"And I'm sick of all my judges
So scared of what they'll find
But I know that I can make it
As long as somebody takes me home every now and then...
Well have you ever seen the lights?
Have you ever seen the lights?"
The Killers, "Sam's Town (Abbey Road Version)"
I didn't expect the simple act of putting my hands on the steering wheel of that little black car to bowl me over, but it did.
The sliding door on the driver's side of the van came off its hinge finally a few days ago and I got the thing towed up to my cousin's garage. I told him to take his time, his business booms these days and we have another car and plus my mother's little black car we could borrow, she'd gone down to Florida to see my sister for a couple of weeks.
I had to work on Sunday, and just to show you what a candy-ass I've become in middle-age, I had to take my family out to dinner after working all day Sunday, oh! The humanity! Sheeet, was it that long ago that I temped in factories, doing whatever they said, whenever they said, the shittiest of shit work, without batting an eyelash? What a luxury, how far I've come, to feel burned out from working a nine hour Sunday.
So I decided to take the family out to dinner, but the remaining car in the driveway, a V6 Honda Accord with a six-CD player and leather seats with seat-warmers, oh, how soft I've become, didn't have room for all six of us, what with an infant seat and two other booster seats needed, so I called my Dad and asked him to borrow Mom's car.
It's a two-door Civic, no leather seats to cushion my fat, soft, middle-aged ass, no power-everything, as the Accord has, as if the driver's gone so soft he or she can't even be bothered getting the windows down by hand. She bought it off of close family friends, and, I suppose, that's where the story really starts.
&&&
John was a sweet-heart underneath it all, though he tried his damnedest to act like the baddest ass that ever came down the pike. He did possess a jones for booze and dope that amazed even an inveterate (back in the day, understood?) fiend like myself. We hung out a lot, we got along and our tastes in music aligned remarkably well, we both had the same devotion to the alt.country scene of back in the day, and anyway, usually when we hung out there was family involved and we held ourselves in some acceptable form of abeyance.
The one time we hung out one-on-one and really got down to some unfettered fucking bidness, we went up to the cemetery where I'd wind up burying a wife way before her time, and not long after his, and he put a smack-down on me that I have never experienced. This was back in the early '90's, by the way, back when my friends had christened me with nicknames like "Big Lungs" and "The Super-Absorbent One." Or, to put it another way, I was once invited to a party where I was warned in advance by the hosts that I would have some SERIOUS smokers to contend with, and I left those supposedly serious smokers crying for mercy; at one point in the festivities, one of those I'd been warned about passed me his bowl and said simply, I'm done, and you, son, are sick in the head.
I shudder to think what John would have reduced them to. He started hitting it at the ripe old age of eleven, moved on to other stuff, but no, not what you might think: it was the booze, I think, that held him most in thrall. The booze had its hooks into him, but good.
He was a sweet-heart, I swear to ya, a heart of gold, sensitive, caring, aware, but he had a dark side, of course. You don't reach the levels of substance abuse he did without a dark side. He had some pain inside that propelled him to make stupid decisions; some pain inside that could never be accounted for, and I wish it could, for an explanation might make things easier for some people I care about now.
&&&
It didn't hit me until I got behind that wheel. Behind John's wheel, the car, his car, that my parents bought off of his parents, we'd rather keep the car in the family, they said, back then.
&&&
Oh, I took my family out for that dinner, and I guess it didn't really get to me then. I got behind his wheel then, my thirteen year old and my seven year old and my five year old in that car with me, and Sheila and the six-month old baby in the car behind me. The seven year old and the five year old kept looking behind me and yelling, c'mon, Dad, beat Mom, we have to get there first.
The thirteen year old, the one I worry about, kept telling them there was no race going on, but they didn't listen to him. They never do, much to his chagrin.
We had our dinner and we went on home and we went to bed and the next morning we got up, just like we do every Monday, they were tired with the late bedtime and the time-change of the clocks moving ahead an hour, but they got up, and I got Bailey, the oldest, the thirteen year old, into that car, and I got him up to school, on time or close enough to it, and then I drove on off to my spot, the spot off the snowmobile track, just past the Coon's Crossing intersection, by the railroad tracks, the spot where I smoke a cig every once in awhile, maybe once or twice a month, before work, and this was one of those days where I needed one of those cigs, one of those days where I needed those four or five minutes alone before I could proceed with my day, with my life.
&&&
I walked out along the path, inhaling the morning every now and then, a fever pitch of some sort making me nervous and doubtful: had I done the right thing, for everyone involved? And how can you ever know if you did, until it's all over? Some decisions can't be made in progress, after all.
It was when I got back to the car, full of trepidation over what I knew was an awful week of work and a series of unanswerable questions looming back home, that it hit me.
My hands touched the steering wheel and I realized, John had his hands on this very wheel. My parents had bought the car off of his parents after he died.
And my mind runs away, back to September of 2007, with Lauren's tumor newly found but thought to be a problem that could and would be solved, back to September 2007, on my way out the door to take the van, the same one I just had towed up to my cousin's, off to the dealer for a problem with the same door, and on my way out the phone rang and for some reason I answered it and on the other end, my father's voice, and the words, John's dead, and I wasn't surprised, it was a call I'd expected for the better part of two decades, but whatever my expectations, the call saddened me.
&&&
For some crazy reason I thought one of the gifts John's death brought us - and please don't take this the wrong way, his death was no sort of blessing - but I figure if anything, he'd think, based on our conversations over the years, that well, this will cover all y'all from the curse of death for a few years. That he'd covered us.
I remember on the morning of his funeral, that Saturday morning, September 8th, 2007, to be exact, lifting his casket off the carrier and into the limo, and seeing his nameplate on there, and freaking out for a moment, imaging Lauren's name on a casket, too, hell, we'd just found out about the tumor, and anyway, it was benign and she was gonna have some surgery and be fine, the doctors said.
&&&
I crushed the cigarette beneath shoes that Lauren bought me some time in the early-to-middle part of the first decade of the century, and I got into the car, and I saw the parking sticker from the last place John ever worked.
I got into the borrowed car, the car borrowed from my mother who bought it from my friend who died, and I ran my hands over the wheel, and I could practically smell 2007 in the air.
I got into the borrowed car and my hands touched the wheel and I blew out a left-over breath from the cigarette I'd smoked and I thought about what John may have seen or felt when he died, did he ever see the light, I thought about what Lauren may have seen or felt when she died, did she ever see the light, and I sorta wished I'd never borrowed this goddamned car, too many ghosts riding in the back seat behind me, a departed friend is bad enough, but a departed wife sitting next to him is a little too much to think about sometimes, don't you think?
&&&
I made it into work well enough, the dead seemed to know I had a rough week in store and they left me alone.
But now it's Friday and the week has ended. I worked seventy hours this week and it's late on Friday night and I'm bummed.
Bailey, the thirteen year old, said some nasty shit about my new wife, and she heard him; she said he said to someone on some online gaming system that his step-mom is a bitch and she won't talk to him.
So Sheila, who has gone out of her way to accommodate children I asked her to help me raise, feels hurt; Bailey, who had mental problems BEFORE Lauren died, vehemently denies saying what Sheila quoted me word-for-word him saying in his room; and me, well, it's been a brutal week between work and whatever else borrowing what used to be John's car has caused.
I don't really know what to do next.
If life were a movie, or a theme song to a movie, John and Lauren would come to me in my dreams and give me some hints, or some suggestions, but I'm not expecting that. The dead sit somewhere far from here, and I'm not sure if it's nowhere or something way better than here, but sometimes, like now, when needed answers are nowhere to be found, either of those places seems better than the here and now.
Whatever, I miss 'em both, and I wish 'em well, and I hope to see 'em again one of these days.