6.

She wasn’t a bad person; nobody who abuses children should be labeled as ‘bad.’ They don’t get to be fucked up all by themselves. Abuse has happened to them and so it is the language that they know. Did my grandfather drag my mother from her bed and make her scrub the kitchen floors? You betcha. Life was a bitch and anyone who ever got a midnight belt whipping could tell you that. She was always an unwell woman. It simply took time and an incident to put her over the line. In this case it was provided by her kid. That would be me.

My stepmother Agnes was a particular person when it came to order and cleanliness. It must have come from her family, a brood of nine Minnesotans. She lived in fear of her father and in anger at her mother and transferred both of those feelings to the world. She feared chaos and dirt made her angry. The combination would drive her into unmeasured fields of the mind.

It’s fitting that I provided the incident that put her into the arms of the Shrink. That I, agent of retribution and revenge, possessor of knowledge so simple yet so awesome, might be the one who would both open and close the Gestalt.

It was a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1976. I was nine. A friend of my father’s had come over and brought the kids, a boy and a girl, both younger than me. My mother had meticulously cleaned the house before the guests arrived, scrubbing spotless bathtubs, polishing the dark brown linoleum floor. The occasion was a success, or so we kids thought. We played a mindless game of chase, tearing through the house and the yard until we were breathless. My father and his friend grilled dogs and burgers, drank beer, admired my father’s lush vegetable garden. It was one of those ‘weekends were made for Michelob times.’

The guests finally left with promises to host the next party. I went inside to take my bath. As I passed through the living room I noticed that we kids had scuffed up the floor pretty bad with our sneakers. Those scuffmarks would come up but it took time and elbow grease and I knew that job had my name all over it. As I drew my bath and got in the tub, I wondered if Agnes (I always called her Agnes) would be angry.

Yes. Yes, she was angry. The scuffs equaled dirt and dirt made her angry. The means by which the scuffs were on the floor (kids tearing through the house) equaled chaos. That made her afraid. The two combined into one sustained action which was this: as I shampooed my sweaty head she burst into the bathroom and grabbed a handful of my hair. Then she hit me and screamed at me until my father came in the bathroom and pulled her away.

The next day was her first visit to the Shrink. It was at my father’s insistence and she was quite pissed, though she had cried and begged me to forgive her. We wanted her to be happy. We got to see it in glimpses and we loved her at those moments when she was singing off key. I saw how it made my father feel when they were good with each other. Who wouldn’t want that for their folks? So yes, please start seeing a Shrink.

“It will be good for us,” my father said.

5.

If you want to write horror, think of the person you love most in the world, then imagine the worst possible thing that could happen to them. But what if you don’t want to write horror, but rather its opposite? What if you want to change a sad or tragic ending to something noble and bright? Then you have to become some other kind of writer, one who uses the stock of his own experiences as well as those of his friends and lovers to alter the life that you have led, both real and imaginary, both what was and what might have been. Therefore, I was shocked but I wasn’t surprised when I learned of Red Mark’s death. It had always been hovering about him, that desire to perform one brilliant gesture brilliantly. We once traded favorite books. I gave him All the King’s Men, the story of a man who learns the secret of his past. He gave me Exile’s Return, the story of a man who died at the right time. Red Mark was all about timing. He took all the shenanigans that accompanied hanging out with me in perfect stride.

For example, on the return to Texas after a weekend of Jazz, booze and sun, my car broke down on the long causeway over the Atchafalaya Swamp. There are few places worse to pull over than the side of a bridge. The big rigs are merciless, blowing by you in a hail of horns and wind streams. Each one that passed shook the very foundations of the bridge, throwing Red Mark and I off our balance. Meanwhile the curious cars sped or slowed as they passed following every rule of the road except the most important one, watch where you’re going. And yet with all this gravity and danger, Fortune was kind to me and my half-assness. The problem that had stopped our momentum had occurred six months earlier. A brace under the driveshaft had come loose, applying pressure to the parking break and disabling third gear. A crawl under the car revealed the need for a bolt and a nut, both of which I had in the trunk, leftovers from the last time I imperfectly fixed it. I pulled out the little package. But for a nail the kingdom was lost.

“That’s all we need to get moving?” said Red Mark.

“Yep.”

“Excellent,” he said.

That was it. Excellent. Crawl back under, both of us, and while one holds the driveshaft in place the other screws the bracket back and cars scream by and the 18 wheelers could run you into a flatness that would match the quality of your mind right now and pieces of broken glass and angry little pebbles bounce across the shimmying concrete as I turned the bolt by hand and made the whole thing stick if only long enough to get us to an auto parts store.

We had dodged death and dismemberment that day but we couldn’t dodge Life. It came so fast and left so quickly you weren’t sure it had happened or you merely thought it happened. Red Mark was graduated from the University. He moved to New York City, one foot in commerce, the other in a bottle of hooch. The artistic ideal that he longed to live seemed to have died the moment he put Austin in his rearview mirror. Even returning to that riverine city a few years later did little to put him back on his path. He got married. He used his degree in math to write computer programs. I saw him rarely, the way things go when you’re still single and your friends are hitched. You are less and less welcome at their gatherings for the wives fear you, what you represent, how it may appear that you have the Secret, the will to live alone that their men secretly crave. But every so often I’d put on a Clash record and Red Mark would roll by in his antique flesh-colored Lincoln with the suicide doors. He’d have a cigarette stuck in his face like a dart from a blowgun, clouds of cowboy smoke surrounding him in a nimbus of ashy grey. ‘Go straight to hell, boy,’ the Clash would sing as Red Mark and I shot the shit about old times. He admired the work I was doing in theatre, how I’d converted my home to a playhouse. And he might say something about that weekend that we went to New Orleans.

One afternoon I showed him the photos we took.

As usual, I had waited nearly a year to get them developed, a time capsule that might explode beautifully or randomly depending on the sobriety of the photographer. But I had done a good job that first day of the Fest. There was the girl in the straw hat. There was Feganowitz making an obscene yet lovely gesture. There was his girl, bottle blonde and nubile and seemingly always smiling a set of ghostly white teeth. And there was Red Mark. Somehow the last frame in the roll had gotten stuck and so it was exposed numerous times. The picture started out as Red Mark lying on the grass, sunglasses on, asleep. But what it became was an explosion of Wild Turkey bottles and the unwashed crowd and the sun and Budweiser and other faces, other people, other unnamed souls. All of that and more and it was exploding out of Red Mark’s head like so much bone and blood and brains.

4.

The beauty of being from New Orleans is that each time you return you either know everyone or you think you do. Like all people in all places, New Orleanians are as much symbol as substance. The homeless man with the eye patch. You’ve seen him in your dreams. The black kid with the weed leaf on his baseball cap. You scored from him one night in the late 80’s. The old black woman holding two Maison Blanche shopping bags. Why, she used to be ya’ll’s occasional maid.

And this same gravity works for strangers as well. I might rave to you about a secret bar off Prytania Street where only the locals go, where there’s a buzzer on the door and once upon a time they used to let you cash checks. We’ll enter together, you under my arm, me ready to play the old songs on the juke box and marvel at how the proprietor had dressed the ceilings for the Carnival season. Behind the bar, where once stood Maginnis or Big Brenda or Little Edie or even Miss Bertie herself there would be a stranger, a young dude in a baseball cap, someone I’d never seen before but you had, you went to high school together or you knew him from a restaurant in Austin or something like that.

New Orleans is a city where you will come to know your ineffable destiny if only you pay attention to the symbols.

And again, in a city as small and cloistered as New Orleans, when one wants to find one’s friends at a parley the size of the Jazz Fest and they tell you what side of the immense crowd they can be found, one need only strip to the waist and buy the first of many cans of cheap cold beer and walk the periphery of the masses until you find your friends kicking a hacky sack around, looking salty and drunk and even a bit edgy. What’s the problem you ask. Why, they’re out of weed. And you, the Texas messiah, you have come to their succor, for you come from a place where the ganja is a bit easier to find and a QP is only 200 and that lasts about a month or two. Sure, you brought the weed, an alligator baggie of ditchweed and seeds and stems and even a pack of papers, the biggest size, bedsheets your friends laugh. But those are laughs of great gladness as Feganowitz rolls the biggest number anyone has seen, fat as bacon and the girls are on their feet, the sun is hitting their well-formed bikini breasts so perfectly and the girl with the straw hat, cocoa colored and elegant like you’d expect to find in New Orleans, some Creole beauty that someone wrote a song about in the 70’s, she’ll be there and the sun will come through the holes in her straw hat creating a thousand solar freckles on her pretty face.

And of course they all loved Red Mark. What wasn’t to like? He could hold his hooch and he let others do the talking and when he spoke he was not removing your doubt as to his foolishness and he smoked Marlboro Reds which I didn’t and so he was different and made smoker friends and he didn’t smoke weed so no one had to worry about giving up their share. And he was in love with an American girl and so he was no threat to anyone’s penis. He just drank and smoked and took in the controlled chaos that is the Jazz Fest.

Which is: thirty outdoor stages with crowds ranging from dozens to thousands.

Which is every kind of animal that has ever lived except the cockroach fried or stewed into gumbo or jambalaya.

Which are the aforementioned tubs of icy suds found at nearly every turn.

Which is the untold holiness of the Gospel Tent.

Which are tents of crafts and goods so diverse as to give one ennui of past lives in the markets of Zanzibar.

Which is a panoply of music that seems to cover all ranges and attitudes. Perhaps Scandinavian death metal is in short supply but there is everything else, but mainly jazz and rock and zydeco and blues.

Which is: Red Mark standing about twenty feet away from Sonny Rollins watching as his idol blows. Later he would say it was like meeting Jesus or Stalin or Attila the Hun. A sound that existed in a thousand nights of record spinning, a sound that encapsulated entire mountain ranges of the mind, a sound that reminded you why you were living, why you were alive, a sound that gave you hope for all of humanity if only we could put down our jihad and our pork sandwich and come together under a sun-drenched tent in the insufferable heat with a fan blowing on the crowd and Sonny telling you just what was what and where was where and who was who and why was why and Thank God at last how it could be done, by you, by me, by anyone, the raw potential for greatness that was in each Individual Soul. Sonny had it, Red Mark had it, I had it and if you had been there that day you would have had it too.

3.

The traveler must have his ritual. For me, the ritual was to pick up a six-pack of Dixie the minute I hit Baton Rouge, regardless of the hour. All across hot and thirsty Texas and wet and verdant Louisiana I would dream of those ice cold long necks, that funky Dixie flavor unmatched around the world, that earthy loamy taste that told you once and for all that you were home again.

So there we were at the grocery store buying beer at 7 a.m. Red Mark laughed at the decadence of it all but the ritual was not complete. Without opening the beers I wheeled us down College Drive and into the parking lot of the apartment complex where my friend Fontenot lived. That was another part of the ritual. No matter the time of day or night, it was necessary that I look up old Fontenot and make sure that he was still breathing. I parked the car and let Pineapple out of the back seat. He baptized an azalea bush and then walked up the steps to Fontenot’s door. He knew the ritual too. I rapped on the door until Fontenot answered, looking half dead and frightened. 7 a.m. knocks on the door for freaks like he and I were unwelcome. But Fontenot smiled and said, “Piney,” as my dog ran inside. He looked at me and said, “Hey man,” and he smiled and it was good to be home. I introduced him to Red Mark and then we went inside. Fontenot was always down with a cold one for breakfast. And now came the last part of the ritual. The Clash. Red Mark liked to ask rhetorically if there was ever a better band than the Clash. They certainly were a fine group, but my interest in them was narrowed to one song, Rock the Casbah. I didn’t care that it was a hit; I loved that barrelhouse piano opening and those shattering guitars, the almost unintelligible lyrics, the political overtones, the simply great four minute and twenty second jam that is Rock the Casbah. And Fontenot had it on vinyl. I sipped a Dixie. My dog walked around outside, recognizing the old smells. I had assed out everything in this apartment, driven Mrs. A. to hysterics, broken in through the upstairs window like a SEAL to steal my own weed, woken to huffers and Jack Daniels, watching Apocalypse Now on an endless loop for a whole day. I had shared Fontenot’s suffering and inflicted my own upon him. He had born witness to the destruction that had been me and Mrs. A. You could see it in his eyes, the gratitude that I hadn’t killed her or myself. And he could see it in my eyes, the love that men have for each other, true and beautiful brother love.

We tried to dragoon Fontenot into the Jazz Fest but he said no. Too many people, too big a city, too far from home. He feared getting lost and drunk in some strange town. It reminded him too much of his roving past. He was a man of habits, no matter if a slew of them were bad. But he was an ass-kicking chef and a handsome man who painted and made weird electronic music years ahead of its time. He was as faithful as an old cat which reminded me to look for his tortoise shell calico. I didn’t see her and asked old Fontenot where she was. The look on his face. I’ll never forget it. He might have lived the rest of his life and no one would have asked him about his cat at 7 a.m. over a beer and a bong hit. He shook his head. The truth must out.

“I just got tired of her always bitching,” he said as if he was describing an annoying woman. “So I took her to the dumpster three buildings away and left her next to it.”

“What.”

Fontenot looked at me. His eyes were wet and pleading. Please don’t judge me, they said. He had already annihilated himself over this terrible misdeed.

“I went back to look for her the next day,” said Fontenot. “I called her a long time. She didn’t come.”

“I’m sure somebody picked her up,” I said.

“I sure hope so,” said Fontenot. “She was an inside cat her entire life.”

Red Mark stepped in from the porch where he’d been killing a butt. “Ready to go?” he said.

“Sure.”

Sure. Enough catching up for now. Later there might be times even better than this, where all our cats were safely tucked in their beds, where mornings began with waffles and eggs and not whiskey beer and weed. Another time, another day, but not this one.

“Goodbye, my friend.”

“Goodbye,” said Fontenot. “Thanks for stopping by.”

2.

Most people called him by his last name but to me he was always Red Mark. It was a natural nickname with his flaming hair and wisp of beard, his parchment-white skin burnt red, the scattering of freckles across his cheeks, the red eyebrows and red eyelashes. He was a boy, like all of his friends, a very smart boy who would do great things, maybe even the ultimate, a star, a star of literature no less. That was the dream of the golden mountains for all of that crew, Colin and Raj and Quentin and Seth, to become the next Somebody. Each had their favorite. I think Seth wanted to be James Joyce, Raj wanted to be V.S. Naipaul (or Arthur Fonzarelli, it switched from time to time), Quentin wanted to be e.e. cummings, Colin wanted to be Hemingway, and Red Mark wanted to be Eugene O’Neil. He certainly had the alcoholic capacity of an O’Neil, and he’d taken a few tentative steps away from his mathematics track at the University to write a couple of plays, one of which was produced on campus. He sat in the darkness watching the actors destroy his writing; meanwhile his major professor sat in front of him in the theatre, clearly unamused. I forget what the play was about but it didn’t matter. The professor’s only comment at the conclusion was to correct Red Mark’s grammar regarding his use of the word ‘hung.’

“It’s ‘hanged,’” said the professor and then he left.

Red Mark told me that as we shot through the darkness that was Texas in the mid-1990’s. The route from Austin to Houston and beyond was mostly a caravan across rolling hills and deep pastures of blackness. From time to time we hit a patch of car dealerships or shuttered saloons, maybe an all-night gas station or a truck stop, but mostly it was mother night and the green glow of the dashboard and two friends sipping coffee on the black vinyl bench seat. In the back, my dog Pineapple and one bag for each of us. The mission was the New Orleans Jazz Festival. For Red Mark, this was a foreign country. I was, of course, going home.

I hadn’t really changed. My folks and I had the typical hot and cold relationship we have with our parents when we’re in our 20’s. We love them but we don’t respect them. They love us but wish we’d stop acting crazy and settle down. We fail to realize that our madness begets their madness in the same way theirs once begat ours. So this trip would be a casual pass by the old house and I might see my father and my stepmother or I might not. They’d come to expect nothing from me except the occasional bad news or phone call from jail. Sure, I was a college graduate now. I’d had my diploma mailed to my folks. There it was, proof that I was a bachelor. A degree in history and yet I knew almost no history. The year of Charlemagne’s coronation? Nah. The decades or even century of the 30 years war? Nope? The pantheon of Egyptian gods? Never. Why Pickett’s charge failed? No clue. I was the classic dilettante, someone who knew just enough of anything to make an ass of himself. And I was still holding out for the girl that would save my soul. In that sense Red Mark and I were the same, helpless romantics always ready to perform the gran geste, the Hart Crane leap from the stern deck, the Hemingway walk to a quiet room, the consumptive, smoking whiskey and drinking cigarettes in a cold garret in a rust belt town. All of that and we still kept turning up with these forlorn tough chicks who’d seen it all and couldn’t care less.

We weren’t in the car ten minutes before I spilled the straight dope on my new girl, Melanie.

“She and I were talking about the craziest things that we ever did,” I said. “I told her about the time I passed out on my front lawn and someone threw me a pillow from my second floor apartment. She told me about the time she got drunk at a party and screwed five guys.”

“Holy shit,” said Red Mark as Texas went by.

There wasn’t much more you could say and so we let it ride. I knew Melanie was just another passing thing, too young for me, too damaged, too blonde. I needed a dark-haired beauty who would listen to my bullshit as it formed into a cohesive nimbus of thought. I needed someone smart and funny who liked books. I needed someone like Red Mark’s girl. Not that I was in love with her. Far from, though she was easy on the eye. No, the affection she had for him and he for her was so lovely that only a maniac would have thought to break them up. That’s me, the maniac.

Actually, it was a straight-forward deal. Red Mark wanted to bring his girl on the trip to New Orleans. I said no.

“Really?” he said, quite surprised. “We already talked about it and she’s really excited.”

It’s a different deal when you bring your girl and I told him so. This trip would be about sleeping on floors and long days of drinking in the sun, long lines to use a stink-ass port-o-potty and God knows what for food. It would b fueled by Wild Turkey, jazz music, blues and gospel and dope smoke. It would be hot and dirty and insufferable. It would resemble the sorority house not one tiny bit.

“You’re right,” he said.

And there are things that only can be said when the men are in the room or the car and maybe there’s a dog and maybe not but what’s important is that they’re able to communicate in a way that can’t occur with the forces of reproduction present. For men are both creators and destroyers and we need to know that there are times in our loves when the twain do meet and this must be embraced and cultivated and if there is a goal to reach, a destination to arrive at, a task to be killed like any predator does then so much the better, pass the coffee and hunker in the darkness and talk poetry and music and art and God and women and death until the night’s long hour and the long shift in front of a hot stove catches up with a man and Red Mark leans his head against the glass and softly falls asleep.

Shrink Wrapped

1.

The journey to peace of mind must come from far away and take a long time to complete. It must be literally painful. There must be loss of sleep and dreams of mutilation. It must take so long and cost so much that a body has to wonder in the end if it will ever be worth it. The journey must not be all of a piece either. It must start and stop and start again like any of the old cars that you will drive. There must be long delays when nothing seems to happen and nobody knows nothing. There must be intervals of solitude, some welcomed, others feared. There must be long views out of wide windows at a land so empty that you’d never be able to find space of your own. There must be accidents and incidents and much drug abuse. There must be secrets to unearth and secrets to rebury and of course, there must be revenge. At the heart of every journey to peace of mind is revenge. That isn’t to say that it should resemble the end of Hamlet, bodies scattered about like 9-pins. No, it might be subtler than that because what is necessary, always necessary is this simple fact: they must know. They must know why you’re there pointing a dagger at their eye, holding a pistol to their temple, wrapping a garrote about their neck, plunging a hot poker into their nether regions. They must know what terrible act in their forgotten past has motivated you to cross as many time zones as necessary at whatever cost over however much time to get to their small circle of self. They must know because you must tell them. Perhaps that will be all because after all that is the entire point of the journey towards peace of mind. You are the agent of remembrance. You are the one who lingers deep in the subconscious where Freud fears to tread. You are the one they remember when they remember what they’ve done, how they lost their morality, their ethics abandoning them under the siege of hard realities. And when you arrive at your destination, your million miles covered in a billion steps you will face the final choice that we all have. You will be able to do one of two things. You can be the final agent of chaos, or you can be a messiah. There will never be an in-between.