Archives for 0

Almost Independence Day 2012

July 4, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

Sometimes I rewrite the past, make it up, turn things around, maybe what happened to me really happened to somebody else or the other way around. I used to think of it as lying, then later as imagination leading to writing. These days I sometimes think I do it to make things easier, at least easier until I have the courage and the willingness to turn into the wind and square up. It’s almost the Fourth of July 2012, Independence Day. Me and Van Morrison have been at this thing a long time. Together, after a fashion. Missing absent friends tonight, so I’m just listenin’ to the music, watchin’ the sun slip away over ridgeline, thinkin’ about how tired I get when I’m wonderin’ about how things are, about how they got this way, when I’m doin’ nothin’ more than waitin’ on the comin’ day.

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.

Driftin’

June 19, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

The court stenographer reminds me of Sandy-what’s-her-name, quiet and proud, interior, aloof. I always wanted Sandy-what’s-her-name. She stood tall and straight. An athlete, a dancer. She walked softly, steady on her feet, blonde pony tail metronome. I thought she was, well, I thought she was beautiful. We talked all the time but I never knew her at all. I asked her to the Jr. High prom or maybe the high school prom.She said no. And then she smiled her lovely, sweet, sad smile.

It seems bizarre to me that I keep thinking of Sandy as I sit here in the courtroom during a criminal trial of a friend. He is facing five years for a felony count of possession of pornography. The expert witnesses are explaining how his bipolar disease had caused his drug abuse, which led to his hanging out with the hooker who led him to the porno sites which became the possession in question. It is very sad . He is my friend. I have been told that I have the same disease. Bi polar maybe, more likely addiction. Mine came on at about age nineteen. I abused drugs for forty years but have never been charged with possession of pornography. Or done hard time. Or died.

I keep trying to listen to the witnesses but mostly I watch the court stenographer. The judge gives my friend five years and then suspends the sentence. He puts him on probation in the care of the facility where he is still in treatment.

Something good has happened here or at least it seems to be good at this moment. I remember, as we walk down the hallway in the company of my friend and his Vietnam veteran Marine Corps lawyer who uses a couple of “oorahs” to describe his feelings, that Sandy had a brother who beat me up once after school. He was always in trouble with the law. Given the choice of going to jail after some serious incident or enlisting in the Marines he chose the Marines. Years later I heard that he died at Khe Sahn.

I wonder if she still walks quietly. I wonder if we met accidentally would we say hello and talk awhile. Maybe we would nod, not really knowing how we knew each other. Maybe we would smile but just keep on with the hurry of the day, waiting for later, waiting for the drift into how it was way back when, when we were all bored silly, scared half to death, filled with promises and dreams, waiting forever for our lives to happen.

Santa Fe Dreams

June 19, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

The E Train went by underground, shaking the floor, the glasses on the bar. The kid standing next to me looked startled.

“When I was a kid the Santa Fe freights used to wake me up,” the kid said. He seemed lost and kind of lowdown when he said it.

We were strangers, standing at the rail of an uptown joint in the snow bound northern city where I grew up. I had come home to visit my father. He was in the stroke ward at the nearby hospital. It wasn’t going well between us, Dad and me. It never did.

“I can still hear them ol’ freights, like rolling thunder,” he said.

After awhile he said he used to wait for the circus to come to town. “Yeah I get that.” I said. “We would go to the Garden, just down the street, and watch the clowns”. I told him how the clowns scared the hell out me, how I thought that my dad thought it was funny that clowns scared me. Later, much later, it turned out it wasn’t true he thought that.

The kid looked at me like I was a crazy old man or maybe just drunk. “I used to hear the circus coming from miles away” he said, “I could hear the calliope from way far off. Folks in town would stop what they were doing and listen.Get ready to party.” Then he stopped, as if caught up in a dust devil memory he shook his head and said very quietly, “they would get a funny look in their eyes, maybe thinkin’ it was something more than the end of summer, more than another year gone to harvest.” He was quiet after that.

Before I left I asked him where he was from. He told me he was from a little town just outside of Denton, Texas. I told him I knew where it was, that I had heard the Santa Fe freights rolling by, that I had stayed awhile and moved on. I wished him well and went out the door. I walked down the once familiar streets to the uncertainty that was waiting at the hospital.

I didn’t tell him that I had been in Denton because I was running for cover, drying out, getting clean. That the trains in the night sounded like all things lost, that lonesome was a way station on the road back from where I had been.

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.