Luke Goebel - Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

So, I got all my papers. I have been having a case with the writing. I would not say blocked. I would never say that. Not that I wouldn't say blocked. Just not about me. I got about two or four hundred or five thousand crumpled papers in a wooden bin for trash in my office — the bin the owner of the ranch's father built. You'll hear about the owner of the ranch's son, Squeaky, soon enough. Mother my dear , get it? Is this coming together? Carl? Are we rolling? There are pictures in frames in the office of boys, kids I've never met, the owner's brother's kids — or who knows whose? — break your heart boys: big ears with haircuts and teeth. Anyhow, I got all the papers and trash outside into the fire bucket. I hate to burn plastic, but there was plastic and it had fish in it, and there is no garbage service out in those living fields. Really I do hate to burn it. I found the lighter. I got the fire going. It's curling and smoking. It's nighttime and my puppy is part husky. Part, also, mixed. (Turns out she's not husky, but dingo.) It's her first snow. The smoke from the paper is making a shadow that rolls across the white snow in the pretty dark. It is first like the snow is being blown over the snow. It's really pretty. Carl was still alive, remember? Remember. Then I put the plastic on the fire. I know, but it's Texas. I'm flying the next day. The plastic had fish in it. Other sorts…. So I start praying. I am always praying. I start praying to God to forgive me for the plastic I'm sticking in the ozone. I start praying all over around the fire asking for my words on the pages to be beautiful as they burn, and for the words to be prayers, and for the prayers to lift and overpower the plastic fumes. I start praying for man to be good enough to overcome all the toxic shit. I start praying and then I think Lucifer instead of God at one point and it just turns my guts. It's idiotic. I mean, it's imbecile hour on the ranch. Here I am hoping my words on fire will be prayers lifting in the smoke. And then I think the wrong word, again, and it tears me apart. It's so stupid. I mean it's really dumb.

I AM H. ROCyour man, but in love. Meaning I am your man and in love and I am your man except in love. Meaning please figure it out, Cocksucker. Meaning please listen up. Meaning Yours Truly is screwed up and has screwed up on to here, where I am now, which I will tell you where if you are good and pay attention — for once. (Where I am has changed. I was in an RV park when I wrote I would tell you where I was, and I still will tell you where I was , but now I am in San Diego squatting at a university I never went to school at in a giant RV rig.)

I went to the San Diego Jesuit university church this morning and wept and wept, reaching into the celestial heavens, me who came up with the name H. Roc as an alias, as a fiction, and with this dirty story you are going to read; me in church with my spirit Indian non-Indian, nonhuman self, in church thinking the wrong words from moment to moment, in California, on a hill in a great cathedral, in an architectural heavenly kingdom of Spanish-y mission buildings and gardens, hearing the wrong words in church, the old crazy in me of the old lunatic in me who has seen much with his eyes and heart open and his head miswired and the things I see are tilted to one side and then another, and cannot see a straight line, firing too fast in all lines, but still I reached up into the celestial heavens of the Creator of the Universe, and then had a fifty dollar brunch of crab legs and raw oysters and roasted meat and drank sparkling water orange juice and walked around a graduation ceremony and lived through the families and couples.

Say I am a lost dog with my lost dog, only I am not a dog, and my dog is my dog, and I am a man upon the planet who is a family member of all families, but no one wants me, exactly, though I put on a great show of being an acceptable human. Plus my cock is far beyond average and I have a lot of firepower to give. Who wants to be human in these families, anyhow? I'm here. Baby. In California, I am saying, not in the RV park you will read about in a few minutes. Ah scamp!

Squatting in a giant bus, living off the fruit of the land, working around words, in fruit of the looms, in my RV, reading a bit of my old teacher, and remembering the him who no one else knows — because just every stitch and wool and skin and heart of what I know of him is how he presents himself, and how he knows me, saw me, and said to me, My Boy, it seems you never had a home, but you have earned a home, right here, with me, forever, don't come visit, call here and there, up to my neck in pussy, gotta run, but you're my Boy , and how many people is he a father to!

Though I am hereby required to strike it big, or strike out, and then I found him the Eagle Feather, which is exactly what the Eagle Feather is for, for the leader who leads with the giant American heart, the great desert West's heart, the giant world heart, the heavenly heart, the perverted heart, the pussy hound's heart, which means you have to love, oh baby, LOVE — the women you are in with — but you don't want to hear this kind of shit from me, you want to hear how I can't not look at the rear ends and the beautiful hearts of gorgeous California tan-legged beauties in Mass, and their noble looking men, and how I think the wrong words in Mass, and how I am a haunted lunatic nut, and how I got that way: partly how it was having a peyote nutcase breakdown, and partly was losing someone I love the most and then really for true losing someone I love far more than that. I dress in the mirror of this long van in my van's bathroom, my motor coach, 31 feet long, 25 years old, smelling of real wood and a shower, and put on my belt and my seersucker pants and my linen shirt and my boat shoes — and then walk around graduation looking at all the families and the money and how tears roll down my face and I am amazed in church, and how I am amazing, and I can't believe how amazing I am and how amazing the world is, and how amazing church is, and how amazing my teacher is, haha, who always wanted to be amazing, an inside joke, and how amazing California, and how I have an image in my head of my old teacher, and me, and all the wildcrackers full of jumping beans of the Lord and these wild mazes of words we have to construct to make the Godhead. And Catherine. But now you're in for this story about my ugliness and my breakfall down into crazy peyote bananas.)

Julie Townlove and guess who had been up by the Interstate Motel? Me! H. Roc. (The Interstate Motel is a real motel on the way to my ranch you now know a portion about. I transplanted the motel to California. Why did I transplant the motel by the ranch out to California? To talk out of my mouth about my youth into a tape recorder while I was driving, years ago. Julie Townlove I made up as a symbol of my youth because she'd love anybody in town. This was my joke about what kind of a girl I was always taking up with back then. Back when a joint in the park meant, dynamite, women galore. I can't hold a candle to knowing a thing about women. A candle is another thing I can tell you about but I won't. Meaning guess who will tell you?

The candles at the table, I used to stare into them and the light and feel myself going out of myself into the room like light itself. Like the candle was my name. I could feel the light in me, I am saying, going out into the room.

Catherine and I had a glimmer of a hope of knowing a thing or two about each other for a couple of years and I still believe we knew one another, but then we had a real hope of being together even with the self I was with her, in her, beside her, feeling we were working our ways toward facing what was there inside us from our respective starts in life, feeling we could sit at a table together and have it be our table, but look what happened with me and Catherine! Sayonara as the Spanish say, am I right? Ha! No not that I am angry. I'm astonished. I'm plumb amazed. Astonished she went anywhere with me when I met her in our teacher's class and went out to smoke ciggies, I stationing myself next to her against the outside wall out on E. 47th Street and talking to her despite her body saying she did not want to talk to me, but her eyes still considering me. You know what she later told me about what she could smell about me from seven feet away, or six point five? When we would have sex the light would come through us. I'm sure you don't want to hear these stories out of me or watch us in the act.