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By chris Date: 2008 Jul 13 Comment on this Work [[2008.07.13.03.56.23792]] |
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I. Jack is opposed to drugs - but only, it must be said, in a vague, "Get high on life instead!", feel-good kind of way. His opposition is also more circumstantial than anything else. Truth be told, his last "connection" was a friend he left back in New Jersey sometime before the Great Millennial Meltdown That Never Was. The guy is probably still eating Cheetos on his mom's couch... But yes, digressions aside, Jack is officially Against Drugs. The daily Jet Awake pill he takes every morning apparently does not count. Neither do the roughly two energy drinks he consumes each day. If you were to press him, though, he'd probably admit to a curiosity about some of the less-than-legal stimulants out there. Did someone say cocaine? Not Jack. At least not officially. And meth was totally out of the question. His first wife had left him for a meth dealer. Meth, he felt, was just...wack? No. That's crack. Someone needed to tap Whitney for a catchy phrase about meth. Meth leaves you...bereft? That's laughable. College professors with bloated vocabularies shouldn't be allowed to comment on illegal street drugs. "The difference between caffeine and meth is the difference between actually getting work done before nine am and staying up for a week to do it again - and again and again." He tells his wife as she readies her things for her weekly meeting at the Kabbalah Center. "Uh huh, uh huh." She is nodding, not really listening. His clever sayings usually start off with great promise but get derailed somewhere along the way to memorable. Quotable? Forget about it. "So I guess it's just me here tonight then." "I guess!" She replies breezily. "I'll stay out of trouble." "Will you?" She's smiling, though. He never says what she expects her to say. And that bothers him. A little. "Someone turns forty tomorrow." "Really? Who?" He couldn't help but love her sense of humor. Problem was, he could never quite tell when she was trying to be funny. II. This chapter is called Trying to Sleep. It's not called Succeeding at Sleep because, well, Jack rarely does. He lies next to his wife in the dark, heart pounding, with all sorts of horrible thought running through the Dollar Cinema that is his mind: Stop thinking about the fact that my heart is beating too fast. Stop thinking about it. Stopstopstop! Everything's fine. 90% of all health issues are mental. Wait...is that actually true? Stop talking out of your ass, Jack - even to yourself. Knowing it's hopeless for the moment, he gets up watches country music videos on YouTube. Jack's politics are somewhat to the left of Ralph Nader (but a bit to the right of Joseph Stalin). Who are these people? He asks without a trace of arrogance or irony. Why do they put their cans in those foam coverings with the funny sayings on them? What's the point of watching cars race around a track anyway? They're not really GETTING anywhere... So he watches Charlie Daniels when he can't sleep (Charlie's a favorite) - "We're gonna put her feet back on the path of righteousness and then God Bless America again..." He loathes the Iraq War - but loves the hint of redneck violence in Charlie's Southern bravado. Don't tell anyone. III. Now it's daylight again. How is that possible? Jack didn't actually sleep, did he? Oh, we're no longer in his tasteful-but-too-small suburban home. This chapter must be one of those flashbacks. No, not a DRUG flashback... That issue has already been laid to rest - or at least it should have been. So where are we? Anonymous paintings on the wall? Check. Furniture/decor that could make someone think they were in a room in Toledo, Ohio or Telluride, Colorado (take your pick)? Check. Perfect climate control that could make someone think they were in a room in Toledo, Ohio or Telluride, Colorado? Yeah... Check. They're playing trivia in bed. She's straddling him, cutting off the circulation to his legs which he thinks, in an absent-minded sort of way, that he still might need at some point. "What is my favorite restaurant?" "Red Lobster." "And this is an apparent contradiction because..." "You don't eat fish - you eat SHELLfish." "Very good!" Only she didn't say it like that. In his memories of their conversations she always talks like him. But her hair was her best feature. There was so damn much of it. Maybe Jack appreciated the such qualities in women because, well, he had so little of it himself. Either way, he always noted (to himself) how it was nowhere near as soft and easy to run his fingers through as his wife's. "Baby hair", she called it. Thinking that makes him smile in spite of himself. "What's wrong?" They are already in the middle of things. "Nothing." Far off, somewhere, there is the barely audible sound of a stylus screeching across the surface of a record. The music has stopped. The woman is officially Not Amused - but also Trying Like Hell Not to Show It. "When this happens it's only one of two things," she announces with all the certainty of a clinician. "Which is?" "You have to pee - or you're thinking. Which is it?" "What do you think?" She didn't do well with questions that appeared open-ended. Too many possibilities. IV. This chapter is why, if Jack's story were a movie, it would not be rated PG - or even PG-13. "You FUCKED her?!" "Yes. Doesn't mean I'm proud of it." "MotherFUCK!" Your language... My God..." "Well I'm calling it what it IS!" "Please..." "Get away from me." "But - " "Don't touch me. Ever. Go to her." "But I don't WANT her!" "Fuck you. You fucker." "Don't you think you've used that word enough?" "I'm just getting started! You motherfucking fuckface..." End scene; fade to black. (If this were a movie, that is.) (It's not.) V. People think it doesn't rain in the desert. Jack moved to New Mexico from New Jersey precisely because on some level he believed this as well. Ignorance of the weather, accompanied with not watching the weather, is an unwise combination - especially once the summer monsoon has started. So Jack is hurrying down the mesa's razor-like basalt edge just as the raindrops begin to fall coldly on his head. Thunder sounds far off - timpani in God's orchestra or Satan at the bowling alley, depending upon one's cosmological bent. Jack is quite big tent catholic here: He is terrified of both the forces of darkness AND good. He believes in both, to make matters even worse. Lightning strikes somewhere alarmingly close. Jack knows because he can smell the ozone in the charged air and because of the purple dots behind his eyes. He remembers reading somewhere how brain activity continues even after death. But what exactly does "brain activity" consist of? He can't remember that part of the article. Does such activity mean actual thoughts? "Dude, I have a theory," one of his frat buddies told him once at the apogee of a night of drinking back in college. "Tell me." "I finally figured out what's going on at the end of Joyce's Ulysses - you know, Molly Bloom's interior monologue - '...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair...'" "I know it. Spare me the rest. Hey, does all the alcohol we've consumed have something to do with your theory?" "And what if it does?" This was how frat boys, who also happened to be lit majors, actually talked. "Tell me then. Interior monologues are pretentious. But enough about putting flowers in your hair. I'll start to question your sexuality." "OK, here it is: She's dead." VI. The rain finally comes down with an unholy vengeance. No sense in making for the car any longer. Jack scrambles behind the largest boulder he can find and decides to wait it out. If his thoughts could keep him dry he'd be someplace that hasn't seen measurable precipitation in a hundred years: I said you were home once. Yes, I said that. Yes, I meant that. Now I know it's all nada y nada y nada pues nada to you - but once, yes, things meant something. Now I just...I just don't remember how to trace my path back to where I started. One minor deviation in course can lead one so fucking far from one's original destination. You're getting impatient. Speak in first person? What do you mean? You know I'm talking about me! Don't you? Look, we're flying in the clouds here. Yes, both of us. Why? Because you got on this plane the same time I did. I got off? No, no, no! You're messing up my metaphor. Listen, my point is this - when you're flying in the clouds you don't know which way is up. You have no horizon. You're flying on instruments, which is fine if you know to READ the fucking instruments... My language? I learned it all from you, honey bunny. The new you, at least. Do I blame you? No, I do not blame you. LISTEN. I could take all of this - being lost in the clouds, flying a plane while not knowing how to fly a plane - and more. But I have to know one thing: Are you with me? Are you? What do you mean I once asked that question to someone else? Wait...the rain has stopped... It's suddenly quiet, but I can't hear you. Still, I have to laugh. I'm on the ground, in the dirt, and still totally soaked. This boulder was overrated, I must say. Do you remember that afternoon in the Plaza in Taos? Remember how it rained that day? But before it did we took the last of the wedding planners from that stand near the gazebo. Then we ran back to the car and ate ice cream while the rain streaked down the windows and beaded up on your new wax job... But we were warm, yes, warm. Who would have thought you needed to be warm in July? But we did need it that day - and we were. Maybe then it crossed my mind how you were home. Maybe it was while we made love later in the hotel room. Those first times I was with you, all I could think of was shooting stars as we did it - shooting stars and the cold blackness of space. Yet such thoughts warmed me. YOU warmed me. So maybe it was then that I thought you were home. Either way, I remember clearly that once I did think it - back when it never would have occurred to me with say something without meaning it - I said it I said it I said it... |