As Halloween approached again, I learned the hard way that the old cliché you hear about the one-year anniversary of a loved one’s death being hard is dead-fucking-on. I’d be out grocery shopping or running errands and for brief instants I could swear I could see him. Someone would catch my eye and something about them – the set of their mouth as they perused a menu; or their gait; or a turn of phrase, like “a couple three” – would remind me of my father so strongly that for a dizzying moment I felt the uncanny sense that he was somehow there. When I got a letter from the Cremation Society a few weeks before Halloween telling me that “the anniversary of a death can stir up many emotions all over again and may come when you least expect them,” I thought to myself “no fucking shit,” and threw the thing in the trash.
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Spirits – a horror story (Part four of five)
Before I called 911, Eli and I went through what we would tell the police. It was an accident. Grandpa tripped and fell. Daddy tried to help. They questioned me and Eli separately, but whatever the boy had seen, he told them the right thing. He was a good boy.
I put him to bed, then went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I vowed to prove my father wrong, to be a better father to Eli than my father had been to me. That Eli would never become like him. Like me. Alcoholism had plagued my family from time immemorial, like some ancient curse. But it would stop here.
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Spirits – a horror story (part three of five)
By the end of that October, I was back up to drinking a handle every three days. I’d stock up every time I went out to buy my father his cases of rum, then stash my extras in the basement, concealing them in the laundry room’s darkened alcove. I didn’t want to give my father the satisfaction of knowing that I was juicing almost as heavily as he was. When I’d finish a bottle, I’d hide it in the bottom of a laundry basket full of Eli’s clothes and bring it downstairs, switching it out for a new bottle and stashing the empty in the darkened alcove. Then I’d smuggle out the empties early in the morning on trash pickup day, while my father was passed out and before Eli woke up.
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Spirits – a horror story (part two of five)
Over the next few days, I tried my best to make the place habitable, enlisting Eli for help. We filled up garbage bag after garbage bag of empty rum bottles and moldy old microwave dinner trays. For the glasses full of cigarette butts, I had Eli hold out a colander, through which I’d dump the yellowish water, then we disposed of the waterlogged butts in trash bags.
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Spirits – a horror story (part one of five)
It was bedtime when my six-year-old son Eli whispered, “Daddy, I think your daddy is a ghost now.”
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Book Review – Four Horses, Seven Seals by Ben Beard
Disclaimer: the author, Ben Beard, is a good friend of mine (and occasional writing partner), and he recently shouted me out on his excellent blog.1
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Book Review- “The Violet Hour,” by Katie Roiphe
This one hit me hard – I read it just a few months after my mother’s death, as I was trying to make sense of it all. It’s truly meditation on death, with Roiphe profiling the last days of a small group of great writers and thinkers: John Updike, Susan Sontag, Dylan Thomas, Sigmund Freud, and Maurice Sendak (with some “bonus material” involving James Salter, who Roiphe interviewed during the writing of this book immediately before his death).
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The Dirty Kids – The Finale
After the service ended, they drove back to Spencer’s apartment. As soon as they walked in the door, Sal collapsed facedown on the bed and began to snore. Spencer sat at his kitchen table for a few minutes, then left Sal sleeping and headed over to the library. About an hour after he arrived, Spencer felt his phone buzz in his pocket. He dug it out and saw a text from Sal. All it said was: “Gotta go.”
“Hold on a minute” Spencer texted back.
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The Dirty Kids (Part Six of Seven)
It was just past eight in the morning when they got to the Presbyterian church. It was the sixth church they’d been to that morning, driving around and relying on Spencer’s memory of churches he’d seen around town during his nighttime wanderings.
Sal shook his head, disappointed. “I told you, it has to be Catholic.”
“I grew up Methodist.” Spencer turned out of the parking lot. “I always thought a church was a church.”
Sal shook his head again. “Fucking Methodists.”
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The Dirty Kids (Part Five of Seven)
Spencer closed his eyes and the sensation of spinning was replaced with one of acceleration. He felt a sinking feeling in his stomach as if he were on a steep drop on a roller coaster. His heart, lungs, and stomach felt flattened against his shoulder blades and spine.
He felt a sensation as if his mind were being pulled out of his body through a straw, and his pure consciousness, disconnected from his corporeal form, was hurtling through an infinite tunnel of time and space. For what felt like an eternity, he continued to rocket through complete darkness until he began to see a flickering pinprick of light in the endless field of black. As he continued to move toward it, he realized that this infinitesimal point of light, surrounded by endless fields of all-consuming darkness, was his life.
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