Beams

I left the mass and headed down Telegraph Road, looking to get a quick bite to eat at Kerby’s Koney, one of the eight million coney island grease-trap joints that line roads large and small in Metro Detroit, places to get eggs, bacon and hash-browns for $3.99, or a chicken gyro wrapped in warm pita bread or the most delicious, fat-addled mess that might ever cross your lips: the coney island hot dog, which is best done the way it is in this corner of the Great Lakes State: well grilled Kogel Vienna covered in a savory, thin sauce, a heap of raw chopped onion and a slathering of mustard.

Kerby’s sits alone in a sprawling, forgotten parking lot, surrounded by the developed remnants of the boom times of past decades: A Lowe’s, Best Buy and other big box stores shuttered and vacant, grasses and other vegetation sprouting from openings in their facades and other cracks and corners of the decidedly 1990’s architecture, the kind that used lots of squares and triangles and columns of criss-crossing metal. Tiny, weed-like trees poked out of the top of a lonely Olive Garden, where families would eat lunch after an afternoon of shopping at The Summit Place Mall, which we used to call “Scummit Place” because of its inherent ghettoness. The only thing that remains open at the mall is a Sears that no one really shops at.

            I finished breakfast and headed out to the Box, noticing a boy and his father in the middle of the parking lot, which seemed to stretch to the horizon, un-interrupted, its surface blown clean of all trash, like some asphalt desert. The only thing that cut the cracked plane were the metal light poles that sprung up every 15 parking spots or so. The two were racing radio-controlled cars, which were able to achieve top speed as they had an unabated path toward maximum velocity. The cars buzzed and crackled when they hit a tiny pothole. I hopped in the Box and drove away, cutting through the lot and feeling like I was very alone, a stranger, it seemed, in my hometown.

            But there was actually a different motivation for me being on this side of Pontiac than just painting my insides with grill grease. As I made my way back onto Telegraph, I pulled into the county’s patchwork of professional buildings. Deep in between them was a facility for the terminally ill, for the uninsured, for those who needed to turn to the government for help in their most desperate hours of dying – or living, if you can call it that. It was a wretched place that I knew all too well. I’d first come there when I was just 7 years old, the baptismal visit of my mom, who after having spent all the money she had on in-home care and private nurses had to come here for the final act, the long, slow closing of life’s curtains around her. She had nothing and imagining what must have gone through her mind when she was wheeled into her room – a room she would never really leave – still frightens me.

            I’d driven to the facility several times over the years, stopping in the parking lot for a minute or two to gaze at the one-story brown brick building, before driving away, too scared, I suppose, to enter it again, to find out what I’d feel there. When I was a boy, it always seemed 10 times bigger on the inside than it’s short sprawl across a greened open space. But such is the perception of a child. Everything seems larger than life, especially if they are tinged with very adult, very intense emotions. It’s then that perceptions can become monstrously large.

            My father would bring me here after mass every Sunday. We would stop in the lot and he’d throw the car in park and ask me every time if he wanted me to have him come in with me to see mom. My hands pressed under my knees and squeaking on the leather seats of his Cadillac Eldorado, I said no every time.  My parents having divorced several years before, I had taken it upon myself to shield my mother from my father. She belonged to me and no one else, and I wanted to keep it that way.

            And he let me go in alone each and every time, times that would eventually number in the hundreds. I’d walk up and struggle with the heavy doors and then sign-in at the front desk before heading down into the bowels of the place by way of its one stairwell. Along the short route to mom’s room, I’d pass the twisted faces of stroke victims, their bodies tied and tethered to hospital beds; lonely old ladies with gray straw-like hair, sitting in wheelchairs, staring at me as I walked past; the old and the worn, drool dripping from their agape mouths.

            The whole experience was scary, for sure. But as the months and years went by, this place gradually became just like any other. It stopped being a place of frightening faces and random screaming and became simply a place where my mom lived. It became her home, and, in a way, mine, too.

            And so I sat in the Box, wondering if this time I had the courage to enter this place. I put my hands on the steering wheel and squeezed and twisted them on the pliable plastic covering, noticing how it moved subtly. Then I looked at myself in the rearview mirror, looked straight into my eyes, trying to look as deep as I could. There was something in there that began to look back at me and I could feel it coming out of my pupils and bounce back into my vision. Whatever it was, we stared at each other for a few brief seconds. I had to go in, I told myself. It was what I had to do, for to ignore the pleading pull that I felt emanating from inside that building would have been to ignore the order of the universe that had captured me at that moment.

            I took a few breaths and left the Box, waiting for a couple that had just pulled into the parking lot to exit their vehicle and head inside. I wanted to enter just behind them to see what the sign-in procedure was before I made my way down into the past, the unknown, the thrilling idea of touching a spiritual place laid dormant in my mind.

            The couple held the door for me and I walked into the lobby for the first time in over 20 years, my heartbeat so rushed and hurried with anxiety that I swore it would squeeze through my ribcage and section itself into two or three pieces before falling between a few organs. I looked at the sign-in sheet, brightened by a column of bright sunshine that cut though the doors.

            In the time-in section, I wrote down 12:50 p.m., my name and then stopped when I came to “Patient to see.” I thought to myself, should I just write down some average, innocuous name and call it good? Mary Smith? Joseph Baker? Or how about a name so complicated that it had to be real, like Genoveve Commensoli or Sofia Maripovich? To hell with that, I said. I was here to see one person. It’s the way it had always been, and always will be here, in this white-washed place of sheer sadness.

            “Lynda Killian.” That’s what I wrote down. I wrote it like I meant it because I did. And I can’t remember ever being so proud to write my mother’s name, I really can’t. For a fleeting moment, I thought I actually would see her. As I made my way around a corner and toward the stairwell, I felt like I was being held and taken by some kind of hand, some spiritual force. I didn’t feel my legs or my feet. I could barely see through the fluorescent lit hallways, the fog of the past had shrouded my clear sight. I was, literally, stepping back in time for the first time in my life, stepping with feet moved by memory.

            The walls screamed white and the stench of urine and disease and dying hung in the air. I headed down the stairs and opened the door to the lower level, where mom’s room sat near the end of one of the several corridors that shot off of a central nurses station. The same sad, drooping faces pierced themselves into my eyes, breaking through the fog. The same drooping bodies hung off of beds that had been wheeled out into the hallways, a respite, I thought, from the monotony of being forced to live in one place, see out the same window, stare at the same wall or ceiling tile.

            I was led by instinct. At the nurses station, I turned left and walked down the hallway where I knew my mom’s room jutted off from. As the length of the corridor came into full view, I noticed a woman seated at the end of the it, shooting a glare at me like I didn’t belong here, like I should go away from this place. If she only knew, I thought, I could have shared with her why I was here. But my mouth didn’t work. I was so captured with emotions and thoughts that speaking words would have been impossible. I was speaking with my heart.

            I came to mom’s room and turned to look inside. Her spot in the four-bed room, next to the window, was vacant. A small wooden cabinet was bare, ready to receive the belongings of some other unfortunate soul. The bulletin board where my school-work and handmade Christmas cards had been pinned into was blank. The floor beneath the bed where I would climb in, holding my mom, was shinned prickly bright. A black man laid with his back to me in a bed closer to the door, watching television. His gown had come loose, exposing most of his back. He was so thin that his skin stretched around his ribs like brown leather on the outside of an internal cage. I watched him breath for a few minutes, and every shallow inhalation stretched his skin tauter, revealing more bone and greater dips of skin. How many more breaths did this man have? I’d seen enough last ones here, even in that room.

            I thought about entering and standing for a while by where mom’s bed had been. But my feet would not cross the threshold. I was not being led in. I had been led to a spot where I could see in and nothing more.

            But I could hear her speaking to me. She could only say two words, “Right” and “Here.” Over and over, as I told her about school or how my baseball game went or how life was at home with dad, she would say those words. “Right here,” she’d say, words that meant volumes, I’m sure, in her mind, but came out perpetually in that binary way. Words that meant “I’m so proud of you” and “make sure you do your homework when you get home from school” and “I love you” and so many other things too numerous to describe.

            But still, those two simple words were said with a sincerity that can only come from a mother’s mouth to her child. Her right side paralyzed from the cancer in her brain, her right eye blind and right ear silent, she would outstretch her left arm and pull me into her, and I’d fall on her half-alive body.

            “Right here,” she’d say, and then smile at me, a smile that looked out of place on someone in such circumstances. Those in her shoes would every right to hate the world, despise the cards they were dealt and take on a disposition of perpetual sadness. That would be OK and everyone would accept it. 

            But my mother was not that way. I was the best thing that she had in her life, her one greatest creation, a life that would continue long after she had given up and let herself go, away from the pain and lonely nights of wonder. She smiled in the face of death, I think. She smiled right at it and right through it. Her urge to stay with her child meant that she would endure years of suffering, alone most of the time, just to see me for a few hours a week, a respite from the heavy hand of her disease, a chance to crawl out of her situation, a time when she could do what she was the best at: be a mother.

I’d grasp her right hand, curled up tight into a claw, and I’d study the yellow, waxy goop that would accumulate under her fingernails. I’d pull up a finger and then, as if there was a spring in it, it would pull back and into place in the claw. I would hold it tight.

            The last time I saw my mother alive was on Mother’s Day, 1989, an early spring day when the sun seemed to burst in the sky above the Earth. The nurses and orderlies wheeled all the souls in the facility out into a courtyard to enjoy the warm weather, until the yard looked like a outdoor hospital, a random collection of beds and wheelchairs and old, tattered people steadying themselves on a nurse’s arm, their eyes squinting at the explosion of natural, non-flourescent light.

             The air smelled of warmth and dirt and evaporating moisture. My mother lay on her bed, her face turned toward the flaming light. She always loved to lay in the sun and bake, her body becoming a deep bronze that many would envy. It was only until a few years ago when I learned of our Native American blood that I understood where this color change came from, rooted deeply in her skin and in our pasts.

            The rays of sun poured on her, and her face glowed in a buzzing yellow illumination. She let her arms hang at her sides, her twisted body fully relaxed, sinking into the white sheets.

            “It’s so nice out here, mom,” I said. “It’s so warm, so nice.”

            She didn’t respond. It was the first time in my life that my mother ignored me.

            She was in another place, another plane of existence. She was floating on the warmth that was rising from the sun soaked cement. She was drifting to a place that had been waiting for her for a long time. She was allowing herself to fall off the ledge of her existence.

            I left shortly thereafter, leaving my mom alone in the yard, a slight smile on her face, the kind that can’t be contrived. I looked back for a second or two, and the sun’s gleaming light on her bed’s metal rails shot all around her. I left her there, face turned firmly toward the sun, toward goodness, toward her destiny.

            Mom died later that Mother’s Day. I think she felt an opening in the warmth of that early spring sky and she decided it was time to walk through it. I think she was just sick of being sick, and she let herself be carried away on the rays of sunshine that danced all around her. She wanted to go home.

            As I made my way out of the facility, I could barely control myself. A bomb of emotions had exploded in me and were looking for a way out. I signed-out and shot through the doors and into the early June sunshine and let them out, becoming a mess of yelps and squeaks.

            I opened the Box, sat down and cried an explosion of tears, a deluge that tapped into a well that I never knew existed. I cried and cried, wept and wept, feeling cleansed by the entire experience. I was not sad, I was actually happy. There was a feeling of prickly warmth that just swirled around me for about five minutes. Once I squeezed every last tear out, I stopped and looked into the rear-view mirror that I had just before I made the decision to go inside the facility, to chance an encounter with the past.

            It was only then that I saw that I was smiling, and didn’t even know it.     

Safe at Sappy

There has been much written about baseball. Words about the intricacies of the game. The history, the drama, the characters. The swelling wins and crushing defeats. The memories that get seared into your brain with the hot iron of past experiences loving and hugging this game of all games.

Much has been recorded. Much has been talked about and pondered, argued and discussed. Fists have been thrown and hands have been held. Drinks have been tossed into the air and smashed against a wall. A beer soaked breath coming at your face as a friend comes in for a quick peck on the cheek after your team just got sent to the World Series, on the wings of some “did it really happen?!” heroic feat.

Soft, wet, late afternoon summer grass under your feet in the backyard with a fast-warming, sweaty beer in your lap and the game on the radio – simple, the way it’s been heard for 80, 90 years. No flashy graphics or replays, no cuts to exclusive interviews between pitches to keep the attention-deficit-addled viewer’s brain occupied.

Just the simple, steady voice of a professional, letting you know what is happening. Balls. Strikes. Base hits. Foul balls. Double play. Hit and run! This game is brought to you by’s. There’s a Boy Scout troop here from Ishpeming. Happy Birthday to So and So, in Section This or That. She’s from Flint. Kicks and deals.

The it could be’s. The it might be’s. The it is’s.

Gone.

These, and so many more, the announcer giving you the script over the airwaves and you are allowed to construct the play, make the movie, in your mind. How it looks, the players’ expressions, the glint of stadium lights on a plastic helmet. The smell of dogs and brats and kraut, smoking in the concourses, floating back memories that were just yesterdays, when it was just yesterday.  

Crack and chatters. Cracks and chatters. The thwack of a fastball landing in a glove of thick, stitched leather. I don’t know if a more beautiful sound exists in sports.

So today, on the eve of the playoff series between the Tigers and Yankees, I just want to say that the reason I love baseball the way I do is not because I am of the opinion that it is simply the most perfect and beautiful game ever devised – it’s because the same is the most sincere and organic game ever created.

And it’s that way because, I think, of the way we experience the game. We experience it in often visceral and heart-wrenching ways. On the edge of our seats ways. Looking through the space between our fingers, which are covering our face ways.

Baseball sucks you in because it’s hard to play well. It draws you in because you can see the faces of those you cheer for or against. You can tell how they’re feeling. You can feel the game and understand it, I think, because we also fail more than we succeed. But we keep stepping up to the plate.

You can’t see that emotion through football helmet.

Football, come to think of it, is just some vestigial tail leftover thing from the Roman Empire in my book. Watching it is really no different than taking your seat with the other plebes in the Coliseum to witness some poor fool get his intestines thrown about by some rabid wild animal that’s been beaten mean for three days.

Football appeals to our inner Neanderthal. It’s a telegraph cable back to the days when we would crush a skull with the nearest “Big Thing” just because. It riles people to tap into that undercurrent of ultra-violence that still seeps between our cells.

It is an uncivilized, undignified game.

Baseball is a game of class and dignity.

It is a gentleman’s game.

It is a game handed down through the generations like a super-special family heirloom, meant to be kept close and respected.

It is a game of unrivaled distinction, where the current players play against not only their opponents on the field, but the ghosts of those long past. Baseball respects its elders like no other sport.

But even more than all this, it’s just a whole lot of fun. Fun like crazy kids in the backyard fun. Fun like your ready to cry and explode with delight and laughter fun. Fun like hugging an old friend not seen for ages fun.

Just fun.

Go Tigers.

The Write Stuff?

This is more than I’ve done with this blog, consistently at least, in quite some time. But I’ve told myself that I need to get far, far away from the constant dribbling beat – easy, slow and methodical – of the 15 inch news piece. That shit’s easy for me now – too easy, really. Like putting in my contact lenses, which is done with the ease of the steady hand of habit.

I have next to no followers on this blog. What are there, nine of you? Hi! Wow, one of them is me! Some of you may know that I have intentions of writing a book about my uber-trip of this past summer. I have gotten intimidated over the past few days reading blogs and articles and summaries on Websites about how to get the book writing process off the ground. Most writers, I’ve learned, fail to get their books published for several reasons:

1)    Their story idea is too broad and, therefore, is unmarketable.

2)    Someone didn’t do their homework and, therefore, doesn’t know what they’re writing about.

3)    They just totally suck at writing.

But the sum of Nos. 1, 2 and 3 is usually splashed around somewhere in the book proposal, a dreadful but necessary document that can make or break your chances of getting to be a shitty writer in the first place. Well, not totally. I can do that here.

The book proposal sounds like taking chemotherapy. It really, really, really blows, but you have to do it. Make sure to bend over, too, ‘cause it's going up your ass. In 10 to 60 pages, you map out your entire book, or at least what it is generally going to look like. You describe the chapters, what motivated you to write the book, who your audience will be and how it will be marketed. And you have to answer the most important question of the entire before-you-even-think-about-writing-the-book process: “Why are you the only person in the world who could write this book?”

That’s the dumbest question ever, I think. No one is that important. Someone will always do it better, catchier, flashier and more thorough. There is always a circling hawk out there, waiting up in the thermals for a chance to dive down and sink its 4-inch talons into your lunch. Period.

I think you write the damn thing because something moves you to, because you felt something, because it’s the only way you feel like you can adequately express something powerful and meaningful and important. And that’s that. I just want a platform to say something, not a market plan.

Sueños de una mujer muy buena

Maria stood in a line of women, the sound of popping filling the greenhouse air as they dead-headed marigolds, when the whispers began, which grew into mumbled words and then slid over the palates of flowers so thick with health they looked like orange carpet. 

Maria shouldn’t have talked, they said. She should have kept her damn mouth shut. Everyone knew Jim, the owner, was a bastard, but what was worse, the way he would slide a bit too close to the women or the ICE detention facility in Battle Creek?

Maria had left her trailer that morning for the greenhouse, driving – as always – five miles below the speed limit, her head just poking over the top of the 1995 Dodge Shadow’s steering wheel as cars swooshed past her on Portage Road.  Her time bomb heart pounded in cadence with the sectioned concrete. The fat man’s laugh still hung over her like a saturated sin.

Since arriving in Michigan from a barrio outside Juarez, Maria had been honing a new life for herself, and Lorena and Carlos, her kids. Gone was the needly rain on the corrugated metal roof, the clouds of slow-death blowing over the trash-strewn streets, the slap of her husband’s open hand for reasons he’d never say.              

For cash and no questions, the woman tended to all matter of grown goods. And they all drank daily from the sour cup of anxiety, hoping foolishly that the glass walls of the greenhouse, opaque with millions of dirty droplets, would shield them from Immigración.

            The verbal jabs seemed to weave into the smoky sweet scent that grew after the careful pinch of each shrink-shriveled head. Rage rose in Maria’s gut.

They didn’t know how tight Jim would squeeze her hands to keep her from clawing at his eyes. How hard he’d push her against the edge of the Formica countertop as he’d close in to lick her cheek. His sick laugh as he’d walk out of her trailer and back into his life.

            Or how she would stand at the open door, bawling, the stenchy saliva from Jim’s tongue still stuck to her face, listening to him tell her: “don’t bother telling the police. They’ll never believe you.”

            But after two years of that, she did. And they did believe her.

            Last week, Maria sat in the courtroom with Carlos when the verdict was read. Guilty on all counts. Sentencing in 30 days.

            Unwilling to face prison, Jim soon split town. He left his wife, and their three kids, too. He had the cash and the means. He could build a life somewhere else. Like a snowflake, he’d quietly land on some Wonderbread ‘burg, and begin again.

            Maria saved her tears for the ride home. As she wiped them, they turned the orange on her fingers into a thin paste, which she rubbed into the rusty skin of her cheeks. It rooted quickly and then vanished. 

The next morning, milky light from a still high moon slid through the frayed curtains in the trailer’s one bedroom, where Maria slept with her kids, brightening plumes of dust that kicked-up as she crept silently across the carpet, toward Lorena, now captured by the deepest of dreams.

            She ran her fingers through Lorena’s straight, jet-black hair, laid hard and flat over the quilt Maria had brought from home. Maria laid down next to her, closed her eyes and tried to hitchhike onto the dream that was holding onto Lorena, firm and tight.

Mass Hysteria

I sat through the mass like a good Catholic should. More than most, I suppose, Catholics don’t really enjoy the mass, at least in the sense of deriving great personal pleasure from it. But we know that it’s good for us. We endure it more than embrace it – not unlike going to the dentist.

I entered St. Vincent de Paul five minutes after the start of the service, which is always a slightly embarrassing thing to do, what with all the looks from the parishioners and, possibly, the priest. So I slipped into the last pew to the left of the altar, just behind three screeching Hispanic toddlers, the children of children.

This was place of my baptism, of Fr. Bill, a large, burly man with hands the size of a small octopi, of eye-stinging incense pouring out of a bright brass orb with holes large enough to let loose the burning embers inside and set the whole damn place up in chomping holy spirit flames in seconds. Fr. Bill’s handshake could have turned coal into a diamond on demand, or split an atom, releasing enough energy to light Pontiac’s streets for a few nights, or bend the bars of a tormented man’s personal prison, and then reach in, grab him and pull him back to himself.

But he was also a man of such unearthly calm and kindness and, when speaking to him, one felt as though they were sinking slowly into the floor. He injected a buttery sureness and certainty into the eyes of everyone he came across, an undeniable dose of faith and love that became a part of people, and the people of it, like a benevolent symbiotic spirit-thing. 

I was 8-years-old at the baptism, or was it 9? It was late, for sure. The church likes to get its members in early, when God’s little creatures are soft and screaming, their cute pudgy-pink cheeks belying the fact that their brain is, at that point, nothing but warm marshmallow fluff. A drooling, shitting baby does not tend to protest this application of God’s good grace. They think they are taking a bath anyway and it’s just as well, for their dirty little souls need a thorough cleansing.

Like many things in my formative years, Mike got a bit of a late start on this one. But he managed to put down the bloody marys for one Sunday morning and haul me off to make it official. And it’s a good thing. God forbid that I should have died in some tragic biking accident, or by the evil hand of kid cancer, or by testing too much of Mike’s “patience potion.” There was nearly 10 years of sin clogging my spiritual circulatory system, blocking the efficient movement of the holy spirit throughout this make and model of God’s temple. Life after the baptism would be different, I was told, for if I was to die now, I wouldn’t go straight to hell. Yes, there was a chance for hell, for sure. But it wouldn’t be the express mine shft elevator ride toward white hot, stoked coals of fire and melting skin. One might descend deliberately, a speed along the lines of a walk along the beach at sunset or the gait of a disabled person or the shuffle of a senior citizen after a stroke. That slowly. 

Fr. Bill poured bucket after bucket of God-approved life-water on my head in what seemed like more of a carnival game than an initiation into the church, the first wade into the mystery of the sacraments. Then it was over and all I felt was wet and embarrassed, as the sound of Mike’s late-70s model .35 mm Minolta clicked and clicked and clicked at a time when nothing should have been...clicking. He took pictures of me like some kind of Vietnam-era photojournalist embedded with a backcountry outfit that was in the shit a lot. He knelt, he scampered, he stood on steps and climbed up to the lectern. All the movements could be seen in his polyester gray pants, which pulled and stretched as he contorted his legs into all the positions necessary to capture this moment. And then he started to direct people into the most advantageous pictoral positions – during the baptism – in a show of his personality that I had simply grown accustomed to. If he wasn’t anything, it was bashful. My father could convince anyone to do most anything. He was bold and brash and came off sometimes like a real sonofabitch. Which he was, God love him.

But here I was once more, older, in this sanctuary of old, dark wood and high stained glass windows, the names of the benefactors for each filter of God’s sunshine labeled on a section of glass at the window’s bottom. On a sunny day, like today, the sunlight would shine through the windows’ colored, paper mache glass in blood reds and deep purples and wheat-field yellows onto the worn rows of benches, the comfort of which was like a penance itself, a butt numbing endeavor that should be doled out by priests in the confessional as a punishment after a penitent purges their deepest and most embarrassing thoughts. No wonder we knelt so much.

The priest, a man in his early 40s, spent his time with his mass, like a mother breastfeeding her newborn or a farmer walking his land, reaching down to pick up a clump of earth and breaking it open, letting it slide slowly though his fingers. After the traditional back and forths, after the standing and kneeling and standing again and holding hands, after the time tested words and phrases – seared into the mind and able to be remembered after decades of roaming far from Rome – had been uttered, the priest laid into Stephen Hawking, about how he was anti-God and should be dismissed, shamed, ignored, I lost interest.

All the memories of this place – the hours that were so numerous they turned into weeks, maybe months – began to fade away. It wasn’t just that I’d been away from mass for so long, or that I’d been away from St. Vincent de Paul, on that lonely stretch of Wide Track Drive, by the abandoned office buildings and crack houses, for years. It was that I’d been away from this way of encountering God for so long. And for all the ways that I’d been moved by this faith for nearly a decade of my life, the mass ended with me not wanting to be there anymore.

There were so many times that I had felt truly embraced in that musty place by the spirit of God, of the Lord, of the Great Big Being Up There. And I can suppose one of the things I admire about this faith is that it’s often experienced in visceral ways, ways that you can touch and feel, see and smell.

The feel of the sanctified host on your tongue and how it dissolves and turns into a thick gummy mess of pure gluten, a warmth swelling inside me that I had no other explanation for expect to say that God had planted something in me that he intended on growing for a lifetime.

The sweet burn of the blood in the back of your throat, which, as a kid, feels something like rebellion if the child wasn’t so native to the meaning of it all. But is it even possible for anyone to fully understand how wine actually becomes blood, a process that just so happens to be one of my all time favorite English words, transubstantiation?  

Sitting across from a man, a familiar stranger, and divulging – puking out, really – all of the things that you are ashamed of, a litany that can stretch back days or years or decades, and crying or laughing or contemplating fully your life outside the closing click of the confession room door. And then leaving that place and feeling light and airy, like you just emerged from a tomb and into the light of newness and possibility. Feeling like you are floating on a puffy cloud to somewhere.

The time when I saw Mike – always in the second row – weeping as Betty, an aged woman of deep, dark ebony, sang Ave Maria after the Eucharist, swelling the sanctuary with the heart-spinning, contemplative sounds of that song to the point that I thought the slate sections on the roof might come loose and hurtle down the steep grade to the parking lot below.

Or the time as an “is-he-eating-enough?” skinny altar boy, when the robe hanging off me somehow drifted over the flame of a votive candle, setting my left arm aflame and seriously delaying the start of mass. From that point forward, I was put on crucifix duty, which made Mike proud because I was at the front of the procession every Sunday. He smiled at me every time I walked by him.  

I’d been moved there, that’s for sure. But I knew now that God could – and even should – be found and admired and felt in places and ways that were outside of the tight, rehearsed, fashioned framework of this church, this faith, this tradition. I left the church through the front door, past the priest before he readied himself for the post-mass hand-shakings and “Have a good Sunday’s.” The holy water that I crossed myself with dripped from my brow as I made my way back to the car. I didn’t wipe it off. 

Could not explain better.

Thus, far from wishing to abandon this way, the author seeks only to travel further along it. This journey without maps leads him into rugged mountainous country where there are often mists and storms and where he is more and more alone. Yet at the same time, ascending the slopes in darkness, feeling more and more keenly his own emptiness, he meets at times other travelers on the way, poor pilgrim as he is, and as solitary as he, belonging perhaps to other lands and other traditions. There are of course great differences between them, and yet they have much in common. Indeed, the author of this book can say he feels himself much closer to the Zen monks of ancient Japan than to the busy and impatient men of the West, of his own country, who think in terms of money, power, publicity, machines, business, political advantage, military strategy – who seek, in a word, the triumphant affirmation of their own will, their own power, considered as the end for which they exist. It is not this.

- Thomas Merton.

To touch the nothingness

From the journal entry, 7/12/11, word for word:

Sitting down to a breakfast of eggs, bacon, hash browns, English muffin and OJ. Slept well last night in a decent spot downtown by a title company.

But there was a reason for that beyond the driving and the heat. I was on the road, driving west on 380 from Carrizozo and I told myself that I would climb a mountain. I felt like my mesa experience could be extended, could be heightened, made more challenging and intense – all for the spiritual aspect of it and also for the accomplished feeling I thought I imagined I might have. I drove into a wide valley about 15 miles west of Carrizozo, kinda between there and Socorro. While I was taking pictures of an old abandoned shack, I noticed a strange mountain formation to the north. Of all the volcanic mountains and towers and hills that are in this basin, these were the most odd and unique. They looked like they belonged on the moon, so I called them the Moon Rocks. They looked like three tops of freshly whipped meringue, each one higher than the next, as they lifted north. I decided that I would climb them as far as I could. So I left the shack. There was a county road that lead closer to the Moon Rocks, heading north down a dusty dirt road that had the feel of a mile long rib cage under the Box (the car). Bouncing, jerking, I thought the fucking wheels would fall off. They’ve threatened to before. Cows ahead. Several, including a young bull who was blocking my way, and every time I’d move, he’d get back in my way. I wonder if he was trying to tell me something. I eventually got around the cows, and ended up at the end of the road. Dead End. There was a gate with a heavy gauge wire attached to it that would be slung across it, presumably at night and presumably by the rancher who lived a few miles down the road.

I got out of the Box. To camoflauge myself, I took off my white t-shirt and replaced it with a brown one. I put my camera in my messenger bag. A Nalgene bottle was filled to the top with water, perhaps 34 ounces. I locked the doors and began walking towards the Moon Rocks. The sun was high, about 12:50 p.m. and the walking was fast and swift. I had my knife with me just in case a bull wanted to charge me. All of them in the area I Was in were looking at me, checking me out. Yeah, a four-inch blade and a 1200 pound bull. That would be fair. Over hot dust and crunching grass, flutes of cactus and the pancake cactus with its 2 inch spikes. The air was silent, there was no sound. Then all of a sudden I heard a dull roar behind me. It grew louder and louder until it totally consumed the valley. I thought it might be some kind of wind phenomena against the mountains, as the breeze was picking up. Then I saw two black dots against the large mountain behind me. Fighter jets from White Sands doing evasive maneuvers. Ducking and diving and circling each other in a mock dogfight. Then, just as soon as they’d appeared, they were gone. Exploded to some other place.

I walked on. A jack rabbit – huge ears and powerful hind legs – and lizards that darted in front of me before skating across the sand toward a bush. I practiced opening and closing the knife, should I come across some animal intent on hurting me. Rattlesnake, other snakes, rushing animal – all came to mind. The Moon Rocks seemed to not have gotten a bit closer, and appeared the same as when I left the Box, like no distance had been made. I stopped to snap some pictures. The rocks looked like they had just exploded from the flat desert floor. Intimidating. The sun was getting hotter, my legs were bleeding from the cactus I was walking through. Came to a barbed wire fence. Threw the bag over and hopped up on the third wire, then over. Then another fence. And then another. And, yes, another. Same routine, over and over. I was walking with purpose, my steps were strong and pronounced. I heard the way I scraped the sand and gnarled vegetation below the soles of my feet. I felt like I could have run across the desert.

All of sudden, my eyes caught something out of place, well past the forest of cactus I was waling through. It appeared to be the head of a bull. It was big, I thought, and all alone. But what was it doing out here? It didn’t move. Not one inch. At this point the Box was out of sight, obscured by the slivery heat that bubbled off in the far distance. The ranch house stood far away as well, perhaps four or five miles. Everything is further in the desert than you think. I was far – far – from anything. No people, just the rocks and wind and heat. Primitive elements of the landscape all around me. I took the knife out and walked toward it, my eyes locked on the black thing the whole time, it, about 300 yds away, obscured my cactus and scrub and grass. Then I saw the thing. It was an old, rusted oil or gas tank. Nearby was a cistern of some sort and a 10 ft long section of telephone pole. I sat down and took a slug of water. So thirsty. Took pics of the tank. The Moon rocks were still in the distance, but looked so close. But they never seemed to be getting closer. About 3:00 now. I never thought once of going back. To do so would have amounted to complete failure. The thought never crossed my mind. I was down to maybe 20 oz of water. Foolish. Stupid. Stupid desert virgin in the middle of the 100 degree desert. 20 oz of water. Think about going to a bodega to get a 20 oz bottle of coke. That much water.

The heat was starting to get to me. I was sweating a great deal. Sun sizzled on everything. No shade. Just heat piled on heat. The sweat would evaporate almost as soon as it appeared. Still, I thought I’d be in the mountain in a half hour. 20 oz seemed to be enuf. I got up and I trudged fwd. My breathing was getting heavy and my heart was racing. Elevation, 6000 ft or so feet. Still, I moved fwd. Four antelope crossed past me and then stopped a few hundred feet away. Looking back, they seemed to say: “Go back, son. We live here. You don’t.” They pranced away on 8 foot strides and I moved fwd. After more than two hours, I’d reached the foothills of the rocks. Toward the rocks. Toward them. Panting now. My legs had turned to near mush. But close now. I climbed to the top of a hill to get a better look at them. There appeared to be a clear path to the top peak. All three peaks were connected by a thin ridge that looked very much wide enough to negotiate. The whole formation was the result of volcanic activity here millions of years ago. The top could be reached. IT could, one boulder at a time. But leg thrust was going to be a huge issue. My mouth was full of thick gluey mess. I’d stop every 100 feet or so. And then I’d rest. Heading up the Moon Rocks. Legs getting wobbly, heart exploding in the chest, mind starting to slow.

I was heading up the rock that lead to the first peak, through small rocks that felt like thick quicksand when I walked thru them. Higher now. To one side, a rock fall perhaps 150 feet to the bottom. To the other, a sheer drop to a small valley between the Moon Rocks and another mountain. It was full of large boulders, the size of full size trucks and vans. I climbed, rested, climbed and rested. Dug my fingers into the sharp volcanic boulders, getting a grip. One foot after another. Up and up. My bag felt like 100 pounds. My legs were about to give out, so I stopped on a boulder to sit and rest. I looked out at the expanse that I’d hiked. It seemed to go on forever, ending at the base of mountains 25, 30 miles away. I sat there, thinking about exhaustion, thirst and what I’d just done.

Then I felt a spiritual force begin to descend on me. It swirled in the wind, it danced on the rocks and glistened off the hot desert floor. I took out a picture of my mom that was on my left pocket. I said to her – because she was there, as real as the last time when I saw her face in the casket in the back of St. Vincent’s church in Pontiac or the day before she died, silent, sunbathing in the back of the county health facility, lying in her hospital bed, smiling, accepting that the end had come and she would walk thru the door that had been open for years, toward peace and harmony and a rest from the pain and the frustration. I stood there, overwhelmed by the thickness of the spirit around me and the shroud of absolute solitude that I was caught in. I lost it, the tears came like a downpour. I wanted to go higher, wanted to reach for the top, touch a rock at the pinnacle.

“I can’t go any further, mom. I just can’t,” I said to the wind, to the spirit.

I was disgusted with myself, beyond words, beyond description. I threw all caution to the wind, any peril I would have undertaken to make it to the third peak, where I had intended to place the picture at the top, be one with myself and the rocks and the spirit that was holding me. To just keep climbing, but I could not. This was the end of the climb, the conclusion of this idea. Then a voice came into my ears, as clear as the wind that was buffeting my ears.

“You’ve come far enough,” it said.

The tears came hard and thick, like the raindrops that washed across the Box in the south, like my soul was bleeding. I placed the picture by a boulder and covered it with small rocks to keep it in place. Mom’s HS grad shot. Black and white. Thick hair parted dn the middle. Bright, glistening eyes above high cheek bones and a kind smile that was a window to her spirit and soul. A gift from Kathy, her best friend in HS in Greenville. I knew she gave it to me for a reason. And then I told her.

“Now you can see the million stars at night. You can feel the warm breeze and lie in the hot sun. You can feel the sometime snow of winter and the see the beauty of this valley.”

I felt like I was on another plane, outside myself, my human body, a spiritual place that few get to. I cried a bit more and then I screamed, I SCREAMED into the valley below, which ate the noise and spun it to some other place on the wings of the howling wind. Then the voice told me: “Leave this place now. Please go.”

And so I did. I crawled back down the mountain, looking up at it as I moved, to the top peak that seemed an eternity away. I found a dry creek bed at the bottom of the mountain. But then I climbed out, the way too soft with sand. After 10 min, I looked back at the Moon Rocks. They stood there, defiant. But I knew that I did what I came to do. I never wanted to beat them, only to climb them. And there’s a difference. It wasn’t an exercise to become triumphant, it was an exercise to find out – about many things. I knew that I’d left in a way that I was comfortable with. I left a bit of myself there, and took away a bit more. And even more, I found my mom there, as real as I’d found her in over 20 years. In the loneliest place I’ve ever been, I found her, on the hot, raging winds and the jagged rocks and the expanse of emptiness. I found her.

Now for the second phase. To get back. I wanted water so badly. Like a junkie wants a hit, I wanted water. I had so far to go. So hot, so dusty, so dry. I sucked in the hot air, I sucked in the desert and the rocks and the cactus and the sand. I all entwined me. I shuffled, took my shirt off placed the strap of the bag across my forehead and let it hang around my back. I felt like I was dragging cinder blocks, it felt like I was dragging the world. I stopped to rest and look back at the rocks. Felt like I’d walked forever, but they were in the same place as I’d left them. Kept going. The Box nowhere in sight. Hurled myself over the fences again, over rocks. Feet shuffling hard. Mind turning to soup. Water – for all that’s holy – water. All I could think of. Cold water, icy water, water to sting my teeth and wash dn my throat, coating my stomach in cold. I’d have cut off something from my body for a liter. No joke. I stopped to sip from the Nalgene. Then again. And again. An hour in and I had 4 oz left. I stopped sweating. Skin on fire. Hands swelling. Body boiling, hot to the touch. I stopped to piss. A few drops. The color of amber. No cows. No antelope. The animals were all gone. Alone, shuffling, squatting every 10 min or so. I screamed to the wind: “GET UP KILLIAN, GET THE FUCK UP!” I screamed and yelled but it just took up more energy. It felt hard to talk, to breathe. Fell dn in the sand, horizon approached like molasses in a freezer. Walking in place, walking against hope. Mind weak. Start singing ABBA song. “SOS.” I always loved that song but it came to me randomly. Love the hook in the chorus. The meaning – the SOS – was lost at me at the time.

I found a road, a road I’d wished I found earlier. I took it for awhile in the dir. I thought he Box was in. Aimless, I walked. Toward something, toward nothing. Hoped the road would spit me out close. I sipped some more. Then decided to down the rest. Water, all gone. Watched a few licks of water, a thimbul-full at the bottom, slosh from side to side – the water you cant get to. Walking, pushed by the hot sun behind me now. I felt like lying dn, closing my eyes, getting some strength back. Just a quick nap, a tiny nap. Get more energy, but from where? Screamed again: “GET THE FUCK UP. GET THE FUCK GOING FUCKER!.”

And I did. Horizon. Blank. Telephone line – looked five miles away – knew the Box was under that line. Tired. So tired. Worried I would not make it. Bury me. Then, I saw a glint. The Box! A goal! Something to work toward. Safety, water, not the desert. Set goals to achieve. A bush – 50 yds. A cactus – 75 yds. A small hill – 30 ft. Small steps. And then, in what felt like a miracle, I made it. I saw the green of the paint and the black of the tires and the glistening of the mirrors and the shit piled in back. Just a bit more. Made it to the gate. I’d have thrown a rock thru the fucking window for the gallon of water in there. I would have. Took the knife and carved a hole in the metal. Then I fell in the ground. Got up, got to the car. Downed a gallon of hot water in a minute and wanted to vomit. I laid n the back and fell asleep quickly. Got up after three minutes and felt the acid in my muscles. And then I drove. Dozed. Overcome. Confused and not appreciating all that had happened. Just a blank stare thru the windshield. I drove half comatosed, enclosed on a stretch of road, like a zombie, like I didn’t know how to drive. Took frequent swigs of more hot water. 8 miles to Socorro. Got off road. Hobble into gas station. Stinking, bloody, dusty, dead man walking. Water. Coke. Took piss in the john. Five drops. Dark yellow and painful. Went to burger king and got order of fries. Burned my mouth. Holes in the roof of my mouth. Bored by the heat and the sand. Parked in an abandoned lot and watched people go in and out of the Socorro Springs Brewpub. It started to rain, then lightening crashed all over. It spilt the sky over where I’d been, threatened to tear it in two, I thought. Violent, searing, slicing lightening over the Moon rocks. It cracked and then it poured. The rain flooded the streets of Socorro that night. The lightening knocked out the power several times. It lit up the mountains and made the desert glow for split seconds. It scoured the expanse of nothingness, like it was reacting to something that had been unleashed. It made people run.

But the Moon Rocks, I’m sure, remained.

I went to sleep that night in front of a title company. The back window half dn, I watched in the last few seconds before sleep as lightening laced the sky in bright dryness. My legs on fire, I drifted off to sleep, not knowing what to make of things. Numbness, not me.

Hey Gabe

He’s been locked in his body for 20 years.

His father pumps food into the side of his chest, like he is priming a motor.

But his engine will never fire. He’s on idle, dead to the world but very much alive.

He gurgles a few sounds and saliva bubbles around the corners of his mouth. He makes a sound, and a few bubbles pop. A thin line of spit splits his left cheek.

His father takes out the spent syringe, then pierces in another.

He says that he doesn’t mind that his son is the way he is. He doesn’t care that he will never have a job he can be proud of him for and brag to his friends about.

He doesn’t mind that he will never give him a grandson to bounce on his knee after Thanksgiving dinner and teach to hit a baseball at the elementary school down the street.

Yes he does.

Lines from two snowmobiles slice through the backyard, cutting through the sun-drenched snowscape.

He takes out the spent syringe and pierces in another.

Palindrome of Power

It was about Exit 95 when the pasty mixture beneath my tongue got to work, sending sharp signals to my brain to enter into Stupid Mode.

About 20 minutes before, my friend and I had sprinted to his apartment to throw what would become a completely unnecessary log of delusion onto the fires that were burning in our heads. To use the analogy of throwing gas on a fire would be to short-change the enormity of what was to come. This was jet fuel. This was a ballistic missile. This was Tsar Bomba.

I climbed into the passenger seat of the taxi, a hell-on-wheels molester van from the mid-1980s with a top speed of about 50 mph. The cavernous vehicle had been gutted of all creature comforts and it was apparent that its only use was to haul as many drunken assholes as often as possible. “Big Daddy Taxi” was emblazoned on the side in a jagged, slicing font you might expect to find on a Black Sabbath album cover.

My three friends and I had decided that it would be wise to head to the casino after our several-hour session of binging. Alcohol does an amazingly effective job lubricating the mind’s machinery before the soon-to-come blowing of precious resources, marinating the logic centers of the cerebellum, turning it into a gelatinous, semi-functioning mass of tissue similar to a bowl of warm Co-Co Wheats.

Tim, our black-toothed chauffer to the casino, was from some backwoods bayou shit hole in southern Mississippi. He was off the clock when my pal, the one with the perverted penchant for poker, called up in a frenzy to get to the casino “as quickly as possible.”

Tim, a self-admitted gambling junky, was happy to oblige. We were all along for the ride now. He pressed the accelerator to the floorboard and the engine gurgled and belched us down I-94, the cabin rattling and shaking with such intense violence that the thought of a large piece of metal tearing off, setting sail and plunging into the windshield of a car behind us was not a far-fetched one. The image of a soon to be headless middle-aged woman in a Ford Windstar came to mind almost immediately.

It was hard to make out what Tim was saying, as the noise that surged from the twisting bolts and rusted suspension was so great that it seemed like the entire van might disintegrate in a matter of seconds, leaving behind a trail of bits and parts, like a meteor being eaten as it enters the Earth’s atmosphere.

The guys behind me were inquiring about the empty cups swirling on the floor behind me.

“I wouldn’t use those,” Tim said. “Seriously.”

Tim then began to talk about the difference between race relations in the north and the south. It seems as though tensions between blacks and whites are much higher north of the Mason-Dixon line, at least in Tim’s erudite opinion, although he was quick to admit that the calm seen in the south might also have something to do with blacks “knowing their place,” he said.

Tim, it turned out, didn’t discriminate with his drugs either. All substances were welcome in Tim’s body: pills, powders, liquids, tabs, sheets – he’d done it all in every way they could be done. So I inquired about the drug I was on, Xanax.

“Good one,” Tim said. “Gets the job done, gets it done real good. You’ll be having a good time, chief.”

I had no reason to doubt him. I’d never been on this drug, which my friend earlier had nonchalantly thrown into my mouth like so many Tic-Tacs. I was feeling good, a blanket of relaxation wrapped snuggly around my entire body. I was warm, giddy, chain-smoking and laughing at Tim’s hillbilly charm.

We arrived at the casino sometime around 3 a.m., a kind of witching hour at a place like this. It’s an in-between time of strangeness, when society’s rejects come out to play: your meth-addled grandmothers who can’t get to sleep, truckers with time and trouble on their hands and whiskey-soaked fools like us, ready to take chances for the sheer thrill of seeing hard-earned cash turn into plastic discs and disappear into a little hole next to the dealer, click-click-clicking all the way in a Morse code message that’s telling you you’re an idiot and should be in bed.

Tim pulled up close to the front door and we all spilled out into the brightness of the airport hangar-esque entrance to Firekeepers Casino. The marketing motto – “Getting to our hot new casino is easy, leaving will be difficult” – would turn out to be exactly right. For the customer’s convenience – ever the motivation at ‘Keepers – several ATMs line a wall just inside the front door to the sprawling place. I took out $60. Just enough, I thought to myself, to play with, have a little fun.

Then, out of nowhere, things started to swirl. For a moment, I thought it might have been the effect of the oxygen I’d heard casinos pump into their gambling pits to calm patrons, which, in turn, makes them blow more money. No deal. This was much more intense than a whiff of stale casino air, bubba. This was that all powerful of palindromes, the drug that only a half hour earlier had me bonding with a hillbilly who was likely wanted for child rape in several southern states.

This was Xanax and I was firmly in its grasp. No going back, not yet anyway. “Leaving will be difficult.” That’s goddamned right.

Things went black, deep black, and most of the rest of the evening has had to be re-constructed from eye-witness accounts of my behavior, the way investigators catch a serial killer or solve a cold case involving a disgruntled Gander Mtn. employee who took off one day with a crossbow and crate of arrows intent on “fixing things at corporate,” only never to be seen again.

I made my way to the roulette table, put $60 on black and then stared at the wall, like some dead-to-the-world schizophrenic who broke away from his handlers and wound up at the casino because he was attracted by the pulsating lights. The only thing is, I kept winning. The first spin of the wheel hit black. So did the second and the third. I kept my chips on black, ignoring the dealer’s questions, not for lack of interest in doing what I was told to do, but because the drug – now firmly lapping in the folds of my brain – had turned me into a catatonic zombie, capable of anything except communication, but very able to amble through his surroundings on instinct alone. A modern day pill-popping caveman, lusting for the essentials of life, like food and money, but unable to wipe his ass after defecating in the men’s room with the stall door fully agape.

The ill effects of Xanax on the human body can range from the relatively benign (drowsiness, dizziness) to more severe (problems with coordination, memory problems) and my favorite (unusual behavior). I got all of them, the 5-Star Xanax ride.

Because I was totally incapable of even the most basic of responses to the dealer’s questions, I was kicked off the roulette table. I gathered my chips, which, according to several witnesses, I was dropping a la Hansel and Gretel as I made my way toward Café 24/7, the casino’s all night restaurant serving “classic comfort food with a fashionable flair” and where patrons can “immerse themselves in the energetic atmosphere.”

The hunger was intense, so much so that the stomach shredding made me awaken from my stupefied state for a moment or two. I remember ordering a steak or some other meat dish and arguing with the wait staff. Then I got pulled back into the darkness and the strangeness began. I ordered shrimp, chicken wings and other assorted meals, which when they didn’t arrive as expeditiously as I’d expected prompted me to grab food off the plates of my fellow Café 24/7 guests, undoubtedly ignoring their protests, like some glazed-eyed Uber Retard. I doubt this was the energetic atmosphere they'd come for.

Unusual behavior indeed.

I got the food, threw it in a plastic bag and began walking around the casino, eating the wings and throwing the bones in the air. Witnesses state that I was speaking, but the words sounded like the noise that marshmallow fluff makes when you throw it against the wall. The next hour or so found me trying to stave off death as I entered a sleeping state 10 clicks past REM, a place where a gorilla uses a unicorn’s horn for a toothpick and the Empire State Building is being overrun by an army of wild, communist chinchillas. Shit like that. Security guards mocked me. A janitor mopped around me. My friends checked to make sure I was still breathing. There was a pilot light of life still in me, yes, Keeping the Fire lit.

On the ride home, I had my head in the shoulder of one of my friends and was dropped off at my home with my bag of wings. The next morning, after thinking about how the body operates on such an extended autopilot, I wondered why there were bar-be-cue blotches on the carpet and why I only had $50 in my wallet.

Fuck it. Small price to pay for a ride like that. To the dark side of the moon and back again, like an alien re-animated. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think at least once that day that I was happy to be alive. I bet Tim would have approved.