Anything Goes

My grandfather used to have a building where he would do weird shit.
The sign above the storefront claimed that they made and sold shoes; this was back when shoes were made with leather and thread and skilled hands. There were generations of knowledge flowing through each decisive movement of those worn and callused fingers. I spent my early years watching them move, a rough ballet that smelled of grease and men and cigarettes. 
Later, as a young man, I tried to capture those hands in drawings and photographs, never quite able to capture the dimly lit afternoons where the light would filter in lazily off the sidewalk surfaces, or the silence that pervaded the space, the reverence they had for what they created.
Those dusty old men working behind the counter were my family, the worktables littered with scraps of pungent leather and metal tools became the fodder of my dreams. The shoe polish-stained fingertips and aprons, rough wrinkled faces that kept their eyes on their work, their tongues relaxed and silent.
My grandfather would give us new boots or dress shoes as birthday presents and he would teach us how to care for them with polish and bristles and tender attention so that they could shine like new.
So I know that sign outside the building was not a lie. They did make shoes in that old place with the brick façade and black wooden door.
But I know they were doing other weird shit in there too. Someone was.

There was a basement in the building.  I was not supposed to go down there, that was always clear. No one ever warned me, not grandfather or any of the other men there, nothing was ever said. It was more of an open understanding. I was not to venture beyond that door.
Although I knew this, I was a curious child, and the forbidden lair had a pull I could not deny. I had learned to blend into the dark shadows of the building, to step in time with the thumping needle of the sewing machine and the sporadic coughs of the men at their benches. I could open the door to the basement silently, and descend down the narrow dark steps into the dark chamber.
There was one tiny window at the top of the wall which faced the street at sidewalk level. Whenever someone would walk by the light inside would dance erratically on the brick walls. I listened intently for the sound of my grandfather’s footsteps.
I went down there only a handful of times in my whole childhood. The memories and sensations from those explorations have sunk to the deepest part of me and colored my vision.
In this forbidden space I once found a tooth.  Another time a red cloth napkin with gold jagged symbols, another time I discovered a small shell and a ball of hair in a little crevasse in the wall where the cement had broken apart between the bricks.

Whatever was happening there, it was not safe. In a dream one time just a few years ago I saw him emerge from the door at the top of the stairs with a bloody mouth. He looked at me. I was sitting in a chair just beside the door. He said, 'anything goes,' as he walked past me, holding up one single finger.
I woke with my hands fluttering, I gazed out the window, remembering the lingering smell of candles and matches on the brick walls. His silence, his deference to a room he never referred to, to a past never revealed but for one word, 'Nantucket.'

Tonight I will go back into the dream and tell him, 'you don't have to hide from me. I cannot be rattled.'

The Past Comes Calling

Behind his cluttered towers of books and old fashioned type writer he could be as eccentric as he liked. This was his fortress. Within it he could let his hair rise in an electrified bride of Frankenstein way without feeling the need to tame it with a comb. In here, behind these impregnable walls of dusty books, he could wear his thermal underwear coupled with just a pair of jeans and fear no reprimand. He was the prince in this kingdom of fiction and nonfiction and coffee table conversational items and references. Letting his appearance blend with the general clutter, his mind could wander down forbidden corridors poking into thoughts left undisturbed by most. He could be David the Heretic, David the pervert, David the mad, or David the meek and no one would know.
Unless he wrote it, which he often did, and sometimes shared it at the weekly writer’s workshops or poetry jams hosted in the back of the shop. Even in this case he was still safe within his kingdom and those delirious poets and various unloved writers either appreciated his own breed of madness or else were too self absorbed to notice him at all.
He could remember too well the days when he had written in spiral bound notebooks in his bedroom and had feared discovery, the time when his sister accidentally carried one of his notebooks away mistaking it for her own, her horrified reaction, the subsequent beating from his father, his mother’s weeping and begging to know where they had gone wrong.
He could remember and the remembrance made this new phase of life all the more precious for its spacious anonymity and freedom of mind and word. They were, after all, only words and held no power of their own. Their power was lodged in the myriad of associations evoked in the reader or listener rather than in the words themselves. He was one of a rare breed that appreciated this truth and thus had no fear of them and twisted them every which way and used them to penetrate the carefully guarded darkness secreted away in the hearts of others, even and especially at the risk of calling forth their wrath and terrible sorrow.
Hunkered over a single serving of raspberry yogurt one afternoon he heard the bells hung over the front door jingle as someone entered. He finished spooning a portion into his mouth before looking up to greet the patron. Raising his eyes and wiping his mouth he beheld with astonishment the sparkling blue eyes of his sister. Her blond hair hung in a short bob around her face and her mouth was creased with lines that betrayed years spent frowning.
“Reina.” He uttered her name in shock, wondering what she was doing in this city, how had she found him, why she was here breaching his defenses.
She smiled a little.
“Hello David.”
Then he only stared at her. All that he wanted to know was what she wanted but it seemed callused to ask after 10 years of estrangement. He couldn’t think of what else he should say so he stared.
“Daddy’s sick David.” She said after a few moments, and big tears welled up in her eyes. “He’s dying.”
Again he could think of nothing to say so he merely watched the tears form in her big eyes and splash down upon her cheeks. She dried them with the back of a gloved hand and said,
“I’ve come to bring you home to see him.” She sniffed and looked at him waiting.
He thought for a moment that he might be dreaming so he leaned forward to the antique type writer and began to type an account of what was happening so that he would remember it better when he woke up.
His fingers clacked away at the keys and Reina said softly,
“David.” But he kept typing and then she cried hysterically: “David! Did you hear me? Daddy’s dying.”
He stopped typing and looked up at her .
“I heard you.” He said and leaned back in the chair rubbing his eyes with both palms.
“We should go as soon as possible. Before it’s too late.” She said “The flight will take about eight hours.”
As she spoke, she adjusted her hand bag.
“I’m not going.” David said simply.
“What?” her voice was high and demanding, “He’s dying. Don’t you understand?”
“I understand, and I’m not going.” He answered nonchalantly. Then he stood up. “Thank you Reina, for coming, for uh, finding me and giving me the choice. I… appreciate that. But I won’t go. I don’t want to see him. Even if he is dying. I don’t want to. You could have just called me, you didn’t have to come all the way here.”
“I know,” she said bleakly. “But I knew that if I called, you wouldn’t come. I thought that if I came to get you, you might.”
“I won’t” he told her with a small shake of his head.
She leaned forward and took a pen from his desk and wrote a phone number on the corner of a sheet of paper.
“My cell number.” She explained. “I’m leaving on the 4:30 flight out of SFO. I already bought your ticket, if you change your mind.”
“I won’t.” he repeated softly.
She sniffed again and this time he offered her a tissue from a dusty Kleenex box. She dabbed her eyes and blew her nose and pocketed the tissue. Then she waved the tips of her gloved fingers and walked back out of the door, the little bells overhead tolling her departure.
David sat back down and brushed the keys of the typewriter absently with his finger tips. His fortress had been compromised. The same piles of dog eared brittle paged books still towered all about him, but suddenly they were an ineffective sanctuary. He no longer felt strong or safe, but rather small and weak, as though he were a twelve year old boy hiding in his bedroom, waiting for his father to come and dole out the punishment he didn’t deserve.
He realized that his hands were trembling so he folded them in his lap and gazed at the door. Breathing slowly, he let the phantoms of his childhood evaporate under the radiance of the present. He was a man now, and the body of his father would soon be returned to the earth, and Reina would be gone before morning. When their mother died perhaps she would only call, and that would be even easier than this.
After a moment the trembling subsided and his battlements felt once again secure. He picked up his yogurt and finished it, licking the spoon clean when it was all gone.

Quest

It is a place of hard sand, a place where billions of grains have hardened and formed a solid ground of bleached yellow and dirty white. There are mountains topped with green pines and big square bricks. The Cannanites were spawned in these lands. Their robes moved in the dry desert wind. It was in the desert heat where a sect would emerge, a small group beneath the deities and gods who destroyed their idols and talked to the being without shape. Without sex, without a female, the sky god ruled alone. This was their glue, the common belief that would separate them from the other herders and farmers and carpenters of the land. Ripe with olives and dates, red with the blood of pomegranates and sacrifice, the land gave birth to the singular. Three thick branches would sprout from the tree rooted in myth and time, three branches linked by story, blood and place.
The world came to and end, as all stories do, as each life is a world unto itself. Coming from the great city to the east, Nebuchadnezzar conquered the mountain, capturing the learned minds of the sky god people. Writers and poets and singers of tradition were taken in chains and brought to Babylon. It was here, in the city, where the stories were written, where with careful pen upon parchment the myths were transcribed. The act of the hand would be the revolution, the action that would carry myth through five thousand years. The tales that would inspire war and sacrifice. The plot that would be taught as total truth clothed in the everlasting wrath of the all-seeing sky god.
Some eventually returned to the mountain and the stories were brought and studied and passed to the children that awoke in the gold-cast land. There would be kings. There would be teachers. There would be small inner chambers that remained forever dark. Animals were sacrificed and fires burned with the heat of prayer. And the branch sprouted.
The Romans followed through with a request from the sky-god elders, forever silencing the dissidents… only, the limb was not severed, it grew in the hard-bleached ground and wound like ivy up the continent and through many seas and over oceans. It would be the same people that would return with a thirst for vengeance, many generations later. Not recognizing their own kind, throats were slashed and children became food for the hungry. The mountain would be conquered again and the men of chariots would hunt the priests of the sky god, the swords would enter and the rituals would die with the men. There would be one, the one escapee, the teacher that would teach after the walls had fallen. The exiles vanished with the cool wind, carrying with them their tragic memories of the end of the world.
The mountain lived on in their dreams and the two branches grew yet another branch of similar design, a singular entity at its center with a different prophet that orbited it like a moon. The mountain grew with cities and people, with kings and priests of all three branches. But they would come from the outside, they, clad in chain mail and red crosses would come with horses and weapons, starving and seeking the mountain. The quest continued. Generations later, the fruits of each branch would bleed and kill for the peaks of gold, for the place that was theirs, for the place where things were good, where the sky god could find them.
In Sunday school, little girls are taught from books with cartoon camels and they are told of little animals that warmed a blessed baby. On Saturday, little boys are scrubbed clean and put into black clothes and walk with their fathers and wig-wearing mothers. This is the place of bombs and pomegranates, the place of exploding buses and red streets, the place of lost knowledge and fixed rules.
Were the secrets ever there? Were they found and then lost again? Or does the quest continue, an endless search for the hidden meaning of absence?

The Book

The three story bedroom house was quiet and still. In the many suburban neighborhoods that surrounded the home, all the children had been put to bed, all the cars that been shuttered in their respective garages, the land was quiet, a brief pause in momentum before another day. Inside the house, after hours of bright illumination, the talking heads on the TV were finally off, the energy of them was finally settling on the dinning room table and the pale beige carpet like dust, settling down ever so slowly. They were probably still mumbling out there, somewhere in the ether world their voices raged on, but not here, not while the clock ticked quickly towards the new day. The refrigerator mumbled softly, turning on and off in uneven intervals. His wife was asleep, covered below a pile of thick comforters. His “snow queen,” he would jokingly call her, since the woman always seemed to be cold. This was his chance for a little bit of peace, a brief moment before the cycle of his life had to begin again with coffee and an incessant alarm that was objective in its dire warning. Before the newspaper, before the search for work began on the internet. He could look now, but…this was a special time and he would not squander it on the fruitless perusal of classified ads. There were just a couple of lights on in the house: the dim kitchen light over the stove had been left on accidentally, the outdoor porch light his wife insisted be left on throughout the long hours till morning, and one more, the only light he really needed, the soft yellow bulb on the end table, right next to his blue lazy-boy recliner.
He sighed, a long expansive exhale that just kept going and going…did he really have this much air inside? His chest caved in, releasing every bit of carbon dioxide he could manage to push through his open mouth. He felt himself sinking into the plush blue fabric, the chair that had been his companion for nearly fifteen years. How many hours of his life had he sat on this very spot? While the earth continued to spin, while the weather morphed from heat to rain, while a hundred wars came and went on distant soil, he sat here, in this exact spot in front of the TV with his wife on the couch beside him. They took turns picking shows to watch and she always insisted on watching the female news hour, that’s what he called the assembled cast of TV-ready personalities that gave their disgusting opinions on everything from warfare to the newest diet pill. They truly made him sick, they, people who had no real-life experiences to back up what they professed as truth. It was the time of the day he least enjoyed, watching their glossy lips move up and down, chatting amongst themselves. He always felt like a voyeur, an unwanted guest in a living room full of squabbling idiots.
But he had nowhere else to go. His work area in the garage had long ago been crowded out by boxes and old clothes and other things he considered useless junk. The extra room held even more stuff, a lifetime of their acquired memories and the third bedroom had been converted into a gym for his wife. And because his muscles were sore and because he had already eaten and didn’t want to sit in the kitchen on one of their hard-backed wooden chairs, he remained where he was, enduring the six gabbing voices, shrill and ignorant and loud. But thankfully, the sixty minutes passed, just as all expanses of time eventually do, and his wife had started yawning and she stood to turn off the box and she gave him a single kiss on the forehead and walked up the stairs to the bedroom.
This was the silence that he did enjoy, the precious moment that needed to be grasped and held like a beating jewel. It was an endurance race and he was just a little ahead, able to keep his eyes open just a little longer than his wife or the other people on the block. He felt just a little more alone, a little more at peace knowing that every house in the area had their lights off and all the TV sets had fallen silent. He felt the energy of the quiet streets, he felt the wind calm down just slightly, allowing him a little more room to breath and think.
He bent over and reached over towards the small ledge between the legs of the end table. He emerged with a hardcover book, a thick 1000 page tome with a black and white cover of a battle scene. He studied the cover, just as he did every night when he picked the book from its somewhat hidden shelf. It was a scene from the Spanish Civil War. A small group of men in casual clothes and rifles pointing in the direction of an unseen enemy. His new friend had sent him the book four months ago, his new friend who was really just a man he had met while waiting for his car’s tune-up at the local dealership. They had begun talking and the stranger with a full head of gray and a whiter beard had turned out to be a retired war historian. They talked, long after both their cars were finished and ready to go. Not long after, he had received the book in the mail.
He leaned back and stared at the cover, as he had done each night since the stranger had sent it, examining the haunting picture without opening the book. He held it for an hour, studying every detail of the men, their clothes, their posture, their fingers on the triggers of their guns and rifles. He imagined the photographer, not focused on the approaching violence, but on the men at his side. These men where a thousand lifetimes away from the talking heads that filled his living room every night. Here there was no incessant laughter, no incessant opinions and no speculation. For them, there was only the crystal clarity of action, beyond words, beyond thoughts, beyond argument. There was only action and nothing else. It was action that moved them, action that made them great. Tonight, he felt a wave coming over him, a mounting pressure that made his heart begin to beat harder and his palms begin to sweat. A sting of tears came to his eyes, it was a distantly familiar feeling, something that he had known before but had forgotten somewhere along the way. Tonight was the night. It was time to open the book.

Resolve

Their effort was united, tied together in a sweet smelling bundle with thin satin ribbons and the colored thread of revolt that ignited every couple of seconds with burgeoning thoughts and the shiny lacquer of birthed possibilities. In the dampness of the morning, the smell of thick sweat and dew covered meadows and greasy hair and kiss covered nipples, they all mingled like never before. This was the aroma of motion, of ecstatic dance after a thousand lifetimes of slumber, of pure life, gazing at itself unpolished and unabashed within the pond of clarity. They gathered together, the five of them, each wearing tattered black leather and carrying small torches or candles. It was a pivotal move, a clear, turned corner that was already a hundred miles from the old way of being. Revolt was their new action, their new tactic. They had gathered four nights before, gathered just the same, sitting in a small circle around the flickering of a single flame. Without a word exchanged, they knew it had come to this moment, this decision, it was change or die. Push forward into the new flower which might await or die in the scarred arms of a deformed master, a breeder with arbitrary rules and masked instructors and chained teachers. Would this continue to be their life? Would they live the next seventy years in the invisible handcuffs of the Woman? In the grasp of the Man? The five of them, bursting with the same impulse, the uneasy flutter so easily found and so easily lost. They felt it, each in their heart and their circle tightened, each second demanding more. It was mandatory, something must be done, there must be a new way of being. They each knew something must change…but how? Their leader watched the flame, in his gaze it wavered and grew and jumped. The life moved and he followed with it, its partner in each descent and arrival. The others held their hearts, as he held the flame, they in turn, held him. It was trust that cradled them in the web. It was intuitive judgement that padded their chamber. Yes, the discretion was all up to one, to the one that commanded without force, yet, there was no steel, there were no weapons of blood. He was the warrior without a spear, the hunter that moved by the moon, by the smell on the wind, by the words that came to him like divine insight. He took the formless shapes and took them to bed, he rolled them up, bathed in their murmurings and wound them together in a sentence of understanding. He was their king without a crown, unjeweled and covered in the flavored milk of love. As they sat in the late hours of night, when the street lamps flickered and the last of the trains left with their sleeping occupants on their way to the suburbs; they planned their next move, their new approach, their renewed attention. They chewed their drug, they let their mouths taste the shape of the "s" and the contours of the "u." The smell lingered, slightly above their skin, playing hide and seek from one nostril to the other. Their drug was the color of a new understanding, and it leapt to them in measured waves and soft caresses. Take what you can and leave the rest for later, it crooned. Pushing too hard will break it, and grasping too hard only pushes the waves to the horizon. Let it come softly, it whispered. We are here, a frequency away. Just a small break and we are here, when your mind is ready. Some understood and then forgot, riding the steel bits of the city like surfers of urban oceans. Nothing could be forced. For a moment, they were united in that pivotal understanding.