Four Spanish Nights/ Love Is Alive.

In a hotel room in Pamplona I hit the buttons that make the Skype work and shove another cookie in my mouth while the electricity does it's thing and rolls out to Pennsylvania somehow. I get lucky and after a couple rings Monica appears on the screen, Henry in her arms. He's smiling at the kitchen cabinets. That's just who he is.

We talk for a while. I tell her more stuff about Spain, about the show tonight. She tells me it's harder than hell being alone with the kids. As she speaks: I finger the cookies on the bed by my side, like an outlaw petting his itchy Colt. I tell her I saw a bullring. Her eyes tell me she could care less. She tells me she took the dogs to the lake and Violet fell in the mud. I rub a chocolate cookie with drunky-drunk fingers, trying to be gentle/not being gentle; the same as I'd rub a Spanish thigh if I were a different man, a different rocker in a different life. And hotter.

Henry gazes at the screen back in my kitchen and spots me in it and raspy grunts one of his laughs out.

"Hi Henry!", I say.

He darts his fist at the screen, trying to grab a handful of me.

Monica tells me she is taking the kids to some kinda craft show on Saturday.

I tell her I saw a bullring. She says I know/you said that already.

There can be romance in separation if you play your cards right. People can miss one another, cry down the Skype. Absence can make you realize what you have when you don't have it for a spell. Hearts can grow wiser given time to beat it out all alone.

Or, in our case, in my case: you can cut straight to the chase, man.

I look at Henry. He's smiling as a bead of drool rolls down his chin and grows into a Drool-manchu. My boy. My lad.

He doesn't understand English at all.

"Hey, can you make me a dirty video, maybe?" I ask my wife this with little fanfair. I say it matter-of-fact. Seven years of marriage has taught me nothing, I guess. I'm less smooth than ever. I'm smoothless. I'm lame.

"What?" she says.

"A video. With the camera. Make me a short video, a sexy one. Could ya?"

Henry reaches out to grab at the sound on the screen. His slobber leak is amazing. And he's smiling at my suggestion. Or through it.

"Why?"

Why?

Seriously?

Why?

Christ, now I need to spell it out? Why would I want a smutty home clip of my wife when I'm rolling across Spain drunk-eating fucking cookies by myself in hotel rooms?

I let the explanations/reasonings settle into her skull without a word.

"Can you make me one?", I say, buttering up my tone a little with the subtle mellow of a Peep Show door guy.

"Um, maybe, I dunno. We're going to the craft show on Saturday," she pauses. "We're busy. I'm busy. I hardly have time to do my work."

I switch gears. I try an approach with more pop. More zing.

"Yeah, I know, and you're doing awesome, but have a couple cold beers tonight and you know...just get loose. And you know, just like, relax. Put on that wifebeater I like," I say, all helpful and all. Then I add: "With no bra."

She blushes a little and I am startled that she isn't exactly blowing me off, though the idea of a nice private home video of Nasty Monica still seems like a pipe dream to me to be honest. But she's still on the screen, still Skyping, so I'm a little hopeful.

I stumble through a few more Director's tips but she cuts me off.

"I know how to make a video, Goddammit. OK?"

This brings me a little pause. I never got any videos before. So I guess someone must've. But not me. Fucking bastards. Fucking bitch-ass little bitch boys.

Whatever, I'm not nearly drunk enough to get sidetracked up a jealous tree. I want a video too. Now more than ever.

Henry buzzes his lips at the screen and from a hotel room in Norther Spain I watch his spittle land on the computer screen back in Centre County.

"You could maybe get wine, you know?", I offer. "Some nice candles. Make it a thing. It could be fun."

"Oh yeah, that's just the kind of thing I wanna look forward to when I finally get the kids down. Make a smut movie by myself."

To be frank: I am running out of ideas here. Our marriage isn't all that magical or sensual. Sometimes I count her laughing at my commentary jokes during MIKE & MOLLY as her having a Big O. So, I start doing what I do. I start giving up/letting out slack/ moving on to thinking about my Euro-cookies and the sandwich made with the lunchmeat I hoarded back at the dressing room of tonight's club.

Then she does it. Says it.

She opens 55 gallon drums of tie-dyed doves that whirl out into the room and start banging into the ceiling and the walls. She takes her hand and waves it and White Castle sliders shoot out of directly into my face, like a runaway firehose spewing greatness all over the sheets I'm on.

She takes a seven pound rainbow trout and rams my hook right through it's snout and I am liding down the creek like Brad Pitt in that fishing movie. I'm hooked into a whale here, people. A motherfucking whale.

Henry punches me in the eye throiugh the screen and cackles wildly.

"Alright, maybe," she says. Out of pity, I guess. Or curiosity perhaps. Whatever. It doesn't matter to me now. Because she's saying things. Big things. "I'll see if I can do something. And I gotta go. Violet's waking up from her nap and I have to feed Henry something. Say bye Henry!"

And before I can say my own bye: they're gone. Sucked back into the Skype pipe. There's just the jpeg I picked out for her number staring back at me.

The End.

Huh?

What?

Did she send me one?

You filthy little fucker! Ha! You wanna know dontcha?

Ha!

Let me just say this.

It was the greatest email attachment in the history of this beautiful/nasty world.

The Trouble With Ghosts.

"Where there's a will, and there is a fucking will, there's a way, and there is a fucking way."

                                              -Teddy Bass, Sexy Beast

One winter night, long long ago, my mom put me and my brother in our early 80's snow shit. It was the hot K-Mart stuff made of burlap and painter's plastic and fake fur from a fake fur company down some industrial street in semi-urban China; the kind of stuff that doesn't breathe. At all. This was pre-breathable. Pre-Patagonia/Pre-Old Navy/Pre-whatever merciful winter stuff kids might get today. My jacket zipped up to my neck and if I was lucky: I didn't catch my waddle of throat skin in there and feel the mighty sting of a trillion pissy wasps trying to eat the core out of my Adam's Apple.

It was the hot stuff and it was all we knew and she put us in it/sealed us up in our own juices/opened the font door/ and took us down the front steps for the very last time.

We left him alone there, my dad. We left him alone there, probably asleep; probably nicely buzzed and passed out. I don't remember, really. I do remember that he didn't follow us out. He didn't call up after us as we waded through the snow, towards the corner where the bars were. He didn't holler anything like "Come back," or "I'm sorry," or whatever.

He didn't say stuff like: "You're not taking my boys away fom me!"

We just walked out/shut the door behind us/and went away. In my big winter boots lined with mildewy drywall insulation, I felt my toes get cold. It felt really weird, the walk, because Mom didn't have time to throw socks on our feet. One second were in the pajamas, getting ready for bed, the next: we were being zipped up and dropped into the boots without socks.

It felt cold and strange on my feet. Strangely liberating too. As if I'd discovered some new way of walking around out in the frozen world, some new naked way of kicking down the winter streets, my one glove tucked up in my mom's glove. My brother's glove tucked up in her other one.

I remember staring up at the street light as Mom dragged us around the corner. In the super quiet: I remember looking up at the billion tiny flakes falling slowly through the ball of light. I remember actually pretending they were vast galaxies of burning stars that we were flying up through.

The three of us soaring out in space.

Together.

We got to my Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop's around the corner in like three minutes, I guess. My mom-mom was at the door waiting/peering out/ plowing the snow with her evening eyes. Pop-Pop was still up too, which was weird. But there he was, in his chair by the eagle lamp, a can of cream ale on the table.

He smiled at us as we peeled off our coats and kicked off our boots.

I put my little nude foot down in a melting wad of slush on the carpet.

"Hi man!", he said. "Want some ice cream?"

I did. And I had a bowl. And it lasted for a lot of years, too.

================

There is a story behind every story, I suppose. Your take. My take. We live the same shit slightly differently, coming in fast to the same bullseye from slightly different angles, like two or three darts launched by two or three different guys in the same bar, listening to the same jukebox. That's just how it goes when it comes to perspective, to the paradigm. The ladies at the bar sip their cocktails and watch three darts tap into the cork; some of them see where they land exactly. Some of them don't. But who really cares in the end.

We moved out here to Pennsylvania this year, me and Monica. We moved back to where my family is, with new kids that they could pick up and swing around and spoil with kisses and little cheap gifts they found at Target or at Rite-Aid. Mom-Mom is gone though. And my Pop-Pop too. They woulda loved the hell out of these kids and if they could somehow find a way to just show up for an hour on our big porch, dammit I know they would. Just to run their fingers through Violet's curls for a minute or two. Just to smooch Henry on his sour milk mouth and taste his hot living breath. Even a ghost would be delighted. And who knows: maybe that shit goes down all the time. How the hell would I know?

Anyways, months go by now where some of the grandparents love these kids and some of them simply don't. And I wanna fucking get in my car and drive to other states and kick down some fucking doors with the soles of my Timberlands and burst into bedrooms of sleep at three AM and grab people by the back of their hair to turn their faces around toward mine, a half inch from the tip of my beak, and tell them how sad I am that they keep fucking it up, not just for them, but for little kids too.

For little beautiful kids with eyes that shine and souls that glow and small hands made out of God Clay and Magic Blood and Celestial Bone: they keep fucking it all up.

The other grandparents show so much love. They screech with joy at the sight of the little ones. They send Halloween candy through the US Mail and their fingerprints are all over the wrappers and their hearts are all up in the melting chocolate. And they make me so happy/so proud.

But it's the other ones that get me.

I wanna haunt them all the live-long night.

Today.

Tomorrow.

And in all the worlds yet to come.

And I intend to somehow.

The Walkin' Talkin' Pink Mountain Coffee Boy Blues.

Down through the morning, I cut a path to the coffee pot in the dark, a dog at my heel in case I might just happen to drop a steak or a rack of ribs or something. They never lose hope, the dogs. I cut a path into the kitchen and flip on the stove light and make the brew in the quiet of a sleeping house.

I drink a cup as soon as there's barely enough dripped out. I don't wait for the whole thing. Fuck that. I don't care if it tastes better if it's all in there or not. I know what I want and sometimes I know how to get it.

The shit hits my veins and rollercoasters down into my heart with hard morning speed. I hear the jangle of the dog's tags as he realizes I am useless to him, that there is no bratwurst gonna slip from my grip. Same as yesterday/same as tomorrow probably.

Over the sink, I stand there with my reindeer mug and my baby monitors and glare at my puffy reflection in the black window. There's an old mountain out there in the freeze, with whitetails moving cautiously out of the dried cornfields and up onto it's rocky trails/ coyotes shitting in the cornflake leaves/ bears staring up at constellations/ turkeys dreaming turkey dreams high up in the pines, their crazy-ass turkey feet all wrapped around the rough bark of boughs where nothing ever happens but bird sleep.

I stand there looking at my fat face in the dark glass and I know there's a city I can't see out there on the invisible mountain. An animal city, with heavy heavy traffic moving away from the light of some human kitchen. A Manhattan of beasts oozing it's way up moss-rock streets away from my pin prick glow.

"Aaaaargh." I hear Henry in his monitor. He talks his gibberish and I wait for it.

Small thump. That's him popping his forehead off the slats of his crib. He's standing up then, I know. Pulled himself up the wood, into the nightlight haze where he can see a little bit of his room. I clock all this through the tiny speaker and I suck down some more coffee and I forget all about the mountain and the deer and all that and I smile like a motherfucker.

"Waaaaaaahhhhh." Crackles of something real and definite.

Here I come, bro.

Thump/thump/thump. He headbutts the cage.

Here I come.

==========================

Henry rides a pink chair because that's what his sister rode and I easily spend thirty bucks on half-decent bottles Rioja but have never even once actually thought about forking out for an unpink seat for my man. That's how it goes, I guess.

Before I had kids, right before Violet was born, I remember having a shitload of one-sided conversations withy my maker, me telling him all this stuff about how gracious I was to be getting a daughter and how I was gonna live my life for her and take all my petty bullshit and toss it to the four winds. Listen, I told him, you don't know me as well as you might think, man. But you watch. I am going to live my life for this kid. Whatever she needs, I'ma get it. Somehow or another.

And we got her the pink chair with plastic buckle straps so she couldn't fling herself out of there. And I would sit there in the mornings and in the afternoons, in the nights, and I would spoon her out little clumps of peach moosh, little clumps of green pea moosh.

God, how I loved her. And I still do too.

And with Henry it's the same thing all over again, you know? So much love. Overwhelming Crazy Love. Exploding hearts while I wipe the crap off his nuts with half a dozen Wal-Mart unscented wipes at once. I fill landfills with dirty wipes all on my own and I don't think twice about it because it's all so massive and I would ruin a hundred Earths just to clean the #2 off my boy's wee.

But, sometimes I wonder if it's enough though.

Or is it ever gonna be enough.

I wake up and suck down half-brewed coffee and listen for their cackles coming across the two Sony Monitors I drag around and then I go fetch the boy when he wakes up and starts fussing and I bring him down in my arms and set him down. And man, he smiles up at me like I'm the only face in the world he ever wanted to see this morning.

Guy Smiley.

Guy Smiley sitting there in a used pink-ass baby chair while I pop the BUY IT NOW button with my fat finger and order another dumbass record off Ebay and drink my coffee by a wild mountain.

All before the sun, yo.

All before the sun.