Tell You What

A short story of sorts…

He began living. Unfolding himself from the fetal, Golden Ratio he was born into; a staircase in the vision of a dreamer. The antennae, receiving and transmitting consciousness, energy which called the world to matter and form. Where we'll start and where we'll end; a question or a statement which makes movement interesting, so when you blink too long and realize this moment it will teach you what you already know, what you've always known … … .ibid

“Man, let me tell you what,” he thundered from his chest through a diluted southern drawl as he clawed skillfully behind the driver's side seat, all the while maintaining a consistent speed of 90 miles an hour, weaving through cars, traffic, and tractor trailers like a master who spent hours stitching and sowing these works of art at a pace you could set the world to; a marathon runner, in it to move. His hand pulled back a pipe and, with both of his hands, began packing it. He had tapered off his speed to 85 mph and was now steering with his knees, all the while very gently and cautiously tearing apart into small, fragmented pieces a bud of cannabis.
“One time I was at this intersection, right? And I'm about 16,17 years old at the time, but I'm ripped though. I mean, I'm not a narcissistic guy but I worked out hard; boxing and lifting, I was built.” He goes off onto one of his patented rants to expound on the zenith of his life when he was younger.
This isn't a masturbatory act, that is to say he doesn't do it to stroke his ego or to make someone realize how great he was, he does this because he feels time pulling him farther and farther away from that point in his life that he thought he was at his best, when comparing it to the whole of his life in the past, and he feels like a victim or bystander of this inertial force.
So, he begins explaining how he used to be and revels in nostalgia, because in the universe of Sam, the past is gone forever and will never be reciprocated in the future. The greatest moments of his life are gone, but in recounting every aspect of this past in manner of storytelling, he gets a chance to live it again, if only in his memory.
He's beginning to come to the end of his rant, you can tell this when he gets that distant look in his eye like a visionary or an ascetic who has finally mortified his body into a state of wonder and awe, seeing God.
With both knees planted on the steering wheel like fingerless hands, he sparks the bowl and inhales a hellish measure. The sound and force of his air sucking the flame into smoke sounds like when you roll down the windows of a two-door sedan doing 90 mph down a highway in the middle of nowhere, this sound is harmonized with the father of the analogy, but it doesn't retract from the orchestra of sounds he's creating with his mouth.
It's like watching an entire Vaudeville show in a matter of seconds; songs, acts, jokes, and falls, the only thing missing are dancing girls.
He holds in his smoke and his eyes glaze over and the drug freezes the feeling he stirred from his mind while reminiscing in a state of artificial suspension; he's back there again, reliving that splendid feeling that made him feel like he could run through the Great Wall lengthwise and then jump off, into the Pacific, and swim to Antarctica to kill a mammoth beast. He exhales the extracted smoke from his body like he's going to blow his lungs out of his mouth into balloons. Even though the windows are open the spent smoke fills the car with a dense fog that is feverishly trying to be cleared by the breath of God livening our journey with heat and sunlight and the scent of unfamiliar countryside.
He passes me the bowl and I take a hit, feeling the drug sneak up my spine like a playful thief and spread slowly from the corners of my eyes, wrapping around the entirety of my head as Sam takes up the story again as if the moment that passed was but a purposeful or dramatic pause, a cadence between notes or a spot of unadulterated canvas, and it was.
His power and presence erupts with force from his voice, “So I'm at this intersection, a four-way stop sign, and it's my turn to go when this asshole pulls out from the other side to the left of me and nearly fucking hits me, and then the guy starts fucking yelling at me like it's my fucking fault, like this is his world and I'm in his fucking way. I'm not letting this shit go down, this fucking middle-aged prick thinks that just because I'm a kid he has a license to be an unmitigated asshole.” The bowl gets back to me and I hit it again. I don't even realize that Sam has, in mid-sentence, taken a hellish hit with all the theatrical flair, held it, and was still talking at the same time.
I don't realize this because none of this stops him, the energy of his story passes undaunted through his body, and I even begin to notice, as the second hit manifests my awareness of him, that he is actually controlling himself.
I don't mean control as in something that is visible or overtly real like a dam on a river, dam being the control and the water being the energy.
His energy and control is more like an abruptly un-damed river, teeming white and ferocious, running breathlessly and crashing under its own strength towards a basin town to wipe away any trace of man or nature when it's suddenly diverted and redirected with such blinding speed that it almost seems reckless, around houses, trees, buildings, and streets, the river losing none of its furious power or destructive purpose but all the while never harming or disturbing the life or land; and even after the born river has passed through the town, the walls of buildings, the pavement of the streets, even the people themselves are left vibrating from its power.
But even still, the people have no idea what just happened, water etching a Tree of Life around spatial and temporal homes of physical creations which would easily dismantle themselves from their present aggregates under such a ravaging, untamed force as this re-livened water; was it God, was it a miracle; because it obviously wasn't in accord with the natural or popularly observable behaviors and “laws of life”.
Such capacity and artistry leaves me wondering whether or not this is all real; maybe he isn't in control, am I in control? What is control, and what does that mean in a world where, according to someone you happen into, doesn't exist for everyone, just individuals. And when these individuals' worlds intersect in such a way to head the conflicting interests into an arena of manifestation, what then?
“So I get out of my car, and he gets out of his. Now this is a big dude, he's about six foot and has some muscle on him, but I'm a cocky shit-kickin' kid, so that doesn't matter to me. He throws a punch and it hits me good, and I'm tellin' ya if I didn't get lucky the way I did this guy could have kicked my ass.”
This, this is what has always interested me about Sam, and I'm sent tumbling blindly through a drug-induced meditation. In some respects, Sam maintains aspects of himself that are very Hemingway-esque, as if he were some archetypal character in one of his short stories, leading out his own private life under the stoicism of some “Greater” force's hand. At least, that's what a passerby would see. Someone in and out of his life would only be able to see or glance the shallow err of, the machismo? the pride? the blinding hubris of oneself? , but yet Sam was none of these things. He was raised within this framework, this machine that ground his flesh to scars and bones and left a broad sign hanging from his neck and pulling his head to his feet, “how a man should act (and subsequently feel)”. Only within this machine could Sam bleed his way out of it.
He truly felt he was the sum of his past, the grand total of all his mistakes and victories, yet somewhere along the line he began to discover the falsity of this and began to be alienated from himself, but was it really himself? It seemed Sam could never tell because more often than not, he was the perpetual stranger, in this world and his own.
He left his single mother and step-dad and friends in the South to live up north. Go and live with his cousin and his grandparents, “better life up there”, is that what she said? To this day I don't know why he left, I like to think it was because he didn't want that life anymore, but every moment he breaks free of his Southern upbringing, his mind begins dissolving panic in the newness of it. How foreign and “unreal” it was to him, but he yearned for it. So much so that, with the right kinds of ears and eyes, you could witness his spiritual and personal battle unfold its self on his face; a modern and strugglingly static Bhagavad-Gita, fleshed into reality.
“But then we get up close and our front legs, the legs a boxer leads with, get locked up and he loses his balance and starts falling back, so I pull him back in with my leg and throw a fucking right cross and-BEAUOOM- he goes down. All of this, mind you, is happening in the middle of an intersection during business day traffic, so I get back in my car and take off.”
Sam's silent now, pulling hard on a cigarette belted between his lips with the muscles and tendons of his jaw taut smooth like a man clinging to his last ounce of life, ready to go. Where? Where the hell are we?
I look out the window and everything looks comfortably familiar and dangerously strange all at once, the landscape speeding by with the howl of Sam's breath and God's heat.
“Where the hell are we going?” The question reverberates in my head and I suddenly realize that it doesn't matter, it didn't even matter at the beginning of the trip. It was all about getting there, the journey, the steps you make from A to B, and yet Sam is doing 90 … no, 100 miles an hour to that place, and then the question hits me again because it seems more important, “Where are we going?” \
Sam puts on a CD and puts the volume up so it can be heard over the roar, making it damn loud. He looks over at me and starts talking, at least I think he's talking, he's not singing, but his mouth is moving and I can hear a dull thud or low rumble when he's talking, but no discernible words.
He's got to know I can't hear him, or maybe he doesn't care.
I look at his eyes while he's driving and I see something, happiness? No, its not that shallow, it looks like something deeper than that, bliss? No, because he doesn't look satisfied. Joy, that's it, and yet it looks almost like bliss.
Then I realize what he's doing, he's trying to stay there. He's moving as fast and as loud as possible to get away from anything that he thinks will stop him from getting there. Like some sort of dervish spinning, trying to shatter his past and himself from his body, twisting and writhing, scraping and retching. Sweat perpetually beading and streaming down his flesh, smoke hanging thick and inconsistent over his face, all the while his eyes sit in pleasure, but they sit uncomfortably in their pleasure. Around the edges worry lingers waiting for his energy to subside, waiting for him to stop wanting it, waiting for him to rationalize himself back. And it can wait.
I stare back out the window, everything is silent in the face of all of Sam's diversionary tactics and I realize myself in him. He told me more about myself through himself than I could see. We're riding, Sam and I, we can choose what we want from it and what we want to do with it. When Sam starts his stories, he doesn't even realize that he is exceeding any experience of any story he has ever told.
He has become an artist, a creator, a God in his world and mine, but he wants more.
What?
What could be better?
But then I see him and me, in mixed measure, bound. Holding hard and caring less, trying to live but forgetting to rest. It's a second to the end and moment to the start, but we're waiting. Waiting for something that hasn't begun but has been cresting to life so it no longer exists as the Tao of our dreams but as the Bell's Theorem of our awakened life. We are renewed, born alive.