Luke Goebel - Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

Know how I got her to come out with me? Here is how. I had a car and she was tired. Her feet! You have heard about her feet! This was in old New York City. Our genius teacher had told stories for six hours without saying um, without boring anyone to tears, while making life better than it had ever been on paper and not even using paper. So, she left me, which I needed, I suppose, to write all this, but I would burn this and be with her if she asks me to burn this and be with her.) [Too late… A joke!]

I'm telling you I was wrong with the Julie Townloves because I was wrong in that I was only in it for myself.

So… we had run and gotten and come back. [I wrote this when Catherine was still in Italy, and me and her writing back and forth and me still thinking I was the one and that I had made it through my idiot youth mania and found “real” life to be with her. Carl still alive. Plenty of heart and will and time ahead. Pancreas healed up and back to banana shape and relative size. Having survived the Indians. Having survived jail and rehab and myself and found myself a grown adult, one who wasn't kidding around anymore, who said “for keeps” all the time and meant it. Still trying to get my talking mind to speak something, something big, something wild and free and in the music of myself, something utterly new in utterance, but being delusional as our teacher called me, after I wasn't there anymore in his class the next year, him in front of Catherine, him referring to things I had written down and sent him in the mail that I had driven myself nuts with at the keys in Spain, when I had taken Catherine on the back of that motorbike, all 50cc's, on the Spanish freeway, which isn't called a freeway, because, guess why? Guess what place isn't a place I would call free? Guess what country and countries, for reasons you will see and have already in part seen, I would not call free? As in, try and start up a conversation with someone there while walking around an old church or museum or in the club? As in, try and find a wild bear or even an eagle or a fox out over a certain landmass where certain white people and darker mostly white people come from and live? As in, guess who doesn't think of himself as being a white person exactly, though he is a white person? You'll hear more about that landmass and what happened that went so wrong to me on that landmass. For now, let's just for Christ let this story finish without any more out of Yours Truly because I don't want to talk anymore. AND you won't hear a word out of me in the next story after this one.]

Only I had not rushed up and gotten and come back with Julie. I had smoked and bit my fingernails and hung my arm out the window, pushed wheel and pulled stick, commanding the driving through the West with the radio cranked with Julie. (Not the dog. This is a different type of story. This is talking about something through something else, remember?)

In the Interstate Motel, her blonde pussy was open with her robe's slip open and Julie was working herself out on the California King — (the person, remember!) and we were both open. Us human kids. The sun through her pink lips and in her open eyes — hair all free from her head but still in her head at one end and rock and roll coming through the radio and freedom galore in a motel with a window.

Oh, to be free and young again in a motel in a wide-open country with animals. Pine trees. The smell of water in summer by a river.

The sun was slicing through the blinds and sitting in a wingback in the room. I was handsome and proud and nervous of the feelings I had inside of me watching Julie in her nudity.

(Guess who I am not talking about? The one I am here to talk about, Carl. Meaning I don't know how to talk about Carl, but I am getting to talking more about him, and here's a hint where yours truly is [was] right now [then] writing this [that]… Tier Drop RV Park. Here's another hint, I'm not mixing one place up with another. Here's another hint: when someone dies there is often money left over in policies. Here's another hint, that makes a person who lost his best first friend and only brother want to cry in the RV park and guess who has the old wet face? Guess, what? Who did I call when I landed back from Europe with a brother not living anymore, my only brother, who is better than I am and I talk to at nights driving alongside a train on Hwy 8 with a light on and the engine going and me going and going on to nowhere, someplace else, and when cresting a mountain with a radio tower so planes don't hit the mountain? Guess who was on a plane and standing at the back of the plane and looking at the exit and going nuts inside himself — who was considering opening that plane door and going out of the life like the only person I ever knew who was my brother and would say, You're good, I love you, I'm proud of you: you just worry too much, you just have anxiety, there's nothing wrong with you. I was in Europe when I got the phone call. Thought it was the motorcycles first off. Howling and screaming…. I cannot tell you what this was like. How it haunts me: that moment in that room. Just a room. That pause before I heard what I was told I needed to sit down for to hear. How much I can't tell you about him. How the whole world could have sooner been blown to Hell, was what I thought for the first year after. Over and over. Guess who took me in a cab when I couldn't breathe out of a place where everyone was going nuts to rock and roll and said to the cab driver, with his arm around me, my brother's giant warm arm, said, “This is my brother. I love him. I want you to take us to such and such address?”

Guess who was shaking because he was about to open that airplane door except he had to get home to take care of what had to be taken care, which was not what should have been taken care of, because I didn't take care. I called the old teacher when I got to the ground, pacing up and down the airport, hyperventilating, throwing up inside, having no idea what to do, having bought everyone presents, having done the unthinkably wrong thing of buying everyone presents. Just a man in the face of the unthinkablest personal tragedy, falling back on old habit, buying presents, coming home not empty handed, but by God, can you imagine buying presents, can you imagine!

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The old man answered my call. He knew my name by voice. He was a pin a thousand miles into the earth holding me to the ground when the door of the plane was not opened and still I was falling. Guess who said what needed to be said? Guess who can't tell you what that train feels like with that light on standing on the side of the highway on the track? You know what it is like to sit with your brother, after all the bananas of growing up in a crazed home with crazy people, and facing the world, and crashing the mind, and never having been in the right mind in the first place, and two brothers and a sister sitting together in Hawaii, which you will hear about, one sober, two drinking, and just sighing a breath of life out into that tropical air and laughing after a shit wedding of our mother, and feeling like there were two people who you really knew and who you could feel inside you? I'm pissed off about how much I know about the stars and stripes. You cocksuckers in Europe! Get a bear. Get two bears, male and female, and get them to fuck each other.)

So, I was roasting a smoker toasting up California and its fruited plain and Julie's fruit was shining and we were rich and I felt the sunshine on the carpet's plaid pattern and on the checkered wallpaper and also on the pictures behind glass of the shadow and dogs hunting in the woods. Oh dream of the alabaster city, as we were just above it as in America the Beauty. Liberty was our nakedness and my knife was across my chest because I liked it there. There was nothing but time and freedom.