The Blurry Lights of London

The dead-air feeling in the air that morning was obvious. The electric static filled my car with mourning. I could see smears of where the blood had dried from the night before on the passenger side seat. After last night, I couldn’t talk to Steph for a while. I really blew it and as I worked my Renault through the morning snarl of traffic, I stared down at the carpet and gripped my steering wheel tight.

I was married to a lovely lady named Gloria, the mother of our two children who shared our three-bedroom Clapham bungalow. I returned last night after my row with Steph, tucking my self into our bed stealthfully, watching the rise and fall of Gloria’s chest looking through the empty vodka bottle at her bedside table, to the warped LED display of the alarm clock, which snickered at me in the way it held up its cards and displayed 4:00. My fist was sore despite stopping at the off license at half two, and the purchase of the whiskey for medicinal purposes –to stop the swelling and make it easier to live with myself for the few minutes it would take for me to fall asleep without the shards of memory from that night revisiting me.

I sat in my car, listening to the morning show on BBC Two, gripping the wheel and imagining what Steph was thinking as she sat in the settee in the front room, her nose stuffed with tissue paper, swallowing slowly and watching the morning news: football scores, adverts for cleaning products, dispatches from far away countries, with the sound turned down, while she choked back the tears and swallowed another Vicodin.

I had ascended the ranks at Gareth and Cornwall, a smallish tax firm on the west side of Richmond, a wealthy suburb of London. As top CPA, my C.V. was filled with panoply of corporate clients; I was carving out a nice niche for myself. I buzzed into work with the usual brusque, rude entrances, required for someone of my particular stature. Once inside the safe confines of my office, however, the remnants of last night came back, and I snorted a line in the bathroom that made everything big and puffy, prepared for a days worth of fixing, cajoling and tempting fate until the last man left, and I sat staring out at the rainy mess of streets and congested traffic. I noticed the grand oak tree outside my office, enjoyed its majesty while sipping on a gin and tonic I procured from my office fridge. The clients liked it when I kept booze around, as it tended to lend itself to an air of relative sophistication.

“Your not going to do that again, are you, stick your little dick into me again. I just might have to tell Gloria, Georgie, what do you think about that?”

“Steph, please we’ve been over this before, can’t we just deal with this like mature adults?”

“But your not a mature adult, Georgie, you’re a fucking kid, you come to me at night with your pathetic sobbing and your incompleteness and think that two shags a week will solve the fact that you’re a pitiful man who wields his power by squashing out the feelings and shoving that shit up your nose, inflating your fuckin ego and I cant take it anymore, if Gloria knew….”

“You wouldn’t fucking dare you slag, with all that’s happened”

“You’ve never been one at confrontations Georgie, that’s why you arrive so late, you fuck me, snort another line, have another drink and mount the battlefields against yourself, and its too much for me to deal with, this is, not fun anymore”

“You bitch”

“Georgie”

“You’re the one that introduced my to him, to Noel, to my fucking dealer, you’re the one who said ‘you could do with a bit of charlie’ you’re the selfish cunt who got me into this, who made me leave Gloria, who started the late nights, and now your going to leave me out there with Gloria and the kids, this fucking habit and a list of clients who don’t know what I’ve done in the middle of winter, at the tail end of a fucking maelstrom of a year you fucking”


And then there was this screaming just this massive screaming that filled the cab. And with his head white-hot and his hands trembling, he slammed the door, dragged her out of the car into a slump in front of her gaff and sped off down the road.

“Just getting those reports done sir, the Barclays account, yeah that one. If you’d just wait.”

He had fallen asleep at his desk, when his boss decided to pay him a visit, as disheveled as George was, head down in front of an empty glass and papers, contracts and confidentiality reports scattered onto the floor, where his chair had rolled over these contracts. He’d had a paper cut earlier, and the blood had flowed out and onto this sleeve.

“Aw fuck Georgie, get yer act together mate, you can’t have a client in here”

Jim or “Jimbo” as George called him was an old friend and loyal boss of ten years. They routinely had drinks, boasted of fictional sexual partners, inflated their profit margins, and generally had a fine time off the clock. Jim had spent many a Sunday afternoon on their settee, complimenting Gloria on her mixology skills. Jim had noticed how over the past few months George’s productivity had gone to shit, but was unwilling to admit it to himself for awhile.

“Corporate just called Georgie, they want to speak with you, I think its serious this time mate, I can’t put them off anymore.”

“Aw fuck Jimbo, what am I going to say, look at me, I’m going to get a fucking divorced, lets get a pint.”

George managed to push a lot of the sadness behind him, handled conveniently in the lavatory of the local with exactly two lines. It rubbed out the raw stinging from earlier, and with the aid of a few pints of Tetley was actually able to have a good time. Repression was a skill George was managing to master throughout this period he described to Jimbo as an ‘experimental phase’.

“I was seeing this girl, you know, your working late, and a friend asks you out for a drink, only you don’t come home to your wife, you stay out a little bit later on the second date, to see what happens. And the next thing you know your in the middle of a full-blown affair, and your just fucking sick at the sight of yourself in the mirror and even the extra shags on the side aren’t enough to disguise the fact that you’ve fucked up a beautiful thing, the only decent thing in your life, so I let it all go, and I told her, ‘we can’t do this, I cant do this. I can’t do this to Gloria’ and I felt fuckin’ better, I tell ya.”

He set his pint down, his mind reeling with all the details he had left out. Reality was coming back harder this time, weighing twice as much, requiring twice as many lines to put it behind him. And somewhere in the middle of all of this, he dropped his stash into the bowl, straight into the toilet, right after finishing the last line, rubbing his teeth. He quickly excused himself, from Jimbo, who was well aware that Georgie was quite pissed, but slightly less of a miserable bastard than he normally was.

George drove around for a few hours, trying to refill his stash, with an increasing sense of hopelessness running through him. His gestures and sayings went out a little bit faster, and he fell asleep somewhere outside the Asda parking lot, three kilometers from his home, where Gloria sat red-eyed and sobbing in front of the television, stroking the family calico.

Morning came with a large crash, and he realized that someone had hit his car. He was still in the same agonized position, and despite the amount of coke he’d consumed last night, he felt surprisingly ok, as long as his thoughts drifted away from the loss of his entire stash from the night before. Which was easy on this particular morning, because someone was knocking on the window, jarring him awake.

“Oy, oy there mate”

“What? Where am I?”
“At the Asda mate, I just hit your motor.”

“But the hood its fine.”

“I hit the back I’m afraid, it’s all fucked”

It took George all the energy preserved through a torturous night of sleep to get up out of the leather bucket seat, and into the cold misty air to see about the back, which was fucked, but only slightly, a bit more than a fender bender, rendering his car still drivable if a bit of an eyesore.

“Oh, its allright. It’s not that bad. Look. Would you happen to know where I could score some Charlie around here, see its late --well early – but I.”

“Sorry mate, can’t help you there, here’s insurance information, but. And excuse me if I appear a bit out of line on this, but you look like shit, you might want to go home.”

Something registered in George just then. A switch, metallic and vibrant with a tremendous electrical storm surging through it, because in a manner of seconds after the unsolicited recommendation, George had punched the man in the mouth, knocked him to the floor, and proceeded to kick him until he could no longer move.

After an immediate evacuation of the Asda lot, George called Jim on his mobile. “I’m getting a divorce, Jimbo, I’m going to need the rest of the week off. With Jimbo’s approval, something along the lines of “Well, the time could do a world of good mate, you’ll see” George sped home; ready to read Gloria the riot act.

He’d had a good hour and a half to come up with the speech, constructed during a nasty slog of a traffic jam on the M4. Storming into the home, George wasted no time in reading out the laundry list of things that hade made him feel inferior. He smashed a few knickknacks, told his wife the pathetic slug of a man he’d been before was gone and that she might as well get used to it, grabbed a suitcase, stuffed willy nilly with scotch, boxers, and a few undershirts, threw a handful of ties around his neck and returned to the car, knocking the left hand mirror off of his wife’s Peaugot as his arms trembled on the steering wheel, en route to the Hotel.

George’s room was on the fourth floor, tall enough to offer a sizable view of London’s west side, while at the same time not high enough for him to do anything rash. He sat out on the porch, smoking a Benson and Hedges cigarette, and drinking J & B straight to the bottle.

Addiction had been a constant companion to him, but it took cocaine to turn him into a self-descrutive maniac. He sobbed in between gulps of scotch, the edges of his posh London view growing softer as the daylight bled into the mixed rouge of evening, and the room span around until he managed to sleep soundly, half empty scotch bottle overturned on the balcony, the drapes swaying to the breezy evening on the 13th of January.

I woke up to an empty house

The day after the event I woke up to an empty house. The blinds were drawn, and I half expected to see the roaring highway when I tugged at the blinds and they snapped back. The carpet had been vacuumed. I felt like an intruder and was amazed at the efficiency by which everything had left, unbeknownst to me, in the middle of the night.

I spent the first few minutes getting my bearings. Waking up to an empty house is like starting everything over again, but everything is on fire. It’s a disaster before the incident even happens. Let this be a warning to you: If you can avoid waking up in an empty house do so before you learn what I did that day.

I paced around the house for an hour or so, but what is time when its not there? I paced for reassurance, convinced that if I returned to the room exactly 15 times, that everything would return, much like the faith present in the fool who reboots his computer thinking that a lost document may suddenly return.

We reset our lives to see what happens.

I began, slowly, to panic. It didn’t come over me all at once, it began in my lower ankle and worked its way up to a childlike portion of my chest, where the essence of fear has always lived, it just needed the right circumstance to arise. We don’t become any less fearful as we grow older, it’s just that events change, people change, she changed, and that’s why I sat on the floor, the cold hardwood floor that once housed our futon, loveseat, and my friend the beanbag chair. I was all gone the morning I woke up to an empty house.

I slept on the warmest part of the carpet, above the water heater, which was still on somehow. I dreamt of luxury town homes, of cabins with roaring fires, and Sybil Shepard during the Moonlighting days.

I awoke to the sound of static, loud and piercing. I jumped up, walking in circles around my awe at and this point, fear. Where it could it be coming from? What sort of sick bastard is fucking with me? Were there people in monitors, people behind the glass mirror that I now stood in front of? Who had found me? Was I being observed, and if so what had I done to deserve it? What warranted this sort of treatment?

Peeling away the reflective layer of the mirror did little to alleviate this feeling that came over me, mounting monumentally as I began to realize that the sound had become louder.
Having little else to do, I sat down and tried to reconstruct last night’s argument. How could she have had everything removed overnight, and why? I knew what I said and how I felt, but did I deserve to wake up to an empty house, with only static as a friend.

I hadn’t realized I had been sleeping when the voices ripped me from my sleep, voices rich with baritone and professionalism, comfortable voices, which were put together deliberately. They had instructions, things they wanted me to do. I was to walk down the street and speak to someone whose name was muffled, and the static returned as I begged for an explanation. But the instructions changed.

Now I was to go somewhere else, I was to take off all my clothes and take a hot bath, and take stock of life. I wasn’t supposed to panic, that much was made abundantly clear.

So I did that. I took off my pajamas, top and bottom, folded them up nicely, because they were my only clothes, and I needed to respect something, because I hadn’t respected my wife before, or the things that were in the house that were now gone and holy shit, there was a For Sale sign in the front yard. I saw it, because I didn’t have a shower curtain.

A For Sale sign, but that would require time, this was premeditated, and I could prove it in court. You can’t put a house on the market overnight. The whiskey I had last must have done it. I didn’t normally drink it, but it was a special occasion, she assured me. Yeah, it was special all right, because the next morning I would wake up in an empty goddamned house.

I directly put my pajamas back on, after yelling at nothing but the instructions buried in the static. And as I dripped through the house, walking around trying to pick out the new directions that came as quickly as every thirty seconds, I heard music. Yeah, I thought I heard music. Classical, Brahms, I heard Brahms as the beads of water dripped from my forlorn body down to the floor that we sanded and finished together in the fall of our new marriage.

We put so much into it and now the empty water hung to it closely as the instructions returned again and I dropped to the ground and wept for all the things I’d lost: the strength, the respect, the work had already taken it’s toll. It was too late to go back.

I heard the door open and I ran towards the light it brought with it from the outside and with eyes closed I embraced the Century 21 agent whose color had drained out of him and out of the newly-married couple, you could tell because they were smiling, before I tackled the guy to floor and demanded to know why he left me in an empty house with constantly changing directions and he listened as I told him, in great detail, the many ways I would change if he could just put everything back the way it was.

Alabama Pt. 2

The last day of Snow

I thought back on all the loves gone past. Forgotten now, I can't recall their last names. They've faded too, along with my goatee and dwindling noise-rock CD collection. And after all these things have dissolved away, and our old stuff eventually disappears, what's left is what we take on as we age. We can't forget these vital moments when we were younger, and still experimenting with being adults, still thrilled with the enormity of life that lay ahead of us, wider than the horizon line.

Sometimes when I'm driving up through the mountains on my way home from a sit, or a hunt, or just wandering around the woods in the middle of the night, I stop my truck and stare at a neighbor's mailbox for a few hours. I lose track of this, and inevitably have to move on, for fear of raising an eyebrow of suspicion in this one peep out of you and your not welcome anymore town.

Years ago I'd had friends and colleagues, but after I moved out of that bigger town for this speck of a town, I've kept a low profile. The loneliness that I thought would be debilitating I find a comfort. The silence allows me so much time to think.

I’ll be in the store one hundred miles away. I drive way out of town to do my shopping. I don't want to be a part of the local chatter. They always look at me strange enough when I'm in the store that's one hundred miles away. They wonder who drinks my milk, suckles on my beer and eats the chicken with the plastic biodome of a container.

I've written three books since coming here, and every word about the man I used to be. Sometimes it's hard to know whether or not I even exist in many ways. It's ludicrous, because I have a job, a night watchmen at a canning factory, but it's after hours, and no one sees me or knows about the meditative walks I take through the aisles of canned pork entrails.

I was on one of my famous walks when I stopped for a moment; blind-sided by the brilliance of the scarf that rested on a loose nail on the wall to the right of the microwave. The perfume, an herbal lilac, mixed with a raw cucumber.

It's Winter 1995. I am asleep in my car on a deserted road off highway 26. I have successfully passed through Atlanta, and more than likely am somewhere outside Decatur, GA. It's still dark, and the partial hangover I'm suffering from tells me it has only been four hours or so. I cough and the ensuing rattling that occurs tells me the ephedrine is still working through my spine and tingling my hair follicles.

I was off to see Claire. A girl I met once at a party in Columbia. That night we talked for hours about the world, and the poetry that sometimes can describe exactly at that moment in time. We had the same taste, she had just broken it off with an asshole friend of mine. He was happy now, moved on and even taking some sort of solace in the void he left behind. I was there to pick up the pieces. I thought, Naively, of course, that we had something, had found something in that evening when the camels flowed as quickly as the keg beer, and the dinosaur Jr. on the stereo--a beer-stained relic that had seen days of sobriety, when it must have been given into its recipient in junior high--I'd never been in that situation before, in love, and saw myself as the "good guy" who could serve as both confidante and lover to a complex woman. In reality she found me amusing and entertaining, but nothing more. I hadn't yet become hardened by the world. Hadn't yet discovered my fire, or If I had it was in the wrong place, and I just looked desperate and sad.

But I was on the road this early morning anyway. We had talked on the phone many times since the party, and I was on the way to Auburn to visit her, albeit a surprise visit. She had no idea. I didn't even know whether or not she had a boyfriend. I only knew she loved Tom Waits and Rimbaux as much as I did, and in many ways still do.

The sun came up as I crossed the Georgia/ Alabama border, and I lit my first morning cigarette in celebration. I'd usually hit this spot right around 1AM, when I'd be fueled by cheap white wine picked up at a truck stop somewhere and the cool night air would whoosh through the interior of the car, and I would just sing and sing until I arrived at my sister's house at three AM, dosing in the car until a more acceptable hour found itself. But on this particular morning I felt a little better, less lonely, a soul with more purpose than the one who last crossed this same border.

And so a few hours later, I found myself suddenly embarrassed at her front doorstep, or at least the doorstep of her housemates, whom I had met only a few weeks prior.

Todd looked at me strangely, staring at his watch and realizing only then that he'd spent the night on the couch, and I smelled the litter box that the cat inhabited, and she rubbed her fur against his ankle.

The door stuttered shut on the carpet, a longhaired dark blue shag that contained random samples of the night before. With the door closed, and Todd returned to his horizontal position on the couch, I waited while a stranger in a wool cap played playstation with the sound down. It seemed as if they’d had a party the night before. If I played my cards right, I could somehow sneak in with the late night crowd, and cover up my desperate yet not without its own never-say-die-charm early morning visit. For all I knew she could have been with her boyfriend.

And as the morning hours passed, and I turned down joint after joint, that was consumed by Todd, -- who occasionally awoke to inhale, cough and fall back to sleep -- and concocted an alibi for exactly what I was doing when it came to me. I was in town visiting my sister. We ended up at their party, late night. I was tired from the drive, and when I woke up it was morning. There, and with that, I finally accepted a toke, leaned back against the wall, and let the beleaguered sleep wash over me as the comforting plotlines of my imaginary visit took shape and form.

When I awoke, her other roommate Tom was vacuuming, and repeatedly bumping the well-lit Hoover –appearing to me to be some sort of miniature squad car, backing up to jab my torso as images of police officers knocking on my car window off the highway, waking me up—against my torso. I woke up with a shot, scrunching my body against the wall.

“Oh, Hi… “ I managed, holding back the anger I felt.

“One of last night’s casualties I see” Tom said. I remembered him from the party in Columbia; he apparently did not remember me.

“Yeah, I checked in late last night, my sister and her friends must have left.” I glanced up at the now empty couch; Todd had left, as had the video gamer.

“Well the party’s over, you can go home now.” Tom was angry, and nursing what looked to me to be a relatively severe hangover.

“I was told Claire lived here. I’m sort of a friend of hers.”

Tom squinted a bit, before sitting on the couch and hand rolling a cigarette.
“She’s asleep in back, always the last to wake up after one of our bashes”

He seemed much more relaxed now, “Aram, right? Yeah, she mentioned you before ‘that guy from Columbia.’” He held his last breath of smoke in, pausing before exhaling.

“Would you like some coffee?” I agreed to that, and we spent the next few hours hanging out, exchanging stories about people from Auburn and Columbia, and the connectedness of the south. We listened to four or five records, of a more mellow nature than the ones in current rotation in my own CD player at home. We were so ensnared in telling stories that I didn’t heard Claire stirring and there she was, standing right in front of me, wrapped in a tattered old robe. Her eyes were big and red, like she’d just been crying.

She sniffled as she walked into the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee, “What are you doing here?” She posed that question in non-committal fashion, the way a person would respond to when asked their preference of salad dressing.

“ Late last night, at the party, with my sister and her friends” I said, coughing and looking down over at her eyes as she peered through the blinds.

She seemed disappointed with the couch, something was telling me she expected to find somebody else on the couch. “Well, do you wanna get some breakfast?” She finally managed, walking back towards her room.

The ice broken somewhat, and pleasantly surprised with how I had pulled off my alibi, I relaxed somewhat. “Sure, yeah, breakfast would be nice.”

Winkies was an Auburn staple, an older diner updated with a few collegiate trappings. It was a glorified greasy spoon with gourmet coffee and tattooed patrons. We waited for a table outside for a while, keenly aware of the tension between us. Girls in pink sunglasses walked toy poodles along the boulevard, and I began to feel a little queasy.

I wasn’t expecting this lackadaisical welcome for one. I thought she’d greet my presence with open arms. I wanted her to embrace me with kisses, but instead she was treating my like unwanted leftovers. She smoked her cigarettes with the regularity of a metronome and I knew some asshole had gone and broke her heart again. I didn’t even need to ask.

Breakfast was pleasant enough. With the addition of food and caffeine, the conversation picked up, no longer pale and hung over, we were back to the old back and forth of our phone calls, and I forgot all about her puffy red eyes and the absence on the couch that seemed to deeply trouble her.

We talked about all things, poetry again, and what kind of writing we’d been banging around with. This led to a torrent of activity as the fields of Art; History, music and stupid jokes we’d made up on the spot came tumbling out of us.

“That’s not a word Aram, I don’t care how intelligent you sound when you say it” jabbing my arm for emphasis.

“Can I blame you the charlatan for not knowing what a neo Platonist is, and you call yourself a romantic.”

“This from a guy who came in with the cat last night.” She turned to look at me, and her green eyes found mine, and she smiled, sitting back and taking me in and for the rest of the meal we sat in silence, content to just be with each other.

The bill came too quickly and we found ourselves in her car. We were headed for the record store when she announced her audible “I’ve got to go see about someone”, the tone changed. Her eyes became heavy again, and she put her sunglasses on and turned up the stereo, now playing Rage Against the Machine. It was a little too fitting. I hated Rage Against the Machine for the macho bullshit posturing it was. The people that found themselves enraptured in the predictable shuffles of this band were the same people who enjoyed the excess of keg stands. I wanted to leave right then and there, but she sped the car up, and headed towards campus. Auburn University.

Sorority girls, or “Sorostitutes” as my sister would call them, always wore white ribbons in their hair, as a leftover from the old southern plantation days. We passed rows of them attending some sort of outdoor fair, replete with frat boys lining up for the kissing booth.

I suddenly felt very empty inside. Like I needed to be alone immediately. It didn’t help when we pulled up to a very pissed off Todd at the rear of the fraternity quad.

I was tired, instantly so tired. I slammed the door before either of them could say anything.

All I thought about for the rest of the afternoon was the look on her face. The shock in the way that her jaw flew open upon the realization that I would not be there to protect her filled her with a disgust that was obvious as I turned and walked away and didn’t look back.

I went straight to Amsterdam, a bar/restaurant. Like most places in Auburn, bars are not allowed, on their own, to exist. In order for an establishment to sell alcohol, fifty percent of their overall sales must also be food. So an old-fashioned bar where one can go order a few shots of whiskey to say, forget about a girl who is wrapped up in a destructive relationship with a pseudo-intellectual frat boy is impossible without being offered a panoply of deep fried appendages that are served with a variety of creamy dressings.

I ordered a shot of house whiskey and a bud and sat down with my shadow, which leaned heavily upon the bar. I wandered over to the jukebox after a few and proceeded to play the saddest country music in the joint. Hank Williams, George Jones, Patsy Cline, they all received a good airing that afternoon as I stared out at the hot pavement and wondered how I got this far. The whole unplanned event had been a complete disaster. Any chance I had was drowned out the moment I bought that bottle of white wine, screwed off the cap and hollered out at the wind “She’s my post to lean on. And I just cut her down. Hopefully something will come between me and the ground.”

My chuck taylor’s seemed to have the answers and after a few rounds I wandered around town, peeking into stores and felt better as the sun came down and I called my sister.

She showed about an hour later, earnestly putting her arm around me and walking me to her car. I told her everything on the way to her house. Ann and I have always had a bond of trust, where we look at each other and know there’s no point in hiding the facts. I told her about Claire, and my last minute voyage, the sleeping off the highway, the arrival, the charade and ultimately the letdown. She laughed the whole way through, which surprisingly made me feel a whole lot lighter.

That night a few of her friends came over, and we played scrabble and I rocked the house, winning game after game. I collapsed on her futon at two am and slept blissfully. It wasn’t until the morning that I realized where my car was, and more importantly, at whose house I had left my keys.

Horton the Great, Part 1

I’ve always considered my parents to be supportive of my ventures, regardless of how ridiculous and impractical my stunts were.

And they’d sit there, my parents, the lone audience members in the school auditorium, where I’d lie suspended upside down, dangling above the stage, holding on to a pistachio colored duster and performing my interpretation of Holst’s “Planets”, through twelve symphonies.

My dad read the paper, tapping out the ashes of his pipe frequent enough to glance up at the tip of the feather duster, momentarily admiring my grace and form as I strategically writhed around the rope in tune to the tinny record player that announced each symphony with a cauldron of hiss and scratches.

When I was fifteen they were there when I walked the tightrope across the steepest part of Marmite Cavern. They sat on makeshift chairs provided by the ample granite, which periodically rose up out of the blackness like bleachers for my adoring crowds to sit in, who would gasp and say “That Horton, I knew him when he was a boy, when he performed his human mop trick at the Galdry Peninsula Moose Lodge in ‘22”.

My parents sat there in the dark, with lanterns on their heads. Patiently they would wait on the ground, staring up and critiquing my technique, “You’ve got your foot awfully close to that stalagmite, son, a drip would kill you.” He puffed his pipe towards the end of his last syllable. Mom would hum a tune, and her twee voice would flutter out into the crevices of the cave, surmounting each level until the water would begin to drip, and I’d dismount, hiking back to the gorge with mom and dad and we’d joke about the day when they’d be hauled off by social services.

And it happened one day on a wintry morning in December, when the last of the leaves had fallen off the trees, and that familiar desperation in knowing that for the next three to four months, the rain would hamper any stunt-making until spring when I’d rush out on my unicycle, practicing for that rehearsal date for Mr. Barnum come July. That date punctuated with a large red circle, incomplete in its hastily drawn presence.

They came in a white wagon, clinical and surgical the separation was. Mom and dad were in the kitchen, thinking of what they could cook with only a can of sardines and stale macaroni that the weevils had inhabited during the Spring prior. It caught them by the surprise, but in an awkward way, in the way unexpected out of town guests would when they arrived suddenly, without notice. Out of town guests, did not talk rationally to them as they fretted about the lack of clean linens for them, that they’d have to make do with only one wash cloth and mom returned to the empty parlor-- home to the broken chair, the stool with three legs, and four charred logs that sat in the corner that to them served as our fireplace—and seemed perplexed at the inappropriateness of guests gagging her husband and strapping him down into the white gurney. “Why, I don’t think we need guests staying here tonight if that’s the way they are going to behave” “I don’t believe I’ve ever had guests act like that why Horace, could you see them out, dear?”
But I was upstairs, flipping through the family album and wondering what it would do for my career to be seen as an orphan. I could get into the papers more easily, and Barnum would pick me up in a heartbeat.

And in a few minutes it was silent downstairs, after the feet tramped across the wooden floors and I heard the door close, and the closure of the wagon’s hatchback, the start of the motor and the careless silence that greeted me as I descended the rickety staircase, being careful of the missing step, even pausing for a moment to look down at a picture of my mom and dad hugging that was swept up by the gust of wind that came to me at that moment, lifting the picture off of the dirty floorboards, where everything died.
My next memories were of the circus, time spent with the trapeze artists, as her personal assistant. And nights spent on the trapeze and high wire. I was an apprentice to Glenda the Amazing, and I followed her sequined tuchus as it bobbed and weaved around the high wire while her jaw was wired to a gummy pink circle. The wagon I slept in had all the amenities, and I’d stare into the mirror and dose off to dreams of increasing importance. I foresaw having my own trailer one day, with Glenda as MY assistant, and the world could go to hell. I’d planned the murder of Barnum for awhile now, and that rage burned in my little vacuous heart and each night I fell asleep after the release of murderous rage left me calm, tranquil and self assured.

Mondays at the Cheerful Tortoise

It kills me to realize that I am not who I was yesterday. If you’ve ever lost a part of yourself so completely in one evening, completely lost it in the middle of a drinking session, when everyone discovered the truth and you were there, naked in the middle of the surgery, when a tiny slice of your personality was surgically removed. Then maybe you’ll relate to my particular tale of woe.

We went out for drinks, after wandering around the park blocks looking for Jamie, but she never showed, so we piled into the Tortoise, which was heaving from all the students on finals week, shoveling drinks down their gullets. We sat in the back so we could openly mock the staff, which served drinks peppered with a sort of garish originality. There’s desperation to it, I think. But all the barmaids want to get laid, or at least give you that impression when they wink at you, but they’re really thinking this guy has ordered four whiskey sours, which is a complete novices drink, a drink people order to act like they’ve been drinking for years. But I buried that thought and carried on talking to Mike, who gave me the low down on the latest trauma his had to induce. His father owns the largest steel company in town, and he’s always complaining about the fact that he cannot find a girl who is “just interested in me.” I always rebut with “I’d love to have that problem” but he never seems to forget that I’m always like that, perpetually single.

Ok, so back to that night. It’s so easy to get off topic, because I’m sitting in bed writing this, and the couple in the dorm room above are having sex, and I’m this little dweeb banging his thoughts onto his brand new HP laptop and its winter in Portland, and I cant remember what I did last night, even though I know its painful.

I light a smoke down on the street; my hair is now up in my wool cap. Showering is useless in this cold, and the construction for the new addition to the Portland art museum woke me up this morning, as did the screeching of the carts at the new Safeway that is almost free of bums.

It was one of those evenings that return to you in flashes the following day, over coffee and confection at the Meetro. I’m on campus now, and walking freely among the busy students who still have finals.

“If you want to go on giving a shit and acting like we never loved each other, then fine, but it’s a slap in my face for you to act like this” I remember this now, while eying a red head gal reading over her Chem Homework. I remember being covered by a drink shortly after Jessica told this too me, even though Martin hadn’t arrived yet. Martin was Jessica’s new boyfriend. Jessica and I broke up a few months ago, but still occasionally got together and have sex like it didn’t mean anything. She always just wanted someone, even if all it consisted of was two body parts arguing and fighting like crazy for half an hour until we fell asleep defeated and exhausted.

She had just thrown a drink in my face after I staggered up to her booth, even though Mike told me I shouldn’t over and over again. I stubbornly refused it, slurring all along the way. The room heaved to and fro, like I was on the Pequot --the ship that Queequeg and Ishmael board in “Moby Dick”-- it was like watching poorly executed German cinema. She laughed at my pathetic sight and for a moment the memory remained then fizzled as I made my way up to my dorm and fell asleep for an hour.

When I awoke my cell phone was still vibrating from the messages left from the disgruntled masses I had offended the evening prior.

It took days to realize I was going to be friendless for a long, long time.