Rhonda

 Everyone in the office seems low-energy, even Dr. Taggert. I can’t get a laugh out of anyone, and feeling my energy being sapped, I eventually give up trying. CK’s either off or hidden away in hyperbarics.

Caitlin cuts off my football and is pleased to report that, while the wound isn’t any smaller, no drainage has seeped through and the flesh looks pink and healthy.

Tom from Evergreen Orthotics shows up like we had arranged, and he tells me about how the AFO works. He looks at my foot and says that most of the pressure will be put on my shin, and on the front of the sole. “It’ll be a little like having toes again,” he says. “It takes some getting use to, but after all you’ve been through, I bet you’re up for trying something new.” 

He makes a mold of my entire foot up to my knee with some sort of quick-setting rubbery material, which he peels off and tucks into a satchel bursting with cloth and foam and a dozen pairs of specialty scissors. “They rummaged through it at the checkpoint downstairs and now it’s a total mess,” he says. 

“Remember when Dr. Thompson snuck her knife past the guards?” asks Caitlin. “She was so proud of herself.” I picture her wielding a huge bowie knife but Taggert says it was just a little thing. 

Tom says he’ll be back Monday with my brace, and Dr. Taggert applies my cast by herself. The nurses are all just kind of wandering aimlessly around the office.

“What’s with everybody?” I ask. 

“It’s been a day,” says Taggert. “Now remember, call if anything feels off.”

“I know, I know. And if it’s off hours, go to the ER so they can saw it off.”

“You can call here off hours but you won’t get anybody, so feel free to leave a long, rambling message like some of our patients do.”

Overhearing, Caitlin yells, “Remember that guy who would call drunk all the time and leave those, um, colorful messages?”

“Oh my god yeah. He’d leave long, rambling messages for some woman named Rhonda. That went on for months. The lesson being, don’t drink and hit speed dial.”

 

Three days later I’m back. I’m hoping the drainage remains low enough that i can go back to coming once a week. 

I set off the metal detector, but the guards don’t bother to wand me. The woman behind me says both her shoulders are made of metal but they don’t bother to wand her either. 

Upstairs, I wait a while for them to get my room ready. A large family sits around a table, evidently waiting for someone. “Hey look, it’s 4:20,” says the son.

“Ha, I remember when that meant something, and not just once a year,” the father says. “You kids don’t know how easy you have it. Used to be you had to journey all the way across town and find some guy if you wanted to get high. Sometimes you’d smoke up all day and realize it was ten at night and you were out and had to go searching for more. You kids don’t know how easy you have it.”

“We’re ready for you, Seann Patrick,” says Bridget. “We’re in room one, Jenny’s waiting for you.”

“Oh no,” I say. 

“Hi Seann!” cries Karen. 

“Hey! How’s Dolly!”

“She’s perfect. Want to see pictures?”

“How come you’re nice to everyone but me?” asks Jenny. 

“Because you’re my favorite,” I say, as Karen runs over with her phone. Her beady-eyed dog stares blankly from a log on the beach. 

“Then a bunch of us took the wieners paddleboarding, but Dolly couldn’t go because there were too many of us already.” She swipes to a photo of a bunch of lithe young women in bikinis with daschunds on paddleboards. Then Jenny fires up the saw and she dances off.

“Oh this looks good,” she says. “Let’s say moderate, though it’s really much less.”

“What does it measure?” asks Bridget, staring at the computer like she is trying to remember what it is. 

“Not today, we’re just casting,” she says. 

“God I can hardly keep my eyes open,” says Bridget.

The top of my foot has a row of bright red bruises. Jenny says it was from the Optilock, the foam bandage they put on the wound. “It’s great stuff, but it’s got this thick edge that you can’t trim.” I’ve never had this happen before, but she’s not concerned so I’m not either.

“So today was baby goat day,” says Jenny. 

“Ooh, are they still here?” I ask. I have warm memories of being here for baby goats day two years ago. 

“No. In fact they left early, we didn’t even get to see them. Apparently the woman who brought them freaked out and they made her leave.”

Karen says, “I had just got down there and she was yelling, ‘they don’t think I’m friendly enough so I’m being escorted off the premises!’ She was not having a good day.”

“I hope to someday be escorted off the premises,” I say. “Hey, what do you all think of the room makeover?” 

“I like the blue,” says Karen. “It’s like gazing out at the sky.”

“Bridget despises it,” says Jenny. “Don’t you?”

“Say what now?” asks Bridget groggily

“He wants to know what we think of the new room.”

“I despise it.” I tell her about my idea for a mural. She approves, and says, “I have a poster at home that reads ‘A wound neglected is a wound infected.’ You could put that in there somewhere.”

“You have wound care posters just hung up around your house?” 

As she wraps my foot back up, Jenny tells Bridget she talked to sally.

“How’s she like the new job?” Bridget asks.

“Well, you know Sally. I’m not sure she likes anything. And it’s an hour drive so she’s not even saving any time on the commute.” I hadn’t even realized she was gone; once they made her supervisor she rarely emerged from the hyperbaric room. When you first arrive at a place, you assume everyone had been there forever and always will be. I think about this at work a lot, where after a number of tumultuous years I am one of the few old timers left.

Jenny leaves to call Dr. Thompson, who comes in and squats on her stool. Bridget stands there looking down at the bucket of water.

“What’s wrong?” asks the doctor.

“I couldn’t get the temperature right,” she says. “It really bugs me.”

The doctor dips her gloved fingers into the bucket. “It’s fine.”

“You know what people mean when they say something’s fine,” says Karen. 

“It means they don’t want to tell you the truth,” I say.

“You probably know what it means in the Italian Job,” says the doctor, looking at me. “Freaked out, Insecure, Neurotic, Emotional. Speaking of which, I still can’t get over that woman with the goats,” says Dr. Thompson. “I could see that she was in distress and I asked how she was doing…”

“You actually talked to her?” asks Karen. 

“Yeah I was there for the whole thing. I love baby goats.”

“I thought with, you know, how you are about germs…”

“For the most part, animals are cleaner than humans. A dog’s mouth is cleaner than a human’s mouth.” 

“But the goats walk around with all that poop on their butts,” says Karen. 

“It’s cleaner than our poop. I asked how that woman was doing and she said, ‘I’ve got walking pneumonia, that’s how I’m doing! Do you need to know my whole life story?’ And then she picked up the goats, one under each arm, and kicked the gate open and stomped on out with them. She had to come back for the other two.”

“We kept hearing calls of a Code Gray at the west entrance,” says Jenny.

“She was definitely having issues. The attendants usually help people with the goats but she was just sitting there with her head in her hands. And then she screamed at one guy ‘Don’t hold them like that, you’ll break their backs’ But he was just holding it normally. The gaps seemed happy, anyway.” She shakes her head. “There weren’t any problems with the woman with the llamas yesterday.”

“I missed the llamas,” Bridget says.

“Are you running a petting zoo here?” I ask.

When she’s finished, Dr. Thompson tears off her smock and throws it into a bin in the new cupboard. 

“That’s for linens,” says Bridget.

“Where’s the garbage then? I can’t get the hang of these new rooms,” says the doctor.

“I despise them,” says Bridget. 

“Wound mural,” I say. 

As my cast dries, they all gather in the main room to continue to excitedly discuss the baby goat incident. The whole thing has reinvigorated them; there is none of the office ennui I sensed just a few days ago. 

“Oh shit, I keep forgetting,” I call from atop the chair, which no one has bothered to lower. “Doctor Thompson, can I get you to sign a form for a temporary handicapped parking permit?” Jenny brings my scooter and lowers the chair so I can fish the form out of my bag. The doctor signs it and Jenny makes a copy and I’m free until Monday. I leave by the side entrance and cross the parking lot, which was recently the scene of such goat-related melodrama. It’s quiet now, the only sign of life an old guy in a Primus t-shirt, smoking, who tells me I’ve got a sweet ride as I scoot by. 

A Dent in the Dishwasher

  The metal detector is once again in service, and this time I remember to take everything out of my pockets before rolling through. Am I the only one who finds that these props and performances make me feel more stifled than safe? As if I need another reminder that we live in a country that would rather install machines and pay thugs rather than stop letting people buy fucking guns.

Shelley has a big smile for me, and says that they’re preparing my room. When Caitlin comes to get me, I refuse to look up from my phone. 

“Oh, so it’s going to be like this, is it?” She asks. 

I sit there for another moment before saying “Oh, hey, I didn't see you there.”

“Just get in here.”

Everything in Room One has been rearranged. The chair is further back and the white board is on the opposite wall. The walls themselves have been painted, one blue and the others beige. 

“This is the big new paint job?” I ask.

“Yup. We’re not fans,” she says.

 “Why are they different colors?” I launch again into my routine about painting a mural of wounds, which she of course thinks is brilliant.

“Now you’re in for it!” screams CK. Her eyes are sparkling and crinkling with laugh lines. It’s ridiculous how happy I am to see her, how good it feels to have the three of us in this room again. Recently my already-severe loneliness has metastasized. After not seeing her for months, CK looks like a homecoming queen.

“By the way, Jenny and Gretchen say hi,” she says. “They saw you were on the schedule.”

Caitlin says the wound doesn’t look too bad. I tell her I’ve been trying to be careful, but that I have to walk a bit at work. “Yeah, that skin stays delicate for a while,” she says. “You have new shoes, right?” I tell her I haven’t even had a chance to wear them out of the house yet. 

She sits at the computer while CK measures the wound. “Point nine, possibly one point oh,” she says. “I can’t tell.”

“Pretty sure it’s point nine,” I say. “Possibly even point eight.”

“Well if someone would hold their foot straight then maybe I could measure it properly.”

“Is there undermining?” asks Caitlin. 

“No undermining. Hey, they’re redoing all the pipes in my condo!” She throws out her paper ruler and swab and bounces over to the side of my chair, where she repeatedly grabs my arm as she tells me the saga. “Everyone here is sick of hearing about this so I’ll torture you with it. It’s an old complex and they suddenly decide they have  to replace all the pipes. So first they did the kitchen, and they totally dented the dishwasher, then tried to deny it…”

Everything disappears except for a flouncing red ponytail, a  slender neck, a hand on my arm. 

You know, this is pretty pathetic, a voice inside myself says. 

Shut up and let me enjoy myself for once, I hiss. 

“So I picked white tile with gray grout,” she’s saying. “And because of the dishwasher thing, they're not charging me any extra to go all the way up to the ceiling! It’ll be nice to be able to take a shower again. I really reek.”

“I didn’t want to say anything. How’s Cathy?” I ask. 

“Oh she has a new suitor, a big black boy with these crazy green eyes…”

“Hello!” cries Dr. Taggert, coming through the curtain like a talk show host. “Your A1C is so good! You’re not diabetic anymore! I mean, you are, but way to go!”

“Well, sure, but then there’s this thing again,” I say. 

“I know but I wanted to start out positive.”

“Thanks. I still have work to do but it’s much better than it was, and I feel good about that.”

“You should! It’s really impressive. And this really doesn’t look too bad,” she says, unwrapping a scalpel and slicing the dead skin. Shelley slips in and takes a seat at the computer.

“Well, I didn’t wait months to come in this time,” I say. “I’m learning. Just very, very slowly. I’ve mostly been really good, but it’s hard to stay off it at work. I’ll probably have to get you to write a note for me to stay off it for a while, and I’m not sure if they’ll let me work through that.”

“Well they can’t fire you. You can sue!”

“No but it could complicate things, and I’m scared of that,” I say.

“Well once you have the shoes on, this shouldn’t happen,” says the doctor. “But I know the in-between time is tricky. Have you heard of an AFO?”

“You mean we’re going to use alien technology?” I say excitedly.

“Ha, AFO, not UFO. It’s a sort of brace that is made that wrap around the bottom of your foot so you don’t put pressure on the front part.”

“Wow, that sounds like exactly what I need.”

Shelley turns the monitor screen to face me. She has the Amazon screen pulled up, with various forms of braces. They don’t honestly look all that bad.

“What does AFO stand for?” I ask. 

“You know what, I don’t know,” the doctor says. 

“Ankle foot orthosis,” reads Shelley.

“Not orthotic?” asks the doctor.

“Orthosis.”

“Huh. Anyways, Evergreen should be able to get you fitted for one. The trick is I don’t know if insurance covers them. But I can send them a referral if you’re interested.”

“Are you kidding? Let’s try it,” I say. Why the hell haven’t we tried it before, the little voice in my head asks.

Shh, I tell it. This is not the time for that. 

But seriously, it insists. Doesn’t this sound like something that would’ve been helpful since the first time we healed up? Why the hell didn’t she…

We’ll discuss this later, I say. 

Yes but…

LATER.

“So we’ll hold off on putting you in a TCC until Evergreen can see you. I mean, if that’s what you want.”

“If you think that’s best, I’m fine with a cast.” 

“Okay good. In the meantime we’ll put you in a football. I’ll send this out and you should call them in a few days. In the meantime Dede or Perez will call you to make your next appointment.” 

“You’ll probably make it on a Thursday because you hate us so much,” says CK.

“It wasn’t my fault!” I whine. “Dede kept saying that was all she had! You know you’re both my favorites. I think she’s trying to keep me from you.”

“She might be,” KC says. 

“And Thursdays are so…quiet!” I say.

“Yeah, a certain other doctor here doesn’t like laughter,” says Caitlin, wrapping my foot in a football. 

“I’ve noticed that,” I say. “Though I’ve barely seen her this year what with her being away. It’s been mostly substitutes, which honestly has not been great. And when I left it was so anticlimactic. There was no closure. I mean, on my foot there was. But there should’ve been a party to celebrate my graduation. A parade through the corridors!” 

Encouraged by their laughter, I have become increasingly boisterous. The prodigal patient has returned. Girls are flirting with me, my blood sugar is stabilized, and there’s a new device for me to try that might actually help with the healing. I am moving in the right direction (not a word, little voice). I am making progress (I said not one word, little voice). Everything (stop it) is going (I mean it) to be fine. 

KC runs to get my scooter and zooms around the office on it, whooping gleefully. I yell at her not to wreck it but she ignores me, and when she disappears around the corner I hear a crash.

I miss the bus, so I sit in the lobby and read for a while. I’m surprised to see that even though it’s close to six, the guard is still herding people through the metal detector, though he’s paying more attention to his phone. He doesn’t even look up when the alarms are set off by a man who walks right through and says, “This is such bullshit.” I feel so safe.

On the bus, an old man across the aisle smiles and laughs continuously to himself, a loud, forced “HA. HAHAHA. HA.” He continues to laugh until we get to where I make my transfer, at which point he gets up and hurries off the bus. 

“Hold on, I’ll get a little closer for you,” the driver tells me, and pulls up a few feet. 

The old man is standing there on the curb, waiting to get back on. I carefully disembark and he steps in, his face frozen in a deep scowl.

Everyone is losing their shit, the voice in my head says. I try to argue but I’m suddenly very tired. 

The Thompson Elk Returns Home After Years in Exile

It’s a perfect sunny day, and I take off my jacket and hang it over the handlebars of my knee scooter as I wait for the bus to take me across the river to my endocrinology appointment. All day I’ve been boiling with tension, a film of irritation covering a roiling sea of anxiety. It doesn’t help that the bus is running late. There are more bodies scattered across the sidewalks than I’ve seen in months.

At the first stop on Burnside, an old man in a motorized wheelchair gets on. I try to make room for him but he ends up backing up and smashing into my knees. I feel like yelling at him. 

I’m dismayed to see that the metal detector and x-ray machine are back up and running in the lobby of the hospital, manned by two beefy young men who look like they’re in high school. I put my bags in a plastic bin and instead of waving me around the detector they tell me to roll right through, causing the lights to flash. They run the wand over me and have me take everything out of my pockets, which I had forgotten to do. I roll down the hall to what they call the Tower elevators and notice for the first time that they only stop at four of the upper floors, the buttons in between are blacked out. By the time I make it up to the endocrinology/weight loss office I’m fifteen minutes late.

They call my name before I have a chance to get a good look at the waiting room. Without the Christmas decorations that were up during my last visit, it looks stark and barren. I step on the scale and just like last time it shows that I weigh much more than I expected. I’m not even wearing a cast this time. Am I really putting on that much weight? I don’t feel or look any different. But if the scale is right, I’m heavier than I’ve ever been. 

The aide pricks my finger so they can check my A1C levels, then disappears and a few minutes later the doctor arrives. I had been warned that Dr. Miller was booked solid and that I’d be seeing his assistant. Like the guards downstairs, she looks like she should be studying for the SATs. Her nametag has the same surname as one of the most toxic ghouls currently hollowing out the country from the White House. I’m tempted to make a joke about it but she seems very nice and very earnest. She tells me my A1C is 6.6 like it was last time, then connects her computer to the app for my glucose reader and walks me through what she sees. “You’re doing so much better, it looks like you’ve got things really under control,” she says. I have never had an endocrinologist tell me that in my life. I’m glad I didn’t joke about her name.

She asks what’s going on with my foot. In the three weeks since I was set free from wound care, I’ve been wearing a post-op shoe instead of my new orthotics. “You were almost healed up last time you were here…?” she asks, reading the screen. I tell her it finally healed, but after two weeks it opened up again, just like it always does. I say that after I see her I’m going to roll down to wound care to make an appointment. 

“I’m really frustrated,” I say, but to my surprise I don’t really feel that frustrated anymore, and I’m able to talk to her about it in a calm, matter-of-fact tone of voice. She is very kind and says that aside from my foot problems, I’m doing really well and that I should come back in four months. 

  When I roll up to the wound care clinic, I see through the window that there is an elderly couple with an ancient woman in a wheelchair at the counter, so I wait until they’re done then hit the good old blue handicap button and roll in. I’m surprised to see Perez behind the desk, sitting next to Gladys, who instantly gives me that disapproving look I’ve grown sort of fond of. 

“I’m back!” I cry. 

Dr. Thompson comes from around the corner and leans very close to me and asks, “How are you? Are you okay?”

“I’m here, aren’t I? The question is, are YOU okay?” She looks confused so I say, “The last time I saw you, you were about to have surgery.” She pulls down the front of her scrubs to show the base of her throat, which is lightly scarred, as if she’s had her thyroid removed. 

“I’m a robot now,” she says, which doesn’t sound like a thyroid issue. Throat cancer? “I’ll tell you about it later. You’re coming back to us?”

“I’m afraid so. It opened back up again. Even though I’ve been really good,” I say, looking at Evelyn. 

“I bet you have,” Gladys says, in a tone that could be either sarcastic or sympathetic. 

I have been, though. In the past month, the only time I’ve done any walking is at work, where I can’t avoid it. And even there I try to use my heel as much as possible to keep the pressure off the thin new skin where the wound was. But apparently I wasn’t careful enough, because after a few weeks, the skin started to tear open.

“The same spot?” she asks. 

“The same spot,” I say.

“Is it bad?” she asks. 

“Not really,” I say, feeling strangely lighthearted. For weeks I’ve been slipping deeper and deeper into despair, but being here, facing this maddening issue at last, is genuinely freeing. Plus, I’ve been so lonely. I hadn’t realized just how dependent I had become on my weekly visits to provide some social interaction. So I’m genuinely excited to see Original Karen appear from the back of the office and ask, “Is that Seann?” 

“Nope, just the bell inspector.” I adjust the three bells on the counter, my hand lingering a moment on the one I so recently rang. “Just as I suspected. I think you need a fourth one.” I pick up the Oscar statuette and shake it.

Perez searches for an opening, typing and frowning. 

“It’s tricky because we’re down a room,” says Original Karen. “We’re painting them.”

“Ooh, you should let me do a mural showing all the different kinds of wounds,” I say. 

“Yes!” cries Gladys. “And a hyperbaric chamber! It would look so cool!”

And at last Perez finds me a slot at the end of the day on Monday. I’m so relieved that I don’t even care that I won’t be giving work much notice. I need to start putting my health first. I suspect that the only thing that will truly heal this up is to take some time off again, or else find a way of doing my job without walking even a little bit, which I’m not sure is possible. I feel resigned to doing whatever I need to in order to get better, even if it costs me my job. 

Afterwards I roll across the street to get blood work done for Dr. Miller. Since I was here last, the lab was taken over by the evil corporate monster Labcorp, and they have installed automatic check-in kiosks that require you to scan your photo ID and insurance card before you can talk to anyone. The fascist police state is firing on all cylinders these days.

I’m finally called up to the counter and told it’ll be a fifteen or twenty minute wait. I watch as patients are called in one by one before me, and finally take out my sketchbook.  

At some point the lab tech calls, “Rosie? Is there a Rosie?” An elderly Black woman and a young white father with a little girl both stand up at once. “Rosie R.,” the tech says. 

“I’m Rosie R,” says the old woman. 

“So are we,” says the young man. “Well, I’m not, but my daughter is.”

“How about Rosie Ross, then,” the tech says, and the man and the little girl follow her in. 

The old woman takes her seat, chuckling, “What are the odds?” 

I wait for over an hour until they call me. The tech is astonishingly fast. When I leave, line to check in stretches out the door and down the hallway. 

I catch the bus and make my connection into downtown. It’s only been three weeks and here I am, back on the merry go round of what will no doubt be a long series of weekly appointments. As we turn off Main Street, I see that the barricades and caution tape that have been littering the block for months have been removed, and that the bronze Thompson Elk statue, damaged during the Black Lives Matter protests, has at last been put back in its place. It’s been six years since they took it down to restore it, six years since the protests, six years since the beginning of COVID. It’s genuinely comforting to see the beloved stag once again standing with antlers held high beneath the trees. I wonder if he is shocked to find that in his absence the society he gazed down upon for a hundred years seems on the verge of collapse.

Don't Chase

 I spend July 4th in the apartment, alternating between cleaning and sleeping. I didn’t have too much to drink at the barbecue but I still feel sluggish and worn out. I have a pretty pleasant day regardless, and by evening feel perky enough to head down to the Goose for supper. 

There are Lost Dog posters plastered all over the neighborhood, showing a moppy little mutt with the typical admonition “Dont chase will run.” The Goose is busier than I thought but most of the crowd is settling their bills and heading out to watch the fireworks, leaving only a few of us. 

As usual, nearly everyone on the deck is coupled up, but when I walk over to the water cooler I see an attractive woman sitting by herself. I smile and she gives me a big, warm smile back. Well that’s nice, I think, but she’s probably waiting for someone. But when I go to sit down with my drink, I see her start to talk to a guy sitting by himself a few tables away from her. He has a full beard and a baseball cap. He also has a dog. 

By the time my food comes they are laughing and chatting like old friends. His dog barks wildly at every other dog that approaches the deck. “She’s just saying hello,” the man says every time. I can’t make out much of their conversation but I hear him say that he’s in real estate. She’s new to the neighborhood, and fairly new to Portland. I hear them talk about paddle boarding. They look like a good match. Even if I had a dog, I can’t compete with real estate and paddle boarding, not to mention that beard, which is full and lustrous. I can only hope that the cap is hiding a case of male pattern baldness, though I know that wouldn’t make a difference at this point. 

I take my trusty sketchbook out for company but my heart’s not in it. I tell myself this is a good opportunity to practice not spiraling down into self-hatred and misery about how alone I am, how long I’ve been alone, how the older I get the chances of this changing grow ever slimmer. It’s so easy to chastise myself for my cowardice. I should have gone right up to her when I got my drink, talk to her before that irresistible canine spell could take hold. But I couldn’t do it. I am convinced that no woman wants anything to do with me. While this might not be true, it has been many years since I’ve seen any evidence to the contrary.

“I need to get a dog,” the server says to me.

“Same here,” I say. “But I like cats better.”

“Me too,” he says. “But, you know.”

The new friends order another drink and I finish mine and head back up the hill. In an empty parking lot, a gorgeous young woman and a man who looks like her father are fiddling with an automatic ball-throwing machine that their dog is nosing warily. The girl is twitchy and holding her limbs at odd angles, like she’s on something. Dog toys and balls and various bits of throwing apparatus lie scattered across the parking lot. 

At the top of the hill, the lost dog signs grow more desperate, hanging from every telephone pole. The sky is nearly dark. Soon the fireworks will start and all the dogs I saw tonight will be whimpering under their owners’ beds. I wonder where the lost dog will hide, who will comfort him as the world around him explodes.

Clean Towels

        It’s the day before Independence Day and the second Revolutionary War has been won. After decades of fighting, the noble rich have finally thrown off the shackles placed on them by the filthy poor. For us huddled masses, it’s all pretty disheartening, but I have the day off tomorrow and am on my way to a backyard barbecue. As I sit on the bench at the bus stop, I look at the arrival time on my phone. It keeps leaping around, getting longer and shorter as some unseen force impedes the vehicle’s progress. A man on the corner shows a cardboard sign to the traffic. I don’t bother to read it. I used to be interested in these signs, in all the different ways people ask for help, the various kinds of lettering they use, but I can’t look anymore. 

        A teenage girl sits next to me, thumbs skipping across the screen of her phone. There is suddenly an explosion behind us, followed by another, and another. It seems early for fireworks –the sun is still high in the sky. I turn around to look and see puffs of smoke in the air above the bridge. The booms go on for a few minutes. 

        “What was that?” the girl asks uncertainly. She doesn’t have an accent I would guess she’s Pakistani.

        “Oh, somebody getting ready for the fourth,” I say.

        “But that’s not until tomorrow,” she says, sounding confused.

        Just then there is a crash right in front of us. An old hatchback truck crammed with junk has spilled a pile of metal shelves out of its open hatch. The truck speeds through the intersection then pulls over. Fortunately, the car behind it brakes before it hits the shelves, and I walk out in front of it, holding up my hand up. The girl runs out after me and we both gather up  the shelves. The words CLEAN TOWELS are written on a piece of masking tape on one of them. We carry them to the sidewalk and the driver of the truck comes and grabs them without a word. 

        

        The girl and I sit back on the bench. 

        “Lucky that didn’t go through somebody’s windshield,” I say. 

        “Yeah. Pretty scary,” she says. The bus comes and I gesture for her to get on first then she does the same to me and I insist and she says no then we both try to step on at the same time and laugh. As we drive off I look at the guy on the corner and finally decide to read his sign. He’s crayoned an American flag next to the words WAR VETERAN ANYTHING HELPS. I wonder if he knows that the real war is just beginning. 

The Lew Welch Memorial Expressway

I wake up beside the highway. Above it, rather. Over the past year I’ve learned the rhythms of its traffic the way someone living beside the sea learns the patterns of the tide. The traffic never stops on the 405 and its many arteries, though it does slow down at night. The poet Lew Welch ranted about the insidiousness of highways in a letter he mailed from a house one block from here that a few years later was razed to build this very road. If it was still there, I would be able to see the roof from my bedroom window. Despite all the changes to the city, I like knowing that many of the buildings he would have walked by are still standing, including this one. 

The sun has not yet crept around the corner of the building so I’m a little chilly as I sit on the balcony with my coffee. The sparrows vanished last week; I miss their frantic chirping, though I never caught more than glimpses of their beaks. I do my puzzles and read the news, even though I know I shouldn’t. I should be protecting myself from the constant barrage of horrifying updates to the story of our country’s plummet into madness. It’s  rush hour and the traffic light on the ramp is helping to stagger the traffic speeding toward the tunnel that cuts through the hills. 

Last week my mother and I drove through that tunnel on the way to the zoo. She was in town to visit and she said the two things she wanted to see were my new (to her) apartment and the baby elephant. Tula-Tu is four months old; I’d never seen an elephant so young, and while it’s always depressing to see animals in cages, my mother and I were both captivated. It’s a strange experience to stand next to the woman who gave birth to you and watch a baby elephant tuck her trunk into her own mother’s armpit to suckle. 

We had a nice week together. Growing old has not made her bitter and crabby like it did to her own mother, who never was all that nurturing to begin with. I didn’t plan a lot but we managed to pack in a lot. I dragged her along to a program dedicated to the work of a local video artist, which wasn’t great, and a production of Assassins, which was. Assassins is a Stephen Sondheim musical about the people who killed or tried to kill the president. It’s hard to believe there has only been a single botched attempt at eliminating our current president, but the show repeatedly urges us to follow our dreams.

The production was put on by a small local troupe of self-proclaimed marginalized  individuals, all of whom were terrific. They performed in the black box theater at Reed College. Lew Welch went to Reed, along with his friends and fellow Beat poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. I wonder what they would have thought of the play, its usual carnival barker narrator replaced by an imposing drag queen Lady Liberty. 

We spent a few days at the coast, staying in a motel in the sleepy town of Rockaway Beach. It was shabby, but it was clean, and it was right on the beach. We had lunch in Manzanita, which is a bustling metropolis by comparison, then went to my favorite spot on the entire coast, Short Sand. I don’t get there often because you need a car. From the parking lot you follow a creek for a mile through old growth forest, where trees sprout from other trees, their roots forming twisted structures that look like portals to the faerie kingdom. It all looks otherworldly. The path ends at a gorgeous cove rimmed with pines and beloved by surfers. 

Welch famously disappeared into the California wilderness with a rifle when he was 44, leaving behind a note.

 

I never could make anything work out right and now I’m betraying my friends. I can’t make anything out of it – never could. I had great visions but never could bring them together with reality. I used it all up. It’s all gone.

 As I sat next to my aging mother, looking out over the Pacific, I felt grateful that she was still in good enough shape to visit me, to drive to the beach, to walk through the woods to get to this beautiful spot. It has been a hard year, as was last year, as was the year before, as was... The losses keep building up and the planet seems to be spinning faster and faster toward apocalypse. My foot is still fucked up, and as usual I’m aching with loneliness. To cope with it all I’m drinking too much, which, oddly, does not seem to be helping. I’m not ready to give up on this world yet, but if I was, this would be a good place to do so. To let go of this world with the protective arms of the cove encircling us. Juncos twittering in the branches. The sun sparkling on the water. The waves crashing against the sand like the sound of rushing traffic on the freeway. 

For the Cause

It has to be done, I know that,

but God is it boring. Unsavory, of course,

but it’s the boredom that eats away at me.

I stare out at the flies crazing

beneath the ceiling fan, feel like my eyes 

are going to start circling and looping like them 

if he doesn’t finish soon. I’m jerking as hard as I dare;

too fast or too slow and he’ll gripe.

It’s small and flaccid, but I do my best  with the material

as I wait for that final spasm so I can finally 

get some work done. In the meantime, 

I stare at the flies and think about the diagrams,

the lists, the maps, all the scraps of folded paper 

outlining the plan to bring down this gang of rejects

from Monster Island. Some of the information 

is vital –lists of potential allies,

the heights of buildings along various routes,

seating arrangements in the chambers and halls. 

Some of it is more esoteric. Secret sauce recipes

for various fast food items. Sources for exploding

seat cushions. Theories on how to keep a head alive 

once it’s been separated from the body 

so it can still watch and feel as a razor-sharp, 

many-pronged dildo is rammed repeatedly 

into the rectum. Is that really a necessary part 

of the overall scheme? 

There are various schools of thought on this. 

Some fear we will lose focus, as I am right now, 

letting my weary mind daydream about a day 

when a never-ending series of handjobs 

and blowjobs won’t be necessary 

to appease and distract these slobs. 

That day seems so distant, 

but at least this current state of semi-hardship 

is close to coming an end, his cheeks having gone 

from orange to cherry to grape 

as he puffs and groans, sweat matting 

linty cobwebs of hair against his brow. 

Finally, with a little squeak 

his whole body shudders 

and a greasy comet of spunk 

streaks across the room

to splat against the portrait of his daughter 

eying us from the end table. 

Milky tears run down her face 

as he struggles to extract his ass 

from the deep plush. 

It won’t be long now, I want to tell her.

He totters and tugs on his trousers 

and flicks a few bills at me.  

As they flutter to the carpet, 

I go to the bathroom and wash my hands. 

One of the flies follows

and I snatch it from the air with a soapy fist 

and drop it into the sink

where it swirls and swirls before 

being sucked down into the darkness.