Brian Long lives in San Francisco, CA, where he works with young adults with special needs.

A Dialogue for Moderation (December 20, 2009. Issue 12.)

Last night, Sunday night, I left my house holding a Louisville slugger. The chalky, cracked lines on my palm and fingers dipped into the whirlpool of swirls and grooves on the polished handle of the bat. My hands, that had once been smooth, were now callused and hard. I carried the bat out onto the street and forgot about it. I was thinking about Tuesday, hoping this year would be different from the last four years.

A cop tapped me on the back, and asked me why I was holding a bat.

“What bat?”

He thought I was joking, but I hadn’t slept in three days, and with his raven moustache flapping its wings up to his yellow eyes, and his cap vibrating on his head, I couldn’t tell if I was awake or asleep then. He unclicked his holster, and told me to put down the bat.

“Huh, I’m not…oh, this bat.” I looked at the bat for a minute, then two, almost three, and then I tapped it to the ground and leaned on it like a cane. I watched the cop move his mouth but I couldn’t hear the words. The words snuck through the air, and crept inside my ears, constructing answers out of mists of questions.

“Sorry officer, present for my son, it’s his birthday on Tuesday and I was so excited I guess I forgot I was still holding it when I walked out onto the street.

“He’s turning four.

“His name is Jim.

“My name is Jim.

“Yes, he’s really named Jim, Jr.

“No, I don’t think it’s strange that I’m walking the streets with a bat at two in the morning. I was holding it for my son. I didn’t give him a present last year, and it made him cry.

“I hate birthdays and I thought it would be a good life lesson. My older brother once woke me up by punching me in the face, and he told me, ‘Never let your guard down.’ I still sleep with my hands over my nose.

“No, I haven’t been drinking; I’ve been thinking, but not drinking.

“Of course, I was just headed there now.”

The cop kept his palm on the outer space black handle of his gun, and he grinded his heel into the cement as I walked back towards my apartment. I turned around and his body became white static as the night sucked him back in. He was another phantasm of the street that appeared in my waking dream, or my sleeping day, and disappeared before I could see his face.

It’s sometime in the afternoon; I’m sitting in the park drinking a beer. I watch Jim, Jr. play on the jungle gym. His black and white striped shirt is not slimming, and it pulls tight over his belly button, exposing the bottom half of his abdomen, it looks like he painted a bowling ball a tannish-pink and tried to hide it under his shirt. I look at his face.

I thought for a moment when I saw his baby picture that he looked Chinese, but then I looked at my old baby pictures and realized that I looked Chinese when I was born, too.

Now he’s tan, and covered in something foul. I rest my beer on the green park bench, and wave to him; he drops ice cream on his shirt and gives me the finger with a green booger dripping on the end. Why can’t he just wave back?

Maria comes up, grabs his hand, and leads him away. She looks at me, and then she looks away.

*

I wake up and it’s morning and I untangle myself from the familiar web of memories and night. I slide out of bed, and I hear my knees crack, then my lower back, my neck rattles in a circle, and then I hear them all crack together as I stretch my arms over my head. A cacophony of bone playing bone echoes from every part of my body. My feet are cold, my feet are cold; my feet are cold, as I walk across the wooden panels on the floor. I trip over my bat, and fall on my boots. The bat hits the phone, and the phone starts to ring, it sounds like my alarm clock; then I remember I threw my alarm clock in the trash; then I answer the phone.

“Who’s it?

“What’s up?

“Why do I have to go there?

“I went there yesterday, and no one showed up.

“Why can’t Riley do it?

“Why can’t you do it?

“DUI, when?

“Really, the wrong ramp you say. Wasn’t there a wrong way sign?

“It’s my son’s birthday, so I’m not staying late, I’m gonna drive out there, drop off that truck and I’m goin’ home.

“I don’t care if she doesn’t want me there, I’m fucking going, mind your own God damn business, Harry.

“What? Yeah, two sugars and black as night.”

I drop the receiver and pull on my cold jeans. They feel like sheet rock on my legs, and my stomach starts to shake, the shiver turns into a low murmur as I stare at the fridge.

There’s milk in there, but it looks like old paste and it smells like toe jam and stew. There’s a black apple, with two worms living in it. There are three slices of pizza and a box of baking soda. Then there’s whiskey, whiskey, and cheerios in the cupboard. Irish whiskey, Bushmill’s, the taste could burn flames off the sun.

I check my watch, it flashes noon, I check the street and it’s still dark out. It’s too early for whiskey. I eat the dust in the cheerios box, and walk out my front door. I walk the few blocks to the subway, and rest into the hard plastic, blue chairs under the orange strip lights along the wall.

I wake up, and I’m in a white room, with white chairs; I’m wearing white clothes, and white shoes that look like slip-on Vans. There’s a black man, with white hair, and his chin cradled in his hand staring at me. He’s tapping a pen on a yellow legal pad, and his smile makes me comfortable.

“Why do you think you’re here, Jim?” he asks tapping a finger on his cheek.

“You know what they call doing heroin?”

The old black man smiles at my question, and nods a yes.

“But why don’t you tell me anyways,” he says sucking the fun out of it.

“Chasing the dragon,” I mutter.

“Why do you think they call it that?” he asks tilting his head slightly in a curious position.

“You get so high, you feel perfect, warm and free. Nothing matters, and then you slide down the scales. Then the next time the high's not as high, and the next time it's not as high, but you keep doing it hoping you’ll catch that dragon.”

“If I could change the subject, Jim, maybe talk about your father?” he says leaning forward for an instant then easing to the side.

I move forward in my chair, and my eyes become thin slits behind a stonewall. My hands grip the pads on the armrests of the plastic chair, and I position my feet like a track star at the starting line.

“My father? What about him?” I ask.

“I’m just wondering how things are, you haven’t said much about him since he brought you here.”

“We talk. He mostly writes me letters. Mostly generic stuff, like, ‘Get better son; I’ll be here when you get out son; I love you son,’ the same old shit.” I wonder what he’s getting at.

“What about your mother Jim? Does she write you?” he asks. I shake my head and laugh.

“I think she’s given up on me, man, why don’t I ask you about your family?” I say trying to change the subject, see how he likes it. His smile starts to fade as I shift in my chair, trying to find a position that feels natural.

He writes something down, and adjusts himself in his chair.

The old black man straightens his tie, and smiles. He places the legal pad on the floor and smiles, his eyes moist and full of pity. His eyes loosen my rigid fingers, and straighten the arch in my feet. They knockdown the stonewall and open my eyes a little wider. I slide back in my chair and sigh. I feel the need to talk.

“I just had a lot of money, and nothing to do.”

“Do you think you’re going to go back to drugs when you get out Jim? Do you think there’s a reason why you’re not doing them now?”

“Yeah, now I’m here and I wanna go home,” I say. He sighs a ‘duh.’

Jim, Jr. materializes out of the white walls that glow a hazy light, and he walks up to the smiling black man. His black and white striped shirt is covered in chocolate and vanilla stains and they both look at me out of the corners of their eyes.

I wake up and it’s seven o’clock in the morning. I’m asleep in a truck parked in the loading dock of Smith & Son’s. Crumpled coffee cups and cigarette butts cover the trucks chipped white paint, metal floor. I fell asleep on the parking brake and rolled into the rubber bumper of the dock.

I hear a creaking and a moan, as Harry raises himself up into the cab. He nods, and I nod and I push in the kill switch and wait for the whirling grunt of the engine. Harry opens his thermos and puts his boot up on the dashboard. He kicks off specks of dirt and oil, and the specks snow down onto the dash and floor. I watch the rpm’s and wait for the truck to switch gears, you can feel the stop and then the surge as the engine goes up. I don’t wait, Harry waits; I stop at the stoplight and pull the black joystick all the way down-- N-R-D-3-2-1, I stop at one. I wait for the light to change and push my foot to the floor, I shift through 1-2-3-D, the surge is softer and the ride is smoother. I check the mirrors, top right side, bottom right side, and top left side, bottom left side; there’s no rear view mirror, the back window looks out at the large white, 12’ 6”, metal box bolted onto the back of the truck.

Harry talks, but I don’t listen; the driving becomes meditation, the shifting, the checking, and the stopping. It all becomes instinct, and feeling, and I feel cars, turns, streets, dogs, kids, mothers with their babies, it’s like walking or sitting, I do it without thinking. I scratch the dried black scabs on my arm, and the dead veins tingle. My heart makes a fist and I think about driving, always about driving.

The model T was first built in 1908. 1908 East Mission Street is on the way to the bridge; Steve’s probably awake. An international truck shifts gears at 2200 rpms. If you’re going to buy a sedan buy foreign, Japanese, German, whatever, but if you’re going to buy a truck buy American. My dad found me passed out in vomit and piss in the back seat of his BMW. He took me to the white room with the black man. Those elevator-box Isuzu’s would crumple like a paper cup in a crash, but an American truck would crush a car as if it were rolling over a Pepsi can. When I was a kid, all I wanted was to drive trucks. I flunked out of high school, and only graduated at all because my father paid for my diploma. When he tried to send me to college, I applied for my CDL. The truck is something, you can hold the wheel, shift the gears, and you can slip and weave your way through traffic creating a moving work of art from above, a gradual and easy quilt of metal. It’s something you can hold and define. Mr. Smith pays me ten bucks an hour, and Harry and me aren’t allowed to join any unions, but at least I can drive.

A jeep honks and wobbles next to me; the truck had wandered over into his lane. I wobble the truck back into my lane, and stretch my eyes. I’m on the bridge, chunks of ice push off each other in the river below. Harry leans his face against the glass, and snores softly in the passenger seat. I pinch my forearm and read the ATTENTION sticker on my overhead visor to make sure I’m awake. The pinch hurts and I can read everything clearly. I think I’m awake.

Red brake lights flash in a line of blinking square eyes in front of me, and I nudge my way across the bridge. The diesel engine shakes and hums turning my muscles into taffy. The shaking stretches my muscles tight and they start to snap apart. The sharp snaps and constant pain forces me to bend forward, pressing my chest against the steering wheel. Harry’s still asleep, always asleep, in the morning, at lunch, when I turn off the truck he’s asleep.

The car jerks to a stop and I stare at Harry. I want to sleep like Harry. I close my eyes for a moment; the backs of my eyelids become a movie screen, and Jim, Jr.’s walking across the screen holding his mother’s hand, and she’s smiling, her mouth isn’t tight like it usually is.

Honk-honk-honk. My eyes are open and the car in front of me is a mile ahead. I push my foot to the floor and catch up. I get off at the first exit to Gray’s Street, my hands are at ten and two and I blink and blink. I’m awake, I know I am, but my eyelids start to slide down again, and I feel the rumble-rumble-rumble of the square grooves on the shoulder.

I pull into the dock at the Gray Street trucking company and turn off the engine. My veins tingle again, I think about it, I think about driving Jim, Jr. and Tuesday, and I force the tingling to stop. I remember his mother. My eyes close.

On Jr’s first birthday, I was passed out in Tony’s apartment. I had been awake, or stoned, for three days, and didn’t know what month it was, much less the day. I spent his second birthday in jail after I stole my father’s car when he was out of town, and my mother refused to bail me out—she thought I needed to sit and think for a while. On his third birthday, I showed up drunk and gave him an empty bottle of whiskey. I passed out on the couch, and woke up when I heard car doors slamming, and angry whispers being exchanged outside.

On the day of his birth, I was wrapping my arm for the first time. Maria always thought mainlining was going too far, but without her around Tony convinced me, “It just gets you fucked up faster.”

But this year’s different. I’d never thought of him as my son, until he thought about me as a bum.

It’s seven o’clock in the morning, and I’m struggling to sit up on the smooth, black leather couch in the house of Maria’s mother.

“Maria, get me another beer,” I scream. She shuffles out of the kitchen, her new Gucci dress still clean, while I look at the sweat stains and other stains on my t-shirt and jeans. My new clothes are disgusting. Maria hands me a beer and sits down next to me. She opens a bottle of water and takes a few sips breathing steady deep breaths.

“You want a drink?” I ask holding the bottle up to her lips. She pushes it away and raises her eyebrows into a tent on her forehead.

“What’s a matter with you? Are you too holy to drink with me now or something? I don’t see you for three weeks, and now all of the sudden you’re better than me,” I fire back, smiling, but I think she can sense I’m only half-joking. She sips her water and leans forward, wrapping her slim arms around her knees. I pull my jacket up from the floor and push my hand in the pocket. I pull out a clear bag with a powder in it that looks like sand.

“I know you’re not too good for this.” I slap the bag down on the glass coffee table and smile. The bag always brings Maria back to life.

“You wanna chase some dragons with me?” I say. Maria stands up and from the morning sunlight outlining her profile I notice the little pouch in her stomach.

“I think I’m going to be sick, Jim,” she says as she jitter-walks to the bathroom.

“What’re you sick from? Withdrawal probably, you need to do some of this,” I say. I hear her grunt and the echo of something plop in the toilet bowl. There’s a picture of Maria as a baby on the coffee table. I lay it flat on the table and spread some of the powder over it. I roll up a dollar bill and lean forward until I hear Maria walking back into the room. I hold up the bill and point to the table, but she waves her hand no.

“Don’t you ever get tired of this Jim?” Maria asks as she moves closer to me.

“No, we’re just having fun.”

“Don’t you ever feel bad?”

“No, why would I feel bad? I’m not doing anything to anyone but me,” I say. I lean forward towards the lines, but Maria’s voices stops me.

“Like a few weeks ago, I had lunch with my mother and Lindsey, and Lindsey talked about her new job, and her new husband, her new baby, and my mother smiled and smiled. But when they turned to me all I could say was that I was thinking about changing the wallpaper in my bedroom.” Maria sits down on the arm of the couch. She cradles her chin with both hands and plants her elbows into her knees.

“Fuck Lindsey, she’s a bitch, and your mom doesn’t care what we do,” I say leaning back on the couch.

“I wish she would,” Maria says.

“Do you really wanna live like Lindsey? All she does is work and wipe that brat’s ass. For Christ’s sake, remember when you two were kids and she gave herself a bedtime. She gave herself a bedtime.”

“Jim, I’ve been throwing up a lot lately.” Maria’s voice becomes soft static.

“You should go to the doctor.”

“I went. She says I’m pregnant.”

“Oh,” I say.

“Oh? Oh, what?”

“Just, oh, I mean we can’t have a kid,” I say.

“Why not?” Maria says.

“Why? Because we’re not parents, Maria. That’s not our thing.”

“I’m tired of our thing, Jim. I want a new thing, a thing that doesn’t make me wear sunglasses at night, or makes me think of some lie to tell my sister and mother over lunch.”

“Oh.”

Maria walks over to the coffee table and picks up her baby picture. I grab her hand and pull her in close.

“What’re you doing?” I say. Her eyes shoot from my hand to my face, and she grunts and winces under my grip. I can feel her bones pushing together under the pressure of my hand.

“You’re hurting me Jim.”

“Where’d you go for three weeks, Maria? Are you cheating on me? So help me God, Maria, I’ll fucking kill you,” I say rising to my feet.

“No Jim, I swear to God I’m not.”

“Then where fucking were you? You didn’t answer your phone, you didn’t tell me where you went; you just said you’d be back.”

She tries to wrestle her arm out of my hand and the baby picture drops to the floor. Pieces of glass crunch under her feet, as she jerks her body away from me. She cries and whimpers as she slices her feet on the sharp little daggers. I look at the floor and see the heroin floating in puddles of blood on the glass shards.

“I went to a detox clinic, Jim. I’m doing everything I can to stay clean,” Maria shouts in my face. I let go of her arm and she stumbles into the kitchen. No one speaks. I don’t know what to do; I don’t know whether to sit, or to pick Maria up, or clean up the glass, or take my bag and leave. I slowly notice Maria’s breathing, I can hear every breath, I can see her ribs expand and contract. It sounds like she’s about to say something, but she doesn’t.

I move towards her, but she slides back against the marble island.

“They told me not to see you anymore, but I couldn’t do that Jim. I thought maybe, maybe you’d listen to me, but now I want you to leave,” she says hiding her face in-between her knees. I move towards her and bend down placing my hand on her head. She shakes it off, and pulls her body in tighter.

I nod. I pick up my bag and coat and walk out the front door. The sun warms my back from behind the house of Maria’s mother, but in front of me, I see gray clouds trying to wipe away the blue of the sky.

In the white room, I talk about my past. The old black man has me write a biography, something to tell me what I want to do when I get out.

I grew up next to a trucking company. As a kid, I’d hear the dem’s and dose truckers talk about the rest stop on I-9 in Iowa where a waitress with the biggest tits in the world worked. “She’d blow anyone,” the one told the other.

They’d talk about tossing a scoop full of pills in their mouths and racing down the midnight roads towards anywhere. They’d tell stories about bar fights, car fires, and working their way through a tropical storm. “Truck shaking and bending like a cobra in the sand, but I got it right,” the others patted him on the back, told him he was a real man. Not some ivory palmed sissy.

That’s what they talked about the most, the driving. They’d talk about town after town, and not about Mr. Johnson’s new pool, or Bill in accounting who could do a great duck imitation. They never talked about elegant dinner parties where people smiled, and drank two glasses of champagne and politely snubbed Mrs. Roberts because she divorced her husband last week and was seen shopping with the captain of the college football team. They didn’t know about that stuff; there was something more important to them.

They’d talk about something real and changing, something you can’t learn in a book or classroom; something you need to see and tell. They’d talk about cash money, about how long it would take to get that house, to get that nest egg. They farted, burped, snorted cocaine, drank flasks of whiskey, and didn’t give a shit about the rich folks in the cul-de-sac next door. They knew who they were. Some were working eighteen-hour shifts to support their families, honest, blue-collar, American men; I didn’t care about them. It was the tough ones, the didn’t give-a-fuck about tomorrow ones I observed from my window late at night.

I remember my father asking two of them to quiet down, “My son is trying to sleep,” he told them.

One spat a long line of bile at his feet, and shot back, “What’re you gonna do if I don’t?”

“Call the police,” my father said, his voice getting stronger with the threat of the law.

“Call ‘em then, tell Jerry I said, hi, and if he hits me with that nightstick again, there’s gonna be hell.”

My father walked back into the house, and never bothered them again. No matter how much noise they made, he knew there was nothing he could do to shut them up.

The shaking of the cab wakes me up. I rocket up and slap the dashboard for the steering wheel. Harry laughs from the driver’s seat. I lean back in my chair and sigh.

“I thought you lost your license?”

Harry shrugs. I press my face against the glass and look at the clock radio. It flashes 3:00

I’m walking out of the white building wearing my clothes. Clean and fresh, I feel new. My father sits in his car at in the rounded circle. He hugs me and smiles. I see two bags in the back seat. I ask where my mother is, and he places a hand on my shoulder. I ask why two bags are in the back seat, and he sighs and looks up at the clouds.

He says my mother couldn’t come; I take that away, even though I try not to hear everything he says. He says she wants to believe I’m going to change, and he thinks I might, but she’s tired. He’s tired; I can see his head fighting to stay erect.

We drive downtown, and I get out in front of an old apartment building around the corner from a Deli. The white sign flashes The ontinental; there’s a silhouette of a C at the beginning. He shows me some pictures of my son, and we have a few cups of soda. We talk about the weather, the Phillies, and the new TV he bought for the living room. He says he’ll stop by as soon as he can.

“Where’s Maria?” I ask. He stops at the door and waits a moment. He says he doesn’t know if he should tell me. “I’m clean, I’m going to prove that,” I say. I promise not to harm her, and not to see her, but I want to know where she lives. He picks up a pen and writes a phone number on a napkin.

I study the photo of Maria and Jim, .Jr in their backyard. They’re smiling, but there’s something on her face, something’s missing.