Kicking Up Dust.

I L I K E D the firm feel of the Adirondack chairs on her back porch. Always did, from the very first time the group of us hung out there, after hours, smoking, drinking, daring the rain to return.

It was just her and me today, tonight.

I watched my old beagle run playful circles around her giggling 2-year old daughter in the yard, both of them stumbling a bit, undaunted. She perched the boom box in the kitchen window, Bebel Gilberto playing, the smooth beat all South America and smoke and sex… a christening.

I don’t usually listen to this kinda stuff she said, flopping easily into the other chair. But now that she heard it, it made her feel happy, she said, like wanting to move and wanting to stay perfectly still at the same time. I smiled broadly, dared the lightest touch of her hand, then took another sip off my heavy glass of Jack Daniels and ice, looking away.

I took a great long inhale: The whiskey, the jasmine in the breeze, the cinnamon of her suddenly so much closer than yesterday. Sometimes things change, I nodded to myself, because they’re supposed to. Stars go nova thousands of light years away which somehow causes tides that pull people to the other coast of the country for reasons they are only beginning to understand.

My dog and her daughter frolicked. Crows took over her stately maple in a bloodless twilight coup. I followed the line of the yard’s redwood fence with my eyes as it fell away with the slope of the yard, into the darkness behind the garage. I thought of the sinuous line of her naked back, just six impossible hours ago, in her bed, the rest of her mystery hidden under the sheet. I had watched her then, while she slept, both of us groggy from the orgasms and the lightning bolts of discovery.

D I A L telephones, I blurted.

What?, she said, almost spitting her beer.

Dial telephones, busy signals, VHS tapes, you know, that kinda stuff, I said. All those things from my youth that I don’t know for sure you even know about, or if you’ve ever even heard of, I told her, leaning forward, the glass balanced on my knee. My kids don’t, I said, immediately regretting it.

She looked at me for just a second, quickly turning away, covered her mouth with one hand, and held her eyes tight shut for a long minute.

Breathing deeply, concentrating, another pull off her Budweiser, finally opening her eyes again.

Look at them, she laughed through misty eyes.

My dog was on her back, rolling in the grass. Her daughter, ecstatic, laying right next to the beagle, imitating her, grass stained and wiggling carefree.

Look at her, she said. When she’s 12 or 16 or 20, all the things she’ll wake up knowing how to do, things you or I have never seen or even heard of, things that haven’t even been invented yet.

She turned to look at me, smiled. Life is always going to be like that, she said.

She put her hand over mine, on the arm of the Adirondack chair.

She said, I don’t give a fuck about your dial tones or her… inventions. I want to just… be. Be with…

A long pause.

Be with this moment, now. I heard it even though she never said it.

So we sat a few more minutes, the branches of that giant tree now framed black against the last oranges and purples of the Oregon sky. Crows flew off to go wherever crows go at night. I closed my eyes, felt her get up, touching my shoulder going by, heard her picking up her daughter.

Time to get you to bed, little miss, she cooed, touching their noses in a kiss as she gathered her up.

She passed me to go into the house, as I imagined her and I on a dirt road we just joined, walking backwards slowly, trying to understand where to go at the fork by studying the dust we’d kicked up behind us.

It was a moment of pregnant silence until I realized she was holding the back door open. Waiting. Frightened. Expectant. Fluttering.

Smiling.

i'm on the balcony with [a] Perfect Reflection

Trying to find the right pressure at which to hug someone is not an exact science. Too much said clingy, too little said you didn’t care. So I hugged her as she sat fully clothed on her faux satin bedspread, still in her smart downtown businesswoman dress wear, legs dangling and kicking as she sobbed about her new apartment, the one she just realized was made for one, not two.

I buried my head in her hair and like it always does the smell reminded me of the first time we brought wood to her old place, muscling it up three flights at her complex, lumbering the dolly up one stupid little concrete step at a time. It had been the first time I tasted her outdoors, leaning her up against the pickup in the gravel driveway outside her parent’s house, lost in hot breaths and clumsy fingers going too fast. I remember the hair, how it smelled… purple… and smoky, a mysterious fog hanging over the bog waiting for a sun that never came to burn it away.

Breakup Machine

[First broadcast April 14, 2014. I was 52 at the time, and finally agreed to do one of these shows as a favor to a friend, whose daughter was a production intern on the show...]

Buckley: When did you write 'Breakup Machine' ? That was one of your earlier, I suppose that is to say, a bit more.. uh, 'emotional' pieces.

Me (laughing): You could say I enjoyed my own drama back then, whether that was good or bad, it helped me become a more, uh, balanced person, I guess. And up until that time, I had been an, uh, unwitting proponent of that whole Dionysian ethic, where you could really only create unless you were in pain, and the best way to do that was to, uh, conduct your life like.. uh, conduct your life in such a way that you fell rapidly in and out of love, which connotes a certain machine-like precision that you have to conduct relationships under.

Buckley: So what does that entail?

Me: Turns out it's a wee bit self-destructive, Bill. (chuckles) So by the time I'd written, well, when I wrote 'There She Was Next To Me,' for example, just two years later, I had come to a point where that sort of, uh, entropy if you will, breaks your body down. So thank God I was forced to take a look at that from a physical standpoint. I don't know if it's karma or luck, I don't really care.

Buckley: I've read 'Breakup Machine' many times over the years, and it always strikes me as dark, then more dark, then intensely dark, hopelessly darker still, then ends with such a... oh, a concession to..... to what, exactly?

Me: I didn't figure that out myself until years later, but it's truly a love song, all the way. This person I was back then, trying to convince myself that love didn't exist, or at least the kind I had just lost, because it was the only way to survive the pain I had chosen to have in my life at that point. But this... machine/man spends his entire life convincing himself that there is no higher purpose than teaching someone to live with pain, and then finally realizing in the end what's he lost himself. And luckily, the real me--- and many other people from the mail I still get on this piece--- many other people woke up before it was.. well, at least before it was too late.

======
[Here is the original piece, 'The Breakup Machine,' in its original form. It differs a bit in length from the version that appeared in 'Nomad Hotel,' the 2010 compilation from Random House, but preserves my original intent as well as can be expected given that editors care more about money than words.]

I am the Breakup Machine.

I was not conceived, fresh from the womb, as the Breakup Machine.

I spent 10 years on the Golden Path of mediocrity with a woman who I knew, deeply in my sinews and circuits, was not right for me. We scraped like sandpaper and all the time I hit those spiky barriers that pop your tires.

The time spent began to teach me the price of not being my self, the Breakup Machine.

I spent another 10 years in relative happiness, bliss even. We sprang from the ruins of each other, re-programmed ourselves to feel, to bleed, to take sledgehammers to our concrete, to grow flowers and food and watch it blossom in spring.

Then in the End, there was still the End, all the more wrenching for lack of a scapegoat. Simply a summer that faded to the beautiful death-red of autumn, then its inevitable successor, a winter that tasted like gunmetal, convulsed me like dry heaves and tore my tears from me in cataclysmic waves triggered by the landmines of remembered bliss. Oh how we romanticize the past.

By way of explanation, I have played plenty of poker and found it to be true that if you’re in a game for 10 minutes and cannot find the sucker, he is you. Therefore, if there are two people in a relationship and you’re not the one breaking up, well………

So I became me. Perhaps more accurately, I discovered me, inside all along.

I developed the ability to break up with anyone, at any time.

I slept with people while knowing nothing more than their name and the fact that most times one of us had a cock and one a pussy.

I made hundreds of breakfasts of eggs, bacon and no doggie bag and no you cannot have my e-mail address. I walked out hundreds of mornings after hundreds of coffees and hundreds of times yelling back over my shoulder that I would not be back, ever, and relished the burn of the mark each one of them tried to leave on me, as if their confused stare or their squinting enmity would linger somehow.

Once just to see how it felt I left in the middle of a fuck, wet and hard, down the middle of the street, dark naked with my clothes balled up in hand, dancing in the halogen moonlight;

I looked deeply into hundreds of pairs of azure eyes, hazel, green and black eyes. Impassive and resolute, I mouthed the words that made the brains behind the eyes fire the pattern of neural synapse jumps that embedded the message into the cerebral cortices of their owners that left no doubt that I would not be back and the decision was final. Time is the fire in which we burn. I did not blink. I did not cry.

I still do not cry. Ever. Because I am the Breakup Machine.

Then I began to understand that I was teaching them, too. About impermanence, the illusion of security, the nature of self-reliance. All truths, all learned harshly or not at all.

So the Breakup Machine found a 5th gear.

I started cultivating longer relationships as long as I could think of how I would break up by the first time I’d looked into their eyes or smelled their perfume or touched their blouse. I began scanning them for insecurities, mining their family histories freely shared, listening rapt to their relationship stories and weaving intricately beautiful tapestries of Breakup. I took my job quite seriously…. An offhand endearment on a third date, a seemingly out-of-character blowup at a restaurant six weeks in, an engagement ring hinted at but never produced, a confession to a sexual deviance whose image could never be erased, a deal-breaking character flaw created in myself and hidden, then outspokenly vocally revealed at a gathering of her family, these were the raw materials from which I hammered out the Breakup---

Such stories I had, such artistry created, all these women my unwitting canvases, so many pages in so many journals about so many me’s, running from one to the other with my magic wand, all of them innocent as babes being kissed ‘pon their dewy heads, until they shook the fairy dust off years later, coming to the inevitable conclusion that what does not kill us only makes us dangerous and unbalanced, and in so becoming, stronger.

I am a teacher. I am the Breakup Machine.

But then something happened. The Breakup Machine met a woman with whom he could not break up and she dismantled the machine, carefully setting each of its parts aside until she found the warm beating heart inside and touched it with her magic and they lived together in the new-found bliss of….

Sorry. Nice try. This isn’t that story.

The first part of that actually happened, though. The Machine did meet The Woman, she did dismantle the parts, she did find the warm beating heart. But by that time, I am the Machine and the Machine am me. I believed my own stories, told for so long and with such satisfaction that what had begun as an exercise in the painful need to evolve the species, had become me. Tendrils of copper wire, fiber optic, network cable, neural relays, indistinguishable from cartilage, sinew, bone, brains, muscle. It became a literal truth:

We are the Breakup Machine. The two of me, the one of me.

Reaching my perfection. All the parts and pieces set carefully aside by the Beautiful Woman, coalescing on their own back into one unit, segments of a symbiote seeking each other with the inexorability of gravity and death, until, shaking off the after-effects of the reintegration, we stood up, took the woman tenderly in our arms, and with blank black eyes and a mouth which spoke programs of electric binary, asked the woman

“Do I know you?”

We both learned some very painful lessons that day. She never thanked me. None of them have ever thanked me.

Yet I have given so much. Given up so very much.