Associative memories

A few weeks ago, I started a semi-biographical account of associative memories (basically, trying to create a "chain" with one memory linking and hopping to another), When Jack Woke Up. Not sure how much this succeeds yet, but it was a fun exercise.

When Jack woke up, he felt half dead.

His neck creaked, his bones snapped, and his head throbbed.

And it kept with him…through the shower dripping sparingly out of an old metal showerhead, or the smell of morning eggs.

By the time he dropped his bleary carcass in his old desk chair with a squeaky leg, he slowly started to feel only a quarter dead.

The computer sluggishly lit up with a shake of the mouse: no e-mails, save for a comic strip about a dog and cat (the eternal struggle), an invitation to watch a woman disrobe on camera, and a credit card bill.

Jack looked up at the calendar, squinting through the steam of his bland to fair cup of morning coffee. Today was the 15^th of June, the day to pack it up and hit the road for home.

Boy, how he dreaded going.

Home was an hour and a half drive through Virginia’s favorite oppressive summer flavor. The sun blared through the windshield, turning his car into a four-wheeled baked potato that not even air conditioning could fix.

In spite of this, Jack continued to take sips from a scalding cup of over-caffeinated corporate coffee with a mermaid on the cup, in between trying to sing along with an album he’d listened to hundreds of times, but could still never get the lyrics to. Except for the really sad ones, he somehow nailed those every time.

Rickety fences surrounded farmland outside his rushing windows, cows grazed in the balmy sun, and the road curved around Jack’s car, a generic four-door fuel efficient car.

The song about a girl who left the lead singer standing alone at night came on, and Jack remembered that sticky July night when she left him…

The humidity stuck to his skin like a bad suit, and the moths circled around the lone light bulb that hung from his front porch…all as he stood there with his mouth agape as she pulled out of his old gravelly driveway and life at the same time.

Late that night, Jack laid in the grass, despite the ticks and bugs that crawled over him, or the bead of sweat on his forehead…or the tears that collected around his eyes, slowly as he defied their coming. And he looked up at the stars, like he did when he was a kid…

Jack and his brother, Dean, stood out on their front yard, and talked about girls and school, and the new Pixies album. Jack was gangly, goofy, unliked, and awkward, while Dean was cocky and popular. Jack’s oversized nose would be buried in a book, while Dean’s salesman-like grin would be yucking it up with girls in a corner of the same classroom.

When they were at school, they were strangers overly critical of one another.

Dad was inside vegging in front of the television in his underwear, Mom was working at the hospital, and Mary was buried in her doll babies in a messy bedroom. Ed was away at college, probably moping in his air-conditioned dorm room, or lugging an enormous bag of dirty clothes to the laundry room.

Jack didn’t fit in with his own family, especially his brother. But, when they were outside, it felt like they were equals. They liked the same music, and some of the same movies and, okay, while Dean wasn’t a reader like Jack was (“I just don’t have time,” Dean would ruminate as he got ready to go out and hang with the cool kids.), it felt like they suddenly had more in common.

But the next morning, back at school…

Jack cut the wheel hard, easing down on the brakes as he pulled into the gravel parking lot at the abandoned elementary school. C_berland Elementary sat in said, derelict letters on the top of the old brick building’s façade. Jack eased out of the car, grimacing at the greeting blast of hot air, and squinted through dark glasses as the old main building’s porch, that cement porch with an elevated planter area running along the sidewalk.

Jack sidled up and ran his hand across the granite before hoisting himself up. When he was seven, he was waiting for his ride to arrive, and a teacher told a bad knock knock joke to someone down the sidewalk.

“Who’s there?”

“Missile.”

“Missile who?”

“Missile kill you!”

Jack hopped down, the shock of landing telegraphing up his heels and to his neck. He wasn’t seven anymore.

But when he was six, he walked the same sidewalk with the girl neighbor. He carried her books in the morning, just as far as the main brick building, and she went off to Kindergarten in the other brick building (the one with the smaller, more run-down playground), and he was off to the hot, stuffy campus-style classroom without any air conditioning.

Or to the art room, with the old hippy teacher, Mrs. Jones, big glasses propped up on her forehead, amidst strands of crazy feathery hair, her long flowery dresses always covered in bits of pastel and paint.

She once passed an art book around, and Jack found the nude paintings, paper clipped together in the back, finding them very, very funny. He was seven. She pointed out casually, in a raspy voice caused by too many cigarettes: “The human body’s a beautiful thing! It’s not really that funny, you know.”

The last time Jack saw her, as herself, he was seventeen and she was standing amidst gravel; smokers had been “banished” to smoking in the side parking lot, like the tough kids in high school in the back of the building. An army of cigarette butts circled her flip-flopped feet, and she squatted down and grabbed a handful after giving him a hug.

“I figure if I get a bit at a time,” she smiled. “I’ll have it all clean by the end of the year.”

The last time he ever saw her, she was hooked up to cords and tubes, machines that went ping and buzz. He read her Horton Hears a Who, and a jaundiced tear, yellowed from liver failure, dribbled out of the corner of her eye.

He was nineteen and, even more than ever before, he realized he was truly alone.

And that’s how Jack still felt, standing amidst the overgrown horror movie wreckage of his childhood playground, weeds jutting out of sand, and once-gargantuan monkey bars sets jutting out of the ground at awkward angles like escaping corpses in a graveyard.

It’s a feeling that always permeated his self, even when he was married, even when he was with family and friends. But, he thought as he looked back at the husk of memories the school embodied, it wasn’t always that way.

Not that once…

The first thought he had of her, outside that coffee shop window, looking in, was how beautiful she was. The type of beauty that turns heads yet still, somehow, doesn’t intimidate but disarms you with this odd sense of comfort.

With her, he never felt alone; not in the mornings they woke up and took walks together; not at family get-togethers; not by his sick grandmother’s bedside; not when he was away from her.

At least, not until she left him for good.

Jack usually loved the open road, the thrill of going out of your own personal world and into another one, waiting for you at the end of the highway. But, when the roads are painfully familiar from the course of a lifetime, they lose the romantic feel of running away and feel more like conveyor belts pulling you back to where you started. It’s not that he hated going home…he just didn’t like it much; every time he did, he found himself facing both the ghosts of past failures and the looming specter of everyone’s emerging old age.