This Was A Terrible Idea
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE TALE OF THE 7 DAYS BEFORE MY 3,000 MILE JOURNEY ACROSS THE AMERICAN SOUTH.
“…we can only ask questions and die. Better Save all our pride for the city of the dead and the day of the carrion: There, when the winds shift through the hollows of your skull it will show you all manner of enigmatical things, whispering truths in the void where your ears used to be.”
-Neruda
“You know you’re running from something that’s just gonna follow you, right?” I think we have that in common. We put so much into a place that it has no choice but let us down. I did the same thing with Brazil.” Jane-Ronnie is speeding down PCH. She opens her glove compartment and gives me a cute and overpriced bottle of vodka, tells me to finish it before we get to Da Poetry Lounge. “You’re going to get there and it’s not going to be any easier to write, or do anything you’re trying to do,” I tell her I know and I look out the window at the black of the Pacific at night. This is the last time I’m going to see it…
Let’s go back in time to a desert town just outside of Los Angeles. I’m a little boy walking out of church with my older brother, Gabe. I tell him that I like his shirt and I ask him what it says. “Leave Lancaster,” he says to me in the way older brothers talk to younger ones. Like mysterious things are obvious. Before that moment, my home town was just that. A home. Sure, there were other places, but this was my place. Where my family was, my friends, my school, my whole universe. But that T-shirt planted an idea in my head that slowly began to germinate. That my town wasn’t a place to call home, but a place to escape from…
Green. His hand (with moss and grass all over it) reached for the sky. I could see the little flowers move toward the sunlight. He closed his pebble eyes– inhaled deeply. Smoke. It escaped from all the cracks in his strange body, catching the thin wind and then blowing away. “At least you are knowing of the why,” he tells me. “The why is always being the beginning…”
That familiar swirl of the cosmic hurricane opened up. My younger selves crawled out of the space-dust time machine. Like Uatu the Watcher they come to glare on days of great importance. Never interfere. Observe only. But why that day? Lying with Ava, looking into her eyes. Looking for words that weren’t mine…
“You are a monster!” she screams at me, pointing her little finger with conviction. I do the only thing I can think of. I take a breath, then let out a roar. A deep roar, resonant, guttural, and fierce. I can see real fear in her eyes for a moment before she turns around and runs as fast as her short legs can carry her. All of her little friends do the same. Five screaming voices running away from me, and I chase them. Running at them with just enough inaccuracy to miss every time. I love being an uncle…
The story of the day I die is an interesting one and (like a lot of my stories) it starts in my car. I was driving down the 5 with my best friend, Justin, on my way to become a Godfather. We’d spent a lot of time together in that car, driving that freeway up, down, and back again through California. My name for the Jetta was Franz. Justin called it The German Whip. It would vessel me across the continent on the journey I was meant to take. Of course, I never made it, since I’m dead now and telling you this story. I wanted to take Franz the German Whip from the west coast to the east in a typical Giovan Journey. That is: poorly planned, last minute, and with heavy existential undertones.
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When the black line that separates the mountain ridge from the sky disappears, that’s when the dragons come out. They’re huge, sleek, white serpents — four stories tall. During the day they disguise themselves as the mills in the wind farm on the Tehachapi mountains. But my brother Giani and I know better. At dusk, we drive out to the desert lot speckled with Joshua trees behind our parents’ house and wait for them to wake up. In the darkness, you can see almost nothing but their red and blinking thousand eyes.
