Scuds


It hits like scuds. Waves of sadness and remorse and loss.
But you can’t take cover, where? How?
Mortars. Intermitent, maddening, a good enemy strategy.
Don’t let them sleep, keep them guessing when the next bomb will come.
Terrorism of the heart.
The enemy is not my wife. It’s marriage, and it’s deadly. The death of a 17 year marriage is a formidable enemy indeed.
Rogue wave.
Hang on; here it comes, hang on.
Despair so complete you have to respect it, like a Vietnamese underground tunnel system. I can’t fight this and win, I can only hope to survive. O.K. then, so now I give in to exhaustion. Only to wake up to bombs bursting in air. They say there are no atheists in a fox hole, I disagree. Why would a God put me in a fox hole in the first place? Growth? I need a medivac to air lift me out of this war zone because of all the growing I’m doing.
Where is Hawkeye?
Put a red cross on my back, I’m shot. Don’t salute me, the sniper will see. Wait, there is no sniper, the war is over, and nobody gives a shit who’s on whose side anymore. We lost.




Chickahominy

When you separate someone has to leave the house. I volunteered. It’s move in day, but more appropriately move out day. I took a little house in Chickahominy which is a town within a town. Meaning Chickahominy is a town within the town of Greenwich. It is blue collar white trash, and I like it because no one in the finance industry would come within miles of this place. The house I left is in Old Greenwich, within Greenwich, where all the hedge fund dickheads exist. I pull in to my little driveway in my forty thousand dollar Volvo XC90 across the street from an ancient Gulf Stream, permanently relegated on what could barely be described as a lawn, so that their driveway can accommodate an old pickup, a decommissioned gas company van, and two jet skis on a trailer. I don’t think we’re in Old Greenwich anymore Toto. Down the dead end street, overlooking the train tracks and I95, is some kind of working Quarry. I don’t mind this overall, but I feel displaced, dislodged, and dislocated. The three D’s we call it in the trade. I moved in an extra sofa we had, an old desk my Grandmother willed to me, (it is one ugly motherfucker, but I like it), and a king size bed my buddy gave me, (I don’t know how much pleasure he had in it and I try not to think about it).
There is a kitchen table and some chairs I got from friends, a T.V. and my sons Sony PlayStation for visits, and the saddest thing of all, my four year old daughter’s plastic rocking horse, which I gently carried and lay on the basement floor. It is an open basement with a painted floor, and as I stood back and the little horsies eyes seemed to call to me, and say, what the fuck am I doing here? You’re gonna leave me alone in this strange slightly damp and cold battleship grey basement? My springs might rust, I’m all alone, and I’m scared. Did I do something wrong? Come back, I’m sorry, I won’t do it again.
And as I climbed up the stairs I wondered if I imagined that the frightened horsy was

talking to me, or the other way around. I walked outside and had to stop and listen for a

peculiar sound. It was like a week doorbell going off intermittently. Turned out to be a

home made wind chime, crafted from some old metal pipes and Bud Light cans.

I guess I’m home.

Memoirs of a Separated Man

The following is the first chapter in my "book"


Enjoy



chapter one




Saab Story


I don’t like Saabs. They claim to be born from jets, but in this one something died.
In a fire engine red Saab my wife said something that has changed my life forever;
She loved me, but she was just no longer sure that she was in love with me.
It was out of nowhere, it was apropos of nothing whatsoever, it just came out.
I was coldcocked.

I had to respond to her, now, here in this car. But how? I asked her if there is a couple out there still hungry for each other after two children, a superabundance of minutia and rote sex? If there is, it is not here, in this overpriced foreign sedan, once hailed as a victory of engineering and safety, which perhaps it once was, but appears to me now to be cheap and riddled with trickery. The exoskeleton seems paper thin. I’m utterly trapped, driving this golden chariot, but not gold, red, and not wood and iron, but plastic and rubber, with my just a moment ago wife sitting next to me, in her leather “death” seat, telling me in this piece of shit this piece of news; I’m not her man.
O.K. Keep it on the road champ. While my blood turns to the white part of fire, and at the same it time freezes as if packed in dry ice like an urgent organ being shuttled feverishly to God knows where, my earthly body leaves this world for a second.
Because it sure as shit can’t stay here.
I desperately start to search to deny that this is reality, and I start gulping for air, fed through a system of plastic hoses and vents winding their way through the frugal infrastructure. I taste metal in my mouth, what is that? For some reason I have become a caught fish, flapping on the dock, but it’s not a dock, it’s a red combustion engine transport machine. Either way I’m toast.
I would ask you now to allow me to compare myself to a caught fish;
It turns out there was a hook buried in the bait. And now I’m out of my element. My bulging lidless eyes are searching for what will never come again; the illusion of comfort.
I always thought the water would be there. Water, representing the comfort, the illusion of comfort that comes from a long term marriage. I thought it might flow in and out of me and honor our pact for as long as we lived, isn’t that in the contract? But it’s gone, the water, the promise, and yet right there, I can still smell it. And after a while as I begin to die for the lack of sustenance that I thought it provided. I start to hate it, its proximity, its cruel taunt…….its allure.
Now it mocks me, the water/commitment, because it could never have sustained me forever, or at all.
I am keeping this red Saab on the road as best I can, because the road looks like it’s a cartoon to me, it’s heaving and undulating. The tar unhitched from the earth it was poured upon.
I’m trying to ignore a low pitched bottomless inhuman frequency, I start to wonder, as I become the Pollock, the caught, the catch of the day apparently getting thrown back, I have a thought as I am being flung overboard in the throes of death;
Wait.
What if I’m not a fish?
Then I’m not really dead.