Where is that feeling? That christmas feeling that made me sick with anticipation and drunk with wonder as a child. Where is that feeling?
I think the problem is I get the feeling that we are not celebrating anything at all. All the Christian folk are thoroughly confused by the holiday, acting like shopaholic pagans and the pagans seem to have forgotten their gods and goddesses entirely, acting like accomplices to the commercial Christians.
Guys like me, broke and agnostic, have more than a few head scratching moments this time of year. When you see that look on our face it’s because we don’t know what we are celebrating.
We used to light up our windows with candles so the homeless and hungry would know that warmth and food were found within. We used to have a harvest and no guarantee against the winter. There used to be meaning to our winters merry making; celebration in the face of a dying world, a prayer for life next Spring. There used to be magic and so many other things that have all but dried up. Now we have movie magic and mickey mouse.
I don’t feel connected to any of this. Does it feel phony to anybody else?
We put up the tree. It looks nice. Bridget made Douglas Fir Sorbet, I’m not kidding.
At 33 minutes after midnight I look left then right down the alley. I can see a man pissing one block South and a woman squatting clumsily for the relief one block North.
I draw up my hood and watch my breath move on a furtive Westerly breeze. On Yesler clumps of club goers move in determined, drunken platoons from one thumping hole to the next.
I grab a sandwich at Jimmy Johns. A Vito. I shoulda told ‘em no onions, damn.
Two young ladies drag each other by the hair into the street. Each woman hold the other by the scalp with one hand and flails wild, hopeful, pinwheeling blows with the other. If I squint it looks like two birds in a furious mating dance.
They stop traffic with their violence.
I lean against a stop sign, chew my sandwich and watch their respective friends pry them apart. A squat man sidles up to me and says, “Weed?”
“No, it’s a sandwich, Jimmy Johns.”
Some erupts several black South and the sound pinballs from brick building to brick building. BLAAAAAAAM! The sound is a timpani of no goodness. Baseball bats on empty trashcans. Mortar shells on baby carriages. I didn’t sound like a gunshot, it was, of course.
Police race past me, fishtail on the wet road and block the entrance to my alley on both ends. 3 cop cars race South, lights, no sirens.
I step past the car, enter my alley and toss a slimy tendril of onion in the direction of the scampering warf rats.
This is where I lurk.
I get a lot of creative inspiration from my alley and the surrounding network of bricked passages so I thought I would share my atmosphere with y’all!
Tubes. I will never get used to the tubes. Not in the beginning, not ever.
Tubes into his nose, tubes into his mouth. Tubes taped to his arm, disappearing into his wrists. Tubes for food and nutrients, tubes for medicine and morphine, tubes for oxygen. Something beside his bed keeps going beep beep beep and fluid trickles from under his gown each time. Jesus. beep beep beep. And tubes that are shoved into his dick and go beep beep beep each time a little piss passes through.
Do I really need that? Is that necessary? Who’s fucking idea was it to have the tube crammed into my dads urethra beep. Not a situation I want sound effects for. The beep screamed ” your dad is hooked up to a machine, a machine that pisses for him! sShall I remind you of that fact over and over?”
beep
happpynormal
scary
“Ok, I love you. OK ok, we will see you real soon, alright? Rest up, love you.”
He says help your mom. Just like that-’help your mom’. Something is crashing down, but it is crashing slowly and I don’t know what it is yet. but plaster shakes loose from the vaulted ceiling of my being when he says help your mom. Like a monster still too far away to see has taken a step in my direction. I will, don’t worry.
“She needs you guys, help her while I’m in here.”
I wonder how much of him is buried under the protective blanket of morphine. I wonder how much of his brain they took. His eyes swim in and out of focus, he is fading.
In the hallway the open spaces seem immense, swelling and stretching. My head looses all its weight and a riot of black sparks dance into my vision. I take a breath and almost choke on it. I was not breathing in there. I was holding my breath. I didn’t notice. The world is slipping and my feet find their place on their own. I have my arm around Dustin and he doesn’t know I’m passing out. He soldiers somberly down the corridor. My head bristles like a waking limb and light comes back into the world. The hallway snapped back to its usual size and I walked on with my brother.
I think I acted the way I was suppose to. Happy and Normal. I didn’t know then that pain and dread and senseless hope are my new normal. I didn’t know you can be happiest when you are full of despair. The less you have to be happy about the easier it is to be happy for the small things, like 5 minutes of silence and honest eye contact. The iodine was that putrid, hateful brown. His eyes struggled through fatigue and morphine, he said he loved me. I remember that.
****
If you have read this, thank you. It has been sitting for 7 years and I thought it was time to drag it out of the shadows and throw it into the light, your light.
While dredging the files of abandoned thumb drives I chanced upon 1,000 words written by a younger Josh in the days after my fathers passing. What I submit to you now has been edited for spelling only. It is not the best writing, it is the stream of consciousness of a grief stricken son. I read it with the fascination of a voyeur. 7 years is not a lifetime, but it seems that way sometimes, doesn’t it?
PART 2
We step out of the peaceful tones of the waiting room. The nurses station is a white murmur of softly ringing phones and soft voices answering. Steve walks us down the tiles, also white and most of the patients doors are ajar and everyone is passed out and chopped up. I don’t want to look. The nurses, speak of insipidly normal things.
“Yes, and it went potty all over my carpet. We just had it pt in 7 months ago you know?!”
I wish they had some respect for a couple guys trying to be normal and happy seeing their father for the first terrifying time after his emergency brain surgery. The circular corridor was filled with drug addled death dodgers.
How does it feel to be apart of my bad dream ladies, to be the back ground chatter in my nightmare? A hundred little devises beep politely and always a shoe whispers on the polished tile and papers ruffle like settling wings. Suddenly the last thing in the universe that I wanted to do was walk through that door and see my (scary) father. He needs to see you, something small creaked deep within me. He needs to see you. I had never thought that it might comfort him, the object of this ordeal. Then it all came crashing down on me. I had not considered his position fully, it was all “my father” and “my life”, but as we walked through the door and saw his gray eyes, I thought of Randy, the man, and all he had endured these last 48 hours. What pain, what sadness, what fear and confusion, and what seeing his sons might mean. These thoughts ran through my head like a arrow of hot lead. we all need to see each other.
He wasn’t sleeping like I imagined. He was awake. His eyes seemed too open, if you can understand it. They were wide and round and lolled from side to side as my brother and I flanked the bed. He smiled crookedly. We bent down and hugged him best as we could. Just put my face on his chest, just hold it there, and under the sick and sterile smell of the smock there he was, battered but not broken, my father. Fuck. His hand feels heavy and immobile.
“How ya doin pop?”
Only stupid questions come out because I can’t say “please don’t die,please don’t have cancer.”
“Oh, not so bad. I think it’s gonna leave a scar though.”
His words are crawling things lurching from his mouth but there is that sarcastic joviality that puts the devil in his eyes for a moment. He is there, or he is trying to be.
“I love you boys.”
Slowly, said slowly and more genuine than I had ever known. He is smiling. Maybe they told him to be happy and normal too. I love you too. I say it and the fucking Universe pours out, everything, no exceptions; i love you too. That is it, baby, the Earth we straddle. It smashes through everything and absolves us of everything. I we exist in “I love you”. That’s all we really want to say. But he says, slowly, through a low gurgle in his throat.
“I’m sorry.”
His hair is greasy and matted, hanging in tussled oily clumps. The left side of his head is shaved, something he hates, and a huge arching frown is cut into his scalp. He is sewn together and the stitches dimple the blood-crusted skin.
“Pretty ugly huh?’ he laughs’ I wish they woulda shaved my whole head though.”
Oh the thousand little embarrassments of cancer. There is no glamour in it. It takes decencies one by one by one. Until you can only laugh or cry, naked in the dark.
It looks like no cut or injury I’ve ever seen. The word trauma comes to mind. A door was made in the left side of his head, just above the ear. Like a storm cellar, all the way the core. Don’t stare. When he turns toward Dustin or blinks slowly my eyes hurry there, unable to help myself.
Happy.
Iodine was unceremoniously smeared over the Healing head wound and had dried in brown dribbles down his temple and neck.
Normal.
While dredging the files of abandoned thumb drives I chanced upon 1,000 words written by a younger Josh in the days after my fathers passing. What I submit to you now has been edited for spelling only. It is not the best writing, it is the stream of consciousness of a grief stricken son. I read it with the fascination of a voyeur. 7 years is not a lifetime, but it seems that way sometimes, doesn’t it?
PART 1
“Your dad might look a little scary.”
Scary? What is this, Halloween? What Steve means is that they just cut a big nasty hole into his scalp, sawed open his skull and chopped up his brain like a slab of sirloin, and he’s gonna look the part. The part of a man taken apart and put back together. Humpty-fucking-Dumpty
I wonder if I will be able to tell now? Will I see the cancer under his skin or smell it rotting on his breath?
“I just wanted to warn you. Try to act as happy and as normal as possible.It’s very important… and keep the visit short. He needs to rest.”
Two days ago the sun fell through the window like a promise of summer. Dad and I leaned against the kitchen table and joked and crunched tuna melts.
That was happy. That was normal.
Yesterday was waiting, and phone calls and family coming to wait and hug and ‘when can we see him?’. It seems like a year ago. This is when time begins to fade and awareness of hours and days and weeks blinks lazily or disappears all together. Just moments. Instances in this crisis that can’t be quantified by Gregorian timetables. On and on part of one big nightmare.
Normal. Happy. Scary.
He may look scary. Will his mouth be slack and trickling drool? Will half his face be reinvented? Will he still be my dad? Steve is lookin us in the eyes, he is real good at that, this guy’s head is screwed on tight. If he could look me in the eyes then I had one foot on solid ground. It helped that he looked like his younger brother, my dad. Dustin just stands there and nods. We are in a little waiting room. Soft lights, fake plants, women’s magazines and jars of potpourri that had gone completely sterile like 5 years ago. Hey guys, change the fucking cinnamon sticks while you at it.
Sometimes standing up for yourself can be intimidating. If you are like me, you don’t want to disturb the delicate scrim of goodwill that floats atop an ocean of malice. But sometimes you have to ruffle your feathers, clear your throat, flex your talons and roar.
This could mean losing money, but it could also mean something else is coming down the line that wants my attention.
Don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself.
This is something I am trying to do now.
on another note… I believe after 28 years I have a wisdom tooth coming in. There is a throbbing, cantankerous fissure behind my last molar that drives drill bits of agony into my jaw.
I mash up asprin and stuff the wound with pain killing white powder. I swish salt water and hydrogen peroxide. I have no dental care and look at my greasy pair of pliers and tell Bridget to wash her hands and grab the pizza cutter.
