Through The Drywall

Father’s mustache always came down to his chin.  It was waterlogged when he dragged me from the pool.  I jumped in and missed the inner tube.  My face filled with water.  I never learned to swim.  There was a Slip n Slide in the yard, water grenades, green plastic squirt guns.  Touch football in the street, kicking soccer balls into puddles so the spray blinds the defender.  Wet snowmen with icy scarves, one day a year to sled down the hill to Safeway.  Straight down to Yellowstone, where the road was blocked by a crossing bison herd.  We stopped and a squirrel climbed up my chest to eat a Fruit Roll-Up.  I fell off my bike in the gravel and a rock split my lip open.  My brother was thrown right through the drywall.

I didn’t know grandma gambled.  I didn’t know grandpa prescribed her morphine.  I only know a ghost floated into the room and out again.  I was in the top bunk.  Translucent.  Filled with water.  There was a blanket, a kiss.  The birthday cake was ruined.  Butterscotch pudding instead.  Garter snakes, a rock thrown into a hornet’s nest, a stinger in my throat.  A 40th Anniversary gold-plated Les Paul guitar, sold to seek Pennsylvania.  Amish on the bus.  Fireworks over the river.  I snuck in the window, hid in the closet, could hear her parents suspecting.  In the darkness I saw a pyramid.  It lit up the midnight.  The man caught fire and toppled.  I got back on the bike.

We snuck wine from his parents’ stash.  Strategy board games, poetry at the Globe Cafe.  Coffee and coffee at an all-night diner.  I walked up the hill, past the S&M shop, down neon Broadway, and into the policeman’s floodlight.  I wore a brown UPS uniform.  I climbed out of the truck, rung by rung down from the uterus.  Through the drywall and into a hallway covered in black-and-white pictures and a metal casting of the Last Supper.  I cursed my knees, was kicked in the shin, broke my right tibia and fibula.  The cast was yellow.  The tapestry was also yellow.  The sunset was purple.  My right leg was half an inch shorter than my left.  An ulcer formed.

It began with Christmas and a kitten foaming at the mouth.  My stocking was green and red.  Pet rats climbed inside my shirt.  They licked my teeth clean.  I made them run mazes and lost my love inside.  I was looking on the wrong continent.  I waved goodbye as the train pulled away.  A Frenchman cornered me in a sleeper car.  A passport, a drunken pornographer, a see-through sea.  I escaped to Santorini and saw the sun set on Atlantis.  Minoan ruins, Theater of Dionysus.  I escaped across the ocean.  I overshot my home and landed in Indonesia.  Malaria swarmed.  Tsunami refugees and dengue fever.  I escaped by ingesting a small white pill and reappeared deep in the heart of the redwoods.  A tree grew on the stump of another tree.  Its roots were taller than a man.  It drank from the river and I drowned again.  When I woke, the ocean had grown.  I slipped in the red dirt and almost fell from the cliff.  But I stayed on the trail and put one foot in front of the other while the policeman watched.  Sirens in the dark.  Helicopters overhead.  Drums of absurd volume.  My head couldn’t hold the sun, so I etched it on my back.  Red skin peeled from overexposure.  I couldn’t think and waited for the synapses to fire.  The road was washed away by a sudden flood.  Bridges burning.  Bridges drowning.  I had to leave it all behind.  I had to leave it on the other side of the drywall, where the gun was hidden.