh betrothal.  In Drew’s father’s case this meant his wife’s sister.  Consummation was evidenced by Grandpa Drew’s half-siblings.

My grandfather’s love for the mother he never knew, how he treated women, how he would never be alone or abandoned prompted a low self-image for him self.  Drew put Adeline on a pedestal.  Adeline was the woman that would stay and love him.  He cherished without question.

My grandparents had this Catholic marriage processing the guilt over Keith.  When Adeline was younger they were super active.  Adeline ran a dress shop.  Drew was working his way up at the tobacco-processing plant.  Eventually they were in the Lions Club, did square dancing and held party after party at their house.

When I turned around ten or so and I remember my grandmother talked about seeing leprechaun’s outside her door.  The green Lilliputian-Smurfs tried to talk to her.  Her memory began to fade.  When I was little my grandmother made up these magical dragons called Panoot and Peanuty that lived in the woods behind their house.  She made up fantastical tales when I visited.  When I got older I think my grandmother really saw them.  Near the end I would talk to my grandmother and she would not even remember who my father was or the names of my siblings depending on the circumstance.  Other days we had complete lucid exchanges. 

For years my Grandpa Drew refused to realize the woman he loved was dead.  She was a plodding-zombie image of herself that perished years ago.  Grandpa Drew’s life was like a Nicholas Sparks Notebook page dog-eared and torn with the underbelly of AMC or Spike TV instead of the Oxygen Network or Lifetime.  This doppelganger was in place of the sweet loving wife that once treated him cordial. 

Adeline was feisty and combative.  Her brain was a drug-addicted mesh of dementia, a busting-out belligerent battering ram attacking Drew for every flaw she could find, invent or transfer.  I ponder that my grandmother was probably critical of him in their private times, but in the shadows of age, private matters erupted publically on too many occasions to have such nubile feminine roots.  These were vintage spinster.  I can only imagine the diatribes she would lambaste on his penis and testicles.

Drew was in love with a ghost.  He kept hoping Adeline could find a light through the forest, a shooting lane of memory to remember him for how beautiful he once was to her; not this constant failure incapable of bringing her ice cream quick enough, who turned the television on a decibel level above inaudible, who breathed at an elevated rate, who activated the electrical lighting system with her Marianas Trench eyesight sensitivities.  The phantom of his opera was inside his mind haunting him with the perfection of a woman that never was.  Life was a stage show.  His true test was internal.

Adeline’s brain disassembled like an old-time telephone operator who had yanked out all the plugged chords in her stupor drug binges.  My grandmother could only plug in one or two lines here or there; a name, the time when Drew was a big-shot at the plant, the name of a daughter, a grandkid, a son named Keith, a daughter who she was sure died.  Frontal lobe function went out.  Adele kept pulling and plugging in only when she could.  The drugs transposed all the numbers and mangled the syllables into alphabet soup.

In the end my nonagenarian grandmother’s lungs gave out.  Within weeks my grandfather went into cardiac arrest.  They never divorced.  Drew never left her.  I think the family was just happy he was finally at peace. 

26

Over the next few years I further reevaluated my life.  I paid down my loans.  I crawled out of the slop-yards of legal associate hell.  I did not like who I was becoming.  I stuck out with Adams and Reese until 2010.  I acquired a cat, a living room set and a marble-top bedroom collection, to go with visits to Bolivia, Naples, Patras, and Denver. 

I dated with varied degrees of success.  I kept looking for that genuine, passionate, best friend cliché without feeling like a cliché myself.  I wanted a man who was a gentleman, with manners, respectful, but who could still take charge of a situation if need be.  I was not a big fan of dating.  I actually hated dating.  There was too much posturing to get to something real.  I always felt like a zester in a world of coffee spoons.  I wanted someone who was okay with being with a successful woman.  I did not want competition in a relationship. 

I wanted someone who was engaged in the world around them and saw the beauty and the faults with the passion to make a difference.  I hoped for a philosopher at heart; someone willing to catch a matinee film with me or geek-out over far ranging topics from history books, to acoustic guitar karaoke, Opera, Tetris, David Sedaris, or vegging out to Shark week.  I dated men with shades of those traits.  I certainly did not have a must have check-list or believe in a “the one” but for however whoever was not my forever.

I was happy with where I was.  I was not looking for a destination.  I wanted to soak in some new experiences without having to see life as a struggling swim drowning out the window-side of a plane trip to some utopian tropical isle landing point.  I wanted to enjoy being down in the water sailing myself.  Where ever I was, in and of itself was a choice worth breathing.  I let the wind carry my jib, ready my mast, and empower my mainsail. 

27

April 20, 2010, changed things for me.  The Deepwater Horizon drilling prospect exploded out in the Gulf.  Within a month I quit my job at Adams and Reese and went to work for a non profit environmental organization called the Gulf Coast Restoration Group (GRG).  GRG had been around since 1995.  Before the spill priorities were addressing runoff from industrial facilities, wastewater, habitat and flood control degradation, sustaining fisheries, renewable energy and focusing on legislation and enforcement of environmental protections to ensure clean water, habitats.  After the spill, the Group dealt with the worst environmental disaster in our nation’s history.

Seeing the plumes billowing everyday I researched what I could do.  I made the move.  I was single and capable of lending.  The money was paradigm shifting, but the precipice was too.  We went through the moratorium on drilling, but I focused on the real changes in practice, in law, in people, and the future. 

Tar balls clumped.  Shrimping nets stayed dockside.  The sheen was a mirror.  Containment booms, estuaries breached.  British Petroleum aired public relations pieces about the effects to partner with localized humanity.  The hypocrisies of allegiances set like turtle exclusion devises in shrimping nets.  The fishing and oil and gas industries funded from the Gulf are interdependent.  Just like every other issue in our country a bipartisan solution was required, but who wanted to hold hands at recess?

Companies like British Petroleum, Halliburton, and Transocean made more money in the short-run by making safety shortcuts allowed by the monitoring and regulatory systems that govern the industry.  Chevron and Shell could have just as easily been airing on CNN.  My role was small, but I realized the Macondo blowout was a game changer.  I wanted to be part of that change.  I was not about vengeance, but about better.

I was no Captain Planet.  I never considered myself an “environmentalist,” just a concerned citizen of Earth, and at least America.  I looked at our power grid using technologies from Nicola Tesla and Thomas Edison and saw the digital smart grid on the horizon linking everything as the key to empowering a renewable energy infrastructure.  I could see the prospects of a vehicle like the Chevy Volt altering our entire world economy.  Photovoltaic arrays could shine.  Wind turbines could spin.  We could ignore OPEC despots.  These wetlands and what they birth for us were irreplaceable.

I assisted in filing petitions and letters galvanizing people from Buras to Pensacola.  I researched the Minerals Management Service, which was headed up in New Orleans, which managed the drilling leases.  I was part of a team with lower stress, better hours, and what I did was actually doing, and not billed out in six-minute increments. 

28

Around the one year anniversary of the spill in April 2011, I worked a booth at a punk and reggae music stage in a street festival called Block Party put on by Community Records in New Orleans.  The fest had twenty bands from all over the country making positive music to galvanize a sense of what doing right means, “One Day at a Time with Others in Mind.”  The record label was putting out a benefit compilation for free download, with optional suggested donation to support us.  The bands rocked.  There was vegan food and real fruit juice snowballs.  The fest had inside and outside stages with a reggae disc jockey in between sets.

I will never forget this one three-piece punk band called “The Rooks” that played around sunset.  The lead singer started talking, “This song is about my brother’s birthday.  My brother has been through divorce and custody hell.  On his birthday, my brother told me his daughter told him, ‘Mommy told me that you only pretend to love me.’  The singer sort of rambled on for a while, choking up with what looked like almost-tears. 

The emotionalism made me think.  I thought what it must be like for that man to have his personal life declared so publically?  Why would a mother talk to her daughter about her father like that; daddy only pretends to love you?  What did he do?  He must have deserved it on some level.  Mothers usually know.

Scenes jetted through my head as I scanned the crowd.  Most people do not want to sense life right in the nostrils and brazing the cornea.  People don’t pick a too-personal flavor to drizzle over their snowballs; child cherry-red blood birthing with purple-heads from a vagina, wrecks and bullet wounds with femurs protruding from legs, two adults in full on hatred sober hurling green insults and former treasures, yellow incest of daddy touched me there, the white ignorant-gluttony of true racism, maroon street riots over conundrum social issues.  Everybody turn your head from personal tragedies and keep them all faceless like some Rorschach test we can meander our own answers.  At-least-it-is-not-me inoculations are media-dispensed daily from the viral consequences of genuine concern.  The rawness of the singer made me want to look in, but most faces in the crowd seemed to shy away.

The singer pointed out to some anonymous body in the crowd, “This song is for you man.”  A queer-look glazed over the faces of the glitter, gutter and non-punk crowd.  Most people seemed to be stunned nervous and weird as if something as gutturally transparent as a discussion suited for a private dining table or a therapist’s couch would be bantered about over a microphone.  

The singer started the song.  The audience was initially stunned incapable of cheering or bouncing up and down as with the previous songs like deer in traffic lights. 

“Well Happy Fucking Birthday, I made up this lie about you.  I told your daughter that you only pretend to love her.  I will drag you through twelve months of bullshit, and then I’ll expect you to still be standing.  Still be standing.  Still be standing.  The girl you thought you knew, she never existed.  The girl you thought you knew, she never existed, she never existed at all.” 

After the first few lines everybody was back to moving with the guitar riffs, but the moment stuck with me like peanut butter on my teeth.  I did not know what to say.  I just looked down at my table of pictures of oiled pelicans and shoreline.