cary head i'm all written out. i mean totally empty.
But I decided what to read tonight, so that's good. And for some reason I want to bring my guitar, the old Yamaha FG-300 that I traded in my junior high school trombone for ... but the case is beat up and I don't know what I'd play. I was thinking maybe like at 7th inning stretch i'd do god bless america but how many people are going to get the joke and how many people are going to be upset and confused? So probably no guitar.
So I thought since I'm all wrote out I'd just show you the thing I found to read tonight, in addition to a piece from the new Christmas book.
It's called
cary head "Traffic Was Murder"
101610 traffic was murder

Traffic on the freeway was murder. So I pulled off the road and sat in the car with the engine running and the windshield wipers going, pounding my fist on the steering wheel. I was going to be late to my son's graduation and there was nothing I could do about it. So I decided to go have a drink. I went into this bar on 83rd street right off the freeway. I love the glow of the St. Pauli Girl sign, don't you? Doesn't it spell promise and happy days to come? Doesn't it fill you with joy? "I'll have a St. Pauli Girl," I said to the barmaid, who wore one of those frilly tops like the St. Pauli Girl girl. There was a jukebox in there and nobody was playing it so I put on this Roy Orbison song, "Crying." Isn't that a great song? I love that song, "Crying." So I drank four St. Pauli Girls in the space of 20 minutes and played that Roy Orbison song six times in a row. And then I thought, fuck it, the kid's going to graduate whether I'm there or not. What's the rush. I started thinking about how long it had been since I'd done a lot of coke. I'd had a toot here and there since quitting for good. But I'd never really gotten into it full on like in the old days when we used to sit in Donny boy's basement and wait for the diaper delivery truck. Donny boy had a whole network selling to young moms out of the diaper trucks. Cute. We thought it was cute. All those kids with their coked-up moms going to the playground and cussing out the other moms. Donny's brother Ken drove the truck and took videos. He had stories. Playgrounds and coke just brings out the weird in moms. And who knows if some of it was going through their milk into their babies. Who knows. But that one playground was a pediatric psych ward. Lots of playground injuries too. And hyperactivity? But my son never got into that. He was a good kid. We never had any trouble with him.

"Is that your car outside?" asked the barmaid.

"You mean the really nice one?" I said. "With the scrape?"
"The red Monte Carlo?"
"It's not for sale," I said.
"It's on fire," she said.

So that's how I missed my son's graduation, and got an excuse for missing it all in the same motion. My car caught on fire.

I made it so the car caught on fire and then I drove to the strip mall that happened to have a bar in it. That was how I told it later.

Come to think of it, I must have gone in to that bar in kind of a blackout. Which was weird because really I wasn't drinking.

Damn. So the firemen had to come and put out my car and I had to come outside and sign papers and that got me all kind of charged up and so I thought well, here's an even better reason to find some coke and really do it up for one night. It's not like I do it all the time. In fact, I had quit for good by that point. I wasn't doing it at all. I mean, I was doing a little bit here and there. But not really doing it like in the old days. Except for this one time I thought it had been long enough, and I deserved it.

But here's how clean I had been: I didn't even know who to get some from. I kind of knew where I could go. I could just go to a certain street and walk around. So that's what I did.

They did an intervention after the graduation and the car fire. Wow. I'm glad it wasn't right after graduation because that night I did go find some coke and I was up for days. I guess the intervention was like a week after that. I came in from playing tennis with the neighbor guys and they were all sitting in my living room. My wife, all six daughters and the son, my mom and dad, my three brothers, and our dog. And they were all looking right at me, even the dog. We never look at each other in my family. If there's something going on, somebody might punch somebody. But we never walk around looking at each other. We consider that creepy and unorthodox. And I have cherished that understanding we have that nobody is really going to get into anybody else's shit like that, like they do on the TV program "Intervention." In fact, we used to joke about the TV program "Intervention." We used to sit around it and laugh. Look at that poor fuck, he's going into rehab. Oh, look, he's trying to escape! Look, he's going the other way! Catch him. We'd laugh until tears came down our cheeks.

And then here they were, all in my living room, getting all up in my face about a few beers and a little coke.

But what the hell. I don't mind. 28 days off work with full benefits. I would never take a job without full benefits and this was just one more reason. So I roomed with this accountant who drove his car up the wrong way ramp and killed a family of five. Guy had no record, no priors, exemplary work record, and he had this almost creepy apologetic streak, like so filled with remorse, or what seemed like remorse, and we'd lie there at night after the lights were out and we'd had all our group meetings and he'd be crying about what he did. And it wasn't like I was minimizing it, but I was just trying to cheer him up. Oh, it wasn't so bad, I'd say. I didn't mean it like that. Not that it wasn't bad. I was just trying to cheer him up and he'd picked up this stuff about being an enabler and all that so I had to back off and say OK, fuckwad, feel bad about it, see if I care.

It was really great, the 28 days. I don't regret it. I kind of got what they were talking about. But my mom, she never, ever got it. She thought they were there just to talk to me. The last thing she wanted was for me to go off to some rehabilitation. It sounded Stalinist to her, and she hated Stalin. Anything was bad, she'd say it sounded Stalinist. "It's not re-education," I said. "It's rehabilitation. Really, Mom, it's OK."

"I will not have a son of mine going into one of those camps. They can't make you do it."

"I don't mind. I'm going on my own accord." She didn't get it. I always remember her face, because she died only a few weeks later. It was some aneurysm. Just like that. She and Dad had their plots picked out so the whole thing was very quick. And I actually had quit by this point. So I was very strong, and I was happy to be a pall bearer. It was good on my forearms. My forearms needed more work. they were getting stringy. I like them lumpy, not stringy. Down in Jacksonville we had this mechanic with stringy forearms and it always grossed me out. I like the Asian mechanics; they have the lumpy forearms. I think it's better. Maybe it's diet. But I'd been doing those little forearm curls. Anyway, I'm getting off the topic of my mom and her face how she looked at me when I told her that rehab was not some Stalinist re-education camp, that it was more like summer school.

"You never needed to go to summer school," my mom said. "You were much too bright for that."

I quit smoking in rehab too. That was hard. Because I don't mind telling you I have a lot to keep down. So when I quit things started to come up. There wasn't much I could do.

Smoking was always something to go to. I really miss it. Now I'm into this Buddhist thing and we talk about groundlessness and how if we can just be there with whatever it is that is making us uncomfortable then there really is no problem. We are just here. We are just witnesses. I can do this. I can be here. But when I was smoking, whenever there was any opportunity or any excuse ... it was like a moment. It was like a moment being lit on fire. It was like whatever moment we were smoking in, we owned that moment. That moment was ours. That is what I miss. And I wish, now that I had some incantation, like Inshallah, or Praise be to God, or what was that phrase in Talladega Nights: Shake & Bake: Some incantation that says: We own this moment. We burn this moment ceremoniously. It is our moment to burn, and we watch it go up. It is our offering.

Grinding butts out on the floor of Macy's. Lighting up in an elevator.
What? I can't smoke in the elevator? Since when?
New regulation.
Rules.

It was membership. It was a bond. Now we are all out here alone, smokeless, in our little Buddhist tents, waiting for the shakes to pass. This one guy in rehab had the shakes. Oh ...

What was nice about the psychologist at rehab was that you could just talk on and on about stuff and only every now and then she'd bring you back to something you said. So I was telling her how much I missed smoking and she said, Is that all you miss?

And I was like, well, I miss St. Pauli Girl. And then somehow it came to me what she meant was, Don't you miss your son? Your family? Your job? And then it came: Your life.

My life! I know it sounds a little simplistic and all, but I had come to devalue my life. What was important to me was getting a beer, and getting some coke, and getting a cigarette, and somehow that all came home like a big explosion in my head, like they talk about the explosion of light, of enlightenment, and I had that. I had that moment.

I had a life. It was real to me for a moment. It hadn't been real to me for a long time. But there it was. I looked out the window. There it was. The world was out there. I had a life.

cary head OK, that's enough for today. Calm down. Move along.
cary head where is that reading again?
Oh yeah, it's at Studio 333 in Sausalito, 333 Caledonia Street, a block off of Bridgeway between Litho and Locust, kinda near the Sausalito Library, at 7 p.m. Thursday Nov. 11th, part of the Why There Are Words series.