---

 

This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue... Down in the Dirt magazine (v117) (the May / June 2013 Issue) You can also order this 5.5" x 8.5" issue as an ISSN# paperback book:

Order this writing in the book Entanglement (a Down in the Dirt collection book)		get the 340 page Jan. - June 2013 Down in the Dirt magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Home Sweet Home

Mike Brennan

    Asides from his bluish pallor, the hardest thing to deal with was my bottle of pills on my brother’s nightstand. It was my stolen medication that was sitting right next to the bloody syringe he obviously used to inject my now crushed pain medication in a blackened Coke can that lay by his right side.
    “Fuck,” I thought, I had only been home a week.
    “I can’t deal with this shit. I have already dealt with enough.”
    I remember flying into JFK from Ramstein, Germany, and catching a red-eye flight to Los Angeles, and the only thing I can speak of the unbelievably long trip is I indulged in a couple cocktails, which I gulped down as if it were the first water an Arab could sip once his camel died in the middle of the desert. I dreamed of home the entire time I was deployed, and all of its double bacon cheeseburgers, vanilla milkshakes, fancy civilian clothes, and high priced cheesy movies playing the usual Hollywood bullshit which I would happily take a girl to see before making out with her in the backseat of my beat-up old Saturn. I thought of my mother’s steaks, my father’s pride, my brother’s homeruns in little league baseball, and my sister’s eventual marriage to someone far richer than any of us could ever hope to be.
    It always seemed strange to return somewhere familiar after a lengthy absence. This was my second tour but while two years away from home seems lengthy to most, in my experience time passes like rapid eye movement. It just goes and goes until you can’t remember what you saw or learned or dreamt or wished. I consciously knew my reasons for leaving. I was a young adult, semi-self-reliant, half-heartedly believing I loved my country to death, and absolutely felt an ingrained, probably premature desperate need to vacate the nest I was nurtured and peacefully yet subtly tortured in. In all actuality, it now seems less a nest but rather a prison which once radiated bizarre fun house illusions of familial and familiar loves and hates.
    Sometimes I feel that the constantly televised warzones I encountered personally, physically, and spiritually in the Middle-East seem less treacherous than my own immediate family’s comfortable suburban home. Most don’t know how quickly any suburb can suddenly turn into a warzone before an insurgent could even pull the pin off an aging and haphazardly discarded Russian hand grenade. The unspoken truth is that death tolls are just kittens, candies, and hefty paychecks to newscasters, politicians, and paperback writers. No matter where you are death always follows- I’ve almost died, watched plenty of others die, and know that it will always follow me like a ghost that continuously wears the guise of my own face.
    It’s a horrible feeling when the first thing you see returning home is your mother’s tears. I knew I was missing a leg but her reaction to my appearance made me feel like I had no life left within me. It wasn’t as if it was too obvious. I had a top dollar prosthetic to limp around upon. My father quietly hobbled over to me. His gout was acting up again and I was sure he had been drinking. The old man definitely wasn’t what he used to be. He saw the medals pinned upon my Marine Corps Dress Blues, and I could tell that he intentionally forgot about the third degree burns scarring the right side of my face.
    “How you doing Sergeant?”
    “Fine, Sir?”
    My father for whatever reason pretends that he was a Marine Corps Officer but in all seriousness his discharge papers I came across in the attic stated that he was nothing but a common E-4 Corporal, but the mind always has a funny way of changing things if you really want it too. I knew I out-ranked him but he would advance himself to a fucking general if it wasn’t too outrageous to anyone who met him. He sure never received the Purple Heart as I unfortunately had. He sure could still walk and move his right side better than I. He sure never saw real combat. He surely doesn’t know anything about this war, me, my generation’s America or my present condition.
    I spent about fifteen minutes in my childhood bedroom until it turned into an electric sand dune. Everything was melting. There was sand in every crevice of my body and I could hear the shouting, the gunfire, the screaming, and the roar of copters over my helmet contained cranium. I felt the sand shriek in my ears, nose, mouth, and all through my ragged unwashed uniforms, and I felt the wrath of the F18 air cover overhead. I saw my best friend Sean screaming as the business end of an RPG tore his limbs apart from his body. It was just a few days before it happened to me but he lost his life and I only a leg. God, what a hell of a tour I had survived, it felt good to be safe and stateside.
    I wandered around my house. Everything was wrong. There was no childhood scent of cinnamon French toast. There was no dog I could pet or comfort because my beagle Buster had died a year after I had deployed. My sister walked through the door after a drunken college party. She hugged me and told me how much she missed me. She was more fucked up than I was even with all the pills and booze that were consistently coursing through my system. I remembered how she was a popular pillar of the high society of high school, but I could immediately tell she was damaged in ways that I probably could never know. I did know that she had a filthy rich psychiatrist she saw and scammed pills from. It must have been really hard being a cheerleader, but I knew this was also probably because she couldn’t confront the difficulty of seeing me as I now appeared.
    Our relationship had always been complicated and I knew she was a bit superficial when it came to appearances. She takes at least an hour just to put on her makeup in the morning. I said goodnight, kissed her cheek, and watched her stagger off. I drank a couple swigs of my dad’s scotch in the small bar of his study. The taste was fantastic and something I had dreamed about often during my forced periods of desert sobriety and subsequent rigorous physical therapy. Taste is a wonderful sensation, and I absolutely love the taste of finely aged scotch. Oh God, how much I’ve aged, although it is hard to believe that I still was only twenty-five. I knew it was unhealthy to continuously dwell upon the past but it is the only thing besides assholes that everyone has. I headed back up to my bedroom, still getting used to my new leg on the winding oak staircase, walked into my bedroom, and opened my drab olive sea-bag. Right on the top of the gigantic pile of dirty sand-strewn uniforms were the pills I needed to live my life peacefully and relatively painlessly- Xanax, Oxycontin, Vicodin, and Soma. They all weren’t prescribed but the patients in the VA hospital were all too willing to trade or donate. All those pills helped with my varying complaints so I took one of each. I lit a Camel Light and hoisted myself upon my bed and drifted off into pharmaceutical oblivion after putting out my smoke when it scorched my fingers.
    Thanks to the drugs I didn’t dream. That is always a relief because all I dream about is being stuck in the desert all over again. Despite my very real psychological and physical reminders of what I had lived through, beyond all else I now had an absolute fear of dreaming. I never thought I would take narcotics never less absolutely need them but now they were a necessity. It is so much easier to swallow a couple pills and fall asleep into nothing then it is to wake up, rattle your bones, and confront the whole fucked up universe once again.
    I headed into the kitchen where the smell of bacon and eggs had instantly enticed me to enter. The whole family was sitting there. It had been years since I had sat down to eat with my entire immediate family.
    “Good Morning, Sarge,” My father gaily greeted me. He was already drinking screwdrivers at eleven a.m., and was still insisting on calling me by my military title. I was done with all that and officially honorably discharged. I’d have rather have been addressed by a nickname reminder of my distant past such as a “squirt” or the much dreaded “junior” than a rank I really wished I never held.
    “Fine sir, It’s nice to be in my old bed again. It sure beats a tent and definitely a fox hole.”
    “I bet,” my sister giggled, while concealing her clandestine hangover. She then gave me a look panning down my anatomy from my forehead to my false foot. “Are you Okay?”
    “Sure. I’m alive aren’t I?”
    “Yeah, you are,” she responded, before slumping down and returning to shoveling her food in her mouth in a manner that revealed her well known struggle with bulimia.
    My younger brother John was always the quiet one of our three siblings. He dressed in an outlandish fashion, got shitty grades, had the obvious beginnings of a drug problem, and was the self-proclaimed black sheep and constant scapegoat of most of my family’s problems. He asked the question that civilians always ask and I hate more than any other and try to never answer.
    “So how many people did you kill?’
    I stared down and looked at my plate. The ketchup I always put on my eggs proved too much. I began dry heaving and passed out while still sitting prone. It was only lasted a few seconds before I managed to open my eyes again. I shouldn’t have taken my morning pharmaceutical cocktail without any food in my gut.
    “Are you all right?” my mother asked, with her face betraying her fearful curiosity.
    “Yeah, this happens from time to time.”
    She kissed me on the forehead.
    “It’s ok, you’re home now honey. We’ll make it through all this.
    I retired to my bedroom again and turned on the television. Reality television, juvenile romantic comedies, and war movies- that’s all I had to choose from. I turned to a History Channel program about the Civil War, caught myself trembling uncontrollably and unintentionally passed out. My brother shook me awake.
    “You want to get high man?”
    No, Bro, maybe tomorrow, I’m still all fucked up from the flight.”
    Despite my brother’s constant fuck ups, I knew he was waiting for the day I could smoke weed with him because I had to be drug free and randomly tested throughout my tour in the military and never really smoked much of it before. I didn’t really want to, I was always fairly anti-drug, and from what I remembered from high school, weed made me way too paranoid. Paranoia, right now, was the last thing I needed. I needed calmness and tranquility. I popped a Xanax and tuned in to something about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination before I drifted off again. I woke up when my leg started tingling despite the fact it wasn’t there, so I took a Vicodin and a half of a Percocet. I needed a bit of rest and relaxation, and honestly because of my wounds and this trip down memory lane, I had no other way to relieve my pain.
    It was around that time that I heard the screaming. Despite my sedation, and because of my experience in the battlefield, I knew what a scream really could signal. I struggled out of bed. My family was encircled around my brother’s room. I was pushed through the crowd with an ease that scared me. John was lying still on his bed with the bloody hypodermic needle besides him.
    “You motherfucker!” I screamed at him, while I noticed that my mother was on the phone with the paramedics.
    “This is all your fault!’ My sister shrieked, as she pulled me away, still perusing my Oxycontin prescription bottle.
    Fifteen minutes passed that I couldn’t describe, as if I was ensnared in the numbness of panic and confusion. The paramedics arrived and lifted my brother into the back of the ambulance. They said he would survive and would be stable within the hour. They all quickly roared off into a dismal sea of sirens.
    I tuned to my father and we caught each other’s crippled eyes. He was obviously intoxicated and locked in a whole other plane of existence. I hardly saw or felt his fist connect with my nose. It didn’t really register until I saw the waterfall of blood splash across the front of my plain white t-shirt, and caught sight of my broken eye-glasses on the floor. It was now impossible to not react. My subconscious being had become a standard knee-jerk display of rage.
    My fist met his face and just started pummeling away. All the lies I ever heard from him in my life just seemed to flow through my fist. I heard several more screams, yet they weren’t from him. This wasn’t anything about my father as much as it was about my whole spirit crashing and disabling without the possibility of salvage. My entire life had been built upon lies, despair, dismemberment, and disappointment. I just kept punching away at all that was supposed to be saving me but was devastating me. I slipped away again and slumped to the floor exhausted to the core.
    I awoke from my stupor to the discomfort of a large knee lodged in my lower spine. My hands were cuffed behind my back and I was dragged up to my feet. Two muscle-head policemen kept me balanced upon my prosthetic leg. My anger was overwhelming. The whole world was awash in blood red sand. Everything boiled down to a cacophony of voices.
    “Get the fuck out of my house and don’t come back.”
    In an instant I was methodically drug downstairs, through the front door, and wedged into the hard plastic backseat of a black and white patrol car. I had for a long time had the feeling that I could never go home again. If I only had a leg up in life, I would rather go back to the war than back to where it all began. I could never go home again. From the womb to the tomb, distracted by disarray- I can never go home again.

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...