You cross your legs and play with your lip ring obssessively, looking like a punk remix of Winona Ryder and Simone de Beauvoir.  I watch with an unguarded fascination as we discuss the homocurious, panicky literary types and all of our adoring fans.  Suddenly I feel like Lane from Franny and Zooey, especially when you start eating the spinach artichoke dip. “God, can we live in this stuff?” and then, bumping my fork with yours, “Let’s work together” and then impetuously, authoritatively, “That’s your side, this is mine.”  I know you don’t think I’m a section man, but what I mean is that you give me the kind of inflated self-worth and personality assurance that people search for their whole lives.  It’s like my friend Nick said about looking at the world through stained-glass goggles.  Who wants to remember what the actual colloquialism is, but that’s what we have.  We’ve each got one half of the goggles, and periodically we have to connect them together for the vision to be completed.  Let’s always insist on coffins made of vinyl with corduroy padding and create controversy whenever we feel the whim.   Let’s not think of ourselves as either apart or together, but always on one another’s mind.  I’ll be your doppelganger if you’ll be mine.

It’s been a day of eradicating demons.  It all started with the rosebushes.  They’ve been encroaching upon our lane for some time now, like a serpent and porcupine’s freak offspring, slithering and stabbing and gliding and grabbing at vehicles, pedestrians and wayward shih-tzus.  My grandfather seemed to be on their side.  “Just cut them off out here.  Don’t go back in there.  You don’t have to cut them at the base, you can just cut them off out here.”  I stared at him icily, and then spat: “They’ll grow back,” with a venom typically reserved for DMV employees and elderly drivers.  He shrank slightly.  “Well, if you want to.”   I snickered inhumanly and glared at my prickly adversary.  “Oh, I want to,” and then, after the first efficient snip, “very much.”  I came to about twenty minutes later, standing in front of a huge pile of massacred rosebush.  I was bleeding all over.  And I was God.  My grandfather’s timid voice rose above my Nietzschean reverie, temporarily.  “Ben,” he quivered, “what are you going to do with all of it?”

It wasn’t until later in the evening, when I was sitting in Starbucks with Erik Kierkegaard Skoglund (yes that’s his name, knock it off) that I saw the wounds while crossing my leg.  Sinewy, vibrant, red lines slashing the pinky white flesh – like some abstract painting hidden in a back closet at the Guggenheim, too experimental and raw to be shown to the public.  In an extraordinary flash of bad taste, I jocosely attributed the scars to my “manic-depressive” tendencies.  Erik blinked.  “I have to pick up my dad at 10:15.”  His dad, the new principal of Heritage Christian High School in White I mean West Allis.  A stiflingly endearing little boiler room of paranoid public relations and meticulous christian imaging.  Incidentally, my high school.  I smirked bitterly.  “Let’s go.”

I scampered down the halls, hugging the yellow concrete block walls with the skittish ecstasy of a kitten breaking the house rules for the first time.  “Would you stop that,” Erik hissed, “I’m the Principal’s son.  We’re not going to get in trouble.”  “Shhh you bastard,” I hissed back, “you’re ruining the fun.”  Almost all of the classroom doors were open.  I sprang about maniacally free-memory-associating, energy provided by the double shot espresso: “I had History here this bubbler never worked what? it works! golly this is weird I mean how completely weird you can’t even know how weird this is what is with the painted boxes covering up the piping? I can hardly stand anywhere I’m so tall jeezlouisus this is total insanity I am so dwarfed I am a dwarf right now where’s Snow White,” I awed in conclusion.  Erik, it seemed, knew all of this already.  The nonplussed party pooper.  It didn’t matter.  We parted company and I crawled in the Camry and took off, listening to every song I ever loved in high school, care of Madame iPod – Wonderwall, Don’t Stop Believin’, Fast Car, Fire and Rain, Same Old Lang Syne, they flew and banged around inside the car like injured seagulls looking for an open window.  I casted a glance at the backseat to see the demons, crammed securely together in the child’s car seat, mine to cherish forever.

The phone rings and this time I’m sure.  Of course I’ve been sure every time.  But regardless, it rings and I watch mother answer.  “Hi.”  Some garbled talk.  Her expression does not change as she turns to look at me.  She nods.  And I realize it is actually the call.  The call has actually arrived.  I was sure it was going to be the call and yet I didn’t think it would be.  It never occurred to me for one second that it actually would be the call.  And yet here it is, standing around like a 9’4″ 400 pound basketball player in the hall foyer, taking up sweaty space, aggravating the hell out of me.  The damned call.  A call for a life.  The little insubordinate woman has finally given up.  What did they do with her?  Is there a dumpster for the sickly somewhere?  Did they skip that on the tour?  I picture her alone in the bed, asleep, then suddenly stirring and swearing off the whole sanitarium with its stifling disinfectants and puddly food with her last breath.  I’m sure by now she has a martini in hand.  I’m sure they can use one more insubordinate woman.  I’m sure He’s delighted to have her back. 

But I miss her like hell.

I’m convinced only the masochistic come back to their hometown.  They’re the kind of people who love waking up crabby children after they’ve had five glasses of water, two stories and three searches for monsters before falling into a fitful sleep.  Because they were those children in their youth.  They’d sit on their tiny butt on the front porch for hours, picking a new scab with the ferocious curiosity of a cannibal, or aim a magnifying glass at an unsuspecting ant with clinical precision.  But “they” is such an accusatory pronoun.  What I really mean is “I.”  I am they.  Them.  Whatever.  Anyway, some mental meltdowns are inevitable when your room is a mountain range of boxes, you run into your junior high peers at the local bar and almost all of your grandparents seem doomed to imminent death.  Let’s be altruistic and address the last one, shall we?

First of all it is a nice place.  I mean, lots of people say that about the closets where they lock away their old folks, but this one really is.  It’s called “Linden Ridge” and has a backyard garden area (with high fences by the dementia unit) with trees and vegetables and a screened-in gazebo where we sit with my grandpa and toss out names like cheerios before a hamster, hoping to coax him out of the haze and into some state of memory.  We can’t make him remember, but we can make him laugh.  Well really anyone can.  He just laughs at everything.  It isn’t disturbing, just startling.  At first we all looked at one another, concerned and stern, but over time we just joined in.  He’s having fun, why shouldn’t we?  At least with him we can ignore reality.  It’s not so easy with my grandmother, now that she’s getting worse.

We tap on her door and walk in gingerly, like atheists sneaking into a church on a Tuesday afternoon.  We pass the bathroom without privacy, the furniture without comfort, and the flowers without life.  She lays there, on a huge bed that seems as though it will swallow her any minute.

She’s bathed in sheets of the most celestial white, sheets that are too white for humanity – the kind of sheets people buy and stow away in their closets knowing they’ll never use them but are relieved they have them nonetheless.  They hang off her pencil limbs like laundry on the line.  I walk closer to her, and I can tell the moment I enter her line of vision.  She gasps with unabashed joy.

“Oh my goodness.  Oh please.”  She trembles, smiles.  “How wonderful.  Oh please.”  She begs our pardon endlessly, attempting to harness the moment with an increased incoherency.  I smile and touch her face.  She still babbles.  “How wonderful.  Oh please, how wonderful.”  I’m crying.  I keep caressing her cheek, trying to free her words, but they remain jumbled and bound.  The damned morphine.

A day later she’s in some state of coma, breathing inconsistently, desperately every couple seconds.  We sit on clownishly striped chairs around her, watching, like spectators at a predetermined high dive, waiting for disaster.

Leaving that city was the worst decision I ever made.

That single thought was the materialization of a dozen ideas that circled my head like a dizzy halo.  I even said it, aloud, as Dane took us back from the airport.  He always drove over the speed bumps like he was passing gas – “oh, oh, here we go – ahh.”  This proved to be the worst possible metaphor at the moment, though, since it felt like a small revolution was taking place in my stomach.  I knew the perpetrator – it was a shriveled bacon chicken club I had purchased, rather foolishly, at J.F.K.  It had no mayonnaise, and the chicken tasted like chilled shoelaces.  It really didn’t matter, since I was dying.  I mean it, I really was.  It seemed as though some invisible lifeline had been formed in my brief stay, and now it was straining and hurting like a bitchy umbilical cord.

I remember stepping off the plane and thinking that Orlando’s airport was so clean.  I had liked that before, but now it was pretty nauseating.  It wasn’t as cramped, as smutty, as sprawling as J.F.K.  There was absolutely no possibility to the thing, and I resented it for it.  But this pointless comparison was just a diversion, because I was so mad.  The city had at once embraced and rejected me, like some kind of expedited prostitute.  I had scampered the streets in my pointed leather shoes, attempting to look completely focused and nonchalant despite the fact that my brain was screaming, “Look – look – look!”  I couldn’t get anywhere fast enough.  I stood in the tunnels, closing my eyes and hearing the subway in the distance like a primeval chorus of eighth grade girls on a roller coaster.  Then there was the gust of compact, warm air.  The mutated caterpillar equipped with a horizontal slide projector would go racing past.  I piled on and searched for Sylvia Plath.  Surely someone had stopped the suicide and she was here, looking for another empty party or scuffing her black patent leather shoes against the brick walls.  I’d sit right next to my parents and whisper something incomprehensible about how I would work in a thrift store and helm an independent film.  They nodded, numb but supportive, their hands firmly pressed against their ears.  Why?  Then it occurred to me the subway was skipping along the tracks like a stone with windows, and scraping like hell.  I hadn’t noticed.  The city’s dirty hands had me by the balls, the brains, the heart.  I did as it wanted me to.  I decided then, staring into the face of a Hispanic toddler through square brown sunglasses, that I wanted it that way.

The burning pine needles looked like fiber-optic silkworms.  The chopped wood was a teepee, sheltering the flames from rain, wind or any of nature’s destructive ploys.  We lit our cigars and inhaled slowly, little by little, watching the ash conquer and the paper lining retreat.  Several relatives putting together a puzzle in the living room complained they could smell cigar smoke.  “Puzzle people,” my father muttered.  I chuckled.  So we left the yard and smoked on the end of the pier, my father and I.  The lake was our ashtray.  They were sweet cigars with white mini-holders that looked like whistles.  I tried blowing it once, expecting a shrill note in reply.  No dice.  I felt rebellious and justified all at once.  It’s probably this cabin.  We’ve been coming here since I was five.  It’s an annoying, split existence: childhood and adulthood uncomfortably squished together like a messy s’more.  You don’t know whether to eat it or say “screw it” and chock it in the woods.  But the cigars, I know that was a screw-it-and-chock-it-in-the-woods moment.  Because my mom said to my dad, “Dan, you’re encouraging our son to smoke cigars?”  And that did it right there.  If she hadn’t raised a raucous, I wouldn’t have felt the need to do it.  But she did, so I did: when they came out to say they could smell cigar smoke I snapped, “We’re outside!  The windows are closed!  What more do you want?”  Like a crabby World War II veteran.  But I’m not that old.  And I’m not that young.  I’m somewhere ambiguously in between.  I can always count on this damn cabin to remind me of that.

Doodle doodle doodle doo doo doot! my father’s cell phone summoned him mid-sentence.  I knew that the call took precedence over me, so I turned my attention to the passing scenery and he said hello to some voice that meant more than me.  I hated that voice, whoever it was.  My dad postpones heart-to-heart talks for a phone call; whatever pressing news that little apparatus contains is far more important.  I was in the middle of a perpetual pity party when he hung up and said, “that was Eric.  Man, they are struggling.  You know, his wife Jane’s sister is dying of pancreatic cancer – it’s spread to her liver and her lungs.  She only has months.”  I looked at the floor and he continued:  “I can’t imagine what they’re going through.”  I turned to him.  “Yes, you can,” I said, “your sister died of cancer, too.”  I could only stare at him.  Why did I say that?  As if he needed reminding.  Suddenly I wanted to know everything about it (I was little when it happened), but I didn’t say anything.  He did: “It changes your entire life.  It blows a hole in your future.”  I wanted to say I was sorry, but even though I was, that had little relevance at that moment.  We sat there.  And I realized why we didn’t try to discuss our emotions.  We really couldn’t.  You see, it was the first time the phone hadn’t interrupted us.  And we didn’t know what to do with ourselves.