My Beating Heart Was Just A Theory

When I was growing up in the 1970's, the Kingdom of Adults seemed so enchanted and wonderful.

Standing down around my parents knees I watched as my dad blew carefree cigarette smoke into the sky while my mom twirled around in the back yard, spinning and smiling to the Doobie Brothers' 'Listen To the Music' on the Kmart radio laying beside the still hot burger fat bbq.

Life was beautiful back then, for a couple of minutes anyway. My dad snapped the pull-away tab off of another warm can of Pabst and I sighed at a butterfly dancing on a thermal.  My mom smiled down at me and my heart was lifted up by chains tied directly to the sun and the moon and the stars.

I was 7 or 8, a little kid standing on the half-dead summer grass of some suburban backyard not much bigger than two station wagons, and I think I remember beautiful waves of safety rolling through my young body. They were talking breezes, hushed Stevie Nicks sexy witch voices whispering to me that our family had so much love that we would probably never even be able to use it all up; not in this lifetime and probably not in the next one either.

You know how these things go though. Ever since the goddamn Cotton Gin and the locomotive changed everything, especially love/from farm love to factory love, there is always some catch, some loophole; there is constantly something terrible and swift swishing around in the kiddie piss just a football field away from the fat sausage pillars of this crowded happy beach.

Divorce came along and my world exploded and I saw my dad a few times after that and then I never saw him again for like 25 years. There wasn't a damn thing I could do about it either. All I could do was stand in the dugout at Little League practice and watch the other dads who had showed up to coach or holler at the umps.

Looking back now, what a fool I was. I was just a dumb kid, still sniffing around the dried-up shit turds of a once powerful, awesome creature that was long gone by then. Love, the love I had been born into, the kind of unshakable forever family love that I thought I had been born into, the kind we all deserve to be born into, that kind of love was so far from me by the time I was ten that I'd stand there chewing on some gnawed-up strand of rawhide lace dangling off of my mitt, breathing in the soft menthol smoke that had just been dilly-dallying around down in the mines of some other daddy's lungs, and for whatever reason it would remind me of my own dad, right there in the middle of the stupid idiotic game.

I was ten and someone else's cigs were tugging at my heartstrings.

I didn't ask for any of that.

I hated my mom so much then: for letting my dad go, for letting him run away from her, from us.

And I hated my dad for picking the booze, for letting it run over him like a steamroller that just appeared at our back gate that summer afternoon three decades ago and plowed us all down into nothing but ghosts of who we'd been.

And this whole mess sliding down out of the bright blue innocent sky before that dumbass Doobie Brothers song was even over.

--------------------------------

That same song came on the satellite radio the other day while I was out driving around, trying to fight the urge to buy a pack of cigarettes. I haven't smoked in almost a year which might not mean much to you, but to me it's pretty big deal. I've felt better. I always laughed when people would say that, but it's kind of true I guess. Maybe that's why they say it to begin with. Anyway, the song reminds me of something I can't put my finger on, something old and good but lost to me now that I'm older.

Pink sun slithering, I was heading due west down the country road not far from where I live and the moment that the tune came on I felt something hot shoot up through me like dope in my blood.

I wanted to smoke really bad in the moments right before it came on, but then as soon as it started playing, I didn't care anymore about any of that. I lost the urge, just like that. Weird, huh?

That's how we get through life, I guess. One second you are sure you are done for and then boom: you pull yourself together somehow.

Or you don't.

------------------------------------

I have a son on the way.

He's my third child and I love him so much already that I get straight-up belly sick thinking certain things and overpowered by thinking others. He's not even born yet and still there's so much stuff I just don't know,so much stuff that me and his mom don't know together.

I don't know if he will be born into a family whose love is strong and forever, and by 'forever' I mean it in the old school way: breathing tubes and artificial gasps and squeezing a still warm, age-speckled ham fist under the hospital halogen lights, fighting back the tears that only can only ever come and hurt so righteously when two people have been inseparable all along, through all the awful shit water you have to wade through to get out to where it's all just one last peaceful winding-down firefly evening.

I know, I know, at least three or four people out there in the world would probably whisper that that's  fool's talk coming from someone like me, a guy who has always pretended that he knew how to do things, how to live right, when really certain people are starting to doubt if I ever did.

But what can I do, right?

What can I say now, to slip old words back into their sheaths and let them rust away to nothingness. If I could go back in time, I'd have ripped my tongue out with a hunk of  Pepsi can long ago. Back when I was like 20. But I missed that chance and I kept my tongue and I swung it around like a boss. Looking back, I think I thought that I could treat new love just like I treated old love. I think I thought that I could look it straight in the eyes and challenge it to not stick with me for ever and ever and ever.

I think I tasted salt on my lips and was fucking sure that it was there to add a little flavor to all the love I was gorging myself on. But I got that one all wrong, too. Because, hey/look, I'd been body slammed by love way back in the 70's and I'm still bleeding out of my earholes.

Turns out that the salt was just old scuzzy blood I've been too preoccupied to feel and too lazy to wipe away.

After everything that has happened, after all of the empires and kingdoms, after all of the battles and the wars, after each and every little rinky-dink story up until now has been told over and over and over again, has been thumped into our marshmallow skulls so that we might learn at least a little bit about how to make things better along the way, after all of that history and living has come down, it turns out that it's me. Me. I'm 42 next week, waiting on a brand new heart and trying to stop a wounded one from gushing itself silly and it's actually me: I'm the lucky son-of-a-bitch in charge of love and marriage and whatever it all is morphing into these days outside, all sprawled across these December streets.

Oh my God.

Who knew.

I want to blame the whole fucking world/I need to blame myself/And to be perfectly honest, I don't think I was ready for any of this at all.

And no, dude. I didn't buy the stupid smokes if that was all you've been sticking around to find out.

The Importance of Being Sully

Any minute now the brown box truck should be here, rolling up in a burst of acceleration and short-shifted gears, the driver jamming on the brakes, slamming her in park.

Oh, the thrill of it all.

Oh, the slamming beats from the basement of my deep-fried heart.

I’m not going to sit here and act all cool and stuff. I can’t. If I told you some cover-up tale about how I’m not paying close attention to the road outside my house, sneaking around the curtains and peeking down the lane to see if I can see or hear any sign of the thing heading my way, you’d just snicker at me and stare a laser hole in my forehead, huh? I know that you know better, especially when it comes to this sort of thing.

Anyway, today is the day I become Sully, the big blue guy from Monsters Inc.

Today is the day that my Halloween costume arrives from somewhere far away out in America and I can slip it on in the privacy of the upstairs bathroom and then slowly slide myself in front of the mirror and blow my own mind into sweet, beautiful smithereens.

It’s not a cheapo job either, you know. I splurged a little on this get-up. I had to, you see.

The stars all aligned and I did my homework early and I searched and scoured the land and eventually, just when I had begun to try and convince myself that maybe I could be something else this year, maybe just another dumb zombie or the 88th Duck Dynasty dude on my block; just when I was going to give up my latest/greatest whimsical notion to appear on some random early October Tuesday afternoon, down in the kitchen, while Violet, 4, and Henry, 2, were sitting there sucking down their 3 o’clock chocolate milk and graham crackers, me popping out in a burst of blue and purple Sully shag, their little eyeballs shooting out of their heads, their wee minds blown by the sight of their own Dad transformed into the most legendary monster of their lives so far, just when all of that seemed to be sliding from my greasy palms: I found it.

Where?  On line, of course, where grown men can and do become monsters with the flick of a click.

Anyway, it’s coming today because I have been ‘tracking’ the SOB and it finally says ‘OUT FOR DELIVERY’ and I cannot even explain to you how tickled my guts were  when I woke up this morning and saw that simple phrase in the email I got (the latest in a long series of short, soulless messages I have gotten because I signed up for emails that tell me where my Sully is out there on the road, out there on his long, strange journey from some shelf in some warehouse or stockroom somewhere to ride upon the shoulders of a 41-year-old Man-Child in Bumtruck, Pennsylvania).

With any luck my kids are going to crap their Granimals.

At least they better.

If they don’t my heart will probably just burst and I’ll just collapse on the linoleum there in the kitchen, a big dead Sully, which is, like, probably the worst thing you could ever really throw down in front of your own kids, huh?

Whatever. So there’s a lot riding on all of this. Fine, I planted this little garden of strange all by myself, so I’ll harvest the brief magic or die trying.

But isn’t it crazy though? One minute you’re this young guy wandering the Earth in search of enlightenment and money and sex and pizza and beer and then, BOOM!...out of nowhere you are staring into the bright, mild eyes of a baby and everything is different forever.

Here I am: a grown-ass man standing in his front window, hiding behind the curtain, peeping out at the porch like some neighborhood freak, waiting for a costume as if I’m waiting for a brand new liver or a fresh kidney on ice.

It is what it is, though. Anything for a smile, you know?

Anything for their smile.

The Lonesome Ballad of Three Teenagers At Once

Some things hit you out of nowhere, like Little League field lightning or city buses or young lust in the corridors of the mall, and you cannot control them no matter how hard you want to. These are the things that make or break your life I suppose.

They are the biggest baddest 'crossroads' you will ever stand at, really, and you will have to choose whether or not you are going to keep on living and making the best of whatever you've got going on at that moment in time, or if you are ready to let both of your white-knuckled fists just go slack off the wheel at once and just ride off into your sunset ending.

Years ago, when Dale Earnhardt got loose on the final lap of the Daytona 500 and his car seemed to just quit trying anymore, I watched as he slammed into the high wall of the track, my heart throbbing in my chest, my blood sizzling through my veins.

Looking back now, it's still impossible to know if he really got to make much of a choice, I understand that of course. But whatever... part of me, for whatever strange reason, likes to think that he did have that fleeting instant where he knew that things were gonna either shake down as:

a) 'Dale is staying'

or

b) 'Dale gotta go'

I don't really understand it completely, but whenever I think about that afternoon (and I do a lot, so that's that) I want to think that he took one deep last drag of Florida sunshine, eeked out one last sly grin, and took one look around at the mess that his hard-earned life had suddenly become. I convince myself that he closed his eyes, thought about his kids, knew they'd be okay, and sighed out the final gasp of his Earthly sighs just before his fellow driver and good friend, Kenny Schrader, ran up to the side of that black number 3 Chevy lying still there in the infield grass and saw that it was hopeless, that it was the end of an era.

Of course, experts and doctors and all might tell you otherwise. They might insist that Dale Earnhardt was gone in a flash and that he was already on the bus to whatever the next stop is by the time his car stopped sliding back down the track.

That's cool, but I don't buy it, probably just because I don't want to.

I want to believe, I choose to believe, that you flick off that switch yourself, man. That there is this Dignified Ghost that comes sliding up to your side when you finally make it down those crossroads that you have been searching for, unconsciously, all of these livelong years, and that the Ghost lifts your hand and squeezes it gently three times ( I. Love. You.) so that you know that you can trust it.

Then you see the switch, just like any other switch, but different, obviously.

And just like that you decide. Do I hang around/do I move along?

I have no idea how it feels to make that decision. A lot of people have spent a lot of time down through the years trying to guess what happens in that instant.

But life is full of choices, and we have to trust our gut feeling.

And there you go.

****************************

I'm like 5 months away from 42 years old. I've lived longer than a lot of other guys, guys who seemed like they probably deserved a longer run than my fat ass, but what can you do? Hank Williams, Crazy Horse, Martin Luther King Jr., Sam Cooke, Kurt Cobain, Stephen Crane, John Coltrane, the list is long and sad.

John Lennon.

I've outlived John Lennon. That seems seriously muffed up to me. It seems like it ought to be impossible. But it's possible alright and I've done it.

What does that mean?/What am I saying?

I'm not exactly sure, but I think it means that I seem to be spending a little more time these days thinking about my own ending, you know? About how my tale will write itself out and all.

Like a lot of people, I never did that much before and so nowadays, when I start barking up the Death Tree, trying to get a good whiff of whatever it is I've got cornered up there, it's usually more than I can bear.

That's natural, I guess.

Still, doesn't it really suck to have to think about the fact that three Fridays ago, when you were laughing and having a couple of beers with your wife or your husband and maybe a couple friends and maybe the kids or the dogs were there kicking around in the lush fat tufts of green grass that needs cutting, and the sun was so perfect in the late evening sky hanging out over your town or your beach or wherever the hell you were, doesn't it seem so unfair that all of that seems like it was just six or seven seconds ago?

You were just holding it all in your own two hands, gripping that wheel, steering yourself through such a beautiful kick-off to yet another living weekend; it freaking JUST HAPPENED!

But then again, the reality is that 'no it didn't'.

It's gone and so much living has come to pass since that night; everybody who was there has lived so many moments/made so many choices/cried/laughed/ eaten so many meals since you were just sitting there looking at them right in front of you, holding them close against the heart of your eyeball, feeling their exhales mixing with your inhales, living together.

Life is freaky because it ends. We know so much about so much but we don't know jack shit about forever. We try and tell ourselves that we do, we come up with ways to convince ourselves that we have an idea, but c'mon.

We have no fucking idea at all.

Even our guesses are probably beer league softballs we end up tossing off the edge of a star ten thousand light years in the wrong direction.

***************************

If I can make it, if I can hold on like I want to hold on, and if I can keep hording oxygen/avoiding shitty drivers/missing the rattlesnakes along the rivers where I fish/ hitting the treadmill/staying off the cigs/watching how many beers I drink/eating my vegetables/ and luck out in the ticker department and the cancer department and this department and that department/blah-blah-blah; if I can just hang in there for another 13 or 14 years I might just have the chance to live through something I never thought in my wildest dreams I'd get to live through.

I might just get to live with three of my own teenagers at once.

Three teenagers at once. (Violet 18, Henry 16, 'Newbie' 13)

My God. I know you probably don't really care too much but c'mon, this is a jaw-dropping realization for me. It's like this huge invitation to live someone else's life in some super strange way. But it would be mine, my life. It would be my life...it will be my life if I can find a way to dodge some bullets and outrun some hyenas.

Lately, something has come over me. Or someone.

It's been like some hard-headed son-of-a-bitch just barreled into this little world of mine, a world that only me and like three other people even give two shits about, and he jacked me up by the collar of my George Jones t-shirt and slammed me into the barnwood wall of the bar I created in my mudroom. And grabbing my shaking fist in his cold steady fist and holding it up against the wall, next to the light switch, he stared into my mixed-up soul with his bloodshot eyes and cackled out a Jack Nicholson laugh , the world melting away from me, my heart bursting with fear as he pulls the whole runaway train back onto the tracks with three firm/hard squeezes.

Or maybe it's a she. There's just no way to tell yet.

But the squeezes are undeniable.

I. Love. You.

Then he/she picks me up by the scruff of my neck and tosses me back into the living room where Violet and Henry are climbing all over Monica, who is sitting there on the couch trying to hold back the First Trimester pukes with a sandwich baggie full of Jolly ranchers and I land down beside them all with a soft leathery thud.

I look around, no one even notices my ass is in the room, but I am as far from that switch as I could ever hope to be.

And I'll take it.