Hiding from humans

Part 1: January

I am still that scrawny 8-year-old
Hiding in the alley behind
the rusted 80-gallon drum, the one
By the green onions
—from teenagers I did not know,
And decades on, still do not know
Why I hid.


Part 2: March

The guy on the phone offered me
His rake, to help me pile the mulch
I was dumping into a borrowed truck;
Seemed dismissive of my thanks, going
Back to his phone call, which ended, “
Okay dude, hang in there,” but
Otherwise sounded like a man to his
Mother, or a tired wife, or grieving
Father—and I shrank, too, from him,
No longer skinny or hidden, but still
Inexplicably guarded against some evil
I endlessly, unjustifiably, anticipate
from the often kind human race.




january & march 2018

Summer of the Cucumber Martini

(with apologies)

ONE

In the summer of the Cucumber Martini I started learning to not defend myself. It was the summer of Anna bringing ripe peaches over and getting engaged to a very different man with a similar name; the summer Erik and his family stayed with us and we learned how life could be. That was the summer after Scott and I each bought old houses and when Greg taught me how to maintain my riding mower.  Also the summer after Jimmy lost his grip because of a student's suicide; during all of this he was fighting, screaming, to claw his way back to sanity, burning through his cigarettes and tears with me on that porch that came with the old house.  That July, I traveled in a daze to Guatemala, ostensibly for humanitarian reasons, and missed one week of my sons' childhoods.  Then, in a sweating Pittsburgh August, we watched Ruthie marry Bruce and again remembered how it could be.


Cucumber Martini summer extended unseasonably long into a drifting, campfire autumn, mostly in my backyard, although we spent time at Scott and Julie's farm too. After her husband's suicide I reached out to Lynda to see if she would be okay, but never really learned. That was the season I spent so much time at the capitol, insisting on numbers in front of U.S. congressional committees and then driving home in a Honda Civic like the nobody I actually am.  Ben moved to New York and we talked less then.


This whole time I seemed to gather up the wrong sort of people and bring out their worst.  Jeff, at work, with the unique power to hate anyone.  Jen, also at work, who would rage and curse at friends with no cause nor warning.  Others, whose names I conspicuously omit.  Family, friends, darling or distant.  Anger would flare and startle, bursting sudden and hot around me.  At first, hearing the loud noise, I would rush to my defense, but in time I learned to tell the sound of pain apart from meaning, and I will confess I also tuned it out.


What does it mean?  It's not as though we can really tell, and God and everyone knows they'll never beg the stars for mercy.  With increasing cowardice I hid my sons from the world to keep them safe and enjoy our privileged days in false aristocracy.


And after all of this you may expect I am inclined to think well of myself, but no: I learned this summer that I cannot even properly desire what is good. Given an inch, given the briefest moment of honest thought, immediately my mind and heart turn foul and dark, begging for selfish sin with a spiteful fist raised toward heaven. As I do with my one-year-old, so Father does with me, ignoring all my feeble hatred to bathe my filth in overwhelming, undeserved love.

TWO

Summer started in October, I suppose. We all traveled to the beach, aging kids drawn to the wide sands under blue open sky; but in the days before we arrived, a twelve-year-old killed himself. And Jimmy--his teacher, his mentor, himself a son of abuse, whose own son had learned from the dead boy how to hit a golf ball--spent the week hemmoraging inside, screaming himself awake at night in a millionaire's rented beach house filled with friends.  And we?  For us, that week became one long smear of frozen friendship, dumbstruck with an intimate pain none of us had expected. How do comfortable Christian tribalists from the suburbs help their friends and fathers, thrown from IEDs or childhoods into a nightmare world of death around each corner? How could we help Jimmy?


And I spent the week asking myself, seven years ago--How did I help Kelly, the stoic utilitarian and bitter-hearted nihilist, when he wept and retched with remorse on my porch, three weeks into knowing me, because someone had to know his brothers--his men, they'd been with him the whole war--all three had been killed together in Iraq, the night before? "They had families," he croaked, looking like a roadkill frog. "Kids, man. They loved their wives. What the fuck? It should have been me."


Don't hold your breath. I mumbled something about their lives living on in him, how each of us live in each other by the things we say and memories we plant--we affect each other every minute of our intersections and live on, the human race one overlapping life--but he looked at me and we both silently agreed I was full of shit. It should have been Kelly. He slept with a roster of girls from his old college days, smoked weed in an endless cycle, and lived with his divorced mother in a house he owned. His father lived in Germany and sold furnaces, I think. Kelly had a gun in every room of his house--he showed them to me, insanely--and would wake from a dead sleep with a scream, clutching the rifle at his bedside in suburban Pittsburgh. It should have been Kelly, in George Bernard Shaw's world.


I said nothing more helpful to Jimmy, in that October visit to the Outer Banks setting up the Cucumber Martini summer. I hunched with him and watched and tried to speak, and never had a useful moment.

THREE

--The martini recipe. I discovered it while looking at Gin in a liquor store. It makes a 6 ounce martini, or if you are like me, it makes two martinis and you must convince a friend to have one with you.  Here is how it goes. Five parts Hendrick's gin, one part St. Germaine, a splash of extra dry vermouth, and the guts from an inch-thick chunk of cucumber. Shake over ice with the diced remains of that cucumber chunk. Pour into a pre-chilled glass and garnish with thin cucumber slices. What makes the martini is the St. Germaine, but people are more familiar with cucumbers than the liquor of elderberries, so I deceptively call the whole thing a cucumber martini. Lies communicate.


The best part of that whole forsaken summer happened toward the end. For one hour in a Pittsburgh August evening, I was Daniel's drummer again and we erased the six years we'd been apart as musicians, playing a small private show in his parents' idyllic backyard: the after party for his sister Ruthie's rehearsal dinner. He announced I was back on drums--and old friends I'd only ever barely known cheered wildly for me. I felt a thrill of false love and mild, silly fame, and learned in one dose to fear the addiction that still drives rich men wild. Someone confided that he preferred me over the drummers they'd collected through the years; I heard the words as a prisoner receiving freedom.


Two other things collided with Jimmy at the Outer Banks that October. One was hurricane Matthew, through which we drove to reach the island, trapping us in place for the several days we'd already planned to stay. The mildly overturned beach houses and communities, nearly vacant, surrounded us with an eerie disaster tourism, thrust upon us.


We also were trying to secure a loan to buy our first house, dragging our newborn and a two-year-old into crippling, life-long debt if the housing market were to crash again. I'd hold Jimmy while he raged or wept and go inside to pore over amortization tables and credit scores.


We closed at the end of November for a price we probably could have reduced, but I couldn't bring myself to fight an old man and his fading wife on the value of their family home.  Immediately we tore out their old carpets, repainted the walls, and had new hardwood floors installed. We moved in an unseasonably warm late January, surrounded with good friends and help.

FOUR

In February my parents visited. In March my brother Ben came for a week, and then we went skiing with Greg and Pam for a week in Colorado. In April we hosted Seder, and I traveled to the woods with men from church, and then Jessica turned 30 in our house while I made our garage into a speakeasy. During all of that, our heating system died and we had to replace it. In May the trouble over Margaret bubbled over, as she declared her intent to preach Jesus in places where they kill for that. The committees who handle such things had meeting after meeting to ensure our hands were fully wrung; I was there. At the beginning of June, Erik and his family moved in; at the beginning of July, they moved out. During that time, our friends from Oklahoma visited, then we went to visit my family in Pennsylvania, and then all my family came to visit us. For two nights we had 17 souls sleep in the house. In mid July I spent a week in Guatemala, digging a well for natives and dreaming misplaced nightmares, while Gina watched the boys as a single mother. At the end of July, Daniel and his wife Bethany visited for a week. Anna, Bethany's younger sister, brought us those peaches--the most perfect I will ever experience this side of the grave. We steamed clams and I invented vodka drinks with limes and crushed peach slices. In mid August we traveled to Pittsburgh for Ruthie's wedding; later, I spent a night in some hotel for work. We welcomed September while camping in the Appalachians, and I looked down to see we had a three year old and a one year old; I could not find the newborn or the two-year-old anywhere. All this time, Jimmy toiled to redeem October, to recover, to find and reclaim his lost life, and I played a flute in the margins of his world.



And then the second Fall, the second October, brought Jimmy to the brink of his own dark pool--and in a gasping week he and his loves and his demons and his laugh were swept away from us, up to Michigan and family, and a suddenly tentative grasp on daily life, even for simple things, even for Cucumber Martinis.


Is that too abrupt?  Well, life is.  In a moment, standing with Chris and Visi on my porch, with chicken cooking too slowly on the grill, answering scorching texts from Jimmy while my sons bickered and fussed and my tired wife demanded an answer to something I can't remember--in that moment, in that inch, I had my chance and never played my cards.


Not that it ends.  It goes on.  We conceived a third child, and my large and wildly joyous family visited again for Thanksgiving.  Ben started dating a woman in New York, and Emily wrote a musical.  These things mean so little to the world outside my heart but as I write these words the worlds of implication and memory leap forth in vivid clarity.  We live whole years and decades sitting still, when suddenly the world erupts with life and movement--and in the chaos, with everything happening, we lose track of so much.