Anger

Jan isn’t speaking to me at the moment. In fact, I just got back home from leaving some money for her in order to fix the damage.

She called me last week asking if I’d like to come over that weekend. I was happy to because Jan and I haven’t spent any real time together in a while. I was expecting a night like the old days in which we ate good food, drank some good wine and talked into the ealy morning. Jan has always been my intellectual equal and I enjoy her company.

I had planned to see Grace that night, but decided to cancel in favor of seeing Jan. After all our would-be burgeoning relationship has been sinking faster than the Titanic. I’m strangely unmoved by it. Once you’ve been through a divorce your feelings about relationships change. You realize that most of them are, for better or worse, transient.

I’ve got a bad temper. I get it from my father who was one hothead son of a bitch. He never hit me, but he was always on edge, uptight, angry at the drop of the proverbial hat. My mother said it was his work. Whatever it was, he passed it to me. This temper of mine comes on at the worst times. It’s cost me friends and lovers. Sometimes it has been justified. Sometimes it hasn’t. You can’t think about it too much, just keep moving forward. A person can strangle on regret.

I arrived at Jan’s in the best mood. By the time I hit the front door though I knew I was not in for a quiet evening. I could hear the chatterheads milling about behind that door. I was set to turn around and leave when two members of the skinny jeans brigade arrived, forcing me to knock on the door to avoid suspicion.

My consternation was further heightened by Jan who acted genuinely surprised to see me even though she’d invited me. I gave her the bottle of wine I had brought for her, yet she seemed more intrigued by the two brats who came in behind me. Nothing much to them, really. Boys denying manhood, whose only goal it seemed was to look like the 70s punk group, The Ramones, a band of ugly idiots if there ever was one.

I wandered around the place, listening to the conversation, feeling the weight of knowing I had no place in this apartment surrounded by these flea-ridden assholes. I should have scrammed out of that place right then, but I’m a dumb fuck so I took a seat and started drinking.

It was about an hour into this torture of wallet chains and stuttered vocabulary that Andy prick showed up. Son of a bitch walked right in and started owning the place, telling people this and that. It was too much, but I could handle the prick. I’d dealt with assholes like him before. They’re nothing. Just a human megaphone spouting their list of imagined accomplishments.

After another drink however I began to take exception to his condescending attitude towards Jan. The son of a bitch should have been on his hands and knees morning, noon and night praising whatever is up there for allowing Jan into his life. Instead he treats her like a mangy dog……and even those are worth a little love and respect. After all, how can you not love a dog, no matter how mangy it is?

I couldn’t stand this prick any longer. I stood up and made my way over to him, let him know what I thought of him. I’ll give him credit, he let me finish my spiel. He must have known before I did I was digging my own hole.

Then he rips into me. You know, my age, what was I doing there, some things only Jan knew that he now knew about me. I have to admit, some of it was right on target. Maybe that’s why I lost my temper and decked the son of a bitch right there.

He wasn’t made of anything. He fell backwards into a lamp, spilling it to the floor. I went in for another punch. I wanted this son of a bitch to swallow his teeth. I tried to clip him as he was falling backward but I missed, driving my fist into the wall. Right up to the wrist. Took me a few seconds to dislodge it. I was seething like some kind of wild animal.  All I could think about was beating this frazzled-headed little bastard into a pulp. I was really losing it.

You’ve got be careful with angry people like me. We let it sit there and sit there, and when it finally explodes, we’re so happy to be rid of it we take no consideration who we’re dumping it on. That’s why it’s a good idea to leave those brooding bastards you see out and about alone. You never know, you may end up paying big time for the person who broke their heart nine years before or the corporate exec who canceled their favorite show or the alpha males who humiliated them in gym class. It could be anything. Anger doesn’t have a set of universal rules. It comes from the heart, the mind and the pit of the stomach where all of our worst fears and venom never digest.

After I punched that snapperhead, the place was quiet. It was as if time stopped. I had gone from an anonymous figure minutes before to the center of attention. Andy had fallen on his back and was squirming like a turtle. He looked ridiculous, prompting me to laugh. I knew I shouldn’t, but seeing that punk blithering like an idiot on his back was a real joy. Sue me. Jan didn’t think much of it, I can tell you that. She told me to get out.

I tried to reach her over the next few days to apologize and smooth things over. All I got was her voice mail with that sickeningly sweet voice she has, young and pretty, chiming in my ear. I left a message saying I was going to leave the money to pay for the damage in her mailbox. I didn’t ask her to call me back. She hasn’t called me back. Probably won’t. Like I said, a person can strangle on regret.

The Voice

My friends think I’m yanking their chains when I tell them how I’m writing the manuscript. That it’s not necessarily being written by me, but through me. That I’ve been ostensibly chosen by some celestial force to write the new bible.

They laugh at me. They think I’m hanging on to some sputtering practical joke. They’ve never seen the manuscript, because I don’t dare show it to them. If they did they would see that over 600 pages have been written. They’ve known me long enough, I’ve never written 600 pages of anything. Shit, I haven’t written 6 pages of anything.

It’s never been for a lack of trying though. When I was younger I put myself on the outs with my old man when I told him I wasn’t interested in the military and working for the government. That had been his bag. I wanted nothing to do with it.

Instead I wanted to go to college, chase skirts and eventually become a writer. It was all bullshit really. While I liked chasing skirts, I never had any actual desire to become a writer; I just wanted to avoid the nightmare he had in store for me. My only real ambition was to avoid doing anything I didn’t want to as long as possible. Thanks to what my father left me when he passed away, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing most of my life.

It was just over a year ago when the voice started coming to me. I woke up on a hardwood floor in a house I didn’t know, my head throbbing from a hangover. Next to me laid a young girl. Definitely underage. Definitely trouble. I got to my feet quietly, realizing the entire place was covered in sleeping, booze-ridden bodies.

As I stepped out into the morning light, I looked back into the room and saw the young girl staring at me. Not speaking, just staring at me. Perhaps I was the first of several men she will see make a quick exit the morning after too many drinks with her. I couldn’t be sure if anything happened between us, but I wasn’t going to stay and find out. I gave her a sheepish grin and closed the door, jogging to my car down the street in case she should follow.

I had no idea where I was. The neighborhood was definitely middle-class with its manicured lawns and the materialistic gains of its residents proudly on display to make the neighbors jealous, but I did not recognize the street names. I decided to just drive until I saw something familiar.

As I came to the first stop sign, I suddenly heard, quite clearly, a voice in my head say, “Turn right.” I didn’t think anything of it and turned right. Right seemed logical to me. This inner voice continued to give me directions until I found myself on the highway. Turns out I was 45 minutes north of town, having obviously decided to accompany the party from the night before to this small town.

I did not hear the voice on the drive home. The only thing I could think about was calming my hangover and a nice breakfast as well as some additional sleep. When I got home, I found myself so tired I forgot about the hangover and breakfast and fell asleep.

Awaking later that day, I found myself suddenly seized with the desire to write. I couldn’t understand it, I never wrote anything except letters…and those weren’t exactly sterling. Now all of a sudden, as clear as one can imagine, I had the details of a massive tome circulating through my brain. The beginning, middle and end. The Alpha and Omega. I could have spoken it out loud as if memorized.

It was about the history of mankind and what was to come when we enter the Great Transition from one age to the next. It was all sitting there in my mind. I saw the complete and utter degradation of mankind, how far we had fallen, and fall further we would before the slow inevitable climb back. The absolute horror and what remaining beauty of mankind was left rested in my brain.

I paced the room. I was concerned. Had someone slipped something into my drinks the night before? Was I losing my everloving mind? The desire to write remained with me. I decided to sit down at the computer and see what happened.

I put my fingers to the keys and they started typing almost immediately, speeding across the keys. So intent was I on what was happening, I had no time to register the words as they flashed upon the screen. I continued this way for what seemed like hours. There were occasional lulls where very little was produced or nothing at all, before the stream of words came again lasting for several minutes at a time before tapering off.

Finally it dwindled to nothing. I sat back in the chair. My fingers felt as if something had been coursing through the tips of them. Some kind of energy. The air around me felt electric. I saved what I wrote, printing a copy. I read over a little of it. It didn’t seem like my writing. It was too clear, too polished….too good.

This was confusing. I got up from the desk and walked to the phone. I should call Sonia, have her look at it. Maybe she could offer a clue as to what the hell was going on. Once I picked up the phone however, I could hear a voice within me telling me it wasn’t safe to show this to anyone. The truth it contained, the unfolding events. No, it couldn’t be read by anyone. If the wrong person read it, there’s no telling how they might react or what they would do. Particularly someone like Sonia who, as intelligent as she is, thinks in a linear fashion. The stack of words over there was far from linear, some of it going into great detail about the various dimensions of existence and the ability to cross them as easily as crossing a street. Shit, I didn’t understand it myself and I’d just written it. No, if the wrong person read this, they’d lock me up and throw away the key. I felt sure of it.

Yet something wasn’t right. Who was I to suddenly have this information at my fingertips? I began to wonder if I wasn’t part of some government experiment, spearheaded by my father. Maybe I had unknowingly been experimented on for years. The voice in my head? What if I was some kind of Manchurian Candidate. The next Sirhan Sirhan. I would have to be on the lookout for women in polka-dot dresses.

I had an idea. Perhaps an answer could be found amongst the possessions of my father I had kept in storage. After his death, people from the government had gone through most of it, claiming National Security. Still, perhaps there was something that had been missed. There had been several boxes my father had left to me personally. Perhaps the answer to this mystery could be found there.

The storage facility where I kept my father’s belongings was on the outskirts of town. I had no room for it at my place and my mother had sold the house and moved to South America shortly after the old man kicked the bucket. I’m not sure why I decided to store them at a place outside of town other than it felt right at the time.

As I was driving, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was following me. All of the headlights in my rearview seemed to be too close. I was a nervous wreck. I had to switch cars. I remember overhearing my father and an associate of his once briefly discussing switching cars to avoid being tailed. Before I could inquire further, he realized I was standing there and demanded I leave immediately.

I pulled into the local mall. I parked and went inside. I had to fight the urge to retch as I came into contact with the zombiefied remains of the American consumer pacing slowly through the halls of the mall looking in vain for the one item that will remove the sense of emptiness from their lives. The Mall and Television have done more to destroy the American people than any other threat, foreign or domestic.

I made it to a pay phone, surprised to see one still standing in this cell phone age. I had a mobile phone but how could I be sure it wasn’t being monitored? My sense of paranoia was as strong as I had ever felt, and I could feel sweat breaking out over my body. Every person I glanced at had a hidden agenda and every noise and shadow belonged to my executioner.

I was able to reach Roy. I had to be careful what I told him. Roy is a conspiracy theorist so he’s paranoid by nature. I couldn’t take a chance on telling him anything until I knew myself. Otherwise, Roy could turn out to be more of a problem than a help.

He was understandably confused when I asked him to come pick me up. I had to feed him a line about car trouble and how I was having it towed. He asked me why I just didn’t ride with the tow truck guy. I became indignant, prompting guilt from him. He said he’d come pick me up. I waited just inside the mall entrance where I told him to pick me up, quickly hurrying to his car when I saw him. I exchanged small talk with him briefly before asking him if he’d be kind enough to take me out to the storage facility, which he did, even though it was obvious he didn’t want to. Roy’s a good man.

The place was quiet. We appeared to be the only ones there. I unlocked the door and pulled it back down once we were inside. It did not appear as if anyone else had been there. I told Roy to look around, I’d only be a few minutes. I went through the small cabinet my father had given me. Until now I had no desire to look through it. To my disappointment, most of the contents were photos of us, books he had left me, a few records, autographs of famous people he’d met – Roy was particularly impressed by the Jimmy Stewart signed photo – and some letters. Cool stuff, for the most part, but I was looking for answers to the voice in my head.

I felt uneasy going through all of this while Roy was there so I simply gathered up the small cabinet, put it in Roy’s car and had him drive me home. Once there, I phoned a cab and had the cabbie return me to my car at the mall. If anyone had been following me and knew where the storage facility was after all of the moves I’d made, they were too much for me to outsmart. At least I had the cabinet.

As interesting as the contents of the cabinet were, they didn’t provide any answers as to my new condition, leaving me to assume that this newfound ability for writing esoteric manuscripts was of something not related to my father. If it did involve my old man, the secret had died with him. I was going to have to figure this out on my own. Meanwhile, the writing continues in fits and starts. Where the manuscript will end is anyone’s guess.

Party

As I’ve written before, I don’t like parties. It’s nothing personal to anyone involved, I just don’t like groups of people in concentrated areas. I find myself disliking their conversations, their attempts at humor, their politics, their passions, their attempts to be relevant. A perfect world would be devoid of empty chatter and we could get down to something truly soulful.

Parties are about people being the center of attention. Groups form at parties. You have to find the group that will accept you. Then you spend the night trying to retain their confidence in you. You lower yourself, you laugh at jokes that aren’t funny, you talk about things that bore you to tears. Anything to hold their attention. It’s torture. Occasionally you come upon a kindred spirit and it turns into a good night, but it’s rare.

Parties are terrible for couples. Couples spend too much time together so they jump at the chance of being around other people. Once they’re around other people though, they realize how much they don’t like each other. Their eyes and minds begin wandering. They become flirtatious. They dream of better tomorrows. And then it’s time to go home, and you’re just happy to have someone to go home with.

Sonia and I went to parties. She had friends in the local intelligentsia and academic communities. A collection of bores and halfwits, rambling on about philosophy and literature and politics as if any of them truly gave a damn about what they were talking about. It looked good, and made sure a generation’s worth of nerds and dickheads got laid.

As soon as we arrived, Sonia would start hitting up the eggheads and artists. She craved their culture. She said I didn’t have any taste. I’d bring up Eddie Cochran, Myrna Loy, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, James Cagney, Fante, Chaplin. She told me that didn’t mean anything. She was never able to define what she was talking about, but she obviously knew what it was, and I didn’t know shit. She only kept me around for sex and she said I was a good talker.

Watching her flirt with the balding fucknut who still had a ponytail, I began to suspect she might be cheating on me. I could have found out, but at that point I didn’t care. Besides, those parties always had plenty of young college women – even a few high schoolers – who were easy to talk to. I’d usually find myself in some secluded part of the house groping and kissing, writing poetry in my mind about their looks and the way they smelled, promising to see them again. Then Sonia and I would make our way home, back to normal.

It was the normalcy that drove me mad. I wasn’t content with normal. I only wanted normal as was necessary to get by without trouble. Normalcy is good for making a living, normalcy is good for operating within that restriction, but it’s not enjoyable. Too much normalcy drives people mad. Too much normalcy drives a person to do foolish and hurtful things to themselves or other people. If I shun debauchery as irresponsible, I have to likewise shun normalcy as being equally irresponsible. In both instances, you’re allowing yourself to be dictated to by a romanticized idea of what constitutes either normalcy or debauchery instead of a realistic idea about both.

Needless to say, I wasn’t crazy about attending Max’s party. But he had invited me and, rather than spend another unfulfilled evening with the handful of people I considered friends or drinking alone, I decided to stop by in the event I might find an excuse to stay a little longer.

The only real question was what to wear?