Shells From The Beach - Interlude

The sun tumbled down behind the last great mountain in the world, and his heart melted away along with it. He knew that right now, as he stood at the base of that mountain, wars were raging all around this little shoebox of a universe. Not the kind of wars you would see on television. There were literally billions of wars raging right now just on the mothball of a planet called Earth. Each of these billions of wars was being fought by billions of electrical impulses in the gray matter of each and every sad organism on the planet unlucky enough to have evolved into walking upright. With all this chaos and confusion and madness happening behind pretty smiles and shiny new car ads something terrible was bound to happen. It was like the entire human race was collectively standing in a large puddle wearing iron boots holding an umbrella up high while storm clouds gathered over the horizon. The Lightning was coming.

He had been stuck at the bottom of the mountain for what seemed like an eternity. It had been so long that he couldn't remember what had brought him here in the first place. Was he supposed to climb up it? He bent his neck and tried follow the massive slope of rock to its peak, but it was lost in the clouds. He just was just waiting, as he had been for a long, long time now, paralyzed by indecision. Without warning or provocation a small black rabbit bolted out from behind a nearby bush. It certainly would not do the animal justice to say it hopped over to him. It was so fast it was constantly out of focus, even when sitting still at his feet.

“Of course,” he thought, “the rabbit dream.”

He had begun to be able to recognize his dreams even while they were still going on. The fact that he knew he was dreaming somehow never made him feel any better, any less terrified.

“The tools that you seek. Reach the mountain top to find. The gift inside waits.”

The rabbit told him this every time he appeared. The man knew the rabbit’s name was Hector from previous dreams. He also knew what to expect next. Without another word the rabbit turned and rushed up a narrow path, climbing high and out of sight in the blink of an eye.

He stood there watching the spot on the mountain path where the rabbit had disappeared. He wanted to follow the rabbit, but it was just so fast. He so desperately wanted to reach the top of the mountain and find the tools necessary to remove the gift safely from his chest, but it was just so far to the top. He knew with certainty that by the time he reached the top the coal would have indeed turned to diamond, but that seemed like such a long time away. He heard the first clap of Thunder off in the distance. The storm had begun.

Shells From The Beach - Chapter 3

“Everybody's in despair,

Every girl and boy,

But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here,

Everybody's gonna jump for joy.”

-Bob Dylan

It was the night before Christmas and I was sleeping on the couch again. I slept on the couch a lot, but on Christmas Eve the act of being exiled to the couch brought about a bit more shame than usual. My wife and daughter had gone to bed and my job was to put all the presents under the tree and eat the chocolate chip cookies left for Santa. It hadn’t been a particularly good year. In order to have money for presents I had to put my winter tour of coffee houses and State Colleges on hold and pick up a seasonal job working the graveyard shift in a mail processing plant. The heavy influx of parcels and Christmas cards forced the Post Office to hire some temporary help each year. It was easy work and it paid well for a temp job so I guess that wasn’t so bad.

It was through that third shift my wife and I had gotten used to not sleeping in the same bed, at least at the same times. My daughter who was four at the time took this opportunity to crawl into bed with my wife each night, and my wife always enjoyed the closeness of the mother-daughter relationship. When the job finally ended the day before Christmas I was sort of the odd man out in the bed department and took refuge on the couch. These sorts of things were never really discussed or argued about. It was just that everybody knew their place.

I was faced with my usual sleeplessness compounded by my body’s biorhythms being all sorts of out of whack from the overnighters. These were the times when I wondered the most. I wondered about time travel and lost chances. I wondered about what my life would be like if my wife hadn’t gotten pregnant on our fifth date, and I wondered how long it would take before I screwed that poor little girl up. When the world quieted down the most, and there was nothing left to drown out the old tapes playing in my head is when the regrets disguised as nostalgia came tumbling out of me.

The presents were under the tree and I had finally fallen asleep. It must have been about three in the morning when Addie came slumbering out into the living room. Her eyes were still a sleep filled mess and she came right to the couch and lay down beside me. I was panicked that she was going to notice the presents and want to start the Christmas festivities in the cold darkness, but she just wanted her daddy. I was always amazed at Addie’s love for me. How she simply refused to not love me no matter how much I hated myself.

It was exactly 6:30am when I got up to pee. Addie and I were awake most of the night. It’s hard to sleep 2 on a sofa, even when one of them is just a peanut of a girl. I was still surprised that she hadn’t noticed the presents sitting under the tree no more than six feet from where we lay. I had a wonderful idea as I got up to go to the bathroom. I pretended to trip over one of the presents. This simple act had the most profound effect on my daughter. I acted shocked to see the gifts, hopping around on one foot as if I had seriously injured my big toe on one of the wrapped presents. Addie was stumped. She was positive there were no gifts when she stumbled into the living room a few hours ago, and she lay restless on the couch ever since.

In the many years since she never hesitated to tell her friends about how she could prove Santa Clause really existed. How he magically snuck in the house and put presents under the tree as she lay, mostly awake, no more than six feet away. That kind of magical belief has been with her ever since, in all different areas of her life. Now at eleven years old she is the last kid in her class who still believes in things like Santa Clause and Faeries. I clung to this innocence of hers for so many years now. I was never able to tell her the truth about that night. Every Christmas since I thought about telling her, but I felt if I could just keep up that illusion a little longer I would be able to maintain my hold on her childhood. It was like her belief in Santa was some tangible evidence that she was, indeed, still just a child. She was still my little girl.

Shells From The Beach - Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

“Frankie Lee and Judas Priest

They were the best of friends…”

-Bob Dylan

Frankie Lee was a blazing skateboarding zombie fire-balling his way through the busy streets of the city. We were both fifteen and the world had that after school smell that made a young man soaking up a weekend away from his catholic high school believe that anything was possible, if only until Monday. There were hundreds of these days, or moments, where my heart beat easy and my mind wasn’t consumed by racing thoughts about what other people’s racing thoughts might be, and how their racing thoughts might affect me and my racing thoughts. All of these brief specs of time when I didn’t feel broken or misplaced, at least in a bad way, seemed to involve a skateboard and my best friend, Frankie Lee.

He was a year younger than me, and this was towards the beginning of our journey. It was a time when he still looked up to me and not the other way around. A skinny kid with jet black hair and a fierce sense of humor, Frankie Lee was better than anyone I have ever known at insulting someone while still making them laugh. He wore work shirts with patches that had names like “Larry” and “Phil” sown above the breast pocket long before they sold such shirts in department stores, and he turned me on to some of the greatest music ever recorded, The Smiths, The Pixies, and The Butthole Surfers to name a few. He had an appetite for apathy that seemed endless, but after digging for a while I discovered a cold, calm anger was the driving force behind all of his decisions. Frankie Lee had lots of reasons to be angry, but mostly I think he was angry for the same reason as most men, or soon to be men, at the turn of the century. He was angry because he was just a lost little boy, and even angrier at the fact that he knew it.

I think the biggest reason for my lingering affection so many years after our friendship has gone the way of rehabs and marriages and funerals and never ending jobs is because Frankie Lee stood witness to my life. He was the laugh track to the comedy of my youth and the red eyed theater goer to the tragedy of my adulthood. I don’t have home movies or warm soundtrack laden montages like the opening credits of the Wonder Years, so some day I’m going to have to search out the ghost he has become and let him tell me these stories, just so I can know that it all really happened.

We found ourselves on the steps of the St. Francis church. The city we grew up in was a monument of decay, but the churches stood as the last vestiges of beauty. They were built out of great stones, and to me were no less mysterious than the pyramids of Egypt. The St. Francis was a majestic castle of a thing, so much so that when crossing the Somerset bridge on the way back into town I would press my head against the back window of my father’s station wagon and wonder if I would ever get to meet the princess who lived there.

I don’t know how or when the decision was made, and I was sure neither of us would follow through with the silly, useless act of boredom, but on some random Sunday in late March two deranged teenagers burst into the ten am mass, skateboards held high over their heads and began screaming as loud as they could. We didn’t curse or take the Lord’s name in vain. We just yelled. All the folks waiting to be saved just turned and watched us. They didn’t seem particularly upset, just a bit confused. After our lungs gave out we left as fast as we could. We made our way down the front steps and then skated off toward the early morning of our life.

The priest blessed us that morning after we left and had the congregation say a little prayer from us. As bad as things have gotten I like to think they would have been much worse without those prayers.

Shells From The Beach - Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

“They’re selling postcards to the hanging,

They’re painting the passports brown,

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors,

The circus is in town.”

-Bob Dylan

There was a phone call. That much I remember. It was a Thursday. The man on the other end of the line announced himself as officer so and so of the such and such police department. It was Thursday at exactly 7:22pm. I know that because as officer so and so told me of the horrific car accident I just stared at the kitchen clock above the refrigerator. The small hand was creeping its way upward toward the eight, reaching for dusk. The big hard was locked two fifths of the way between the five and six. I spent the entire time the officer told me about the death of my wife determining, for certain, that it was indeed two fifths of the way. Both of the clock hands jutted out from a smiling sun hand painted on the clock face with a small inscription just below. Don’t worry…be happy is what it said.

That was nearly an even seventy-two hours ago. It was now 6:30pm on Saturday night and I was standing in Doubleday Funeral Parlor. I found this all out later, after the fact. I came to at the head of the sympathy procession line. People were shaking my hand and giving me hugs and crying. My mother-in-law was next to me and she was crying. Her ex husband was next to her and even he was crying. What the hell was all this about? Why was everybody crying? There was a clock. Both hands were on the six, dead on straight down. Then I saw the casket. It was closed, but I knew my wife was in there. God, she would have hated all this.

I just wanted to know what had happened. I wanted to know what day it was. I wanted to know where I was. I wanted especially to know where my daughter was. Who had been taking care of her? Was I? Was anyone taking care of me? I really wanted to know what I was supposed to do now. Mostly I just wanted to know when this god damn wake was going to be over. I leaned into my mother-in-law, Jane.

“How much longer do we have here?”

“What are you talking about?” she whispered with that same annoyed tone she had every time I asked a stupid question.

“What time does this thing end?”

“This thing ends at eight,” her whisper growing in volume. “You’d probably know that if you had anything to do with making the arrangements.”

I decided not to ask any more questions.

She never liked me and I never liked her. Maybe if I was a friend of one of her sons she would have gotten a kick out of me being a third rate singer-song writer still trying to make a living off the one hit that appeared on the soundtrack of a film my friend, Frankie Lee, directed. He was able to get my demo past the producers and studio, and a little ballad I wrote played over the happy ending, just before the credits rolled. As it was, to her I was just some boy who didn’t want to grow up. I was that asshole who wore ripped jeans and dark aviator sunglasses when I sat down to Thanksgiving dinner. I was that schmuck who left her daughter home alone with her granddaughter in June while I went and toured shithole clubs, only to return in September with two hundred and eighty-seven dollars in net ticket sales and a wicked case of gonorrhea. Those were just some of the reasons Jane hated me. I hated her because she was always so right about me.