photo: random street poetry near ANB Harbor and The P-Bar on Baranof Island, spring 2012: Sometimes, just as clear as can be, the universe comes along and wallops you with a message, and don’t ever believe anyone that says otherwise. Since the point of taking a break from being inside at the bar was to go outside and have a smoke, reading paired up well, and by the third or fourth line, now sitting out there in the alley with the trash cans, taking this one in, remembering:
As about a 13-year old kid, trying my level best to understand the guy, it was the fact that he acted out in risky, often dangerous ways, unexpected twists going from a mostly predictable, clean-cut and polite person, to a cynical perverted swearing pirate literally with a turn of his head, it all kept me guessing. There was a tolerance, a forbearance by everyone else around the guy, an accommodation. There was no questioning or discussion beyond anger and fighting, insistence on being right, an adult acting as a child: he seemed to be owed something.
Manipulation and deception were his tools, words chosen particularly for their ability to stick in the mind of a kid, building trust on some lousy idea about truth and honesty that came only from him, though truth and reality both were something far beyond his capabilities, lurching emotionally from too stupid to get peanut butter out of a jar! to firmly implanting the lesson nothing in life is free by sitting on his wallet outside waiting in the car parked in front of the grocery store, while my brother and I went inside to steal food, to fondling and grabbing, groping, patting and touching that in any other time or place would have landed him in a jail cell. Winston’s, Wild Turkey, and Busch tall-boys were so interesting, high school went by the wayside and was as simple to quit as walking out the door and never going back, encouraged and distracted. Wandering off alone, far away, is something that has never changed, but running away then, even making it all the way out of the state once, was the priority.
But light shifts, turns, holds something present in a moment that hitches into a mind, something right there, if only to look, something perhaps previously unseen. Like how early one morning in suffused pre-dawn light, years after this photo, a lamp post to my back and street signs above my head – Franklin & Front, the light was busted – with closing eyelids, watching 2 people across the street, one sound asleep with his head sideways, face on the concrete, the other with a jacket draped across the back and a book in their hand, reading it – apparently all of the possessions they had between them at the time – then closing it and so gently placing it under his head, as to not disturb sleep. Seems compassion is an instinct demonstrated most frequently by those who can least afford it, however, and even less likely a grace granted to oneself, waking up with that on my mind hours later still next to those signs, a cigarette butt on my face and a shoe missing, it was clearly time to empty something really heavy out of my pack, set it down. Frank on Franklin. Up-front on Front.
Because, it can take decades to recognize that hatred of any kind is bad when it’s directed at a person, paired with a very deliberate dissociation from it inside a heart, something blame disguises and discourages, playing out as dangerous, self-destructive living. And the worst form of shame and humiliation is the kind that lives only inside and cannot be talked about: the lcd clock would flip over digits late at night sometimes, him in his own bed just on the other side of the wall from where I slept on a couch, and my teen mind was doing math. I wanted to kill that guy.
Nobody expects a parent to be perfect. Nobody expects their parent to be the villain.
Upshot is, all that craziness and carrying on like a kid, it all ended up driving everyone away, even from each other, never once having gathered together again as a family, never once having spoken at all in countless years, impossibly disconnected by really super fucked up circumstantial decisions and one guys incongruous, distorted mind.
It was April of 2012 and the roe herring fishery was just getting rolling on the west side of Shee Atiká, and the little town that was home for me was busy, summer was on the doorstep. Sitting aft, watching a friend emptying a winters-worth of stuff out of her 30-footer, the sun was really hot, the phone vibrated across the fiberglass deck, scooping it up before it got wet, reading.
See, people call them ‘smart‘ phones, but I haven’t carried one around in years, all that distraction, walking around looking at your hand like there’s some kind of an answer in there, where the feet should land next, or maybe just another excuse for bad behavior for some.
Flat as they are, they skip real nice across water though, if you chuck them just right. Look, a byePhone!
The bar was a block away, and there was some poetry waiting to be discovered. It was a text message:
Dad is dead.