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Of Concrete and Cows

The dream began with a group of us high school students still in Early County High working on “the final project”. Steel boxes, no, not coffins, nothing that obvious, but the boxes were thin and flat, like security cases for cookie sheets. I didn’t understand how we could be in post-graduation mode and still have this “final project” but that made as much sense as having a teacher scream at us about acting like adults but not letting us go to the bathroom when we had to pee.

In the dream I walked home, and one the most enduring memories I have of the high school was this: a cow pasture with cows in it sat next to the school, and if you think the coffin metaphor was cliché’ imagine the cattle comparison. But right next to both the school and the pasture was a cemetery, so there is that, too. The sidewalk beside the pasture was my path to and from school, and I grew up thinking concrete fence posts were common, because that’s what was holding up the fence around the pasture. As I left Early County, and Blakely, and got out into the world, I never saw another concrete fence post.

In the dream, the pasture was already gone. In Blakely Georgia, the cycle was for someone to build a new “shopping center” that had a new grocery store, everyone would leave the old one and it would close, then in another seven or eight years it would happen again. There was the Piggly Wiggly when I was a kid, then the IGA when I was in high school, and finally, there was the cow pasture strip mall, where they paved over the cows’ home, built a new store, and I think it’s closed now. I haven’t been back for over a decade and won’t unless someone else I care about dies.

I was looking for one of the concrete fence posts in the dream and couldn’t see one at all. The shopping center was in ruins, and broken concrete pillars were half buried in the dirt. The ditch that had run like a scar across the field, and across the cemetery, had drainage pipe laid in it, and buried, which seems stranger than anything else for some reason.

Reality began to set in when girls I knew became pregnant and dropped out of high school to have babies. Their boyfriends, or husbands, which were usually the same guy, would get some menial job, they would put a trailer in the backyard of her daddy’s house, and live there until they could afford to move. In due time the baby would grow up, go to the same school with the same teachers, and be taught no to have to pee until class was over. They would be taught not to be tardy, and they were told to just say what the fuck ever to drugs.

No one wrote, no one painted, a few people played piano or guitar, and I did know a trumpet player. But by and large, no one left, no one did anything but produce the next generation of students, unless they died young.

I woke up from the dream wondering about the fence posts, and what the symbolism was with the cookie sheet steel security boxes, with their heavy-duty rivets, and hinged flaps in the front. I wondered if they ever fixed the electrical outlet on the north side of that room, where we dug out the granular insulation, a small pile each class period.  I wondered if all the teachers I once knew, and hated, were all dead now, and if former students came to the funeral, and were sad.

I wonder what happened to those concrete fence posts, dozens of them, now remembered by only a few people, maybe just one. A day will come when that school is torn down, another built, and someone will send me an email, telling me it’s gone, just like the other schools I went to as a kid, yes, all gone. The lesson they never taught us, for they themselves did not know it, is this ends, this all ends, everything, and one day, nothing will remain of the world we once knew, and we certainly will not survive it.

The cows, the kids, the teachers and the posts, the building and the final projects, yes, even those, will simply cease to be, except in dreams.

Take Care,

Mike

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Sex and a Smoking Gun

“Remember that party at Beth’s, you walked up and we cracked up laughing?” she asked in the early morning darkness, the chill of the morning slain by our bodies.

“Yes, neither one of you would tell me what you were talking about, and you turned a very lovely shade of red,” I replied. She and I had been friends for a while, and recently decided to date. We went to the beach with some friends, spent time together and enjoyed it, walked by ourselves and talked. On the ride home, we were sitting next to one another in the backseat, and I reached over, held her hand, and she squeezed mine back in reply. It’s odd how two people can wake up one morning alone, and then the next morning they are together, and perhaps in more ways than just physically.

“So are you now going to reveal what you and Beth were talking about?” I asked, and she laughed again, and again, turned red.

“Before we started dating I had sex dreams about you, three or four times, and honestly, I’ve never had sex with a guy I didn’t know. I’m not easy,” she said with a smile.

“I can attest to that. But if you were already thinking about having sex with me, why make us both wait?” I asked.

“Men allow their dicks to make decisions for them, women are more prone to ignoring the advice given by their vaginas. Not that it doesn’t happen; we are hormonal creatures, after all,” she sat up and looked around.

“So were the dreams, uh, specific?” I asked, feeling that this conversation was leading somewhere.

“All of them were us on the floor,” she said grinning, “right there.” She pointed beside the bed.

“I can make your dreams come true,” I said tossing a pillow overboard, and she grabbed a blanket.

Apparently, there was four dreams involving two different positions. There was nothing earth shattering about acting out the dreams, there was no astral choir or trumpets, I think that would have been a distraction, but it was different. Later, she told me the beach trip was set up so the two of us could spend time together, but she wanted to make sure we were compatible before she started flirting seriously with me. I’ve always thought women had the hardest part to play in dating. In my life, I’ve had two women ask me out, and one of them told me she had never done that sort of thing before. That sort of thing, like asking a guy out is akin to soliciting sex or sending him a nude out of the blue. Women seem to think that asking a man out is too forward, while I think it’s culturally backwards for the channel to only run in one direction.

The first time we were making out, and it was very clear things were heating up, she suddenly stopped me, put her bra and shirt back on, and just seconds before, I thought more clothes were coming off. Later, she told me she wanted to make sure I would stop when she asked me to, and she wanted to make sure if she was ever in a vulnerable position, I wouldn’t simply overpower her and keep going, unless that was what she wanted. How, I asked, was I supposed to know? She said if I knew her well enough, I would know, and that’s one of the reasons she stopped me, was because neither of us were at that point yet.

All of this is way past what I was going to write about this morning, but pertinent because last night I dreamed I was sitting in a coffee shoppe, drinking coffee with a woman I know only from Facebook. Sharply dressed, in a black outfit and her make up expertly done, for some reason I thought she was going to a job interview, or something work related. Florence and the Machine was playing in the background. We were talking about if snakes could survive in a zero gravity environment, or if catching prey would be too difficult.

“I’ve got to go,” she said, and putting her purse on the table, she pulled out a Glock, aimed it, and shot me in the chest.

People screamed, as I fell over backwards, and hit the floor. It felt like I had been kicked by a mule and the pain flared like a supernova.

She walked over to where I lay on the floor, pointed the gun, smoke still wafting from the barrel, at my head and said, “Don’t bring that up again, okay?” And fired.

I’ve been awake since then.

Take Care,

Mike

Posted on by Mike Firesmith

Devvin, by the Sea.

As far as odd, and detailed, dreams go, this one went on for a while. It started with me talking to my girlfriend, and we were both excited about being at the beach for a week. She was pretty, blonde, great smile, and we were standing outside a nice restaurant waiting to be seated. The sun  set in about half an hour, with hopes of getting a table on the patio. It was perfect.

Let’s call her Mary. In the dream no one said her name, or I don’t remember it, and so Mary sees a motorcycle parked near the restaurant and wants to take a photo of it. She walks over to the bike, and at that moment, the hostess steps up to speak to me, and her nametag reads, “Devvin” as her name, and underneath it someone has written, “by the sea”.

Devvin and I exchange greetings, I look over and see Mary talking to the guy that owns the bike, a tall, skinny, and long bearded man, she looks at me, looks away, then she gets on the bike with him, and they ride away.

I tell Devvin to hang on for a minute, walk over to where the bike was parked, and wait. I call Mary on her cell and there’s no answer. I send a text. Nothing. We’ve been dating a while, and this was our first real vacation together. A week at the beach during off season. But now she’s . . .? Gone?

After waiting a bit, I go back to the condo and wonder what to do next. Call the cops? No, she wasn’t kidnapped. I call again. No answer. But this is a dream that takes place in current time, so there’s one answer to every problem: social media.

I walk out to the beach, take a glorious photo of the sunset, post it on FB with the caption, “a fitting metaphor for today” and change my relationship status to “single”. It’s the most passive aggressive form of communication ever invented because you can get other people to do your dirty work for you, and the mutual friends of Mary and I quickly react to what’s happening, whatever that may actually be.

I get a call from her best friend who is freaked out. I tell the woman what happened, and she tells me I have to call the cops and report Mary as missing. If something goes wrong, and it might, then I was the last person she was with. What she says makes sense. If the biker kills her, then I’m left trying to explain her disappearance. I call the cops, they arrive, and tell me there’s nothing they can do, but get the video from the cameras around the restaurant, but they understand me making a report.

More calls, FB explodes with WTF, but no one has heard from Mary. I call the person who rented me the condo, tell him I want to check out, and he tells me this happens more than you’d think. A newlywed couple checked out after fifteen minutes when the bride bolted. She changed into her street clothes and walked away while her husband was in the bathroom. He tells me if he can rent the room the next day I will only be charged for that time, but if he can’t, I’m still on the hook for the entire period. I tell him to hold that thought. I might stay.

There are two suitcases, some clothes hung with care, and Mary’s purse. Truly, what are my responsibilities here? She’s left me, I think, and there’s no reason for me to pay for a condo just to keep her stuff, yet she made the decision to leave, so what do I do? I decide to spend the night drinking, and then drive home the next morning.

Three hours after all this has started, I get a call from Mary. Yes, she left me for a biker she had met and was overwhelmed by the moment, that was how she put it, and she left me. The problem was, and is, for her, is that he was meeting his group of friends in another town to take a tour of Florida. He’s got his stuff to carry on the bike, he’s sharing a room with a friend of his, who isn’t thrilled about either giving up his half of the room to Mary, or having to rent another room, and there’s little room for all of Mary’s stuff. She has no riding gear, and apparently her new found love has a history of picking up women on road trips that aren’t road savvy. Worse, she has no money because all her belongings are in the condo. I lie. I tell her I left right after she did, and I’m two hours out, on I-10, heading home, and I left her stuff beside the door of the condo where she could find it.

“My purse?”

“In your suitcase.”

“Fuck”

“Seems one of us will be.”

And she ends the call.

Mary finds herself in a hostile environment, and the group of riders tells her new love this is his issue to solve, and he can catch up with them. Mary freaks out and asks him to take her back to the condo, and he calls Uber to drive her back, and is done with her. Meanwhile, Mary is texting her friend to come get her, her friend is texting me to please go back and get Mary, it’s a five hour drive one way, and I’m kicked back on the balcony being a terrible person for dragging this out, and lying about it.

I go across the street to a store that sells mixed drinks to go and bring back a quart of Margheritas. I take Mary’s credit cards, all three of them, and call the numbers on the back and tell them I found them lying on the ground, and they kill off the cards. I also take her cash, and I make it look like someone went through her stuff. I sit in the hammock on the balcony and drink, and wait.

Mary calls in a couple of hours, she’s at the front door of the condo, and her stuff has been plundered, could I buy her a plane ticket home?

“Greyhound would be much cheaper,” I tell her.

“You want me to get on a damn bus?” Mary is furious. “Don’t be petty about this.

“You could always ride a bike.”

“Fuck you.”

Her friend sends me a text, and tells me it’s going to take over a thousand bucks to get a plane ticket this soon, and would I please turn around and go get her? I tell her I’m nearly home now, an hour or so out, and if I go back, I’ll have to find some place to stay, and I’m sure as hell not spending the night with my ex. I recommend greyhound. A couple of hundred bucks and it’s a done deal. Mary gets an Uber ride to a bus pick up point and is on her way back home by midnight.

Okay, it wasn’t really this detailed, but the gist of the story was what I’ve written. Then the dream shifted into an even more surreal adventure.

Take Care.

Mike

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The Would Be Writer

I get a text message that seems all the world to be some sort of scam. A guy saying his name is Mark texts: “I got a great idea for a book but I can’t write good, you wanna help?”

I ignore the text and keep going. The phone rings, the caller is Mark Smith, and I let Robokiller handle it. Mark leaves a message, “Hey boy, call me, I got a great idea for a book. You gonna love this shit.”

Sorry, no.

Then I get a call from a friend who admits she gave Mark my number. Mark is into science fiction and has started trying to write.

Sorry, no. I’m the last person on earth a new writer ought to talk to about beginning writing. They need someone who has been in the education field, not someone who just writes.

“I’ll buy you lunch if you just talk to him, okay?”

Will give writing advice for food.

I call Mark and it takes a good five minutes to get him to shut up long enough to have a conversation. Most of my questions about what he’s done, and how he’s gotten to this point are answered with, “I ain’t worried about that shit, just listen to me.” And then he goes on with the narrative of his story which isn’t at all science fiction.

Mark’s Great American Novel is the story of an CIA spy who has to get into Russia to stop a nuclear bomb from going off that will destroy all life on earth. The Russians have built this device, and are going to set it off in Russian, then blame the Americans. The Russian will then attack the Americans and move into their country and live happily ever after.

Mark sees no plot holes. Of course, he doesn’t know what a plot hole is.

After another five minutes of nonstop jabbering, Mark finally answers two questions I find pertinent; one, how much has he written in regards to this story, two, how much has he written in his lifetime? The answer to both questions is zero. I ask Mark what books he has read. Incredibly, Mark doesn’t read, and he has never written anything. Ever.

He tells me the spy is going to rescue Maren Morris from the Russian and he’s going to get Maren Morris to play Maren Morris in the movie. I have no idea who this person is.

“Write the first chapter,” I tell Mark. “And email it to me. I’ll make some suggestions and we will go from there.”

“I ain’t writing shit, that’s your job, you’re the writer,” Mark says as if it’s a given I’ve bought into this thing. He then goes into the scene where the hero of the story kills one hundred guards using nothing but a broken bottle.

“Is this a cartoon?” I ask.

“What?”

First off, Mark, no one is going to do the writing for you. It’s the hard part. A narrative, no matter how compelling, is the easy part. Everyone has an idea. Ideas are easy. It’s telling the idea that makes it work, or not work, or give the reader the idea that someone has worked hard to make it work.

Mark pauses. For the first time, I think I have actually reached him.

“You ain’t stealing my idea, boy.”

And I hang up, block his number, and call my friend, who swears she had no idea he was that bad. She didn’t actually know him. Mark is a friend of a friend.  

For what it’s worth, I will help anyone, anyone at all, who wants to write. But you have to be a reader, and you have to have tried already. You have to have horrible writing you’ve done before you can say you’ve begun.

Then, you write some more.

Take Care,

Mike

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Friday Firesmith: The Sins of Gregory McMichaels

Gregory McMichael had no regrets about murdering a man who he admitted he wasn’t sure had done anything wrong. When he called 911 he was asked what his emergency was and he told them there was a black guy running down the street. After the murder, he called his friends who worked in the DA’s office to make sure everyone understood that he thought he was doing the right thing, after all, there had been a black man in his neighborhood.

Two different DA’s bailed on the case because McMichael had worked with them before he retired, and one of them said even though it was inappropriate to get involved in the case, he was sure McMichael was not guilty of any wrongdoing.

But William Bryan, for whatever reasons, leaked a video of the murder to the press, and all hell broke loose.

From the very beginning, I assumed Bryan would be the undoing of the defense because he was the third man out going against a father and son, who would see him crucified to help one another, and I think Bryan knew it. I think he leaked the video to save his own ass, not because he felt remorse for killing an unarmed man whose crime was running.

Gregory McMichael is old enough to remember a world in black and white. He was sixteen when segregation ended, and his world of white privilege, the one I grew up with for the first decade of my life, disappeared. But he still remembers the time when white people would treat black people any way they liked, and there would be no legal repercussions.

Gregory McMichael is old enough to have tasted the evil for so long it seemed natural and right. Blacks had their place, and they were supposed to stay down, accept whatever white men like himself allowed them, and it infuriated Gregory McMichael that a black man would run through his neighborhood.

This was an old fashioned lynching in 2021. This was the 1900’s come to life in south Georgia because in his heart of hearts, McMichael knew the white system of justice could be called on the phone and he knew he would speak to the right person, and everyone would understand nothing had happened that had not happened thousands of times before, and he would live his life without so much as a ticket.

But in this day and age, a video is worth a thousand nooses, and the outrage grew as did the size, and color, of the protest crowds. What very likely sank the defense was you cannot chase someone down with a gun, and then claim self defense once you catch them, and kill them. But McMichael never seemed to understand he had done anything wrong.

Because he never understood he had done anything wrong.

In the end, white men like McMichael are ghosts of segregation. They haunt us all, whispering in dead voices that black people aren’t really people, the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, and we were all better off when white people could kill black people anytime they wanted, for any reason.

McMichael has been sentenced to life without parole, and he’s going to have the rest of his life to think about this subject.

You should think about it, too. How one man can kill another, and then think the system will save him from murder.

You should think about how close this came to being swept under the rug of a justice system that still will offer more help to a murderer, than a black man.

Take Care,

Mike

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The Unicorn on a Unicycle

Memory, in your brain, in the human brain, isn’t like memory in a computer. I once read we do not store memories at all, but store the scaffolding of it, and rely on external input to fill in the blanks. This doesn’t make sense at all, until you think about the number of times you’ve remembered the words to a song, but only after hearing the song on the radio. You couldn’t have written them down, but now the song is playing, you’re singing along just like you were a very long time ago.

Dreams are worse, in as far as remembering them goes, for they are not reality, sometimes not even based on reality, so there’s nothing there to grab to build on. They are here, somewhere, in your brain, then the dream is gone, and you cannot remember anything but how it made you feel.

I started getting up and writing down my dreams, back in the 1970’s, when I was in high school, and that helped me remember them. As is usual, the effort you’re willing to make to do something will define how well you do it. But most people ignore their dreams, consider them transient things that happen, and afterwards, only a vague unease exists.

Last night a dream began, ended, and as it was gone before any sort of writing could be done, I cast my line into the darkness trying to snag an image or feeling, or anything that night help. A house, in the darkness, lights on, and that was it. I knew who lived in the house, a woman I have not seen, literally, in decades, and right now I’m having trouble remembering anything about her at all. Wait, it’s the house she lived in with her husband and kids, and I want to say I know where the house is, but I cannot.

You would recognize the house where some character on television lived in, the rooms, the kitchen, but you know it’s a set, not a real structure, and in your mind there are places that actually exist but you’ve never seen them in their totality. Ever been in the kitchen of your favorite restaurant? Ever been on the roof? You go home with someone for the first time, you sleep in their bed, and leave the next morning, and if you see that person again, they show you their garden in the backyard, and it’s a surprise to see the rest of their living space, just as it was a surprise to see their body for the first time. Interesting tattoo you have there, why did you get a unicorn riding a unicycle?

But then the person is gone. This person you were once joined at the hips with has eased out of your life, and you’ve eased away from the backyard and bedroom, and now you are a memory, and so is that person. There was a fight over money or infidelity, or there was nothing there but heat to begin with. Or you were unable to keep from being weird. That happens.

Now, years later, something sets off the scaffolding and the memory is recreated, flawed and patchy, holes in the details which your mind dutifully fills in, and destroys the memory in doing so, but you still, even if you know this as a fact, accept the memory as whole.

We cling to the scaffolding of memory, not the memory itself. The memory doesn’t exist, it never has, and it never will. We accept this, unconsciously, subconsciously, for it is all we have ever known, literally. Dreams lack this, so we allow them to pass into the ether, and even though I suspect the two are closely related, we will declare one a crop, and the other a weed.

The house, the woman of decades ago, the memory of the past is an illusion created in my mind, and after I am done writing this, soon now, it will recede again, a coin flashing and reflecting as it sinks deeper and deeper, until forgotten.

Take Care,

Mike

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The Death of Christianity

Back in high school, I began to drift away from the beliefs of my parents, my siblings, my friends, and community. It made no sense to me there might be some old white dude in a bathrobe and sandals, waving a shepherd’s crook around flinging people into Hell forever because they never got dunked in water.

The Christians I knew back then were dying out. The church was changing. There was a time you sat with your family in a hard wood pew in a dimly lit wooden church, and listened to a preacher talk for an hour, if you were lucky. Being a kid didn’t get you out of it. There wasn’t a separate place for children. Infants were held by their mothers; little kids were forced to be still and quiet.

The people in the church did things for the community and nothing was ever said about it. No one ever mentioned the fact that three or four members of the church got together and went over to someone’s house and cleaned up their yard because of sickness or poor health. People donated food because they could. Christianity didn’t need a presentation because it was a lifestyle.

Today’s churches don’t resonate with people because it’s more of a commercial than a message. There are huge television screens, microphones, piped in music, soundtracks, and all of this costs a lot of money. Churches are businesses now. There’s a contract to sign, autopay, direct deposit, and money is a big concern.

Churches have nurseries, ball fields, gyms, carpet, full kitchens, security systems, professionally designed websites, their own email domains, and it’s more of a social club than a spiritual journey.

Atheism is getting easier. Leaving the church isn’t what it once was. Now, it’s like walking away from a bar, or a restaurant. The depth of spirituality of Christians is as superficial as the strip mall buildings they’re housed in. There’s no bond of generations of families who sat in the same pews three generations ago. Convenience of parking, how pretty the lawn is, and how big the building is, yeah, that’s what the Christians are these days.

There are multi-millionaires running billion dollar industries that call themselves Christians, and there are millions of people following this in the name of a man who told people to sell their belongings and give the money to the poor.

I never truly believed. I never accepted the idea of a god of any sort, not even when Christians were good people, conscious of their beliefs at all times, and the driving force in every community. Oh yeah, the judgmental and racist churches that littered the south were a problem for many of us, but overall, I miss the Christians, those who were good people.

Christianity, if it is not dead, is on the brink of extinction. Greed, the love of political power, the raw and ugly commercialism of Christian holidays, and the idea that presentation trumps faith and service is killing the church my grandparents knew.

I always hoped to see the day religion died in America. I just never expected to be this sad about it, and I never thought for a minute it would look this goddam ugly.

Take Care,

Mike

Posted on by Mike Firesmith

The Pencil

It’s been two decades, now two decades and two years, since I found the pencil. Sounds odd, doesn’t it? I was working on a bridge project in Valdosta, where the two bridges and the field office were close to the State Prison. What roguery men committed to be enclosed in such a place, I cannot say, but I never looked upon those shining spirals of razor wire on those fences without wondering how it is that a man could find his way there, and how other men could find a way to keep him.

There was a set of scales, like you’d see at a farm, or a woodyard, where a truck would pull up to be weighed, and perhaps at one point I knew what they were for, but I have since forgotten. The scale house was an old trailer, falling apart and in ruins, but I pried the door open one day at lunch and looked around.

There was a soft drink bottle on the floor and a trash can with paper in it. All manner of evidence of the office not being used, the smell of urine, recent signs that rodents had taken over, and there on the floor, was a pencil.

Once upon a time, if you used a pencil, and everyone did, the instrument had to be a No. 2 pencil, and that had something to do with the darkness of the graphite that was the part which wound up on the paper. Most people referred to it as “lead” but it never was. This pencil was rather old, having survived many trips to the pencil sharpener, and I wondered why, at the point of its life it had ceased to be possessed by a particular person, it had been left lying on the floor.

It was a big deal, when I was a kid, that everyone had a pencil every day of their lives at school. The worst crime, and all crimes were the worse crimes, was not to have a pencil. We were led to believe we might have a job one day, go to work without a pencil, and be fired for it. True enough, I once worked with a manager who despised anyone who was not, at any given moment, in possession of an ink pen, but for some reason, the world kept spinning and the work was done, and no one, ever, was fired.

I kept the pencil, pondered its existence, and wondered what it had been used for, by who, and when. Had some great work of literature been sweated and scrawled into being by this very instrument? Had a love poem been written during lunch to the object of some man’s affection? Did someone write the letter to their wife or husband, explaining why things had gone wrong, and nothing could fix it ever, and this was the end?

Or, more likely, had this been the tool used to mark official forms, with its No. 2 darkness, date, time, load number, weight, tare, and truck number? Its future sealed in wood, the tiny rubber eraser nubbed at times, day in and day out, like the man, or men, who used it, and then one day, the office closed for the last time, and the pencil lay on the floor, abandoned and forgotten.

How many pencils have I owned? In grade school, middle school, and into high school, dozens perhaps, each one of them gone, forgotten, lost, broke, stolen, loaned, given away, but nevertheless unaccounted for. Perhaps, incredibly unlikely, this pencil was one of those I released into the wild, only to be found accidently, unrecognized, like a chance meeting of the same stranger, twice.

I took the pencil, put it in a plastic water bottle, then sealed the cap with glue. The contractor didn’t notice me digging a hole at the bottom of the form and the next day they poured a footer for the bridge, and underneath that, the pencil lies waiting to be discovered again. It’s damn unlikely, I know, that one day someone will find an old plastic bottle, with an even older writing tool in it, and they’ll wonder, much as I have, why and how, and when, and who.

But it is entirely human, for memory to kick to the surface, the image of that time and place, and that pencil, and it is entirely human for me to write about it now, and you to read it. The prison is filled with men who might be freed if the right words are read, or written, and we must understand the power of this. Yet for all the men, and all the pencils, this is the most likely outcome, memories, laid to letters to be read, and perhaps, found again one day.

Take Care,

Mike

Posted on by Mike Firesmith

Exit

I remember seeing Greg at Exit 16 for the first time. An odd sight, for there to be someone I knew, someone I had worked with, someone who I had drank with, and someone who was going to college at some point, living under the overpass of I-75. But there he was, sitting, waiting, and homeless.

There were drugs involved, also stealing, cheating people out of money, lying, and it was the lying that seemed to be the worst part of it. Greg became a living lie, with every word and every sentence based on creating a narrative that would somehow transfer money from someone else to his use. Greg and I had reached the logical conclusion to our friendship when he stole from me. Trust was no longer possible, and no longer feasible. But Greg had run out of friends entirely and run out of second chances with anyone he had ever known.

If there’s any truth in the story, Greg’s family had worked hard to get him into college, get him where no one in their family had ever been, and he lasted one year. Cocaine was Greg’s thing, because it represented a lifestyle he could only bear witness to by watching television. Greg and I both worked at Shoney’s, the one on Ashley Street, and I remember him telling me he wanted to be a cocaine dealer. Greg got into crack instead, and he stole his father’s truck, and then looted his family’s home, and sold everything he could put in the truck at a pawn shop. He did that to his girlfriend’s mother, having a yard sale at her house while she was at work. And he stole stuff from his roommates. They threw his stuff out into the yard, and Greg set his bed up in the yard, close to the street. I drove by when I heard about it, and sure enough, there was Greg lying on his bed, in the open, in the yard. The first big rain ended that, and Greg retreated to Exit 16.

For not the first, and not the last time, I stopped and picked Greg up, took him to get something to eat, and turned down every request he made for money, and that was a nonstop thing with Greg. The year was 1985 or maybe ’86. I moved away in 1992, and didn’t give Greg a second thought until I saw him at Exit 16 again, but this time it was 2004.

People who have lived on the road for a while, and I’m talking about those with substance abuse problems, have a smell. Not the unwashed smell of someone who has been working all day in the sun, but a sour smell, of chemicals and alcohol seeping out of their bodies. Frequent walking in the sun bakes them, dries them out, fries their already tormented skin, and they begin to look a lot older than they already are. Being homeless is stressful. There’s no telling who or what is going to happen to you. Greg was now missing teeth from fighting with other homeless people, and someone had thrown something out of a car window and hit him, or so he said. Lies, lies, and more lies, Greg had a narrative of his life as someone who just needed a little more help, just a little more, and he would change.

I’d buy Greg food but never give him money, and someone gave Greg a job about the time I found out he was still in this area. He got fired for panhandling during lunch, with his employer telling him not to lie to people about needing work when he was on his lunch break. The man fired Greg after one day.

I went a very long time not hearing from Greg, and not hearing anything about him. I worked two interstate construction projects, and met a guy who knew him, or claimed to, anyway. Finally, about five years ago someone called me to say Greg’s body had been found along I-75 in Florida. He was off the right of way, in a patch of trees and bushes, and died there, apparently. His body had decomposed to the point there was no way to identify it. Because he was considered homeless and not missing, there was no one out there looking for him, so the body was cremated, and that was that. The only way anyone ever knew who he was is they took X-rays of his teeth and that matched dental records when they finally got a match. I’m not sure how all that works. But his former girlfriend saw me one day at the gym and told me. Apparently, the ashes were already gone by the time anyone even knew Greg was dead.

I saw Susan again today, she saw me, but she was with her family and I know she didn’t want to talk about how I once fit into her life. I was a friend of her boyfriend, and I was there when he was working, and people trusted him. We went out and drank beer, shot pool, ate food we can’t eat anymore without gaining weight, and I remember Susan and I talking once time, about how odd it was that each individual in that tiny bar had come from somewhere else, yet we were all there, at that very point on Earth, at that very point in time, and it was all very unlikely, yet we were. Now, she and her husband are meeting the kids for coffee before church, and there are small people who look like grandchildren with them.

Somewhere out there, unlikely people are meeting for the first time, or seeing one another for the last time, and as unlikely as their meeting might be, it still occurred, and there may or they may not be, some memory of it stored in the brain of a person, or maybe ten. Then one day, one of those people might die along the interstate, thousands of people passing as a funeral procession, and no one knows how death came or where it went next. Like an endless stream, people in your life come and go, and then one day, the last person who remembers you will be gone, and the last person who remembers that person will die, too. And nothing you ever remembered will still be with here, at least not from your point of view.

Take Care,

Mike

Posted on by Mike Firesmith · 1 Comment

Alcohol or the Desert

Alcohol is heaven, no, not heaven, maybe haven, somewhere the sound ceases, or at least is muted. The mesh in the sifter is larger, more permeable, so there’s less to appraise, less that has true depth. The vacation to the lizard brain means the lights are dimmed, no white hot glare of the bare desert full of demons and dreams.  There’s a reason for bars, and there’s a reason most of those places are dimly lit.

The reptilian brain seeks only feeding, fighting, fleeing, and fucking, the four F’s, and a bar will allow you any of the four, in any combination you choose, or is chosen for you. Ride the anesthesia of loud music, strangers, and the drug of choice in its various forms. Fun, funny, serious, or sexy names for whatever precent of the drug, or what’s mixed with it, and it will get you from Point A to wherever you decide to stop, or wherever is decided for you.

The morning after. There’s still fog, still haze, and maybe a stranger you regret, or a stranger with promise, and maybe you are the regretted stranger, or a promise of sorts. Time to flee, one or the other of you, numbers exchanged, and hopefully nothing else in the dark, that might need medical attention.

There’s absolutely no difference between this, and a Sunday church service, and your chances of finding someone looking for sex are about the same.

Sooner or later, you have to go back into the desert.

No, really, you don’t. Seriously, you can very easily spend your entire life anywhere else but. Unless, of course, you know you belong there. There’s a blank canvas, or a blank page, or a shapeless lump of clay, or a camera staring at you from inside its bag.

It’s a hard scrabble, cracked white gypsum desert. Flat and devoid of even so much as a tough weed, the sun is always directly overhead and perpetually oven hot, without the slightest trace of a breeze. Moisture is sucked out of your skin faster than you can think of water, and there’s no relief from the blast of radiation from the sun. An environment not meant for the weak, meek, or those who retreat.

There’s nothing here. Not a single sound or sight or smell or sensation that doesn’t drive you to leave. You can go into the kitchen and get a snack, or a glass of wine. There’s new social media on your phone. Stay and you have to create something, made of nothing and of sweat, pain, suffering, and time. It’s tedious and repetitive. Your vision blurs and boredom with the process can distract. Crafting with words in this climate is putting melting ice beads on a hot metal string without gloves. The wind in the desert is deafening. Nothing else can be heard, nothing else can be felt, and nothing else exists.

The work done here is parsimonious. It’s panning for pieces of metal whose worth cannot be gauged until the end. There is no surety in hard work except nothing else will produce worth. Second seem like hours, yet when a vein is struck the hours seems like moments that pass without time. It’s trying to mount an invisible steed made of sentences and discomfort.

Words become sentences, which have to be woven into paragraphs, and the thread is wane, weak, sticky, and ethereal. The fiber from which they are created comes from one thing, then another, memories, books, oh my dog, more books, and books, then moments with people long gone, in one way or another, or people who just appeared, and for some reason, there’s a push, a lift, some sort of peculiar catalyst that requires nothing but a thought, or a question, or a presence.  

Suddenly, you step away. What have you to show for this time in the desert? What is it, and what will you do with it, what can you do with it, and more importantly, will anyone else give a fuck?

It doesn’t matter, does it?

You save it, don’t save it, put it away to edit later, or not, none of this matter, because regardless of what it is, or how good it might be, you know you’ll go back, and do it again. It’s not the product, but the process. It’s being there, within, deep inside, feeling the heat, embracing the nothingness and daring to bring forth anything at all, and not hoping for the best, but working for it.

Take Care,

Mike