CHAPTER THREE - VINCENT

excerpt:

That was the night I took everything I could carry and slept on the hide-a-bed in my drummer’s mom’s basement.

Carl was at the kitchen table filling out forms for hospice care when I came knocking.

After a radical double-mastectomy and two years in remission his mom’s cancer was back but she was done with doctors. Said fuck it to further chemotherapy and had Carl move her bed to a first-floor room with a view of the birds in the backyard. Bought a ridiculously large TV that made all four of “The Golden Girls” look big as Mount Rushmore when we crept past her open door on the way to the basement.

The bed looked unmade and empty but she was there, sleeping while a studio audience roared and a cellular mutiny of rot multiplied unopposed inside her body.

Carl went through this with his dad around the time I moved to Seattle.

He opened a door at the end of the hall and led me downstairs. Asked:

"How’d you fuck this one up?"

"I said I wouldn’t drink. And I did."

I dropped my backpack and stood my guitar upright in the corner under slanted bands of streetlight.

Carl flicked a switch, powering fluorescent tubes that popped softly, snapped and clacked overhead.

"That’s what you do. Dogs roll in dead shit and you drink."

My movements felt remotely controlled, vision detached and delayed. Eyes red and raw from processing grainy video feed from an undersea probe.

I submerged further into shock. Looked at my hands, saw my legs below me and my feet beneath them, attached but somehow separate and uncomfortably abstract. A photo of a drawing of an image of me, standing in shoes my fingers laced up that morning in a thoughtless moment of automatic action. I considered how my fortunes had changed since I left Margaret asleep in our bed, tied those knots on my feet and walked downtown to open PapaTaco.

I turned my hands over and studied parts of a puppet impostor incapable of doing all the things I’d watched them do that day. I couldn’t understand or accept the fact that I was here now, shot down behind enemy lines, seeking shelter from a sympathetic partisan ex-bandmate.