The Ride Home

(A short story about how and what we commute. A recurring influence while working on this piece came from Gauguin, from a letter written to an old friend: "Work freely and madly; you will make progress and sooner or later people will learn to recognize your worth - if you have any." Not just the quote itself, which is pretty good, but that he wrote as much the very year he left a wife and four children with inlaws in Copenhagen, taking a fifth child back with him to Paris, only to be dumped later at boarding school so that Monsieur Paulio could go paint the tummies of underage Tahitians with his Gallic goo...)


The Ride Home


(I)

19 December 2006
Approx 1700 hrs
AlaskaAir Flt 229 to Seattle

Taxiing down the runway at Nazi Blowjob (or Lindbergh) Field, I’m about to leave San Diego for a visit up north five months and eleven days after packing up my son, two cats and several guitars the day I turned 40, the impetus to emigrate sufficiently strong, and not unlike that which landed me in Seattle’s U-District the day I turned 30. This holiday-of-sorts arrives just after torrential winds and rain have thrashed the Pacific Northwest, an ominous sign for winter’s soon to be beginnings. Nancy will meet me around eight this evening, and there’s every likelihood that we will saunter off into the nocturnal world of bars and bullshit meandering that one sometimes resigns oneself to placate existence and thinking. At least that’s how I’ve come to look at it, and certainly not meant to negate the fact that I’m going to shtup the Korean out of her at the first opportunity and revel in it (in another time we wouldn’t even have made it out of the airport parking structure); no, it ’s just that dinner will be lovely, our previous problems given the hall pass they deserve until and when (not if) we cross that threshold into the world I dragged her through repeatedly for years simply by living with a bartender. I’m so antisocial that copious amounts of alcohol are almost de rigueur if any sort of parity is to be achieved with other organisms in nightclub or barstool scenarios; Nancy, on the other hand, is naturally quite social, and can derive some actual sense of worth in vodka-laden exchanges framed and fueled by noise, cigarettes, cocaine, etc. I suppose it’s preferable, if illusory, to the cop out of letting booze or any other medication wash over the pursuit of non-pursuit, those goals not achieved in lieu of debts satisfied, as if it’s really dry ice in that glass, assisting thoughtfully in the vaporization of an aspirant soul (okay; enough...)

Let’s think happy thoughts, shall we?


Late April, 2002

Disengaging from the quay at Bainbridge is serene and tranquil enough, and moreso in the evening. The receding postcard that is Eagle Harbour melds into pockmarks of luminescence just off the port bow, the ferry running parallel to the inlet’s northern shore and the nestled homes that flank it. Each residence appears almost at arm’s length, and by the time one imagines how days would be spent there, amongst those trees and with that slice of waterfront, a replacement presents itself, allowing for brief and vicarious intrusion, and then another, all equally if just momentarily near and seductive, and with the rustic port no longer officially called the City of Winslow beginning to diminish in candle power. Trees were felled and nature disturbed for this human conquest, yes, but the fenestration applied here to the surface of the earth seems anything but offensive, at least tonight. My eyes follow along as my transport home hugs the water’s edge: Wing Point Drive becomes the peninsular Wing Point Road, which halves the brief and jutting extension of terra firma for which both road and street are named (a larger thoroughfare, the two-lane Wing Point Way, is closer to town). This sublime little land mass, with its select inhabitants and their dwellings, keeps me company for a few minutes more. The boat turns again by degrees in concert with the topography, and Seattle, now visibly acquired, is about a half hour distant as night goes to work on Bainbridge Island, mini-peninsula and all. A blanket of darkness completes and consecrates a temporary ménage for the senses, with the din of elderly Washington State Ferry engines and steady blasts of salt air playing respective roles.

It is cold and crisp this April evening as I enter through the aft doors of the passenger deck. I’m not yet chilly, though, the hours at the job site having sufficiently warmed my blood as well as sullied my jeans. And no, real construction workers do not utter the word “sully,” but that’s okay: I am an impostor, having recently capitalized on the opportunity to generate a third revenue stream by working for a BC cabinetry concern. Compound words such as “toolbox” and “drillbit” now infiltrate my vocabulary, and it is quite literally day and night from helping manage a fancy pants bar inside the Westin downtown, and then working into the early morning at a raucous Pioneer Square nightclub, though all three are equal in keeping the cold at bay long after work.


Cruising altitude acquired and the sun drops into the ocean with the most beautiful slow-burst of oranges and yellows, reds and purples. A disproportionate number of children are on this flight - infants and toddlers everywhere - and, surprisingly, only the one up and over one seat seems to have suffered (audibly) from eardrums being pushed outward. Across the aisle, an eager-to-ambulate little blue-eyed bundle has launched into her tenth round of glottal-tinged BUH-boo, BUH-boo, BUH-boo, sprung from some endless well hidden within her two foot frame and replete with shrieks and squeals of delight. Cute factor 6 rapidly morphing into annoyance level 27...


The Puget Sound sloshes away as seagull escorts run their sweeps; there are clouds but no rain right now, and with a moon up there somewhere I fold my dusty corporeality into a WSF bucket seat that harkens back to an era when lunar transport required “One of these days” and “Alice” to be someplace in the equation. My feeble brain shuffles through myriad thoughts as my feebler brawn happily lies dormant - how odd a life of jeans, boots, 7-11 coffee, etc., that is construction. Does one truly enjoy lusting after larger pickup trucks in accordance with career ascendancy and midsection girth? And why doesn’t someone hand down an edict from on high proclaiming that polo shirts tucked in is now considered a sign of mild retardation, not desired veneration? (And if tucked into shorts we proceed directly to forced sterilization.) Extra precious are those donning the cleanest polos and driving the shiniest trucks, a creature called “fore-man.” This apparent strain of male hominid leads an operation, and is firmly committed to his shaded eye wear. Like fore-skin, but taller and with some UV protection. No doubt different from job to job (and skin to skin), but the crew at my site today, from el jefe, his adjutant and the rest of the hierarchy, aside from providing us grunts with such lovely eye candy, almost to a man strictly adhere to that which I can only assume they regard as some sacred rite: Be invisible by three p.m. This, in turn, is all but pure munificence sent unbeknownst my way, as an empty job site allows for true proletariat serenity. Perhaps the end result is roughly the same with regard to quality of work and wages garnered, but the experience could hardly be improved upon. So...good-bye Skynyrd, hello Mahler! Or, at least, a little NPR or (if late enough) BBC World in place of the monosyllabic twaddle being spread like some sort of toolbelt-hosted typhus from room to room during the day. Left alone, save for the occasional ruminations of a security guard finally concluding he should venture past the confines of his vehicle’s front passenger seat, the physical labour becomes quite peaceful.

Today was about half and half, population-wise, at the jobsite. Increasingly alone as the day wore on, this Yid with power tools was free to practice his monotheism unfettered (all hail His Holiness Makita the Redeemer). There is one guy, though, I’ve noticed that’s almost always there, regardless of the time, and when it’s late he has actually popped back in to see how things are going. Reflexively, he’s like some sort of gal Friday (“my man Friday” might be too homoerotic out here in the provinces - but “gal Friday” somehow works), and is always busy with a task of relative importance. A nice guy, but in a too-many-fish-caught-downstream-from-the-tannery kind of way. I refer to him now simply as Asbestos Dude, because this morning he made a proclamation in the basement level hallway about working “with asbestos now in case anyone is interested.” I was lining up floor cabinets across the hall from the to-be-asbestos-christened room, and was privy to the history lesson that followed when Asbestos Dude was queried on how safe it was working around asbestos. “Well, you’re probably thinking about that asbestos,” he began, “and there’s no one still alive who has ever worked with that asbestos...” and so on, with that representing whatever kind of asbestos he actually said that I’ve already forgotten. I believe World War II era fireproofing was mentioned in relation to dead asbestos workers at one point. A-Dude’s little PSA ended with a closing assurance, and everyone in both directions nonetheless scurried to an upper floor. I went back to work.


(II)

Children scream, laugh, fall, scream, squirm, shut down, start back up, scream and get shuttled to the restroom. A flight attendant has taken ill, so much so that a row of seats has been cleared and a call gone out for any medical personnel aboard to please inform the flight crew. Were my sister present, she would no doubt switch to EMT mode before unclasping her seatbelt; alas, her elder brother is of little use unless the stricken AlaskaAir rep would find discussing the decline of Western civilisation therapeutic or a perfectly constructed martini helpful.

Into Oregonian airspace now - the woman suffers, the kids yelp, I scribble...


Stationary now, inside the lighted cabin and with mildly exhausted limbs sending volleys of info upstream, the message familiar and redundant: Don’t get too comfortable, as we are shutting down for the night. I surrender anyway, and glance about my surroundings as bones and flesh, feeling somehow equally gelatinous, begin to set. Up a few rows and over to the right a fairly young woman has set up her cello in the middle of a walkway. The sound fills this part of the cabin beautifully, if slowly - her minor key excursions suggest what playing a Paganini caprice might be like while stuffed full of Xanax - and extra points are given for the flower dress and Doc Martens ensemble. Not exactly Yo-Yo Ma, and probably not your Ma-Ma either, unless your mother happens to resemble P J Harvey. Soothing and most welcome as I reach for an abandoned newspaper.

Layne Staley was found today - he didn’t die today, but was discovered today in his University District condominium. It was estimated that his 80lb shell of a body had been lying there for two weeks, traces of speedball apparatus among the debris describing his solitude. I read on, but my brain is already off doing what I’m sure others have done today, in Seattle and elsewhere, when confronted with the question of self-extermination: measuring the current quality (or absurdity) of one’s life, if only for a moment.

I’d never met him, or any of the Alice in Chains guys. I saw them perform years ago, and briefly played one of their tunes in a band in Vegas, also years ago; and, the last time I considered myself a musician, I, too, lived in Seattle’s U-District. But my reflections only linger over physical comparisons and other such trite indulgence - that he was a year younger than I and less than half my bodyweight, that I was sitting there lightly coated in a drywall/sawdust rub with hands that didn’t spend one minute of their day wrapped around a guitar, etc. - no; within nanoseconds I can only fixate my attention on those I knew who adopted varying degrees of a similar posture thanks to heroin. There was the French ex-pat who showed me how to play Beatles songs in the early 1980’s - he never went back to being a junkie after leaving Europe with wife and young son in tow, but he did opt to paint the walls of his Vegas flat with synaptic fluid early one morning after an all-night binge. Or the gent who successfully quit after more than a decade of use followed by a bid in a federal penitentiary - he, too, never went back, and instead became my father. Even those remembrances, fond though they may seem, become marginalized as I concentrate on a former friend and bandmate, a one time powerhouse of a rock frontman whose current utility consists of foraging around Seattle for whatever will help assemble his next speedball. Unlike the unfortunate Mr. Staley, this guy just looks dead. From another journal entry, the introduction to our frienship’s epitaph:

"Alvin was of average-broad stature the first day we met. I had responded to a classified ad request for a guitarist, and we introduced ourselves as I entered his immobile mobile home just off Nellis Boulevard in Las Vegas. Slightly taller than myself, perhaps 6’2”, he possessed that rarest of qualities found in a rock outfit’s frontman, sole lyricist and only singer: a rather pronounced stutter whenever he spoke. Very similar to Mel Tillis, if Mel Tillis approached a microphone with the feral nature of Maynard James Keenan’s vision and screaming. Alongside his calm demeanor and primitive artwork, Alvin was an exorcism set to music, one in which I was only too happy to help consecrate repeatedly. We wrote a few tunes together and became friends in the process.

"Alvin was of markedly diminished stature the last day we met. I had responded to my sister and her boyfriend’s request to act as liaison to resolve matters of unfinished work, monies owed and materials returned between their cabinet company and Alvin. My sister could no longer countenance his inveterate heroin-based decision making, so much so that she was no longer willing to face him. So here I was, in a pizza joint on NE 45th Street in Seattle and long, long after I had personally stopped giving Alvin repeated second chances, interacting with the broken creature before me. Oily hair unkempt to the point of visible flakes, weathered eyes kept active only with the sense of opportunity; the probability of walking out of this pizzeria with enough cash to go cop something. Downtrodden, unshaven and with graying jowls that added at least a decade to his 37 year old face, the remnants of my friend included some spittle that had found its way out of the right side of his mouth sometime before I arrived, and remained there for the duration of our meeting."

-----------

30 minutes ago the city was growing ever so perceptibly in the distance, a ferry-ride still-life where the salt water below could just as easily have been yellow bricks for me and my Toto/Toyota. Now the increasing magnification is so unabated as to seem unchecked while simultaneously unfolding in slow motion. Blossoming from Elliot Bay at various heights, x-axis beginnings fostering y-axis altitudes - an elegant graph soon to be pierced by a disembarking and special-needs ‘91 Camry.

It is particularly majestic at night, this marriage of architecture and light, water and movement. To drink it all in, here, now, and suspend everything else, however briefly, in the presence of such beauty; well, I would be remiss not to label the experience glorious, but I cannot. Ever since reading that Bukowski reflection on some poetry groupie lucky enough to have the back of her tonsils frosted, after a reading at said groupie’s college (“...it was glorious”), that descriptive term now seems both insufficient and inappropriate. Gifted wordsmith and insouciant bastard could’ve picked another word.


(III)

40 minutes to SeaTac, and there is this sense of goodwill in the pressurized air. Noisy goodwill, but goodwill nonetheless. Maybe because we’re closer to the moon, and this is a “good” gravity & tides evening? Who knows?

I do know that I left Seattle with an almost immeasurable need to re-calibrate. When occasions start popping up where turning around becomes irrelevant - the default/binary thinking that everyone has done at least once when out drinking - when that becomes a lifestyle, a suit of armor the consistency of chilled “fuck it” with which to ignore the reality that things aren’t happening; well, extraction seems obvious. Everything I worked for since moving to Seattle felt raped, or at least trampled upon by a couple seasons of wildebeest migration, long before I left it behind (how does one self-rape, anyway?) But lifeforce by nature doesn’t wished to be extinguished, and is remarkably resilient. The process of letting go is not abandonment or detachment; it’s self-preservation. Obviously one is not afforded the luxury of “letting go” of a responsible place within a household five minutes after it’s less than palatable (a supreme act of cowardice), but years of slogging through muck, increasingly self-inflicted and with decreasing patches of daylight, provides some rather stark end-game scenarios if one is paying attention.

Toward the end I became haunted, continuously, by the glaring fact that those inside our home would continue marching on in dysfunctional formation, and when I expired there would be a pause, coupled with shock or a psyche scar or two, but little in-depth comprehension as to why things imploded within those walls. Too dangerous, of course, that level of self-assessment, and certainly not a requirement for earthly existence. The guilt I felt and feel is considerable, having insisted on independent thought as necessary, but somehow not stressing the importance of putting self-discipline at a premium - of acting out of principle instead of reacting with petty characteristics more in line with daytime talk show contestants - and then leading by despondent example for a time once I knew the towel was thrown in, and all that was left was which month to schedule the Budget truck rental.

Toddlers squawk as SeaTac approacheth...descent in altitude matched with increasing SPLs...


With muffler all the rattle and dripping petroleum like telltale breadcrumbs, my bloody but unbowed Toyota ambles onto Colman Dock. A vibrant city welcomes the weathered pedicab and its tethered captain, inspiring and encouraging the trace amounts of adrenaline now en route for eye sockets and metacarpals. Accelerating north along Western Avenue, both car and driver fold into purpose-driven focus like white blood cells heading for a puncture wound - if white blood cells could sputter. In what I assume must be motorized gliding, we hit the onramp that joins SR 99 just before the Viaduct tunnel, gutting the breadth of Belltown and emerging just north of Denny Way, with lights along concrete seams having provided unnecessary guidance, as hold the turn, then accelerate, then pierce the aperture with maximum thrust already preprogrammed data. I blast through the opening in full afterburner at Mach 1/20th, and remember to breathe as the Camry, seething now with all the ferocity of an uphill trolley, begins to level out at a cross between retarded trot and Tourette gallop. No matter; the last leg of the relay home has reanimated flaccid tissue quicker than a Teri Garr Laboratory Reserve ‘74. Presently I shall be en casa. Cool.

The tunnel recedes in the rear view with the rest of downtown as four cylinders of hobbled, Japanese ponies gallantly imitate bushido-sworn thoroughbreds, obeying their gaijin master’s every futile command for increased velocity. On Donder, on Britzen, etc.; metal and mettle are pressed with confidence, “soon” being the operative word and figurative fuel. Fellow northbound travelers this cool spring eve could be forgiven for seeing only a dusty, symbolically dusky, guy piloting a vehicle that is actually sweating in the light rain. The whore in church pushing 40 mph, if you will, with the Aurora Bridge an ecclesiastic, overseeing the hand of God that is Lake Union and granting safe passage to the congregation between Queen Anne and districts northern. Successfully darting across the water, the whore and I now slip off into Wallingford: more darting, down narrow streets on long hills, all leading to the water’s edge, all making my piety more filial as I crosshatch the earth a little farther east. Necessary yielding at tiny cross streets, an occasional stop sign at a tiny four-way; two or three stoplights, depending on the route chosen (taking two tonight), and my flat near Gasworks Park comes into view.

The architecture of the city, seen now from the side opposite Elliot Bay and the Puget Sound, stands every bit as tall and strong across the darkness of Lake Union, framed elegantly between the lights of Capitol Hill and Queen Anne.

A future senior center in Poulsbo, Washington, has some new cabinetry. A current, if lesser-known, Jewish carpenter has made it home.

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My girlfriend greets me at the front door, and our simple two-bedroom, one-bath with kitchenita waits behind her lithe and supple body. Eyes and lips meet, and silent accents of understanding run just below the communion of contact, then mesh with informal pleasantries voiced at the surface. Two eleven-year-old boys have been primed for a quick Hello & Goodnight, and scamper off the three and a half feet to respective bedrooms (Girlfriend and I are presently of the Lower Futon tribe, the front room being our natural habitat). I disrobe and shower.

And shower and shower. Layers of grime are sandblasted off just like that which is brought home after closing a bar, with the difference perhaps being more particle dust clinging to pores and less unidentifiable viscousness assaulting lower extremities. The body’s mechanical nature, however, is remarkably consistent: to get clean, topically, while purifying the spirit a little too, releasing the day’s memories from their inner orbit. In a more dramatic moment I might have lifted my hands straight up in the Tai Chi 101 pose, palms open toward the face and suds running off the elbows, and let Trent Reznor croon “What have I become?” a couple of times from the on-call jukebox between my ears; but no, no such selfish, nihilistic refuse this evening. For tonight I have only room for that base mixture of physical need and sentimental yearning, a pre-sapiens train of thought that unites all day laborers worldwide by lopping off at least four-fifths of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs with a less than poetic “I want some food, and I’d love some pussy” running through the central nervous system. I’m simplifying here, of course, as I do not personally think in such unrefined tones. At least not before tucking my shirt into my shorts.

The truth is that one can, every now and again, taste the true essence of having survived into adulthood - of paths not taken, both good and bad; of some dreams realized while others languor, their brilliance fading ever so slightly with each sunrise - an honest day’s work allows these insights to present themselves with striking and sobering clarity.

Things are quite clear tonight, and from our ground floor living room bedroom, with windows that look out over a few feet of concrete courtyard before hitting a three story wall, yet in a beautiful city with healthy kids going to decent schools; there is no dichotomy, no poverty by first-world standards nor even an impoverished mindset, only unity and cohesion. Girlfriend is wearing the red silk robe I’ve been disrobing since the mid-1990’s, and happiness unfolds in the form of turkey burgers shared on our couch-bed. My plate arrives with a little corazón outline of ketchup, a Cupid’s Arrow of dijon running through it.


(IV)

25 December 2006
Approx 1700 hrs
AlaskaAir Flt 576 to San Diego

Feeling frazzled as a Muppet drummer, I negotiate the gangway to my seat just past the wings of the aircraft. I pass by a High School basketball team from one of the schools in South Seattle, en route to a conference; all are wearing the exact same Adidas windbreaker, black with three white stripes down the sleeves, the exact same one I am wearing. Cute. I sit and fidget a bit, knowing full well it’s not going to be any more comfortable than the unceremonial good-byes with Nancy a short time ago. It just is, and they just were. An airline flight mag peers out over the flap in front of my knees, smirking. Gloating, even, at the knowledge that a forest was consumed for this alleged publication. Teenagers full of life and health and volume play with electronic gadgetry. Inside, I am folding myself up like a tray table; on the outside, I pretend I can still read and write.

The week came and went, passing mostly as an exercise in devolution with wisps of or wishes for bouts of amnesia. The first night lovely; the last, not so much. Some of it amusing, some of it quite tragic and all of it to be expected I guess. I’m one that believes change is good, but the fact is that change is not always good. Necessary, yes, but not always good. In this instance, and for this week, the good parts were good, and that’s that. It was good to see Nancy.

I ask a stewardette for an extra bag of peanuts and a second cup of coffee - it’s a birthday party, after all - and continue staring at my notepad. Nothing happens. I celebrate quietly, looking out the window and acknowledging that He might very well be rethinking that trip home...

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We set up and feed each other mini-compositions, my girl and I, as is our custom. Usually this most natural of acts consists of assembling hot and cold combinations from a palette of rice and vegetables, chicken or fish, salsa or gochujang, in public or private and not always bite-size. But setting up a yummy bite by shaping the contours of a sandwich with one’s own chompers is itself an act of communion, and perhaps not for everyone. For us, it would only seem unnatural were it to someday cease. We chomp away, in love. Two bellies become warm and sated, with four ventricles busily pumping peace spiked with joy.

The imagery from the day - the remembrances, spanning backward through hours and years and cities and people - dissolves. The concentration required that keeps power tools from removing digits, the same concentration that absorbs life through salt air and contemplates the fate of junkies; the appraisal of fatherhood and parenting through manual labor when the only appraisal necessary is a simple, “Those That Can, Do,” and so forth; all the internal dialogue reduces like bubbling soup stock in the face of my girl’s beauty as her skin fills my mouth and limbs wrap and bend in pornographic sculpture. We’re alive, now, living this moment, and that’s all that matters, all that has ever mattered. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche look in through the window, scribbling away as I thrust fire into a 105lbs of Asian hottie, with canons of White People Philosophy regarding some raison d’etre distilled to a one-line synopsis of a popular Seventies novel: “If the shark stops moving, it sinks and dies.” Not racing toward nor away from death; just mocking it by loving lust, by pouring a tall glass of Camus’ “meaningless pantomime” and setting it out on the ledge next to the chatty Europeans. Girlfriend and I shake and sweat and laugh, and share in a ceremony far more religiose and substantive than any cathedral ceiling or pious circle jerk could ever hope to achieve. It’s the half-tenet referred to in Shawshankian theology as “Get Busy Living,” and, tonight, I live inside my girlfriend.

Camus was right, of course - will revolt more against absurdity tomorrow, promise - but this most insignificant sound and fury rep is calling it a night.


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