Jack Kerouac once wrote that, “…the only people for me are the mad ones…who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn burn burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
That’s crap, but thanks Jack. For the last few years I’d tried to be one of Jack’s people. In my spare time I’d written stories about that kind of life and even tried to live it my way, but then I discovered the truth about that shit: these hip, creative folks most always, like Kerouac, wind up in the bughouse or with a mouthful of broken teeth and a jar of Xanax. Or worse. They wind up dead.
In therapy at my nutward, my shrink told me that I’d been suffering from a form of PTSD (with headaches) since my years as a New York City private detective. The incident that had taken place resulted in me participating in the deaths of several people. That incident is when the wheels began coming off in my life. Doctor Feldman also diagnosed me as bipolar and alcoholic.
A day or so after that session I went into a week-long emotional slide and the headaches got much worse. One morning I found myself in the chapel, killing time. The chapel was the only place on the grounds where you might get lucky and sneak a smoke, as opposed to going all the way downstairs, checking yourself out at the desk, getting a green slip, then standing in the parking lot in twenty degree weather just to suck on a Marlboro Light for five minutes.
I hadn’t been to church in twenty years, and anyway a chapel isn’t a church, it’s a room with a few pews and quiet vibes. I had considered that a chapel was a church.
As I was sitting there, after my smoke, a stained glass portrait on the center wall caught my attention. Jesus paraphernalia.
And I heard myself say, “Look God, I’m sick of this. I can’t do this any more. I don’t want to drink. I need to clean up. I need your help.”
When I looked up a strange thing began to happen. There was a light coming through the stained glass and it began to get brighter. Then I felt something. I still don’t know what it was but it was clearly something. As a result of seeing that light I haven’t had a drink from that day to this. My boozing just stopped. I don’t even think about a drink anymore. I’m just done—except for the headaches.
Now I live with my mother and attend AA and make every effort not to punch people. The PTSD headaches are still there. The dreams too. It’s almost always the same dream with one or two or three different versions: #1: I see the wounds but the bodies have no faces. #2: I’m buying cigarettes or am at a market somewhere and I pull a bloody hand out of my pocket instead of my wallet. In the hand is my gun. #3: I’m holding my gun with blood all over me. There are two dead girls but they are smiling and talking to each other.
Mom, who is now eighty-seven, and her caretaker-companion Coco, and their half-dozen cats, occupy two of the six bedrooms in the house on Cliffside Drive in Malibu. Coco is a tall, strong woman. She’s only seventy or so. She used to be mom’s neighbor until her husband died of colon cancer. The chemo treatments and other medical expenses lasted for two years and cost the couple every dime they had. Their house on Point Dume, their restaurant, everything. After her husband’s death Coco was tits up—about to be homeless. Mom called her and made her the companion-care taker offer and when her house foreclosed she became mom’s full-time live-in companion.
Because Jimmy Fiorella had left a $500,000 life insurance policy, mom was now more than okay financially. She’s been obsessed with astrology for years and never fails to let me know what new shit planetary aspects are infecting my life.
My bedroom is the small one at the other end of the house.
* * *
My new AA sponsor, Southbay Bill, says that I am what in AA they call a WILL NOT. “A will-not,” as in “will not completely give himself to this simple program.” And in my last evaluation from my free biweekly state-supplied therapist in Santa Monica (who terminated our sessions, she said, because of my anger issues and my use of profanity), I was told that I should be back on medication but I refuse to take any of that shit for the headaches or anything else because it doesn’t help and it makes my brain stupid. And Southbay Bill has told me that he won’t sponsor me unless I’m 100 percent straight and off of everything.
Two weeks ago I got my driver’s license back after a long suspension for my last arrest and DUI in California. My license is restricted but I am now allowed to drive to and from my AA meetings and work—except, of course, I have no job. Old moms gives me fifty bucks a week for gas for her oil-guzzling red Honda shitbox that fires on only three cylinders and emits a cloud of black smoke everywhere it goes.
A few days ago when I began driving again, mom and Coco, concerned that I might get drunk again and wreck the car and on the advice of mom’s attorney, signed the title of her farting old Honda over to me.
As a writer I have three cardboard boxes filled with poems written over the last twenty years, and two published books. One is a book of short stories and the other a collection of a hundred poems, dashed off by a desktop publisher in San Pedro, who chose to call his odd venture into the world of print Goliath Press.
My book of short stories, The Doo-Dah Parade, sold a staggering 350 copies. Four years ago, just after the book was published, my agent—who disappeared quickly—used my PI experience to get me a scriptwriting TV job on a series, L.A. Homicide, where as one of the six staff writer flunkies. I helped on three episodes before I was replaced by the producer. My book of short stories came and went at record speed at the three indie bookstores left in West Los Angeles and earned me a grand total of $152.00. I’d stopped writing completely until very recently.
* * *
Claude and Meggie are now holding hands in the row in front of me as the room continues filling up. The girls in the hoodies are still giggling. Claude has finished gobbling down his chocolate doughnut and is now scratching his goatee while scanning the room for the movie stars he knows. I can’t help but notice that Meggie is wearing pink throng panties that come two inches above the top of her jeans in back as she sits in front of me. Frilly panties. Very exceptional.
A couple of minutes later Facelift Albert stands at the podium to begin the meeting. “Hi,” he says, “My name is Albert and I’m an alcoholic.”
“Hi Albert,” the room chimes back.
The former classroom is full now. There is only one open seat in my section, the seat next to me, and here comes down the aisle a tall, fiftyish-looking woman in high heels and designer workout gear. She stops at my row. Scary-looking bitch. All yoga muscle with perfect makeup. But the wrinkled skin on her hands and the liver spots are a dead giveaway that fifty is realistically sixty-five. Maybe older. The pulled face can’t hide what she really is.
I have to stand to let Glenn Close squeeze by me. But when I do, somehow the butt of my Charter Arms .44 snubnose—a remnant of my New York City days, gets hooked on the backrest of my metal chair. The prick then tumbles out, clatters on the seat, and falls to the floor.
I pick the gun up and tuck it back in the rear of my jeans, then sit down again.
Looking up I see that a dozen pairs of eyes are on me. The three girls in the hoodies gawk but Claude’s expression is one of alarm. He grabs Meggie (in the pink thong) by the arm. “Vee must moff from ere,” Claude hisses loudly, still glaring in my direction, “too anozer zeat.”
Meggie snatches up her tote bag, then turns back to me. “That’s pretty scary shit, JD,” she whispers. “A fucking gun at an AA meeting.”
“Yeah, well,” I say, “shit happens. Have a nice day.”
The two of them walk to the back of the filled room and stand near the coffee table for the rest of the meeting.
These days I attribute my black moods and my unpleasant evaluation of all humanity to my long absence from alcohol. Sleeping at night has become impossible because of the headaches and the dreams of blood and massacres, so I mostly busy myself by surfing porn sites, reading every book I can get my hands on, and nodding off when I can. But I am usually awake until the
sun comes up.
To tire myself out during the day, after the noon AA meetings I’ve been walking the local beaches. For hours. I have drunk coffee at every Malibu café within fifteen miles and “talked” recovery until I felt the onset of rectal cancer. I am unwillingly familiar with every snot-filled hard-luck story of every celebrity tabloid knucklehead at every AA meeting.
I am not a “winner” in sobriety. I do not kid myself. I now understand that booze is the great equalizer. I am the same as everybody else at the Malibu meetings—in the same fix. Beneath the cologne and Botox they are all holding on to their ass for dear life, just like me. They sit in these meetings with their sunglasses and Malibu Colony tans and whine about their cancelled TV series or getting shafted in their divorce. Their kids hate them and are in jail or have wound up in rehab themselves. These people have what everyone in America thinks they want. If money and fame could “fix it” they’d all be fixed. But they’re not. Not by a long shot. They suck air and shit once a day like everybody else. We’re all the same. They’re just like me. Nowhere.
* * *
At mom’s house that afternoon, with nothing to do, and no present interest for visiting the sex chat rooms, I sat down at Jimmy Fiorella’s old typewriter and began to type. The idea of writing something on pop’s antique machine had suddenly appealed to me and I decided to write like he had written. Before computers. So I began typing.
An hour later I looked at the clock. I had written a new poem.
Lighting a cigarette I leaned back and read what was in the machine and now on the desk in front of me. It wasn’t very good but I decided not to throw out the page. It was a poem for my mom.
PARROTS
Broke again, and carless
and hoping to mooch a few free months in Malibu
I discovered that now there are wild Parrots breeding on
Point Dume
Big, loud, noisy fuckers
breeding in the high trees
following me up the road in the afternoon sun from the highway
chattering their non-sense like an orchestra in warm-up chaos
This time I’m home with all that I own in three plastic bags
along with my laptop and a commitment to attend AA meetings
Old mom opened the door when she saw me
and smiled
and that night we laughed and talked on endlessly
about Rupert Brooke and Edna Millay and Tennyson
and that jerk T.S. Eliot
And I went off to my room
fat on pesto pasta
but sad for Jimmy Fiorella’s fading ghost
and thanking Jesus or whatever’s out there
that there is one more person left alive
on the plant
who’ll
still
listen
to
my
bullshit
© 2012 Dan Fante.
About Dan Fante
Dan Fante is the author of novels, plays, short stories and two volumes of poetry. His newest novel, Point Doom, will be released through Harper Perennial in January, 2013.
The Man Who Loved Birds
by Mar Preston
Harold Shorsey awoke that morning certain that a freight train had collided with the front of the house. The bucking and shuddering of the daybed in his study bounced him up in the air and then onto the floor. From an epicenter fifteen miles away, a previously unknown fault fishtailed upward, emerging to grind into the surface rock that formed the Santa Monica Mountains.
All around Harold was the creaking judder of load-bearing walls straining at the foundations. Glass crackled and fell in sheets. Heavy furniture toppled forward onto the carpet. CD recordings flew like Frisbees across the room. There were several blinding flashes that Harold realized later had been transformers blowing.
He heard his wife Mei-Chun shouting from the next bedroom and tried to rise to his feet just as a bookcase, not bolted to the wall, splintered and flung hundreds of scientific textbooks into his frantic path as he clawed his way out of the room.
It was black dark. His heart was beating so fast, a coronary seemed imminent. He staggered into the living room, stumbling and falling over the stereo equipment tossed the length of the connector cords from the shelves. Mei-Chun grabbed at his arm and fell with him, her small body landing hard, cross-wise against him. She was screaming into his ear, but he could scarcely hear her amid the avalanche of kitchen cupboard contents falling and smashing on the floor.
It stopped finally as anything so terrible must. In the eerie silence that followed, he heard dogs barking and car alarms going off up and down the city street. Mei-Chun struggled to sit up.
Harold could see nothing but impenetrable, palpable thick darkness. He kept his hand on Mei-Chun’s shoulder.
“That was a big one,” he said, his voice breaking.
Mei-Chun pulled herself away from him. He heard the crunch of music cassette cases splintering under her feet as she walked from the room.
“Put some shoes on,” he ordered her, trying at this late date to take charge.
He heard her punching numbers on the phone.
“They need the phone for emergencies. You shouldn’t use it.”
“I want to call the boys and tell them we’re all right. The phone’s dead.” She flung the phone away from her and plunged into the dark. She’d naturally think of the boys first, off at Yale now, a continent between themselves and their father.
His little flock of sparrows were silent, unmoving from their perch in the service porch. From somewhere in the living room he heard the flutter of the raven’s wings, a broken-off ark-ark. Harold tentatively stood up, becoming aware of fine plaster sifting down from the ceiling. The house jerked leftward sharply with the first aftershock and Harold crouched down again, waiting for the roof to fall in upon him. He felt his way to the closet and found a flashlight, shining it around the living room.
“Mei-Chun, Jesus, look at this. Jesus.”
Silently his wife came to stand by him. She was already dressed and had a backpack over her shoulder, and a flashlight in her hand.
“I’m going,” she said shortly. “I’ll be needed at the hospital.”
Harold bit back saying I need you too. Look at this mess. After the boys left, he and Mei-Chun had become independent, staggering their work schedules so they rarely saw one another, leaving notes on the kitchen table, doing their own laundry, buying their own groceries, staying together because they could not afford to divorce.
“You think the birds are all right?” Harold said.
“None of them got away, I’m sure,” she said sarcastically. Then Mei-Chun fell over a breakfront that had pitched forward, crashing down into the glass coffee table. She cursed in Chinese, clambered over the breakfront, and pulled and yanked at the front door until it opened.
“You’re just going to leave me here with all this?” Harold said, shining the flashlight onto her face, the beam glinting off her glasses. “There’s going to be more aftershocks. Maybe that one was just the precursor.” He heard his voice rise, becoming panicky.
“You’ll manage.”
His heart still pounding, Harold made his way back to his study, treading gingerly. He got his hands on something that felt like his sweat pants and struggled with them until he realized he was trying to get his legs into a sweatshirt. Another aftershock racked the stucco bungalow. Hugging the sweatshirt close to his chest with one hand, Harold blundered to the closet and yanked the first pair of pants he found off a hanger. He stuffed one foot into a tennis shoe and the other into a wingtip in his haste to get away from the creaking walls.
Outside he heard neighbors shouting and looked out the window to see a faraway column of fire shoot into the air. Harold lectured himself to think clearly but it was as if his intellect had turned to gelatin. He was a scientist, a botanist who had spent his life cracking the micro-code of corn plant morphology, yet he couldn’t seem to follow
one line of thought. His brain darted about, olfactory nerves sniffing for gas, identifying a wetness in his right shoe as blood; his interior balance mechanism had gone awry with the floor continuing to jiggle every few moments. His heart beat hugely in his middle-aged chest. It wasn’t as if Mei-Chun was any comfort to him, but he wished she were here now.
The aviary! Harold kept a pair of ravens in an airy enclosed structure attached to the carport. He shuffled through broken glass and made his way into the kitchen. A quick survey with the flashlight told him he’d need a shovel for this. He shut the fridge and freezer door, leaving their contents strewn on the floor, and tipped the oven door shut as he passed. His little flock of sparrows in the service porch moved about nervously as he entered the room. A fluttery cloud dipped past him into the kitchen, settling on the edge of the sink.
He heard his next-door neighbor crying out, sobbing, her flashlight casting about on the ceiling in her bedroom.
“Harold, Harold, is that you? Mei-Chun? Help me. I think my leg’s broken. I can’t move.”
Harold stood still and turned off his flashlight, scarcely breathing. He listened to Evelyn McIntyre wail. A fresh shower of glass came from the side of her house and Harold saw a section of the eaves give way. From inside, he heard the woman scream, the sound now more muffled. Harold grinned.
In a moment he was at the padlocked door of the aviary, the ravens’ rustling about in the pitch dark. He shone the light in and saw them side by side on their high perch, their yellow eyes glinting. Beautiful creatures, doomed beautiful creatures. Harold had trapped them out on the desert and brought them home to shelter them from predators.
Gazing at them, he felt calmer. The ground under his feet rippled like a shiver that ran the length of a dog’s back. Around the neighborhood he heard shouts, car doors slamming, and children crying.
He scuffled his way toward the back door and heard Evelyn McIntyre mewling, crying out his name, begging him for help. He waited a moment in triumph, listening, and then went in and slammed the door loud.
The Big Click: May 2012 (Issue 2) Page 2
