Ask the Arawaks

Every time I think back on it…everything was a mess. My parents hated each other. My father hated having a family. My mother easily weighed 300 pounds. I know he cheated on her. I know he did. I still have my mother’s dictionary. I came across the word “affair” in there & the word was circled with a little plus sign by it. When I was 16 or 17 I was hanging out with a group of my friends & my buddy C told me he saw my father driving with some woman that wasn’t my mom & everybody was laughing @ me & I was convinced he was mistaken. The thought of my father having an affair was incomprehensible to me. Now, of course, I see all the signs were there, but @ the time it just didn’t seem like something that could be happening. I was so naive. I really was. The first time my friends did blow I wouldn’t do it. I was appalled. I said something like, “There is no way I am putting that shit in my nose” or something ridiculous like that. I became the biggest coke fiend in The Central Valley. No kidding. My nose was ready to cave in. You could see all the way through the left side under the bathroom light.  Once I discovered smoking crack, thanks to Mr. Sorrow, my nose was safe. It just seemed like such a waste to snort…no, no, no, smoking was the only way to fly(of course even that mode of transportation would become too slow, too crude, however we are not there yet. Patience, Dear Reader…Patience). I had tried it many times before it became a full-time thing. There was that dude who would come by the apt. Now, this is a really strange story, but none of us, my roommates & I, knew this guy. He showed up @ our door with a brown paper bag & asked if he could come in. He told me he needed to get off the street, that somebody was following him. I know now that it, of course, was Mr. Sorrow: Both the follower & the target. But back then I had no idea. O Mr Sorrow…appearing like a vagabond @ my doorstep just like Christ!! He came in & sat @ our little kitchen table & emptied the contents of his crumpled brown bag. He had a glass stem & a baggie filled with yellow crumbs. He placed a large one into the pipe & smoked it…then offered some to me. Goodness. The Voice of God! yes. Always felt that way every time. Prepare for take-off. The world snapping first wide open & then shut & then a high-pitched whine! Perception pulled taut like a wire that you now could traverse across both time & space. This little guy appeared @ our apt. many times after that. He would just show up. He needed somewhere safe to get high. Our place, I guess for him, was perfect. Then there was the lady @ the bank. I used to be a bank teller. (Just one in a parade of degrading pursuits.) This old motorcycle gal used to come in & deposit endless checks in incredibly large amounts. This is back in the eighties. Banking & phones & the whole fucking world was so radically different…anyway, this woman was loaded! I mean her account balance was extraordinary. I never met someone with so much money. & the thing that was so strange was she did not look like someone who had a lot of money. She looked like some old retired motorcycle mama or an extra from Easy Rider or president of the Steppenwolf fan club. Now, I was a young man. I had just turned 21. I was used to older women leering & coming on to me. It happened all the time, in fact, I had a whole army of “older” women I slept with. Most of them were married & loved using me to get back @ their ridiculous, impotent, aging husbands. & let me tell you, I was happy to help. Anyway this old broad leaned in one day & asked me when I was gonna come over to her place? & slid a dirty little torn piece of paper across the counter @ me. I took it & a couple of days later called her from a payphone - Ha! See this is what I’m talking about!! It was important to have lots of change to make these clandestine calls in the middle of the night, which is what they were & the audacity I had to make a phone call @ 230am with a blood stream blasting through the electric rivers of my veins filled with booze & coke & nicotine & whatever else I could get my nasty little hands on & phone up some middle aged woman who slid her phone number across the chasm of age & propriety & morality & integrity & shame & destiny to a 21 year old who was already careening out of control & meant well, yes, but was not well - Anyway she answered on the second or third ring & told me to come on over & she lived out there on Herndon or Alluvial which might as well have been Mars because I lived in West Fresno by Motel Drive a stones throw from Mr. Sorrow’s domain. So I went on over there & she was there listening to (not Steppenwolf!!) but ELO!! E - L - Fucking - O!! Telephone Li-iine… & out on her kitchen table(I guess the preferred method) was the biggest crack pipe I had ever seen & the most crack I had ever seen & she was the sexiest fucking woman I had ever seen & I stayed there until the sun came up & I heard the Fresno Bee trucks out there making their rounds & I could hear the City Transit wheezing on up to the curb & her son came home & asked her when she was gonna finally stop & get some help. Do you think these forays into the wilderness of our humanity have anything @ all to do with a 300 pound mother? Do you think the eating habits of a mother of three from the bowels of New Jersey could cause such a ruckus with the psyche of a 21 year old boy? My father was a sheriff - look, he’s not dead yet, I just saw him…I went back home to California to be there for the official diagnosis: Alzheimer’s! & late one night he thought I was Uncle Joe ( his Brother…who is dead) & asked me how many years I was behind him(my father) in High School & if I remembered when our(his) older brother John used to bring his pal Albert Lee(!) over? - My father was a sheriff & a military man & when he was a young man, he worked on his father’s farm. A man of discipline. But he couldn’t keep it in his pants & he couldn’t help his wife, who was careening out of control simultaneously with her young son(me) who he also couldn’t help & was up against something he was ill-prepared for & furthermore thought he was immune to, but was suffering from the same as we all were. In fact, I might be so daring as to say that he & my mother were merely vessels carrying the disease or the message or the ghost that Mr. Sorrow had been whispering to my grandfathers (yep both of em) & my grandmothers too! All the way from The Coast of Spain. All the way from the 33rd floor of Jersey City. I mean… didn’t my mother look exactly like her mother when she died & wasn’t she exactly the same age(60!) w veins clogged & mucked up & major organs in a systematic shut-down? - Her body just calling the whole thing off. & isn’t my father all alone with no Love & no Memory? & didn’t my dad’s dad blow his brains out all alone in his trailer with the Black Socks strewn about the room? & didn’t my mother’s father drink his insides to liquid & shit the bed over & over till Mr. Sorrow escorted him to the other side? Yes, yes…yes. What are we up against here? I am eleven years sober. I have been w the same woman for ten years. We have a three year old daughter. It has been some time since I’ve seen Mr. Sorrow in the flesh, he still shows his ridiculous face in a dream or two - all horns & stripes & impeccably dressed. What are we up against? I want to do what’s “right” I want to be someone who can be trusted & my wife can count on. I want to take care of her & make enough money so we can have a place of our own. I don’t want my daughter to slouch & hand out phone numbers across the chasm of despair & grief & want to be loved so badly she will do just about about anything other than love herself to do it. I am in uncharted territory. I still have all the old maps. I have all the old methods of transportation in my skull. & yes, I hear you Mr. Sorrow with your sad & lovely song. & yes, I miss you. But I think I’m going to try something else… I just don’t know what it is yet.