After Chapter One of To Own a Dragon...

To Own a Toyota Hilux

It’s 6:06 AM and I never fall asleep but feel a little sickly, so no better time than now to drop an Airborne into a glass of water and watch it fizz. I swab out my ears with a Qtip, not much on either end, but I see a book of matches and light it up, the Qtip, thinking it would look like a flaming Hawaian pugil stick, but it barely ignites, and poofs out. And this makes me think about voice, and I wonder about mine, and if I’ll ever have a writers’ voice and what will it sound like, and where do I fit in literature today, if Donald Miller fits where he does, and will my voice ever sound as friendly and funny as Don’s, or will I always be humourously distant and pugilistic and poof out?

I think how does Don pull so much glass-is-half-full crap out of his past, and how is the glass, in fact, half full, or is he kidding himself, and his audience? I think why is my glass neither half-full nor half-empty, but cracked from the dishwasher’s rinse cycle because it was put between pots and pans.

I can write happiness. I can make up stories about how greatly it benefitted me to drive my ’72 Toyota Hilux with a bed so rusted out from fifteen years of pool chemicals and muratic acid that the tailgate falls off in traffic, and the window lies shattered in pea-sized chunks on the bottom of the door, and how I lost the key, so I have to start it with the "roach clips and wire from the battery to the coil, and a screwdriver across the starter terminals" trick.

I can draw positive conclusions out of those days, like wax out of my ears, and satisfy any Christian’s ears. But it wouldn’t be sincere nor deal with the reality that maybe I am no closer to understanding life now as I was on Brush Creek Road with my rusty tailgate bouncing down the street towards the hood of a 500SL.

Reality isn’t chock full of funny stories. It’s full of dearth and measuring up short against the insatiable world, it’s my little brother the first day with his license, hitting a retarded old woman with his truck and her dying and the cops being lenient because of no priors, and him never being quite the same since.

My life is about being punched and too confused to hit back.

There were no mentors, MR. Miller, just a few boyfriends in my mom’s bed in the mornings and getting water from next door when it gets shut off. It was finding an used rubber in the street by my house, stealing a box of rusted nails to work on my fort, it was friends who stuck around until their folly came out and that was the end of the freindship. And it was a trip to Dad’s for a month that turned into two, then three, then four years of living hell, of being a limbless punching bag and a mute tampon soaking up one man’s wrath toward his mother. I didn’t starve for a father figure. I didn’t ask the steam shovel “are you my father?” I hated fathers, mine and everyone’s. Men, for that matter, and most of all myself. I could find the back door of every man, where he snuck all his shit out so you couldn’t see. Every man had a pile of deception stacked outside his back door, and eventually that’s where I started with people, straight for their back door, not through the front.

I checked the back doors of churches and the allys between pastors, and the one’s with new Volvos and new Saabs always have a box-full there. Do I long for a bunch of great guys to whom I can submit and grow under and whose wisdom I can gleen and possibly rejuvinate parts of my stagnate soil? Yes. So I call a guy, a pastor I kinda like, and cast him on the water, as it goes, and he calls right back (three months later) wanting help on his house and a good deal on speakers.

Mentors aren’t listening, or I’ve not read the signs, or something, but he was the guy who wrote that “More Time With Fewer People” article I liked so much, and maybe I was wanting to sample that. Yes, I had cute moments with church people, pestering them and hiding my desparate need for attention from a male figure, but with different outcomes. Most church personnel aren’t sweet like David Gentile. Most want to assimilate you into place, starting with a signed faith confession and an intro class, and a trip to camp where you have some touch, feely, crumple-up-the-list-of-sins-and-throw-them-on-the-bonfire experience, and come home saved, just like everyone else, ready for Christianity 102, Traditions & Paradigms.

For me, Christianity isn’t some epiphany and a copy of Pat Robertson’s “Secret Kingdom,” but a maze through a thousand inert human sandtraps and the only thing driving you for ten years is one glimpse of truth you had, past them trees, and you want more. Every man of God, every Amway distributor and every friend in between is a self-employed harbinger swinging hay hooks to get a good purchase on your thigh, so to hook bone, and help you along the path of becoming just like them. But the irony is you want to be just like them, just like anyone but you, because you can’t, since the days you drove that rusty Toyota Hilux, make two dots and draw aline between them without the first one moving.

Do I sound like a walking volume of pathologies? I don’t blame you for already thinking that, but I’m not, really. I actually do good and am a decent, flawed Christian. I could become perfect if a few things went away, and they might, and my whole life would be half-full, like yours. At that point I’d have a decision to make. Do I retract everything I’ve ever written and destroy it, or do I start anew, painting white stripes on all the black experiences, or do I quit writing altogether, and start a landscaping business? For what does it profit a man to gain the world and lose his writing voice.

Sometimes this whole emergent thing, I think, is it really new? Or just a trip back to square one for me, a short trip to full-circle? Because, shamefully, I don’t need a book on pop culture to know what roach clips are, or why I need them to hotwire my Toyota Hilux. Is it an exercise in learning all the precise notes of religion, then growing some form of soul patch and long surfer hair and forgetting them? Because I just stopped treading and stood up and saw I was right where I started, on the beach in two feet of water, and I may recall some notes along the way, for when I have to "emerge" back into Christianese, but they’ll be less like Blue Jazz and more like dissonance.

I'm like Peter with his buddies back at the fishing nets after the long ordeal, after three denials, and this whole thing was just one big silly adventure, until you have this last controversial Chapter 21 in John, and breakfast with Jesus by the fire, which some scholars think was written by imposters.

I had breakfast with Jesus. It’s years ago, and I’m numbly reposing in a deep mire of self-unworth. The people around me put three bucks in their tank and buy used tires and have no education because college is for better people who come through and teach us stuff and leave. My tires get so bald that they pop and my dad says Go find a tire outfit that will let you wash windows for a set of radials. Which I do, calling every number in the book until this girl puts me through to the owner of a huge, thirty-store chain. The owner says Go pick out some tires and they’ll mount them if you say I sent you, and I say thank you, thank you. Tend my lambs.

Now I have brand new tires, expensive tires, and no one knows what to say. They look at me with a sense of fear, because I crossed into some forbidden, lucky zone, or grabbed a bar and raised myself up a notch, and where will he be in a month? they wonder. I work the tires off and there are more windows, and the lady has no desire for me to stop washing, so I get rims. Aluminum rims, swirly ones from a special catalogue customers haven’t seen yet, and I have to order them, and they put them on for a case of Coors Lights, and now I have swirling, shiny rims and black, new tires with deep tread, and mouths are agape. Shepherd my sheep.

I was a new man. I stayed up late sanding my Bronco and painting it, and I start filling my tank full of gas, instead of putting three bucks in at a time, and I applied to colleges and got in and at age 23, not a moment too soon, I’m out of there, never to look back, or take up a squeegy again. Tend my sheep.

I'm convinced...

...that my middle school is possessed by evil spirits. Just today I read how a small group of six girls called "the Rooks" have plotted to kill the assistant principle with rat poison, or by luring her into the woods to beat her to death. Times sure have changed since I went there, from1981-1983. We did have some noticeable pathologies, mostly girls, however. One girl, Rose, had a total freak-out attack one day and started crying and manifesting. She was sure her friend was going to die or be killed. I was part of a class called GATE, where we talked and talked and talked about I still don't know what, and some people did wierd things in that class to get attention. Two of my classmates died, Chris and Christie, and one teacher had a special discussion of it and drew the connection between their names, Christ. I wasn't listening until she said that, so I'm not sure what she was trying to say. Most of my time was spent sitting at the big round table in the back of class and scrubbing dandruff out onto my Peechee folder.