Lassitude and Longitude

From the fallow fields of my effete recollection a road emerges; a trodden lane of alternative and infrequent travel. Like a trail etched into the woods by the patter of curious footsteps or a scar smooth as wax where hair no longer grows, this is my way back.

With a purple marker the surgeon plotted points across my abdomen where later the constellation would be cut away and removed. I stood facing the supply cabinets looking off into the murky depths of betadine, which reminded me of rust water, or the ochre of an aged puddle of blood. I thought about his scalpel slicing into me, my skin filleted and fleshed away like hide from a hooved animal. I imagined forceps and hemostats lost and left behind corroding within. The taste of iron suddenly filled my mouth and I asked if I could have a soft drink before the surgery. He moved over my body as if it were not my body or the body from which the question came.

I was told I could rinse my mouth with a saline solution. “Swish and spit Paul, it’s necessary that you don’t consume any liquids prior to the operation”. His hair was voluminous and shiny like a fox’s fur, and he smelled like a warm ATM withdrawal. His smile, a radiant flash accompanied by the sound-effect of two swords striking or a star being born, made me feel yellow inside.

I dropped the paper cone into the trash, and then slipped back into my robe, which hung loosely over my body like linen used to cover the dead or indecent. I felt the cool breeze of gurneys icing by and sheets being removed. We arrived and checked-in at the registration desk where three tanned, torpid women attempted to look busy.

Two large doors opened before us, and I was led into a large porcelain room equipped with plastic wrapped apparatus and fixtures fitted with hoses and tubes. The operating table reminded me of a movie I had once seen where a frightened, remorseful subject of a lethal injection was fastened with both arms outstretched and secured to separate boards. The anesthesiologist and surgical nurse showcased the padded crucifix with glamorous waves and gestures of the hands as if I was in the showcase showdown or that was my cue to climb up.

I stared upward into a large, round bank of lights above me, and then surrendered to the table’s Christian design. The cool prickle of antiseptic diverted my attention from the face of the anesthesiologist, an Indian woman looking lovingly at me from behind a mask that, if removed, would reveal a thin set of lips and a fine, dark mustache. She moved over me like a mother while the surgical nurse slid an IV catheter into my left arm and inflated my artery with barbiturates. My eyes rolled sideways like two olives in tandem beneath the brine and vodka of my bleared vision, then came to rest against the glass of the Indian’s gaze. I focused on her forehead where a red bindi dot burned in vermillion versus of things sacred and concealed and began counting backwards from ten.

Ten, nine, eight, and I could feel the body’s wires course with the current of integers and amnesia. Seven…six…five… and I met with the warm embrace of ambrosia, the anonymity of the self separating, like a locust from it’s thin papery larvae luggage, and I spread my wings, falling gracefully from the outer bark of inauspicious surroundings into the warm romantic breeze of altered consciousness. The cacophony of surgical sounds rippled through my cortex and transformed into an unbroken ocean upon which I stood, a sea snake with scaled skin coiled and contemplative, reposed in it‘s pre-shed state, then suddenly I was a Portuguese man of war pirouetting down into the smeary blue depths of unconsciousness. Five…four…three… I tired hard to hold on, opening my eyes one last time meeting with golden gilded smile of my sleep keeper and the corona of a salty half inserted sun.

Black is a word too big to fit into the box in which I was buried. I laid for ten hours, unresponsive beneath the bale umbra of unconsciousness and lost to an unaccountability so profuse and profound that the deepest trawlers and draglines could never touch bottom or snag a survivor from that nadir of nothingness. There, at the bottom between oblivion and abyss, my body laid in suspension like a lipid buoyantly bobbing between two worlds. The one that hurt to touch, and the other one waiting to receive me like a deep blue embrace.

After the operation, I never really woke up. It was a slow ascent, a surfacing, a decompression back into reality where the pain issued and ebbed from an unidentified source; rising within like bubbles from the seal of something broke. I was wrapped in blankets and set to thaw under a set of pale fluorescent pillars that sizzled like mist or speakers unspoken through. Over the intercom doctors were paged and cryptic codes were corresponded in grated voices that sounded like transmissions from Mars. As the anesthesia lifted from my limbs and released me to the custody of corporeal sensations I attempted to speak.

I tried to call out but the air escaped without inflection. Panicked, I tried again and encountered a clot of congestion knotted and lodged in my throat from ten hours of intubation. Taking in air around the obstruction and clenching my throat tightly in an attempt to cough, I thrust the nest of callused crimson and gelatinous grief from my hull until my mouth overflowed with the stuff. A nurse responded to my distress, firmly placing an oyster colored pan beneath my chin and telling me to cough. She asked me to rate my pain using a scale of one to five. I held up five fingers then slumped further into the sheets as I watched as she injected narcotics into my IV line.

If truth is a road, then pain is a way back and scars are not testimony to truth or fact, but to how we once felt. I had felt nothing there in that darkness of an unaddressable world, not the cold steel table ready to resist my stains nor the bulge of my newly stitched navel – not even the relief of a retired, unwanted former self snipped away. And, suddenly, as the slow drip of drugs smuggled back across my borders, I was back at the bottom of the abyss with the creepy antennaed crustaceans and pale fish, floating beneath myself, beneath the pain of plastic surgery and magic tricks gone awry. From my box, my separated and sawed-in-half-self sown back together again, I stared upward through the vitreous bottom water and tried one last time to touch the surface where it always seemed to hurt the worst.

With my greasy index finger I pressed down the stiff red button on my father’s tape recorder and annunciated the words, “ I hate you”. I was ten years old, hiding in the hallway closet, and hurt by something my sister had said to me.

Like a cat maneuvering around an unplugged vacuum cleaner, I always maintained a constant level of alert in her presence. In her youth, my sister was a volatile synthesis of instability and unmet emotional need; a tomboyish bully with the disposition of an unfed ogre. Even to this day, despite her domestic guise (the Kathy Ireland cardigan and khaki capris) she remains a tyrannical bitch with the stature and temperament of some fabled woodland foe. When she was on my side I felt safe and secure, but for the other 23.5 hours of my day I lived in fear.

My mother worked three jobs and attempted to go to school in the evenings. She was never seen and her presence never felt. My father was a brain case, a survivalist Vietnam vet with who’d smack the teeth out of your head if you wandered too far within his perimeter. He was the household’s daytime dictator, ruling from his crumb-covered armchair with merciless impunity and a penchant for corporal punishment.

My sister and I were his designated grunts, carrying out his domestic duties so he could sit in his underwear and perfect his vacant, deranged dad face while watching tv. If we weren’t vacuuming up the wake of what he had just eaten, we were preparing his next meal.

He was a sloth, unclean, unkempt, and under our roof where neither of us wanted him. Most kids I went to school with spent their summers playing in parks or swimming in pools. For my sister and me, manual labor marked our summers. The day would start with a swift kick to the box springs, flipping me from my dreams to the living nightmare that was my life.

If I wasn’t stripping peanut butter off the kitchen counters or vacuuming chips and cookie crumbs from the crevices of dad’s recliner, I’d be exiled outside into the hellish midday heat for a day full of yard mowing.

I was a fat kid, I mean truly, honestly, fat. I had bitch tits and started sweating at the site of stairs, so carrying the literal weight of this burden only made my duties more difficult to perform. Risking hemorrhoids and herniation I would hoist the large wooden garage door to reveal the lawnmower leering at me from the other side of an impassable gauntlet of garage artifice; table saws, tool boxes, and cardboard boxes brimming with garland and Christmas tree ornaments smudged with grease.

After a clumsy extraction, accompanied by a few asthmatic episodes, I pushed the lawnmower to the edge of the lawn. Usually, it needed gas, which meant I had to maneuver a five gallon gas tank out to the front yard and risk a HAZMAT incident due to my weak, pudgy grasp and poor aim.

The gas container is a perfect example of how everything was always so goddam difficult and impractical. Most folk keep a half-gallon or one-gallon container for gas in their sheds or garages, but my pops, no… he needed a gas tank big enough to refuel a small jet or burn down 500 acres of jungle.

Even the lawnmower was archaic and impossible. I didn’t know of one other single lawn mower in our neighborhood or in existence that had a grass catcher. If you’re not sure what that is let me explain…Designed by some lawn snob with a fetish for colostomy bags, it’s that useless scrotum sack that sags off the back of the lawn mower that gorges on grass clippings.

I could cut two lanes on a decent day before having to empty the catcher, which meant the grass wasn’t wet and heavy with dew or yesterday’s rain. Then, I would have to stop the mower and remove the catcher, which was now completely full of hot green yard guts. The bag weighed about 20 pounds and when attempting to empty it the trash bag would always collapse and grass clippings would fall anywhere but into the trashcan.

Invariably, this meant I had to reach down into the foul smelling dankness and scoop the shit out. I ask you, who does this, and why? Every now and again, during lawn mowing season, while driving through the city, I catch some old bastard mowing his lawn with this dandy catcher device and the urge never leaves me to get out and whip him with a garden hose until his flip flops fall off.

My dad liked making life miserable almost as much as he liked his peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches. There was never an opportunity for my sister and I to commiserate over the unfairness of our father’s abuses and the plantation like politics of the house. And, for this, I have to give my old man credit because this is surely where his military training paid off; keep the prisoners divided so their strength can never combine to equal or rival that of your own.

My father treated us differently. He rarely ever struck my sister and when he did it was out of love unlike the blows bestowed to me, which lacked any restraint. With me, he had no reservations when it came to ratifying his authority with physical assertion. His hand was a hammer under which he drove me down like a bent nail beneath the boards that sealed shut my childhood fate.

My sister would eventually form a coalition with my father, using him as an ally to carry out punitive damages against me when her and I were at odds. Sometimes we got along, which basically meant she was bored and sought entertainment, so she might ask me to play with her until one of her friends came over or the weekend went by. During all other times there were no rules of engagement. If my sister’s bangs went limp before the school day had ended or if she was forced to sit alone at lunch, I was the one who would suffer the consequences.

One glorious afternoon she chased me down, clutching a wad of toilet tissue in her hand, which I could clearly see, was used to wipe her ass. I’ve never known another girl as ornery or wicked as her. She loved to fart and simulate shitting on my face on a daily basis. I believe it’s what kept her regular.

On this particular occasion she backed me up against the only phone in the house which happened to be in the kitchen – a black AT&T rotary that rested on a hook big enough to hold a coal shovel. As I groped for something to grab or cling to behind me, she beamed as if overcome by catharsis and went to make her move.

High on the body’s fight or flight pharmaceuticals and feeling my life in imminent danger, I responded with a crushing blow to her forehead with the receiver of the rotary phone. I should have given more thoughtful consideration to the placement of that blow and killed that bitch when I had the chance, but there’s no time to think when a wad of shit shoved in your face

Five minutes later she used that same black phone to call dad who was at the VFW deeply involved in a game of clabber and drinking beer from a can. He answered her distress call, accepting another commission to carry out justice in this case where I was the criminal and my sister the subject of another unprovoked attack. She was rehearsing and perfecting the role of the victim and emulating my father long before she became his full-fledged female facsimile.

My father took pride in beating me the way a Canadian seal hunter enjoys bludgeoning baby seals. I still remember the taste of his boot – the angle of his jaw and complete absence in his eyes.

Jack Nicholson scared the tube socks off of audience’s feet nationwide starring as Jack Torrence in the Shining. Post-it notes revolutionized the way we sabotage ourselves, and while Richard prior freebased cocaine, Mount St. Helens Erupted, darkening midday skies with over 600,000 tons of ash and claiming the lives of sixty people.

Saddam Hussein waged war with Iran over oil rights as John Lennon bled to death in the back seat of a taxi cab after being shot three times by Mark David Chapman. People were drug to inevitable ends on the cold steel rails of circumstance just as in years before and in years to come.

While the world outside committed some of history’s most heinous fashion gaffes, I was kicking in my mother’s womb as she sat cramped and uncomfortable in waiting room chairs. She was a regular at the VA clinic and the temp agency, as well as all of the municipal buildings downtown that doled out public assistance.

I could say a lot about the nineteen eighties if, in fact, I was in business or politics at the time or if at the very least, I was cognitive and not preoccupied with shitting myself or wailing for something to suck. Chronologically, I was the second of only two children, born five years after my sister. My recollection of early childhood is gauzy and inconsistent; forever out of focus like a hastily made photograph shot from the hip .

My memory begins with my first day at kindergarten with the blurred faces of five year olds, like day old dreams with forgotten plots and indistinguishable characters. A dull euphoria filled with game shows and girls with big hair, balloons pouring over presidential candidates in black and white on a twelve inch set.

On another channel, a space shuttle sifting through bad reception, returning to earth in pieces while I waited for the yellow bus. I recall copious amounts of wood paneling and glass bottles of pop; Michael Jackson’s thriller album on vinyl and my mom’s big plastic eyeglass frames.

Outside of school, my world was no bigger than a city block. I entered into Head Start at the age of four. I remember my mom’s powdery face and the drive downtown on days when she was able to take me. I spent more time in the laps of large black women while being read to than I did with my own mother.

I remember big cars, Monte Carlos and Cutlasses cruising streets, which were narrower then and interrupted by fewer traffic lights. From a socioeconomic standpoint I would later learn that my family was white trash and that the Head Start program was just one of the many government amenities my mother took advantage of in order to keep her kids out of foster care.

My arrival into this world occurred during the initial stages of  my father’s physical and psychological decline. Since before I could speak, I have been forced to suffer my father’s war stories and hard luck sagas. The area of my brain which I allotted to record my father’s lamentations is like a landfill where the grandiose garbage of his invented self sifts down, decaying and dissolving into the acrid soils of abhorrence.

What I remember is muddled and messy, a bit incoherent, but so were most of his stories. I can tell you that he was a demolitions expert in the US Army which meant one of his duties entailed cooking up batches of foo-gas and agent orange – the shit they used to incinerate villages and jungles in North Vietnam.

He had survived the Tet Offensive in 1968, returning home in 69 to picket signs and anti-war propaganda. He met my mom outside of nightclub called “Nippy’s” in Martin Co Indiana. Underage and fleeing from a police raid she jumped into his Pinto and never looked back.

Shortly after my sister was born in 1975, my father was admitted to a Veteran’s Hospital in Marion, Illinois. He was under the care of Hung Che, a Chinese physician or in my father’s affectionate words, a “fucking gook”.  My father entered the VA suffering from phlebitis which was confirmed by a Doppler that revealed a massive blood clot in his upper right leg.

Che, an illegal immigrant and unlicensed physician [later discovered] ordered physical therapy instead of immobilization and coumadin [an anti-coagulant] which was and still remains standard procedure for treating severe blood-clots.

A day later, the chief of medical staff was recording the time of my father’s death when suddenly my father produced a life sustaining heart rhythm that registered on the monitor of the EKG. The prescribed physical therapy had caused the clot to dislodge creating an embolus. My father suffered a massive stroke and heart attack, both at once but lacked the sense and regard to stay dead.

From the time of my birth my father was unable to work. He had once been district manager of a Canadian based trucking company which garnered a heft salary and all the amenities bestowed to top officials; paid vacations, holidays, trips taken under the guise of business meetings/conferences, company cars, top shelf living to say the least.

While seated in a booth with my father, watching my mother sweep floors at Hardees for $3.50 an hour – it was hard to fathom that my parents had ever lived with a future in mind. Between anger management sessions and PTSD support group meetings hosted by the local VA clinic, my father put together a legal malpractice case against the Veteran’s Hospital in Marion, Illinois and against the United States Government.

Neither my mother nor my father was gainfully employed. My father was unable to work since he was fighting for his disability rating, so a local law firm working on contingency picked up the case.

The legal battle spanned a period of fifteen years, addling my father’s discontent to a thick, whipped state of mental devastation and inciting a deep, profound hatred of United States Government.

On a snowy March first morning while my shell shocked father watched cartoons in the waiting room my mother pushed me out into a blizzard of overdrafts and overdues.

Awakened by the sound of black birds bickering on the wires outside the second story window, I sat up from where I had fallen asleep on the floor and flicked a pillar of ash from the butt still wedged between my first and second fingers. It wasn’t uncommon for me to pass out in random rooms, fully clothed, clutching a cigarette in one hand and my wallet in the other.

Tim was collapsed on the couch either overdosed or still sleeping. I could see him, hazy and blue beneath the fog of burnt food and incense that had floated up from the first floor where his brother Greg, a thirty-year-old, unemployed, internet predator, and connoisseur of vintage rock band tee-shirts slinked around in silence, knowing that he was resented by everyone, including ‘alfie’ the family dog.

The house was a shit hole but saying it was a shit hole implies that one might have been inclined to take a shit in such a place. The truth is, I wouldn’t even touch my ass to the toilet in that place which was precisely why I was rushing the blood back into my head and extremities, preparing for my routine exodus to the local Shell station for my morning evac.

Tim had lived with his grandparents since he was born and given up for adoption by their only daughter who suffered from a multitude of psychotic disorders and drug addictions. She came around from time to time when her boyfriend became bored with beating her, or when no one else would have her or listen to her dazed, indigent banter; a sort of drug induced double-talk that had a spooky evangelistic quality.

She would amble around in the glow of muted morning shows mumbling incomplete sentences about dime bags and prescription pills, until Tim would yell at her to shut-the-fuck-up, and she would. She’d steal our cigarettes while we slept and leave in the am in a primer gray late model sedan driven by one of satan’s foot-soldiers.

Jimmy and Linda [Tim’s grandparents] were hard workin’ folk, but neglectful parents. After all, they were responsible for rearing and letting loose into the world a sibling duo of degenerates incapable of cranking up carnival rides.

Jimmy was a large man, big enough to back a bull into a butcher shop. His hands were the size of pork butts and he had a wild look in his eyes like those people you drive by that wander across bridges in the middle of the night.

Linda was a frightened woman with big yellow eyes with wiry wisps of hair shooting from her scalp like fake snakes from a can. She worked at the nearby Sate Hospital where they boarded the local lunatics and psychotic progeny of lobotomies gone awry.

She worked in the laundry tweleve hours a day loading shit stained and vomit soaked linens into the fiery furnaces that tumbled like rows of rusty wheels. She was thin and trembled when she came to pause or light another cigarette. If Elvis were still alive, she’d have left the whole freak show behind and hit the road long before her looks left her.

Before leaving, I took one last hit from my morning menthol, then spit a long stringy globule onto the arm of the couch. Over the hiss of cooking phlegm and carcinogens I told Tim I was cutting out and that I’d be back after nine. I opened the door and was met by the stale sunlight and steam of the adjacent upstairs room used to store Christmas ornaments and rusted weight bench equipment.

We had painted Tim’s room black three months prior, at the beginning of that summer. The intention was simple, snuff out the sun so we could sleep while others worked and waded through the sobriety and regret of their daily shuffle.

Stepping beyond that threshold was like entering into a decompression chamber where the body was purged of euphoric aura and illusion and prepared for assimilation, but this was only a changing room, a room where make-up and wardrobe was kept; we never wore those costumes very well or for very long.

For inspiration, two porno mag posters hung on either side of the door. The first was a blonde in butt-less leather chaps centered on a Harley with feathered hair, wearing a state trooper’s sunglasses. The other was a nubile teen tennis player suggestively clutching the thick foam rubber handle on her racket. She was bent slightly forward over the net with a white pleated skirt that was hitched up enough so you could see that she was shaved.

I always imagined the one on the left to be Tim’s girl, after all he was into heavy metal, and MILFs. I wasn’t real big on bikes or blondes, especially not the vintage hairspray whores with teased bangs. So, I locked eyes with the one on the right and let my focus adjust while the dust fell from my vision. I could hear Jimmy’s voice in the kitchen below, which brought me around real quick and cut off my little love affair with the poster prostitute.

If there was anything Jimmy despised it was teenage boys, especially ones that descended from the stairs of his grandson’s bedroom at three in the afternoon red-eyed and woozy. When I met with the last step and unhitched the door the sounds of Sunday’s supper preparations stopped and Jimmy looked up at me from his sink full of fresh tomatoes. “Goddamit boy, you just getting’ up, I oughta break your fucking neck boy – little bastards got no sense of nothing.’”

Linda always knew there was some good in me and never let Jimmy go too far with his husky half-hearted beratings, which was his way of showing affection. Jimmy hollered at me to stay as he wiped the seedy slime from the fillet knife, breathing in such a loud, labored manner that his enormous gut lunged with each gulp of air ingested.

“Boy…, I went to that doctor’s today…” Linda lowered her paper and looked at Jimmy pleadingly, but Jimmy kept his head turned towards me with his wild eyes fixed on me. “I’m a goddam dead man, dead as fucking nails boy, take look at me! Your looking at a goddam dead man, that’s right! Might as well put a bolt in my brain and spread me out over them maters’ in back cause I’m a goner, dead as fuckin’ nails boy. They says I got that cancer all over my body, head to fucking toe boy.”

Jimmy rested his hands, folding them on his bare white belly swollen with cancer, and laughed like a storefront Santa. I laughed too, but laughed like a dog bites at air trying to catch gnats, because I knew of nothing else to do to fight back against the buzzing nuisance of awkwardness blackening the voids between our places at the table. I looked to Linda to either confirm or deny, but the stillness of her stare accompanied by a pale yellow glaze quickly wiped and removed with a dishtowel told me this was truth.

For the first time in my life I was sitting across from a man about to die, a man I would wake to bearer, in the milky morning fog of factories and freeways, across a frozen field of plastic vases and flat stones to his final destination. Jimmy died that November, just two months after his formal diagnosis.

The funeral home was filled that day with flannel shirts and stonewashed denim jeans and men with slick hair and scabbed lips. The women congregated near the kitchen and kept mostly to themselves, they’d talk in short slangy spurts between drags and brandish their newest tattoos like flashcards of trailer life literacy.

I poured my paper cup full of cherry pop and gazed across the two card tables they pressed together in the recession hall. All the food looked the same, processed chesses and meats mingled together and gilded to the sides of glass pans, bowls full of bacon and beans and of course coleslaw. Fat, bumbly winter flies with iridescent green bodies gorged themselves along the tips and tines of forks while a dirty unclaimed kid licked cake from his fingers.

In the fluorescent light of the funeral home everything looked green, even the water that sputtered from the calcified faucet in the bathroom where I used my finger to brush my teeth. I stood in the wood paneled prison cell stuck to the floor by piss and overflow looking into the mirror that returned an image I never recognized as myself. I looked back down, dried my hands and pulled at the doorknob with the corner of my shirt.

Jimmy’s coffin was a plain plywood box wrapped in a bolt of lavender fabric. I sat in the front row with the other pallbearers, Tim, Greg (Tim‘s uncle/brother), and Shawn, a kid from the block who robbed garages and dealt drugs, a porch-kid roped into the responsibility by his parole officer. The four of us carried Jimmy’s four-hundred pound person, fifty yards, across the frozen dirt to a hole that steamed with dark heat from the earth’s dank basement.

I looked down into the hole past the writhing worms, past the grayish layer of clay, down deeper than I had ever looked before until I was finally behind myself, somewhere else, where baked foods no longer tasted of smoke and perfume, where toilets flushed and screen doors didn’t sag, where flies stuck in the scrim of storm windows and stayed outside, where all the things that crept and crawled kept to their cellars, where all trash and sleaze bided beneath the dirt of freshly dug graves and landfills.

I leaned over as we lowered the coffin onto the lift, and the only thing I could see was the certainty of dirt and darkness, the non-negotiable decent of death. I extended my head forward and spit into the gape just to see how deep it really was, but the only thing I heard in return was the faint hiss of autumn leaves sliding over the stone faces in that cemetery and the work bell whistle at the Whirlpool factory signaling the second shift.