Nobody is ever taught how to gracefully exit a room. Maybe God is not on our side and we all wear the blood of a rose on our cheek and whisper to the streets we were here. There are weird memories to be recalled such as pissing in a sink near a warm bed for beginners with the dust asleep at the bottom of hills and yes soon there will be no light under the door. Justin still thirsty for drink was not ready to settle that debt yet over his head.
At the tale end of one of Justin’s alcoholic delirium he conclusively came to the fatalistic realization that his chance to flee was leaving him. It was a warm late July evening crickets were chirping in unison in the rare hedges of the neighborhood in Kensington. Justin thought of summers of bygone years. Summers that never ended when he was young chasing fireflies capturing them in the palm of tiny hands watching them glow through the thin slivers between fingers before finally letting them go. Tiny green lights circling warm August nights like falling stars dreaming beside a bed.
It was a late in the night when the seemingly endless parade of passing cars had stopped. The streets were calm and gone, empty of the people and the voices that overflowed just hours earlier. Here sat Justin alone in his yard, thinking of Nicholas Holloway and Rich Gannon, behind his home lost in the intermittent shadows of skinny trees and telephone poles that sat directly across the small alley from him. The alley lamp bearing little luminous light that filters through branches that swayed gently late in the last night of July night. Perched on cement steps taking small sips from a warm bottle of gin in the late wee hours, the talking and joking of friends were all replaced by quiet reflection. Row homes lined forever on endless streets spread out in grid architecture were all but barely present in the quiet darkness. The whole scene was gone and so was Justin he was too drunk and absent to everything including himself. It was another stupor in what had become very quickly a long life of drunkenness. The beer was gone and the bars were closed, yet there always seemed to be one last option; a bottle gin kept hidden behind clothes in a drawer. Justin looked up at the stars that were faint behind the industrious fog of working class Philadelphia with a feeling of lostness at the colossus of the world that surrounded him. As he pardoned himself from the remaining night for sleep sometime around four in the morning it occurred to Justin that this was the end.
This would be one of the final nights in his room with the familiar wash of the electric light across his bed. He lay dreamily electrified, shuddering at the all anger showed to him by the world. He shrugged it off eventually and wept a deep cry from the empty pit of his stomach. He cried until he could no longer and then he felt truthful and clean like a newborn child being torn from his roots. Justin exhaled to the stars warm light stringing up a pale china plate moon that tortured him until dawn’s arrival.
Standing on the platform of the “EL” which rose three stories high overlooking his hometown, Justin watched the sickening life of junkies and hookers, and lost sad elders who roamed and polluted the streets below. That sight became eternally engraved in his head as he stood there in sober revelries, watching the old men who sat on the large stone steps of the banks. The same old men who stood around in circles everyday, as they had probably done when they were young, as their fathers probably had done before them. Fathers that stood around in proud satin union jackets with sad faded letters of some long forgotten bowling league. When a Tuesday night tradition consisted of fathers kissing their children goodnight on the forehead and assuring the old wife they would be back by midnight. The times when the streets were shiny and new, and they walked without fear or worry, with a bowling bag in one hand down crisp streets of asphalt and concrete.
The good old days on godforsaken earth when the American night was filled with working class heroes whose families loved and lived and prayed and sweated in all the promises made by great America. Now the times had spun horribly wrong and there was good reason to believe the dream was dead. No need to tell anyone, it could be read on everyone’s faces. No face to compare to the sad eyes that rolled around in tired pink sockets on old wrinkled faces, scarred with living through the nightmare to the golden dream, back to living through the nightmare again. Here they stood slouched, remembering someone not around any longer—faces numb, mouths downcast with furrowed brows staring at the various walks of life that roamed aimlessly around them. The old men’s hands scarred from working the fertile land; erecting the great nation that now shadowed them and made them feel humble and forgotten to the legacy they built. If only they had realized that nothing was bigger then themselves. If only they had realized that nothing is bigger than the hearts that pounded in their chests forever through sun and storm. They knew they were the last generation to sneak a peak at the great promise made to everyone who reached the shores of America. In those last few men lay a secret knowledge of a world long forgotten; the simple pleasures passed over for some “greater good.”
Justin knew this. He felt in his heart without the effort of thought- the
great burden of a secret knowledge of old warmth in America. He knew he had to get out but be did not believe in himself. Justin never thought he would have the discipline. He saw that these men were now prisoners to a new nightlife on these ravaged streets, the various street people with their own sad fables of luck gone wrong, trying to rely on those struggling to survive daily. The hookers who roamed to sell themselves with vacant eyes and needle scarred arms had their own harrowing tales of survival. He watched the pimps who orchestrated the evil scenes of the streets behind sunglasses and hateful hands as they prey on the weak and needy trying to earn a few dollars. At that very moment Justin looked away, closing his eyes in sadness and anger for all the wasted life and all the people imprisoned in their homes. They were like his mother and grandfather just footsteps away from the grave days of August 1995 Kensington.
The train came rumbling into the station, stopping with a high-pitched squeal making most wince. Justin got on, torn between alcohol’s dead dream and the stunning realization that he must do something, anything, to save his family, himself from the horror that surrounded them all. The train rumbled and rattled on with the overwhelming stench of body odor, alcohol, and urine. The same train every day.
Justin looked out at the gray neighborhoods where you could physically see the disease of hate and drugs crippling everything it touched with their deadly hands.
From the life that Justin knew it was impossible to relate to others and the consequence was a life sentence as the observer. In social situations Justin would always fall to pieces. His stomach would tense and he would sweat faintly become conscious that he was sweating and this would cause more sweating which would eventually cause him if he stayed in the same nervous situation to probably simultaneously combust into a fiery explosion of sweat and nerve endings. Justin’s mouth would clench tight and his mind would go blank and he seemed to be getting worse as he got older instead of better. It felt as if a spell was cast over him and he could never recover in these situations he always thought of Rachel or some other girl and torture himself with what could have been if only he was not so scared. In his head he would be fighting himself sweating to the point of profusion with a clinched jaw getting worse by the millisecond- at least he understood why he was alone.
There are a lot of simple pleasures under Fall skies, walking alone with golden leaves under foot, an indisputable laziness all around in many a somber afternoon. Trees were losing their illustrious colored leaves the seasons and people all changing, everything moving in different directions. Is there such a word for the little speck that you feel like when everything and everyone is rushing by at a furious clip? Always the laughter in the night in some house- the unfamiliar smells of home and happiness that lurk thru windows and red brick. The smell of burning wood, nostalgic to some, but to others of a darker sadder kind a bittersweet foreign scent that had always eluded them.
Sometimes Justin would walk for hours, forgetting everything. Sun would be long replaced by stars and night, and people would be replaced by shadows. Such a country that created these streets for him to walk and wish and pray for deliverance upon. Such a world for God to create that exists in pure virtue and evil loneliness that is well worn in everyone’s face. Souls are everywhere next to Justin and thousands of miles away moving through the landscape tortured by time and memory. White drunkenness of a new day’s dawn peered through Justin’s tiny bedroom window- outside the window he could see rooftops swimming out in lines and lines until everything blurred again like last nights drunkenness. That blessed alcohol that soothed for so long the aching in his heart for love and peace.
Everyday for the last few years Justin had been haunted by the plague of ignorance and violence that annihilated his once quiet neighborhood where he once knew everyone’s face, but now it was almost too much to mention, and he would hate to have to tell the whole sad truth. He feared not for himself but his mother and his family, a poor group of people that have weathered an innumerable heartache. No one more than his own mother suffered. Sometimes at night Justin wished he could echo his own sadness. Too lost to even know how to cry, he would pray on his knees when no one was looking except for the kind sacred heart of the Lord himself. Countless nights in quietness he begged for a miracle to take his mother from the lonely solitude of her home. As the streets approached darkness, violence became so thick he could physically feel it. What despair, here was a supposed grown man bent on his knees, stripped of dignity, pleading to an empty sky for help for his mother these times filled him such embarrassment it was a physical manifestation of emotional abandonment, it was the great burden he felt he was bestowed with.
Sometimes Justin would sit alone and watch his mother and wonder what she thought, imprisoned in the world around her loving heart. All the truths and worries she carried with her Justin wished he could take it all away. Yet she never knew- no one ever knew. Justin’s quiet nature made it impossible to be his true self and love which he never felt capable he could. He flowed deep beneath the surface, hidden behind layers of dead emotion hidden beneath personal barriers and foolishness in every guise, but still ragged and mighty like the sea in a great storm.
Just as some may lose themselves in work, Justin searched out the library to read and get lost in someone else’s world. He was a young man starved for companionship he had nowhere to go. Book after book of subtle craft and form could match the street life of the people he knew. Exceedingly dulled by books bogged down by contrivance and a careful pungency of culture Justin searched for hours for something that would speak to him like a friend, like a brother. The library was a good place to be if you had no true friends. The only people Justin knew were the kids who witnessed with him the streets before them all converted into a warish hell under seas of blue- green neon bar signs on every other corner but even he did not fully understand what warped so many minds of his generation.
By night there was a smooth evil that hid and continuously existed in everyone and everything on both sides which would be released and accepted as the only way. Justin lived with the remorse for his sins, for turning his back on the sacred heart of Jesus, on the forgiving nature of his mother, which he felt he deserved ten fold to suffer for.
At the main library of Philadelphia it seemed a major portion of the crowd was made up drunks and bums who slept loudly and scratched incessantly as they stared back at disapproving librarians. A great deal of time passed in the main reading room that smelled vaguely of dust and rotting paper. There were some books that were torn from life bled from the heart and the guts. The whole world faded into the printed word it stood gorgeously on the page and the world was wonderful for a moment.
A favorite of Justin’s was to go alphabetically to the C section and check for writers that shared his name Alan Clarke’s translation of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist is as close as he came in fiction. Perhaps I could be the first. Deliciously he pushed a wedge between the books to make way for his imaginary debut. Justin began to imagine it possible. He bought a small maple notebook and cracked its spine one day and thought for a long time of its initial scribe:
Beauty come to me the way I come to you. My broken feet over your city streets, your faded afternoon forming over my roof. I have loved you for so long from a distance come to me as I come to you.
A mixture of happiness and embarrassment came over him and he closed the book and followed the scent of perfume that passed- here was the spark of a dreamer.
Silently, reflectively Justin returned home with some books back underground, under the same trains that rumbled and trembled like his once pure heart that was now over powered by the chaos of his own hands. That train was like a death train, looking at the heads of the people below through the train window. That train was more like a fallen angel hovering over broken homes and lost souls.
Retiring to his room in the evening and having never seen a grayer sky float by Philadelphia Justin decides to spend another night in. In private thoughts he has made a vow to himself to stay in and try to self-rehabilitate himself. If he stayed in, temptation could not get him he thought. It takes along time to drown out the noise of a small house that radiated with sounds of voices intermingled with television to get to the heart of personal matters.
Secretly his mother is happy to know that he is home tucked away in his room, safe from the world on the porch and beyond. Then without further hesitation she hurries downstairs to attend to some detail she has forgotten. He imagines his mother always rushing around cleaning and cooking, going from one chore to the next, keeping her mind off her heartache.
Justin thinks about this for a second and wishes he could tell her he knows. Justin sees himself a thousand times getting up, taking her into his arms and telling her everything will be okay someday. Not that he even believed it but he could not bear to think at what could possibly lay ahead.
Night after night Justin would sometimes sit broodingly tucked away broken and overwhelmed by the window of his grandparent’s back window the city moved much softer by dawn- before him were hundreds of shadowed rooftops momentarily interrupted by a large blackened school building adorned with a bob wired crown as an asthmatic whisper of wind blew through the chicken wire screen of the bedroom window. A few years have passed since the days of hopeless melancholy and the artificial gaiety of a chemical romance. So blurred and distorted do memories of this period come that they have merged into one lovely nervous entity. The triumph was still being alive- alive with at least the hope of the ever passing idea of happiness, but the underscore of memory is loss. Looking through the window at black spots of rain expanding on the sidewalk their was a elderly man wearing a dark coat who moved outwards from the shadows and into perspective only to disappear again between tin machines mortar and brick.
So lost in his own thoughts the sight of another person altered Justin’s senses, the man’s mere presence became a gross intrusion on an otherwise private life. But the city keeps a furious pace so Justin wrapped in confidence his inner thoughts and stared straight ahead, as the foreground of shadows came gradually into sufficient sight revealing all the secret taboos that nourished the evil view of this section of the city.
Up to this point Justin had only seen the world from the view that others offered. No longer did the dazzled gaspings of local neighborhoods, or the timid youth who came to stare at the show behind an army of violent alcoholics fuel the impression that tangled in the heart and the spirit. He had accepted the limitations and the excess and stood dumbly and blindly at the countless injustices and cruelty that came from one group whose commonality was color and thirst. From the window of the bedroom an anonymous internal invitation turned Justin away from his own conception of splendor. Inside this home was the warm center of the world out there in the paranoid heartless world, was the countless misgivings of excepted limitation- save for the rare nights of luminous moonlight and the brief passage through infatuation.
Lately however Justin had lost sight of this ancient world and now came the desire
for another world. The spread of pink, red and blue skies before Justin was brilliant and beside his hand on the small night table was an empty bottle of Bush Mills Scotch that nursed him through many an alcoholic mist Justin felt continuously betrayed by a gooey persistent idealism. Scarcely accountable is all the unattached hours of complaisant waste but in this house, life was mellow and safe, a fine distillation of all that Justin wanted. The gentle noise from the street outside penetrated thought and mingled in the room with difficulty through the great barricade of self-absorption and scotch.
So entangled in life from this period with a mellow monasticism that true happiness was scarcely to be dreamed of. The thing to do was run and in a haze of anxiety and unhappiness over the next most impressionable months of Justin’s life he plotted to find the very symbol of happiness and purpose. Instinctively drawn towards the west, the inarticulate unknown that became a fusion of vigorous infantile ideas that formed a highly idealized nucleus in a landscape that epitomized a miracle- surrounded by foamy lights suspended by stars over the majesty of a twinkling city.
The theory of the east in Justin’s conscious became unexpressive; the city appeared bloated, gutted and board with ceaseless revelry. Head in hand Justin walked reverently through the echoing tomb. Among the ruins granite faced old friends burnt out already at the end of teenage years who could only summon up all their enthusiasm with a, “so what?” Lit up alcoholic faces with frayed nerves were strewn about dirty street corners and absentee parent’s living rooms. A few brave and feverish kept up the thin masquerade with hallow wraiths in the stillborn night. But against this current of life new words were born “A.I.D.S.”, “overdose”, and “suicide.” From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable extending into all their lives came dismay, which was never to be expected- they had their limits. Vaunting pride had carried them from tradition into empty parks and earth. The city seen that morning from the window no longer whispered fantastic success and eternal youth but summoned expressions for the horror of wasting youth and lost memory.
Before geography could make its separation a quiet vitality stretched tightly over his skin that marked a facial mask of misery and nervous pain. The effort to be made was often out of proportion to the situation; the truth was Justin had developed a faith and a conscious and whenever he wanted to try and talk to his family he was viewed as the brutal youth who passed out mid sentence not a burgeoning adult who was lost utterly on the cusp of his second decade on green earth. As he stood before his family he was obscured by past failings and all abraded by sorrows Justin thought perhaps they were not equipped with understanding.
In a deep blue grandeur Justin sat up at night as stars fell on his map formalizing authoritative plans to visit towns such as Grand Forks and Morro Bay. Steadily disciplining himself by long majestic twilights for the first time in Justin’s life he felt young and impressed, embalmed by the realization that the world beyond the window was possible. He promised himself he would leave in the spring when the land bloomed and opened up.
Saving what little money Justin had earned he was also indebted to his grandfather who gave him a bank account when he was born. After nineteen plus years the account had swelled several thousand dollars and Justin believed faithfully that fortune was about to change in his favor. And one fine morning in early spring Justin woke and packed his clothes. On a small table by his bed was a stack of scattered maps with red lines stretching across Route 6 and loops drawn around highway 15 and names written on clean white pieces of papers “Ambos Nogales” and smaller crudely drawn maps of the great river bend roads of Winfield. The wind had come and whispered America and Justin was intoxicated with the idea of purple darkness on an evening road. After tearless goodbyes to his family Justin sat in the drivers seat of his first car. All the arguments and counter arguments were over now and his mother’s last command to call often was promised.
As the engine started up Justin reset the odometer to zero and drove off. Passing through streets Justin looked at the living memories of childhood and knew in his heart he would never come home again. Off into the night he drove seeing for the first time in his life the south and somewhere in the tobacco scented darkness of North Carolina Justin checked into a motel he had made it. As he sat on the bed and looked around he saw his face in the mirror of the dresser there was a face beaming with pride staring back at him. As he lay on the bed Justin thought about what he told his mother that he would be back by winter and go back to school in January but Justin’s real intention was to find a great town that he could feel at home in and start anew. Somewhere out there was his place he knew all he had to do was find it.
For the next six months Justin drove over thousands of miles of highway and met strange and wonderful people but mostly he was alone and happy but eventually that faded away and deeper more fundamental issues Justin had surfaced as he spent countless days alone behind the wheel staring at the rode ahead of him- running whenever he felt and stopping only because of exhaustion.
The problem with going west was that eventually the land gave out. For months the west had always loomed ahead as the promised land, beyond the filthy streets of Kensington, where the stars rolled over beautiful prairies and sparkled like jewels in the night. Justin saw himself brooding at the end of an illuminated street with sweet smell of dew in the night. Off he roared from his family spending a long night watching the blurry white lines of the road passing daylight into red evening to purple darkness and back into new morning again. All around him scenery change and silhouetted into wonderful new towns to be explored. He was far from home. Far from the reminders of the haunted life out there on the perimeters of America he was a ghost and seemingly happy for one of the few times in his life.
Being so far from home every new sound and smile was a ceaseless miracle and everything ordinary stood out from the creak of wood to the echoing footsteps of boots the beautiful smiles of midwestern children coming home from school and leaves of autumn gold blew and twisted in afternoon wind. The great deep laughs of rawhide as boots clanked on linoleum floors in a small cafeteria in Texas. Justin did not have a care in the world. He felt like a strange and ragged observer who walked the land at night with a dark word but the words could never form fast enough to match his experience. All the memories and roads blurred into sweet dreams and stunning reality the burning horror in his stomach subsided some to a nervous irritation of excitement.
There are fractures of memories such as standing on golden fields that stretched forever in front of him as no skyscraper blurred the sky Justin thought if indeed he had mistaken the swaying of the golden wheat for the rustling of angel wings. The distant memory of the first sight of the Mississippi River for along time he just stood and listened to the wine of the dark river moan beneath riverboats. Wild, reckless, and dangerous he had burst upon the streets from the bar at midday in Butte Montana to call his grandfather and tell him for the first time in years that he loved him. Justin left it all behind because there was something else he wanted that he did not know what it was and that he would never have. Something abandoned and lost and really forgotten by someone, something majestic and beautiful he saw which brooded in his heart’s restless and unknowable depth. The patience of the eternities he did not have he left the night blessed with the immeasurable pricelessness of the present not belonging to any place or a restlessness to be anywhere. Soft spring flowers scented and cool echoing with a muted far off sound of some new town. So vast and mysterious and exciting he felt like the hero and the lamb all rolled into one. Wanting to confess everything, all that was dark and lonely and crazy and fearful in his heart. This was the roads end of aspiration- the great and good mystery of being.
He saw the sky sown with stars alone and hidden in the land. Eyes of wonder. So ghostly and lost in the skies tonight the inescapable haunted ghosts of a past life. Soft fading nights, street drunk with places of raw simplicities that had now gone into the night far beyond the incomprehensible sprawl and the cancerous smoky suburbs.
So easily forgotten became the turmoil’s of city and time. The long dreariness lay spread out empty and glistening before him. So mystified the saccharine wonder of his own heart he carried with him to the opposite end of night. Why was life so short, so hard, so furious with men, so impassably mortal, so cried for, restless, so sweet and so deadly? The print of a thousand memories he sees what time has done it was something waning like the fall- something was fading from the sun. America is the strange and immediate, massive and instant he stood and watched in beer fog flashes of drunkenness.
Sure Justin wished for a woman who would understand all he wanted to say without words and beyond his loss and sorrow who would show him the visions of the golden future in a new land far off and shining. The simple visions of streets blazing – the countless and rich lights of Nashville. There were many lonely towns and casual voices. Ohio, Kansas, Indiana, Iowa- a vast and sultry river where he saw himself in the river’s bottom. His incoherent personality gave way to a fantastic transformation in his memory. This was life, the life he spent on the rode remembered.
He remembers the rage and fear that over took him Moab, Utah it broke his heart to think of his mother:
Why couldn’t I have protected her? Why wasn’t God watching over her? Why couldn’t God give me the strength, the courage? I want to die for everything, for all the failure, for all the shame for this horrible life.
One night Justin was in a bar in New Orleans and following around a beautiful girl he had met earlier. Their he stood stupid and lost to the inside jokes she told to her friends as Justin hoped for sometime alone so maybe he could finally tell someone what he was doing but the time never came. This night in New Orleans became almost identical to every other night he spent traveling across the American highway. In New Orleans, at four o’ clock in the morning Justin returned to the small room he had rented high and drunk and alone. As Justin lay on the bed the hot southern night outside choked the room of oxygen as Justin sat there with the image of that young girls face and he could no longer remember her name. He could no longer remember his own name or why he even left home. It was to late to call his mother and tell her he was okay so he wrote a letter that conjured up all the magical excitement of the unexplored road ahead he threw the letter in his bag and left the next morning ashamed. He rewrote and edited the letter to his mother until finally he threw it away. A deep humiliation enveloped him what was he going to tell his mom that he was a drunken child criss-crossing the night looking for companionship or at least what resembles it in darkened rooms smothered by alcohol and music.
Justin noticed that he was falling into a pattern every evening after the sun went down- he found himself in a bar. It was the satanic inspirations from the dark. Amazingly how time had gone back to him fully realized. For years he watched the workingmen of his neighborhood dirty from industry roll into the bar and drink beer when the workday was done. It was this romantic idea of the bar he had watching from the outer wall as occasionally the door swung open and just for a moment Justin could see into the darkened doorway the brass of the rail, the wood of the bar top and the shiny bottles glistening behind the bar. But now Justin was older he had drank in the bars and lulled himself in shadowed corners drinking to the music of his father. The novelty had faded and Justin tried to leave the heavy wooden door and escape out into the world. Something however seemed to pull him back. When the sun went down and people disappeared from the streets Justin was faced with the nothingness to do. Back into the bars he went because loneliness is heritage. Justin left everyone but he never went straight. Sitting alone most of the time clouded, suspicious and unclear in his mind he was lost joined together in corrupt defenses the lost streets rotting out before him.
Gone now was faith and youth- long gone was the passion for living everything vanished in smoke. Justin was the moth towards the blue flame of the cities- in the tongue of darkness of America safely tucked in the catacomb of stone and brick barrooms he fell into strange and terrible problems. For Justin alcohol became the bosom of God. Their came an invisible string of vices that tangled Justin in the night and drug him deeper into himself past a point of no return.
One night in Santa Fe, New Mexico Justin stood outside a bar at closing talking with a guy named George, roughly his own age he was introduced to the idea of smoking crack cocaine. It was late and there was nothing to do and Justin had nowhere to go so he followed this guy to his apartment that he shared with his sister.
Everything back at the house was secrets and whispers as the guy’s sister had to get up for class in the morning. In the latest possible hours of evening they stood out on the landing looking out over a vast beige desert of sand as the sky lay littered with glowing dots named stars and Justin had the longest conversation of his life. Eventually the moon faded and whispered voices gave out and Justin retired to the couch and fell into short sporadic sleep.
The dream this night looked like all the rest he was back in Kensington always at night, where the darkness of rooftops by the old corner gave him a hint of that inscrutable future he was longing for. On the old corner Justin stood alone not looking at the future book looking back with sorrow and a vague understanding of how many a man has haunted the earth, pacing in staggering wonder, circling the shadows and highways and all the intelligence learned encompassing- pointing to nothing except to the sublime wonder of strangeness as we dot infinity with our thoughts and old rooftops and lonely hometowns then fade forever away.
Justin woke up when he heard the crash of a dish and went into the kitchen bleary eyed and sleep deprived. He watched George’s sister clean up a dish in her nursing uniform and hurry off to school then suddenly a manic notion flashed in his head-“Go East.” Justin looked around at the stranger’s house his head was numb as if it was filled with freon. He was disgusted with the world, the cheap furniture, the humidity, everything agitated him as he gathered himself and stole a box of crackers and plunged out onto heat shrouded Cerrillos Road and looked for 14 South he was headed east, he had enough of freedom. Over ten hours later Justin’s mood had not really changed as he pulled into the small town of Eldorado and took a small room on an upper floor in a cheap looking hotel.
It was too hot and dark in the room, the carpet was soft and faintly held the light of the corridor. Outside the window bright facades seemed like remote defiance from the sleepy streets that gasped out a saccharine song of our youth. Hours bloomed signaled by chime of ancient sounding bells. The old homes near the business section were falling to pieces at last. All over invented deep mysteries were taking place behind native windows. Dreams of lovely children grew greener where quite visibly one could stand and watch the green grass grow.
No one knew, yet it seemed, the city was poor and the last remaining faces on the street were harassed and defensive. The talk that underscored alcoholic waltzes was one of echoing voices that lost their orientation in the deep blue cosmic presentation of how things are. Further along the window the last remains of sorrowful elms that whispered happier places many years ago. The faded grandeur of the hotel was proudly installed in imaginative facts of gold-lit facsimiles that yielded beyond imagination the imitable story of work and death. The juxtaposition of so many replicas, beyond the window and outside of locked hotel doors was confusing and depressing. Even the moon seemed counterfeit and tired leaning lustrously on rooftops in the blue dusk beyond. One thing rang true- the many impressive photographs of old and dear family these faces were very precious, though it was hard to keep them straight in memory tonight. Their faces provided measure and breath and connection to a world enveloped in tragedy and pursued by a doom so powerful that
Justin could no longer afford the nonchalance in which his somber mind resided.
The room smelled of jasmine and the hot backs of many nights that sweated through Texas heat. The table was scattered with odd papers and receipts that could tie one down to certain places and times. Across the room was an old trunk on top of which sat empty bottles and cartoons, which were used gallantly, toasted the world’s obliviousness to private theories prematurely abandoned by white exhaustion and accordion-like shadows. All things lie deep in the pocket of night even the face of the women in the hallway black at fifty-one because her boy forgot to come home.
In Justin’s shirt pocket was a photo of his mother. In that photograph none of the violence existed just one sweet woman that came to represent so much goodness in the world, perhaps all the goodness. In that last tangible remnants of her arms lye the world, the memories, of home, over and over in his head he tried to remember why he ever left looking out the window at the world, the crown of the struggle.
The real night, the darkest hour, has begun and in this dead of the night Justin knows he is only one conscious of the dark millions gravitating towards the unknown. Conditioned by the intense fatigue of his mind and a still throbbing nervous system- old thoughts have come to haunt. What Justin could have been is lost and unrecapturable. Once he could have acted thus, reframed from, been bold where again Justin found himself timid. All the pain he inflicted came back to him like a terrible storm. A prefigured death, a vicious abyss of endless repetition of life, he seemed unable to pass it and return to it. The bell chimes- the arrival of another hour comes without warning and again leaves quietly without a sound.
So deep and warm is the night, enfolding as a lullaby. Wanting to sink into sleep or nothingness the catharsis of passing midnight hours. The picture he held, the loving face and hands that held him, the girls he had once knew, with big blue eyes, real blonde hair. Moving about in shadows Justin drank deeply from a cup- a white hot substance blurred for a moment in his throat then the hot trail into the pit of his stomach. Dry knuckles leaned on a windowsill his face pressed against the warm glass, only a few neon lights remained. How long he stood their was not important but he stood there long enough that the weight of his body caused pressure on his legs and several times he shifted brushing his lower legs and knees on the wall beneath the window.
Slowly he moved away from the window unrecognizably shrouded by late evening. Sitting in a chair with a hint of collapse he turned on a desk light and due to the silence of the room when the chain connecting the light bulb hit the base of the lamp the sound made a terrible crash. On the small night table was a tall yellow legal pad and a motel pen taking off the concierge’s fake marble counter. After several minutes of staring at the blank page Justin shuddered and lifted the pen from the table and from the depths of his inner thoughts he tried to construct the path that brought him to this very moment.
What shadows are cast amongst the living –a mute appeal to sympathy for our continuous decay? Life as I have know it has been one violent flow of rapid rhythmic action punctuated by fear and fueled by alcohol.
To the world I have been born neither excepted nor indebted. How unworthy and unfit I have been in my days crippled by a silent judgment I have believed I have seen in others. I might have doubted the darkness of my days had I been able to find a purpose for my own existence. I searched countless tempestuous days to find nothing (seemingly because it is not even there). Bored and disgusted by the whole of the people I have known whom I have found by and large nothing above the actions of dogs.
By this I mean if you observe a dog in his owners yard the dog is content knowing the boundaries and limits he is placed in by someone bigger (his owner). If you were to try and open the gate to enter the yard where this dog is upon him not recognizing you the dog will then proceed to bark and growl with all the viciousness he can summon at this unknown thing before him. If other dogs are in the vicinity they join the original dog in his barking and yelping and there is nothing as vicious, ugly and brutal as a multitude in any species driven by hatred for that which they cannot understand.
Of this I speak with experience. I have played both side of the line and truthfully neither well because I have at least on some level compassion but what I have above all is cowardice. This is the soul piercing truth. While I lack the evilness so invested in my father I also lack the heart and determination of my mother and by in which armed with this knowledge I have absolved myself into the inconsiderate multitude. For this vulgar vanity I blame no person and the general application of such matters has left everything dust. For myself I give up-not riotously such as my father and not even sadly but tiredly into the blackened night.
I know that I may have lost the love of many, for my fidelity towards them, but never shall they lose mine. But if I labored over the satisfaction of others and the frenzied hope of internally formed minds I would have failed to see the great contrary inclination of so many people who were intelligent, foolish and the many who still operate on childish inclinations and the great passion which challenges the idea of our mortality. Nature does not seem so triumphant compared to the great dissimilitude who inhabit its topography. For as long as I have been capable of any deeper thought I have felt at home nowhere. Couple that thought with the great deformation of time and this is the inward discord that has served my mind to the multitude. I ask you however to bear in my mind I do not lie in wait to find fault, but the worlds wickedness I seemingly cannot disentangle from its deep relation to my personal history of knowledge.
A strange and saddened history it has been for me all the while providing the breath of life for understanding. This personal history shows again a remarkable history of triumph by violence. You can look at the founding of any country for countless worldly examples. This knowledge has carried over the vast and devouring spaces of so many thousands of years, and has given us incalculable piercing imagery from heroes to villains to ideology to flags. Brave New World! Countless, just countless lives have flourished and fallen and out of the depths and darkness of the earth, their fame and memory our delivered to us almost daily over drunken revelry and antiquated ideas of loyalty and friendship. We are living in the violent times we created. All the errors and ill deservings that fall to everyday people have so wrought our blinded and stupefied minds that the infinite eye and wisdom of God seems like an abstract dream so far removed from the concrete reality that we have encountered in our lives.
I do not wish to speak ill about the idea or existence of God but there is a lot of false beauty in the apparent actions of those who use his name to justify horrific acts. Personally, I have searched for that great consolation of belief and have only felt my own emptiness echo against the long wearied procession of time. The heavens have always felt high, far off and unreachable. While I think we have sense and feeling of corporal things and of eternal grace some revelations of earthly thoughts have long lay lamented in passionate dispute.
You may say there are some things else of greater regard than the former but let me tell you always after I went to bed there were voices-indefinite, fading just outside on the streets below. I have always followed these voices and now here in this room I can still summon their voices, their inflections and tones but I can no longer make out the words. For years I operated on a timid stupidity and allowed idle winds to drive me. It is years of countless distractions that deviate us from our truer path. Now seemingly standing at the port of a self imposed abyss it is not to God I cry out to nor even you. I confess that it is a great comfort of our friends, to have said, that we ended well, because we all desire to die the death of the righteous but it is the ability to end this on my own terms that gives me a great comfort.
I do wish things could have been different but at this point it is just as well owing to have no one to hold on to it makes this all the more easier. It must be strange to still mail you my letters. I wonder if you even read them-it’s fine if you don’t I’ll never know. But if you want to know a reason why I still mailed you letters it’s because I at least wanted you to care and hoped that you still loved me.
I have always thought I was not much of an egotist but to sit and write in thinking you still cared goes against what I thought of myself but Christ give me something.
Goodbye,
Justin Clarke
Justin thought about all the ways to go. He relented control over life and decided that he would hang himself. Above his head was a sprinkler head, fumbling into his bag Justin’s hands vibrated with adrenaline and drunkenness as he tied a knot with a shirt sleeve. Justin looked over out the window in the immediate was a faint silhouette of himself but out in the greater colossus was a vast sandpit of desert. The winds were blowing and Justin’s legs thickened like syrup he could hardly shove a chair beneath the sprinkler head. The air was heavy Justin struggled to breath his shirt collar and palms were drenched. No one stirred in the hotel. Justin raised himself on the seat of the chair and tied his shirt to the pipe. Again he could see his silhouette and from a higher view he saw the blackened buildings and closed his eyes. Involuntary he began to sway on the chair. One leg of the chair raised and Justin jerked forward jumping off the chair and landed right in front of the window.
Justin was sick he ran to the bathroom and purged his body of everything. He closed the blind and took the final sip of an empty bottle of liquor. Again he looked up at the pipe that his shirt hung limply from and for a second he got a glimpse of himself hanging lifeless. His legs shook wildly as he again raised himself and placed the gray shirtsleeve around his throat. He choked deeply as he tied it strongly around his throat and closed his eyes and raised his left leg to kick the back of the chair. His thoughts were splintered, as the only clarity he could decipher was to kick the chair quickly. With eyes closed he kicked the chair and in a split second he was suspended in front of the closed drapes. He winced and gasped and resisted the urge to swing his feet in his ears small and inconsequential he could hear a cracking and a breaking- is it my windpipe?
The crackling sound grew greater by the second as Justin felt his body begin to slump. He thought he felt sweat dripping from his skull he raised his eyes only to see the indentation of a pipe in the ceiling’s cheap plaster before his mind could truly process what was happening Justin was falling to the floor as a stream of water and a fire siren erupted instantaneously as Justin burst through the upturned chair and fell on the ground. Somewhere shortly after hitting the floor Justin passed out cold.
There was a pounding on the door from the female night clerk. Justin opened his eyes as a waterfall was falling on in him in the middle of the room. What a strange thing he thought- How did they get that waterfall in the room? Before he could react or move an overweight woman in a blue uniform was standing in the door entrance and yelling something indecipherable at him. He tried to look at her face but the falling water made it hard to see all he could make out was a liquidity outline with a large red face pointing at the ceiling with an open mouth. Her voice was lost beneath a siege of water and surprisingly working fire alarm system. Justin looked down at his body a sobbing gray shirt tied like an over sized handkerchief lay from his neck and unto a filthy wet carpet.
The women came as close as she could without getting wet still yelling at Justin as he tried to raise himself onto his feet. Her voice was a high shrill equally as piercing as the siren but somehow more annoying as Justin rose slowly to his feet he looked around at the room and grabbed his bag with his clothes along with the water dropped legal pad from the desk and tried to walk calmly out the front door but the women grabbed him as he tried to pass her.
Where the hell you going?
Dazed with a shirt still hung around his neck and soaked to the bone Justin told her very sincerely, “I think someone pulled the alarm.”
Justin continued to walk as a stubby yet strong hand gripped his shoulder and easily knocked him to the ground in the hallway. Justin tried to get up but a small but powerful leg lay on his back rendering him complacent. As Justin tried to turn around to yell at the women a group of confused firemen and policemen were looking on in horror. Justin was so weak he could barely force out the one word he spoke in their direction “help.”
There are a lot of lows a person may face in life Justin was sure that this was his lowest. Down the fire escape a group of police led Justin cuffed and soaked. No one spoke. Once outside he could feel the glare of hatred aimed at him from interrupted sleeping families and the God only knows as they stared at a white male in his early twenties whose whole outline was visible through his clothes was led to a squad car.
“What is your name?”
“Justin Clarke.”
“Just what in the hell were you doing in that their room?”
The shirt still clinging around his neck. “Nothing.”
“Were you attempting suicide?”
Justin tried to think of a proper explanation as the cop continued to shine a flashlight in his face.
“Do you have any identification?”
“In my bag, sir.”
“Hold on.”
The cop shut the door as Justin put his chin on his chest. A few minutes later and the light flashed back on his face.
“Clarke?”
“Yes.”
“You hurt.”
“No.”
“Your from Pennsylvania?”
“Yes.”
“You came way down hear to kill yourself?”
No answer. For a few seconds only the dispatcher’s voice could be heard through the monitor in the front seat. The officer opened the door and led him to paramedics still cuffed with the shirt around his neck like an awkward tie.
Justin was taken to the hospital and tied to the bed until the doctor’s could examine him. They asked about family or anyone they could notify but Justin said he was alone. He lay their all night hearing a host of question’s from fresh-faced residents. After they left Justin felt so ashamed the residents were roughly his age and look how drastically different their lives were. Justin did not give many answers he mostly stayed with “I don’t know.”
The next day a doctor he had never seen before came to Justin to tell him that they were transferring him to a care center to better help him. Justin was forced to stay another twenty-four hours at this rehab place where they tried to talk to him but Justin was hidden behind embarrassment. Finally he tried to explain the psychologist:
“I understand your concern but believe me this was a mistake I never really meant to try to kill myself I was just feeling low from drinking it is the first and last time I would ever do such a thing.”
The doctor’s to their credit really tried to help Justin but he refused everything and when it got to the point where they could no longer hold him against his will Justin signed himself out. Justin’s belongings were returned to him as he quickly rummaged through his damp clothes and found his keys. However the ordeal was still not over as Justin was now released to the cops who arrested him for a litany of things and told him about the thousands of dollars he owed to the hotel for damages. The cops handled him coldly and after seventy hours Justin was released on his own recognizance and scheduled to return in a month to court.
Justin was never coming back. As he walked out of the tiny police station of Eldorado, Texas with a bundle of paperwork he looked at the sky that blackened out the stars and began the two-mile walk to his car still back at the motel. All along the walk the wind swayed and spoke around him Justin was alone and he felt it chewing inside of him. Finally when he got to his car he noticed someone had busted his front window shield. Perhaps a gift from the staff ?
Justin sat behind the wheel and looked out through the spider web of glass Justin could see the rode before him and that was all he wanted. Somewhere near Austin the next afternoon he found a junkyard and replaced his window shield. Further along in the same day Justin sat by himself and decided to come east to find his mother and reconnect to the only people who had shown him love. He never really called or wrote home after the first six months but he thought of his family often, he decided to just show up and surprise his mother he imagined the bright smile on her face as he would put his arms around the women who gave him breath and heart.
It had been nearly two years since he had been home and almost ten months since he last wrote or called home. Along the passage of the highways he had lost himself everything he ran away from was in fact himself. He looked in his bag and pulled out a small damp notebook that contained his scrambled writings over the last two years:
I never saw my home until I escaped to the west. Every year I am falling apart looking for away out of an incomplete dream. I never really saw my mother until the white lines of the road left her face behind back where busted bicycles were orphaned in the rain. Remembering dreams that could still burn me down. Every time it rains, old memories show up like the forgotten landscape of the inner heart. Take me home. I am sorry that I broke your heart. It is just that these late nights are the only time that I can breathe.
All these bars have spent my spirit looking for the heart of the American night where someone was always telling me it’s wilder down the street. It’s pouring champagne stars tonight as I try to walkout between the rain, chained to the earth while the wind shivered my bones as night after painful night I took the fearful leap into the dark. I’m just trying to open my mouth and let out time, let out anything that matters. Slow poison the sweetest taste of blood. I grew up their all my life. I still cannot get away I am frozen to a shipwreck lost out in the rain. All the places
I have dreamed of never cared for me. The world is on fire and the moon is the same color as our bones. Out on some chimney smoke lane where the petals of our favorite rose lay shadowed dark and long. Every summer I try to carry on in the garden of devoured singing a song between the invisible stitches of state lines. On a train is a good place to dream thundering between the iron scrapes of wild years where time is slow honey sweet and thick.
The only thing cleared is confusion. Rachel I still see you the diamond twinkle of your eye and the mercury moonlight of double-breasted hills. The highway of a scar mended on a hand is the price paid to be a hero. I saw dance hall girls with root beer hair with dreams that die every morning. All these twisted machines and crowded rooms leave my heart to the wind. You have become my inspiration as I strive for purity but the night keeps on winking at me and calling for me to come out. Tears on my window shield to big to hide. Blazing through this midnight jungle where the wind blows away fortunes and blows back in pain. Well I guess you get what you paid for I’m alone waltzing with a streetlight and I am down on my knees all red nosed and rumored. I’ve drunk half a river and I still can’t forget her. I just wish the one who got away was me.
Countless nights have been torn in half by sirens and assailants. The avenue is full of hookers with stiletto hair and prophylactic eyes and smell of tragic perfume.
The old men wheeze and cough and keep me up most of the night and I am usually drunk all the rest.
All that racket that gets carried under the guise of night.
Who hung all those scarecrows in cold black fields? I want to burn down all the honeymoons and erase your momma’s prayers.
Now I lay me down to sleep with dreams made of chrome with streets that stretch forever I will never find a home. I hope I die before I wake, bury my heart in a potter’s field to see if it will grow. The ghost of thistle kisses broken promises beneath my sleeve I guess that I was lying when I said I never would leave. While the rest of the world is asleep I’ve sailed down the gutter of a city with a broken pocket watch of squeezed of time. I hocked all the things that meant a thing to me. I slept in a dry rivers bottom. Froze in an open boxcar and through the wind and howling night I wrote upon the rain. I risked it all for a better life as I close another door from a room I lived so many times before. Through the alley, back from hell, holy chime of steeple bells, insane screams from a murderous cell. Trying to recall distant moments where roses withered I cast my eyes down ten thousand tears on the cold breath of mercy.
I’ve smelt like alcohol all my life like murdered ghosts that haunt me. For all the years- a debt on my back. I have seen your face turn white from dead children’s lullabies. Spring songs from days long gone I sat for a while beneath the portrait of Saint Sebastian. I have seen the small birds sing on falling leaves, as I lay amongst them drunk and lifeless. Been knocked out on pills in cheap cafes where old men with money would feel up your leg. To heaven or to hell let God worry about the queers, lechers and poor as we raise Cain and have a drink from the well.
Maybe it was all a dream and maybe it was real but a man’s ambition must be small to write his name upon a prison wall. Churches rise from crooked roofs in a mad world of blood, death and disaster.
Dear dirty delightful drunken old days, I remember walking destroyed by drugs and alcohol at night on the breeze bored to damnation where all the stupid kids I new meant nothing to me. All the drugged up psychos with roses in their eyes trying to turn clean once again. Little green bottles that used to flood my floor I had a thirst like the devil listening to stories of Vietnam. Elusive dreams and rolling streams of rain for things that’s lost that once I’ve seen through midnight screams of pains. Farewell to the girls I have known who left me lost in a sea of foam.
Farewell to the friends who left without warning. I once kissed a girl by the factory wall her lips dam nearly made me cry when she had to say goodbye. Evening drinks with the boys smelling the smoke on spring wind in the memory of good company telling lies no one ever believed haunted by the passing of time, youth the wasted vitality of summer days but I guess we all lose are way like ships in the fog. Sweet city of my dreams shimmering lights and schematic schemes where will the cold winds find you lashed and crucified buried in the foul mud of device? Mother’s eyes were sparkling diamonds. My rose that never withered may the good Lord forgive her and deliver her from the gates of hell tonight. Though all the world betrays thee and pictures in the hallway fade and you curse the spade and curse the plough all my love is with you know.
Madness from the mountains calling how far away do I have to go to find my girl with green eyes? I’ve bathed in holy water and followed death until it revealed its plan splitting the silent softness of the day. Eyes that watched through many a night, trembled to open can’s from the backseat of cars to the backroom of bars living by the night and hiding by the day tempest by booze and pills late at night some of them still get on their knees to pray. I never dreamed of the future I was to young and free but the years go by so quickly and I am stuck here in the furious misery. Home is only made for coming from with only a photograph beside me. Skyscrapers look like tombstones from the sky.
The fiery spark of stars over the sleepy towns and empty roads I watched from a silver light. I’ve washed away from torrent rains down lonely darkened lanes to lose my pain each morning and sparkle once again. All along I have come to realize that I need the light inside of me. Who put this cross on us?
I have seen the hollow sweep of many a mountain while dusk stole the polish from cold rails. The twinkling light of houses from far away, a sad strange song like streams of stars quivering by the rippled brown plains. The sawdust glow of profligated pines in time I will return to thee stripped of plum, leaving, soon gone caroling softly long. I have been where voices fall like sheets of rain amongst the soft suggestion of shadows, hidden from a thing called God.
Heaven is a sphere. The earth is round. The subtle syncopation of space-dark air seeping life out to alleys beyond night. Afternoon, the beer house is dark where you let your breath be moist against me with incandescent insulation, open your lips child to the lean white spring. Rows of houses shift and contract as the sidewalks are flushed with ginger touched by an orange shower of color from the lamp. Hear me now. Whoever you are. No wind stirs the water in hidden pools of glass. I want to learn the trick of words, to make them true, so I may sing a thousand Junes, on a beautiful afternoon.
I too was made in his image.
Into the blaze of light, the images of the unutterable spirit of his life lay in the net of words upon the pages. All the visions of pain, the essential congruence of substance offered to the eternities. Justin sat their all afternoon until the last ghost lights fade into low evening across the long corridor of coasts; pale blue television lights echoed the night sleep to the crystalline radiant sky. A sleep that dreams and presses the essence of hours into sequestered twilight that hurls down the dead years; shadowed desires among the ember flames of splendor and the great sadness of the world. This was the immortal poignancy of time. In an hour of thaw and stars crowded with life Justin returned inward to the most finite and beautiful taste of half remembered thoughts, leaving the great husk for home, the dream forgone and the deed forborne.
So the white car crept east nightward in the dark and there was no life stirred as the wheels rolled on…beauty high, the glittering moon and starry eyed trees divided where crescendo laughter fades in the crushing morning of incoming skies of blue. Goodbye to the broken glass and wooden nails and memories of train yards overrun by violent dogs that are wounded in a night ripe for prayers. Justin sought a return to the east the snowy brown dirt of a childhood embankment to the great east of closure. A return to all those days of lazy hours of youth the awkward age that bruised him and left him battered on concrete lawns. Along he went into the diesel dreams of the highway tattooed with razor sadness. Justin was disappearing into the family name into the long curtain of rode that trembled with every rise and fall over the glass globe of earth. Alone down in the evening Justin kindled the flame saved from the ashes of home a smiling memory awakens gradually as the road led him where he wanted. No pride, just another little boy who ran away from home who finally has seen the world just keeps getting bigger, once you get out on your own.
So- in the dark enfolding night young Justin Clarke sat on the curbstone of a city street staring at the house he was born in. Surrounded by the city and distant thoughts as the occasional lights of passing automobiles illuminated his shadowed profile. The sounds and voices of a house once filled with a family had now dissolved in the night and those voices, so far away. Faces and voice of the past burned among a muted geography of time moving silently through the world of night. A fake sigh escapes Justin’s lips as the smile of a young angel is touched by the dark miracle of living…
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