Confessions of an Asshole

I remember standing in a field in upstate New York with a shotgun in my hand. It was a cornfield, where birds were messing with the crops. And that particular farmer of that particular field asked us to “take care of” some of the birds. Like an old gangster flick. That was back when my father was still drinking so we went a little overboard on ammo, boxes of shotgun shells and 30. 30. rifle rounds stacked in the bed of the truck. We were at it for hours, popping off shots at anything that moved – I wasted half a dozen rounds trying to blow away this butterfly, although it might have been a moth. I didn’t get him. Dad and the farmer mostly drank Coors spiked with the vodka dad kept stashed under the driver's seat. Eventually, as the day aged, the birds got wise, but not until we’d collected upwards of twenty dove, crow, and pigeon corpses on the lowered tailgate of my father’s truck, because you eat what you kill, that’s the second rule to guns. After the birds had pretty much abandoned the field we started throwing old tomatoes into the air and shooting them, they exploded red. I remember when my father, drunk and taking large chalky white pills out of a plastic sandwich bag for “back pain,” stumbled in the mud and threw a tomato crosswise so that he obstructed the line between me and the tomato with his body. I would have shot his face off but I didn’t pull the trigger. He got so mad at the wasted tomato.

I remember wild nights of excess, crippling mornings with foghorn blue jays and boxers in the crack of my ass. All the pale wraith men in the mirror, liquor thinned teeth. Somebody built a beer can pyramid in the living room. All the logos point toward the front door like sentinels, dead terracotta soldiers. I take the top one off, Dutch Gold, and flick the pop top. I rub the ball of my thumb on the jagged underside, thinking about its journey from this room to the corner store to the brewery to the factory to the foundry to the earth. I cut my thumb just enough to loose blood beads, so slow and thick, like sugar, like hungover water unwilling to motivate. I rubbed the blood all over my thumb and gave it a hat, a liquid veil, my thumb, a priestess of Mars.

I remember thinking that feeling would never go away. Bare corral tipped breasts were all around me. The beach like stretched goat skin. And the Mediterranean: water looking so much like a dream, like an ad agent’s mock-up of water. When the sand got too hot and the women flipped over I went into the water and thought about her and not being with her ever again. I hoped the waves would knock the hurt out of me, I hoped tumbling against the rocks and sand near the shore would scrape away her memory. After, on shore again, sitting with icewater and a view, I recanted, panicked at the thought of losing her – which meant, of course, that she was still there. Rattling in me. What a relief. What a pit of dread. Like Sisyphus pulling on a cold wet bathing suit for all eternity. If Spanish beaches can’t cure me of her than nothing can. And now it’s better, I can tell myself I am happy, I feel like a consciousness among consciousness’. But sometimes when I close my eyes I can hear Spanish men in tattered shorts and baseball caps hawking: “Cervezas, coca kola, mojito, best quality!” and if I lick my lips at that moment I will taste salt.

I remember stars spinning in a wheel about my head. We were on that island up the river from some well known lake, Upstate New York. That afternoon, as we farted our way up and out of populated territories, the treeline along the shore and the blank sky above it were mirrored in the river water, so that trunk ran into trunk and the upper canopy jutted into one of two blue infinities. Deer had stripped the leaves from the lower branches so what was left looked like an endless procession of arrows, evergreen missiles prepped and waiting for launch codes. The stars, though, that night, all the stars we don’t see in the city came out to caress our little campsite. We brought no tent. We knew the celestial dome above us offered more protection than canvas. In half-dark we heard an owl challenging us from his lookout in a tree – “Who goes there?” –, then a rustle, a squeal and we knew the stars hadn’t meant protection for all.

I remember falling into the water with my socks on. No big deal, just white athletic socks without any purpose or value beyond keeping my feet from rubbing against the suede of my shoes, averting blisters and dead animal smells. But it was a warm day so I chose not to take my socks off, which lead to a worse smell and damp-related rotting. My feet turned white. I pulled great sheets of dead skin off me like the scrapbook-worthy ads in a magazine. I hung the sheets around my room in direct sunlight, always shifting the foot-skin herd from morning until afternoon. The wooden cross pieces in the window casted shadows on the hardwood, defining rectangular fields of sun; I used the shadows like fences. Skin cowboy. I hoped the skin would dry enough to be used as leather, bind a book with it maybe, but eventually all my efforts fell away to dust.

I remember heat. Fourth floor room without air-conditioning, melting like butter on the hot frying pan that is an Iowa summer. I’d turned seventeen that October and as I remember she was sixteen with a birthday fast approaching. And what we did there on our own time is of no account, but say that it was sweet, complete in a way that can only be seen in retrospect. On our last day together I left early in the morning and she woke up to see me off. And that was all, a swift peck on the mouth, farewell, I’ll most likely never see you again. I, and my fellow eastbound teens, piled into a van. One of the others with me was in tears. He’d said goodbye to the girl he’d spent his past two weeks with. They both were crying I saw. She was standing on the stone steps of our dorm, waving to him and by, proximity, us. At the time I thought they were play-acting, poking their passionate hearths to create a spark of empathy in the rest of us. But now I don’t think so. My girl and I knew we were stuck in a line-segment that would end, so we capped ourselves emotionally and understood the inevitable. This other couple did too, I’d think. What I mistook for theater might have been the true expression of the emotions we try to invoke in our writing: love, terror, hatred, joy. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen those emotions running down someone’s face, but it was the first time it didn’t scare me.

I remember a high-pitched whine. Nowhere but my ears. Twin sound spheres hung around my head like earmuffs and just that tone, that eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee that threatens to blot out the world if you focus on it. I remember thinking that is the sound of my death, a mosquito buzz reminding me that every concert, radio tune, and ditty in the round is a past experience, a youthful indulgence I pay for with the tiny waving cilia in my ears. That noise is their death dirge, a doomed forest’s lamentation. So I focused on it, letting it fill my head with monotony, the sound that made up the silence. The sound of my death is annoying as fuck. Not the warrior yawp I’d imagined. Instead, distant traffic, an approaching gnat, all the things I didn’t care about spilling from the holes in my head. One day, I know, that will be all I can hear. Wind and voices and footsteps and crashing waves muted by the death hanging around my head.

I remember blank faces made of pottery. Tiny sticks with flat tips in those delicate hands whisking away fluffs of wet clay. A few low-pressure twists of the wrist and an eye popped open. Soon the kiln’s heat will harden that face, giving it the illusion and weight of permanence, like rainstorms you get caught in without a jacket. Those hands, though, the ones that carve the faces, they reminded me of birds building a nest or spreading seeds in their feces. They just do what they do in their chirpy day-to-day lives, but the results are incredible. Bird bones are hollow. They’re easy to break, fired pottery. Who would break those hands? Who would destroy something that creates? I have. Birds, and their miracle shits. But would I again? Yes. Destruction is it’s own creation. Fragments convey a romance the whole just cannot replicate. That’s why in Spain, in a gift shop near the Guetti park, I brought a hurley – that old Gaelic bludgeon, delicate too in how it can balance a ball – and with the hurley I smashed the shelves and tables and hanging doo-dads sending shards of ceramic bulls flying in a way that the natural world couldn’t replicate.

I remember a pair of balled up socks. Not clean socks, but the kind that get balled up after you’ve tossed them in the hamper. There are laundry fairies – except I think they refer to themselves as laundry gremlins. In any case, these fairlims sneak into your room or closet at night at very specific times. I knew a fairy who only showed up at precisely two twenty-two in the a.m.. Many liked to start work at midnight as a historically significant “witching hour” – many fairies that still deal with children still do – but in the modern artificially lit era so many people keep hitherto unthinkable hours, so such strict schedules are impossible. That’s how I met my fairy, late at night when a healthy circadian rhythm would have had me sawing cellulose, I was lying walleyed, considering jerking off. I heard a creak, the conspirator’s calling card, and a slim strip of light oozed into my bedroom from the hallway. A two-foot figure slipped in. He, Kevin, tiptoed with high knees so the bells on his hat and curled shoes wouldn’t jingle. I’ll be fucked if I understood why their uniforms are like that considering their professional reliance on silence.

I remember wide mouths and wet eyes. As little as I seem to KNOW, I know how I affect people. I am a presence. If this is a mirror consider this my pep talk. Connor is power, energy. A worthy talent. Calm caught in the wine bottle. Buckfast make you fuck fast. There is no world outside of my head. We are worlds that orbit around each other. Discreet universes sharing commonalities but no two the same. If only that were true. Isn’t that what we all look for? Someone to rule a shared universe? Arrogant sons of bitches don’t care fuck all for your opinion. Better to love ones self and be called an asshole than be loved by all and despised by self. Right? Nihilistic asshole. Wild eyed, intense personality. I hope I am. To others I might be boring. Do not mistake my silence for dispassion. If you wish to be a god you must have an equally light touch. My head condescends to my shoulders. One day it will float off, get caught in chilly layers of atmosphere, smash back down to earth with ice in the hairs of my nostrils.

I remember size like an anvil. Empty space defining a hundred million years of river, rain, and wind. We drove in two cars, the cookies and vape pens we’d smuggled in from Colorado being put to good use. Up a hill that was really a wide cliff defining the canyons, red dust falling off bellow us – Mars, hundreds of rusted out oil tankers pulverized and blown out of an aerator across eastern Utah. Near Moab. We get out of our cars, just the leading edge of high. The first look over the drop is joy. The shock of never before seen topography and distance. Layers of stone, maze of valleys, impassible, an aerial peephole into the house of the Geology Gods who rumble endlessly under our feet. My earwax is dusty, my sweat making mud run into my eyebrows, as I put my face against the dessert and try to sneak another listen.

I remember a cut off the highway, white letters painted on the red Cliffside –“Hole in the Wall.” A parking lot, iron statues, a faux-Old West general store that sold energy drinks and beef jerky, but no alcohol because this is Utah. No beer over four percent. Piss water. We shot a scene under the sun, an angry scene where the camera spun around the protagonist and I, the boom mike operator, had to stay slightly behind the cameraman and not rattle too much. Afterward, we sat on a bench or coolers or the ground slapping deli meats and Swiss cheese on gluten-free bread. The female lead put potato chips on her sandwich. Later, after we re-packed the cars with food and firewood, I put the female lead under the tent of my sweatshirt. Exhausted and dirty, she looked at me with what I now know to be love. That slippery word that alternately feels like icewater or dirty pennies in my mouth.

I remember tiny BBs on the floor of our attic playroom. Although, more accurately, I suppose, it was my attic playroom. Cory’s old room was up there, but that was just a storage area after she went to college – all her leavings plastered with pastel felt-tipped pen ink. Then it was truly mine. The attic, sewing room, cedar closet, coats from the seventies, box of Legos, gift wrapping paper, skiing equipment, a couch like quicksand, small framed photos, my BB gun. The BB gun which, one year, uncle Mike borrowed during the migratory period of the Canadian goose. The geese would not stop shitting on uncle Mike’s grass, hydrangeas, and even the plastic black lab he’d bought to ward the shitters off. The dog worked as a scaregoose for a few hours, but was nowhere near fearsome enough. Uncle Mike borrowed the gun. I showed him how to load and pump the machine, all black metal and brown plastic made to look like wood. Later, he told me how he’d tried to shoot around the animals, kicked up clods of dirt near their webbed feet like old western gunslingers, but BBs do not work like bullets, BB guns are not six-shooters. There is no bang. The lawn accepted the brass BBs like raindrops. So uncle Mike shot one of the birds in the chest, the BB cutting through feathers and flesh and hollow bone. He did not intend for the bird to die, but, well, shit happens and we should all be grateful that we have the privilege to bury the dead after the killing is done.

I remember nothing but discomfort, awkwardly standing between the kitchen and the livingroom with a cheap beer in one hand, a fidget in the other. People had streamed in, filling the space that had been empty – just some dudes smoking cigarettes while playing Mario Cart, sofas full of bacteria and burn pits, waiting for the pill to kick in. Jennessa and Dan had cracked their capsules on the coffee table, crushed the contents into fat powdery worms and snorted them. It burned badly, they said, but would pay immediate dividends. Ten minutes later they we nauseous, removing themselves to Dan’s bedroom to ride out their trips, KO-ed before the party even started. What always happens when I take slow moving drugs happened: the delay between ingestion and effect stretched like sinew, on and on until I thought I’d been ripped off. I was going to turn to someone, one of the milling drunken twenty somethings, to tell them I’d been ripped off with a bum dose, anybody would have done, I felt so alone in my sobriety, when my rib cage started to rise. There were carnival balloons in between the bone of my breastplate and goop of my guts, lifting me, separating me into my best components like a butcher’s cleaver. My eye caught Dan’s – a different Dan than the one previously mentioned – and he grinned at me, the corners of his mouth, the brightness of his eyes, his pupils inflating, trying, I knew, to encompass me. Me. The flesh of rampant joy.

I remember yesterday. The feel of battle, the arming of the hero. I am a hero, if nowhere else than my simple broken world, the one between the delicate tributaries of my temples. A skull is armor. A skull is an ozone layer beating back the forces of the vacuum of space and the sun god, Helios. But armor is only as effective as the missiles hurled against it. What good is a layer of gas against planetoids? What good is a crust of skull against the woman you love(d?) hurling betrayal and suicide attempts at you? You selfish fuck, I tell myself. Remember that you are not Helios, you do not light the solar system. That’s called empathy. Remember that the thickest armor for both you and she is distance. You want to speak to her now because it will make you feel better, not her. Armor, good armor, takes a long time to put on, but it also takes a long time to remove. Defense is a complicated beast and you worry that you will have no answers, that there are none to be had.