Sleep paralysis a couple nights ago. First time in a while. The dark figure in the doorway. Its skin is red and black, I know, though I can’t see its face. Only imagine. Nothing is visible, really, except the image my mind projects. I can’t move, can’t breathe. Just wait for it to end. 

I’ve learned to squeeze my eyes shut, tight tight tight, to try to wake myself up. It’s really the only thing that works. 

In high I would try to move my legs, or raise my arms, twist my shoulder. It started happening so often that I started to try to fly. To “lucid dream” or whatever. I always thought that was a load of shit, but people say they do it. I only managed to do it once, and it felt like i was in control for a minute, darting out the door of my room and through the house and out into the open air, but then everything was black and i was sleeping and I woke up gasping. 

Eventually I took to squeezing my eyes shut, or imitating the motion in my brain, in the hopes that I would squeeze them enough so that my eyes would snap open. It wasn’t the not moving that bothered so much as the not seeing. Always been visual. It’s how I learn, remember things. Images, handwriting, letters and numbers. I don’t know what I would do if I ever went blind. 

More than anything it was really the end that I just couldn’t get down with. 

The noir, murder mystery atmosphere and expertly woven story and the creative and unique language choices grabbed me from the start, which is why I felt so unsatisfied by the ending. Something was missing. By the end of the book I was left wondering: has anything really even changed at all? 

With relatively minimal backstory, the reader is dropped into the world of the story, taken for a ride, and then yanked back out (a technique which I love). At least that’s what I was expecting and hoping for, but, alas, that wasn’t the case. Rather than be yanked out of the story, after bloodshed and drugs and more bloodshed, we are gently placed at the stoop of Ree’s porch to study the horizon and imagine what the next adventure is. A children’s book ending to a gruesome story. 

The last word, “wheels”,  leaves us with the image of Ree embracing freedom and seeing the world as her proverbial oyster, when in fact nothing has really changed. More people will be killed, more crank will be cooked, life will go on. Dead dad or not, Ree is not free and most likely never will be. She is tied to these mountains just like everybody else. Does she know more now than she did before? Yes. Will life change drastically for her now? No, probably not. At least not for a good while. Working your way up from the bottom is no easy task. And yet we’re left with thoughts of hope and feelings of closure. It’s off-putting, considering the story is nowhere near closed and life for Ree is hardly any more hopeful. Generations have lived and died without leaving the Ozarks, and it will be no walk in the park for Ree to be the first to jump ship.

Of course there are going to be questions at the end, but the ones posed just don’t feel realistic. It’s a storybook ending that sweeps everything that just happened under the rug – just another folktale, and they lived happily ever after. Please. A weak and tacked on finale to a captivating and mysterious and beautifully written story. 

Men think with their minds, women think with their hearts. That’s what a friend of mine used to say, and I used to believe him. We looked out at all the beautiful, dark-skinned flacas strolling up and down Broad St,, with their boots shorts and spaghetti straps and Dominican flags painted on their cheeks, banners and streamers waving everywhere, the smell of roasted meat and Spanish rice thick in the air, and I knew that the welling in my chest and the smile on my face didn’t have a damn thing to do with my mind. But who was I to say.

Heart, mind. Mind, heart. Of course our hearts don’t feel. Then why do they hurt so good? Why did my ex double over and clutch her chest when I told her we can still be together, I’ll just look at you differently? Why did she keep saying my chest hurts, I can feel my heart breaking? The heart and the mind, man.

That was the same one who had two kids at twenty two and a star around her belly button that the second one gave her. I give her hell ‘cuz she gave me stretch marks, she used to say. But she loved her kids, even she was worried about her son becoming a faggot – a concern that brought her very close to tears once – because he was growing up around only women and his voice was high and and soft and he was a real nice boy, gentile to the touch, and a little bougie.

He was a kid that needed a man around, in the words of his mother. She used to ask me to hang with him, watch the games and talk to him and all that, try to get him to like basketball and stop watching My Little Pony. His mom got her nails done, changed outfits five times before leaving the house, had a weave or a perm most of the time, used to get down in the living room to that bullshit they play on Hot 106 and his sister was the cutest damn thing you ever saw, so what did you expect? He was a lady’s man. A man of women, women who needed their little man to to become a man, a man who was hard and who didn’t g.a.f., who was cold and about his money and who hit first, or at least harder, and who would hit his girl if she got an attitude, maybe just a little bop, or a big one, but hey, that was Kingstree. That’s what men did.

Last I saw he was still a nice boy with a shy smile, skinny and tall like his mother, rocking a polo that was a little too small.

Haven’t heard a peep from her in over two years now that I think about it. Probably won’t either. Not that I want to, it’s just weird to think that there was a time when we talked every day, when I knew her in and out, and now there’s just a girl out there who looks like her, a girl I used to know to the bone that I’ll never see again, who has probably already changed so much that we wouldn’t have anything to talk about.

Joan Didion writes in a matter-of-fact, journalistic style, sprinkled with some cynical humor, not always discernable as purposeful or not, in short, to the point pieces that each contribute to the overall narrative. The length, rapid-fire nature and lack of unnecessary transitions between essays draw me to this book, and reflect a kind of style that I often draw upon in my own writing.

Some memories are short-lived, snapshots, some are longer, spanning days, weeks, months, and I think that often stories can stand alone no matter the length, whether a sentence or fifty pages. And I appreciate the notion of leaving it up to the reader to connect one story to the next. Because, really, that is how memory and trains of thought operate – there is never a voice in our head that narrates the transition between memories we visit and thoughts we explore.

So far, I especially enjoyed her recounting of the time she hung out with The Doors, and the segment about the life and death of James Pike, American. Though I know little about Pike, or his mother, I can only imagine the kind of household James grew up in that ingrained in him the sense of entitled exemption from commitment that Didion describes. A single son raised by a single mother – mama’s little angel, granted the world and all its spoils.

I never much cared for religion, so it gives me a certain amount of satisfaction, albeit malevolent, I admit, to picture a good little Catholic boy, swaddled and smothered and spoiled, walking out into the desert expecting to experience some kind of spiritual enlightenment only to be met by the blistering, unforgiving sun winking up at him from the bowels of his empty silver spoon. A morbid and spiteful thought, I know, but I can’t help but feel some amount of satisfaction and glee, the spoiled brat.

Poor guy, though. After all the preaching about heaven and hell, he ended up rotting and being picked apart by buzzards and insects, alone, dying, most likely regretting everything that happened in his life that brought him to that final resting point in the desert. There is no heaven or hell, if you ask me, only biology, and he must have had quite an eye-opening closing ceremony when he realized that. Maybe he should have taken his head out of the clouds. I guess I could say that about a lot of people.

Joe and Wendy spoke to each other, or rather, Joe spoke and Wendy responded, Joe being the young, charismatic black man raised by strong, patriarchal men, and Wendy being adopted, a young Asian woman raised in a white household, with a quirky demeanor and a slapstick kind of humor. They sat in her car one day after school, smoking, Wendy thinking about grades and exams, Joe already seeing the light, the end of his high school career that would end prematurely without much consequence.

Wendy had no doubt already stolen and pawned some of her mother’s jewelry when Joe told her: you have to do this, and this, and this differently, and look at that this way and so on, the kind of lecturing his father gave him.

“It was just a necklace and some earrings,” Wendy said with a giggle, per usual, and Joe no doubt felt he owed her some fatherly advice, the kind he was given by his father.

Schooling her to the truth, he called it. What school? The streets, I suppose, hard knocks, no books. What truth? Well, the truths of life, of course, the truths that he was taught – the way we talk and walk and see the world unfolding as a series of events, which we later reflect on and consider and maybe squeeze a lesson out of, where to go and where not to go, where not to go alone, who not to talk to, when to run.

“You can’t just flash all that jewelry around, all that cash,” he finished his thought aloud, to which Wendy without notice wrinkled her nose and felt the familiar flush of heat in her cheeks whenever someone told her what to do, and then laughed.

“Whatever,” she said, irritated now the more she thought about it, the more she knew he was right, but who was he to say? He wasn’t her dad. Her dad wasn’t even her dad. Who was anyone to tell her anything? No one. But she has to know, Joe thought to himself, that it’s dangerous to be out in Olneyville and Hartford in a car like hers, looking like her, dressed the way she was dressed, toting around gold and diamonds like they were nothing.

“You have to be careful,” he said, and thought back to the time when someone had pulled a lick on him and he was sincere in the fact that he didn’t want that to happen to her, so he kept talking and she kept brushing him off, a collision of worlds that barely knew each other, the two of them. I don’t need this, she thought. She needs this, he thought.

What he didn’t think about was as much as his father had shared with him, all the long car rides and late-night talks about life, school, girls, sports, the truths, secrets that Joe, Sr. wished he had known and that spurred his enthusiasm as a father, knowing he would prepare his son far better than his father had prepared him, despite all that, Joe didn’t think about how much he learned on his own, how much he had needed to learn on his own, and how little advice really does when pre-emptive as opposed to retrospective, especially at the age that they were.

Anyway, here we are, Wendy thought. It doesn’t really matter anymore, “I already sold them, don’t worry about it.” She heard the words come out of her mouth, but she was already past it, over the conversation, over Joe telling her what to do.

He was serious and she wasn’t. That was the root of the problem. She hated that everyone was so serious all of the time, because really what’s the use – it was a thought that entered her mind often, when she hiccupped or tripped or stumbled on her words or said something outlandish and misinformed – what’s the use in being so mindful of every goddamn thing you say or do? Doesn’t that just take away from the impulsiveness that makes life so interesting, the spontaneity that breaks the monotony of this mundane existence, history lectures and parental guidance, rigid schedules, deadlines, routine? She shuddered at the thought, something so confining as a routine – dear God, strike me dead – because what else do we have besides the excitement of the unknown? Lord help us, the incredible boredom of those who value a structured life: parents, adults, baby boomers, the corny old fogies, phonies, lonely behind their picket fences. Ick.

She pictured a shadowy hand, hairy and pale like her father’s, turning the knob on a gaslamp, and the knob squeaked and stuck, but his grip was firm, and the flame grew smaller until it was a crescent of blue burnoff clinging to the wick, gasping and thirsty, and was out. The wick smoldered, a cherry, a kernel, a wink, and smoke swirled and spiraled upwards into darkness and she swore she would never live that way. To bring order to the madness would be blow out the pilot light, poof!, no more.

“Where are we going?” Joe heard her ask, and he rushed back into the car on Broad St., which was turning on Eddy, and he couldn’t remember where he had been just then, but he remembered that Chi had just gotten out of class and would be expecting them to pick him up. The three of them, the car, the after school bliss. They might end up at the water, at Roger Williams, in the parking lot at the end of Swan St., on the Eastside in some shady, wooded nook. Somewhere in there Amory would jump in. Thus was the daily routine. They were the crew, the car their ship, and they sang the shanties blaring on the radio as they sailed through the corridors of Providence, free at last from the confines of their respective prisons.

Barry Kimm passed on April 8th, 2014, four days before my birthday, and nine days after the death of his wife, Susan. When Susan was diagnosed with cancer, the two of them dropped everything and took a road trip around the country, seeing everything they had never had the chance to, documenting their travels and taking photographs, their shared talent and passion.

Susan passed on March 29th, and Barry soon followed, taking his own life, unable to live without her. The memorial service for Susan became the memorial service for both of them. They lived as one and died as one.

The man himself never meant much to me. I’m fairly certain that he never knew of my existence, nor was I aware of him for much of my early life. As a child, the idea of my biological father wasn’t anything more than a blurry figure in the distance, static, unimposing, and unimportant. Until the young man who would eventually raise me introduced himself, the only form of fatherly love that my infant mind had grown accustomed to was my grandfather’s, and I lived the early years of my life in blissful ignorance, devoid of any notion that there might be have been someone else out there with whom I was inherently connected.

My acknowledgement of the “missing-link” within me coincided with our move across the country. At eleven years old, still afloat in the euphoric ignorance of pre-pubescence, I found myself riding shotgun in a blue 1994 Honda Civic hatchback, packed to the brim, as my adopted father steered us further and further away from everything I knew. We departed Olympia, Washington in the summer of 2003, en route to Providence, Rhode Island, a 4 day drive if your pushing it, and a journey that I would become well accustomed to.