The lunatics: the ribbons

After the scar healed I left the boat and I took a job in a restaurant. Alaska in the winter and I chose to work in a restaurant. Although that's a funny way to put it- chose. I didn't have much of  a choice, you're either on the boats, or you're a woman or a you're a tired man or you're a disgraced fisherman and you work in a restaurant. I hated it at first. I wanted to put my fist through a window.

A man used to come in named Michael. He wasn't a lunatic but he wasn't a hero. He would come at the end of the night and he'd sit at the bar and slowly drink from his one drink and he'd try and talk to me.

Michael was just like everybody else in that place, a lump on a bar stool,  but there was one thing that made him different, and that was the hours he kept. We closed every night at 11pm and he'd come in every night at ten thirty five.  That's ten minutes before last call. He'd sit at the bar stool and he'd order a drink and nurse it as we closed the place down, stacking the chairs and counting the cash and mopping the floors, each one of us more desperate than the rest to be done, to go home, to leave behind the sour smell of liquor and lumps and hard surface sanitizing solution and steam. He'd sit there and sip at his liquor, holding it up to the light every three minutes and studying it, pretending to be pensive, pretending we were watching him, mysterious lump.

We were not encouraged, by the owner, to show patrons the door. He knew this and he stayed and it drove us mad. It was his one small power, his little sissy sips, his crossing and uncrossing his legs, the way he tried to make me stay and talk to him when he knew I had to be in the back washing up. But we were not encouraged to ask him to leave, not encouraged to put his head through the window where it belonged, and so I put my fist through the window instead.

It was the night he told me that the scar on my face, which was round like a crater, made me beautiful. He told me not to worry. Maybe not everyone recognized a true beauty, but he did.

He told me this as if I wanted to hear this, as if I needed to hear this, as if I'd been waiting my whole splinter-filled life for him to come plonk onto a bar stool and reassure me that I was not hideous. Little crater girl, little pock-cheeked thing, you're so pretty to me.

Oh Michael, Oh Mike-can-I-call-you-Mike, that was a misstep.

I've always been like this, placid as a fish in a bowl until I am no longer a fish in the bowl. My mother fed me medicines for years, carted me along to the hospital every other Tuesday or so, had me poked and examined, draped in lead blankets and needle-pricked. I was sick, she'd say, and I needed to be fixed before it was too late. To her credit, I always did have a stomach ache. Not to her credit, how do you say that, it was because she would feed me milkshakes of pepto-bismal and tumblers full of cough syrup. The one day when I was seven I got tired of the doctors with their insulting questions and their little mouths pursed.

They'd given me a little plastic cup and asked for a sample and I went into the bathroom alone. At first this had been a struggle, they'd decided my mother had better come with me but I insisted I could brave it alone. I screamed, my mother winced, the doctor shrugged. I went into the bathroom and waited a few minutes before I could go, I could feel their mounting impatience on the other side of the door. And then I filled up their cup and  I washed my hands. It was one of those kiddy bathrooms where everything is miniature. As I was reaching for the soap I ended up touching the mirror instead, the cold smooth glass, and then I decided to hit it hard with my forehead. Silver glass splintered across the sink and the floor and my whole world turned red as the blood pooled down into my eyes.

The doctor ran in yelling for someone and then that someone appeared and swooped me up, running me down the hall as my mother jogged behind them, white as a sail, so horrified, so dignified, the beleaguered mother of such a sick, twisty little thing.

Fifty three stitches and all nearly above the hairline. Five numbing shots below the skin and a raspberry lollipop at the end.

And so that night when Michael was holding up his glass and making a big deal about telling me how pretty my dented face was, I got tired of it, like my mother and her glasses of thick syrups, and I turned around and put my fist through the window.

This may not have been the biggest mistake, putting it through the glass. I think the biggest mistake was retracting it, pulling it out again, against all those shards and spikes I'd made, making ribbons out of my wrist. You'd think I'd been trying to kill myself, but I wasn't. I just wanted Michael to pay his tab and leave.

The lunatics: The Deep Serene.

For Yonton, and for my rent.
I knew he was a lunatic because he lived on a ship and knew nothing about the nightmarish bacterial biosphere of the human mouth.

It happened after I'd been living aboard The Deep Serene for thirteen days. Unlucky thirteen my father would have said, and I was to prove him correct once again. 

Why I was on the boat in the first place is a long story, to be told at a later date. Essentially, the first lunatic caught wind of my polar dreams and convinced me that McMurdo station would only consider hiring a woman, or a man, or any person, if they had extensive experience with life in the open sea, deep space, or somewhere of equal stress and isolation. 

Seeing no opportunity and having no desire to find my way into the space program, I took him for his word and stepped aboard his boat, The Deep Serene, which, at the time I write this story, has been reincarnated as the bulkheads, bows, sterns and ladders of one hundred other vessels at it's once-home port. Which is to say it was torn apart and canabalized by its own cousins. The lunatic, stripped of his captain's license for good. 

Thirteen days at sea, although never too far from port, we travelled mostly in circles, and I had learned a considerable amount about boat life. I could name the anachronistic instruments in the bridge, although their actual purposes were dangerously coupled with mathematics, of which I am hopeless. The lunatic would talk gibberish about the stars as if he could sail simply by their tilt and placement in the sky, but I saw him pour over his maps with his sexton and pencil a hundred times more often then I ever saw him look upwards at night. Besides which, how difficult can it be to sail in circles.  

Besides the navigation, I learned radio commands and a new set of words for every day items, six brand new knots: the triple overhand, blood knot, square knot, the Turk's head, figure eight and bow knot, and proper use and function of the Head. In addition, I developed a rigorous set of rules to keep the galley tidy and functioning to fit the needs of myself the voracious appetite of the captain. 

It was the generator that did me in. The generator that coughed twice and then died, killing the lights but not the radio, which had its own set of batteries. The lunatic was in the bridge reading a water warped paper back novel, having dropped the hook a few hours earlier. We were rocking a bit in a disagreeable wind, although it never bothered me. I grew up in the tips of trees, as far away from my Munchausen-stricken mother and her glasses of medicine as possible. The trees swayed and waved the long limbs where I clung, and from that I developed an iron constitution and legs that bent and braced independent of my thinking mind.  

And so, on that thirteenth night, what disturbed me at the moment was not the tipping floors but instead the lunatic reading in the bridge instead of in the living quarters with me. He'd been spending more time there in the evening, while we were swinging securely on the chain and he could have been below. I was happy to keep quiet and let him read in peace, and I told him that over dinner, but after we finished the meal he was up the ladder and out the hatch all the same. I stood there, turning the dishcloth around and around on the plate like a broken record. I was feeling grim. And then the generator hiccuped, the lights blinked twice and then went out for good. 

The insult of sudden darkness on an already disappointing evening made me suddenly seethe with anger, and I slammed down the dish cloth (not particularly satisfying) and felt my way through the tiny passageway towards the little space towards the stern where we slept. There, I groped for the panel that hid the generator and pulled hard. It refused to budge. With mounting frustration I put both hands on the metal handle, turned my head to the side and yanked with all the strength I could muster. The panel flew open and the corner ripped across my cheek as it swung by, leaving a stinging gash. 

 What was I doing anyway, opening the panel? I did not have a flashlight. I know next to nothing about generators. Was I planning on kicking it? I hope so. I'll never know. 

I stood there, hand pressed against my cheek which suddenly felt wet and three times bigger than it had been ten seconds prior, until the lunatic appeared next to me, holding a flashlight. He looked confused, almost annoyed, to see me there, until he saw that I'd been hurt. His expression melted into worry and I became instantly satisfied with my injury.  

"Come with me," he said, leading me by the hand to the main quarters. He sat down opposite me, setting the light on the table and gently removing my hand from my face. Playing on his tenderness, I decided to act aloof as punishment for his sudden exit after dinner. 

"It's fine," I said, pushing his hand back. "I just need the med kit." The med kit, which I suddenly realized, I'd never seen.

And then the Lunatic leaned in, opened his mouth like a fish, and changed the course of my life entirely.  
He pressed his mouth against my cheek, enveloping nearly half of my face, and began sucking it gently, as if removing the venom from a snakebite. Which is something you should never try to do because it is not effective. The course red hair on his face bristled against my eyes and chin and I drew back at first by instinct, shocked but also bemused. Here was the lunatic, the big barrel chested man, softly working his lips against my face the way I'd seen fawns chew peacefully on the tips of branches. He tongued the gash as if to clean it out.

Which is a terrible idea. 

But also the sweetest thing I'd seen him do in my short and ship-bound time with him. And so I let him do it, leaning against his chest and shutting my eyes. When he'd finished, he pulled away and gave me a long and serious look, although there was a note of something else, one of triumph, of personal victory. Here he was, the Good Captain and ship doctor as well. And all without iodine or sterile strips. 

I let him lead me to bed, and before I undressed I almost asked for the med kit, but stopped, thinking it might hurt his feelings somehow. Lulled by the ship's rocking and his strange but unusually soothing gesture, I fell instantly asleep.  

Within three days, the infection had set in. Red lines spiderwebbed from the abrasion, which wept a greenish yellow glaze. It grew hot and pulsed with my heartbeat, and I touched at it compulsively.  He was reluctant to take me to shore and to a hospital. 

It's as if he saw that infection as a conscious choice that I made, some sort of systemic rejection of him. 

the Lunatics: a walk across a field

Here's the thing. The first boy who fell for me was the first boy I destroyed. His name was David. The funny thing is, that was also my Grandfather's name. David was a friend from Tell City with an alcoholic sister named Jenni. Did I mention that luck did not run in abundance through our town. He would steal alcohol from her because it would fall into his lap every time he visited her. Jenni had a husband named Wayne and she kept the bottles hidden everywhere in the house, I mean everywhere. David would look in on his sister and the bottles would rain down on him every step he took: in the hat box, under the bathroom counter, miniatures in the spice rack. He would bring it to us- I mean me and the rat pack I used to run with- but would never touch it himself.

Poor David would walk to the ends of the earth for me. He looked at me with these aquatic frog's eyes. I've seen infants gaze at their mother with the same time of rabid, hopeless, need-driven love. He was a good kid, nice temperament and lovely tanned skin the color of a walnut. But when someone looks at you with so much love you either need to love them back or you need to step out and get a breath of fresh air. Since I was not in the position to be loving anybody I should have excused myself from the table, so to speak. But I didn't. So this is what happens next.

We were all sitting in Natty Clement's car in the field above the cemetery. We were fifteen and sixteen years old. There was a marvelous lightning storm playing out across the world. The world at least as we saw it, through the windshield, and that's only world that was for us. It was Natty and Johnny and David and me. At that point I had never seen such a storm. Later on during the Unseason when my mother would stand at the window and flutter her eyelids, then I would get used to the terrific beat and pulse of lightning, to nearby thunder banging in your teeth and resonating up your jaw, climbing up your face to your eyes.

But at this point I was just fifteen, just a girl caught in a storm. I had two parents at home reading the newspaper and worrying about seed-pearl rain on an unfinished chicken house. We were drinking a bottle of Davey's sister's finest: lemon-flavored vodka that smelled like something you'd use to disinfect the drain. It felt that way too but I drank long, outlandish pulls just to get the eyebrows raising. I could always be counted on. And the Natty from the front seat turned and told David he ought to take a walk across the field. The absurdities of this suggestions are too many to be catalogued. The storm was on us and we were the eye. He would have a no easier time dodging the stabs of lightning than he would trying to avoid the raindrops as they fell. Johnny twisted his body around and looked back and forth between David and Natty, his interest piqued.

'Just a walk across the field, David, that's all.' He spoke evenly, a little smile playing over his mouth.

We were all watching David. I stretched my arm and tapped his knee with my index finger. 'We'll come and pick you up on the other side. You just have to go one way.' He didn't say a word, just turned his face and pressed his forehead against the window, exhaled through closed teeth.

'David.' I said, 'go walk across that field. And tell me all about it. I'll take you out to Jillian's after this, just you and me, and you tell me all about it.' As I said this I could see, in my periphery, Johnny's jaw hitting the floor of the car. I ignored him. And that was it, David turned his high-beam eyes to me and made this expression with his mouth, half open, like he was fishing for words but coming up dry. Then he put his hand on the door handle, gave it a pull and stepped outside.

Why did we let him do such a thing? Because we were at an age where curiosity starts to bend into cruelty. Because kids throw rocks at animals.

He made it nearly halfway across the field. Any farther and we would have lost sight of him in the deluge. I think he was feeling a little better, not so scared, that he made it that far. Something made him stop dead and turn around. He raised a hand up to us, either a salute or a hello or a goodbye. Didn't wave it, just held it up next to his face. And then there was a white flash with a pink center that was David. It was accompanied by a grotesque clap of thunder that was like a hammer being slammed down on our eardrums. In the aftershock there was a faint buzzing that you felt more than you heard. And the rain kept falling and the storm went on.

In the car I Johnny was screaming and Natty was shouting 'OH JESUS OH JESUS OH JESUS OH JESUS'. I was quiet but I was pulling out pieces of my hair without noticing. My stomach ache felt like it was frothing up and would very quickly be spilling out of my mouth. The car suddenly reeked of sweat and lemon vodka. As for David, he lay on the ground smoking. I don't mean he was smoking a cigarette I mean there was literally a plume of smoke curling up from his head.

Somehow we managed to lurch the car over to his body. And I stood outside by the hood of the car, I seemed to be glued to the car and couldn't move from it- and Natty bent over David and shouted 'CAN YOU HEAR ME??? CAN YOU HEAR ME??'

Well he couldn't hear him. Was he dead? No, but he never heard another word as long as he lived. Deaf as a doornail. Funny thing was that even after all that he still wanted me to take him out to Jillian's. Kid wanted his reward. But I never did. I figured, there wasn't much for us to talk about now that he couldn't hear me.

There is a word for girls like me. Thankfully, by the time David was old enough to know it, he had lost his grip on language entirely.

the Lunatics; meet Eve

My name is Eve. I grew up sitting in trees. My father called me 'The parrot'. When he saw me running on the ground barefoot and wobbly (the tree gave me sea-legs) he would exclaim, "Now, what is The Parrot doing out of her tree?" When I came down my mother would feed me medicine. I drank glasses of pepto-bismal when the other children drank milkshakes. She claims that I liked it especially though a straw. As a result I had a perpetual stomach ache and I think that I have some developmental problems. For example I can't remember the names of birds and certain colors make me throw fits.

Some things you should know about me. I spent my limb-bound childhood dreaming of being a polar explorer at McMurdock Station. I am from a fairly, fairly small town called Tell City, where bad news grew on trees. Nobody from that place had any luck. Just take me! My father shot himself, my mother aged at twice the normal rate and is scared of her own shadow, my poor aunt is the size of a house, and I, having already lived a substantial portion of my life (I don't expect to live too long), have never even set foot on the South Pole. Closest I think I've come is when one of the lunatics cracked the ice in the pond and smashed my head under so I could see the world from under beneath the freeze. It looked like light coming in through church windows. It was a long cold minute I spent under there and I longed for a layer of fat like seals have to keep them warm. I didn't run out of breath because he would yank my head out every now so that I could hear what he was saying to (shouting at) me:

Head out: "You bounce for me! You bounce for me now! You don't bounce with anybody else!"

Head back under: silver bubbles, white ice, silence

Head out: "YOU UNDERSTAND ME NOW GODDAMNED IT EVIE YOU REMEMBER WHAT YOU'RE-"

Head back under...

and so it went. But it mustn't get to you. That is how a lunatic speaks when he is In Love.

the Lunatics

"Why does this winter feel colder than all the others?" My mother wondered, sinking down into the chair with her back pressed against the window. The window that leaked cold air into the house in a frigid square, that she wouldn't fix, that she was continually drawn to like an insect to a porch light, that she sometimes left open in the dead of winter. She had her arms crossed over her bony chest, holding each elbow with the opposite hand.

"Maybe it's because it's your husband shot himself in the mouth" said Aunt Bella, making a gun from her hand and pointing it towards her face. As if we needed clarification.

It's a quiet way to go. After the initial blow, obviously. But a shot is a shot, we heard them all the time. Usually it's the hunters in the woods or somebody's ill-fated dog bearing the brunt of somebody else's bad day, or my mother in the yard shooting at the roosters to make them run. This time it was dad in the kitchen, right out of a shower, his hair greased, wearing starched pants and his nicest shirt, the color of a lemon, buttoned down and tucked in. Thought he'd save us the trouble of preparing him but he hadn't anticipated the blood. How can you plan to shoot yourself and not be thinking about the blood, that's what I wondered. I had a cousin leap from a bridge and he didn't leave us with anything to clean up at all, now, that's being thoughtful.
I think if you're going to go early, slip out the back door and take your hat with you.

My mother was nodding faintly. Then she snapped her head up and looked at us, my aunt and I, and then towards the kitchen. "Isabelle?" She asks, her voice tugging at the last strains of her sister's name, so it comes out like a whine, an insipid question. "Could you make us some dinner this evening? I just don't think I have the energy."
"Oh to Jesus!" My aunt heaved herself up from the couch and shuffled towards the kitchen, a gigantic marionette on sagging strings. "You had your week Eleanor, you can't just keep this up." She spoke with her head inside the freezer. "What happened to the pasta the the Guillinis left you?"
"We already ate it."
"Oh, to Jesus!"

***

That was the year that summer never happened. The snow melted but the grass strained to grow. The apple trees went directly to fruit- hard ugly knots that turned brown and fell to the ground. Birds fell right out of the sky. They pirouetted down, and lay in a daze for half a day before shakily standing up, stabbing at the ground with their feet trying to get their land legs. Lightning waned in the sky for days and my mother refused to sleep, convinced that it was her dreaming causing the storms.

It was the Unseason. And that's when I met the first lunatic, went running into him with the sort of frenzy that takes over when you're running fast down a steep hill and you lose control, your arms windmill and your knees give out, and whatever heavenly body you slam into next is going to take in the full force of you, all at once.

But remember the roosters shrieking as my mother took aim, cold air pouring in through a closed window, the shot gun blast directed towards my father's tonsils, the back of his throat landing on the opposite wall, the ubiquetous lightning. Bear in mind that I wasn't just running full force into the first Lunatic, I was also running away from all of that and the dogs and the grass that refused to live.

half way there, I just wanted to look at this again

i tried, for the purposes of my own delight, to create a list, upon which the traces of every hard lesson would appear like dust, or frost, illuminated on the surface and sparkling; an all serving list, made beautiful by brevity, each word clear and etched fine, as if on glass. But when i got to the end, I had to start way back at the begining, at when i returned to the begining all there was to say was: the merest morning light, certain strong smells, lover of animals, your name in my hand really hurt and then I never saw you again, a moratorium, brave, give me my shoes back, was that even possible, and never again.

this ain't no fiction

For the last eight years there has been an evil man in the whitehouse. In 2000 we hung our heads as everything our country was built on was stolen from underneath our feet. Those were dark years. Then in 2004, the planets shivered and our teeth chattered and they did it again, an old man in a cowboy belt held up by the tips of his ears by a terrifying empire of power, violence, corruption lust. We held on tight and lowered our faces against the storm. We prepared for the worst. But we had no idea how bad it would be. For too long the planet tilted on the axis of this man and his handlers, a monkey banging away at a typewriter with the nuclear codes scattered at his feet. It took an enormous effort, a massive unearthing of strength and will and determination- they will not do it again- that this country has not seen for decades, that my generation has never before experienced. It took the hope and frustration and fear and desperation of 66 million and the prayers of the entire rest of the world. But we won. We defeated and we broke the fuckers. On November 4th, 2008, Barack Obama was voted by a landslide to be our 44th president. The course of the universe changed directions, the doomed planet rocked back on its heels and thought, well, maybe I DO have a chance in hell. The little man has been folded up and packed quietly away, medicated with industrial strength shit, and left to luncheon with charitable Texas ladies the rest of his little life. May he live many long years with a tormented soul. But it isn't over yet. For now they are still sitting pretty, his pack of maniacs, spitting on our country, like a pack of dogs they will not leave easy. May Cheney and the Wolf be tried for their atrocities and war crimes. May they too live long lives without decay- may their minds remain sharp, may their conscious kill them slowly. May they die in mental anguish and rot in hell.

Welcome to the world, Barack Obama!