Dialogue Bubbles.

I was thinking I might write a story about a crew of guys who work as sort of "missing persons detectives" for souls. They'd be hired by mourning folks and have to suit up and trek into the afterlife via some ridiculous method and deal with all of Heaven or Hell's illogical physics and have conflicts and have special weapons and tactics, but I decided against it. I didn't want to write about Heaven or Hell as if I believed it. It seemed like christian fiction. I staunchly believed in death as a final experience and found the idea of afterlife to devalue the one we have. If there turned out that there was one, then that was icing on what we hopefully already thought of as a pretty excellent fucking cake. Also, it seemed like a lot of effort. I'm a lazy writer and if I can't finish a thought by the end of a bottle of wine or whatever record I'm listening to, I'd probably not finish it at all.

The house was dark and everything was vaguely fine at that time. I had a little bit of money in my pocket, and everyone was still on speaking terms. No one had fucked anyone and no one had fought anyone and no one had died yet. I used to watch documentaries about people involved with certain scenes (punk in the seventies for example) and they'd show the people now and they'd all talk about how great things were then and now the people were old and some of them were dead and they spoke of the love and the tragedy and the impact of everything on them forever and I feel like that now. But back, then...

I tapped the pen against my notebook and stared out the window. I was trying to come up with something that was good, sure, but that was also true to me. I was tired of writing the things I wrote. I didn't think I needed to change, just that I needed to grow. I doodled a face on the blank page and a dialogue bubble. I wrote "I wish I was a writer" in it and closed it. I hadn't had a story published in over a year and I wasn't sure if I cared. I certainly didn't put the effort into getting them published anymore. I had been writing for the sake of getting shit off of my chest. My stories had become little more than thinly veiled diary entries. That had its perks though. I was writing true and I could always deny whatever I wanted. Sometimes things were fiction and just enough of them where honest denial was plausible. 

The evening was coming and I had finished what little wine I had left. I didn't have a buzz but I had an urge to go out and get another bottle or two. I was on unemployment then and I had time to kill. What difference would it make? I reasoned. 

I don't think she was in love with me then. Even then. I had tried to write about that, but I couldn't. It was all speculation and I would always read it back and it always seemed so fabricated and dishonest. Now I think that maybe I couldn't focus on it because I didn't want to focus on it. The passing thought of it made it hard to breathe but I did my best to ignore it or tell myself it wasn't true and pretend everything was fine. I assumed I was being self destructive and looked away. I scribbled another face next to the first one and in the dialogue bubble I wrote "I love you" and under the first dialogue bubble I wrote "I love you too."

I decided I was going to go to the store. Everything was vaguely fine then. I had a little bit of money in my pocket, and everyone was still on speaking terms. 

On the Back Porch with Mike.

"It's red and dark, but it taste like fucking chardonnay." I spit it out onto the grass. "What is it?"

"Chianti," Mike said.

"Bullshit it is. It tastes like a goddamned fruit roll-up." We were sitting on his mother's back porch. He had come back to live with her while he got his shit together after a break up. It was night and summer and beautiful. The porch light was off but his phone was playing music and lit the porch well enough to hold conversation. The neighborhood was quiet otherwise. I had been working all day and my back hurt, but Mike wanted to see me and I had nothing else to do.

We didn't talk about Heather anymore, and I think he wanted to but he knew it wasn't good for him. He could have to me, but it wasn't good for him.

"Don't drink it then," he said.

"It's fine."

It was a large bottle. He called it a Handle but it didn't have a handle.

"Good. It's all I have."

"How much was it?"

"Eight."

"Dollars?"

"Yeah," he said. "Eight bucks, four liters."

"Hmm, mystery solved then."

"Yep."

I put my feet up on the chair in front of me. Mike's phone played Neutral Milk Hotel songs quietly and I sipped the supposed Chianti.

"How much money you have saved?" I asked him.

"Not a lot. A few hundred."

"Little longer and you'll be back on your feet."

"Hopefully. It isn't easy. Starting from nothing. It's like being a fucking teenager again."

"I told you you could have stayed with me."

"I couldn't do that to you," he said. "You know. Going through that shit. I didn't want to be that guy. Making shit weird."

"The offer still stands."

"I'm doing all right, but thanks man. Besides, you going to do my laundry?"

"Are you serious?" I laughed.

"Well fuck dude, I'm living at home, I think she's glad to do it."

"Jesus. You're thirty-three years old. She pack you a lunch too?"

"Fuck you." He laughed.

"She does, doesn't she? Peanut butter and fluff. Crackers and cheese. Juice box."

"Not always."

"I love you."

"You too. Asshole."

I refilled my cup and passed the handle-less to Mike. "You want to start a band?"

"I wouldn't remember how to play guitar if I had to. It's been so long."

"Fuck it. We'll be a noise band."

"I don't think there'd be much difference than High School then."

I smiled in the dark.

A moment passed and the album ended and the neighborhood was dark and quiet now.

"I was going to be a stock-car driver," Mike said. "Remember that? We both were."

"I remember."

"Team... team... What was it?"

"Team Raptor."

"Team Raptor! That's right! Like the dinosaur."

"Yep."

"Stock car racing and dinosaurs."

"Yep."

"Man. We're old now."

"No we're not. We'll be old when we look back on tonight and realize how young we were."

"Remember when I asked Melissa Chatham to be my girlfriend?"

"I remember you standing halfway down the hallway. Then yelling her name, then throwing up. I remember that."

"I didn't throw up," he said.

"Yes you certainly did. You threw up and Mrs. Barbireau had to walk you to the nurses office and then you had to sit next to Melissa all day after she watched you throw up. I know you remember. You didn't say a word for like, a week."

"Fuck you dude." He laughed. "I tried."

"You did," I said. "More than I could do."

"I remember," he took a sip, "tenth grade. You and Allison... Fuck, what was her name?"

"I have no idea."

"Oh fuck yes you do. Allison... Allison... Winslow! Yeah! You and Allison Winslow. Tenth grade. She was all about you, man. Remember  we went to the movies that day and Allison wanted to sit alone with you and I sat on the other side of the theater?"

"Nope."

"I saw you get up and I followed you into the lobby..."

"Never happened."

"Remember what you said to me?"

I laughed. "She tried to touch my dick. I didn't want to piss."

Mike laughed loudly. "As if you were just going to piss all over her!"

"Shut up."

"Jesus. Tenth grade and this girl wants to give you a handy in the theater and..." He took a drink. "Jesus man."

"Nevermind. You can't move in with me."

"Ahh, you'll just end up spending all your time here anyway."

"Probably."

Another lull in the conversation came and I thought about Allison Winslow. I would have sworn then that I had loved her. I had no idea what had become of her since high school. I thought I'd look her up.

"What happened man?"

"What do you mean?"

"To us. Man we had the whole thing figured out back then. We knew what we wanted. I have no idea what I want now."

"Me either. I don't think anyone does."

"I'm so fucking lost."

"We'll get you on your feet again. I promise."

"I'm glad you're around."

"Bros after hoes, sir."

"Bros after hoes."

We clinked our glasses.

You Kill Strays

1.

In 1987 we had stolen a gas can from Corey's Dad and we always had a lighter. The plan was to go to the old boxcar, covered in overgrowth and rust, and splash the gas all around it and watch it all burn and we would walk into the woods and watch the trees burn and maybe we'd never come back.

The roads to the tracks were cracked and faded and barely a single lane. Lined by tall old trees bending and reaching over us and sometimes a house and sometimes people lived in them. The sky was overcast. On a good day the sun would chip through the spaces between the branches and needles and leaves and splay out across the pavement in shards and islands and glow bright against the shadows. Not today. The road was a darkened corridor and the air was cool. Corey hummed to himself and I could hear the gas in the can splash back and forth with his pace. We passed a joint back and forth.

“You think it'll go up fast?” he asked.

“Probably. It's gas.”

“I mean the trees.”

“I don't know.”

“I bet they do.” He went on humming and he was moving a little faster than me and soon he was some distance ahead and he didn't seem to notice. I kept the joint and finished it and tossed the roach thinking maybe a plant would grow there.

I began to fantasize about the woods. The flames and they were fifty feet high and burst from the boxcar high and out and swallowed the grass in a blackening circle. It passed through me and to the trees and Corey sat in the boxcar and laughed and the flames climbed the trees and danced and ate the sky and the world and I was alone.

I watched Corey and his Iron Maiden t-shirt disappear around a bend in the road. I didn't think he'd live to see twenty.

I got to the trail head and kicked leaves and sticks as I walked. After a little while with the sounds and smell of the forest I came to the tracks and Corey was bent down in the middle of them. I got closer and I could see he was petting a stray dog. It should have been a large dog but it was thin and there was a torn open bag of garbage near by and I assumed that had been dinner. The dog was gray and brown and filthy and I had no idea what breed it was, but it was a poor example of whichever. The dog rolled onto it's back and seemed happy. Corey was talking to it.

“Who's a good boy? Who loves belly rubs?” he asked.

The dog got up and barked softly and nuzzled Corey until he fell backwards on his ass. “You want to be my dog, boy? You want to be my dog?”

“Where'd he come from?” I asked.

“Woods, I guess,” Corey said as he wrestled the dog a bit and got to his feet. “He's friendly. A good dog.”

“Yeah. Are you keeping it?”

“Until I can't, I guess, if it follows me. What should I name it?” He looked at the dog and scratched behind his filthy ear. “What's your name boy? Huh? Are you a Bruce? No, you aren't a Bruce. How about Ronnie? Are you a Ronnie?”

“Maybe he's a Randy.”

“Is that it boy? Are you a Randy?”

The dog circled us and smelled us and barked softly again.

“Randy it is! Let's go Randy!” Corey began to jog down the tracks and without hesitation Randy followed. I watched and trudged along behind again.

2.

At some point the pot had caught up to me and the contrast of the forest was nearly overpowering. Greens and blacks and even under the gray sky the world was far brighter than I was comfortable with. I couldn't see Corey, but I could hear him talking to Randy somewhere ahead.

The tracks climbed a small hill and then diverted further away from town and after climbing the hill and some distance into the forest a clearing opened up around the tracks and I could see the boxcar ahead, and I could see Randy pacing back and forth and I thought it was a beautiful dog. Corey came around the other side of the boxcar and saw me.

“Hey, where've you been? You finish the joint?”

“Yeah.”

“Want to smoke another one?”

“Sure.”

I walked with Corey to the side of the boxcar. When it was left here the door had been left open or someone had opened it at some point. The inside was wood and held together with steel beams. The wood was starting to smell and bend, but I imagined it could still pull its weight if it had to. I pulled myself up onto its floor and lied back on it with my legs dangling from it. The ceiling seemed so high and the entire boxcar was a cavern. I couldn't quite see into the corners and there was graffiti and garbage in it. I wondered how many people had fought here or fucked here or slept here when there was nowhere else and I tried to see them all but they were only shadows and Corey tapped my chest.

“Take it man,” he said. He handed the new joint to me.

“Thanks.” I stayed on my back and pulled off of it and I felt Corey get up and heard him talk to Randy again and heard their feet banging around on the grass and sticks and leaves around us.

It was cooler in the boxcar and even now the smell of it has never left me. Mold and rot and forest and love. Maybe in that order.

3.

Corey never came back for the joint and I finished it and stared upward and counted to myself and sang songs to myself and dreamed of getting the fuck out of Ohio. I closed my eyes and heard nothing. I heard nothing and smelled gas.

When I opened my eyes I couldn't focus and I sat up and leaned against the boxcar. Corey was far from me. Corey and Randy. I couldn't see them and I could smell the gas. I looked around and there was a puddle near me and I thought that maybe he had left a trail to the boxcar to set me on fire and I was too tired to move.

Randy howled and I looked up and he was bright now and then Corey was screaming at Randy.

“Burn! Burn you mangy fuck! Burn you mangy fucking waste!” He started circling the dog and the dog was yelping and screaming and rolling in the dirt and trying to run but I don't think it knew where it was going and it ran in circles and screamed and screamed and screamed and I realized Corey had set it on fire. I couldn't imagine why. Corey seemed to like the dog. He seemed to want to keep it. Maybe it was a game or a trick and the dog wasn't on fire but they were so far away that it just seemed like it and I was so tired. I wondered what it would be like to be a dog on fire. If my eyes would melt or my wet nose or if my fur would burn and maybe my skin would bubble and pop and char and how long I would yelp and scream.

Corey danced around it and howled at the dog howling back. He kicked dirt at the dog and then he kicked the dog and the dog collapsed onto the ground and Corey kicked it again and again and called it a mangy fucking waste again and I got out of the boxcar.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Fucking waste!”

I walked up to Corey and the smell was awful in the air and it didn't smell like gasoline anymore but the ground had caught fire and was spreading from the dead dog to the dead grass and I knew it would climb.

“Why'd you kill the dog?”

“I'm bored.”

I stared at the dog. It's fur was short and burnt and black and its eyes had melted and it's skin was black where it showed and it smelled awful. The grass was on fire and spreading.

“Me too.”

Tomorrow and Probably the Day After

And you step back for a moment and see.

You breathe and are alive and you will be tomorrow, and probably the day after and those days could be worse days or better days, but they are days. Laid out in front of you and waiting. Waiting for you to figure out just what the fuck you're going to do with them. You know the choices. You feel them. They bite into you and gnaw and chew and tear in you just like me and everyone we know and that is being alive too. An ever-unfurling red carpet of time, the comfort of mediocrity, the constant regret. We know the carpet ends at the door. We know we stride quicker and quicker toward it. Under the eyes of everyone we know and love, and do they speak of our failings or success'? Our growth or stagnation? Our deeds... Or not at all? Do the lights shine on us? Why do they why don't they? Why do they why don't they?

Which is worse?

What am I doing with myself?

I'm hunched over a dark table in the back of Del Franco's, an Italian bar where they serve wine and spaghetti and whiskey and spaghetti and whatever and whatever. I'm scribbling in a pocket notebook something I'll never type up and tapping my finger against a glass of the house Cabernet and I have survived the end of the world. Well, the end of whatever mine was anyway.

I drink from my glass and motion toward the bartender. He's an older man. He wears a black vest against a white shirt even though I am sure the dress code doesn't require it. He tends bar and he knows it and he's okay at it and he'll die someday and he'll have been a bartender. I won't have been a writer. I won't have been a husband. I won't have been anything besides alive and then not. My eyelids are heavy. I'm not tired. I'm only getting comfortable. I don't want to leave the table. I want the darkness outside forever and I want to write a masterpiece and then never write again and I want wine and a beautiful woman and I never want to know her name and I want the beautiful woman I know to cry for me and over me and miss me and love me and she won't and the bartender comes to the my table. The night is slow for him.

"What can I get for you James?"

"More wine."

"No problem. Right on the tab?"

"Please."

"Sure."

He disappears for a moment and I stare at the utter garbage I have scribbled out and turn to a blank page. I am running out of blank pages and I need a new notebook and I can't help but spot the goddamned metaphor. I still wear my ring.

I turn it with my thumb. Smooth and warm and I know I'll have to give it up someday. I can't today or any day soon, I imagine. 

Before I had always thought I'd be ready. Okay with it all. There were so many things that had bothered me about her and our life and I  remember thinking "if this keeps up...", as if not getting fucked for two months was some crime against humanity. Pacing through the house, silent and agitated.

"What's wrong?" she would ask.

"Nothing," I would say. You always read that talking shit out in a relationship was helpful. That it would bring you to solutions easier and that you'd have a deeper understanding of your partner. I had taken to shutting myself in and letting shit boil until it burst out of me in a long drunken drive home where I'd lay every petty nonsense fucking issue out on the line and offer no mercy in accusations and brutality. That's what I was. Brutal. A cunt. 

I had to be. I thought it then (and assumed later I wouldn't) and I thought it now. There was no talking to her.   There was no insinuating or stating or reporting anything wrong. What wasn't met with unfiltered anger ended in "compromises" that ultimately led to nowhere. I saved more money and we got nicer things and we went to dinner and bought new clothes and she still thought it was okay to berate me and belittle me and not fuck me and I thought it was better to keep my goddamn mouth shut. I regret thinking about it. There had to be a moment before it all twisted into that fucking knot where I had slipped. Where I could have been better. Where I could have said the right thing at the right time and I could have saved it all.

Ten years down the drain. 

The bartender came back with a bottle of Chianti. "We are out of the house Cabernet, so I brought this Chianti. On the house."

"Really? Why?"

He smiled and pulled the cork out and filled my glass. "I'll be closing up soon."

"Okay."

He walked away and I stared down at the blank page. I had nothing. Nothing that mattered or spoke or meant a goddamned thing. I drank the glass of Chianti and poured another. I had passed the drunken level of creativity and wandered into self pity and regret and I knew if I kept going I'd kill myself on the way home. I needed to get laid. The bar was empty and I drew squares and circles on the page in my notebook and gave them faces and when the bottle was gone I got up and waved to the bartender and left and walked home to my apartment. 

I had moved away from her and I had heard she moved even further and my apartment was cold. I left my clothes on and went to bed and thought that I'd be alive tomorrow and probably the day after.

Shuffling and Fog

The first lungful of spring air. The warm sun on your face. The pools of melted snow and you think "I probably don't need a jacket today." 

Three years ago things were different for me. I worked in a basement apartment with a large sliding glass door that let the light in and had a small concrete porch attached to it. I used to smoke there and read and write science fiction stories that weren't any good but I thought they were all right. I used to pass meds and make meals and clean and on the television there were a lot of reruns of Bonanza and Gunsmoke and Charmed. 

On Sundays I worked thirteen hour shifts and in the mornings on those days I would go to church because that was part of the job. When church was over and I had made small talk with folks who tried we would drive to a nursing home to visit a dying sister for a bit. The nursing home was hollow in every way. Long corridors of fog and shuffling and sometimes a woman would come to me and for a few minutes I would let her believe I was her son or her husband or whoever she needed me to be and I would text Marie and try to let it go. 

The sister was all there, or at least mostly there, for a while. She died on a Saturday and we hadn't driven there in two weeks. It sat heavy in the air of the basement apartment for a while and people became worried but I said everything would be okay. There was a lot of talk of death and finality and there should have been. People grew old and if they grew old enough they were eventually the last of their kind and it was the end. We went grocery shopping for the apartment and we did laundry and made small talk and everything was quieter then.

Mostly I sat on the couch. Through the sharp autumn air and evenings, and through the winter, and in the air conditioning for three months I sat inside on the couch with my feet over the armrest and my laptop glowing and my headphones on and typed bad science fiction. I can admit it was bad now. I watched movies and read great science fiction and played video games and reruns of Bonanza and Gunsmoke and Charmed played and I passed meds and cooked and cleaned and my managers thought so highly of me. I didn't do shit. Everything was quiet and the sister had died and there was shuffling and fog all around. 

In the spring the snow melted off the lawn and dripped onto the concrete porch and I opened the glass sliding door and let the light and air in. I wished I was a caretaker. I wished I was better. I wished I had been better. The sister had died and things had become quieter and through the spring air and sunlight there was shuffling and fog and I left that job.

Eating and Picking and Blackening.

I stood at the window and the snow fell. The afternoon was setting in and I had done nothing and yesterday I had done nothing and the day before and on and on forever it seemed. The house was dark. I had the curtains drawn and the lights off. Marie would call it a cave. I'd open them when she was home, so long as it was still light out though I thought it wouldn't be. 

Every morning I woke and said I would do something. I would create something. A story. A painting. A song. Sometimes I imagined things far more ambitious. A short film. A graphic novel. A puppet show in eight acts. I drank my tea and looked out at the snow. White, tiny, and all consuming. I had painted one painting in the past month. I had written a three line poem. I had written and scratched what I assumed would be the beginning of my first good story of the year. I couldn't focus. I didn't necessarily want to. 

I sat at the computer, or behind a notebook or canvas and I would stare at its perfect nothing and I would try to see all of the beautiful things I would cover them with and for fifteen minutes I would be there, in that moment of creativity. I would know what would happen. I could see it all spread out before me, and I would understand how great it would be. But I'd be out of wine, or I'd only have twenty minutes, or Doubt would show up.

Knocking on the door. Knowing I'm home. He has a box of wine under his arm and he knows all the great writers and all of the great bands, and all of the real artists and he sits on my couch and we talk about how nice it must be to be one of them and the daylight fades and we don't laugh or smile or joke. We just talk about how nice it would be and know that we aren't that. We aren't those people. We aren't genius or marketable or connected or special. We glance at each other in the bathroom and Doubt looks like me. He has my hair, but his is thicker. He has my eyes, but mine are dimmer. I am heavier than him, but not by much. He's better than me, and like everyone else, I can't understand why. I love. I love my art. I love my need to make. I respect the process and the journey and I believe I may have something to say and sometimes people tell me I make such nice things. It's nice of them, but somehow void.

I stood at the window and the snow fell. I stood at the window and the snow fell and I was ashamed a little. This time I was wasting feeling sorry for myself.

I could be tapping away or strumming away or mixing color and sound and word and I have nothing to do, so what is the goddamned problem? I have nowhere to be. Unemployment rolls in and hours roll out and maybe I'm tired now. Maybe the winter sits in me like a whispering cancer. Eating and picking and blackening. 

There was no Doubt today. The snow fell and his footsteps never appeared in it and that was fine.

Winter.

Marie says winter hits me hard.

I thought about walking to the store for beer. I didn't have any boots and my unemployment was late.

Boyfriends

I kiss your forehead before you wake up and I slide out of bed. The room is still dark but I know it well now and glide through it with ease and shut the door behind me. The floor of the kitchen is cool on my feet and the air is cool on my body. I find the thermostat on the wall and bring it up a few degrees. I go to the bathroom and piss and then I wash my hands and then splash water over my face. Stale whiskey is on my breath and dried wine has stained my lips. My stomach is a knot and my head is a pool. I have to leave for work soon. I have to be awake.

I make coffee and sit on the couch in the living room in the dark while I listen to the coffee maker spit and sputter. 

It's hard to focus and I don't remember going to bed. 

It was nice to wake up next to you. 

I imagine we all think it.