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.
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Journals Fromthe
Time of the RadarDog
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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
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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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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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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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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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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.