from Part I: Summer

Strange what one day can do. You live your life a certain way and a year can pass with the days blending into each other with nothing too dramatic happening to upset your rhythm, then, one sunny May morning you wake up to a convoy of DEA agents brandishing assault rifles, pounding down your door. To be accurate, I had already been up for about twenty minutes, dressed for work and had just put on the coffee when I saw the convoy. I ran to the window to make sure I was seeing what I was seeing, then ran into the bedroom and woke up K with a panicked, “the cops are here.”
Rubbing her eyes and sitting up, the zebra print blanket falling to her waist, she says, “no, honey it’s not the cops. Probably April, or Roger.” Her voice had that condescending, don’t-be-so-paranoid tone to it. And for a second, I thought maybe she was right, that I was being paranoid. We hadn’t slept together the previous night, because I was so fidgety. Kept getting the cold sweats, my joints were aching, my thoughts assaulting me from every angles, all with one urgent message: get out of the house, now.
K and I were having problems, had been for some time. She’s an alcoholic who has perfected the Jeckle and Hyde routine, and despite my efforts to stick to my sober guns and insist she cut down on the drinking, I was slowly becoming a co-dependant, spineless prick. My guns turning to shot glasses, my ammunition of choice: Jameson. Every night was up in the air. We might have wild, drunken sex, or we might have wild drunken fights; it was as predictable as flipping a coin. I knew I couldn’t carry on this way. I’d already conquered several addictions: sex, heroin, pot, speed, acid, but I never thought I’d journey into alcoholism. I was beginning to hate myself. Here I was, a devoted yoga practitioner, vegetarian, mountain-biker, teacher and stage actor, throwing my sanity away for some fragmented notions of loyalty and love. My instincts had been kicking in now, telling me to leave, so I related the urgent thoughts of escape to our relationship. “I’m going to end it,” I said that night, into the silent darkness. “Now let me sleep.” But my instincts weren’t satiated. I managed maybe two hours of rest the entire night.
“K,” I said “It’s two trucks filled with guys carrying assault rifles, dressed in camo.”
This description got her attention. “What?” She said, life shooting through her widening eyes as she pulled the blanket over her breasts. I turned and hurried out of the bedroom and I was half-way to the ping pong table (Yeah, we had a ping pong table in the living room), when they were through the door, barking orders and pointing their laser sighted rifles at my head and chest.
My heart was thundering and my head was grasping at reality straws. Everything was moving so fast, they were moving so fast, and acting so forceful, so full of energy. The way they were dressed with their camouflaged fatigues and black combat boots, for a second I wondered if there was a camera crew somewhere or if I was on stage, and had so thoroughly embraced my character and the scene, that the stage had turned into my living room. Then a second passed like a bullet and a portal of pure white light opened in the center of my head and tractor beamed all my thoughts into its bright void. The light turned into a fist of adrenaline that punched my consciousness into the present. The vastly narrow present.
“Hands on your head! hands on your head,” I heard but I didn’t catch who said it. There was all this screaming and even though they had all the control and all the guns and ammo to kill us a hundred times over, fear tinged their voices, like they were in a war zone and I was the enemy and who knew if there might be some booby trap or crazed wife with an uzi ready to jump from a corner and blow holes through their dreams.
My hands shot above my head and I was frozen by the intense excitement in their faces, the adrenaline shooting from their eyes like nothing I’d ever seen so early in the morning. There’s nothing to fear, I repeated like a mantra in my mind over and over, and I knew I was thinking it as much for them as for me. There’s nothing to fear.
“Hands behind your head! Hands behind your head!” My hands went behind my head as more of them streamed in through the front door, darting into and out of rooms, rifles at the ready.
A large, barrel-chested man with a crew cut and pouchy cheeks, a prominent hair-lip scar, holding a walkie-talkie in one hand a pistol in the other approached me and looking me hard in the eye, said: “is there anyone else here? I managed, in a daze of surrender: “Yes, my girlfriend’s in the bedroom.”
And an authoritative voice from the bedroom (I didn’t even see anyone go in there), “we have her, she’s secure.”
While two guys handcuffed me, the big guy with the pistol bent his face so close to mine I could smell his aftershave. “Is there anyone else here?”
“No,” I said, “Just us.”
He cocked his head slightly like he didn’t believe me. His light blue eyes bore into mine “Are you sure?”
“Yes, there’s no one else.”
To the two guys who were holding me, he says, “He secure?”
“Yep.” And it was true, for them, I was secure. The cuffs bighting into my wrists could attest to that naked fact.
To me: “okay, on the ground. Face down, flat on the ground.” I complied, and got on the ground, my arms at an awkward angle cuffed over my ass, my head facing the bedroom, my chin becoming one with the blue carpet fibers. I could see K’s bare feet walking out of the room, her gold-colored toenails, the tribal tattoo snaking up her left shin, the zebra print blanket caressing her thighs. On either side of her, acting as escorts, were two pairs of black combat boots. Quite a juxtaposition, I thought, and couldn’t help but grin.
“Take her to the couch,” the guy in charge said. Then, to us, in an almost-friendly, this-is-just-business kind of tone, “Okay guys, we’re going to ask you some questions, figure out what’s going on here. First, are there any firearms?”
K and I answered at the same time. “No.”
“If there is, we’ll find them, and that won’t be good for you, so I’ll ask again, are there any firearms on the premises? Anywhere?”
“No,” we both said again, and I added, “There are no firearms. I’m a teacher.” It felt just as stupid coming out as it probably did to hear. There was acerbic snickering and someone said, “He’s a teacher.” More snickering. “You teach your kids how to smoke pot?” A couple guys laughed and I couldn’t blame them, it was such a hoot.
“What?” I said. My shoulders were beginning to really hurt and I could feel a knot rolling hard against the left side of my cervical spine.
The captain of the merry DEA brigade said, “Which brings me to the second question. Is that your greenhouse down the hill?”

Part One: Summer/ Instincts

Part One: Summer
“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” William James (1842-1910)

1. Instincts
“…consciousness is defined by intentionality. By intentionality consciousness transcends itself. It unifies itself by escaping from itself.” Jean-Paul Sartre

The neighbor’s dog has been coming around a lot lately. Feed a dog once, you have a friend for life. His name’s Buddy and he’s a mostly black pit bull, with a diamond shaped splash of pure white in the center of his bulky chest. He’s 65, 70 pounds, I’d say. Solid muscle. He’s barely out of puppyhood, so he maintains an overeager curiosity about everything. No matter how many times he’s sniffed around the room, it’s never enough. Nothing eludes his scrutiny. Right now he’s licking the stone floor near the fridge. Who knows what lingering flavors his tongue is absorbing. Now he’s sniffing around the corner of the bookshelf.
Although he’s annoyingly friendly, with severe boundary issues, there’s this thing I discovered that sets him off in the other direction. If you look him in the eyes and start talking he gets this scared, attentive look. If you keep at it he’ll grow even testier, bark and hop on his front legs, as if to shake you off. I know this because it just happened about ten minutes ago. He came over for food and I told him that I’d give him a cracker if he’d offer up some conversation first.
This is the effect that teaching middle-school kids has had on me. Pets aren’t just pets to most twelve-year-olds, they’re best friends, partners in crime, magical familiars. In their world you can talk to animals and they can talk back. It’s what Shayla, an adorably-pudgy sixth-grader, calls: “The language of instinct.” It’s a very involved theory. In Shayla’s words, “instinct is way more important than English cause instinct is what makes survival and if we didn’t have instinct we’d all be dead and there would be no people to speak English with.” I’m one of those teachers that learns as much from kids as they learn from me, plus I remember being a kid, having those same ideas, refusing to buy into the superiority of the human race. As part of our educational exchange, I informed Shayla about the hypothalamus, which is centered at the base of the brain, below the thalamus and how it integrates our primitive instinctual drives, things like hunger, thirst, fear, anger and aggression. She nodded at me blankly and said, “Mr. S, it’s a lot more complicated than that.”
As a result, I now talk to animals.
Buddy, however, didn’t seem to understand me at all, so I looked him in the eye, hoping to engage him on the instinctual level (as defined by Shayla), and repeated myself. He reacted like I said, including curling up his jowls to bare his formidable teeth. A jolt of fear pulsed through my chest. Maybe the old wives’ tale is true, I thought: stare a dog long enough in the eyes, it’s akin to invading his soul. The expression he had on his usually happy-go-lucky face, was like he had just caught me uncovering some dark secret no human is supposed to know. I thought about how I’d have to talk to Shayla about this.
Since Buddy’s the neighbor’s dog, I didn’t feel an obligation to put up with his shit. I buried the fear, and got forceful. “Okay then, you don’t want to talk, go home.” I pointed the direction as if he didn’t know. The aggressive stance dissolved and he raised his ears and cocked his head as if to say, “Dude, are you serious?”
“Yeah, I’m serious. Go,” I said with ultra-alpha emphasis. He slumped to the ground, and, thumping his skinny powerful tail on the floorboards he gazed up at me with a fresh innocence. Like he was hoping for me to change my mind or to say, “Dude I was just kidding, here have a meatloaf.” When I didn’t, he stood up, turned around like saying “whatever,” and strode with his head slumped, off the deck and into the woods.
Dogs, like kids, have short memories, especially when it comes to being reprimanded or hurt. Maybe it’s because they forgive easily or because the present is just so overwhelmingly there that it takes up too much space in their being to spend any time or energy on stuff that happened so long ago. Five minutes after he scampered off, Buddy was back. Right now he’s curled up on the rug next to me and in front of the sliding glass door, every tenth breath or so, a deep sigh.
I moved to this cabin only three weeks ago. It’s a nice place for a cabin. Toilet, shower, stove, propane heater, refrigerator, phone, and next week, for internet access, Wild Blue will be installing a satellite on the roof. I had to move out fast from my previous residence and was lucky to grab this place so quickly. The neighbors, who own Buddy, are also my landlords. A family of four. Husband, wife, and two adopted boys. One of the boys, Michael Jon, is my eighth grade student, and is pretty much the reason why I landed here.

Peace Time

When I visited my brother about three summers ago, I found out a couple strange things about him. Nothing life-shattering or anything, little things really, but they stand out more when it’s about someone you think you know so well.
I’d been living in Northern California for five years and I make it a priority to visit friends and family in New York and Ohio, at least once a year. Being a middle school teacher, that time generally takes place during the summer. My brother G still resides in the same town we were brought up in – Dunkirk, NY – a blue-collar factory town off the southwest coast of Lake Erie. When I arrived, he had just moved from the east side to the west side for his first attempt at home ownership. It’s a three-bedroom, two-story house with functional basement and large A-framed attic. His two kids live with him: Morgan, a highly responsible Junior in High School, and Evan, a goofy and awkward Eighth-grader. G’s wife, L, had left him for a large black guy right before the move. According to G, she had been cheating on him for some time. They both had gained so much weight and were fighting all the time, the combination had a deleterious effect on their sex life to the point where they weren’t having any. L began hooking up with strangers via the internet, behind his back, until one day she told him everything and told him she had met this guy, a roofer who lived in Fredonia – the neighboring town – and that he could satisfy her and that he didn’t always want to talk politics and books and movies. He was a man, a real man.
G never replaced her. He dates a lot, but, at the time of my visit, he wasn’t troubling himself with any long-term commitments. In a lot of ways he was regaining his youth. Started working out, started running, and as a result, he lost a lot of weight. Looked really good, the best shape of his life. Ironically, on top of that, he started smoking. Got up to about a pack-and-a-half a day during the weekends. The other five days of the week G spends in Allegheny’s high security prison, teaching English Literature to inmates. Not a lot of opportunity for smoking, but he manages to sneak one every now and again. Most of his smoking, he does at home, in the attic.
When he gave me the tour, he saved the attic for last. He pulled open the flimsy, unpainted door, which was hanging on from a single hinge. “Gotta fix that soon,” he said. Neither one of us have ever been accused of being handymen. When it comes to fixing shit, we embrace the procrastination gene like some last vestige of hope. I’m the same way about moving into places. I never finish unpacking. I can’t quite motivate myself to completely set up house. When you’re renting, you live in a temporary world, a rented space, a rented time. You’ll have to give it back at some point, you don’t want to fool yourself by making it too much your own. Strange, I know, but that’s what I’m talking about. We all develop peculiar habits, the ones we try to shield from public because if the public found out they’d judge us for being less than normal, odd, strange, maybe even disgusting. Which itself, is odd, when you think about it, since we all do strange, peculiar things, you think they’d understand, they’d suspend judgment. And that’s how it usually works out in the end. We might judge each other, we might judge ourselves, but we adapt. We get used to how fucked up people can be.
When it’s about a friend or family member, it hits you like something from out of left field, and you think, hmmm…that’s kind of strange. But it’s no big deal, so you move on, storing it as a mental note about that person and how refreshing it is after all to have discovered it because now they have more color, more character, and you feel better about yourself, because you might do some strange things – and believe me, you do – but at least you don’t do that.
My last girlfriend, K, for instance, likes to chew her toe calluses. She kept that habit from me for three years, until we finally moved in together. After that, she let it all hang out. It just goes to show, even beautiful women can do ugly things. “God,” I’d think, watching K on the side of the bed, hunched over, her foot balanced on a knee, digging into her foot like it was breakfast time. “I’ve been kissing those lips for three years?” That was my initial reaction, but after seeing it for the umpteenth time, I got used to it. I liked the way her lips tasted and if her foot chewing habit flavored those luscious lips, who was I to complain. When it comes right down to it, isn’t that what love is all about?
My brother warned me, just as he pulled out a Marlboro cigarette. “It’s a little gross, I know,” he said, sounding confessional and matter-of-fact at the same time. I could smell what he was talking about before I could see anything. The aroma of used cigarette filters, carried by the thick, musty attic air, assaulted my nostrils. “Damn, dude,” I said and borrowing a phrase from one of my seventh graders, I added, “it smells like butt ass up in this place.”
We climbed the creaky narrow staircase and G paused three steps from the top. “Yep,” he said, “that’s exactly what it is.” He pulled the chain to a naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling, and it flashed to life, illuminating the smell’s source. To our left, between the stairwell and the wall, covering a 2’ by 10’ cranny space, were several containers of all kinds, from ash trays to plastic bags to mason jars, all filled with cigarette butts. Thousands and thousands of them. He had five mason jars, standing in a neat little row, filled to the rim, two clamped shut, the crooked and smashed yellow butts spilling over the top of the other three. The last time I had seen mason jars was at my mom’s house in Ohio. She keeps a stock of jarred tomato juice in her basement. Whenever I visit I like to use the juice to make bloody Mary’s. Looking at the jars in my brother’s attic, I couldn’t help but shutter.
G pushed open a window and lit his cigarette. “I don’t know why I don’t throw them away,” he said in the tone of a scientist trying to explain the erratic behavior of a certain lab rat. “Look over there,” he pointed to our right. A long row of stacked empty Marlboro hard packs lined the stairwell railing and led to a three-foot high mound of cartons. It looked as though he had lost patience with his initial project of organization and said “fuck it,” and just started hurling the empties into an ever-growing pile of thin, neatly painted red and white cardboard.
“I don’t know G, why don’t you throw them away?” I was trying not to sound too disgusted. “Do you really want to know how much you smoke?”
“It’s about three year’s worth,” he said, looking around the room as if he was just now recognizing the oddity behind his collection.
I pulled out my pack of American Spirits, withdrew a cigarette and put it between my lips. G lit it for me with his silver lighter. “I don’t think I need this cigarette,” I said pulling it out of my mouth. “Just inhale this room and I got all the stale nicotine I need for a week.”
“I like this room,” he said. “It’s not about the smoking, though, it’s about having my own space. My own time, you know, to reflect, to just relax, to get away from the kids, the tv, the world.” He looked up and casually swatted the light bulb’s chain. He looked at it snaking in the air, pinging against the bright bulb, and then he grabbed it, let it slide gently from his fist, to remain still. He looked at me with his brown eyes, the look that brothers get when they are letting you know this isn’t just bullshit. This is them, opening up to you in some little way, giving you the truth of themselves, if but for a moment. A moment that will be left behind by all the others that jockey for attention.
“Being here, smoking, thinking…it’s the one time I feel like I have control. You know what I’m saying? I don’t have to do anything. Just look out the window and inhale and exhale and think. Each of these butts represent, what? five, seven minutes? Seven minutes of peace.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” I said. We smoked in silence and I climbed the rest of the stairs and investigated the rest of the long room. Cobwebs glimmered dully in the shunted light, looking like hammocks weighed down by dust and rocking between both sides of the angled ceiling. Boxes of books and records, a multi-stained mattress, empty picture frames, an old tv set, speakers, vacuum cleaner, bags of clothes. The stale smell of cigarette smoke clinging to it all. It seemed so haphazard and depressing, especially compared to the rest of the house, which was always neat and put away, everything in its place. Polished wood flooring, plush black leather couches and chairs, a wide, hi-def flat-screen television, a computer in every room, all the latest in technology. Both Evan and Morgan own cell phones and i-pods and played their dozens of Wii video games.
It just didn’t match up, was the thing. If G were living in a trailer and was an alcoholic who beat his kids every morning before breakfast, this deplorable collection would make sense. I’ve seen homes where the occupants, usually elderly folk, refused to throw out newspapers and magazines and they were stacked all over every nook and cranny forming furniture for more junk, furniture made with yellowing paper and filled with crumpled fading words no one would ever read again.
Compared to me, G’s life seemed so stable and secure. He’d had the same job for years, lived in a big house, drove a nice car, paid all his bills, took care of his kids, dealt amiably with a manipulative, half-crazed, 300-pound ex-wife. He seemed to do it all with an almost saintly, non-judgmental air. I was thinking all this while skimming through his LP collection, smoking my cigarette, when G said, apropos of nothing, but shocking nonetheless:
“Two days ago, one of my students hung himself.” I let the Jane’s Addiction flop against Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast and raised my head. He was wearing a faded purple t-shirt with holes around the belly section and the sleeves. Some kind of compass design logo adorned the chest. His blue-jeans were likewise haggard with a hole at the right knee. Red flip-flops revealed his black-painted toenails. Painting his finger and toenails was a habit G acquired in high school. He never explained it and never applied any other makeup – say eyeliner or something – but I always took it as a sign of rebellion. There was always something of a rock-star wannabe in G. It’s probably why he DJ’s at pubs, and why many of his friends are musicians. G himself, like me, doesn’t sing, play guitar or any other instrument.
G was looking at the wall more than at me and the way the light glinted from his thin, peach-fuzz facial hair made him seem a lot younger than his 35 years. Despite all his lost weight, G still maintained a round baby face, an attribute that made him quite attractive to the ladies. He was always going out with women much younger than him.
I didn’t know how to respond, so I waited. Still looking at the wall, he bit at one of his fingernails. I noticed that all his fingernails were chewed down past the finger line. All but the pinky nail which was extra long and quite feminine looking.
“It’s fucked up, man,” he said. “One day you’re discussing the imagery of T.S. Eliot’s ‘J. Alfred Prufrock’, and the next morning you come in and are informed, in this business, matter-of-fact tone, that John Runningbear hung himself in the middle of the night.” He looked at me, an angry glint in his usually soft brown eyes. “With his own goddammed shirt. What the fuck am I supposed to do with that? I mean, talk about imagery. I didn’t have to see him or anything, it’s all here,” G tapped his head. “I can see him hanging there, his eyes rolled back, his head at a fucked up angle, the blood gone from his face. Just hanging there like some heavy sack of lard. He had these huge dimples too and he was always smiling, you know, like he wanted poetry in his life, literature, books, something other than the shit and misery of prison. You think maybe you can do something, make some kind of positive impact.” He shook his head and looked back at the wall, took out another cigarette and lit it. Inhaled a lung-full of carcinogenic smoke and blew it out in a giant cloud that climbed the ceiling and billowed into non-existence. “And it doesn’t even matter. His life was totally worthless, you know, as far as the ‘system’ is concerned. They just replace him with another felon and I get a new student.”
I had to say something, so I stood up and walked over to him, wanting to put a hand on his shoulder, but choosing not to. “Heavy shit, dude,” I said, sounding pathetic in my attempt to be reassuring. “God, I mean the worst I ever have it is worrying about a student getting expelled or turning to drugs.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry for sounding like a downer. It just happened you know. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
Suddenly we were interrupted by the sounds of banging furniture against hardwood floor and we could hear Evan screaming at Morgan and Morgan screaming back at Evan, and then footsteps pounding up the stairs and the attic door crashing open and Evan sobbing in explanation: “Morgan…(sob)…Morgan…(sob)…turned off…(sob)…guitar hero…(sob)…right…(sob)…in the middle…(sob)…of my game…”
G looked at me and sighed then smiled an ironic smile. He dropped his cigarette to the dusty floor, coated with streaks of smeared ash. He stepped on the cigarette and ground it into the floor, picked it up and tossed the remains into a white plastic bag, to join its countless brethren. “Well, bro,” he said to me as he started down the stairs. “Looks like peace time is over.”