Luke Goebel - Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

He is with me, them both, as men, Carl and Coach, Catherine is not with me as she could be, though she calls from time to time — informs me I can propose in eight more years, tells me this and that, does she still love me, because I won't quit, because my teacher wants to pay me for the marital product for his girlfriend and his use, because I said, Hey, Pal, this one is on me… overnight shipped to your door, you know… since… I just don't want anyone to get hurt , and he laughed, and he said that's funny— Ha —then he calls me as I am in SF and I say moratorium , and he threatens to call my parents and the police if I won't give him my address to pay me back, and I say I don't give a damn about the constabulary forces, and he's been through the knife and he's fine — I say I will trade the juice for this and that word, for this and that totem, because I want to tell him about the Eagle Feather and he says let me read this book if I want his this word and that word for the book, and I say I don't want anyone to read this book, just write the following and told him what I wanted him to write — which do I even have to tell you he refused; told him I just want to be on the next tear and the next, chasing that which cannot be held, to the sea and spume and spunk, to the city, to what is out there… too many goddamned people you care about… and the one that isn't here… all of it in here and out there ((P.S. Don't come to SF! Learn to work on a rig. Learn to take out stripped screws with a chisel and a hammer, learn to run on gas, learn to have your piss the color of egg yellows and smelling like gasoline or diesel, learn to conduct a wild machine through tight conditions, to get delusional enough to never stop, to be up up up, for the people who need you, because you need them, because it's about what kind of a story you can make for yourself so while driving it's you and big Carl, and you and the teacher, and still burning for Catherine, and Jewely eating a dry rabbit that looks like a muff — the humor of that — a big dry bunny merkin — and the girl in this story you have to sacrifice, you have to take advantage of, you have to push on beyond, girl or boy, you or them, if it is not true love, because you have to be shaking rattling and rolling through cities in search of what's out ahead, manic, trying to take care of everyone, though you didn't save your own, though you failed, can't go back, dreaming up moves to write, San Francisco, what a letdown! Oregon up ahead! No place to stop but to stop in and see your great sister, the one who keeps you alive, you two go sit together both of you feeling together what it is to have lost, both, your shared brother, the kid sister who is the only one you let run your ship this way or that way, your sister the artist, your great family, you in a coach with no money and no fame and so it's onward, never stopping, never dying, scribbling the adventure in your head which is always better in life than on paper, getting yourself big and ready, being a real man, or woman, a real nut, making something to last a little longer than yourself, your moods, your age, your teaching class, and when I came to SF and it's dead city. So here is the end of one journey, and it's time to move on, time to find the next great disaster, the old teacher with me always, as he was with the great so-and-so and the other great so-and-so except of course not, as I am like the child and he is like the Coach, and they were women and men to men and would have told him fuck off Coach and buy your own lube! , and New York is where you want to be, LA is where you want to be, up and at it, in the sun action, or in the weather action, trying to make something out of yourself, trying to figure out how to present yourself as yourself, making up your myth, finding a way in…. Fuck San Francisco, Fuck all except having something funny to tell, so that when your brother calls, you don't let him down, because you let him down, and tonight the great jumping bean I know, one of the greatest, will land in Oakland, and we will launch for the north, still with the back tire leaking air out of the valve that cannot be tightened, and if it blows we go side over and full of 60 gallons of gas and twenty of propane, rolling further up and out there , up the winding logging road to Eureka, driving like a Wildman, flying the curves at 80, 85, hair-pinners, wherever it goes, after the end of this journey, in the old city, overlooking the Cliff House, overlooking Land's End…)) and so here it is, that lousy story). Out There beyond the tables, past the candles and the bar and the chairs and stations, over all the seats with the couples having dinner, over the head of the daughter of J.P.B., his name not stated to protect the person he is — she who works at a bar and restaurant on First in NY where they actually serve a cocktail called the Vision Cleanse, which really is a cleanse, cayenne and maple syrup and lemon juice, plus liquor, but can I drink it, no , and farther over the bar where the Japanese Commercial Print Photographer keeps drinking Roy Rogers and telling about the real-deal-Indian-Witchdoctor who showed him how he would die one day but gave him a silver-trinket belt buckle to keep him from it (this guy rubbing it in, showing off that he has what I've always wanted, knowing that he is safe and will never die, and if he does die, he will be protected by the Spirit of the Universe, given to him direct from a myth of the West of Indians of the American blood-in-us of the Indians, of the wild romp of the storytelling West, and he has it and I am anxious as shit with myself nuts as nuts, and this story is just some dumb story I wrote for the first story I wrote in the teacher's class, and I never got it approved of, but here it is, the worst one in the book — I'll try and find something in here to spruce up and make into a story for you, you incorrigible needy wild brain of a person, seeking the heart of the meat of life, which I can and cannot give) — and to the door, over the heads of the waiters and waitresses, past the bottles of wine and water and the bread baskets — beyond the tiled floor with the table legs rising — out to where there are no more mosaics or passageway arches, the windows open where the shutters extend and air passes from the bar into the street — there on the sidewalk is a man struggling to bring himself back into his wheelchair; he is setting his wheel locks and he grunts as he swings the chair upon its casters, arm-crawls on his chest on the sidewalk, him double-checking the clamps across the wheels, he groans, with his belly and groin and legs all dragging, pulling himself against the weight of failed parts, trying to lift himself, his chest, to seat level, reaching for one padded armrest he grips the cushion in the rain — but he slips, a hand upon the vinyl padding slips, and he falls with his chin cutting across one silver footplate, scraping his neck and face as he moans to the traffic and the headlights, but no one stops to help him, arms flexed, fists drawn together, neck corded, he shouts but only to submit back onto his back, humping, dragging himself across the grime, first there is all this — first there is this — but this is not first because before this, before this man and his chair and sidewalk, before the bar and me sitting at the bar, watching the kids running down the street until one collides into the back of the man's wheelchair and the man is jostled, struggling admirably, before all this, there is the waitress and I am out there looking for parking, en route to see her, because I should first say I am seeing her; I should tell you I am (was) seeing this waitress (so simple I was then, so young and stupid, now I have engines to learn, whole wheel assemblies, axles, transmissions, real things, new books to write, if I ever write another, so much lost, but still the great city in the darkness propelling me to get on the viatic trip and ride), apron, black pants, black shoes, whose name is Maesa, but she is not first, because first is not her, first there is me, the I of this story, and I am first, selfishly, unavoidably, using Maesa for a place to stay in old NYC (before meeting Catherine) and more sex and driving through the Village alone and finding nowhere to park, trying to get to where Maesa works and to park, but I hardly know the Village at all; my father knows the Village well, grew up here, and so maybe my father is first, but how can a father be first when a mother could really come first, and surely a father can't know a thing about being first such that a mother does (wrong!), and so certainly Mother must come first, and always did, with her fortune and her man's belt and powder case, and if Mother comes first then perhaps women come first in this story, and if women come first, then Maesa — but before Maesa, her own mother then, and so this is to get ahead of ourselves, as you will see, because Maesa's mother means exactly the round woman suffocating in a photograph on Maesa's wall, ahead of ourselves now we are, tubes up the nostrils and her in a wheelchair, too, back getting her photograph taken, and so now there is no way but to get ahead of things and say I was with Maesa this night long past when the man was thrown from his wheelchair, after I had been sitting at the bar and saw what happened to the man, and I thought to go and help him and did not and knew that my father, certainly my father would have helped this man because my father is a good man, a Christian man, although he was born something like a Jew, Fatherkovitch, but met Jesus or found faith, after he found drugs, and when he had found drugs was back running around the Village over the same streets as this restaurant is cornered, Maesa's restaurant, with the Japanese Print Photographer in his tight t-shirt still yack-yack-Yakatori-yacking at me, cartoon bird on his chest, and the man in the wheelchair struggling to rise, pitifully, strongly, on the same sidewalk where as a boy my father went running curly-haired, and one day stopped running and looked at his young foot and saw that it was made of glass and he saw a goldfish swimming inside his foot and this was when he was still very young, and America was aware in the heart, and he was excited to have a pet goldfish and he was eating dope all the time, in that time before me I am always trying to imagine, and I thought I would imagine better one day, but have not, and have found myself farther from — (as it must be for my father now) back then my dad was in the Rockies of Canada, those purple white topped hills under the blue of sky (where Brother Carl caught the trout), lost one night under the sky and stars, and someone gave him a Bible and said, “Take this and yada yada,” and that was all, he had found Jesus Christ and himself and he is a good man, my father, and certainly he would have helped that man on the sidewalk, let's not forget this man is real, now, or was — and on the sidewalk, and I was not helping, not helping, watching, only, although I had thought to help him but was too afraid since so much was happening all at once and what if the man had something in his pants, a needle I thought, and I got prodded, pricked, or if he became violent with me or any number of things and anyhow weren't you supposed to be able and fend for yourself in this town, then I thought about my brother, Carl, who is also first before me (he was still alive when I wrote this worst story in the book, and I didn't save him, and I was insane to write, but you have to learn one part of the motor coach at a time, when you are nuts, when you have the itch, when you are bound to go down with America, in pursuit), and certainly my brother would have helped the man since my brother Carl is strong and lives in Oregon and anyone from Oregon would help anyone (see how dumb I was, what a kid? Having no idea we'd lose him) — especially a cripple in a wheelchair — who of course had no real power to harm me, I thought, and my brother rides a motorcycle the size of a mule and smokes cigarettes and packs a 9 millimeter and a smile to disarm the world with his big shoulders and genuine face and long Christ-like Buddha nature and his curls, and wouldn't go to the bathroom anywhere but his own place, not to take a dump, and would laugh and laugh at anything, and was so strangely himself, a great man with his St. Bernard, and his motorcycle, and his pistols, and his pot and his drinking and his great giant heart and laughing, and surely this man would not harm ME, and then I thought perhaps otherwise, and didn't know but what if it had been my mother sitting at the restaurant, what would she have done — who knows, other than she would have made a big production, made a speech and been seen, would have sermonized (trying to give the world something she has found, too, her delusion, her desire to show and to do and to make and to take hold, though maybe she would surprise me, as she has done all my life, and go help him, put her hands on his, be human which she has done), and if her parents had been there, certainly they would have done something to help, my grandparents from Ohio so clean and sharp, or made Shy the bartender do it, my grandmother would have said to him, My God, Shy, YOU do something, the man is hurt, you are strong, or my grandfather would have helped the man and then she would point this out, too, saying, ‘Look he's however many years old, etc.,’ but then maybe he would do nothing since he had a once terrifying incident down in New Orleans when he was a boy and besides he's eighty-three-or-so years (the same age as my teacher) and only about five-eight which definitely isn't big enough to help a broken man who needs to be lifted up into his wheelchair and who is shouting at the whole world of the Village and also my grandfather looks like a handsome millionaire turtle with white hair combed over and bottle glasses but he's no joke and everyone knows that's not the sort of man to… but I could have helped that man, seeing as how I am six-foot-seven-and-a-half and had not even moved from my seat with the Japanese man showing me his belt-buckle again, for the howmanyth time, so proud he wouldn't have to die, he wouldn't have to die, from a real Indian Witchdoctor (me still all flipped out on peyote, which now is just a little squeak and wink and the knowledge that there is nothing that cannot be surmounted, and there is no death, I pray, plus all the heat waves of vision), and out came Maesa flirting by and she was giving me the eye-lined-sex-eye while this woman in the corner was giving some man the sex eye and I was thinking how there was no way to try and make things work with Maesa, suddenly, when I just only wanted everyone to get away, back off, and give me some room, to be clean, again, and to be alone in the desert at night, tingling, but when I conferred this upon her later on — how I wanted to get alone from her, everyone, everybody, Maesa started crying and we struggled for hours in this really pathetic sort of fight that lasted too long and didn't get to any point and in the middle of fighting she wasn't wearing anything but these high-over-her-hipbone panties and I got interested and said I took it all back, “I take it all back,” I said, and put my punctuation inside her so that we were having unsafe sex again, as lately I've been having this thing with the caps and inside Maesa on her giant comfortable bed I looked over and there was the picture of a sort of old woman, not too old, tubes running out her nose and rotund, obviously not going to last, I figured, and was it a really recent photograph, no, which I could tell from the hair and dress and the color, etc., and fading, and when we were done, not because we had cum in ecstatic leaps but because Maesa started crying again, I asked her who that woman was with the tubes out of her nose and it turned out, sure enough, her mother, collapsed lung, lung died and mother started smoking cigarettes and died altogether which made Maesa cry even more in my arms and I started rubbing her back absent-mindedly, as my father always did for my mother, before she left, my mother I am saying, and I started thinking about when I die and suddenly it was happening — there was this big Native Chief in the desert with a raised mound of dirt and he pointed to the SKY and said, “He wants to talk to you,” and he had a look about him, like stones, like knowing things, like an old river, and blew a whistle of eagle bone, “you dumb shit,” he said and pointed up again, and I went up and God was huge and fat and smoking a black cigar and laughing so I could either start laughing, too, or be left out of the joke entirely and so I started and he said, “You're done, Pal.” And I said, “Great!” and hoped he'd like me and we went into this white space and I was about to disappear when I looked down and Maesa was still crying and there I was having a hell of a time as usual — thinking about dying and meeting with Indian Chiefs and smoking black cigars with God and suddenly it was then too late and I was back in my body on the bed feeling guilty (now, let me ask you, do you think I now think of dying? No. I am here for the duration. I am here to help and to be here for the ones I love, who will go before me, and I will be there, standing, throwing up inside, weeping in love with the earth and the spirit of life and all that horseshit, meaning I will be there holding the handle and walking through church, throwing up inside, meaning I will be here, for each person who needs me, anytime, to make up for my inability in every other respect of living) so I started scratching her back again and realized that this very woman with the fishtubes up her nose was who Maesa had come from, and it hit me then that Maesa's mom had come first before Maesa and I remembered Maesa telling me her father had been told to leave by Maesa's mother and then Maesa's mother died and Maesa was just about fourteen or so and suddenly she had no father and no mother and was on her own ever since and I thought, Jesus Christ, everything is fit to go wrong with this girl trying to make me into her mother and father at once and she'd take anyone and I remembered the man outside his wheelchair who I didn't help, so much to speak of, but did go stand next to and watched him struggle awhile and asked him if he needed anything, or some help, standing six-foot-seven or six-foot-seven-point-five inches beside him, and I remembered, holding Maesa in bed (after the sex, during which I was thinking all the wrong words, panicking with my insane Peyote nervous break down shit) how he had said to me, with the light from the streetlamps orange and making the world look so slow, the shadows smaller, a little eagle tattoo on his arm, “You think I need help from you? You think I need anything from YOU? Like I'm the one who's crippled and you're the ONE who rides the elephant? Well let me tell you, Boy, we are all cripples down here. Cripple heart. We all! Each and every one of us. To the damn death,” he said and started laughing so I started laughing and he lit a black cigar and he smoked it, smoking and smoking and smoking until there was nothing but near white, and I could see nothing except smoke and I was so glad to be out there, with him, all alone past the tables and chairs and the couples fighting and Maesa crying, and my mother with the children running down the street and the bottles of wine and the Japanese fellow yapping and all the bread in the baskets, as many as they could fill, overflowing with bread, and Shy the bartender and my grandparents smiling and waving, and Carl riding his machine, and my kid sister, Marie, always a genius and really I just truly missed my father a tiny bit, there in the smoke, feeling myself disappearing — my real father — and I wished I could see my grandfather one last time; wished I could see everyone again like I had wanted in that peyote ceremony, as I have ever since I was a boy, as a man even, to see my father and grandfather and America and suddenly I thought back to it all and whispered, ‘So long, I'm heading off, Cocksuckers. Thanks for everything, Cocksuckers. Thank you. Thanks so terribly much. Thanks for nothing! It's been real. I'm off! Gone.