Fiction

Tarmac Meditations #200: A Halloween Love Story

October 31, 2017 By Michael Lebowitz 1 Comment

Things had been crazy for the last two, three weeks. I had seen these nights for twenty years and they never got better; no sleep, no women just another run of no luck, bad luck. Went to Portland, just because, tossed around in a bed I didn’t like, in a house that was filled with the residue of the daily discomfort of people who were trying to put their life back together. Too many drugs when I got home, too many hookers, then briefly, a new woman, someone I wanted to care about, she got lost in the storm of drugs that followed. The flat gray streaks of dawn were outside the window; me, I was on the couch alone with everything going on inside, panic, pain, my cocaine nerves working at supersonic speed.

It was time to move, to get out. I looked in the bathroom mirror to see if I was okay, and saw my death head looking back at me. The drum beat of nerves was louder, more demanding then ever before. I was face to face with my own nightmare . Slimy, with cold sweat and fear, I knew I was in trouble, serious like a heart attack trouble. There was a pain in my chest that wasn’t just bad coke; the Reaper was playing his hand, I could feel him right there, right now. I needed to get some help. An ambulance would take too long and the hospital was just up the road. I could drive there.

So, I do. I have a heart attack running and I’m overjoyed, about being able to make right turns on the red lights like you can here in Canada. I found the ER, as I went through the doors a nurse standing behind the reception desk saw me and started to moving toward me, definite, competent and sure. My time for lies was over.

“I’ve done something really stupid. Please help me. ”

She took my arm, led me to a gurney, asked questions as she hit my arm with an IV of some wonder drug that in the end probably made the whole thing a good scare with very little damage. Painkillers and blood thinners and as the darkness finally came in I thought of the kids and prayed for sunrise, for release.

In the morning window, sunlight in the world and me, unbelievably, here to witness it.

I met Paula a couple of months later at a local island bar where she was working. Between sets of a legendary, local rock band, I asked her to go to the after party with me. She took me home to her house, we slept together with no sex. She seemed sweet, gentle and steamy. I was sure we would work, that she would help me save my sorry ass life. No more lost romantic hero in my own fairy-tale. We felt like forever in every morning. We got married, six months later: a small island wedding, friends, family and Van Morrison’s “Perfect Fit” playing in the background.

After all that, it didn’t work out. Not only did it not work, it ended like stepping on a land mine, noise, fury and the end of things as if in a heartbeat.

There are moments when I remember that I loved her. It makes me smile. But the drum is beating again, the drugs are running and the nights, oh those nights, are never really over anymore, interrupted sometimes by the gray light of a rainy, “uncertain dawn” and the sounds of a stranger tossing and turning in my bed.

Photo Credit

Daytime TV

August 28, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

So I’m watchin’ a program and the guy goes into a church and goes into the confessional, tells the priest that he hasn’t been to church in three years and ain’t that a sin? and the priest says yeah.Then he tells the priest he committed adultery. Ain’t that a big sin? he says? Yeah, the priest says.”Wait a second, you just got in here and you’ve already confessed to two sins. Aren’t you being a little hard on yourself? The guy shakes his head as if to clear away an annoying bug, jabs his arm froward, grabs his leg with one shaking hand, sits absolutely still, until his pant leg starts flapping like a loosened sail caught in sudden breeze. He let’s go, get’s up, walks out without a backward glance.

Note to my Editor

August 25, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

I am swimming upstream in a river of fog, I am wrecked on shoals carved by indifferent time. The meds are having a fiesta with my sanity and my clarity. Possibly too, my vocabulary. Hopefully the re-write is useful and on target. The other draft read as if it had been written by a crew of monkeys in search of Hamlet in the original English.

Summer died today.

August 18, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

There is a chill inside the sunrise today, the air seems quieter as if beginning a long exhale which will end with the first snow. I bend to gather up small windfall branches. An unfamiliar ache seems to whisper, “Too soon. Be patient, old man, there is no need to hurry.”

Dreams

December 2, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz 1 Comment

Bob Dylan once said that if “my thought dreams could be seen, they would probably put my head in a guillotine.” I know people who put their dreams on Facebook or better yet in group email lists meant for other purposes. Makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. If you see what I mean.

I read a poem the other day by a famous American poet. Didn’t understand damn near anything in it but for this: “If you cook like the way you walk, Chiquita, I will eat it down to the husk.” He said that right after he said that the substance of lack was the prime substance of desire. And then he mentioned that a child beggar in a South American village was looking up at him, pointing to his own mouth.

I remember my dreams. I still have them. To remind me, I suppose, of distances “which are not near,” places to which I drove myself until, for no good reason(as if there ever are “good” reasons) I was left with no choice but to leave. I now wake from my night dreams in fear of earlier guillotines and death dealing husks choked down in doorways of imagined Mexican chapels somewhere along the way. The substance of loss is the prime substance of salvation. Providing, of course, that you can keep it down.