Aug 20, 2009

Careful What You Wish For...


Once upon a time I dreamed of this life--traveling around the world with a Buddhist master, making a positive meaningful impact on people’s lives. And for the most part, I do. Help others, that is. The problem has become my lack of ability to help myself. I have become the very person I humbly warm others from becoming.

By day I wear a suit and tie, spending countless hours helping an incarnate lama as we travel the world giving talks on compassion, understanding and meaningful living. By night I slink around in any bar I can find drinking until blackout. My life has somehow, unbeknownst to me become so painful that I must anesthetize myself from it.

Before we arrived in Colorado we were in Baltimore, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Before that, Vienna, Amsterdam Germany, Paris and Italy. Then South America. I can order drinks in ten different European cities in five languages. I know what time Happy Hour starts in at least fifteen of the nation’s major airports. I’m now so tired I hallucinate. While I’m awake. I visit a family friend, a doctor. He takes my pulse, my blood pressure, does a Chinese medicine work up of my phlegm, then pronounces me “Exhausted”. “Thanks, Bill--real news flash” I laugh, buttoning up my shirt.

A tall man with intense, caring eyes, Bill takes me by the elbow. Not forcefully, but it gets my attention. “I’m not kidding. You are clinically exhausted”. Doctors can add a stress to syllables in a way that commands respect. He could say “No Dana...you must take out the gar-bage” and it would take on a new, important significance.

“You can rest for a few days, or I check you in right now and hook you up to an I.V.”. I stop buttoning my shirt. Bill’s words weigh me down with their solemnity. I meet Bill’s penetrating gaze and nod. “I hear you. I do”. Bill purses his lips, blinks his forgiveness. “No stimulants, stay away from spicy food. In three or four days, you should start sleeping through the night again. Dana, you need to rest”. Bill leaves the office and I sit there, his admonition a slap on the face, still stinging.

I leave his office, shaken as much by Bill’s intensity as his diagnosis. I drive along in a daze, not sure what to do. I notice “El Chico’s”, a bar popular with the University set. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon as the cute sandy-haired waitress smiles and sets a cocktail napkin down in front of me on the laminated table. The tables are chest high and I feel like Lily Tomlin in her oversize chair. But already I feel better.

El Chico’s is famous for its margarita’s that come in a laughably industrial size glass big enough to raise trout in. There’s actually a neon sigh above the bar--an oversize glass with a line through it, forbidding anyone from having more than two of their large or three small margaritas. This always makes me laugh, but before i finish my first large, I am happy like a five year old on Christmas and realize that Bill the doctor is simply jealous of me, of my lifestyle.

“Getcha’ another?” the waitress smiles and I grab for my glass, a little too desperate for the last gulp. I fish the plastic straw from the cavernous glass bottom as she lifts it from the table. I can chew on the straw and suck the last of the margarita from its marrow to nurse my buzz until she returns. Somehow, I’ve now been at El Chico’s for four hours. The after work crowd is in full swing as is the first of the college crowd. Van Morrison wails “Brown Eyed Girl” and twice I almost tip over and fall off my stool.

I switched to beer long ago and am on my fifth Dos Equis, acting like I can handle this. The truth is, I am an instant drunk. My mother is diabetic and Navajo. Any kind of alcohol instantly converts to sugar in my system. I can get drunk on literally half a beer. That I’ve had the equivalent of twelve drinks means I’m dangerously inebriated. Being this drunk now means, I must have sex. And if I must have sex, I must drive my car to wherever the sex is. People tend to forget how easy alcohol makes problem solving.

Suddenly I remember I haven’t checked in with the secretary of the day. Essentially, I’m a traveling Joint Chiefs Of Staff. So whenever we arrive at our next city, I have to constantly ensure that the daily schedule is adhered to. The daily schedule is a Wooly Mammoth of meetings, interviews, conferences with local directors and public talks. The daily schedule is a massive, ambling Dinosaur that crushes me with every step. No matter how fast I run, I cannot escape the lumbering daily schedule.

I look at my watch, squinting to stop the hour hand from spinning. I left for my doctor’s appointment six hours ago. By now the staff is dealing with the fact I’m not there – I justify my absence as a much-needed break. What’s six hours away from the grind for a guy that travels over 250,000 miles a year, right?. Again, alcohol enables me to really cut through the bullshit and get to the heart of things.

Besides, I am invincible. I travel with a Buddhist lama, so even deeply intoxicated I tell myself I’m blessed and can do no wrong. I exhale deeply and for the first time all day cannot feel the Wooly Mammoth’s huge foot crushing my chest. I smile to myself and stretch my arms. I am not exhausted. I am fine. Bill is wrong. I am still stretching my arms, which must be incredibly long because they are going up and up and up. I feel free, airborne. And then my head hits the floor solidly with a hollow “thunk”.

People are pulling me up. A twentysomething kid with a Van Halen t-shirt high fives me and hands me his beer. I drink it as a bouncer leads me outside. He hails a cab. We drive for one block before I am curbside, emptying out my body of liquids and solids. Cabbies hate pukers. My ride is free. I wake up later, behind the wheel of a friend’s car.

I’m on the Interstate leading into Denver. Within an hour I’ll be downtown. The windows are open and the radio is playing Cool And The Gang. I am Cool And The Gang. I haven’t slept a full night since we left Amsterdam. That was eight cities, three weeks and many time zones ago. The gas pedal feels like a marshmallow under my foot – it gives way easily, all the way to the floor. I’m flying again, soaring past the cars next to me.

I close my eyes, cold air rushes through the windows. I remember the cold air off the coast of Portugal. An exotic, old-world mix of orange, red and yellow buildings spired and tiled. Cobble stone streets disappearing up alleys so narrow, cars have to flip back their side-view mirrors to navigate through.

When I open my eyes, I see the ruby red of taillights ahead, and wonder who put a parking lot on the Interstate. And then I realize the cars ahead aren’t parked, they’re stopped. I’m going 85 MPH, waking up too late in the left lane. And now I wonder if its true – am I really invincible? Because unless I click my heels together and manage to Oz myself out of this dream, chances are very good I’m going to miss our Thursday flight to London.

Aug 19, 2009

The Cool Warmth Of Family


We are gathered together, family both immediate and extended, a clutch of close friends. My mother is in a casket, of sorts. It’s actually an industrial strength cardboard box. She’s been transferred to the box and lay inside, surrounded by dry ice. She’s frozen. Solid. She’s a momsickle. And we’re here to cremate her body, finally. Its been a draining, exhausting seven weeks, no one more exhausted than my mother, who finally gave up the struggle to lung cancer four nights ago.

Since then, its been a bizarre, disorienting emotional roller-coaster as those who loved her have laughed, cried, anguished and some of us, visited awake in the predawn hours by my mother’s spirit. Her latest visitation “from over there” my uncle likes to say with a wry smile and nod-up of the head, was to inform a woman who never met her to gather family and friends for a wake of sorts.

The woman tells my father this at six-thirty a.m. on a cool, bright Colorado morning. Estranged for thirty years, my mother apparently felt compelled to have her former husband see to a few last minute details for her. That’s mom--always including everyone. The woman is both apologetic and dumbfounded. She never met my mother, but worked in the same building. While the soap slid off her body in wet slimy sheets during her morning shower, she said her head was suddenly “filled with a movie--narrated by Louisa”.

The “message” says to bring Bushmill’s whisky (my dad’s favorite for some time, who says time doesn’t heal all?) and red roses. Lots of red roses. Her brother, a frail, dark-haired Spanish wizard of a man laughs when he hears this. “I told her the Navajo put flowers in the grave--so their relations would walk on petals in the afterlife--she always loved that story”. He laughs again, a high, thin laugh that shakes his whole body. His face lights up and we all laugh.

Now, two days after our “wake” we are here to say a final goodbye to the husk, which housed her for sixty-six years. We’ve prayed, done Buddhist ceremonies and cried. Cried so much that if anyone else wants to shed a tear we’ll have to get some Fed Ex’d to us – we’re all cried out. There are no more prayers. Louisa’s spirit has stopped making house calls. We can say goodbye.

But the morticians aren’t moving. They’re whispering in too-loud voices. Something’s wrong. “Problem?”. I ask. They exchange worried glances--a tacit, morticians “rock-paper-scissors”. The loser, a mid-forties death-clerk takes a breath, coughs nervously. “Her jewelry--state law prohibits us from cremating her with her jewelry on”.

Nobody says a word. We kind of decked mom out in her favorite rings and bangles thinking they’d make the trip with her. “We’ll have to remove them--unless you’d like to...”. I glance around the room--no one in my family would like to apparently. I can’t blame them. We’ve spent four days with my mother’s decomposing body, the sweet heavy smell of death now coating our every cell. Everyone’s gone just about as far as they can on this voyage--time to head for home. But since we’ve come this far...

I nod to the mortician who actually seems relieved. I’m about to find out why. I reach down alongside my mother’s frozen body and find her arm. It feels like a branch in the winter, stiff and lifeless, hands balled up and still. I feel her fingers, they are tiny, thin, preserved. I cup her wrist in my hand and pull it towards me--her whole body moves to the side a bit. She is of course, hard and cold as a rain-soaked sidewalk. And now I see the dilemma. In order to remover the rings and bangles, I’ll have to force her cold, frozen fingers free.

As I move her arm back and her body is once again horizontal a wisp of knowing moves through the room. Now they get it, too. And now, with complete certainly, no one would like to be involved. My personal macabre meter reached “tilt” long ago and though this is a new high, or low on my all-time weird list, grief has long given way to a kind of giddy, humorous disbelief. I mean, really--how much more fucked up can it get? I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. Then I wrench my mother’s cold arm-stick up in one quick motion. It gives way somewhere at the shoulder and rises from dry-ice mist in to view.

In a way, this is awesomely bizarre beyond words--I would so dare anyone in the Addams family to top this. I firmly take my mother’s preserved fingers and force them straight, sliding off each ring. By now, I’m in to the rhythm of it and am satisfied at my own handiwork. The last ring is pulled over her hard, small finger-knuckle and I raise the gold like some deep-sea diver hoisting up the final nugget of booty surrendered by the deep.

My family looks on in awe, shock and final, silent confirmation. Despite the mood, the circumstance and the sheer madness of it all, the moment is just too perfect and I cannot resist. I look around the room slowly and with confidence as I remove the latex gloves, snapping them off professionally “I’m afraid that’s all I can do for her”. My brother shakes his head and suppress a giggle. My girlfriend who will someday be my wife and mother to our precious daughter, nods and smiles--she’s loves that I am both freak and saint, sinner and devil cursed with all, but blessed with innate, perfect unpracticed comic timing.

As we leave the mortuary, we look up to the chimney which coughs thick, curling dark clouds up and in to the inverted-ocean blue sky. Louisa. “Oh no” I say, “Now she’s everywhere”. We go to breakfast and cannot figure out what to say as the perky waitress asks “what’s everyone up to this morning?”. Between bouts of quasi-hysterical laughter, we manage to order a table full of pancakes, omelets, bacon and endless rivers of coffee.

We laugh and eat like lumberjacks. I eat and eat and eat knowing the empty feeling will never be gone, not now. I eat anyway. After twenty minutes I sit up, take a deep breath and look out the window. Endless Colorado sky blue to the edge of nowhere. Except for a few dozen cloud-puffs. I look again. They float buoyantly and I cannot help but notice about a dozen of them resemble small rose petals. Laid out across the sky so perfectly you could walk on them.

Aug 13, 2009

What To Watch For...


I try and not watch anything on TV that in any way contributes to the culture of misogyny, violence or sexual objectification already so prevalent in our culture.

Not really, but it made me feel morally superior to write that.
Okay, so I love Damages with Glenn Close. Frighteningly, she’s the backstabbing Xerox of a former boss of mine: mean-spirited, her-at-all-costs Narcissist. Glenn Close’s the reason they have acting awards.

So maybe Entourage does appeal to my hidden puerile instinct towards a Peter Pan, stay-young / irresponsible / hide your immaturity behind material objects and chase down twentysomething hotties like you’re a Cheetah on the African plains live now apologize never lifestyle, wait – I don’t have a counter argument here.

The Shield – try and jump over the bar that series set. Dare you.
Hung. Jury’s still out on this. The tone / characterization feels a bit unbalanced to me. And, its just difficult for dudes to root too fervently for a concept built around the premise of a guy with a huge um, a large uh, well let’s just say when he orders a deli sandwich he doesn’t need the giant pickle.

I have to admit, even by my standards (wtf, I have no standards…) Burn Notice is style over substance, pretty faces trumping characterization and essentially a montage of beautifully lit panning shots of a sun-soaked Miami meant to lull you in to not noticing how implausible most if not every episode really is. My total, absolute fave show on TV. If Fiona showed up at my door with matching Makarovs and some C-4 plastique, my marriage would be in serious trouble.

True Blood. Some weeks I bite, others I don’t. Haven’t watched any of season 2 yet. So no, technically I’m not one of the rabid fang-gang.

And of course, the most morally korrupt, lo-tech reality show in the ignominious history of television – Cheaters. Basically, is what it says – hand-held cameras and a crew of 15 bust cheating spouses / lovers in the act. Best episode so far was when wife+cam crew walk in on hubby – naked, wearing a black leather mask, handcuffed to a cheap hotel bed and getting whip-spanked by a 6 foot, black Transvestite. He freaks, manages to get loose as wifey’s screaming at him, chasing him around the bed in this 10’x10’ Motel Six (maybe they should just go ‘head and change the name to Motel Sex) room trying to hit him, and he actually pleads his case, saying “'I'm doing this for us! She's helping me with intimacy issues!!!”.

To which I say, those are some intimacy issues I never, every want to hear about. Or the episode where a black husband gets cold busted by his wife. He’s total deer in the headlights – silent like a mime, just kind of blinking at the camera lights realizing he has no out. Until he invokes Presidential privilege.

He goes to wife “We can work this out, yes we can”. She’s like, “Are you out of yo black mind? Work this out how?!”. To which he earnestly responds, “Yeah, President worked it out with Hillary, right? We can fix this too”.

But not all episodes are a comic reveal on our collectivly flawed humanity. Last night they had midgets cheating on midgets. Yep, little people acting like big freaks. I was like “Man, even I can't watch this'. Turns out I could. And you know what, I learned a lot about myself, from my tiny friends.

Like you can’t measure what’s in a person’s heart. Passion really can blind a person to the obvious. And if a midget tries to punch you just reach out and put your hand on top of their head. They have big hearts, but short arms.