love

Love Story #7

June 21, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

I woke up this cold summer morning in the arms of a nightmare. The taste of last night’s crack cocaine still rancid in my mouth, the smoke drifting across the dust in the morning light, I was right there, right back where I used to be every morning in those endless years.

These days I know that the dream is just a dream. That the taste is a memory of lost highways and bad medicine. That loneliness has been the way of my life. But then again, I’m clean. It is another day to work the spaces between the black keys of meeting my fate or the white ones of following my destiny.

And you? Where are you? I left you hanging on the phone after the last time you called me and asked for money to go to school. We both knew that two grand wasn’t for school. It was a coke buy and a short hard run into back to Hell.

I remembered taking all your garbage bag suitcases out to the front stoop, locking the door behind me, leaving town, going up river. A couple of days later I left the state and then the country. After awhile, a long while, it was far enough to get you out of my daily mind, my midnight terror.

Until this morning.

I loved you in my broken way. Recently I met someone and I think it might be a true thing, the real deal. I think you showed up last night to bless my escape, say goodbye, to let me let you go.

I hope you made it out, that you never found the two grand, that you got off the highway. I hope that I never hear how that worked out, that I never see you again; not in the street, not in a store, not in the drift of an early morning or comin’ in soft on the night wind. Never. Not ever.

But sometimes I know you are around and it reminds me that there were unexpected moments of kindness and fiercely sweet, an odd loyalty inside our unholy partnership, that we were danicng a Devil’s two-step way past the end of love.

Loose Ends

May 30, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

I am now, as always, lost in the grainy black and white myth of Bogart and Bacall; a kiss is still a kiss, a twin engine DC 3 waits on the rain slick tarmac in the night fog, it leaves in a hour for Lisbon, and we all walk off stage right into the swirling fog at the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Ain’t like that here. Just pay the bills, carry the weight. I’ll turn off the lights one more time and “close the door lightly” when I go.

Cut it loose an old friend told me years ago. If it don’t bring you joy, she said, cut it loose. Acceptable losses is what she meant.

Tying up the loose ends is what I said to her yesterday. At the end of love nothin’ is easy. What the hell, over is over.

Once I Was

May 30, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

I remembered this morning that there had been a life between us, holding us tightly as if a private gravity, personal and rollin’ steady, like ” a circle ’round the sun.”

Today breaks over the ridge, shadowing the valley road. Each morning is a gift these dwindling days, a 4/4 rhythm in the dancehall of runaway time. “Dance me outside.” a favorite local writer once said. Waltz me one more time under night bright western skies is what I say.

Listen close, hear the far off sounds of saxophones playin’ soft, of dinner dishes settlin’ in the sink, of sweet music in the kitchen. There are shadows dancin’, lighting up the wall.

Loan Me a Dime

October 27, 2010 By longrun Leave a Comment

It began with a phone call. It usually does.

My name is Billy Prophet and these days my job is to find what’s been lost. People come to me when they tried everything else, including prayer.

I don’t do salvage work like some of my fellow sleuths say they do on account of I don’t believe in it. Once something’s been lost or broken it can’t be salvaged, not really. Hemingway once wrote that people heal stronger in the broken places. I ‘m not so sure about that. You can’t step in the same river twice or so I’ve heard. I figure the only way to find what’s been lost is to use what you know and then imagine the rest. Maybe that will allow you to start over with a clean slate. Sometimes it works for me and my clients. Sometimes not.

I should have died the way things were going. I came to that last time, on my knees, looking for any kind of cocaine on the rancid floor of my bedroom. I remember asking a god I didn’t believe in and had been angry at for as long as I remember to please just let me go to sleep. After what seemed to me to be a long while I asked him/her/it if it would be okay if I woke up.

The past simply stopped. What I know is that it was over. There was nothing left, nowhere to go. Death or starting over. There are still days when it is not an obvious choice.

I have tried to stop wondering how it is that I am still here. It doesn’t really matter, the why of it. I pretty much leave that to talk show hosts, Republicans, and TV evangelists. When I look back I see that I have left every place I’ve ever been with nearly everything left undone, smoke rising in the rearview mirror. What I do know is that I have left before I have had to pay the true price of things.

I’ve lost damn near everything I’ve ever had and more to the point, pretty much everything I ever thought I was. I guess that’s why I look for lost things.

I’ve been doing it for a long time.

One of the things I learned right off is that you can lose something when it is right in front of you. I was thinking about that when the phone rang. She said her name was Linda Granger and she wanted to come see me. She had gotten my name from a friend of hers who knew me but she didn’t tell me who. I wasn’t surprised. People are embarrassed to come to me, to have other people know that they have come. In a society where ownership is status losing something or someone is a stigma, a sign of failure. I figure if you come to me you have nowhere else to go; that you think your laundry is so dirty that you just want it to go away before any more damage can be done.

I find lost things sometimes but more often than not I am simply trying to put things right, to help my clients start over. Guessing from the sound of her voice Linda Granger woke up everyday with something else that went wrong. She had nowhere else to go.

I had a bad feeling about this one.

to be continued…