Two nights ago.
I hit pause on Tiger King and head to the kitchen for another slice of pizza. I feel good, floaty, happy, relaxed. The kids slowly dissipated from the house by this afternoon/ mine heading to their mom’s, hers to their dad’s. We get these rare hours to try and relax, we take an hour or two, watch an episode of whatever we’re watching at the time.
And what do we do? We watch Tiger King. The most neurotic twisted piece of candy-coated horse shit dipped in cocaine that probably ever existed. Just like Duck Dynasty was. Remember them? Barely? I know. That’s what I’m saying.
But we sit on the couch, eat the pizza, hope no one coughed on it while they were making it. I head to the kitchen and the twilight is streaking through the front room and the soft glow is pinging off the fresh coats of paint we laid on the walls in there this afternoon and that feels like something to me. It feels accomplished and mature. It feels classic in the very deepest sense of the word/ we painted together across another lost American afternoon. We are set to buy this house we’ve been renting since we joined lives. In fact, we were set to sign the papers today, up the street at the lawyer’s office, except something came up on their end and it got pushed back a few days.
As I move past my wife, past the coffee table, past the bookshelves in the middle of the room… stacks of books scattered around on the floor where I piled them/dusted them off/ remembered I had them/I’ll be damned: A Jesse Stuart Harvest…The Nix….Lewis & Clark’s Journals…City on Fire….so many books: and I need to read some of these….but as I move past them they make me feel something like worth, like, “Hey man, you are doing okay. You got books. You got pizza, homie! And now you two are buying this house…oh shit! Look at YOU!”
I say something about all the good work we did today to Arle as I hit the kitchen.
“Hard work pays off!”
It wasn’t that. That would be dumb. So no, I didn’t say that. I don’t remember what I said, to be honest. I just know I mentioned ‘work’. I just know I did.
Then she’s right behind me/ coming into the kitchen right behind me/ which is strange. This isn’t how this goes. We have our unconscious cues and stage positions even in the most mundane moments. I don’t stand right behind her when she’s bushing her teeth. She doesn’t cut through the bathroom when I’m in the shower. I cut through the bathroom when she’s in the shower. Things just unfolded the way they did a year and a half ago when we started living together and that’s how they remain, you know?
So, what gives?
Why is she following me into the kitchen on my pizza run?
It doesn’t make sense.
Now she is talking. We are two grown-ups talking. Two mature, house-painting lovers/ divorcees/ pizza partners/ parents doing the best we can. I am a handful. I know I am. She is a calm and guiding human. Her faults are tough for me to make out. Her presence calms me unlike anyone I have known in this lifetime. And I know damn right well that I don’t naturally repeat that lovely favor for her in exchange. I beat myself up. I wake up, I start training. In the morning pink, I head to the Joe Frazier’s gym of punching yourself in the face and I do that. I don’t know why. I want to give more/better/ but I don’t know exactly how.
Point is: she rolls up in the kitchen unexpectedly in the middle of Tiger King Episode 2 (paused) and I’m happy to see her, even if I’m slightly surprised as well, because I can whiff the clean green paint she gently spread upon our front door today and it’s whirling all up together with the semi-gloss white I put on the trim and between the various colors I can still see us at our separate walls/ NRBQ on the Soundcore Flare/ NRBQ At Yankee Stadium/ her first time hearing it!/ I was so excited to play her that/ to give that small gift/ and I watch her now and love her deeply/ don’t tell her enough/ we are so badass together/ we are going to make it/ I am learning to be a man!/ I would do anything for you, girl.
She talks. She says what she has been holding back for a half hour now.
It could not have been easy to do that, to know when to open her lips, to let these words out.
“Hey, speaking of work, ummm, remember when I woke up from my nap a little while ago? Well there was an email from work.”
Then a hanging dollop of artificial sanguine spittle lands on my hand. It must have fallen from the lips of the universe. Look at us here in the kitchen talking about work and grown-up shit in the middle of a worldwide pandemic! We got this, babe!
Sing it with me, y’all!
We are doing this!
Working!
Jobs!
(SING!, I said!)
Kids.
Cars.
Bills.
Paint colors: Ocean Foam or Laying in a Moss or Nevada Pine Evening Sun on the Hood of a ‘68 Chevy Sasquatch?
Groceries.
We have an extra freezer someone gave us/ One of those ones you can put venison in if you have any or maybe freeze cakes or something. I don’t know, but we have one of those now.!
Fish sticks for 5, count ‘em 5!
Payments.
Mortgage.
Mortgage Payments.
Morgan Freeman.
Don’t they both sound mature and hip and good?
Morgan Payments.
Mortgage Freeman!
We are buying this house, Honeysuckle Rose. And Covid be damned! AM I RIGHT?!
The nano-dream hits the floor, splatters on the warped fake wood beneath our only feet.
“I got laid off,” she says.
Everything melts back into the other stream of existence I have known in my days, the more familiar one. I feel the rush of the effervescence leak out of the room. The paint smell goes sour/ kid puke in the backseat. My insides roll and I am old friends with the habit energy climbing the cellar stairs.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Kicking the door open/ a flaming dust devil shooting across the room into my mouth and my guts. Upset is here.
“We are so fucked,” I say out loud.
She bows her head and weeps and I don’t go to her as quickly as I want to because I’m not sure this is even happening.
What will become of us?
How will we make it? Her out of work, me out of work. The virus. The house. The kids. The virus. The kids.
Mortgage Freeman grins at us. He looks at me and points a finger long as a hickory whip. Then that deep soothing voice
“You, sir, sniff too much paint.”
The he pulls out a little revolver, still smiling, and burns one through his temple.
Radicchio.
That’s the name of the color of his blood as it sprays all over the pizza box and the ceiling.
——————-
We walked away from Tiger King right where we paused it.
I went upstairs and laid on the bed and waited for her to follow me. This time she did not.
I lay there by myself with the box fan blowing on me, trying to expedite my thoughts so I could fast forward through all of the uncertainty laid out before us. In my head, I grasp for anything. I’m panicked, moving through scenarios that all end in tragic disaster.
It’s a drag. I want to save us. But I am rarely ever able to save anyone. That’s just the truth. I punch myself in the throat but there’s no one around to see it/ to ask what’s wrong/ to tell me I’m not as bad as I think I am/ (You’re worse, Pops!).
So I write it down here instead. Disclosure. I open the barn doors and there’s a fucking tornado in there and…here.
You hold it.
I text her.
Come lay down
Ding. She texts me back.
I’m sorry for everything.
That’s what it says. Can you believe that? My heart breaks. She doesn’t deserve this. I know it’s happening everywhere to everyone, or at least it seems like that, but I can’t help wanting to lash out. To jaw someone. To ramp up my blood and heat up my heart and start swinging with what? Words? What else do I have? I’ve got nothing, man. Just what I showed up here with. Just what she fell for, I guess.
That hits me then.
I can’t right now.
I cannot be this small. This loose with my fear.
In a moment of truth/ I picture her downstairs and Mortgage Freeman is massaging her shoulders as she cries quietly in the chair at the end of the island. She is strong/ mountain strong. But right now, even the strongest need help, you know what I mean?
There’s a trickle of blood mapped out down the side of Mortgage Freeman’s face and he seems almost flirty if he didn’t have that bullet hole in his noodle.
I am made of things yet undiscovered and I will be goddamned if I will miss this now, this reckoning unfolding before my eyes.
I must strike at once.
My walls are steep but I throw myself at them anyway.
Shut up and come up
here. I love you! We will
get through this!! Come
lay with me!!!
———————
A few minutes later, as I’m stressing/ trying to decide if I should fast-track the Patreon thing we’ve been talking about me starting for my writing, the bedroom door opens and it’s Arle.
She moves like she always moves, gliding, perfect posture, I want to crack a fence post on the side of someone’s cheek, that’s how much I love her walk.
She lays down beside me.
I wrap her up in my arms, she’s warm.
She puts her face in my shoulder and I can feel her close her eyes.
I pull her tighter.
“Paint huffer!”
It’s Mortgage Freeman standing over by the closet. Only I notice him. I touch my finger to my lips. Shhhh.
He opens the closet, backs in/ discombobulated, closes the door.
—————
We signed the papers for the house yesterday. Before we went, I made a big tadoo about wearing face masks to the lawyer’s office. It’s a block away from our house, and this town we live in, man, it is super small. The chances of us encountering people who want somehow missed the memo and come close to us in a rush of excitement at spotting us is essentially zilch.
“But,” I tell Arle, “what about when we are there! At the lawyer’s! What if there’s virus all over the place? We gotta wear masks!”
We don’t have masks. We have bandanas. As we are fixing to head up there I douse two paper towels in Formula 409 and stick them in a Ziploc. I shove two pens in my coat pocket so we can sign stuff without touching foreign pens.
Upstairs Arle is working on her hair as I slide by her into the bedroom. I take out my box of bandanas and I choose two of them.
One is Nebraska Arcus Cloud Clover in a traditional pattern.
The other one is Walmart Woodland Camo.
I put the camo one underneath the clover one because around here if you walk down the street with a camo mask on your face in broad daylight: you run the risk that if someone sees you there is at least a chance that they are thinking this might be the moment they have been waiting for for a long long time now. Thoughts get clouded. News blurbs collide. Then they shoot you with an AR-15.
Arle ties on a dainty western one that makes her look cute. Mine make me look insane.
She has hers pulled up across her face the whole walk up there.
I have mine down around my neck like a douche.
I hand her a doused wipe as we approach the door. She uses it to turn the knob. Inside there’s not a lot of people. I’m nervous, fidgety. Arle is poised and graceful. She is pretty in her mask. No one else wears one. I never pull mine up.
To our house closing in the middle of a global pandemic: I wear two big green bandanas around my neck. Like a leprechaun cowboy.
We sign our names.
We buy our home.
——-
On the way back, Arle gives me shit in the alley for not wearing my mask when all I did was bitch about how we had to wear them all day long.
“I KNOW!,” I tell her. “I was embarrassed! I didn’t want to offend anyone!”
I also say other stupid shit and by the time we hit the yard, I have said something wrong and ruined a moment, I guess. Arle goes upstairs and lays down as I keep painting the walls.
But it doesn’t feel right.
I put Miles Davis on. It doesn’t make any difference.
I eat a granola bar and look around the kitchen. I’ve covered the walls here with the kids’ art from school. If it’s colorful, I put it up. Cardinals. Snowmen. Gum ball machines. I put them all up. In the kitchen. Arle never says a word about that. She swears she digs it, but I don’t know. It’s a lot. Most people would probably ask me to back off the Kindergarten classroom look, but she never does.
These are our walls now.
Or at least they feel more like ours than they did a few hours ago.
Nothing ever really belongs to us though, you know?
I mean, reality’s endless filters and flags and loose co-operatives dictate a world image that seems to indicate that we are people named this and that…. living in a country called this or that….buying a house or a car or whatever with money that stands for this or that….losing sleep in the long dark night/ tossing and turning over whether we will be able to continue keeping our share of this or that or the other thing…when really you don’t have to too many layers of the symbolic onion to recognize that '‘ownership’ is just another makeshift table/ three walnut shells/ a little crowd gathered round/ find the little silver ball, mister!/ which shell is she under this time?/ place yer bets, people.
I put down the cutting brush on the lip of the can and head upstairs.
Arle is under all the covers. Nothing can get her there. Not the unemployment blues. Not the husband who was a fool. Not the politicians on TV. Not the virus down the road, all spread out and stalking you ‘til the end.
“Hey!” I say.
Mhemw. That’s what she says from under the pillows on her face.
“What are you doing?! You’re being silly! Come down and paint with me! I didn’t mean to say dumb shit. It’s just my way of proving I’m still alive to you.”
Then I add, subtly, “I’m sorry.”
Mhemw.
I don’t understand the word she says, but I do understand the tone. That is something that comes with certain territories. The closest people in your world/ you can understand their tones even from under an avalanche. If you’re lucky in this life: you can communicate with a very select few….maybe even only one, in the old ways, in the ancient ways that existed even long before language gummed things up.
I know what she means.
She means: “Okay, asshole. I forgive you. We bought a house. I love you. Wear a mask so you can’t talk as much, okay?”
Then I head back downstairs. The future is uncertain. Miles Davis blows his horn. The joint smells like paint. The books are on the floor. The room is bright and beautiful, new evening shards of fading sun shattered all over our worn-out rugs.
You don’t really own anything in the end/ you just borrow it.
I hear her coming down the steps.
I hear her coming ‘round the mountain when she comes.
I pick up the brush/ keep going.