#soberdad

September 2

It is early Spring of 2000, the sun is just coming up, the trees are arched like a canopy, and the earthly leaves are thinly separated. The infant light is illuminating rays of the sun through a large window, scattering, willowing the light against posters in my bedroom.  The poster hanging above my bed is Nirvana, it is yellowish with burnt rose images and on the other wall is scattered words in pink and purple obscurities from Pearl Jam lyrics and Counting Crows that I have injected, overlapping the off-white house paint.  I wrote a few words that morning in a loose-leaf notebook that read on the cover in fire engine red ink in my handwriting: “Rage Against the Dying of The Light.”  I write that morning, as I have done every morning since the day, I could write my first word.  On that day I would have told you I was never going to stop writing.   

I do not wake up to a shrilling alarm clock resembling a baby nor to a tyrannical dictator in a smog riddled concentration camp working us from flesh to sunken emaciation, vanishing to the bone.  I awake to Jackson, and he is utterly alert, and his eyes are large, and inviting. I carry him into the kitchen and just as I think I am rested for the first time in weeks, I step in a red acrylic painting that I must have knocked over, with a trail of size 10 shoe that resembles Fred Flintstone, I make noticeable indentions into the carpet and it looks like a murder scene from a horror film.

 I do an inventory of the bathroom as I clean off the red paint from my skin (Jackson now an extension of my right arm) 1-pink toothbrush, 3 residents. 1 of those residents has not a tooth in his head and the other two are in their 30’s.  In my full and complete awareness, it occurs to me we are sharing a toothbrush.   Then for an uncomfortable amount of time I try to recall Kayla’s middle name but Jackson is fully alert and I am rested and I am unsure if the pink toothbrush is the tool I used to clean mud off my running shoes two mornings ago.  Jackson in all his alertness has kept this vow of secrecy.  Jackson and I listen to The Beatles before I head off to the gym. 

At the gym I am reported from a Mario Kart looking contraption that my blubber has dropped to 5% body fat, and it also reads my fortune but the words are in ‘Mandarin’ so I assume and make assumptions in my favor.  I lift intensely as if somewhere in me must make up for the misspent time I wrangled in addiction.  I watch a young father carrying his daughter to the daycare, his arms wrapped firmly in great protection and his eyes focused in a way almost animalistic towards some great survival timeline; he kisses her softly and kindly, and I watch his focused eyes hold open without resistance and in that look, in that moment, is everything beautiful about the human condition.  In that moment he watches his daughter's entire life unfold, he watches her scrape her knee, eat a snack in 1st grade and he watches her fiddle awkwardly in a dress on prom night, and he watches her get married and he watches her being his child. 

2 Hours later, I arrived to pick up my boys for River’s teacher conference. Phoenix has accelerated attempts to annoy me and he succeeds.  He speaks babble intentionally, and then he prays for more attention by pulling on my shirt, and then dancing like a lunatic.  Then he calms down and I take a breath and he unravel his energy with diplomatic immunity.  Attention seeking at its most prolific.    They are in full tilt of being spastic little boys, fighting and telling on one another’s trespasses.  River tells me Phoenix said a cuss word (but he said it in riddles, and in babble language, perhaps in ‘Mandarin’) and Phoenix tells me that River punched him when I was not looking.  River tells me that Phoenix has been hiding his shoes, but Phoenix tells me that he is hiding his own shoes, and by the time we need to leave I cannot find the left shoe. Phoenix has hidden my car keys and neither listen as they drive me up the wall.  Phoenix dances and jumps around, and he will not put on his shoes.  River laughs and does not listen, and he talks smartly to me.  They most likely have planned this; they can feel me unraveling.  They are like an Abbott and Costello act and the more I unravel, the more the banter is intense.  I scream like the soup Nazi in Seinfeld, “No Milk Shake for you!!!”  They laugh and begin pestering one another, I enjoy the reprieve but like a surprise-twist ending to an M. Night Shyamalan movie you know there will be much more nonsense.

River sits in the barber seat for a haircut and I recognize that he is almost seven years old. This is my first time to know where his school resides, I will meet his teachers, and I will no longer be absent but in a new position of co-parenting with Brittany.  When the stylist asked me which haircut he preferred, I told her a little boy and River called me ‘lame’ and told her he wanted the sides blended with a 3-inch blade. Phoenix hears the song ‘Thunder’ by Imagine Dragons and is dancing around the hair salon. 

Phoenix lives his life the way most people wish they could live.  He lives in a different world than the rest of us.  He lives in howls, and he lives in wild abandonment.  Where he lives there is no fear, there is only dancing and attention seeking and movement.  I think sometimes when I look at him, he may be the last of the wild things remaining on this earth. 

We go to River’s school and meet Mrs. Guthrie. Phoenix runs up and down the hallway howling like a mad man, like some character out of a Hunter S. Thompson novel.  There are rules because of Covid-19; bringing your own water bottle and not sharing snacks.  I picture Phoenix eating off other kids’ plastic plates and they quarantine him like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.

At lunch River is wearing a mask because of the signs reading ‘DISTANCE’ and he wonders about this half open and half-closed world.  He wants to know honestly if people are miserable because of the Covid-19 or did Covid-19 give them another reason to be miserable?  He wants to know why people want to be closed off, yet want to be openly seen?  He looks at me and lifts his mask, and says do you think that when people realize that they may not die because of this, they will try to live, or is it easier for them to just see it all miserable?  I tell him no matter how people act, we are going to live our lives, and he asks me the same question I asked my mother at his age, is it scary to die?  And I tell him what I believe and I say no buddy, we create ideas and notions and abstractions but underneath all of it, is a bunch of terrified people afraid of something they shouldn’t be afraid of.  When you were born, you were not afraid.  We complicate things River.  Phoenix spills his milkshake in my lap, and I cuss behind my mask. River ends our lunch by saying I do not want to live scared or hiding behind cloth. 

The Art of Losing Car Keys

Written by Dustin W Bailey

August 31st

The alarm shrills and sounds like a crying baby.  I pause for whatever reason but then I realize it is my child, yet I think about the pause and then pause again.  Jackson’s cry is high pitched, the sort of alarming sound one thinks of when a traveler is mauled by an animal in one of those videos circulating YouTube.  It is 4:32 am and I have been asleep for two hours. I know this because we have done this before.  See also 2:32 am.  See also 12:32 am.  It is my turn to get up, Kayla is snoring. She has returned from her weekend with Aiden.  Aiden caught a fish.  I make a bottle of Similac (Sensitive) with two scoops of formula, and I add 4 ounces of water.  I pause as I did when the strange baby crying wakes me from a dream to realize this odd sounding baby shrilling is my child.  I change Jackson’s diaper, I sing to him, “You are my sunshine” and I feed him the bottle of formula.  I burp him, he spits up. I pause, thinking about the fact I did all this without a shirt on and burp rag.   We have grown to like one another I think, though I read he cannot see passed a few inches in front of his face, so he really does not get the full effect of my presence.  Jackson falls back to sleep.  I grab my gym bag already prepared the night before like I did when I was in the 5th grade.  It is still dark outside, as I open the door to escape like a cat burglar, I knock into the television, and again I pause, like when I woke up uncertain who is making that shrill and the second pause about the ratio of water to formula.  Jackson wakes up.

Twenty minutes later at the gym a friend of mine practicing Buddhism asks if I want to know the secret to life, and of course I say yes, and he presses his finger to my forehead and says you are only right here.  Then he accidentally forgets his password to Facebook and screams out loud (It was probably telepathy). I buy River’s school supplies. I forget half the list.  I misplace the car keys in the trunk and lose 15 minutes.

Phoenix turns 4 years old today and he dances in the moment.  We listen to Tom Petty; Phoenix tells me Jackson’s name is Michael Jackson. I play the song “Beat It” Phoenix says mockingly that it is not Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson cannot even talk yet.  I change diapers, I use my gym shorts when Jackson spits up.  I wash and dry clothing but halfway through it occurs to me, I have not used Laundry soap.  Wash. Rinse. Repeat.  I rock Jackson, I watch Phoenix dance and River tells me about his favorite day on earth.

I clean the house; I lose my car keys (they are in the refrigerator).  I paint, I throw a canvas off the balcony and I change a diaper. I watch how beautiful it is at this moment.

Some days we are lost in our heartache, while other days we are lost in our past.  Some moments we get lost in a bottle of booze.  Yet some moments we dance on our 4th birthday.  Some moments we just want to be held or rocked.  Some moments we talk endlessly about a moment and sometimes the moment is so good, you hope it will last forever.  But you know it cannot, so you pause, and you embrace your baby’s cry, and you finally grasp that you are alive, and the moment is yours.

I edited a picture montage video of the boys. I clean the apartment. I get hired to write a memoir that resembles the movie ‘Mean Streets’ so I explain the difference between fiction and nonfiction and even meta fiction.  He asks can you write it, and I say why not, I plagiarized through college.  

Today I realized that for the first time in my 37 years of existence I have taken ownership over who and what I am, this is my life and I stand by it.  As I come to this realization, I hear a shrill from Jackson, I hear River chatting endlessly about a game and Phoenix seeking my attention and I know that I belong to something bigger than my own creative thoughts.

Moments after, Phoenix falls and cuts his knee, so his mother (Brittany) calls me to take him to the minor emergency room which I rebuttal it is my job…Though