Posterity

             Singers used to know how to sing. Musicians used to know how to play. They knew they were getting a paycheck, like all of us workers, but they felt their songs. They weren’t doing it for a paycheck, like we all are. The music industry is and was not ever a lucrative field (unless you hit it “big”) which only proves the point more that they were doing it because they loved it.

All those musicians who gave out to their old age live on through their songs, but what do the factory workers live on through? Their children? Hardly. They think they will raise upstanding kin who will carry on their legacy because that is what is important to them. When their children’s children die, they live on no longer, their stories forgotten through so much time, whereas those musicians—Betty Weiss, Robert Johnson, Ray Charles—they live on much longer than they expected.

The rest of us hope to have legacies, but we won’t. We will have diary entries devoted to amateur poems we wrote, so subjective our grandchildren won’t even know what the subject matter was, but they will make up their own and we will love them for it.

After we are gone—this large group we are in community with—what will remain of us? A headstone that reads, “Faithful husband and father”? I hope there is more than that. Even if it all boils down to only one instance when a niece or nephew is reading through my journals, and through one single entry, they have a Tesla sort of headache-wreaking epiphany about what they want their life to be as they listen to the out-of-date Ray Charles singing, “Come Rain or Come Shine”. That will be enough for me to smile in my grave, instead of rolling over.

Resemblance

            It’s strange meeting someone who almost exactly resembles a person you no longer talk to. A person who fidgets with their hair like that ghost who still floats around your memory, peeking around corners every two dreams or so. You try to ignore this and certainly don’t tell the new person about it, because you kind of like the presence of this half-forgotten ghost, breathing and in your face again. Their inhabitance is cathartic.

            You remember kissing the ghost and wonder if kissing this new being will feel as enthralling, removing clothes while you’re at it. Will they order the same drink when you go out to a bar with them? Will they be excellent at conversing about anything but your now coupled existence because “that is the most banal of conversation topics”? You hope so.

            Every single detail you can remember about said ghost is perused and considered with a somewhat ephemerally languorous exertion. You take your time with this task you feel obligated to endure, because when you think about someone in a certain way, they exist in precisely that way.

            However, once you have catalogued every viable option, you are somewhat stung by the knowledge that this new being will, given enough time, be just as much a ghost as the ghost they resemble. And you wonder to yourself, Just how many of these familiar spirits are stacked on top of one another?

An Excerpt from a Story

Sam opened his mouth in the direction of the man who was seating himself, but the man beat Sam’s coming words with his own. “Listen, I don’t want to talk about that shit anymore. It’s boring and you’ll stew on it in your brain for the next few hours whether it’s our topic of discussion or not. Tell me more about musicians. Music. You can go through every damn song on that jukebox, if you’d like. Let’s just not talk about that.”

            That man’s first word fell so perfectly before Sam’s that the timing alone pushed him even farther into believing what he was trying to ignore. He took time to process his awe and then had to go back to reviewing what the man had said; there was a short instance of silence, but Sam finally spoke.

            “Why the sudden change of heart?”

            “Change of heart? Sam, I only brought it up after you kept harping on me for answers to personal questions about my life.”

            “Well, you were elusive and mysterious, man! I’m curious like a cat and you can’t blame me for that! Sometimes I rhyme too, Jiiiiive Turkey.” Sam laughed uncontrollably at the mixture of how stupid his comment was, how giddy he felt over becoming sort-of friends with a supposed Satan, and how all of a sudden he felt like all the alcohol he had dumped into his system was stored up somewhere, only to be released as he formed that sentence. Sam almost leaned a little too far in his guttural shaking and rocking back and forth. The man had to stretch his feet to the ground just to hold up Sam’s light-hearted body.

            “Lay off the sauce for a bit and go pick out a new song. Susan,” the man turned in her direction, “can Sam get a few more quarters? He’s looking to give us all a history lesson or two and I am in compliance. What say you?”

            “I’ll agree to that,” Susan said. “Whatever makes the time go by faster in this shit hole.” The last part was let out mixed with a sigh, like someone does when they hope no one will hear, but want their frustration justified by vocalizing it. The man heard it and winked at her through his grin when she brought the quarters over.

            “Lady and gentleman,” the man was now standing, arms raised, and head tilted upwards in a prim manner, “I present to you, The Omniscient Samuel Pickard!”

            Sam’s head turned so fast to look at the man that the force almost threw his body off the stool. How does he know my last name?

            The man seemed to be waiting for Sam’s reaction, his eyes focusing beams directly into Sam’s, hinting at a secret, inaudible conversation going on between the two of them. Sam noticed a smirk, just barely visible where the man’s lips met on the right side of his mouth.

            “Go on, Sam. Your audience awaits you.”

            Sam leaned onto the bar top enough to get his view around the man and onto Susan and Johnny. They were both staring blankly at him, like children with heads cocked who don’t understand what they are waiting for.

In Addition to Dying

            When we die, our bodies are lowered not into a grave, but into the back seat of a car one of our best friends drives. We are looking down, trying to light a cigarette, but the wind through the windows keeps us from doing so, and so, when we look up finally, after that infinitely long trip through the black, empty streets, we find ourselves in a cushioned position with the parking break on in the parking lot of the hospice our favorite aunt and, in some sense, second mother, died in when we were eighteen.

            We remember copulating with another body we thought we finally loved for the first time the night after our aunt’s soul left her body. We remember thinking we don’t know what we’re doing, “but the sadness will make up for it” while we try to keep quiet because our parents are asleep down the hall. We remember thinking how “all the porn added up to this?” Suddenly, the hospice building shrieks through our sight and conception of the clock and we somehow realize we are moving backwards or forwards through time. It is difficult to determine which, and depends on when we arrive upon this realization.

            Some of us will revert all the way back to the pictures we saw of our first birthdays. Though we don’t honestly remember this moment, we vicariously experience it, giving a strange, inexperienced existence to those memories we don’t recall. Our fathers are somewhat drunk in the corner, wondering how they even got the girl they have convinced themselves they love pregnant in the first place. We are their third living child (fourth, technically) but, by some awkward epiphany, they have only come to think of this now.

            The time in second grade when the girl we thought was cute and convinced ourselves we were in love with finally talked to us passes as well. That elementary school we grew up in is blurred by the movement of this passing we are experiencing, but we can still recognize it as such.

            Because we have become prone to thinking of all our milestones in terms of schooling, we don’t remember any of the times we spent at a friend’s house at the end of the block, hearing stories about the Gila Monster he had, alive and well, living in his camper on the side of his house, or the time he threw rebar like a tomahawk into the flat part of our faces. We don’t remember how our English teacher told us we would never amount to anything, but that passes easily through the sieve of our thoughts because we are no longer the person we were.

            We are now, and will, from here on out, be something we can no longer conceive. We are ideas. We are the thoughts we once had as living beings. All our memories pass through us as though we are smooth rocks lying dormant in the rush of a river we held a girlfriend in once to keep her warm. We are the cooling wind on our own skin we felt in that window of spring, which exists for such a short time in Arizona as the valley lets itself become submissive to the summer. We know we are fleeting but we cannot accept such a fate. We want a god to cradle us and tell us we did well, that we were good and faithful servants, but such an afterlife does not occur. We become a foreign version of nature as our bodies pass into a form of our memories, but we are still unexpectedly happy that such an afterlife exists, no matter how quickly fleeting it is.

Dying

            The afterlife does not exist. When we say rest in peace, we, as life-filled humans, mean it. The black ether, void, what-have-you, welcomes us in as we are descending. Though we are still alive as something we cannot understand while we are breathing in the bodies we inhabited, which have stopped doing so, we now understand the darkness that is waiting and a smile creases our bloodless, pale lips. Our eyes are closed by a family member with their sad, little fingers—if they found us in a room after our suicide—or our eyes closed by our own power on an unfamiliar and despondent hospital bed because we were so tired from all the living we had to endure.

            When we hear, “Rest in peace,” or see it on our own gravestones as an abbreviation—our heads tilting back to see what message our loved ones chose for us through the coffin that is invisible—we know it will be thus. We know that finally all our work will be paid off.

            We laugh at the pre-mortem thoughts we had of meeting the creator we thought existed. Finally, we realize how ridiculous it was to think that our maker would want all of us—after all the red wars and random fights with ex-girlfriends or boyfriends—in the heaven it has created up there with it. We know that we are not ones to be saved by some savior we have created. Whether or not it exists is no longer a concern. We feel the peace bouncing off vocal cords and landing somewhere inside of us.

            That first fistful of clumped soil is tossed onto our faces and we accept that it is the closure and answer we have been looking for during our entire existences. We smile, if only to ourselves, cross our arms over our chests and feel the emptiness coming for us as a pastor we never honestly liked recites some Bible verse we knew when we were children who would believe in anything. His voice fades as we escape.

Fishing

            There was no beer to make the sun drag its body faster. My father never drank beer in front of me. I’m honestly not even sure if he’s ever had more than one beer in one sitting in his entire life. It is ironic how things change when parents’ habits reach a dirt fork in their children’s minds.

            “You’re tying it wrong. Let me do it”

            My father never revealed himself when he was supposed to. It was almost as if he would only crack the seal when he knew there would be an unspoken time limit on the subject—which was good, because he easily drifted though incongruous topics.

            “Your granddad and I caught a lot of fish with these rods.”

            I nodded enough to resemble a listening son, but I thought about the crawdads in the lake-water shadows, my kind-of girlfriend, my summer vacation waving as it passed, etc. I was bored.

            My hopes for catching a fish would have put me at the edge of the rocks my ass now resented, had I had better luck in the past. Having never caught a fish in my life, I was wary of my father’s excitement when, weeks before, he triumphantly handed his waders and our poles down to me from the attic. He was gentle with the goods and cautioned me to treat them the same as if we were taking them to the Antiques Road Show to have them appraised. We both knew the rods—along with the rest of our rusting possessions huddled in the house—weren’t worth anything, but still, there is some pride in that alone.

            “I think I got somethin’.”

            Why do all fishermen say that? Just a nibble. Story of my life.

            Maybe he resented me for not talking. He always has been and always will be a talker, a “people person.” I always have not been and always will not be one. However, I congratulate him for attempting to pry open a treasure chest of conversations that never existed to begin with. It was, and still is a noble task; ask my ex-girlfriends.

            He worked his summers as a boat boy until there was nothing left: tying boats to the dock; bringing engines out of the boathouse for hobbyists, retired men, and lonely women using fishing as their antidepressant (I know…it’s strange.); and getting “cute” girls’ phone numbers. Five, two, zero, five, two, four, seven, something, something, something. (Up North, any girl who doesn’t weigh over 180 pounds is cute. It’s a different standard, which might explain the insurmountable list of divorcees now living in the Phoenix area. Go up North, find a cute girl, get hitched, move to the city, find cuter girls, get divorced, miss the girl who used to be cute. A cycle.)

            My uncle—he’s my second cousin, but I call him my uncle—now runs the boathouse my dad worked at. It’s been in our family for decades. My great-grandfather used to run it. For a small period of time, I even considered following my father through the vaguely lit stories he still lingers on, but once back in the city, the idea did not appeal. (The cycle had not caught me, yet, or maybe it did, just in a peculiar way.)

            “How’s your girlfriend? What’s her name, again?”

            “She’s good.”

            Years later, I found the lyrics to a song my dad wrote in my late granddad’s dulcimer case. He taught my father how to play, though my father still doesn’t know how to all that well.

            I never used to sense jealousy in him (hell, I wish I could catch fish like that), but as the great Father Time wore into us, things nestled like parasites in our spines, and the cycle hit us both in a different way.