Wesley.

I got a voice-mail yesterday that my dad died. His girlfriend found his body upon returning from a weekend away; the county coroner said he died of a massive heart attack. His drinking and sedentary lifestyle rendered him bloated and unable to move about or get outdoors. He had, as at other times in his life, ballooned out to nearly 350 pounds, though his frame was slight.

Wes wasn't my real dad, though he was my real father. His life was a page from Kerouac, a track from a mid-career Tom Waits record, and some things a lot less romantic all rolled up. Like Barfly meets Glengarry Glen Ross meets Cannery Row.

From what I understand, Wes was many things, if not a dad. He was a salesman, a laborer, a drunk, a rambler, a lover of nature and animals a sharp-dresser and a fast-motorcycle-rider. And he was a dad probably a bit, just not to me. His girlfriend had several kids to whom he probably gave at least some parenting, though they, like me, had real dads.

My mother met Wes shortly after he returned from Vietnam after receiving a dishonorable discharge for disobeying orders in a combat zone. He refused to go on a suicide mission that ended up wiping out his platoon. He was sent home, but not before significant exposure to Agent Orange, the effects of which plagued him to his death. He was charismatic and warm despite his time in Vietnam and despite being brought up by a psychotic and violent alcoholic father. He and my mother were married and I was born in 1974. Liquor and pot were his first love however, and by 1976 he had moved on.

Twenty years later, I looked Wes up on my own. We had never met or even corresponded. Nor had our families kept in touch. In fact, his last image of me was probably of a sleeping one-year-old. He was thrilled to hear from me and traveled down from Grand Forks, North Dakota to visit me in St. Paul, Minnesota. He brought me a motorcycle as a gift: 1971 Yamaha 650 that he had restored during a recent period of sobriety. He was a smoker and had installed a cigarette lighter near the bike's ignition, the kind you see in a car where it pops up when it's hot.

A few months later, he visited again and took me to one of the Indian casinos in the area and gave me a hundred dollars to gamble with. I actually came out ahead.

Wes moved to Tennessee a few years later and I visited him in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains where he'd straighten the curves with his crotch-rocket motorcycle. That was the first time saw real hillbillies. They sat on their front porches in rocking chairs, crooked stovepipes jutting from the cobbled shacks, just like in the cartoons.

Several years later just before Christmas, when I was living in Seattle, UPS delivered a smoked salmon to the door. That was Wes. I don't think we'd talked for nearly a year and suddenly this salmon shows up in the mail for Christmas. in 2003 I got married and though he was invited, he did not attend. As it turned out, Wes was drinking again and in bad shape. We didn't speak after that until a couple of weeks ago.

I was walking through the mall on a coffee break and suddenly felt like I should call him. Since we spoke last, I'd been divorced, left New York, moved in with my girlfriend in Maine and had a baby. I didn't know if he was still at the same phone number or even if he was still alive. He was both and answered right away in his deep voice and hybrid accent which straddled the Mason-Dixon line.

He was very happy to hear from me and to learn that he was a grandfather. He told me about his new golden retriever named Ben who was kicked out of guide dog school for being a rebel and I could hear the pride in his voice. I told him about my chihuahua and cats and he was very interested, commenting in ernest about the intelligence of chihuahuas.

He also said he was happy that I had a good job in this economy and remembered back to the recession in the mid seventies when I was born and he was unemployed. He'd take his pickup truck into the Minnesota woods during my first winter and chop down trees which he would in turn break into firewood and sell to neighbors from our back yard in south Minneapolis.

We didn't talk long, but it was enough so that when I got that voice-mail last night I wasn't filled with regret, only a dull shock that Wes is dead. He requested there be no memorial service and so I suppose this may be his only Eulogy. I can't say it's particularly flattering or well-written, but Wes was a straight-shooter and for that I admire him and for that I'll remember him.

Limping.

I work in a shopping mall these days, in retail. I punch a time clock and report to an assistant manager. I remember a certain dignity to retail employees in Manhattan that doesn't seem to exist here. I remember feeling that, in general, people working retail jobs probably led interesting other-lives and, if nothing else, were noteworthy and dignified by virtue of being New Yorkers.

Here, people are nice enough. They have friends and family and hobbies. For me, there's just no sense of being involved in something bigger. Local politics bore me to tears and I couldn't care less about daily news items. I don't think I've ever bothered to pick up a local paper in the year and a half that I've lived here; didn't even consider voting.

Anyway, back to the shopping mall. It's located near the hotel i worked at last year, out in South Portland. It's a one-story affair, trapped in the 80's, with the usual mall suspects: Sears, JC Penny, Macy's, Best Buy. Four or five giant jewelry stores (why?), a food court, a smattering of shitty wagons that sell iPod cases and sunglasses and stuff. Crazily bad piped-in soft-rock (think Lionel Ritchie, Elton John, Michael McDonald).

Oh, and if showing up and pulling open the doors to the shopping mall every morning wasn't bad enough, I'm greeted not only by the likes of Air Supply but to a creepy hodge-podge of elderly exercise enthusiasts: the mall welcomes senior citizens to walk laps around the mall from the early morning before the stores open to the late night.

So as I weave around the geriatrics, through the teal-bathed corridors, forced to listen to god-knows-what, the sickly smell of Cinnabon and BenGay in the air, I ask myself: What the Fuck? What the Fuck am I doing here? Before I got this job I think I went to the mall maybe once during the course of a year. I am 100% alienated.

On my lunch break, I'm forced out into the wilds of the mall to fend for myself for an hour. For the first few weeks, I ate at the food court. McDonalds, Panda Express, Taco Bell, whatever. I can think of few things more depressing than eating shitty fast food in a sea of wiggaz and mall rats, forced to contemplate the lyrics to "Solid as a Rock" or "On the Wings of Love."

If I'm feeling more anxious or have less money, I would go to the TCBY/Pretzel Time at the other end of the mall and just get a frozen yogurt or pretzel dog and sit in a public seating area, often next to mouth-breathing seniors taking a break from their workouts, completing WordFind puzzles and hacking phlegm.

Yesterday, by accident, I was two hours late to work. I forgot that a week ago I'd agreed to come in early to cover my team-leader's dentist appointment. He makes the schedule and he hadn't adjusted it so i forgot. I've been "written up" once already for being late and since then I'd been making a real effort to get to work on time. So yesterday I thought I was 10 minutes early but when I got in I found that I was in danger of receiving a "no-call" infraction which would put me on final notice for termination. It's so humiliating to be treated like a teenager. I mean, I think my boss at Little Cesar's Pizza was more lenient and I was 15 then.

So when lunchtime came around yesterday, I was so depressed that I had to leave the mall during my lunch break. I thought some fresh air would do me good, so I decided to traverse the mall parking lot and cross the main drag to buy some dog food at Petco. All the walkways were blocked by snow piles from the parking lot plows and I had to snake through in a funny way that led me by the Wendy's. I felt depressed and people were looking at me like a homeless person because nobody walks out by the mall.

I decided to drown my sorrows in a Number 2, large, with Dr. Pepper. I saw a manager interviewing a prospective employee and felt so sorry for the kid, before I realized that my job is about the same. By the time I finished the giant box of french fries I was full. I forced myself to eat the hamburger anyway and then, feeling bloated and disgusted with myself, finished the walk to Petco.

I walked back to the dog food section and then realized that I had spent the dog food money at Wendy's. I was $2 short. So I trudged back to the mall, through the teal corridors, past the limping seniors, the chair massage place, past the baby portrait studio and back to my store where I punched back in from lunch. It's a good thing my dog likes cat food.

Après l'école.

In 1984, I lived in San Ramon, California. My parents were about to get divorced, my sister had run away from home at 15, and I was in the fourth grade. My best friends were a group of three brothers from a strict Christian household: Joe, James and John. Their parents were named Joseph and Mary.

Joseph had an enormous beard and worked for Industrial Light and Magic, George Lucas' company. He had art boards propped up around the house that would be used in Return of the Jedi-- big boards with intricate paintings of the interior of the Death Star.

I would go to the brothers' house to play Atari, hang out in their backyard fort, climb trees and do other Christian-friendly stuff. For seamier times, I'd hang out with my other friend, Brad. Brad was a latchkey kid like me. He'd steal money from his mom's purse and buy us candy and sodas. Then we'd leaf through his dad's porn collection.

But Brad and the brothers were weekend friends. The interminable weekday afternoons-- between getting out of school and my mother coming home from work-- I spent alone. I would while away the hours after school by dumpster diving for Amway samples or shoplifting from the Safeway by the video arcade. And I figured out that if I worked a metal nail file in and out of the quarter slot of the newspaper machines that the quarters would spill out, Vegas-style. Then, it was off to play Ms. Pac-Man.

What I mostly shoplifted was candy bars-- five or six at a time, all different kinds. When I got home I'd unwrap them all and arrange them on a plate. I also had figured out that a certain combination of button presses on the cable box would tune in the pay channels. And so, each day after school, with my plate of candy bars, I would kick my feet up in front of Escapade, the precursor to The Playboy Channel. All by myself on Interlochen Drive.

Two Dads and a Motherboard.

I have an odd job, I really do. I work part time for a national tech-support dispatch service and jobs get routed to the pool of nearby technicians via email and text messages. When the text or email shows up on my phone, I scramble to get to a computer and log into my account and accept the job before anyone else does. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I don't.

The job can be either commercial or residential. If it's residential, I usually go to someone's weird house in god-knows-what suburb. In any case, I am required to represent whatever company is sourcing me that day (e.g. CompUSA, Acer, Dell). It's hard to remember who I'm representing on any given visit, so it becomes "Hello, my name is Nick and I'm with (slowly scan work order in hand) "International Laser." Smile.

Today I drove to Lebanon, Maine, near the New Hampshire border. Maine has all kinds of cities named after foreign places. A quick look at the map reveals names like: China, Lebanon, Vienna, Lisbon, Peru, Wales, Mexico, Sidney, Palermo, Paris, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Naples, Madrid, Belfast, etc.

Anyway, today I drove to Lebanon and met with an old queen named Ron who had a dead computer which he professed to having bought at "Walmart's." Ron had the patina of a serious lifetime smoker. He had 'smoker's hair', 'smoker's face', and a shredded voice. He wore black jeans, a tucked-in mock-turtleneck and a studded black belt. Ron lived with his partner Steven (another tense, white-bread Mainer) and an adopted Pakistani teenager, a boy named Rahesh.

Rahesh had only a Maine accent and was called on to figure out the basement lighting. That's where the computer was. His two dads snapped at one another upstairs while I got to work dismantling the PC. "I said 'can you pour me a soda?'!"

"You just had a soda!"

They were preparing something in the kitchen for their Christmas dinner and the entire house including the basement smelled like bagel dogs. My job was to replace Ron's motherboard, which I did, and as I waited for the computer to start back up, I looked around and really drank in the scene for the first time. Shelves and shelves of antique bibles, several dozen VHS tapes including a 2-tape set of My Fair Lady, several books on sexuality and a few really old sets of philosophy books, spanning dozens of volumes, on unfinished plywood shelves.

The basement was done up in wainscoting and brown shag, severely torn in places. Several dusty museum-ready stereo components were lined up on a low, lacquered entertainment center: an audio cassette deck, an early CD player, a turntable, a receiver. I began the final steps of reassembling the PC so I could get out of there.

Then the dads started in again: "Did you turn my oven down!?"

"Yes! Do you want the outside to burn before the inside's even cooked?"

I felt sorry for Rahesh, then felt guilty for feeling sorry for him. He's just a teenager with parents like anyone else. As long as the three of them love each other, it doesn't matter how weird Ron's skin is or if they are having burned or raw bagel dogs for Christmas. Then I felt a little bit happy for them.

I got Ron's elaborate signature on a few forms and wished them all a happy holiday. As I left the house, they were all filing down to the basement, as a family, to check out the fixed computer. I wondered what they'd do, gathered around the computer. I imagined them browsing to a sports website or maybe the dads would check a joint email account. I have to admit, I felt useful. Which is rare.

The Todd.

Journal Entry: Wednesday, December 6, 2000

The Todd River wound through town like a dusty serpent fossil; once or twice each year it would attract enough rainwater to begin to flow, sometimes to swell, and sometimes to carry away garbage, animals, even people. On a particular summer night in 1992 it was as dry as ever, and as I approached its sandy banks I brought my bicycle to a halt and jumped off. I was returning from Alice Springs to our little home, a shy, lopsided wallflower on the outskirts of town. The warm air carried suggestions of drunkenness and discord among the tribes people whom resided among the wispy, brittle bush that dotted our Central Australian landscape: deep bellowing and shrieking from the torn numbed throats of a beaten, weathered people. It is tempting to trace the spaghetti schematic of my late 20's neuroses to my 17-year-old interpretations of the dangers lurking in the night along the banks of the Todd River. The idea of snakes haunted me terribly and with money I saved from stocking grocery store shelves I bought a small lamp to attach to my bicycle, anticipating better odds of survival lest I come across a king brown snake taking in the warmth of the Stuart Highway or one of many scabby three-legged dogs that were affixed to the "blackfella camps."


I could see our little porch light scratching through the tar of the moonless desert night: a comforting signifier that my cries for help might have the ability, if uttered during some grizzly scenario, to be carried by a hot breeze through an open window and into the ears of my sleeping parents. Our small tilted house lay at the end of a dirt track. The dirt track split from the Stuart Highway and ran about a half mile, corrugated and dusty, curvy and unforgiving and was cut in half by the Todd. My family owned a rusty Volkswagen bus that required a full-throttled preamble to a Todd River traverse. even then becoming mired, almost terminally, in the deep sandy basin but generally breaking free, as if from quicksand, to begin an overheated meander into town. Crossing by bicycle was impossible. I waded through the prehistoric sand, dragging my little machine behind, light flickering between white and yellow in a vain attempt to warn of miscellaneous evils via its dim composite of my immediate future.


At first I was confused by the hissing. To recall the prickling of skin and the welling of tears is effortless. The raw instinct of fear split through me like an axe and I froze waiting for teeth to pierce skin, for my spine to become poisoned, for venom to begin its journey to critical organs. I wondered about the breeze. Which direction was it blowing? Toward the house? Away from the house? Would the Aborigines hear me? Could I even bellow for help? I stared at the ground as I did once when confronted by a large dog while throwing newspapers on a dark winter morning. I hoped the serpent would sense my benevolence in the way the dog had as its snarls turned to growls and then throaty warnings until eventually he released me from his locked attention. I wondered if my jeans would help, or my boots. Where would it strike? Would it hurt? I then realized, with no lesser of a fear, that there was no snake.


____________

Watching the flickering oval of sand at my feet I realized the ground was becoming increasingly visible. illuminated with a green hue and the hissing was becoming louder. It's hard to describe how easily one can be frightened in the Central Australian desert at night. There are things there that kill people. There are spiders that can destroy a person's nervous system. There are dogs and snakes and scorpions. There are people, invisible and omnipresent: people half-understood. People kill people in the desert (the murder rate in Alice Springs is the highest per capita in the world). Loud hissing noises only serve to rattle a traveler's nerves. Bright green light on a dirt track miles from any appliance capable of producing bright green light only serves to cause a traveler to hastily review the details of his life and to try to revise his half-hearted religious pessimism.


I looked up. Falling from the sky was a green ball of flame, its descent clumsy and vital and mortal. An enormous rock was screaming through the sky over my head. It was on fire. It came from space. Never had I felt my eyes forced open so wide nor such a sustained chill throughout my body. My benevolence shifted skyward in its focus and I felt okay. No snake was biting me, no three-legged dog was tearing out my innards, nothing was infecting my spine with venom. I was watching a meteorite descend from the heavens. My body cut a sharp and shifting shadow on the ground as the rock rumbled through the sky just a few hundred feet above sizzling loudly and crisply. I started to cry.


The whole affair couldn't have lasted more than 45 seconds and ended with an almost subsonic impact several hundred feet to the north. It was the lowest of low sounds-- the kind you feel rather than hear. I felt as I did after sex with a stranger-- an odd post-coital awkwardness checked only by the validation of the sexual experience and the satisfaction obtained thereby. I stood spent and confused in the darkness that again swallowed my bicycle and me and I realized that my light was no longer flickering but shining steadfast. I started to laugh.


I covered the remaining distance to the house in record time, exhilarated and happy and humbled. I switched on the radio scanner in the living room and listened for any mention of the meteorite by air traffic controllers or policemen or truckers. Nothing. I stepped out onto the wide wooden porch and listened for sirens. I listened for shouting and I wondered if more celestial debris would assume broad sizzling arcs above the dark little house. But the desert was quiet. Even the specter that met the earth just minutes before had fallen deathly still and silent but I knew it was there on our neighbor's land. Melting the sand and rock it touched, pulsing, steaming, cooling and expanding, half buried. I climbed into bed wondering if the rock was still glowing, wondering where it came from. I wondered if I had not been out on the track, would it have gone unnoticed? Was I the only one on the planet who saw this shooting star touch the Earth? I slept beautifully and dreamlessly.

Miss Neighborhood, 1987.

Journal Entry: Sunday, December 10, 2000

It was the late 1980's. Our neighborhood was typical of the stale hot part of California east of the San Francisco Bay. In our section of Concord, we had an Elvis impersonator, we had a retired HAM radio operator, even a recycler. We had schoolteachers. We had psycho sex offenders and soccer moms and soccer kids and kids who beat up soccer kids and men who beat up their soccer mom wives. We had a Naval weapons facility; it lay at the fingertips of an arm of water that stretched eastward from the Bay, double-jointed and impossible, made possible by blasting and dredging and money. Ships and trains arrived daily trafficking nuclear weapons to and from earth-covered bunkers, scattered with antelope and invisible from the air.


The yards of the houses in the town were dotted with all types of fruits and vegetables now seemingly exotic and even incredible to me as an assimilated Midwesterner: walnuts, peaches, plums, guavas, figs, pomegranates, kumquats, loquats, oranges, apples, grapefruit, Swiss chard, persimmons. It seldom rained. It was seldom windy. Lawns were watered daily, garbage picked up weekly, and every other Thursday at dusk, dozens of pounding, black helicopters descended to dump Malithion onto our homes to exterminate our fruit flies. The government recommended we remain indoors.


I lived with my mother, her fourth husband, Jeffrey, and a truckload of insecurities in an Army green rambler on Margo Drive. My parents drove matching Dodge Darts and worked at the same middle school in Walnut Creek. Apart from that they had nothing really in common, save for an interest in Louis L'Amour novels and Gewürztraminer. On Sundays we'd have waffles for breakfast and then cruise the flea market at the Solano drive-in. They'd look for Louis L'Amour novels and I would covet old hi-fl gear and Beatles LPs. Apart from that, we weren't a family.


The only one-on-one interactions I had with my stepfather were boots to my bed when I slept through my paper route alarm and stern warnings about door-slamming. He knew a guy over in Solano who invented a little rubber device to make trees grow straight and so after his janitorial shift at the middle school, Jeffrey would go work at Grow-Strait until quite late. Doing god-knows-what. The weekends saw him shut in the garage turning wood on an industrial lathe or manipulating band saws, drill presses and the like to produce bizarre dishes and implements.


Each morning for five years I sat on the tiled floor of the front entry and folded newspapers. The smell of newsprint and recycled rubber bands collided with the exhaust from my stepfather's bright yellow Dart as it drifted through the screen door as he left it running endlessly in the driveway. He was very particular about his car. Once out of the house, I enjoyed the still, dark neighborhood and stumbled around throwing my papers and inspecting the yards and cars to see what had changed from the day before. I studied the front page of the paper: the extended weather forecast, the headlines, the pictures. The ink built up on my hands and I wet them with the dewy grass, wiping them clean on my canvas bag.

______
There was a girl who lived on my route named Shelly Doorak. She went to Concord High and dated a boy who drove a white Camaro. She was kind of a bad girl and never looked at me when our paths crossed. At sixteen, she was the cutest girl in the neighborhood and had never said a word to anybody I knew. At the end of the month I went around to each house to collect the $7 subscription fee and! actually prayed, to some god, that Shelly would answer the Doorak's avocado green door. She never did, but one morning in late summer there was a bra lying on the welcome mat where the paper needed to go and I picked it up, a little white piece of cotton, and wondered about it. I became nervous and didn't know what to do with it... leave it on the mat? Throw it in the bushes? Wrap it up in their newspaper? I decided the best thing was to stick it in my bag and take it home. I hid it inside of a toy helicopter and every now and then I took it out and looked at it but usually I was afraid to, until one day it was gone and I was paralyzed with fear and guilt. Who had taken it? My mom? Was I in trouble? How did she think a little bra ended up in my helicopter? What was she doing looking in my helicopter?


I was fourteen and my sexual slate was clean. Squeaky-cleaa In fact it had not yet been unpacked from the box. Rumors were all around school about Shelly and her sexual exploits with various high school bad boys. Standing in the Doorack's dark front yard. forty papers in my shoulder beg and breathing on my cold fingers, I watched her pull on sweaters and make her bed and put on lip-gloss. Huey Lewis played on my headphones and I watched her talk on the phone, flip over cassettes in her boom box and fight with her mom. I watched her brush, curl, crimp, tease and blow-dry her hair. I saw where she hid her cigarettes and where she kept her socks. I was looking in on Shelly Doorak's life and knew things about her that even the white Camaro guy didn't know. When I'd see her smoking behind the grocery store on the way home from school I knew how many shirts she tried on that morning and the color of her underwear.


In the summertime the sun came up early and I lost my window to Shelly's life. I knew it would be months before I would know her again. The sun pinned our town down like a tanned wrestler. The hills turned to gold in the distance, the antelope danced around on the nuclear missiles and my parents consumed more Louis L'Amour and Gewürztraminer. I saw Shelly smoking by the dumpsters behind the store and wondered how many shirts she had tried on beibre school. The yellow Dart choked me, the alarm was ignored and the bed was kicked for three more months. The helicopters dumped cancer and we remained indoors, windows closed, air conditioners on. I wondered about my older sister who ran away from home and whether she had a boom box in which to flip tapes or a hair dryer wherever she was living. I waited and waited until the cold weather and daylight savings would again change my world.