- Road Trips, and: Prophecy, and: I Lose a New Cold War
Road Trips
Gabe’s driving home from Sea World, two-year-old son yodeling in the back seat when, at the Oceanside off-ramp, Ann announces, “Kenny called the other day.” Seems Kenny lives in Oceanside,
which makes her think of a road trip with him and Rainbow—“this drug-dealer from high school.” “Is that when you took the trip?” “No,” she says. “A month before I met you, Kenny convinced me
to come with them, and try three-way.” “Kenny sounds gay,” Gabe says, not without satisfaction, he’s so sick of hearing how Kenny broke into her house, drained her dad’s booze, and passed out behind his bar;
how he cross-cut his wrists in her driveway when they broke up; how he had blond, Led Zeppelin hair, which he’s kept, and “incredible talent” as a painter, which he’s lost, along with half
his brain cells. “He’s pretty bi,” Ann agrees. “That was the turn-on.” Is this payback, Gabe thinks, for Nigel the dwarf? Years back, when Gabe’s band played The Cave in Portland, Nigel wheelchaired in
beside his wife, Jen: a busty blonde who wiggled in her seat, and cast enough come-hither [End Page 124] looks to stretch the whole band, slobbering, at her feet. After the gig, Nigel begged Gabe, “Come home with us
and sleep with Jen. My health won’t let me . . .” Not a three-way, he assured; all he wanted was to watch through a peephole. “This kind of thing keeps us together,” Nigel said in his thin squeak. “I’d appreciate it, man.”
So, in bed last night, when Ann whispered, “What’s the kinkiest thing you’ve ever done?” Gabe confessed. Now, son snorfling behind him, he demands, “Why tell me this?!” He wants to know if she sees Kenny
on the side. He wants a fight. But when he turns on Ann, her eyes drip pearl-sized tears. And just as he’s feeling like Gabriel in “The Dead,” sensing places in his wife he’ll never reach, a man whose influence he can
never break, she says, “I’m just so glad I married you.” And they drive on through the dusk that settles its sea-scented blanket on families alive and flourishing, and on the past— maybe not buried, but still dead. [End Page 125]
Prophecy
Somebody’s gonna be drinkin’. Somebody’s gonna be smokin’. Two black hands slap the backbeat hard.
Somebody’s gonna be cheatin’.Somebody’s gonna be dopin’. The words ring clear, but the picture
is murky as seashore shallows, storm waves pounding in. I see a man: shirtless, in frayed pants,
though the real man could have worn a black coat, white shirt, chartreuse tie—a preacher fresh out
of his pulpit, if not his mind. The crowd that’s washed up on the shore is not for him. Some shrimper’s trawled
a turtle from the sapphire sea: yellow-eyed snake-head tensed to snap off a boy’s hand as easily as the broom-
handle somebody—my dad?— shoves at the pink-tongued mouth to prove Dangers abound.
Turtle and preacher may have happened years apart, linked only by a beach, seawall behind it
built to hold back hurricanes. Still I see the turtle’s green-black hump behind the preacher: [End Page 126]
head-pumping, hand-clapping, exhorting, Oh praise Jesus!Praise our blessed Lord!
Washed up on the mind’s shore, such scenes hold psychic treasures, doctors say. But what are they?
Why do they float into my dreams from a time when cheating meant at marbles; lying, that I didn’t
break Mom’s lilac anniversary tureen? Why do these words, that spurt like turtle blood, seem enticements
to the sins the preacher lists— no hiss of hellfire, only hip-shaking calls: gleeful, ecstatic
as the devil-songs of Chuck, Big Momma, Little Richard, Fats? Somebody’s gonna be teasin’.
Somebody’s gonna be sleazin’. Oh praise Jesus! Praise our BlessedLord! [End Page 127]
I Lose a New Cold War
Oleg from American...