Dear Dad (4 page)

So, when I got to Reno, I was pretty rattled from a week of partying and didn't know what to do, except to prove to everybody I was a man now, especially proving it to my uncle, who was the drunk alpha male of the household. So, I got excited when my uncle took up my request to start drinking at 4 pm on a Wednesday. Booba came over and I was doing shots of Vodka with my Russian Grandmother!

Two hours later, after wrestling with my uncle in the living room, and being a cocky shit to Booba, I got a huge pang of homesickness. Usually when I got drunk somewhere, I wanted to be somewhere else, and friends would be scrambling to find me when I was already on the road, driving away and swerving to miss the oncoming traffic. I told my uncle I was leaving. My aunt yelled "NO!" It was a twenty hour drive back home and I was wasted. I was determined to leave when suddenly Alpha-Male Uncle picked me up by my shirt. I whimpered as he held me three feet off the ground against the wall. I got embarrassed, real embarrassed and ran up to the guest bedroom like a little girl. I was so embarrassed that I left silently the next morning while everyone was at work. Booba eventually passed away, but for a few minutes we saw eye to eye and it was worth it.

WHEN I FORGOT TO GRADUATE HIGH SCHOOL

During High School commencement, I was sitting in the parking lot in my pickup truck with a glove box full of beer. I had resigned at the beginning of Senior Year. Standing by my open window was another friend, with the same type of disdain for school, talking shit about the teachers and the stuck up ass kissers that were going onto Ivy League schools. The alcohol had reached a euphoric level in my consciousness and I had trouble listening to him. That night, half of the school population was planning their future, while the other half went home and watched the clock. The biography of my existence, at that point, was created by Rock stars who I worshiped. My only dream was to be in a band who would break into stardom. The light of that star dimmed the moment I heard my dad speak of my future.

Months later, I had been up all night wrapping my brain around Hallucinogenics, when it was time to move. My buddy had rented a large U-hual and when he tried moving it closer to the his mom’s house, the top of the truck hit the gutter. It was a large truck and it was even larger in our distorted minds. Pretty soon we were driving away in a U-hual to a Mexican farm town, where we tried weaning off of alcohol using cough syrup. My buddy’s dad had a little cabin he wasn’t using, so it was our exciting escape from a town I had traversed in so many times, that even invented stories of occupying exotic cities was a futile exercise.

I was ready to leave school behind and girls swirling their hair and closing and opening their legs with the itch of lost virginity, and the bullies, who bullied, like millions of newborn crabs clawing at each other in shallow water. We stayed a month in that Mexican farm town and went our seperate way afterwards. I landed back in my fishbowl and had to regroup.

A couple weeks later, I was lying in the back of my truck with another friend staring up at the stars and talking about our futures when we heard a loud car chase. As I looked over the railing of the truck bed I saw a big old car flying up the hill with a little white car chasing it. I was shocked. Nothing like this happened in our small town.

Sometime during the next week, through small town folklore, I found out that it was my friend, who we called “Mark in the Dark”, driving the “boat” in that car chase. Apparently he flipped off some Jocks in a little white car and a chase ensued. Mark and his anti-social anorexic punk buddies were on L.S.D. They were scared shitless, when during the chase the Jocks rammed their car into Mark’s car several times. Mark had floored it through town going 80 in a 20 MPH speed zone.

When a new sheet of Acid arrived into town, half the kids were up all night, driven mad, playing tag and Capture the Leader, wearing bandannas and drinking cups of O.J. at florescent supermarkets that buzzed with electric paranoia.

I found myself living in a VW van on my friend’s property. He felt obligated to put me up because he took the van out for a test drive a couple days prior and dropped the engine to the ground when he was trying to burn rubber. It was all I had until I met Roxy at Sea Galley.

Roxy was a cook and I was a dishwasher. She was the mother of the Capture the Flag leader. He was the leader because he said he was a secret tiger that could perceive differently. He eventually moved to China and became an artist. I was writing poetry at that time when there was enough daylight shining through the amber stained glass of the Volkswagen. I made succinct impact with the lines of words which eventually won Roxy over and she invited me to live with her.

I was Twenty, juggling manhood, God, Sexuality, Parents, the beginnings of Alcoholism and now, an older woman. We lived in a plush apartment downtown above a wine seller. We could see the gift shops and the pizza joint across the street from our window. The pizza joint had an infamous green bench in front where crazy transients would stop to beg, sing songs and scare the conservative tourists. One Halloween night, I dressed in a black cape and nothing else and stood on a chair in front of the window and did a Jesus pose. Two teenage girls looked up and we stared at each other as I shimmered with maniacal youth and they froze in fear.

Roxy invited me into adulthood with my first legal beer at the local Tavern and with going all the way in bed. She introduced the Beat Writers, like William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, into my life and we listened to Nine Inch Nails in the dark with a red lamp in the corner. She worked with Pasta during the day and would bring home elaborate meals, like black squid ink pasta with a yellow Saffron sauce sprinkled with red Flying Fish Roe. I was a unemployed Boy Toy perhaps, but the love was as classic as Sid and Nancy. And, during moments of midnight vulnerability she unwound her steel heart to reveal a childhood crush. She looked into my eyes, her eyes vibrated with a yearning to jump back to a time when we could have met as innocent and young, shining and together forever.

COSMO THE WRITER

I'm not one for rationalization, and when I have ideas flowing through my head like a meteor shower of inspiration, I strike out, stake a claim into the oblivion of my consciousness. Stream of thought? I think not. As with geniuses, they make a statement by not showering, not combing their hair or making contact with other humans for weeks on end. I wish I could afford a real aversion from the supermarket, but I find myself in the bright florescent lights, with the tinted windows up above with security, eating donuts watching me like a Gerbil. I profess that I'm not ordinary. My parents nod their heads, professors laugh but instantly remember their work ethic and hide their snicker in their coffee cup. I'm onto something, maybe it's the tail-end of a tail of a writer that passed through here twenty years ago. I ride my Schwinn cruiser bike downtown and occasionally get a honk of a car horn to remind me of the Present. My legs are sore. I'm exalted from lack of nutrition, truly alive from foraging for a meal, high from the immortality of adolescence, numb from naivete. I get home, wet from washing dishes, and make tea and cinnamon toast. Every flavor excites the neurological chain in my brain. I type on a old Smith-Corona typewriter, they have created Word Processors by this time, but the hammering feel of the typewriter keys fortify that I am physically working on a novel. I am the next hero in my own movie. I am dirty. Night. Night.

DEAR HEMINGWAY

I know its been a long time since I written you. In fact never, but sensibilities that I should write you become my illusion of fact. You and I were one and the same at birth and then slowly with experience, left turns rather than right turns, and finally booze and electric shock treatments, you left me behind. I don't know if you were far ahead or far behind, but nonetheless you disappeared. I kept to typing on the little manual typewriter I bought specifically to damage my fingertips for the sake of redemption of the writer's curse. In the middle of the night there was a cat fight and the mill's smokestacks hissed steam and I lied there silently and thought of you strolling down the streets of Havana, with bellicose laughter and a cigar half the length of your boxing stance. It occurred to me that maybe you were running from something or maybe you were reaching toward an ideal of manhood that no one could achieve. Of course, any chance to experience a quarter of what you did would measure a man today. It's just mysterious how a man so strong was taken down so quick. I'm not going to get into cliches of "Living fast and dying young" or "I rather burn out than fade out" mantras of the disillusioned youth of today that just want to kill themselves with drugs and alcohol. I am sincerely baffled as to what happened. I want to hold your hand at your bedside and stare into your distant eyes and intuitively get answers from somewhere deep within your spirit. I'm not just another fan that hasn't moved on. In fact, I've only read two or three of your short stories and one book. I am just a nosy connoisseur of universal truths, half-truths, bitter ironies and plain unjust stupidity. I feel that I know everyone that I come into contact with and their "aura", "vibe" or "countenance" can shake me like an earthquake underneath the ocean floor or they can boil me like a lobster. I am too vulnerable to be in this world, at least in the city where urban occupants may walk around holding Starbucks in front of them as if it were a GPS. I want old and broken, at least something that resembles a disorder that reminds us that were only a step away from being Primates. Hemingway's disorder was vibrant and stunk with an Originality ahead of its time. He made no excuse for his unyielding craft and He didn't falter from taking his life with a singular explosive blast. Amen. And to think that we move forward, when great people leave us, as time covers the holes of existence like new asphalt, and the speed of our own approaching mortality leaves us asking: "What the fuck?”