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the scene
Installment 1 of A California Blue

Parick Fealey

    a lawn chair has fallen on its back.
    How many sons of the rich and famous are doomed?
    You can find genetic material by the freeway, beer cans and rubbers: out the window clues to what we love by the roadside.
    My pain is tattooed between my eyes. look! he’s just like us!
    the sun out here shuffles my eyelids. dog in the grass, what are you thinking about? i’m thinking about how medicated i am.
    747 jet trail: I am anticipating your destination.
    windy promises, bent weeds, abundant roses and a kid’s swing, fickle bamboo and eggplants, brussels sprouts.
    where is my girlfriend? with her son at counseling. the kid needs it. i’ve never met anyone as lazy and apathetic. he cannot raise the toilet seat to take a piss. i constantly clean urine off the seat before i lift it. i have met men who have lied as well and easily, but the kid still has time to perfect the art. time, it’s on his side. if he sits long enough he’ll be rich. he thinks about that, knows it. 10 years old and he’s telling his grandparents not to build a ninth house on that lot in tahoe because he doesn’t want to take care of it. he needs a smack society now says i cannot hand out. i drink and smoke like a suicide complex, but i want to live to see how it all turns out. will the stem support the fruit?
    the drugs change. perception is altered. all that i do is new. i tell myself not inferior. but i don’t know. when you are inside, you can’t see from the outside. i feel better this time, but it’s always night in here. i’m buying guns in my head when i don’t need one i have one just want a bigger caliber that’s all want to be sure. last night i dreamed i bought a tommy gun. that’s sure as the giant spider on this table fearless red and black. i have it made in the california ginko sun and cypress, loftings of yesterday’s blue jeans and spoils. these drugs aren’t bad. the others weren’t bad. i’m just getting worse. they say that’s the way it goes. take the cocktail and fuck the announcers.
    time. my life was bound to appointments. i never wore a watch and i was never too early or late. an internal clock, the sun, something primitive. after the crack-up i can’t tell you the hour or day or week or year or place the planet in the solar system, but i’m still never late to the dates i don’t have.
    pestered by whiskers. i have found a friend in this sun that gave me my life.
    flora. there’s a sick pleasure in hanging on for the next disaster. no claims to sublimity, i’m just another asshole collecting bacteria. i’m my own dinner.
    old friend. out of touch 21 years. my former best friend and i don’t have much to go on. sentimental reminiscences are worth a page. then? he brags about how good his life is. i do the same. our lives are pretty good. we were surf buddies and put a lot of time in the water together, dawn patrols, road trips, torturing humanity when the surf was flat. we talk about surfing now, jumped from 1990 to 2011 without a period. i was the better surfer, but now he has me. i went the other way into words and derangement, alcohol and heroin, while he stayed on the wave. he’s an aesthete, but in good shape. we still have respect and don’t discuss how it ended. he can’t interfere with my love life here, the jealous liar. he knows he was wrong. he knows i have written about him. he contacted me to revise history. he’s worried about how he looks. he’s not worried about who he is.
    pizza on the way. marilyn showed me her obit because she was 28. marilyn likes to show me obits of people my age and younger because she wants to scare me out of my habits. the girl was a blonde and i recognized her. i picked her up hitchhiking a year ago. she wasn’t really hitching, but she had her thumb out and i am in the habit of picking people up. she was a prostitute. i asked her where she was going and she said palm springs – about 1,000 miles from eureka. quite a ways, i said. she asked me where i was going and i said fortuna. she asked what’s in fortuna and i said my girlfriend’s house. we were heading south. we got to fortuna and i let her off after she asked me to buy her lunch at mcdonald’s. i didn’t. she got on the onramp heading back to eureka. that’ the last time i saw her. with her thumb out. she was wearing skin colored nylons, as if to improve her legs. she was quiet, yet present. the obit said she was creative, a free spirit. i guess she was. you never see these things coming. i should have bought her lunch. i didn’t mention it to marilyn.
    typing outside. this old typer came from marilyn’s cabin. marilyn found it in her grandmother’s closet. her grandmother is dead so we took it. it’s a late 30’s portable smith-corona, near identical to the one i bought on polk street for $4 and wrote 4,000 pages on. that was the only typer i was ever sad to leave on the junk pile. i’m sitting outside in the sun and wind drinking light beer and smoking my own cigarettes, wondering if my dad will get his father’s day card on time. marilyn is putting a pizza in the oven for me. i enjoy writing outside, the looseness that comes over me when faced with nature’s order. in the midst of its rules, i am liberated. something good comes of conservatism but not the miserly. out here it’ a splitting off from logic, a degeneration from indoor confusion. i used to know that nature helped but i thought this for the wrong reason. the grass and trees are opposition, friction i need, the conflict I need to make art – surrounded by the indifferent.
    noble. if he wants something, he wants it, but he rarely complains. he craves attention and gives it freely. he is equally solitary and spends a lot of time with his head in his hands, alone, ears tuned. he knows love so i suspect he knows despair. we wrestle and play frisbee, cover the beach like fleas. the car is full of sand. he believes in eye contact and wonder. he doesn’t have all the answers. he looks at me. the bridge is near complete. shared wonder we have and we each know the rare joys and abundant sorrows, together and alone. we have met one another. man and beast.
    someone else’s kid is not your kid and there’s no substitute for the loins. i have inherited a boy who is a good kid and a monster. he talks back more than i ever did and i was almost sent to a penal colony in australia by my parents. this is not a joke. it was arranged. i threatened to run away before i’d leave my friends. the kid is abusive toward marilyn and lazy as shit. he plays video games all day. at the dinner table, if he needs a spoon, he cannot get up to get one. he asks you to do it. he doesn’t eat home cookin’ because he’s dined in so many fine restaurants throughout the world with his grossly affluent and spoiling grandparents. he can’t flush the toilet or turn off a light bulb, close a door or pick up his expensive toys, which he leaves in the rain after brutalizing you into buying them for him. i told marylin last night that if he continues like this as he ages, there’s a chance i will move out. i want to be surrounded by pleasant, actualized people, not live with a little asshole. she didn’t take it very well, but hopefully it will be impetus to be a less lenient parent. the kid has been spoiled. and he’s spoiled. he has never known a slap, deprivation, or even very many “no’s.” he’s set to inherit fourteen cars and harleys, eight houses in california and hawaii, and a mountain of cash. he will be the typical rich kid i hated in high school and college. this country was brought up to its best by men who were slapped around by their fathers during the great depression. the dog is eating corn chips out of the bag behind me. i just had some pizza. now with a natty light and cigs, the sun a few inches or maybe a foot from going down on this thursday, the last day of school for the kids here.
    the idiot. i’m exhausted from living with assholes like my last landlord. he listened to rush limbaugh and went to the pentacostal church, where he fell asleep. he told me the indians gave the europeans syphilis. he told me the jews deserved it. he had phd’s in history and chemistry. he once taught in saudi arabia because he couldn’t find a job here – the worst people on earth, a bunch of goat herders, he said. his woman friend told me he said i wasn’t smart. every day the radio clock was set for rush limbaugh. he locked his beer in a refrigerator in the garage after I asked him for a couple. he wrapped a chain around the refrigerator and put a padlock on it. why? because i drank his beer. he was moneyed. i was living on $700 a month. i cut the chain and drank his beer. i cut the chain so he could not see the break and i could reassemble the links seamlessly. when he took the chain off to get his beer, the chain held together. for a week he didn’t know i was drinking his beer. it had not occurred to him. one day i got really thirsty and drank six of his beers. There were only 10 in there. “are you drinking my beer?” he said. “yes,” i said. “you’re out of here! i want you out of here by the first!” he hated my mother because she was a jew and he liked my father because a bully likes a bully. he got a dishonorable discharge from the air force after striking an enlisted man. he was never violent with me, but i thought of killing him. the basement floor was dirt and nobody would have missed him.
    authors’ prayer. I am always discouraged by the man who can be led to a book, drink, and gain nothing. i hope never to be read by such imbeciles.
    qualifications. there is no looking back when you are obsessed and compelled. if you become unobsessed, you will die. i mentioned this to greg and he wrote a poem about it, the peril of becoming unobsessed. he is also obsessed and doesn’t want to die. i’m less obsessed with dying than getting caught. i don’t know what i’m doing, but i fear getting caught. i must be doing something in addition to eating, sleeping, drinking, and smoking. maybe i’ll get caught making love. . . i have always heard words. i catch my words. i do not hear voices, hallucinations, but words, quiet language running like a river in my head. i have stars in my hair. flowing and shining for a long time, they guide me toward nirvana. they have always been with me. i earned myself the rest of it, except for my genes. i never made anyone fuck anyone. life gave me the rest of the rest.
    the jews and the irish have had some hard travelling. humor evolved to stall despair. a manic-depressive sees life from more coordinates than most men know exist. an artist is one who is looking for something and in the process of not finding it. derangement is an ingredient, but will take you only so far. derangement is not a meal or wisdom. derangement is an illness you give yourself to diffuse the healthy shield you are born with. you must rewire your brain, but whiskey and needles don’t add up to vision. of course you are an alcoholic because you have a weakness for life. they tell you that you are legally insane, sanity as defined by the doctors, engineers, hot dog men, and barbers. inspiration. the muse. visions. you take them seriously without being precious. you have been hearing these words your whole life, familiarity breeding familiarity. you have no memory. you cannot remember what you did five minutes ago or five years ago or what you did when you were five. but, but – memories come to you as verbs. memories are acts by another that you watch. you pause when someone asks your name. it is of no consequence. memory belongs to those who lack judgment.
    you have survived. your friends have not. you have known loss like a war. you are alone, walking the streets with your head down, looking for cigarette butts, dismissing humiliation. you live on peanut butter and forget the days when you spent $2,000 a month on wine. you have known more women than rudolf valentino and errol flynn, or at least more than you’ve known. which reminds me: you are a man and not a woman. the cessation to misunderstand existence happens in the balls. some days the will to live overcomes the price. in the beginning we are mouths and in the end we are assholes. the most we can do is shut up and eat less. choose your context, man.
    “sascha’s looking at me.”
    “what’s he looking at?”
    “i don’t know. he’s always watching me.”
    “you’re not doing anything. maybe he’s waiting for you to do something.”
    “he’d better be patient.”
    “it’s true you don’t do much.”
    “when the spirit moves me.”
    “look, his eyes are closing.”
    “he’s looking for those spirits.”
    “greg, why is it every time i send you a poem you write a poem based on my poem? and whenever i am eloquent (rarely) you write a take-off on my words? don’t you have your own thoughts?”
    “you’re inspiring.”
    “and you’re a thief, which i suppose makes you a genius, which i already knew, but you look like a barnacle. i’m thinking of not saying anything intelligent to you again.”
    “i have plenty of my own thoughts.”
    “i’m aware. do you want me to steal your life? i don’t mean your words, i mean your existence. because i can. or should i leave it to you to live?”
    “i’d be honored if you wrote about me.”
    “i’m not talking about that.”
    “then what do you mean?”
    “i mean i know you better than you know yourself. i’m talking about your soul.”
    “i need some dialogue for this story.”
    “why? it’s fine without it.”
    “it’s a visual thing.”
    “why bother?”
    “something different.”
    “you don’t need it.”
    “i don’t need the story either.”
    “give yourself and the reader a rest.”
    “no and yes.”
    “why don’t you talk to the pilot of that 747 overhead?”
    “how boring is flying a 747?”
    “very.”
    “like driving a big car in a straight line for 3,000 miles. we build ourselves up to the greatest boredom/success/loss possible.”
    “you never seem bored, just weird.”
    “i worry about the day i’ve grown bored. i reassure myself with the alleged immensity of the universe and the peculiarities of man.”
    “you’re so full of shit.”
    “really, i’m reassured.”
    “bullshit. you’re just killing time like the rest of us. you’re travelling in your head. you’re beyond boredom.”
    “i suppose the universe could be bored with itself. you do something long enough.”
    “is that why you gave up on physics?”
    “i didn’t do physics long enough and i didn’t give up. i’m working on a perpetual motion machine.”
    “and cold fusion.”
    “i’ve seen post de facto cold fusion in a rock.”
    “perpetual motion will always be conditional.”
    “that doesn’t even make sense. love is the only perpetual motion machine i have known. and it is a machine that often breaks down. a few get it right.”
    “does this horseshit fill your need for dialogue?”
    “it’s not the right dialogue.”
    misogynist. a man can be dumped and still talk to the woman. a woman gets dumped, she ignores, forgets, or torments the man. don’t go there, the voice says. you know women who did not cut you off, the fleshpots and whores, real whores who never asked for a thing. the ones who refuse to talk to you are the ones who always thought well and high of themselves. you have insulted their existence, a woman’s existence being her womanhood. you rejected her pussy. the whores are more than women, more than pussy, they gave you a man.
    greg wrote a sad poem about the girl we once shared. it was supposed to be a sad poem, and it was, but it was also a lie. barbara was doomed by abuse. she spent her life fleeing her father. she could not adjust. greg and i shared her for a couple months. greg and i knew of one another, but had not met until barbara insisted. greg and i, writers and painters with similar tastes in women, got along brilliantly. a pimp turned her on to dope after greg forced a needle into her arm. he leapt on her veins with a rig and she came to me crying like she’d been raped again. how could he do such a thing, but she liked it. the pimp came along and she told me excitedly about how she was getting free drugs from a cliché, a puerto rican in a long fur coat. it was ominous, but we had all broken up by then. she was living in another city. soon she would be turned to the streets. greg’s poem about our lost lover did not ring true with me when i recalled how he got her drunk on vodka the day she was kicked out of the hotel for being drunk. or the time we were together at the cemetery. she said that greg was distracting me from my writing, which he was, but it was my choice. greg said what about my writing? barbara said, i don’t care about your writing. he kicked her shoulder onto the ground. later she showed up at the lobby of the hotel with her face beat in. she said a gang of kids created the bruises. then she said the cops did it. i don’t know who did it, but greg has a long record and has served time for beating up women. i don’t like greg’s poem and i don’t like wondering if barbara is still alive.
    wolff helped writers lesser than himself. he’s got carver helping him. been dead 20 years, but he’s got carver on all his book jackets. the same quote again and again. i like carver. he taught me a lot and opened himself to all./ blindness, suppression, jealousy, fear are wolff’s. wolff is an ivy league war criminal. go to oxford and drop bombs on children in a vietnamese elementary school. i’ll use what he said about me, render onto wolff that which is wolff’s. our enemies define us as much as our allies.
    okay, maybe you’re a man. observation is my defect. my response is a weakness. the rotten need spoils the peace. my flaw is my humanity, for good and for bad. as for the medium. . . the highest production of power is not conduction but the POWER released in a short-circuit.
    sascha needs to learn how to tilt back his beers before we can become true drinking buddies.
    i repeat myself because the themes are the same and i don’t know many words.
    disgust. it is not enough to spin off hemingway or bukowski or kerouac. you must be able to do hemingway, bukowski, and kerouac better than hemingway, bukowski, and kerouac. courses on your own journey include fucking the dead heroes up the ass.
    greg wants me to write the introduction to his book. i said yes. but it is better to say yes to a party invitation and then pass out at the table than to decline the invitation. i am cautious about these things. as a reviewer, i was forced to say good things about garbage for years. a reviewer cannot say “this is an unnecessary, unoriginal piece of shit” to every book that his editor, who is sometimes friends with the author, hands you. you would not have a job and since reading and writing were easier than sanding yachts, i looked for the positive and where there was none i made it up. i was a professional liar, doing something which was the exact opposite of what i did at home. the worst part was listening to romance writers say “my agent.” reminded me of the slackers in san francisco sitting at the café terraces seemingly not in need of jobs, with their laptops and $100 pens. i was envious of their time more than anything, but the cool of it did not go unresisted. the café guys looked cool. i never looked cool. i had no money for the clothes and they wouldn’t have fit anyway because i was too troubled. i crossed the street and walked on the other side, less than a ghost to the scene. when i hear some hack drop the line “my agent” it’s emetic.
    greg’s request is similar, though i think he is qualified to write a book about a beagle mix. he rescued elliot from an ambivalent home and gave him a good life. elliot gave greg insight into a being other than greg. marilyn wants me to have nothing to do with greg because he knowlingly gave me hepatitis and tried to kill me with a hot shot. “he tried to murder you,” marliyn says. it’s accurate, but i put myself into those situations and got myself out of them. greg cannot be blamed so much as noted. the note would read: “stay away.” i tell myself greg is interesting. he may be changing too. he also makes it clear to me how much i mean to him. he says he’s never had a friend like me. maybe a con, but hard to resist. i’m being myself – with some reservation. he passively tried to murder me the night he killed himself. i saved his life and this has now become my problem. he overdosed. he went out. he turned pale grey and stopped breathing. resuscitation, life support, brain damage. when he says i saved his life it is true but it is not a simple truth. he tried to take me with him. he said, “here’s yours” five seconds before he keeled over. as i watched him die, i thought about closing the door on the scene. as a drug buddy, he had been abusive and greedy. he was abusive toward all his friends. i could have let him die because that was what he was about and he had tried so many times so why not let him finish it? instead, i cradled him in my arms and spoke to the corpse until paramedics arrived. now i’m in a spot. the people i trust the most tell me they cannot find one good thing about greg. i tell marylin he’s a good writer and she scoffs at his pornographic poetry. his writing is reason enough to talk to him, but like him? yes, i say, though i am not sure why. i respect greg’s street creds and how he has survived adversity. i realize he brought most of that adversity on himself. i cannot reconcile the good i see in him with his dark half and i don’t think i need to.
    uppers coke and speed and meth are false personalities, turn people into human flies. down, down, down to the roots of my beauty and the majesty of life/death, love/hate, good/evil, to the water and wheat, humble heroics, the gangsters were saints because they drank, the winged obscene.
    i don’t have a big heart and i have admitted this to myself. my big heart has been sliced away. i don’t have a small heart and i know this of myself. i don’t piss on it all from any height. i’m sensitive and brutal as lightning.
    the neighbors have rats so we have rats. that’s the way it goes. even the worst rat can get through the best fence.
    the morning starts like that and the day ends like that. i mostly reside in the in-between lands.
    today i am not a writer and this typewriter smells like oil and grandmothers, metal and ink. the guy smells like fungus. he’s sweaty and his bare feet are warm and his wrist hurts. he wears blue jeans and a white t-shirt and has nothing on his mind but the next cigarette and cold beer. if he was starving in ethiopia he might be concerned with changing the world. . . i told angela about the prostitute i picked up. the girl in the newspaper obituaries. she listened well and didn’t say much. of course she can’t like me picking up women hitchers and prostitutes but she just said women shouldn’t hitch. in her eyes, i am supposed to discriminate between blondes and beards. i see her point of view. the beard is headed to the soup kitchen and the blonde wants in somebody’s pants. sex was never mentioned but it was there in the talk like a sublime underworld that couldn’t translate to action. as for prostitutes, i’ve never paid for it. i’ve been with two, one as her lover. i’d see her turning tricks on the corner and say that’s her life. let her buy me lunch.
    i am not a flycatcher. one editor i liked called me a “malcontent.” i didn’t say anything. i could have asked him if that was a political statement. i could have asked him what he was content with. i knew i was a discontent. i could have told him and asked if that was alright. this editor was alright. i wasn’t much discontented with him, except for him calling me a malcontent. i don’t have the predisposition to be negative or be predisposed to things. a malcontent is a cynic. he runs on a program. i’m skeptical and leave room for the sacred, like the sound of a carpenter hitting nails, a man sweating over the lawn that was forced on him, a dog barking behind a fence because he doesn’t know what’s on the other side. people::: i don’t hate you. i don’t like you. there’s a difference. . . that’s how we keep going. . .
    the bettors. hawks fly over the chicken coop, looking for rats and chickens. they fly overhead again throughout the day. in a year, i have never seen one dive for prey. i did see a falcon explode out of the sky in chase of the two metal sparrows which sit atop our birdfeeder. he sat atop the feeder with his inedible prey for a moment. the hawks never give up. they’ll fly by for five years to catch one meal. the chickens and rats are on the itinerary if not today’s menu. there’s always a chance. chance for gain equals compulsion.
    marilyn happened to see this story on my table. she said she had read only the part about me leaving if things deteriorated with her son. just moving out, but she saw it as me leaving. she said i was shallow. the going gets “unpleasant” and i bolt. “unpleasant” is a very unspecific adjective, but nonetheless we had much ado about nothing. nice argument there. i told her i had no problem with her and did not intend to leave her but that suddenly i have a 10-year-old brat.
    marilyn says she doesn’t want to come near my renegade crotch, even though she does. she says my jock itch is a ploy to avoid sex. always playing for the lay, my sweet marilyn, and i like it. our sex is infrequent, but i can’t think of another woman when i am with her. to defeat flight from the present is ecstasy.
    fidelity comes to me often. it arrives. you must be faithful. to her, to this, to all. i consider its price. i consider my dual nature. i consider hurting people. i cannot come to a decision. there is no agreement in the all. i can look at the parts. i look at one or the other for an answer. it’s a hell of a mess love has gotten me into. it’s a hell of a mess to live without love. i imagine choices. i want what doesn’t exist. the all exists, but you can’t have it. why do i want what isn’t? what i cannot have? here comes the discontent and paralysis. not over any person, woman, but with the rules and the subjugation to a thing i will never understand.

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