Chapter One

i am in the middle of writing a non-fictional autobiography of a fictional character, and the idea of literally, not figuratively, following your dreams. this is the beginning to that novel.

CHAPTER 1

             

It appeared at first like something I’d heard on the radio, where you can remember a fragment of a line or a small piece of the chorus, only I knew I’d never actually heard it before. It kept coming back to me, whenever I was cleaning, driving to work, or masturbating in the shower. It had a haunting refrain. I know you can’t hear it now as you read this, to you it’s just words on a paper. But it had a haunting melody. Take my word for it.

The song, like so much that propelled the journey I have taken in the comic-book-adaption of my life, came to me in my sleep. Parts of it were definitely grounded in reality, but from what I remembered, most of it took place against the back drop of a sunken German U-boat filled with skeleton warriors and my living room set. I had stopped at some point differentiating between nightmares and dreams.

                It began with a G chord. You could play it barred, spreading your thin fingers like meat butter on the guitar neck. I did. The progression was simple, a back and forth, almost Irish-folk sounding romp. That’s all there was to it. Except for the bridge.

                “I’d do just about anything…”

                Then moved to an A minor. It was meant to be easy, on purpose.

                “…to create…”

                Then to a quick C.

                “…the space…”

                Then back to your good old, buttered up G.

                “To keep you and that broken lamp…”

                Then waltzing once again to an A minor.

                “From…”

                And, again, to a C.

                “…my face.”

                Wash rinse and repeat. I’ll let you know when it changes.

                “…You get home, drunk and stoned with the sadness again.

                Just to survive, to feel alive, I’m letting my addictions draw me in…”

                That last part wasn’t an exaggeration. I was actually rushed to the hospital during one of the worst nights in a chain of f*****g horrible nights. It had been an unbroken series of communication failures between me and the aforementioned young girl who I dreamt was gunning for my head with a fistful of glass. It started with dinner and one dozen freshly-purchased lilacs.  It culminated in my alcohol poisoning.

                She was there when I woke up in the hospital. I believe I cried when I saw her. I remember feeling bad that I didn’t tell her why.

                I remember a time when I used to be happy.

                I’m not talking about when I was a child and only thought I had less responsibility. I’m not even referring to when I was an awkward teenager, all lanky and grasping, reaching out for everything everywhere in hopes it would do anything. No. It was 3 and a-half years ago.

                Approximately.

                I held a generic office job in a generic call center, sure. So did almost everyone in the third largest town in Pennsylvania.  The call center was the flat-lined 00’s version of the roaring 20’s assembly line work. It’s what everyone did who had no dreams left of their own. These giant, rented, glass and steel monoliths were the slave ships that granted you indentured passage to the land of the weekend.  Everyone I knew at that time could say “Good morning, and thanks for calling {insert monotonous, androgynous mega-conglomerate here}, how can I help YOU today?” like they were athletes training for the Olympics. No one ever won, but, they never missed a practice.

                But I was happy. I drove an almost new, 8 cylinder, 2004 Jeep Grand Cherokee, a gas-chugging, soccer-mom-loving metro tank. It was just the kind of thing I would have happily railed against as being “corporate w***e-mongering” years before I worked for a major corporation.  I would probably still do this, even today, as I sipped my Starbucks mocha-frappa-chocolate-anything, and meant every goddamned word.  If we weren’t hypocrites ourselves, we wouldn’t be able to pick them out.

                And yet, at the end of the day, I went to bed, holding whomever I had been sleeping with at the time, with a smile. Sure, I wasn’t exactly living the life I imagined when I was a smaller me.  The big difference between now and then, however, was the one thing, the one invisible, intangible and impregnable notion that I would always rant was what really separated us from animals.

                I had hope.

                I had just gotten my associates degree and was reviewing options for another 2 to 16 years of schooling. I was writing, editing, rewriting and self publishing a local literary and art magazine.  If I had trouble sleeping off the effects of an 8 hour shift shilling support for products no one needed, I was put to rest with the thought that I was working toward a brighter, smarter and more handsome future.

                Maybe the magazine, the New Reaganomics, would take off. It was a labor of love between me and a few key friends adept at the modern arts of graphic design and product placement. We were getting honest requests from local coffee shops and diners, the hip spots for the target audience we were desperate for, about advertising. The almighty advertising dollar, France’s gift to the world, was becoming the road to our own version of the American dream. (true fact. Though advertising has been around since early Egypt, it took one ingenious French newspaper, mystifyingly named “Le Presse”, to invent the concept of paid advertising. It took exactly 4 years for America to take the idea by the throat, in 1840 by a man named Volney Palmer, and opportunistically make it the staple of our entire economy.  This set the model for almost every interaction America had with any foreign country to present day.   Yes, sir, thank you for calling, we’d be happy to assist with that.)

                With advertising, we could get a wider distribution. We could attract recognized artists and writers. We could do the unthinkable: we could print in color.

                Or, maybe at the end of my long academic hallway, I’d be a professor, and extend love for the written word or the intrinsic value of music to new waves of fresh minds. Students, open to learning and growing, coming in droves to hear me lecture. I would give them a cutting edge spin on tried and true teachings, completing the perfect circle of taking the old and making it new, and if done correctly, attractive again. They could in turn take my words as seeds and an entire forest of truth and beauty might spread.

                Perhaps, if the stars were just right, I could have been a rock star. I would be playing some impossibly clever acoustic ballad, one that compared my loss of virginity to the industrial revolution, when, at that exact moment, a major record label executive would hear me. He’d stumble into the 19th Street coffee shop where I had become a folkie-fixture, having stopped for a pick-me-up on the way to some undoubtedly important teleconference. He’d stop then dead in his tracks. He would be mid-syllable between ordering his cappuccino latte with a double shot of espresso and a lemon grass booster when I’d just started my set. He’d forget his order and sign me on the spot. I’d be the next-to-the-next-Bob Dylan, he’d say. The rest wouldn’t be history, it’d be my story.

                The future was a thing so far away that there was absolutely no way to know what it was or looked like, let alone how much it cost.  All my trappings and comforts were stepping stones and day jobs while the real, inner me, the poet and musician, the writer and righter, would flourish and change and enlarge until no one expected it, until no one saw it coming. The future was so bright and distant that it shone like the sun from the heart of the perfect summer day.

                And then, one day, when I was least expecting it, the goddamned thing got here.

                Maybe it inched onwards. Maybe every procrastination and poor decision I’ve made may have only been days in the now, but years in far off future time.  No matter how I tried to explain it, or even look away from it, one day I woke up and realized that THERE somehow got HERE.

                I could still remember the exact day this realization sunk in. It did not slowly drop like a crumpled up paper ball eventually would in a happy sink full of dishwater. It was like giant steel hooks, dull and mean-looking, each one weighing so much that you didn’t need anyone holding the chains to halt your progress to a grind; they could do it on their own.

                It was maybe 11 in the am when I heard them pounding on the door. I had been working the graveyard shift at everyone’s local call center, having recently taken a promotion, and had just fallen asleep about four hours ago next to my brand new 18 year old girlfriend.

                Now, I’m going to come back to at least 3 key details in that last sentence that acted to me then as gigantic, murderously bright, neon signs that my life was not going in the right direction. However, should you come upon  a very specific and remarkably unexpected knock on your front door, regardless of the hour, you get up and get it or you get up and get out. That thunderous and menacing thud you hear at your door, that machine-gun-fire-in-the-heat-of-war noise you’re hearing? That’s a cop knock.

                I was still half, maybe 3 quarters asleep, so my own waking up and hearing that doom drum for what it was didn’t happen. However, the red head, half-covered, half-off the bed, did rise at the sound. She had maybe a full 8-13 hours of sleep. She was a warrior, if not prepared for the sounds of war, than at least able to recognize them.

                “Holy s**t….Jeph… it’s the police. Jeph…Jeph wake the hell up…”

                That 3 quarters shot to a straight left and my gauge was suddenly emptied as my eyes forced themselves open. The police? Now? Here? I distinctly remember every thought I had at that moment was monosyllabic and ended with a question mark.

                Now, at that junction in what comprised my life so far, there was probably a good deal of reasons the police could have shown up in the morning looking for me. I had …”friends”… who had illegal habits, I owed at lot of companies various amounts of money I had no intention of paying, and at one point, been pulled over for not wearing a seat belt in a place called Horsehead, New York (I did not make this up, that’s the actual town’s name. When driving through, I did not spend the night.) and was pretty sure they expected me to show up in court at some point to plead to said charge.

                When the police came in, I did luckily have the clever foresight to ask what the flying f**k was going on. Of the two huge, man-sacks that were there in uniform to do their duty, at least one was kind of enough to explain the situation to me. Police were not the villains of every movie, but a lot of times it felt like they should be. In this case, however, these two fine gentlemen acted without malice and, despite not having a neck between them, were pretty human about the whole thing.

                I was being arrested on an outstanding warrant for unpaid parking tickets.

                Yes. They apparently can arrest you for parking tickets. At least, the way the officer with the slightly bushier moustache explained it, they will when the sum owed is well over one thousand dollars.

                While they let me get dressed (I’m sure neither wanted a look at the heart and stars boxer shorts I had been thoughtful enough to fall asleep in, and if they did, they hid it well) the young girl who had answered the door was completely lost adrift an ocean of tears and hysterical sobs, an emotional juggernaut who would neither slow down nor stop to wear much more than a blanket. I was not one known to let the pain, frustration or sadness of a situation get me down. I felt, despite being arrested with probably less than 4 hours of sleep and still buzzing from a pre-bed, whiskey nightcap, I was taking things rather well. My girlfriend, however, was clearly not. She could not be contained, reasoned with nor even actually understood in her theatrics, as sort of sweet as they were on my behalf. She cried uncontrollably, her face as red as the fire in her curls, and threatened and cursed in torrents at the proceedings unwrapping like a candy bar around her. This however, would similarly set the example for her own foreign policy, with every interaction she would maybe ever have. She could go from curious to unstoppable with the gale force of a heart break. Her name was Eleanor. She was there that fateful morning, just as she was there when I almost killed myself with gin, so much farther down the road. Though I would spend the next three years with her, she was in my bed after knowing me only a handful of days. And I did not love her.

                It was in the back of the squad car I next found myself in when it finally hit me. By it, I mean the realization that I was officially no longer young enough to wake up hung over and led away by armed police, and, by hit, I of course mean it struck me like a brick thrown at my jaw. Self doubt and loathing crept down me through clenched teeth and soaked me in it.

                The real horror that settled in at that moment, however, was not that I was under arrest for a series of 11 or 12 small financial and legal oversights that were my unpaid parking debt. I was pretty careless then. It was that carelessness, and possibly the feeling of the handcuffs digging in to my slight wrists, that brought the situation really into view. I wasn’t upset about what had happening at the moment, but that when I woke up to the shrill voices of my sudden guests, I somehow just realized that I had grown up. I was officially “too old for this s**t” and I didn’t even notice it. Drinking by myself at 7:30 in the morning? Letting bills go so far that police officers get sent from Philadelphia to collect me? An 18 year old girlfriend when I was close to 30? A growing pouch of flab that hung almost imperceptibly over my belt?  A recent promotion to an even more inconsequential position at a place I felt I had no right to work at? What the f**k was going on?

                Did this happen just right then, in the early light of that terrible morning? Or had this whole “adult” thing been going on for years without anyone pointing it out to me? Who the hell was I?

                As the car drove away, as the world and all the thoughts I could muster in it, swirled and murked up the insides of my head, I was explained that, if I could pay my unpaid parking ticket balance in whole, I could forgo the entire process and be released in the immediate.

                Of course I could not afford that. So while an officer removed my handcuffs at a quick stop for coffee, they let me make as many phone calls to help reach that formidable sum as I could think to.

                It only took one, but it was not a proud one.

                “Hey, Arnie, yeah… it’s, It’s me. Listen bro, I’m sorry to bother you, but… yeah? How are the kiddos? That’s awesome. Awww… Really?  Oh, hopefully I’ll be in town in about two weeks, and I should be able to make his game. Totally. Oh, right. Well… listen, I’ve… uh, been… arrested. “

                This last statement was followed by a good 3 minutes of silence. I didn’t know what to say, and, I don’t really think my brother did. Of everyone in my family, I was always the one that would have been voted most likely to get arrested. I dyed my hair, listened to Nirvana from the release of their first album and spent my entire youth playing Dungeons and Dragons. I was, I’m sure, the picture of the budding villain. Yet, the actual fact that this had actually happened, after years of trying to live in a mold that they would find more acceptable as my family, or at least lying about it at every opportunity to them, this was not what they were expecting.

                Of course he helped me. He paid the entire sum with one credit card purchase. That’s why I called him. That, and of course, he was my brother. That also made him the one person in the entire world I wanted to reach out to last.

                That was the first day on the job of being a fully-realized and newly appointed adult.

                I had already managed to f**k it up. Within the first hour.

                The bridge then kicks in after the last C major barred chord. It’s an F#, and it’s sad and pretty at the same time.  It’s played in the same pattern, with a C and G major played after it.

                “But I held my own fate

                I lost my own race

                I wrote my own plot

                And maybe, just maybe I deserved what I got.”

                It was three weeks and four days after I wrote these words that you are now reading, that I had the Next Dream.