Eight o’clock. “Time to head out,” dad said.

They are driving me back to Charlotte, NC, where I flew in and will fly out in the morning. At 6:00am. I am staying at the Days Inn outside of the airport because driving me there in the morning would conflict with their church schedule. To the hotel!

I attempt to fall asleep in the backseat for the duration of the two hour drive. I manage the half-sleep that I remember feeling coming home from Christmas at my grandparent’s house in Junior High. I would fantasize about a droopy-eyed girl that had a twin and rode the same bus as I. How her twin got to school, I don’t know. She was well-developed for her age and I fantasized about her womanly body. The uglies and retards seemed to get breasts before everyone else. In the car now I fantasized about going to the hotel bar and drinking alone. Whiskey, people in transit, stories exchanged…

We pull up and I rouse my slumber to dig out the luggage. “This looks nice,” mom said.

“Yeah, it’s new. They just built it.” Dad is proud of his reservation. My reservation is calling him out on saying the same thing with ‘it’s new’ and ‘they just built it’.

We enter, check in, say goodbye (mom cries but I don’t feel that it’s genuine because, after all, she’s making me stay in a hotel in the middle of North Carolina rather than spending one more night with me. The reason is her god. I wish that I was her god) and I get in the elevator. Repeatedly hit the CLOSE DOOR button, thinking about how I make fun of people in a hurry hitting the UP or DOWN button like they’re masturbating it.

They didn’t just build it. The elevator slumbers to the third floor and spits me on stained carpet. I throw my luggage on the floor, light a cigarette, and call Lil’ Knucks. She’s drunk. Doesn’t want to talk. I put out the cigarette, return downstairs and ask where the bar is. “There’s no bar.”

“Well, where is there a bar?” In the five minutes since I last saw her, she’s forgotten me.

“You can go over to the Marriot. They have a real nice one.”

“Where’s that?”

“Take the service road over the parkway and it’s just past the gas station.”

“Thanks.”

I laugh at myself walking the service road. What if I get hit by the recycling truck? The food delivery for the shitty continental breakfast? (“It’s free…but it’s at six…when your flight is,” dad says.) There’s the parkway.

Billy Graham Parkway.

To be hit on this would be the greatest way to go. Hoggle Parkway.

I enter the Marriot and find the bar in the middle of the lobby, flanked by fountains and tropical plants of all sorts. I root myself in the barstool and wait. “What will ya have?”

“Makers on the rocks.”

“ID?”

He looked at it and I was hoping that he would see the Chicago address and say, ‘Chicago, eh? What you doin’ here?’ while pouring the strong drink. Amber, not tan. Happy, not sad.

He said nothing.

“Start a tab?”

“Why not.”

I ate peanuts. I drank fast. I got drunk fast, too. After number three I asked, “Is that pool table free?”

“Yep.”

I stumbled over, racked the balls, filled my head with Tom Waits’ “Jitterbug Boy”, broke, and started on the first verse. Out Loud.

“I’m a jitterbug boy
By the shoeshine
Resting on my laurels
And my Hardys, too…”

Disgusted with my ability and the comments from the drunk patrons, I returned the stool after three solo games. A man came down to pick up an order and I struck up a conversation out of boredom. Anything, anything. Please.

He recently returned from Iraq. He was a sniper and loved his job. Enough of that. I turned my head and let him talk to my full-haired crown while I coveted a man’s wife sitting at a neighboring table. Eventually, I blacked out.

Black as night. Even with the fountains, peanuts, cigarettes. I think it was the whiskey. Appraoching the double digits ordered.

I came to.

Convention.

In the Marriot.

Pimps?

Am I surrounded by pimps?

Can I take your picture?

No.

Okay.

I did. When they weren’t looking.

In the bush…the wild ones can’t see you. That’s what I had been truly looking for all night. Solace. I left quickly.

Walking back, I stopped at the grocery store and awakened myself into an almost sober state by screaming, “OE! You guys have forties of OE!”

I bought it, walked back. Into the elevator. Wanted to brown bag, but they gave me plastic.

I sat in the room. Leafing through the yellow pages looking for something funny to call…I got mad that I couldn’t figure out the alphabet. Clock says 2:24am. Fuck it. Fuck it.

“Front desk.”

“Can you get me an escort?”

“What?”

“Can you get me a cab?”

“Where you going?”

“The airport.”

“Ten minutes.”

“Thanks.”

I pick up my suitcase, go downstairs, and smoke outside.

I wait at the airport for four hours. Sober now. Mad now.

So dry and cheeks wet, I return to my home.

He came back.

With extremely puffy toes and fingers.

Walking into my parent’s house, I looked around and dragged in what I could (they moved here only a year ago…I want to drag inside what I know…what I can feel or relate to…)…and I see a girl on the couch that I know, somehow.

Oh, no.

What?

Really?

The girl on the couch is Whitney King.

I “dated” her in high school. I was a senior. She was a freshman.

18>14, right?

Why is she here?

She lives in South Carolina. Mom thought it would be “nice” if she came…why, I don’t know.

At this point, I AM FREAKING OUT.

On my rigtht are the spawns of my sister…they are precious and the only kids (save for one other) that I will protect to the end of my life…and then there’s Knucks (who I dated in Chicago for six days and we had a freak out session on the train platform where I left here in tears…and I had no regrets until I actually GOT TO KNOW HER…Heavens, Jason…you are a lucky man) who has never met my parents and Whitney whom I haven’t seen in 10+ years.

So what was the conversation like?

Ha.

It was one of the few times that I wish these girls (my nieces) were going to misbehave…just so SOMETHING WOULD HAPPEN.

We ate. We didn’t talk. Knucks left (I wished that I could go with her). I retired to talking to my brother-in-law. It’s weird, but being the last member of the family, I should feel that he’s an outsider of sorts, right? No. He’s the only one I actually talk to. Everyone else says nothing. I loved that he was there. I have something.

Then they left.

My parents went to bed when they left.

I made a bed for myself in the “den”. A lazyboy housed my loins that night. I went to sleep to Invite Them Up. It was a CD that I, weirdly, couldn’t find in Chicago but happened upon it in South Carolina. While listening I heard footsteps outside the door. I was worried that my nieces, or maybe just one of them, were outside the door. The language on the CD is not for the two year old that says “ma’am” and “sir” and dresses up for church every Sunday like it’s Easter. Open the door. Nobody. I hear it again. Nothing. I turn the CD off to go to sleep. I keep hearing it. Nothing. I ask mom in the morning. She doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

I go outside to smoke. The morning dew smells like magic and I blame it on the mountains. The air is crisp, for lack of a better word…how about crunchy. Burnt but tasty. The cigarette feels like heaven and tastes like shit. Its the cheap ones from the Karton King off the highway Knucks and I took to get here.

Looking around, I want a guitar. Or a punch in the face.

The plan today is to visit dad at his new job, Lowe’s, and then out to lunch with my sister and the glorious girls. I planned on taking dad’s picture. It would make me smile to see him in a service job. I’ve always blamed his small-mindedness on the fact that he spent his days in an office and was never around people of all kinds. We drove over there.

“There’s his car,” mom said. It sat in the back row of the lot with four to five empty spaces on both sides. He likes to take care of his vehicles. “That’s where he eats his lunch everyday.”

“Where?” I thought of the grass embankment.

“In his car.”

“Why? Don’t they have a breakroom here?” I pictured my dad eating bologna, looking at nothing, not even the wet spots his tears are swelling on his lunch bag.

“He likes to be alone. He doesen’t know his coworkers.”

We walked in and found him in his section. Power Tools. He was leaning against a shelf holding four different radial saws. Looking at the floor. Tennis shoes swollen with sore ankles and flat feet. Fallen arches.

“Hey, dad.”

“Hey, buddy.”

He was exhausted. He looked at me with blue eyes. My blue eyes. I always thought his were green. Or hazel. I thought the tears would hit me…like a summertime Bronx fire hydrant. Like the shitty Santana music video. Rob Matchbox singing about the half naked girls who were dancing in the streams of my father’s tears. I could kill him for it. Rob, not my father. I kept my camera in my pocket.

Walking out, I looked at the floor. I looked at his coworkers and tried to convey, with my eyes, that if they ever made fun of my father then I would kill them. Actually kill them.

We passed a truck with a new washer and dryer in the back. Mom told me that dad helped a young couple put their new washer and dryer into their truck a few days ago. I wanted to kill them too.

Mom drove us over to Ruby Tuesday’s to meet my sister. I forced her to sit outside with me while I smoked. I asked her what she thought of him working there. “We need the money.”

“Hmmm…,” I looked down at my cigarette. Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn.

We went in and had lunch and then home. I napped. I wanted to sleep, wake up, smoke, and then sleep. My body wouldn’t let me.

The night has only just begun…

…to get bad.

The rain fell like a quilt of spring. I smoked and smoked and walked the side streets home. The darkness made the drops light up in streetlights. Glancing up, I knew which way to angle my umbrella. I had to hold the cigarette close to my mouth to keep it from getting wet. I worried that I looked like an aristocrat getting ready to say something important. I didn’t want to say anything. And I just like the look of a blazer.

I wondered about choices and destiny. I don’t know if either exist. If Mercury is in retro, does that really mean that electroncis and appliances go haywire? How could it? Appliances and electronics have nothing to do with the stars…or is it everything? Magnets…orbits…lightning…

Heat Lightning.

A friend that recently moved to Chicago had never heard of heat lightning. He thought I was lying. I asked around to make sure I wasn’t. To make sure I wasn’t had (like the popular jackelope trick for the kids). Others knew of it and have seen it. I’ve seen it. August bonfires, cookouts, lit up with the humid flashes in the sky. No danger…no more than regular lightning. Ground to cloud, cloud to cloud, lover to lover…it’s all bright, hot, and dangerous.

No lightning tonight. Just the rain. Large puddles that the overused sewer system spill out like a tub that fills very fast reflecting the streetlights showing the rain and the angles.

All is quiet on the midwestern front…including my head, legs, body, and C chord.