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I’m not much of a night person, or maybe my sleeping mind is very much of a night persona. I love getting up too early too much. When I was 5 years old, I would wake with this great excitement, flush with the knowledge that “The Lone Ranger” would be on TV at 6 a.m. That vivid greed to join the day remains with me to this day; the chair which waits for me in the living room each morning is like a saddle my haunches leap for, straight up out of the depths of sleep like a breeching whale. Reaching for that gold coin in all certainty that it’s there, somewhere just above, ahead. I tucker out usually before 10 a.m., -- no duh, by then my day’s already had a long march. Maybe I’ve simply learned on which side of the night I belong. In my boozing years there was always a sense of violation in heading out for the night’s immrama through the bars; the breathing, seething darkness seemed stern and occluded, remote, sighing scornfully with each step I took further out the door. I hada passport but I was no citizen; my desires and needs were suspect, even criminal, and out there in the party vistas I always found myself trying to wedge or sandwich into, insinuate myself inside the borders of that noctal disdain. The later I stayed, the more foreign the bar’s milieu, watering hole morphing into spiritous bog and then downright drowning pool, my fellow revenants growing pelts and canines, yapping and tearing at each other in bloody joy. Nothing like a bar’s parking lot at 3 a.m., the building black and shuttered tight, only a few cars left in the lot -- ghostly remnants of the lucky or the taxi’d off, the barmaids soon to get off, me -- a few lightposts casting insomniac phosphor over me, the unsleeping eye, the eye which refuses to close while the world lies dead. Criminal, like the way an alcoholic thieves a life doing business with whiskey bottles. We’ve got it ass-backward, cart before the horse, runner’s buzz before the burn, noctal bliss before nuptial ring, triumphal will before actually doing anything worthwhile. We learn in reverse, bitch-slapped by errancy, taught the measure of evil by our boundless wallows in it. I’ve found for myself that the treasures of the night aren’t assaulted through midnight as welled from the first thoughts of 4 a.m.; maybe it’s just the difference between a searing and surrendered mind - both approach the altar, but the direction is fateful. *** So here I am, abed at 9:45 p.m. on New Year’s Night, the bedroom up on the second floor of this bungalow like the bridge of a schooner, my bed facing the sliding glass door which opens onto a balcony overlooking the sea some 30 yards away. Breezes are stiff but not really cold so I leave the glass door open and float off in this boat of a coffin of a boot of a bed, rocked by the rough orchestrals of the seaside night. I lay a good while before finally falling off, not sure what was clinging to wakefulness. When letting go proffers the purest relief. Why is it always a fight to the finish, reaching for booty which ends up falling through our hands like water? What fools we are, surficial, perambling territorial predators of the wide savannah, eking our mastery from the outsides of flints, cartographies of conquest, the feel of booty in the hand, pearly and gold, relishing the thieved satin of flesh. Up and down the shore money has heaped itself in time-share condos and mulitmillion-dollar getaways, like the gamblers we are, betting the house against the sea, greedy for Pluto’s abyssal treasures, the full measure of Poseidon’s gold palaces founded deep in the earth’s salt womb. Dayside enterprises -- our furious making -- are all cashiered in bronze and fire and shaped by blades and scythes, the brutal alchemy of rude stones stuffed back in the mother’s kiln in order to cook up some new homunculus of power -- steel, oil, radioactive cores, bytes. The bright tide towers, tsunamis, crests now, for better and ill -- what secret of nature cannot be penetrated and seeded and nurtured for our benefit? So asks the arrogant animal will of our species. But then there is the night. Lamp it as we try, it’s just too big. Ten feet away from the streetlights by the road night reassumes itself in a vaporous dense black breathing. It has an appetite for us that feeds on what nourishes us -- canines which take joy in the tearing of flesh and meat, the glut of blood. A deep carnal hellfire which augments the good graces of night. Or take the sea, whose surfaces we have fully sailed, whose perils have been drastically reduced by innovations of keel and sail, GPS and satellite weather. No matter how thick the steel underfoot, it’s always a raw balance of ballast spreading wings over water and drowning depths pressing up from below. Each wave carries both a threat and promise in its caul, like a two-faced Janus, nightmarish of the rogue and dreamy of Tahitian satieties. Outside the opened glass door, it’s blow and wave-crash in a low ostinato with a few honks and blatts from the sax player next door mixed ink, with further riffs added by that couple arguing yet again. All of it out there, just beyond my closed eyelids, like a big pair of hands clasped around my head, fingers over my eyes, thumbs gently rolling around and around my temples, a deep voice whispering Release ...
Or is it Farewell
or Darling
or Down the hatch
or Daddy
Fading at last, my thoughts loosen into the murk and dissemble, show the last traces of me sinking in the last shape I assumed before disappearing altogether, darkness reaching for me like a falling gold coin.
I was wrong about the boat I’d seen that afternoon. It wasn’t a fishing trawler but the salvage boat, out panning for deep gold on New Year’s Day, searching for the drowned lode of a squandered Spanish empire. That former state trooper called later night, sweaty for a drink, needing to talk with another drunk. I tell him how hard it is for me to avoid the whiskey sometimes, when I just want to drown away all memory of Jan and Brendan, when the work of taking another breath just doesn’t seem worth it -- when my tongue trembled to carve those three words which kills most drunks: Aw Fuck It ... I tell him it’s pure grace that keeps that drink from my lips, poured into me when I say a prayer for help; grace to that there is a next right thing to do and reaching for it is like reaching for a white chip, surrender with shoe leather. And it always helps to have a fellow drunk to tell about it, and I thank him for giving me the opportunity to do so. He sighs Yeah and seems to settle.
We talk on for a while. He asks me what I do and I say not much, just got the settlement, going to try beach life for a spell, regroup, do some odd jobs, write a bit, stay away from women, you know, He tells me that the boat had found some interesting stuff that day just off Malion Beach, some larger iron tackle, an intact wine bottle, even a few gold coins. The crew unloaded from the boat excited and motivated, telling him to get things in order for a three-day foray the next day. There was a feeling of immanence in the air, even he got caught up in it, but when he got back to his trailer that night it collapsed, turned to its other. He just sat on the couch staring at the spot on the coffee table where he used to keep the framed picture of the family before he couldn’t stand to look at it any more. I tell him he can reenter that picture if he keeps working on this thing. Just keep coming back, I told him, stick around for the miracle. Sometimes it’s just platitudes, but drowning men can hold on to those where sufficient men simply flounder down around them.
We ring off and I return to my iMac, diddle a while on some prose, randomly open folders containing thousands of poems that never emerged from their digital stables. I know I shouldn’t but I then open the folder of photos, jacketing myself in an iron maiden of memory: Jan and I over her parents place in the first flush of courtship, sitting together at a piano banging out pop ballads from a cheat book; Brendan sitting on the beach at three, eating sand; the three of us at Disney World, snapped by a Norweigian tourist whose thumb blurred the bottom left of the frame, obscuring half of me, that part that survives. I look outside the big rear window at the sea, all black now, the sky above in dark grey toil, whorling, breezing hard. A few lights flicker far out and then nothing. That’s where I see my face in the window, a distant phosphor, travelling like a shaman’s swooning soul into infernal regions of woundedness, ferrying a song that has black wings and a terrible beak as far out there as it needs to go. Jan in a coracle, Brendan in a cradle spinning and turning on that tide, no longer needing me, sighing for me to let them row on to oblivion, but how can I? My face like a moon tiding them round the world through its oceans, remitting something as they revolve. Or maybe just waiting for that grace to hand me a sextant up from the wash, something that will lead me back to this next life.
Whatever. I power down the iMac and settle down with Moby Dick for the night -- again, again -- eerily solaced by its big black music, its unavoidable end. Winds picking up outside, whipping and bracing the house, opening lower stops of the organum, cooling things off. Melville’s gnostic tongue lashing back at that wind, defiant of its God and white agency: How can I pray to that same God for help? Yet I do. Maybe the only way to Him is through Melville, through his hell, aboard his melancholy black ship where mercies are small and tides are too great. At least in the reading.
There’s nothing emptier than the broad flat littorals of afternoons by the sea; even under cloud cover the light hammers the mind into triumphal affirmation, a servile thrall. I swing in the hammock on the back porch watching the sea strum against grey skies, those firmaments mashed monotones of aether and salt, straining out, zero-summing any individual nuance. Solitary walkers down by the shoreline, pelican squadrons flying over the surf, a bobbing trawler far out in the grey blue -- all these signatures are leeched of present life and rendered into a singular photon so dominant as to door its vast dark other, those semphoric wraiths of past and future oblivion.
I doze, rocked by these eternally external motions of presence and absence. A wave washes over me and I find myself on my hands and knees of the porch, prying loose a board, then several, climbing down to the foundation of the house. I start to dig in the earth there, scrabbling until the outline of something appears in the dirt, apparently the roof of a much older structure. Then I’m walking through the living room and kitchen of this much older house which is familiar and not, as if a lost version of myself or some ancestor had once lived there. I try to read it as if I had pulled a crumpled draft from a wastebasket, exhuming a life from what is still there --- a Navy uniform hanging in the closet, a box of flatware and cooking utensils on the counter. I smell Jan’s perfume, a scent so sweet I feel my face pressed between her breasts, sniffing deep what she had once scented, my mind swooning deep into the calyx of some lush graveyard flower.
On the floor of a living room empty of furniture lies the doubloon, heavy and gold, like a manhole cover. I’m afraid to pick it up for whatever well it might uncap. I hear a woman’s voice calling my name faintly once and wake up. A girl is calling her dog down by the shore -- c’mon Duke, Duuuuuuke, Duke! The long steely-stately afternoon comes back into view. Nothing’s changed. I stay in the hammock for another hour as the day wearies on, wave after wave after wave exhausting itself on the shore, the breeze incessant, neither warm nor cool, neither close nor far.
I have no idea what to do next. History has brought me thus far, depositing my bankrupt heart here at this house of dreams by the sea, using the most damning means to bring me to this place, this unresolved end of stillborn beginnings.
Maybe that’s just how it goes. In the Grail Romances, the tale always fizzes at the end; Perceval wanders on, no longer to find the Grail Castle, Launcelot ages past his amorous steel, Arthur floats off to hibernate in the bosoms of his apple-maids, Merlin wanders in the enthrallment of Nininane. Those stories are like dreams, substantial and yet not, tearing every which way and then just sort of hanging over in a fading drone of waves at the shore.
Maybe it’s just the misery of mystery waking up into history. The end of the quest is a dissolution, as if the circumstances which prompted the journey -- hot blood for action, the promise of treasure, a young man's dream of dragon slaying and moonlit maidens -- ages past a midpoint and deflates, empties of that earlier purpose, eventually gives up the chase, and turns around, clopping lonely on a steed headed back to dayside sunders and surrenders.
My pen is poised over this page, not so much hesitating as stalled, awaiting what to say next. Asking the angelic orders if there is anything left to form adequate words for. But I’m not writing anything, just composing thoughts in a hammock by the sea of my 50th year, reminding the absent orders -- God, love, vocation -- that their birthright still has a pulse.
***
I watch a guy emerge from the house next door and walk down through the dunes onto the beach. He’s carrying a black case that looks like it houses a musical instrument. The sax I heard last night? He’s probably around 30, with dark, professionally groomed hair, wearing a Chicago Bears t-shirt and cutoff shorts. Pale as a northern whiteout. He gets down to the tideline and sets the case on the sand, letting the end tips of waves tickle its edges. Stands there scanning the horizon a while, then bends back down to open the case and haul out the saxophone. He grips it in a familiar way, fingers playing the stops, hefting it up and down, sideways and back, relishing or remembering its heft and feel; then swings it way back and then forward, as if to fling it with all of his might out into the surf. But he doesn’t let go; I only imagine that bent gold object whirlybirding out and plashing into cerulean foam and disappearing fast. Maybe he changed his mind, maybe he never meant to ditch sax in sea; whatever the case, he sets it the horn back in its case, clasps it shut, then hauls it up and walks slowly back toward the house. I try to make out his face; the details don’t quite focus but I read serenity to it. Or maybe the eyes are so empty they metaphor serenity, the way an infinitely gray afternoon by the sea is all a soul could need, forget desire and it plural, errant and dystopic hooves. Whatever. The guy passes out of sight and I return my gaze like a keel back to the sea, my mind content to stay lost there.
I make it to an AA meeting every noon, a few miles inland, on the frayed south end of a small town called Woodbine. The club is located in a cheap storefront of a strip mall that is mostly deserted now, a Chinese takeout on one end and a laundromat toward the other. Most of the other businesses tanked when the Wal-Mart opened a ways to the north. Our storefront was previously an x-rated video mart; we still get the occasional furtive video voyeur walk in the door looking for trade, often drunk or stoned. They never stick around when someone welcomes them in. Not the party they were looking for.
We’re a small group and a mixed lot, run-of-the-mill drunks from every life stripe, bankrupt salesmen, retirees and bikers, housewives with bad perms and guilty young men drying out their consciences and probations before climbing back on their bottled Ninjas, nice cleaned-up church-going types and cross-addicted ex-cons with more ruinous baggage than anyone can shoulder. And there’s me, the recently-settled man of means whose wealth is haunted with lead vapors making all thought of it repugnant, living large at last by the sea with its emptiness his housemate and lover and muse. My three years of sobriety are thin walls against the sort of cold winds blowing inside my house these days, so I keep close to AA, staying alive not so much for myself as for them, the newcomers so desperate for help. Whatever good person distills in me through AA I see as the one working a legitimate way toward Jan and Brendan in their ghost suburb far away.
Today it’s a small gathering, maybe ten or so. A beefy guy around 60 whose been coming to our meeting for a few weeks is beginning to open up, uncorking his story. He says he’d been sober about six months now, coming to his first meeting in Leesburg as part of his probation. As he talks he stares into his coffee, avoiding eye contact with the group.
“It was another of those rock-bottom nights in the last months of my drinking,” he says in gruff voice. “I had closed down my usual watering home and was driving home in a blackout. I must ran a stop sign and come to in the intersection, because I veered wildly and then was up over the curb and careening onto the front porch of a neighbor. There was a loud crash. I crawled out of the wreckage and fled home on foot. The next morning when I stumbled up out of bed, my face all bruised and my right thumb broken. I didn’t remember the accident at first but knew I had done something.I peeked out the front window to check out the damage. Blackout drinkers do that, you know, always fearing what they might find on the front bumper. The car wasn’t even there.”
He paused to look out the window with that faraway gaze we all know. “Then I got the call from the station. You can’t know the shame and remorse I felt as I stood there in the bathroom, trying to button up my state trooper’s uniform.”
His eyes teared up for a moment and he took a sip of coffee. “You would think after all the things I had seen as a result of drunk driving that I would be its worst enemy. I’ve seen teens who were friends of my daughter hurled through windshields and split in trees, children cut dead from the wreckage, their mothers still holding them in their laps. One night I came across a guy walking down a country road with a bleeding stump where his right arm was. He had spun out and crashed into a tree, walked up to the road, collapsed there, and had been run over by another drunk driver, severing his arm. While we were getting him into the ambulance he was begging the parameds for a drink. Another night we found a car up in the trees one Saturday night that had spun off an I-4 bypass. The guy up there was hollering that if we didn’t get him down right away he would sue us or kick our asses when he was freed. And I turned out no different.”
He paused again to sip his coffee, big blunt ex-Marine fingers holding the styrofoam cup like a chalice, gentle, still. His voice almost a whisper. “Well, I’m here. I still can’t look myself in the mirror, but my head isn’t hanging lower every time I approach it.”
***
After the meeting I shake his hand and tell him to keep coming back. We stand outside somewhat awkwardly, bound by dark deep tides, the surface rhythms of our lives almost incomprehensible to the other. He lights up a cigarette and we talk about small stuff. Traffic on US-1 slogs ever-heavier sludgy wan sun of Over-Developing Florida, rigs and SUVs and Harleys vying for the best lane in a vast arterial juice, still on the make, on the go, still trying to grab the gold ring.
Don -- that’s his name -- says he’s just doing odd jobs after being discharged from the force, figuring he’ll work forever with all the staggering credit card debt he’s amassed. Lately he’s been helping a salvage crew that’s been hunting for a Spanish fleet that went down a few miles offshore in the 16th century, doing maintenance and cleanup mostly on the boat while it’s at dock. Apparently they’ve been pulling stuff up of late that suggests they’re close, bits of iron, a glass bottle, a couple of coins. I briefly tell him my story and that I’m living now on the beach, but I don’t mention the doubloon. Give him my phone number and tell him to call whenever he likes. He palms my card, slips it into his shirt pocket and grunts a thank you or a farewell, shuffling heavily off towards his car. I hope we’ll see him again but sometimes cats like him just flow on through, never finding enough hope to leave the past behind. Or maybe sometimes the past takes a long time to walk from. Don’t I know it.
Later, I walk the beach. Here, close to the Georgia-Florida border, the Atlantic has a steely feel to it, neither cold nor balmy, brutal enough yet prescient of tropics close by. Three-foot rollers stroll in from the horizon, gathering size and lustre as they approach the shore, pounding in an ever-regular tympani of rise, curl, and crash, strolling fading booms down the shore.
A few others are out, a young man walking a shaggy golden retriever, a retired couple walking fast against cholesterol, a lone surf fisherman in a chair looking disconsolately at a pole stuck in the sand with its unflagging line attracting no interest in the surf (bottom-nets further out have scoured the area clean of fish). The early morning light raw, like the silvery sides of the fish that guy will not catch, grey and meaty and flailing.
Back when I had a family I used to get up very early every day to write poetry, before all rhythms of the working day. I’d sit in an easy chair in our living room with the window open to suburban dank dark and pour words in wavelike rollers across and down a page. It was like walking a shore, or watering one, milking some teat of the sea with a mind hungry for sea salt and the divine aura of blue waters at first light.
The real deal, I’ve discovered at this later date, is much ruder and solitary and silent, full of an empty magnitude. I would trade this entire Atlantic for just one more morning of finishing the day’s poem and heading upstairs to wake up next to Fran, there in our highly mortgaged bedroom in the middle of that profane suburb, hearing her sleep next to me, those long measured breaths incomparably deeper than any inked exhalation I could summon to the page. Her back to me, the long undulant curve of shoulder to waist to hips down to feet, eternally close to my hand, receiving my gentle stroking touch with something much finer than sex though intimately spooled through it, like a finer gold thread.
The light of that hour distills bitterly here, like vinegar, sopping the beach morning with an uncomfortably hard breeze, making the whitecaps of waves boil cruelly, as if no birth was here possible, only endless repetition. Ah well. I’d been walking an hour or so, getting ready to turn back around, when I saw something glint down by the waterline. The remains of a wave foamed up over it and then fell back and the object was still there, sticking up out of the sand like a proffered toe. I walked down and lifted up what turned out to be a heavy coin; washed it in the water and looked at it again and it was some kind of doubloon, gold no less, the markings on it nearly worn off, just the faintest tracery of empires long drowned.
All kinds of stuff washes up here, eventually, bits of spar and tackle from lost boats, plastic six-pack holders, champagne bottles, a telephone pole, a bit of fuselage from the Columbia space shuttle that exploded over the Atlantic 25 years ago, TVs and gas stoves and refrigerators, a 15-foot beached whale, naked dolls without heads, trees washed downshore from flooding rivers, house-timbers flung from hurricanes, stiletto pumps and lacy thongs, shotgun casings and a landfill’s worth of plastic and aluminum and styrofoam containers, empties all of past assaults and reveries on the sea, all remaindered eventually here to be discovered and hauled off.
There are Spanish galleons out there in the deep, split by centuries-old hurricanes, their vast booty littering the descending Atlantic shelf; now and then after a nor’easter, some of their treasure washes ashore. But it’s rare. The doubloon freights its heavy gold in my palm, cold, distant as Pluto, the mint of something tossed and lost. Brendan’s hair was like gold, catching the sun as he played in our back yards like a sail that turns light into something more gossamer and billowy, pure drammage of heart.
After he was buried next to Fran there was only whiskey, hell’s gold poured in measureless quantities down my throat. One day I sat in our obliterated family room, heavy Scotch glass in one hand, .38 in the other, trying to negotiate a frequency between the two of them, begging a way into there, reuniting our home. But I couldn’t pull the trigger. Maybe they wouldn’t let me. Today I believe it was a God’s grace, though that deity remains faceless, bereft of any theology other than I am a part of that blue divinity, like a fish. And He not so much a higher power as a deeper one, deeper even than the sea. I joined AA, put the plug in the jug and worked my wounded way on to here.
I turn the coin over in my hand while the waves crash and resound, alone with eternity. Is this a message from them, like a cup handed up out of the wave? Or is it some long-overdue payment which the $1 million settlement failed to settle? Is it too late to matter? Should I keep walking and watching the shore for the other coin, fitting both over my eyes for my final row home?
I stand there scanning the tide, but the sea doesn’t whisper its intentions. It never does. I pocket the coin and keep walking. Up ahead a family is staked out on the sand, obviously Northerners devoutly spending New Year’s Day at the beach. The man and woman in folding chairs, white as skinned whales, watching a boy down by the waterline pouring buckets of sand onto a large lump which may yet be a castle. The boy almost greedy in his hauls, piling those dull gold grains as high as they will go.
New Year’s Day, humid and warm, drippy with a faint, indifferent rain, adding a eerie sheen to the beginning. I sat out on the back porch feeding the cats at 5 a.m., slow rollers working in from the Atlantic, freighting what’s left of the shore in heavy signature the print of a moon that can’t be seen.
The couple who are wintering in the house fifty yards down from here are grimly partying on with friends who don’t quite seem intimate, their voices hoarse, unmerry, toasting hooch to some raw goal which may end as soon as the coming of day. Someone’s playing sax on the back porch, attempting an old torch song with blunt fingers, like they hadn’t picked up an axe for ten years.
I lean back as the cats attack their food with wet mouths, my mind composed of that sound and the surf and the jackal party next door, not so much thinking as breathing a nous whose cerebrations are sensual, riffing the raw material of the moment in a jazz no more ably than that dumbass of a sax player, honking and fretting squawky notes not even to himself.
I’ve lived here for two years since my wife and child were killed in a freak accident. Jan was driving Brendan to his elementary school when a driverless garbage truck careened into an intersection. It caught our Honda Civic in its midsection on the drivers side. It took an hour just to cut through the wreckage to get to Jan and Brendan and by then they were gone. I got the call early in the afternoon. I was slogging through a layout, so deep in a tangle of color schemes and fonts that the officer’s words didn’t register, as if they were deep underwater. When I began to comprehend, the words changed altitude, they were like meteors slowly finding their marks on a long empty prairie. Fran and Brendan are buried in the same cemetery as Fran’s parents, mom-and-son-sized marble markers like opening quotes of something I have to say before adding my endquotes.
The cats finish off their meal and amble off, tails up in droll curlicues, faintly visible beyond the porch light as they lay about the yard preening themselves or disappear into the dunes. Light will soon be warming an invisible seam between black ocean and cloudy night.
The thought of that suggests there is still something left to do. Before bed last night I started some noir thriller and there was an epigraph from Irving Thalberg that went, “The end of a story should be what the beginning is about.” -- Maybe that’s what has me posting my story, inserting myself into a fiction which has a poesis but is no poem, as I am neither protagonist worth mention nor author of any note, just one cache of the world’s harrows and hallows, offering a sampling of iotas between.
The sax player next door has given up on the song; the last note wheezes into silence and then I think I hear him weeping softly. But it may just be the long grasses in the empty lot between these two houses, sighing in late night breezes. A bottle crashes inside the house and the couple are screaming profanities at each other. Still living large. Me, I’m just going to sit here and let it all decompose into the new year, letting night ebb into raw morning and feeling my way into the finalities of beginning again.
