You Can't Go Home Again

I put on my sneakers and went out for a walk.

I told my mother and Hap what I was doing before I left. “I’m not doing this for fitness purposes,” I said, “I just need to get out and listen to some music,… look around and shit.” My mother told me that the trip up to the corner where the grocery store was located was exactly a half-mile, so the trip there and back would be one mile. “Kindergarten mathematics, mom,” I said,… “I’m crazy. I haven’t lost my ability to add,… and, again, not for fitness.” I had plugged my ipod into my laptop earlier that morning, so I had a nice full charge. I put the earbuds in my ears, turned the volume all the way up, put the thing on complete shuffle and headed for the corner.

I’m not totally convinced that the random shuffle on the ipod is entirely random at all. In fact, I think the fucking thing is lazy. It’ll find a band or an album it likes and three or four of the first ten songs it plays will all be from the same one. This afternoon, it happened to be repeating two albums in particular. Boston’s first album and Neon Trees latest album,… I wasn’t about to forward past either of these though,… one new classic, one old one. Both albums are what I call “wall-to-wall” collections,… every song is completely listenable,… a very rare quality in albums (or CDs for you younger readers,… I have to remember to stop fucking dating myself).

I walked slowly. I smoked cigarettes while I walked,… like I said, I wasn’t doing this for fitness purposes. However, I quickly found myself up at the corner,… half-a-mile doesn’t take forever even if you’re just ambling. I turned back around with the idea of heading back toward mom’s house. Right on the hard corner out in front of the shopping center with the grocery store was a gas station/convenience store. (“Hard corner.” Lingo from my days as a real estate developer. I was an asshole back then, too,… but at least I was sane.) I really,… REALLY,… wanted to go in and get a beer for the walk.

Instead I forced myself to face south and head back in the direction I had come. I lit another cigarette. When I got to the street where I would have turned right to go to my mother’s, I instead kept going south. I was going to see where this road led,… what I could see along the way. Another Neon Trees song came on,… nice. There were little hand carved and painted signs signifying directions for the golfers along the course that lined the homes in the area. “To the 12th Tee,” and an arrow pointing right, or some such shit.

I fucking hate golf. I used to love it but now I hate it…. Well, that’s not exactly true,… I enjoy watching golf on the television—the way those fuckers can control a little tiny white ball while hitting it 350 yards or so,… making it draw or slice depending on the layout of the fairway,… pretty impressive. I hate PLAYING golf. It’s a frustrating avocation and it costs way too much money just to practice,… to say nothing of the greens fees to actually get on a course. Why do I want to lay out that much cash just to get pissed at myself? Furthermore, I think it’s a god damn elitist activity primarily enjoyed by rich, older white dudes who take their games and themselves way too seriously. Fuck ‘em,… fuck ‘em in their fuckholes.

I ended up heading south for another forty-five minutes or so. That was when it struck me that I had to walk another forty-five minutes just to get back home. Holy shit, was it hot, too. Not a cloud in the sky at one-thirty in the afternoon in Florida in late June. Really not enjoyable. Another Boston song came on, but I was more interested in the little bead of sweat that just dropped into my right ear from my hairline. I tried to pick up a little speed as I went back toward mom’s because I had just smoked the last cigarette I had in my pack. As I walked past the same ponds and mailboxes and tee boxes, I came across two buzzards on the side of the road,… right beside the sidewalk. Turkey buzzards,… ugly fucking birds. But what struck me at the time was that they showed no fear at all. Didn’t try to fly away as I came near them. I literally passed within four feet of them, and they didn’t even offer me a second glance. I imagined what they were thinking: “move along stupid bipolar motherfucker,… nothing to see here,… why would we be afraid of you,… we’re fucking buzzards!”

By the time I got back to the house, I was drenched in sweat. I had been out for more than ninety minutes. My mother asked where I’d been and then admitted that after a half-hour or so, she drove up to the corner I had originally headed for to look for me. I didn’t know if she was worried about my safety or that I might have headed for the liquor store or the little shitty fern bar in the shopping center. Ahh,… what did it matter,… either way she was worried about me.

That afternoon the U.S. played in a World Cup soccer match. Every four years, the World Cup comes around and everybody around the fucking globe comes to a standstill and watches the sport for a month. Everybody except Americans. We watch it until the U.S. team loses and gets knocked out of the tournament. But they had reached the quarterfinals and all the talking heads on ESPN and the sports websites were actually talking about soccer gaining a foothold in the American sporting consciousness as a result of the U.S. team’s success thus far coupled with the high television ratings the games had garnered. Then again,… the games were in South Africa. They were televised in the morning and early afternoon, and with the unemployment rate in double figures in some parts of the country, what the fuck else were out-of-work men going to watch?.... Soap operas? And then,… the American team lost to Ghana? Ghana? Really? Fucking country has around twenty-four million people, and we lose to them? Americans, of course, stopped paying attention to the World Cup immediately, and the talking heads went back to baseball and Tiger Woods and where was LeBron going to play next season. Soccer stinks anyway. Fuck it,…. Fuck it in its fuckhole.

My mother made dinner that night for she and Hap and I, and we sat down at the table like a 1950s nuclear family. They even said grace. They genuflected and bowed their heads and recited the prayer they said every night. I stifled the laugh I wanted to bleat out, which was a shame because it would have been the first time I laughed in weeks.

My mom went over the plans for the trip to the airport the next morning. She covered every single imaginable detail: when we’d have to wake up, when we’d have to leave the house, airline, departure time, where they needed to get dropped off,… I swore she was going to tell me which underwear I had to put on. I think she saw me roll my eyes once and just let the conversation drop.

I told her that after I dropped them off at the airport and before I went and picked up my daughter, I was going to drop by my house and see my wife. She didn’t like that idea,… not one bit. I told her I didn’t care if she didn’t like it, I was going to do it,… what the hell was she going to do about it, anyway,… she’d be getting through the security checkpoint at the airport and taking off her shoes and shit (fucking Richard Reid sucks too).

And then,… something odd happened,… my mother got angry,… and she told me about my ass. She wasn’t having any of it, and if I wanted to be an asshole, she could just go back to her original idea of taking me to a hospital. Also, she had already talked to my wife knowing that I would try to talk them both into letting me go to the house, and my wife had agreed that it was a bad idea. And I capitulated,… of course I did,… it’s what I do.

And as I trudged off to bed, I was both pleased and pissed: I had gone a second day in a row without drinking,… but I was still being kept from my own house.

But I wasn’t going to give up entirely this time,… not yet.

Tomorrow would be another opportunity.

And I had a plan.

Next Time,.... Square Peg. Square Hole. Wrong Size.