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 Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 7:58 am
Personal memoir -- something to do with family
"A Casual Meeting with Death"
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Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 8:13 am
I thought I saw a vampire once.
He was a diminutive creature, only about a foot and a half tall, with a head many times too large for his body. He skipped across the pond without disturbing the fetid water, and zipped toward and away from me barely parting the tall grass. His trick was to stay in my peripheral vision, so I never saw him directly, but I knew what he looked like. He had yellow-green, cat-like eyes that took up the majority of his face like giant saucers on a watermelon.
He ran toward me, then he was beside me, then looking down on me from the deck above. Peeking down, his eyes narrowed in devilish pleasure and seven technicolor mouths, each inside one another, smiled, revealing a toothy maw of glittering black fangs. I felt those fangs gnawing on my brain, sucking away on my fear, leaving me lifeless.
The dextromethorphine hydrobromide pounded through my brain as my dry heaves echoed into the empty porcelain bowl. I could still feel the vampire's grip.
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Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 8:41 am
I thought I was a time traveler once.
Stumbling in the half light behind a grocery store, warm with rum, the pungent stench of rotting cheese from the dumpsters made my eyes water. Insects buzzed around the security lights anchored to the corners of the building, which functioned only to make the dark that much darker and the light painful to look at.
The shortcut was neither as short as we had intended, nor did we feel alone. It was quiet, but we felt like we were being watched. Looking around, we saw nothing -- it could have only been from the roof. We scanned the artificial horizon to no avail. But the feeling of being watched was not one that caused anxiety or fear. It had a touch of familiarity to it, not like it had happened before, but like it was someone I knew -- ninjas, we surmised.
Weeks later, after struggling up a drain pipe, I surveyed the vacant grocery store parking lot, as if looking down upon my kingdom. I wandered the rooftop, looking for signs of life, but found nothing. Creeping over to the edge, to avoid being exposed by the flood lights, I looked over into the barely lit alleyway behind the grocery store, and looked in disbelief down on myself and my friend dragging our feet along the asphalt. I felt both me watching myself and being watched by myself, and something gripped me from inside and ordered me away from the edge. Quickly rolling out of view, I knew at that moment I was in the alley scanning the rooftop for my voyeur.
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Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 9:11 am
I thought I was a "good boy" once.
Living in the tattered shadow of my brother, I could do no wrong. Smart, hard-working, obedient, my parents had no reason to think otherwise. My parents trusted me to live in the basement, while my father stayed up nights drinking Hot Damn waiting for the police to bring my brother home.
I smoked in the garage and waited for my father to lumber up the stairs to his room, at which point I eased the back door open and climbed the fence off the patio, walking down the street to meet my friend waiting with Faith, her diesel Mercedes engine rumbling. I would return only a few hours later and repeat the same steps in reverse, all the while holding my breath until my last footfall on the carpet of my bedroom, the door securely closed behind me.
A tall bottle of rum sat between two friends and I in my room, fueling the fire of our drinking game. Grabbing some green, harvested directly from the train tracks and stored under a bathroom sink where it was nibbled on by greedy mice, we sat in my friend's parked car across the street -- enjoying the unusually light feeling of what we had, the high of which was comparable to the buzz from too many glasses of champagne.
Stashing the bowl deep within the bowels of Faith, we made our way back to my house, only to be stopped by flashing blue and red lights. We removed our shoes and answered their questions honestly. They could smell the rum, and where there's smoke, there's fire. But Faith was on our side, and they never found the evidence.
Sitting on the stairs while my father talked to the police, my friend handed over the mostly empty bottle of rum. I'm sorry, I said to my father, I'm so sorry, and I wept. My carefully constructed facade had collapsed. But, surprisingly, very little changed.
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Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 9:35 am
I thought I had a brother once.
We have the same crooked smile, and we write the same capital J in our last name. We both have the same inflamed blood vessel on the white of one eye, and squint when we wiggle our glasses up to the bridge of our nose when they start to slip down. We both have parents who were brave enough to do the right thing, even though they were too afraid to tell us the truth. And we both have a drunk aunt who opened her mouth when it was agreed that she shouldn't.
What I don't have is a mother vegetating in a hospital bed a few hundred miles away, or three older siblings. I neither have red hair, nor do I have too many dimples in my face to count.
Remember when we were kids and I told you that you were adopted (as older siblings are wont to do), my brother said. Well, I'm the one who's adopted. His mother was actually Linda, my mother's half-sister. This doesn't change anything, my father said when I called him for confirmation. You're still brothers.
Of course we are, I said. I've never not had a brother, but it's good to know that we can't donate kidneys to each other.
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Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 10:27 am
I thought I liked girls once.
Despite what I might have thought or felt, I compartmentalized, rationalized, and denied -- all more powerful strategies than one might expect. I had loved, but I knew something wasn't right; it didn't feel like it was supposed to. I broke hearts and had my heart broken, all the while knowing and not knowing why.
I envied the popular guys, and glittering movie stars. They were popular, muscular, handsome, and always dressed impeccably. It was an exotic feeling, both wrong and somehow right. Only years later would I let myself go and realize that it wasn't that I wanted to be like them, I wanted to be with them.
I never changed who I was, or how I spoke, dressed, or acted. I was and still am the same person, but with heart and mind communicating freely. I was never oppressed by anyone but myself, or encouraged to hide who I was, but simply being honest with myself removed some of the world's weight from my shoulders.
Testing the waters, I didn't care what people said or thought, and I refused to label myself. But being honest with oneself and being honest with other people are two completely different things. I almost lost my best friend over something he would later embrace and celebrate, even more so than me.
The final hurdle was my mother. I was so afraid she would think she failed, that I would never give her grandchildren, or get married. I know, she said after I finally mustered up the courage, moms know these things.
Thanks, Mom, but I hate when people tell me they always knew; why didn't I get the memo?
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Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 11:04 am
Walking through Death's door, my elongated shadow cast upon a featureless floor by the rectangle of white light behind me, I was naked and unashamed. I took a few steps and the light behind me disappeared, leaving me in inky blackness. Though there was no light, no floor, no walls or ceiling, the room was oppressively small.
A small, hanging lamp with a green shade flickered on as if on a timer. It illuminated a five-person poker table framed in polished dark mahogany, more blood red than brown, and covered in fresh red felt. Death sat in a chair on the far side of the table, while an empty chair stood askew on my side, beckoning me.
I took the empty seat and stared at Death. I sat not expecting anything; he evoked neither fear nor comfort. The only thing about him I could pin down was his suit, neatly pressed and of a color I could only describe as nothingness, like it contained all colors and no colors. His face similarly was one made up simultaneously of everyone I had ever known and no one I had ever met; images and emotions flowed unceasingly across it, like water rolling over rocks in a slow, shallow creek.
He puffed on a black cigar barely hanging onto his lips; smoke bubbled from his mouth and nose although the end of the cigar never seemed to light up. He never once looked up while I examined him; his attention was squarely focused on a worn deck of cards he shuffled on the table before him. He cut and shuffled them, split them into piles, flipped them over and shuffled them back together again. It was a deck entirely composed of jokers -- ugly, black-outline caricatures not unlike a Renaissance-era harlequin.
His shuffling slowed until he cut the desk once more and flipped over the top card and put it back onto its respective pile -- one a smiling joker, the other one crying out. Removing his hands from the table, he leaned back and finally seemed to take notice of me. Through the smoke I couldn't see his eyes, but I could feel them -- divine and infinite. He was waiting for something, but I didn't know what, so we sat in silence.
I thought I would've had more to say.
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