Penance by Sea - The Freighter

I’m on this tanker out in the middle of the ocean.  I’ve gone from living in a Midwestern rambler to this iron maiden floating on the sea.  The ocean tries to drown us every day.  We slice through swells forty to fifty feet high, and when the calm comes, it feels like a momentary reprieve from the wrath of an angry mother.

I know nothing that is required of a ship mate.  I got this gig from the captain, who I went to school with a hundred years ago.  We fought on the playground, we played tricks on each other, I egged his house, and then we became best friends.  We would ride our bikes to the edge of town and hunt for a giant snake rumored to be living in the gulch.  We traumatized a possum we found living in an oak tree.  We built tree houses, started fires in fields of dried grass, and then his sister died and his parents moved them out to the West Coast to forget.

Twenty years can change a guy.  Harris is thick and hairy; best way I have to describe him.  His arms are like stumps, his neck sunburned and gnarled like an old log.  Beneath his cap he is bald as a cannon ball, but  he is almost never without his cap.  Teeth aren’t so great, and he squints because he doesn’t want to buy glasses or wear contacts.

I am his polar opposite.  I wear reading glasses.  My arms are skinny and my skin sallow for lack of hard work and sun, but I’m hoping all of that changes after three months out at sea.  So far I’m spared much of the heavy lifting because the first week I broke my arm and spent days laid up in the infirmary.  Then as the sea swelled my stomach turned inside out.  Yes, I am infirm.  I brought along several novels and have started a ship library for the rest of the crew, though I think they would prefer I replace Joseph Conrad and John Steinbeck with Playboy and Penthouse.  Little do they know the joys of Lawrence and Nin.    

Why am I out here?  Unlike Harris’s parents, who ran away to forget, I have followed to remember.  You see, I killed Harris’s sister.  It was an accident, but something for which I never took responsibility.  But the mind does not absolve one who knows the truth.  The soul grows sick from a wrong never made right.

The Meaning of IV

No, IV does not represent the 4^th cantos of my poem, nor the 4^th chapter of my manifesto.  Neither does IV represent the century of Constantine.  It is why I am home today from work, why I sit around uselessly in this quiet, empty house.  Intestinal Virus.  My stomach rumbles and gurgles like the errant plumbing of section IV housing.  I am an upended decanter of ditch water.  Fever and dehydration created the perfect conditions, a lapse of mental discipline, a crack in a years-forged wall of self deception, so I remembered.

I left by way of the back door.  I couldn’t bear the thought of staying in that house a moment longer.  It harbored all the years of my confinement, all of my fears and hate in the shadow of a cruel father and wraith mother.  Why must I become them?  Why shrink in cold, airless rooms?  Maybe I couldn’t believe in myself, couldn’t trust that I could make it on my own, but there wasn’t much else to choose from.  “What the hell, why not?” A rally cry for freedom as good as any other.

I drifted down The Great River road to Beale Street and Bourbon.  I slept in unlocked cars, ate what food was left unguarded, wrote in a notepad while I smoked along the levee.  I drew out a picture of my father, crinkled Kodak paper with spores of mold, but there it was again; his flashing smile coming out of the dark, his white teeth approaching like a line of ghosts.  It made me warm, happy, proud, protected.  What of this father in the picture, who was not my father in the confines of the house, who was not the man he projected for the lens, but who ran deeper than the polluted waters held back by this levee?  Perhaps Bukowski could help reconcile me with my forebear, my template, my mould, the piss pot emptied and waiting to be filled.

Were they really that bad?  They left me with board games but nobody to play with; Sorry and Life and Surgery.  I dressed in costumes of their old 70’s clothes, wide ties and polyester purple trousers and wigs and white boat shoes. 

I had left with a regrettable lack of drama.  No fury towards dad, no accusations or commiseration for Mom.  I patted the dog on the head and began walking.  As I accumulated miles at my back, I began to believe in myself, in an utter lack of infirmity, an immunity to cold and virus, flu and bugs that get lodged beneath the finger nails.  Antibodies.  Parasites.  Latent.  Blooming.

IV represents my fallibility.  IV represents the number of years I’ve been gone.  IV is the number of miles left in a nearly complete circuitous route back home.