I figure we were going nowhere. You asked me, early on, if I was ever content in my life. Must have been asking yourself that question. I figure that the old solutions had become problems for you. That the sad, far off look of what once almost was is no way to live. I came into this with not much going on save yesterday’s box scores and tomorrow’s wanna be’s. I figure it’s not that way anymore.

One mountain bike

Two helmets

One pair of short-fingered bike gloves

Two bikes

Three pairs of gloves

Two Italian bowls

One stock pot

Forty CD’s

Two boxes of books

One striped suit

One “not that shirt” green flannel work shirt

Four pairs of running shoes

One pair of gray sweats

One sweat shirt

Ten tee shirts

One bike shirt

One ugly green hat

Two jackets

One pair of sandals

One double wedding hammock

One set of chain link

Four “s” hooks

One green robe

One computer and printer

One set of spare Ford keys

One house key

One fully packed backseat

One loaded trunk

One sunny day

One afternoon beach

One friend riding shotgun

Two ferry crossings

One island in the wake

A marriage.

It is not easy to buy flowers on a Wednesday here in Browngrass. The bulbs have been up since February and most of the spring flowers are on the way out, save some late blooming lilies and the occasional iris.

This Wednesday I had flowers on my mind. I don’t usually. The kind of work that I do is the kind that rarely allows flowers as a business expense.

You might say I’m an investigator. There are days when that description is accurate. I look for lost things. Most of the time I look for intangibles that are lost — love, time, sometimes money, and almost always, dreams. It often takes the shape of divorce work, or embezzlement or, for the most part, missing children. In the latter case the intangibles get lost along with the very real possibility, too often the case in the meth-addled days in which we live, that the final losses — of life, health, possibility — are the acknowledged outcome of the investigation.

I tell my clients, that closure, that knowing, is better than not knowing. But the truth is, as far as I can see, that with knowing comes the death of hope, the end of dreams, the loss finally, of happy endings.

Victor Frankl, a survivor of Auschwitz, talked about how having bad dreams was not worth the cost of waking the man up when his life was to be found in Auschwitz. Frankl said, with astonishing clarity, that without the dreams, horrible though they were, the man had nothing left to live for. More kind to leave him to struggle in that world, than to deny him the dreams in this world. I have a hard time arguing with that.

This Wednesday had nothing to do with a client though. I was looking for guilt flowers. I had just jacked up a good friend, a woman about whom I care deeply, someone who brought out things in me I thought had died long ago.

I met her almost a year ago through a mutual friend. I sometimes take personal pictures for friends; weddings if they are truly informal, soccer games, marathons, you know, the stuff you want to have done well but can’t really see paying for. The personal pictures often act as refuge from the strain of the other work, the divorce stuff, the blood.

I took some pictures of Jake’s soccer game. Jake is Zach’s son whom I have known all his life. Zach for much longer than that. One of her kids was on Jake’s team. In taking pictures of all the future Pelés, Ronaldhinos, and Mia Hamms, I always try to take crowd shots to round out the day. You never know when something beyond Saturday morning soccer will show up.

I came across a picture of her in a pink fuzzy toque with a designer name on it. She was in profile, starting to speak to someone out of the frame. I couldn’t take my eyes off the expression of intent in her face; the teeth bared not in anger, closer to passion, her eyes sparkling, alive.

The rules don’t allow for hitting on the moms, so the picture would just have to do. I sent it on to Zach and thought no more about it.

Not exactly true. I thought about her from time to time, mostly at sunset, purple fires streaking over the mountains, Dexter Gordon playing in background. It had been a very long time since me and Dexter dreamed those dreams together.

Life got in the way, my work got ugly and the skies turned springtime misty before she surfaced again. Turns out that she had some pictures she wanted taken as record of her body art. I hadn’t figured on that. I suggested we get together to talk about it. We agreed to meet the next week at a local java joint.

In conversation she has an almost hidden face, the kind you might not take note of on first glance. It didn’t take very long to notice that her eyes are attentive, her smile welcoming, inviting more, her presence an attitude of repose but paying attention.

She told me that she got my number from Zach after he showed her the pictures from the game at a soccer related event. We agreed to meet again the next week the same place.

I asked Zach what he knew about her. He told me he thought she taught somewhere, that she was married with more than one kid and that sometimes he caught a look at her and could not help thinking that something was wildly out of keeping with the tended lawns and German cars in the neighborhood. What, how, why that was he didn’t know. He thought it might be the long, braided, dark hair that hung to her waist. Maybe he just needed something to take his mind off the tedium of getting from here to there with a retirement plan intact.

I took the pictures on a cloudless day in late March. The background walls were yellow, the sky cerulean blue and bright. The body art, sleeves of tattoos, colorful and active, imagery straight from La Dia de los Muertos, made for quite a contrast, but somehow it all worked.

This gal was not a model but there was something in her that the camera loved. Maybe it was all the hidden stuff, as if her life was in her back pocket. In my experience, the people who know that best are the ones who know how pain comes from right close in, how love is never an equal exchange, who know that only the young die young.

We met for lunch a few days later. We had agreed that I would hand over the pictures; she would pay for them with a chic lunch at a local joint with the same name as her daughter. Somewhere between the green salad and the crème caramel, she let me know that she was ”not monogamous”.

I almost choked. When I found my voice again, I asked her if her husband knew that he wasn’t monogamous. It was a trick question I guess but it spoke to my work and the horrors that I had seen come from such situations.

Lunch was clearly over. Whatever hesitations I might have had, wanted to have, disappeared minutes later. We played a little clutch and grab on the street under the budding poplars and agreed to meet the following Tuesday. It didn’t work like that. By the time Friday had come and gone, so had she and not very much would be the same for the next several months.

She does indeed teach and equally does aid work in South America. The teaching, the work on an article, the upcoming three-month fieldwork expedition began to take all of her time. From every day at lunch our meetings started to be separated by days at a time. I was going into some emotional places I hadn’t been since I put away the crack pipe and the Jack Daniels several years ago.

Things were growing deeply complicated. An act of kindness, of intimacy became the doorway to the addict in me who always wants more. She had been here before she said. Not me. Not sober. Even so, we were doing fine until the first argument about getting together. Her life was taking over and it flat out pissed me off.

One day — well, Wednesday, to be precise — I called her to ask her what time she was coming over. We had kind of decided that we could grab one day a week of four to five hours, given her schedule and play the rest by ear. That lasted a week. I felt everything slipping away, her words of reassurance and her request to just let her get the work done so she could be present, fell on my “I need more, you don’t get it” ears. I said as much in a phone call at mid morning.

I heard the anger, the violation in her quiet response. I ignored it. In the end we agreed she would get there at 12 for three hours. There wasn’t much about it that felt good.

I went out almost immediately to get a sticky bun of some sugary walnut caramel thing that I knew she liked and thought to add some flowers. Looked for roses, got irises but it took three stores, some judicious, “what do you mean you don’t have fresh cut irises” negotiating. Irises in hand, sticky bun in the box I got back to house.

She came over; we fought; it got mean. I had put the irises in a hand blown glass coffee maker that doubles a vase in my bachelor house. I had pointed them out to her early on. She didn’t exactly ignore them but they certainly did not get in front of the runaway train that was our anger and frustration.

I had forgotten how my anger gets rolling, how it takes no prisoners, how it uses therapy terms as clubs. I become the bully I track down for others. Where it comes from is another story not for now, but it was there. She didn’t back down an inch. Quiet, controlled, in the end, mean as only the truly wounded can be, she gave as good as she got.

Eventually we got to a sweet place and after awhile she left. The irises were still in the vase on the kitchen table. When I mentioned it to her later that night, or maybe the next day, I said they were for her, her office or whatever. She said she left them because they looked good there.

We met up at a lecture on Friday that week. I was tired from an 18-hour day to that point and not thinking very clearly. She was uncomfortable with my being tired, likely with my being at the lecture in that condition. We went for coffee.

The fight that followed was cowardly on my part, an act of desperation. I felt criticized, cut down, abandoned. In fact she was married. And committed to it in her way. There was no changing that. What the hell had I been thinking? I told her I was going home to get fucked up, the junkies’ only good answer. The fight was over.

We parted, neither of us able to make this right.

As I came through my door, I saw those fuckin’ irises. I took them out to the deck and threw them as far as I could. I went back inside and lay down.

I awoke in the freezing darkness. Far off the sound of crying, the smell of salt. Slowly it came to me, I was lost, the tears were mine.

The next morning I found the irises in the garden below. I cut the stems on a diagonal, wrapped them in wet paper and tin foil and put them in the trash.

Photo Credit

“Iris” (matt) @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

It’s been raining hard all day.

I’m driving south on Main Street towards Marine Drive. I’ve got some bills I have to pay. Roy Rogers and Norton Buffalo are playing on the radio. It sounds like the lost nights and the window skies from so long ago. They were sweet and endless like youth itself — and now, it seems, over. Rest in peace Norton.

I stop for a red light. I catch sight of the Honolulu Café on the eastern side of the street right there between the New Antique Market with a “new” container from Belgium and the Come-In Enterprises Emporium, featuring stamp collections and “super healthy” food from Hong Kong.

Honolulu, I think. Hotels, beaches, Pearl Harbor, beautiful Hawaiian girls, the Pipeline. The palm tree sign out front has fallen over. The place looks wet from the inside out, shrouded in the rain like Noah’s final port of call, a last chance hole in the wall wait it out ‘til paradise kinda joint.

I get to thinkin’ how maybe Miles or ‘Trane played here some long ago lost night on the road but that’s romantic tripe. My guess is that nobody ever played anything at all at the Honolulu Café.

I feel lucky I don’t know anyone in there and it is lucky they don’t know me. On a rainy day up here, north of the original Skid Row, every passerby is a convict, every customer is a saint. Every driver is an innocent bystander. According to a local ordinance, every act of kindness will be revenged.

Behind the fallen palm tree sign and the worn out yellow light the shadows drift behind the fading yellow window. From where I am you can’t tell whether they are convicts or saints but I’m guessing that one thing is for sure: Every act of revenge will be a kindness tonight at the Honolulu Café.

Outside the Honolulu Café an old man staggers against the blowing rain. I imagine for a moment that he is remembering how the decks were awash in the South Pacific swell and the hold was full of tuna, or maybe it was Toyotas. The Southern Cross was all but gone as the winds picked up again from the southwest. As he ran for the wheelhouse he prayed that it wasn’t another one of those killer waves rolling up from the South China Sea.

From behind the wheel it looks like that storm is right here, right now. Watch caps and John Deere hats don’t keep you dry up here. The streets are wet, his pockets are empty. My guess is that there ain’t nobody home waiting up. He turns to look at the oncoming rain. It slashes his worn face but even from here I can see that he is remembering his last good day. I’m guessing it was somewhere east of Solomon Islands, running for home in front of the storms coming up out of the southwest.

At the Honolulu Café you got to figure that since they don’t say anything, they got to know something.

A memory inside the rain pounding on the roof carries the sounds of chairs scraping on the wet floor and dishes hitting the bus box. A deserted hotel kitchen long after the meal service was done, a voice, pure and clear, a gnarled figure singing, “you’ve lost that lovin’ feelin’…” over and over again. He was back lit in clouds of steam and endless stacks of dirty dishes. He wasn’t young like me or old; it seemed from where I stood he was just worn out with the distance between here and there.

I went to look for him the next night, to talk a little, to ask him where he’d been, to ask him what he knew. He wasn’t there. I guess what he knew best was being gone.

I’m waiting for the light to change. I can hear the wipers on the windshield, the rain on the roof, the road wet tires and the sound of passing by. I’m heading south, paying some bills. I’m waiting for the fog to lift, waiting for sunrise over the islands. I’m waiting for the phone to ring. I’m waiting for the waiting to be over.

Photo Credit

“Neon Palm” Fred Davis @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved