Category: Esperando el milagro

[A snippet from a writing project in gestation that will probably make more sense if you read the preceding snippets.]

If you’re reading this ten, twenty, thirty years from now, then the technological landscape must be beyond what I can imagine at present. Certainly I was not able to anticipate how quickly this landscape would change during the time period that I’m writing about. When I started blogging about my experiences in Mexico I was the only person I knew who blogged. Most people I knew probably had never heard the word “blog” uttered by a human being. It still strikes me as a ridiculous word, one that rolls off the tongue like a mouthful of cheeseburger. Some of us can remember that time when the internet still had that fresh “new car smell.” (Note to future: cars were vehicles we used to “drive” around in, back in the day.) I remember first hearing about the social networking website Facebook (circa 2007), but I didn’t join right away because I was already a member of MySpace, which seemed to serve pretty much the same function. In just the few months that had elapsed between leaving for Mexico and returning with the knee injury, it seemed that everyone had dumped their MySpace profiles in favor of Facebook. Reluctantly, I created an account. I had never used my real name on the internet before — not in my blog, not as an email address, not for anything. I enjoyed the freedom of expression afforded to me by anonymity. Only the handpicked few knew about my blog and my MySpace page. I could create without fear of judgment or unsolicited criticism. However, the whole point of Facebook, aside from paving the way for corporate America to infiltrate every waking second of everyone’s life, was to allow old friends and acquaintances to find and connect with you, and so using my trusty pseudonym would defeat the purpose. And so I whipped up a quick profile and gave it a trial run. It would prove to be a fateful decision.

Within a few weeks I was saying “Hey” to an entire universe of ghosts from my past. Several of my buddies from high school were alerted to my presence in Troy, and before I could fully think through the pros and cons, I found myself sitting at the bar of Downtown Dan’s with Tim Steele, Jacky J., and crazy Henry Beckett.

Tim and Jacky looked like slightly fatter and older versions of their former selves, as one might expect given the passage of almost twenty years, but otherwise they seemed utterly unchanged as personalities. It was comforting, on one level, to discover that a piece of my past had been preserved in amber, that Tim and Jacky were still carrying on as in days of yore. The only hitch was that I felt out of place and fake, pretending as I did that I too was the same ol’ Bobby, only with a beard and few lines around the eyes. Then there was Henry. Clean cut. Clean and sober. Clean up and down, inside and out. No longer Crazy Henry, but now Mr. Henry Beckett. Father. Pillar of the community. Upstanding citizen. Sane as rain. “Change” is too week a term to describe what seemed to have happened to Henry. It was a complete transformation. I scanned his forehead for the lobotomy scar but saw only the little mark above his eyebrow, barely noticeable now, from when he crashed through Jacky’s front door in drunken stupor that night we experimented with the vodka and Tang.

It only took about two minutes post-handshakes for the homophobic banter to commence.

“I heard you turned queer out there in San Francisco. How’s the boyfriend?” Jacky said.

“Great Jack. Thanks for asking. I never would have guessed cock tasted so good. You should try it sometime. It might even feel good shoved up your twat.”

I didn’t resist even a wee little bit. Even though I had made several gay friends in San Francisco and worked hard for years on eliminating gratuitous homophobia from my language habits, it just seemed pointless to play any role with these guys other than the one they expected.

Of course I got far drunker than I had intended and was more than ready to sleep it off by the time Henry pulled in front of my parents’ house to drop me off.

“Listen, Bob”, he said. “I heard you’ve been working as a shrink or a counselor or whatever. Well, I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind having a chat with my son, Henry Jr. He’s 14 already, right around the age I started acting up and whatnot. Well, he’s into some really dark shit, has some pretty self-destructive tendencies and stuff, but he won’t talk to me or Lisa. I mean, I know you’re busy dealing with your knee and stuff, but I was thinking maybe you could at least meet him and let me know what you think.”

Shit. I was hoping this type of thing wouldn’t come up with friends or family members. Thinking quickly on my feet, I explained to Henry that of course I would be happy to help him and his family out, but meeting with his son for an actual counseling session was out of the question, as I would be practicing in a state where I wasn’t licensed. I suggested that Henry (Sr.) and I meet up some time soon to discuss his son’s situation in detail, and then I could share my perspective and recommendations, as a friend and not a professional. Henry seemed to understand, and we left it at that.

When I got up to bed I threw myself back and stared at the ceiling for a good long while. I imagined the bed was the corner of an enormous spider web in which I was helplessly stuck. I could feel the vibrations as they traveled up my spine and realized it would be only a matter of time before I was fanged and sucked dry. Fucking Facebook. How did I get myself into this predicament? One minute I’m in a foreign land reinventing myself, and the next I’m back in the womb-tomb reliving a past hardly worth remembering.

*

The next morning I dragged myself through the dull routine of my rehab exercises before flipping open the laptop to see if any other ghosts had slipped through the ether during the night. Another “Friend Request.” Ann-Marie McCarthy. Ann, no e, hyphen, Marie. The thee. The first. We dated throughout our junior and senior years of college before she decided to cut bait and disappear back into the mean streets of Brooklyn, leaving me sniveling on my shirtsleeves for the next two years or so. Fast-forward seventeen years later, and through the black magic of the internet I was but one click from opening a door I had assumed was closed, nailed shut, and burnt to ashes for eternity. Crazy Henry Beckett and now this? I needed time to think this one through.

I met up with Henry the following afternoon at Duncan’s Diner. It didn’t take long for him to glide right past the issue of his son and into the unraveling of his own, delicately knit-together sanity. Turns out Henry had been spending all his expendable income on prostitutes and cocaine. Coke and whores! Now there’s the Henry we all knew and loved. He was on shaky ground with both his wife and his boss. The shit storm was rumbling overhead, and it was just a matter of time before the streets ran brown with chaos and calamity. I didn’t know what else to do aside from lending an ear and extending some compassion. What could I do? Nothing. Whether in a formal counseling session or in an everyday encounter like this, there was never anything to be done, really. If I had learned anything from my years as a mental health professional it was that relationships of all types are subject to the same basic principles. All that was ever required, to be good counselor or friend or whatever, was to pay attention and respond with compassion and genuine concern. Everything else takes care of itself. Or not. And so I patted Henry on the shoulder, picked up the tab for our omelets, and told him to hang in there. Everything would be okay. Or not.

The interaction left me more anxious than ever to get back to Mexico. Social entanglements like this could only hinder my progress along the path to the Promised Land, and I was already in the weeds with this knee injury nonsense. The last thing I wanted was to get sucked back into the past by one ghost or another. And so I resolved to ignore any future friend requests, virtual or actual, and to focus on getting myself in shape for my return journey to the Pueblito. But what about that knock on the door from Ann-Marie, which was technically set in motion before my resolution?

I decided to sleep on it, and sure enough that night my dreams were driven by a torrent of hormones and dark emotions, a brew toxic enough to leave traces of salt on the sheets. Ann-Marie. The way I had worshipped her was fucking disgraceful, looking back on it, but at the time I couldn’t help my virgin self. She was a Goddess, thought I, a Goddess who never even noticed me until I came to class one day with crutches and a braced knee. She was the teaching assistant for my Psychology Statistics class, and I had just had knee surgery for a torn ACL. A torn ACL! Anyway, somehow I found the courage to ask for some “extra help” with the assignments, and before I knew what hit me she was calling me “just to talk,” because she was having a hard time with her boyfriend — the captain of the friggin’ basketball team. I played the only good card I had, the “nice guy card,” and soon she was dropping by the dorm room to say hi. One night, she didn’t feel like going home. I stepped out for a moment, to inform my roommate that he would have to clear out for the night, and when I returned, the Goddess was buttoning herself up in one of my shirts, a makeshift nightgown that meant, above all else, that she was not wearing much, if anything, underneath. I can’t remember what led to what exactly, but at some point she whispered in my ear, “Do you want to feel what it’s like inside?” This was without a doubt the most compelling question put to me in all my years of education. A simple yes or no answer was all that was required, and I didn’t even have to think about it. I could’ve just nodded I suppose, or said “Uh huh,” but no, I gave a clear and resounding “Yes!” as if I were answering on behalf of the entire universe for all time. So began two years of ecstatic adrenaline rushes, jealous rages, drunken arguments, and an underlying sense of insecurity that culminated in an hour-long session of convulsive weeping in the passenger seat of her Mercury Zephyr, as she drove around looking for a suitable place to set me free.

To say Ann-Marie was my “first” is, I think, to place too much emphasis on sex. If, rather, we’re talking about romantic love more generally, then the story could just as easily have begun five years earlier, or ten for that matter. So many points of entry, all leading in to the center, like eating an apple. It was in 5th grade when I finally confessed to David Prescott that I “liked” Hannalore Stanton. That bastard David, he made it seem like telling him was this big bonding thing, like we just became best buds or something, then he goes and tells Hanna the next day, tells her right out in the hallway as we’re all readying to go home. She wheels around, gives me a look of pure meanness and shouts, “Well, I don’t like HIM!” I never forgave David, that little fuck. Years later, when he was desperate for a friend, weeping at boy scout camp over being shunned by the cool kids, I coldly told him that I didn’t like him that way. The scoutmasters feared he was on the verge of suicide, and his parents had to come fetch him from camp.

Each year it was a different Goddess, starting the year before Hanna, in 4th grade, with Pola Russo. Pola, with an “o.” She was quite the looker, and years later she actually got some work as a model. I never said a word to her, just stared all gaga from the next row over, several seats back, a perfect spot to gaze lingeringly and lovingly, undetected. It’s not that I wanted to boink Pola. My prepubescent pee-pee and I didn’t quite know what boinking was. She just made me feel weird. Good weird. After Hanna it was Amelia Lewis, then Michelle Wilson, the latter of whom I most definitely, desperately, did want to boink. Then marched in countless more, a string of unattainable, unapproachable vortexes of feminine energy, projection magnets that sucked out the best and the worst of me, and everything in between, down into the unfathomable unknowableness of their mysterious beings.

Molly was the first woman in all my life — and I was thirty when we got together — whom I related to as a human being, a real person with flaws as well as beautiful attributes, a woman possessing her own soul apart from my needs and projections. And so, in a sense, she was the “first,” the first to know me as an individual secure in my own being, confident, aware and awake, able to respond spontaneously, transparently, and authentically. I can’t help but wonder though, what it would be like, setting aside the rules of space and time, to relate to any one of the Ghostly Goddesses now, from the perspective of my more secure, more mature self.

I suppose I don’t have to wonder. If I really want to know, it would take but a click of the mouse to open the door.

[A snippet from a writing project in gestation that will probably make more sense if you read the preceding snippets.]

I’ve been walking around the neighborhood every afternoon as part of my pre-hab regimen. My route takes me past a hilly patch of maple trees that, if followed through, leads back to the dead end of Pleasant Street, where my parents live now, and which will forever be “Grandma’s Street” in my mind. I remember vividly when, as a kid, I fully explored these woods for the first time, starting from the dead end of Grandma’s street and clambering my way through to this other end where I’m standing now. It was like discovering another planet. “Who are these people living in these strange houses?” I had thought to myself. This little patch of woods was like a whole world unto itself back in those days. It looks so small now, so insignificant.

Across the main thoroughfare and several blocks away is the house I grew up in. At the end of that street is a much bigger patch of trees, but still, nothing compared to my memory of it. These were the woods where David Woodburn and I discovered a pile of porno magazines, just lying there conspicuously beside a well-worn path, like a hastily laid trap. I can still remember the name of one the centerfold models. Cathy St. George. I smuggled the key pages of that issue back home, folded up in my back pocket, and kept the stash buried under the front porch in a zip-lock sandwich bag. I can still recall the musty smell under that porch, how I would have to pull back a piece of broken wood to crawl under, how I would brave the spiders for a look at Cathy, but for no other cause. Those woods were also where Jason Gillam and I saw a “walking stick” crawling up a tree one day. There was also the mysterious “underground fort” we found in a hidden clearing. Actually, it was a dug out pit covered by a big piece of plywood, and it was full of empty beer cans. David and I smuggled my Daisy Red Ryder B-B Gun into these woods once. I remember the thrill of lining up my first bird, then the shame when it dropped dead to the ground. And, of course, who could forget the “sand banks”— that ledge from which we would leap down onto the soft, sandy slope below, sometimes tumbling all the way down to the apartment complex at the bottom, the one where all the poor people lived.

There was also a teeny tiny patch of trees – long since cleared away—directly behind my house, which provided just enough cover for the neighborhood boys to convince Cindy Wilson to pull her pants down and show us all what was going on down there. Afterwards there was talk of how Frankie Dalton stuck a stick up her crack, but I don’t think that really happened. But we did build several forts back there over the years, most of which were eventually torn down by rival groups of kids living down by the “brick road.” Of course, we would search for, find, and destroy their forts as well, for good measure, although who knew who started the whole mess. We built some really cool tree forts and one huge fort on the ground that was like a little house. Our parents even let some of us sleep there one night. Carry Woodburn was there, and the rest of us conspired to try the old “warm water” trick on her after she fell asleep. And did it ever work! She pissed herself right through the sleeping bag.

All this from passing a little patch of maples.

The other day the wind was blowing briskly, and I noticed a few leaves drifting down from these maples onto the road in front of me. Suddenly it occurred to me – I hadn’t caught a leaf yet this year! It’s my own little fall tradition, to catch at least one leaf as it falls from a tree. In years past I’ve been known to run down a promising leaf to the to ends of the earth if need be, often diving onto the grass or even out into traffic in an attempt to make the grab. I even got Molly into it last year, although she was less willing to go the necessary lengths to make a legitimate catch. It has to be fresh from the branch and caught before it hits the ground. Nothing off a roof or blown up from the ground will do. Anyway, being crippled in Mexico this fall, I had forgotten all about this annual event. Having remembered it presently, there was nothing to do but catch a friggin’ leaf, come hell or high water. To fail to do so would be a disgrace of the worst variety. I have said it many times before, that the year I go an entire fall without catching at least one leaf, that’s the beginning of the end, a sure sign I have given up the ghost and lost all connection to reality.

Well, let me tell you, it’s not as easy as you think, especially with a torn ACL. In fact, I only had two realistic opportunities to make a grab over the course of my walk, and both times the leaf suddenly changed direction just as I was about to gain possession. This, of course, is the whole challenge, the whole fun of it, but the bottom line is I returned home without having made a grab. Now, it’s always preferable to catch a leaf in the natural course of things, as one is walking along and notices a leaf drifting somewhere within reach. Being overly intentional goes against the spirit of the whole thing. But it being late fall and there being no guarantee of another suitably breezy day, I resorted to standing under the big maple tree in my parents’ backyard. I stood there staring up at the leaves for about forty-five minutes until my neck started getting sore, but the time invested did not yield a catch. Five or six times maybe I had a legitimate shot at one, but whether it was the knee or just wanting it too badly, I just couldn’t get it done. I went back inside to get my bearings and to let my mother know what I was doing, in case one of the neighbors called her to report the strange goings on in her yard. To my surprise my mother admonished me a bit for giving up so easily, and with that I went back out for round two. Within a minute or so, I made the grab. A leaf hit me square in the face, so all I had to do was reach up and pin it to my nose before it had a chance to slip away. But there was more work to be done. I had to catch one for Molly, as she probably had a better chance of seeing a tarantula fall from the sky than a maple leaf. Again, within a minute or so, I had corralled leaf number two. After releasing it back into the breeze from whence it came, I strutted back into the house victorious, rewarding myself with a salami and cheese sandwich and rich cup of coffee.

It seems there’s still a bit of magic left in these old Trojan maples. The veins in the leaves, the roots in the earth—somehow these things are connected to the neurons encased in my skull. Somehow these magic maples can lead me back into the deep woods where long forgotten things can suddenly spring back to life, where boobs, bee-bee guns, and walking sticks float back into view out of an empty September sky, winding their way through the blue before making a soft landing on the tip of my nose.

[A snippet from a writing project in gestation that will probably make more sense if you read the preceding snippets.]

If you asked me six months ago to imagine a scenario which would result in me living with my parents, I would have laughed heartily and given you some wildly unrealistic turn of events, like a complete mental breakdown or traumatic brain injury. I mean, shit, I’ve been away – hundreds if not thousands of miles away – for fifteen years now, and there’s simply no way in hell such a thing could happen, yet somehow here I am, upstairs in the house where my Grandmother lived for most of her life. My brother and I used to stay in this very room when we visited Grandma. I remember we needed to have a bucket to piss in, so we wouldn’t have to make the long trek to the bathroom downstairs. I wish I had that bucket right now, as my mother has some friends over this morning and I’m trying to wait them out.

I’m starting to get better at adapting quickly to change, as life has been unfolding in unpredictable ways for the past several months. In the past several months I’ve stayed in Kentucky, North Carolina, Vermont, Mexico City, El Pueblito, and now good old Troy. Troy, New York: The Home of Uncle Sam! That’s what it says on the big green sign you see on the way into town. “The Armpit of America,” is a descriptor I remember reading once in a magazine. I call it “home,” and it could have been a lot worse. I’ve got at least several weeks ahead of me to continue “pre-habbing” for knee surgery; then I go under the knife and begin the nine-month to a yearlong rehab process. The doc says no way I can head back to Mexico until spring rolls around (at the earliest), which means a long time apart from Molly and all my unfinished business south of the border.

Today I took a stroll around the neighborhood, breathing in the crisp autumn air and noticing the many changes wrought by the fidgety hands of time. Those hands had hold of my mind as well, sliding my thoughts around like chess pieces from present to past to future. In some ways it’s good to be home again. I feel a sense of reconnection that typically gets lost in the chaos of brief holiday visits. And I’ve been able to maintain at least some equanimity this time around, whereas I usually tend to withdraw into a passive daze after a few days under the Trojan moon.

Even though I was only there for a couple of months, my time in Mexico was a real tonic. In fact, despite the difficulties I faced there, in some ways it was easier to tap into the energy of creativity, and easier to maintain focus and discipline in the face of inertia and stultifying habits. I felt more awake and alive than I have in a long time. Of course, this has been the case whenever I’ve made big changes or, more commonly, when big changes have been thrust upon me. Once things settle down, however, and I settle into a relatively static routine, it’s not long before I drift back into a semi-daze, feel existentially/spiritually disconnected, and start to feel the whole Restless Soul Syndrome coming on all over again. But I’m determined not to fall into the same old traps this time around. If it’s change that’s needed to keep the juices flowing, well shit, there’s nothing but change, if I take the time to notice. Maybe I’ll finally get it, or maybe I’ll continue this same old shuffle of “one step forward, two steps back.”

This reminds me of something an old professor told me while I was in graduate school. He was quoting the Jungian analyst Robert Johnson, who said something like, “For years I was taking one step forward and two steps back, but that’s okay – I was headed in the wrong direction.” I was especially fond of that professor—Charlie Tart was his name. He had made a name for himself in the Wild West of Woo known as Transpersonal Psychology. I call it woo not to be totally dismissive. I did, after all, go into considerable debt in pursuit of a master’s degree in the field. But much of what I encountered at the California Institute of Transpersonal Psychology was dubious even to my then freshly cracked-open mind, and even the things I thought (and still think) were life-changing and avant-garde were (and still are) dismissed as claptrap in the mainstream of the mental health field. Professor Tart was especially known for his work in the area of altered states of consciousness. Here’s a snippet of a paper I wrote for that class, just to give a taste of what my “unconventional” education was like:

If a child were fitted into a virtual reality helmet at birth, his or her experience of “reality” would be quite different from non-helmeted humans. Much as our typical human experience is limited by the structure of our organism (e.g., our brain and sense organs) and its relationship to the physical environment, the experiences of helmeted humans would be determined in large measure by the programming of hardware and software. If there were a power failure causing a complete shutdown of this virtual world, would a person born and raised in this computer-generated reality experience a death of some kind? What would his or her experience be of the “natural world” if he or she were to take off the helmet and perceive light and sound through their naked eyes and ears for the first time? Would they be “born” again?

Helmeted humans! It was Charlie’s class—and an incredibly hot girl I met in his class—that inspired me to wander into Buena Vista park one day to purchase my first bag of weed. Brenda was an unabashed pothead who extolled the many wonders of weed smoking nearly every time we got together. I eventually smoked with her, on several occasions, but the only effect of note was an unpleasant amplification of a general state of self-consciousness. Brenda speculated that my problem was an inability to relax and let go into the experience, suggesting that perhaps if I smoked up alone in my room I wouldn’t feel as self-conscious about how the drug was affecting me. And so I headed up Haight Street toward the park, a section of town where normally I couldn’t walk a hundred yards without being offered “buds” or “doses” by some dreadlocked teenager passing me on the sidewalk. When I first moved to San Francisco, I actually thought these kids were calling me “Bud,” as in “Hey Buddy, how are ya?” Yeah, I was pretty naïve back then, but now that I was hoping to purchase some of these magical buds, I couldn’t attract the usual attention from the would-be dealers. So I headed up into the densely forested section of the park, like a fly hoping to get caught in the spider’s web. It worked like a charm. Some nappy-headed hippie gave me the nod within a few minutes and I awkwardly negotiated the deal, heading home with a plastic baggie full of something that smelled a lot like what had been in Brenda’s plastic baggie. I had nowhere to be for the next two days, so I closed the door to my room, filled Brenda’s pipe with a load of green, and smoked the entire bowl with a series of deep huffs in rapid succession. It was like chugging a beer, I reasoned, hoping the quick hits would bypass the whole self-conscious thing and move right into this “high” feeling that everyone was raving about. While I was waiting for the effect to dawn on me, I filled the bowl again and “chugged” it in with another several deep draughts, coughing up half a lung in the process. “That ought to get things rolling,” I thought, but before that train of thought could move any further, the thing went completely off the rails.

I got so high so quickly that I could no longer keep a thought in my head long enough to anchor myself in the old familiar world where things made sense. I rapidly cycled through phases of déjà vu and amnesia, which frightened me a great deal, but not as much as the amplified sensation of my heart beating against the walls of my chest. I became certain that I had overdosed and would pay for the mistake with my life, and so I attempted to make my way into the living room to the telephone where I could call 9-1-1. Fortunately, my seventeen-year-old housemate Helen was home, and she quickly divined the precise nature of my predicament. She assured me that, although I sincerely thought I was going to die, I most definitely was not actually going to die. Despite her young age, Helen had been through a bad trip or two in her day, and she expertly coached me back into state of relative calm and sanity. I had no idea that marijuana could have a hallucinogenic effect on a person, no matter the amount smoked. The experience unnerved me, but intrigued me enough to try it again a few weeks later. It took a bit longer to move from high to tripping balls, but I got there once again, this time documenting my reaction on a hand-held tape recorder for posterity. The next day when I listened to the recording, I was amazed to discover that I had only uttered two sentences, which were whispered and separated between long, long periods of absolute silence.

“Oh my God I think I’m going to die…” and “That’s not me, that’s not me…”

The first thought was a return of the deeply held conviction that I had smoked too much pot, that it was likely laced with something toxic, and that I was going to be punished for my foolishness with a heart attack. The second was something I said after noticing my reflection in the full-size mirror hanging just outside the bathroom. I looked at the image in the mirror, could not fully convince myself that it was my own reflection, and gradually became stricken with a doubt deep enough to drop me to my knees in a state of abject horror.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. One step forward, two steps back. Restless soul syndrome. I need to fight against it, to keep things in constant motion so the patterns can’t set in. Stay in the flow. Which reminds me that I have to piss like Niagra Falls. Mom and her friends are still clucking away like a brood of hens. I have neither a bucket nor a pot to piss in, nothing but an empty plastic water bottle. I’ll give them five more minutes; then I’ll choose between pissing in the bottle (and possibly all over myself) and the thirty seconds of awkwardness I’d have to endure interacting with strange humans on my way to and from the bathroom. I’m sure there are more options, but sooner or later a man has to take that next step, whether or not he can tell the right direction from the wrong. Reminds me of another Robert Johnson quote. Not the analyst, but the bluesman:

I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees. Asked the lord above, “Have mercy, save poor Bob, if you please.”

[A snippet from a writing project in gestation, which will probably make very little sense if you haven’t read the preceding snippets on the the Zia page.]

Our host family in Mexico didn’t have a mirror in their bathroom. I found this to be curiously unsettling during those weeks before construction of our separate quarters was complete. I missed checking in with myself each trip to the bathroom, giving myself the old “thumbs up” or flashing myself a goofy smile. It was as if I wanted reassurance that I was still the same old me, that I hadn’t withered into a husk while lost in a daydream, or shape-shifted back into some long-forgotten, original form. Like any habit, the mirror check-ins served a function, kept a familiar pattern in place. “We are what we repeatedly do,” is a truth that can be verified in difficult circumstances, when one’s choices have been restricted. Try locking yourself in a cage for a few days, or better yet, a few weeks. The drunk becomes sober, the smoker a nonsmoker, because one can’t truly be a thing without doing the thing that makes you that thing. It’s a foolproof method of transformation, so long as you don’t mind living in a cage, and you never get your hands on the key.

Now that I’m back in the land of free—Troy, New York, USA—I can indulge once again in all the little habits that keep the me-machine running. It’s a major upgrade from my jualita (little cage) to the swanky minimum-security prison I’ve come to call “home,” which comes fully equipped with all the amenities, including a spotless, well-lit bathroom mirror. This mirror is more than a mere reflector of cold, hard facts. It’s a canvas upon which I cast my hopes and fears, creating a sense of illusion every bit as convincing as the work of a skilled stage magician. It’s a seductive and compelling illusion, but as with stage magic, at bottom I know it’s not real, I know I’m not really free.

Suddenly I’m reminded of Whipple, of his own reflections on his reflection, the news anchor game he played with his sister, the nightmares of his father’s slightly altered face, the deep-seeded doubts about his own identity. Was any of that real? Was Whipple just the whimsy of someone’s imagination? I can’t know for sure at this point, so why not sit back and enjoy the show before questioning everything to death? To question everything means considering the possibility that I never went to Mexico at all, that maybe I’ve been living with my parents all this time instead, for years even, retreating ever deeper into the recesses of loneliness and regret. Some questions are better left unasked, better left quarantined with the other queasy feelings until they slip from the tip of the tongue and into oblivion.

Morning. I limp down the stairs, through the kitchen, and into the bathroom. An unpleasant bouquet of cigarette smoke and shit lingers from my father’s last visit. There are no sheets of toilet paper left on the dispenser, so I hunt around for the back-up stash. I don’t have to go. I’m just looking out for my Dad, covering up the evidence of his crime. Under the sink, my mother has enough T.P. stored to make it through a nuclear winter. There are no short stories, not even a haiku, written on any of the rolls that I can see, so I grab one at random and place it on the dispenser. I turn around to face the mirror, only to find my own reflection and nothing more. I give myself the old thumbs-up, flash a goof-ball smile, but feel no comfort or reassurance, only a gnawing sadness. The smell my Dad left behind is starting to sicken me, so I crack the window to let in a little fresh autumn air. My Dad grew up in this house, one of five kids in this teeny, tiny mouse-hole of a domicile. Eight people, if you count my grandfather’s spinster sister Hazel, shared this one little bathroom for all those years. I remember the day my grandfather collapsed right beside the toilet. My grandmother called in complete hysterics, and so my Dad threw me in the car and we were there inside two minutes. I’ll never forget the look of sheer terror on my grandmother’s face, or the sick feeling I got in my stomach as I tried to determine why my grandfather was slumped over on the bathroom floor. He survived that heart attack, but died soon after from another one that struck him down out back while he was packing the car for a fishing trip. I was told he was found lying down on the soft green of the lawn, staring up at the clouds with a peaceful smile across his lips. I wonder if he saw any forms in the clouds before he passed on, like a turtle, or the outstretched hand of God.

One particular moment from the funeral is seared into my memory. I was kneeling beside my father before the open casket, alternating glances between the man in the box and the man beside me. “That’s his father, and he’s my father” were the words that I recall floating through my head, but the sensation that gripped my entire being held a meaning far beyond the words. That’s when I discovered the horrible truth that one day it would be my Dad in the box. I’m not sure if it occurred to me then that I too would be in the box someday, but if it did, that thought didn’t seem to matter one bit compared to thought of losing my father. I buried that thought deep down, and for a long, long time I let it lie fallow. But now that I’m home again I see the handwriting on the wall. The chain-smoking, the disregard of dietary recommendations, the frequent illnesses, the yearly medical procedures, the mounting pile of medications my Mom puts out every morning in a little plastic bowl marked “Sam.” I can hear the rumble in the sky, see the dark clouds banding together on the distant horizon. There’s nothing I can do though, nothing except enjoy the company of the man who has been to me everything a son could hope for in a father.

The sound of my parents’ car pulling into the driveway snaps me back to the little bathroom in their little old house. A quick glance back up at the mirror and I notice my beard is starting to come in thicker than I’ve ever seen it before. The thicker the beard growth, the more I look like my Dad. In fact, if had just a little more hair on my face and a little less on my head, I’d be a dead ringer for my father as he looked when he was my age—thirty-six. At that point I was just a kid of 8 or 9, just about the time the two of us knelt beside Grandpa and his box. I’ve drifted off again, and suddenly I’m no longer a man seeing his own mirror image, but rather a boy seeing a strange man, a father-imposter, and now I can completely relate to Whipple’s nightmare.

“Ro-BERT!!!”

My father’s voice startles me back to the here and now.

“Stop admiring yourself in the mirror and help your mother bring in the groceries! I’ve gotta take a dump!”

I fling open the door and there he is. The real deal.

“But Dad, I can’t help it that I’m so pretty to look at. And keep that window cracked, will you. The paint’s peeling off the walls from your last trip in there.”

He feigned a playful punch to my midsection as we squeezed past each other in the doorway. A box of Fig Newtons was poking out of the one grocery bag he left on the kitchen table. My signature childhood snack. Before I could reach the back door my Mom kicked it open carrying at least three grocery bags in each hand.

“Oh, Bobby. I didn’t know if you were up or not. Don’t worry about the groceries. I can get them. I don’t want you to hurt your leg. Where’s your Father? In the bathroom? One lousy grocery bag and he’s done! See what I have to put up with?”

I gimped out back to the driveway to grab the rest of the bags. I set them down for a moment so that I could close the trunk of the car, and in gathering them up again I became fixated on the narrow patch of earth between the asphalt of the driveway and the fence that marked the property boundary. This two-feet-wide strip of earth that stretches the length of the driveway is where my brother and I would dig for worms, collecting them in an old Maxwell House coffee can before heading out on a fishing expedition with Dad and Grandpa. It seemed to me that there was an inexhaustible supply of worms living in that skinny patch of ground. My brother and I never needed to seek another source. When it rained, the edge of the driveway would be lined with squirming worms that had been washed out of their cozy holes. I remember going up and down the driveway as a kid, picking up the worms and tossing them back on to the patch of earth. I felt like a rescuer, a hero even, saving those poor worms and sending them home to their grateful families. Somehow it never occurred to me that these were the same worms who, on the next fishing day, I would be pulling from the embrace of their family members, kicking and screaming. Who I would toss into a coffee can, pierce with a fishhook, and then cast away to their certain, gruesome deaths.

A little while later I was back upstairs doing my morning mindfulness meditation. It’s been super hard to stick with this practice since I’ve returned home, but it’s not because I don’t have the time. I’ve got time to piss away, to burn, to stew in. And it’s not because I can’t find a quiet, peaceful place to sit for twenty minutes at a stretch. I think it’s this: It turns out sitting in silence can be a far more objective means of generating a reflection than a mirror mounted above the bathroom sink. In fact, it’s the perfect gauge for the most accurate and updated information on the state of my soul, and since I’ve been home the needle on that gauge has been bouncing around like an old pick-up truck on a God-forsaken dirt road in Mexico. Like those infernal trucks that rolled in every few days carrying loads of battered and bruised watermelons. Those infernal trucks that would stop just outside my window, bright and early, as I was trying to squeeze in a few more precious minutes of sleep. They’d stop and then start blaring some fucking annoying sales pitch into a megaphone. I’d have preferred to be awoken by a tarantula crawling across my face. At least then I would’ve had the satisfaction of exacting revenge. Yes, since my return home the soul needle has been bouncing around just like all that, straight away each morning before I can enjoy even a breath’s worth of peace and serenity.

Mindfulness is hard because my mind is full of worms writhing on the hot asphalt, half-hoping to flail their way back onto a patch of cool, moist soil, half-hoping for the swift mercy of a swooping bird or the rolling tire of a car full of Fig Newtons.