back to the future

Today I went with my father and his girlfriend to three cemeteries. I saw the graves of his parents, who I knew well, and their forebears, who I did not. I learned that I am directly descended from veterans of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, that my family has roots in this part of the world that stretch back to the seventeenth century, and that a distant ancestor was once Lord Mayor of London.
That’s a rare thing in our culture, to be grounded in so many centuries of history. It perhaps explains my peculiar slant on things, which I inherited in large measure from my parents. I saw that in new ways tonight as Dad and I discussed Stephen King and Japanese culture and the movie Grand Torino. Clint Eastwood still kicks ass. I know it’s not very Christian of me, but I hate gangbangers. I want to get my genocide on when I see them. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.
We live by a code that so much of the world is passionate about pissing on. We are losing ground every day. We don’t care. We’ll die with rifles in our hands ass deep in brass and grenade pins, at least figuratively speaking. To the rest of the world, we’ll just fade away forgotten by all but the very closest (and not all of them), but the rest of the world will never know that every day was a fight, and every day we went to bed the same people we woke up as held victory for us and those we love. We may fall, but we will by God fall forward.
I do not need to be a racist to be proud of my heritage. I do not need to be ashamed of my ancestors to be tolerant, compassionate, or responsible. What I need even less is to be the least bit concerned about how I will be judged by the fickle, flawed opinions of a vapid, predatory commercial nonculture. The gavel is held by One, and my fathers stand behind Him and beckon me to better things. I want to spend the rest of my life answering that call.

lunch date

Friday noonish I am walking downtown to take a dear friend out to lunch. It is about right temperature-wise, perhaps a touch on the warm side. The rain that has persisted for the last day and a half has just subsided. Leaves are falling in earnest now, making sidewalks slick even for the newish ACU boots I’m wearing. I have never been to Britain, but the weather and the air and the little Connecticut city feel like Doc Martens and best bitter and shepherd’s pie and bagpipes and Sex Pistols and heart-melting accents in fetching female voices that waft from unpainted lips framed in creamy white skin. I wish I was still thin enough to wear my Levi’s 501’s and my Ben Sherman knockoff with narrow scarlet braces.
The Britishness intensifies as I near downtown. And yet it is undeniably American. There are old men who worked at Electric Boat for thirty years and hang out at the library and walk up and down State Street. There are BMWs with New York plates champing at their automotive bits at traffic lights. There are tiny convenience stores full of incense and penny candy and do-rags and cheap slippers made in China.
There is a splendid Thai/Japanese restaurant on the corner of Eugene O’Neill Drive. My friend works on the other side of that corner, and I spot her not five minutes after I get there. We hug and I compliment her on her new green corduroy coat. I make my way for the wrong door, and as I notice the sign putting me aright I also notice that there is a little plate of food and a cup of what looks like black coffee on the sidewalk just inside the doorway. Just like the last time we were here. I remember that my wife had a coworker whose parents were from Ireland, and they would leave bacon on the front steps for the faeries (na pucai, pronounced “na POOkee”) so they wouldn’t cause mischief. A paranormal gastronomic protection racket. I told my friend that story last time, so I won’t repeat it, even though she likely wouldn’t resent me if I did. I wonder what Thai faeries are like.
We haven’t hung out in quite a while. There isn’t a whole lot of catching up to do, so the conversation comes back around to relationships. We are both married to people we dearly cherish, though my wife and I for a good bit longer than her and her husband. I remember when we first got close to her, a little over five years ago. We had known her a little, but were unprepared for the vise-grip she would envelop our hearts in, which sounds maudlin and cliché if it’s never happened to you. It just happened. We went out for ice cream after a picnic with about a zillion other people, and before we knew it we couldn’t get enough of each other.
It felt naughty and wicked and exhilarating, though absolutely nothing remotely untoward was ever happening. I had been taught well by American Evangelicalism. Fear the opposite sex. Fear intimacy. Assume the worst about all desire to draw near to another person. God doesn’t use anyone but your spouse to speak to you. Because He just doesn’t. Stop asking questions. Shut the fuck up. Watch your language, God damn you.
We talk and enjoy the food and the camaraderie and the memories and the myriad ways our minds and hearts are interlaced like the vines and Celtic knots I’ll be working into the tattoo I’m designing for her, interlaced with those of our spouses and our closest friends and our Creator who designs this weird little clan a day and a life and a battle and a triumph at a time.
The tattoo will feature a bad penny, whatever I decide that looks like. I remember a time not long after that delightful season started, when I was confronted by yearnings and desires that I needed no one to tell me were evil, interlaced with the good and true so tightly that I couldn’t tell them apart, and the only thing that kept me from shutting the whole thing down and retreating back into the fortress I had so dutifully constructed to keep this from happening was that the need was just too damned huge. The cork was out of the bottle and there was no getting everything back in.
They had every right and every reason to shun me. Forgive, sure, but that doesn’t equal trust and acceptance. They saw everything I was. I saw the ugliness and depravity; they saw the desperation behind that to see it transformed into something better. And they could have turned away but they stepped forward to help that happen. She placed her hands on shoulders quaking from the release of long-repressed tears, beneath a head that was screaming silently to put a bullet into itself, and prayed aloud to a God Who had heard all of the filth and lust and evil hurled into the open, that I would see her and the others as friends who were like a bad penny – they would keep turning up.
We finish lunch and brainstorm tattoo details and I walk her back to the plaza where she works. She vents a bit about family struggles, the kind that are as old as she is but renew themselves afresh in the same tired ways. She handles them so much better now than she used to. They are annoying tickles around her face instead of tentacles that squeeze the life from her. I remember all the talks we had, all the rants I unleashed on her behalf, all the times I visited her when she worked for that buffoon up the street just to be with her and remind. To remind myself that she wasn’t just a cruel hoax. To remind her that the forces that try to grind her into oblivion pale before the love of her God and her true friends. To remind us both that there are those who will keep turning up.
It has been a well-spent hour. We hug goodbye and look forward to dinner at a pub later that night with our spouses. She goes back to her office and I turn about to walk back home. I pass the building she used to work in and I remember Chinese takeout and a purple plastic disc with the name of an Australian city inscribed on it and terror and love. I pass my workplace and see the platform behind the Quonset hut where the compactors are, the ones I fed two or three times a night when I worked on second shift and agonized that I had so little time to spend with her and a giant comic geek and his lovely pregnant elvish wife and a delightful twelve-year-old sprite who once asked me to paint a Union Jack on her face at a festival because she’s that feckin’ cool. I remember seeing my friend’s blue Honda Civic through the chain link fence two houses down from the plant every time I went out to dump the trash and cardboard, and feeling snakes with razor-blade scales twist and writhe in my guts because I couldn’t be there with her as she faced her own bottomless need. If I had only known what would be happening a year from then, and all the joy and triumph in between and afterwards. All I knew at the moment was a red haze of pain. And terror. And love.
I don’t want to forget. I don’t want to give in to fatalism. I want to keep turning up. I don’t want this to end, and I never, ever want to be fooled into thinking that it has, or that it will, if what I have been promised is true.
Donasgillin gu Brath. Bad Penny Forever.