Absorb The Losses

It was after my friend John was killed that I think I first realized, I mean really realized, just how tenuous everything in life is. All the good things, anyway. Innocence, happiness, love, success. Mine is hardly a unique experience, but after that realization, my final loss of innocence, I never really believed in a “sure thing” again. Or in security. In happy endings, an end to all troubles, sustained success. What I finally really did then, after my friend died, was begin to grow up.

At some point, after one falls from grace, one decides how to live with what one is left with. Or does not decide. Myself, I do not recall ever having made some conscious decision, or having had any epiphany about how I should conduct myself in the aftermath. Rather, I can look back now, thirty years on, and realize that for whatever reason I just kept going, and never truly slipped into cynicism or despair; instead, I began to take each thing as it came, and each person. I began to value laughter and good times, and not take them for granted anymore. I learned how to get by when times were lean, waiting for when the times were good again. Rather than wallowing around thinking about how unfair it all was, I learned that what was most important – above all else – was to just keep moving. When one was always moving one was sometimes alone, even lonely; but better that than sitting around in a slough of despond, just waiting to go under. How I ended going down the path I did, in the manner that I did, I do not really know. Was it an accident? Nature? Nurture? Providence? It was probably some of each.

But I found a way to keep moving, that is the thing. To put it simply, after my friend John died, I began to think like a wolf. Not a lamb.

Oh, and here’s one thing: This guy named Robert, one of the closest friends I had, was sitting on my living room floor one night, basically in a drunken stupor, rocking himself back and forth. He kept mumbling something over and over. At first I ignored him; but then it began to get really annoying, so I moved closer to hear what it was he was saying to himself. He was saying, “Absorb the losses. Absorb the losses.” Over and over again, like a mantra. At the time, I asked him if he would please shut the fuck up, I couldn’t hear the stereo. Later on, sober, I asked him about it. He did not remember the incident at all, or where the phrase he was muttering came from, or why he felt specifically compelled to employ it as an incantation that night, shit-faced, on the floor of my apartment. Who knows? We decided the words probably came to him from God, or at least from one of the Muses. Personally, I think he was facing his demons that night, whatever they were, and it was the only thing he could come up with at the time with which to defend himself.

We laughed about that night and his drunken, nonsense phrase for a long time; but to be honest, I kind of adopted it, and I have used it more than a few times myself over the years. I found that whenever I did, it seemed to ease my burden a little. . . if for no other reason than it brought thoughts of my friend back to me. Absorb the losses, yes.

The death of my friend John was one of those losses I needed to absorb. It was a tough one, I don’t mind saying. It took me awhile to even begin to think about how to go about starting to absorb it. I sometimes think I still have not, entirely.

And then there was my friend Robert. He was one who liked to wade way out, into the deep waters, confident always in his ability to stay afloat. And one day he just got fucking swept away.

The demons got him in the end, I guess. Absorb the losses.

____________________________________

Standing In The Light

My cousin Fred is pretty fucking big.

He is not overly tall, 6′ 0″ or 6′ 1″, tops. And while he weighs over 200 lbs., the weight is stretched over a large-boned frame, so he doesn’t look fat at all. He is just one of those people who exude bigness. When you are around him, you think of this big person you have with you.

Fred is just plain big, in some ways. His feet are size 16, and he has most of his footwear custom-made, which he says is expensive. According to his first wife, a clinical psychologist who was crazy as hell, there is something to the foot size/dick size corollary; although I don’t remember anyone asking her about it at the time. Fred shipped her off to the loony bin years ago, and good riddance.

Fred and I grew up in different towns, but we saw each other fairly often, and we were pretty close, as kids. Not as close as brothers – we didn’t spend enough time together for that – but I would imagine we were closer than most first cousins, and we still are. Fred is one of those people who, whenever his name comes up, this warm feeling comes over me. He is about my age, he is a good guy, he thinks like me, and we have had lots of fun together over the years.

One time we were staying down at the beach for several days, in a rented cabin. Me, several of my school friends, one of my brothers, and Fred. It was probably Spring Break, I know we were around 18 or so. One night we were having this big party at our cabin, mostly friends of ours who were staying at the beach, too. Along the way, Fred OD’d on beer, and passed out on the floor in the middle of the cabin. No problem, people just stepped over him, or around him, and the party carried on. At one point three or four guys were standing there drinking beer, looking over Fred, and dispassionately discussing his present state. “I wonder if he’ll come to before the end of the party?” “How many beers do you think he had?” “I hope he wakes up before he pisses himself, that would be kind of nasty.” Then one of the guys, wholly unintentionally, dropped an almost full can of Natural Light, right on Fred’s head. It made a sound I heard clearly, over the music and conversation, all the way across the room. But Fred hardly stirred. A halo of beer and foam formed around his head on the rug, and someone said he would probably wake up and wonder if he’d gone to heaven. Up to then, I’d pretty much always called him Fredward, or sometimes Freddy if I was in a rush. But from that night on, my cousin was universally known as Fred the Hammerhead, or just Hammerhead. He seemed to like the nickname all right. Not that it mattered, we would’ve called him that regardless.

Fred was with us the night of the phosphorous ocean. That was an early spring night around that same time when a bunch of us were drinking at night down on the beach on Bolivar Peninsula, and a rare incursion of phosphorous caused the whitecaps of the breaking waves to glow greenish-white in the moonlight, shooting right to left across the horizon each time a wave broke. If you dragged your foot across the sand, the track where you’d dragged it would glow. At the time, none of us had ever seen that before, plus we’d been drinking for hours. The night, especially in retrospect, took on an almost surreal quality. I sometimes wondered if it had really happened at all. People who were there still talk about it wistfully. Most of us ran around like idiots, screaming and playing in the glowing water and sand. Meanwhile, Fredward went to his Silverado and reached behind the seat and pulled out one of those folding shovels like you’d see in an army surplus store. I’m not sure why he carried it, but it did not really surprise me that he did. Anyway, while the rest of us were acting like retarded fools, Fred calmly shoveled several hundred pounds of the glowing sand into the bed of his truck. He figured he’d take some home, spread it around his flower beds and such. Conversation starter. Fred was always thinking ahead like that.

I was with him the day his sister died. She was killed on the beach highway, on her way home. She wasn’t driving, it was her and three of her friends, and they were all pretty drunk, I heard; as was the guy who crossed the center line and hit them head on. And probably a majority of everyone else on that highway that day. Everybody involved in the wreck died at the scene, basically. We had been down at the beach for the day, and Fred and I headed back to town 45 minutes to an hour after his sister and her friends did. When we came up on the wreck, we didn’t know what it was at first. We were freaking out because there were cops everywhere. We were both pretty loaded, and we thought we’d come up on a DPS sobriety check roadblock. But it wasn’t; and when we saw what was left of the light blue Cutlass her friend had been driving, we knew what had happened. I don’t know my immediate reaction, I just remember that my emotions at the time were dulled by being intoxicated. So were Fred’s; I distinctly remember him being almost stoic when he found out his sister had been somewhere in the tangled mess of that Cutlass. Even though they were essentially D.O.A., Fred’s sister and another girl were life-flighted to UTMB. So we jumped back in his truck and turned around and hauled ass to Galveston. By the time we got there, his sis was long gone. I remember sitting in the hospital while Fred called his parents and let them know what had happened. We were sobered up by then, and I felt myself getting emotional, but Fred’s voice never broke. I admired him a lot for that. His little sister has been gone now 31 years, but I can still remember parts of that day very clearly. Too much, too soon.

Fred lives in South Carolina now, in Georgetown, near the ocean. He’s a civil engineer. We don’t see each other much anymore, but we keep in touch by e-mail and the occasional phone call. Fred is a big Astros fan, always has been, and he tries to follow the team as best he can; but he says even with his MLB package and the internet, it is not the same as living close by. I called him last week, on his birthday, and at one point he asked me, “Are things as bad as they seem?” Yes, I told him, maybe worse. That’s what he thought, he said, but he’d hoped he was wrong. But, he can see it all the way from fucking South Carolina. Fuck.

While talking last week, we remembered the night of the phosphorous ocean for some reason, and I asked him what he ever did with all that sand he’d loaded in his truck that night. He laughed and said some of it is in the pitchers mound on the AAA field at the Little League park in his hometown. The sand had never glowed at all after that night on the beach, and I was glad to hear that. What happened that night, if it happened, was fleeting. Only the people who were there are left to tell the story.

Fred’s sister didn’t make it past age 15, and so I will always remembered her as young and pretty and a little bit wild and really funny; and not as what she might have become, good or bad. I sometimes wonder if she was ever even here at all, if I didn’t dream her up like I sometimes think I dreamt up that glowing night on the beach, so many years ago.

But I didn’t dream her up, and I feel like I will see her again someday. On a night when the phosphorescent ocean is glowing in the background, the gleam shooting like lightning across the horizon, as the endless waves keep breaking and breaking, out beyond the first sandbar, before rolling up and washing over our bare feet and toes, as we stand together there on the beach. I will be with her there on the beach that night, and I will put my arm around her when she shivers in the wind, and I will say something clever, and then I will listen to her terrific laugh. Fred will be there, too, of course; sitting in his lawn chair next to his truck, drinking a beer and listening to the Astros game on the radio. I’ll be able to hear the broadcast in the background, over the sound of the breaking waves. The team will have pulled out another stellar win that night, moving decisively into first place.

Yes. From my dreams to God’s ears.

No one hears his lonely sighs
There are no blankets where he lies
In all his deepest dreams he flies
With sweet Melissa

________________________________

Over Under Sideways Down

Did you ever have a dream that kept you awake at night? And then kept you awake many nights later, just thinking of it, even though you hadn’t actually had the dream again?

Got a curse I cannot lift
Shines when the sunset shifts
When the moon is round and full
Gotta bust that box, gotta gut that fish

I’d been haunted for weeks by something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It was out there, just beyond the sightlines of my consciousness, driving me to distraction. And it would not let me peacefully sleep.

There was no peace where I lived. Some cosmic thing had gone awry, and nothing worked like it should have. I was having dreams and premonitions. It was no good. The light was getting smaller and smaller. It felt as if the walls were closing in. Only one thing could have saved me, and I’d just swallowed the last handful of that. What I really needed . . . I needed a girl to wrap her arms around my head, and bring me back down to a human speed. I needed a girl with the words to soothe me, and slow down my racing mind and heart. I needed a place to go where I could rest, and get some peace from whatever the fuck it was that came at night and fucked up my equilibrium and everything else.

But what I needed, I could not find.

I remember one time my brother and I were sitting out on the beach in the middle of the night, watching the lights on the horizon and listening to the waves. I don’t think we’d said anything to each other in quite awhile, maybe hours; and in fact, I wasn’t even sure he was conscious anymore. It was probably 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning. I looked over and I thought he was slumped down in his lawn chair, but it was pretty dark, and hard to make out. Being slumped over in his lawn chair was not all that unusual in those days, but I wasn’t sure. He was far enough away from me that I could have yelled at him and he might not have heard me. He wasn’t really that far away – maybe ten yards or so – but between the wave action and the stiff onshore wind, he might not have heard. I chose not to yell. I was straining my eyes, trying to see him move or something, and it was giving me a headache. Then, all of the sudden, the big light came.

***************

I was restless, and could not sleep.

That was unusual for me, especially in those days. I always fell asleep within minutes of my head hitting the pillow, no matter what. People who knew me used to marvel at this, and I came to recognize it as a gift. No matter what external thing was going on, I had been programmed so that as soon as I got horizontal and closed my eyes, the natural narcotics kicked in and, before you knew it, I was in la-la land.

Charge me your day rate
I’ll turn you out in kind
When the moon is round and full
Gonna teach you tricks that’ll blow your
Mongrel mind

That particular night, I was in my old apartment, the first one I had after I moved out of my parent’s house . . . and I found myself up at midnight, pacing the floor. I didn’t know what the fuck was wrong with me; but I couldn’t stand it, and I needed to talk to someone. I didn’t call the girl I was dating at the time. She was nice and all, and enjoyed a good time, and we’d been going out a few months by then. But there was no deep emotional connection there at all. I needed to talk to someone who knew me, who was ready to jump down the rabbit hole with me at a moment’s notice and help me try and figure all this shit out.

After thinking about it awhile, I called Callie. Callie was a cousin my age who I’d grown up with and thought of as a sister, kind of. She was my confessor and confidant in those days. I called her and told her I couldn’t sleep – it was probably 1:00 a.m. by then – and I told her I was going crazy and I needed her to listen to me and tell me what the fuck was wrong and help me get everything back on an even keel. That may sound like a lot to ask, but Callie was special . . . and she’d saved me before.

In her usual assured manner, Callie said she’d be over in 15 minutes or so – we were living in the same town then – and she said we’d go for a ride and talk about it and work it all out. Very calm and matter-of-fact, she was – and I immediately felt better, like things were in good hands.

***************

I thought I was falling in love with this girl named Angela. She was a particular friend of mine. Very pretty, and she had a perpetually upbeat outlook on life. Always cheerful. That is something that can be taken for granted in a friend, but on the other hand it can be so fucking valuable, just having someone positive around when one really needs it.

Another good thing about Angela was that she was in pharmaceutical sales – she was some kind of district rep – and another thing besides a positive outlook that can be valuable in a friend is having one who usually has boxes and boxes of sample prescription drugs stacked up in her living room at any given time.

Angela had it in her mind that I needed to be taken care of. Perhaps I was projecting that at the time, I don’t know. Anyway, she thought I needed to be taken care of, and she thought she was just the one to do it. She may have been right, too, but damn, it just seemed too easy to me. There had to be a catch.

The first time I thought I might be falling in love with Angela was the night she gave me a baggie full of sample amphetemine capsules, 50 mg a pop. In truth, I preferred the tabs, which gave one a quick jolt. The capsules were supposed to be for time release.

But of course there were ways around that. Angela said to crack the caps open and then wash them down, or even mix them in a drink. Instead, I was eating them like Pixie Stix and then washing away the acrid aftertaste with wine or beer. Worked like a fucking charm, from the get-go. The first few days I was getting an hour or two of sleep here and there, and I kept forgetting to eat. After awhile I leveled off with it, and I rode the buzz for a good long time. Then, when I felt like maybe I was starting to burn up the circuits, I weaned myself off of that shit. Speed can be a wonderful thing, but you have to always keep in mind that it can’t go on for too long. You have to always have in mind when and how you are going to kick. But for awhile, it was a nice little ride.

I remember when I was in college, some of the people I hung around with started getting into opiates. I was afraid of those, but it was fascinating to watch someone you knew descend into that netherworld.

My best friend at the time was this guy named Phil, and Phil had got into heroin. He wouldn’t shoot it up – he was as afraid of needles as I was – but someone showed him how to mix it with his weed and smoke it. So he smoked it. I don’t think the effect was as direct or as powerful as from shooting it into the bloodstream, but still, when Phil smoked that shit he’d get this certain look in his eye only a junkie gets, and you knew he had got himself knee deep into the Mexican brown again, some kind of way.

We were sitting around his place one day, getting high, and the fucker mixed up his stash and we ended up smoking one of those heroin-laced doobies. I could feel the difference almost right away. And, wow, I realized I was made for that stuff. Just fucking wonderful. Somehow or another I managed to keep myself away from it after that, even though it was all around me. All I can guess is I was being looked out for; and thank goodness for that.

Meantime, Phil had got himself a habit, and it went on for awhile, too. When he finally decided to get off the stuff, he didn’t go the conventional route of detox and withdrawal. He kicked “city style”, withdrawing from the heroin while taking handfuls of prescription narcotics to ease the sting. Damnedest thing I ever saw, and it worked, too.

I thought about Phil and his “city style” practically the whole time I was with Angela. That was a swirl of bennies and Seconal and Darvon and Xanax and I don’t know what-all else that went on for nearly a year, I think. Pretty much ended when she was fired from her job, for consuming more of the samples than she distributed. She eventually ended up in the loony bin. As for myself, I walked away from the wreckage; with psychic scars, and some lessons learned.

Phil ended up dead, but that is another story.

***************

I woke up with that weird sensation you get when you think someone is watching you. Someone was, too.

I was in bed at the beach cabin, in the old cabin, the one down at Emerald II. I squinted one eye open and could make out the form of someone sitting at the end of my bed. Once my eyes started to focus a little better, I looked again and realized the person looking at me was my cousin Mark. He was sitting at the foot of my bed, dressed in jeans and a Dickinson High School hoodie, drinking a Coors Light shoved down into a plastic coozie that advertised something or other. I looked at my watch on the fake bamboo nightstand. It was 7:30 a.m.

A bunch of us had been staying down at the beach for several days, and on the spur of the moment Mark had decided to come join us for a day. He was a sophomore in high school, like 15, or 16. It was a pretty weekday in the spring, and he had left his house early, then decided to ditch his classes, get some beer, and drive down through Galveston and across the ferry to our cabin.

He said when he got there, early that morning, everyone was asleep; so he decided to start drinking his beer while he waited around for us to wake up.

I really didn’t know Mark all that well. He was younger, and I never spent much time with him growing up. His older brother and I had been pretty close, though. So, he was family. And he had apparently reasoned that a few hours of partying on the beach was worth all the trouble he was probably going to get into later. I could definitely identify with that ethos. So, as much as I wanted to just go back to sleep that morning, I forced myself not to. I got up and started drinking beer with Mark, instead. Back then I had a strict rule about drinking before 8:00 a.m., but this was a special circumstance, so . . .

The night before, we’d been partying and things sort of dissolved into chaos as the night went on. I really don’t remember much about it. I remember coming to in the middle of the night on the beach in my lawn chair, with the blanket I kept behind the seat of my truck wrapped around my upper body. The onshore wind was strong, and the surf was really choppy. I looked around, and about 10 yards off to my right I saw my brother, also sitting in a lawn chair. He was not moving much, and I could not tell if he was awake or not.

I was still pretty groggy, trying to process information and wondering if I was really on the beach, or just dreaming I was. It was really dark and hard to make anything out. That is when, suddenly, everything lit up.

I saw my brother kind of jolt awake in the periphery of my vision. We both watched intently as a large halo of light floated above the ocean, maybe out at the first sandbar or so. And, no, it wasn’t a fucking flying saucer. What a fucking joke. It was a natural light. We just didn’t know what the hell it was.

I don’t know if it really happened or I imagined it, but afterward in my recollection there was also a voice, and a figure in the light. My brother said he did not remember any of that, just a very bright light. It was weird, I felt like I had not seen the figure or heard the voice, either; but somehow it was imprinted on my mind to remember that I had. To this day, my brother and I do not talk about that night much; we apparently saw two different things, and there is no way to resolve it.

Not to mention, I began to discount what I thought I saw to myself, right away. That next morning, sitting there drinking beer with Mark, I started to think about it again. The figure in the light was so improbable, and the words the voice said were so impossible, that almost right away I figured it was my mind playing tricks on me. I never have been able to completely convince myself of that, but for the most part, in order to live normally (well, more or less), I have put the event entirely aside.

It is just lately that I have been awakened at night, with those words from the light in my head again. Goddamn it! Once that happens, I can forget sleeping anymore. And all the pills in the world cannot make it go away.

***************

Callie picked me up, and we drove down Interstate 10 in her Cutlass 442 in the middle of the night, headed more-or-less in the direction of Jacksonville Beach, on the Atlantic Ocean, at the eastern terminus of IH-10. I’d always wanted to go to Jacksonville Beach, for the surfing.

Along the way we talked, and I told Callie about the stuff that was bothering me, and about the vision I had that I’d put out of my mind, but how now it was back to haunt me. I told her what the figure in the light looked like, and the words the voice had said to me.

She was quiet throughout, which was not unusual. Callie was a terrific listener. I would unburden myself to her, and while I was talking, she would never say a word. She would just listen. If she had anything to say about it, that came later. It was one of the things about her I loved so much.

On this night, after I’d told her my terrible secret, and why I could not sleep at night anymore, I stole a glance over at her, in the driver’s seat. I wasn’t looking to see if she had a reaction so much as I was wanting to see her calm, beautiful face. For my own reassurance, more than anything else.

When I looked over, I could make out most of her face, cast in a greenish glow from the dashboard lights. I could see she had been crying, that there were tracks of tears down her cheeks.

Goddamn it! I’d made Callie cry. All because of my stupid bullshit. I resolved right then to just shut the fuck up about the figure in the light and the voices I’d heard, maybe forever.

***************

By the time we got to the Atchafalaya causeway, I could sense the pre-dawn glow all around us. It wouldn’t be long until sunrise.

We pulled the Cutlass off the Interstate at one of the exits off the causeway, Henderson or Whiskey Bay or one of those. We eased down the ramp and turned down a state highway for a bit, until we found a good spot near the river to pull off the road. Callie put the car in park and turned off the engine.

I heard her unclip her seat belt and turned to see her pull back the console and slide across the seat to where I was. I put my arm around her as she leaned into my shoulder and grabbed my other hand in hers. Then we sat there like that, in silence, and watched the sun come up, rising slowly up over the great river and swamp.

I told Callie that I felt like it was a new day, and that everything would be different now. Whatever had happened before was done. I had been changed.

I will always remember that night and morning with a sort of bittersweet fondness. Telling my cousin all my troubles, and then testifying to her at sunrise, about how I was changed, and how everything was different.

But it wasn’t different. Not at all. And what I will remember more than anything from that night was Callie’s silent tears, after I’d told her what I had seen and what I had heard. About how I had denied my vision, and turned and walked away from it. And how I had refused to listen to the message that came with it.

She knew. She knew even she could not save me, not after that. Callie had been crying that night, silently and to herself, because she knew I was fucking doomed.

***************

I remember, I remember
What life was like in the yard
‘Cause you can’t ever think about dying
And it just makes a person get hard

I keep wondering if my friends feel like I do
I don’t know how someone could stand it
To go through what I’m now going through

So every night we party
And every night we get too high
And I put myself so close to death
‘Til I think that I ain’t gonna die

And I realize just a little
Why sometimes I like to feel like dirt
It’s the only thing in this day and age
That can make me feel close to the earth

But if I ever get to heaven
If I ever reach that door
I will ask them why I had to go through this life
When I just couldn’t take any more

But everybody’s going to heaven
‘Cause already we’ve all been through hell
Everybody’s going to heaven
‘Cause already we’ve all been through hell

_____________________________________

Shadow Lands

The thing about Oswalt, he was deceptively strong. He maybe did not look so durable, though; and one of the fun things to do in the years Roy was here was read various ‘experts’ predicting Oswalt would succumb to arm injury woes anytime now. And he never did, really. He had an in-season ‘dead arm’ a few times along the way, and he famously dealt with a tricky groin for awhile; but his arm never actually went bad on him, or gave out. Some attribute this durability of his to the myth-like, almost surely apocryphal story in which Roy received a heavy-duty shock in that golden right arm of his one day several years ago, while fooling around with the battery in his truck.

Maybe. But some of the deceptive part of his sturdiness was due to the fact Roy O. was one of those people possessed of a physiology that used to be referred to as ‘wiry.’ Not big and bulky, but not weak, either. As tough as wire. Other than his legs and butt, which of course were the key, the rest of Oswalt made him appear as a sort of skinny, country-ass fuck, like someone you’d see pumping gas at a rural filling station. Laconic and hard to read, the guy gives you the directions you asked for. But was he really helping you out? Or giving you the bum steer? It was counterintuitive for some people, including me at first, to see the smallish-for-a-starting-pitcher but actually normal-sized Oswalt out there, firing 95 mph fastballs knee high on the corners. Something had to give, right?

Nope. I have in my mind a mental picture from a dream I once had about Roy Oswalt, set sometime after his playing days end. In my dream, Roy was living at his place in Mississippi, out in the country. It was late fall/early winter, and the leaves were on the ground, and it was kind of wet out. The air was steely cold under a grayish-white sky, and a stiff wind blew. Roy was inside his house, but realized he needed some more wood for the wood-burning stove. So he walked through the front doorway and around to the side of his house, where he had neatly stacked a couple of cords of split hardwood. He had harvested the wood by knocking down some trees with his bulldozer, and dragged them over to the side of the house with his tractor. He trimmed and cut logs into lengths with his Husqvarna 24” logging chainsaw, and he split the lengths with his hydraulic log-splitter. Roy grabbed up a couple of armloads of firewood off of the stack, almost effortlessly, and slowly carried it back into his house.

Outside, just beyond this tableau, a car had passed by on the road out front, and a young kid in the back seat witnessed this scene . . . Or, better yet, a barn owl was sitting up in a tree in the yard, wise and solitary, its huge black eyes taking in everything . . . No, I’ve got it. A red wolf was moving across Oswalt’s property, unhurriedly on his way to wherever it is wolves go. He suddenly sensed movement in the periphery of his vision, and glanced up in time to see Oswalt carrying a seemingly disproportionate amount of wood across the deck in front of his house and back inside. The wolf’s glance only lasted a second or two, just long enough to discern there was no immediate danger. No prospective meal, either. But in that few seconds of time, our wolf formed the wolf-equivalent of a coherent thought, in the front part of his lupine brain. And he voiced that thought, to himself, in whatever the language is that wolves speak to themselves in. He said, “Damn, that little guy is bad-ass.” And then, imperceptibly, he nodded. It was a nod only wolves can see. It was really just a minute motion of the wolf’s head, from straight ahead to slightly upward, back, and to the left. In the wolf world, this type of nod is a sign of grudging respect for an individual from a non-wolf species. The wolf nodded in Oswalt’s direction, but Roy was already gone. The wolf seemed to consider this for a second – probably me projecting a little here – and then he moved on, as well.

For a man, if he even knew the wolf was there, which Roy didn’t – red wolves are famously stealthy . . . for a man, a nod of respect from a wolf would be a great honor, I would think. I certainly would be honored. Either way, I am with the wolves on this one. Roy Oswalt was bad-ass. And for an extraordinary length of time in the baseball world, he was our bad-ass. Despite the bouts of whining and the demanding of a trade and accusations that he was not always the best teammate, I am sorry to see him go.

Like the red wolf in his yard, I give Oswalt my imperceptible nod of respect. He was bad-ass allright, and I will miss watching him.

++++++++++

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

I knew this girl once, back in school, and she was really pretty. I don’t mean “hot” or anything like that. Neither did she have the classical good looks – high cheekbones, an aquiline nose, and a delicate facial bone structure. She was just pretty. Fresh and wholesome looking. For lack of a better descriptive example, she was Mary Ann to everyone else’s Ginger. She had long-ish dark brown hair, and even darker eyes. She was never a girlfriend of mine or anything, or even really a friend, I just kind of knew her. On the odd occasions when we met, walking across campus, or at a party . . . just seeing her always kind of made my day.

This girl’s whole face lit up when she smiled, which was pretty often. She literally beamed. But from the beginning I thought I detected something else there, too. When she smiled at you, all her facial inflections and body language signaled that she was wholly sincere, and I never doubted that she was. But just beyond the borders of her face, from just behind her, emitted something that seemed like a physical incarnation of something else, something approaching deep sadness. At least, that is what I thought at the time. The thinnest ribbon of darkness outlined her beautiful, beaming face, and for a brief moment a shaft of dark light would glint over her shoulder and onto me. What was that? I would think about it awhile, and eventually convince myself I didn’t really see anything. But by now I am pretty sure I did. I cannot adequately describe it in physical/spatial terms, but it almost appeared as if she had a second shadow following her around, a darker, heavier version of the original.

I don’t know what happened to that girl after school. For all I know she went on to a great career, a storybook marriage with wonderful kids, and a life of true happiness, mostly unmarred by the darkness out there everywhere. I certainly hope she did. Maybe the menacing darkness that seemed to stalk her in our college days decided she was too bright and good for even an extra shadow to fuck with, and so this extra shadow moved on, to dog the footfalls of some other poor soul.

++++++++++

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

The red wolf that happened by Roy Oswalt’s house several winters from now, just as Roy was coming outside for more firewood, had intruded briefly into our dreamy little vignette set at Roy’s place, and then just as quickly had left. But he didn’t exactly leave. He moved outside the frame of the picture, and out of our direct vision, as wolves will do. But something – I have no idea what and neither did he – something made that wolf want to linger there on the periphery of the scene for another moment, just beyond the lines of our collective sight and awareness. He hunched down silently behind some brush, and a small, fallen tree at the edge of Oswalt’s property, and he stared back at Roy’s house.

When Roy had been outside earlier, the wolf had noticed the interior of his house, through the slightly open front door. The wolf did not see much detail, but somehow processed the idea that the home emitted warmth and light and a certain level of comfort no wolf in this world will ever likely experience for very long, if ever. And deep down in his emotionless natural soul this wolf felt a tiny, brief tinge of something he’d never known, something like regret. This cold-blooded predator and howler at the midnight moon experienced, for just a second, a sort of longing.

He longed for something he did not know, and never would know, from a time so far back in history this fuzzy fellow, as apparently bright as he was for his kind, could not begin to comprehend it, or know how far back in time the object of his longing really was. Actually, we are talking mega-time here, hundreds of thousands of years (times seven for a canine, remember), too many years to be sensibly comprehended even by the bi-peds the wolf occasionally saw in his roamings around; like the little guy he saw earlier, carrying all the wood. In truth, the time frame this wolf was attempting to contemplate went all the way back to the time when his genetic branch had suddenly and dramatically split, back in the mists of pre-history. A time when some of his ancient ancestors left their brethren and made one of the biggest leaps of faith ever made by anyone (or thing) in biological history. They did this despite all their instincts and accumulated common wolf sense that compelled them not to. These ancient wolf ancestors had hunched down in the cold outside the mouth of a cave, just like their modern counterpart did at Oswalt’s house, and they saw the glowing light coming out of the cave opening, and they could smell cooking meat, and could hear the sounds of grunting camaraderie coming from inside, and they could sense the warmth there; and they could almost feel the comfort present in that bright, warm and safe place.

This is what they did next. One of the wolves, because it had to be just one very brave one at first, before more would see this action and follow, or not. . . one of the wolves befriended a caveman one day, while both were out hunting for their respective dinners. They had both stopped to rest, and warily, silently, they sat next to one another on a log. The dirty, hairy bi-pedal human dragged his paw-like hand across his protruding brow and then, following a built-in instinct he had no clue about then and his descendents still don’t understand, he tentatively reached out and lightly stroked the back of his new canine acquaintance’s neck, on the scruff. Right at the spot where the wolf’s mother used to pick him up with her teeth and cart him around while running her errands, back when he was just a pup. And the wolf experienced something like appreciation for maybe the first time, certainly towards a human. He opened his terrible, tooth-filled mouth, extended his rough sandpaper tongue, and lightly licked the back of the caveman’s hand.

After that, of course, it was all over. Man had got himself a best friend, St. Bernard had someone to bring him his brandy, and I had bestowed upon me a lemon beagle with a mind of his own, who is barking like a harbor seal out in my backyard just now; who from time-to-time deigns to communicate with me. Telepathically, he insists.

What our crouching wolf’s ancestors did, some of them, against all reason and good wolf sense, was form an alliance with this often stupid and mindlessly destructive race of mammals, who slaughtered wolves among other things with abandon and would continue to, forever. Those early wolves crossed the gulf between them and the two-legged cave dwellers anyway, because somehow they knew they had to do it; they had to befriend the humans, and allow themselves to be mutated and dumbed down to accommodate the human’s needs, to become companions and even servants to these humans. And to gain their trust and affection. All so that the rest of them, the wolves who did not cross over and all the descendants for the rest of time of the wolves who did not cross over, would have a chance, at least, to dodge extinction. A chance to survive.

What those early wolves did was mull over what they perceived as their their options at the time. Then they decided it was time, for the first time ever, for some of them to come in from the cold.

++++++++++

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us – if at all – not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men

Oswalt’s wolf had the germ of an idea and presence of mind to tap into whatever it was inside him that allowed him to peer back into time, all the way back to his earliest ancestors. Which is a remarkable thing, and reminds me of something from way back.

We were visiting my mother’s family in western Pennsylvania, and one day several of us kids, my brothers and cousins and some neighborhood boys, were playing in my grandfather’s pasture, firing crabapples at one another. My grandparents had stubby-looking crabapple trees nearly everywhere on their land, so ammunition was readily available, on the vine (unripened and hard) and on the ground (beginning to rot, all nice and squishy.) Then one of my cousins spotted a rather large hornet nest hanging from the bottom limb of one of the crabapple trees, maybe six feet off of the ground. We stood and looked at it for awhile, transfixed. Then we walked off a distance and began throwing crabapples at the nest.

I was 10 years old at most, but even I knew what we were doing, while entertaining, probably wasn’t such a great idea. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before one of my older cousins delivered those hornets a message pitch; some chin music, high and tight. The next thing we knew, hundreds of really pissed-off hornets were swarming all around the pasture, looking for someone to fuck with.

I did not know at the time I was mildly allergic to some varieties of the western Pennsylvania hornet, but I was. I got stung on the cheek, about an inch-and-a-half below my right eyeball. Almost instantly, that side of my face began swelling, a welt that eventually grew to softball size. My grandfather slapped some pre-chewed (by him) Red Man on my face, which was fucking nasty. But the tobacco juice drew out a lot of the poison, apparently. It wasn’t long before I was back out in that pasture again, squinting out of my bum eye, and firing crabapples around with abandon.

The odd thing was that just before my cousin’s toss found its mark, sending hornets swarming, I happened to be looking at the nest, and saw a soldier hornet crawling down the side of it. Then the crabapple hit, and I literally watched that particular hornet take off from the side of the hive, spot me, then make a direct line across the pasture for my face and plant his stinger into my cheek. The whole sequence lasted probably two seconds, but to me it unfolded in slow motion, almost.

I won’t forget that day. In a twist on the old WWI adage that you always heard the bullet that would kill you coming, I can say you sometimes see the hornet that’s going to sting you heading your way.

And, I would add, you can always see a certain kind of trouble coming, from way, way off, just like that hornet . . . you can always see coming the darkness that is going to do you in. I indentify so much with that wolf crouching outside Roy O.’s door in my dream, the one with the savant-like ability too see into the distant past; to see, from somewhere like here, straight back up the time tunnel to his million year old great-great-grandfather. I think part of the reason is because I, too, have looked up that tunnel. Not back a million years, maybe; but at least as far back as 1899 or so, to the hardscrabble coal mines and oil fields and company towns of extreme north-central West Virginia. In the front room of a damp, cold "company" house in late January, 60+ years before I was born, my fate was essentially sealed.

My paternal grandfather, my father’s father, was born on that day in that place, and from the moment of his first breath he had the hellhounds on his trail. I could see the shadow lurking over my infant grandfather, through the time tunnel, from my vantage point here and now. I could see it attaching itself to him, knowing that what it was really doing was setting out to get me in the end, three generations before I was even born.

The demons which hounded my grandfather drove him to an early death. He had started a career and family, but his wife abandoned them all a few years later, I never learned exactly why. The shadow had clearly descended upon him by then. The night he died, two years later in a house fire he started by passing out in bed with a cigarette, his oldest son – my father – ran into the bedroom to try and get his father out. But he could not, and had to flee to save his own skin. He watched his father burned to a crisp in the subsequent conflagration, all because he (the boy) was not strong enough to save the day. A few years prior, the same boy had come home from elementary school one day, to find his mother in flagrante delicto, you might say, with a neighbor from down the street. He hadn’t been able to do anything to fix that, either. She left them forever two days later.

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

That boy grew up to be a father himself. As a child, in a hot, smoky bedroom with the flames closing in on him . . . in a suburban living room on a bright spring afternoon, he had seen that already he was doomed. He eventually passed on some of the existential blackness in his soul, onto someone he dearly loved, his oldest son; who was too young and naïve to know what was happening, to see whose instructions were being carried out, to defend himself from it at all. This son . . . I tried to deal with the darkness I inherited from my father any way I knew how. I tried to kill the demons outright for awhile, with various killing agents, but that did not work. I tried to think my way around them, to ignore them, to sic Jesus on them. None of that ultimately worked, either. I think I finally realized it was best just to go the way of my friend and mentor, a man called Jim Duncan. Duncan, you’ll remember, was the wraith-like apparition/former U.S. Marshal who materialized out of the heat and dust of the coastal plain one day and rode into the lakeside town of Lago, and then systematically exacted from it the most brutal, soul-cleansing revenge imaginable. At one point during the near-biblical mayhem he induced, Duncan and the town midget sat in a tavern, drinking whiskey shots and contemplating plans to ambush and slaughter some people they wanted dead. The midget turned to Duncan and said, “What happens after?”

“Hmmm?”

“What do we do, once it is over?”

“You live with it.”

The demon-haunted son had grown into a demon-haunted man . . . I looked down a dark tunnel like the one the wolf looked through. Like the one I had seen my grandfather through . . . the innocent baby’s beginning and the drunk man’s end. But this time, instead of looking backward in time, I looked forward. I wanted to see if there was a light at the end of that tunnel for me; which of course would mean I was about to be run over by a train.

_______________________________________

Darkness, Darkness

. . . So I have this mouth shut-off button installed on the side of my head, and I am constantly laying on it full force to try and stop some of the really stupid-ass shit before it ejects from my mouth. No way I can stop the stupid-ass shit from running through my head, but . . . It is the end of spring, the beginning of summer. Normally one of the brightest times in my year. This year, the darkness is unrelenting . . . I need another button that shines a Q-Beam, to try and see through the blackness. I’d be laying on that one, too, if I had it; not that it would do much good now . . . I had a dream one time, back in my heavy-duty partying days. I dreamt that I got so fucked up this one night that the vicious hangover I woke up with the next day didn’t go away, I had to deal with it for weeks. For weeks, walking around with a pounding headache and the feeling of shattered, broken glass rustling around inside of my head. In my dream I briefly considered a gun for relief, but ended up smoking some kick-ass cheeba with this dizzy chick I’d met, before going to bed with her for three days. That got rid of the hangover, but now I had this hippie chick hanging off of me . . . I had that dream my junior year in college, while in real life I was dealing with the girl of my dreams getting pregnant and deciding to keep the baby and abort me, instead . . . After that, in quick succession, academic probation, check (I literally partied for days on end, no time for class or books that semester); death of a friend, check; parents divorce, check; death of a close friend, check. That was one hell of a semester, boy. The only period of time in my life I truly ran off the rails. I ended up spending a lot of the time “experimenting” with window pane LSD, with my friend Phil. Purple micro-dots. I felt like I needed to expand my mind, or something . . . Awhile after that, I had quit the psychedelics and was staying down at the beach cabin, and a couple of friends showed up one night. They were tripping, and had just come from the Eagle’s Lodge down at Crystal Beach, of all places. I tried to imagine what the normal clientlele in that place must have been thinking, looking at my friends; who told me they were so fucked up that they sat in a booth and ordered beers, but were too freaked out to drink them because the mortar between the bricks on the interior facade of the lodge was literally oozing out and running down the walls. So they came looking for me . . . Around that same time some drunk girl picked me up in the bar at Steak ‘n’ Ale one night. She planned to take me home with her, I think. But instead she ran her LeSabre off the road at about 70 mph, out in the middle of fucking nowhere, some rice fields off of IH 10 between Winnie and Anahuac. She never even hit the brakes. We skidded wildly across muddy fields, taking out a couple of barbed-wire fences along the way, before going nose down into a 10 ft. deep drainage canal. I was belted in but still hit the windshield hard enough with my head to crack it, in a circular pattern roughly the size and shape of my skull. Noticing that was the last thing I remembered, that and seeing the girl try to get loose from her seat belt and climb longways up the inside of the passenger compartment, to get to a window . . . and I also had the vague sensation of really cold water creeping up the legs of my jeans, just as I slipped into shock and unconsciousness . . . Some farmer found the car, six hours later, while riding his tractor around in his fields. It was nearly half a mile off the road, semi-submerged in this fucking ditch. The car was perpindicular to the ground, and the only thing that stopped me from drowning was the seat belt, which kept my upper body out of the water. I was submerged from the waist down. I did crack three of my ribs; but that seemed minor, considering. It took them three days to find the girl, who had made it out of the car, and then took off across the rice fields in the dark, in a panic. She’d looked over at me after I’d passed out, and thought I was dead . . . Anyway, point being I’ve had some eventful times along the way, but I never was fazed by any of it for too long, because I always had this inner sense that I was being looked after, and that I was doing what the person looking after me wanted me to do, more or less. Maybe not some of the specific details so much, but I was living my life, not sitting through it. And I could bounce back from anything . . . So, that’s about it.

Right now, I’m in one of those dark times again, when I cannot tell down from up, and the only thing I know to do is dive off of the deep end, and see where I end up.

Like an Inca, or something.


Early this morning
You knocked upon my door
Early this morning
When you knocked upon my door
I said, “Hello, Satan,
I believe it’s time to go.”

_____________________________________________________________