"I'm kind of a paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of trying to make me happy."
--- J.D. Salinger
Peanut shells and sawdust on a stoned concrete floor. Ghostly warehouse steel and burnt red brick line the back walls past the pisser like electric blues in this urban district that according to a magazine article doesn't realize it's cool, I guess 'cuz it ain't Austin, Texas. I order a whiskey on the rocks backed by (what beer am I gonna try tonight?) Emerald City Stout out of River City Brewing, Wichita, Kan. This damn guy sitting across from me knows how much I love dark beer. My buddy is having a Tornado Alley IPA.
Ariel, the waitress, recognizes me and my friend back again, having another book club meeting. This time it's Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin. "You're all over Facebook -- Gov. Kelly's State of the State address, in classrooms and Topeka." I'm not at liberty to divulge my friend's name, only that he is a public servant. He gently asks Ariel if she's found a teaching job yet. "Lookin' where I had an internship in Augusta," she says. (This was through the online education program at Fort Hays State University. "I wanna teach first or second grade, but I'll do kindergarten, third grade, whatever they might offer me in the primary grades." Her mom's a retired English high school and community college teacher. Dad's a retired high school shop teacher and coach, contemplating running for a seat on the Kansas State Board of Education.
Some band named Shinola sets up in the corner --- then --- slingin', waist low Fender guitar, lead singer with about a three day old building blending with the sideburns and the black hair, a strand falling into his left eye, the rest slicked back as if held by Royal Crown Dressing. I hear he's hustling for the wife and baby at home, sweating it out by day at the same damn heating and AC factory his bass guitarist works out. Now here -- the slamming beer bottles inside. Pina Coladas and clove cigarettes outside on the fenced in porch with the plants and lights.
When you move in right up close to me That's when I get the shakes all over me
(blasting cymbals, cranked guitar, lead singer like the grey ghost) Quivers down my back bone I've got the shakes down the knee bone Yeah, havin' the tremors in the thighbone Shakin' all over
Followed by Elvis & James Burton's "Burning Love."
Ariel proselytizes to my public servant friend. I remove the books from my backpack occupying the stool next to me. This prompts Ariel to shift gears and talk about my blog and other writings. "You know my mom named me after a Sylvia Plath book," she says. "Yeah, I know. Damn thing was published posthumously." And we all click our shot glasses, drinking a toast to Sylvia Plath. "Ted Hughes was a bastard -- but hell, that fucker could write, himself," I say.
Ariel, her hair so straight it looked liked she combed it with a hand iron, silver with sangria streaks and a California surf wave swooped in front. She's wearing a nose ring, an infernal rage and snake headed tattoo sleeve and I wanna feel her like moonscape and sweet grass.
"People tend to respond more to your tortured soul blogs," she says. "I'm afraid you're right," I answer.
"That's what I respond to," she says. "Your angst, your torment, the naked soul, I mean that's -- that's me."
"Is that right?" I say. "Really, no BS."
"Yeah, sometimes I feel like I'm the only one, but -- I don't know, you're kind of spiritual."
"Yes, but I'm not a successful elected official like __________ here."
My public servant (can we call it PS?) friend laughs it off. "Oh, I'm just some dildo in a patch full of pricks."
"Yeah and me, I'm just the fucked up guy."
"He's him and you're you," she tells me as if she didn't hear him.
What you want
It's hard to tell what's going to make it with people. Well, not always. You put something up for your mom on Mother's Day or about how you love your wife or girlfriend or kids, they validate you more generously than you'll ever know. If I express an oblique sense of humor, maybe they'll get it, maybe they won't. I knew the narrative, Life in Television Hell, based on my work with KPTS and life-long fascination with television was good, but I didn't expect it to be so popular with readers. My biggest flaw is writing too long of pieces, and that one had over 3,000 words. Hell, even when I look at blogs and news stories, I'll scroll down to see how long it is and if it's too long, I might just browse over it or chuck it all together.
My longest piece was more than 6,000 words. I don't blame people for passing on it, but it was a stream of conscious thing that I had to get down for myself. Kind of a cathartic thing. Not everything's going to fly. People let you know when they enjoy your work and they let you know when they don't. I don't expect everything to be a hit, and honestly I'm glad there are some misses because otherwise I'd get a swelled head.
But yeah, I've learned through experience that the messy stuff about my fucked up life resonates with people. One of the first introspective pieces I wrote concerned the overpowering loss I felt after my wife left, taking our kids. It hit me like a bullet. It took two years before I could venture into the dating world again. On my first post-marital date, a woman asked me out via a dating app. She was a middle school special ed teacher. We met at Starbucks at Central and Rock Road and she kept throwing all these questions at me. "How many siblings do you have?" "How long were you married?" "What was your childhood like?" "Do you like to go to sporting events?" Even the innocuous questions left me tight-lipped, guarded, undemonstrative. I can't even talk on a date, I thought to myself. I was nervous to get back into the dating world because I'd only slept with one woman for 17 years. But eventually I overcame those walls around myself, got comfortable & yeah, I popped my cherry (and wrote about it, using pseudonyms, of course). You never forget how.
Strong, you know
"I'll Facebook you the critic's list for the best books of 2018," my PS friend says, finishing off his beer. He then stands up. "I gotta use the piss." So do I, but I abstain. I mean, hell, what are we gonna do? Stand there at the urinals in a dick swinging contest, back slappin' each other as the beer flows out?
"Cool," I say. "There better be some good shit on that list."
A female singer who sounds like Susana Hoffs joins the band, sings, "Feel Like Makin' Love" and I can't miss spotting the priest and nun, drinking beer at one of the booths. This is Maggie O'Malley's pub -- standing like a Willa Cather character among prairie weeds -- in the Delano District, that lawless saloon cowtown of yesterday's vaqueros and whores. Maggie is a devout Catholic by way of a Bakersfield, Calif. branch that struck from the East Coast bunch that arrived on the Atlantic shores in the late 19th century. Or back to Ireland if you want to go that far. Of course the hierarchy of the Mother Church are going to frequent this water hole. Girls like my friend Jennifer celebrate their 40th birthdays at River City Brewery to the east, the young and the damned rage like the machine at America's Crawlers in Old Town; the artists, thinkers and poets drink cheap beer at Leroy's, the ratty old dive bar behind WSU and the off-duty cops drink at Dukes on the southeast side.
I walked around and lost track of PS a long time ago. "Christ, is he jackin' off back there?" iPhone vibrates. "Hey, I'm gettin' out of here," PS says, his voice inside his Hyundai. "We'll do it again soon, I say."
(Hours later)
I sit solitary in my own private booth, oblivious to the white noise, clicking away on my iPad. She saunters up. "You want another beer?" Ariel asks me. "Can we just make it coffee, black?" I say. "I wanna make sure I'm regrouped. Completely unbuzzed." "I understand. Can't drink and write," she says. "Of course, I can. You've seen me do it a zillion times, it's just...I lost a friend to a drunk driver." I see Dusty's face in my mind again; I hear his voice. "I'm so sorry," she replies, gently. "You know Maggie won't let us serve anyone who's too fucked up." I laugh. "That good Catholic girl will confiscate the car keys out of your hand. She makes mass every Sunday, right? I mean, no matter how long she spends cleaning this place down, Saturday night.
"Abso-fucking-lutely."
I tell Ariel my daughter, Gabby, is staying all night with friends tonight. Parents are my pastor and his wife. "It's good for my girl to see a life like that. My boy goes over too, but he's with his mom tonight."
She peers into my screen light. Reflexively, I jerk back a little, then realizing it, stop cool. "I'm sorry." "Oh, no worries," I say like I'm texting a friend. "Whatcha writin' about?," she asks.
"It's about man's unyielding struggle between life and death," I say. The same BS answer I've been giving to that question since I was 19 and didn't know what the fuck I was doing.
This woman -- around 20 years younger than me -- I think she knows I'm full of crap.
Then she said, I shit you not, "You're a very interesting man."
"Hmmm."
I feel okay to be in silence. I reach across and
hold her hand
her hand
my eyes are in my coffee and I see the silhouette of my head in the blackness. Head down, hand touching hers. a moment need somebody silence comforting think of sadness and joy and Andy Warhol's, The Chelsea Girls, and the two-lane blacktop Buddy & the Crickets drove from Lubbock, Texas to Clovis, New Mexico in '57, upright bass strapped to the hood, how my PS friend likes that song "Maybe baby, I'll have you. Maybe baby, you'll be true." the old gas pump my old friend photographs in a Washington State ghost town the girl i know who plays piano in the historic liberal Mennonite Church Suzanne and my body and her mind and sailors bread and wine of JC and communion love is a ring on the telephone and my friend Kyle the pastor holding the bread in the air -- Christ's body (it was hung in the air on a cross) -- the wine -- blood shed for us -- Patti Smith fresh horses jesus died for someone's sins but not mine -- and stars --- and, but i believe it, must believe it --- Daddy, are you a good Christian? No. Communion at the Church of All Saints and Sinners Catholics & Episcopalians call it the Eucharist which is beautiful and the cigarette smoking priest from the '60s, in his book, writes of secretaries and bad drinking water, racism in Alabama and all, the complexities of sexual unity within the marriage bond and burning and delicate small, soft, un-tattooed palm and fingers gracile
i wanna hold your ha-a-and i wanna hold your hand
hands
clasped
together
Black Gasoline -- Dirty White T-shirt