I'LL JUST STAY HERE

KID VHS

By Patrick Biesemans

“Horror to me, true horror, is an unlabeled VHS buried in the backyard.”

I was digging a hole in the backyard, looking for buried treasures, as boys my age do, and I stumbled onto something, something I didn’t know would change my life.

A regular Sunday usually entailed going to morning services at our church, the first Presbyterian on Parsonage street, and usually followed by lunch at Rick & Ann’s cafe but today, this particular Sunday, was unusual; my dad was away for the week on some business thing not important enough for a young boy to remember; my mom was patiently waiting for an old friend to call from somewhere with some other time zone. Also, not important enough to remember.

The important part was that I had a Sunday all to myself. No church, no chores, no plans.

So I grabbed a shovel.

I had read about kids, my age, finding things like old Indian arrowheads, jewellery, little keepsakes to place on your nightstand. Who knew what I might find. I also read that, somewhere in England, a family had dug up an undetonated hand grenade. Leftover ordnance from WWII. Can’t say I was hoping to find one of those.

In our backyard, above the multi-tiered garden, is an unkept patch of overgrowth and cypress trees. The backdrop for countless, bloody battles between the galactic empire and the rebel resistance. Today it was the dig site for Black Bart’s long lost lockbox of gold bars.

Do you ever think about the people that may have lived in your house before you? I never did. Being a kid I assumed that the house stood only because we lived there, never occupied by another soul until we opened the front door, holding our moving boxes. I didn’t think about the possessions they may have had. Or how those possessions could end up in the yard, let alone this far away from the house, among the cypress trees, but here it is: a black brick with tape taught between two white spools inside, half sticking out of the dirt, with a simple “X” on its label.

It wasn’t Black Bart’s gold, it wasn’t a hand grenade either, but I guess it was interesting enough to pluck from the ground. It must have been put there with some thought because it was wrapped in a large ziplock bag. Someone didn’t want someone else to find this thing... But they still wanted to be able to come back for it one day.

I made no assumptions about what might be on the tape, however, that didn’t keep my curiosity from taking hold. I dug around in the dank basement for an hour, looking for our old VCR that I knew we had in the guestroom but was retired to the basement a long time ago. I knew we had an older TV in the garage, so I lugged the VCR from the basement, through the house, and into another dank dwelling. 

Both the TV and VCR had a mess of ports and cables to navigate. I felt pretty accomplished for solving the dated, tangled technological puzzle. All I had to do was continue the fantasy of being a resistance fighter trying to decode a lost message from the dwindling alliance.

Pushing the tape into the slot, a rush of nervous excitement charged from my fingertips through to my frontal lobe, leaving me with a tingling sensation throughout my body.

Sitting in a pool of static light, in the dark garage, I watched as a grainy image popped onto the TV screen. The image was nearly black and white, but it was ghosted by a phantom trail of red, green, blue and yellow. All vying for space in the darkness.

From what I could make out It was a cold looking room of cement, with little light and a blurry blob of an object sitting in the middle of the room, on the cold pavement. Nothing else except a shelf of familiar household tools, barely visible in the color-fringed darkness.

It took me a moment, a long moment, that lasted what seemed like several longer moments stretched out and stitched together, before I recognized the room to be my own dank garage. The shadows on the screen seemed to reach out from the corners, carrying with them the phantom colors, reaching out to the blurry blob sitting in the center of the room. 

Something moved from the shadows, swiftly, crossing the room, passing the blurry blob sitting on the floor, disappearing back into the adjacent shadows. The blurry blob, now clearly a person, slumped over, lifeless, with a dark pool quickly accumulating on the floor around their neck.

A cold rush of fear dripped down my back. I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t a rebel fighter anymore. I was being plunged into a scary, bottomless dark world of fearful things that meant to do me harm.

The “New” Oakland

By Patrick Biesemans

“Melting pot doesn’t mean utopia. Oakland is certainly not that. It is something else.”

I’ve never seen Dex angry. Truly angry. Even at the direst of moments, his ability to shrug it all off and rest with a smile is astonishing. That’s a universal truth about him. But tonight he’s angry. Tonight we’re at Somär. This club has been around since back in the day… Which means I don’t remember an Oakland without it. Its walls are covered in Afrocentric art. Painted portraits of Eddie Murphy and Dave Chappelle adorn the back wall of the bar. It’s the beat pulse of Oakland at night.

“Man, I don’t even recognize this place tonight. Shits a snowstorm in here.”  Dex is right, there are hella white people in the club, all gyrating offbeat. It’s like a caravan of shuttle buses, flowing from silicon valley, empty their passengers until the clubs hit capacity. A lot of V necks, fleece, and paleo diets all vying for space to dance badly.

We have lived in the outskirts and surrounding areas of Oakland our entire lives. Most of our moms gave birth to us in a hospital not more than three miles away. Oakland, for better or worse, has been our home and our education.

Dex is getting visibly more upset as tech bro after tech bro collides into our group, spilling their vodka tonics on us, with little more than a glance of acknowledgement and absolutely no apology. No “sorry, bro” or “My bad.” Nothing. Just a judgemental look, one that a kid might give a captive zoo animal. I'm used to being the only identifiable white guy in this place, for the most part. Tonight I feel like I’m part of the problem, only because I’m lost in a sea of other white dudes behaving like assholes (go figure).

A rambunctious group of Facebook employees form a circle around two of their friends dancing. I can’t tell if they’re completely inebriated, making fun of hip-hop, or are truly just bad dancers. They try out the moves they learned in overpriced Brukwine classes, the dudes and the chicks try twerking. This shit is embarrassing and borderline offensive.

A repeat offender or the bump and splash gets Dex good this time. Vodka tonic soaked into the threads. “Bruh!” Dex is mad, and rightly so. The tech douche squeaks out “Sorry, my dude.”  and immediately turns right back to the Google dance circle. We all know this crowd has money. We know more than most of them are Caucasian. We know those two things equal privilege. We also know Dex is black, and if he were to do anything to the privileged white Google dude, something bad would happen to Dex. We’re still in Oakland where people still say “fuck the police” proudly.

The night belongs to Google or Facebook, wherever those shuttle buses came from. We decided it’s only gonna get worse. Somehow, after a few more rounds somewhere else, we end up at Nations. Breakfast for dinner at 2AM isn’t so bad, especially while sitting in good company. But as I look out at the Prius soaked parking lot, I sense something bad on the horizon. I sense the imminent doom of whitewash, sterilization, gentrification. Juice bars and paleo diets crashing down on our little skiff of true culture. 

For the Anger of Him

By Patrick Biesemans

     “If you don’t love me now, you’ll never love me again.” Classic rock, country and talk radio blares out of each cabin. The intense fumes of diesel fuel are inescapable, it sticks to clothing and nostril hairs. These people are fermented in a concoction of wet pavement, gasoline and energy drinks, ossified to their very existence. Even the coffee tastes like it has petrol in it.

I’m not as impatient as I was when I was younger but I’m waiting for him which puts me at a base level of dull agitation. There’s not a goddamn thing I wanna eat here, everything looks like a straight shot to artery replacements or diabetes. I order the fries. They’re probably lowered into a vat of motor oil. My petrol coffee with a side order of Valvoline french fries. This place is the embodiment of a Bob Seger song. The looks I’m getting aren’t even subtle but the waitress at the counter still calls me “Honey.” Her smile brings me little comfort.

He is already a half-hour late and there’s no wifi or reception in this black hole of communication somewhere between Cantua Creek and Kettleman City. If I look at the timeline of my life, I’m sure I’d be surprised to know I’ve been waiting for him for a little over ten hours of accumulated time. That’s really not that much in the scope of thirty-five years. Problem is that it’s not just the waiting, it’s the effort for an inevitable waste of time; I’ll sit across from him, and he won’t make eye-contact and I won’t break mine. I never break eye-contact with him, I know how it makes him uncomfortable. He’ll ask me about things that I don’t feel like telling him. Not because I’m lazy but because I don’t think he deserves to know anything about me. I wish he’d just stop blubbering and tell me he has cancer or something terminal… anything that would force me to be obligatorily nice to him. Faked pleasantries in the face of looming death are better than listening to him blunder his way through a string of false apologies.

I’m already ahead of myself, battling it out with an apparition of him before he even walks through the door. Emotional shadowboxing. I wonder if the opposite side of this story is happening across the counter from me with someone else. I’m probably the only fool in this joint that went out of his way to be here. This shack, this waterhole, this isn’t somewhere you plan to be. It’s somewhere you most definitely end up.

Tired of waiting, I go outside. I wouldn’t be mad if they threw out my barely touched basket of translucent fries. There’s not much to look at out here. There’s a sparse beauty to it; the landscape canvas soaked in royal blues and purples. Hues of pink hug the darkness of the hills being penetrated by motorist’s headlights; families on vacation heading to Disneyland; teenagers on their first road trip without parents heading to somewhere “cool,” secretly wishing they were heading to Disneyland. Certainly, either one of these truckers or motorists is getting road head. It’s just something you do on this stretch of road. There isn’t shit else to pass the time. You can only sing your favorite songs, at the top of your lungs, so many times.

I wander around the wet fluorescent-lit structure for a while, looking for a signal. I don’t know why, there’s no one I would call right now, it’s just something to do. I’m wandering around long enough to make a decision: go back inside and wait or jump back into my econo-rental and drive back to the civilized world, out of the barren wasteland. I think of few reasons to get gone but the dread of sitting in a car for the next few hours outweighs any reason to leave, and I go back inside, back to my basket of fries soaking through the parchment paper they were haphazardly delivered on.

I take the basket from the counter and sit at a booth with my eyes on the front door. I think five or ten minutes have passed, and my head finds its way into my hands. I think it’s time to go. The Christmas bells jingle above the door and someone calls out his name, and then another person grunts a low registered welcome. He is clearly a regular. I don’t look up right away because, honestly, I’m used to him forgetting about me, forgetting what I look like. He’ll probably walk right by me and not even...

A worn-out voice mutters “Hey.”

I look up and see him standing there, you can tell he wants a hug but I’ll be damned if I give him one. Instead, I offer him a Valvoline french fry. “Sorry I’m late, I just…” I cut him off with a head shake before he can squeak out another lame-ass excuse. As he sits, sarcasm oozes from my mouth as I ask him, “Do you come to this charming place often?” He scoffs. He doesn’t know how to handle me, never has. The waitress from the counter saunters over to the booth and asks him what he’d like. “The usual, Maryanne” he replies. He knows her name and orders the “usual,” he does come here often, and we can’t be any more different. I would have to be from another fucking planet.

“How’s your mom?” he asks, to which I swiftly reply, “That’s none of your damn business.” The “usual” finds its way onto the table… I think it’s Salisbury steak. I think. There’s just too much gravy involved to be entirely sure. In the back of my mind, there are a million other places I’d like to be right now but not a single one of them comes to the forefront, so I make up a general lie. “Look, I’ve got somewhere I need to be, so we should probably say what we gotta say.” He pushes the “usual” away while still gnawing on a bite of it. “Okay, well, I’ve got cancer.”

I’ve never been able to contort my expressions to say what I’m not really thinking. So right now, he is reading “It’s deserved” written across my unsympathetic face. It’s deserved, it’s your sentence for the years of absentee parenting, it’s deserved for making my mother cry, for hurting her, for hurting us. It’s the penance you pay for being a knuckle-dragging-ignoramus. Your cancer is the cure for full-blown asshole. I’m not sad, I’m angry he won’t be around for more years for me to ignore his fucking phone calls. I won’t even question what kind of cancer he might have or where it might have come from. I know his pack-a-day habits, his six-pack after six-pack midnight routines. He’s eating that damn plate of Salisbury mush while looking for sympathy. He has cancer, I don’t question it.

Somewhere in the midst of it, while wading my way through emotions hidden by a contorted expression, I looked down at the table. I broke eye-contact and the table opened into a swirling portal of memories that won’t go away; Christmases, Easters, birthdays all swirl with a form of happiness projecting from my mother center stage, a radiant aura of love and warmth. But frayed at the edges of these memories is a spot painted in angry colors, smouldering reds and earthy yellows. A picture developed wrong. It’s him. It’s all my anger. It’s all my resentment, frustration, and callousness presented in technicolor.

“What are you telling me for?” I ask because I can’t think of anything else to say. His response is muffled, it’s far away. His sob story is the same one I’ve been listening to for years but now it has cancer as the punchline. Like it was the behind-the-scenes culprit that was fucking up his otherwise promising life the whole time. At some point during his lengthy session of the blame game, I stand up.

“I’m having a smoke. You can keep talking outside.”

I’ve been here for five hours, that’s half the accumulated time I’ve had to wait for this asshole in my life. I’ve been here for five hours and I realize, outside of my childhood, this is the most time I’ve ever spent with him. I’m about halfway down my cigarette when he asks if he can have one, my reply full of sarcasm. “I don’t know, can you?” I light his cigarette, and the most subtle of details reveals the most devastating revelation; he takes a long drag and the cigarette finds its way low between the index and middle finger, close to the top knuckles. No one holds their cigarettes like that, no one but me.

This little detail, this insignificant speck of information; I look at his hands, calloused, saturated with twenty years of physical labor. Although shorter than I, his posture is mine. The wrinkles and creases of his brow leading to a sharpened point of discontent, also mine. His anger, mine. My anger, his. I’ve waited for him for ten hours accumulated time but I have lived with his anger, within me, for my entirety. Not because of him but because of me. I’ve nurtured it, I’ve cultivated it. I’ve honed it into an unbridled weapon for me to wield against those that have wronged me and even those that have loved me.

We haven’t said much in the last few moments. All I need is for him to say two words and we can release the burden between us. He’s said these words many times over but I wasn’t receptive, I was oblivious to the little details. His cigarette is nearing its end. I just need him to say two words. The cigarette butt sails across the backdrop of fluorescent haze and wet asphalt. In my peripheral, I can see he’s looking at me. He wants to say so much more but all he can muster is “It was good seeing you.” It’s more than I can say, I’m just waiting for him to say those two words. All I can squeak out is “Yeah.” With a slight nod of acknowledgement, he begins to walk away. Please just say those two words and we can make up for all of that lost time. He’s far enough to know it’s not going to happen…

“Hey!”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry.”

The Familiarity of Falling Away

by Patrick Biesemans    

   Coming to the edge of the roof your stomach drops into your socks and your butthole tenses up. Like any adolescent, you spit to measure the distance of just how far down the drop is… It’s a good three seconds before you hear contact. Before you hear the splat.

The school was built into the side of a hill, standing tall above several cascading hills below. So when you’re on the roof, it feels like you can see the entire town huddle around the contours of the bay shorelines… It also makes you feel higher up than you actually are. There’s always a few other people here but I never know anyone, and they never recognize me no matter how many times I’ve been up here. The lack of recognition doesn’t attenuate the circumstances,  we all know why we’re here.

The roof is covered with itty bitty pebbles that make for good traction. I’m always wearing chucks so grip, depending on the state of the Allstars, can be an iffy thing. At the opposite end of the roof, the basketball courts and lunch quad disappear. From this standpoint, it looks as though there is nothing but the town to catch your fall… it would take your spit at least fifteen seconds travelling in a straight line to hit the asphalt. 

There’s no need for encouragement, there’s no ego this high up, this isn’t a rite of passage. The unfamiliar faces of the few souls up here watch with warm smiles. As fast as I’m running each step feels like a fraction of the real-time, as my knees lift into the air, my legs feel like they’re cutting thick mud. By the time my toes hit the ground for the next stride, it feels like too much time has passed, and I’m reminded that I have to do it all over again with the other leg. Float to the deep end of the pool, sink to the bottom, and try running, that’s what this feels like.

My Allstars leave the itty bitty pebbles behind. The row of familiar strangers turns into a blurred shape leaving me in the background. The basketball courts quickly approach beneath my feet. This is the only moment I should panic but there isn’t enough time. I barely touch the ground before I’m vaulted back into the night sky with ease, before I’m on another arched trajectory to the hills scattered below. 

You’re nine years old and the momentum and inertia of the swingset have brought you to the peak. There’s a sense of accomplishment every time you swing up, you float your chest out because you’re defying gravity. “I’ll jump off at the height of the next swing!” this is how most kids break their ankle… Not sticking that landing.

I’m airborne again, my view of the bay is spectacular. The fact that I’m up this high and can see where everyone I know, and love, is at in one moment brings me a comfort that can only be described by a person on their deathbed surrounded by their friends and family.

This sensation can’t last forever because nothing does. Soon enough, maybe too soon, I’m back on the ground; the school, the basketball courts, the souls on the roof, everything is in the distance. I’m the one on the ground and everything has fallen away from me.