roadtrip.

So you are going to want to get the oil changed first. Then you will need to make sure your father goes to bed at a reasonable hour. You need to make sure that the cooler is packed full of diet ginger ales for him to drink as he drives down the road listening to Steely Dan. Next, you need to find out if 90 year old Uncle Emery is coming and if he needs to take a shower before you all get in the car together. You will need to use force to get him into the shower because it has been months since his last one. He will portest. Tell him to pack his brown jump suit and thermos full of coffee. Make sure your brother has all the cigarettes he is going to need for the drive. You know he will not want to smoke the brands that they have in the middle of nowhere in Iowa. You will have high hopes of leaving at dawn. You will put your bags by the door, you will go to sleep early. But in the morning you wake up and your father is still asleep downstairs and Uncle Emery is talking jibberish about doughnuts in the kitchen. The dogs will not be fed. It is hot out and the van is already unbearably full from all the packing that you did the night before. When your father does rise he will tell you he has more auctions to list on ebay before he can leave. Your family will call from Michigan asking where you are on the road, and you will tell them that you haven't left yet. The 90's toyota previa is waiting, sagging in the driveway. There is the promise of the thunderstorms in Nebraska late at night while you listen to Radiohead with your brother and talk about the universe, art and what we will do when we get to Michigan. Emery will put his thermos underneath his seat and fall asleep. Your father will put the ginger ale into his cup holder, your brother will begin to chain smoke cigarettes.

colorado.

last night i really had a dream about the hurricane that came over the mountains. i was holding a jig saw puzzle. when the wind finally came into the mountain valley the puzzle flew out of my hands and into the wind, breaking into little pieces. and in an instant landed in my mother's mouth. and she tried to yell into the wind over me. puzzles of kittens and state capitols. is see your lips sucking on me like a cigarette for one last moment.

and colorado what if the hurricane did come? what if the aspens were gone. and what about all of those houses that we lived in? what would happen to them? what about the dog that died and the ashes that we left in the backseat of your toyota? would they float into the air. would the ash get into your eyes? i can barely talk about you colorado. but i can tell you somewhere in colorado there is a dry weezing love of mine. of the basement that smelled like pot and the buddhist flags that hung in your windows. the massive hippy parties that took place in blue school buses, where they cried and danced. wore flowers in their hair and told the children about the government that would and could find them. but its funny of us are not really from you colorado. we are just transplants. as allen ginsberg would say, denver is lonely for its lost, and transplanted. what about the dirty snowy water than ran down the roads and the tv that never gets turned up. the yard sales of our old disney movies, high chairs. our plastic silverware. someone is sifting over our coffee mugs. but tonight colorado i am going to remember all of car rides where I had to ask your permission to roll down the windows. and the car sickness i got while smelling your old fish coolers as we rode up the side of a mountain in your old ford explorer.

and we took hot showers in the empty lake house to warm up from the lake that had a black bottom.

11

September 11th,


When I was in eighth grade I didn’t know you. You were in Washington D.C playing with your brother and listening to Korn. I imagine you with chapped lips and black t-shirts. My dad would drive me to school. I would wear billabong hoodies and giant raver pants. I only spoke to my father, I painted my room purple. You didn’t have many friends, you were a minority at school, the only thing I ever read all of middle school was To Kill a Mocking Bird. My middle school class lost a student every year, plane crash in the mountains, lukemia...suicide. I think I still might have seen more beautiful things than you. I hear your a great baseball player, I know your dad makes you go to church every Sunday, he sits you down and explains what exactly your music is trying to tell you. And you don’t care. Your quiet, but you haven’t always been.

I guess I knew I diddn’t like you almost right away. I saw you playing in the street. It was snowing, your dad had shaved your head so close I could see the milk white of your scalp. And we did not talk, but we played P-I-G in the snow. I knew you weren’t from around here. On the morning of September 11th your father was working in the pentagon, my father was unemployed sitting in his basement. I got driven to school late, you got dropped off for the last time.

And I meet you again here now, my room is still purple, you still listen to Korn and I still don’t like you. But here I meet you ten years later and I fall in the love with the son of a man who didn’t know he had it coming.

HOARDERS

I have been staying up every night this week. I moved my bad away from the wall and my head is where my feet should be. I have done this because I am obsessed with watching Hoarders. I will watch it on A&E, TLC and sometimes its even on Discovery Channel. From time to time you might even catch an episode of Animal Hoarders on Animal Planet.

I don’t usually get into the sheets I usually just lay on top of the quilt that I got as a part of my Target set a few years ago. I move the pillows down to the edge of the bed turn up the AC and switch on the TV. I say that I will go to bed at ten and then Hoarders comes on and it’s a freight train all the way into early dawn.


I watched this one last night where this woman in Kansas basically had a land fill in her living room, the glass in the house was brown and the trash had decomposed so much that it just looked like a brown mass from floor to ceiling. When the cleaning crew came to help her, they found in the rubble 13 dead cats that had cannibalized each other. They said they must have been dead for over ten years. She had this old wood hutch in her ‘living room’ that was filled with ceramics from her mother who had gotten them from her father who was in the war. I can’t be too sure which war.

I get up for a glass of water. I look around at the dishes I didn’t do at dinner and the litter box I really should have scooped before going to bed and I start to wonder am I a hoarder? I then turn on all the lights and begin to clean the dishes and wipe off the counters. Robin in Kansas looks down at her front lawn from her greasy red bangs. As the crew moves further into her house they make another alarming discovery. The stairwell is filled from floor to ceiling with grocery bags. Robin has been using the bages as her toilet for the last ten years. The bags are filled with human excrement. They begin to pull the bags out from the stairs, if they used a shovel they would just break and fall apart. Her daughter has started to cry and the psychologist has run out of ideas. I guess it got bad when Robins mother died, the loss was too much to handle and then the trash couldn’t get picked up and the pipes broke and now she is using her stairs as the toilet. She claims that the house now belongs to the cats. An empty can of Nine Lives cat food found is sitting in a pile of cat poop and and cat remains.

I look at Robin and she has the look of someone who has either been extremely addicted to drugs or lived on the street for a long time. I start to think about my dad at home with his furniture from Goodwill and his 15 coffee pots. I imagine the walls caving in around him and the rooms in the back of the house molding shut. I imagine the water getting turned off. I imagine him laying on his bed surrounded by animals. 120 dogs and, 240 eyeballs looking at him.

They get to the top of Robins house and they discover that the house is basically falling down around the trash and it is unsafe for the workers to get up to the second level. They have to call off the cleaning efforts. The house must be demolished. Forty years of family history is lost.

Its 2 am and I need to get up but I would rather wonder about the eyeballs on the other side of the world.


If you want to check out Robins Episode of Hoarders- http://www.aetv.com/hoarders/video/?bcpid=44241147001&bclid=605799158001&bctid=606337257001

When did the parade of living things begin?

This story is on the ceiling, it is tired of being told. It glares at me and kicks me in the back if I mention its name, snarls and closes its swollen eyes. If I could I would eat this dark story: Sit down at the kitchen table. I would fold this story neatly into the center of my plate. I would slice it up into a hundreds of oily little pieces. I would put every little morsel into my mouth. I would bite through this story's patchwork wings. I would gnaw on its inky heart. I would even chew its long fingernails. This is no supplement.
I have worked most of my life to get to know my parents. This fruitless battle for truth has turned me into wishing I had never known them at all. I have searched, and struggled and fought and waited, and I have come up with ways of thinking about them that may not be factually true. My time with Rob Nauman on Cloverleaf Drive is still groping for the truth.
How strange it is to dream of childhood and wake up an adult, to realize that the names populate our consciousness now—including our own –will one day be names from the past.
I used to get night terrors when I was little. I lived in the highest bedroom in a homemade house. My mother had just re married a 56 year old who loved gold plated fixtures, silence, and fly-fishing. He looked flushed and nervous constantly, giant bug glasses that never looked my way. I had a bad bob haircut then, and Rob, that was his name, made me painful aware of my re semblance to my younger brother. There are some things I will never even in adulthood understand. He never tried to talk to me, but he knew that I could reach up, grab his hair and ears and tell him that I knew. I always knew. I saw their faces in the wall. I saw their scraggly hair and singed eyelashes. Eye sockets filled with lint and cigarette ash.
He built the house in the ground alone. Alone with his pink skin the mud; he never intended to share the house with anyone. It had three levels, ski lodge looking wood work, mismatched paint colors, walls unfinished in places. Maybe the women ripped the paint off the walls and doors off of their hinges at night.
My terrors started in this house, Rob were in the basement all the time, he moved with slime down the stairs. I knew nothing about this man I only knew that he must have done something wrong in that house. The dust in the corners the hallow noises in the basement. I knew they were there. Even when I was awake I got the terrors, the walls would pulse and fear would stick its ribbon like tongue into my thoughts and dreams. Rob’s hair would find its way into my food and his fingernails would claw into my legs in the middle of the night. They got married by a lake in the mountains, I cried in my bob that day even as a kid I could understand that Rob would be a character in the dream of my life and he could not be removed or changed. I have virtually no memories of him whatsoever but this day on the lake when he looked over his glasses I could see his every wickedness.

He covered the rest of my family’s days in dust.
My mother and me have always been strangers—I am convinced she was driving across the desert on a cloudy day and saw me staggering across the road. She rolled down her window and I awkwardly sat in the passenger seat. We had nothing but our hauntings in common. She locked the doors and I haven’t been able to get out of the car since. I keep watching the gas gauge waiting for her to stop. We have been running on EMPTY for so long. I could really go for some Corn Nuts. She tells me to dig DEEP.
We moved into the house on the hill after they got married on the lake. I know my mother would never hold my hands when I felt like I was going blind. She was always lost to never self, in her quest to settle her days she terrorized my years.
I would lie under the covers sometimes after taking half a bottle of Nyquil and pray for sleep, pray for it to bring me out of the rattling room and into the palm of my father. My mom would have never believed me if I told her what I was afraid of in the house. I could not try and tell her that the walls did have the noise of decades. There where no conversations or prayers in the walls. These walls held nothing and she would never understand. These walls held their faces and our fate. I could never tell her that. The women would look back at me in the basement sucking air in the sheet rock. Vacant eyes of good intention gone wrong. They told me they had loved Rob. Nubs for arms- slits for mouths. Broken down dolls under the eggshell paint. I swore I saw them. They touched me in my sleep. They pushed the windows out and in again. The glass hugged me. They touched my fingers ,the space between my eyes. They clawed into the kitchen and gummed the butter sticks. They looked right at me while they tore every page out of every book in the house.
When my mom had met Rob he gave her two rubies in a dirty handkerchief. My mom was living in a small house on the outside of town. She had just left a poor contractor. She hated him because he was so cheap. He gave her a banana hammock for her birthday. When my mother saw the rubies she was convinced she had found the man that could really love her to her bones. He had a baby face and long nails. He barely spoke when she dove into the handkerchief after the stones. They were her supplement. I am left sitting upstairs waiting for her to slowly walk up the stairs in a sleepy haze.