Show N' Tell

“This is my mom’s massager. You turn it on like this.”Pausing a moment for dramatic effect, I scanned the classroom then clicked the power switch on, and the vibrator sprang to life. The humming sound could be heard echoing to the far corners of the room, and all eyes were glued on me as I began to demonstrate the massager and its usefulness in working out cricks. I started by rubbing it all over my neck and shoulders.“If you put it under your chin, it will make your teeth bump against each other.”I demonstrated. My teeth clacked and clicked, and my mouth began to tickle. The kids in my class were watching me eagerly; they too wanted to play with my neat new toy.“Now, be careful. If you push too hard you can bite your tongue.” I removed the vibrator from my chin and I turned the power off. As was customary, the class would now pass my object around the room as I answered questions about it. I handed it to the girl sitting in front of me, who took it, turned it on, and immediately put it between her legs. As I looked around the room for raised hands, the loud sound of the tip vibrating against the hard plastic of her chair rose from between her legs and drifted around the room. She was holding it with both hands, and she had a huge smile on her face. After a few seconds, without turning it off, she handed it to the boy next to her.“Where’d she get it?” someone asked. Since I didn’t know, I ventured a guess.“Santa brought it to her for Christmas.” I tried to look confident and knowing, and anyway, my answer made sense. After all, had anyone ever seen a toy like this? And who else but the big guy himself could come up with something so neat? With the holidays fast approaching, I thought that maybe Santa would bring me one for Christmas this year if I asked. As the boy who now held the vibrator turned it off and passed it down the row to the next child, a girl named Sissy, The first girl raised her hand and said “It feels even better if you put it between your legs.” Sissy clicked the power on and then handed it back to the boy. “Here, try it first,” she said, and he briefly buzzed the toy against his pants and handed it back to her.Meanwhile, my teacher was sitting at her desk, behind me and to the right, a huge smile pasted to her face. But it was not her normal smile. This one was tight with strain, and it made her look older than she was. As the children continued to pass my object around, she just smiled and smiled, looking almost but not quite on the verge of panic, saying nothing, her glance shifting every few seconds from the door to the clock to us and back again. Finally the last student, a boy, finished looking at my toy. He passed it forward to me, and as he did, my teacher said, in a thin, high voice tinted with just enough anxiety to be noticed, “Are there any more questions or comments?”“Why don’t you try it?” asked the original girl, and as she was asking, I handed it to my teacher expectantly, wanting her approval more than anyone’s. Looking at me with a mixture of horror and firm resolve, she took the vibrator, clicked it on, and quickly rubbed her neck and shoulders and even under her chin.“Try it between your legs!” shouted a girl from the back row without raising her hand or being called on.My teacher clicked it off and handed it back to me with a look that was relief, longing and amusement all scrambled on her face like eggs, while at the same time gently admonishing the girl for speaking out of turn. “We must raise our hands before sharing.”I took back the vibrator, relishing my moment in the spotlight to the sound of polite applause. Then I put it in my backpack, and we moved on to the day’s business. In retrospect I can see that my teacher handled it rather well. I mean, how exactly does one deal with a room full of five-year-olds who are rubbing a sex toy all over their bodies, except to just let them finish quickly and hope that some member of administration doesn’t just happen to drop by to see how class is going, or perhaps to offer a word of encouragement or praise to the new first year teacher? Like me, when it was all said and done she had one hell of a story to tell.

Beginnings

I was a teenaged drug addict living in a cozy white suburban community. My parents weren't rich, but most of my pals came from affluent families, and their parents were too caught up in their own lives to really pay attention to ours. It was the ideal setup for druggies; we'd go to school, skip class, get high in the parking lot, gather in hordes for more of the same during lunch and after school. We lived in Evergreen, a smallish mountain town 30 miles outside of Denver, cut off from the big city by a range of foothills that gave us small-town security while our parents reaped the financial results of working in a major urban center like Denver. It was a big small-town, with all the benefits of being a suburb and the illusion that it had none of the problems. To the people in authority... the cops, our teachers, our parents... the problems were invisible . To us, they didn't seem like problems. We didn't seem like problems. But we were. And we did alot of damage.And we had some fun.This, then, is my life. Or to be more precise, my stories. A memoir of what it was like to be a drug addict in a town where there was no supervision and no consequences. And how, through it all, I managed to survive, often only by sheer dumb luck.Enjoy the stories, and remember, they are all true.

Bobbing for chicken

He rings the bell. She comes to the door, dressed in... What, polyester? Yes, polyester pants, pink and yellow. She greets him friendly, asks about his day, apologizes for leaving so quickly, wishes him well, and is out to the curb, in her car and gone.He walks in. The smell of scorched butter hangs in the air, filmy, like truckstop concrete. He greets his friends, notices a pan on the table in the middle of the kitchen. It is lined with foil."What's this?" he says, as he peeks inside."Chicken," says Tim, "for the bitches."Chicken for the bitches. He grins at this, says nothing. He reaches in for a drumstick and it bobbles under the surface."What'd you do to it?" he asks."I cooked it," says his friend. "what'd you think?"Cooked it. Can you fucking believe this guy?"How?" he asks, seeing perfectly well, but wanting to hear Tim explain it.They were about to become roommates. In fact, that was the reason he was here. He came over to talk about some of the apartments they had looked at, to see if he had an opinion."In butter," says Tim.Does his Grandmother know he did this? Probably not, he concludes, she'd never let him do this to Chicken."Where'd your Gram go? " He puts the chicken back in the pan, watches it sink under then slowly rise back up."She went to play bingo," he replies, "and we've got some bitches coming over for dinner. We're making them chicken and corn."As he says this, he pulls four cobs of corn on a cookie sheet from the oven in the kitchen. He sets the them on the counter next to a plate of biscuits, which look ok."How'd you cook them," he says, "in what? That pan?""Yeah. I just put 'em in the pan with the butter and put it in the oven."He examines the pan on the table again. It is about 4 inches deep, oval-shaped. Inside he sees seven drumsticks, mostly black on the outside, floating around lazily in a greasy pool. He pokes one again. It dips under the surface and re-emerges. He thinks it may be the same one he just picked up, but isn't sure."Shit, man, how much butter did you use?""I put in a stick for each leg," he says. He is putting the corn and the biscuits on a large platter. The platter has blue geese painted around the edge, looks Asian.A stick for each leg! "Dude, that's like almost two pounds of butter," he says, and his friend laughs.

flat Irons 1988

I have lots and lots and LOTS of outdoor stories that probably should have ended worse than they did. Like the time I went rock climbing in high school with 2 equally fucked up friends, and we were in the Flatirons just outside Boulder, Co. It was around midnight, our acid had just kicked in, we'd just smoked a fatty, and it was time to climb! We decided to climb up the 3rd one, which in this picture is the left of the big three, because it was the only one whose top we could see against the sky in the moonlight from where we were sitting.So anyway, we're pretty buzzed, and one of us stayed on the ground because he was a big pussy when it came to climbing. OK, so we're climbing, and it's only like a 5.6 or 5.7 (easy, for you that don't climb) but it's dark, we're fucked up, and the thing is so massive it seems like vertical.We have one flashlight, a lighter, and a pack of smokes between the 2 of us.About 1/2 way up, I start freaking out. Normally I was the solid one, but I was so high I was literally having an out of body experience. One second I was there, 200 ft up the rock, reaching for the next handhold right there above my head, and the next, I was looking down on myself from miles up in the sky. I could see those massive rocks like they were tiny hangnails on the Earth’s skin, and myself just an insignificant parasite attached tenuously to them. Then I was back again, having managed the last handhold without really realizing it, looking a few feet further up for the next one.I kept bouncing between these two perspectives about every 5 seconds, and I was afraid I was going to fall off the face in my confusion. My friend talked me down (from my panic, not off the rock) and we eventually made it to the top. As you can see in this pic, the front side is very angled, and an easy climb, but the back side is a straight drop, and at midnight, it looks as though it drops off into oblivion. Fortunately, I was no longer popping in and out like I had been as few minutes earlier, but I was still freaked out. Ryan however, was enjoying our role reversal, and was more bold than usual. At the top he lit a cig, then swung himself over the backside of the cliff and lodged a foot into a crack somewhere below. Then he starts swinging his free arm and leg, making goofy noises, having the time of his life seeing how much he was freaking me out. I was totally convinced he was about to plunge to his death, but no amount of begging or whining was working to get him back safely on my side. I finally convinced him by saying "Dude, I'll show you the coolest thing ever, but you've got to come back first.""What is it?" he asked, not believing me."Just trust me. Here. Take my smokes and if I'm lying, you can keep them." That convinced him. He crawled back on my side after I handed him my smokes, and then I said, check out THESE trails!" and I threw our flashlight as high as I could off the cliff.The trails (tracers to you Texas folk) were amazing, and nothing like them had ever been seen before or since.We watched it fly, leaving a long, purple-green smudge across the sky that lingered on for what seemed like minutes but was probably only about 7 or 8 seconds. Our silent contemplation was soon shattered though, when we heard a painful cry from far below.“You hit me in the fucking hand!”Dave, our friend who had been waiting below with an increasing amount of impatience, was not usually someone to be afraid of, but he did often get short-tempered on our occasional climbing trip, because we left him alone while we climbed and teased him mercilessly for his fear of heights. “I’m going to kick your ass when you get down here,” he yelled up at us, missing, like us, the greater significance of the fact at hand, which was that I had just thrown away our only source of light and we would now have to down-climb nearly completely blind. We eventually bumbled our way down to the ground without killing ourselves, and when we got to the bottom, Dave had decided not to beat me into a pulpy mush. His hand had an ugly purple welt on it, but he didn’t appear to have broken anything, and amazingly, our flashlight had survived the fall. Dave had picked it up and claimed it as his own, in payment for the accident. We then smoked a victory/survival/ appeasing-Dave bowl, which kicked off our peak all over again. I nearly left my car keys in the grassy meadow, but fortunately Ryan saw them, so we counted our blessings and started heading home.Unfortunately, we didn’t make any farther than the Coors brewery in Golden, where we were pulled over by a cop for driving down a one-way street the wrong way… but that is a story for another time.

Dansant

"I'd say you're 28."
She speaks softly, leaning in close
The tilt of her voice
and her smell
provocative

"Close," I say, laughing,
believing her.

She steps in front of me
"How close?"

She leans in,
moves a lock of hair from my ear

"36," I say;
I look at her chest, pale white and freckled


She follows my eyes with her own
"I could be a dirty girl," they seem to flash,
and her lip curls in the hint of a smile

"Really?... Is this your natural hair color?" she says,

Her eyes following mine as I glance back at her pink nipples
then to her eyes again

deliberately

curious what she'll do

Her eyes amused but inviting,
I laugh again
A million possible choices
floating through my mind

I settle on "Yes."

"Is that yours?" I challenge,
having fun now

Pulling this particular dance from the dust
along with a thousand hedonic memories

"No," she says, stepping back a little
a nonchalant solicitation
to take in all of her

She flashes her eyes downward,
like she's read my mind
And then our eyes meet again
and she gives me a wicked grin

she's so open
it's practically a caress

"But it's nice, don't you think?"

And I think, yes.... it is.

Prey

In Sleep's fitful first throes
I struggle to run
Like through molasses
Here, where I often find myself
At 1, or 2
And other times
Between dropping off
And the restless thrashing
That comes after waking
From the dream that isn't a dream
I've tried to flee that familiar house
Where down the stairs that lie within
Stalks that nameless thing, terrifying
More times than I could count
Face to face with my dying
My chest tight, the fear
A crushing weight
I wake up,
Heart pounding in my ears
Knock knock knock knock...
I'm a rabbit down a rabbithole
Just in time.

Husk

Twilight tethers ghosts to spine
The world is dim, the fear divine

Bat dive-bombs boy at dusk

Awful vision, just a husk

Creeping through the caves of time

on knees in dirt, with death entwined

Monster

Could that have been me that Fall
When the snows came early, and yellowed leaves
Spotted the parks and drives

You came expecting Spring
But ashes still remained
Where new life should have been

You couldn't have known that
And so you left full of life
And a longing for Summer

But the season cycled early, and the harvest withered
And you couldn't have known
that I was as empty as Winter

Life story in couplets - the 80's

In 1981 I went with you to Jesus camp.
You stayed awake with me through the cold night, waiting for the Indians to attack

In 1983 I wrapped my arms around you to stave off the cold.
You comforted me by saying that the night was nearly over.

In 1985 I wore your loud paisley shirt, and slipped away to the city
You got me lost on the way home, our stolen goods stuffed down my pants chafing my waist

In 1987 I had a heart attack in the front seat of your car on the way to school
You opened the door and let me tumble out onto the asphalt, curious if I'd live or die

In 1989 I was born again.
You... survived. I knew it wasn't your fault.