santa claus is coming to town
Corey’s house – the new haircut will make it easier to calm the parents down
My dad’s coming to visit next week. He and my Mom read the blog and they are worried about me. It’s like the Jim Jones Massacre anniversary that’s been in the news recently – Jimmy got his start here in SF thirty years ago before he split to Guyana. Anyway, my Pops, like a senator, is on a fact finding mission. It’s nice to have folks who care, so I appreciate the trouble he’s taking to make the trip West.
I know part of the thing is, they are Christians and I’m not. They worry about my soul, of all things. Not that they mention it much any more, but Mom let’s me know she’s praying for me. And I tell her I’m drinking for her.
Now I think I have the gout. My toes were killing me in New Orleans, and my diet consists of meat and alcohol – the very thing Wikipedia stools out as the culprit. Soon as I got back from The Big Easy I took a breather. Laid off the sauce and after a few days my feet were feeling better.
Maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe I don’t have health insurance. I definitely don’t have health insurance. SF has a few free clinics, so I’ll head to one this week and I guess they can test levels of uric acid in your blood. That’s what gout is. Uric acid crystallizes and builds in the joints of your toes. Painful stuff. I’m a hypochondriac (self diagnosed) so let’s hope it’s nothing as bad as that.
That being said, maybe I do need someone to check in on me. A warden or something. A den mother. I don’t know. A flight attendant even. Someone who can tell me to shut up and sit down. After two weeks of the dry spell up here on the wagon I’m starting to wonder if I might just find the Lord. I thought I did one other time back when I was drinking.
“Here He is!” I screamed. “Found ‘im! Up on top of the refrigerator this whole time!” Turns out I was looking for my keys but got confused. I started to lose faith in Jesus back during childhood wiffle ball games. I played them by myself by throwing the wiffle ball up and hitting it against the side of the house. The little white ball would bounce off the shingles of the gambrel roof and I’d drop the bat and try to catch the ball. Sometimes the wind took it out into the weeds by the brook.
I’d pray to God that I’d find my wiffle ball. Heartfelt earnest pleas that only a child out in the woods with no one to play with would cry out (but silently in a Puritanical New England composure). There were no promises or bartering with God, just a petition that He would help me find the ball. I needed to know that someone was going to help. And shortly I’d find the ball under a sumac sapling struggling up through the golden rod.
I don’t know how many times I lost the ball and sent up a prayer like a shallow infield pop-up. But it wasn’t too long, maybe a season, maybe not, before I realized I could just look for the ball and I’d find it just as easily without the prayer as with one. So I stopped praying. Then I outgrew playing wiffle ball with ghost runners. I guess I didn’t want to believe in ghosts either. It was probably the summer Nathan Slocum moved into the neighborhood and I finally had someone real to play with.
Not too long ago I read about the evolutionary trait of belief. It is something most of us have, the capacity to believe in something, because evolutionarily speaking, it helps us survive. So I can’t say I don’t have the capacity to believe. There is still something in me that wants to find the Lord. But unlike keys or a kitten, I’ll never put my hands on it and know the search is over.
I was under the hood of a 1991 Dodge Caravan the other day. Changing the valve cover gasket. I dropped one of the bolts and couldn’t find it. I hunted and hunted but it was gone into the leaves. Then I went to reconnect the accelerator cable and found the kickdown spring was also gone. That one I never even saw vanish. But without it the accelerator will just stay floored unless you bungee strap the pedal to your foot so when you pull up the cable also pulls up. I hunted for that one too. I hunted and hunted. I couldn’t remember what it looked like so I’d never be able to find a replacement. It got ugly. I was under the car, in the dark and leaves and dog piss and couldn’t see a protruding bolt that caught my forehead smack! right above the eye. As I lay there I found myself praying to God because this was a situation where no person could possibly help me. If I could pay someone to help me find that spring then I would have done it but I could not think of a single person in this city of 20 million who would take my money and actually find the spring. It was impossible. So I prayed to god, “God, the effort that it will take for me to find a replacement spring will be so great that it might push me over the edge that is also so close. Please, I’m not asking you to fix this crappy Caravan. I’m not asking for you to give me great insight into why cooked oil blowing out of the air filter. Just for right now, I need to find that spring. I need that spring.”
It didn’t help..until I had completely cleaned up and found out that I had killed the battery by leaving the hood light on. Then I needed a flashlight to even pick my tools up. Then I had nothing but a weak flashlight and I used that light to see into the engine, under the brake lines and the oil stained rags holding wires together, and into a puddle of oil on top of the front axle member…and there…could it be? I reached, actually climbed into the engine to reach in the dark and pulled out not just the spring, but the bolt also. Both of them had fallen down through the exhaust manifold and through a tangle of crap and miraculously bounced onto the same piece of metal and became submerged in a puddle of oil. I threw it all back in, jump started the van and got that bitch on the road. I have no other explanation than God. He’s a fan of Dodge vans.
Comment by oggy — November 29, 2008 @ 9:58 pm
Are you rockin’ a Members Only jacket? Tell Big Jim I said hello.
Comment by J Landry — November 30, 2008 @ 4:47 am
do you think things would have been different if our gospel choir had actually manifested?
Comment by mims — November 30, 2008 @ 9:08 am
if He’s a fan of Dodge vans, how do you explain the caravan? And yes, that’s a fabled Members Only jacket from yesteryear. Good eye Linger.
Comment by Rolston — November 30, 2008 @ 9:12 am
Nate Slocumb was a cool bastard, i flicked his ear on the back of the bus and he turned around and punched me in the face, it wasn’t my first,,,,, sadly it felt like my ole mans punches, only i punched him back, and from there on we left eachother alone
Comment by Ken Hawkins — November 30, 2008 @ 10:25 am
A very long comment, but I have a point, I swear;
Ten years ago I fell off my flat… 17 feet or so. Around 5am I heard my cat fighting on the ledge of my building. Someone left the window open again. Having seen a raccoon on this very ledge only a few days prior, my motherly instincts took over and I dashed to save my baby. I had on only a robe and slippers, this will come into play later. Once out on the ledge, in my half asleep state, I misjudged and fell straight down. The night before had brought pouring rain, so the ground was still soft and cushioned my fall. So did my neighbor’s small palm tree which I fell into. I sat in the mud and what was left of the palm tree for a minute, expecting to wake up from this crazy dream. Soon I realized this was reality. Once I got up, panic set in. “How on earth am I going to get out of my neighbor’s backyard?” I thought. I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry like a scared child lost in the forest. “Don’t crumble now,” I told myself, “we’ve gotta figure a way out!” The house has no side yard, meaning no side gate to get out of. “I know,” I thought, “I’ll try to climb up the neighbor’s lattice fence, leading to the ledge I fell from.” Did you know that lattice fencing is made from recycled Popsicle sticks? After getting about two feet up, I heard the sound of cracking wood and jumped as to not fall again. “I have to channel MacGyver,” I concluded. I circled ’round and ’round that yard, 45 minutes or so. Later, at the doctor’s office, I was told I was probably in shock and hence why I didn’t think about simply screaming bloody murder until someone heard me. While still circling, I happened to look up towards a second story window in another house next to the one I was trapped in. “Is that someone in the window? Oh. My. God. That IS someone in the window!” I exclaimed. I began to jump up and down, frantically waving my arms like a soldier returning from war and trying to get the attention of his lover in a crowded train station. The figure moved towards a back door, and out came a man in a white robe, carrying a white dog, staring at me as if to say “What the fuck?” It all came pouring out of me, my cat was fighting with something and I fell and I can’t figure a way out of here and please, oh please, help me!!!!!!! His look changed from wonder and fright to shock in seconds. He put the dog in the house, turned on his backyard lights and ran down the stairs. He told me to come to the fence between the houses. He passed me plastic milk crates from his yard, told me to stack them on top of each other and climb over to his yard. He’d place more milk crates on his side for me to step onto. Fortunately, the fence between the houses was also lattice and only five feet tall. Unfortunately, the milk crates weren’t very sturdy, and just as I had my bare left leg over the fence, the crates crumbled and I fell to the ground, scraping the inside of my thigh on the fence on my way down. And this time I didn’t fall in mud, but on a recycled brink patio. Here is where what I was wearing comes into play. My robe was made from a silky, polyester fabric and somehow during the fall, my robe opened. I’m not talking about a little boob, the entire robe was twisted around and under me and I was lying on the ground buck naked. Being rubenesque and having little self esteem back then, I was mortified. The neighbor freaked out and started to tear the fence away with his hands. Being that it was lattice, it wasn’t as hard as that sounds, but I was still so grateful that he was as determined to get me out as I was to get out. Finally, there was an area big enough to get through. I asked if I could use his phone, realizing only then that while I was free from my neighbor’s yard, I was locked out of my flat. I called one roommate, no answer. I called another roommate, no answer. I called back the first roommate over and over and over and over until finally I was greeted to an angry hello. “It’s me, I fell off the flat and I need you to unlock the front door so I can get back in.”
“What?”
“I fell off the flat and I need you to unlock the front door so I can get back in.”
“You fell off the flat?”
“Yes, and I’m on a neighbor’s phone, so can you just unlock the front door, please!”
“Oh. Kay.”
I lost a slipper in the mud and palm tree, my robe was torn and I was covered in mud and blood and leaves. As I ’rounded the corner I saw my roommate, staring at me with half shock and half amusement. After telling him of my early morning rendezvous, I checked on my cat, took a shower, called in sick and tried to sleep. A trip to the doctor’s in the afternoon revealed only a bad sprain to an ankle. When I told the doctor what happened, he said “Walking away with only cuts, bruises and a sprain from a fall like that, well, you must have someone looking out for you.”
I didn’t find God in that yard. And I don’t remember praying, I just remember trying to think clearly. My mother told me God sent his angels to protect me from my fall and woke the neighbor to rescue me. Actually, my fall woke up his dog and the dog wouldn’t stop barking and that is what woke him. But according to my mother, God woke that dog up. It takes me a while to process things like this, close call things. This wasn’t the worst of them, but it was my first, so I thought about God and if he played a role. This is all I could come up with…
I still don’t know. I still don’t know if God woke the dog and angels caught me. But if there is a God, then he sent an angel to rescue me in the form of a gay men who I really couldn’t care less about being naked in front of after all is said and done. That is what I was most concerned with. Not with falling off my flat or the fact that I could have broken my back or cracked my head open, but being naked in front of a judging stranger. And that is not from God. That is from man.
Comment by jb — November 30, 2008 @ 2:23 pm
Rolston….By the way, I saw these two little grade schoolers waiting for the train the other day doing the two-fingered dip can slap. Old school style…Thought of you.
Comment by J Landry — November 30, 2008 @ 2:36 pm
I think things would have been different, Mims. Once it progressed to the point of divine snake handling in a hot desert church in Nevada. We would have ended up planting our broken down tour buss somewhere in the Mojave, spending the rest of our days hunting for gem stones to bedazzle our costumes with.
Comment by millar — December 1, 2008 @ 2:26 pm
let’s not stop dreaming. what did we use for a collection plate? A cadillac hubcap? My big old shoe? Maybe it never happened at 13 North Main, but hasn’t it happened somewhere? I remember that church in the desert.
Comment by Rolston — December 1, 2008 @ 9:15 pm
it was a cadi hubcap. I remember how the coins would roll around the rim a couple of times and fall between the spokes like a game of roulette
Comment by millar — December 2, 2008 @ 9:42 am
ha ha deerskin is in trouble, time to live on the tracks with haskins
Comment by pooperlooper — December 2, 2008 @ 1:44 pm
Mrs. Gallant and her pantry are too far away to do that again…
Comment by Rolston — December 4, 2008 @ 12:25 am
tanks to her we are here to enjoy the finer problems in life
Comment by pooperlooper — December 4, 2008 @ 1:33 pm
you guys are gonna give my MOM all the props for that shit!? wow
Comment by rodger — December 5, 2008 @ 9:53 am
you’re mom and dad are good people. I don’t think we even asked her for the food, we snuck in the basement door and took it. But she let us come and go and loved us anyway and we figured our little problems out so we could go on to the bigger challenges in life without malnutrition holding us back.
Comment by Rolston — December 5, 2008 @ 10:45 am
no i took it and distributed to all my friends that lived in the woods
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