I failed. I wrote this piece. It was well developed and into the final editing stages when I realized I failed.
It was about how awesome I am, starting with mom and her chainsaw sculptures, dad getting stuck in the power lines again, hanging by the strings of those old round parachutes. I wrote about how I was a competitive fancy dancer, driving to pow-wows, fighting with Cu-Nu for sitting on the steel cooler that Gramma called an “ice box.” It fit neatly between the two front seats of the pea-green Volkswagen bus, full of nothing but ice and cans of Budweiser. The only thing that interrupted that front row seat, those rolling views of the world was when Gramma or Grampa would ask us to get one of those Buds. Stand up, open the cooler, and reach our hand in from the heat of the summer to get a can, chilled down to near freezing.
In a failed interlude, I wrote about Cu-Nu. He was a fancy dancer too. Cu-Nu always won the dancing. But I won the beer cooler rights in the V-Dub more than he did because they were actually my grandparents, I remembered. I wrote that me and Cu-Nu were huge fans of Micheal Jackson and Bill Cosby, which would look terrible in print.
Grampa Kil would press a cold can up against his forehead against the heat, then put his forearm on the low-angle wheel while he popped the tab. Time and distance measured in Budweiser. A six-pack to the Queens County Farm Museum or the WMCA on 14th St. A twelve pack to Connecticut. Barryville, southern New Jersey would be a case. Two cases to North Carolina and five to Oklahoma.
I wrote about how when back from pow-wow I’d go to the New York Yacht Club, about how I skippered the 1992 Russian/America’s Cup boat around New York Harbor. I did actually write about that. It felt good but I failed. Confusing. I imagine, to readers. I’ve been listening to music lately. I get giddy with the influence of music. Also podcasts by this guy from Limerick who wears a supermarket bag on his head named Blindboy. I feel a new confidence that I’m not convinced isn’t false.
Samuel Beckett was right, “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
I wrote that life in the Hamptons was actually pretty tough, that I was the first person to be arrested and jailed in the new Southampton Village police station that my dad designed, charged was resisting arrest. I deserved the time behind bars though, not for the oxymoronic and ironic situation of getting arrested for resisting arrest. I deserved time behind bars because right before I walked out of the Irish Pub in the Hamptons and got arrested, I ordered and drank a Black-and-Tan followed by two Irish Car Bombs. I’m sure if I actually sent that off some editor would notice the totally insensitive and horrifically ignorant drink orders, and that if that got printed, everyone in Ireland would hate me. I wrote that I raged against the machine inside that cell.
I mean, ick.
Many great writers failed. Lee, Twain, O’Connor, Fitzgerald, Selby Jr. I’m sure they did. But just like me they were clever and awesome enough to realize when a story failed. That’s why we’ve only read the great stuff.
I mean, there’s my friend, named Jesus.. I even wrote about him. Jesus is alive but he’s been better. Jesus loves my soup and saved me once during the big budget production of ------- -------. He saved me because years ago he ate my soup and he liked my soup. I had forgotten completely about Jesus and he just marched into the room and said “Dylan you made the best soup I’ve ever had,” and gave me a big hug. I hope Jesus is happy. I really do. He had a stroke and he’ll never be able to tell his own story. You can’t send that in. Too much baggage.
I wrote about how once I submitted a paper titled Anal Syntax and Big Diction while I was living in Gerry Lopez’s old Pipeline house behind the giant Banyan tree. Todd Chesser had just died. An economics student who looked like Curt Cobain gave me liquid LSD before class and I drove north through the pineapple fields to surf OTW. I was supposed to write my take on the novel Infinite Jest but I was more interested in heavy petting with the local gangster’s daughter. That part I liked but it did sound like I’m trying to be Hunter S. Thompson or Bukowski or something.
All these writers try to write the Great American Novel and it can’t be done in a book. I didn’t write that, but I should have. I should have written about how the great American Novel can’t be a book. But it can be in music. I should have written that Bob Dylan wrote the Great American Novel already and it’s six hundred songs long.
It’s just I’m so dam happy. I wondered if this happens to everybody. I’m middle-aged, over inspired, overstimulated, and my wife says there are things wrong with me. I wrote all that too. And nobody wants to read about happy characters, and everybody’s wife thinks there is something wrong with them.
I wrote that I hi-fived Kelly Slater after coming out of the best barrel of my life, him saying “nice wave,” my head swimming in LSD. But it wasn’t like that time when Slater hi-fived Machado during the Pipe Master’s finals. We high fived, like, when we were almost back out, so it was something that already happened except not as dramatic or cool.
I wrote about the time I sailed to the British Virgin Islands and a customs agent would not let me on land until I cut my white-boy dread locks off.
“Dreadlock is not some trendy hairstyle,” he said. His head was bald and he wore a badge. His breath smelled like bacon.
Jah save me, I nearly sent that in.
I wrote all that and I was going to send it in but then it’s festival weekend. I don’t go to the festival, full of teenagers and bad music. But I can feel the buzz, so I head to Eryc’s house. I have a wife and a kid so it’s a special big deal to go hang with your friends.
I tell Eryc my stories. He tells me his. He’s honest in the same way that it rains all summer.
Salmon comes over. People call him Salmon because his family have been poaching salmon for a thousand years. I call him Salmon because he’s the only dad around that can swim faster than me. He’s got mini bottles of poitin in his socks and we enjoy it, sweaty ankle temperature and all. His girlfriend can’t get a cab, can she come over? Eryc says yes, so long as you don’t wake his kid.
A middle aged woman walks in, not the usual young festival goer. Obviously I don’t know Salmon beyond the small talk at the pool while swimming. When she walks in Salmon deflates like a knifed waterbed. She walks in and tells Salmon to shut up, him having not said a word.
Holy Moses, I thought.
Eryc is chatting to Salmon. Calm. Salmon’s freckles have a backdrop of deep red. His eyes are a deep dark like space between stars.
I do the small chat with the girlfriend. Her name is Oonagh and she’s from one town over. I say how great Salmon is and ask how long ago did they meet.
“I’ve been with him for twenty years.” She says it like she was talking about prison.
I know Salmon has at least one kid. Because we talked about getting rid of worms. But I didn’t know if was Oonagh was the mother.
“She’s the mother of my kids,” Salmon says.
Eryc knows what kind of train is coming. Eryc knows and understands. He knows Salmon. He’s kept Salmon's pain with him. Eryc tries to change the subject, to derail the train. He thumbs at me “Dylan is a good dad.” I bask in the compliment. Eryc’s truth is built into his atoms like carbon. Me, the guy who wrote and nearly sent in an article about how great and happy I am now that I’m middle-aged, said, “I have a lot of fun with him,” meaning, of course, my kid.
“You’re lucky,” says Salmon, but sounds super bitter.
“We are all lucky,” me having just finished the “I’m so great,” article.
“Not us,” Oona says. “Our son used to be normal, but now he’s not.”
I scoff. I cringe for scoffing. I cringe like when I think of the time when I was ten and kicked my dad’s ancient dog for being in front of the TV, for smelling bad, for being something a ten year old could kick because of arguing parents.
“Normal?” I say. “What does that even mean?”
“My son,” she says. At this, Salmon bursts. Tears. Eryc hugs him in the way you hug your friends when you know their darkest secrets. “My son, at four years of age, stopped talking, and then he stopped moving, some rare condition.”
It was right then I knew I failed. What I’d been writing for a month. I failed. Me trying to convince my readers that I’ve suffered enough will fall totally flat.
“We had another kid too and this one…” she leaves the sentence there. Her stone face looking at me, “While him,” she sticks a thumb at the sobbing Salmon, “On drugs.”
She went on, “Both needed life support at the same time.”
“Valiums. Ten years of them,” Salmon goes, still sobbing.
The Salmon of knowledge eats the pain of the poet. Eryc there, holding him. “Blubbering now,” she says. She goes on, giving details of the degeneration of the brain and muscles. “The doctors asking me if I wanted to turn off them machines. I had to make decisions”.
“Alone,” I say. I now understand the undercurrent. The hurt and anger there.
Oonagh’s face was a stone with fake lashes. She looked at me. I thought I could say something great. Something monumental. But Oonagh blinked and got her fake lashes stuck together. She passed out in her chair trying to get them unstuck. Salmon still sobbing. Him shocked with her purge.
“I’m so stupid,” Salmon says.
“There is no such thing as stupid,” I say. I tell him about Howard Gardener and his theory of multiple intelligence. About how we are all smart in different ways. Eleven different ways.
They have two children that can neither move or speak. One born that way… but the other, happy and healthy and fun as our kids. Four years of that and then… I keep going, I tell the Salmon of Wisdom the theory I learned while failing to write.
I learned what happiness is.
Your ideal self, who according to you is the best version of you, the sexy, witty, athletic, suave, organized and relaxed you that does not exist. The actual you. The lazy, fat, aging, smelly actual you, exists. The space between the ideal you and the actual you is called the actualizing tendency. The shorter your actualizing tendency, the happier you are.
I’ve spent a long time failing. Long enough to realize what Beckett did. That to do this well, failing is essential. My ideal self fails all the time, so my actual self is close. My space is short. I tell this to the Salmon of Wisdom, that his actualizing tendency is long, and the way to lasso it in is to support and share the burden with the woman passed out in the chair. That there is no way out of suffering. Only a way to be happy with it.
Salmon sniffles. The sobs have stopped.
