Opium Night Blues

I walk and I crawl and I run through a forbiddingly wet desert of geckos and elephant-sized zebras and yellow tulips, and at a broken pink transmission lying beside a sprinkler spouting green oil I stop to ask a barefoot man in dirty jeans: Are you my father?

Who are you?

A traveler with a purpose such as purposes go that changes by the moment; and for fun I find moments like these to look for those who brought me into this world of wonderment and chance, chicanery and foolishness, and to repeatedly discover mistaken notions about everything that comes to mind.

And…?

I look for all those people like you that I know only in stirring dreams and midnight strolls among Old World gremlins with prehensile tails. Now is this what you want to know about who I am?

Change the tires on your five-wheel car and add oil and black kerosene to the sprinklers that surround the house in which I fed and clothed you. Do that for me, because I am your father! And fathers know what only fathers know and all sons must learn at their peril, or perish.

Change the tires and add oil for you! What real right brings this on? Mere DNA like mine, but so the same can be said for bonobos whose elusive habits beneath lianas and Italian café umbrellas you cannot possibly imagine. You, a stranger at this moment, a mere man now sitting on my much coveted beer cans and telling all your friends I am told of my quest for three-legged parrots in the amazons of unknown places—which is a truth better than the other truths you hold about me.

Yes, do it for me, your father. Because I so command it!

I will not have time for you, father or no father, until I have finished and written a discourse on the epistles of St. Paul and his disquieting disquisition on the unlikelihood of anyone’s resurrection, because even St. Paul knew that Jesus was a horny trinket peddler with fungus-infested toenails.

You are by all your own accounts a son without a father, and your latest girlfriend, the toothy tall one you call Sharina from the shores of the Caspian Sea, stole my corncob pipe and sold it to a Scottish mercenary on his way to fight in El Salvador. And for a mere fifteen cents! Why do you not find yourself a good Irish Catholic girl with a fertile belly and fat legs who has a burning desire to serve you like she would serve me my dinners, as I have always by right been accustomed to being served by all women who can be called women?

The sun burns away the oil and the multiplying cyanobacteria on his parched hands, and his silver cowboy buckle melts to a mess, a meaningless mass of metal. A basketball the size of a ping pong ball bounces in front of him and circles around his cloven feet, and then he follows the bouncing ball to the horizon where sand turns to flaky snow, and a wife will be found and he will feel the need to say of his son: You were the first accident after the one that died and so it is not surprising that you wander with nine passports and Mumbai nail clippers and find pleasure in writing stories about the meaning of plastic glasses sitting on orange crates in Fortaleza.

It is good to know you have learned how to take the measure of a son who would have nothing to do with second-hand wrenches and romance novels written in nunneries on parchment paper. We are in my mind no more related than the most confused puddles of three billion year-old bacteria that inhabited the beds of syphilitic kings and queens in the Age of Charlemagne. Can’t you see this most obvious of obvious truths?

When I was a boy I did the noble thing of supporting my mother on cans of Polish spaghetti and North Carolina green beans, and because of my daily goodness she encouraged me to fly across the ice of Lake Superior in search of a woman worthy of my devotion to abstinence and frugality and the collection of quarters that I would use to buy and smoke Cuban cigars when your mother was playing bridge with effete men who had never married and women who had no chance of getting married because of their wrinkled necks.

All that ice-flying on your boats has found me now distinguished only to others solely because of my unwavering passion for the distant twin sisters of Sicilian street beggars. They are my favorite bedmates when I am not drinking and penning words that are as useless as nearly all words are useless, save those that are parsing the maimed anthropologies of the mind that turn good men with strong and resolute hearts into servile workers at a termite nest.

Midnight has turned to morning light in the time it takes to light up and tie shoe laces before pushing on toward random possibilities discovered on torn maps, places where one-night love resides and once-proud fathers scrape bubble gum off the undersides of Victorian chairs to support wives they cannot bear to bed, or smell. In the distance, beyond the street lined with lemon ice teas and peppermint ice creams in crumbling cones I will meet a wall through which I will walk, and there I will see at the base of a pristine mountain my mother in her pure white wedding dress and red gym shoes waiting for the man who will hand her a tablet of home-rule commandments. And a spoon for stirring chili. And an unknowable promise baked in Atlantic cod sauce about the fertility of his seed.

She is pretty and thin and these are words that become mantras to all men without firm morals. Men who never imagine bathing their minds amid golden church spires and who frolic with frivolous fork-tongued maidens who will spend their short lives making salt and pepper shakers and cleaning hotel toilets.

We will talk, and we will talk often, and I will rarely understand what she says, and I will conclude that my lack of understanding her meanings has something to do with the many times I read Grimm’s Fairy Tales as an adult, a book I know her never to have read and to have once confused with a massive tome on trench warfare on the eastern front.

It is from those Tales that I learned the meaning of unrequited love and how to make sense of a pain in my bowels and a hunger in my groin, and when to eat mussels and drink champagne on a tropical afternoon. And it from these Tales that I came to understand what my mother and father have done to make me who I am, and that in sane moments I need to walk backward and blindfolded into the unknown alleyways of lands far from home if I am to have the slightest chance of understanding who I think I am.

© Korski. All rights reserved by the author.