5
Turns out Deangelo had a lot more sentimentality about our younger days than I would have imagined and was true to his word. He let us release Matchbox at midnight and the thing was finished. Still, gruesome stuff. We got there when the moon was high in the sky, and I couldn’t help but feel like it was judging us all. Matchbox stumbled out of the Porta Potti like a newborn, soaked straight through with all the biocides and smelling like the most rotten skunk of your life. We got him to his car, and I think he drove to the hospital. He survived and everything, but I hadn’t remembered feeling so damn bad for somebody in all my life. The poor bastard probably wanted to die in that thing, all for running his mouth when he shouldn’t have.
I knew that I would see Deangelo again after that. Sometimes you just get a feeling that a person ain’t done passing through after they pop up again from the past and show face.
I’m sitting on my couch and listening to Tom Waits’s album Bone Machine while tossing a few Miller Lites back. Truth is, I hate Miller Lite, but Leon loves it and always leaves the extras here at my place after an evening spent hangin around. He’s just gone and now I’m left to sipping these beers alone.
On some evenings, Leon’s a lunatic and comes over so messed up and high out of his mind that he really begins to forget all the tiny particulars about his own life, insisting that memory is an illusion and that he is always near the brink of a phenomenal new frontier of thought and experience and existence or something. I don’t not believe him. He’s insanely compelling when he wants to be, but sooner or later he’ll really be off to the races and start talking about string theory and all of his other research. He always loses me a bit there. It’s not so much what he’s saying but how he’s saying it that really locks me in. His eyes light up, his cheeks get flushed, and the passion basically explodes from inside him. He’ll go on for hours sometimes and all I have to do is give him a simple, sincere, no way or man, really , and he’ll be so blacked out of his mind high and revved up on his own miracle genius that he won’t remember hardly any of it the next day. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said, “Leon you gotta write this shit down man,” but he never does.
He was over this evening and Tom Waits was playing. Leon started tripping out about murderers and death and other horrors. He went really deep into the psychology behind it all.
“Cash, do you even KNOW about Charles Manson?”
Then he went spinning off into this huge thing about cause-effect weblines and his eyes were bloodshot while unfolding and refolding up the million layers of his own complicated past. “And if that woulda happened, Cash, Cash, are you listening?” He always repeated my name like that to make sure I was still following.
“Always pal,” I responded.
“Okay, good, good, Cash, Cash, you see, we were that close,” and he puts his forefinger and thumb a millimeter apart, “that fuckin close to not being here, you and me.”
Leon’s dad was an alcoholic who died when we were sophomores in high school. He was a mean motherfucker who used to belt Leon over the kitchen table for no real reason at all other than a rip-roaring jealousy in his heart that drove him to bouts of madness. He was green thinking that Leon’s mom loved Leon more than him. He was a fucking crazy loser is what he was. When he finally did pass out drunk at the wheel, and sent his semi-truck tumbling through the median on an off abandoned Wisconsin highway, not one of us cried. Leon still claims he can’t cry. Not for his father and not for anybody or anything, but I was there the night Leon found out about his dad, and the truth is he cried for hours.
After that, both Prince and Leon had lost their fathers, and I hardly ever spoke to mine. I figured we all became brothers, in part, because of the symmetry of our lives.
Anyway, Leon started talking about his father and the psychological impact the leather belt had on him as a kid, and it was so terribly sad that my eyes almost started to water. I’m not a huge crier or anything but I’ve known Leon my whole life, ya know? What he was saying about his dad was true in his heart, and to see that it still caused him so much pain was a tough pill to swallow. I also knew that Leon not being able to cry anymore definitely had to do with the fact that his father belted the flesh off him as a five-year-old kid while his mother sobbed hysterically in the corner and watched, helplessly.
But, in true Leon form, just when he really had me on the ropes, he executed the cleanest transition you’d ever witness. All of a sudden, he starts talking about all the different kinds of flora and animals and algae in the Fox, the small river that runs through the outskirts of Johnston. I had no idea how he made the connection, but all of a sudden his smile was giant on his brimming face, just like that. This led him to bringing up the time where he jumped off the Fox Bridge on Carson nude as hell and holding the hand of his now wife Mo, short for Morene, while they both screamed silly like kids in the night. I tell ya, you really have to be on your toes when Leon goes leaping from one thought to the next. God, he could make me laugh. What eccentric joy he had in his heart.
I don’t think he stopped talking for the whole three hours he was over, not even for five seconds. That was fine by me. When one of us hit a wave, it was their time, roll roll roll we’d say, and sometimes chant. We kept the thing rolling as good as any, all high and alive, on the brink of our own great something.
Well, Leon loves Miller Lites and he brought an entire case over tonight but only finished half. In the end, beer is beer, so I drink them out of respect to Leon and because they won’t drink themselves, as my father used to say.
I’m on the last of the bunch, decently tossed and listening to Tom Waits in solitude and doing some of my own thinking. Tomorrow, I have to go do some painting at the Millers’s house. The family won’t be home, which is always nice. I like painting most when I have the place to myself. Still, I might see what Prince is up to and if he wants to drink some and keep me company. Maybe play a little Springsteen.
God, every five seconds I’m back to thinking about that girl, her green eyes and the mission she seemed to be on. What are the chances she comes into Jimmy’s Place yesterday just as I was leaving to help Leon save Matchbox? Two nights in a row. What miserable luck. My knee bounces, electrified by the memory. I lean my head back against the couch, let out a breath, and whisper softly to myself, “Fuck.” I know now for sure, I’ll never see her again.
Waits is singing about a pistol, a Bible, sleeping pills and falling in love with a sailor’s mouth, about a wounded-eyes-type girl and lust. He’s such a dark bastard. It ain’t all war, Tom. It ain’t all war, you gravel stoned cold throated crazed poet.
Fuckin Matchbox and his blue stained skin. He cost me my chance.