Journals From the Time of the Radar Dog

Pat Lawrence

BlazeVOX [books]
Buffalo, New York

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 reproduced withoutthe publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Book design by Geoffrey Gatza First Edition ISBN: 1-934289-56-6 ISBN 13: 978-1-934289-56-3 Library of Congress Control Number : 2008920498

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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 thumbing through them more recently.

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 out of. 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 From the Time of the Radar Dog

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

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, where the 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 slowly digested 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 me something 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 sink and 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 the first 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 his slamming 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 over the 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 flatstriped 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 with strong 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 my pockets. 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 they swung, 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 waveridden. 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 or school 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 set by 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 mornings going 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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