Am I Bad?

The subject comes up from time to time, in episodes that sometimes take days to pass. It comes to me when I'm writing my memoir, my third attempt to put to paper what everyone tells me is a fascinating life. It surfaces in the microscopic details I have to employ to help recreate on paper what lives so vividly in my mind. Sometimes it seems like ages ago, another life. But such feelings are cast aside by the realist in me who is immoveable, rigid, and stubborn. The truth is that no matter what the circumstances, no matter what outside forces influenced my decision to act, I should have known better.

My father, brother, and I, robbed jewelry stores in New England for close to five years. The cap we said was enough before we'd stop kept getting bigger, a hundred thousand, two, a million. Some of the robberies barely netted us a few thousand, one took a month to plan and an hour to execute, all for a few boxes of catalogs. Others were huge, blanketing every available surface in our house in gold, gems, and cash. I thought I knew lust's allure when I discovered what other uses there were for the old back massager I found in our attic as a teen. The day I rolled around on ten thousand dollars in cold hard cash made that seem like an itch in my pants.

During those robberies we beat a man, duct taped two of them to wooden chairs then left them to fend for themselves. We shoved loaded guns into all their faces and threatened their lives. And ironically, one was killed after we chose not to rob him. A week later someone put a bullet in his head for the same reason we were only going to cuff him to the bathroom sink while we cleared out his store.

Today I'm clean, living a quiet life, on a tiny island, where people go to die, is how a friend describes Nahant. I prefer it that way. Considering where I could be. My brother is behind the wall for two more years, bringing his grand total to ten. Dad served 11 and a half of his twelve years. He's retired, collecting government checks, and living off his retirement fund.Prison never leaves me. It haunts my dreams. Part of my desire to see the memoir published is so the world can judge my father. I realize my head is on the same chopping block. But I offer it humbly, or so it may seem.My therapist tells me guilt in the absence of a crime is neurotic. What about guilt in the presence of one? He also says there are no bad people, only people with greater or lesser degrees of mental health. It took me a long time to allow these ideas to rent space in my head, let alone come to some understanding of what they meant.

Am I bad? Sometimes it takes convincing.

Cultivation with intent to distribute

Dreamer. Drifter. Lolligager were the words that described me best as a teen. I blame it on my drug use. Excuse it away with a joke that I only have two brain cells left and they don't get along. With every joint a little voice in the back of my head whispered a wives' tale that every hit deleted brain cells as efficiently as my backspace button deletes the awful sentences I write. Case and point:
My room was deplorable, clothes scattered everywhere, an intricate system where each pile represented a degree of dirtiness from soiled to slightly smelly. Surface space was sparce. Dust piled high. The room stank of cat piss from the abandoned cat my sister brought home. He resided in the attic ajacent to my room and emerged every night to defecate under my desk. Mold spawned in patches from the food I discarded. The shades were forever drawn. Dank slathered the walls making it hard to discern their actual color.
It was early spring. I rolled a joint. Some seeds must have fallen on the rug, into some primordial ooze, because they sprouted. The next day three spaghetti looking strands squiggled in between the grooves of my shag carpet.
I gathered them with the fervor of a god, feeling omnipotent, the giver of life, and scurried to the backyard where I knew there were clay pots and dirt. I gingerly set the sprouts on the picnic table and scurried to the garden and filled one of the pots with topsoil. In complete darkness I submerged the ends of each sprout in a finger sized hole and cradled the pot while I carried it back to my room. The next morning I woke to the nourishing rays of sunlight bathing my sprouts. I was elated.
I needed a bigger pot for the rest of the seeds I fished out of the cellophane baggie of weed. I planted five more in a giant fish bowl and set them in the backyard to bake.
I thought briefly of what Mom would do when she saw them. The pot seeds were hers, from the buds I plucked from her stash. Her silence was assured in the threat of me saying out loud what we all knew when her bedroom door was shut and the sweet smells of sinsemellia wafted through the kitchen. Mom was getting baked again, time to make cookies.
In no time I had plants with thick green leaves, like the ones I saw pictures of in High Times Magazine. I never read the articles. I just looked at the cool pictures. But mine looked more like sticks than plush bushes. I cradled them and carried them across the street to my neighbor, a body shop mechanic with a master's degree in botany.

"You have to separate the males from the females," he said while shooting me a look that exposed me as a fraud for trying to pass them off as exotic posies.
"How do I tell?" I asked while lifting the leave of the tallest one, looking for little green testicles.
Another look, this one exposing me as a dumbass, "The females flower. And you can't let them. If they flower, they die." he said while traipsing off to wrestle the venus fly trap he fed with Miracle Gro, the one capable of eating small children.
"How do I stop it from flowering?" I shouted.
"Prune it," and he was gone, Indiana Jones style, machetti in hand.

So while I looked up what prune meant in the set of encyclopedias I plagiarized school papers from I decided to consult the High Times Magazine.
In the question and answer section someone asked, 'I heard my urine is good for my plants. Is this true?'
The editors answered yes with a lengthy explanation that I ignored. I pruned the females, extraced the males, set them aside to dry out, and stood over the remaing females like a pervert getting ready to deliver a golden shower.
I put head to pillow dreaming of plentiful, red veined buds. Not only was I going to be a self sufficent stoner, but I was going to get rich off of whatever I didn't smoke.
Dreamer, Drifter, Lolligager woke the next morning to the sight of my freshly pruned females wilted and brown. Some of them were speckled in black spots. They looked like they contracted the plague.
I revisited the article and read it through. The words 1 part per 100 jumped out. One teaspoon of nitrogen rich urine to each gallon of water.
As I smoked the microwave dried leaves, a headache rumbling like storm clouds in the reccesses of my head, I crossed off botanist from the list of potential careers. All that was left was space cowboy, or writer.

P-Y-N-K

He's a little bit of a thing, faded and pilled, with red dots from the sheets. And he's lost that new bear softness. He's a pink and white baby Gund. I can't seem to find another, not that I'm looking. I sleep with him every night, nestled in the crook between my chin and chest. I fall asleep on my back but inevitably flip to one side. He either gets tossed and re-gathered when I get up to pee, or he survives the turn and is spooned, cradled, and held tight to me. I am lost without him. I'll turn on every light in the house if I can't find him but he's always under the bed or my girlfriend snags him. She has her own, a replica of a bear she had as a kid, but she is gluttonous and hoards all the bears. He is irresistible, so beyond mild agitation, I can't blame her. I bought him at FAO Schwartz in Boston and he has become a MAJOR player in our relationship.

I slept with a bear early on, Bob, a panda stuffed with little styrofoam balls. I know this because after he disappeared I found his lifeless body near the trash bin in the garage, a place I wouldn't visit for all the candy in the world. But I was distraught. When I picked him up his body felt limp and liquidy, his one eye glimmered with the eternal blue flame of the water heater. I think the trauma of that event might have sworn me off getting close to any other bears. Although there was a coarse, flame red, chicken, embroidered with green and yellow sequins my grandmother brought me from Poland. But he lacked panache, was completely unsnuggleable, and made my skin itch the same way the insulation in the attic did whenever I snooped for early Chrismas presents. It was only later in life that I understood why Mom called him asbestos chicken.

In my late teens there was Monium, another panda, I'll let you figure out why I called him that. But he was way too big to sleep with and brought back flashbacks of when Mom used to prop me up in a pile of stuffed animals with my bottle, safe and sound, so she could go mix a drink and chain smoke. I have to admit even in my late thirties, freakishly large, novelty, stuffed bears freak me out.

At Plymouth State College, where I majored in drug dealing, altered states of consciousness, and drunken makeouts, I had a brown bear, but someone bearnapped him and he was never heard from again.

Which brings me to P-Y-N-K. He is alive, in me, and speaks through me. You could say I channel him. He is his own bear. With his own personality. He loves crunchy fish, fresh kitty if it's sliced thin and is really lean, and has recently had to stop eating squirrels due to their high cholesterol content. The genesis of his voice came from when I used to live with my mother. She kept ducks in a pen under the porch and bunnies in thier own cage further out in the yard. In the morning, following strict written orders to feed them and give them fresh water, I'd often find the ducks loose and lounging under the bunny cage. I was only a month or two into my sobriety so I'd sing to them in a cute, squeaky voice I knew only they'd understand:

Bunnies and Duckies
Bunnies and Duckies
Bunnies and Duckies
Just don't mix.

Because then they'd be

Dunnies and Buckies
Dunnies and Buckies
Dunnies and Buckies
That's a neat trick.

And so now he lives with us. He waits patiently for us to fall asleep on the couch and wake up in the wee hours, trudge up the stairs, and into bed where I'll joke if I can't find him, "Pynk is probably out fighting crime." Either that or Rachel snagged him before I could.

The Rara Calculator

You've reached for one, whenever you can't quite figure out the plus, or minus, hundred in your checking account or when you're trying to figure out that pesky interest compounded over a fiscal year. I'm talking about a calculator. I need one the second my ten fingers and toes fail me. But what about that mental calculator, the one we use to weigh risk against reward, the one we say those emotionless sociopaths seem to be born without.

Some of them are simple, like mine. Right plus wrong, should I times shouldn't I, consequence squared divided by impulse. Others are way more intricate, like Rachel's. Rara's calculations are a unique mix of calorie worthiness, morality, general safety, pleasure, and emotion. Nothing as neurotic as planned spontaneity, or three months salary socked away, never to be touched. Hers has a special button, one marked with a symbol that mixes the above criteria into one, comprehensive, educated decision. (We men avoid that button in favor of the one we think calculates logic but in the end we'll just end up doing something crass like spelling boobs with 80085).

We were on roller blades when she calculated the breeze in our face plus the adrenaline rush and minused out the missed weeks of work times piles of unpaid bills if she got hurt. (She's the bread winner. I can do my job from a wheel chair if need be). One quick press of the equal button and we were back home, unstrapping those aligned wheels of death and opting for a nice quiet night sipping wine and eating organic dark chocolate from the safety of our living room.

My Mom used the same calculator only she had what I called the Fuck It button, a manual override. She'd look at the last entry in her check book, the one that read -.78, and pull out her credit card, wave it around and say, Fuck It.