Ribbons, a novel -- Chapter One

Ribbons

ONE

         “The earth used to be flat and green and nourishing.  That was back in the early eighties and nineties and even, for a while, at the turn of the twenty-first century.  Back when I was a kid, or a starry-eyed, young man and opportunity was truly everywhere.  Then, one day the earth wasn’t flat anymore.  The planet was icy and jagged.  It was uneven, off-axis, sharp, debauched.  No more dandelions.  No more ‘Thank You’ cards.  The world was ruined and it was my fault.  That was a bad day.
         “My eyes ached--a throbbing, stinging pain like they’d been left on a beach somewhere.  They pulsated and threatened to implode into my skull, lodge into my brain and find absolutely nothing there worth writing home about.  My skin was greasy with sweat, though I shivered and my teeth chattered; it itched like angry, violent bugs were trying to burrow out through my pores, with pincers and hairy legs working in shift rotations.
         “Someone had shoved one steel spike into the base of my skull and another up my ass, which stuck to the edge of the sagging, makeshift bedding--naked, sweaty, sore and begging my legs to stand for some relief.  This same someone, surely, had loosed tiny dogs with fangs to gnaw at my fingers and toes, and now he was pounding at the door demanding payment for services rendered.
         “My lips were cracked and raw and crusty; my steely mustache and beard, an inch thick at this point, dug in at the corners.  Hard, white blisters had developed about my nose and mouth and glands, while a white puss formed periodically in my tear ducts, pooled beneath my lids, and then dried to my lashes like a resin.  My voice didn’t work properly; I hadn’t used it in a week and a half.  My tongue was white and I’m certain my breath was rotten.  I stared blankly at the television, which gave a faint, blue glow to the black room and stared right back at me.  I took another swallow and watched as my clear, liquid hourglass emptied out another milliliter.
         “Forty minutes left, maybe a little less.”
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--Recovered from Audio File
Dated 12.31.2010

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         Slowly inching its way northward over the surface of a flat earth, a green, nineteen-seventy-something Oldsmobile crunched and punished the gravel alleyway beneath it, rocking side to side as it crept forward.  One of its balding tires was dangerously low.  Its paint was flaking off in pieces the size of dollar bills.  Its hanging muffler scratched and scraped against the rock, sparking on occasion.
         Life, to young children and old men alike, is a series of layered horizons.  For tiny, six-year-old Burl Wonder, stuck to the vinyl, front seat of the Oldsmobile by sweaty legs like a fly to flypaper, the series of horizons began with the car window, which his eyeballs could barely peer over, and ended with a line of leafy treetops a block away from the alley, just past a broken playground.  Beyond that was infinity and the unknown--albeit a flat infinity and a flat unknown.  Of this, Burl was so certain that he had never even bothered to think about it.
         In his lap he cradled an egg carton.  The egg carton contained twelve, small pebbles of various proportion, color and degree of sparkle.  The twelve, small pebbles contained Burl’s basic understanding of the flat earth on which the green boat-of-a-car moved, and from what it was made.  From a certain perspective, one might argue that little Burl Wonder held the whole, wide world in an egg carton in his lap. 
         The car came to a stop in Burl’s mother’s driveway, which was little more than a widening of the alley itself.  Burl lifted up on the silver handle and threw his entire body into the heavy door, forcing it open just wide enough to block with his sneaker.  He intended to exit the vehicle gracefully, but forgot, momentarily, about the egg carton he supported in his lap.  The pebbles he’d spent the entire, hot summer carefully selecting and examining spilled out of the pink, Styrofoam carton and back into the dust and gravel they’d come from like salt into a sandstorm.
         That’s life.
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         This is life, too:
         Burl Wonder answered the phone once when he was nineteen, just before the turn of the twenty-first century, because he was high.  Had he not been high, he likely would not have answered, even though--had he not been high--answering the telephone would have been a far more reasonable thing to do.
         “Hello?” he said from the bed’s edge, his feet flat on the floor, his head resting against a large, burgundy pillow propped against the wall.
         “Hello.  May I speak with Burl, please?” came the animated, grey voice from the other end.
         “This is Burl.”
         “Hey, Burl.  It’s Jon T.”
         “Oh, hey!  How’re you doing?”  Burl sat upright in his bed, a little shocked and unprepared, his voice high and phony, almost a falsetto.
         “I’m doing just fine.  Did you get my message?”
         “Yes.  Yes, I did,” responded Burl as he rubbed his eyes and fixed his hair.  “I was planning on calling you tomorrow, since I wasn’t sure if it might be too late, you know, tonight.”
         “Whoa, are you taking a shot at my age, there?  Hey pal!  It‘s only seven-thirty.”  Jon was so chipper.  He chewed on syllables like they were bubblegum.
         “Ha!  Yeah.  No-- No.”  Burl tried his best to echo Jon’s exuberance.
         “So anyway, what do you think?  You interested?”
         “Well, yeah.  I-- I think I’d definitely be, uh, you know, interested.  What do I-- I mean, where do I go from-- What’s, you know, next?”
         “Oh, nothing much.  We’ll just need some basic information.  Fill out a few forms.  I mean, the hiring is up to me, of course.  So, if you’re on board, then we can get started on Monday.”
         “Okay.  Yeah.  That’d be great.”  Burl’s stoned words drew out like song lyrics, but were fitting for a tune of dumbstruck gratitude.
         “Great, then.  Do you want to know a little more about the position?”
         “Yes.  Please.”  Burl cleared his throat.
         “Well, you’d be working primarily with third- and fourth-grade students, kids with special needs.  All general subjects.  Some physical therapy.  Music, art and all that.  You would be Brandon Rowe’s assistant--so, grading papers, copying, that sort of thing.  Also--and I wanted to make sure you were aware of this--you’ll need to assist in the bathroom.
         “It’s called an inclusion classroom,” he continued, “kind of a new thing we’re trying.  The goal being that the kids with special needs grow up and are familiarized with the norm-- I mean, the rest of the children in their class.  You’ll be responsible for a handful of students.  Half the day you’ll work with them alone, but you’ll technically be part of Mr. Rowe’s classroom.  So, you won’t have to try and wing-it all by yourself.  We’ll start you out at ten an hour. 
         “Let’s see, obviously, that’s Monday through Friday, eight to four.  And, well, that’s about it as far as the basics.  You’ll figure out the rest as you go.  I really think you’re going to like it.  Any questions?”
         “Nope.  None that I can think of,” replied Burl, his eyes bloodshot and nearly crossed, a big, fat smile on his face.
         “Okay, then.  Super!”
         “Yeah, super!  So, hey, how’s Sam doing?”
         “Oh, Sam’s doing great.  Still up at Anderson.  Yep.  He’s engaged now.”
         “Oh yeah?  That’s just-- You know, that’s great.”
         “Yeah.  Actually, he’s the one that mentioned you might be open for the job.  He said you’d had some financial problems and won’t be returning to school in the spring?”
         “Yeah, it’s, uh-- Yeah.  No, I won’t be.”
         “Well, I am sorry to hear that.  But, hey, this could be a good opportunity for you.  Save some money and get right back at it.  And since you’ll technically be a teacher’s aide--wink-wink--you don’t even need a degree.  Perfect, am I right?”
         “Yeah, definitely.  That’s a plan with promise.”
         “Well, okay.  I’ll see you Monday at eight o’clock, then.”
         “Alright.  Have a good weekend, sir.  And thanks for thinking of me, Mr. T.  I really appreciate it.  And congratulate Sam for me, will you?”
         “Hey, don’t mention it, Burl.  Take care.  Bye-bye.”
         “Goodbye.”
         Burl hung up the phone.  He exhaled, feeling somewhat exhausted, reached over for his purple one-hitter and tapped its contents into an ashtray next to him.  He rubbed his eyes and wiped his brow and cheeks.  He visualized a large chunk of his stress dissolving like Alka-Seltzer at the prospect of an income. He looked out his bedroom window at a gorgeous, tangerine sun and beamed a set of pearly, white teeth back at it.
         “Hey,” he said at last, nudging Catherine gently on the shoulder.  “Guess what.”
         “What, baby?” she asked from the floor, lifting her head from his lap, a thin strand of saliva trailing from her bottom lip to the tip of his penis.
         “I’m a teacher,” he grinned.
         “Mister Wonder,” she said softly with a moist, red mouth and pink tongue.
         He nodded and Catherine resumed with the oral offering.
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         Some more life:
         The police, two of them, came through the open, front door looking for Chloe’s boyfriend.  No one in the house--besides Chloe’s boyfriend, presumably--knew why the police were looking for him, but were each ready to give him up without blinking.  That included Chloe.
         Approximately thirty minutes before the police came unexpectedly through Chloe’s open front door, her boyfriend, James, had also come unexpectedly through the door, saying nothing and bolting upstairs, undressing as he climbed.  Three of the friends shrugged at this and immediately returned their collective attention to Michael Jackson, who was performing some remarkable recreations of old, Billy Joel songs on the keyboard in the otherwise empty, dining room. 
         Everyone was drinking cheap beer from cans and smoking cigarettes and lighting candles and laughing.  Chloe and Michael Jackson lived together along with Chloe’s boyfriend, James, and a girl named Bree in an old house on the east side of Indianapolis.  Michael Jackson, who looked a bit like a young John Lennon with gapped, Elton John teeth and a bowl-cut, would have altered the strictly platonic nature of his relationship with Chloe had he been able, but seemed content to simply be close to her.  He’d loved her for years, which she knew.  He even allowed her boyfriend to live with them, rent-free, though it made him cringe to see them together.
Bree, on the other hand, who was not present at the moment, paid her monthly portion on time despite almost never being there.  She was a cute thing with a diamond face, bouncy, purple hair and thick, black glasses.  She claimed to be a lesbian, but Burl had witnessed her in sexual congress with at least two, mutual, male friends and was, therefore, unconvinced.  He secretly pondered ways of testing her preferential dedication, as most men do with attractive lesbians.
         Burl’s heart belonged to Catherine, though, and they were sharing their first apartment just off Massachusetts Avenue in the trendy, downtown neighborhood near the Murat Theatre, sometimes known as Lockerbie.  They had been together for over three years, managing to escape high school with hearts intact, and had somehow stumbled into a beautiful, shared life.  Both were young, barely twenty, and full of energy.  People often remarked at the fact that the two never argued, never bickered, and never parted company.  Catherine had fallen in love with Burl in high school, as the story goes, because each day for an entire week she witnessed him sitting with the unpopular kids in the cafeteria at lunchtime.  She later discovered that he had actually been serving a punishment for smoking on school grounds, but it was too late; the arrow had already found its mark.  The only negative and always unpredictable variable in the relationship, really, was that Burl possessed--and at the age of twenty, no less--testicles and a penis.  So, naturally, their beautiful life together was in constant peril, threatened on all fronts and borders.
         Anyway:
         When the two policemen walked through the open, front door, no one said anything.  There was a good handful of bad weed on the coffee table where they had gathered, and only Michael Jackson was old enough to legally drink the alcohol which could be found in every corner and on every raised surface of the house.  So, the puzzled partakers simply sat petrified--Burl and Catherine on the corduroy couch, Chloe in a large, pea green recliner and Michael Jackson on a wooden stool at the keyboard.  Busted.
         “Does one, James Perry, live here?” asked the first officer.
         “How many--” began Catherine until Burl squeezed the ever-loving shit out of her kneecap.
         “Does he live here?” the officer reiterated with raised eyebrow and sterner eye.
         Everyone nodded.  No one spoke.
         “Is he here now?” asked the second officer.
         Everyone pointed at the staircase.  No one spoke.
         A few moments later, the policemen marched back down the stairs with James in handcuffs.  He had changed his clothes, shaved his beard and taken a shower since bursting through the door.  He feigned confusion as the officers perp-walked him outside, but said nothing to the others.  Likewise, the police did not even acknowledge their presence, which no one objected to and Burl punctuated with a certain stare directed straight through his beloved’s third eye.  The junior policeman simply shut the door behind them and they were gone.
         Finally, Catherine broke the silence.
         “What the fuck?”  She tried to stifle a giggle, as everyone shot her a glance echoing the question without a giggle to be stifled.
         They then looked to Chloe.
         “Oh, fuck him.  I should’ve left him months ago.”  She glanced briefly at Burl as she said this and smiled while tossing her long, brown hair and advertising her ample bosom.  Burl noticed and Catherine noticed him noticing.
         “Fuck it.  Let’s smoke,” suggested Burl.
         “Let’s do,” replied Chloe.
         “It’s late, we should maybe--” attempted Catherine.
         “Beer?”  Michael Jackson ran the blade of his right hand up the keys from low to high.  The atmosphere had suddenly become very awkward and strangely anti-climactic.  The time for beer had passed; they would have to shoot their way through the night.  Michael Jackson cast aside his signed, Garth Brooks, cowboy hat, replaced it with his authentic, Slash-signed, top- hat and began playing the piano intro to Guns N’ Roses’ November Rain.  Everyone raised a lit lighter and rattled their buzzy brains for the lyrics so they could all sing along, in harmony, while Chloe retrieved the vodka.
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Excerpt #1 from Burl Wonder’s Journal
Dated 09.12.2001
(Apparently Undelivered)
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Catherine,
         The city is premenstrual on the day that I retreat to our small apartment with two bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon and a pint of Seagram’s 7.  You tell me that my army-green fishing- hat makes me look ridiculous, but I like the shadow it casts over my forehead.  You say I drink too much, but I feel that drinking too much is my birthright.  You say that I am an attractive guy and I appreciate you saying that.
         Our apartment would be too small for most people and were we to be honest with one another, we would concede that it is too small for us, too.  But there is no room for honesty in a place when both of its inhabitants are lonely and looking for something elusive.  The lamp beside the computer flickers like a sleeping lightning-bug and reminds me just how important light is as I take a shot of the whiskey and flush it down with cheap wine.  The television spits out relatively unimportant information in twinkles and peeps, reflecting off the bare window and solid, cement walls as I match a cigarette. 
         Beneath a silvery, sorrowful sky and its elegantly ancient trees, I fixed your windshield wipers today.  Outside our tenement the city is a shaken bottle of carbonated beverage.  But in its pressurized atmosphere, I cannot tell whether it is me, pushing and expanding in a bilious cloud of tension, or the city itself that is disgusted and swollen and ready to bleed.
         I really needed to do laundry today. 
         I fixed your windshield wipers, I must confess, for selfish reasons.  I needed to get to the bank; I needed quarters for the washer and dryer.  But now that I’ve accomplished this small task of fixing and driving and withdrawing and returning, the only action I can consider in this contradiction of light and dark, this contrast of cold and warmth, is drinking and smoking and feeling the blood rush to my face.  Like a gay man rushing to the gay bars after finally stepping shyly from the gay closet and finding that no one is really much surprised, like a first-time cocaine user rushing to do the next line, all I want to do is smile.
         The city is premenstrual on the day that I, a confident, secluded man in the middle of a staring contest with life, put on an Elvis Costello record and sneeze my soul out through inadequate nostrils onto the shirtsleeve of epic tragicomedy.
         The wine glass stares back at me as I sneeze.  The whiskey couldn’t care less.
         “Is it a change in the weather,” I find myself asking, “or just a change in lunar influence?”
         I cannot say that I am overwhelmingly overjoyed with current circumstances, but neither can I say that I am much surprised.  I’m afraid that there is not much slack in my fishing line.  I’m in the middle, man; I’m the middle-man, man.  I’m the best and the worst of the good and the bad. 
         Does that make me common between the extremities or am I a sponsor for the extremities of the common?  Or am I, possibly, that perfect little thought that escaped your brain before you could determine its validity?
         You ask me why I think of things so ridiculous and all I can think of are ridiculous answers to your question.  “Well then,” I want to ask, “if you’re so enlightened, what do you think about?”  But I know your answer, and yet, I’m too optimistic to believe it--which makes me just as guilty of the same crime.  “So,” I figure, “why bother asking when I know that the common answer would be one of ambivalence, one of both extremes in equal degrees?  And how,” I wonder of you, “are you so free as to ponder these questions of me?  How do you get past you?  How should I, then, get past me?”
         I suppose your freedom stems from your--dare I say it?-- ambivalence.  And I suppose you don’t see the irony?  Here it is: You ask a question that only an ambivalent person could ask in order to find some deeper meaning, while I find a deeper meaning in the fact that such an ambivalent person could be concerned with such a question.  Thus, I cannot answer.  Still, you have to admit that as the sun comes up here in our apartment, you remain ambivalent in its rays while I take on that old feeling of slothful semi-depression.  And while my logic remains ambivalently ridiculous, your question, nevertheless, remains unanswered.
         The wine glass stares back at me as I sneeze--“At-chew!”  The whiskey couldn’t care less.
         Finally, the sun is up and I can go to bed.
         Knowing that I love you.
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         “I could have read through those journal entries and sketchbooks if my eyes hadn’t turned into glossy orifices resembling Satan’s asshole, and if my lamp hadn’t been cracked and on the floor, busted beside the bed.  Maybe they’d have cheered me up.  Thousands of pages of words and thought complete with illustrations, portraits, even sketches of furniture I would someday build.  And I might have considered half of it corny as hell now--but hey, that’s where the glory of youth lies. 
         “We have all sewn pockets in our hearts where we store our dreams.  Occasionally, we pluck those dreams carefully from their home so that we can admire them secretly and, when we’ve had our fill, we replace them and refasten the clasp for another day.  But if we never slam them down, like a shot glass onto the workbench, grab our hammers and drills and get to the work of tinkering and toying with the fuckers, then, we may as well have never dreamed them in the first place, and we’d be a sight richer had we never purchased those tools, because both--dream and hammer--are as worthless as the place we’ve stored them.  And if we do grab our balls and get to cracking, and we find that we’ve got a real, workable gem on our hands, but we set it aside or destroy it with temptations we simply do not have the capacity to master and should have left alone to begin with, then, once again, we’ve not only deceived ourselves, but we’ve committed an atrocity towards those who never had a mind to dream the dream and couldn’t afford the tools.  And if that is the case then, well, maybe it’s perfectly reasonable that we should be imprisoned inside our own decaying heart-pockets, with no way out and no methods to act on one if we found it.  For, as living beings with imagination and reasoning skills unmatched on this planet, we are born into a beautiful opportunity, an obligation, really, to shit or get off the pot.
         “And that, in case you were wondering, is why I’ve been sent to this Room.  Seeing that stark contrast between the, ‘might-have-been,’ and the, ‘was-and-is,’ has put me here; that is to say I made my choice by refusing to choose, by choosing and toiling, and, worst of all, by choosing, succeeding, and turning my back on that gift for worthless objects and irretrievable experiences.
         “All that I truly understood as I looked at those piles of words and ideas, my dead babies glowing blue, reflecting the television, unopened and bound, falling over in silent stacks like toppled tombstones, was that I had become That guy--the one that people only speak about quietly.  ‘He could have done anything.  Anything at all,’ they said about That guy.  And they were absolutely right to say it.  I said it, too.  I said it quietly. 
         “‘Tick-tock,’ echoed my beautiful hourglass, my solitary companion and accomplice, in its driest, dark-eyed, stinging, quiet voice.  My beautiful, fucking hourglass: the mistress I turned to for insouciance, revealed to be my loathed wife.”
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--Recovered from Audio File
Dated 12.31.2010