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South Landing

Patrick Fealey

for Michael DeCapite.

    Jock itch hatches in 30 minutes. You feel dazed and angry at the sky. The Mojave cannot surpass the agony of an Arkansas summer.
    “Can I might could use your restroom? Those sausages – Polish sausages – I ate last night aren’t setting well.”
    He’s one of the power-washers I found on Craigslist, the one who stands six-foot-five and has three chins and, in profile, has a pear for a skull. Bulbous forehead, no jaw. He must be close to 350 pounds and is not shy about it. I say “sure” and worry about how many sausages he’s going to drop into my toilet. He is the unofficial supervisor which means he owns the power washer and watches John work it and sweat off the 101-degree, 75% humidity afternoon. I supervise all of them, high on scotch. After all, nobody can miss one inch. (Churchill, considered the greatest man of the 20^th century, above Einstein and Roosevelt, drank a bottle of brandy before breakfast, scotch and soda before lunch, and wine for the remainder of the day and night. I do not feel as if I am trespassing on anyone with my so-called “alcoholism,” including myself. Labels are easy. The truth is it keeps me alive.
    John sprays the house. The white paint looks a little brighter. A San Jose native who has been here most of his life, his hair is long and dark blonde and he lacks front teeth. Smells like a skunk and something septic, he needs a power wash. Jack Daniels and cheap American beer do occur to him. He quoted $450. The boss said $500. I said $475. John brought his girlfriend along. Born in New Orleans in the ninth ward, I must wonder how she escaped after hurricane Katrina wiped her house off the map. She has lost many of her teeth, but I have lost 5. The main point is she is a tall and lean brunette with short cropped hair, Italian-looking. She is pregnant with apparently John’s child and is very cheerful. She sits in the truck. She climbs a ladder and scrubs the wall outside the garage with a natural bristle brush. She outwits John and the pear head, but they pay little mind to her jokes. They are more interested in their own jokes. She talks to me but throws her arms around John. I imagine them living with plastic sheeting and blue tarps overhead their trailer. Pear head tells me when the economy was good they’d make a grand a week. Now sometimes they make $350. I gave John the cash and he quickly handed it to the Pear. I said, “John does all the work and you take the money.” “We have an arrangement,” Pear says. John says, “All ya’all need to make it here is one good friend who respects you and you can trust. That’s all ya’all need.”
    I don’t have that. I will find a substitute in a contractor named John Sickles, but will blow it when he turns on me and I threaten to expose him as a fraud to Medicare and Social Security. He will work construction every day for the three years I will know him, but files for disability. He is paid under the table so he can qualify for Medicaid. It started when I offered to pay him for two days work (half-days for him) with a gun. I figured the gun was worth $200. He likes the pump .22 and says yes. I give him the gun after the first day. The next day he blows me off. I look up the gun on the internet and discover it is old and not made anymore and is worth between $900 and $2,000. I tell him I would like the gun back and he does not return my messages. That’s when I made the threat. Then he said he would give me the gun back, but he said it was worth only $200-$300 and he intended to keep it, not profit from it like the things he finds at flea markets and sells as a very lucrative sideline. He tells me he will hurt or kill me for threatening his fraud. I tell him I believe in living under the radar and I have always supported, and given advice on getting Social Security Disablity. I tell him to keep the gun. But peace will never be restored. Half his life is a lie, the other an endless stream of jokes. He is funny, but he is slippery. He drinks half the beer and whiskey I have in the house and has not once brought over a six-pack.
    But I do have a friend in Marilyn. We have trust and she makes the money while I sit at home writing and drinking. It is unfair to writers how it seems they are never writing. The fact is I can bang out an immortal story in four hours and then suck on the bottle until my woman comes home from work. On the surface, I look like a loser. Which is exactly what her shallow and insane mother and obstinate sociopathic son call me. “Why do you always pick losers,” the kid asks him mom.
    John Sickles was another Craigslist find, and all was well for two years. He is a genius who fixes everything we throw at him, from motorcycles to French drains and electricity. He finds many things amiss and takes his time repairing them. Air filters in the ceiling, a new deck, and takes care of the place when we are in California. His southern accent is less overwhelming than the power-washers’, but Marilyn has a difficult time understanding him. He is a wizard when it comes to discovering legitimate problems around the house. Tall, jovial, a talker, he wears a towel around his neck because he sweats heavily when he works – outside and inside our house, the towel is rolled up like a collar and tucked into his shirt. I smell cigarettes on him so I worry for him and over our deck, which needs new planks. His skin is yellow. It will take him a year before he lights up in front of me. I will ask for one and he will give me one, setting myself back to the path of smoking.
     John can tell you everything you want to know or don’t want to know when it comes to house construction and repair. He charges $15/hour except for plumbing and wiring, for which he charges $20/hour. He is a talker and will tell you about your deck for 20 minutes, but it seems he subtracts talking time from his invoices. Some of his stories are beyond believable but they have value as stories. I feel our house is in good hands when he is here, his eyes falling all over the place from the inadequate supports in the basement to the clogged gutters.
     John is also a ham radio operator. He also owns 70 hot tubs, which he fixes and sells. He rents a house with his third wife, who will soon divorce him. He said he rents because he lost two houses in divorces. On a Hawaiian vacation, he was busted by the hotel for running an antennae wire out his window and into the ocean for better reception. The hotel management frowned upon his communication methods. He builds his own radios and says he has talked to the international space station as it flew past. His best friend is a charter pilot. He said the “Hero of the Hudson” was so brave you “couldn’t put a nail up his ass.” His best friend will die when his charter plane crashes in Oklahoma. It was neither pilot error or mechanical failure. The ground crewman put jet fuel in one wing and high octance gas in the other wing. So much for minimum wage. The guy was fired and the airport suffered lawsuits from the families of the executives aboard, as well as his friend’s wife. The airport went under. John will tell me the facts, but does not reveal any emotion.
    Our front yard is more bare moss and mushrooms than grass. It’s the oak canopy we have which shades the jungle floor. And we’re on a hill, so rain erodes the topsoil, leaving bare spots of infertile clay. The roots of the trees are laid bare. On this posh street it’s an embarrassment. I never worried about lawns in the past and I think that’s because I always had one. Here there is no front lawn. The seeds I planted there in fresh dark soil from plastic bags sprout and stunt.
    Marilyn created a web site for her students in five days. Using HTML. She had not used the program in 26 years.
    I built an office in the master bedroom closet using sawhorses and a six-foot long by 26-inch wide by one-inch thick pine board. The board didn’t want to fit in here and then the office chair put up a fight. I dread the day I have to take that chair out of here. I have wired the place with a surge protector. The computer and desk light, printer and stereo are connected. I carried my hindu fetish in my suitcase and it now sits to the side of the computer, spreading peace, sadness, and joy. Whether he is Buddhist or Hindu, he is a calming figure who has been on my desk for 16 years. I found him on Narragansett town beach after an enormous storm washed him up 100 yards from an 1800’s shipwreck. I was very ill at the time and walking the beach saved me. When I saw the fetish’s face looking up at me from amongst the kelp, the ivory diamond on its forehead, I considered it a sign, a destiny. Skinner auction house in Boston wanted him when I needed money for heroin, but I kept him. He’s become a talisman and rock through all the changes, 19 places in 16 years, an event, a connection. The fetish is smarter than me. I know this because he beams enlightenment through closed eyes and has never spoken a word.
    116 degrees inside Marilyn’s car yesterday. 102 degrees outside.
    There are 380,000 people in the surrounding area. I must meet one of them. At least one.
    Two neighbors have come by to introduce themselves and welcome us to the neighborhood. Sarah is a professor of education at the University of Arkansas and her husband is a former illustrator who now paints. He drew for high-end magazines, advertisers, and CBS, NBC, but he is old now and painting what he wants. He tends toward realism, but his signature handling of light is full of expression. Sarah stopped by and gave us the inside story on the neighborhood. Turns out our neighbor across the street who lives in a mansion is a certified public accountant with a retarded son and dead wife. The house is modern, straight lines, three floors, massive. Sarah said it took two years for the son to pass his driver’s test. Now he drives a massive blue pick-up with huge Oakland Raiders stickers on the side and I am frightened about meeting him on the road. His mother taught, tested, and coached him for those two years. Sarah didn’t present any theories about why she committed suicide. My only thought on the matter is she was married to a number-cruncher and her home life was difficult. Her son is off his nut. He came over here one day and has since been yelling my name from 200 feet off when he sees me. Then one day he came over and asked me my name again. He can see in our kitchen windows from above and is the type for whom I own weapons.
    Sarah invited us to go out for dinner with her and her husband. We hit what had become our favorite Mexican joint since arriving here and we had a good time, with Sarah and Marilyn doing most of the talking. Ken sat opposite me and occasionally spouted inappropriately personal questions. A strange fellow, a quiet gray-haired painter who broke jokes but mostly remained silent with his beef and chicken fajita. He talked to the waiter, who he knew, more than he talked to me. I guessed he was shy and inward like many artists. I had seen his art back at his house and found him an excellent realist. I considered realists as working in the past, especially photo-realists. He used acrylics. So anyhow, I sat across from him and ate my food like all that mattered was food. Ken was strange and far away that night, but his younger wife compensated with her wit and friendliness. She was a bit too friendly, a sexy Navaho, but I did nothing to dissuade her. I think she knew she had to compensate for her husband, that the burden was not new. They were nice people and I recently visited Ken and found we were able to talk. One time I went over to their house to return a dish and she answered the door. We talked about the spring, knowing what we knew, and she said, “Who knows, anything can happen.”
    The other neighbor who stopped by was Colonel Earl Massey, who formerly was in command of the nearby Air Force base until he retired. (One day I saw a Warthog jetting over the neighborhood. Another day an F-18.) Days ago Massey retired from teaching ROTC at the high school. Short white hair, do what’s right as defined by the defense department kind of guy – who would put a .223 into your liver in the name of America, as defined by defense contractors. He was extremely friendly, but he hadn’t heard my electric guitar yet.
    Legal moonshine. Rumored: cockroaches and cottonmouths. The best ribs in America! Absinthe – with water and sugar this year. Repairmen and handyman, leather couch delivery, New York City Jewish movers arriving telling me my move isn’t paid for, inspiring me to tell them to fuck off and check with their dispatcher while i shove a receipt under their sweating noses; after the lead Jew accepted that the company had been paid in advance (he had called the headquarters), we all got along fine Fact is he wouldn’t even be at our house if we hadn’t paid. Was he trying to double his profit? He’s sitting in his truck in front of my house telling me I owe him six grand if we want our boxes. Miscommunication within the company, maybe, but stupidity and possibly something more sinister: holding our things hostage until we paid more than the contracted amount . . . I had been warned about companies which do that. The other two movers were excellent and I tipped them a Franklin. Friendly carpet installers . . . Most days we have had a stranger in our house and Sascha has greeted them all with a bark and wagging tail. He is good with everyone, even those who are terrified of the gentle giant. I do not think we have a good watchdog in our 103-pound German Shepherd. We have a puppy. Marilyn is kicking ass at the university. “The best,” a web designer said. Her own HTML studies at Humboldt State are in the past yet she recalled it well enough to build the best nursing course web site in her department. The girl never ceases to amaze me with her intelligence and talents. She is also a great abstract painter in and out of the sheets.
    Things are worsening for my friends Matt and Kim in Rhode Island. Kim has already told Matt he is free to fuck other women. When your partner won’t sleep with you and gives you a ticket to sleep with others, you know you are in the end stage. Yet he clings to a past and last night tried to go down on her and she said, “No! No!” I told him I was sorry he was dealing with such rejection. Kim has drifted away since they had Vera. Matt remains in love with her as always, but it is unrequited. Matt says it’s because she prefers the tough type, like landscapers and fishermen, not the writer and musician. She looks upon him as weak and distracted, though she is good at running interference when a woman takes interest in him at a gig. He can’t fix a broken faucet, therefore she doesn’t care if he is a genius. I think it’s a little more specific than sex but Matt refuses to admit it. She doesn’t love him. She just needs him financially because she is too mentally unstable to hold a job. They began as a consuming fire, where she met him at motels on lunch breaks wearing high-heeled black boots. Two, three times a day they fucked like savages. It was all about sex, they were still on a roll when she became pregnant. Then she gradually turned and since the birth of Vera she has frozen, denying him sex and whatever good will she has left in her. He does not come home smiling. He comes home to complaints and cigarette smoke. His daughter Vera is his savior. I tell him he would win her in a custody battle. He could leave Kim for a more affectionate woman who would be willing to have the five more kids he wants. Maybe he doesn’t believe this. Maybe he fears Kim would get Vera. So Matt is chained to Kim. He loves being a father. It has so transformed his perception that he says he loves Vera more than he has ever loved any girlfriend. That’s powerful and I am sure Kim knows it. He says they stay together so that Vera will have two loving parents. This might fool her until she is six. One day Vera will learn they stayed together for her and founder in guilt.
    Sascha and thunder. Living here he may get over the frequent rumblings of the clouds and quit barking in fear of the unknown. It was a rare sound in California. The weather here reminds me of the East coast, but fewer summer storms.
    Buddha or whomever my friend is, looks settled. He travels well and is very aware for a piece of wood and ivory. A part of me wants to auction him through Skinners because I am broke, but I suspect that would curse me to bad luck for eternity. While I write, I feel he is a guide. One priest said he is a Laotian funerary statue. The carves into his chest represent family members. He stands just nine inches, but his sun-like face can command a room. He is carved of one piece of wood and stands perfectly balanced. I looked into his origin and found no Eastern fetish like him. His body more resembles something from Africa.
    Marilyn has put the dish soap in the cupboard under the sink. This is a pain in my ass when I go to wash dishes. When I ask her to move it onto the side of the sink, she argues that we have never done that and it has always been under the sink. I cannot possibly fathom what makes her lie so vehemently and blatantly. In the end I win because I can yell at her better than she can yell at me when I have the truth on my side, as well as common sense. So ridiculous to be fighting over dish soap with such energy and frightening how readily she lies.
    The most dangerous shark to man is the bull shark.
    The most dangerous man to the bull shark is me.
    Hang up your shirts, man. 2,400 mile shirts. The box blocks your desk chair.
    This is the most spacious closet I have ever written in. It is the size of my hotel room in San Francisco, 1999 – and has no bed or sink or cockroaches. It is a room with shelves and poles. My desk displaces 260 shirts. This is going to work for as long as my brain works. Sometimes I fear I have become wet-brained, but I then believe I have ten more years in me. On the menu:
    Moonshine in a ball jar.
    Daytime Scotch. With ice and club soda. Straight at night.
    Tequila. Shots and cocktails.
    Citrus Smirnoff. With margarita mix on the rocks.
    Mudslides.
    Absinthe. Sugar and water. I used to shoot absinthe. The most difficult liquor to keep down after a shot. Fire in the lungs! A stomach screaming NO! Absinthe made scotch and tequila shots go down like grape juice. I now drink absinthe the way it is meant to be. Sugar and water, murky green turns on new lights.
    Late night concoctions. Throw together whatever is left on the bar.
    From dawn to 3 a.m. There is a drink in my hand. I remember starting up again when Katz died. He left Champagne in the fridge before he blew his brains out, then the bottle of rum he left for us on the kitchen table, to tequila and beer. I had quit for seven years after the onset of severe manic-depression. I tell myself I am stronger now. But I don’t really know how strong my scars are. If I crack up again, will I get a third chance? I have heard of second chances and I am using mine up like a waterfall uses a river.
    This is the first short story I have started in months. I’ll admit, I have lost the habit. We have been in Arkansas one month. It was not a block but pure laziness, preoccupation, and disregard for the readers i do not have. I have written several million words and hopelessness lay upon my shoulders, white and light, but cold.
    I dropped the motorcycle in the steep driveway yesterday. I was pinned under 300 pounds, with the weight of the engine centered on my ankle. I yelled for Marilyn for 10 minutes before she heard me. I feel like a novice who has forgotten how to ride. It really hurt, but my ankle was not broken. Motorcycle mishaps are often less forgiving.
    Nefertiti has sent me an email with Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” attached. She said it reminded her of me, of us. Did I ruin her for other men? I told her it was one of my favorite songs, a masterpiece. I asked her if she was one of the men because I did not understand her comparison. I asked her about who the other man was in the blue raincoat. Kerouac? Only because he was famous at the time and his raincoat played a role in On The Road. I have no idea why she sees us in the song and when I asked she never answered. I must consider and know that I was the best fuck of a promiscuous woman’s life.
    Nef is working in the Persian Gulf, excavating a Bedouin settlement. It sounds like her least exciting dig, but the Gulf is about to combust and I wonder if that is not her true interest. She is always working in war zones, where revolutions, coups and conflicts between nations and inside nations are going on. The last one was Egypt’s revolution. She doesn’t tell me which Middle-Eastern country she is in now. Sounds just like my ex-girlfriend Orit’s stories about her life and father, who was a pilot for Pan Am and a CIA agent. She was in Afghanistan when the Russians invaded. I mentioned the CIA to Nef once and her reaction was explosive. I haven’t brought it up again, only have watched the patterns in her locations. She has a PhD from the London Institute of Archaeology. This last job in Egypt, happened when the leader was overthrown in a revolutionary uprising she was in the center of. She told me she had lost friends. Then she moved on to the Gulf region, which has never been so unstable. I don’t know why she won’t tell me which country she is working in. At this time, I am not completely convinced she is CIA, but also realize that this belief is the conclusion a good CIA agent would strive for. My ex Orit didn’t realize her father was CIA until I told her he was. Based on the portrait she created. She called her mother. “Mom, was dad CIA?” “Yes, honey. They all were at that time.” “All” refers to the Pan Am pilots. It is absolutely necessary to have a cover job to go undetected. The jobs are real. The spies have two jobs. Nef is a highly respected archaeologist who makes no money, yet lives well in London and locations. I have unresolved emotional entanglements with Nef and I hope she is not working for the CIA. It would change everything with us. She would be affronting her mother and father and how she was raised. Her mother’s house was a stop in the underground railroad for Vietnam war dissenters on their way to Canada. Spying is necessary, but she wouldn’t stoop and take the job, even if she needed the money. Would she? No doubt she has been approached and makes little as an archaeologist. I don’t know who the hell she is, except a sexual masterpiece, but she says she is going to retire at 65. On what?
    Famous Blue Raincoat. It’s a sad song. A friend sweeps into town and fucks Cohen’s wife and she is never the same for Cohen. The experience left her so affected that afterwards “She was nobody’s wife.” Cohen handles it well in music. The song is sublimely scorching and is a perfect poem and perhaps the only avenue of retaliation available to the songwriter. What the song has to do with Nef and me? My one guess is betrayal, my <>Ione against her many. We both wrecked a love where everything flowed like wine and our neuroses were balanced and therefore normalized.
    The Buddha looks cheerful today. Must like living in the dark.
    Nef writes. I respond. She does not write back.
    I initiate correspondence. She does not reply.
    Always the kiss, kiss, kiss sign-off. “ xxx Nef” but no Nef.
    I write and ask her why she starts conversations and does not respond to my reply. The very next day she calls me an idiot and claims she has not been near a computer in weeks and that I am harassing her.
    I am a fool who thought I had more priority in her life.
    I tell her I assumed she was near a computer when she wrote to me about “Famous Blue Rain Coat” and when I wrote back immediately, I expected a response.
    She called me an idiot and said she has been on a river barge for weeks.
    You can see how little sense she makes and how easily she angers with me, the man who dumped her.
    She says that I am not a fool, but she believes I hate her.
    I tell her that statement is frightening and untrue.
    I know she feels this way because of the book I published, in which she was a main character. She let something perfect die and calls me hateful after I put the truth on paper. When we were together she suspected she had an std and didn’t mention it until after our four weeks in bed – over lunch. I can see how she thinks I hate her, based on the details in the novel (“Too much detail,” she complained. “That’s what a novel is,” I replied.) I have written about us, and my love for her is greater than my love for most I have known, despite the destruction we have delivered upon ourselves. I wrote about love and death and she cannot take her eyes off the death.
    The years are catching me. Each day I hear my hellhound. The hours. My days pass through nothingness. It’s actually become an effort to find things and people to hang onto. About all I have to hang onto are aches and pains. I am beyond alone. I do not exist, but for the designs which surround me. I notice my life. That’s all.
    Beauty the bull dog barks at a chair. My deceased old man, one year – his ghost sits in the chair. Only beauty can see the ghost. Beauty loved him and remembers him. Beauty is a bulldog. My old man was a jealous and abusive motherfucker. I never liked beauty. She constantly tried to kill my dog. Bullies usually gravitate.
    Completed a painting yesterday. It rose out of me like lightening. Using the colors of my very first palette of 17 years ago. Thick black, white, ultramarine, cadmium red, yellow ochre – spread with the knife. The painting is dark, a subterranean labyrinth with colors showing like a late sunset through thick shadowy tree-tops: silhouettes.
    The Clonopin I take at night for sleep hampers me in the morning. The Clonopin works for 12 hours; I take it before bed and ideally sleep eight hours. The last of it is in my system while i am trying to wake up. I will not allow the mornings to go wasted with exhaustion and that benzo-induced writers’ block. Mornings should be sharp. I am a farmer. I must retire at sunset and awake at 4 a.m., calm and clear. I farm words, thoughts, ideas, and especially people. The seeds are in the air, in our blood and tears, born behind our ribcages. I catch them and plant them onto the blank page. Every minute and day is a new harvest. To stay awake late and take the Clonopin before bed is to wake at noon with the day’s power lost. A plague of locusts feeds on the bare brain silence of the one who wakes after dawn.
    Small red bible on the dash, well-worn cover –a shaved head he has come to cut our lawn with his fiancé and two small and patient children. He thanked me for the work. They arrived here nine months ago from coastal Oregon for the work and low cost of living. He came from a town of 1,900. Not much work in these small towns anymore, storefronts emptied every day, anemic main streets, ashamed of themselves. That’s where he came from. Or is what he came from, a place without a how? Mike did a great job with the lawn and will charge me less next time because the grass has now been cut for the first time in six weeks. The guy had a genuine handshake and did what he came to do. I’ll keep him as long as he keeps us. Postscript: Some mechanic who worked on his car for the previous owner (a 70-year-old woman) took out the catalytic converter (reason unknown; maybe she didn’t want to pay for a new one) and welded in a straight pipe. His Honda is loud and probably illegal, however lax Arkansas is about emissions and fuel fumes. Speaking of gasoline, I have been using it to thin my paints. I don’t smoke on these paintings.
    Liquor stores with drive-thru windows. Christians don’t want to be seen in liquor stores. All of the religious fanatics are private about their so-called sins, which are not sins or anything else suspicious to the free man. They came up with a trick to make hypocrisy easier and more endurable – that I am sure fools no one. And imagine the folks who survey liquor store parking lots to see who is with satan? All of them are lost because they cannot accept and savor this life.
    Marilyn’s parents arrived with Derek at noon. They clung to him until the very last moment. He missed orientation at school. He knows nothing of Fort Smith. He begins school in one day. His grandparents’ “love” has done him a disservice. Clinging to Derek, a spoiling grandma abused by her grandson, this is Marilyn’s mother. No words between her mother and me, avoidance strategy – though I do listen to some of what she says as we give them the tour. She is clearly still sour about us moving from California to what she calls “one of those bad states.” Virgil was courteous right off, shook my hand, looked at me, unlike his wife, but Virgil is a liar who is constantly covering up for his wife’s nasty mental instability and hostility. She and I are where we have always been only now it is out in the open. She speaks less when I am in the room ever since I told her she was asserting her existence with noise that only injured others. I told her she was an irrelevant human being when it came to me. I can discern now that she listens to me and even repeats what I say as her own. One of those exhausting types who needs to be beaten down and shown the door before she can act civilly. I was surprised to see how Derek treated her, but he knows how to handle her. The frightening thing is Marilyn is a lot like her mother when it comes to inviting what I’d call abuse. I don’t want to be part of it.
    Her mother ignored me, scorned me for the first 18 months in California and the relationship improved little in the following two years. It was too late. She was insane and I was the sore she could not stop picking at. Virgil told me the first year of silence was “a test.” Pretty sick. One does not need to treat another like a pariah for a year to see if he is admissible. The highest relationship we have achieved is toleration, which is a perpetual losing. She is full of trivia and gossip and hatred. When I said something, she tilted her head and looked at me like she didn’t understand, which I believe she didn’t. We’re just so far apart. I have seldom seen a person so tangled up in the shallowest. I could not say one true thing to her without her face twisting in confusion and finally rejection. A rabid conservative Republican who cares more about her money than the truth. The lying war-monger President Bush is her favorite President because he protected the wealthy. Benefitting from unions their entire lives, Karen and Virgil turned against unions once they had their money in the bank. Finally I gave up on her. She recently attacked me through Marilyn, calling me “a bipolar alcoholic with anger management problems.” In response, I really gave it to her and now she shows a respect I had to win by enduring hatred and waging my own war.
    It is going to be painful for them to leave Derek behind. They have over-loved, over-identified, which is not love but a spoiling and a destruction. They have lived through him by buying him things that made him happy for five minutes. Since her mother called me a bipolar alcoholic with anger management problems I have been drinking whiskey in front of her and Virgil. It doesn’t matter anymore. Marilyn used to have me hide my drinking from her family. She wanted a closet drinker, wanted me to act like someone who was ashamed, which I am not. Ironically, I am writing this in my closet office, but it’s just a writer who brings his whiskey to work, as well as everywhere else.
    Marylin must go to the university today for a convocation, wearing her robe to meet other faculty and the new students. Her parents and Derek decline. I will go.
    Ankle still hurts a week after I dropped the bike on it. I was pinned with the engine case crushing my ankle into the pavement. I was wearing sandals with my bare ankle gripped by steel and concrete. Lucky I didn’t break it in the falling. Imagine wearing a cast in 102 farenheight and 90 percent humidity? Concern now is getting the bike to start. The crash shut down the electrical system.
    I took the family out for dinner last night. Good food. Didn’t talk to her mother at the table, but we exchanged one smile when I told Derek that at his new school he will have 450 girls to choose from. He’s already on to one. I ignored her and she avoided me and we did not exchange words until we were in the parking lot and she said, “Thanks for dinner!” And I said “You’re welcome.”
    I’m cooking spaghetti and meatballs tonight. Karen and Virgil slept at their hotel last night, but may spend tonight here. The question is how long will they linger in Arkansas? I think tonight Marilyn will give us a tour of the nursing building and department. Thinking: If Marilyn finishes her PhD here, which is a job requirement, I’m going to be sitting in this closet with my homemade pine desk for three or four more years, contending with a totally stressed out and infrequent girlfriend for too long. She may do her doctorate on how most couples split when one of them is in nursing school. The stress and work, as well as a woman’s sense that she soon can be independent of her husband – on whom she probably relied to get through school – often leads to a break. Marilyn got her masters without help from her rich parents or husband, who wouldn’t even pay his share of the mortgage. Marilyn worked two jobs, medical surgical nurse and teacher at the nearby college, raised Derek, dealt with a sick and useless German husband (who kept using her credit to buy more and better Jettas and BMW’s which he wrecked because in his country he had never driven while she wrote 200 essays over two years and achieved a 3.9 GPA. She was sleepless for two years. Next she will go back to school while a full-time Associate Professor, which she thinks will be easier. One job, no husband. Just a half-mad artist and a teenager.)
    Karen and Virgil came over this afternoon sheepishly saying they had eaten a big lunch and would not be staying for the spaghetti and meatballs I had cooked, despite accepting Marilyn’s invitation yesterday.
    Less energy. Slipping into this place. Sleep on the couch or write, paint. Constant has been playing outside with the dog, accompanied by the frenzy of cicadas. Sascha likes to chase sticks and catch frisbees. We have many trees in our yard, but I found a straightaway to throw through the trunks.
    Alliterations. Accidents. Altogether now! Love, love, where are we?
    The rifle leaning against the wall in here and the pistol on my shelf constant reminders that i have a choice. Yes or no. Stay or go. This is the question I awake to each morning, kill or kill. Yeah, this must be – is – my SONG. Essential to living on the edge is to remain calm. I am not excited by the things others believe I should be. One looks to me for laughter and it isn’t there, I have lost the smile. One looks to me for anger: i say nothing. I have been reincarnated as a ghost whose goals are to be clear, calm, peaceful. I have only an appetite for geniuses and paradox. I am willing to eat grasshoppers. So far, my visions have severed me into many immaculate pieces and delivered me to many sacred places.
    “Are you taking your medication?” I asked Marylin. (anti-depressant)
    “What does that have to do with anything?” she said.
    “Are you taking your medication?”
    “What’s this? Out of nowhere?”
    “Are you taking your medication?”
    “The question is more like ‘Are you taking your medication’?’” (bitch mode)
    “Don’t make this about me,” I said. “Are you taking your medication? Because you have been a bitch for days.”
    “I’m the same.”
    “You’re not. Are you taking your medication?”
    “No. And I feel better without it.”
    Lying bitch, I buy newspapers and look at the rental ads.
    Took an interrogation before a simple question was answered, to achieve simple honesty from my girlfriend. Are you taking your medication? It is common for psyche patients to quit their meds when they start feeling better. They quickly fall and exhibit the same symptoms which landed them in the psychiatrist’s office. Then they lie. Medicated, I am healthier than Marilyn is un-medicated – and she is allegedly healthy and I am one of the ”sickest” individuals several doctors said they have ever treated. (Bi-polar, schizo-affective, seizure absentia, sometimes psychotic.) Last night I didn’t want to sleep in the same bed. Without her meds, she is interpersonally psychotic. (Avoids contact, counters everything you say, is a slave driver who ignores or critiques your accomplishments, yet still expects to be serviced every night – despite how psychologically unattractive she has made herself. Perpetually frowning, better than, argumentative.) On her meds, these lower intolerable symptoms recede and she seems what I’d say is normal. If she insists on skipping her meds, then I must leave. She is thwarting my openness, denying my experience, and making my expression a liability. How can one remain with one he does not want to see or talk to?
    Derek should be home in 45 minutes. In order not to be bitched at by Marilyn like last night when he took the wrong bus and I did not make a fuss about it, today I will walk down to the bus stop and see if he steps off it. If he does not, I will call the school. I will go to the school and pick him up, which is what all of his efforts not to take the bus are about. He was driven to and from school up to the age of 12. His mother. His grandparents. Me. We have all spared him the bus – more spoiling. I told Marilyn he would resist. She replied that he was confused. Like how he walked right past the gathered kids on the corner bus stop yesterday, passing by the obvious and walking for blocks without looking back. He didn’t know that we were down the street watching. We ran after him, Marilyn shouting, and we finally got him to come back and join the other kids. I told Marilyn he was trying to miss the bus so he could come home and get a ride. She said something back to make me feel like an asshole. Now Derek misses the bus twice a week and we must drive him to school. He has three alarm clocks. When they wake him he gets up and turns them all off and goes back to bed. School means nothing to him. I have asked him if he had learned anything in school today for four years and he always says “No.”
    She refuses to understand her own kid, or accept what he is. She always defends him, despite the obvious. He gets away with lies and abuse of his parents, grandparents, drinking alcohol, and smoking pot at age 11. She lies to herself. Her baby is incapable of deception and manipulation, even after all the lies and crimes she knows he has committed. When I told her he had a “dark side” she refused to believe me and acted like I was a piece of shit until a week later he was busted making marijuana deals. For awhile, she listened to me and believed she had a troubled kid, but now her son is back to perfect and I am left in the dungeon once again. She is in denial about her kid, subservient to her mother, and antagonistic toward me. You think this relationship will last? Today Derek got off at the right stop. I was there. Then Marilyn pulled up. Then the grandparents. Do I feel trusted? Does he? Derek and I walked home together, despite the eager eyes of his grandparents wanting to give him a ride. Derek and I kept walking along in the heat; grandma looked disappointed that I could persuade Derek to walk with me, to walk on boiling tar instead of riding in her air-conditioned nightmare. Later she will accuse me of driving a wedge between Derek and them. Derek will say, “Some people can’t handle reality” and “They are always attacking Marilyn.” It’s a spiritual ground busting out relief to see him defend his mother.
    Marilyn and I had a good talk last night about our distance and aggression. She sat on her zebra stool and I sat on the edge of the tub. She blamed her aggression on me. I blamed my aggression on her. My rudeness versus her bitchiness. It all equals distance. She said she is taking her medication again and she did seem better this morning. Last night she said her med was mostly for stress with an anti-depression component. Asked, she said it was not a benzo, but she hates taking it because it eliminates her libido. The truth is she has a relentless libido and if anything, the medication spares her some rejection. Our talk ended well with a big soft kiss. The comrade was back. Having an accomplice in life is more important than getting laid.
    Marilyn is reading a novel. The cover of the paperback has a simple design: FUR.
    “What are you reading?” I say.
    “Steppenwolf. Hesse.”
    “What’s it about?”
    “You.”
    Thou shall not covet the neighbor’s porsche. Thou shall buy his owneth.
    (American Folklore)
    You walk out back onto the deck and you are standing amidst an oak jungle, feeling high and hidden deep in the leaves where the cicadas hang on with sticky legs while grinding their enormous hollow abdomens. They watch us with four eyes. We have not seen many birds here. In California we had every type, falcon and hawk to vulture, bluebird and bald and golden eagles, and especially hummingbirds and crows. I have not seen a crow here in one month. Maybe the farmers dynamited them all. The farmers do that around here. They wait for the crows to land in a tree for the night and blow it up. Thousands of crows sleeping together for safety from owls are blown into black and bloody justifications. Killing wild animals, and college athletics, are the two activities which spin Arkansans into a frenzy. One little girl dressed as a cheerleader from Oklahoma for Halloween. She got no candy. Given the option, the people here buy red cars to celebrate the Razorback team colors. Looking at houses online, we saw many with entire rooms devoted to the Razorbacks, flags, banners, stickers, posters, mugs, large flatscreens mounted on red walls, piles of nachos and cases of American beer, tv light bouncing off red bellies. Please buy my house before I overdose on red. I want to move to the white frontier of Alaska, to kill out of necessity and never hear a sports announcer again. Please! I cannot survive my distractions. Will even sell my red Harley. I need to save my marriage.
    This dog with a muddy nose follows me everywhere. Man’s best friend is a stalker. I clean his nose with a paper towel. Each morning he checks on the bone he recently buried. He digs and moves dirt with his nose. His face emerges looking like a bulldozer. Times he comes in and wants to rub the dirt off by sticking his nose in my crotch. My crotch is one of his most comfortable places; I rub the backs of his ears and he stays down there. I say, “Where did he go?” and reach around my leg and grab his nose. “There he is! There he is!” His tail wags.
    I bought a five-foot giraffe yesterday at a flea market. It is carved from one piece of wood. It’s form is extremely elongated, Giacometti on LSD. I placed it just inside the front door. I mentioned to Marilyn we have an African theme going.
    But where are the birds?

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