The Oklahoma

Oklahoma

Summer warm sun through the kitchen window. My dog laying asleep in the heat on the back porch. My mother’s in her apron standing over the stove. Fried onions and beef liver. I suppose there are a few, but I never met a kid who ever liked the taste of liver. Me pinching my nose so I wouldn’t have to taste it as much. My Mom, she always served her fried liver with her Brussel sprouts. I never liked the taste of them much neither. When she put them together on a plate like that, to a kid, it was a double whammy.

Her eyes a blue of sky before it meets the horizon.

“I’m not going to eat it Ma.”

 “Just try one bite kiddo,” she said. “It’s good for you.”

I love my mother so much I had to give it another shot. But I couldn’t get it down. Choked and gagged and spit it back into my napkin with tears in my eyes and the feelings from somewhere deep within me that I had failed her.

            Sorry Mother.

            Fifty years later and I still don’t like liver. Specially the one I got inside of me. The one I got inside of me that isn’t doing so good. It’s all scarred up and cirrhotic. It’s worse than that. It’s got the cancer in it.

            Six months. Five years. A liver transplant. Ten years. Twenty. Fifteen percent survive. Eighty five percent survive. It’s all on the internet. It’s all in the math. I hate doing the math.

            All the arbitrary terms. All the numbers. I am only a number of one. I am only one of a kind. Living a life no one has led before me or will do so ever again.

            My mortality. I am not really close to coming to any kinds of real terms with it as yet. Nothing intelligent anyway. Hell, I only found out about it last week. I can’t seem to help but to think about it pretty much every damn second of every damn minute of every hour those arbitrary numbers have allotted my time on this here earth. And as a result of all that thinking I have to come up with at least a couple of reasons why I can justify them reasons why I got cancer in the first place. Thing is I need to figure it out before I drive myself crazy judging myself too harshly and start labeling myself out to be some kind of drug crazed irresponsible dumb as rocks burned out hippy bachelor alcoholic ex musician that almost made the big time loser.

Drugs, in the 1970’s, they was a sign of the times. I mean they was everywhere back in them days, the heroin and the cocaine and all them other drugs. Especially down there in the suburbs of Los Angeles. All them hippy peoples that came before me in the 60’s, somehow for me, they had given us a kind of permissions. All of our heroes did drugs. The Rolling Stones’ and the Crosby Stills and Nash and Young’s and the Pete Townsend’s. Even the Beatles. They sang about it all the time and put all them ideas into them songs with them lyrics like, “Hope I die before I get old” and shit, some of them died, but me and my friends, we wasn’t stupid and we saw their dyings as examples and told ourselves that we were smarter than them and that we weren’t going to make the same mistakes. That we was going be more responsible about doing them drugs.

We played our own parts in the song, “Your the Reason God Made Oklahoma”, and though none of us ever had been to Oklahoma, that is when everything became our Oklahoma. Oklahoma being our personal metaphor. Our summation of the world and everything we knew in it. Our land, our musical, our reasons, our Toto’s and Auntie Em’s and Scarecrow’s and Cowardly Lion’s. Because lord knows because we knew we weren’t in Kansas anymore that made us even more bound and determined to learn as much as we could of the world. To do it right. At least in my crowd. To be drug professionals. To live out our Oklahoma.

Drug professionals.

We were livers.

We loved life as the most precious miracle that could ever be afforded to a bunch of molecules that had the chutzpah to be assembled together on this here planet. And we were bound and determined to revel in it. To live life in the fullest and most complete ways that we ever could think of as possible. To experience life in all its ways of flesh and blood and sex and thought in the midst of war and repression and injustice. To look at life from every perspective and different angle that we could get a hold of. And that meant that we was going to use drugs.

It is one of my first memories as a child, going inside myself and feeling the mysteries of my physical and ethereal being, of being alive and cognizant. Lying in the green grass on my back and looking as far as I could into the back of the blue as blue sky above me, I remember wondering if and how all of it could really be real. Life, it is not an easy thing to figure out. And figuring it out, at least making an attempt of trying to figure it out, it is at least one part of what makes us worthy to live in it.

But as life goes, my friends, they fucked up. People still fucking ended up ruining their lives, or worse yet, people died trying. I don’t have enough fingers and toes left on my body to be able to name them all. But I don’t think it would be correct for me not to at least name a few.

            My friend Joey. Red hair as long and unruly as Robert Plant’s. He shot up some LSD. Mixed a couple of tabs of blotter in with some water and drew it up into a syringe and stuck it in his arm. Flipped out. Never was the same. Spun. Probably wasn’t the lysergic acid diethylamide as much as it was the strychnine that they put in that blotter acid to preserve it. Nasty stuff. Was in and out of mental hospitals his whole entire life. Ended up committing suicide.

            My buddy Franz. Pretty near one of the best musicians I ever knew in all of my lives. He was a bass playing funny ass kind of quirky fellow. Wore a mustache and black high top Converses. He always drove around in VW vans. The ladies used to love him. Or at least that’s what he always told me. That the ladies always loved him. His mother, she found him face down on the top of the water in his swimming pool at home. Home being his Momma’s house. He hadn’t lived there for a couple of years. Overdosed on the heroin. Don’t know why it was that had to choose to go back home to his momma’s house to die. I don’t think he ever would have wanted to have seen his momma cry so sad like that.

            Pepper. Pep for short. He just up and died not thinking about much. No rhyme or reason to it. Wasn’t careful. Was at a party. Another overdose. More heroin. Another bad decision. Unprofessional. Fucking died for it. Gave up all this beauty and wonder and grace.    

            And Brent. Big, good looking guy. Had muscles on his body I don’t know if he ever knew they were there. I ain’t saying he overdosed or nothing but he sure as hell took a handful of Quaaludes before he got on his Norton 850 Commando motor bike and tried to ride it home. Hit a telephone pole. I didn’t go to his funeral. Didn’t want to. Fuck, I was the one that had sold him the ludes.

One of my greatest sins.

            All men.

            Sorry Mother.

            Sex, and drugs, and rock ‘n roll.

            And me. And somewhere, somehow, I made it out.

Almost.

            The Hepatitis C. Sneaky little bastard. The Hepatitis C I found out about ten years ago. Deal is, you can live with it for thirty years and you might never know you got it. Or where you got it from. Makes me sick to think I have been carrying around a thing like that for thirty years.

            Evil fucking cowardly virus.

            I started getting all itchy, started getting them sores all over my body. Went in to the doc and he told me he wanted to run some tests. Stuck a needle in my arm to see if I had ever stuck a needle in my arm. Took out some blood to see if I had shared somebody else’s blood that had the Hepatitis C. I figured I might as well tell him how I was once a casual user. I didn’t like telling him. Felt in a way like I was a traitor to everybody I ever knew. That I was betraying all those people that had died. But them docs, chances are they ain’t never going to call no cops, and they can’t tell nobody else about it unless you want ‘em to. They got that generous oath that keeps them running around fixing everybody up mums the word.

            Oklahoma.

            I could get real good Japanese philosophical and save my face and tell you that I caught that Hep C from when I got a blood transfusion when I wrecked my big brother’s bicycle into a tree stump. I was eleven. The bike stopped on a dime and I kept going. The inertias of me over the handlebars and then ten feet more in a kind of forward momentum that racked my forehead into another tree stump. I got knocked out unconscious. There was blood to blood. They gave me a transfusion. Gave me blood that could have had Hep C in it. Back before they knew what it was or to test for it. Lots of people that never did drugs at all, they got it that way. I suppose there may have been a chance.

But if I am going to be man up about it, I know it for the truth that I probably caught the Hep C from shooting up the heroin. Or maybe the cocaine. I could have snorted up that virus with a shared a dollar bill with somebody that had a cut in their nose while I had a cut in mine. Sounds ugly but to us, back then it really wasn’t. We were just exploring our paths through our certain ways of light.

            And the thing is, I would do it all over again if you would let me.

            Not the Hep C part, but everything else. The laughing and the conversations that went all day and all night that changed the ways I think and breathe and react. Our Oklahomas. The feelings that we all belong, that we are all a part. That perhaps we had come a little bit closer to figuring out why we were here in this place on this earth. On why it was that we were worthy.

We was careful. Used the bleach to clean out the needle every time we shared one              but Hep C, it’s a good hider. And it’s mean. The way it silently and quietly eats away at your liver. The way it’s got that fucked up name that goes along with it.

Hepatitis.

            Unromantical. No beauty in it at all.

            At least if you was hearing it for the first time the AIDS, it sounds like it could be trying to help someone. Aiding and abetting. Like it was a nurse. Or the Lou Gehrig’s, it sounds like a hero. Like a famous baseball player.

Not Hepatitis C. The first time you hear it, it sounds dirty. Sounds yellow. Sounds unclean. Sounds like somebody forgot to wipe off their knife after they cut up some chicken in the kitchen and left it in your soup.

            AIDS, they got them red ribbons, and Breast Cancer, they got all them pink t shirts.

            Yellow. Hep C, we got them yellow skin and eyes.

Hep C don’t got no ribbons or t shirts.

            Dirty blood. Dirty needles. Suppose them AIDS people and us, we got that in common. But Hep C it don’t have in it anything as sadly beautiful and innocent as sex. The first six rows of gay men and women at Broadway during the AIDS epidemic that were lost. There isn’t anything as beautifully sad as the first six rows. We will never able to get back the first six rows.

            I may get misunderstood here. I shouldn’t really talk about such things. Like I was an ape. About which disease is nastier than the other. Of which one sounds better or worse. Like them diseases is all in a race. All them diseases, they all suck beans and rotten tomatoes that have fallen off perfectly otherwise healthy vines to rot on the warm hard dust of the earth. I know that. There really isn’t nothing right in trying to make sense of it at all. It is hard. But I am trying to be worthy and so I try.

Hepatitis C.

            Weird how people start treating you different after they find out you got it. Start not hiring you for jobs, start not asking you out to the movies anymore. Start kissing you on the cheek different. People that you used to have sex with for years, they stop having sex with you at all, even after you had told them, even if you was planning on using protection.

            But they can’t tell you about it. They hide all that stuff. It is a secret. Fucking Hep C, the biggest fucking cowardly lying secret of them all.

            It’s even worse when somebody doesn’t know you got it goes on to give you their humbled opinion about what they think about people who do. It was actually one of my friends who said it. Someone who I cared about and knew that they cared about me. It was during a dinner we was all having one night. She said it casual, as if she was asking someone to pass her the potatoes.

            “Oh you don’t want to date anybody with that,” she said. “People with Hepatitis C, they have sores all over them and they smell bad.”

            Those are the kinds of things that people say that stick around in your ears for years.        

God, I hope I don’t go around smelling bad and nobody is going to tell me about it. Makes me walk around and throw my nose under my armpit all the time when I don’t think people is looking. Truth is, you get so used to the ways of your own smell that who’s to say if you can really smell yourself at all. But just thinking you might smell is enough, and you start letting all them things get under your skin and start to get to eroding at your confidence. And because of the sores you go to airports with long sleeved shirts on even in the middle of summer and you are going to Hawaii. You have to sit real close to complete strangers on planes and shit, you know you can’t transfer the disease around as easy as that. That it has to be blood to blood. But still, it fucks with you, because you giving it to anybody is the biggest fear you ever had ever on this earth. Even spending the night over at somebodies house freaks you out, ‘cause even though you know it doesn’t make any difference you want to tell them to wash the sheets from the guest bed after you leave, but you can’t and so you yank them off the bed anyway and act like you are doing them a favor by saving them the thirty seconds it takes to strip a bed. You end up telling a lie.

            Them girls you used to like to talk to, you can’t talk to them like that anymore. You just can’t swing the bat the same as you used to. You just can’t bear the talk after a second or third date when you have to tell them you have Hep C. About the blood to blood. They may even like you enough that perhaps they really don’t care at all that you have it. But you know you have it. And that, that changes everything.

            The unromantical disease.

            You believe they can see it in you, even though they never had no way of knowing and it gives you a sliver of a glimpse of what it must feel like to be judged even before someone meets you for the first time.

It is always there. It is always inside you. You the invisible leper.

All the time, all the time, you know that virus is in you, knocking and punching away at your liver. You just want to pretend sometimes that it isn’t in there. That you are just the same as everybody else. So you do, you slip, and you forget about it, for an hour or two. You have a  beer. Not like you used to, never like that. But one every now and then. To make an attempt to forget, and to be like everybody else again.

            But never again, never anymore. It has taken yet another one of your biggest pleasures away from you. And then it all stops to matter as much as it once did because they tell you that you have cancer.

            Six months, five, ten years. Arbitrary numbers. Memories of youth distant and past. The realities of all the things in my life and what they have meant to me. The consequences. The glory. The beauty and grace.

            A blue as blue sky before it meets the horizon.

            The Oklahoma.

Fool.
This is the piece I did as a joke for a reading last winter on April Fools Day. The prompt was to exhibit "bad" writing. Of course I won first prize. I don't know what they were trying to tell me.

Fool

When Barth told Bif about the upcoming reading event concerning the 

April Fools hobnobbery, Bob almost immediately lost his top. His inner moist thoughts carried him into the feelings he had about the oatmeal that he had cooked earlier that day, in the morning. He had not been able to find a lid that fit significantly in a snug manner to the circumference of the pot and thereas there was not a proper seal and thusly the steam had wept out, crying out into to the birthing of the early morning airs of those early minutes of the earliest part of the day, and therefor ensuring the prosthesis that his oatmeal would for surely most likely develop into a kind of dryness the kind most people of this modern age have come to associate with an almost sure prognosis of the onsets of a yeast infection something soon to this day will come.

“Why should you be telling Bif about your plans to write something before presenting them to me?” Bob asked Barth with his hands and feets flailing about in wild abandonments. “As it was it that I first happened upon the posting on the internet much further back than the good parts of a month ago. Thirty three days to be exact. Thirty three days of my mind telling my body that it would never come up with nothing to write about worth a mere mention of the fact that it was inevitable that the fool’s day would come to inhabitate the earth and that you yes you Bif would end up on a fool’s day errand chasing the words upon the backs of every fairy tailed princesses from the harbors of New Delhi, Connecticut. Thirty three days which translates easily with a calculator into 792 hours which transcribes into over twenty seven thousand seconds never mind the milipedial tenths or one hundredsths of –parts of the seconds of time manufactured over the wombs of the inirtiatic turning of this earth’s rounds of the moon like the rouletted spinning wheel of Rupunzle and her blonde dirty eyes herself upon her spinning thread bares of gold and yes, you may have guessed it, as father time old man winter himself looked on with his graying beard that was once adorned with the same spinning nuances of the same tops of dradels that inhabit the fists of all children yet to come and that have come before and hence the Rumple Stilt skin is once again confronted with his family ties to the man the very same man and his lack of forty winks Rip van Winkle himself.

For those three men sitting there in the cafeteria, it was almost as if the water, it ran backwards instead of forwards under the bridge that day.

Barth placed his hands upon Bob’s back and started rubbing it in much the same way a man rubs a magic lamp after he has spent the good part of the night before at the house of one of the wives of one of his neighbor’s friends.

“Do not be too upset Bob,” Barth exclaimed romantically, “It is not as if the hairs on the tortoise were ever of much interest to any of the ladies anyways.” Barth smile shimmered much like a super Nova does on the outermost stretches of the universe.  He managed to expunge a shiny wink out of the right corner of his right eye to Bif, “Not the good looking ladies anyways heh Bif?”

“It is just that I am almost sheerly positive as a sheep that I shant find anything worthy to write about anyways,” Bif enamored. “A foolish heart is almost always branded by a cowboy in thick leather boots even if he is never the wiser that the hot poker is still wet in his hand,” he accrued.

Bob readjusted his sitting position, stifling an urge to run his hand down the back crack of his trousers to solve and itch that which had not just a minute before procured itself in a hostile advancement of his self awareness. That some sweat had started to gather there with no clear intention of dissapating anytime in the area anytime anywhere near soon. He wanted to reassure his friend Bif, as they had roomed together for sometime in college that he would come up with something.

“Do not worry much about it tonight Bif,” he said with an alarming velocity from his own tongue. “Something is for sure to come. You will think of something.”

“Perhaps you are right,” Barth said.

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

Bob turned and sprouted more words out of the side of jaw, “Yes.”

‘But it shalt most likely turn out to be pure drivel,” one said unto the other one.

“Perhaps you are right,” the other one said unto the one.

“Yes drivel,” the third offered up devoid of any attachment.

“Perhaps we should all write it out together,” they all three said at once.

“Yes,” Barth procured, “Perhaps we can all write about the benefits of languidity.”

They all watched as the sun dipped down under the boughs of the nearest cherry tree, the very one that perhaps had escaped the axe of the George Washington some many moons of fort nights ago. Barth thought for a moment that he was reminded of Bif’s uncle, and the day they had both encountered Bob’s cousin Bixby all those many years ago. They all thought together, at the same time, and it was uncanny really, how they all came up with the pictures of a beach in the south of Wales on a particulary hot and sunny day at exactly precisely the same time and moment.

Uncanny.

Cambel’s Beans with Bacon and Cream of Celery or just plain Tomato .

“Languidity?” Bif conceded with his next question. He glanced furtively over with his eyes at the rest of them. “What is the meaning of languidity?”

Bob clenched his stiff upper lip and said through it in a high pitched cry representative of some chivelrictic knight, “Languidity? My poor and old stupid friend that I had once met in college,” Bob said with glee, “Languidity is the quest of all fools fooling and the rains that will inevitability fall splendidly upon this very first day of April’s plane.”

“I would like to go to Barcelona,” Barth said, and Bob could tell by the looks on his face that he meant it. He looked, well, he looked, like traveling.

“A fool is nothing short of his plane since departed,” Bixby said.

“Exactly,” Barth said languididly placing his foot with a slow drooping drop of exhaustion down to touch upon the hardness that surely was meant to be the floor, “Exactly.”

And hence, Bob and Bif and Bixby and Barth, they all went to heaven content in the knowledge that they all would be better for it for playing the part of a fool, especially on the first day of April, because that is the day any fool and his partners should like to play at being the fool the best.

And they all were rest assured that they were now one step closer to knowing the trued meaning of languidly.

To all my hearty April Fools friends and their fools a very foolish goodnight.

A Bunkie Tease

The Bunkie Spills is a novel about two momentous days in the life of a tribe of suburban L.A. teenagers set in 1976. The story is told through the eyes of 17-year-old Bunkie, whose view of the world is as charming and skewed as the malapropisms that come out of his mouth.

The Bunkie Spills starts the way so many stories start: with a girl and a Jethro Tull concert. On the way home from the concert things start to fall apart for Bunkie and his high school sweetheart, Evelyn. Nothing has been quite right between the two of them for a while, but Bunkie realizes that there’s something more than friendship going on between Evelyn and Big Pete, the oldest member of their tribe.

Then the entire tribe does heroin for the first time.

Thus begins Bunkie’s quest to listen to his broken heart.

A few pages from the Bunkie Spills,

I had to work the lunch shift that day. Down at the Blue Windmill café. One to seven. I hated working on Saturdays on account it was always busy as hell. I thought about not going in at all but, shit, it was payday. I was going to be able to get my check and cash it and maybe if I had enough time I could make it out to the mall and pick up Evelyn’s ring.  

I was running a little early so I decided to stop by Big Pete’s house on my way to work. It was right on the way. See what he was up to. Maybe even ask him for some advice about Evelyn and this talk she wanted to have with me.

Me on my big brother’s bike. The Santa Ana winds blowing blue skies hot out of the desert, making the San Gabriel Mountains clear and crisp enough to touch. Me in my Levi cut off shorts with the frayed edges. The tee shirt I bought at the Rolling Stones concert, the white one with the giant red tongue sticking out of the mouth.

Let It Bleed.

The weight of my day pack on my back with my black slacks and my white button down shirt in it for work. Black shiny shoes, white socks, an extra pack of Marlboro reds, box. Pushing the bike’s pedals with my naked feet. The muscles of my legs turned the sprocket that drove the chain that turned another sprocket that turned the rear wheel. Rubber on asphalt, you can hardly hear it.

My big brother. His name was Emmanuel. I always thought it sounded too much like Christmas, Emmanuel, so I just always called him Manny.

When we was younger Manny told me how he was going to build a rocket ship in our backyard. Told me he was going to fly it out into the big beyond, to get away from this earth for a little while. To look down from the space. The white and blue swirls. Told me how beautiful it would be. I really believed him. Believed my big brother Manny was so smart and capable of doing something like that. I was always on the lookout for large scraps of metal and rocket engine parts to start piling up in our backyard. How I thought I was going to wake up one day and my big brother would be gone.

Years later, when I was thirteen and Manny was fourteen, we was on a campout.

The whole family. Me and my big brother and my Ma and my Pop and my little sister. Up to the Yosemite National Park. Up to see the El Capitan and the Half Dome and the waterfalls. My Mom and Pop in the tent with my sister. Me and Manny laying out under the stars zipped up in our flannel sleeping bags, sharing a Hershey bar, listening to the crickets.

“The stars are suns,” he said. “You know that. And planets, and whole solar systems,” he said. “Like ours. The Milky Way. The odds are pretty good that there must be life up there somewhere. There must be someplace where everything comes together right enough to form thinking, breathing, creatures like us humans here on earth. What do you think Emmit?”

I was keeping one eye open for the shooting stars. My other eye in a droop, wanting to dream. My mouth closed, my tongue running all over the insides, the thick of the melted chocolate against the front of my teeth.

 “But imagine there being no such place out there in those stars that could support any kind of life,” my big brother said. “That all the planets out there are dead. That our earth is the only place in the universe that life happens at all.”

“Katy Roberts, she told me she seen a UFO once,” I said.

My big brother reached over and socked me in the shoulder, not hard, but it was asock just the same.

“Emmit,” he said. “Listen to me.”

I turned over onto my side and propped my head up with my hand and my elbow. Them millions of stars in the sky throwing down their light on us. My big brother’s eyes, same dark as mine, staring out into the sky, seeing the same sky as I was. He was flat on his back, his palm between his head and his pillow, his elbow in a sticking out bony and bent.

“Pay attention Emmit,” he said. “This is important,” he said. “Chances are, you are only going to get one shot at it and if it is true that there is no life out there anywhere else, well, well you have to use this life all up as best as you can.”

“Use what all up Manny?” I said.

“Don’t you leave anything behind,” Manny said. “You hear me?”

And I suppose that part of what my brother told me, it is part of something I will always remember and now, I suppose it became a part of my middle. I wasn’t about to live any of this life unlived, no matter how long I was lucky enough to be on this earth for, and what the fuck, mostly, life was good and it was a blessing to be alive and Christ, I wanted to celebrate in it and I liked getting fucked up and laughing and fucking and drinking and expanding my perceptions about all of them ways I went around to look at the world and me and Evelyn and Big Pete and Wayne and Angelina getting to sit around and get loose and push at the boundaries about war and peace and religion and politics and music and about all the populations of this here country we live in as well as well as all them peoples that live everywhere else.

Fuck, we wasn’t doing nobody no harm. It was our bodies gods damn it. Not my Ma’s body, not my Pop’s body and it sure as hell wasn’t the Devil’s or Jesus Christ’s neither. We could do with our own temples as what we pleased. Nobody had to be the wiser because from where I was standing or sitting, I didn’t even know what the wiser was yet.