Novel: A Thousand Miles Out of my Mind

Colin is a spoiled North Dallas brat who thinks that happiness is just one mishap around the bend, so he steals a car and hits the road in search...of something. And something is just what he finds when, thinking he's picking up the girl of his dreams, discovers he's been kidnapped and forced to drive his own--albeit stolen--car across country so his new companion can live out her Elvis Presley centered fantasy at Graceland. Available now at Amazon https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1942956924/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Ambivalence in the Time of COVID

 

Grant Sisk

 

Ambivalence in the Time of COVID

 

At first it seemed like so much of the news one gets these days, Klaxon headlines and all the breathless, over the top rhetoric, visions of doom and gloom, on and on, the endless loop. I didn’t really think so, as people have been eating bats for as long as there have been bats. And people. Then again, maybe it was captured and encouraged to thrive in a controlled environment as is the case with so many of us these days.

After the virus escaped and went travelling and went jet-setting and went snowballing it was another thing entire. I locked my office door for the weeklong spring break and never went back.

In fairness, working from home wasn’t—initially—all that different; ninety percent of what I do I can do from anywhere on the planet if there is an internet connection, my laptop and coffee. Or whisky. One had to be careful during the ensuing days that stretched into weeks and then into months of videoconferencing on a multitude of platforms; no two groups seemed to use the same one and soon I became familiar with them all, as I also became familiar with colleague’s kids and animals, spouses, lovers, all drifting in and out of the camera’s eye, some intentionally, some repentant, others shocked and left to stand gaping like a latter day Adam, Eve or some conglomeration thereof into the blindness wrought by their world’s first sunrise. Mostly, we all just checked out what we could of each other’s houses and apartments like voyeurs, laughed at the awkwardness and little tech or proficiency deficiencies, such as one colleague who’d forgotten to “Mute” his microphone relieve himself during a break in the discussion. At least he flushed. After my first videoconference was over, I looked around, cast critical eyes at my home office, then began to move this and change that…staging for the next meeting. I also came to enjoy having the ability to turn my camera off and lie down on the sofa for a quick nap. I’ll miss that when the world reopens.

Later, it got worse. The meetings began to stretch in length but contract in frequency. Five one-hour meetings a week gave way to a three-hour video-thon on Tuesday and then nothing until Friday. We yelled at our kids, our spouses, cats were slapped from desks, dogs howled plaintively from behind locked doors. And there were other things. Sometimes we turned off the cameras and microphones entirely, left them that way for unhealthy periods of time, events unfolding unknown and unheard to the others who chatted glibly about projections, plans of action, the virus, accounts receivables, the return to normal, beginning to learn by degrees that everything was lurching towards an accounting. I began more and more to notice people’s affect, the ones who were engaged and chatty, and the others, whose cameras eventually went dark. Friends and colleagues in China with whom I had worked for years, whose homes I had visited and considered friends were guarded and to the point; we’d become strangers once again.

Outside of the house it was better and easier to handle. I’ve always been both restless and healthy and wasn’t overly concerned for myself, but I have elderly parents who rely on me for necessities such as yard work, groceries and company, but mostly company. That and traffic—or the dearth thereof—must have been a too great temptation to resist. I don’t know of course; I figured resistance was futile, so I didn’t try. That said, I really did try at first not to enter their home but it was no use and besides we share the same religio-fatalistic attitude, sort of a “God will do what God wants and anyway if it’s bad I deserve it” mentality so we dropped all pretense of quarantine in the strictest, really any, sense of the word. My dad was going stir crazy too and so we began to make daily trips to the farm where he grew up and where I run a few head of horses, using a lanky,  grey gelding we named “Maximus Silver Bullet Tall Boy” as our main excuse. From the very start we couldn’t remember the whimsical name we’d layered upon him on and started calling him “Huh?”  We’d picked him up on a short jaunt through the country to look at another gelding just as the pandemic was spiraling down into Texas. A casual glance out the truck window and there he was, fetlock deep in mud, penned up next to a double wide where he was being systematically starved to death by the owner. We eased the truck to a stop and just stared, wondering why anyone would do such a thing.  We paid the lady 130.00 dollars because she said that was what she had in him, loaded him in the stock trailer and that was that.  

Back at their house my dad and I would sit on the back porch as evening dissolved into night.  Smoking cheap cigars, we’d talk about how nicely Huh, a.k.a. “Maximus Silver Bullet Tall Boy” was putting his weight back on, owls, politics, the virus, the farm, his parents and grandparents and extended family, anything, everything and so on for hours and at leisure I never had before with work, its deadlines, my problems. We talked a lot about this new virus, this COVID-19 and how for some reason the world seemed so locked in terror and yet, it was like a legend you hear about but never really, truly encounter. Sitting there I thought about how life is always a mixed bag, the good enjoined with the bad and that if it hadn’t been for the virus, like so many people everywhere I’d have never gotten to spend this time with those I love,  my dad, mom, sister, my wife and her kids, my mother-in-law and my son, which is to say “family,” that group of people most of us say are all important in our lives; important we say it I guess, because we so rarely show it.  It occurred to me that with every loss something is always found.

Travelers

Oftentimes, in unexpected and unusual ways the past has a way of catching up and when it does in some painful or unpleasant way, I retroactively reconnoiter in an attempt to discover exactly at what point in time the decisions I made or actions I took set in motion events that led to whatever outcome. Sometimes it's not hard at all. I was aware as I was doing it and so, like jumping onto a moving train, the repercussions and changes they heralded came as no surprise. However, that's not what I want to write about tonight. Tonight, I want to write about the future because my son, Logan, and I are about to jump off a platform onto a train that is moving very fast.

At this moment there is an eleven year old South Korean boy named David Lee hurtling toward us across the Pacific Ocean, seven miles high and close to 600 miles per hour; he'll arrive in Austin late tomorrow and then he'll come to live at our house for the next three months. There are reasons for this.

Though eleven seems startlingly young to me, Logan's school routinely hosts foreign exchange students from SK. This past Monday, the Principal sent out an email to the effect that there was a desperate need for a family to host David, as he was about to board a plane and come over and so far, no one had volunteered.

Ending the Year

I dreamt about my grandfather again last night. Though he died almost thirty years ago, he still appears regularly in my dreams and last night’s tracked most all of the others I have of him. He’s always the same, in his late seventies, active, fit and interested in whatever is going on, which is a far remove from how he was at the end, broken in body and spirit.


In my dream I was driving a red truck that had been sitting up for some time. After getting it up to speed, the thick layer of dust had blown off to reveal the old and spider tracked paint, patterned with minute hairline cracks like an impenetrable, organic labyrinth sprung from the slow passage of time. I drove into and finally through a howling

A Small and Perfect Gift

This year I woke to the first white Christmas Texas has seen since 1926. As I was beginning my drive from Austin to Dallas, fierce head winds sprang up from the northwest and the weather deteriorated rapidly into the kind of instant storm we sometimes get in Texas. The wind was gusting to forty plus miles per hour, snapping off road signs and hurtling icy rain punctuated with snow, slantways across the highway and into that variant beyond which is a highway's only constant, so fiercely that keeping my FJ-40 Landcruiser on the road became my sole focus. By the time I got to Dallas snow was general from there on north and west, but I didn’t expect it to last, because it almost never does.

My parents have a bungalow behind their house which is where I stay when I’m in town and when I arrived, dad had already built a mesquite wood fire and it was nice to drop my bag and

Among Other Things, School Buses

Disclaimer: No children or small animals were hurt during the research/creation portion of this essay.

Yesterday, while taking a load of Kindergarteners to Buda TX, to visit the Fire Station, I wrecked the school bus. My upbringing left me saddled with an above average amount of guilt, so it's my nature to take the blame for things—even when they aren't my fault—and in this particular case, it really wasn't; I was following the hand signals of a very nice, very earnest young firefighter and he guided me right into a fire engine. More specifically, he guided me into one of the engine's side view mirrors that are about eight feet off the ground. I want to be nice, but in retrospect, I really expected him to pay attention to all of both vehicles, not just the eye level parts.

It's really not hard to be understanding when the vehicle—or as in this case vehicles—you've wrecked are not your own, but still

All My Friends Are Gonna Be Strangers

It's Southern Decadence week in New Orleans and I'm standing on the wrong end of Bourbon Street surrounded by literally hundreds of sweaty, horny, and very drunk gay men. Here, there’s a six foot six cowboy who’s built like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime and wearing only a straw cowboy hat, pointy toed cowboy boots and a black leather jockstrap. There, a matched brace of youths that might weigh in at buck thirty five a piece in matching sailor hats and white briefs. They’re singing "Anchors Aweigh" and seem very patriotic, albeit in a rather unconventional way.


It’s swelteringly, tropically hot and love is in the air, in the street, in the bars, the alleys. Am I uneasy? No. Am I straight? Yes. Am I offended when some men hit on me and some don't? Not exactly, though I do wonder why. Primarily I’m impressed with the sheer force of abandon with which these boys are partying and at the same time amazed at how well groomed the majority of them are. During beach season one year I tried to thin the hair on my chest with an electric beard trimmer, but the results were not as I see before me tonight. When I finished I didn’t look any the better, in fact I looked as if I had mange.

In any case, though dwelling on the past is as inevitable as it is futile, one needn’t dwell on the worst of it. I turn to why I even have the capacity to stand here and take all this in and it’s this: Georges Bizet and The Dallas Opera.

A lifetime ago, after college but before grad school, with no idea of what to do or who to be, I impulsively auditioned to be a supernumerary, a non-singing extra in the Dallas Opera's production of Carmen. The interview consisted of sitting down with the diminutive stage director who expressed relief when—after inquiring if I had any acting experience—I answered “No.” I told him I considered myself completely free of any opinions on acting, productions, plays, and anything else theater related.

“I couldn’t stage a coup in South America,” I quipped.

As he looked me over for a long moment I expected to be shown the door. The he broke the silence. "That's good," he said. "You have no idea how trying these bitches with a little experience can be."

It seemed sensible to agree, so I did and that sealed it. In short order he gave me the run down: rehearsals were every night for two weeks, afterwards there would be four performances: Friday night, Sunday matinee, Wednesday night and Saturday night. He paused before delivering what many in my position must have received as highly offensive information.

“The pay is five dollars per night.”

He may have taken my silence as the preliminary stages of shock. “Per night,” he reiterated. “Not per hour.”

I shrugged my shoulders and said “Sounds great.”

He pursed his lips and continued. Though vital to large productions, supernumeraries play only a small part and are always expected to do exactly what is asked, nothing extemporaneous, nothing additional and “No acting!” We were scenery. Even so, we were expected to be polite scenery and call ourselves and each other "supernumeraries"—or “supers”—as opposed to the trade slang “spear carriers” as that was considered a derogatory term. Upon entering the room I had noticed

Arachnophobia Past and Present

Logan is crouching over the shower drain with a homemade spear, waiting for me to pour the gasoline. As I tip the can and watch the source of many of the world’s problems sluice down the drain, I have the irrational thought that a Sewer Cam would be nice so I could monitor the situation in the septic tank.

As a single dad I know I don’t always set the right tone for how to live, but I mean well and though I’d like to think today’s lesson is something like “Meet your fears head on and if possible, be armed,” I think in reality it has more to do with my past than it does his future.

For the second time this week, Logan has come to whichever room I’m in and calmly announced “Dad, there’s a scorpion in the tub.” Both times

Al Dente

Al Dente


Each summer here in Texas that as the heat climbs, the rains stop and the temperature builds at a truly ferocious pace, I increasingly find myself standing trancelike on my front porch. My mind travels northwestward, through the pecan groves and the oak stands, the mesquite thickets, skimming over the Brazos, Pease, and Red rivers, further and further, leaving the cotton fields of the panhandle behind and finally soaring over the wild, high Texas plains and the deserts of New Mexico. This goes on for days, and for days I shake that vision off and I shake it off until something clicks—or snaps—and I recognize what I knew all along; there’s a long drive in front of me.

As with many of my lifelong habits, this started innocently enough. One August day a few years ago I got a phone call from my friend Evan Voyles, who is one of the strangest and most wonderfully interesting people I have ever met. We first met in Abilene, TX. I lived alone in a small stone house on College Street; Evan had a small house too, but shared his with four hundred pairs of custom made cowboy boots he'd collected from all over the Southwest. In addition to his boot collection, Evan also trade in Navajo blankets, antique firearms, knick-knacks and old neon signs, the kind you see advertising hotels, department stores, long defunct products such as Bull Durham Tobacco, Four Roses Whisky, AM radio stations, greasy spoon diners, in short any of the old, quirky stuff that that was

Terrae Cognito

This an old essay, one that Stephanie G'Schwind of "The Colorado Review" was kind enough to take after offering some much needed suggestions resulting in many, many revisions. It is in the CR 2004 Summer Issue XXXI. Check them out at http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/.



Terrae Cognito



Lately I’ve been digging up parts of my family. I’ve returned after an absence of many years to my father’s homeplace, a hundred acre farm/ranch in the southernmost section of Collin County, Texas where my grandparents lived until they died. As many of the generation who came to adulthood in the fifties, my dad—realizing there was no was no future for him there—lit out for the city as soon as he could.

The house itself was not remarkable in any architectural sense, as are some of the stone houses found in the hill country and other parts of the state settled by immigrants from the northern European countries. Aesthetically it was—and remains—little more than a two-story box, cobbled together to provide shelter from the elements, and little else. But filtered through a lifetime of memories, some mine, some provided by my ancestors, it was the axis upon which my paternal family revolved. Each Sunday we would all convene there for lunch, and my grandmother—Minnie—would try to make herself heard over the din of clattering utensils to apologize for again serving the same meal: fried chicken, mountains of mashed potatoes, lakes of cream gravy, okra fried in cornmeal batter, homemade biscuits, corn on the cob, green beans, all washed down with sweet tea and followed by meringue pie. Unless she let us eat cake. To the best of my knowledge, with the exception of the tea, flour and spices, everything we ate there was produced on the farm. Thus, when in elementary school one of my teachers accused me and some accomplices of behaving in the old cliché—specifically running around like a bunch of chickens sans heads—I knew, perhaps better than she, exactly what she meant.

To the casual observer, the only thing remarkable about the house is its position relative to the road that runs into town. Unlike many of the other houses in the area—most of which are now gone—my grandparent’s house was on a dirt lane almost two miles from the main road, a fact that during rainy winters frequently necessitated prolonged periods of isolation. I’ve often heard my grandparents and others claim that the farm is on the highest point of Collin county. I don’t know if this is true or not, but standing in the yard one has an almost panoramic view of the surrounding countryside, so I guess it’s true enough to make for another curiosity: unlike most of the other houses I’ve seen in the area, theirs had no storm cellar. Perhaps after spending weeks mud-bound at the end of that long bog of a driveway, being sucked up by a tornado headed for oblivion seemed a prospect not entirely dismal.

Meanwhile, back in the suburbs, life at my parent’s home was like it was for many other middle class kids growing up in a city in the late sixties and early seventies; staid, placid and predictable. We ate supper at seven and watched the Vietnam War on the news. My friends in the neighborhood