Allegory

I am sitting in the back off my truck watching airplanes take off from the Burbank Airport. The irony of this is funny to me. I have never been comfortable seeing low flying planes. It makes me un-easy to see thousands of pounds of metal take flight into a sky that was never intended for it. In just a few miscalculations metal and flesh can become a flaming ball of wreckage and there is not a damn thing you can do while you ride it into the ground.

Even more disturbing is the sound of the engines preparing to take off. It is a sound that has come to define me as a person. It is consuming me right now.

I am standing in the kitchen speaking to my friend. I am composing myself because my daughter is sitting in front of me smiling at me. She calls me Poppa with food on her face and milk on her hands. She does not know what I am hearing on the other end of the phone.

“Josh I took him from all of you. Its all my fault.”

Engines roar between my ears. They started at low hum yesterday when I read the bulletin. I saw that there was something wrong and I spoke softly to myself that I hoped everything was okay. As I first heard those propellers powered by jet fuel in my temples I remembered the past six months or so. I remembered all the times that this beast of a sound took over my head. I remember back to the first time it took its hold on me…

“Joshua, I don’t think that you and I should be together anymore”

The engines have been turned on. They are revving up and everything behind me and in front of me fades into a black, tarry mix of night and tears. This is the beginning of a great many things. Those engines are screaming now, and the ground is shaking and the air is filtered and distorted from the heat that the turbines are giving off.

All of this. In my head. In seconds that feel an eternity.

In the following weeks I changed. I learn to roll with the punches and decide that if I can through this I can do anything.

Regardless of that I stumble. I falter in ways I didn’t know I could manage. Apparently I am good at all sorts of Fuck-Uppery. I prove myself the weak pile of flesh that I have been trying to hide for so long. Pathetic. Tiny. Begging for another chance.

I drone along at work and at school. I write and stare at images and videos on the web. I work in an office but I do not shave. I do not tuck in my shirt. I do not cut my hair. I do my job to the extent that Tyler Durden did his. “In Tyler We Trust”.

“Did you or didn’t you?”

Engines ready

“I did”

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Please grab your ankles and kiss your sorry asses goodbye.

The engines are at full throttle, and I am tearing pictures and paintings and photos from the wall. I am anger personified. I am what happens when you think your life is going just fine, forgetting just how fallible even the most important people nearest to you are. I am strapped to the wings of the plane as it takes off. It is just that loud in my head.

I am standing in front of my classmates, and pretty much the whole school. I am giving my final portfolio presentation. My clothes hang off me after losing too much weight. My face itches from hair that should be shaved off. I looked forward to this day for so long. I wanted this day to be the start of a new life. My little family in the back of the room smiling and waving to me; what I have built, what I have created, witnessing all that I have worked for come together in the form of cheap photoshopping and commercial art.

Instead of my family there is some Douche Bag asking if he can take his slice of pizza to his class because his 3D animation project is due in a week. I wonder how long it took him to blow dry his Morrissey hair, and how much those dirty looking jeans cost him at Diesel. I wonder if he knows that one of our classmates is fucking his girlfriend. I smile at him as he leaves.

“Josh can you see me in my office please”

I tell Christa I have to go meet my boss. She has been consoling me nearly everyday along with Joe and sometimes Erich and I chat randomly. We are chatting via AIM. She is telling me I should go out, have fun, get laid, be a guy for once in my life. I tell her I’ll give her a call when I can. In spite of a 3 hour time difference she listens to me because we both have children. We both had families once, and we both deal with our exes in our own ways.

“Josh close the door please”

Engine lights? Check…

“Josh I hate to say this but the company is cutting costs and I am going to have to let you go.”

Louder the engines get, and my face burns. I think about not being at work, and where I will go after this. I wonder if it was my fault and how the hell am I going to make ends meet in the coming days looking for work. I say goodbye to the ones that matter to me, and the others have already been laid off due to the poor real estate market.

I go out and grab some coffee with Muerta and talk.

In months I am freelance. I am broke. I am giving advice to people who are facing the things I am living.

“How are things with you and Rukh?

“Erich is amazing Josh.”

Christa and Erich are falling in love. They speak all the time and when that is not happening they are chatting or messaging. I don’t understand it, because I had love once, and I don’t have the ability to handle something like that again.

I manage odd jobs for odd people. Vanessa struggles to make ends meet in the wake of my recent lay off, and an unwilling job market. I get dressed everyday as if I have a job and I go to interviews, and submit resumes, and present myself in a manner I think suitable. I have nothing to offer the world at this point. No drive, no skills to speak of except for the ones I forced myself too learn for a family that is broken and gone from me. I keep going though for fear of what might happen if I were to stop.

“You should come out here Joe. What the fuck are you gonna do out in Colorado when you want to make films”?

I should listen to my own advice. What the hell do I know?
He will do it in his own time. I want him to know I will badger his ass till he does it though, just so he understands that I care.

Joe Gish is in love. He is building from where I am now. He is so much like me its gay. The day I met him I understood him, and where he was. We are two self-destructive motherfuckers.

Erich and Christa have met and are so deep into each others minds there is no going back. I wish I could have been there for the first time they actually met in person. I wanted to see sparks like that. I wanted to say that I was there to see two of the most hopeless romantics become this ridiculous force of warmth, and smiles.

Both have been ears to me, and words to me that no one will ever know. I have become more secretive of late.

“Erich is moving out here to live with me.”

We talk about this. I hope it works, and I hope they are happy. They both deserve to be happy. All they want in this world is to be in love and it shows.

Time goes by, and I manage all sorts of trouble. All in the name of the single life that I was thrust into unwillingly, here I am and I might be getting the hang of it. I don’t write as much, but I drink a lot more. I smell like Parliament lights and Pabst Blue Ribbon when the budget allows (which is not often). I listen to music I didn’t know I still had, and I get rid of the music that began to define a certain point in my life.

I appear out of nowhere and focus on only a few things. Me. Emma. Me. Emma. Me. Emma Emma Emma Emma. I have never loved anything more than fatherhood in my entire life. It is the only thing I wake in the morning for. It is the one thing I feel I can do well. The only thing that makes me happy is this.

I begin to wonder if I have spread myself too thin. I begin to wonder if I have popped up into old scenes at the risk of people not knowing exactly why or what I am about. Part of me hopes that this is okay. All I know is that it causes more problems.

“I don’t think we can be friends anymore.”

Those fucking engines again.

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you over the sound of the 747 that just crash landed into my fucking skull”

I pack up my stuff because it’s been a busy day anyway, and this freelance gig is coming to an end. I wonder how Christa is doing, and I wonder when Erich is gonna move out there and make Christa the happiest girl in the whole world.

It’s been months. Anniversaries that used to matter somehow missed my calendar completely. I was never good at them anyway. Birthdays I don’t care to recognize come and go.

I am working a processing gig. On my breaks I listen to my mp3 player and watch the planes take off. They shoot into the smoggy sky and disappear over the Hollywood hills. They come in and circle the San Fernando valley. “The Valley”-Porno capital of the world. I see myself in the windows and don’t recognize who is looking back at me. I walk around and try to remember what I am learning. I am penniless and eager for my first check. I am trying to cut down on my smoking because I don’t want Emma associating nicotine with her daddy. All I think about is me. All I do is try to make me better. I have been doing this for months.

What a selfish fuck.

So much time has passed. So many things have changed. So many perspectives have been skewered. Lives have molded into things I didn’t know they could become and I find myself wondering about Joe. I think about Christa and Eric. Christa knows things about me I didn’t know about myself. She was the first to see it.

Her words were always so soft and always careful but they carried a weight in my head. They always hit their mark and linger in my head like delicate perfume. We correspond she and I, and I wonder when we will talk again about how things are going all the way out on the eastern end of America. I wonder if she and Erich are okay.

“Josh I took him from all of you. Its all my fault.”

Her voice isn’t just soft right now. It is frail. It is weak from effort and the thought of why it is so difficult to speak cuts me to the marrow.

“Christa don’t say that he..”

The crescendo of these engines blast louder in my head than they have ever before.

“Josh he didn’t make it.”

I want to sit down in my seat. I want to grab the arms of the nearest chair and dig my fingers into the fabric so deep that my nails snap backwards one by one. I want the tips of my fingers to be bloody stumps. I want to let my eyes tear up and I grit my teeth and shake and quiver and yell. I want for one moment to look like a man in the Electric Chair shaking and writhing from the anguis of what I am hearing.

“He didn’t make it?”

Emma smiles at me between bites again, and it is the most beautiful smiles I have ever seen her give me.

“No Josh.”

I am vapor. I am mist. I am shallow and low. I couldn’t hold anything close to me for longer than it took for me to fuck it all up. I have been spending all my time trying to find myself, and cautiously soul searching while others watched me decline into a state of near insanity.

For what?

My brain for so long has been working without a soul behind it.

When you have put your brain on autopilot, your body becomes the Yes Man to the Corporate Assholes of your mind. I have allowed that to happen. I have forgotten what it was to love. I have forgotten what it is to feel with reckless abandon.

Not Erich and Christa. They met, corresponded, fell in love and he went out to live with her and be happy. They found each other at a time when none of us knew what to do with ourselves. Among failure, and weddings, and babies being born and jobs being lost there was Rukh and Tiffa falling head over heals for each other.

The plane is leaving the tarmac this time.

Christa has another visitor and she must go. She asks me to call her back. She makes me promise to call her back. I am crying and hiding it from Emma. I am shocked but I don’t want Christa to know, because if she gets excited the nurses will not let her receive calls.

“Promise me Josh”

“I promise Christa I’ll call you in 15 minutes.”

Flames and anger, metal and turbines, rubber and sky meet in my mind.

“I love you Josh.”

This is the moment that shatters me. I have not thought of Love in any way for a long time. I have not been able to say it to anyone at all, in any real honest capacity be it friend or otherwise. My dearest friend Christa says this and I realize that I might not get a chance to say it to her again. None of us can take something like that for granted.

Erich didn’t take it for granted. He went out and grabbed love and held on and now he is gone. I think of Erich. I think of his smiling face from pictures and his voice online and his messages to me of encouragement. I think of how he just went with his gut.

It takes my heart less than a moment to start beating again for the first time in months.

“I love you Christa, I’ll call you. I promise.”

It was easy to say because for the first time in this new life of mine I am able to mean it. I feel it, and it feels as if I am not just hearing the airliner take off, but I am standing on the runway waiting for the landing gear to tear me to bloody shreds.


Men like Joe and I (he and I have since agreed) are the ones who should have been taken. We are the ones who should be gone. We are the ones who were so low we took life for granted. Erich should be here. Not me.

My heart is done pounding out of my chest, and I have composed myself. All I can think of is Erich. All I can think of is Christa in the hospital and the awful details she gave me.

These engines are fading away into the distance. They came with static and they came with lights that blinded me. They are the sound of breaking. They are so loud in my head that I wince at the sight of the phone as I push “End”. The engines are the allegory for change on a scale I am not yet ready to handle and they are burning so hot it feels like the world is on fire.

Emma is done eating. I pick her up and hold her and tell her that I love her till she falls asleep in my arms.