Prisoners Ate Here

Living under the overpass in that old refrigerator box in the way you did, I know you found hope.

It smelled like split pea soup when I thought of you and that refrigerator box.  Every time I thought of you I smelled it.

And then I looked up the word "scalene" just the other day and realized that it spoke more of you and me and those caissons (as they went rolling along) than I could have imagined.  "No two sides equal."  Truth does not come in degrees, you always said, but this was more true than the truth of a good coffee.

So that man in the straw shirt bought two coffees and waited for his lover.  "Random" she said to him when she arrived, "you are always so random."  Why?  Where was he supposed to be? I'll show you random.

But as the sleep fell upon me I could not smell the split pea soup anymore and so the memory of that old refrigerator box went the way of the memory of the man in the straw shirt, and I chose not to care.

I closed my eyes and the night became as bright as the day.

Is it Live, or is it Imitrex?

Kip. His real name. Kip had some kind of racket going on. He just wasn't on the level – there were those who maintained that he sold drugs or got his income in some other sort of illicit manner. Just what that might have been, I have no idea. Kip was firmly planted in the 1990's, but when I met him he looked like he had just rolled out of Lake Tahoe in 1960. “Badda-bing.” Only the second person I ever met who really used that phrase, as I have mentioned before. “Badda-bing,” Kip would reply whenever he needed a moment to think or whenever he wanted to respond in the affirmative. “Badda-bing,” and he would drain the last few drops of his cocktail, glance around whatever room he was in, and smile.

Badda-bing. That sly rascal Kip was always smiling at me from behind those horned-rim and silver frames, those bold print short-sleeve shirts on a hundred different summer evenings, downing gin and tonic after gin and tonic. Brylcreem when Brylcreem was definitely not hip; Brylcreem almost 20 years before I started using it myself. Brylcreem taken intravenously, perhaps, to give that swagger, that groove, that badda-bing to the man who sported such a stylish stingy fedora when the weather turned cool.

Yeah, the Kipster was a man out of time. He rolled into our lives on a wash of Sinatra and rolled out in a filthy, drunken haze of Smashing Pumpkins and Mudhoney. The last time I saw the aging hipster he was hunched over on a barstool – it may have become part of the anatomy of his nether region by that time, in fact – and he was once again draining the last few drops of his cocktail. An ashtray filled to overflowing with butts of Camel Lights showed that he had been in the same position for more than just a short while.

I got no badda-bing out of Kip, just a stare through deadened eyes. His stubbly chin was supported by a hand that had grown a permanent cigarette between the index and middle fingers – a yellowed pair of fingers that seemed to show just a hint of a tremor. Kip had forgotten who I was, I am sure, the “Hey, guy,” greeting giving that away.

I can't remember if I bought Kip a drink that evening. I think I probably did not. I think I probably saw in him what I could have become, and what a lot of my friends could have become. The 1990's were not kind to Kip, but then, Kip was not kind to himself in the 1990's. For Kip, though, it would forever be 1993 or sometime, I suppose, and the next evening would always bring the chance for a new beginning – a new beginning that never actually arrived; a new beginning that would whisper of prosperity of the sort his parents had wanted for him a long time ago, the sort of prosperity that his oldest brother had found, but the sort of prosperity that got tossed out the window to the pavement below while Kip and his classmates and barmates and bandmates drained the last few drops of a gin and tonic and a west-coast microbrew while laughing to the penetrating feedback of angry guitars from Seattle and L.A. and wherever else they needed anesthesia in that wasted, wasted time.

Here we are now, entertain us.

A Nice Tie-Tac

Chico Bowden (not his real name) stood a lot taller than my father, and my father was not a short man. There were many things in Chico's closet, I am sure – things that we speak of figuratively as being in his closet, or perhaps more accurately as his “baggage” – but when I think of Chico (or “Mr. Bowden” as I knew him when I was a child) and I think of closets, I then think of polyester and I think of checked patterns and I think of leisure suits. You have that in the thinking part of your melon, now, don't you ? Polyester leisure suits in checked patterns. If I mention sideburns, glasses with large lenses and heavy frames and open collared shirts, I trust you will paint in very accurately all of the rest of the image of Chico Bowden that you might ever need.

Chico sold insurance. Or cars. Or real estate. Or time-shares. I don't think it could possibly matter what it was that he sold – he was a salesman, as it were. 'Nothing against salesmen, of course – I used to be one myself (perhaps I still am, in a way – aren't we all?). Chico sold. Chico sold himself as a product, and we all eagerly watched as he ran the commercials on the small screen of his life. “Hey hey...Ange the Man...Ange the Man,” he would poke at my father when he saw him, “badda bing...how are those kiddos of yours, you old Ange the Man?”

Dad had been called “Ange” in the Navy – contraction of “Andrews,” of course. Sometimes I think he hated being called “Ange the Man,” but I never asked him about that.

Chico was perhaps the only person I ever heard use the phrase “badda-bing” in real life, with no acting. The other person who might have used it was Kip, whom I knew in college, but he had begun using it as a humorous tool in speech, and it eventually just became part of his unconscious vocabulary. More on Kip later.

The Chico of my childhood aged over the years, of course. The grey, wrinkled man that I saw at my father's funeral was really not much different than the man in the casket, in fact, aside from the fact that he was still breathing and talking and doing all of the things that the deceased no longer bother doing. I got no "badda-bing” from Chico that evening, no sales pitch of any sort, and Chico was no longer in polyester. He wore a tasteful dark suit, a crisp white shirt and a rather tasteful tie.

As I marinated my liver in a second martini, wrinkled old Chico shuffled over to me. He spoke through his tears for a short time, and I longed all the while for this relic from my childhood and my father's youth to refer to my dad as “Ange.”

A Tale of Two Jerries

When Mike Stencil was still in college - well before anyone had ever dreamed of calling him "Father" and a long time before he ever met Jerry O"Brien - there came a winter of confusion and a winter of sadness and a winter of wild introspection.  A small airplane with his brother at the controls and a lot of December winds took them south from Salt Lake City to a coastal town in southern Mexico, where Mike was able to stay up late listening to music in a hotel bar, drink cerveza before noon, stroll through a sleepy little village, write poetry in the afternoons and wish that he had studied Spanish in High School.  The better part of a month was spent in a Mexican haze, looking at people in the streets from behind his sunglasses and growing the first real beard of his life.

A wild New Year's Eve in a club brought many, many beers and an invitation to go sailing the next day - from another Jerry, fancy that, a Jerry much better off than the one who would enter Mike's life many years later on some dirty streets in a city in Upstate.  This Jerry sailed the coast, plying the beautiful waters of the Pacific, drinking beers and giving day trips to Americans he met in exchange for more beers.  "Come around noon," he told Mike, "we'll have something to eat and drink."

A sunburned afternoon of sailing and drinking left Mike woozy and probably staring too much at the young lady from NYU who also happened to be along for the ride.  "I'm Jewish," she kept telling him, cheerily, in different contexts.

"As if I care," thought Mike.

The afternoon lolled along with the waves, and the beer flowed freely.  Captain Jerry steered his gorgeous boat back to the tiny harbor from which they had begun and after swinging at anchor while the last of the beers were finished off, the captain and passengers watched the sun dip low in the western sky.

Suddenly the young Jewish girl sprang up. "Let's go," she cried, grabbing Mike's hand.  She hit the water before Mike really knew what was happening, and like a fool he followed after.  The rush of cool water brought him to his senses, and when he hit the surface he looked up to see Jerry smiling and waving adios.

Mike looked around while he treaded water, and saw the Jewish girl backstroking away from him, smiling and laughing.  "Who the hell is she, and what am I doing in the water swimming after her?" he thought to himself.  Having nowhere else to go, he began lazily paddling toward her and toward the shore, some 150 yards off.

Streaks of orange and yellow sunlight played over the top of the water all around him, the sounds of the tiny harbor bouncing around the inside of his head that was woozy and already hurting from too much beer, and the smell of the salt water and the diesel of distant boats filtered into his nostrils.  "Beautiful," Mike thought.  "Absolutely beautiful."  It was then that he saw the shark.

No, there was no shark in the water - this story does not end with a shark attack and missing limbs.  It ends with a young Mike Stencil asleep in a lounge chair on the veranda of his hotel, hours after swimming to shore in the midst of a panic attack over a non-existent shark.  It was a shark that he saw in his mind's eye - a shark that bared its hideous teeth and sank them deep into his legs and violently thrashed him about from side to side.  It was a shark that he then saw go and attack the young Jewish girl and rend her limb from limb.  It was a shark that had been in his sub-conscious all his life, perhaps.  It was the same shark that would haunt him all his life - those dead, black eyes staring at him whenever he felt insecure, whenever he felt the grip of self-doubt and failure seize him.  The shark that would surface and make a deadly bee-line for him whenever he was at his lowest - it would play upon all his fears and upon all of his insecurities.  Those sharks can be real bastards, and they don't care who they eat...who they dismember...who they leave washed up on life's beach.

Mike Stencil awoke with a pounding headache.  It was Sunday and church bells were ringing.  Fresh clothes and fried bread and a walk and some Kerouac read in the open air of the village square made him feel human again.  He swam no more for the rest of his time in sunny old Mexico.