Читать книгу Sunshine on an Open Tomb - Tim Kinsella - Страница 28

At the very least, until recently, I’d retained my alligator health enough to indulge my mild hedonisms.

Minor embarrassments surfaced during my divorce: a fling with a woman with hands as big as shoeboxes, a couple cases of itches picked up from professionals.

What can I say?

Whether it’s the struggle to see or the struggle to not see, everyone struggles with interiority.

There’s bound to be some fallout, everyone butting up against each other, each moving thru our own animal fear, lost in that mysterious hole we each find at our own centers.

A lot of that stuff is simple upkeep.

My alligator made some decisions as if it was a jellyfish with its unified organ that’s both brain and stomach.

My ex and I had somehow lost the knowledge of how to even begin to touch each other.

And you have to keep the spirit moving smoothly thru its pipes somehow.

I’ve never been the sensualist of The Family.

But after my divorce, after a year catatonic, I did enjoy a satisfied return to feeling like the Division A state football champions celebrating The Renaissance; The Birth of Venus in shoulder pads calling a flea-flicker play after play; Myth, History, and the invention of Perspective driving down the field, even faking a punt.

I felt liberated from that dank tomb of King Charles, like an alligator scraping along city streets.

There are more relevant matters at hand, however, Randy Reader, than the dwindling health of my regal penis.

True to the institution of divorce, I had very, very little contact with my ex.

Fundamentally, she mystified me, much stranger than a stranger.

I remember she liked old-timey female country singers, meeting people, and being seen.

And she hated how I enjoyed telling The Help to take the afternoon off to go see a movie.

But who she actually was, and her ways of being, that was all a mystery to me ever since our shared habit of every dayness had been severed.

We married young, our marriage one more awk result of my brief flirtation with conforming to The Family’s expectations.

I was rehabilitating from my cool and self-conscious years, obsessed with underground rock legend Cy Franklin.

It’s basically accurate to say I’m a lifelong bachelor: married at 26, divorced at 29.

And I don’t blame her.

She made the decision, and the swiftness and totality of its execution stunned me, but us splitting up didn’t surprise me.

Mostly, primarily, I remember her as dull.

But dullness isn’t anything I resent or fear.

I passively aspire to it, I suppose.

Most friends I’ve ever had could be described as dull.

And if anyone leveled that charge against me, I wouldn’t feel obliged to defend myself.

Yup, common dullness, OK by me.

My ex and me, however, we exhausted each other with our dullnesses.

Knowing how I was back then, I can’t regret marrying her.

How I was thinking, what I thought mattered, pressures put upon me—she was the perfect candidate: pretty hair, slim, smart enough in all the socially acceptable and tasteful ways, but not smart enough to see thru the folly of worrying about social acceptability and taste.

She’s from Jackson, Wyoming, The Joplin, Missouri of The Open West, with all its nightlife and dazzle.

And she was on track to become the wife of someone like me.

And we intersected.

We had the desire to throw a big party in common.

Of course, she came with some cha-ching!

Nothing compared to my own, but enough that she could be accepted as worthy.

She’s since invested all that money into a system of private prisons that she insists is the future of incarceration.

It’s worked out well for her.

Her name was briefly dragged very publicly thru deep mud.

Isn’t it insane how some Contras slaughter a dozen civilians and some doctors at a healthcare clinic and rape some women while their children watch—horrible stuff, but way across the world—and my ex ends up testifying to Congress?

Luckily, she was on a first-name basis with half the committee.

Nowadays, my ultimate romantic goals all involve catching a beautiful woman in a lie.

Catching the same woman over and over no longer interests me.

Ideally, I’d like to catch a beautiful woman in a lie once, then move on to the next beautiful woman.

I’m a punchline in my ex’s biography—or résumé, I should say.

A big gold-star punchline.

She married into The Family, and she also knew to walk away from me.

Looks good on paper.

She still looks good for her age in her slim-fit business skirts.

She never wears too much makeup, but she’s never without some makeup.

And what’s she have to do all day but go from one light- impact workout routine to the next?

I get embarrassed for her when she occasionally attempts her condescending tone with me.

Her true vacancy is on full display when she’s stretched, attempting to express any emotional depth.

But our semi-annual one-minute conversations are fine, friendly enough, always re: our sons, of course.

My brief playboy phase fizzled when the simplicity of professionals became apparent.

No risk like when you run into an old senator and with a softened tone he introduces you to his pig-tailed date slurping on a pacifier, her eyes rolling around the corners of the room.

And no shame like some jilted Secretary of Defense that’d fallen in love with The Pass-Around-The-Party-Bottom, raging and pouting as he watches her in The Act of Love with everyone else.

The Act of Love itself no longer interested me as much as my quick escapes knowing that it could’ve happened.

With my deep bellybutton and my tits that ache with every flight of stairs, I’m never King Charles by myself.