working on a novel. it'll be a memoir when my parents stop breathing

the wheat-haired saints of wayne county


Chapter 1

rings of burrs around my creaking knees


In truth, I woke up early because the sun screamed through my eastward facing window.  Rationalizing it as a sign of adult maturity, or at the very least personal growth, I decided to dress up like a snappy nine year old.  Blue jeans that I could not squeeze into last year suddenly require a belt to stay around my recently excavated hips. (Prescribed amphetamine has given me back some glimpse of my anatomy, also a constant feeling of nausea, and a clenched jaw.)  Cuffed up the legs of my pants like Tom Sawyer, I suppose in order to avoid entanglement with the bicycle, though I have become an expert at such sorts of justification.  Pulled on a bare charcoal sweater with waffle-stitched patches on the elbows. Broke out in  a chipped nicotine smile despite my sour stomach. Cold sink water beaded down my feral blonde hair spilling onto my already sweaty forehead.

Pedaled my pale yellow Huffy towards downtown.  Every breath from my stale chest was harder to conjure than the last.  In the true light of a Mount Pleasant morning, sun just come up, every house on Lansing Street appealed to me.  I tried to swallow the deep jealousy of their front porches.  Bruised my soft thighs over the choppy asphalt of downtown construction.

This place doesn't need new streets, it needs a new soul.  The quiet calm of empty streets at night turns into a paranoid discomfort at three in the afternoon.  Where are the young people with their younger people tucked into strollers? The old men looking at their watches with nowhere to go? Children eating ice cream but mostly decorating their faces? I faced only an endless silent column of large parked plum and tan trucks, windows deeply tinted, sad country music trapped inside.

The hill.  A left-hander from the far side of Main Street's obstructed flow. A descent that causes my fingers to anxiously pulse the rusting brake levers.  Air pressed into my nostrils despite sickly lungs, pastel bushes blurred by the smudging thumb of rushing air.  I translated momentum into nervous rotation.  Rattled through the parking lot behind a softball game, cautiously eying shirtless men hidden by reflective sunglasses. They all kicked in unison at the red clay under their feet.  Were these men all adept at pouring concrete?  My father's good friend Ray (they met at the Moose Lodge) hired me to pour front porches this summer.  I lacked the strength to keep up. With two feet stuck in the hardening gray mud I would feebly at the liquified stone until his ropey hands intervened.  Ray stared at me in early afternoon sun and prompted by my sun-reddened face, asked, “do you ever fucking go outside?”  I was let go the following Monday.  This time I wasn't fired with full ceremony.  Ray just stopped answering his phone.

Rode without pedaling past the perfectly straight marble edges of the wars' memorials. Over a wood bridge and across a damp field, my thin tires digging into the marshy grass.  Somedays I head to this quiet part of the park to feel exposed and tough.

My stepfather hunts elk on horseback high in the Montana steppes. My great-uncle braved the marshes of Cambodia and Laos to provide basic medicine to a population deprived of any care.  It is not dangerous to pull off argyle dress socks and press my feet into the freezing muck of the river's edge, but it still appeals to my well-buried animal soul.

My tree there has slumped horizontal, a hovering bridge over the nearly still water of the Chippewa River.  Though with spring long since past, the muddy channel presents itself as a well-fed creek, enough to create banks of sludge and cold feet, but little else.  I shambled across a field of low lying threatening weeds, and as the unknown flora scraped against my knees I was suddenly grateful for my silly bright denim rolled tightly with high thick socks pulled up and underneath.

A quiet mass conducted by nature.  Placed bundled socks in a soft leather loafer and stepped from the thick brush onto the brown putty shore.  My toes held for a moment on the unsteady ground, then sunk. Both feet disappeared to the knobs of my ankles before they discovered solid ground underneath.  I worried about leaches, do they live in mud?  I worried about my Mother, what would she have to say about this little act of rebellion?  Grabbed hold of a thin dogwood and slowly birthed my feet from the slick soil.  Shambled up my favorite fallen friend and sat cross-legged on the rough surface.

I laid out my supplies on the molding trunk of the fallen oak.  “When Things Fall Apart”, Buddhist essays on trauma. She writes with a deft touch but I never feel any better.  A pack of Parliament Light cigarettes, with a small blue Bic tucked inside the foil. My rattling asthmatic breath.  A notebook, but without pen or pencil.  My bicycle was deposited at the edge of the taller grass. I pulled out the meditative text and pretended to find comfort.

A man approached from the edge of the bridge.  He led a mangy golden retriever and looked a bit like one himself.  A gray zipper sweatshirt, unmarked white v-neck beneath, too blue bluejeans, things bought from a store going out of business, or provided by a shelter.  The thinning hair on his head matched the unkempt beard springing from his neck.  He came a bit closer before noticing me sitting on the fallen tree.

“You just sittin' on a tree?” His eyes were amused, left hand on  a frayed red leash and right trembling noticeably in the kangaroo pouch of his sweatshirt.

“No.”  I felt like being an asshole.  I felt like the ants crawling up my freshly exposed ankle.

“What's that?”  He didn't hear me. Or, he heard and did not care.  The dog drove him forward and began munching on the taller grasses beneath its scraggly chest.

“Yeah!” I was almost shouting. The man might have a hearing problem. “I like to just come here and read.”

“Oh. You from around here?”

“I uhm. Go to Central. We're starting up in about two weeks.”

“Two weeks! Wow!” He was genuinely happy for me. Or terrified for the infestation that annually turns this town from miserable to unbearable. “Yeah, well I, hey! Lucy!” The dog had begun really going to town on a particularly thick patch of weeds. “She likes to eat that sweet grass. Really calms her stomach down. I always feed her way too much red meat.”

“She's a pretty dog.” I was being entirely sincere. Dogs don't have the capacity to bullshit.  When a dog is unhappy with you, they shit in your shoes.  I've never seen my terrier fake a smile.

“Thanks!” He was still shouting. “Litter of eleven dogs, she was the only one who made it.”

I whispered something awful underneath my stale breath.  From my feral pack of high school friends I am the only one who has gotten this far.  Not the friends my parents know about, those quiet guys who came over in polo shirts for salmon on Thursday nights, but the ones I really could identify with.  Ben ended up losing eighty pounds he didn't have to spare from too much cocaine. Now he's an inspirational rapper/comic book artist who pushes gurneys at Detroit Receiving.  Andrei got burned out by the club scene, lost his job bussing tables at the Italian restaurant, and pines for a plane ticket back to Romania.  Matt might still be going to classes.  Every time I come home he's going to a less reputable college.  Every year he's fucking a set of skinny pale girls with red streaks in their hair, always just graduated.  I was sympathizing with the mangey dog more and more.

“I uh, work at Mountain Town,” he said.  “It's not bad, washing dishes. Not a bad job. Not a good job. But you know, people don't give jobs like dishwashing enough credit.  I was a little lost when I got there, but now I'm pretty good.”

“Yeah. A lot of 'easy' jobs are a lot harder than most folks think.” I really do agree with him. A single shift at McDonald's would drive me to drink, more.  I wanted a cigarette but didn't want to offend his sensibilities.  The wise sage of the woods should not be smoking filtered cancer.
 
He advised me that the Blackstone offers dollar beers on Tuesdays, and maybe still Thursdays.  It doesn't get too loud in there.

National Healthcare is a bad idea.  It's just going to blow up in our faces, he warned me.  Just look at Social Security.

There aren't going to be jobs in Michigan for an awful long time, maybe ever. He was on a roll.

Creative writing?  He looked at me incredulously.  There can't be any money in that.  Sometimes it's better to take home a solid paycheck than feel good about what you're doing.

His voice came in thin and reedy. “I'm real sorry to hear about your stepdad.  Those Germans really fucked up Chrysler for everyone.”  From a stone somewhere under the damp bridge, I snapped back into my skull.  The sky had gone from blue to green but the weather was all wrong for a tornado.  Some days I worry that all those sandwich bags of dry mushrooms have spoiled my brain.  In Island Park the nameless man was still gesturing wildly, busy turning “stimulus package” into surreal innuendo. The saintly dog sat on her hind legs beside him, occasionally biting at the air around his knees.

He said I should ask Randy at Mountain Town about a job.  I should really consider changing my major, going into business, there's an awful lot of money in business, these days.  It's all going to be about wind turbines. 

Michigan will rebuild while the inner suburbs smolder and crumble. Sunken veins of freeways will connect the outlet malls of a brighter tomorrow. The future is in the breeze.


Chapter 2


tell no one (out loud)

frosting on his chapped lips. carrot sticks untouched beside a small pond of blue jello

My father looked up at a us, a cupcake messy on his face, when we walked into the room. His feet exposed, bare, the skin loose.  My eyes had finally hardened.  The loose tears that worked their way into the back of my mother's seat while she drove had all gone away.  Though he had never had one before and has not had one since, everyone still calls it his “first heart attack.”

moldy nostrils. earth in my damp ears. a terrible buzzing from the windowsill

I woke up preposterously late.  Or, came to the surface for air.  My shift as weekend receptionist at the physical therapy office began at 7:30.  I was to turn on the coffee maker, unlock the front door, turn off the answering machine.  There would only be a dozen patients, I would play solitaire and hope to avoid substantial paper cuts.

somewhere carol made frantic phone calls. an old woman banged on a steel door

The vibrating phone next to my bed suggested that seven times people had failed to reach me.  It was nearly eleven o'clock.  I would surely be fired. “Let go.” Beside the too-short single bed, wedged between dark wood frame and my pastel blue wall; two empty plastic bottles that once held water, but more recently vodka.  I had eaten a few too many grams of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and tried to fall asleep under a cloud of 100 proof dreams. I was drunk, still very drunk.  The yellow light seeping through my plastic blinds stuck me too brightly.

how much extra is a large orange juice?

Wearing a polo shirt with holes in the armpits.  How was I possibly sweating this much?  My forehead became a maze of irrigation canals carrying my worry towards bloodshot eyes.  The Saturn station wagon seemed to pull to the left harder than usual.  There are always cops on Ann Arbor road.  McDonald's. I'll stop at McDonald's and soak up some of this booze in my stomach.  I'll buy some time.

last april he called from vegas and only said “say hello to your new stepmom!”

for a moment I wasn't sure who would speak next

Mickey called.  She was still Mickey, then; a real unknown quantity.  She is still just “Mickey” though they've been married for the better part of a year now.  She was terribly calm.  “Andrew, your father has hard a heart attack.  He's fine. He's fine.” He's fine. He even quit smoking and drinking for a while, a whole month. Lost an awful lot of weight.  He's fine.

everyone in the office apologized. they said “I'm so sorry.” they gave me a signed card.

They couldn't fire me.  I drove right home, making sure no one would have a chance to smell the five o'clock vodka still thick on my tongue.  His heart giving up after years of abuse kept me from paying the price for my own fledging campaign of forgetting.  My Mother took one look at me and volunteered to drive.


Chapter 3


Tesla in the sandbox

I must have been watching too much Sesame Street.  My mother found me palsied in the basement. At the bottom of a water-filled salad bowl sat rusting nails like sunken British shipping.  An old car battery, pilfered from the garage surely, was on the desk beside my spastic hand wrapped in copper wire.

It would be a stretch to call this experiment my first suicide attempt.  It had all surely been done in the name of science.  Copper, the most powerful of conductors.  Water, a surefire way to let electricity take it's course.  After studying the DK Book on weather my uncooked brain decided to discover the secrets of lightning.

Math and Science have since taken a backseat in my life.  I could not explain to the sixth grade algebra teacher why numbers will not line up orderly in my head.  Even the red digits of my alarm clock flicker and dance when I turn my head towards it.  Who can say what switch was flipped by gripping that spool of golden thread?  There is no proof of the change that occurred in those minutes of unconsciousness spent on our tarry basement floor, while twelve volts rearranged every thought in my fragile mind. 

Words  began to take on a much more important meaning.  I had been imparted with a vocabulary both indescribable and unpronounceable, but accessible all the same.  The suede of my dirty purple Hush Puppies had suddenly become “puce.”  Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home, I told my mother, was “awe-inspiring.”  She moved to rub the cowlick always standing at attention on the back of my head, but pulled her hand away quickly, shocked by some unknown force.


Chapter 4


The Nashville Incident


“Toe-headed in a three piece suit”.  My father still tells it like none of us know how it ends. He  usually has his feet up and a beer sweating within reach of his fat fingers.  “You were five years old, sitting in the back of the limousine with your grandmother and the Van Bommels.” Not Kevin Van Bommel, who is roughly my father's age, who went to Detroit Jesu elementary/middle school with all of the Dooleys.  “Mr. Van Bommel” is Kevin's father. He was about eighty years old when I rode in the limo with him and is almost certainly dead by now.

“So Andrew turns to Mr. Van Bommel and asks him 'Have you seen Dolly Parton's new shoes?'”  This may be my father's favorite story. He probably takes a few shallow breaths at this point, maybe ashes his cigarette.  “Mr. Van Bommel looked down at him and shook his head, so Andrew says 'Well, neither has she!'”

I had no idea what the joke meant.  It wasn't until much later that I found out Dolly Parton is a mildly scary country singer with an amusement park and massive breasts.  Mr. Van Bommel opened the door to the limo, and spilled his body sideways towards the curb.  We had yet to leave the parking lot outside the church.  The old man laughed so hard he pissed his pants.


Chapter 5


This is why TiVo scares me. Seems too much like magic.


For the first time, I did not run to the bathroom.  By turning off the television, it was assured that Sesame Street would start up exactly where I had left it.  The number of the day would not be revealed, the Counting Count would still be sleeping in his castle.  I went to the bathroom, both literally and figuratively, and returned to our living room.  The bannister separating carpeted lower room from the kitchen would not be broken by the weight of my shoved sister for another year.  This was a time of relative peace.  My father was working midnights, asleep during the day. I had kindergarten in the afternoon.  This left me with more than enough time every morning to chew on duplos (lego's larger and less interesting cousin) while watching a solid three hours of quasi-educational T.V.

The pause function had not worked out. Hey! Grover was talking to me, but I had no interest.  Bert and Ernie were done with their conversation about carrots, apparently.  Did all the people in the world have to be so rude? Not one person was willing to wait for me to drain my small bladder?  It occurred to me for the first time that other people were watching. Not watching me, they had no interest in me. The whole planet wanted to see Big Bird, too. People who had no sympathy for the little pale boy who drank too much apple juice.


Chapter 6


this is the season for growth, again


Spring, when waterlogged boxes of Franzia made a tiled floor of the sorority front lawn next door.  When my eyes joined the stiff soil in thawing.  The skin of my left arm scarring warm and pink.  Cut my flesh to delicate ribbons with a buck knife given away in a bag of beef jerky, crackerjack box for the depressed.

Carved the word “NOW” in straight lines.  The “O” squared off.  An inch tall.  From sunken elbow to aching wrist, because a half-gallon of McMasters' Canadian Whiskey could no longer bring my burning head to sleep.  Because my little sister was imprisoned in a private padded asylum.  Because I was failing Modern British Literature  and every last shrub felt like a hedgerow from Wuthering Heights.

The gnarled tree beside the abandoned and never renovated white house two doors down.  My six-foot ceilinged bedroom.  Room big enough for a mattress, and a desk displaying my collection of handblown glass pipes.  A thin maple sapling growing straight in my muddy window box.

This is the season for growth, again.  When I start calling doctors and eating their prescribed cures.  When my mother lets me know at six o'clock in the morning that “I have disappointed her” and that “everyone in the family is just worried about me getting it together.”  I want to get it all together, grab up all of it in my veiny calloused hands.  I want to hold my crumbling family and feel the faint pulse that allows us to forgive so easily.

I had never cut myself before, deeply, nor have I since.  These days I pound on a broken Olivetti typewriter. Some nights I eat too many peanut butter sandwiches.  I smoke terribly cheap pot from a proper briar pipe, become a bumbling Sherlock before falling asleep to the static whispering of NPR.