Letter to my Wife
Know you don’t get it. I’m way way out there. All the crap Hemingway wrote about detecting one glass of wine in a writer’s voice, bullshit. Fitzgerald pretended too. When you’re like us, we write soused and lie about it.
I don’t write at all anymore except under the influence. It’s a way out of the humdrum. Where everyone lives every day is useless and dim. Why I was never able to become a “friend of Bill’.” Who was an asshole. (Felon and confidence man too btw)
We all know it hurts the ones who care about us. But the writing is the thing. What the loved ones never get. The ones who aren’t relatives of Faulkner, Cheever, or Dylan Thomas.
I’m way way way out there. After The Boomer Bible, Shuteye Town, and The Naked Woman where would you expect me to go?
Dulled myself down to write all the blogs. Sober is a thing I do to get along with others. To keep it under control. All the secrecy is for you and others, not for me. I’m delaying to join the other dead paupers, Poe, Mozart, and Keats. All the ones who did and should have died young.
But He wouldn’t let me. How I know he’s there. Used to see him, as I told you, walking across the Mount giving me an occasional nodding glance. Not skeptical, not judgmental, just knowing. Like, “You know what you’re supposed to be doing.” No Angel, just a corporal of Christ with at most a Bronze Star in the angelic army.
Gave me a few great pieces of writing. Then he wanted me to do corporate warfare. Then personal rescue. And then, finally, a demonstration of ultimate loyalty and permanent love. Meaning you.
He wanted to save my soul. A psychic called the Witch of Yellow Springs said as much. Had to live down some egregious sin I committed in the Middle Ages. She was a medium who tuned in to the young woman who’d ensnared me right away and told me to run like hell. Not just a pretty dancer. A disastrous date with destiny. Run!!! Couldn’t. I was compelled to atone to the reincarnated soul of a stripper on Rte 168 in Mount Ephraim I’d mistreated 1,600 years ago before I could get back with you. Go ahead. Laugh. You weren’t there. The Witch stopped talking to me when I disregarded the gravity of her warning.
He walks back and forth across the Mount. Always has. From early days of my youth. Feeling special as a project. Gave me Boppa. Gave me my dad. My mother. Then a gauntlet of Herculean challenges. Until you, and then waiting and Monica duty, years and years before I could earn you again.
My theory. I was a bad bad guy in the fifth century in Scotland. The witch of Yellow Springs said I chose to come back from a long long time ago, which is, um, highly unusual. Most souls move on. But I didn’t move on. Lots of time and guilt to overcome. So I’ve fumbled and screwed up and all that. I fell for the same Lamia-sister/daughter/whoever yet again, and I have paid. But I never bedded her in this lifetime. Just loved her and tried to help her. Out of her sorry life as a naked dancer. Wrote half a book about her, lost forever along with the sadder half of the original Naked Woman. She never laughed at me. Women may find me difficult and forbidding but never laughable. We parted. My doing. I no longer have the most entrancing Polaroid photo anyone’s ever had of an ancient obsession. Every man who saw it did a double take. “Jeeesus!,” they all said. End of story.
Haven’t seen Him on the mount lately. My bad. Still too much a warrior, not enough apparently, despite Monica and you, a crippled child of Christ.
He made me a runner. Every kind of vehicle. Can’t list them all here. Now he makes me walk like Joe Biden. Laughing at me. Except he hasn’t taken my mind away. He’s insisting I do even more with what I have left. More poetry. More graphic art. More analysis. More prophecy. The tottering prophet.
I accept. Wanting just one more glance from the Mount before I die. Pretty certain, though, not writing is not part of the deal. What he gave me coming in I’m supposed to keep using.
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