Luke Goebel - Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

The adventures are over! The adventures that led us to here and there and no more sailing around Puerto Rico on a motorbike, or running New York in search of the greatest editor of all times, the editor Gordon Lightning-running. The editor Cuff Cuff. The editor Solomon Everbloom. That great editor in the sky, up in the penthouse, up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, up there smoking joints in his shorts, at his ivory table, me down below running amuck trying to get a postcard from him to say I am the one he's been waiting for, boy, to call me his boy, to call me up and say, ‘You're my boy, Kid, you have spake like no one has ever spaken, German talk, so and so, you're the future of American Letters, etc.’ How about a joke? Yes, I was running a muck waiting for my name to come out of his lips on paper, his Injun lips out of a wild leather jewboy grown insane face in New York reading Salinger, ripping off Salinger, wearing a hat with a feather I found for him, a Bald Eagle, me not naming it and not even having a face except for my face, wanting my name in lights, running wild all over with my face under lights, trying to really wear jeans, like a Colorado kid, a real live Kid, like so many men in jeans from Colorado from the famous stories of famous books that Solomon Everbloom read, and I read, and you read, and me trying to get myself some more pussy from Catherine while I didn't even have a face, falling so in love without a face, being seen by her and really being loved by her and suddenly being Real just as if my name really was in lights, trying to get an adventure, having an eagle land on my head, trying to find the Indians I knew from pictures under glass in grade school Ohio, where my brother Carl and I went to grade school, and my kid sister Marie, and but the adventure is over, Boy, it's time for chores. Here's the JOKE: A man tells his kid never to go into the adult bookstore. He says, “Don't go in there or you might see something you don't want to see.” So here's the punchline. The kid goes in and there he finds his father! How do you like that? Having lived all over America. Having prayed. Having been nuts. Having been in rehabs, jails, having jumped and leaped from my brain with my body into the streets, now in a coat and tie, teaching college, with time off to go bananas.

Anyhow, the truck is a grey Ford in the sun. My shirt is off. It was when I thought of this.

You want to know what my big brother was like? He brought people to live in his home, he gave my father flowers on holidays, he walked around with sausages wrapped in paper towels in his pockets and shared them — he could smile so you understood Christ is better than books.

What it was that really got me to think of this, after all the time in New York City, the bars in New York City, the art shows in New York City, the cups of coffee in New York City, the blue and white paper cups of coffee that taste like coffee, the Library in New York City, the Catherine who looks better nude than any woman you've ever seen, the streets in New York City — the palm trees in San Francisco when I walked around with a bandaged foot and a golf club in San Francisco — where the ocean-bound bums covered Fulton or Geary, where the Mission creeps along or rides on bicycles or bums dope or stomps in the streets, or on the streets of the Tenderloin where I walked faceless all night chasing prostitute transvestites for nothing but a look, too afraid to do anything but look, where I saw people living in broken down cars, where drunks wove through the night, down to Fillmore where the black dudes blared their music and the lights were all on in the buildings and I walked with my hands in my jeans with no face, for six years, and ended up in a Peyote hut with Indians I was too terrified to look at, as they knew what to do and I didn't, when I woke up without sleeping in the dawn of ice on ponderosa and horehound and the only love I found was Catherine and my own and my family — from the cardboard orange juice days of chores — and my brother's, Carl's, who I grew up with who had sad brown clean eyes and caught a fish through the eyeball on a first cast in the mountains of Montana. He caught it. Who with my sister we formed the three of us who could take it all and push onward. While fishing off a silent canoe. My father was there as a young father of ours and what got me thinking about this all was being shirtless and seeing the holes on the truck, the little black specks I mean on the truck.

My dog Jewely is out here.

Or was when I got the idea. The big willow is weeping in the wind, or was. It's a sunny day with the water hose in the grass and a blue bucket with a wash cloth and suds. I live in a neighborhood now. The first thing is to get the truck wet. Then you sink your hand into the soapy water in the cold bucket for the dish rag. Spray down the grey truck in the sun with the water from the hose. There is music to work by. A guitar then a voice. Drums. The drums keep the ground while the guitar travels out into the world beyond words. Then the singing gives us the heart, the gold Chalice that old Joyce wrote about and Gordon Lightrunning knows by heart in his golden heart all alone in his apartment on the Upper East Side eating steak. He wrote me a postcard once and it said I was a citizen for sure for finding him that Eagle Feather and for what I wrote about it, even though later he told me it was nothing to write home about. I showed everybody that story about the Feather. I showed it all over the place. It got me a bowl of soup, some nookie after Catherine left me for the Spaniard, and first place in a journal contest. Oh, and it got me a gig editing in NYC. Well, the singing is more than the guitar and the drums together. I have sprayed the truck with the back window cracked and water has gotten inside of my brother's truck which I have to take care of now. Sometimes, after the palm trees on Fulton and the Palm Trees at rehab number four, and the palm trees where my brother and I went as boys to see the old alligator they had to spray with a hose to get to move, and the palm trees on post cards, and all the while and all the adventure, and the stark raving around in jeans trying to be a real man with a face, and all the chores and the books and old Gordon Lightbloom, I can't hold it all in anymore and I have to look to the sky at the clouds and the blue and the drifty clouds of a Saturday at work and listen to the music and cry some of those tears that feel half-fake for as hard as I've tried to ride the horse with my guts, and to travel this globe, and to win old Catherine who I will never stop loving, and to be a good brother to my brother, and then I remember my big brother as big as any man around when I would hug him, and his curly long hair and motorcycle sunglasses and pistol in his pocket or truck, and him saying to me on the day I was leaving for my last adventure so far, him saying, “Why don't you just stick around, Man? Don't you want to just stick around and spend some time with me?” And how could I have known but I should have known what he was really saying. He was saying help me out, brother. Be here. But there I went like an idiot trying to mean something in the world with my name in lights and nothing but horseshit and there was the last time I saw my big brother until he was gone and I was carrying him through a church crying my eyes out and throwing up inside. So eat that, Lightbottom you editor from Hell. Life! It's not chasing old Catherine around. It's not kid stuff.

The music is the drum that holds you to the earth and your sex, desire, will and want to fuck and stay, the guitar takes you traveling, and the singing is the golden cup of feelings. Bells also do this. An album used to be an album, where we knew the musicians were making the impossible sounds of music — so we listened closely. I was listening closely to the music, and I had gotten the hood of the truck that is my brother's Ford all wet. I turned the spigot off on the side of the house. I turn the spigot and the water stops spraying on the brick house from the ring of the hose that attaches to the spigot. I had been to the hardware store in this small town in Texas and walked the aisles. Oh, boy, do they have stuff for chores. And so this is where it all ends. The eagles, the peyote, boy, did I tell you about the peyote? The way the ash spun in the air above the fire in the slowest spiral, and how I saw through my brain instead of my eyes, and still do. But the eyes didn't get it right. Moving everything. Do you know what it's like to try and really wear a pair of jeans after that? To really live in America? To be in East Texas, well, that's the only place to be after all! For a time. New York, give me a break? Do you know what New York looks like after the ash spun like that? You need a palm tree after that. I have no palm trees in the yard here in Texas. I have a yard to push a mower through, a manual mower! I still haven't figured out how to look at the sky since that episode with the Indians. But it doesn't matter now after my brother has died and I have to wash his truck and do some chores. Don't kid yourself. I'm licking wounds — but still kicking.