[We are rerunning this excerpt from our first book-length message in a bottle, available HERE, because the events described herein also occurred on a December 8th—somewhat apropos, the anniversary of John Lennon’s death. Happy Xmas (War is Over).
Read previous excerpts ONE, TWO, THREE, and FOUR, as well as a stealth excerpt HERE. Fun fact: this is actually the oldest written portion of the entire book.]
Chapter V
Yes, I have been my mother and I have been my son.
_______
And then I awoke.
A blinding light shatters my dreamless sleep. “Time to get up hon,” says Mom, barely awake herself, “You’re gonna be late.” The clock-radio reads 6:00 AM. I slide slowly out of the bed till my face rests on the carpet. I need a cigarette and I don’t even smoke. I’m here, in a room, in a house we moved into 8 years ago when I was 9 but which has never quite felt like home.
I also know I’m awake because my nose is running again.
And it’s a nasty cold, too—head’s stuffy, throat scratchy, whole body aches, and I really should just stay home today and sleep it off—and my parents aren’t hard people either, I know full well if I stayed home, they would ask “Are you sure?” only once, then allow me the day in bed. But I’ve had this cold all week you see, and I got up every other day this week with this same cold because there was just so much I had to get done these last couple weeks before Christmas Break and I can’t very well end the streak of suffering through another school day now can I, so up I go—
Dear God will I still be like this when I’m older—
______
She lets her hair drip dry a minute. The longer she waits the more the anticipation heightens. Then, like in a film, she flings it back and admires herself in the mirror.
The blonde is gone—her hair’s bright red now.
If only this were Ireland, or Wales, or Liverpool, or someplace else impossibly romantic, she’d wear her red hair up and play her Celtic harp on those Gaelic beaches while she awaited her lover. But instead, she only shows off her red hair to the blinding Arizona sun.
______
So I stumble into the bathroom where I peel off the retainer from my teeth that I’m too timid to stop wearing—I resent the retainer, and I’m ashamed I resent something so small and petty, yet still I resent it. Billions live below a dollar a day, there are wars in foreign lands, and even my own High School is populated by the weary eyed denizens of broken homes, drunkards, abusers, addicts, and families-in-flight fighting to survive without legal residency. What have I got to resent? A cheap plastic strip that preserves a small fortune in orthodontic work I never asked for? For being raised in a stable, nurturing, middle-class American home? For winning the socio-economic lottery? Poor you, you poor bastard. I scarce file my grievances for their triviality. My misery and melancholy would be laughed out of court.
I have the palest skin I have ever seen.
______
Right away her teachers, her Church leaders, neighbors, and folks on the street, here in the Arizona of Barry Goldwater, all note and whisper to each other that her eyebrows are blonde, not red, just who did she think she was fooling, or just what was she rebelling against, or just why would a blonde want to be red—
______
Maybe I won’t go to school today. I do live in a free country and enjoy full use of my limbs and mental faculties, do I not? Maybe instead I’ll go on a walk-about into the forest. Or speed on up the freeway to get lost on the streets of Seattle. Or drive out to the frigid coast and walk into the sea.
But deep down (and not even that deep) I already know that the most I’ll do is skip school to sleep off a cold, and it depresses me horribly that this is what passes for teen-age rebellion for me. I am no Prince Hamlet. Nor am I a Joseph Smith, emerging from some grove of trees with visions of the Father and the Son and the Kingdom of God upon the Earth.
Good story, that one.
______
Maybe she just wants to dye, and the color doesn’t matter. Maybe she finds blonde kitschy and fake (even though it’s her natural hair color) and wants something that feels natural (though obviously fake). Maybe there is no natural, no fake, only red.
______
These scattered thoughts do not so much weigh as meander through my mind as I crane my neck down over the truck steering wheel to peer through the small clearing of fog near the bottom of the windshield, as I drive rather carelessly pass pine trees, lumber yards, Outlet malls, gas stations, scattered Churches, and lonely Christmas lights left on all night, while I scan the radio fruitlessly through a series of static-ridden Seattle and Portland stations too far out of range, searching for something that isn’t commercials or Country. My brother and I are on our way to Early Morning Seminary: a series of LDS Church-sponsored religion classes held each day before High School, consisting of rote memorization of 25 scripture verses out of context, dated videos-for-Youth from the ‘80s, and nodding-off teenagers forbidden caffeine.
I will not be attending this morning.
______
Or maybe she just wants the attention. Maybe she hides behind attention. Because when you see the red you don’t see her.
No matter. She’s outside at noon in the oven of Arizona, walking along the red-rock front yards with their blooming cacti and Nixon/Agnew yard signs, while every living soul stays sensibly inside with the AC on. Her childhood was timeless but ephemeral; her red hair likewise fills an ephemeral moment that will last forever.
______
I tap the truck clock radio—it’s off a couple minutes. Off from what, I can’t say.
Five days ago, in this truck, I was in an un-pressed white shirt and tie with another 17-year-old, driving around town delivering the Holy Sacrament to the sick and bed-ridden in nursing homes smelling of bleach and body-fluids, to people on respirators watching basic cable and with only a thin curtain between them and their neighbor. It depressed me horribly like it always did, as I wondered just what on earth we are staying alive for, if this is how it all ends.
In this manner do I keep myself awake while I wait for the fog on the windshield to clear.
______
Once while on assignment at Los Alamos, a low-level physicist was someone he wasn’t, and before he realized it the Reds had the nuclear formula. He’s paid much closer attention to the people around him since then.
So when a Red head one day bobbed down the bedroom hallway, though the kitchen, out the door and into the pounding Phoenix sun, he paid stark attention. By trade he’s a listener, a watcher, of people who don’t realize they are being listened to or watched. And when the whisperers at Church assumed he couldn’t hear them talk about his daughter, he did.
______
I drop my brother off at school. He asks if I’m coming in. I tell him I’m going to park first, which I guess was accurate—I hadn’t said where. I didn’t even know yet.
I hesitate a moment; out of habit I scan the parking lot for an empty space, because for some reason I still want to be honest. But then I rub my face and decide to actually be honest for once and pull out onto the street.
I wait to feel guilty heading home—in fact I want to feel guilty, to know where I stand before the Almighty and hear thunder from heaven declare my sins so I can either repent in ashes or defiantly claim them as my own—
I hold my breath, wait for a pang, a twinge, a sinking feeling.
Nothing.
I feel nothing.
I feel free.
______
Then one day after church, a gentleman (whom he’d noted only in passing resembled a man from Munich he once knew on his mission) took him to task openly for failing to discipline his youngest. His calm G-man reserve, strained by many Federal secrets, chaffed as he was dressed down by the doppelganger of someone who (he later learned in the Bureau) had become a dedicated National Socialist after the rise of the Third Reich—
______
And as the red haze gathers on the horizon, it occurs to me that for all the times I’ve risen this early, I can’t recall the last time I actually saw a sunrise with my own eyes.
And there’s this right turn I always take, after retracing past the Outlet malls and gas-stations, churches, lonely lights and lumber yards, a turn I must make to return home. It’s automatic at this point, a single fluid motion wherein my right arm pulls down the steering wheel and hits the turn signal at once, pointing the truck home.
So I do something I haven’t done in too long: nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not even breathe. The truck shall decide where it wants to go today.
And today it decides to go straight.
______
She gently lays down the needle in the middle of Side A of Sgt. Pepper, careful to strike the narrow space between songs so that it lands on the flowing harp intro to “She’s Leaving Home”. She lays back on her bed and imagines the waves, as they wash the beaches of Ireland, Wales, or Liverpool…
And on cue, father storms in.
“For Pete’s sake,” he declares in as strong of language as his religion allows, “Clare, would ya put on a decent skirt on Sundays? Church ain’t a TV show, and when you attend Church you’re gonna show some respect, you hear? It’s bad enough with the red hair—honest to goodness, you’re embarrassing me—”
______
The truck gathers speed as she crests the viaduct, and the momentum carries me straight past my turn. We don’t even brake. I exhale, a weight lifts, my eyes focus, I start to waken—for real this time. My foot sinks on the pedal. This old engine roars to life. I soar past the last neighborhoods of city limits. I enter the forest, where I have never before been.
I follow the road where it leads. I floor it on the short hills, try to get air on the crests, then hug the tight turns, peak into the left lane, downshift, and blur through the last of the Fall leaves under the shadows of the evergreens. The truck’s a rickety old ’88 but seems to enjoy the turns even more than I do, like an old dog let loose in a field at last.
______
“Well, don’t you worry about that, Dad,” she begins after a pause, “I won’t embarrass you at Church anymore, because I’m never going again.”
She gets up and marches right past him. She didn’t even have to sneak, like that devil in New Mexico.
______
I turn off the headlights as light continues to collect behind the trees. My nose has quit running. The fog is long gone from the windshield. The radio even comes in clearer now. I turn down the heater.
Suddenly the trees open up, as the truck and I enter this a rustic farmland valley—this vision—that I never even knew existed. An early morning mist blankets the fields, like something from a dream dimly remembered.
I hold my breath several times, waiting for the dawn to crest, though it took longer, always longer, than I expected. But then finally the colors fill out the silhouettes, the trees turn green, the sky blue, the light spills through the branches and—
______
She kept her word.
______
—the rising sun breaches the evergreens. It bathes the dashboard, washes my face, blinds my eyes, and illuminates the mists before they melt away entirely. Tears almost crested my eyes, yet I didn’t cry but whispered:
Dear God in Heaven.
It’s perfect.
______
“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” he said a few weeks later, barely peeking his head through her bedroom door, “I don’t care what those other old fools think, and never should’ve in the first place. There are more things than…yes, there are more things….
“Frankly, you can show up to Church buck-naked for all I care. Just so long as you’re there.”
______
It’s enough, it’s enough. I find a shoulder and turn around. I’ll leave the rest of the valley for later, now that I know it’s there.
Soon enough she asks, “Back already?”
“I’m sick,” I reply through my plugged nose, though my head is clearer now. “I don’t care anymore. I’m just going to sleep it off today.”
“Alright, hon,” she says, “I’ll get you some orange juice.”
In short order I am curled on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, and have plugged in the old family turntable (even older than me), to listen to Mom’s original pressing of Abbey Road. There’s something religious about side B, I swear: the way the disparate song fragments, almost without being aware of each other, or meaning to, or even having a reason to, begin to echo each other, blend together, merge together—the way “Mean Mr. Mustard” suddenly explodes into “Polythene Pam,” or how the chorus to “You Never Give Me Your Money” returns triumphantly on “Carry That Weight,” or when Lennon & McCartney cry out in anguished harmonies, “Didn’t anybody tell her/Didn’t anybody see…”—as they become at-one, an Atonement, and literally Come Together in fulfillment of the promise of track one, just before the band broke up for good.
Then there is that near full half-minute of silence between “The End” and “Her Majesty,” an effect often aped but never equaled. I know it’s rich to say anything’s underrated about the BEATLES, but I swear: nobody used SILENCE better than the Beatles.
______
She pauses. She hadn’t considered this. She took the needle off the record. “I’ll think about it.”
______
And then to hear it on vinyl! The full weight of history is in those cracks, pops, worn grooves and collected dust. You hear both the past and the present and everything else in between, all at once. It’s not even vintage I adore; I prefer it when the record’s scratchy, worn out, that much closer to crumbling apart, fragmenting at last and slipping back into eternity, into the silence that begat it in the first place and will preserve it forever—