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true stories
Wrong Number Prophet
I'd like to start this off with a disclaimer. This stuff happened to me (or perhaps I happened to it) when i was 11 years old. Some of the 4th coming events are pretty rotten and this retelling is not meant to glorify these (my) actions in any way. Thinking about it now I feel pretty bad for her and can see how there but for the grace of god could go me...
So the story begins sometime in the 7th grade. My dad was an insurance salesman and was moving out of his offices on main street into the garage apartment at our house. He had a 2nd phone line installed while i was at school. When i got home he was plugging in telephones and curious to see if we could get this baby working. He sent me upstairs into the house to call his new business line. I dialed the phone number 367 8985. or so i thought
Voice: Praise the lord!
Me: Uh, dad?
Voice: Jesus Loves you!
Me: I think i have the wrong number... sorry about that..
Voice: No, Don't hang up. Wait. Just for a second. I need to ask you a question. This is very important.
Me: I really think i have the wrong number...
Voice: Have you heard the good news? Do you know? He's right here! Standing right beside me, he is, and his touch is of love, of the purest love that ever could be known... did you know he dialed this number... his touch... this moment was created for you to talk to me to hear the news... the good news...
Me: uhhh
Voice: Will you pray with me? Please? Just for a minute. I don't want to lose you. I don't want to see satan grip his tendrils to your soul to drag you down to hell. Pray with me.. please pray with me...
Me: ok, maybe a quick one..
Voice: thank you so much (in a different voice) Dear Jesus. Hear my prayer, protect this boy and save him from harm. Show him the truest love of god the father deep in your heart. Jesus, show this lost and troubled soul the way of your light and love... Dear Jesus... Help us to understand the way of the lord... the way of the light... help us feel the holy spirit in the name of your father... let us have the purity of the virgin mary evelop us in a ball of the purest light of love... we ask this most humbly in the name of the father, son and holy spirit...
Me: That's very...
Voice: Jesus, I hear you, I hear your voice... i feel you coarsing through me like the blood of king david. jesus touch this boy as i have been touched... give him the gift of faith... give it to him jesus.. give it to him now.. now now now! Boy, Do you feel it?
Me: i think so
Voice: Do you FEEL IT! Are you ready to give your life to god? Forever!
M: uh, sure... that's fine... look i gotta go.
Voice: Will you call me back? Let me know you are doing ok? Please...
M: that's fine... Uh,, bye bye
V: Jesus loves you...
So i go downstairs and ask my dad for the number again and he's like... "what the hell took you so long?" and i tell him of this wrong number prophet. he sends me back up and i call again... It's him.. but i remember how i misdialed... what i did to reach this lady.. it struck me that i might just call her again.. if only to have a bit of harmless fun...
(to be continued)
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i am but a sheep
(mars took the pictue)
I am hanging out with kc and re-run. He begins to chew on my shoe so i spray it with the bitter apple. I then get up to go look for an appropriate chew toy for the dog. It's pretty awesome the way he comes when i call as i walk from room to room. I'm almost wondering if perhaps he's begining to respond to a few words. I can't seem to find anything appropriate for him to chew so I begin to crudely construct a sock chew toy with a couple of treats deep in the middle. Kc seems to think it's not a good idea. If i give him a sock he will think it's ok to chew on socks. With no better solution at mind i call mars to see if she knows anything.
mars tells me that his toys and bones were in a bag in the trunk. Seems we left them from the near camping experience a few nights ago which almost happened. I get the keys and re-run dashes outside as we go to retrieve the prescious chewables from the car. I follow him around the back of the building where he's lapping water from a bowl with leaves in it. I try to call. no reply. i say come. no register. just lap. I say re run. nothing. I slowly walk toward him. he runs away. there goes my theory about him learning commands. I follow and he's keeping a distance of about 7 feet. I run towars him and he quickly changes direction. the grass is wet and very slippery. there is almost a disaster.
eventually re run starts running back in forth and i'm still walking towars him, hoping he'll sit sitll long enough to be grabbed and put inside. sadly he's just running, only pausing out of reach. i think, well he's pretty energized anyway, might as well let him run around as long as he doesn't go too far outside the yard (or into the street.)
run around he does. pretty soon he's running circles around me, really tight circles and i'm just spinning in circles following him. I ask kc if she'll grab him if i get him close. she says no dice. so i just let him run around me as i graze about mine and my landlord's yard. he runs till he peters out and sits, and i just snatch him right up.
I take him inside and then go back outside to retrieve the prescious bag of chewy things. Re-run suddely has displayed before him a shmorgusborg of appropriate teething relievers. he decides on the rawhide bone and soon is happily gnawing and clopping the bone on the hardwood floor.
later discussing the incident it is revealed to me by mars that the reason re-run was running in circles around be is because he is a sheep dog. he was herding me. KC says "you are a sheep." Funny thing is I am a sheep. I was born in the year of the lamb. I was also born in the month of august, which makes me a lion.
lion and lamb. that's complicated
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driving to work at a pizza place in winter 2002.
I lived at my dad's house in new iberia. I worked at a pizza restaraunt in lafayette which is about 30 minutes away. You could either take the major highway 90, a buzzing four lane lined with ugly metal buildings and bilboards with crazy agressive drivers or a peaceful sneaky little senic 2 lane roadway 182. 182 was pretty much the only way i knew how to get to lafayette for a long time cause the road was so close to my house, it was easiest to bypass 90 altogether.
The wintertime however poses certian special challanges for those who travel highway 182 in the early morning. It's a twisty winding road and in thick winter fog, it's hard to see very far in front of you which wouldn't be too much of a problem if you didn't have to keep swerving into the opposing lane of traffic to avoid very slow moving tractors.
You see, along highway 182 is many many fields of sugarcane, and winter is harvest time. The cane is taken from the fields in huge trailers pulled by slow ass tractors. the road limit is 55 miles per hour (you'd typically go 65) but these tractors only go about 25 miles per hour (taking up the entire lane of traffic no less.) So traffic lines up behind these tractors and drivers have to look for an opening in the other lane of oncomming cars in which to swerve into. Then they'd haul ass down the other lane around the traffic and back into the right lane before hitting another car (hopefully.) there would be another tractor maybe a mile down the road. The Lethargic Enormous vehicals are headed both to and from the sugar cane processing plant so cars from both directions have to perform this death defying manuver 6 or 7 times before getting off that 10 mile long strip of death.
Now think about that blanket pea soup fog that ends the human line of sight that i described at the begining of this entry.
i'm greatful i don't do that anymore.
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last night had a fist fight.
yesterday i was feeling like a hermit and didn't want to leave the house but i did. I went to the cafe to watch a friend of mine's band known as the transmission. There were 3 bands on the list that night, first my friends, then a local "swamp rock" band, followed by these 2 kids with acoustic guitars from california. i was in the back of the cafe near the pool table looking at a friends photo album while my friend's band was playing and one of the swamp rockers was complaining about how "even if they start at 10:30, they still better be done by 11." i thought to myself, what a rockstar.
Band number one finished about 11:20 or so and band number 2 started up. Here's the thing about the cafe and music. Most bands that come to the cafe have the misconception that they are playing in a stadium and need to be as loud as fucking possible. they crank the "music" to the point where they can be heard from anywhere inside or outside the building. so these bands have the groups they bring with them, and then the rest of the cafe usuals disperse to hear music and conversations at the same time. what sucks is that the cafe has no working AC so it's just as hot inside as outside and when a band is playing it gets even hotter and then you want to go outside for relief but it's just as muggy. There's no relief from the heat.
So the swamprockers are rocking and the rockstar from earlier is getting testy because not everyone in the club is standing right infront of the stage watching him. i'm outside the cafe and this guy will come outside with his guitar and play it for the crowd outside while yelling "COME ON! LET's ROCK!!! GO INSIDE!!!..." and then when it didn't happen he was like "alright, we'll see.."
so the kids from california show up and it turns out that these were kids who used to be lafayette locals. I knew them. They left a year ago to go to california to make music and they were back for one night to share. aww. too bad they had to borrow a microphone cable from the swamp rockers otherwise this whole mess might have been avoided.
they started the last set about 1 am. and after about 3 songs the rockstar cuts them off with, "one more song, wrap it up so i can go." the girl singing begs for 3 more songs and the rockstar starts getting testy, "i got to GO!"
I tell him about how they are only here for a moment and he says to me "That's not my problem man! I got's to get the fuck." he starts getting loud and nothing is happening when this other guy from oklahoma who is standing there talking on a cel phone says "hey, man I just want to listen to music!"
the rockstar takes this somehow as a personal insult
RS: what did you say to me?
OK: i don't want any trouble.
RS: are you trying to start shit with me? do you want to take it outside? Let's go! Let's see what you got!
OK: I don't even know you. I don't want to fight. (into cel phone) hold on this fat fuck wants to fight..
so the guy from oklahoma puts his drink down and cel phone in pocket and suddenly the rockstar is whaling on him. I'm standing next to a girl and try to get us out of the way of the carnage, but of course, they smash right into her, into a table. So i jump in carefully to restrain the rock star, while the bouncer is grabbing the other guy and the rockstar's brother is jumping on me and for a second it looks like it's going to be one of those brawls you see in cowboy movies.
the brother of the rockstar threw me off his brother and onto the ground. I stood up and he said "don't hit my brother!"
i said "no no, i was just trying to stop the fight. I want no trouble. Peace peace."
that's when the girl finally gets over the shock of being bumped into and starts to yell "WHY MUST STUPID PEOPLE BE SO VIOLENT?!?!?!?" I grab her sholders and say "peace baby, please peace, peace peace." I think she's going to keep getting angry but that's when Ugene UGENE grabs her and says "don't look at them, look at me. I'm still me. (and here is ugene's new catchphrase) I'm Ugene DAMMIT!"
the bouncer thanks me for helping break up the fight and i talk to the kids from oklahoma who were only intown to see the folk guitarist on stage (and cause all of these people were intown for a wedding.) he was pretty banged up but very congenial about the whole thing. he said "i'm from the city, tulsa, and this ain't no city, this is a town. You expect this kind of shit in the city. There's always some asshole trying to pick some shit. If he had caught me when i was on gaurd it would have been a different story but i got my ass kicked and that's ok."
I said "i'm sorry that this is a reflection of your visit to louisiana."
He said "don't worry about it, this doesn't reflect on your state at all. This kind of shit is everywhere."
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a true story from right in my neighborhood.
i moved into the house i'm living in at the begining of march. as i was moving in a group of kids were moving out. I got to hear horror stories from both the landlords and the tenants about who damaged what and who deserved what deposit back. you know, the oldest landlord story in the book.
my land lady can talk your ear off. she'll go on and on about how she has to go to the hospital and her husband has to go to the hospital and about how the bars down the street are too loud, her dog barks too much... you know, old lady kind of stuff.
my land lord is a great big hulking old giant of a man. His name is sterling hubbard. he's mean and ornery, but he's also pretty nice. the kids who used to live in the house hates his guts but he and his wife are both very nice to me.
today she told me a story that moved me...
it's a story that i've heard bits and pieces of a few times before. the first time i heard of this story i was signing the lease and the landlord asked me to please not let any black people live with me while i was in that house. before i could ask why he told me a story of when he was young and this guy was his good friend but something happened. i'm not sure what led up to it, but for some reason, the landlord's friend shot him in the face with a shot gun. The blast blew the left half of his face off. he's got a pin in his jaw, no sinuses and can't feel anything on the left side of his face. it was a while ago when it happened, 50 years probably. he should have died by most accounts...
the story i heard today begins with a bang. my landlady kicks off with
"He was in the car, and half his face was blown off.. he was trying to drive to the... it was st anthony's clinic then... i don't know what you call it now. well he was driving and he had to stuff a t-shirt in the hole cause the blood was spurting on to the windshield and he couldn't see to drive! Well, somehow, he drove to the doctor's office, and he'd lost alot of blood. and he was walking up on the outside of it, and was stumbling agaist the wall and he was Punching it. He was punching the wall and Leaving holes! leaving big holes cause it was sheetrock but he was punching the walls dammit, you know, to get their attention, to get some help. when the nurse finally found him, it was her first day right outta school, when she found him she passed out cold. Then, i don't know, they get an orderly or something and get him onto a gurney and into an operating room. the nurses were asking if they should take the t shirt out and the doctor said, "naw don't bother, he's dead already." And that just made sterling MAD. It was cause he stayed awake that he stayed alive. He couldn't talk cause his vocal chords had been cut but he could still move and make noise.
"now it was about this time that this other doctor, who was there so see another patient, he just happened to be there, he found out what was goin on and he was a surgen and took one look at sterling and said, "I need a scalpel to cut this man a wind pipe or he's gonna die". so they try to find a scalpel but can't find one big enough to do the job.
So sterling takes out his knife and opens it and gives it to the doctor"
The doctor cuts him up a fresh windpipe or whatever and sterling could breathe.
Now my land lord and this doctor guy ends up becoming friends after that. The doctor was a very skilled surgen but according to my landlady not too good at much other stuff. she called him clumsy. but he liked sports cars. He liked little fast cars that he could wheel around town. Sterling told him repeatedly that he would die in a car, that he needed to be careful, but people do what people are gonna do, right?
Sure enough this doctor friend of my landlord ends up wrapping his little sports car around a tree and it takes off the whole back of his head. Brains were showing but he was still coherent. He called for my landlord to come to his side. he stayed with him till he was dead. He kept calling him daddy rabbit because of a little kid who couldn't pronounce doctor robert. "everything is gonna be ok daddy rabbit, everything's gonna be ok."
that night was the first night my landlady saw her husband cry. he was saying "i couldn't do anything for him. He saved my life and i could do nothing but watch."
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marley dog.. first impressions..
he was a dachsund. i don't think he was ever castrated so he had a tendancy to run around like a freak. He was a fat little weiner dog who was raised by his flakey hippyesque mom in a house with a big yard until she wanted someone to adopt him. My girlfriend at the time was frequently mentioning wanting a dog so i thought, "how about getting marley for my girlfriend thereby solving two problems at once?" what an idiot i was.
The girl (we'll call her Exie) was excited about the idea of having a dog around and it was kind of cool when she lived in a big house with several guys, but pretty soon some shit was stolen from her and she wanted her own place. For a while she was padlocking her own room.
she moved into a one bedroom apartment with basically me and the dog living with her. the dog and i fought alot. he would bite and scratch and fight and i would wrestle, ALL THE TIME. That dog would never ever ever chill the fuck out. if ever me and exie were to practice the sexy we'd either usually lock the dog in the kitchen or on the porch cause he'd attack the bed.
This dog would also run away all the time. Basically anytime the door was open for more than a second and a half that dog was down the street. running and running. I remember chasing that dog down, hunting that dog down, carrying that dog back home. (i bet i felt a bit like my father at times) When you would walk with marley he would drag you.
One night my next door neighbor rusty was throwing a huge party and people were coming back and forth in the house. Marley got let out like three times by this same girl visiting my roomate while exie and i tried to curl up on the couch together and watch the back to the future trilogy. she'd come in the house and start talking with the door open and everyone would yell "CLOSE THE FUCKING DOOR" until the dog ran away. when marly ran sometimes we would let him stay out cause he'd gotten clean away and would usually come back when hungry. that night however we wanted to keep him inside because of the party and all of the traffic.
after the 4th time marley ran away and about 4 of us spent a while searching the neighborhood to no avail i just said "fuckit" and let him go. 20 minutes later somebody was knocking on the door cause marley had been hit by a car and was lying in the driveway breathing funny. I knew in my heart marly would die, but i saw my girl sitting with the doggie in her arms crying, and we found a friend (john Steele) with a SUV and an open vet emergency about an hour away. We used a big sheet of wood as a makeshift stretcher and i rode with exie for the trip holding her hand while she held the slowly dying dog, crying.
he was dead when we found the vet. all the guy there could do was confirm it and dispose of the body. we decided to go with cremation over burial. We said a little prayer and marley was gone.
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it was spring of 2001 in the semester of my heart
(preface: this is a continuation of the story i started a couple of days ago. I might not finish the story cause there's a lot to it that lasts a few years. but at this moment i might be able to trudge through a few more months of it. This was an incredibly productive and positive time in my life artistically speaking. I was doing a lot of drugs, mostly illegeal country bathtub crank, pot, LSD, Robotussin, Hash, Shrooms (hand picked of course) and the good old colligiete stand by alcohol. yet i took 24 hours in school (not counting the summer plays that were 3 hours of A) and passed all of them with A's. alot of those classes were theater classes or philosophy classes. There might have been a math class but i probably dropped it after not going for most of it. The big classes from that semester probably would have been Existentalism which helped put into words alot of what i had been feeling for many years about the emptyness of religon and the absurdity of life and Playwriting, which helped me take my inner confusion and put it into words, into pictures, into actions designed for people to see. I acted in every major production our department put on, and spent a good deal of the semester getting my newly written plays acted out by the kids in the directing class who always were looking for short plays to direct. what's funny is that alot of my love problems from that semester became plays that i wrote and helped produce that semester. It was like watching the creation of a tv show version of your life AS YOU LIVED IT. Almost like reality TV.
I never slept. I only worked on writing and learning and going on psychedelic explorations and looking desperately for the love of this girl. I was not not not stable at all.)
this girl was in both the playwriting AND the existentialism class. Her boyfriend at the time was in the existentalism class. I was just getting into making Photoshop art, so i would take a digital camera and take pictures of people i knew and then distort the images to make strange ominious and dark cartoons about them.
They say absense makes the heart grow fonder and i think they might be right. i saw her evey day in every class, she was around me, haunting me. For some reason what didn't bother me at all in the fall was totally fucking my head up in the spring. I had decided to leave her alone but then i somehow changed my mind. Somehow her affection was something i could not do without. i spent most of my time trying to create things that described our situation, that would let me show her how much i cared about her. when she would ignore or rebuff me i would just act like a little brother and do things to try to twist jelousy and possessive feelings out of her. I'd go on dates with really attractive girls and boast about it infront of social gatherings she was around. i wouldn't do anything but i would do my best to look as if i was some kind of supreme player badass.
She'd be pissed at me, I'd be pissed at her but if ever we were alone we were able to talk to one another. There were feelings of understaning and tenderness that we felt because we both understood feeling alienated in a crowd. I was working constantly on either school, the paper, or the theater (or drugs) and had no time to be around her, which was ok because she had half heartedly gotten back together with her cheating ex, but i still wanted her so so so bad.
I had pictures of her, her ex (with whom she was sleeping with and living with) and me. I made these photoshop compositions designed to express the pain i felt in not having her and having lost her to him. I took about a dozen of these pictures and made my own personal gallery using all of the moniters of a school computer lab. I gave her a private showing of the pictures and whispered "i love you" in her ear. She started to cry and i kissed her. Then we had to go to class.
later that night, and this night i eventually wrote into a play with no dialog, only movement, dancing and music. she's hanging out with him, sad and unhappy, i arrive and am buzzing and cheerfull and happy. I totally light up the room with cheer. The sad mopey guy she was with leaves. We have sex. The next morning he walks in on the two of us naked in bed together and slams the door. When the stage production of that story came out, I played him, and my roomate ced played me. it was pretty weird. I will publish the script if anyone asks for it in a comment.
the next weekend i went on a trip with my theater department to louisville kentuky for some indy theater festival, but before i left i had a conversaton with her on the topic of monagomy. she lived in the same house as this guy she was boyfriend/girlfriend with and would be around him for a weekend right after we had gotten together. I dont' remember if she asked me or if i asked her but some how we got on the subject of encountering temptation in the week ahead. I do very clearly remember telling her "you go a head and do whatever you want." but in my heart i knew it was a really bad idea.
i had a really good time in lousiville. THe indy theater was totally high tech and awesome. They made some really cool stuff. I went out clubbing with all of my theater friends, there was tension, but nothing happened. I almost felt guilty. In the back of my head I had a feeling that something was wrong.
When i got back to town i called the girl and she didn't want to see me. She was uncomfortable talking to me and i pulled it out of her that she had slept with her ex a few times over the week i was gone. It tore my heart apart but i knew that it was my own fault for telling her to do what she wanted. i felt betrayed and stupid and hurt, really really hurt. But the worst part about it was that i knew that it was my own fault. What a FUCKING IDIOT. I think if i hadn't been so chemically determinined (a result of forming a relationship over METH/LSD/XTC,) I would have given up on the whole thing right then and there... Actually i did give up on the whole thing right then and there. I started to cry and hung up on her.
She called back but i told her that i felt like i couldn't handle this open relationship bullshit. I was way too sensitive (unstable) for anything like that to do anything but destroy me. i told her that i couldn't see her anymore, it was way too painful.
Her house was a house right next to campus that had a lot of traffic in and out. Lots of my friends frequented that house so i was known to hang out there. It was a couple of days later that i came over and found her by herself, crying her eyes out, breaking down completely. I gave her a hug and asked her what was wrong. She said that there was no one in her life that cared anything for her and she didn't want to live anymore. She called her mom who was coming to pick her up. I held her until her family showed up. We talked about these kinds of attacks and how they pass and how things get better. She gave me her home phone number and i talked to her over the weekend. I'm pretty calm in crisis situations, It's those bouts of calm normalcy that i have trouble with.
she came back to school with a doctor's excuse just in time for spring break. We took a ride with a close friend of mine Jr. here is a classic jr story. we went to texas to a party at a friend of ours farm. There was drinking and natural drugs and music and cooking so it was very nice and gentle. I remember sleeping on the stage under the stars, having sex in the morning under the sunrise, staring at her, hoping the moment would never end.
when we got back to natchitoches on monday we got word that her aunt had died and we needed to head to alexandria immediatly for the funeral. I had been invited to south padre island to enjoy a rockin spring break with friends but insted chose to go to a funeral of a girl whom i was very uncertianly seeing's aunt. I remember being so in my element. I lost my mom so i felt comfortable with people who were just encountering the shock of losing someone close to them. While we were there we planned a 2 part play that we would write together ( and we did.)
I remember at her parents house making love secretly in the backyard. The backyard had donkeys and chickens. A donkey kept sticking his nose in my butt while we were being romantic in the mud and i had to swat it away. i hung out with her family, her mom really liked me and her dad liked to fuck with me. Her brother and sister were pretty cool. I was starting to feel comfortable and happy in love...
then i had to go back to school for neglected final projects and final plays. Then i had to quit meth. My troubles hadn't even begun...
TO be continued.
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