https://www.amazon.com/Three-Lives-Richie-OMalley-Thriller/dp/B08BF2TY78

Pearlman pulled a bottle of Jamison’s Irish Whiskey from a brown bag as we bounced in the Jeep. We were headed up the road to La Malaza. Soon we’d pass the scene of the attack that killed Carmella and Rodrigo. I was driving and following his mysterious orders. 

“My Daddy’s favorite driving whiskey,” he said as he handed me the bottle.  “I killed my dad,” I replied, not taking my eyes off the road as I took a swig. “Busted his fucking skull open with a shovel handle. Then, I set the motherfucker on fire.” I handed the whiskey back. “We never went on long drives. We didn’t share driving whiskey.”

Pearlman took the bottle and poured another long slug down his throat. He looked at me hard and said in his ever-breathless rasp, “I’m impressed. That’s pretty fucked up. We make a good team!”

“I’m from the north like you,” he continued. “Northern Jersey. You know in the fall and winter after all the leaves come off the trees, and you can’t see the wind? Unless it blows really hard, the trees don’t even move, but the wind is there pushing things, moving things around, making it cold. That is me, that’s what I do. I’m the wind through leafless trees. I billow the sails. I’m the invisible, driving force.

Driving home in the red Ford, top down, listening to nothing but that sweet small block rumble, a black sky full of stars, a waxing moon.

Up in the headlights on the dark stretch I catch a glimpse of this guy, stumbling and tripping over the grasses and brush that border this road.

Dark shirt, dark pants, long brown beard. It looks like he puked himself. The front of his pants are wet, I’ve got to imagine he pissed himself too. He’s carrying a plastic grocery bag full of the spoils of this night, the remnants of a six-pack, in the other he had what looks to be a quart of something, might have been vodka, I was sure it wasn’t water.

Stumbling and falling and hitching a ride.

I almost stopped, but I wanted no part of that noise… no one coming to your rescue this night my friend. If you get lucky maybe a cop, but that ain’t much luck to brag on…

The rest of the ride home was deeply troubled. That happens when I look in the mirror sometimes.

I remember the prayer to a deity I no longer believe in but still managed the words, ‘but for the grace of god..’

Luis’ cousin, Sixto, warned him one time, “That white guy is fucked up.” I went after Sixto with a bat for saying that. He had a knife. It was a bad fight. Luis broke it up.

I was going to fight this guy Ruben one time. I’ve long forgotten why. He was big, way bigger than me. I planned to beat him with a 2×4. I spend a week slamming that board, about 5 feet long, into the trunk of a tree, as hard as I could, so I’d get used to the sting in my hands and arms when I finally connected with Ruben’s torso. That was Luis’ idea.

I ask guys about the fights they’ve had. Some recall one or two, most recall none. I remember the fifteen or twenty worst. Most of them were with Luis; the reasons lost to the fog.

Luis was a violent drug dealer and drug addict. He ran to Middletown to escape the city’s shadows that haunted him, and eventually caught up to him, and killed him. He had to bring his whole family here to some kind of safety, even Sixto.

My mom loved Luis. She thought he was a good influence on me. I still ponder that this criminally insane thug, who blamed most of his insanity on his Puerto Rica grandma’s witch blood, was widely viewed as a better person than me. I still believe he was. He was my best friend.

I got better after I stopped doing drugs. It got better; I’ll never be cured.

I called out a guy yesterday. It wasn’t some random incident. The night I first encountered this guy, I knew I wanted to fight him. I’ve been waiting for the chance. I swear to God I don’t understand this. Last summer, it was some MAGA hat who came toe to toe with me. He backed down when I told him he had one shot, make it count.

It’s always a man; I’d never raise a hand to a woman or a child, I can’t hurt an animal, I have a hard time eating meat, for Christ’s sake.

They always back down. That’s what feeds this. I tell myself I need one of these jerks to kick my ass, but I’ve had my ass kicked so many times, it doesn’t seem to register. I like the fight. Maybe I need the fight.

It baffles me, and it terrifies me. I’m old. I’m too old to fight anyone, but I look for it. As I’ve grown older, the fight is always with the younger men and or perceived authority. Maybe I’m threatened by authority or envious of youth, or terrified of my own inescapable demise, so I pick a fight to prove I can still fight.

It makes no sense.

I should apologize. I should do some good AA/NA fourth-step work and make that ruthless self-inventory. I should make a list and apologize to every man I fought, who is still alive.

But the desire to make the list, the desire to make amends is elusive at best and probably non-existent.

There is still some jagged edge of my soul, some monster without a name, buried deep, but very much alive, that still looks for it. Still wants it. Still needs it.

I hate whoever that monster is. I hate what feeds him and drives him. I want him to leave me the fuck alone and die.

I was in a crowd of two hundred peaceful people yesterday, and I realized the only problem there was me.

I was off the bike, at least any serious riding for the past year. Covid took athletes heart and turned it into afib and heart failure. Not riding wrecked my back. My knees are a mess. It’s been a haul, but now I’m back on the bike and today met the guy I had hoped was forever in my past.

I don’t want to know that guy again. The asshole who always had to catch the wheel, even on a recovery ride, of anyone who passed him. Just because.

Push harder

That death before dismount guy, the guy who said he loved the hard climbs and would sing while climbing just to piss people off. The guy who was somehow proud he only vomited once on the bike and that was that climb in north jersey that would make anyone puke.

The guy who pretended to like Franco because Franco was the only one maybe a little more nuts than he was, and Franco used to call him a psychotic fuck. That one day we found Franco busted up and dehydrated and passed out and he just wanted to leave him there to keep going.

Harden the fuck up

I don’t want to ever see again that guy who used to ride 180 mile training rides to get ready for a 210 mile race. And the guy whose summer was a disaster unless it involved a dozen or more centuries and maybe two double centuries.

Fifteen thousand mile years

I don’t want to ever again see guy who’d suffer mad anxiety on a Wednesday night at the movies, because the weekend was going to be ‘epically’ hard.

I don’t want to be around the guy whose season ended on Christmas Eve and started on New Year’s Day. The ten-below zero guy. The skinny tires on ice guy. The guy who feared cookies at Christmas because he didn’t want to carry those cookies on his fat ass up any climbs in the spring.

The guy who bonked so bad he went into shock and finished the race with a 103 fever. But he finished, that’s all that mattered.

The need for constant forward motion.

I don’t want to know the guy with the dozen broken ribs, or the broken pelvis, or the wrecked knees, who said it wasn’t a big deal.

Truth be told it hurt like fuck.

I want to go slow and look at flowers and shit and not curse the breeze.

I want to coast a little and be the old guy way back there and be ok with that and maybe a little tired after fifteen miles, and not be the guy bitching he’s not sweat up a kit for a stupid fifteen mile ride.

But today I got a glimpse of that asshole, again. He was on my wheel…

I dont want to ever see that guy again.

Bread—a Christmas story

Christmas 1965 will always stand out in my mind as the best and saddest yet somehow closest to perfect Christmas of my life.

My father died in April that year and I started to hate everyone and everything, in no particular order.
Ma and I were never close, and we both decided to, at best, survive our relationship, not unlike, I’m sure, people brace seconds before the impact of a train wreck.

In many regards that was a perfect picture of who were were, a dysfunctional wreck. We both did the mechanical things a relationship requires to function, something like how a cam shaft and a crank shaft work together, performing different jobs independently but mechanically lashed to each other. It was always, at best a functional relationship.

It snowed heavily that Christmas Eve day, and that made me feel all the more isolated and angry and alone in the little stone house down by the swamp my dad insisted was a lake. It was not, not a lake by any stretch, except in his mind, I suppose. I don’t think it qualified as a lake by any definition, except, perhaps, it involved a relatively large ponding of water.

I watched out the front window as the snow worked to pile up on his lake until it disappeared from view. I watched a big buck deer plod through the thick white frozen drifts until it got too close to the stream that drained the swamp, where the ice was soft and thin. With great thrashing and sprays of icy water I watched the helpless animal break through and fight to free itself from the entanglement of the weeds and grasses and sharp and thicker ice, wailing at times that hollow bellow a stag will make in a fight. I watched it’s last fight and heard it’s final howl as It finally went under the water, dead.

I put on my red and black plaid coat and rubber boots and walked the quarter mile through the snow and ice. At times the dead and brittle grasses that poked up through the frozen water line would trip me and I’d land face first in the white and wet frozen mess. I came to the spot where the buck went under and down a foot or two below the surface, I saw the violence of his final bout. The water churned muddy and red. Bloody hoof prints covered the snow and the sharp shards of ice that cut him where he tried to free himself from the swamps death grip. I figured he bled out and drowned.

I felt strangely envious of the deer. I looked down past the man-made wood and stone dam that made this mudhole something more than a wide stream, and dreamed of building a boat, or stealing one, to one day sail away from that dead man’s house and his goddamned lake.

The night began to fall and the cold rushed in even quicker. As the gray day became the gray night, I could see Christmas trees in the windows of a couple of the few houses that surrounded this frozen pond. Including the front window of our closest neighbor, Mrs. McCabe, an old, widowed woman I’d been scamming for home-baked cookies since I was old enough to walk. I didn’t give a fuck about trees and lights and mythical men in red suits or mythical babies in mangers, I wanted no part of any of it that this night. I went back to my house, slipping in through the back door in silence, where my mother and me retreated to neutral corners to try and survive this cold and wet and wretched Christmas Eve.

I remember sitting in the dark, up in the attic, the safest place I knew to be alone, comforted and tormented by boxes of my fathers’ clothes, not yet ready to be thrown out or donated. My house was haunted. I wrapped my knees with my arms and rocked myself slowly, listening for and hoping for a word with the ghost, but none came, and I found myself just hoping the night would end.

Resenting the words of the of songs I heard on the small, staticky AM radio in the kitchen as they lifted up the small and dark stairwell to my safe place. Songs of peace and comfort and joy. Holly and pine wreathes and red bows and white Christmases, and silver bells.

I thought about the now dead deer and how I envied him and admired his thrashing fight. I thought about the stream and my escape. I was not sure where I’d sail, but I’d go anywhere to escape my father’s goddamned swamp.

I heard a knock on the front door. I ran into my sisters empty and darkened room. Ten years older than me, she’d left that year. Looking out her window, I saw it was snowing harder. The world an ugly collage of grays and whites. There were no streetlights on our dead-end road. We didn’t have an address; we were just RD#3. Middletown, NY. We might have had one of those new Zip Codes by then. If we did, I didn’t know what it was. I figured the mailman knew where we lived and that was be good enough for everyone, and I didn’t care because I knew I no longer lived there. I just survived there and suffered the nights like this one.
The noise at the door was Mrs. McCabe. I was summoned to join her and my mother. The old woman had walked down from her house up near the main road the thousand feet or so from her door to ours in this heavy snow. She stood in the small front room, wearing her deceased husbands’ heavy railroaders jacket, and big black wet boots and a thin cotton house dress.

She carried with her a heavy, woven wicker basket with a lid wrapped in a blanket that was covered with snow, now melting on the floor.

Mrs McCabe apologized almost meekly for not coming by since the death of my father and offered the basket to my mother, saying, “You both need this.”

She turned for the door and offered a shy “Merry Christmas.” She paused and looked around the house realizing perhaps she’d mis-spoken.

In the basket was a loaf of fresh baked bread and a small tub of butter.
Ma and me, we sat in the tiny dark kitchen and listened to the staticky radio, it carols making a mockery of this night. The wind had picked up and wet snow flakes slapped against the glass panes of the back door.
We drank black coffee and ate the good, warm bread in a silent communion and listened to the windswept storm.

I’m not saying the bread fixed anything, some shit is too broken to ever fix. But it was the first moment in almost a year I felt anything that didn’t feel like hate.

In all my life I’ve never known a greater kindness than old Mrs. McCabe and that loaf of bread.