My mind glitched last night.
I thought I was going to read a D.H. Lawrence book called Kangaroo. I downloaded the file to my iPad. As I was reading, I thought, Wow, his language is very modern. That is true, but I wasn’t reading Kangaroo. I was reading one of Kurt Vonnegut’s last books, Basic Training. Also, I had recently been reading Anaïs Nin’s “D.H. Lawrence, An Unprofessional Study.”
I discovered my mistake after a few minutes. My brain, however, didn’t ever catch up. “Wow, Lawrence is nailing it,” I said to myself, out loud. I think this book is supposed to be taking place in Australia, but I am not picking up any references. Over and over, I mulled the idea, “This is phenomenal writing for the 1920s. KV wrote it in 2012.
The language began to swim. I couldn’t make out what was Nin, Vonnegut, or Lawrence. A swirl of ideas raced along in parallel lines. I started to come unstuck in time, just like Billy Pilgrim.
I can’t admit that I may have been experimenting with plant magic as of late, but I can tell you my mind was not altogether sane. Infuse my confusion with my mental meanderings about the glitch as it was happening. My embrace of Lawrence (I recently reexplored Lady Chatterly’s Lover) obscured my understanding of the words flowing off the page and whipping around in my cranium. I could not keep the narratives straight.
This will be great, I thought.
Is it?
From an early age I explored escape through reading. I even recall my very first science fiction epiphany, a book called The Dueling Machine. (In the present timeline, I recently purchased a copy.) Today, I am aware that literature is swizzled incredibly tight within my biographical memory. Did it happen to me or did I read about it? Have I ever been into space? Why do I think in light-years?
Words, language, logic, memory are all spun together in our synapses. The recall of our histories is more like making chicken soup from a plucked carcass. Lawrence, Whitman, Hunter S. Thompson, Kerouac, Nin, Virginia Wolfe, all vibrate within my LLLM with the same resonance of a real memory. And often, the two mix together in surreal ways.
Towards the end of my college journey, I took a semester abroad at Oxford. (Ooo, la la.) I only took one of the three classes offered that summer. D. H. Lawrence and the Spirit of Place. Then we traveled to his hometown, where his genius took place, and wandered the forest where the groundskeeper was corrupted by her beauty and youth.
I too was embroiled in some shinannigans at Oxford as well. Two young ladies, daughters of two of the three professors who came with us from Texas, began to court myself and my friend Hunter. It was all casual and fun. There was some casual pint and dart tossing at the local pubs. Some innuendo. It seemed the daughter of the Shakespeare professor was crushing on me.
I was just a swirling whirl of sadness and ambition. My dad was on his deathbed back in Austin. My mom was struggling. At that point, everyone was still alive. I was living it up, somewhat, in jolly old England. Leaning into the town’s fascination with Lewis Carroll and the young girl whom he wrote the “Alice” stories for. I had a Sony Walkman Cassette player and I would cruise the campus in the mid-morning warm while jamming out to The Simple Minds and Frankie Goes to Hollywood.
Jessica, the daughter with the crush on me, was darling and untouchable. I had no desire to prey on either of these young pubescent coeds. They were fun to hang out with, flirt with, and throw darts at the pub with. I did not kiss the girl.
Upon return to the United States and another semester of college, my dad promptly died. I slipped through the cracks of a huge mechanical institution of higher learning and drifted into my own oblivion. I tried to drop my ballast bags of sand. I withdrew from all but one class. I went to the student health center to talk about antidepressants. I was in the Shakespeare class of the other girl’s father, who was also on the trip.
Into a blur of blinding blackness I stopped going to class. I didn’t forget to withdraw, as was suggested by the PA at the student health clinic. I simply didn’t. I dove into the mud and guts of the loss, the elation at the death of my tormentor, and the freefall of uninhibited rage. The rage was pointed inward. The rage was depression with a kick.
Months into the next semester, Spring of 1985, I approached the professor for a redo. He gave no shit about me, my father, my loss, or my apology. He mistakenly thought I had screwed his daughter. It was the other daughter who was into me, the Lawrence scholar, and I never even kissed her. Not once.
That F, in Shakespeare, haunted me the rest of my college career. Mr. F can choke on a skull. I think of the Monte Python skit of the grave diggers. “It could be worse. It could be raining.”
I did finally graduate from the University of Texas with a BA in English. My father, years earlier, when I told him, was furious. “What is an English degree going to do for you?” He never understood the short stories I read to him. He couldn’t see himself in the father characters. I guess he wasn’t really a reader. Smart, but not book smart. I think, mostly, my dad made it on his charisma. He was a charming motherfucker. Everyone in his medical practice loved him. He treated the allergic children much better than he did his own children.
And, as we know, physicians are terrible at self-care. He had a heart attack when I was in second grade. I was with him at a country club tennis tournament, where he was in the finals on a hot October afternoon. They had split sets and were taking a short break before the third set. My dad was reclining on the grass and guzzling a large sweet tea. His cardiac arrest ended the match and nearly ended his story. He survived. He was survived by his four children, his new wife and her daughter.
Oh, right, he didn’t die at that time. He didn’t die during either of his next two heart attacks. It was brain cancer that imploded his puffy alcoholic frame into a shrunken invalid in the ICU. I have never imagined someone so angry, scared, loving, and desperate as my father after the cancer and the requisite drugs rendered his loved Cutty Sark into a nauseating poison. He couldn’t drink.
He sobered up for one year in my early twenties. Dealing with his own collapse, he did his best to find happiness. He purchased two condos and a house on the lake in a nearby golf resort. He played every day he was able.
In the last visit, I rode in the cart while he played. I couldn’t stand his rage when I would lose a ball. I just watched him. Now frail and entirely bald, the glaring red scar announcing his brain surgery. It was his last good weekend.
At the door of his condo on Sunday afternoon, he said, “We need to do more of this. We haven’t really spent much time together.”
“Yes, Dad, I’d like that.”
911 was called a few days later. I saw him in the ICU and he could no longer speak.
It is said that during the last few days of my dad’s life, in the hospital, his sister came and told him, “If you don’t put your kids back in your will, mom and daddy are going to be pissed when they meet you in heaven.”
He updated his will and died a few days later. Of course, his new wife was going to contest it. We all lawyered up. It was going to be a fight to the death. His wife died a few years later under suspicious circumstances. Marrying the older rich guy didn’t work out so well for her. I think it was the drinking.
I don’t really drink. I would probably have a cocaine habit, but I can’t afford it, so I no longer imbibe. Plant magic… Well, I have a history of epiphanies and delusions of grandeur. I might be in the middle of a fugue right fucking now, with all this writing. It’s hard to tell.
Is it happiness or mental illness? Am I deluded, high, or off?
The jury is still out on my sentencing. My father blipped out. My oldest and favorite sister followed a few years afterward, while we were on Christmas recess from the lawsuit to remove the independent executor of his estate. Look it up. Case law. My brother, the Junior, exited from alcohol-to-cancer as well. Mom died of old age and being unhealthy. Now, it’s just me and my sister, the one who worked in Hollywood and got me an introduction to Bill Fucking Murray.
