Journals From the Time of the Radar Dog by Pat Lawrence Book Preview

7/31/2019 Journals From the Time of the Radar Dog by Pat Lawrence Book Preview

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Journals Fromthe

Time of the Radar

Dog

Pat Lawrence

BlazeVOX [books]

Buffalo, New York


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Journals From the Time of the Radar Dog

by Pat Lawrence

Copyright 2008

Published by BlazeVOX [books]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproducedwithoutthe publishers written permission, except for briefquotations in reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Geoffrey Gatza

First Edition

ISBN: 1-934289-56-6 ISBN 13: 978-1-934289-56-3Library of Congress Control Number : 2008920498

BlazeVOX [books]14 Tremaine AveKenmore, NY [email protected]

publisher of weird little books

BlazeVOX [ books ]

blazevox.org

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Prologue to Journals

From the Time of the Radar Dog

The journals Ive got here are in what I

can manage of a date order; that should

make them easier to read. When I wrote

them originally, though, I stacked them

together all higgledy-piggledy; so in coming

back to them I had to re-arrange them based

on what I could remember of the times they

cover. Doing it brought back more memories

than the ones Id found written down here,

and editing these pages turned into a sort of

fit of nostalgia. Not only did I recall more,

but I was able to make more sense of it, the

way retrospect allows you to do, I guess.

Except for the few times when I have

consciously omitted something for someone

elses sake, I tried to keep this an accurate

and complete account, and, in pursuit of

that, I filled in the gaps in my journal entries

with the things I remembered while thumbingthrough them more recently.


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In all, I think the effort paid off. They

form something of a comprehensive and

(hopefully) comprehensible narrative. When I

think about this time and all the things that

were going on, though, it doesnt have a lot to

make it coherent. I was in a sad state,

something Im glad to have pulled myself outof. It was a confused existence, like any

other, like all others. A furious, manic,

maybe dangerous period. Still, whenever Im

shooting the shit with someone who knows

Im a writer and some anecdote from this

period comes up, something wild and crazy

like Neal Cassidy, they always say I should

write it down, make a book out of them.

Maybe this is just what everyone tells writers,

that they're full of stories, hoping one day to

be immortalized in them. I, for my part, had

been reluctant to write about my own life

until now.

Whatever the case, here they are, the

Journals From the Time of the Radar Dog.

-P.


6/23

Journals Fromthe

Time of the RadarDog


7/23


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Book One: a steno pad with its cover

missing

I will not kill myself.

The world is comprehensible.

I will know it.

And then things will end and begin again,

And I will know that, too.

Save me Sisyphus!

The first thing I remember is that in

the dark, it became hard to focus on the

difference between waking and sleep. And

sleep and death. And philosophy and

ignorance. Because of the big murky mass of

the world and its swimming colors.


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Pat Lawrence

12

When I was a child everything was the

monotone. The house and its adobe walls

and the dirt road we lived on. And my skin

and the flats outside town. And the car and

the dust on the tires. And the sky, and my

hair and my eyes and everyone else.

After that I moved to the city, wherethe buildings are grey. And the people are

brown and white and ochredifferent colors

than their clothes, and even their clothes are

multi-colored, dyed to match their mutable

moodsand their shoes, too. The shoes in

my new home are shades and shapes and

textures. The catalogue of them is volumes

long. In the library of them, I have to use a

ladder to reach the athletic sneakers and

stoop to get the wingtips. Loafers, oxfords,

tennis shoes, basketball shoes. And its not

only that I see so many more people, but

each individual presents me with another

pair on another day. It sets me off, it was a

new scene. I loved the new heterogeneity. I

loved it and relished it. It was like I felt the

wind moving on me now. It was something


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different every day and it made my skin

tingle. And it wasnt just shoes.

When I got there, I was lingering in my

past. I still had only one pair of rusty

running shoes with loose soles. But I didn't

intend to get a new pair anytime soon. Even

at work, where they were being slowlydigested by the muck under the dish tank, I

wore them. I wore them to walk and to run.

I only took them off once a day if I could help

it. It was frugality and it was stubbornness.

I was killing time at the Triple-X

Factory. It was a strip club and I wasn't

proud. But I wasn't a prude either. It was

good work, and I never messed around with

the girls. They were like twisted sisters after

I'd been there a while. Some of them were

doped up, and I avoided them, especially

when they needed me for something. But a

lot of them were simple and feminine, and

weren't strippers except at work. In their

lives they were quiet or students or lazy.

I was also looking for a girl of my own,

but stifled by circumstance. It had been a


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Pat Lawrence

14

while since I'd made love, since I'd kissed or

groped or even lusted with enthusiasm. I

was mostly making up for that emptiness

with bitterness. And also hating myself for

the bitterness, but seeing it as a necessity. I

tried not to make it show, but it was still

crystallizing inside me, and it gave mesomething to think about all the time, which

meant I didn't need women or religion or

friends. Just my bitterness and the pain in

my forehead from my furrowed brows.

It was a good life. Everything was just

fine. Working at the Triple-X Factory,

changing clothes, sleeping. Things were

going really well. in 1967. This was the

dawning of the age of Aquarius.

I was moving steadily in the same

circle, or the same monotonous line with no

beginning and no end. I thought obliquely

about things like whether life was cyclical or

linear. And I decided linear, because, despite

obvious universalities that showed

themselves regularly, things were changing. I

could tell the difference in myself and in my


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life since I was a child. Whether things were

growing or decaying, I could not tell.

Certainly decay made a convincing

argument when I lost my job.

I have a condition. And it caused me

to wake up startled and confused in the

bathroom at the club with my face in the sinkand Reniken, the manager, splashing cold

water on me. I had passed out in the dish

tank again. Again meaning one of several

times in a short succession of days and

weeks. I had them often, my condition acting

up and keeping me down. But I'd dealt with

it until that point. I was a liability to the

club, said Reniken without emotion. And I

was handed papers of the walking kind. I

was out on my own again, out of a job.

I had been tripping for days in my

despair. Id been liquefying my brain when

this shit started.

Sonofabitch.


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Book Two: a wide-ruled spiral-bound

journal

Slowly one morning, before the city

woke, when the sarcophagus of the sky

begins to fill its breast with the breath of life,

I managed to fall asleep.

I woke up with anger burning a hole in

my esophagus. I was always doing that, it

seemed.

My roommate. There were always

things to hate about roommates, or people in

general for that matteranybodybut he

was an encephalization of them all. Morose

and moody, an emotional suction cup, terse

and vacuous, a sonofabitch and no good at


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sports. Jesus, he should have been good at

something. But he wasnt. Just nothing. He

was a waste of time and space like nothing

else in nature, and except that he paid the

rent on time, he was one foot out the door on

his ass. Id take that matter into my hands

and lay him flat on his pointy beak nose thefirst time he missed a payment.

Bitch.

I was sinister in my waking. I dosed

again before the last wore off. Another phase

of my trip began.

It was quiet. It was quiet. I became

aware that he was awake.

His sounds pounded invincibly and

barbarously into the air in my bedroom,

ringing in the walls and through the door, to

where Id been sleeping by myself, and I hate

inescapable. He was that: loved smells and

sounds and the bright sunall the sensory

shit that accosts you without relent, that you

cant get away from.

He was talking on the phone, sobbing

really; so loud. A sort of blubbering fatness


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Pat Lawrence

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of words falling out of his limp lips, which

were bloated and wet. Bloated and wet. Like

a woman. He might as well have been a

woman. He was talking like a woman to a

woman, his girlfriend. I had nothing to say to

her. She wasnt allowed in the house. That

was the last thing I needed, to hear hisslamming and grinding turning my dreams

into nightmares. Input of sensory stimuli

from external sources. His stimuli. No thank

you.

He barged in. I was still under the

sheets. I sleep naked and he doesnt know,

so it was a weirdness: me wanting him to

leave because nothing separated us except a

gauze-thin sheet. Get out get out get out. I

listened to him. He garbled out a string of

nonsense. I can recount it, but its mostly

stupidness. When you get broken up with,

thats all that comes out: Why? and How?;

when the answers sit in piles like puke on

the floor. I could have given them to him

(because you have no ambition. because

you have a stupid haircut. because you cry


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all the time for no reason. And are weak and

loathsome and snivelling), but I said, let me

put some clothes on, okay? Then Ill come

out and we can talk about this.

Sonofabitch.

I took stock as he left, to know myself

and get it collected. My clothes were all overthe floor and all over the chair, and the floor

was hardwood and so was the chair. The sun

was burning soot-white a square patch from

the window onto the floor, but outside that

swatch there was a chill blackness from the

shadows that had hung around since the

rapidly-fading night, the lingering point of

darkness and silence. The contrast of the

suns brilliance and the ombre made the

corners of the room invisible. My other

things were in there, I knew. Blank CDs in a

pile, pens, pens, pens, notebooks with writing

on the first few pages of every one, envelopes,

binder clips, charcoal and newsprint, a belt,

a shoe and another shoe, a few socks, brass

brads, a stick, several jars of dirt, a white

ceramic mug with a brown ring in the base, a


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Pat Lawrence

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hubcap with a Mercury insignia, six pieces of

paper folded into eighths and on and on in a

circle around the bed, which I had pushed

into a corner, but which I often contemplated

moving into the center of the room. It was

the only functionable furniture, anywayit

should be the focal point. A floor-level nest,and there was no place in it for Reynold, my

intruding nemesis.

My feet were bare, but I wore a pair of

pants; the cuffs were rolled up in round

rings; Id been walking in puddles the night

before, and now they hovered mid-calf, the

hair of my legs standing out unruly all over

my pale skin, shocked into life by the static

electricity of my sheets in the dry air.

Sonofabitch.

He was in the living room, a flat-

striped shirt on, green and white and wide, a

poor choice for his girth, a glass of iced tea in

his hand. Grandmothers and aunts in pastel

coats with long collars drink iced tea in the

morning. I found a beer in the fridge and

made him look like an outcast. It makes


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dealing with him easier, because it quiets the

voice of concern and empathy. Im a selfish

drunk, then, I guesswhen it gets out of

control; this was just a reminder, not a full

binge. It elevates my thoughts and

subordinates his. Perfect. It was perfect. It

was a long drought of a burly woman withstrong arms and thighs like logs. It was

purple filter-fed fields and a wind over the

mountain tops. He was still talking. and

she said that she didnt feel like I was more

than just a sonofabitch.

I consoled him, I dont know why. It

just means he sticks around longer. It just

means he thinks better about himself and

goes out wearing confidence in new emperor

robes, finds himself another gullible bint and

brings her back here so I can re-iterate the

rule that he is not to bring them back here.

Then they can find out who he really is and

dump him, and it can all culminate in this: a

ruined morning where I have to comfort a big

crying baby in my living room, and dont get

to sleep in, and dont get to sleep in and dont


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Pat Lawrence

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get to sleep in but have to be awake, and not

for something fun, but for this. Blackmail

and cyanide in the veins. This is what I hate,

inescapable cyclicity. Perpetuity and

knowing always how it will come out. It was

looking like this might be the way of things.

I left him there with my hands in mypockets. I left him on the couch with the

Playstation controller in his hands getting

over it slowly, his belly rolling over his

waistband and obscuring his belt, a relic of

his dead father hed had to cut two new holes

in to accommodate his growing excess. The

sun shone in from behind his head, and we

had no shades so it was angelic and

powerful, and his head stuck up in it, casting

a shadow on the TV just big enough for his

game to show through the glare. Fat head.

The sacrosanct image didn't fit. Music began

to play in my head.

I left with my hands in my pockets,

fingering a rock there Id been carrying for a

couple weeks, the top of it was flat and

smooth and the bottom was like a fishs


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scales. Id found it in a puddle and dried it

off on my pant leg. Now it conversed with my

keychain. Clink clink clink, it said.

It was getting warm and I started to

sweat under my arms and on my foreheadI

was shining slick and gleaming. I held my

arms slightly akimbo at my sides as theyswung, allowing a little breeze in between

them that did nothing except chill, and

therefore accentuate, the wetness of my pits.

Damnit.

I took a seat on a cement rail outside a

bank and watched people come in with

money and leave without it, or come in

without it and leave with it. Brown coats

were everywhere on them all, and though it

was hot hot hot, they were tied up tight

around necks and wrists.

I saw the people floating; it was wavy,

the pavements black faceit was wave-

ridden. It burst in on me; anywhere I turned,

the shoes of the mooks were smoky and

warped, I looked at a kid and she was

reaching high on her short legs, fun-mirror


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reality up to her knees, her mother oblivious.

Not seeing oblivious. She was hanging on

her mothers hand at a distance, just not tall

enough, and the big woman walking too fast

with her mind on something they were

rushing for, an appointment to check on the

impendingness of a sibling, or a drycleaner orschool or something, it was always that. The

olive-skinned matron kept clicking forward in

turquoise high-heels. She began, also, to

lose form from beneath, from the bottom up.

Her bulbous fat deposits slipped from her

frame.

I had pink hands. It was the heat.

The capillaries were swollen; my hands were

big meat puppets, pasty and numb, pinched

at my wrist by my watch, black plastic and

plain. Twenty-five years old and running.

There was nothing to do. I looked behind me.

When I was sixteen I stepped off my

fathers porch onto the prickly concrete,

grass growing between the disjunct square

slabs. We kept pill bugs busy crawling over


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the yard in the ground dirt chunks and crab

grass where I first wore my bare feet down

into calluses. There was an old lawnmower

given over to rust in the far street corner on

my left, under the shade of the tree from our

neighbors yard, whose leaves I raked up into

piles and packed up into black bags and setby the curb in back. So obvious. So obvious,

his little whining son could have done it,

should have done it, but didnt. Instead, they

fell into the poor peoples yardlet them deal

with it.

My brother and I shared the one room

my dad wasnt using. But John would leave

soon, he was eighteen, feeling the pressure

my dad gave off, when our house was like a

teakettle about to whistle. And he was right,

my father was, as he always was. My brother

needed to get out, wasnt getting anything

from staying home any longer. He was just

learning to skip class. He was just learning

to pull out. He was just learning to cough so

the alveoli would open up and let the smoke

in deeper. But I didnt look forward to the


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year and a half I still had to finish school

before making my own last trip across this

path (my brother John had failed the eighth

grade, so he was actually almost three years

older than me).

In the meantime, I would pound that

same path with my Converse in the morningsgoing out and pound it again when I came

home from school. I would sit in my room

upstairs looking out over the street between

posters of bands onto the kids in shorts

riding rusty two wheelers in the empty street,

wide and off-white. Hold it. Exhale. I was

years ahead of my brother. But in secret.

Sonofabitch.

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Journals From the Time of the Radar Dog by Pat Lawrence Book Preview