For ML.

In the evening sun, we stood there laughing, down in the low spots between the mountains, our squirrel guns in their Kmart cases just lying there in the bed of the truck.

Hot radiator smell: you either know it or you don’t and we knew it well. It had started gently enough, back around Allentown, the slight sweetness filling up the cab. I’d light a smoke, try to block it out from being real, but there was no blocking it out. By the Lehigh Tunnel it had become foolish for us to pretend anymore. You can open the fridge fifty times in a row, but if there was no cold pizza in there ten minutes ago when you were first hoping to encounter a miracle/ then there damn sure won’t be any in there this time either.

We had pulled over right when the steam started being visible. Pin-dots of liquid splattering the windshield/ cassette music blaring/Johnny Cash/Motorhead/The Nils/Hank Jr/windows down/country air/ October freedom when you are young, when you are 19 and 17/ when you are the age of the warriors that have passed before you, you can drink it like heavy syrup/ the age of the titans when they are discovered by the Yankees in the Dominican and groomed and cultivated/when you are that age rock’n’roll matters more than it ever will again because you are you and pure and untouched by what is rushing at you hard from space/ a torpedo of sadness and disappointment and student loans and birthday parties that make you feel like you’re dreaming it all…which, by the way, you are…..16, 17, 18, 19: when every zit and every hard-on and every badly rolled joint and every cowboy sneer into the badly-lit 6am mirror is just another drifting artifact in a long and lovely space trail of youth unfolding, of life passing you by even as you catch that radiator trying to warn you, even as you frown at the this sweet waft of something that wants so goddamn badly just to let go and die.

Even as the strange, pukey poetry up in your head would sell millions if it could only just get out.

On that side of the highway though, we had no idea. You’re not supposed to, man. You do what you do and real-time living moves your feet through all the rooms. It was around 6 or 7pm, I guess. Cool but not cold. I remember the air feeling so good like maybe bathing in cool Sprite? I don’t know. But we laughed in the sunlight and chugged our gas station sodas.

As if they would instantly turn to piss.

As if they ever could.

——————-

Life is all a dream or something close. This is what I believe and I don’t know where it comes from. Everything is a reaction or a shadow game to something else in the end and that’s true of all this too, I figure. Light and density and matter/ blood and bone and spirit: who am I to them? What are we to all that?

I can prescribe to a God as easy as I can prescribe to a magazine. Nothing wrong with that, but neither resonates much for me anymore. In the place where answers dwell, I skip my little crick rocks out into the ocean, you know? I put these tiny moments of existence out onto the waves crashing in and they sink into something so oversized and ultimately deep that the vastness is more than remarkable. It’s more than words.

We are born into a long-running pageant of dreams and we develop a character and we play the role that we alone write/only we’re so unconsciously influenced by all the roles before us/ the deep bottomless well of DNA/the way your Daddy ate his sandwich/the way your Mom would cry in the locked bathroom/running in place, we move so swiftly through the magic.

Our skin goes from spring roll baby powder to speckled and worn. Our creases and scars remind us that the crick rocks are still out there somewhere, maybe just sand now, maybe in the belly of a Great White off the coast of South Africa, maybe still laying there exactly where you threw it: waiting for you to come back and get it or for some other kid to find it first.

I feel more at peace in such a hard, lonesome play at times, just by squeezing my eyes shut and feeling the endless galaxy of nothingness wash over me like cornfields under starlight.

—————-

Mike used an old towel he behind the seat to start undoing the radiator cap but it would take a bunch of small moves and angry hisses before he’d finally get it off.

We talked in between turns and I moved away each time he held his face down by the front bumper and yanked the cap a little more to the left. It took a while. I was no help. I just stood there smiling, joking, probably high.

Oh who am I kidding. Of course I was high. But my high back then was different. We got Appalachian High back then, cowboy. We didn’t get backflipping-against-my-will high or call-911 high. We got high in a way that made me certain that I was most happy when I could listen to Grandpa Jones and play poker for smokes. I probably wasn’t all that happy, of course. That’s where getting high..or buzzed…or drunk takes you. It takes you to edge of the glowing bonfire that doesn’t actually burn. But I didn’t know that then.

And besides: remember (between you and me): this is all a dream, okay?

Anyway no one stopped and we didn’t want anyone to stop either.

What could anyone even do?

PULLED OVER ON THE SIDE OF THE TURNPIKE ON THE WAY TO SQUIRREL HUNTING WEEKEND BLUES

A one act play by Serge Bielanko

“Hey, fellas. How’s it goin’? Looks like you’re overheatin’.”

“Give us your money.”

“Say again?”

“I’m Frank James and this my brother Jesse and you know right exactly what that means old man. Now give us yer gold.”

“Well, I’ll be. You two is the James Brothers? For truth? “

“We are indeed. Today is yer lucky day, Grandpa. Now. Gold nuggets and any bacon or biscuits you got on that wagon too, mister.”

“Bacon? Did you say bacon? Hahaha! Well, I’ll be!! The James Brothers is robbing me of bacon! Even when they are high as a mountain cat up a ponderosa pine!”

BOOM.

The old man has shot this so-called ‘James Gang’ dead before they could even have the slightest inkling that they were the two worst outlaws that ever tried their hands at highway robbery.

Please no.

This was our world, just the two of us and no one else was welcome in it. My brother Dave and our other friends were up ahead in another car, moving away from us, no idea we were shouldered. All of us: headed to Central Pennsylvania: some clothes in a duffel bag, a box of small game shells, trout fishing gear, our shotguns: one of our short weekend trips to my stepdad’s cabin.

When you are that age it is everything.

But this whole overheating truck business was unwelcome business, as would another human being be if they showed up.

—-

In failing to find myself adopting one particular star I think I might find myself related to them all. But quicker to claim one would be quicker to lose the rest. If that happens, if you stay with one idea, one notion, and the dream becomes more stable for you/ less air turbulence/ less confusion/less questioning reality when the answers aren’t important because they come from on high/ then you are better off in that boat, I am sure.

But I can’t get in it.

I want the whole night sky. Not just for me, but for Mike too.

It’s been years since I’ve seen him or heard from him. Then he died last week/ cancer/ and I didn’t know. We had been Facebook friends once for a short time, but then we weren’t anymore and I think it was because of me.

I think I was drinking hard. I think I was so afraid of the past being better than anything I would ever know again. And I think I wasn’t thinking, but probably was just reacting to some inane comment or senseless dumb shit and I left the dream for a moment.

You should never do that. You should NEVER leave the dream, big onion. Because when you do that all kinds of stupid happens. You kick your feet into the stones, pick one up, and throw it into the crowd instead of over at the ocean.

Big mistake. Now you have to live with it, with your humanity.

Unless you climb back up on the damn thing, back up on to the dream.

Unless you can climb your ass back up there and kick it gently in the ribs and aim her at the sun setting down behind those green green hills of home.

————-

I never told him this but…

The thing is Mike had a smile that was straight beautiful.

Unabashed and sly, looking to see how you would react to what was making him grin at you. Also you ought to know that he wore a greaser haircut with a duck’s ass that he kept slick with some kind of original 60’s ointment. I don’t know where he got it. Maybe if you are handsome enough and the hair is perfect enough, they just send it to you in the mail for free. The government, maybe. Or Sha-Na-Na.

Mike wore that haircut better than anyone ever did before. It was as if he never thought about it, which is more than half the battle. And when he smiled right then and I could still smell the tang of anti-freeze in the rising steam of the overheating truck, I felt my own smile come easy.

“Okay, piss all you got,” he told me. “Otherwise, the only squirrels you’re gonna shoot will be the ones in your dreams that you dream while you’re trying to fake sleeping as some fat redneck dude rapes you in the hick jail cell where you’ll be going when a state trooper pulls up here soon and finds that quarter of weed in your pocket.”

In the evening light, in the sweet antifreeze ether, I smiled back at my friend and watched the Marlboro dangling from his lips flip around to his words and I knew that somehow this was gonna work.

Somehow.

This.

Is gonna work.

——

The final thing here is this. No big surprise, I guess. No big crazy story. It’s more of my essay-ish bullshit, stream-of-consciousness prose jazz.

But I write this with love, and that is all I’ve got now for this one.

It was an October long ago and we were young and strong and fine. We weren’t cruel by nature and we might have made good soldiers or good teachers if we had gone that way, but we never did. It’s okay though. In the dream, you can be all of it at some point. Maybe later, maybe tonight, I’m not exactly sure how that works, but I can feel it when I clench my eyes like I was telling you about, remember?

It was October, like I said, and it was that cool evening and I felt nervous about the truck but so good about our chances.

Me and Mike, we turned away from one another on the far side of the Ford/Chevy, away from the rush of the rest of the world, and we did it. We steered the dream right into the magic.

Standing there, laughing, smokes on our lips, opposite ends of a broke down vehicle, the best of friends pissing hot and heavy into the empty plastic bottles.

Goddamn, I remember how hard I could piss back then. You wouldn’t have believed it.

Firehose piss.

Knock a man down onto the stones piss.

Mike too; Mike could piss an iron beam.

—-

My god/ the two of us. Us and our friends. The years we had. The moments upon moments upon moments. The fires in the wood stove and all that cursing and all those loud guitars and deep down we could never have said what we felt or even comprehended what any of what was happening truly was.

I speak now in weak generalities because that’s the best that I can do at times like this. I try to use words to come close to all the wordlessness, but it isn’t easy. I don’t think I’m all that good at it, to be honest. But it feels good.

And I think that’s enough, really.

————-

Me and Mike pissing into soda bottles to save ourselves.

I wonder what we were capable of? We could have spun around together and aimed our swords of piss at some tractor trailer hauling Thom McAn loafers to the people of Scranton and we could have knocked that son-of-a-bitch clear into the guardrail and up and over it, crashing down in the southbound lanes, metal grinding and black smoke trees dancing across the road and fire shooting up at the sky, fucking shoes going everywhere; a disaster if you ever saw one, and me and Mike standing there in disbelief.

Sirens in the autumn twilight.

————

I’m not so sure I know how to say goodbye or even if I believe in that. What will it lead to? Goodbyes hurt. And hurting isn’t part of the dream.

Or is it?

Is it possible that everything I have ever known has been wrapped up in a comet-like nugget of instantaneousness….racing across the anti-universe…shooting starlight across the space behind the space we think of when we think about forever?

What about that? ‘

What if I can close my eyes and squeeze them tight and hear the rushing of the April stream running through the narrows and there is Mike, right fucking there, looking back at me, his smile as disarming and contagious and beautiful as anything I have ever seen before?

Lost to the years/ back in my face. Standing there smiling, egging me on with his eyes and his soul, ‘whatcha gonna do?’

I walk over to him with my fly rod and he’s standing there with his spinning rod and we don’t say anything. He’s got a Styrofoam thing of worms. It says CRAWLERS in purple magic marker.

“This is fly fishing only, don’t you remember?” That’s what I say to him. After all these years, can you believe that? So awkward. But he takes it alright.

He just smiles/ oh man what a smile/ and he holds up the container worms, his eyes sparkling like some long-lost jar of lightning bugs.

I smile back now, reach out to take what he is offering me.

It isn’t worms.

It’s an old Pepsi bottle filled with hot piss.

And it’s perfect.