Goodbye Brett

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Dear Brett,

Jesus, buddy!  What the hell happened?  I think I can safely assume that you are probably pissed off right now at the manner of your demise.  I can imagine what you might have thought at the last moment.  Probably something along the lines of “This is such bullshit!  Please, God, let me have two more minutes…just TWO MORE MINUTES so I can run and grab my .45 and blow a hole through that guy before he gets away!”

You were such a good dude.  I feel sorry for the way you died.  But I don’t feel sorry for you.  I think you had a pretty good life.  You can tell when someone is having a good life.  It’s in the eyes and in the voice…the choice of words and inflection they use when they describe their day, or their family, or even another person.  Even when you and I would make fun of other dealers I knew that you had no animosity toward them…it was all just snarky observation and silliness.  The way you told the story about Nathan and the way we embellished it together every time we recounted it.  Or the one about Whiskey Bill.  So great.  And your laugh…such a great fucking laugh.  It made me laugh.  The way you would walk in the store and sometimes we would just look at each other and start laughing.  And the way you would walk in the door, straight past me toward the bathroom for a thirty-second piss and you would just say “be right back.”  So funny.  

We were both on the road, though you were there a lot longer…a warrior as they say.  Coffee is for closers and all that bullshit.  And you didn’t even drink coffee!  But you were the most caffeinated person I ever met.  We had met so many of the same dealers, been in so many of the same bathrooms, met so many of the most interesting, ridiculous, good, bad, ugly, and awesome personalities in this beautiful and heartbreaking industry that there was never a shortage of material for a good conversation.  Sellers, Baer, Nancy, Nathan, The Time Toilet (a little inside, I know), Tom T, fucking Looney Tunes parade, man!  Overture!  Curtains, lights…  Fuck me, are you telling me I can never have one of those conversations again?  Because I know for a fact that there is not another person alive who saw people in quite as similar fashion as I.  And that just sucks.  I am selfishly pissed off at the miserable, filthy bastard who did this.

Your cars…how many fucking cars did you go through in the years I knew you?  All those awful retired police cruisers for so long!  You would brag about how cheap you got them at auction but all I saw was a piece of shit.  But you didn’t care because you were a road warrior and those were your war horses and war horses are meant to be filthy and mean and ridden to death and that is what they expect and hate and that’s okay because God has a special place for them and for the men who ride them.  Well…at least for you.  Those cars have no doubt been melted down by now.  

I never met your family but I like to imagine they meant a great deal to you.  I imagine you loved them very much and I feel very sad to think that they will miss you.  I can’t fathom how shocked they must feel.  I pray for them in wordless mourning because how can you use words ask God to assuage what they are experiencing.  To attempt to do so would do a disservice to the awful depth of despair that accompanies the violent taking of a loved one.  So I guess I just want your family to know that you were a connected person…that is to say that there are a lot of us who feel a huge sense of loss right now.

I never ordered stuff from J&B Importers.  I ordered from Brett Walquist.  Your prices were always higher than QBP and I always found mistakes in the product you shipped.  I think it was because you relied on your memory, which was prodigious, to input part numbers.  Like the time you shipped us about twenty 3-way Torx wrenches.  WTF?  Or all the times you send us the wrong kickstands…the ones with the flat plates instead of the s-shaped ones.  But you always made good…”Oh don’t worry about it, I’ll take care of it, you’ll see something show up next week with the same value but there won’t be a charge!”  Shyster…  

If I still drank, I’d throw down a few bourbons for you.  It is New Year’s, after all.  Instead, I think I’ll go out back and burn all my J&B catalogs and fire off a few rounds of the ol’ 9mm to say Goodbye.  You take care now and stop fucking pacing around so much!  Relax, buddy, the hard part is over.  

-Richter

Sunday Morning Coming Down

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Can you start a piece with an interlude?  Well I will:  That pseudo-song call and response piece of dung called “Home” by Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros is playing on the radio at work and it is so very awful!  That bit in the middle when they talk to each other…I just ground my molars to shards and my left eye just shot across the store.  I voiced my displeasure and the boys started laughing.  They said they were surprised it only took 30 seconds.  Shame on them for being tolerant of this auditory tripe.  

It’s slow here this time of year and I’m quite jumpy.  Music is powerfully mood-altering to me.  If it were just me in here there would be only Jazz and Reggae and maybe Johnny Cash when he did those cover albums as an old timer with that quivering old voice that was forged in a crucible of tobacco, pills, booze, and the kind of desperate longing that only a sinner of the worst kind can know.  That sort of man has hated himself for so long that the years and the “mud and the blood and the booze” have erased the memory of the original reason for that self-loathing so that all he is left with is a broken soul and a bone-soaking darkness that is never more than a half-smile away.  A man like that can never truly smile because he knows that the smile is held captive by a terrible spiritual malignancy.  He can never be reconciled because he doesn’t remember what it is that needs to be reconciled.  And so he is left to God’s mercy in the end and until that day he takes a wife like June and sings epic poetry and if he is lucky he stays away from booze and dope.  Jesus, this is me!  So it’s Cash for camaraderie, Jazz and Reggae to sooth the jerky nerves.  Sunday Morning Sidewalk.  Sunday Morning coming down…reality barging its way back into your life after you’ve done your best to run and hide and hide and hide and your mind lies raw in a pool of horror...or terror…sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference...but there is one. 

I quit drinking this year.  I haven’t done drugs for many years.  Booze was always the best for me…and the worst.  I can remember the rush, the euphoria, the acceptance.  I remember the anticipation of drinking.  I remember lying to myself about how much I would drink that night…or day.  I have derailed so many trains in my time I can scarcely believe I’m alive.  Never a daily drinker…just a drinker of vast quantities.  Ten beers would be chump change for me.  How the hell can I function around these people with only ten?  I need the walls to close in.  I need the blurry, fuzzy vortex of noise to be close enough to rub my cheeks.  The din of two hundred voices all stirred up together and swirled around and around until they are an indistinguishable boozy noise blanket.  And I wrap myself up in it and it all looks homogenous and I can pick out whichever one is least threatening and touch it.  Colors and sounds and fragmented memories of shapes of wooden floors and glasses and shirt colors and bar-rails.  That dark brownish-burgundy color of fake leather and cheap pool table felt.  

The dry mouth and twitchy sleep of 4AM and that awful breathless time lapse between the dissipation of the BAC and the onset of the hangover.  There is a period of time when there is perfect, painless clarity (or at least perceived perfect sobriety) at that point.  Chemicals being processed—eliminated…some new chemicals shoving in to fuck with your eyes and your stomach and, worst of all, your mind.  The vertigo and the acute anxiety and depression dance around sickeningly and taunt you and all you want to do is sit under the warm shower and know that it’s hot and sunny outside and maybe it will be until you feel better.  If you’re going to be hung over, do it in Summer.  Winter is worst for that sort of thing.  The grey skies are just a tombstone over your emotional grave and there is not a damn thing you can do about it but embrace the dread or drink again.  And you probably will…for twenty or thirty years until you Allow yourself to realize how pathetic it all is.  Until Sunday Morning Comes Down for good.  You pray for Sunday morning…the one that Johnny sang about.  He didn’t sing about it in a literal sense.  He sang about it metaphorically and that is what most people miss.  I missed it the first hundred or so times I ever heard that song but I get it now.  Sunday morning is God’s presentation of grace and maybe redemption to you.  Even when you think you are the worst person in the world at the time.  The smell of the chicken frying, the laughing little girl playing, even the cleanest dirty shirt.  Those things all point to something new and brilliant and maybe soul-cleansing.

But not everyone is ready for that just yet.  It takes that man whose heart has been frozen for so long that even the slightest whisper of love or even concern from another person ignites some ferocious longing deep inside his soul.  And I do mean ferocious.  That kind of longing functions as both a fire to melt the frozen heart and a protective monster to guard what it has thawed.  It is a built in Mother Bear…or maybe it is God working through us and we only think it is a thing we create.  Those who Believe tackle this question every day on some level.  It’s a tough one.  I have beaten that question back into the darkness so many times I can’t believe it still pursues me.  I simultaneously love the longing and hate it with everything I can muster.  You see, it shakes up my belief paradigm and makes me very uncomfortable while also allowing me a faint glimpse of something better and beautiful!  But I am comfortable in the dark stasis of this person I’ve created.  There is no work to be done here.  It is anesthesia.  Pure, numb apathy.  Not bad and not good.  Nothing.  Some people think that is what hell is.  But then that piercing light shoots through a crack in the ice and blasts you in the eye and you see something familiar.  You have no idea what it is, though you can see it quite clearly.  All you know is that it is familiar and warm and I’m not sure what the other thing is but it’s some sort of happiness.  Either happiness or peace I think.  

But as I was saying…not everyone is ready for that just yet.  For some people, you just have to reach down to the bottom of the well to where you think you’ll find your own damned redemption and you don’t need anyone’s help Goddammit!  And that’s what is so confusing.  You will find water down there but a man dug that well and that water probably filtered up through the bedrock from miles away.  There is nothing special about that.  It’s just plain physical processes.  Rain falls and soaks in and gravity pulls it down to the depths and heat pushes it back up.  Dinosaurs die and rot and turn into oil and diamonds.  Birds are not magic…they are aerodynamic and use their wings and thermal updrafts to fly.  But we all continue to look for the Answer in those things.  Four leaf clovers and fire and rockets and elementary particles…the Higgs Boson.  We observed all these things and we even created computers that can beat Garry Kasparov at chess.  We will continue to advance our manipulation of the observable world.  Will there be a point at which we know so much that we cross a threshold where God is plausibly deniable to everyone alive?  I doubt it.  Because I think we have all seen that beam of light every now and then and it still makes us wonder.  We still get precious glimpses of that thing which is so familiar yet so unrecognizable.  Johnny and I have something in common there.  We both sat at the bottom of the well for a long LONG time just clawing away deeper and deeper because we were sure we could find ourselves if we just dug another few inches.  He got tired and went on one last bender and woke up one Sunday morning and the sun hit him in the face and he started to climb out. 

Trainer Season...Does anyone have some really REALLY warm gloves?...Goodbye Coach Troy Forever.

I kept waking up Tuesday night and into the wee hours of Wednesday thinking I was hearing something downstairs.  A dreadful sound, actually.  Now that I think about it, I’m sure it was dogs fighting.  Dobermans, maybe…or dingos.  Or coyotes.  Whatever the hell it was it was really annoying me and I couldn’t sleep.  I didn’t get up to check on it because I wasn’t sure if it was real or a hallucination brought on by the frostbite I sustained to my frontal cortex during the previous morning’s run.  I don’t mind hallucinations…so long as they are reasonably quiet and respect my sleep patterns.  But these buggers were noisy and mean and for some reason were pissed off and probably Irish.  

So I turned up the fan and double checked my pistol and finally fell asleep around 4AM.  I slept fitfully for two more hours until my wife had to get up at 6 and when she was in the shower I heard them start up again downstairs.  Was it outside?  Something was off about this.  I looked out the window to the back yard and couldn’t see anything in the grey mist that had settled over the common area.  The birch trees and the willow were still and there was no sign of a scuffle in the mulch beds.  Were these things in my house?  The basement maybe?  I looked around the room to make sure the walls were still solid and gave my totem a quick spin on the bedside table for good measure.  It toppled over after a few seconds so I couldn’t have been dreaming.  Winston was snoring and curled up like a furry little butter bean in my wife’s warm spot and didn’t seem to hear a thing.  I heard Beth singing something from the Acousticats in the shower and I could smell the soap so this must be real, right?  But where were the noises coming from and if dogs were fighting in my house, how the hell did they get there in the first place?  

“Screw it” I thought and decided to go have some coffee and check out the basement.  Maybe the furnace was just acting up and it only sounded like canine fight club.  But coffee first.  See…I simply must have two large mugs of Café Richterissimo and one full hour of news before I even open my left eye.  So I sure as hell wasn’t going to venture down to the lower basement (we have two basements) without cranking up my CNS.  The lower basement is where we keep our exercise equipment, Christmas decorations, furnace, water heater, water softener, and wolf-spiders.  The upper basement is where we keep a lot of carpet and air and is Winston’s preferred clandestine toilet which he uses when we are asleep and he really REALLY needs to go.  But the news…the news was boring that morning.  Something about Justin Timberlake in town and a bunch of girls arrested for plotting to capture him and lick him to death.  I switched it to the History Channel and watched Modern Marvels and learned something about bridges for the rest of my wakey-wakey and prepared to go check out the furnace.  

Beth and the Winston came downstairs around this time and I kissed my wife goodbye and tossed Winston into his daytime blanket, where he spends 90% of the day sleeping and occasionally yelling at noises outside which are undetectable by human ears.  After Beth had driven away and I had waved and blown kisses at her like the charming and loveable man that I am, I decided to get down to business and check out that awful noise.  The noise was escalating by now and I’m sure I also heard chains clanking chaotically as if some trapped thing was fighting for its life while having rocks thrown at it.  I was fairly certain it wasn’t the furnace as I descended the stairs to the upper basement because I suddenly became aware of the fact that the sounds of fighting and clanking had stopped and were replaced by the hideous sound of soft, deep laughter.  “Jesus, this is ominous”, I thought as I continued to the bottom of the stairs to the first basement, which we fancy as a rec-room and around the corner to the door which led to the lower flight. I opened it slowly.  Peeking through a small crack in the door, cautiously, I uttered one of those loud whispers to no one in particular…”Hello?…Who’s down there?”  Again…soft, slow laughter in the deepest, most sinister pitch I’ve heard since I went surfing in Ireland and that evil bastard Leviathan-swell up at Bundoran cracked all my ribs and gave me rhabdomyolysis in my shoulders.  Whatever this was I knew it was not something kind.  Perseus was over in the corner playing cards by himself on my Grandma’s table, in the dark (solitaire, I guess), and I motioned for him to toss me his shield so I could use it as a mirror…in case whatever was down there was Medusa or something else that could turn me to stone or maybe something worse with it’s awful gaze.  He gave me the shield and mumbled something about being “so sorry” that he had lost the helmet the week prior in a poker game.  Perseus has a bad gambling problem and a history of holding out for trips with a small pair (huhuh…that’s what she said *wink*).  The helmet would have helped.  Silly bugger…I’ll probably kick him out soon but he is very handsome and his Dad asked me if I would keep an eye on him and “sort of be like a sponsor” while he’s getting back on his feet.  Don’t let it ever be said that I don’t have a charitable heart!  And enough about him…he’s a nice enough guy but I think he likes my wife and I’m not sure I could take him in a fight.  He has half of Olympus on his side, after all…

So I snatch the shield from Perseus and head down the lower flight of stairs and then it happened:  Fucking Coach Troy comes bolting out of the corner from behind the water heater with a stopwatch in his left hand and a DVD in his right.  He has on those patterned, baggy Zubaz-style pants and a polo shirt and I can tell he hasn’t ridden his own bike in months.  He shouts something at me about the eleven-tooth and 95 RPM and I don’t even hesitate when I plaster him in the side of the head with a wicked roundhouse kick.  He falls awkwardly down against the water heater and is out cold and I snicker to myself because I’ve always wanted to sucker-punch that patzer and here he goes ahead and gives me the sleepy broadside of the barn.  But wait…I’ve jumped to a bad conclusion here.  Because just as I finish patting myself on the back with one of Coach Troy’s severed hands (yeah I did it…trophy!), I hear that rotten laughter again.  Smaug?  Hmmmmmm…  It’s to my left and slightly behind me, adjacent to the stairwell.  I can smell the unmistakeable odor of burning tires and molten high-carbon steel.  I nearly left my body and fled to another dimension when I realized what it was.  The sound of the rattling chains confirmed it.  I had chained the filthy thing up almost nine months ago and forgotten about it until just then.  That awful smell of melting tire tread and sour, dried blood…the sort of blood that only comes from burst vessels in the human eye when the pressure is too great.  This happens only at high wattage and low cadence.  It was Kurt.  I stared at him in disbelief and dropped the shield.  It clanged noisily on the concrete floor and slowly came to rest after spinning around slowly a few times, casting a sickly golden light around the room and illuminating the despotic object intermittently like a lighthouse on an evil green Kraken.  I looked desperately out the window…it was locked securely and there was a grate over the well.  A few snowflakes had begun to float down.  Beautiful thing for most people.  But not for me.  I looked up the stairs and saw Perseus standing there with a sad smile on his face.  Judas with curly hair and a tunic.  Swine!  He tossed me a small towel and a half-full bottle of water and said…again…”so sorry”.  Then he shut the door and I heard it lock from the other side.  Rotten traitor.  That’s the last time I give you a few bucks for “lunch”.  And that pretty much did it for me.

The bike was already there with a cheap steel skewer in the rear hub and a sticky orange tire on the rim.  Kurt unfolded his terrible arms and opened his voracious mouth and I knew there was no point in resisting.  I slowly rolled my bike over to him and winced as he closed his awful mouth down and crunched.  It was terrible.  I felt utterly defeated.  I tried one last time to lunge for the door but tripped over Troy’s lifeless body and I knew…I knew I was done for.  I had beaten the gatekeeper but the monster within still ruled this dungeon and Winter was upon us.  There were a pair of bibs hanging near the window and a three year old pair of shoes with brittle nylon cleats…but all I saw were shackles…manicles.  I reluctantly put them on and mounted my bike.  Netflix?  Sufferfest?  Hara-kiri?  I pressed power on the Edge and turned off the GPS.  My cleats engaged and I threw up my arms and screamed in anguish like Elias in Platoon when the helicopters left him behind.  My legs twitched and shuddered and began to turn in slow, rhythmic circles and my arms and hands slowly dropped to the brake hoods and I looked up and saw my wife standing two steps up from the bottom of the lower flight.  Her early wake up call, the kiss goodbye, even the drive-away from the house…these had all been a ruse.  I had been sold out.  She looked at me in tears and said “I love you.”  I feigned a smile, shot a knowing look back at her with a small toss of my head upward and said…”I know.”  And it was finished.