Suicide in G Minor (fiction)

In the cheating hour, when the stains from some secret sin creep like dead soldiers along the pale blue walls, he sits, hands pressed hard against cheek and head, and thinks, of her. He thinks of her face, perfect, carved from the wheel of a potter's son, or the strong slow curve of her cheek, the pout and sweet breath of her lips and eyes, the sinewy play of light and dark in her breasts and legs. He thinks of her, too, in love, gently arching, the slow then sudden breath quicker then quicker arching up and then the delicate whoosh of her voice, her hips and legs dropping slowly into place and when it is done she lies, still, dancing silently to the beating of wet wings on a red willow. The nights the days the perfect breath and skin and beat of her heart. The perfect beat of her heart.

He is a sad man.

Memories like a scarecrow's whisper, he sits in the dark, counting stolen angels on a slippery pin. First a finger, then two, then a finger and thumb, gently stroking caressing her lips and thigh, smooth skin like silk through a Chinaman's finger, he bends down to kiss the sweet dark hairs of her sex. He touches her sex he is her sex she is nothing but sex. Nothing but sex. He dances now, alone. Stolen angels on the head of a slippery pin.

In the morning when the night has dissolved into faded tomboys and blue trombones he will wake and look at the warm day too soon twisted into frozen night. He thinks, hard, too, about the days past, the days of her.

Picture it. A man—tall but not too tall, with broad sloping shoulders, narrow cowpoke hips and the crooked swagger of a man chasing a mule. He is a pack rat, a seller of dreams, a snake-oil desperado with a leather case and a platinum tongue, quick-witted but quick to take offense, famous as a cool head but privately white hot.

He is a lover a fool a spinner of tales tall and deep. He is troubled, too, damaged long past unable to be too talented not to be good too fractured not to discard all that he gets too blessed to lose for long too twisted not to wish, to lose.

He is a sad man.

He lands in shit and smells like roses. Again and again. His glass is always half full yet he still pours wine onto barren ground then prays for light where light cannot truly be found. He is a golden child a fair-haired boy.

He is an angel.

Yet demons are his friends. He is nothing, if not unique.

He thinks, always, of her. He is thinking now.

Of her.

Demons are his friends. He is a golden child. The glass is always . . .

For those in the know this is a confessional a trip down memory lane a suicide note for pregnant ears and aficionados of the night. He is acquainted with the night. He lives for the night. The right night.

But not in the way one might think. He is neither dark nor devious nor cool. He does not wear nor worship a dark or twisted cross, does not wring the necks of tiny birds nor wish ill of elderly women or babies with inappropriate birth marks or mothers with multiple tattoos. He is a lover of art, of birth of Jesus and Gods one or many-sided. He is a student too he knows many things he has read many, many things.

Experienced—

many

things . . .

He is an angel yet demons are his friends. He has seen angels dance devils spit and walk upright in to the bold light of a perfect day. He has seen things many things that live deep in the night. He wants to share his gift the gift of the night. This is a gift his gift—to you.

The gift

of

the

night.

The gift

of

death . . .

The gift of his death

for you

he is dying

for

you

he thinks

only

of you

your arms and legs

are perfect

he remembers he thinks

of nothing

but

you he is nothing

if not

unique

he thinks

of nothing but

you this

IS

his

gift

--to you

the gift of memory, memory like the stolen whisper on a scarecrow's chilled lips, the stain of a thousand moon beams dragged screaming into the sun, the swollen thighs of one freshly born.

For those in the know this is a confessional

a note

a ring-side ticket to death

my

death

a gift

to

you

this is my gift

to

you

my words my death my story the story of my life


THIS IS THE STORY OF MY LIFE

Where to begin? I was born on a cold snowy day in Ohio the only son of parents proud and true. No.

Try again.

I was an only child blonde and beautiful with a bag full of toys and marbles and puppy dog tails and all was well and then I fell off the world and the world grew dark and my hair turned brown like shit and I lost my soul and . . .

No that is not the story, either.

Although there are ELEMENTS of truth in all the words they are after all only words; words chosen as much to hide as to reveal for that as you say is his nature to hide to hide behind a string of words so let us start again.

He was a fat child.

Ah, that perhaps is truly a part of the story. Already he is hiding behind the impersonal third person pronoun "he". He is no longer willing to claim this part of his story as his own. There is pain in his words. Can you feel it? He is as he says to you in pain. Perhaps this part of the story may ring with some small semblance of TRUTH.

He was a fat child. Maybe you can feel some of the pain in what he is saying, feel the hurt in his use of these particular words: "a fat child".

He was a fat child.

I am only able to say just so much. Part of it is hidden part of it I wish to hide part of the hidden is hidden by choice but most is simply unknown. For all my searching my desperate searching to know myself to know the "truth" about who I REALLY am the greatest part of me is a mystery to me still.

But this part I know: he was a fat child.

It is/was not a happy thing to be fat to be a fat . . .

child.

But surely that can't be all of it. He is a handsome some might say extraordinarily handsome man what difference can that make now?

All demons leave their mark. Can you see it?

He was a fat child. He would sell his soul to be thin. He was a fat child.

He would sell his soul to be thin.

He would sell his soul.

Not for a moment though did he play Faust and offer his immortal coil to Lucifer to shed a pound or three. He is dramatic some might say (and have said, you have said so yourself) overly dramatic. He is making up a story. Yes he was a fat child but the part about the Devil and selling his soul well that is all fluff all make believe. He is making up a story perhaps to prove a point.

Perhaps, though, he is trying to pull some sleight of hand. To pull the wool over one's eyes.

He is, after all, a magician with words. Words are his tools his Ace in the hole.

They may prove to be his downfall, too, though, don't you think? He is drunk with words he is in love

with

words in love

with

HIS

words. He is a magician with words.

Can you believe anything he says?

Yes, because he was a fat child and being a fat child has left a mark and even though it is invisible to the naked eye he still wears it like a thorn and he is sharing that scar with you so that you will know him better. He is weaving a story partly true partly not true but a story none the less designed to REVEAL TO YOU the story of who he is.

One of my favorite games as a little boy was marbles. You don't see marbles so much anymore not like you did back then. I remember having two big coffee tins full of all different kinds of marbles, big cobbs, "shooters", and all sorts of assorted colors and patterns of colors. I would sit in the front yard on Van Buren Drive and draw out a circle with a stick and shoot marbles for what must have been an hour or more all by myself. Sometimes the marbles would roll down the slope of a hill in the front yard but they never got very far.

When I was a little boy I used to have lots of guns to play with, too. I remember having my detective pistol and a wad of play money I kept in my desk drawer. Once my mother bought me a beautiful new bedroom suite with big brown bookcases that wrapped all the way around my room. I loved that room but mom sent it all back and I left my pistol and the money in the drawer even though my mother warned me not to leave anything I didn't want to lose in the furniture. The workmen heard it rattling and gave it back to me but I was sad nevertheless.

Big brown furniture filled with books and toys. I had it for a few days when I was three or four—who remembers exactly how old they are when things happen as a child—but it was taken away from me by the workmen on the truck and so I was determined to never let it happen again.

Maybe this says something about me. About why I do things. I know that a lot of what I do, or what anyone does for that matter, says a lot about them sometimes big and loud other times subtle like a whisper or a secret shared only amongst friends but you never want those whispers to turn and run loose behind your back or in school or church or wherever. I'm rambling a little but I'm trying, honestly, to piece it all together, even now after all these years of wandering in the dark of the night, when the furniture all comes and goes but the torments never end.

I have thought about killing myself a lot over the years, a lot, but I'm afraid to die and besides I'm just so damn curious to know what's going to happen to everyone else. It's not like I'm nosey, which I'm really not, so much, but I'm just intellectually mad for knowledge so maybe that mania to know and collect and covet keeps me going when the times don't ring so true.

Hemingway wanted to live but he wanted so much, too, to check out which is what he finally did. I don't think I'll go that way. I don't want to. I want to die when I'm old with a couple of dozen books and my family by my side like Clifton Webb in those old movies from the fifties.

I read a lot and so I have a tendency to remember everything through the context of a book or a play. For example, just yesterday I read in a book by the German writer W. G. Sebald, Vertigo, about Henri Beyle (later to go by the nom de plume of Stendhal) and how he could never remember things clearly as they really were but, rather, through the lens of a painting he had seen years later. In other words, memory is a tricky fellow not always to be trusted, a coquette with red lips and grey blue gums, a bottle of glue found open in a crowded drawer. Memory lies, a fool's gold, in the frozen arms of a subjective truth.

One of my earliest memories is of the hospital when I was a little boy; I was in Cincinnati to get my tonsils yanked. There are two or three pictures that twist around my brain even now. One is of the hospital room itself. I remember the bed butting up against the wall on my right side with the door at the foot of the bed. Was this the way the room was laid out? Probably, but am I certain? Certainly not. Especially since one of the strongest and most compelling memories of my life not only may not have happened but, in looking back now, forty-eight years later, seems so unlikely as to beg the question of whether god or gods exist and to what extent they come out of their cocoons in Heaven if they do and come down to earth and play amongst us.

Who am I? This is a common enough question but yet it is the one driving force of our narrative. Who am I? Who is he, the narrator of this tale?

Who are any of us, really? Are we the sum of our experience? The stuff of our dreams? Why are we here on this twisted speck of rock three stones from the sun?

Why

are

we . . .

Here and not some other place? That is what he wants to know, what I want to know. Why here? Why not some place

. . . else?

Do you believe in reincarnation? In life, after death?

Well, it turns out that during the first regression we did I was some kind of king in Eighteenth Century Germany and as a result of my karmic heritage (and natural good looks) I got invited to a couple of parties in Mill Valley. The advantage of attending said parties was to allow me the opportunity to not get into the pants of some very very hot little New Age divorcees from Southern California since I was entirely too stupid to realize what was coming down and, therefore, would have the opportunity for the next thirty years to feel bad about it. However, it did afford me the opportunity between bites of tofu to hook up with one of the best psychics in the world—at a time when finding somebody like her was ultra-critical to my development (and maybe sanity, too, perhaps). At the time of the regression, though, I really didn't know shit about Eighteenth Century Germany or psychic development so when the crazy old wench in our class from Austria filled in the blanks as to just how accurate my little trip down (past life) memory lane really was—while taking the sideline opportunity to belittle the American educational system (quite justified it would seem judging on how little I knew, don't you think?)—it just made my cinematic inner journey all the more compelling.

After all, I have a kingly kind of persona. Maybe it was true. How else could I have seen the things I saw that night?

Of course, all of you of a somewhat philosophical bent are poking big whale-sized holes in my twenty-four year old logic but (at the time) it made perfect sense to me. I knew I had lived before. And I still believe it because I think it's true. However, the ways and means of justifying that belief (and what, really, is life if not an elaborate means to justify some half-baked idea or two?) have gone through a somewhat erratic evolution.

Like all stories, there has to be a beginning. Once upon a time—or some other variant of the once upon a time theme—that is how the story should begin.

Once upon a time, high above the city, in a manger filled with straw, the three wise men descended upon Jerusalem.

Sorry, wrong story. Let's try again.

Once upon a time, a little boy was born. He was chubby with long coal black hair and a dimpled chin and his mama and poppa loved him very much. He was an energetic lad with a quick mind and—

Sorry, AGAIN, this once upon a time shit can get kind of boring so I'll sum it up by saying that I was born in Ohio in 1955. I was an only child who grew up to become a tormented teen with a crazy mother and a KKK totin' factory workin' father. Since my family was from Appalachia (with the accents to prove it) there was a very distinct form of snobbism at work in my home town directed towards them and their kind; this was reserved by native Ohioans for those families who had fled Kentucky during the war to come up to Ohio and work in the factories. The point you are supposed to get from all this is that the trickle down effect of this snobbery rained down upon my psychically vulnerable little head and caused irreparable damage to the even development of my self-esteem and sense of self worth. The economics of 1960's America were such, though, that a factory worker with a good job (in my father's case General Motors) and the drive to succeed could make a very good living. My father was many things but idiot was not one of them. Out of place, yes. Politically incorrect, yes. But, idiot, no.

My mother, though, might qualify for a big Yellow Y on both the out of place and the idiot ticket; although her heart was (I think) in the right place her means of execution often was a tad twisted. Since my father was something of a poor man's money making machine we lived in the best area of town with all the bank presidents and executives from Kroger.

As a result, my childhood often had a kind of reverse Eddie Munster in Hell look and feel to it. Escaping to California and the attendant terrors (and joys) of the way deep subconscious mind was, therefore, a consummation devoutly to be wished. That night after I got back from San Francisco (the class was held in the attic of a house on 15th Avenue) and before settling in to bed in my Berkeley rooming house bedroom, I tried to recreate in my mind the steps I'd gone through during my earlier regressions.

I remembered that we had gone through a series of commands where we were supposed to imagine someone rubbing our feet and legs and upper body so as to relax ourselves. I had never done this before. Of course the visions really started after that and for many years they never stopped. But I don't want to see visions anymore or sing late night songs to the darkening stars while tribes of tiny little wet-haired angels fornicate on a crooked pin.

All I really want now is just to water my perfect green lawn on a sunny Sunday afternoon, curl up with a good book or a good ballgame, and let the moons roll past, one by one by one.

Of course the truth if such a term exists when it comes to self revelatory types of things is that I do see angels fornicating on the head of a pin and the songs I hear floating up beside me in the silky white night make that morning drive to work a little more difficult. Some days, though, when I feel like it, I can still see the stories of all the people around me trailing behind them like the long red train of a stolen wedding gown.

Every story is a sad story too even the happy people their stories are all so sad. So sad buried deep down in the worn blue folds of some long forgotten midnight slight or the bright sunny burst of fire from a demon sun all so sad.

And Death is a terrible thing.

Even if you want to die even if the wheel of karma may spin around a little bit higher the next time through still the thought of death for what really is death but a thought because once it comes then the thoughts are all that is left here vapor trailing behind you even then you must admit it is a terrible thing. It is a terrible thing to die. For beauty to die. Or love. Or the sweet heroic stories of a perfect history.

The heroes are all dead. Don't you think? Bones rotting worms singing in the lonely night. So on we go as best we can weaving consensual sunny day stories all masking a deep dripping secret pain too stony for the fertile ground of a midwestern Tuesday afternoon. To die to sleep.

No more will we love the night you say, say it out loud you do I know you do don't you?

You are worrying about me again; that's OK I've come lately to expect it. After all, the wisdom of death is a terrible secret to share for it is the secret I'm sharing. To die to sleep. No more will you sing no more will the sweet sudden breathes of a warm touch touch you touch you deep inside where the songs won't sing off key key to what secret door to what secret passageway we've all heard all heard but forgotten too soon forgotten and buried deep inside. It is death of which I sing.

I am the troubadour of death.

Come along with me you sinners and defilers of the sun come with me and raise a toast to the only god that really matters. The god with the key to turn

you

and

me

off

There I've said it. The god of which I sing of which I am asking you to join me in a chorus or three is the god of death.

Thanatos of thee I sing. Of thee

I

sing sing with me won't you all sing with me better yet take a journey with me walk with me and the god we all call Thanatos and walk through his secret chambers let his warm crooked smile crease ever so gently across your wet upper lip for too soon we will see him see him standing there in the sweet

in the sweet

by and by in the sweet by and by we will see him

standing

there