“That’s me,” he replied. He sat down into the wheelchair. “Home, Jeeves,” he said as she smiled. She wheeled him through the halls, elevator, and into the front lobby. He stood up as she came to a stop at the glass doors. Reaching into his pocket for his lighter, he lit up his cigarette and kept walking out the doorway onto the early morning, crisp wintry day. The flurries had left about three inches of snow on the ground. It crunched under the soles of his running shoes. He thought of Cathleen and the video games.
Crunching, falling snow was all around. Arriving at Al’s, he took an empty seat. He interfaced with the waitress and gave his usual order. He smelled the bacon, eggs, toast, and pancakes cooking. There was a certain something to all those smells that he hadn’t noticed before. He began to catalogue all the conflicting aromas. Butter on the grill, aftershave, coffee, deodorant, perfume, starch, wood, maple syrup, jam, and soap. All the smells of freshly showered workers and students beginning a long day. These aromas stood out at him. It felt as if he was bottled up for weeks and like a shaken pop bottle, uncapped violently, he was coming loose of his confines. He felt a tremendous sense of release.
* * *
Sean composed a note for James in the responses section of James’ blog.
“Will you be in Rochester for Christmas? I will be visiting my parents for a few days. We have both been so busy that we haven’t been able to connect yet. Your blog has been a good communication tool. E-mail cannot contain your collection of stories. I find them to be good but not stellar. To get published they should be truly lurid and tarted up a bit. You tell good tales, but if I can comment on their printable nature, the author of the James Bond stories, Ian Fleming, was described by his wife as a writer of ‘cheap pornography.’ That is the industry standard and you will have to conform to that norm if you want to actually sell the stuff and get published.”
Blog Post Nine
Explosions, the thing that Minnesotans fear the most, the natural gas explosion that claims the houses of three homeowners every year. Here is the year’s best demolition I can throw together.
A blog note. Just finished Marya Hornbacher’s book Waiting. It is a tome on the concept of spirituality without god. She is a devout nonbeliever but has come to a place of spirituality without god.
Her book is superb use of language. My own science fiction is nowhere near her elegance and subtlety. Her analysis of her twelve-step program is detailed and nuanced. She dissects thoughts and feelings in ways no psychologist could ever do for a dry, soulless report for a judge in a courtroom. Her discipline to the twelve steps is as careful and simultaneously as deft as the simplicity of great artists like Jesus and the Buddha. “Before I achieved enlightenment I chopped wood and carried water. After I achieved enlightenment I chopped wood and carried water.”
The simple viewpoint grants access to the complex. My own beliefs truly are a beginning while hers are those from the mountaintop and greased with the experience of drunken binges and dead friends. People beckon to her and say, “Come to the desert in spring, watch the hummingbirds at night as the cacti bloom.” She writes of those hummingbirds and finds a whole world described in two pages of text.
Her perspective is at once from the experiences of mental illness medicated by self-induced stupors of drugs and alcohol. A great drunk she was, and Neil Young said, “Every junky is like a setting sun.” Oh, that I could have drunk with such a creature. There is time for me to find such addicts, and held them dear till the day that they avoided the tavern.
Never underestimate simple addictions like alcohol. Lives can be had and trashed with the commonality of a couple of martinis. All is well in my life, and the writer’s tools of description are beginning to take hold. Soon I will learn to write term papers and five-paragraph essays. I will study the words of psychologists and give them to lawyers to unravel like knots of destiny.
Where can I go to write reports for courts? They require evidence and not just an in-depth version of feelings and emotions. Marya is the perfect subject to write a courtroom report on. “Subject is a 56-year-old divorced female of eastern European descent, Jewish-atheist, and describes herself as an alcoholic with a mental illness. She has published four memoirs on anorexia, chemical dependency, and bi-polar disorder which have been best-sellers and is financially independent. She can and has professed a desire to pay cost-of-care and is currently insured.” When such a description includes people like me, I wonder how they do it all. My circumstances are more that of chronic homelessness, a history of drug and alcohol use, and financial irresponsibility. How she could live as colorful a life and still been able to balance a checkbook and a credit card are beyond me. Perhaps she used a debit card.
Fortunes and opportunities surround her like wasps buzzing around a plate swabbed in maple syrup and left outside in the sun to bake and caramelize. The manner of life that has been extremes of success and catastrophic despair has not yet blessed me. I have had the middle of the road, in comparison. She could write a screenplay or do another book. She has the world as an oyster.
I have a Social Security check and a VA Home Loan guarantee. I have a history of enough drug and alcohol use that my inheritance includes a lifetime of membership in the local church basements where twelve-step groups meet. It’s not awesome but it works. It is the Subaru and is as disposable as a Bic lighter. It’s far from the Maserati and the gold Zippo.
The cause of religiosity rings true in the telling of such life stories. For Jesus and Buddha and even Mohammed, the history of being social leaders and leaving such histories behind to guide their minions runs true in Marya’s books. A modern depiction of crime and punishment, despair and redemption, the blues and the ecstasy, all come full circle when the tape is rolling to capture it all. For Jesus it was sheepskin and papyrus, and for the others it was rice paper and the more common wood pulp variety. This is the way we immortalize. Marya has written a chapter in the communion of the wine and come out of it all with her text intact. We are what we leave behind, and some of us, like Marya, barter fame for a nominal fortune. She has left us with a “book of Marya.” Or rather five books, to date.
So, Sean, I will meet you this year at Wong’s Chinese restaurant and we can dine on lo mein noodles and beef or duck. We can exchange tales of nominal depravity and plan on the next self-published book of science fiction and put our addictions into the context of weird planets and the spaceships that get us there. You be the Jesus this time. Write us a good revelation and I will get you into the awards dinner for the year’s best sci-fi. Good luck to us all.
* * *
Evening settled on the West Bank amid snow and slowed traffic. I really dig this tranquility, thought James. He walked into the Hard Times, cruised past the line of people waiting for service from the cashier, and beelined for the pay phones on the wall. He dropped in two quarters and keyed in Cathleen’s number.
“Hello,” said a mousy-sweet female voice.
“This is James. Got any plans for the evening?”
“I’ve got a comp class I’m writing for. But I should be done with that in an hour or so. What have you got in mind?” said Cathleen.
“Have you had dinner yet?” said James.
“Not really,” said Cathleen.
“Come try the trout at Café Brenda. We can share a bottle of wine and munch on fish. Fishy, fishy,” said James.
“That sounds nice. Look, it’s six o’clock now. I’ll bike over to your place at seven. See you then.”
“Okay, you’re on. Seven, then.” That left an hour to kill. He looked around the customer dining area and spotted Jerry. “Do you still think entropy is going to destroy the dishwashing machine?” he said.
“But of course. It has moving parts so wear is inevitable,” said Jerry.
“What’s up, buddy?” said James.
“I’ve been trying to design a hollow turbine fin for use in a turbo jet aircraft. It’s for my lab on turbine engines. The curves are being programmed into the compu
ter,” said Jerry.
“Is this the old I-5 or the new I-7?”
“Both, but mostly the I-7,” said Jerry.
“I hope your calculations are correct,” said James.
“My languages are very out-of-date. My first work on the I-5 was in BASIC, and any new stuff is all in FORTRAN 77,” said Jerry.
“You need JAVA and C,” said James.
“Yeah, that’s true, but I’m having fun with what I’m doing. How about you? How’s the guinea pig job going?”
“Got my first check, which is nice.”
“You gonna be around for awhile?”
“No, as a matter of fact, I’m going on a road trip soon,” said James.
“Really? I’ve got class so I can’t go but I would if I could. Where to?”
“Someplace in Rochester,” said James.
“Drivin’?” inquired Jerry.
“Yes. Say, I gotta get home soon. Cathleen’s gonna meet me there. We’re going to Brenda’s for dinner.”
“Woo! Trez chick,” said Jerry.
“Yeah. I’m gonna be gone for awhile, so I want us to part on happy ground,” said James.
“Good, see you later then,” said Jerry.
“Yeah, see ya.” James turned and walked out of the café, into the snow, to McKnight Tower. He checked his mail and found a letter from Bryce Pharmaceuticals. It was an order to report for a psych testing date. The appointment was scheduled for December 20, 9 a.m. Damn, he thought. This is gonna alter my timetable.
The elevator stopped on floor 13. Cathleen would be there in 40 minutes. He set up a pot of coffee and cleaned his bedroom. The floor slowly reappeared beneath clothes and other debris. He cleaned off his desk and threw a black velvet cloth over the computers. He reached for his candle collection and arranged them around the room, lighting each one. He put two in the kitchen next to the entry hall with its pass-through window port. The place actually looked good. The living room still had piles of lumber and electronics equipment in it, but in the half-light of the candles, that room’s debris was darkly concealed.
The buzzer for the door on the first floor sounded. James hit the door latch button without a word. He then lit an incense burner with a small globe of frankincense. It hissed and smoked, filling the room with its rich, timeless scent.
Soon there was a knock at the door. When he answered, there was Cathleen, clad in an outdated leather coat, jeans, and bicycle helmet.
“Come in, come in, you’re no doubt cold,” he said.
She led her mountain bike in, and he took it from her and parked it alongside his bike on the balcony.
“Care for some hot coffee?”
“Sure, I’ll take a cup. It’s cold out there.”
James poured fresh coffee into a mug and handed it to Cathleen. She unbuttoned her coat and took off the helmet. Laying her cold-weather gear onto a defunct television, she stepped toward the kitchen and he handed her coffee.
“Come into the candlelight,” he said. He led her into the half-light of the bedroom.
“So, when do we eat trout at Brenda’s?” she asked.
“I’ve got us a reservation at nine.” He set his coffee down on the worktable with the two covered computers. “The next two hours belong to us.” Cathleen still cradled her coffee as James began kissing her temple, her cheek, and her neck. She turned away and set her coffee on one of the bedside cabinets and returned to kiss him fully.
* * *
James had taken a booth seat in Wong’s. The terra-cotta brown of the booth’s upholstery complemented the chrome coat hooks and black-painted trim of the Chinese restaurant. It seemed like a blast from the past to be sitting here waiting for Sean.
The drug test was going well. He felt calmer, more serene, and in that serenity he was comforted. The comfort he felt was that of home. Here was the town where both he and Sean had grown up, both being the sons of famous physicians. Dr. Witherspoon had given him a book called Boyd, which James had read a few chapters of. It was positively enchanting how this fighter pilot, John Boyd, had taken on the whole Pentagon on the issues of defense money. Millions of dollars were at stake. He had been so impressed with the book that he bought a copy for his father for a Christmas present.
James was brooding over the fate of his father’s cancer. He hoped they would get many more years of his father’s company and leadership as the family’s patriarch.
The waitress came to his booth and asked if he wanted anything. He ordered a Coke and a bowl of egg drop soup. He waited.
All seemed well as Sean walked in in dark clothes, and they instantly made eye contact. Twenty years’ separation disappeared in an instant.
“Sean,” James said.
“Jimmy,” said Sean. “What’s been keeping you over the last years? You look well. I read your last post and it felt as if you wrote it just for me.”
“You noticed that, did you?” James replied. “I don’t know many Buddhist addicts so you are an easy one to write for. I like eastern interpretations of western philosophy. I guess it goes with the Thai Stick I used to smoke.”
“Used to? Have you given up the old party that never stops?”
“I still dabble but I never got into the expensive habits. Couldn’t afford to be a true addict. I have to keep a low profile. I still have a touch of the grass but I always avoided the white powders. I have no money for such things.”
“Perhaps that’s a good thing. If you ever feel like giving up for good, then give me a call. I noticed you wrote about Hornbacher. She is quietly famous for doing the program without the God effect.”
“It’s more of a discipline than it is a belief question. For me the higher power and universe are interchangeable concepts. I fear the whole government-enforced higher power concept is too much of a state-sponsored religion for me. I get hung up on constitutional issues,” said James.
“Buddhism is more of a mental discipline for people. I got a heavy dose of Catholic Jesus when I was young. For me a resolution of Christ as a Buddhist is an essential end. I will always be partly Jesuit in my scope.”
“It’s great to see you, Sean.”
Sean took off his wool Navy pea coat and slid into the booth across from James. “How’s the family? How are the ’rents?”
“The parents are fine. A cancer scare but all else is fine. Dad got the proverbial ‘fear of God’ moment. He had cancer of the appendix. They cut it out and he seems well. Soon they may do chemo. I don’t think it was metastasized but you never can tell.”
Sean considered his words for a moment. “We never got onto the treadmill of being doctors. It’s kind of one of those Mayo Clinic ‘failure to launch’ items. We ended up doing more drugs than our fathers were prescribing. But Ann got her MD degree. At least one of us regenerated into a famous doctor. Mike did too. He’s trying to break into medical journalism.”
“Mike is a good man. Too many of these doctors’ kids just get onto the professional treadmill and lose all conscious contact with the soul of mankind and plod on without healing anybody. They forget to be humans and they just become as enslaved as the bulk of humanity, addicted to cable TV and low-calorie precooked dinners. If you are a doctor and you cannot cook, you are a lost cause.” James looked at his friend and continued, “I hear you had a cocaine moment and got sober?”
“Got a good dose of it too. Been dry and off the sauce for almost twenty years. I live in recovery. I got you a book to inspire you on your literary journey. Fletcher’s Inside Rehab. Give it a read and tell me what you think about it. As a writer you should find it tasty.”
James took the book from Sean’s hand and looked at its cover, a cover with six chairs in a circle. He withdrew a book from his coat. It was his own self-published text. The cover featured a photo of the NASA space shuttle landing at a desert airstrip. The title was superimposed over the photo and was the word “Unlimited” and James’s name below that.
“It’s not a best-seller but it was my first effort. I have bee
n told it isn’t stellar but is ‘good.’ I guess that means it’s a pretty girl but not the homecoming queen.”
Sean accepted it graciously and touched the rehab book. “This isn’t a homecoming queen either but it is a good beef stew to a starving man. You should create a chemically dependent character in your next story. I notice you have done short stories. Have you ever tried to write a novel?”
“I am toying with the idea,” said James.
“Dune was all about drug addiction in its own weird way. We all read that in 1984. We were all teenagers then and all of us were pot smokers too. That’s about the time I got my first taste of Cocaine College in 1989.”
“I did the Marines soon after that. Got stuck driving trucks until they found out I could type. U-S-M-C. You Signed the Motherfucking Contract or Unmitigated Shit and Massive Confusion. I have papers in progress to get VA benefits. I hope they come through soon. It would mean a raise from the SSI level of finances. I only bring in twelve hundred dollars a month. That’s not enough to go to school with. Plus you get a back pay check for all the time you waited to get paid. They start the clock the day you apply for the benefits. It’s been two years so I could get seventy-five thousand dollars.”
“I hope it works out for you,” Sean said.
“I also hear you have two teenagers and no wife. Did that all come as a package or did you acquire it over time?”
“One failed marriage and two kids. They want college money now. I am more gainfully employed than you. I am one class short of a degree in counseling. What kind of school are you looking at?”
James sat up straight and said, “Nursing. I hope to find a good RN program. I think I have found it. I see it as a kind of legal martial art. I got committed six years ago. I felt powerless in court. The RN degree could be a path to empowerment. I still want the VA benefits but I need to learn how to write a good legal report on issues like mental health commitment. There is always funding for the imprisonment side of the house while depressed people get told to be homeless for years before they get any semblance of real care. They only pay for ‘forced care.’ The prison agenda comes first in the funding equation.”
Sean puzzled for a moment. “That sounds like anger and bitterness. You could be fighting your destiny or fate. Most drug addicts go through a stage of fighting the system. I regret to inform but the system will judge any complaint as a resistance to their all-too-necessary will. The numbers aren’t in your favor. Most of the time drug addicts either thank their captors for breaking their drug habits or go on to resist time and time again. They say the average is seven runs through treatment before an addict actually gives up their addictions.”