making plans

It’s time for Plan B –

Elope to a quiet mountain retreat with a guitarist…I shouldn’t have left him alone at the show, will probably regret walking away until I’m 65. Was going to invite you to my hotel room and realized I didn’t have one, could’ve gone mute, dumb and retreating. His white shirt held the glow from a black light.

10 minutes.

The punk rock poetess idea was a fail, twenty years of poetry readings, creative-writing workshops, thousands of dollars of debt, and depressing jobs.

6-foot-3, they have to be at least 6-foot-3 or more.

Old medicine bottles dug up from the creek in Nacogdoches line the kitchen windowsill. Back when the kids were younger, biking on trails with Mr. Kangaroo in backpacks. Frisbee golf, piney woods, and the million dollar art gallery. The dishes are piled up in the sink. Two days of flooding in the city. Newscasts and emergency alerts coming through on cell phones. Stalled cars abandoned in streets as puddles rise beneath overpasses, bayous overflow and trees fall into the raging waters rushing through the streets. As the rain subsides, the mud remains and wildlife leave tracks in the mess – birds, rabbits, and dogs. A little bunny lies on the edge of the trail along the bayou. I remember as a kid, a brief craze of dyed rabbits’ feet hit the streets. A foot. They were purple. Pink, green, all colors – key chains you could clip to your belt loop or backpack. Rabbit fur coats for kids. How gruesome it all seems. How clueless I was, on the river beach with a cut off foot watching boys rev their four wheelers up and down the banks.

Blood trails from its mouth.

I think about the mountain cabin I should have (with the guitarist), just up the road from a truck stop/convenient store of souvenirs – magnets, post cards, t-shirts and knickknacks. An ‘Only you can prevent forest fires’ poster of Smokey the Ranger Bear staring you dead in the face. He grips that axe tight.

Candy and soda machines.

Outside, elderly couples photograph themselves with mountain backgrounds. Forty years of kids, grandkids, and now retirement. No more running the steel mill, no more part time storage unit office. This is it – arthritis, a pocket of Tylenol, social security (what’s left of it after the kids college fund) and a long road trip which includes a greasy dinner of chicken fried chicken and mashed potato at the Smokey the Bear Restaurant where the middle age waitress takes smoke breaks in between bringing plates.

You and I. it’s been years, bars, coffee shops, apartments, traveling, isolated in rooms, sitting among circles of intoxicated friends, steel bridges, dropped calls, and fights with a fellow office employee trying to get me terminated. Our social security has gone to shit. Our lives have passed us by.

We cling to screen doors like flies, like summer camp cabin bugs. I wind the water hose like I learned at the State Park when I was 8, with Nana in her flip-flops and owl rim glasses. Renting a summer cabin and covering ourselves in sun tan lotion, watching the piles of daddy-long-legs gather up in corners. Clusters of arachnids all legs, a web of elongated legs like alien creatures. I stand against the wall to have them crawl across me. Swim until nightfall then collect fireflies in tea jars.

Plan A and Plan B.

I was fifteen when I knew – we lived in a quiet suburb at the circle end, woods spiked behind our house near a winding bayou. Collecting frog figurines, National Geographic animal cards, Australia posters, Garfield books, and gumballs on my bed frame. Read Whitley Strieber’s ‘Communion’ book and waited for the aliens. Night after night waiting for aliens. Night after night waiting for something to twitch or move. No god, no aliens – become a artist and date punk rock boys. When a dog becomes your best friend you realize there’s no use pretending you’re cool anymore.

They poke sticks in hallways next to lockers so we bring rats to school in lunch kits to crawl on the floor of the cafeteria and urine in Dr. Pepper cans. As they write fake love letters to show their friends – pointing, laughing, saying ‘who would be your boyfriend? Gross’. No date for prom - only tall freaks from other high schools across town, in trench coats wandering the halls yelling my name. Like the Nina Hagen song, “Paul, let me be your baby doll”…So the art teacher taps me on the shoulder to tell me someone’s roaming the hall – hurry. We skip school and walk down back streets to an abandoned building where we made love in a closet and I called him ‘Johnny’. He didn’t care but he couldn’t play guitar.

So I found another boyfriend with a car and friends who lived on the 2^nd floor apartment complex. A friend with spiders, lesbian moms, bootleg copies of ‘The Wall’, and punk rock cassettes from floor to ceiling like a wallpaper of culture shock that took me to underground coffee, skate spots, bus stops, and overseas catalogs. Cassette tapes and T-tops – Firebirds, and meeting guys in bands who worked at bookstores or sandwich shops who saved pennies to go on tour.

Sometimes, they’d make it to New York but most the time it was halfway and a stalled van. I had too many words for them, too many words and not enough to drink. So I tried to drink them under the table and ended up in Austin with blues bands downing $2 pitchers, stumbling down the street only to be kicked out of a theatre for urinating in a sink because the line was too long. And I thought back to a time when I sat in the Laundromat down the street from my apartment reading Tolstoy or Chekov, my favorite Russian storyteller, and watching the Lucky Cat kitty’s arm wave up and down. Up and down, a metronome arm on a plastic white cat surrounded by pennies, nickels, and dimes. And I wanted to be surrounded by pennies, nickels and dimes – I wanted to be Lucky Cat.

Who could make me Lucky Cat?

The dryers spun, the whir of red and black, purple and white – eyeballs – Chekov, quarters, detergent, and lucky.

A scriptwriter online tells me how his parents moved to Vegas, how it’s just a strip of ugly and disgusting in the middle of the desert and then just suburbs. Planned communities with no trees, no grass - house, driveway, house, driveway. The cement heats up to over a hundred degrees. They are elder; they shrivel in the sun, wear sandals and panama hats. He’s envious of their 40-year marriage and just won’t admit it, makes a joke about Echo Park and wives with machine guns. Sells jokes in scripts, hides his uneasy loneliness, gives himself nicknames and surnames, a stage name, a page name, and online identities. The only way I know it’s him is by the area code - his atheistic Jewishness and his 310.

3-1-0…

And we are stuck here in a time gone by, hoping someone writes our Wikipedia article and coming up with a Plan B.