Luke Goebel - Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

(My brother was baptized there too. We wore the same lace gown. He then I. We were like little Christs and grew side by side toward our trouble making heartfelt lives. We had our differences of course. We didn't stay two by two. We each had our path, but by the end and the way through we never turned a back. We always loved one another. In the end and all through he loved me and let me grow up the way I did, into the thing I am, the man, if you want to say that, and I always felt and feel he was the secret greatest. There's more of him to come! [He died at 33, year I am now.] I cannot believe he has gone on, rode on ahead, not here with us, me, crazy, and my family, dead. But I wrote this before he left.)

(I smoked a strange drug with an Indian when I was a younger man and went back to the church ((on the drug)) in Ohio with my spirit. You leave your body on this drug. I saw the stained glass windows pinwheel with light and geometry. They were always beautiful in physical presence. But this was warmth and light not from the sun through glass but from God, or from the soul of the self, the universe, from the tomahawk of what was loaded up for me in that pipe, which the brain lets rip when you die, which also makes you dream, and there was no anxiety of being — anxiety that being separate from the universe is the source of all pain and suffering — I wasn't separated. I felt God beside me and in me and I in It. Looking without the eyes. Feeling God behind the poker face. I felt the world after death and it is beyond impressive! Hours later a car flew off a cliff before the rig I was in, which had a driver who'd picked me up hitching. Who had one leg but never mind that, the driver's half leg. This was real life. The car that flew off the road landed at a forty-five degree angle and nose planted in the river, standing on its grill in the water like an enormous arrow. I rushed down a herder's path and held a boy alive and in shock and felt parts of him go soft. He looked into my eyes, which back then were clear and I showed anyone. Others had come down switchbacks from the road high above. “You're doing fine,” I told him. I felt the easiest sense of calm. Old God and me looking into him with great affection. A helicopter came out of the sky. Times like that the world isn't doing too bad in America. Boys and girls coming down in a helicopter to save him and his girlfriend, she in worse shape, who knows if she lived. He did, I believe, but her, who knows. They lifted them into the sky. There we were, finding our own way home from then on and forever. I was sort of wearing a half dressed outfit, by this time, and the man with the half leg had me drive him to the Mission in San Francisco, my golden town. The driver, now I'll tell you, had lost half his leg in a single nod off on junk. Circulation. Me in a half dressed state, barechested in youth. When he scored and shot, what was I still doing there? He filled the center chute with his own blood mixing with the junk. I guess I wanted to see it live, and then he shot some up to the sky. There was, on the ceiling of the RV he drove, blood and brown from before. What was my cue? Arrivederci, I was off, and not to cocksucking Italy.)

Sometimes I get to thinking of her over there with Manuelo and Italy and how it's every girl's dream to go to Paris and fall in love and then I get in my little rig and drive to walmart in town and walk around at 2:00 or 2:23 a.m. and look at anyone. Look at all those people. I have seen an odd armadillo in the grass tottering on its legs — and I think of all the men who ever loved and lost and went out to outer space to live with themselves.

Then a song on the radio plays as I drive over the stumpenly remains of a freshskinned skunk torso twisted in the roadway stinking through the boat of my car's undercarriage.

She's over there in Paris with Manuelo. She was visiting Italy only, she said. You have got to love the thing that will not cease itself or be killed or let itself die. Guess that's not us. Once it's gone, how can you love it? Is it something else you are loving then? When it comes to sexual love? Mother my darling… Mother my dear… I love you… I love you.

I picture them in Paris. I have never been there, but I imagine the streets are prettier than here.

In a desk in this home I rent there is a box of Mirado quality writing pencils — the best! There is a small clear sharpening box taped to the box of pencils. Somebody taped that there. Let me tell you, they're the best!

At the grocery store tonight, there was a man with a very nice telescope. He was waiting for fools like me who wanted to look out into space. He moved the position of the telescope and found the moon. I looked into the scope.

I once saw my sister being born. Me and my brother did. I watched a man in a uniform with a scalpel and blood dripped into a silver bowl and I watched my mother scream. Yell, really. Yell and yell. Whoop. Whoop. Whoop. Mother my darling… Mother my dear….

Saturn was so far away, even through the telescope, it looked like a little trick on a screen.

Manuelo isn't half the crazy that I am. I can prove that, too.

Why do you suppose he did it? Why are we so interested in space? Whose stars are those you see at night? Who has got his hands upon Catherine right now? Her skin lit up green in a dark moonless bay? Her whole heart alive. The man with the telescope, his eyes were screwed up like he hadn't spent much time looking at things down here. What do you think makes a man do a thing like that?

YOU WANTto know how dumb I am, Yours Truly? You want to have any idea what sort of… it's embarrassing. It is. I am ashamed. I mean, this is the sort of dumbshit nonsense that I am talking about. But when I tell you this, you are never going to want to hear from me again. I mean, you will not want to read any of what issues forth from out of me after. None of my harebrained ideas, schemes. You are going to want to cut ties, I am saying. Well here it is. Here's the hair from my brain. It is nothing, really, that you cannot probably get behind. I moved to East Texas. You probably know, I left New England. So long. Left New York City behind. Goodbye. Even as mostly a visitor. A little post teaching and editing on weekends, scratching nothing out. Nothing much. But I moved to East Texas, and started taking up in this little hundred acre ranch. Got some dogs. You remember? A puppy. An older dog, came with the place, too. A third that came over days from the neighbor's trailer. I had to do something with the trash, the garbage. It was the night before a trip. I should tell you, ice storms had wracked the country. Is that the word for ice storms? I'll leave that to the papers’ writing and the news people. That's what they are good at mostly, for, the papers. Coming up in verbs having to do with snow, or ice, or weather. Terrorism and what idiots think about everything — reported to the whole world on our new news. You get it, don't you? I'm in the weather like you are also. It was snowing in East Texas. It was not going to be cheap, heating this house. I'll tell you that. There were cheaper years to move to Texas. That's for sure. I don't have a mountain of cash. That is for sure. To rent a hundred acres and heat a house. But it is what it is, right? I figured I needed to have a ranch to be in Texas the way one should be in Texas. I'd lived in the roach and rats buildings in New York City. I wasn't going to get an apartment in Dallas. I was on a ranch with steer that screamed in the night and coyotes in the near distance and Jewely. I had found the Eagle Feather. I was going to always love Catherine regardless. I was a man in the wild world. It's what it is. So, it's snowing and I had all this trash.

I got the goddamn dogs. Got them riled up. I can't find my lighter. I'm yelling at the dogs questions out loud. Gathering up the plastic and the trash, ‘And there ain't nothing like a friend who can tell you you're just pissin’ in the wind,’ Neil Young was in the room over on the record wheel. (I hadn't lost my brother, Carl, yet. Carl left us a few weeks ago. Over two months ago. (Over one year ago.) Carl is gone. Carl died in his bed. [Two years ago.] There isn't anymore Carl on this planet we are stuck to. Not here, in terms of a body, in terms of our living Carl. In terms of that Carl is my only brother. My older brother.)