piles for Christmas

My old ass has been hurting me for a few weeks now. Working in Olde Towne requires a two block walk to the potty when nature calls. If you combine that fact with my recent affair with a particular milk stout I’ve grown fond of you get a doubling of my colonic output. I don’t think I have a problem with lactose, but they brew this beer with that milk sugar, and it gives me the boiled egg farts something awful. Hot and moist, they frequently come, from the third beer on into sleep. Sometimes they follow me into my working morn. I don’t mind really. Anyone who claims they don’t enjoy the smell of their own winds is a lying bastard. The thing is I also have I.B.S., or irritable bowel syndrome. Constant changes in my BM schedule and frequency are commonplace as it is. I have brushed against the world of piles a few times in my forties, but none was as brutal, as fiery as this recent outbreak. Four days ago I asked my wife to get me some hemorrhoid cream and medicated wipes, as I could no longer stand the pain. I felt debilitated; every step, every attempt to sit down proved to be a slow, painful crash. I can’t bend over or down, can’t tie my shoes or pick up the loose pasta elbows my daughters spit under the dining room table. This sucks. After getting all the Santa Claus junk ready, and helping with the unbinding of the various death colored dolls and fantastical princesses blinking there, behind the plastic, I headed to the emergency room. What a treat; Christmas Day at the ER. The only good thing was that I was one of only three people in there. There was an older, Latino couple; the woman of which was in the triage when I arrived. Then there was just myself and this other woman who rushed in wearing dark sunglasses, old jeans and those furry boots the kids like down here when it’s cold. She didn’t really look older, but in a Jersey kind of way, looked a bit more aged than me. She may have been younger. Her backside looked alright. I noticed as she turned her gaze toward me before talking to the attendant behind the check in window. She looked at me as if she was hiding something, or maybe she was surveying the room, and then the water works started. I don’t know what was wrong with her, I am half deaf, but she was babbling and crying pretty well. After she got her magic hospital bracelet she went to sit with her accompanist who I never got a look at. The sobbing remained audible though, until a few minutes later when Trisha, the triage nurse stepped out and called my name; “Mr. Butler…?” I got up slowly and limped over to greet her. She got the info from the front desk clerk about my pains. She was also at least in her forties, and an admitted mother, so I imagine she had suffered herself. She gave me more facts about ‘the human condition’ than anyone I have ever met. She used words like varicose veins, thrombosis and proctoscope. I was both amazed and terrified. I didn’t really care what they were going to do. Maybe they would lance them, or drain them. Maybe the rubber band technique, rubber band ligation, whereby they take one or two small rubber bands and wrap them around the hemorrhoid, cutting off the blood flow and within a week or so it withers and falls off. What will it be? I wondered. Once back in the room the nurse and doctor were both there quickly. They had very little else to do. They had me quickly lose the jeans and put on the super fancy hospital gown. First the doctor informed me that he was sorry, but he would have to perform a rectal exam. I told him that I was the sorry one; he shouldn’t have to look at my behind on Christmas. He shrugged it off as all in a day’s work, but really, must be one of the least favorite jobs in there. So anyway, he tells me to sit on the table, avoiding pressure on my ‘hiney’, and to roll over onto my left side and pull my knees up to my chest. Before entry he said it didn’t look like I had an external problem, just a lot of cracking. I still don’t know what the hell that meant. So then came ‘the pinch’; he inserted his gloved finger up into my glory hole and then spun it around a bit. I just tried to relax and breathe. He was done fairly quickly. He told me that the masses were inside and that I should maybe seek the treatment of my gastroenterologist. “Masses…?” I asked. “Well you have to understand, I can only ‘feel’ this deep, showing me the length of his pointer finger, “I can’t see what’s going on up there…you need a lighted scope for that. Also, are you at high risk for colon or rectal cancer?” “Yeah, my mom is dying from it right now.” I said. “Well, I usually recommend that anyone that has high risk factors get a colonoscopy by age forty-five…” “I had one at forty, three uppers and one lower…” I interrupted, proudly. “Great!” he replied. We’re going to give you a prescription in the mean time; it’s a suppository that you’ll use once in the morning and once at night. It will numb you and help with the discomfort. It’s strange though…” he went on. “What’s strange?” I asked him. “Well, usually internal hemorrhoids don’t cause pain, just bleeding like you have. Anyway, just go see Dr. Farber in Elizabeth City after the holiday, okay?” he finished gleefully. “Will do doc, thanks…Merry Christmas!” and I was out of there. The day was looking up until I hit the pharmacy. I have terrible insurance. The pharmacists took all my info and I wandered about looking for the other things I needed, stool softener, a sits bath, you know- the good stuff. He called me over and explained that the drug prescribed was not covered by my insurance. I thanked him for his help and excused myself. I have had this issue before. I have this problem every time I get a script. I usually have to call the doctor, and then he/she has to call the insurance folks and do an override, tell them all the over the counter stuff won’t work. But it was Christmas day, not much headway to be made I thought. I began driving home when I decided to call the hospital and see if the doc could prescribe something else. Everyone involved knows all too well the struggle we faced. The doc told me to go back to the pharmacy and have him call, and that he would prescribe something different. My disdain turned again to the hope of relief. I couldn’t wait to shove the magic bullet into my rectum. But it was not to be; the pharmacist called me over again and explained that he and the doc had gone through several medications and NONE of them was covered. I was left with the collective expression from all of the professionals that I was screwed, and would have to wait several days, at least until the first of the year to get and rectification. One might think that being told that you have hemorrhoids or something else, maybe ass cancer growing in your poop shoot, would be a disconcerting turn of events, but not this guy. I had the makings of a brilliant story, better than this one; one of mental scars and comic noir. You see, a couple nights ago, when the pain was a solid ten on the hospital triage chart; I was in the throwing room doing the after-drop routine. I had, in addition to the medicated wipes and ointment, some leftover Benzocaine spray from the last time my wife gave birth. I figured it would work. So here is the scene: me in the bathroom after cleansing the area with warm, moist toilet tissue, patting dry and then wiping with the medicated wipes. I was a step away from the ointment part, the part of the booty fire ritual that involves the spraying of Benzocaine onto the brown eye. So there I was, poised and readied, trou dropped and bending over to widen the gap, so to speak. I was shaking the spray can when I heard the door knob turning. “Daddy is on the potty!” I shouted frantically, “I’ll be out soon, I’ll help you then!” The knob kept turning, it was Ella. “Emmy needs you daddy, she is stuck in the deep water and we need to rescue her!” “Ella, I will be out soon! Stay away from the door!” feeling nervous and rushed now. “I’m not Ella! I’m DIEGO!” she replied and then it happened. The knob turned and the door swung wide. There she stood one hand on the door knob, one in her hair to keep it out of her eyes. “Daddy, what is that?” she asked. Embarrassed now and looking at her upside down, through my knees I yelled “NEVER MIND, CLOSE THE DOOR PLEASE!” but she didn’t, not until the wife, laughing hysterically came and pulled her away. “I’m sorry” she snorted and chortled walking away. And that was it. My daughter, probably scarred for life from seeing a hairy full moon, complete with gargoyle and daddy bent over aiming a spray can at his bottom bull’s-eye. I laughed when it was over, but it wasn’t all that funny really. I learned a lesson anyway, and had another reinforced; no matter the ill, booty cancer or the piles; when in the bathroom cleansing a soiled thrombosis, it might be a good idea to lock the door. Also, put NO trust in the medical community, no matter what. Sorry Ella, you’ll be able to un-see that some day. I promise.

$300-

I lie there in a would-be nether land of ether; save one solitary cricket and her song of longing. I press eyes closed inches away from the sofa cushion’s front. The imprinted square fades into my fastened lids’ cave and withdraws; escapes as not photograph in series- though a print in nature. It neither is a black and white smear of a scene through negative blown large like carnival poster…no image nor bonds. As eyes open they fade away and I find myself on bloody hands and knees, feeling my way blind through moss and gutter and mountains of recycled beer bottles, windows and fraternity boy tankards lain smooth as baseboards for a rotted city side street; parking lot. I rub the ends of my knobby fingers along my path as I see nothing…driving at times but slumped in the seat…seeing only the steering wheel and dashboard…but crawling I am both pressed against and hanging from that granite lined ghost walk. I don’t know anything. The last three months have brought such emotion forth that dammed rivers and beavered streams have all combined; drawn together from every finite point, every singularity such that a sea now rises around and above us from every sewer drain, storm trough and retaining wall. We are swept up in her grey like crackers crushed then swirled in a thin soup. The shape of us is lost, the individuality, the molecular integrity itself leaves protein structures to crash in upon the weight of themselves. We become the primordial slurp, the sludge fest plus lightning that caused the first amoeba, the first flagella to fishtail in the mist of the beginnings of this, our modern world.______________________________________________________________________________________________ Driving in now the clouds were the first and last to strike. Like stacked nursery pillows or cheap Norwegian lamps the hung, suspended as if just hands above the trees; held up by a zephyr. Each one is an individual and ever-changing animal. They rise riding thermals like vultures and loom imposingly on the next several moments. Perhaps they are the dusk devils; imprisoned cyclones created by the cool and light Northeast breeze that blows summer away as he kissed with the warm waters in every backyard rental pool, a million jellyfish from one. Smokestacks, tailpipes and factory farm emissions spew them forth one by one. Behind is the pthalo blue. Big smears of strata not scraped off the edge of the bubble’s skin hide all that remains from the outer world. The chips of cloud span miles of mind and moment. Low and behind them, and to the left the fireworks show takes hurried pace. Every bit of organic fire and ice in the spectrum dances in particulate before my tired eyes and my children’s swinging session. My wife takes pictures of them and this in a park somewhere as I drive in, ease the stop; slam the shut on another trip. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Has it been weeks or moments? Has it been days or another lifetime; a dream of blinking or a blink while a dream? Different bedding covers the sides of the road now where my North Carolina home meets Virginia. Weeks ago the sweet corn was gone. Now the feed corn has disappeared too. The fields are split. Some of them have been injected with the stupid American soybeans…always grown too long past tender. I watched the crop dusters circle and dive down over the power lines to spray them with whatever that shit is. It is all controlled madness; the methods of growth and the foods we feed us. Some of the fields remain as rows of smashed brown stalks while inside the tracks of the loader tires the stalks stick up in a lack of order, like Rommel’s Asparagus; 1944. Some of the yards closer to home have even seen the arrival of the suckling collard leaves, laid neat in quickly walking winter rows. Where has my summertime mind gone? Everyone and everything in this sand town have moved into another season and in my mind I am still hiding under a bed when I was four in June. I have missed something while reconnoitering the lightning quick edge of Heaven and earth. My beard is glorious and my mother has gone home; she climbed down off of the roof while hepatitis wept along with the sepsis and the embolisms, the congestive bleeding hearts and the choking of forced, humidified oxygen; the beeping of the appliances and the changing of dressings. The Fever jumped from dust mite to cat’s dander and doorknob to nose and the Dogwoods and Weeping Cherry my father planted years ago after retirement stand a silent guard on that back porch in Suffolk…safely back from enemy lines. She sits now, carefully, but I must only imagine momentarily relieved as the first Nor’easter of the season keeps the breezes coming faster than the antibiotics and intravenous nutrition. Inside my dad sits asleep in a chair with one ear open; still at the ready to escort his bride over the threshold. Sometimes Portsmouth produces a real winner. The ever nourished fields planted by my mother and father decades ago lay lush as constant reminder and tribute to that simple peace. Here between me and the ocean, between Sand Spur and gossamer, it all just rolls toward the new lazy play. Everything in frosted shadow, everything which needs takes the dead clay’s walk towards a scampering sun. This is deeper than will. Zoo tropism and a need for alcohol drive most around me down here. Portsmouth promises more heart attacks, murders, babies, kittens, hobos and heavy lead to keep me working and paid until way past Christmas. My Island home is now divided between the jet set that is preparing to flee to one winter paradise or another, and tired souls hunkering down to crunch numbers, hoping the unemployment insurance will get them through the winter; keep the rent man happy for another season in this tiny little town whose residents think for a living. This irrationality leads them to believe that somehow this narrow strip of shifting sand, blown together by hurricanes and overtop of rivers and millennia of other little towns is the center of the universe and therefore the best place to be on earth. I moved here in 1989, writing these few words upon the night of my arrival; “Nags Head, Virginian for Utopia…” I now enjoy my time in the ghettos and the historic districts of the highway town that spit me out forty three years ago a bit more than this sandbar; conquered by some restless drunkard that stole it all away here one night. I had a girlfriend and a sandwich. She had her daddy’s dealer car. They were both shiny and red and we all went to see my grandmother one Saturday morning, after the first Friday night but wearing the same clothes. Grandma said we looked like hell. We were. I miss her, and I drive by her house on the creek every day. Portsmouth, Virginia has cradled me just fine for the last few months, despite the gunshots and leg cramps. I look forward to ever tunnel ride and every trip overseas in the Econoline. Did I mention that the collards are coming? Yesterday I was picking up toys and clothes and books from my living space and I grabbed a toy lizard, only it was alive. The cat lay nearby; obviously proud of what she’d dragged in. I picked up the nervous Anole and took him outside. He was grey from the inside out and panting like a dog, his heartbeat must have been one hundred times that of the calliope. He left my hand and crept onto a thin leaf in the Snake grass. When I slipped outside this morning to take trash to the road I saw him there on the salt treated steps. He looked up at me as I paused to give him the moment and the stage. He craned his neck…his eyes chameleoned around like they do and he watched me. I talked to him but it’s a secret. He slid then hopped off of the step back onto his green living space to let me pass, watching as I threw out so much rotting food and wasted wood. Humans do that you know. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Has it been weeks or months or days? I cannot remember the last stop/start motion. I can’t recall the floods. I remember the wet and the screams, the coughing and blood, consumption and fevers. I try and forget all of that and the chills too, I just can’t sometimes. It moves me. I can hear my train these days. Everything is building and tearing down. We move through the time lapse world; watched, by a greater good or bad…it sits in a still, sepia or twilight but just enough loving light to capture the dripping and ripped hearts. As we closed in on completion of my new friend at 218 Glasgow the news of the closing of the “hobo-hop” came as no surprise. That’s all this is; birth and death, equilibrium, homeostasis, Utopia. The Kwick-EE-Mart is going to be razed so the city can put in another chunk of Expressway. The Martin Luther King Jr. Freeway is going to be turned into a side street just like Ann or Bart or Detroit Streets, and Brian, Superman and Ghetto Chuck will have to find another compassionate concrete hang. All of this passes me by as Jimi Hendrix screams throat-less over my head. I reach to turn it up again. It is the day in October now when my first grandma died. I was fourteen, and that was twenty nine years ago. She was my mom’s mom, and she died of the cancer mom just had cut out. She told me what Heaven looked like when I asked…I must’ve been eleven or twelve, suspicious and loosening up the chains of caged youth. The first death of pure love and holiness changes everything. I ran away that moment. I left it all burning as I pressed my face into my arms and leaned against the ivy-covered pine. A childhood friend sat beside me. He seemed to be the only one in the world that understood…gave me time, told me it was alright, and would be. I got my first girlfriend in the next two days and within two years she would give herself to him. I have murdered him one thousand times since then. I will track him down and kill him in front of his family again someday. His name is this. Actual quantitative and provable love and compassion only show themselves to me in those five minutes. They live between hyperventilation and humiliation. Oblivion, annihilation and exhalation, a wiping of an awkward nose on its own denim-covered shoulder: these are the true scant and squandered electric moments that verify their existence. A boy snorted as I left that field of witches and pig-men. I dropped the match down the drain onto the dried leaves and pine straw and walked away. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ That night I asked my mother a thousand questions and got one thousand and one answers whether they fit or not. The house was filled with horizontal panes of thin blue smoke as I woke within the dream. I walked to the yellow telephone hanging on the kitchen wallpaper and picked it up. It was ringing and I picked it up. “Peter…” she asked. “I love you grandma!” I cried as tears burst again and filled my mouth and glazed my cheeks. “I know you do. I love you too-“was all I was able to make out as I shrunk to the floor. I folded and melted into a moist ghost as I clung to the mold on the jam. I woke up in a sweat, clutching the pillow in my bed. She called me. That was twenty nine years ago tonight. I haven’t really been back. Funny how these days things make me wonder when I have all those answers. My mother told me everything I ever wanted to know and hers assured me of Heaven. She walks through cities of gold now; a fitting payment for serving as witness in Portsmouth for all those years. It is no fun being God’s eyes I bet. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The lizards were back today. They came out about an hour before the sun. I watched them from my bathroom window as they put on a show. There’s always one around this time of year, but rarely do you see more than one in a particular spot. They’re territorial and for the most part solitary, except during mating season or natural disasters. It is a little past mating season. I recognize them because I always have. They are Green anoles, or as I prefer, Carolina anoles. Some people refer to them as American chameleons because of their ability to change colors…but they are more closely related to iguanas. As I started out of the bathroom this morning I noticed the one I took from the cat. He was sitting low…laying really, and looking brown, grayish brown. Little diamonds which strung the length of his spine were visible…like tiny mosaic paper art. His eyes appeared baggy and dark. He wasn’t happy. He sluggishly pulled himself towards the edge of the rail on the deck, and then raised…running like a micro dinosaur and then pouncing to grab an ant with a flick of his tongue. It was then I noticed another male. He was smaller and fat. To really know the gender of a lizard he or she must sex them, and I didn’t do that, but I can tell you, they were both males. As he inched closer to the rail where my rescue sat, now lapping up water as it dripped from the roof, I watched as my friend began to turn bright green about the belly and ring of the tail. His eyes lost the sunken, sullen hues and took on an almost humanly amount of color; though the turquoise and glittery pastel blue was nothing any human could really re-create. He began to turn quickly into that Jamaican porch green I love and the second guy leapt into the frame. I thought about making a small movie, but just stood idle instead. The little guy, looking grey himself moved to within about two feet of the rescue, then it began. He pressed himself up like a crocodile when it walks, and extended his pink dewlap; the rescue moved away and browned. For a second, the new guy stood guard on the drip site and a third entered the picture. He did nothing. After a couple of minutes my favorite moved back into position. He was a good six inches, a full grown male, and survivor of unspeakable horrors. He slinked in at first and then BAM! He pressed up like a combatant at mess. He went up and down, his larger, deeper pink skin fan flexing in the first rays of sunlight as his green came back and his adversary jumped back to the long thin rail of the planter box. He ate a few ants, each time scraping the side of his scaly mouth against the two year old deck boards as if he was wiping it off. Then he gave chase! He jumped down to the planter and chased the intruder a good ten feet in total before the other guy hit the ground and made for the Rosemary bush. I felt confident enough now to leave the bathroom, tell the story and go about the day. The last I recall he was walking back towards the window; my buddy. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ After nearly a week of gale force winds, burning rains and tidal inundation; the sun shines brightly on this sandbar. We finished 218 Glasgow a week ago tomorrow but we’re still waiting for the check and the land lord is still waiting for the rent. My wife is serving with split hands the wiles of the whimsical and my daughters’ count one, two and three. I walked out onto the driveway to take a moment’s visit with the warmth of late autumn. My hair is frazzled, thinning and stands high like a mad man’s. My beard is now resting on my breast. I have a deadline for the novel in two weeks and could really use some insurance…some time to think. I do all of this for the book. I travel, sleep, rot, wake, eat, bleed, lay, cry, worry, rejoice, think, talk and ramble on drunk sometimes about or for the damned book; the life. We’re supposed to start painting a post office in Phoebus, overseas next week. This week has been a wash. All of this goes on as I try and correlate, mix this and mash that together into a fine representation of what it is to live and die of Portsmouth, Virginia. I conjure the images of Anoles, hurricane, Yellow Fever, hope…angry seas and dead cats hanging from aluminum roofs. I am insane. I got up a minute ago to find a crust of bread, something salty and wet, and water. My mom had called twice while I was writing. I called her back. She told me that she had some extra pocket money so she had my daddy send me three hundred dollars. She said she figured with the rain I wouldn’t be working and that would make up for the lost week. Hell, a good week is five bills…and I worked Saturday and Monday so I would have a five hundred dollar week with the extra three. Mom said she figured that’s the way it would work out. She knows it will keep the daily strain of regular life away for another week. She even ended the conversation with “you just enjoy your week off…” and a little laugh. She is just like me. She understands how hard it is to put on the multiple masks every day and juggle the needs to steal away an eventual couple of hours or days of want time. She went on that if I was up there on Monday working and tried to get in touch with them that she would be at an appointment with another barber for another biopsy. I asked what it was about, knowing that the margins on the tissues removed back in June were positive for cancer; they had missed some. I didn’t say anything though, just asked what it was for. She told me it was about some swelling of the lymph nodes in the groin area they were concerned about. “It’s always something…” she added, “just enough to aggravate you. You just go on and try and make your week and I’ll talk to you. I love you.” We each hung up the phone. Just then for some reason I felt like I was flying, and at the same instant I heard a door scream shut in my slamming mind. The headache of the last two days returned and I moved onto the couch for the remainder of the afternoon. I was full of wind and rain, and I needed a good nap and time to straighten all of this shit out.

"Honey, the cat is on the roof..."

“When you wake up one fine morning with that pistol in your head; don’t cry for some God to save you, because you are all ready dead.” I just wanted to get up and write that song. I heard it in the mist of my waking as the voice of Tosh echoing away while my eyes bore slanted holes in the new day. I kept waking up last night, unsure of where I was. I had to explain it to myself in codes, again and again like following a mad man’s check list before turning over, away from the heavy tweed-ish matte of the back of the sofa and towards the closed, muted windows. This was in there, when the dreams left the other morning, waking up next to Scott’s Creek. I reached into the pocket of my paint-smeared cargo shorts to grab those words, scratched down on throw away paper and folded, then carried for the last seventy seven hours or so. Inside the folded pulp was a bright, blue and red label; “Nitrile Gloves…Nitrile Coated Knit Gloves For General Purpose Use (one size fits most)”. I thought of the hilarity of what the last print really states and then threw the label in the trash. One size fits most, and if you don’t fall into the most category, well…don’t look at me. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I remember two jokes from my childhood, and one card trick. I hardly ever do the card trick. I don’t tell the jokes. One of the jokes had to do with angels lighting candles and the cat peeing on the matches. The next joke was more complex and needed precise timing to be told. I have never been good at this sort of thing. A little girl, as I remember had gone away to summer camp, leaving behind Thomas, her cat. (Things didn’t go well at home) Little Mercy called home on the first night of camp, and after talking to daddy for a moment, she asked “where’s Thomas? Can I speak to Thomas?” to which her daddy replied “Well Mercy…Thomas is dead.” Mercy began screaming and shouting in hysterics, she was hyperventilating when she dropped the phone, hundreds of miles away. Mercy was another father’s explosion for the moment. Big sister stood next to father, aghast that he could have been so cold and break the news like he did, knowing how much Mercy LOVED Thomas, and how alone she must be feeling anyway, all those telephone poles away from her little bed. “What?” asked father loudly; and oblique. “YOU CAN’T JUST COME OUT AND SAY IT LIKE THAT!” cried sister. “Well what should I say then?” he whined in the sarcastic tone of an embarrassed cherub. “Sister started in…”well first, you tell her that the cat is on the roof…” “I’m listening…” waited Mercy’s father. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I didn’t write the song yet. It was stuck in my head good. It is a five minute deal. Picking up a guitar and playing the thing and filling in the melody lines will be the easy part; the work was receiving the gift, and remembering. The sharing will be my payment back to the souls for giving me that presence in that present. The wheel spins and the circle turns and the earth meanders slightly as we fly and fly and fly. It’s pretty outside, but hot and sticky. The traffic tells me the summer here is over but I have been living as the ghost; the come and go man, the self image stripped bare sagging and overweight prophet. I like the word historian, and I like history. Even better than the history is the macro, or nano-study of the moments that are actually lived already as we soar through the unfolding enormity creating our own time, achievements, and time itself. Humans search and never find. We understand so much that we know nothing. ___________________________________________________________________________________ Charles lived out London Oaks way. He was another guy that hung out at the Kwick-EE Mart off of High and Constitution. He worked with Naples a while before I did but he didn’t work out. There wasn’t much work and one thing led to another, but he is like a brother to Chris. We knew about London Oaks from our earliest years. That’s where the kids came from that were bused in from the other side of the Churchland Bridge. Naples told me that the pool at London Oaks has been dry for fifteen years. Charles has a wife and two kids; the kids don’t go out without Charles or his wife. London Oaks is a housing project; if you want something, or if you need something, or if you want or need to get something going or done, you can hook it up in London Oaks. Charles ain’t about any of that though, he is a straight up young man trying his best to help a woman raise two young men. We would see him sometimes in the evenings when coming in from one job or leaving for the next. The hang was a different spot at night. Naples pointed it out the first time we pulled in. He knows and shares my love for the potentially bizarre. He turned to me as we pulled in and said quickly “Oh man, this is a WHOLE different spot at night time.” and laughed a little as we got out. It wasn’t all that much really. The lighting was different. The folks were the same. There was one dude in there that looked like a broke-ass Ice-T with red jumpers and a wife beater; lots of feathery and braid stuff, crotchet pieces and all in his thin, tied dreads. He walked past me and Naples, both of us smeared in several coats and colors from earlier and still sweating on the way in for more and he said “Whaddup homies?” Then he just strolled past. “Good good…” I trailed off and Naples gave his love. This is a fun ass world to be in. We must have looked like Salvation’s clowns at a KISS concert. There is no more joyous feeling than that; to be the freer or the freed. It weighed like being lost but unafraid, on a vacation from the fake smells and lost frosted lines. It was “stand in fucking line”! Later that night I would sit outside Chris’ house, staring at the lights shimmering on the creek. Nothing ever changes there. My little friend, a young Night Heron walks by under the orange fallout of the streetlamp, moving in a funny way, and like a ninja…foot first, then stretching to catch up with the legs…the body sliding slowly forward like the shadow of a pear as the head cocked and bobbled. It was a fun gaze. My wife is sleeping silently on the big bed with my two little angels while my mom sleeps across town. Both of them are bad-asses, my mother and wife. My kids are in the darkness on it, my brothers and sisters clutch bound books while my father works like a battlefield surgeon and my mother fights with heavyweights; I move slowly and awkwardly like the creek bird at night…careful of my next step, every moment looking over the shoulder, listening, smelling, tasting and marking. The world for me is as one for a blind man, sometimes especially, and sometimes except when I am sleeping. North has fallen off of the wall, magnetic north proper anyhow. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Mercy’s daddy leaned in to hear the rest from her sister…”so?” he went on…”what happens when I tell her the cat is on the roof?” Sister said calmly; “You have to let her down gently. You can’t just get into details. So after you have told her the cat’s on the roof and she freaks, you just tell her that everything is going to be alright, that the fire department is on the way now and not to worry, that you will talk to her soon…and hope she forgets for a while.” “The cat’s on the fucking roof?” shouts father in a pure blur. “What the hell is that gonna do?” Sister explains. “First; you tell her that the firemen are coming… to buy you some time and get her used to the idea that Thomas may be in trouble, it’ll be way easier that way. Next; you ‘re gonna need to tell her, like tomorrow probably that the firemen did all they could, but Thomas got a little hurt on the way down but that he’s gonna be fine because we took him to the vet.” “And that”, she said “will buy us at least another day…just tell her we won’t know for certain for a day or two.” Father stared into the wall fading with all hope of remembering the name of his first hamster that died when he was four. He could still feel that hamster, but not touch it, with his hands, cupped together beneath the pillow every night. It made some of those dreams insane. It made his breathing heavy and his nervous system a jumping electric terror storm. He looked into another wall as the snake doctors dipped and dove against the rafts of algae which covered the warm and septic waters of the the city ditch. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I don’t remember much about the day before yesterday except for the fact that I worked my ass off. It was hot, I remember that also, and sticky. The start of it was familiar; we were back at the house on Glasgow. There was enough paint to do one third of one third of what we needed to do. Naples sat in the van and waited on a phone call from the lenders…he/we had not received a check in almost six weeks. The folks owed him close to ten grand, so he was nervous. He was pissed-off nervous. I was just standing on that ladder spreading the Ghetty Grey as fast as I could, as if it would bring some pause…if not some end to all of this. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Mom’s blood clots were dissolving and she was talking normally again. I tossed and turned; waking again in an unfamiliar spot, completely disoriented. Mom had the first good night’s sleep any of us could remember that night though, and the drainage from her bottom incision somehow just stopped. I have always loved Tuesday nights. It was Wednesday now and insanity was slipping away with the feigned and brittle myth that is Monday’s pain. So much has happened on Tuesday nights in my life, but never a miracle…not until this recent one. I cannot and will not elaborate on this. Three days riding in the van while listening to the new Portsmouth family class, the hobos and the creek had earned me four day’s pay. Three days waiting for the axe to fall; for the phone to ring. Three days in the natural red and accountable black had led me to a cliff in the mind. I stood now and stared across the chasm. There was no sky, no ground below the clouds and no punch line. Reason was left for those seated around lunch counters and outside the sidewalk cafes. I clung to a metal blanket against it all and hoped that the phone calls would stop. I can’t remember the rest. I thought of Mercy all week as I worked my way towards the black steel roof. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Everyone in the room waits as Sister looks at Father. “Well?” he begs quizzically, still not feeling the gravity of the moment. How does one handle the explaining to a child that their love has died? How in the fuck does this work. How is this supposed to go? What am I supposed to feel? Why am I waiting for this thirty some years later? What makes sense to me right now? _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Across town in another dimension the joke plays out; “imagine this” cracks Sister, this is how you finish it. A phone rings and Mercy’s father answers. Sister had told him what to do. “Hey baby…” daddy’s voice cracked, “ha…how are you?” Mercy immediately begged for news about Thomas. He thought of the last advice Sister had given him. He repeated the lines she taught him. “Well baby, the vet did all he could, but Thomas was in a lot of pain and they tried everything they could, but they had to let him go to sleep.” “SLEEP?” screamed Mercy…”you mean...?” “Yes” said father…Thomas has gone to Heaven.” Sister went on to explain that this was the best way to let Mercy down easily. I thought of that whole thing; breaking it to you slowly. I feel like the biggest asshole in the world for this as well. It seems every day…well. Back in the world of nonexistence a father’s phone rings again. It is several hours later and Mercy has just finished soaking a summer camp pillow in the first several hours of an innocent child’s lost love; first heartbreak. Still seated there at the kitchen table Sister looks at Father suspiciously; would he hold it together she wondered. Sister has been sitting on my left shoulder all day long, threatening to knock me off of my perch. As the Father answers the phone he hears little Mercy on the other end. “Is mom home from Aunt Mary’s house yet?” Across the table Sister is cracking the back open on a Blue Crab and crunching the claws, picking all she can from the dead sea bug. Father looks over to her, gazing woefully as she leans in, having overheard Mercy’s query. Sister just looked at him through yellow-green eyes and waited, smiling as she wiped the melted butter from the corners of her sheath. “Well Mercy….Mom’s um…well, mom’s…” babbled Father. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I was hot by the end of Wednesday afternoon and ready to see my girls. Naples and I went back to his place and sat out on the back lawn beside the creek. He had been paid and he paid me. I took a shower and headed to see mom over at Maryview. She was slightly better off but didn’t want me moving too close for fear that some particle I may be carrying would send her into another tailspin. In light of the recent developments she was being slated for a possible trip back to the nursing facility in Suffolk come first of the next week, and neither of us wanted to mess that up. I sat for a moment and talked until she ran me out, citing weariness. I told her I loved her and made for the elevator, the Ford, the big road, the cold beer and the brainless. I told Naples I would be back the next day, but one thing lead to another and I ended up a hermit for the next ninety six hours. Hell, it must be good for my constitution in some way or another. I waited for the call from Mercy’s dad all week. The call never came and I decided I guess to save the roof for another week.

“Pictures from a Mother’s memory”

It was cool and bright without much humidity when I first started my trips to Portsmouth a few months back. All of the fields I passed were full of young and leaping green corn stalks. We had a fairly easy time of it for a May and June in southeastern Virginia. The sky was a soft blue that day as I pushed the Ford up to the hospital for the surgery. It’s now eight weeks later and mom is still in the hospital. They let her go home after the first four days, to Suffolk. It was a short term escape as within two days she would be back at the ER for a spike in fever. The butcher told us that she had “leaks” in her intestines and that they needed to “rest” them for several months before attempting to fix the holes they’d left. She also told mom that all of her nutrition would be through her veins as everything she was ingesting would just leak out of her insides and then through the three large incisions left by the surgery. The only thing mom wanted, all she dreamed of was a summer tomato sandwich. It gave her something to chase; to wait for, look forward to. Then the gastro-barber told her that she would not be able to eat or drink anything for three months. Soon thereafter, a second escape was successful; she was moved to a nursing facility in Suffolk, out of the jaws of Portsmouth once again. She may have been there a week, I don’t remember exactly, before she developed another very high fever and what the doctors liked to call a “blood infection”. A blood infection is sepsis. In fact, my dad told me this interesting fact as shared by the doctors; all blood infections are sepsis but not all sepsis is blood infection. I don’t even know what that means, or why anyone would say that. It got better though, the nurses chimed in. After my dad told me that mom had been having trouble breathing he let me in on another little detail. The nurses said that “she has a little congestive heart failure.” “A little…” dad repeated, “You’ve heard of a little bit pregnant haven’t you?” I told him I had heard about that. The punch line was that mom had returned once again to the city of all of our births. Now the machines and the interns and the guessers and custodians and ICU had her again. Her lungs were filling with fluid and heart struggling to pump oxygen rich blood to everything that needed it. They gave her some shots for the lungs, the nausea, the cramps, the pain from coughing and a mask that she demanded to have taken off several hours later. Mom is claustrophobic. They equipped her with one of those that just goes into the nose and she seemed to get along with that fine. I went up early Monday morning before meeting Naples at the job. When I got there at eight she was receiving her breathing treatment; Albuterol if I had to guess. I could say that it was hard to watch; her twisted fingers almost autonomically reaching for the fog-smoking mask. I sat silent as she waved, and dad counted the numbers so she knew where her blood oxygen level was going. It hit the low 90’s while she wore the gas mask but as soon as she took it off it began to fall into the eighties…and into the seventies as she gasped to talk. She was trying to let the pulmonary boy know that she felt a new pain in her chest but he wrote it off to pleurisy. I watched her gasp to speak for maybe two or three minutes and she motioned for my dad to take me to the waiting room to talk because she could not; she asked the doc for pain meds. I leaned over her and kissed her forehead and told her that I love her and walked down to talk with dad. The talk lasted about ten minutes. Dad verified all of my suspicions that the heart failure was leading to the lung issue and that the sepsis was leading to all of that. He told me that they were still growing cultures and trying to track down the particular strain of bacteria in an attempt to get her on the correct antibiotics. Outside the window Portsmouth screamed and howled. I gave dad a hug and asked him to call me if anything changed and he said he would and to the ladders, the hobos, the dollar ice and Yellow lead I went. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ We sat on Naples’ back porch for a moment getting our heads right hoping the rain would stop. Most days we just packed up and piled in the Econoline bound for Olde Towne. This morning was more of an introspective time out. I sat and watched the rain drops send ripples across the reflected oily paintings of those houses of my childhood. Most mornings are more routine and fun; a distraction. For instance; if you leave Shea Terrace and drive straight down Constitution across London to High and take a right there is a really run down “Kwick-EE Mart”. This was the first spot I learned of upon my return to Portsmouth. The hipsters in Norfolk would cringe at the sight of what I saw that first morning. Bear in mind; leaving the lily white Outer Banks for the urban Petri dish that is downtown Portsmouth can be a bit of a culture shock, lucky for me I love that kind of stuff and have no fear of anything. I wasn’t too keen on getting on a forty foot ladder that first day, but the seeming “living dead” that moved slowly towards the van as we pulled in would have certainly scared most dumb ass white folks I know. Naples said “Okay, now I gotta get you caught up on the P-town hobo scene.” “Cool…” I said, looking straight forward as high and as green as that corn in the early summer fields of farmland that separate my sandbar and his living city. The first man to approach us was Brian. Chris knew him well. Brian was an alcoholic, homeless most likely, and wearing a large soft cast boot thing on his right foot. His eyes were red like a Jamaican rummy’s. They were sort of brown too where the white is, and big and round, taller than he was. He was having “the hanks” as he put it. Naples and I both gave him what change we had in pocket. All he wanted was a beer, maybe a dollar and five to get his morning started. He had his hankering and we had the jingle to get him most of the way there, in fact that’s what Naples always said to him; “I can’t get you all the way there, but I can get you part of the way…” as his sharp speech trailed off into a quick involuntary chortle. Chris introduced us, we shook hands and I told him I’d see him soon. The next guy was not a regular, some dude on a bike selling propane tanks, stoves, big equipment and the like. He was on a ten speed bike. Chris told him he had no use for any of that, and anyway, Brian was our daily tradesman. As we drove away Naples told me of another regular named “Superman”. He hadn’t been on the scene very much lately. Chris said he was sort of “half-retarded” or that something wasn’t quite right but that he was super cool. All Superman ever wanted was a Coke. He would come up and ask “d.d.ddo you ha have some money for a K K K CoCola?” Chris would usually just buy him one. Superman wore a white tee shirt with the words “Superman” and “Man Of Steel” written on the shirt with a black sharpie marker. I couldn’t wait to meet him. I haven’t yet to this day as he has been banned from the Kwick-EE mart. Superman was thrown in jail for “attempted abduction” of a toddler, but this is what really happened. One day Superman was at Wal-Mart and found a little girl wandering around, in fact he had seen her wandering aimlessly for quite a while so he approached her and asked “where is your momma and daddy?” The little girl didn’t know so he walked her straight to the front of the store and put her hand in the hand of the manager. Within an hour or so the mother of the child was in the store with a lawyer demanding Superman’s arrest. The hired gun and the manager along with the mother took a look at the video camera tape from the store. The tape showed the mother walking around on a cell phone while the little girl wandered off. It then showed the mother in the checkout, and then exiting the building, still on the phone while never apparently noticing she had no child with her. Next, some video from the bank next door was introduced to follow the timeline and actions of the woman. She was in line, in the bank, on the phone, no child. Then the store manager showed the video of Superman walking up to the girl, leading her directly to the manager and told the woman that she was unfit. A fight nearly ensued but the woman chose to walk out cursing, yanking the little girl’s arm as she strolled. Her lawyer was overheard telling her to never ever call him again and suggesting to the manager of the store that she be banned. Nevertheless, by that time there were Amber alerts and Superman was all over the Portsmouth television stations. He was taken into custody for a few hours before being completely exonerated. It sucks though, the ordeal got him banned from the Kwick-EEE Mart, well, that and a little too much effort to get that Coke money from some shit stained white kids that apparently didn’t understand the economy of the parking lot, the world karma bank and automobile insurance. Naples explained to me that he goes there every day; he even gets free ice for his cooler. He buys a couple drinks for the hot day, fills the cooler with ice and then gives whatever change he has to the fellas outside. This, he explained, is the cheapest form of vehicle insurance that there is. These guys may be bums to some folks, but they are people we see every day, and they know we see them, and they look forward to it. If we pull in and leave the van unlocked out there in the poorest section of town, nobody is going to blow a good thing by screwing with his van, not to mention, if some new blood by some chance decides to mess around, the neighbors we know are going to alert us or the management because they don’t want to look for another place to get their Coke, or cheap morning beer. We have a symbiosis. No! We have a mutual friendship, no parasite nor host. The cops and crooks of the city have a symbiotic relationship, but it’s hard to tell who the parasite is and who the host really is. Those lines are as blurry as Brian’s vision, and getting blurrier. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ A few weeks passed as we scraped, sanded, caulked and puttied away at the old house on Glasgow Street. We stood on steel stilts with the sun beating our backs as the city screamed all around. Portsmouth really does have a scream to it. You have to listen hard to discern all of the parts; which organs are failing and which are working overtime. As you stand and brush primer on the pre-American wood you can hear the saws, the church bells, the tree grinders, the beeping of the backing dump trucks, the hisses of the hydraulics on the public busses, the tears and laughter of the kids in the park and the fights between the Mocking Birds and the Crows fighting over the ripening figs that grow on a tree beside the creek on Naples’ property; right next to the creek I grew up in, Scott’s Creek. Everything together combines in a cacophony of nature, destruction, progress and ghosts. I drove up this morning on the same route passing the used car lots, the banks, golf courses, closed restaurants and cigarette stores of Currituck before turning off on my short cut to avoid the toll road. I passed the corn, now tall and browning in the middle and on the tops. Harvest time is coming. I sat on Naples’ back porch again, as we do, smoking the stuff and getting ready for the Kwick-EE Mart and the climb. We had been reviving that grey piece of Olde Towne for weeks now and still no paycheck. Naples was getting the run around from the city people. The PHRA, or Portsmouth Housing and Redevelopment Association needed invoices for everything and they didn’t pay until certain progress points were reached. Nonetheless, even though we had made much progress they owed Naples around ten grand. We kept working, he and I, while the rest of the crew started another job to keep the payroll coming. Naples was working nights in condos to make enough money to finance the wood needed to replace the rotten stuff we stripped off. We all needed money. My wife was getting worried seeing none, and the first of the month had come and gone, she wanted the six hundred I promised her weeks before. I barely had enough to get up there that day, but I made it. I stopped, filled my cooler with drinks and had one dollar left in my pocket. After that morning’s porch session we hit the block and saw the local hobos, right on time. Naples went in but since I had no needs I stood outside and talked to Brian. Walking around the blind side of the van I reached in my pocket and pulled out the one dollar and gave it to him. He was surprised I think. I told him “look man, I got one dollar to my name; it ain’t doing me any good right now so you use it. Hopefully when I need more later I’ll find it somewhere.” I then told him a story about when my wife and I were about seven hundred short on rent a few years back and we went to the grocery store with about fifteen bucks in the account. When the total was rung and the cashier asked if we wanted to round up the twelve and thirty to make it thirteen and donate the change to whatever they had going on I said “sure”. Once outside the wife gave me the business about giving away money when we are so tight. I explained my decision like this;” what is the difference in seventy cents and seven hundred dollars if we can’t really find either?” We would find the money we needed, I assured her, and asked her to please climb down off of my back…don’t worry so much. The moment passed without any further fanfare. As I told Brian this story his eyes lit up. I just said “God provides.” Now I am no follower of any religion, nation, man, group, affiliation, organization or cult; but I sometimes say things which can be universally translated and understood among the least of us. Brian said “Man, God is gonna bless you!” as he moved in to hug me. I just said “man I hope He blesses my mama…” then explained to him the ordeal that she was going through. She was at the time in that nursing facility in Suffolk. Brian had been in the same place but was kicked out for rules violations. He is an alcoholic, and he knew how to get it. He told me his story. “Look man, this is what had happened to my foot. One night I snuck out to go to the store. I had a little beer hid up in my room, but I wanted a little mo’…so I sneaks out and while I’m walking to the store I step in a hole. That was my fault. So I gets back to the place and it didn’t look all that bad so I just drank my beer and layed down. Next mornin’ I wake up and that jam had blowed up! I didn’t really wanna do anything cuz I’da had to tell the nurses what had happened to it, so I drank some beer and laid down but it was hurtin’ me BAD! Now I got this friend in there and he took a look at it. Now this dude is just half right enough to know he’s crazy as hell, so he looks at it and tells me I had better let the nurses know…he said it looked bad and I should get it cleaned up, cuz he got the cankers! So I had to come clean. I told the nurses what I had did, and that was on me, that was my fault. Turns out they had to cut the bone on both sides of my ankle and join it back together and now I got this rod that go down through here…” showing me where it was. “Damn…better take care of that shit man, don’t lose your foot over that shit.” “I’ma be alright” he told me, “I’m straight…” and about that time Naples emerged from the store, fat on ice and ready to hit the house. Brian shook my hand and again said “thanks brother…for real, you gonna get a blessing…y’all stay cool today.” Then he put his fist to his heart, looked me in the eyes and with wide eyes and the most solemn of tones just looked at me and said one more time, “thank you now, for real.” I took my sunglasses off and looked back and said “ah’ight man, see you in a minute…be good.” ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Everybody in Portsmouth has a story. Too many people who live down here at the beach like me don’t have them; we have lost them, like souls. We have schedules, classes, jobs, surf, heroin, murder, girlfriends, boyfriends, Wednesday nights, free music Fridays, wind, rain and sand. It seems that everyone here, me included has left their story where they came from. Most of these bodies however, unlike me, have replaced those stories with some meaningless rebuilt self image, lighted candles and false penance. I am in the process of remembering my story. I sit on the creek bank and smell the mud, watch the herons and egrets. I stare at the idyllic reflections of the same houses on the other side of the creek that were there when I was eight, ten, fourteen and then gone. The same oaks crack the same sidewalks I learned to ride a bike on. Everything is still right there, as if time has stood still. It even seems a little sweeter, though the names on the boxes have changed, the ivy and figs and salamanders and mosquitoes are all still there, noticing nothing. When I was a little kid I remember a guy that lived across the fence from my grandma, James Bald. Mom never wanted us hanging around him as he was constantly in trouble. It was usually petty stuff, weed, breaking into a car or house. He once broke into a house that he had the key for. I can’t make the case for him being a model citizen, but I can make one for negligence on the Portsmouth Police department for letting his brutal slaying go uninvestigated. It happened about three hundred yards from Naples back porch about two years ago. I remembered it from the news, but never really paid it much mind. People you know die every day. This death, however, had a back story. I didn’t know all of this until just the other day. There is a man named Blue that walks the city. He has no know last name, he doesn’t wear clothing that sticks out, and he doesn’t have a memorable face or voice…just stories. He told me one the other day as I sat looking at the creek, waiting for work, waiting for the rain to stop. He told me of a girl I never met and whose name he could not recall, a young woman who lived with monsters. She worked on a crew like mine, and she would be heckled by all the other guys…she was a tough beauty. She let on to him that one time that her father and brother, the two monsters would routinely beat her. They had hospitalized her and her mother several times, and her mother was gone, nobody knows where. The latest episode was about two years ago he told me. She had been brutally raped and beaten nearly to death by her brother for putting her father in prison for raping and beating her. Now she has gone on to make a fine life for herself, she won. She put that story before her and forged a new life through the brick walls and everything in the mind that tells you to quit because you deserve it, but she turned into a real genius and is now helping other battered women. She wasn’t really the focus of the story Blue told me, it was those assholes that once kept her tied to a whipping post, both free now. Apparently the son had an ex-wife a few years back, at least one really. One night he saw her and my old friend James Bald at a pharmacy and a fight quickly erupted. James and the ex were both injured sufficiently enough that the cops came and took the rapist son to jail. This is where I would like to remind you of what I alluded to earlier; cops, crooks, parasitism and blurred lines. As Blue told it, the sister and mother beater got out of jail around three in the morning the night of that fight. His son had bailed him out. A few hours later the cops, fire trucks and everyone in town except the paramedics were at James’ house. Sometime in the early morning hours the ex-wife had been stabbed around fifty times in James’ bed; James’ throat was slit and he was beaten severely, stabbed a bunch as well and then thrown in his car and set on fire. By the time the folks arrived at the scene he was part of the charred frame, a ghost, another Portsmouth ghost. The police never lifted a finger as Blue tells it, and that case is considered a cold one. That is pretty damned fucked up I thought to myself, looking at my shoes now as Blue walked away. Portsmouth, Virginia. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ This past Monday looked like rain, but it was the first chance I would have to see mom since she hit the ICU and was suffering from “a little” congestive heart failure. It sucked watching it as I said, but I was there, with her for a moment, another one to remember. She has since been on the mend, blood infection going down, breathing getting better, but still pretty messed up, all things considered. I left and headed over to Naples’ as the rain started in. We sat and waited, I feel like I’ve already gone over this…what the hell. This morning we wouldn’t ride out and see Brian, listen to the howls of the tunnel traffic or scrape the exoskeleton from that old ghost house. We just sat, and as we did a strange sense of calm took me over. I looked out over the creek; scanning from my left to right and remembering where the bridge was, and the piers. I remembered a recurrent dream I had as a kid. The dream was short, terrifying and always the same while strangely, slightly different. I was in the family car, a 1965 Pontiac Bonneville convertible with mom. Sometimes I could see her, sometimes not but I knew she was there. Sometimes she drove and sometimes me, sometimes the top was up and it was raining and sometimes the top was down. The dream always started on a bridge; a tall bridge, and there was a visible high, wooden retaining wall and sand and people below. As we progressed along the bridge we would lose all sight of land and a fog would set in. Soon the bridge would begin to shrink and before long we would be on a pier with no rails and the end fast approaching. This is when I would get terrified. I always woke up startled, heart pounding as we drove off the end and started soaring through the air, but downward, but I never remember landing. As I sat and stared at the creek, the remnants of the old bridge and the pier from my childhood that still stands today I began to think of the strangest things. My mother was with me there, then. Although I was born and raised in Portsmouth, I am pretty sure I was conceived in Nags Head. I have done the math, and seen pictures of mom and dad down here looking like they were having a blast about nine months, give or take, before I broke through the bubble’s skin. I thought of the old bridge across the sound and what it looked like, then the Leckie Street Bridge, and it slowly started kicking me. I was now looking at the things my mother had looked at so many times. She loved the beach down here. She still does. I take her a jar of salt air whenever I go to see her. I realized that the dream was not just mine but hers, only in her case it was in the form of mental snapshots and home movies. It was lodged in her DNA, her bones and blood and when she gave from that to create me the pictures, the stories all came along with it. It is my Portsmouth legacy, coming to call. My dreams, both sweet and scary were still and moving images from my mother’s memory. Everything made sense at that moment. I don’t have the dreams anymore, but hopefully I will soon as she gets stronger again. I thought about that a moment and then forced the Ford towards the tube, back down south. Last night though I had lots of dreams, none that I really remember, but I remember a short bit where I was driving that old drop top and had to get out several times to put the top up and back down. It was just as I remember as a kid, the same hinges, latches, canvas smelling of mildew and plastic window. I can assure you that a good percentage of the people I know will tell you all that the last half hour’s worth of my rant doesn’t mean anything more than I am slipping into insanity, but I would say they’re wrong. Fuck them! And please; God bless Brian, my mother, and Superman. Fire may burn the rest.

"To Live and Die of Portsmouth,Virginia (rough draft/progress report)

To Live and Die of Portsmouth,Virginia in Virginia (7/4/13:1200hrs) plus eleven… i swear an i’m like that counter part cohort to Stretch Armstrong; -that reptilian, stegosaurus-spiked and upright swamp monster that nobody remembers the name to but YOU YOU, … -out of all thought IT the fastest and THAT connected us forever though i may never know TO that day in my childhood when I filled the green thing full of air powered pellets after wrapping it taught around a young Pine Tree, don’t know what type of Pine, it was in Virginia; I know of all the pines around here but don’t know the Virginia ones; just the Azaleas and the Dogwood blooms. “the Had” I was born in Portsmouth, Virginia in a blizzard. The hospital where I was delivered was blanketed in ice and snow and as my mother Mary labored to pass me my father Joseph and my grandma Jordan watched the doctors with eyes like an eagles. The birth was a terribly difficult one for mother. As I emerged there were pipes bursting from the freeze and a flood inside the old Naval Hospital as somewhere in New York Jimi Hendrix was recording Stepping Stone. It was 9:28 in the evening when I finally emerged and began screaming as his guitar wailed along and he sang “I’m a man…at least I try to be, I’ve lived before; the other half of me, I heard before that you loved, me but I ain’t gonna search for nothing desperately…and I’ll try, try not to be a fool…” It was January 7th, 1970 and in another two hundred fifty one days Jimi Hendrix would be dead and the world would hardly even know the cries of a young Peter Butler. I like to think we had a connection, Jimi and me. Portsmouth was an old highway town. In 1620, the future site of Portsmouth was recognized as a suitable shipbuilding location by John Wood, a shipbuilder, who petitioned King James I of England for a land grant. The surrounding area was soon settled as a plantation community and was later founded by Colonel William Crawford, a wealthy merchant and ship owner, who dedicated the four corners of High and Court streets for a church, a market, a courthouse, and a jail. It was established as a town in 1752 by an act of the Virginia General Assembly and was named for Portsmouth, England. The Portsmouth I was born into was a far cry of that early colonial heritage. All that remained was an atrophied downtown and the humble beginnings of suburban sprawl that had begun to crop up where the old plantation land once yielded food and held humans in slavery; Highway 17 and the waning business of a seaside shipping town and The Norfolk Naval Shipyard. My father worked at that shipyard. My mother quit traditional work when I was born and took up the honorable work of motherhood. When I was born mom had a brand new ’69 Camaro, burgundy and dad had a ’65 Bonnevile drop top. They decided that now that we were a family that mom would give up her Camaro. She told me when I was a young boy that she had traded it in for me. I could never figure why she would have done that. I had seen pictures of it. It was a sweet looking ride. During my early days we lived in the Portsmouth Garden Apartments off of High Street and when I was nearly a year old we moved into a rental home, the downstairs of a duplex at the corner of Constitution Avenue and Leckie Street. Grandma Jordan lived right around the corner in my father’s childhood home on McDaniel in a modest waterfront house built in the 1940’s beside a small tributary of the Western Branch of the Elizabeth River known even as far back as the American Revolution as Scott’s Creek. At low tide we would trudge through the black mud in search of old bottles and Fiddler Crabs, and when the creek was full we would crab and skip smooth stones. Grandma’s driveway would be freshly paved with oyster shells every summer and the smell of the creek mud and creosote were always noticeable from the constant maintenance of the neighboring resident’s piers and bulk heading. It was a great place to grow up. The expansive roots of large oaks cracked the sidewalks and dropped acorns for us to crunch with our bikes in the summer and the frigid Tidewater winter’s would cause the creek to freeze over but never solid enough to support us. I remember throwing bricks and large stones into the thin ice to break holes and expose the different layers and the changing tides. The water was dark and brown and supported nothing but Blue Crabs and Bull Gudgeons. In 1975 my father had managed to save enough money to move us to the other side of town to a neighborhood in Churchland called Westwood. We lived at 4716 Haywood Drive. There was a large yard in the front and back with towering pines and red, white and pink Azaleas. I remember racing through the new house with my two little brothers, Francis and Saul and sliding on the new carpet like we were sliding into home plate. We didn’t have carpet in the old rental. None of us except mom and dad knew that we were buying this house and had been renting the other; we were just thrilled to have carpet to slide on in every room and plenty of pine cones to throw. There were a few other children my age in the new neighborhood but I have long since lost touch with them, and their names don’t matter to me anymore, friends can turn to strangers as the world turns children into adolescents and the ideals of youth into points of debate and argument. I left that neighborhood in 1988 just after graduating high school and have seldom gone back. Dad retired from the Navy yard in 1999 and they moved out into an old house in Suffolk, just farther North on 17, off of Bennett’s Pasture Road. With all of the children grown, graduated and gone to start their own families, dad took to gardening and mom took to sitting on the couch and smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. It has always been my opinion that once we were gone mom felt as if she had completed her career. She began feeling the stresses of Rheumatoid Arthritis a few years before but was allergic to any medical treatment, so she would sit, read the Bible and pray away the pain. The long and painful process of dying from an attacking, systemic illness had begun, and she refused to discuss it. She just looked forward to being a grandma.  I just got back from a 96 hour stay in the old home town. Mom and dad have since moved to Suffolk, where my middle brother Francis works as the Deputy City Manager. Saul lives in West Friendship, Maryland. Saul and his wife both graduated from Virginia tech with engineering degrees. Saul’s wife Gloria works for a big telephone company and Frank’s wife is a dentist. They both have two daughters, just like Holly and me. Holly waits tables at a couple of seasonably busy restaurants here in Kitty Hawk while I work as a reservationist at a large, semi-corporate adventure and retail outfitter. My job is seasonal as well. I started in the warehouse and moved up a month later, about two weeks ago. The pay is the same but the cerebral component is much greater. I liked it pretty much until the last four days, well, today really. Four days ago I rose at four a.m. and left Kitty Hawk for Portsmouth to stand and hold space as my mom underwent cancer surgery. Today I drove home exhausted. Mom seems to be on the mend after a touch and go ordeal that lasted just under eight hours. The surgeon says she was happy with the results they got, or rather; they got all that they wanted to get out. There is nothing left for us to do now except wait for the pathology report on the margins of the removed flesh and tumor while mom lies in the bed awaiting physical therapy. I may have slept a total of ten hours in the last ninety six. On the morning I left, everything was draped in a cool mist from the Atlantic which covered the Eastern Coastal Plain as I drove from first light northward and westward from my barrier island home towards the dirty metropolitan Tidewater and Maryview Hospital. Just after my quick breakfast I passed an accident on the road. It appeared as if a body was lying in the highway as I approached. As I got close enough to take a full gaze I realized a tourist had just collided with a young Black Bear. A harbinger, I thought? Soon after I watched my brother the Red Tailed hawk taking off from a fresh kill of squirrel on the roadside into the rapidly brightening sky. It was reassuring that all was as it should be. As for me, I was decked out in full talisman and supernatural girding. I was wearing a light blue shirt, mom’s favorite and boot cut Levi’s to keep me warm in the hospital. Under the shirt along with my regular prayer beads I had a necklace given to me on my graduation day by Grandma Jordan; a gold necklace I haven’t worn in twenty five years, but it served as a nice retainer for the first ring my mother’s dad had ever given her and her high school class ring. I also carried an antique charm bracelet from her childhood which now had charms for all of us brothers, my father and her other siblings. I carried in my pocket a printed transcript of Psalm 116, her favorite. I got to the hospital as she was being wheeled into the operating room. Dad and Saul were already in the waiting room. I asked them where the free coffee was and after making myself a styro foam cup full I sat and joined them. It was seven a.m. and the anesthetist was on reserve until two. I was prepared for a long wait. There was a large television screen full of colored boxes with numbers. Each color meant something and each number was a patient scheduled for surgery. Yellow meant pre-op prep, lavender meant recovery and green meant the person was in surgery. As the day wore on many different numbers appeared on the board, but my mother’s 344311 remained green throughout. The families of the other patients came and went as we sat, as still as the potted plants. There was a silver lining to this otherwise overcast day of waiting and nervous hope. Our ninth grade geography teacher Mr. Franks was now retired and serving as a volunteer in an adjacent waiting room. He was one of my favorite teachers. He was a round man, short in stature and with thin but not thinning hair. He would get excited and animated, mixing humor, often risqué in nature with lesson plans and always held our attention. He would sweat through his shirt by mid-morning in the hot summer months and the front of his shirt was often dusted with colored chalk from his brushing against the blackboard while he wrote and then erased the many lessons he taught us. We all loved him very dearly. When I went in to speak with him he rushed back over to me and Saul. “Okay” he said “I have two geography questions for you; one is easy and one is hard.” I smiled while Saul stood nervous. We had no idea what to expect but I knew it would be golden. “Alright, the first one is easy” he started in, “How do you spell Mississippi with one “I?” I covered my one of my eyes with my hand and started “m.i.s.s.i.s.s.i…” “You got it” he continued and quickly came with the next one. “Okay, now for the hard one…if you’re an American when you go into the bathroom and an American when you come out; what are you while you’re in there?” he asked in that old familiar accent that none of us could ever place. His cadence was on par with Robin Williams’ as was his passion, but with a tender but firm southern drawl, like from savannah, which buffered his confident delivery; it was as if, in between words, and canvases of the visions he would invoke, held themselves suspended, singularly in mid air, strung lightly together as if by an almost dripping wire of amber nectar connecting each thought…each phrase. Saul and I looked at each other and then at him bewildered as he began the punch line “ you’re a’ peein’…” he giggled as we laughed, and just like that he continued without giving us a chance to catch our breath or catch up to his wit and train of thought, “unless you are in a hurry…” he continued “ then you’re a’ rushin’” while we laughed even harder and bang, bang, bang like that he continued “and if you’re done than you’re finnish;.” He laughed along with us as we not only enjoyed the joke but the flash back to a familiar soul and mentor and one of the best teachers any kid could have ever known. He left as quickly as he laid us out to go and tend to sick people and nervous folks. He hadn’t changed one bit. Later as he escorted us up to ICU after mom’s procedure was done Saul asked him about when he had retired and whether or not he missed teaching or the students and I interrupted; “I bet you don’t miss the smart asses.” I joked, to which he replied “exactly, I was always worried another Butler boy would come along, mhh hmmmm hummmmmm…” he tossed back, no latency…just professionalism and a tack sharp mind. That inherent and ever present laugh of joy we’re a gift as school children and was gift on this day. He showed us into the Intensive Care Unit and then disappeared back downstairs to the ones still in limbo. Before we left for ICU, Saul had gone out and left me there with my dad. I haven’t always been proud of the kind of son I turned out to be and we had some rocky years a long, long time ago. He doesn’t like to get into those details so I usually leave it alone. That day however as we sat waiting for our escort to the Intensive Care floor, I looked up at him and said “dad, you’re the strongest and best man I have ever known.” He looked up and asked me what I had said and I repeated myself. “I’m not that…” he replied softly, looking down again. “Well, you are to me.” That was the end of it.  Once inside the unit we got our first glimpse of mother. She looked still and quiet but the nurse assured us that she was coherent. We entered the room and she did a mental check of who was there. “Well,” she said “you two have one up on Francis this time.” We knew she was joking as Frank would have been there if he could have, but he was traveling with the Mayor and City Manager on a very important business trip to New York. He would be in the next day we thought. We knew it was killing him to not be there. Mom motioned me to come in close and asked me, “Did you read 116?” I told her I had and that it was in my breast pocket, right next to my heart. She was thankful. She was in a great deal of pain and still weary from the anesthesia. She had multiple incisions with one running down the center line of her abdomen and two others, one on each side. One incision was for a colostomy bag and the other was a drain. The last incision which was over her anus had been sewn shut. This one, we were told, would probably take the longest time to heal, possibly six to eight weeks. The surgeon did brief us however and as I said before, she was happy with the results of the very “technically difficult” procedure. She was also a bit of a condescending witch. She stared at the floor as she talked in five and ten dollar words and only looked up to explain the difference between the rectum and colon. I had already grown tired of her due to her slow approach to surgery. Here we were in late June and mom had finished chemo and radiation treatments back around Christmas. I had to hold my tongue when she stated that they like to do the surgery no more than eight weeks after those treatments but due to mom’s lack of cooperation on one matter or another it had been delayed. My father was in charge and had already dealt with enough stress so I remained silent when I really wanted to bite her. There was really no point in it anyhow. Mom had survived and we were now with her in the Intensive Care Unit. The arrogant surgeon was in the rear view mirror for now. On the second morning mom looked much better. The doctors had removed the tube from her nose that stretched into her stomach to keep it empty so she wouldn’t throw up. She was more like mom; opinionated, particular and to the point. Mobility was a prime concern as she has severe rheumatoid arthritis and has a problem getting around on any given good day. Now that she has had this mega surgery, there was a valid concern that if she did not quickly get with the program and try hard to regain mobility she may never walk again; maybe get transferred to another facility. She was not a happy person when it came to the discussion of this fact. She is dignified, set in her ways, and doesn’t like to feel as if she is burdening anyone with her condition. Saul has gotten on her over the last twenty years as her condition has deteriorated, but I never have. She is and always will be my mom. She lives by her rules and I respect that. Saul has more of a proactive agenda. Perhaps the difference in our views on life and mortality differ such that I appear cold when it comes to mom’s potential end. I can assure you however I am not, not on the inside, I am a scared and emotional wreck, I just don’t show it in public, especially around her. Not much happened that second day, Mom just laid in the bed and eventually conceded to the morphine pump. She was at first saying that with her arthritis she has been in pain for so long that she feels like its normal to be in pain. The nurses and I told her to take a “pain vacation” and use it for its intended purpose. Mom reluctantly complied, eventually getting some rest. We left her that night to return to Frank’s house a few miles down the road. I didn’t sleep well either night. Saul had a few beers, and I had none. I wanted smokes, but Saul was a good little brother, he wouldn’t let me buy them. That second night before hitting Frank’s house we stopped at a neighborhood Thai restaurant. I half believe it is because Saul wanted me to identify a dish he liked; tell him how to make it. So I was game, and we had a great dinner. I had Som Tum or green papaya salad. It is a wonderful rollercoaster of sweet, spicy, cool and crisp. Saul had the basil rolls, kind of like a fresh rice paper roll, but heavy on basil. Next I had Lad Na, which my brother chef Jojo describes as a Thai version of chicken and dumplings, very home-style. First a very wide and thick rice noodle is stir fried with oyster sauce and transferred to a serving vessel. Next, chicken and broccoli are cooked with oyster sauce and sweet soy sauce and thickened with corn starch to make gravy and then poured over the “dumplings.” It is extremely savory and filling. Saul ordered his garlic pepper chicken. This is the dish he wanted me to identify and formulate a recipe for. As a former chef I am pretty good at figuring out what is in something. I took a small spoonful of the sauce alone at first and slowly swished it around my mouth. Next I took a bite with the chicken, closed my eyes, and chewed very slowly, thinking, savoring and cross referencing my known ingredients. I opened my eyes and said “oyster sauce, sweet soy sauce and soy sauce.” After we had nearly finished eating I asked our server if I might speak with the chef, informing her that I was also a chef and wanted to ask about the dish if I may, and I was certain as well to compliment it heavily. A young man appeared and I bowed in the traditional fashion and greeted him. I told him I had an idea what was in the dish and wanted to guess and he agreed to help. I told him what I thought and all I missed was a bit of sugar. We discussed a few other things and I complimented him, expressed my thanks and he returned to his duties while Saul and I finished up and waited for the bill. Saul bought dinner and I thanked him. As we left I walked over to the young chef and handed him a ten dollar bill, bowed again and said thank you in Thai. He replied and we were gone. Saul was impressed with my knowledge and I felt like a winner. It was a good meal. We headed over to Frank’s. His wife Kathy was up and greeted us. She put a movie on the set and we watched as I grew weary. I walked up the stairs and closed my eyes but sleep was not there, only a restless darkness. I laid there in and out for the next few hours and eventually got up and waited for the rest of the crew to wake up before heading back over to the hospital.  Day three came early and we headed out through the streets of Churchland and over the Churchland Bridge to the hospital again. Mom was doing much better and they decided to move her to another floor, out of ICU and into recovery. This came as wonderful news to us all. She had to be lifted by strong men from the bed to a recliner and then she and all of her hoses and wires needed to be transported up to the fifth floor. The nurse told her to go ahead and take a couple of extra pulls of Morphine. Mom was reluctant so I said I would have two of those and one nicotine patch please. The nurses laughed, but I got nothing. The new room was older and a bit musty, like an old motel room where smoking was allowed. There were a host of new nurses and mom went about the business of choosing her favorite and putting her to work. About mid-day we were all sitting there discussing various topics and mom got tired of the voices. When her meds kicked in she wanted to be still and quiet. She told Saul and I to leave and have lunch. We went to another favorite spot of his; a greasy spoon on County Street called Pop’s Country Cookin’. It was in the first floor of an old row house and the fraternal order of police was on the second floor so needless to say there were cops everywhere. The menu featured a regional oddity, the square dog, which consists of two hot dogs split and fried and then laid on a large bun and topped with ham, lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise. It looked good, and dad used to make them for us as kids but it was the first time I had ever seen one on a menu. I was intrigued and snapped a picture. I ended up ordering the special which was hamburger steak with mashed potatoes and green beans, a chili dog with mustard and onions and a large sweet tea. As I began Saul said that there was no way I would eat it all. It was quite large. I took it as a challenge though and did finish every last bite. I have never been so full. After lunch we decided to take a drive down memory lane. We passed the first house on Leckie where we lived until I was five, and Grandma Jordan’s house right around the corner, dad’s childhood home. There was a foreclosure notice on the door and Saul pointed out that the mailbox on the porch was the same one from our childhood days. I talked of stealing it, but again, Saul talked me out of it. He has always had more sense than me. From there we drove past dad’s elementary school which is now condos. We took London Boulevard downtown to West Park View and looked at our Great Aunt Virgie’s old house. She passed away in 1997 but the house looked the same whereas all of the others looked smaller for some reason. Perspective is a strange thing from youth to middle age. Along the way I took snapshots on my new age Polaroid camera to later post on a large blue wall located in the center of the universe for all to see. I chose no physical contact on this journey, and no correspondence other than that of a human leopard, scratching at various areas and then leaving my mark in the form of the photographs on the wall to document my journey through time and space in downtown Portsmouth. We passed mom’s childhood house, and that of our Nanny, mom’s grandmother Pauline. I remember a Crabapple Tree from childhood and it had grown to the sky it seems. All I could see was trunk, but it still stood firm after all these years. We finally ended up at the old boat rental place in Port Norfolk, another constant from childhood, even from dad’s. We stopped and talked a bit with a man we had never met but who knew mom and dad. While we stood there talking, the biggest Osprey I had ever seen dove into what I would call three feet of water and snagged a fish. We thought she had a big one as she had trouble with the take off. She was really struggling. After a couple of tries she made it out and the fish was less than spectacular, a Croaker it looked like, maybe six or seven inches, but with a hook in its gut and a bottom rig attached to the hook and a three ounce sinker. The mighty bird flew off and as she made her way skyward we saw the silhouette of the bottom rig and sinker trailing her as she went. This was Portsmouth in a nutshell. Saul and I returned to the hospital after that and mom gave us a load of mess about how late we were. She didn’t care that we had fun and walked down memory lane, she had other issues. The drain in her side had come loose somehow and she was being moistened by her own fluids, and this made her very concerned about infection. That could end her quickly. She had tried to call the nurses but to no avail so she had gotten really worked up. When we all returned she chastised us for not knowing the meaning of shift work and leaving her all alone. Never mind the fact that she had sent us home, she was scared and that changed everything. As it turned out the bandage securing the drain had come loose and caused some seepage. The nurses fixed it but mom needed a new gown and we had to step out for a moment. Her tome turned to that of a scathing lunatic for a while thereafter. She was afraid, and we had abandoned her. She couldn’t help herself and we were not there. As we sat, soon there would be another leak and she got very nervous. She asked dad to recline the bed and he did so in such a way that it stretched her belly and caused her great pain. Things were not going her way. By this time Saul had left to return to Maryland and I was scheduled to stay at Frank and Kathy’s, but as the situation was not fixing itself I felt inclined to stand watch. Mom and I got into a mild argument over my disrespect of Kathy’s work schedule and staying out too late and I told her I had decided to stay with dad, but by this point I was thinking of old friends to stay with, where I could drink some beers and play guitar. Before we left mom turned an erie sort of quiet; observant, inward and still. She asked dad to come close so she could hold his hand. She asked him not to squeeze it, but just to give her something of home to hold. They sat there like that for maybe five minutes. All was silent. I feared everything at that moment. Was my mother dying? I didn’t know anything. I know now that she was just scared and needed to ground herself. I also know now that she is dying, just like we all die. There was one hell of a storm brewing and mom kicked me and dad out for the night, she wanted to press her pain button and go to sleep. The day had taxed her and she was done. As dad and I left I told him that I was going to hit a burger joint in Churchland and maybe stay with a friend. He wasn’t keen on it at first but I explained that the last few hours had freaked me out to the point of needing a different comfort zone. I told him I would call him in a half hour. I called my buddy Santos and he said to come over, so I went and bought a six pack and did just that. We sat around in his garage for a while as I went over the events of the previous days. I called dad and told him that I was freaked and needed a break. He tried to reassure me that it was fine to stay with him, that he had made a bed and all, but I just told him that I had reached my limit and although I didn’t take mom’s attitude personally, I had done all I could for three days to remain calm and steady, a rock, but I was now genuinely freaked out. I admitted that it was a product of my own stupid sensitivity and he agreed but I told him that whatever the case, I would be five minutes from the hospital, and I just needed to drink a few beers with a friend and play some guitar. He realized it wasn’t worth fighting and just said “okay, that’s cool.” I was a runaway at seventeen, so he knows I have limits. Once I got to Santos’ house I spent a few moments talking with his mom and then she went up to bed. As I said we hit the garage and listened to some great Hendrix outtakes and bootlegs. We listened to Stepping Stone and I told him I was being born while it was being recorded. He said that was nuts. After a few beers each we went upstairs to jam. He was playing a new old Fender Strat and I was on an even older Mustang, a ’62 I think. It sounded sweet and felt even better. We just jammed over a few chords I had scratched down and a half hour in we were both done. I bid him goodnight and headed to the guest room to crash. This time I slept. It may have been three in the morning and I needed to be up at six, but I crashed hard. I had a very strange dream that actually made all the sense in the world. My dream only had a few characters. There was me, my father in law and a really great bass player and idol of mine Mike Volt. Mike was born in Portsmouth but moved to San Pedro very shortly thereafter where he grew up and resides today. We were all in Norfolk near the old Boathouse venue. My father in law for one reason or another opted to take a kite he had into an old warehouse to fly it and disappeared. I stumbled over to the Boathouse, mobile phone in hand as I had been in the waking life for quite a while, ready for anything. As I neared the front entrance the load in was going on. I was supposed to be home soon but I noticed a familiar face, Mike Volt’s. I had interviewed him before. He started very enthusiastically pushing the show which I knew was hours away and to attend it meant to not get home on time and miss another day of work. I sent a digital message to my boss to cover work and now all I was worried about was the wife. I was also flat broke. It was lucid, everything seemed so real. I walked up to Volt and he went into his pitch. “Aww man it’s gonna be a great show, as an opener we have…wait for it now…the Had!” I played it off as if I knew what he was talking about but had no clue. He seemed pumped on it so I went along. After a few minutes I knew I wasn’t getting in without a little love so I walked up to Volt and extended my hand and said simply “Peter Butler.” He went nuts. He hadn’t really seen me in a couple decades and the interview I did was over the phone. I said “yeah man, it’s been a long time, I haven’t seen you face to face since a gig at Lewis’ in Norfolk with your old band Firehouse, and then I saw you once again opening up for Sonic Youth here, at the boathouse, you had two drummers and an ass kicker on guitar, it was HEAVY!” He noted that he remembered that boathouse show and then he saw what looked like a recording device in my hand and said “man I can answer any questions you have.” I told him I didn’t need any of that, but asked if he has any room on the guest list and he told me no. He said that he was maxed out, and they were worried about getting thirty nine minutes worth of material out after “the Had” finished their set. Dreams are crazy, the thirty nine minutes thing made sense then, but not now, not as I recall it for all of you. Nevertheless I was bummed, and all of a sudden it seemed as if hours had passed, a feeling that I had missed my ride came over me and I felt like I wouldn’t get home to see Holly. I was inside now, staring at a bunch of guitars on stage and my eyes traced over them and to his old bass guitar; “Fucking Mike VOLT!” I thought to myself, smiling. Almost instantaneously I woke up in the guest bed at Santos’. It was 7:44. I got dressed and got my shit together and talked to his mom a bit before I split for the hospital. I felt crusty and beaten, but I had to chew some gum and get ready to see mom, hide the smell of freedom from the night before and put on my mourning clothes again.  I called dad and he said that mom had had a good night and I told him I would be right there. We hung up. I chewed that gum to cover the abuse of the hours before, rubbed my eyes, drove over and went up to room 512. Mom was complaining to dad that he had let her teeth dry out and she couldn’t get them in. She was really letting him have it. “Bring me a full cup of water Joseph, not two ounces!” she snapped “I can’t do ANYTHING with that!” I just sat there for probably three minutes. She turned towards me. “So what are you doing?” “I was just stopping in on my way home to say bye and I love you…” “Well, BYE!” she snorted. “Okay then, I will call later, have a good day, I’m only a phone call away…” and “BYE!” she repeated. “Bye” I replied, “I love you” and headed out the door to “Joseph…you let them DRY OUT! That’s why they won’t hook in, they have to stay moist!” She’s doing okay I thought to myself. I hit the nearest gas station and bought twenty bucks worth of low grade and a Coke and headed for the downtown tunnel. Along the way I snapped a few more shots of famous landmarks to post on the big blue board. I turned onto Effingham Street and found myself in a five way “hopper” of sorts. There was a continual but carefully orchestrated and technical five part merge going on. It took me maybe ten minutes to get from the street to the entrance of the tunnel. Once inside it was bumper to bumper. When I reached the other side my exit for Chesapeake and 664 South was an easy hit. As I pulled onto the exit I notice that I was the only car all of a sudden, it was surreal and peaceful. Nobody was going my way. I hit the expressway but opted for the old road, the toll bypass, figured I would save three bucks. I passed rows of corn looking uniform and green, head high, and dotted every so often with sunflowers. I smelled the Mimosa, Honeysuckle and Hemlock again. In the winter this road smelled of fields of onion, but it was hot outside now, summer was really here to stay a while this time. Soon I would be back in Carolina. I thought of all that had transpired in the past ninety six hours, give or take…. I felt a sense of relief and also unsettled, nevertheless I kept the radio off as the story in my head was rapidly unfolding. I passed the farmer’s market as I got closer to home and read all the signs painted on hayseed characters. There were cantaloupes, watermelons, honeydews, boiled peanuts, fresh corn, pickles and sauces, tomatoes, plums, squash, peanut brittle, fudge, hayrides, snap beans and crabs. I love being back in Carolina I thought to myself. As I approached the Wright memorial bridge Holly called. We talked briefly about me just getting home to rest and write, and about how the past four days had really changed my perspective on everything. A person doesn’t come as close as I did to the death of a mother and not change from it, not if you are walking the path I have chosen. It doesn’t make me any better or worse than anyone, but it makes a person tend to not sweat the little things quite as much. I thought of how glad I was that the Ford had made another haul. When I was sitting in traffic back on Effingham an hour and a half before in the gridlock of downtown Portsmouth I had to turn on the heat as the broken radiator was low on fluid and threatening to blow, but once I hit the open road and cruising speed she cooled right down; sucking at that sweet southern breeze. Holly and I talked all the way across the bridge and through the US158/Route 12 interchange as I pulled her onto Duck Road. I started to feel a familiar rumble and hear a suspicious sound. I told Holly I had better get off the phone as I thought a tire was going flat. It turns out I was right. By the time I was a mile from the house I had a decision to make. Should I pull over and leave her and walk it, or limp on the rim all the way to my driveway. I chose to limp, so I turned on the hazards and drove about 15 along the shoulder until I got home. The rubber was shredded but the rim was alright. I was as careful as one could be when doing something very extraordinarily stupid by conventional common sense standards. But I had made it home. It was high noon. I wanted to lie down. I wanted to write. But instead I picked up the phone and called the big boss of my company. A week ago I applied for a position in the top ranks, Human Resources Director. I hadn’t heard anything in a week and I was growing tired of all of the emails and protocol that comes with my eight dollar an hour job. I asked the main man if I had a chance for consideration or if it was a fool’s errand. “Well, nothing is a fool’s errand” she said. “I saw the letter you wrote but not the application or the resume…hang on.” “Yes ma’am.” I replied and waited as she perused my documents. I was sure she would tell me that I hadn’t the educational requirements for such a position, but she didn’t. She asked if I could meet with her Saturday to discuss it, and surprised I answered her “Yes ma’am!” and “Thank you!” You never know really what will happen. I had called my old boss as well in a pre-emptive strike just in case I decided to drop the reservations job. The reason I quit in the first place was because of arthritis and pains. I was really just laying out, looking for pain meds and being lazy. But something snapped in my brain after leaving mom. I realized that if I went back to doing kayak tours, doing what I loved I could make the equivalent of a week’s salary in two days from tips alone, not to mention the twelve bucks an hour. They assured me that I was always welcome back. So I left it with the plan of searching my options and the souls of my current taskmasters on Saturday to see if I may get security and a year round position in exchange for the low wage, and if they couldn’t promise me that, then I will serve notice at the end of that interview and go back to work for big tips. I will grow a pair as they say, put my pains in my pocket and do what I need to get paid. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I guess the next forty eight hours will tell the next story. I feel strong; indestructible now, and I refuse to let any job take that spirit away. I guess I am “the Had.” Everyone has had a piece of me and for cheap. Maybe it’s time I started setting the rules and the prices. Who knows? ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ "Abandoned Hipster Chickens" In the city of Portsmouth it is illegal to keep hens in your yard for egg production. Many refer to these as “backyard chickens.” In many other parts of the country it is legal to keep them and that is not going so well for the chickens. In fact, the new trend of raising these backyard birds has become fashion among a group of counter culture that has become known as “hipsters”. I woke this morning to an article on some form of news media stating in the title stating; “Chickens Increasingly Abandoned At Animal Shelters By Hipster Farmers”. I found this to be amusing and horrific at the same time. I was amused by the fact that these orphaned fowl are being rendered as such by hipsters and appalled by the cruelty of taking on “egg laying pets” as a short sighted statement of coolness which is now ultimately leading to the wholesale euthanization of what were once soft, cuddly creatures. Many arguments have been made about the lack of humanity in chicken industry slaughterhouses, and I will not echo that argument or attempt to draw any likeness to this new threat. I will however try and get to the marrow of why a human would think it chic to take a chic as a pet, and why, once that little fuzz ball turns into a lace-less, low top shoe-pecking pest, one might feel justified in simply boxing them up and carting them off to a local animal shelter. Most of these kids would treat their mobile telephones with a higher respect. In examining this phenomenon I must first get to the bottom of what a hipster is. I looked in several dictionaries and periodicals to try and find a definition, and I have found some very interesting observations. For example: Wikipedia refers to “hipster” as “a culture of young, urban middle-class adults and older teenagers that appeared in the 1990’s”. They associate this subculture with “independent music, a varied, non-mainstream fashion sensibility, progressive or independent political views, alternative spirituality or atheism/agnosticism, and alternative lifestyles”. Douglass Haddow referred to these folks in “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization” as a “mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior(s).” While in “Time Out New York” Christian Lorentzen asserts that “hipsterism fetishizes the authentic” characteristics of most “fringe movements of the postwar era—beat, hippie, punk, even grunge”, and borrows from the “cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity”, and “regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity.” Another contemporary columnist Mark Greif wrote in a New York Times editorial entitled “The Sociology of the Hipster”, that the term” ‘hipster’ is often used by youth from disparate backgrounds to jockey for social position”, while questioning the contradictory nature of that label and the way that no one thinks of themselves as a hipster: “Paradoxically, those who used the insult were often themselves said to resemble hipsters – they wore the skinny jeans and big eye glasses, gathered in tiny enclaves in big cities, and looked down on mainstream fashion and ‘tourists’” Greif is said to believe that the difficulty in analyzing the term stems from the fact that any attempt to do so provokes universal anxiety since it “calls everyone’s bluff”. In his conclusion, he draws from Pierre Bourdieu’s “Distinction: A Social Critique on the Judgment of Taste”. He writes: “You can see how hipster neighborhoods are crossroads where young people from different origins, all crammed together, jockey for social gain. One hipster subgroup’s strategy is to disparage others as ‘liberal arts college grads with too much time on their hands’; the attack is leveled at the children of the upper middle class who move to cities after college with hopes of working in the ‘creative professions’. These hipsters are instantly declassed, reservoired in abject internships and ignored in the urban hierarchy – but able to use college-taught skills of classification, collection and appreciation to generate a superior body of cultural ‘cool’”. He continues: “They, in turn, may malign the ‘trust fund hipsters’. This challenges the philistine wealthy who, possessed of money but not the nose for culture, convert real capital into ‘cultural capital’ (as Bourdieu calls it), acquiring subculture as if it were ready-to-wear. (Think of Paris Hilton in a trucker hat.) Both groups, meanwhile, look down on the couch-surfing, old-clothes-wearing hipsters who seem most authentic but are also often the most socially precarious—the lower-middle-class young, moving up through style, but with no backstop of parental culture or family capital. They are the bartenders and boutique clerks who wait on their well-to-do peers and wealthy tourists. Only on the basis of their cool clothes can they be ‘superior’: hipster knowledge compensates for economic immobility.” In other words, as Wikipedia touts, “Greif’s efforts put the term ‘hipster’ into a socioeconomic framework rooted in the petty bourgeois tendencies of a youth generation unsure of their future social status.” And the “cultural trend is indicative of a social structure with heightened economic anxiety and lessened class mobility.” Well, that is quite a bit on a little word now isn’t it? What about the chickens? Why would these disenfranchised and wanna-be upwardly mobile spawn of Hunter S. Thompson’s “doomed generation” be so interested in raising chickens? I live in North Carolina now, and I can assure you that having a dozen fresh eggs with which to make a luscious crème brulee, or Sunday French toast is a wonderful thing; but backyard chickens are legal down here. We have the space. So I ask myself again; why would some ultra-cool-kid bartender in Portsmouth’s Olde Towne district get the urge to suddenly drive out to Airline Blvd to the feed and seed, or out to the country to some chicken hatchery and scoop up a few of those little peckers and build a coop? When I was just a young hipster, I was content with the co-op, or the availability of those farm fresh eggs on the side of the road on a Thursday tailgate sale. I loved the fresh eggs sure, but I wasn’t rushing to get how-to directions from some internet site on building a better henhouse. What are these kids of today thinking? I guess, as I have said many times, it can be attributed to what I call “upper level shit”, or that which is above our heads. It is a general term I use to refer to questions for which I have no real answer. Example: why is it raining but all of the bushes are covered in ice? (upper level shit) Why have so many friends of mine from Portsmouth died in the past year from either natural or drug related causes? (upper level shit) Why can’t three hundred million pissed off people overthrow five hundred and forty five little minds who continually run our lives and living into the ground after they told us that they loved us and wouldn’t do that to us? The answer once again is simply upper level shit. I think I first got the term from watching a weather forecast and subsequently training myself to determine the tracks of hurricanes instead of always opting to be prepared. Wait! That must be the answer to all of the questions I have posed about hipsters, economic uncertainty and chicken rearing; stupid human laziness. There is an organization called Chicken Run Rescue in Minneapolis where the owner Mary Britton Clouse cites that in 2001 only fifty chickens were dropped off at area shelters and by 2012 that number had grown to five hundred. In an article Clouse said “it comes down to people not wanting to invest the time or the energy to raise the chickens.” Better yet, Clouse explained it like this; “People don’t know what they’re doing. And you’ve got this whole culture of people who don’t know what they’re doing teaching every other idiot out there.” So I guess that’s it in a nutshell. When you have a whole generation of “winning participants” ready to change the world through their music, fashion, politics and even chicken regulations, somehow, everything just gets a little screwy, and in this case, hipsters deciding to raise backyard chickens seem to me are making a poor “fashion statement.” If there be any good news for the chickens at least, as I reminded you all at the start of this piece; it is illegal to raise chickens in the city limits of Portsmouth, Va. I don’t even need to resort to my old standby here, as it is much simpler than upper level shit in this case, just humans being dumb…under the sad and unfortunate guise of trying to fit in. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Buggin’ Out One I spent last week at home. I wasn’t with my wife, my kids, my cat or my beach. I was in Portsmouth with my junkies, beggars, half-wits, holy men, rock stars, histories, lead based paint, ladders, marijuana and my grandmother’s ghost. Ever since mom went into the hospital there about a month ago, I have been spending lots of time in Portsmouth. Three to five days a week I will fire up the old Ford and push it in that direction. Dad wasn’t too thrilled when he heard I had quit the job here at the toy factory to drive the hundred miles each way to make more money and be near mom. He is a responsible man, always has been. He looks beyond my moment to moment justification of bare minimums and bottom lines, opting for the longer, well thought out options. He is certain that while in the short term I may be making more money, if I continue to drive so much the car will fall apart. I understand his point of view, but I have a bond with the machine. We have both agreed not to give up on one another. So we drive. There may also be some deep seeded issues of scruples and legality when it comes to my new employer and the residents of his and my childhood neighborhood. Now isn’t the time for that. My new boss is an old friend of mine, Chris Naples. He and his partner Santiago “Santa” Leon own a painting business called Buggin’ Out. Chris drives the main van which is plain white. Its chalky white really, an old Ford Econoline with everything extra torn out. The damned thing should be on the cover of a punk rock record. Inside there are tons of stickers ranging from “Jesus is my homeboy” to American flags…old bags of Mexican corn nuts taped to the wall, POW-MIA flags duct taped to the ceiling, various stickers from low end rock and roll labels and bands from across the U.S. and right on the front console area, below the radio and all that stuff an autographed picture of Dick Dale. The van itself is a character, documentation, a valid history lesson or timeline. The people that work or have worked with Chris and Santa make up a who’s who of friends, rockers, ne’er do wells and dead folks who each, in one way or another have touched my life, if only briefly. The most recent casualty was an old friend from childhood, Alex Brand. Alex was the most loveable dude on the planet. He could roll with anybody. Being from Portsmouth one must develop very early a sort of innate sense of humor and learn how to take insults and quickly dish them out. This is what we call love. Alex definitely had that ability. When I describe anyone in this crew, the prerequisite of love and the sense of humor of a whore are constants. This ability to roll with the punches and keep one’s head afloat gave us all the ability to shrug off any low end attempt to rile us when away from our hometown, in the game of life, but also equipped us with a short fuse. If we happened to be in Ghent, or Virginia Beach or Brooklyn or Williamsburg or Nags Head it didn’t matter; if someone wanted to start in with some form of mockery or incite a reaction from one of us we would generally exchange a couple of jokes amongst ourselves and then, with the explosive and unpredictable dance of a pack of hyenas, reduce the non-Portsmouth aggressors to a literal or figurative bloody carcass. We got kicked out of a lot of places for this, but so what. Being from Portsmouth was an albatross around the neck when I was nineteen, buy my early thirties it became something I joked about to tourists before taking them up into the plastic villages north of Corolla where a hundred or so horses run dying. Portsmouth seemed to carry with it a stigma. Tales of heroin, guns, habits, nuns, overdoses, d.o.a.’s, lawyers getting their peckers super glued to their stomachs while sleeping by their disgruntled wives, hustlers, shipyard workers and peanut butter factories were the claims to fame of that little highway town. Aside from Alex the other fatality in the crew was my brother and kindred soul Michael Poulos. Mike was in a band with Santa and another Buggin’ Out alum by the name of Barry Kay. Barry was born in Maryview Hospital the same day as Chris’ brother, so they say they have known each other all of their lives. Mike, like a few from Portsmouth do, had developed a habit. He liked the heroin. Chris would never put up with anyone working while using, and to hear him tell it, Mike was actually doing well right before the last shot. We talked about it the other day. Mike had died five years ago, overdosed, but a few hours before he had talked to Chris. Chris told me that he hadn’t been using; that he had just had one of the busiest weeks of his life and gotten one of the biggest paychecks. I won’t speculate on the rest of the night, I loved Mike, and I wasn’t there. He was at the height of his career and the band was getting play all over the world. He had been named the best punk rock guitarist in the world by Guitar magazine and to respect the feelings of the band mates that were left behind and all of his friends and family I will sum it up thusly; “that night some shit hole club was minus their thunder.” I was lucky enough to play in a band with him before the big one and one night he clocked a guy in the face with a pay telephone receiver. He was one of a kind. That band with Mike, Barry, Santa and Billy was a force, nothing like that will ever again rise from the haze that blankets that waterfront shipping hell we all call Tidewater. To be in the van now is just a reminder of how truly experienced we all are, to have just survived the aging process, the bronzing, the years and years and fucking years of painting and repainting things all the same color to maintain an historical appearance, or a Navy issue one…I have returned to Portsmouth, half full. This must have been the third day at it, and I had just left the van. I hid the metal cigarette that gave me a hint of spectacular and walked back over to my ladder. Scaling the thirty feet or so; slowly…carefully, I began scraping away at the layers of grey paint and rot on the two hundred eighteen year old monument to Portsmouth’s glory days. As chips and flakes of lead, color and rock and roll passed by my mouth and eyes, settling on my arms and clothes I thought about the silly significance of just how far back I had come. I was not living in Portsmouth, no. I wasn’t even there for a visit in the traditional sense, but as I hung on that ladder hugging the house I realized what I was in effect doing. Chris, you see, works for the City of Portsmouth’s Historical Preservation Department, and this house is on their little map of famous houses. Here I was coming full circle. I wasn’t just working with a cool old friend whom many other friends and legends had worked for; I was taking part as a steward for my city, restoring the vibrancy; the life to an old wooden hull. I was once again feeling the tug of an umbilical cord, and I felt like one of the millions of ghosts of the carpenters, freemasons, sailors and slaves that had come to do this work before me. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Buggin’ Out/two American Plague Transducer The house at 218 Glasgow speaks to me. It is one of Portsmouth’s many famously haunted houses. I lay upon her all day and she whispers the sickness to me. Sickness is a strange effect. Last night, as I pulled the Ford into Kitty Hawk again and made for the beer aisle that strange, effective teacher began to tighten my low back and needle my gut, like any old friend would. Her story is a fine one and I will tell you about it, but today is a little more pressing on my foreword memory. Naples and I had spent the last hour or so swapping stories of shitting one’s pants as we cleaned up the lead chips and spattered grey drop cloths. I don’t remember what got us on the subject, not as much as I remember that it is always a funny swap; good old fashioned stories of temporary incontinence. We have all had them. If you haven’t then you will; and if you don’t someday have the balls to tell them with friends you have known for life then you are living in a pretty sick nothing world. I stood next to the van, admiring the autographed picture of Dick Dale as I smoked some marijuana from a small metal pipe and felt what I thought might be a fart coming on, but stopped short, grabbing my stomach as I felt the pressure that was not the wind. I thought about heading up the block, to Portside to hit the crapper before heading home…standing there; momentarily silent and then decided against it. I hit the road, no problems. On the way down the coastal plain my stomach started in on me, and again with the low back pressure. It wasn’t like good gas pressure; it was like chewing gum stuck in your eye pressure. It was like something you would only remember from childhood; most likely something you would remember being of your own doing, something dumb. It felt pesky and inevitable. It was familiar and innocent. It was looming as frequency, and building behind stilled thoughts; hushed visions. Cold and hot, blinding and wet, an annoyance, but one for the examiners. It just felt like the start of something. It was the heat, the no food and the ladders. It was the ghosts of Yellow Fever and a widower sea captain and sick daughter. Once down again I walked into the grocer. I made my selection and my electronic self purchase. I was fighting with all that I had the feverish humidity that was enveloping my neck and mine alone. I squeezed hard at every below waist muscle and nevertheless found myself with mustard in my ass. Even straining, no release I felt a leak burst forth. I asked the attendant at the electronic self checkout if I might leave my purchase there a moment while I used their facilities. He agreed and I began the slow walk of a man trying to hold a glass of water between two hams; no glass for the water and the hams, well, the hams. It is that certain walk; the one you resort to when you have nothing left, and anyone who happens to be paying attention will notice. It looks like the walk of a cripple; slow and plodding-areas of the lower torso and legs contorted as if holding something. It is funny as hell to anyone but you, well, maybe even you if you are me and you just had this talk an hour and a half before. There was an ironic and justified understanding of this slight suffrage. I went into the grocer’s bathroom and made for the cleanest safety net in there, but standards drop in my position. I found a nice seat and the bottom of me fell out. There was a spraying, yellow, saline, jaundiced purpose about the explosion. I checked my shorts while seated there for any moist damage and lucky I was that I had not soiled them. I just cleaned up and walked out again, with the confident walk of a sane and sound man. I picked up my beer and made it back to the Ford. I popped one of the beers and knocked back about a third of it as I was driving back north on 12 for the last curl of that familiar track. When I got home I needed to rinse my brush and strip from the lead contaminated clothes I was in. My oldest daughter had been vomiting for the last few hours and the youngest had gone through about eighteen hours of it the day before. I began to unload my tools from the front floor board and a quick, short cough caught me unaware, and I puked up the beer I’d just taken. A cold cloud came over me like on a hot oceanfront day when a temperature inversion brings some otherworldly fog out of the deep and sprinkles salt tears all slowly over the pricking heat exhausted skin which lay spread upon the sand. I rushed to clean and spin my brush and then stripped down and made for the decontamination tank. After having been unleaded I threw on some clean shorts and a tee shirt. The wife and babes were lying on the couch under a thick, soft blanket and I wanted to lie down too! There was nowhere but the bed really, so I slid under the sheets and started my sweating. In just the past fifteen minutes I had become a shaking hell. My teeth chattered. My vertebrae felt fused. Every muscle convulsed as I lay still, eyes closed beneath the sheets in my cool, dank dungeon. That’s when the visuals hit me. That’s when I realized a whole new definition of illness, or rather, a different way to observe it; perceive it. It was not unlike a very strong mushroom trip. I just began the laying down and waiting for it to be over. I was convinced now that the sickness had burrowed inside of me too. I saw pictures but like holograms while unclear as well of the character of the virus, there were spirals and bright yellow colonial hatchings against the tarot card black rag woven scarf; like chess pieces posed and unmoving; bright, negative and supine on a borderless velvet battlefield…the watching of parading imagery was all that there was; it taught me in five minutes or five hours something that is revolutionary to me. I have been taught a new way to see. I thought of my daughters and I thought of that eighteenth century seaman with his. Closing my eyes I scrape the windows outside of the attic where his daughter drew last breath, and I tell him to myself, go away to light again, your daughter is waiting and well, again. You need to be with her, the sea is endless and entirely empty for you now. Only gales and whitecaps roll in the grey and the warm sunshine will never come back for you. Go, and be with her at home. I lie in bed and shake and my daughter brings me a penny; “Daddy, I found you this penny…were you looking all over for it?” Yes baby…thank you, I was looking all over for it. I love you. I would walk those steps I thought. I was now convicted; daydreams covered in toil get the best and I felt at that moment like a bona fide American Plague Transducer. 218 Glasgow Street was a known infirmary during the breakout of Yellow Fever in Portsmouth in 1855. It was owned by a doctor and he converted the house into a hospital during the epidemic. Damn, I thought, I have lain upon her for too long. Never mind the lead poisoning, the painter’s colic. While all of this headway strikes me as completely unbelievable it also reminds me that I have known in my life of things which I could have no knowledge of. I am no master; I have no practice, study nor plan. I watch and sometimes in the watching I mix worlds. I smash panes, folding the spaces and times and I talk to the no voice. It’s about the scraping known lead based substances from an historical and sick building while holding thin cotton to your breathing and navigation and all the while having a proper respirator in the front seat maybe seventeen steps away round trip. It’s about that forced knowing that there is danger when there is and that there is not danger when there is not. It’s the sitting on the not perfect toilet seat in the grocery store, the gas station when you really have one other public choice; a fool’s choice and so you make the move, you pick your seat and you suck on your sick. It is how I define poetry as it has revealed itself to me in eyes, wind, dead beach animals, wild flowers and burns; in structure, practice, form and rule: i force a clean soul against the filth and the dirty edges, the inevitability of a human world and record what it feels like. That, there about adds me up; Portsmouth, Virginia again. I know that I couldn’t possibly have the lead poisoning, not the Yellow Fever, but being next to that and the feeling there bred inside my sick mind leaves the beard feeling on fire –just slightly, and the lips, the taste in the mouth and the cold drink…I tend to get overly concerned for no good reason. There is enough sickness, poverty, spare change beggars, sign holders, old men walking dogs, city workers, perfumed walking women and bankers holding Thursday money until Friday and plenty of malignant and benign repute to fill our sand wagons for a hundred lifetimes; for some reason though, a crooked toilet seat, where was I? Damn these sick, sick dreams of mine. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ “Yellow Fever, Ear Infections, Painter’s Colic and Cancer” My body has been away from my beloved Portsmouth, Virginia but my mind has not yet left. It has been little more than a week since I have climbed a ladder or scraped at sickness, years and lead dust. Since Monday my Ella has been down with an ear infection, her nose has been running like a Sanderling; sometimes just one leg, sometimes both. I myself have been having the fever and back spasms that seem to come out of nowhere and disappear as quickly as a snowflake on my beaten brow. We are in the sun again, warmer than normal even inside the house on Duck Road. The cold air is on, but we don’t notice; Ella and me. My forty three year old eyes see less physically than those of my 20/20 youth, yet in my mind they see beyond my horizon. Nevertheless, I squint through reading glasses at the moles on my arms, once freckles; now like embedded ticks, tiny and crystallized. The blood had been drawn, the poison infused and the microbial war is waging within me. Fevers of one hundred and three have plagued my youngest for the better part of the week. Every five minutes I bend to wipe the greenish discharge from her sinus, using warm wet compresses to dislodge the crust. Every time I feed her the medicine for the fever, the mucous or the microbes she screams like the cat hit on my road last May. It sounds as if I am torturing her. It breaks my fucking mind, every four to six hours, but I must fight where she cannot. “Are you hungry yet baby?” I ask her every so often while my mind drifts to that old sea captain and his sick daughter, and my mother; moved now to a “facility” in Suffolk. At least mom has escaped Portsmouth again, for now. I pray for her rest in Suffolk in the house she shares with my father against the heavy stakes on an inevitable rest in Portsmouth with my history, my friends and my grandparents. “Are you hungry?” I ask again…”I’m cleaning the toys up.” she says. “You’re cleaning the toys up? Good girl.” I say. I flash back to 1855 and the outbreak, the fevers and the hemorrhaging. Only seventy three years later that only daughter of a Portsmouth father would have been saved; only seventy three years, yeah. That’s when the old Army doctor turned bacteriologist discovered penicillin, and changed the course of mankind. Sir Alexander Fleming; and in a strange twist his work would eventually lead to advances in chemotherapy. Bittersweet that all is now that the 6milliliters of bubble gum flavored antibiotic given twice daily will spare my little girls life and the chemotherapy more than likely had a hand in my mother’s decline. Life is a sick and funny bitch. Funny in the sense of a slip and fall on thin ice, funny enough to kill you, funny to camouflage the heart wrenching sadness of it all. The simple discovery of that mold lead to the saving of hundreds of thousands of lives, and spawned an industry that is now hell bent on treating symptoms rather than finding cures. What a fucked up twist. Fleming would roll over in his grave if he could see the flowers of his rotting wood. Flowering fungi circling death plowed under and flourishing in the mystical beauty we call fairy rings. A sick and twisted mess this has truly become; this world which we have created. Before that singular discovery, borne out of a mistake, bacteria and militant microbes killed more human beings than all of the wars in history combined, all fourteen thousand five hundred of them, since man discovered hatred towards himself. Cancer is a business now; part of the medical industrial complex. This once great nation, home of the famously “greatest generation” now leads the world in incarcerated persons, heart disease, cancer and inflated health care costs. Just the other day the cops busted in on an old folks home and using tasers and bean bags shot from shot guns finished what the Japanese couldn’t sixty eight years ago, killing a widower of ninety five years; armed with a walker. I don’t like to use the term and I feel no need to justify the distinction between one or the other, but these weren’t cops, they were pigs. We are truly, as Hank put it, “born into this, into hospitals so expensive that it’s cheaper to die, into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty, into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed…yes, as the chalk faces laugh, and Mrs. Death smiles.” If Bukowski were alive today he would be heralded as a prophet, yet the ones who judge art and give the prizes keep him in the back of the cheap bookstores, the beer soaked speak-easy, and the category of low-brow. He was a true patriotic hero, a Thomas Paine for this “doomed generation.” Nobody listens to the prophets anymore; they beat each other and blow themselves up with two thousand year old myth. One is just as good as the other in my book. Nobody notices anything anymore; not butterflies, not bums, not truth. “Would you like a hot dog Ella”, wiping her nose…”are you hungry yet?” as she stares, glazed eyes focused on a flat high definition screen filled with animated ducks and farting pigs. I think it’s time to be a father, and just cook the meal. I know it is lunchtime, because she can’t. In a few hours my mother will use deformed fingers to dial my number and ask me how she is doing. Meanwhile, as I said earlier, she has been moved to a facility after five weeks of post operation ass covering by her surgeon and doctor who I wouldn’t let cut my hair. They dug into her belly and up her anus for eight hours, carving tumors from her rectum and vaginal wall, missing a bit and then sewing her up again. Now she is “leaking”. While they were in there they fixed a hole they tore in her small intestine, while tearing several others open that they seem to have missed. It wasn’t until blood and bodily discharges began seeping from two of the three incisions they made on her that they noticed. CT scans and best guesses haven’t yet found the troubled spots. All the barber says is that she must rest her digestive system before they can “attempt” to fix it. It will be another two months before they do surgery to venture another guess at that, and then, once rested more chemo. The esteemed surgeon did have the stones to admit that “maybe” the radiation had something to do with the weakening of her bowels. Wow, I thought…really; could shooting radiation through a sixty seven year old body that’s been ravaged by rheumatoid arthritis and all but lost its ability to fight infection, as the disease makes the body attack itself, be affected adversely by that treatment? I wonder to myself while I chew on my tongue every time I find myself in that butcher’s presence. She said that there was so much scar tissue; adhesions from an ill-advised hysterectomy, gall bladder operation, three childbirths and half a life’s worth of mothering, that once inside her guts were like a spider’s web of organ and torn tissue paper; everything just all jumbled up and glued together in her lower abdomen. Now she rests in the facility because my father’s forty years of serving our government can’t buy her the comfort or care of a Congressman, a Senator, or a corrupt Wall Street banker. The whole thing makes me sick. It’s not yellow Fever sick, nor Painter’s Colic sick, not ear infection or cancer sick…it is the sickness of a mind too full, too full of prayer, worry, hope, love, faith, brutality, childhood, hysteria, depression, anxiety, malice and dying freshly cut grass. Mom will call in a few hours, struggling to do so as she wouldn’t want anyone here worrying about her; she just wants to know that her son and granddaughter are alright, never mind the wounds; fresh scars that won’t yet heal. So off I go now, to cook a small meal for my littlest genius and give thanks for my mother’s life, not forgetting that for the last five weeks nor for the next eight that she will not be allowed by her keepers to eat one bite of food, or take one sip of drink. I take off my reading glasses for one moment and look over my horizon and vow to myself; never like that. I will never end like that. I don’t care if it’s by burning or by sky burial, I will never rot away in a bed in Portsmouth fucking Virginia. Outside my sunny Carolina window the fathers and daughters stroll swiftly on the hot sidewalk past my house; necks wrapped with wetted towels and skin of bronze for just one week. In a few days’ time this reality will be a picture in a frame.