The Heart is a Private Christian Apple

Yesterday in the country graveyard I look down at one of the graves with a Civil War star on a pole sticking up out of the wet dirt and I lose my breath.

No way.

The soldier, his name. Jesus God.

You ready for this?

His name, it’s written right there in the stone.

You ready?

Christian Apple.

Man, oh man.

That is too good to be true.

That is so fucking punk rock. Am I wrong? But he was probably a country kid, barely old enough to shave, and off he went/ Christian Apple/ to fight for the Union/ to kill him some Rebs.

I look over at Arle and she is way over there looking at another flag star grave, standing on the dirt laying upon the bones of a different country boy soldier. I want to holler at her about Christian Apple, but I don’t. I’ll surprise her with it. I will give this to her as a gift of sorts, like some kind of real-time beautifully hip and historical swirl of honor and giggles. Hey here baby, come look at this.

Then she’ll read the marker and BOOM: Christian Apple! What a name! She will smile, laugh, feel my spirit slamming into hers as we navigate this new reality of fearing the virus and staying away from other humans and spraying the goddamn kitchen table with lemony chemical shit so we can disinfect ourselves from the kids who are the only other people who ever touch it besides us and what is happening/what the hell is happening, please?

She has Angus on the leash, on the choke collar because he’s a puller. It’s drizzly/ gray/ Dickensian dank. Above us the mountains that guard Sugar Valley form a parallel run moving east and west.

You wanna know something? People from out west look down on these mountains.

“Those aren’t mountains,” they like to say. “Back where I’m from we’ve got mountains. These are just hills or little Indian burial mounds or something.”

Pfff.

Then I hit them in the jaw with my flat black spray-painted motorcycle helmet. They never see that coming. Little cowboy babies.

Or if I don’t do that then I just tell them the other thing.

“Well, truth is these mountains are way way older than your mountains.” That’s what I say and it IS the truth. “Your mountains are just teenagers peaking out, but these, THESE are the Appalachians and they are older than time, dude. This is where the Earth began.”

That last part is not true, of course, but when you are hellbent on revenge you make stuff up.

“And another thing,” I tell them. “These hills were once as high as any Rocky Mountain is today. It’s true.”

Again, I don’t know if that’s true or not. And I don’t care either. I am defending a lifestyle here. I am defending Bill Monroe AND his mandolin, plus scalding the hair off of a dead pig with hot water cooked on an open fire on bright October mornings, AND wild gobblers blowing off steam in the shadow of the shadow of a moonshiner ghost.

AND Christian Apple.

Arle moves closer with the dog and I wait for my moment, acting like I’m still looking at other graves when I can’t stop looking at Apple’s. I can sense her just outside my sphere. She’s lingering, taking her good old Appalachian time. She is a real native of all this: born and raised with Appalachians staring down at her every move since the day she was born.

This, I will admit, turns me on.

Red-headed/ German/ Irish/ English/ long-legged/ multiple Civil War soldier descended/ deer huntin’/ pee-wee football playin’/ baby raisin’/ dog lovin’/ meat eatin’/ hard workin’/ self-made sexy-ass beautiful soul of kindness unless you cross her in which case you might find a can of Appalachian Jack’s Mountain Woop Ass opened up all over you like yellow jackets at the fallen Choco Taco.

This is love and I can own that and I will, I do. I own it here, you as my witness, just when I thought I would never love again: along she came and away we went.

Okay, she’s only like ten feet away now, but I can’t take it anymore. I need to let this out of me. It is stinging my insides, this diamond I swallowed. I need to spit it into her pretty little country paw.

“Look at this,” I tell her as fake cool as I can muster. “Look at that name.” I point at the only name on the stone at my feet.

She looks over casually. I’ve got her so good! She is maybe a little bored or whatever. But she is gonna flip out when she sees this name, just like me.

She stares at it.

“Look at that name!” I command her. I’m standing there grinning/ she GETS me/ we are in this together, no matter what happens/ if she got the virus I would still take care of her in our quarantined house and it would just be me and her and I wouldn’t be afraid of getting sick too because that’s not what this is about, is it? Marriage is love and love is two people willing to go to the viral wall together, man. Hand-in-hand. Maybe I don’t kiss her on the lips when she is hacking away or whatever, but you know what I am saying, right?

I am so pumped right now/ so IN LOVE with this find of mine/ and that is the kind of, I don’t know, independent joy?, that can very quickly set the walls of a man’s inner house afire, especially out here today in all these fresh Appalachian breezes, all spring manure and musky Earth.

I stare at her like a creep. Like a drunk guy in a bar staring at my wife and I want to hit him with my flat black spray-painted motorcycle helmet.

She doesn’t look at me.

I love you, I tell her in my mind. I fucking love you so strong, Arle.

“Yeah, I saw that already when we first got here,” she says flatly.

Angus starts to take a shit on the end of the leash in her hands. I know, that sounds like a lie but it’s true.

My guts flop over in my guts. I was expecting something else entirely. I mean that’s what I’ve been telling you up ‘til now, right? You know what I was saying too, don’t you? I had a legit thing happening inside of me and it was taking me away from all this virus blues.

Christian Apple. 137th Pennsylvania. I think they might be one of the few regiments in the entire Civil War who didn’t lose a soldier in combat. Just disease. Just illness. Viruses, I’m sure.

But I had fallen in love with this guy out here so suddenly.

“Look at that name!”

She is watching Angus relive himself instead, the southern ridge looking down on her, down on their native daughter.

The deer up there raising a fist at her.

“Solidarity, sista,” they whisper.

The wild turkeys scratch out her name on the leafy forest floor.

A R L E

A bobcat on a mountain rock glares down at us and wonders what she’s doing with me.

“You could do so much better, Mountain Sister,” he growls, but it is lost in the ghost of a gust that has been kicking back and forth out here for centuries now.

I am still smiling because I am an idiot. I think maybe she is joking with me.

Christian Apple, I want to tell her. But it is becoming increasingly apparent even to me that she has been down this path before and she was untouched by the finger of this magic. His name, for all she cares, is Joseph Miller. Or Henry Bierly. Or Samuel Musser. Nice names, all, but common in these parts. Not so punk rock. Not so hip in the eyes of the wildly unhip.

She is moving away now. Back towards the car.

I watch her go, the way she sways, that country lighting out back my barn.

She is smarter than me and prettier than me and kinder than me and just more than me and the mountains know it.

The dead here know it.

Christian Apple, if he didn’t know it before/ he knows it now.

I get so caught up in my own things, you know?

The dead beneath these broken graves, they know nothing of our poking around. We come here looking for connection, I guess. Or I do. But to what? The past? Some kind of glory or something? I don’t know. But I know she goes with me. To all of them. And she goes because she is looking for something too. Not just doing it for me, dude. Not just graveyard walking for her tried/true man.

Fuck no.

I can feel her digging up this dirt with her eyes, same as me. We scoop it all up, pile after pile, until we hit the snappy rocks, hours later, except they’re not the snappy rocks. They’re the bones. The snappy bones out in the daylight once again.

Oh, those happy happy bones, we fling them up out of their holes/ too long in the dark/ and they run around like puppies/ clacking into each other/ pecking at each other’s ears/ popping straight up into the springtime sky on account of this is unbelievable/ we are free and alive again!

She lets Angus in the back of the Honda where he mucks up my seats with graveyard mud and then she climbs in the passenger side up in the front and checks her phone.

“Go to her,” I hear him whisper. I already know who it is. So do you. It’s obvious but it is what it is so whatever.

“Christian?,” I say. “Christian Apple?”

“Stop saying my name, son!” he cries. “I’m about to put two barking irons up to your thick head and trade spots with ya!”

I stare at him. He is taller than I thought. He has a mustache but no beard. He is old. Not like he was as a soldier, but old like when he finally died long after the war.

“Ummm, okay, Hi!, I just wanted to say thank you for your service and I wish….”

“SHUT YOUR PIE-HOLE AND GO TO THAT LADY AND TRY TO TREAT HER RIGHT, YOU TINY FAT GRAVE ROBBER!!” he roars.

I shudder as the mountains shake.

I run to the car and hop in and start it, skid us across the deep shoulder mud, and out onto the Winter Mountain Road towards town.

I’m breathless/ dumbfounded/ afraid/ what just went down?

Arle looks at phone, never looks up.

I peek at the screen and right away I can see she is looking up the name of a different soldier whose stone we just came across. In the rearview I see Christian Apple standing in the road back there watching us disappear from sight.

You want to put on some music?, I manage to ask her. She fiddles with her phone. Johnny Cash comes on.

We hit a dip in the road, soar like the Dukes of Hazzard.

The Walkin' Talkin' American Mongoose Blues

One summer evening in 1984, feeling good with a belly full of flounder and fries, I flung the screen door open, moved with the swiftness across our front porch, and climbed aboard The Mongoose. If you never saw The Mongoose, which I am guessing you never did: let me help you out with that. She was everything. Chrome. Red pads. Red knobby tires with park dirt up in the treads. Her pedals were heavier than a Huffy’s, more serious it felt like to me. Maybe more determined? I don’t know. It felt like a bike rider’s bike. Everything before The Mongoose had been K-Marty. Plastic chain covers that you had to kick off with your sneakers as soon as you were down in the alley far enough from the house.

My mom would have lost herself if she saw me out the window kicking the chain guard off of a brand-new bike. But you know: she never did: I wasn’t gonna let that happen, obviously. I’d kick it off down in Bally’s Alley; snap at it with a couple sharp pops and it would crack and break and just fall off eventually. Then I would tuck it back in the junk trees under some leaves, my fingers brushing aside dried up locust shells.

You know that sound? The sound of a dried-up locust shell flying off your finger flick?

It’s like a TCK.

One…two…three…TCK TCK TCK.

SO SATISFYING.

Jesus…why? I would pay money to have a coffee can full of dried up locust shells now. Just to flick them with my kids. Off into the yard. Flicking little abandoned exoskeletons or whatever the hell they are…it just feels comforting. Is that weird? It wasn’t if you were 12 years old and body high on fried flounder and you had the chorus from Oh Sherrie playing on a loop in your brain and the sun was starting to go down and you were staring at The Mongoose as if your very life depended on whatever was about to go down.

Oh, there’s a locust shell.

TCK.

Now it’s gone.

GODDAMN THAT FELT NICE!

Chain guards were for dorks. For losers. For shit heads. But they were not for me.

I was a back alley cruiser/ a behind Town Valet Cleaners speed bump hopper/ a Silt Basin deer chaser with the luck to lose. I would take The Mongoose to Josie’s candy store and skid out a long crimson skid mark right up to her front stoop: a winding red suburban Philly rattlesnake: and then drop the bike AS it was still sliding into the steps/ move FROM the bike onto the steps like liquid/ fluid/ husky kid cool/ and open that banged-up white metal screen door with a black silhouetted old time horse-drawn carriage up in the middle of it just below the screen/ and pull myself into that cool mystical darkness on the backs of fifty million Swedish Fish heading to spawn up that raging river of Tahitian Treat which flowed directly beneath the wheelchair upon which sat one old, Italian, mean-ass but also lovely woman with stubble and glasses and a small box full of change which contained all the mixed coins of a life played out once upon a time/ God knows where?/Sicily?/ Philly?/Norristown?/ Pfft if l’ll ever know.

I was The Mongoose between my legs and she was me.

That might sound dirty but I don’t care.

We WERE dirty together. We were one, like sex way before sex. Like something better than sex even maybe?

That evening, out front the house as the neighbors started coming back to the neighborhood from work, cars pulling their extended selves around the tired corner onto our street like big boats moving off the bay/ pulling themselves back into tiny lagoons of stiller water/ there she sat: her kickstand poking down into the grass by a clump of someone else’s small dog stinky summertime sneaker-bound dog shit: shining/ GLEAMING in all that tired daylight, her cheap silver paint accentuating her redder hues, her name in orange and red: MONGOOSE: right down her body bar: I stood there and felt the energy of the deep dark ocean (frozen Acme flounder!) rising up in my blood stream.

I swung my leg over her seat, knocked the kickstand back with the heel of my Nike, and effortlessly, Easy Rider on a Mind Harley heading up Forrest Street, heading to the north and to the east.

Towards New York City.

Towards Iceland.

Towards the Norwegian Sea and beyond that, the eastern most archipelagos of Russia, in all her early 80’s weirdness…just sitting up there, up that long cold beeline from where I was pointing the Mongoose, waiting to devour me and my flounder guts.

At Mrs. White’s house, Babs, her chihuahua, flung herself at me as I rolled by. A small torpedo in the shade of the ivy, she aimed herself, 100 heartbeats a second/ a revving of the engines/ timed it just right and then slammed into the chain link fence, attacking the air with hissing fangs and ridiculous barking as I swung the hard left on 9th Avenue and started past Mr. Anson’s place towards the park.

Lawnmowers cut the sky that evening. Far off humming, buzzing, sputtering. Sometimes I would see a man up ahead, sometimes a kid, pushing the mower, spewing the week high grass onto the freshly-sheared strips of lawn. If I could, I’d swerve my bike out into the street then. If I couldn’t, I’d stand up, raising my butt off the seat, my entire body straight up and down now like some cavalry Custer blazing down the lane, and I would meet the eye of the mower just as I flew by them and they would be sweaty/ high on ketchupy steak or Shake-n-Bake pork chops and broccoli and cheese and cool milk or warm tap water or lukewarm Miller High Life, and I would smile a little at the last second if I knew them or just nod maybe if I didn’t and they would do the same I guess. I don’t really remember. I wish I did.

Gaining speed, down over the sidewalks, uneven bricks giving way to smoother concrete, tree roots pushing entire plates up over the years and forming hops that were so familiar to us, to me and The Mongoose, that we could almost do the entire street with our eyes closed.

That’s what home is, you know?

You can ride a Mongoose down any street and feel the bumps and the jumps before they even happen. With repetition came familiarity. With familiarity came a kind of melding. And once that had taken place, there was nothing separate anymore. Me/the bike/the horrendous sudden rising bricks that would have killed a stranger hurdling at the same speed, they came to me moments before I came to them. I could anticipate entire prairies, entire wilderness passes, just by squinting my eyes and breathing in the new cut grass smell, just by clocking old Verna’s house here: I could begin to lift into the sidewalk pushed up into….a jump….right…..riiiiiiiight…….THERE!

Through the air we would go then, and through the air we went that day: the breeze of movement sliding her finger combs through both sides of my head at once, my scalp tingling, my eyes closed, rejoicing in the air born freedom of thought and expression…living life/ finally!/in the true Utopian land of equality and thought where all men and women are created equal…up there in the middle of that busted sidewalk rampified jump through the never-ending sky that started right across from Michael Brenner’s house and lifted us up up up past the ancient tree that had probably watched kids just a little older than me march off to die in the Civil War…up up up….up.through the summer evening/ up through the green tree top/ past a squirrel’s nest we shot/ Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Squirrel!/ Hello there, Mongoose Serge! Nice night for a ride!/ …up up up/ until I could look down and see with my own eyes the work-a-day men and the second string defensive ends and the divorced moms with drunk ex-husbands and the tube sock’d teenagers and the shirtless old grumps with skin cancer dots dabbing their bald crowns with blue and red bandanas…..all of them down there mowing their little patches grass as the sun was starting her long set in the west…..that fragrance/ that sweet sweet summertime cut grass honey shooting up my nose and through my skull and out the other side and up up up into outer space….

And BAM.

We hit the sidewalk on two tires at once, so fast but we’re both ready for it and my heart is bursting and I have no other thoughts in the world.

Not pain or longing.

Not suffering.

Not sadness at the end of the day.

Money doesn’t cross my mind.

Ladies, they don’t cross my mind.

Even the Phillies don’t cross my mind as I’m hurdling down 9th Avenue in that Conshohocken summer twilight on the back of The Mongoose, past the mailbox at Maple Street, picking up speed as the hill comes on. And she is a big hill, sir, if you have never seen her: out of nowhere, out of flatness, dipping down to Sutcliffe Park, I get scared and it’s why I’m doing this. I want the thrill. I’m no danger boy/ my life is ice cream and boners and baseball cards and I get so high on the dinners my mom makes me and on the smell of all these lawns being mowed every night now, and all I want from life, unconsciously, is to somehow feel that I will be okay. That I will make it. That I will find my way and roll down the hill and live to tell the story to people that love me and need me and would cry if I died.

Even right there, as I race without stopping or thinking, I am beginning, at least, to understand that deep down I am simply trying to prove to myself that I exist. And that that matters. And that I counted for something, God: for anything in the end.

The hill is a mountain and we hit it at full throttle like we have never hit it before.

The Mongoose does not pause.

The Mongoose obeys.

The Mongoose abides.

In the softest loveliest American gloaming, as the sun sets on another summer day, as Bruce Springsteen drinks a protein shake backstage at some colossal stadium and looks down at his setlist and closes his eyes and imagines what that roar is going to feel like when he walks out on that stage in a few moments and counts in the song….

Whan-Tha-Thra-FO!

And as Born in the USA kicks off, as the kick drum slams and the snare drum answers and 60,000 people form a hot wind that wraps itself around the guy at the mic and drives itself into his skin/ his bones/ his blood/ and his brains…as that is happening out in Cleveland or LA or wherever….

I am cresting the hill and taking the slope, standing upright on the Mongoose.

Born down in a dead man’s town!

I feel the wind blowing harder than I’ve ever known.

The first kick I took was when I hit the ground!

People in the stadium are kissing with tongues. They’re drinking beers, fists pumping the air. Some smile at their lovers. I forgive you, asshole! Synthesizers so loud. The crowd is a wave that never stops crashing.

End up like a dog that’s been beat too much!

I grip her red rubber handles until my fingers might pop. I see the lush green grass of the park, but it’s a long drop to go.

Born in the USA out there in the far off twilight! I can’t hear that shit, but isn’t this amazing? Isn’t life so insane?

‘Til you…

Oh God.

Spend half your …

Oh God.

Life…

Oh God.

If you had been there that evening, outside watering your pansies or whatever, letting your little dog take a hot piss on the 1984 grass outside your little house on the steep hill, you would have seen a flash of silver and red shoot by you faster than a bullet train heading straight for the park, for the curb at the bottom of the hill, for the little lake of gravel stones and broken glass that always pooled right before it, and you would have held your breath and waited.

…..justa covering up now!

There I was.

There we were.

Oh look at us go, Mama.

Racing down the hill, racing across the years, racing towards some unknown ending, some big beautiful banging, Racing in the Street into the side of a parked car.

Into the trunk of a tall hard tree.

Into the park.

Bawwwwn in the usA!

Into the kitchen of a lady frying onions.

Into the past.

Bawwwwn in the USa!

Into the future.

That’s it! Into the future!

Into the years to come!

Bawwwwwn in the USA!

Racing straight across the galaxy into the wide open jaws of a global pandemic.

Ima cool rockin’ Daddy in the USA!

And maybe out the other side.

On a fucking Mongoose.

75 Days Ain't Nothing but a Thing

We were in Germany with the band, maybe opening for Steve Earle/maybe not; I don’t remember the specifics. It was Germany: that much I recall. Germany because they had a bar in the breakfast room and at 3am when no one was around except the people I was with who were people I must have known, probably even played in the same band as them, but I don’t remember them now/ it could have been anyone, I guess, but like I was saying: Germany/bar/middle of the night/just us/ and guess what.

The taps were still on.

So we did what any self-respecting American whose Pop-Pops had fought in the War would probably do in those wee small hours. We went back behind that bar and we started pouring our own.

Pint after pint after pint. Pounding them. Laughing. Toasting the Euro-darkness outside the breakfast room/the darkness that could look in and see us when we couldn’t see it. Out there, maybe in some courtyard where you could smoke in the morning and listen to German birds warble a slightly different tune while you ate your sweet pancake thing or your breakfast meatball or whatever/ now it was all just the darkness looking in and stretching back across the land…over the towns and villages/over the lit-up cities and the riverbanks and the fields/ over the sleeping granddaughters of Nazi criminals who had managed to seep back into the system/the flow/the days being washed away, over the barking dogs stood upon dirt stood upon holes filled in with the bones of so many kids, so many young women and old men and school teachers and doctors, oh Christ, they killed them all and now there they are/ down in the dirt underneath the late night dogs and me: pouring my own pints until my teeth hurt from drinking. Until I couldn’t see anything except slits and flashes of the real world continuing on as I stumbled backwards into the path of the same old train I’d fallen under last night. And the night before.

And the night before that. Berlin. Hamburg. Dresden. Cologne. I’d seen them all out the window of the van. I’d walked their streets, turned strange corners and walked into their gothic squares, ordered tiny fine coffees from their Fräuleins/ imagined falling in love with them/oh the complications of all this history and all this distance but you can’t go by any of that, dude…you have to love who you love. None of them even saw me though.

I’d enter these cities where once the world was Hell and unforgivable and strange like the columns of smoke rising up from the bombed-out rubble, and I would ponder all of that and then ponder the gig last night and the people with their smiles and their accents and their kind words:

“Rock and Roll”. They raise their beer. “Rock and roll, motherfucker,” I raise mine back.

And then I would slowly disappear into the gathering fog of my own inebriation.

There I am stumbling to my room door. You see me? Look. I’m fumbling with my wallet, digging down into my backpack, fishing out the key. I’m so good at it, at being wasted. I’m a pro. I never lose my key. I never can’t get back into my room.

I open the door.

I go in the bathroom.

I’m alone.

I’m hammered on pilsners/white wines.

I might have been married at that point or I might not. I can’t remember. It’s all a blur.

But look at me smiling in the mirror/ my eyes a mess/ rolling in my skull/ popping round my sockets.

I loved it, man.

But you end up wondering what might have been.

At least I do.

——————-

I’m 75 days sober today. It’s nothing in the grand scheme of things and I don’t know how else to throw it at you, really. I’m not looking for applause, but then again: why else would I write that shit down and feed it to you right here right now, you know?

On Christmas Eve I uncorked this bottle of wine a friend had given me. I poured a glass while I showed the kids the personalized videos that Santa had sent them. He talks right to them too. It’s a good deal for a few bucks.

“Hell-Oh VI-O-LET! I’m so happy to get to talk to you!”

Stuff like that.

In the background it’s Elves running around talking jive/ reindeer in the snow. I don’t know where they shoot that stuff. Probably in some suburban California parking lot, a truck full of fake snow, rent-a-deers, the works.

The wine was sweet and it made me gag. I was so disappointed inside, pissed off, if I’m being straight with you…I had looked forward to this all day, this drink. (These drinks, as it would end up being.) Red wine was my thing. You know how it all goes. Red wine is ‘grown-up’. It’s sophisticated. I’d come with a civilized excuse to kick off my work shoes and lay that burden down in the evening and once you train your mind to walk that particular plank night after night, you can go on that way ‘til you die. And people do. Lots of them. Wine is excused too. Parents love wine because they have corrupted it and kidnapped it and keep it in the over-lit basement where no one could ever possibly call it sneaky or scheming or even naughty.

You can brainwash the wine. Or the wine can brainwash you. Beers these days/ same thing. When I was growing up, the construction dads sitting next to my dad at Fayette Grill: they all smelled like plywood and Pabst. The old veterans propped up next to Pop-Pop at the VFW: they were pork farts and Genesee.

But the beers nowadays/ you could crawl up inside their crafty names and logos. A mom and dad can unwrap the day from around their back and stand there in the kitchen and let the warm $12 a sixer IPA breezes wrap them up and it’s beautiful. It feels so good. And it’s legit as fuck.

Rock/Roll band guy transitioning into working ‘PRESENT’ Dad…..I never had to think twice about any of this stuff. The drinks were my right, my entitlement. As long as you can avoid the DUIs, keep away from missing work, and steer clear of violence and fighting (or too much of it), no one has any right to say a goddamn thing to someone like me.

I do my shit, man. I earn my keep. I pay my way. I teach my kids.

I drink my booze.

Just like my dad did.

Well, except he was bad news.

Okay, just like my grandfather then.

Except, well he was drunk more often than not too.

My dad and my Pop-Pop. Drunk and mean to their wives.

But that was back in the old days. Back before you could even dream of buying a perfectly quaint fake wood sign that says:

Her Day Starts with a Coffee and Ends with a Wine.

The old days.

Jesus.

—————————————

That last wine, that candy-flavored horse piss I drank on Christmas Eve, that’s when I knew something was up. Years have been chasing me for years now. Eventually they had to grab me/ I ain’t that fast. Depression and anxiety, my god, I have lived with them for so long, smeared my shit all over so many other people, and let them smear theirs all over me.

I think the drinking never helped me at all.

I guess that’s the realization you come to if you stop. My mind cleared up. My meds, I think maybe they started doing what they’re supposed to be doing. Evenings come now and the sun starts sinking low and I feel the gates inside of me unlock, the old caretaker peering out from behind the iron bars.

“It’s wine, son. It’s as old as the hills. You don’t have to worry about it. You’re not a drunk, are ya?! Hahaha! Drink some goddamn wine, Daddy-O!”

And I look at him, his folksy face, he’s so familiar to me, this guy. My oldest friend/ care-taking me through decades of adult life without close friendships, across many miles and years of being true to my own isolated nature, but settling in at sunset for a toast to my own insecurities and endless searching.

I don’t know what the regular evening drinkers look for or want. I spent so much of my life marching with that army and I still don’t know jack shit about their cause, about where their heart hangs.

I only know that you can swallow that setting sun with one first sip once each day. The golden embers of paradise shoot through your sagging veins and you can almost hear the hissing of the live long day as it steams out your valves.

Then you have that next sip and it ain’t the same. I always knew that too. I always knew that the first sip was everything and then everything started rolling out towards lies and sadness.

I wasted so many nights wasted.

I don’t know what comes next.

You probably read this and feel so awkward about it, huh?

I don’t care.

Good.

I chug seltzers, try and do my burpees, buy books about the Battle of Gettysburg.

I lay on the bed in the dark of the morning, feel her feet laying on mine, 5 kids asleep in the next rooms, I’m up before all of ‘em. I can feel my chest rising and falling. I can tell my head is clear and that I’m ready for my oatmeal and my half a grapefruit. For my coffee, buddy, I am ready.

Sitting up, I reach blind for the floor and my body feels good. Clean. No grog. No shooting bolts of blues first thing in the morning. I find my Vans in the dark right where I left them and I slip them on. I still get down. Down on me, down on my mistakes, down on my coming up short, down on my misses/so many misses/ I got so close or at least it always felt that way, but close to what?

I don’t even know.

Probably nothing at all.

I slip into the bathroom, take my pill, look at myself in the nightlight mirror. It’s 5 in the morning. Over in Germany they’re all at work, or sitting in traffic, maybe riding on the trains. A Fräulein pours the hot good coffee for some American guitar player far from home. The birds sing in the trees along the streets that I once walked down/ never to walk down again.

I hit the top steps/ they’re creaky as hell/I try not to wake the kids/ slip down into the downstairs, into the kitchen/ hit the coffeemaker/ say good morning to the dog/ no glasses in the sink.

No one knows I’m here and that feels good to me right now.