PART ONE
HIPS FOR ERECT WALKING
(and other stories of love)

We were becoming all of us less ourselves. I had succeeded in throwing the spindle of fishing line over the house. Walked it across the street and threw it up and over the power lines. Around that time someone found a stamp printed backwards or upside down. It made the news. The covers of magazines. A success of what I couldn't imagine. My father explained it and explained it to me. We were becoming more machinelike. Or machines were becoming less machine and more like Ron from across the street. Ron's garage was filled with mechanical parts smelling of plastic and Ripples' fur. Ripples was the hairy half-man half-dog beast I believed had emerged from a hole in their fleshy lawn. Forever wet with drool. Ripples and my father, two non-machines. Coiled migratory beings with a specific range. Molten gurgled language, both of them. Ron didn't notice me shuffling across his roof, driving wooden telecommunication conductors into the lumps in his yard. He was endlessly in that garage, soldering together the circuits of an early divorce. Conduction, he explained, and sparked two wires together. Wood was invisible to him. I refused to play in my tiki shack playhouse. Instead, I dug a hole in the backyard, filled it with water, climbed into it shirtless and in jeans, and slid the top over. A board covered in stapled clumps of dead grass. The sides collapsed just as fast as I could dig them out. Total invisibility was my project. I spoke with Ripples through the Dixy cup telephone strung between us. Shared with him/her all of my beliefs. The shadowy echo of my secret heartbeat. My father steamed out the door. Drove his mini van around the plastic world radiating signals of distress. I brought the cup to my ear under water, my conduction. Waited for an answer.  

MOPAR DETECTION AGENCY

My father asks if we can go to the Jack-N-the-Box drive-through and sit in the parking lot to check out weirdos. Watching weirdos had been the title of my teenage journal about his and my mother’s favorite pastime. They found weirdos everywhere: on the beach, on television, downtown, at restaurants. They ‘loved’ the way people ate, the way they walked, and they especially loved those who were extremely desperate or sad.

Frank was extremely desperate and sad, and my father was drawn to him. He sat in his truck watching Frank for long periods and then gave us full reports when we returned from work. So the fucking weirdo shows up today with a new helmet, he announces as I walk through the door. He’s so fucking weird. I don’t understand what in the hell he’s thinking. I must have watched him for hours and hours and he just sat there drinking coffee. Approaching the situation cautiously I asked, Do you think it is at all just as strange that you stake out homeless people everyday and report on their behavior? Fine, he said in a clipped tone, then I won’t tell you dick.

We pull into a Jack-N-the-Box parking stall with our food and my father immediately begins unpacking his meal by tossing the unwanted wrappers and utensils out the window. As I watch the trash blowing around the parking lot he spots Frank riding up on an ancient bicycle. There he is.

Frank wears a black leotard that from a distance made him look ten years old. Up close his skin is old and sagging, his face a brittle fist taking refuge beneath the oversized helmet. He is a spectacle out for a Sunday morning ride. My father leans far out his window and yells:

What ‘n the hell are you supposed to be?
Frank is ready with a quick, firm answer, I am a California ranger.
Ranger my ass, my father yells back. A California ranger, he tells me. Christ!
What’s a California Ranger?
How the shit should I know, he says, but I sure as hell know he’s not one.

After running errands we sit down at an Italian restaurant in San Francisco. I have to read him the entire menu because he has forgotten his glasses and I am surprised to learn that aside from the word spaghetti he doesn’t recognize anything on the list. Welcome to your new life, I say, cheering his coke with my wine. Whatever, he says with a smirk, trying hard to hide his satisfaction.

(This story has been shortened for this entry)

DREAM

I dream he is lying on the floor in his white briefs. Searching frantically through the Yellow Pages for an ambulance, I discover that none of them will come out to Marin County, where we are living in the dream. I feel his heart and to my surprise, it’s faintly beating. He’s lying dead with his heart still beating. Cut. Now my sister and I are trying to find a place to sleep on the moon. So many little rocks, you’d never suspect. They’re covered in the same creamy dust that blankets everything. We lie down and watch as the landscape drifts into darkness.

I awaken startled and walk down the hallway to find him at his usual station five feet from the television talking back to the screen. Standing in the doorway to his room, I watch as he shakes the last white cigarette from its carton, balls up the pack, and with a hasty glance over his shoulder grinds it deep and invisible into the soil of the nearest potted plant. Beside him is a remnant of pumpkin pie from Thanksgiving. He pulls off large chunks with his hand, and feeds himself between drags. My entrance startles him. Dad, I say gently, you’re diabetic. There’s no sugar in here, he says, taking one final bite. I helped to make the pies, I say, so I know there is sugar in there. Lots of sugar. He belches. The fuck does it matter anyway, he says.

Meanwhile outside I notice the rains have stopped.

REMOTE CONTROL

In the prehistory of my childhood when someone wanted to change the channel or the volume on their television, they had to stand up and walk across the room to the television itself and twist the dial. Somewhere between building a cabin in our backyard, where he could house his yard tools, and rebuilding the rafters so that, if needed, someone might be able to sleep up there, my father, pioneer that he was, decided that standing up in order to change the channel was asking way too much of him. He wanted to sit down at the end of the day with a tall glass of milk and a pack of cigarettes and not stand up again until the monochrome Indian test pattern signaling the end of television for the day, drove him out of his chair with its monotonous drone. So, armed with an ancient and cursory knowledge of electronics and a driving urge for catatonic relaxation, he set to work on developing the world s first ever remote control unit.

When he wanted something done, my father s motto was truck it or fuck it, which he sometimes translated into words don t mean dick, Jack. He was a man of the hand, a mule who hitched up to an idea and trudged off in a direction, plowing right out of the field of intention and out over the hillsides towards entirely new objectives. He was long sighted where he should have been near sighted and near sighted where he should have been thinking long. Once, while tasked with making a small hole in the wall so that the phone cord could pass from one room to the next, he slipped and ended up removing the entire wall saying simply, now we don t need two phones. When he decided that an outside barbeque would be nice, he spent several months cementing over the entire back yard and erecting a multi-burner barbeque storage unit of such enormity that we came to refer to it simply as the dining complex. In this way, cleaning projects turned into retileing projects, repairs turned into remodels, and remodels turned into rebuilding. When he found time inside this hectic schedule, he would expend energy trying devising new ways to enable himself to relax.

For an entire week he labored in the garage, periodically screaming after mysterious crashing noises that would scare our parakeet, Green Green, to the point of plucking out her feathers. Occasionally he burst into the kitchen for more coffee or to fetch electronic devices to use as reference points. When the mental challenge ended, the physical challenge the tedium, the physical fatigue, the incessant need to perform beyond his abilities kicked in. Somewhere in the middle of the week he came into the kitchen and leaned against the counter rubbing his forehead with a look of defeat when I asked him how it was going he said, how does it look like it s going, Jack. Understanding that this meant not well, I asked him if there was anything I could do to help and after thinking about it he said, yeah, go tell your mother she wants you, and returned to work.

Several mornings later we awoke to find our living room had been transformed into the first ever analog television remote control system. Strings were attached to the volume control knob on the television, threaded up through small pulleys mounted to the ceiling by means of eyehooks, crossed the room in one long droop and passed through a second set of pulleys on the other side and then descended to meet his armchair where they were individually tied off around an old anchor that used to hang in the garage. Around the channel changer there was a similar system that used a heavier twine passed through individual eyelets and tied off to two door knockers mounted to the armrest, which he could control by simply pushing down on them.

All of the energy put into building the first electronic remote control system had failed, but he had trudged forward, determined not to stand up from that chair again even if it meant turning our living room into a circus installation. It didn t take long for me to reach the same conclusion I could see on my mother s face: he was now in control of everything. All their fighting for control of the television all of the nasty bickering that would come to define them after the creation of portable remote control units they could point at each other in anger it was born on that day. Remote control meant there would be other televisions, retreat units in the den and the garage, places he could go to escape. Remote control meant that for years to come, the silence in our home would be punctuated by her shouting, turn to nine& oh, wait...twenty seven, you won t believe it. I saw the future in her blinking eyes and vacant expression: He was out of control and had to be stopped.

That evening as we sat down to watch television we were entertained by five minute segments of everything in general and nothing in particular a mode that would later come to define their viewing habits. Armed with an outdated TV Guide my mother never stopped directing him or shouting whenever he missed a channel or turned the volume up too high or down too low. And somewhere between commercials, while he struggled to keep the system from flipping past five or more channels at a time, a string broke. You see, she shouted, you fucking see what an idiot you are.

He leapt out of his chair and launched into an immediate investigation of the twine, after which he concluded she had cut the string in order to fuck him over. They argued like this for some time until his anger reached a point that he swung his arms furiously, breaking the strings and showering the living room in acoustic ceiling and drywall. My mother ran off into her room, slamming the door behind her. He bolted out the front door, followed shortly after by the sound of screeching tires.

All the slamming and crashing awoke Green Green, and I watched her glide across the room and land on one of the dangling bits of twine. As she flapped her wings and regained balance by grinding her beak in-between the frayed fibers I realized she had done this before.