Fiction

Armistice Day: Part Two

November 13, 2011 By cielosea 1 Comment

Part Two of Armistice Day reveals a boy who never wore the uniform and who fought his own war for too long…Armistice has been a long time in coming

I woke up in a red telephone booth. A guy name Tommy was kicking me and it hurt like hell. It was also light outside. Tommy, a Chinese guy who sold heroin and crack but only on the phone, apparently thought I was killing his business by passing out in his “office” – you fucking monkey junkie he kept saying. I couldn’t really argue, hell I couldn’t speak, for the blood and the ache behind my eyes.

I had no idea what had happened after I left the bar but I must have called Tommy and begged him for some dope. There might have been a woman involved. A redhead. Maybe not.

I stumbled down Commercial into a drizzle and a rolling sense of despair that yet again here I was, long past the best years, not yet at the end and still just wasting time looking for something that felt like peace but given my way of doing it, tieing off and blacking out, it was always a matter of taking out yet another mortgage on a barren nights sleep in a land where dreams died aborning and the rent was never was fully paid. I could always stay but I could never leave with the price of my seeking a hollow sound, a howling, in my head that gave me no peace at all.

Up ahead I saw obelisk and a bunch of old timers in full drag-no wait, they were in full uniform, blue and brown, watch caps and full dress, and red poppies in every lapel. Talking quietly they were somehow arranged in loose formation, flowers in hand, tears and laughter, an inevitable head count and younger generations in tow, some willingly, some less so, but all respectful enough on a lousy wet morning in november.

Armistice Day is what it was. I saw an old friend, a writer and his family. A guy whose father, a captain of a destroyer in The War who had recently died, and whose loss was both painful and a relief, was lost in thought as he stood holding hands with his daughter and his partner. He was a gentle, somewhat driven soul, a good friend to me until I stole his money and lied straight-faced too many times, a guy who was lost in how to help someone who said he knew the way home but was so clearly lost that there were no words left to describe it. Better to walk away. When he looked up and saw me he did just that as if death was palpable in the rain, in this place and no poppy or poetry would transform his pain into art or forgiveness at that moment.

I turned down the block towards my house, trying best I could to stand upright, to walk with purpose, to somehow honor the fallen, the memory of my father and his principles, my uncle and his horrors on Guadalcanal, my own dreams of combat heroism, and my own eventual refusal to fight in an unjust war, all of it a mess inside me. A roiling stew of loss and anger and dreams gone missing in rain soaked clouds, dope and whiskey, I recognized, maybe for the first time the principles of my childhood and ideas of standing tall had been sold for a twenty dollar rock and that since that day I was in search of my own peace, my own cease fire, an armistice of a very different sort, but a cessation of hostilities that might finally bring quiet to my nights and the possibility of an end to the destruction of my days.

I had been no warrior but it often seemed to me as if I had been with Odysseus, battered on the way home for a long long time. Emily from next door, was maybe 11 at the time. She came up to me as I walked up to my house, and smiled a hello, and told me there was no school that day. It was Armistice Day. She said she was going to get ice cream with her dad when he came back from work. What kind of ice cream did I want? I told her chocolate or coffee. She said she would remember and said thanks and went inside.

I fell asleep to sound of bugles far off playing Taps in the rain and children laughing in the park and when many hours later I was awakened by a knock on the door I realized I had been dreaming about chocolate ice cream in a sugar cone and a red haired girl with green eyes from a long time ago.

Photo Credits

All Photos courtesy of Author. ©Michael Lebowitz

Armistice Day: Part One

November 12, 2011 By cielosea 1 Comment

In Part One of Armisitce Day, Michael Lebowitz introduces us to a man who is waging a war against himself.

I went up to a bar named for a guy who was a barfly and a hell of a poet even if later on the know-it-alls in the college thought he was second rate or, as they put it even more pretentiously, if you can imagine, second tier. His kinda joint was a blood bucket, twenty four hours a day, sloppy, stinking, dried vomit and broken glass, cigarette smoke from before the war and broken dreams and lies that were both newer and older on a daily basis. The regulars just called it Swats, or for some of us, the “office.” In this iteration though, they made a hell of prix fixé a lamb skewer with cilantro dressing and rice pilaf, and a baklava with organic almonds for 17.95. Blood buckets just weren’t the same. The lies though, well, some things never change.

The new owner, an old friend from Mexico City told me how good I looked, how the writing must be going well since I looked like Keat’s ghost. I asked him how he knew Keat’s ghost. Told me he met him in Rome once and then we both laughed like the total assholes we were truly afraid we were. I told him that I hadn’t been around for a while ’cause the writing stunk but the cocaine was fresh out of Peru and Frida was rollin’ in family money. A perfect life, he said and ordered me a freebie draft with a Jack back. Truth was Frida was long gone and the only thing rollin’ in my place was a broken glass pipe and a whole mess of stolen rock. Put more traditionally, shit was rollin‘ downhill and truth to tell, there was not much left in the tank, nowhere left to run. Yeah, he said, you lookin’ good, that pipe diet is good for you and he went off to be the perfect host to someone with money in their pocket and a stock tip or two to sell.

It was open mike night and for what ever the reason I got called up. Hell I was dressed for it, scarred leather jacket, faded jeans, black tee shirt that had seen too many cocaine cinders, shades, bad hair and an attitude heading south on every draft. The bar was full, the local poets, writers, critics, love groupies and drug dealers all assembled for the weekly outpouring of trash occasionally highlighted by some truly awful but honest and embarrassing writing by some newbie who didn’t know any better. The real pro’s drank mint tea, because they couldn’t afford to blow the cover charge. What the hell, I had been all of them at one time or another, now, well who knew, I had a couple of rocks in my pocket, a pipe in my jacket, a mess of beer and whiskey in my gut and nothing left to lose on this night.

Your anger destroys me, (I intoned, flat, dead poet reading voice)
“When hope is gone the ultimate sanity is to grasp at straws.”
Rain water on window glass
has no meaning.
If you write it, has it happened twice?

Dead freakin’ silence in the room…I had heard myself speaking so I just assumed that I had nailed a universal truth in five lines and that gravity was suspended for the moment…crack and whiskey can have that effect, moments before they kill you or cause you to open your mouth call for 911. I followed up quickly with some Zen shit I made up on the spot:

Last week I did a three-hour meditation
on my past lives. (no laughin’ matter).
I remembered waving grass, rocks, wind.

Mountain fastness, frozen passes, river banks
red with sunset.
I am always not yet there.

The sun was gone when I wakened

to an uncertain night.
My guide asked me what I had learned.

I told her that in the beginning,
as in this fleeing moment,
We are here alone.
I stepped into the relentless now.

There was that dead silence thing again and then someone said, yeah man, very fuckin cool, relentless now, very fuckin’ cool!
I figured I was a hit. Or not a bust or something. Whatever it was it went downhill from there.

Photo Credits

All Photos courtesy of Author. ©Michael Lebowitz

Morning Wood

January 5, 2011 By cielosea 2 Comments

I lay back on the soiled sheets and rearranged the pillows. The pillowcases needed to be washed. The room was grey with careless use, our sweat still fresh and the sheets damp beneath me.

“Hey, man,” she said again, leaning back to stare at me with her dark brown eyes, eyes dark like her hair, wet and wild, eyes deep, masked, like the shaded trout pools on the North Bank.

“Yes,” I said into her silence, the silence of the not-still-young, a silence which ran like a river beneath the fast chat and the joke lines, the riffs of a private vernacular, a silence of frustration and anxious grief for nameless losses.

“Hey, man don’t be sad, okay? Older guys, afterwards, you know, they get down. I don’t like to see guys sad after we fuck. It makes me blue,” she said. She sounded lonesome, like November morning rain among the sycamores along the river.

“You don’t make me sad,” I said, not telling her that where she was is sometimes sadder than any middle age, that she made me feel old, older than the mountains, more ruined than the clear-cut sitting jagged on the sunburned slopes outside the windows; not saying that her life was full, and still in front of her, that the heartbreak and loss that was coming was like nothing she had ever seen, that her laughter and her stories of people I would never meet, never play cards with, released me from the dark tunnel of my own journey here but they also brought a boxcar of regret, a wind rent with lost voices and restless souls, all of it real for me in the hollow light of countless broken mornings.

“It’s been too nice a day to be blue,” I said.

“Great,” she said, sadly.

And if I could have done it I would have lifted her in my arms, she as light as a bundle of dried blackberries. I wanted to break the spell, to heave her into a creek somewhere, to shout and splash water happily, to find some quick irony with which to resist, to overcome.

She looked over at the clock, almost apologetically. It was almost always apologetically. When she turned back it took a second or two for her to be back in the room.

“You’re crying, you old goat,” she whispered sweetly, almost happy.

“Maybe I’m still high.”

“You’re not still high; you’re crying.”

“Maybe so, but I ain’t fuckin’ blue.”

Photo Credits

“Women and Sand” by Michael Lebowitz

Dancing After Midnight

November 20, 2010 By cielosea 3 Comments

A man meets a woman and writes a poem. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

When I got to the bar it was nearly empty. The usual? Yeah, I said, a draft and a Jack back. An old bartender once told me that it was a man’s drink so that’s what I’ve ordered ever since. I suppose I like how it sounds. Sometimes it makes me feel like I’m starting out for the first time.

It’s past midnight now and I’m coming down the stairs, tapping out a hopscotch memory, just tapping to beat all.

Rebecca saw me tapping and she laughed. She told me, when I asked her, that she was here with her partner, she told me she wanted to be a photographer. Why not, I thought. If she specialized in self-portraits she could make a good living.

Something about her reminded me of a photograph I once saw of a dusty Guatemalan hill town. The photographer was looking at the church at the end of the dirt road. The setting sun, caught at the edge of the frame, lit the bell tower like fire against the night sky. What held my eye though, were the two figures embracing in the recessed doorway of a flowered garden wall. It appeared they were local kids hiding out, stealing a kiss. Maybe they were talking about times to come. It was the kind of photograph that Neruda wrote.

Steely Dan played something about reeling in the years and for whatever the reason I reached my hand out across the bar and Rebecca and me, we started dancing. We laughed and then we did it some more. On the way home, I noticed that the trees were turning green.

I wrote this poem later that night. I told my friend Peter about it. In fact, I read it at an open mike poetry reading at the bar a couple of nights later. When Rebecca found out about it she was furious. Peter’s girlfriend told him that Rebecca felt violated.

I guess romance is best left to the Guatemalans.

Photo Credit

“the Loving -renegade- @Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

Mandy’s Tune

November 9, 2010 By cielosea 2 Comments

“Now you know what it’s like to get f–ked for money.”

This, left on the answering machine. I guess she means the eighteen hundred bucks for rent and cable to start clean and stay clean. No such luck — she’s off the wagon now, tricking again, heading back to the outskirts of hell.

No one is spared, rich or poor, abused or shallow, broken hearted or holy. The party keeps going, there is always more.

You can hear the city whimper. Another day breaks to a rollin’ steel rhythm, a last minor chord. One more morning with the “can’t get no more, answer the f–kin’ phone” blues.

My city is dying from the inside. The suburbs keep sending the brightest and the best to fill in the ranks. Nobody knows nobody or so they say. The smoke rises, the bodies break, the hometown football warriors, the homecoming queens become ghosts. The war on drugs is just about over. All that remains is the body count and next week’s order.

“You ain’t no addict til you got no dough…”

Aloof, with their blond hair and empty eyes, they were hard muscled, lithe, gymnasts or dancers, before it all changed. Crack, strawberry licorice, cheap whiskey and salesmen from out of town become the daily protocol. The once hard bodies are now host to cold eyes and colder hearts.

_______________

God appears to the broken and the worn and offers his only answer. Faith is what is needed. Faith? they say, You want faith? Just go down the stairs and give the dude on the corner a twenty. Come back up here and we’ll cook that shit. Do you know the dude? No, but I hear he’s got good stuff. These soldiers of god have been on the road to paradise since the day they quit tenth grade and took up residence on the sidewalks, in the doorways, in the cheap hotels, seeking out the holy rock, crack cocaine.

Innocence dies but the body carries on, crumbling to the unsteady beat of a broken heart. Dreams die hard out here. The dead are the lucky ones.

On the stroll the nightly litany begins, “Hey mister…”

One day they start showing the client the ropes and before the sun rises on the next day these beautiful and not yet broken dream queens find their fates. Suck it in slow, steady. Puff, twist the pipe, Pull, long, slow. Get it, hold it. Eyes closed. Lean back. Count to five, let it go. Blow it out, the rush begins.

It’s all high speed, everything moves in slow motion. The streams of blue smoke fill the room. Watch for the small smile, the uncurling, lengthening bodies ready to catch the light, feline, predatory, at the top of the stretch. Her eyes find yours. Relax, she says.

I don’t why I do it. I hate it…Pass me the pipe

The armies of the night take in a new angel of death. Before their twenty second birthdays they have the certain knowledge that the only heaven they will ever know is the kingdom of the fallen children of a merciless god.

You never know when the phone will ring.

Hey, you busy?

No, but I don’t have any dough.

Got any product?

No.

I’ll see you in twenty minutes.

_______________

What do you give the man who has everything, they say. Give him a crack pipe for Christmas. Next year he will have nothing and he will want everything.

Look into their eyes, feel a graveyard wind. Behind ice cold gaze you see them kneeling down in desperate prayer, lost daughters, children, dreaming of proms and homecoming; wanting to go home despite the long worn out hope that one day they will be released.

Will you stop all this lying?

No.

You will be dead in three months if you keep hitting it this way.

I know that, she said.

Photo Credit

“Strung-out” AbigailGeiger @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.