haint nothin’ but a boo thang

I am not a believer in ghosts. Not. Just not. And this has created some unexpected problems for me, since my life is haunted pretty much up one side and right down the other.

I should explain that the phantoms that plague me are most often entirely my own, holdovers of myself from different flashpoints, too often low points, sometimes even no points at all. These nagging afterburns, however fleetingly encountered, are so vivid when re-met as to seem, in that instant, overwhelmingly real.

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Boo, I say. Boo.

Consider this a cautionary tale, pilgrim. Of among those things that can befall you, should you perhaps never leave the place from whence you hail. Or, in my own case, should you be sucked back into the thick of it after thinking you had, on several separate occasions, successfully mustered the necessary escape velocity to overcome your hometown’s unexpectedly wide orbit. And, let’s face it: you, as in me, are pretty clearly gravity’s bitch for good this time.

So now, in front of any given suburban yard first encountered years back as untouched woods flanked by blackberry brambles with astonishingly sweet fruit; around whatever next bend in roads I’ve driven so many times they might as well be renamed for me; down any half-familiar Tar River-area side street where I got lost a time or two in trying so desperately to get lost; alongside the odd former farm field that more formerly still was native forest, but forthwith grows rank with lifeless vinyl-covered cookie-cuttings in half-filled subdivisions with ponderous stone signs proclaiming Non-Native Tree Species Paired With Fancy Scotch-Irish Word for Clearing, there is the real possibility of encountering myself again as I once was. Skinnier. More and less naïve. Kinder. Angrier, always angry as all hell. And marching in the same literal and figurative circles, having set out from wherever with the intent of ending up somewhere else, anywhere besides where I was right then. Where I am right now.

Which is to say: Hello, again. Hello. And boo.

Still, no do-overs, please. There are so few things I would choose to have had go a different way, if given the chance; I am who I am as a result of all I’ve blundered into, and through, and it’s been hard enough coming to terms with that without the possibility of rolling the dice on the past, to see if things might have been somehow better, or worse. Nonetheless, there are any number of those same things I’d just as soon not be reminded of, at any given time, all the time.

And yet. And yes: boo.

Crossing the Greene Street Bridge nearly every weekday, on the way home from work, I glance off to my right, almost reflexively at this point, at the Third Street train trestle. It used to have a ladder down to one of its mid-river concrete pilings, before the rebuild brought on by Hurricane Floyd, which sunk this entire end of town back in 1999. And most days, especially if I’m traveling Greene Street around dusk, I see him there, slumped cross-legged on the piling ledge, open wine bottle at his feet, shadows of a few friends flecking this emphatic memory around him. He’s broken into a million pieces held together poorly by meat and gristle and bone, and the flimsy glue of self-righteous stupidity; sometimes, I imagine a soft light bleeding through the cracks in him I know all too well are there. And sometimes, I actually wave at him, very literally wave, deluding myself in the perpetual hope he’ll wave back, an act that might finally break this hainting, and whisk him out of the howling attic of my head, for good, for always, for goddamn. He never waves back.

On Maple Street, walking near the university, as I’ve taken to doing on occasion lately, I sometimes think I hear the faint echoes of a song my dear old buddy Scott was briefly enamored of for its reverb-bombast drum solo, back when he lived, also briefly, in a house there, in the early 1980s, I think. Back, anyway, when the whole lot of us were just puppies yet.

Invariably, I catch sight of myself on Scott’s former front porch, full of a fierce energy that may or may not have been joy, but that carried me like a rocket through my own internal world in those days. Right up until the fuel ran out, and the engine stalled, and the outside world seeped in to badly backfill the absence.

I can never bring myself to stand in front of Scott’s old house but for so long, though; I’m not the only troubling ghost I find there, you see. There were more of us alive back then. And some ghosts, especially for an unbeliever like myself, are even harder to look at than are my own.

When I go walking beside the river along the city’s greenway, as I do a lot of late, it’s almost always there, that flicker out of the corner of the eye, unavoidable, endearing and intolerable. Because understand: There are already fewer in our number by then, we the world-weary-wise and wine-emboldened, riding that dislodged log in the muddy summer moonlit water, whooping it up like the wonderful fools we were, out from the Third Street trestle, attempting to kill our own pain through simple acts of outrageousness. But those of us adrift in this particular haunted picture were all still friends then, no one yet fully lost, no one disappeared. So I blink hard, and walk on, fast.

I do not mean this to seem but so maudlin, really. I’m a happy sort of malcontent, with a family that I love profoundly, in my fits-and-starts kind of way, and that loves me right back with a consistency I cherish. A gaggle of pets that act like the sun has just risen when I walk into the room, a woof-and-purr assembly of gloriously crowding devotion. Coveted friends of an uncommon caliber, present on my horizon even if not in my daily life, inspirational geniuses and cranks and fabulous buffoons, if all a little worse for wear this many bumps and bumbles and outright stumbles down the road. This long, long screw-you-Don-Henley of a road. We can go the distance. Sure we can.

But sometimes, the lack of personal movement, literal movement, from this place, this fretful tobacco-stained map-blot of remnants and remains, of ghosts, and ghosts, and boo, you bastards, boo, is plenty tough to handle for such a wind-up wanderlust heart. So I find myself mouthing, often, that infuriating mantra, over and over, in my head. You know: “Bloom where you’re planted.”

Bloom where you’re planted, bloom where you’re planted, bloom where you’re … bloom, badda-bloom, bloom, bloom, Lord, have mercy, bloom, hallelujah, bloom, hallelujah, amen. Bloom, you fucker, bloom.

Solid advice for any of us, I suppose. Right up until that point it dawns on us that our roots are no longer pushing us up into that sweetly warming sun, but are holding us back instead from finding a way to finally get airborne, to fly, high, higher, ever higher, beyond candy-floss clouds and passing storms, into the upper atmosphere, where heaven, some say, awaits. To see if we’re ultimately just the sum of overheating wax on feather-shedding wings, or if maybe, just maybe, we were truly made to soar. We hawks, we mighty eagles. We engines of glory. Boo, goddammit, boo.

Years ago, on days off from work or school or whatever, I’d put on my ratty running shoes at the first hint of a storm, one of those glorious coastal Carolinas blow-the-lid-off-the-friggin’-sky kind of storms. And awhee, awhee I’d go, into the rain and thunder, into the lightning. I always understood, on some fundamental level, the profound risks in this. But that didn’t matter to me, at all; I was innately confident I would always come through it, the storm, the literal one. The lightning would never say boo.

And I loved this. Oh, how I loved it.

Then, one torrential black-sky booming thunderclap of a day in my mid-20s, something sudden, and new, and unwanted. I was once again slapping soaked shoes up crape myrtled Elm Street, to the intersection with 14th, where I knew each dip in the sidewalk, and where best to step to get over wet train tracks to avoid slick-shoeing into rocks and creosote wood and steel, having run this same route so often, for so long. The old Rose High School, by then no longer a high school, was in clear sight just ahead on the left. And right then, and right there, for no reason I can figure, something within me broke. I didn’t realize for a long time just how big a something it was.

Because I noticed, on that rumbling dark day, all at once, the jagged barbs of lightning eating down the sky, everywhere around me, and I thought: Y’know, you could die here, bub. Right here, in the pouring-down rain. In the roar and the light. In the middle of freaking everything.

And for the first time, I asked myself a pretty basic question, given the circumstances: What the hell are you doing out here, running in a raging electrical storm? And a voice in my head rejoined: you fool. You fool, you unbelievable fool.

Mortality is a helluva thing to have wallop you upside the head, seemingly out of nowhere, with all the light the sky can conure illuminating your young life as it clings to you, right then and there, within sight of your old high school.

At first, I doubled down; I kept running along the same set path I always followed. But I was ultimately just too shaken, fundamentally shaken; I turned tail abruptly as I came up alongside the school, heading as quickly as my plodding feet could carry me those couple of miles back home. And with every fresh light flash and boom of acknowledgment along the way, I felt I might explode out of my skin, my suddenly very mortal skin. You fool. You fool, you unbelievable fool.

It could be argued that some piece of adulthood, responsibility, good judgment, whatever you choose to call reasoned fear, found me right then, at long last. That’s certainly one way to look at it. But there are other ways to look at it. I’ve read Equus, and Catcher in the Rye makes me cry, every time, at that point when Holden confronts his own metaphorical end of lightning, out there in the imaginary rye. I suck on loss like hard candy. There are other ways to look at it.

Now, I have always had an overactive sense of mortality, in the broader sense. Yet up until that fatal puncture in my personal paradigm, the sense of finality was purely academic, entirely removed from me. Death happened to you, and you, and maybe even you, sadly. And the God I never quite believed in loved me, surely.

I was in a car accident when I was 19 that damn sure should have killed me. But it never occurred to me, even right in the middle of it – with my ’67 Beetle tumbling side over side, all the way across the grassy median of I-40 outside of Greensboro, leaving me dangling from the floorboards by only that Volkswagen’s old tough-ass seatbelt material in the middle of oncoming holiday traffic, and Ian Anderson bleating “Nothing Is Easy” out of my somehow-still-functioning cassette player as loosed battery acid dripped all over my jeans – that I might be about to beat a hasty retreat out of life.

Now, suddenly, in that literal lightning flash of a moment on a rain-soaked hometown street, I had a target pinned to my retreating back, like everybody else. Just like everybody else.

My snap-and-crackle neck and I have finally reached an uneasy peace on my running days likely being over now for good, for realsies, for goddamn, but I still walk past that Elm/14th intersection on regular occasion. And every time I reach that corner, every single blessed time, I feel the ghost of my own blind fearlessness retreating from me, yet again.

And I suppose I could just walk some other way, y’know? Yet I persist in this, though I have no clear answer as to why. Maybe it’s simply that there are always ghosts, everywhere, and it’s impossible to outmaneuver each of them in a place I’ve inhabited for so long now, for so very, very long. Or maybe, some part of me doesn’t actually want to forget.

Maybe. Because it really would be so much easier, most of the time, to not remember that particular me ever existed, with him so long ago having run, fool that he was, unbelievable fool that I am, straight out of my own life. Because he’s truly among the ones I miss the most.

^{_{<Post likes lost from original blogsite>}}