Tooth Marks In The Wood.

I just got done shoving some more joint compound into a hole in the bathroom wall when Monica called up the steps that Amy Winehouse was dead. Some stuff fell off my blade, but I kept pushing what was left into the old plaster. Finish the job, I told myself. Hide the hole, motherfucker.

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My daughter is half a year from three now and she talks a lot. We'll be in the Honda, cruising down the road towards the Home Depot or the beer distributor and she'll be back there in her seat all strapped in, the summer gushing through the window/making her curls medusa, and out of nowhere she'll holler,"AIRPWANE! AIRPWANE! OVER DARE! IT"S AN AIRPWANEOVERDAREOVERDAREAIRPWANELOOKANAIRPWANE!"

And sure enough me and her mom will lean out over the dash and look up in the sky and see some jet high out over the world, dangling from a cloud.

"There it is!," we'll say.

"AIRPWANE! DARE IT IS! OVER DARE! IN THE SKY!," Violet will say.

Airplane: full of people; full of businessmen with tilted necks gazing down into reflectionless laptops; airplane full of LAX-bound Sikhs; full of peanuts and Diet Pepsi. It ain't our airplane. We ain't riding on her and probably never will. We don't know anyone up there probably either. Probably won't ever meet anyone who was taking that particular flight. And, even if we did, how would we ever know they were way up that afternoon, soaring above our little car/little ant down between the cornfields?

Still, the plane becomes a wonderful little part of us, and of our proverbial ride. This little girl who melts my chest open and dumps my molten heart out all over ten differnt floors a day: she called it out with such lovely gusto.

Aiplane.

Airpwane!

So, in some ways, that thing is ours now. Forever. We rode on underneath her, living our life as she passed us by. Then, one of us tore through the wind in her eyes and saw that bird cutting across the bluebird sky and pointed her little right index finger/marzapan stub and announced it like it was something she'd lost long ago and just re-found.

And so: shit. That makes it as much our airplane as anyone elses, I guess.

Maybe even more.

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Violet in the morning. Six-ish. Seven-ish if I'm lucky. Standing at the peak of these carpeted stairs in a house we barely even know yet, Violet grins a little: like a bashful grin, something shy coming over her. She nudges a pillow-matted curl out of her eye and giggles a little, nervously.

I know what's up.

I know what's up down here on my perch on the fourth step down.

My sweetheart is scared.

We touch eyeballs for a sec, but it doesn't last: and almost instantly she throws her look back down the long stairwell.

She doesn't want me to know. That she might be scared of these deep old stairs.

I act smooth. Or I try to.

"Remember to use your butt, girl," I tell her. "Slide down like we practiced. One Cheek. Two Cheek."

She rolls around on the upper landing and pretends to be getting in to a conversation with a plastic Wal-mart cow.

I let them have a couple private words before I come back in.

"Hey Violet, you can do it!", I tell her, a little pep in my tone. A fat bald little coach standing there on the tip of my tongue, his whistle dangling down a red lanyard, his clipboard curled up in his one arm like a sleeping baby.

"C'mon Violet, you can do it!"

She grins/her eyes give her away/she looks for a way out.

"A COW!" she screams.

She holds up the plastic heifer and looks him in the face. "A COW A COW RIGHT HERE A COW!!!"

Whadya do, you know?

"Oh yeah," I say. I know I sound dejected too, but this is before coffee and I'm bursting with old piss and I just wanna get down these steps and walk out into the kitchen, into the new day. But, I sound like a douche.

I pump some DaddyNeon up from my guts, up into my face. I get more interested.

"OH LOOKY THERE; IT'S A COW! RIGHT THERE IN VIOLETS HAND! SHE FOUND A COOL MILK COW!"

She digs that and I can see that right away.

I lay on some thick butter.

"Why don't you give Daddy that cool cow and I will help him down the steps while you come down on your own because you are a big girl and you can do it, Violet!"

"BE CAILFUL BOOTS!", she hollers as she slides her tiny ass down a step. And then another.

Boots is Dora's monkey friend. Duh.

"I got the cow!", I assure her after she gives him up to me to sherpa down the morning slope.

"CAILFULBOOTS!", she says.

We slip our asses down from one carpeted step to the next. Same as we did yesterday. Same as we'll do later this afternoon.

At the last step, I turn around and watch her descending just behind me, concentration smeared all over her face like her jelly gets.

I love her so much. So fucking much. I hand her the cow as her feet hit the floorboards.

She brushes him aside with a wave of her hand.

As if to say: what cow, daddy?

As if to say: that never happened, Holmes.

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Fear wells up in me all the time and I try not to let it show, but I know I suck at that and my wife would confirm that. You can't keep your kids from falling down off shit or splitting their lips open on the very tables we set up to hoist their small dinners toward the heavens. Bees are gonna find that soft skin and they are gonna be fucking excited as hell when they hold their asses in the air and wave 'em around and then send the stinger home some early evening when you're all relaxing out in the yard, putting flowers in the dirt and feeling all good about yourselves because you're such a quality time family and look at us out here digging in Mother Earth together but not in some dirty hippie kinda way but more in a Beekman Boys vibe and aren't we just so....BAM.

The kid gets stung. Hell comes calling.

I can't stop it. I can't stop anything, really.

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I would give anything to have all the dope in the world out in my garage. And all the fast cars and all the bees. I wouldn't care if taking the bees away fucked up the planet. I wouldn't give two shits if their missing honey started making it rain hot glue balls.

I would give all my limbs and my eyes and my teeth if that was the deal, if I could stave off all the goddamn possible bee stings. 

Not being able to makes me crazy. And super sad.

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If you YouTube Amy Winehouse you can see what you wanna see. You can watch her in Serbia, all messed up. Her eyes seem like some lighthouse miles away over rough rough seas. You see a moment, a flash of glow. And then it's gone/out/blocked by raging whitecaps. People boo her/a new song kicks in/the people sing the words/it falls apart/people boo her/

You can check her out just a few hours before she died too. Dancing her kooky dance onstage over in London, a few blocks from her house, cheering on her teenage friend as that young girl sings a good song. Maybe Amy was loaded that night. I can't tell. She seemed happy though.

Or you can watch her sing back before she got stung bad.

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Goddamn, that little girl could sing.

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They will have burned her body and her bones by now. And now, no matter how much you maybe wanna stop it, there will be nothing left but the songs and some dust and whatever she left there on her nightstand, on her kitchen counter.

It won't be a half-written song or anything like that, either. It'll be something way more sad and way more heart-breaking.

A half-eaten bag of salt'n'vinegar chips. A novel with a bookmark in it.

A pencil with tooth marks in the wood.

Bad Henry.

The night of the day my son was born, I cracked open a cool pilsner and leaned back on the rear legs of my vinyl hospital chair with one eye on the door: so I wouldn't get busted by some fresh third-shift nurse/ contraband hound dog. I had the sixty dollar bouquet for a backdrop, my greasy hair tickling the vase glass, feeling it slide just a little back on the wide vented windowsill; the rooms they stick you in an hour after the kid arrives: you either put the flowers under the window looking out at other people's rooms, or you put 'em on the toilet with the lid down. That's the only two choices. So, when I popped back in with my beer bottles clinking away in my jacket pockets, and bags of cheese and olives and hummus, I moved right towards the windowsill and nudged a little space in between the box of granola bars and the keepsake New York Times from Henry's birthday and set the flowers I'd bought for my wife down into their little clearing there.

Then, we smiled and talked and kept looking over at the plastic bassinet, at the new baby sleeping off the long strange trip. I'd break a wad of feta off the block with my fingers and shove it in my mouth, watch the door, sip my beer, tuck it down in its hiding spot on the cold tiles.

Letterman came on. The Letterman music. Happy horns. I wasn't paying that much attention.

Then I heard that announcers voice say Hank Aaron.

My heart cannonballed into my gut pond.

I screamed.

Monica looked at me, startled.

Hank Aaron, I said. Hank Aaron! HANK FUCKIN' AARON!

It was all just too strange, too cosmic to believe. I'd never seen Hank Aaron on Letterman before. Or on any late night shit really. I'd seen a lot of Foo Fighters. And a tractor trailer load of Seth Rogans. But, Hank Aaron: no.

My chest started caving in on itself. I really couldn't talk or understand what was going down.

I slugged down the rest of one beer and ripped the cap off another. I stopped worrying about the door, about the nurses.

Sometimes things happen for reasons. Unexpected, surprising you with hot blasts of synchronicty and kismit, you are sitting there exhausted next to your sleepy wife in her hospital get-up and all of the sudden God or the Gods or somebody decides that you've been cool today, you been decent somehow, and they tilt over off the side of a throne the size of a dozen suns and they jiggle their fat God fingers and sprinkle a little magic glitter dust down through the stars. Down past the spinning planets and the martians zipping around out there in their Le Cars, down through the solar winds whipping across the black wilderness of forever, so that by the time it rains down on your tiny unimportant soul breathing in and out between a jug of supermarket Kalamatas and lukewarm brewskis, its just a few flakes is all.

But, man, a few flakes of that shit is all you need. Trust me.

So, my gift came in the form of Hammerin' Hank. The same dude I'd spent the entire morning watching on YouTube videos swatting drug-free pure rockets into the sweltering Atlanta nights long ago, as the chemicals slow dripped into my wife's veins and my boy began the long slide home. I'd been obsessed with Hank the last few weeks, as we'd settled more and more on naming our son Henry. We'd toyed with other names: tossed them around and felt them in our hands and our heads, trying to figure out whether he was maybe a Charlie (Charlie Brown). Or an Oliver (Oliver Twist).

But Henry was the name that kept showing up neon.

Henry: the son of a friend, an eighteen year old kid, gorgeous kid with a mop of black hair and an acoustic guitar under his arm in a million pictures I'd seen of him.

Henry: Hank. Hank Williams: the greatest loneliest voice who ever sang a song.

Henry: a king's name if there ever was one. Henry The Fifth. A Shakespearean guy. A name with power, and infamy.

Henry: the conflicted soldier in the best Civil War story ever written. The Red Badge of Courage.

Henry:  Hank. Hank Aaron. The greatest long ball hitter who ever played the game. And more than that, a young guy who stared hate and odds in the face with dignity and quiet peace. A beautiful guy, I kept thinking. A great great American.

When all of that swirled up in my head, I just turned to Monica one Saturday afternoon about three weeks before her due date and told her we had to name our little buddy Henry. It just made all of the sense in the world. His name was Henry.

It always was.

It just takes awhile sometimes.

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Monica got a little grin on her when she saw how giddy I'd become. I was a little buzzed on my beers and my new daddyhood and she could probably see a little boy there right beside her on either edge of her mechanical bed for a minute or two. She didn't say much that I remember. She just watched me. I liked it.

I kept talking through Letterman's monologue and the commercials and all. I kept jabber-jawing about how I just couldn't believe what a sign this was. How the hell did these people come up with Hank Aaron as a guest on the night our boy came into this world. How the hell did they know. Hank didn't have anything to promote. No books or salad dressings. He wasn't the new coach of the Yankees or anything. Hell, spring training was just getting underway; baseball was still just some tapered icicle hanging off the carport for cold weeks now.

But there he was. Here he was. Hank Aaron.

I don't even remember what the hell he said, to be honest. I remember he was charming and radiant. I remember his big beaming smile and his soft southern drawl washing over me and my new son and my wife and our cheese and our flowers, as if the room was pumped full of real night air, real chilled lovely natural air. Letterman was bigger and better than ever too. He knew what he had there on the couch. He knows shit like that. He likes Bradley Cooper and all, respects them and all. But still, after all this time, he knows where the gold is hid.

I remember Hank's big grin when his time was up. Him and Dave shook hands. Then they cut to a commercial and just like that he was gone from the room.

I slipped another cap off another bottle and eyeballed the door. I changed the damn channel too.

Monica understood.

Little Henry, he understood.

They weren't gonna march out some band or some actress that we were gonna give a shit about after all that.

We just watched the late news instead, my heart doing little girl cartwheels, one right after another, way down inside of me tilted back in my hospital chair.

Back Then/ Yesterday.