Alignment with the Columnar Spine of the Universe

When I was younger, I used to drop acid because I enjoyed the fruity bursts of reflection that would bombard my consciousness as if they were so many cherry bombs in the hands of idle schoolboys. As an exercise, I tried to keep notes on cigarette foils and the backs of notebooks, but thoughts flooded past me like the rush of interplanetary travel and I never could keep up. At peak time, I could get lost in the bathroom for hours, watching the contrasting patterns of bathroom tiles and hand towel ribbing reveal to me profound momentary truths about the universe.

I recall my first time dropping acid. It was with a guy I didn’t know so well, but he was dating a girl I knew who used to be a next door neighbor of that little boy that got kidnapped up in the northern suburbs. You know, the one they never found, but there was always talk that the parents were involved in some kind of secret cult and the kid got offered up in some kind of ceremony. Anyway, this guy and I, we planted ourselves underneath a bridge that spanned two adjoining lakes: Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles. There was car traffic on top, then a small path underneath where joggers and bikers were kept separate from one another by a thin white line that ran along the pavement.

We dropped at almost midnight, then curled up together at a side of the tunnel, watching the world go by as if we were reliving a more passive enactment of the Three Billy Goats Gruff. The intensity of the dose made my body tense into a coil. I don’t believe I could have stood up, even if I’d had the inclination to. I was a marionette, strings contracted into a tangle.

Like a flight to Europe, the peak and subsequent easing took about seven hours, which we spent entirely under this bridge. What was remarkable, from our position dead center, was that dawn and dusk were frozen at opposite ends of the tunnel, as if they had been pasted on at the mouths if each stony arch. Looking left, I saw the rosy nostalgia of evening settling down with a dark blush. To the right was the hopeful eye of the morning peeking shyly at us.

Each time I shifted position, I could feel the hefty stirrings of my circadian rhythms as they tried to accommodate the time change. If I alternated head positions quickly - left-right, left-right, left-right – I felt woozy, felt as though radical philosophical displacements were happening in the very liquids of my inner ear. Felt as though I were a sliver in the hand of god, a hair caught in the eye of the whirring of the universe. Here I was, an auxiliary verb at best – no – like a minor dialectical inflection of an auxiliary verb - between the mighty posturing of the two substantial nouns that begin and end the day – dawn and dusk. Dusk and dawn. Left and right and my thoughts tumbling over into the secret of this tunnel, where startled joggers were even then glancing at us over their shoulders as they mended this broken seam in time with their wagging legs.

Falling Down

I ask mom to send me Oxycontins through the mail when I get my nose done. I’m afraid to ask the doctors for too much pain meds. Afraid they’ll think I am some sort of addict. But I really hate pain. I am a total wimp about it.

For a month now, all I can think about is that crazy doc in his sterile lab coats. I think he has a big mustache like a push broom, all stiff and wiry and brown. I pray he’ll cover it with one of those white paper masks so I can’t see it. I’m afraid it will have crumbs on it from a muffin or something. I can see it all now: First, a fat nurse will pump in anesthesia through my right arm, the one with the biggest vein. Then the mustached doc will crack my nose. I hear I’ll get black eyes and finger marks on my face from his latex gloved hands pressing into my jaw. Then, he’ll pack my nose with gauze for a week so their handiwork won’t collapse. I don’t want to look like Michael Jackson.

I’m gonna call them before the surgery and act real scared. We’ll I don’t need to act, cuz I am. I want to talk to them about pain management. Might as well get the best drugs I can, right? When I broke my foot doing a cartwheel in high heels near the Target Center this summer, I went in to the clinic and stood my ground.

“Let’s discuss pain management,” I said in a cool, collected voice. My hands didn’t shake even though my heart pounded. It didn’t pound nearly as much as my foot with the streaky olive green and purple bruises that pushed greedily towards my toes. It looked like raw steak, really. I learned that cartwheels in high heels aren’t a good idea, and that bruises take on a life of their own. And that general practitioners give out stronger pain meds than specialists. Specialists are fucking judgmental and controlling, doling out enough Percocet for the weekend like the gatekeeper or something.

“So, I have to have this nose surgery. I need some pain pills,” I tell my mom. I’m fishing a little, dropping my line with confidence and control.

“As long as they’re doing your nose, tell ‘em to make it cute,” she laughs.

“Well, it’s gonna suck. I hear it’s horrible as an adult. I’ll be laid up for a week or more and they won’t give me anything. I’m sure of it.”

She babbles on about her new friend, a claustrophobic guy who hoards magazines and licks the bottom of cardboard Chinese boxes clean. He doesn’t want to waste anything. She dated him thirty years ago before his motorcycle accident. She says he was strange even before his skull smashed onto the pavement, before his brain swelled up like a silver dirigible, before the docs wrapped his head in white cotton.

She keeps on, chatting quickly like a racecar heading for a new record down a smooth strip of a racetrack. Her frantic rhythm lulls me, makes me start thinking about the “Jack and Jill” nursery rhyme. There’s a part where Jack fixes his head with vinegar and paper. Boy, he was stupid to fall down a hill in the first place. He deserves a broken head. So does my mom’s friend.

“I gotta go, mom. I’ll talk to you later,” I say, sleepy from the rhythm of her pressured speech, and the rhyming last words I recite in my head as Jack tumbles down from the well.

“Three. I’ll send you three,” she says with a matter of fact tone.

“Promise? Don’t forget,” I say, somewhat excited.

She assures me that she won’t. But she’s forgotten my own birthday before despite the fact she bitches about how awful it was the day I was born. Maybe they’ll get here before the surgery, like a belated birthday present wrapped up in pink tissue paper. Maybe I’ll take them right away, just in case. Just to calm my nerves.

This overnight shift is killing me. Slowly, at an almost imperceptible pace, my mind is eroding and my back is breaking. Fourteen hours on the line, seven days a week for nineteen straight days. My fingers are worn to the bone from the assembly line, and I've grown hard to the touch of those I used to love. My eyes are bloodshot from endless hours of florescent lighting and lack of sleep. My nostrils burn from acidic vapors left over by chemicals we use to clean the floors, and also from the speed I inhale to stay awake on double shifts. And while I haven't yet confirmed it, I suspect my teeth are rotting from endless cups of coffee I drain to combat the headaches I get when I try to quit drinking coffee. It's a vicious cycle, but somehow it seems fitting. I am twenty-four years old, my doctor says that if I keep this life up, I won't live to see thirty. I'm shooting for twenty-seven, an age good enough for Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix. If it was good enough for them, I don't see any reason it isn't good enough for me.

None of that matters as the whistle blows, eleven am, quitting time, and for the first time in nearly three weeks, I have tomorrow off. Nevermind that I've been up for nearly twenty hours, I'm going out for a drink. In fact, I'm going out for drinks, plural. I'm going to drink until I can't drink anymore, and then I'm going to have one more for the road. After that, I'm going to stumble back to my crappy little apartment off Lyndale, and I'm going to sleep for fifteen or so hours straight.

As I go through the turnstiles and out to the Union parking lot, my mouth waters, and I start to get a bit of energy from some hidden reserve. Fucking eh, I'm going to have a drink. Lots of drinks. And then tomorrow off, fucking eh right.

The drive home passes in usual fashion. I am too tired to notice anything on the road and probably shouldn't be driving in the first place, but I make it, I always do. 55 to 62 to 35W, get off on Lake and over to Lyndale. No problem. The CC Club stands out like an oasis in the desert, a beacon of hope, the Promised Land. Fucking eh, Beauty, Perfection in the form of a dive bar in South Minneapolis.

The inside is dark and on the cool side of things. Not a soul in the place save a few hip businessmen hiding out from the corporate monster, and a couple of old men that frequent all dive bars during all hours of operation. Old men posing as professional drinkers, old men with yellow livers, living off disability checks, paying their rent and staying as drunk as possible. Barflys. Ignoring them all, I get a stool dead in the middle of the taps, let there be no mistake, I am on a mission. I am going to get fucked up.

"Hey Keep, how about some whiskey, Canadian stuff, and a Premo to chase," I say, and it feels good. Real good. At this point I feel almost human. Two glasses appear on the heavy oak bar in front of me, a small one of dark amber fire, and a pint sized one of a honey colored extinguisher. I smile because it's been awhile, and because I need this. I need this drink more than I need food or sleep, more than companionship, more than oxygen. I need this drink to forget about my crappy life, and my crappy job, and my god-awful apartment. I need this drink to forget that I haven't been to church in a year and haven't talked to my family in months. I need it to forget about that beautiful girl, the one I was scared to commit to, to one who loved me way more than I've ever loved myself. I need this drink to forget about going back to school, to forget my dreams of writing, to forget that I've pretty much already forgotten what it feels like to be happy.

I raise the small glass of fire and look to the ceiling, I nod, because I always do, and slam the fire down my throat and the glass onto the bar. It makes a satisfying thud, the startled businessmen look up briefly; the Barflys never move, they've heard my sound a million times before. Twenty-four down, three to go.

Emily's First Portrait

Although I was not technically covered by insurance, when I was about five months along, Rick was able to hook me up with an obstetrician at the woman’s prison, some miles down the road from where he worked. They weighed me and prodded at me and pushed down so hard on my stomach that for a second I worried that the pressure would squeeze Emily right out of me. Then they put on these rubber gloves and reached up inside of me – much further than you’d think they’d be able to go - to see if they could feel her head and they rubbed gook on my stomach so that I could listen to the heartbeat. It was cool, but all that pushing and reaching around in there like I was some kind of animal hurt dreadfully. It was sort of humiliating, actually. But finally, they did an ultrasound and gave me a few copies to keep of the picture.

It was Emily’s first portrait – black and white, the baby herself contained in a sort of conical shape - a far cry from the weekday specials at JC Pennys, but it was my first real look at her. You could make out her two little hands, her mouth, nose, even two little black slits where you could presume her eyes to be. The picture was more conceptual than anything – there was a grainy, streaky quality to the image that left much wanting in terms of detail.

The interesting thing about it was that, if you held the picture up sideways, a scene suddenly formed. The narrow end of the cone (or the upper end of my womb), from which much light projected, suddenly became a window glowing with warmth. The baby herself in profile took on a sad, ghoulish appearance, with one arm raised as if to knock against the window while she herself hovered slightly above in the darkness, looking down. She seemed so alone in there, seemed to long for whatever it was she saw on the other side. Her lips were parted slightly, and I could tell from the distribution of shadow that her eyes were set deep back into her skull. Beautiful and unearthly; a child who was already a ghost.

Aborted

Karli had been aborting his child for months. It was the result of T shaped surgical steel wrapped in copper like a piece of jewelry found at yuppie art fairs. The IUD prevented carrying a fetus, but not getting pregnant. An abortion once a month.

Andy spent the weekend playing a video game. It had a fleet of cartoon army men– like the dime store, plastic kind she used to have as a kid. The hard, grenade colored ones her father used to step on barefoot and swear, “Fuck! Fucking kids!” She didn’t understand why Andy didn’t buy the real ones. Instead, he lived in an animated backyard with neon green leaves and phony ant hills and tree trunks straight out of a “Winnie the Pooh” book. Manufactured men with machine guns that shot pixilated bullets. They groaned distorted groans like a dying alley cat whose head was shoved into a tin can by some neighborhood toughs. She was aborting his child and all he could do was play video games.

Or watch sports. Smoke pot. Anything but talk to her. “I get sick of talking. It’s not even in my top 100 things to do. We talk enough, really,” he said when she tried to communicate with him. He kept frantically pushing his fingers onto the candy colored buttons of the controller instead.

Years ago, Karli took a Greyhound bus precisely to avoid silence. She left Indiana with the brown, paper bag landscape and water towers she never could climb. She shoved some clothes into a duffle bag of her father’s along with stationary, good pens with smooth, rolling ink, and an address book full of everyone she’d ever met in her young life. Names of people she may or may not write, whose addresses no longer existed, whose phone numbers might be long disconnected. She collected their names written in colored ink like butterflies pinned to felt by their thorax or yellowed stamps carefully pasted in soft covered books.

The people might not even remember her blowing through town, changing high school after high school, changing her hair from brown to jet black to purple. She couldn’t believe how often she moved, how many school desks she sat in when there was only a handful of schools in the Elkhart. But she still fantasized sending one or two of them letters about her travels, how the bus smelled of the Scotchgard they used to huff in junior high, how a boy on leave from the army tried to feel her up in the back seat near Chicago. She’d leave the return address blank just to add a little mystery to their boring, small town life full of crushed beer cans and joints and dead end jobs.

She came to Minneapolis full of the naivety of a small town girl, with a wide eyed glow that reflected off the mirrored sky scrapers towering above the dusty, bum infested bus station. Carcasses of smoked cigarettes lined the sidewalks, flanked tiny, decorative fruit trees intended to spruce up the declining downtown. Instead of long stretches of toll roads and county roads, she saw snaking freeway ramps crowded with commuters.

But her cosmopolitan dream of smoke filled coffee shops with crappy, dumpster couches and forgotten table lamps came crashing down quickly. The icy stillness of Minnesotans stagnated her mind, her hopes of late night literary discussions gave way to staring out coffee shop windows at people bustling around in their boxed in worlds. She discovered the concept of personal space, distance, stand back at least five feet when talking. Smile, nod, but don’t ever show your teeth. She stared out windows just like she used to back home, only with a different landscape.

She left to avoid men in flannels and work boots, swollen bellies and snot nosed kids with nothing to do but huff glue behind the wood shed, boys and girls exploring each others bodies long before puberty waved its wand void of magic. But now she sat in her apartment watching Andy violently tap away on the plastic keypad, tethered to the TV by a plastic umbilical cord, his cigarette butts stamped out in a soap dish instead of an ashtray.

“I am slowly aborting your child again,” she said, this time to herself.