Dedication-Revival

By Jeff Guy

6 a.m. May 31. I must’ve been high. Black coffee emanating from my Gettysburg Address cup (I bought it years ago at the Lincoln museum in Springfield, Ill.). Sun gradually easing up outside the kitchen window like the resurrection of a ‘55 Cadillac as I interrupted writing for the 15th time to look at Instagram. January Jones in a bikini and I was in just-like-honey worship of all woman have from Bible times since the world began.

I knocked on the door, waiting for Kenzie’s acknowledgement, then opened a crack to tell her we were going out. “What for?” she asked with a sort of sleepish agony. “To put stuff on dead people’s graves,” I said. “It’s Memorial Day and at this point in my life, I get holidays off.”

Next, while taking a shower, I scrawled writing ideas on the bathroom tile with body wash foam. Showers, bathrooms -- they inspire more creativity than you’ll ever get at the kitchen table where iPhone procrastination and Instagram pics are persistent temptations.

I pissed around, listening to The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds in mono on my turntable, wondering what an octogenarian retired music teacher friend of mine from Newton, Kansas would think of it. I had a CD of Wilco in my car with a song called, “Piss it Away” and that’s what I did. I pissed it away.

10:45 a.m. Time was wasting. I’d thought about going to Walmart to buy flowers. “That’d be in the home and garden department, right Kenz?” I said. “Ya know, my librarian friend, Melody -- her boyfriend, Randy, works in lawn & garden. Wants to join the sheriff’s department, but shit, the guy thinks the vaccine is a mind control device and Democrats are operating some satan worshipping, pedophile ring. His mom’s an anti-vaxxer too. She’s on oxygen ‘cuz she smoked cigarettes all her damn life and ---

“DAD!”

“Yes, Kenz. Inside voice, now.”

“Flowers are in the floral department.”

Worthington, Kan. Driving down the rainswept main drag, I just said “forget it” to the flowers. And to Bad Penny’s Diner for bacon, eggs and more coffee. Didn’t want to spend another minute in town. Minutes after I’d passed the turnpike, Kenzie asked where I was going. NPR was on the radio, a reporter talked about departed veterans and I told Kenz to just sit in the buggy.

A jet to the promised land

After about 45 minutes of driving through a rough, then receding rain, we were on U.S. 254, from which I turned into Bentham, Kan. (pop. 1,000), determined to get to an eating joint my filmmaker friend, Adam, had eaten at the week before with his girlfriend. The pictures had been on his Facebook page and they looked so happy you’d’ve thought they were gonna dine and dash, but Adam’s daughter waited tables in a restaurant through high school and he had far too much respect to ever leave without paying and leaving an appropriate tip.

“Found it without my GPS,” I said, pulling under a tree. Stearman’s Aeroplane Diner sits on a fertile patch of landing strips, instrumentation and the terminal zone -- a small town airport. ”Alpha, bravo, charley, delta,” I said, stepping into the light raindrops feeling no regret over the forgotten umbrella.

Inside, it was a classy looking brasserie, but not exactly what my friend, Adam, would call a club. The young lady operating the beer tap in the northeast corner bar looked barely old enough to drink.

A jukebox by the bar played one ‘50s and early ‘60s song after another. Chuck Berry, The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly. The golden hits of Rock n’ Roll’s first generation.

This young woman approached our table. Her smile was pie a’ la mode and her eyes had a sheen that drew you into engagement. “Hi, I’m Janessa and I’ll be your server.” She brought us menus and asked what we’d like to drink. We said, “water.” I figured she’d draw a happy face on the bill she’d later serve us.

I heard a man at the next table, ordering chicken fried steak with specially cut mashed potatoes and homemade macaroni and cheese and the power of suggestion overcame my mind. When Janessa returned, asking if we’d set our minds on something, I asked for the half-order. I knew a full-order would be like some man versus food car crash from the second ring of Dante’s hell. Kenzie had a light order of simply mac and cheese.

“Dad, get the hell off your phone,” Kenzie said.

“Just checking,” I said. “My comment is generating a lot of likes on Facebook.”

“Quit being a whore.”

Guiltily called out on my inner whoredom, I shoved the phone across the table like it was a dog turd and took out the little blue 1970s-looking memo book I’d purchased at Anderson’s office supply store in Newton, the weekend previous. I started to jot down a few lines from song lyrics just to warm up, then said to Kenz, “I know you’re an artist. You aced your painting class and all. Can you draw a design on this?” I handed her the diminutive book, and gave her a pen, one of three I was carrying. Halloween was months away. Nevertheless, she drew a picture of the ghost. It’s fitting for any season, really. I tend to write about things that haunt me.

Spaced out, I took to staring out the rainstreaked window, the model of jet airliner hovering above, hanging by wire. Stuck for words to write, my mind drifted to one of my readers in Albuquerque, New Mexico and that took to me thoughts of my childhood friend, a little blonde girl named Suzanne. Janessa and her effulgent smile brought me out of the reverie when she arrived back with our food.

“Can I get you anything else?” she asked.

The Cascades were on the jukebox, singing. “Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain…”

“Can’t think of anything,” I said. “I’m gonna have a big job eating this chicken fried steak.”

“Well, I bet you're up to the task.

“It’ll be a labor of love.”

Midway through the meal, I told Kenzie I was beginning to feel the stirrings of fullness. “You should quit while you’re ahead, Dad. You don’t wanna give yourself a belly ache.” Something I’m susceptible to. “Just a couple more bites.”

I’m sure Kenzie expected me to keep hauling the food into my mouth, like debris to a dumpster, but I did stop after two bites. I was already on a full tank.

“I’m Fat Fuck Guy,” I said.

“Dad, you’re too loud. You see that little girl over there,” she said, her eyes shifting to the vanilla blonde girl, sitting back to us at an angle. “She didn’t hear a thing,” I said.

About this time, Janessa returned to collect our plates and offered to refill our waters, which we politely declined. “So are you in high school or college?” I asked.

“I go to Grossmont (Community College),” she answered.

“Yeah, my son goes there.”

“What’s his name?”

“Sam Guy.”

“Oh, I know him,” she said. “He’s a super nice guy.”

You can’t not feel good inside when people talk up your kids like that.

“He was in my English class. We had to critique each other’s papers,” she said. “He’s an excellent writer.”

“Well, thank you. I’ll tell him you said so. It’s sort of a family trait. Goes back a few generations.”

Anyhow, I did give the girl a generous tip. She worked for it. Drew a happy face and all, and she wrote the J in her name with an almost Hollywood-style e'lan.

The rain had receded to a few drops as Kenzie as I made our way into the car, eastbound lanes into Beulah. I explained to Kenz that I was going to see my dad and it would do her good to see her grandpa.

“Call him and tell him we’re on our way.”

I circled the truck route around town.

“He said he’d have the door unlocked for us,” she said.

We walked in through the door from the garage, past the pantry, kitchen, dining room to the commodious living room where Dad sat in his chair watching the TV across the room next to the K-State memorabilia. A young Clint Eastwood in a saloon scene from the old black and white western, Rawhide.

“He’s so damn cool,” I said, watching from the couch. (Respectfully, nobody sits in Marcia’s chair.)

“He must be about 90,” Dad said.

“And he’s not slowing down.”

I won’t forget to put roses on your grave

When the show was over, we went outside and Dad gave me clippers to cut a few peonies from the group of flowers at the northwest corner of the front yard, standing against the wide wooden fence.

“Are you going to Marshallville?” Dad asked. I said yes so he handed wooden crosses to stick in the ground before my grandparents’ graves. Then he handed me a third cross. “You can put this at your mother’s grave.” That really made me feel good, the kindness, given that Mom wasn’t Dad’s favorite person.

Family members had taken Dad to the graves on Saturday.

At Clearlake Cemetery off Harveyhill Road near the college, I drove in the rain, searching for my step-mom’s grave. I looked for the big floral memorial her daughter had placed there. I got out of my car and clicked “Dad” from the contact list on my iPhone. Before he answered I already regretted making the call.

I told the old man I couldn’t spot Marcia’s ml grave. He started talking in the irritable voice I’ve heard a million times, asking exactly where I was in the cemetery. Which road was I facing. Jesus, he's gotta be the most impatient man in the world He talked like a compass, directing me like a perturbed maestro to the grave.

“Okay, I got it,” I said.

I didn’t have it, but it was best to appease the man. I told Kenzie we’d have to miss it. Then, turning a corner, I saw the display, which I thought to be a bit much. I laid the flowers before the resting place in memory of Marcia.

Then I drove past the refinery, a bait shop and turned on Prospect Road where I drove, the only car for miles, unmolested on the road to Marshallville.

We walked respectfully to Richard and Fern Guy’s graves. “Your great-grandparents,” I said to Kenzie.

Then I said I needed to find a tree and take a piss.

“Urinating in a cemetery,” she said. “Don’t you have any respect?”

I told her it was okay. We were in the country.

“Still.”

“Hell, I’ve known people who’ve made love in a cemetery,” I said.

“Well, that’s just cool.”

“What?”

“It has style,” she said. “That’s what Mary Shelley did.”

“The chick who wrote Frankenstein?”

“She lost her virginity on top of her mother’s grave. Look it up.”

I could’ve driven to Lathrop where another damn branch of my damn family is planted in the ground. They came from Switzerland and Germany, I’m told. My grandma Guy’s father died when she was 2-years-old and sitting on his lap.

Driving that distance wouldn’t be a good plan, I thought. It was raining again and if a deluge poured down, the road could be treacherous. Besides, I had to have Kenzie at her mom’s house in Derby at 4 p.m.

We took Old 54 Highway to my hometown of Jett, Kan. (pop. 4,000 in the ‘70s), passed the railroad tracks and wet trees to Kuster Cemetery where Mom is laid to rest with her brother, parents and paternal grandparents. She was named Victoria Lou after both her grandmothers. I pointed out the graves to Kenzie and felt the unreal quality of knowing more of my life has been lived since the grandparents’ passing than when they were alive.

“There’s a lot I’d like to tell Mom,” I said. “She’s missed so much. I wish she could see you and Sam.”

My car was muddy for the first time since I bought it so I drove it into the state of the art Cascade Car Wash in Derby.

I drove into the Spring Hill neighborhood where smart, kept up houses were aligned by dark trees, and wished for a second that I lived in such an appealing little community. But I cast such thoughts from my head because they would only do me harm. Comparing myself to others had led to a precipitous downfall. “Have a good visit with your mom and little brother,” I told Kenzie.

She would. There was still faith. Aliveness.

Back home in Worthington, I sat at the kitchen table, waiting for Kenzie’s mom to bring her home. I texted Sam, but didn’t get a response. It wasn’t personal. My boy just has a busy life and isn’t that what I wanted for him?

Trying to write and drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon, I just couldn’t get the words, the rhythm to travel from my head to paper or a keyboard. Not even the ghosts that haunt me at night. I could look for inspirational quotes from my hairdresser friend and other women on Facebook. Maybe I could comfort somebody who’s in a bad place by telling her she’s beautiful and it would comfort me too. I could look at January Jones on Instagram. But screw social media.

Back in the ‘90s, when I was much younger than now, I desired the singer, Jewell. When she sang “Foolish Games,” I knew I wanted to take care of her.

But I don’t think about that anymore. Just seeing my daughter into adulthood as I have, my son. Still, I worry; hope he's doing all right. I'm living for now and wondering how long I’ll remain viable.

if I’ll live as long as Dad and Clint Eastwood?

Wilco -- "Passenger Side"