Creeps in a Honda

I have a fear of the Wildwood boardwalk.  It’s not the carnival rides that would surely kill someone with my condition to go on them, or the sticky clusters of inconsiderate beachfolk that will not get out of my way with their stares.  It’s not the tram car, which sadistically operates on the same track people must use in walkers and wheelchairs to travel along the rickety dock-smoothly.  The automated voice “Watch the tram car please” is really just saying “Get out of the way cripple, so that people who are fully able to walk but just don’t feel like it can get transported across the boardwalk without having to run into the likes of you.”  I play chicken in my walker with them, getting out of the mechanical artery path at the last possible moment then staring down at the diapered humanity as they slowly chug by.  My fear is not from the amount of money an average capitalist servant spends there in a day, which is more than what I make on SSI in a month.  It’s not the sunburns, or the crowdburns, or the seagull shit rainstorms.  It’s the memories, and the fear that I will run into them again there.

Jesse had an enchanted childhood in the Wildwood.  His entire family would rent a beach-house together, and him and his cousins would commemorate it with breaking out laughter from broken chairs.  These saltwater-taffy moments were sweet and stretched across time with his fondness for them.  He was getting two days off from work, and suggested that we spend them at the tourist crab-trap known as the Wildwood beach.  I was more than apprehensive about it.  I trepidaciously told him about my emotional allergies to the place.  He understood, and asked if I would rather go to Ocean City instead.  I wasn’t going to let it get me like that.  I told him we would go anyway, for it would be an empty, uncrowded Monday.  Monday becomes you’re favorite day when you are disabled and cannot work, and somehow bitter at the world that has to.

Sunday night we packed up our nouns: bathing suits, beachtowels, our laptop, his guitar, my pink ukulele, and my walker.  We drove the spotless ladybug, a little hybrid Volkswagen wannabe painted orange-red that is almost too small for Jesse’s identity to fit in the driver’s seat.  He’s been borrowing it from my parents while his busted Crown-Vic antiquities itself in the showroom of his mother’s front lawn.  It’s a new car, but it never had that illustrious fragrance of a new car smell.  It just smelled like plastic.  Now that it’s reeked over with the residual aromas of smoke and dominant scented cover-up sprays, I like it much better.

We took the highway to go down.  I once made a drawing of the garden state parkway sign into “The Garden-Gnome Parkway” for my old roommate, who for who knows what reasons collected those diminutive humanoid novelties.  Exit 51 was the one for the house that I used to rent during my sophomore year of college.  “The golden days”; alchemized with the fondness of absence.  I’ve told Jesse, but there is no better way of telling than to show.  I asked if we could take a small detour and go by the old place.  We had nothing else to do, so we might as well go sight seeing in my savage wilderness of memories.  He made the turn and I straightened out my thoughts. It had been over three years since I’d been to the Mystic Islands shore-house, I didn’t even know if I could even remember how to get there.  I called upon the sagacious wisdom of Tucan Sam and followed my nose through the familiar sights.  Everything around was exactly the same, the restaurants and shops had not moved, and even the people in them seem to have not gone anywhere in all those years.  The same community children were outside irritating the same community sidewalks.  The bait and tackle-men were out with their customers and crab cages.   The “Shop N’ Bag” grocery store was there with all of it’s sign letters lit,  (although I remember when they had burned out to say “Ho bag”). The pseudo-wawa called “Hometown Market” was at the end of where my old bicycle route used to be.   It smelled like seawater and sentimentality; even the sun shone down the same.  The only things different were me and Jesse.   

I dug up from my head: “Mathistown to Radio Rd, Radio to Bayview-”.  At the corner of Bayview Rd was a watch-tower.  It had watched me many times.  I was pointing out sights and describing moments at them, when I got to the parking area in front of the tower-

“That’s where-“

I paused for a moment and thought of how to collect the words

“That’s where we used to park the car and hang out.”

I directed Jesse to drive up further and turn onto “S. Spinnaker”, the little forgotten back-road that my Mystic Shack had been located on.  I really expected to see the place torn down.  It was infested with termites and deteriorated when I had lived there.  The walls and windows were eaten away in many places so badly even that in my one roomate’s room you could actually stick your hand out the wall underneath of the windowsill and wave to the neighbors outside.  In the wintertime I purchased some Home-Depot insolation marshmallow-fluff caulk, and filled all the holes up like a hostess cake to keep the house isothermal.  We had a lawn of little stones like the bottom of a fishbowl, and a backyard of lagoon water.  To my discredited surprise the house was still standing in one piece.  I got out to look at it, and Jesse got out to smoke a cigarette.  He knows not to smoke with me in the car; my lungs are made of tissue paper.  He came around my side and helped me out and up into a standing position.

From out the sunny abyss a familiar figure approached us.  A middle-aged stout friendly Italian family-man, that I recognized to be my old landlord.  He did not recognize me, but he recognized the opportunity of out-of-towners he could try to sell his condemned property to.   I broke his hello with

“Hi- I’m not sure if you remember me, but I used to rent this house from you with my friends for college a few years ago.”

Of course I knew he remembered me

“Yes, weren’t you gothic back then- the all black one?”

He looked at Jesse, and I knew what he was thinking.  I’m glad he didn’t ask about it.  He asked me about college, I told him I was working for a magazine as a writer now, I did not mention that I had been forced to drop out or that I was now disabled with a progressive neurological condition.  I leaned against the car so he could not see my impaired balance, and kept my cane in the car. 

“You guys wanna take a look back there- go ahead.”  He verbally took down the invisible fence of illegal trespassing for us.  I thanked him then held onto Jesse as we made our way as a stable-unit around to the backyard.  I showed him the oceanic garden.  I told him about the time superbowl came around and my roommate and his friends lost a bet on which team would win, so they defeatedly had to jump in the January water completely nude and 4 ft taller than it.  One guy hit a pipeline then proceeded to come inside and dance around our kitchen naked, dripping with blood and lagoon water.  I told him about the afternoons coming home from class and blowing giant soap bubbles with Lauren and Owen off the dock-of-a-deck.   I remembered the time Frank ate a completely raw burger off the grill.  I remembered painting the lamps that we never used other than to hang Lauren’s Viking-lady tinfoil costume she’d worn to frighten the pizza man.  Owen’s room was always lit red from a tinted novelty light bulb we’d swapped in there when we needed his regular one for the kitchen.   The sun was beginning to set, and the color of the sky started to remind me of that, and the time he had drunkenly passed out on the patio with a pipe and a plastic Darth-Vador helmet. Every crab we ever caught back there we named “Thomas”, or an extension of that: “Thomasina”, “Giganthomas”, and “Samoht” the backwards crab.  I remembered the look on Frank’s face when he came home to the surprise birthday party I threw for him.  It was almost like that scene in the Patch Adam’s movie, but I didn’t recite Elizabeth Browning poetry, and the whole house filled with only green and yellow balloons, for he was a green-bay packers fan.  I remembered what it was like coming home to this place, and I told Jesse it was time to leave.  As we made our way back to the car I pointed out that all of my caulk-spots were still there, especially the one underneath the windowsill.

Exit 44 of the parkway was the one for the house I had stayed in the following junior year.  Really there was no junior year of college for me, but my three roommates spent it there while I took leave for my sudden onset of a medical condition.  I wanted to show Jesse everything, so I asked him to take us there as well.  He was curious to see it, but the sun was setting and the dusk irritated his eyes.  I persuaded him anyway with the opportunity to grab another cigarette.  The lady-bug made a right of the parkway, and I wondered if it was wrong for me wanting it to.  We arrived at “Sturbridge Manor” at twilight.  It was a one-story house in the deep woods that Lauren had euphemized that for a Halloween party we never ended up having.  The sky was a sedating into a blue-grey, and the house only appeared as a shadowy silhouette with the lights peering out the windows like eyes of a jack-o-lantern.  I did not want to alarm the new tenants by lurking at the end of their driveway, so I made my verbalized window-tour brief and to the point:

“That is where I died.  That room over there with the window at the bottom, it was so low that you’d have to sit on the floor to look out it.  That was my room.  I only spent two nights in there, the first night was right before we moved in, before there was a bed, and after I had been poisoned with antibiotics to the point of my brain herniating. The local hospitals released me without knowing what to do, so I had to spend days in there on the floor with towels over my overly sensitive eyes from the photophobia without any idea of what was going on with me.  My suffering stabilized, and it became purgatory for me.”

Jesse was rubbing his eyes.  They were dry, and it was bothering him immensely.

“A bed was put in there eventually, but I never used it.  The next night I spent in that room was after I had moved my stuff out.  I could not sleep with Frank in his room the night he told me it was finally over.  So I slept in mine, again on the floor with towels over my overly sensitive emotions.  This is where I was born.”

Jesse told me that he desperately needed eye-drops and a cigarette, so I suggested that we pull up to the end of the street and put the hazards on so he could get out and do so. 

We parked at the stop sign at the corner.  Jesse got out, and the hazard flashers lit up the red octagon like a futile warning.  It was more rhythmic than my pulse.  I read it on beat, and synchronized it’s flickering presence with the Platters “twilight time” that was playing through the car speakers on my I-pod. I had listened to that song before undergoing anesthesia for my first brain and spine surgery, and after kissing my ex goodbye and telling him that I loved him.  The music came on right after the last “I love you too” that he ever said to me and really meant.  The four letters flashed like a sedated strobe against my raving thoughts.  I remembered those moments after the night fell.  In the living room- where I came home half dead, disfigured, and traumatized- where Lauren told me it was going to be ok, and I smiled and stopped crying although I knew that it really wasn’t.  I remember becoming strangers with her and Owen, losing all topics of friendly topical conversations. We grew apart like Galapagos finches, I had evolved from the tragedy and truth of life.  I remembered waiting on the floor at that window, waiting for Frank to come home from class, and wall-flowering a world I was no longer a part of.  I remembered the hours I spent locked up in the bathroom scrutinizing my disfigurement, obsessing over the obscenity of what the surgeons had done to me.  There was a tri-mirrored medicine cabinet overtop the sink, and the two side cabinets swung out so that the right positioning could allow the reflection of a reflection…the endlessness of a single appearance.  I watched an infinity of remorse in the paper-chain echo of my swollen neck and tilted-down skull, and felt the same excruciating neurological symptoms that I had sacrificed my human form to get relief of.   The damage was done, I could never be myself again.  I remembered the backyard right after it had snowed that January.  I remembered lying down in it to get away from all of the pain.  I remember Frank coming home early enough to stop me, and throwing me in the hot shower while screaming out of his mind “This house is for sane people, THIS HOUSE IS FOR SANE PEOPLE ONLY!”  I remembered the day he left for the military.  It was August, right before what would have been our senior year, but couldn’t even wait to finish his last year of school and get the degree he had slave-driven his brain for.  He had to get away from me, even after I told him that I was going to hang on through this just so that we could be together.  He said that my medical problems had gotten too much for him to handle, and abandoned them for an easier life of self-sacrifice and arduous obstacles in the National Guard.  I remembered him saying “This wasn’t supposed to happen to us, this is supposed to only happen to people when they are old.”

Three years.  Three years of sharing a life, sharing a love, sharing a bed.  I remembered how easy it was for him to forget them.  A few weeks later he moved onto another girlfriend he met in training and stopped contacting me.  In that same few weeks I underwent my cranio-cervical fusion-revision surgery that involved the shattering of my skull and spine to reset it with different titanium hardware in a new fixed position that would allow me to at least be able to fully open my mouth again.  The procedure was so severe and high risk that only one place in the country was willing to even do it.  On record it is the most invasive procedure ever to be done at The Chari Institute, whose surgeons have operated on over 3,000 people. It took 19 hours, and 30 hours of anesthesia, for I was so swollen that if they had woken me up any earlier and taken the intubation tube out my airway would have surely closed up.  Afterward I refused all morphine and analgesic medications, and I used the pain to fill up my hollowed out heart.  The stop sign was still flashing in front of our car.  It was time to head it. 

Jesse finished his smoke and got back in the car.  He could tell I had been transmogrified into my thoughts again.  Tear tracks are impossible to tread around when you’re wearing liquid eyeliner.  I expected him to ask me about it.  Instead he complained about his damn eyes still being dry.  So I complained about his complaining:

“Right now there’s electric lightening striking my cranial nerves, the pain is intense, and the vertigo makes this car ride into a carnival ride…but all I’m not thinking about that….I’m thinking about how much this trip means to me.”

He looked at me through irritated ocular balls of crystal wisdom.

“I don’t mean to come off as an insensitive asshole, I’m just worried about driving us there safely, that’s all.”

He saw that I still looked sad.

”I love you.”

I smiled sincerely at him.

“I know you do, otherwise you wouldn’t have driven me all the way out here.”

He understood everything without the words.

Wildwood was where I had spent every summer with Frank.  It was his hometown, and he took me around like a native guiding a shipwrecked foreigner, lost in his land and in his love.  He taught me survival in South Jersey, with the cheapest pizza places, and who was being friendly and who was just on drugs.  He took me everywhere in his town and in his story.  Love is a journey through another person.  The boardwalk was a few mile stretch of escape for him from a broken life and a fractured childhood.  We rode the Ferris wheel together, even though he was terribly afraid of heights.  He once won me a sleepy-moon Care-bear plush that I named “Val-yum” and lost the next day.  We would go broke into the bookstore and use it like the library.  We would talk with every step, every foot forward we would go a little deeper.  We discovered each other through the cracks between the planks. 

When Jesse and I arrived the next day, I found that the boardwalk had been entirely remodeled.  Due to failing business from the economical recession, none of the stores had stayed the same, not even the T-Shirt shop that my best friend Amanda had worked and essentially lived out of.   It was a different place, and I could enjoy it that way.  We played skeeball- and Jesse stationed himself behind me to help me get the momentum and balance needed to throw the ball. Taste testing the difference, he made me very jealous that I didn’t get the pina colada flavor of polish water ice.  He walked and I walkered down the boardwalk talking about Pollack curses and T-shirts he had stolen from the stores back in the delinquent phase of his youth.  I told him that if I bought a hermit crab I would paint a portrait of Emily Dickenson on it’s shell.  He didn’t get it at first, but then he laughed at himself for the delayed comprehension.  We talked about the hypothetical couples T-shirts we would have made for eachother…his for me would say “Poop comes from here”  and mine for him would say “Capitalism’s Bitch”. He cared more than I did that everyone was staring at me.

The ocean water was too cold to swim in, at least for myself to.  Instead I took pictures of Jesse backyard wrestling the waves with his bull-shark body as I built a small igloo in the sand.  Igloos are much easier than castles to build when you lack the tools and juvenile energy.   Jesse came out of the salty green froth, and helped me build a snowman in the sand.  There’s a reason snowmen are made in snow, sand is heavy and dries fast.  After two Babylonian collapses we decided to downsize to just making a snow-fetus instead.  We gave it a Mohawk of seashell shards and a Gene-Simmons tongue from a strip of seaweed.  Our backs were burned into on the areas I had missed with the sunblock.  My fingerprint streaks were branded across Jesse’s back.  He liked the way it looked.

I thought that my thought’s would all be “What if he’s here, what if he can see us?”.  My ex currently lives in Wildwood, we even had to go by the street his place is on to get to the boardwalk.  I thought that I would thinking about him, but my only thoughts were about how difficult it must be for people in wheelchairs to get onto the beach, how much the red freckles surfacing in the sun on Jesse’s face brought out his clear blue pool-water eyes, and how sea snails must be made of a different substance than regular snails because the saltwater doesn’t dissolve them.  I then thought about how I was cured, even if it still hurt just as much.  The day was not about remembering those old times, and neither is this life.  It’s about making new times, and beating your best score.

I woke up to Jesse that morning in a flamingo pink motel room. Captivated by the getaway novelty, I marveled at every one of his molecules.  His eyes were shut and crusty and his breath was hot and stale.  He was warmer than the blankets. The night before we had had a fight, made up, made a song, then made love (the fight had nothing to do with my ex or old memories, it was about which lyrics to use at the beginning of the song chorus.) I kissed the bristles of his face, and lovingly squeegeed him with my Roman-nose.  He was asleep on his back showcasing the calligraphy tattoo on his chest that reads out the pessimistic message of mortal truth:

“Life will never last”

I realized that if I had never died there I would not be here in this life with him.

 I took out my liquid eyeliner and graffiti-ed underneath it

“Love will”

Smiley face
drawn on to your grave
Darlin'
the drink is laced
with the cloth of whiter days

and it's all gone without a trace
draw it back free-handed

Creeps in a Honda
why are they pulling up to this house?
the twilight is fonder
of all of the thoughts we put to sleep
Saltwater deep

flowers on a motel blanket print
dry eyes
moisturize
lay in the bouquet
sites of where
we buried our visions
should we dig them up for old times sake?

Creeps in a Honda
why are they pulling up to this house?
the twilight is fonder
of all of the thoughts we put to sleep
Saltwater deep

http://www.youtube.com/greatneckband : "Creeps in a Honda"

(Note: We actually drive a Hyundai…but that doesn’t rhyme with anything other than Bonzai.)