Well, not “ring” rings, it’s more of a ringtone explosion. It’s Cherry Pie by Warrant.

The campaign manager pretends it isn’t happening and buries his head in his laptop. The driver, a fellow in his 60′s, a Vietnam vet with three kids and seven grandkids, he rolls his eyes behind his dark sunglasses and wishes he was still driving Carrot Top around. That guy liked good music.

“Sheez-mah-cherry-pie-cool-drink-of-water-such-a-sweet-surprize!”

The guy they call The Conduit looks down at his iphone in the American flag rubber wrap to see who it is.

This is what he sees:

GOD CALLING

He lays a finger on the SILENCE button. I can’t right now, he mumbles in his mind.

But. Then it hits him.  Dang it, I better get this, he figures. He‘s gonna see me if I toss him right to voice mail.

The Conduit adjusts his Bluetooth, makes a little sucky-sigh, lays the phone on his lap and hits answer.

“Hey Boss,” he says, half-heartedly.

The voice on the other end is Danny DeVito’s. Except it’s not. It’s His voice and He’s upset.

“Don’t hey boss me, Conduit, we got problems, big problems, big fat hairy stinky problems, Conduit,  and they’re getting under my skin and you’re down there parading around in your silly outfits and shaking hands and eating griddle cakes in greasy spoons with people who don’t even like you but they  wanna be on CNN for two or three seconds of their life if they can and so waltzing up to you and shaking your dead fish handshake while they try not look at the orange juice pulp stuck on your lip is the only shot they’ve got at getting on TV.”

There is a pause. The SUV rolls ahead, under the green light.

“Are you hearing me, Conduit?”

“Yes Boss, I certainly am.,” the Conduit/the candidate says. ” But when did I have pulp on my lip? Is that something where you could send me a sign somehow to me let me know? Maybe float a doughnut across the room or…”

“STOP TALKING C! Don’t worry about the cotton-pickin’pulp right now! I need you to listen hear and listen good! Capice?”

“Okay Boss, I’m all ears.”

“Good. Now, I looked into a 7-11 in Albuquerque the other night while you were watching Planet of the Apes on Showtime, which is pretty great by the way. Where was I? Oh yeah, I was peering into a 7-11 and they have all these condoms for sale in there and I was like WTF?!?”

The SUV rolls past a school, with children out playing at recess.

“I know, Boss. I know. It makes me sick inside,” the Conduit interrupts.

“Right. And so then I was reading this article on the Daily Beast or somewhere and it said that some people are thinking about putting contraception pills in vending machines!!! Whaaaaaaa? Is that real, C? Is that for real?”

“Not if I can help it, Boss” blurts the Conduit. “Not when we win this thing and rain down some hot lava judgement on the land!,” he says, getting worked up enough to knock the Bluetooth thingy out of his ear.

He scurries to stick it back in while God is mid-sentence.

“…..Betty White or Angelina Whats-her-face or somebody with some snazzy Hollywood juice! Can’t you get anyone like that, someone to help you get the message out that this is all wrong and there’s gonna be some real fat bolts of lightning to dodge if things keep going the way they’re going?!”

There is a sigh from the Conduit’s lips.

“We have the Catholic church, Boss. That’s no Betty White, but it’s something.”

“No no no, man, those guys give me the skeevies. They won’t help us. What about Clooney?”

“Uhmm, I don’t think he likes me, Boss. Or our message, to be honest.”

“Hmph. Pitt?”

“Well, same deal.”

“The Gosling kid?”

“I think he’s a Lib, Boss. They all seem to be committed to all of this choice and equality and justice, sir. It’s frankly pretty darn disheartening.”

There is a silence down the line.

The Conduit’s palms clam up.

“You ever notice something, C?” the Lord asks.

“What’s that, Boss?”

“You even notice how all the handsome ones, all the pretty faces, all the dashing movie stars and starlettes, they all seem to be Libs?”

The Conduit says nothing.

“Maybe we’re doing something wrong here, C. Maybe we got it all wrong. I mean those books are really old, and to be honest, man, I’m not even sure who wrote them?”

The Conduit is dizzy.

“I gotta go, Conduit,” says God. ” Don’t call me. I’ll call you. And by the way, it’s me who puts all that pulp up on your lip, fella! It’s so funny! OkayGottaRun!”

The line goes dead.

In more ways than one.

You could leave tonight on some two week package tour and when you got back home, tired and all bloated from wine and pressurized cabins, me: I'd be forty years old. Go ahead. Go ahead and dip your crusty bread in the shallows of olive oil under the rustic beams of Tuscan's better joints. Go over and walk along the streets of gay Paris with your lover or your partner or your grandmom, I don't care. I'll still be here when you get back.

Fly out tonight if you want; if you can. Seize the goddamn day already and get out there in the German squares. They'll be decked out in all their Christmas glory by now. Hell, they probably have been for a week or so already. Sip some beer from a mega-stein in a cathederal's shadow. Have a bit of mulled wine with your piping hot brown sack of Euro-chestnuts. Buy some shit, some hand-painted Kringle Klause ornaments for your tree back in the states. Let loose for once. Enjoy yourself.

And when you get back: I'll be forty.

I don't know why but age never really occurs to me all that much. I mean, I just don't find myself thinking about it often. Most years go by and for the most part, at any given moment, I'm thinking about, like one of three or four things. You could swish down out of the heavens on a bluebird May afternoon, or some wintery gray morning, and circle my skull three times and then just slip into my earhole and fly back into my Department of Thoughts and the first thing you would see, I guarantee you, would be either a fat trout jumping out of the water/ my kids playing in a field of fresh clover where I have never ever been and neither have they/ various stupid things for sale on Ebay that I am probably going to buy/ or my wife in a tight, white wife-beater, black Chucks, striped knee-socks and these baby blue short shorts she got from American Apparel like six years ago.

That's it, really. I mean, c'mon, that's obviously not everything that ever registers in my brain, but it's pretty fucking close, I'll tell you that.

And so sometimes I get to wondering where exactly my mind should be at 40. What should I be thinking about? Should I be thinking about my health? Because, to tell you the truth: I really don't that much. I go the gym sometimes when I can, but probably not as much as I should. And I know the reality is that if I really had the willpower/the gusto, I could be getting up at 4am and jogging down the country lanes in the dark, like a lost deer with a wafer full of iTunes clipped to my bicep. But I don't do that. And I don't even think about that.

What about money, like finances and stuff? I should be considering those things I know. I should be planning my investment strategy and watching my shares in this and that rise and fall, huh? I ought to be squirreling away some Benjamins too; for the kids' college. Or their bail. But, somehow I avoid thinking about that and instead, when I could be micro-managing my 401K I'm pretty much holding Henry in one arm and motorboating on his ear while I use the other hand to work on stupid shit, like my Amazon Wishlist. If Amazon Wishlists ultimately paid off some kind of weird dividends, man, I'd be set. I update that thing daily, sometimes hourly; the very tides of my immediate existence reflected in the perpetual adding and deleting of swarms of fishing poles and miter saws and paperback Thomas Hardy novels.

There are days when you could be monitoring me from your secret spy cam tucked into the bonsai plant on the living room table, watching my ass with your friends all gathered around your computer screen/drinking beer and laughing, and you'd be mortified as you witnessed me put my baby son down onto the floor to play with the electrical cords from the tv and put big tumbleweeds of dog hair in his little mouth just so I could delete the first two seasons of Mad Men on Blu-Ray from my Wishlist because I don't know if I even really wanna waste a wish on that shit or not. And, then, a half-hour later, you and your buddies would be screaming out loud: OH NO HE DITTINT! as you watched me put a spoonful of Gerber goo on my baby's nose, aiming for his lips but missing big because I'm not looking at him right that minute; I'm adding Mad Men back to the list.

I spend a lot of time outside my skin. I get out a step ladder I keep out behind my heart and my lungs and I climb up on it and crawl out the window of my face and I walk over there, maybe ten yards away and just watch. I watch me and try and clock exactly where I'm headed, who I'm becoming. Maybe there's a name for that sort of thing, but if there is I don't know it. What I know is that I stand there in the corner watching me do my thing and it's hilarious and sweet and trivial and monumental and maybe even tragic too, but it's way too early to say, I hope. 

But I stand there and I watch closely. There I am: fucking wading in the chest-high waves right off the coast of forty years old. Look at you, you husky squat bastard: walking around the house, in the early morning, pushing Violet in her high chair, across the floorboards real fast, making NASCAR engine sounds as she raises her hands in the air and lets out a high-pitched shrill thing that could kill a coyote dead; parking her there in front of the tube, way up high over her little brother who I got sitting down beside the coffee table in his pink chair, sucking on a bottle of his expensive powdered hooch; her taking her first bite of toast and honey as I pull up one of the episodes of Mickey Mouse I recorded on the DVR/ pulling it up in the nano-millisecond before she's about to look at me with a mouthful of food and ask me for just that. Reading her like a book.

Reading them like some super badass book that you can't find on any wishlists because there's only one copy in the history of the world since it was a drop of syrup plunging down through cold dark space a zillion years ago and you already own it.

You already own it like a motherfucker.

So, yeah. I'm not worried. I think about the wrong stuff, I guess. And I waste time sometimes/ a lot of times.

But in all seriousnes: my toast and honey?

It's like swallowing forty years worth of God's personal pecan pie.

What happens is this, really: I'll be driving out there, looking at barns and mountain ridges and maybe some cloud animals; daydreaming about stuff; maybe glaring at the cars zipping by to see if there's anyone interesting over there: any college chicks who wanna have four second eyeball-sex or maybe a Where's-The-Beef old lady barely peeping out over her steering-wheel: someone I can snarl at and drill holes in her left temple with my glare as she chug-a-lugs down the road at the speed of kicked Jell-O.

I'm there in my own little world, just driving along/not bothering anybody, and then out of nowhere Violet is on fire, crying and blowing bubbles of aggravated snot, kicking her feet, chucking chipped Goldfish crackers and raising a ruckus and then that scares the sleeping Henry, of course, and sure enough he erupts with his own torturous aria and then, Shazam:  Monica will unsnap her belt and flip herself around so she can get a knee up on the vinyl arm rest and fling herself into the back, to try and referee the chaos, and in the midst of all of the noise, all of the screeches and gurgling sobs, I imagine a way out.

And within seconds, as my wife is back there in the middle of the ring trying to sedate the beasts with a soft song about a Peep Squirrel or some shit,  I am taking my fingertips and slipping them up under my upper lip. I push my fingers and then my whole palm and my wrist up in there, my knuckles slipping in  against my soft wet gums, my aluminum wedding band tapping off of the base of my nosebone, and with one swift yank, I go ahead and just pull my whole face off of my head while I casually lower the power window with my elbow point.

I throw my face out of the car as if it were a McDonald's bag.  A couple fallen fries hid under the dirty napkins, under the cheeseburger wrappers; the thing just catches seventy-mile-an-hour air and bursts away.

It's all I can do sometimes. Either that or just jump out of the car and do a shoulder roll off into the grey woods and pick myself up and scrape the gravel and glass out of my wide gashes and just start running, down through the woods, hopping creeks like a deer-man, never stopping, through the next seven dawns.

But still.

I mean: I'm driving and I still love everybody and all even though people are driving me bananas some days with the real intensity. But I know the deal. We have to get these groceries into the fridge as soon as we get home or else the fake butter will start to turn into something else, and so I just settle for ripping my own face off and releasing it out in the road-wind. And I feel a little better.

I do.

-----------------------------------------

Lately, Violet will roll up to me as soon as I plop my ass down on the couch with my first glass of evening Rioja. She doesn't show her face when I'm standing there fucking with the remote, trying to decide either King of Queens or the last half of a Bizzare Foods in Malaysia.

She waits.

She waits until my ass in maybe three inches from the sweet soft leather, like some sort of NASA-controlled perfect little Moon Lander.

My ass lowers six inches from the couch.

(Crackling sound of Mission Control: "Violet prepare for momentum").

 Five inches

("Ooookay, Violet, lock in co-ordinates and prepare for momentum").

Four.

(" Ooooookay Violet, imminent momentum, co-ordinates locked. Annnnd  looks good, looks good. Violet, prepare for momentum and throttle up.")

Three.

(And we have a lift off. Full momentum. We are up.)

I hit the sofa/tap the remote/sip the first sip of electric wine and I hear the tap-tap-tapping of sock feet on the floorboards. Perfectly timed with razorish precision.

"Daddy Daddy Daddy, ook whot i found", she slams around the corner and across the floor and into my knees, a smile on her face, her curls flapping away from her nose on the air from her tiny voice.

It's a stegosarus.

Maybe six inches. Green. Some purple, I think.

This dinosaur gets around, people. He is omnipresent, everywhere. You don't just "find" him out of the blue. You basically take two steps anywhere in the damn house and he finds you. I see him in the morning on the kitchen counter when I'm scooping coffee into the maker. I see him on the edge of the tub looking at me when I fumble out a piss in the nighlight light. He's been in the fridge; I've seen him in there. On the floor of the car, under pillows on different beds. I've found him pressed up under Henry's stubby legs while the kid was strapped in his pink chair watching Third and Bird. I know he's probably seen me and Monica get busy. I can see it in his creepy lizardyeyes. He gets around.

But this is how this dance gets danced and I'm man enough to see that.

"Daddy Daddy Daddy! Ook whot I found!"

Her eyes are glimmering as she shoves the plastic fella at me.

I put the wine on the side table under the old Ikea lamp.

I pick it back up and take a sip. Then, I put it down again.

"Whoooooa! Looky there!, " I say. "You found the long lost dinosaur, huh??!!"

She's beaming, rotating the thing in her tiny fist a little, so that he seems to be dancing at the sight of me.

"Yeah! I foun him I foun him! Stegsawris!"

The way she says it/ the way she says Stegosarus/ I watch her lips in the seconds leading up to it, knowing she will say the word. Stegsawris. My baby girl. Oh man.

We put the Creature From the Dollar Bin down on my lap and she runs back into the playroom. Her foot patter changes tone when she hits the carpet out there beyond what I can see from here. I mute the Bizzare Foods guy and the thumps go softer, but I can still pick them out.  They fade to stop. And then they return, louder, louder.

"Daddy Daddy! Ook who et is!!"

It's the brontosaurus. The same one I find sticking out of one of my Timberlands sometimes. The same one that hangs out on the radiator cover by the fridge.

We smile at each other. I take a sip of the wine, my wine.

"You found him!" I holler. "You found Brontosaurus!"

She looks up in my eyes and grins so wide and grown-up.

"Yeaaaaah!" she says. "I found im!"

We smile at each other.

The dinosaur goes in my lap.

She turns and goes in search of others.

The beat goes on.

We talk for a while. I tell her more stuff about Spain, about the show tonight. She tells me it's harder than hell being alone with the kids. As she speaks: I finger the cookies on the bed by my side, like an outlaw petting his itchy Colt. I tell her I saw a bullring. Her eyes tell me she could care less. She tells me she took the dogs to the lake and Violet fell in the mud. I rub a chocolate cookie with drunky-drunk fingers, trying to be gentle/not being gentle; the same as I'd rub a Spanish thigh if I were a different man, a different rocker in a different life. And hotter.

Henry gazes at the screen back in my kitchen and spots me in it and raspy grunts one of his laughs out.

"Hi Henry!", I say.

He darts his fist at the screen, trying to grab a handful of me.

Monica tells me she is taking the kids to some kinda craft show on Saturday.

I tell her I saw a bullring. She says I know/you said that already.

There can be romance in separation if you play your cards right. People can miss one another, cry down the Skype. Absence can make you realize what you have when you don't have it for a spell. Hearts can grow wiser given time to beat it out all alone.

Or, in our case, in my case: you can cut straight to the chase, man.

I look at Henry. He's smiling as a bead of drool rolls down his chin and grows into a Drool-manchu. My boy. My lad.

He doesn't understand English at all.

"Hey, can you make me a dirty video, maybe?" I ask my wife this with little fanfair. I say it matter-of-fact. Seven years of marriage has taught me nothing, I guess. I'm less smooth than ever. I'm smoothless. I'm lame.

"What?" she says.

"A video. With the camera. Make me a short video, a sexy one. Could ya?"

Henry reaches out to grab at the sound on the screen. His slobber leak is amazing. And he's smiling at my suggestion. Or through it.

"Why?"

Why?

Seriously?

Why?

Christ, now I need to spell it out? Why would I want a smutty home clip of my wife when I'm rolling across Spain drunk-eating fucking cookies by myself in hotel rooms?

I let the explanations/reasonings settle into her skull without a word.

"Can you make me one?", I say, buttering up my tone a little with the subtle mellow of a Peep Show door guy.

"Um, maybe, I dunno. We're going to the craft show on Saturday," she pauses. "We're busy. I'm busy. I hardly have time to do my work."

I switch gears. I try an approach with more pop. More zing.

"Yeah, I know, and you're doing awesome, but have a couple cold beers tonight and you know...just get loose. And you know, just like, relax. Put on that wifebeater I like," I say, all helpful and all. Then I add: "With no bra."

She blushes a little and I am startled that she isn't exactly blowing me off, though the idea of a nice private home video of Nasty Monica still seems like a pipe dream to me to be honest. But she's still on the screen, still Skyping, so I'm a little hopeful.

I stumble through a few more Director's tips but she cuts me off.

"I know how to make a video, Goddammit. OK?"

This brings me a little pause. I never got any videos before. So I guess someone must've. But not me. Fucking bastards. Fucking bitch-ass little bitch boys.

Whatever, I'm not nearly drunk enough to get sidetracked up a jealous tree. I want a video too. Now more than ever.

Henry buzzes his lips at the screen and from a hotel room in Norther Spain I watch his spittle land on the computer screen back in Centre County.

"You could maybe get wine, you know?", I offer. "Some nice candles. Make it a thing. It could be fun."

"Oh yeah, that's just the kind of thing I wanna look forward to when I finally get the kids down. Make a smut movie by myself."

To be frank: I am running out of ideas here. Our marriage isn't all that magical or sensual. Sometimes I count her laughing at my commentary jokes during MIKE & MOLLY as her having a Big O. So, I start doing what I do. I start giving up/letting out slack/ moving on to thinking about my Euro-cookies and the sandwich made with the lunchmeat I hoarded back at the dressing room of tonight's club.

Then she does it. Says it.

She opens 55 gallon drums of tie-dyed doves that whirl out into the room and start banging into the ceiling and the walls. She takes her hand and waves it and White Castle sliders shoot out of directly into my face, like a runaway firehose spewing greatness all over the sheets I'm on.

She takes a seven pound rainbow trout and rams my hook right through it's snout and I am liding down the creek like Brad Pitt in that fishing movie. I'm hooked into a whale here, people. A motherfucking whale.

Henry punches me in the eye throiugh the screen and cackles wildly.

"Alright, maybe," she says. Out of pity, I guess. Or curiosity perhaps. Whatever. It doesn't matter to me now. Because she's saying things. Big things. "I'll see if I can do something. And I gotta go. Violet's waking up from her nap and I have to feed Henry something. Say bye Henry!"

And before I can say my own bye: they're gone. Sucked back into the Skype pipe. There's just the jpeg I picked out for her number staring back at me.

The End.

Huh?

What?

Did she send me one?

You filthy little fucker! Ha! You wanna know dontcha?

Ha!

Let me just say this.

It was the greatest email attachment in the history of this beautiful/nasty world.

"Where there's a will, and there is a fucking will, there's a way, and there is a fucking way."

                                              -Teddy Bass, Sexy Beast

One winter night, long long ago, my mom put me and my brother in our early 80's snow shit. It was the hot K-Mart stuff made of burlap and painter's plastic and fake fur from a fake fur company down some industrial street in semi-urban China; the kind of stuff that doesn't breathe. At all. This was pre-breathable. Pre-Patagonia/Pre-Old Navy/Pre-whatever merciful winter stuff kids might get today. My jacket zipped up to my neck and if I was lucky: I didn't catch my waddle of throat skin in there and feel the mighty sting of a trillion pissy wasps trying to eat the core out of my Adam's Apple.

It was the hot stuff and it was all we knew and she put us in it/sealed us up in our own juices/opened the font door/ and took us down the front steps for the very last time.

We left him alone there, my dad. We left him alone there, probably asleep; probably nicely buzzed and passed out. I don't remember, really. I do remember that he didn't follow us out. He didn't call up after us as we waded through the snow, towards the corner where the bars were. He didn't holler anything like "Come back," or "I'm sorry," or whatever.

He didn't say stuff like: "You're not taking my boys away fom me!"

We just walked out/shut the door behind us/and went away. In my big winter boots lined with mildewy drywall insulation, I felt my toes get cold. It felt really weird, the walk, because Mom didn't have time to throw socks on our feet. One second were in the pajamas, getting ready for bed, the next: we were being zipped up and dropped into the boots without socks.

It felt cold and strange on my feet. Strangely liberating too. As if I'd discovered some new way of walking around out in the frozen world, some new naked way of kicking down the winter streets, my one glove tucked up in my mom's glove. My brother's glove tucked up in her other one.

I remember staring up at the street light as Mom dragged us around the corner. In the super quiet: I remember looking up at the billion tiny flakes falling slowly through the ball of light. I remember actually pretending they were vast galaxies of burning stars that we were flying up through.

The three of us soaring out in space.

Together.

We got to my Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop's around the corner in like three minutes, I guess. My mom-mom was at the door waiting/peering out/ plowing the snow with her evening eyes. Pop-Pop was still up too, which was weird. But there he was, in his chair by the eagle lamp, a can of cream ale on the table.

He smiled at us as we peeled off our coats and kicked off our boots.

I put my little nude foot down in a melting wad of slush on the carpet.

"Hi man!", he said. "Want some ice cream?"

I did. And I had a bowl. And it lasted for a lot of years, too.

================

There is a story behind every story, I suppose. Your take. My take. We live the same shit slightly differently, coming in fast to the same bullseye from slightly different angles, like two or three darts launched by two or three different guys in the same bar, listening to the same jukebox. That's just how it goes when it comes to perspective, to the paradigm. The ladies at the bar sip their cocktails and watch three darts tap into the cork; some of them see where they land exactly. Some of them don't. But who really cares in the end.

We moved out here to Pennsylvania this year, me and Monica. We moved back to where my family is, with new kids that they could pick up and swing around and spoil with kisses and little cheap gifts they found at Target or at Rite-Aid. Mom-Mom is gone though. And my Pop-Pop too. They woulda loved the hell out of these kids and if they could somehow find a way to just show up for an hour on our big porch, dammit I know they would. Just to run their fingers through Violet's curls for a minute or two. Just to smooch Henry on his sour milk mouth and taste his hot living breath. Even a ghost would be delighted. And who knows: maybe that shit goes down all the time. How the hell would I know?

Anyways, months go by now where some of the grandparents love these kids and some of them simply don't. And I wanna fucking get in my car and drive to other states and kick down some fucking doors with the soles of my Timberlands and burst into bedrooms of sleep at three AM and grab people by the back of their hair to turn their faces around toward mine, a half inch from the tip of my beak, and tell them how sad I am that they keep fucking it up, not just for them, but for little kids too.

For little beautiful kids with eyes that shine and souls that glow and small hands made out of God Clay and Magic Blood and Celestial Bone: they keep fucking it all up.

The other grandparents show so much love. They screech with joy at the sight of the little ones. They send Halloween candy through the US Mail and their fingerprints are all over the wrappers and their hearts are all up in the melting chocolate. And they make me so happy/so proud.

But it's the other ones that get me.

I wanna haunt them all the live-long night.

Today.

Tomorrow.

And in all the worlds yet to come.

And I intend to somehow.

I drink a cup as soon as there's barely enough dripped out. I don't wait for the whole thing. Fuck that. I don't care if it tastes better if it's all in there or not. I know what I want and sometimes I know how to get it.

The shit hits my veins and rollercoasters down into my heart with hard morning speed. I hear the jangle of the dog's tags as he realizes I am useless to him, that there is no bratwurst gonna slip from my grip. Same as yesterday/same as tomorrow probably.

Over the sink, I stand there with my reindeer mug and my baby monitors and glare at my puffy reflection in the black window. There's an old mountain out there in the freeze, with whitetails moving cautiously out of the dried cornfields and up onto it's rocky trails/ coyotes shitting in the cornflake leaves/ bears staring up at constellations/ turkeys dreaming turkey dreams high up in the pines, their crazy-ass turkey feet all wrapped around the rough bark of boughs where nothing ever happens but bird sleep.

I stand there looking at my fat face in the dark glass and I know there's a city I can't see out there on the invisible mountain. An animal city, with heavy heavy traffic moving away from the light of some human kitchen. A Manhattan of beasts oozing it's way up moss-rock streets away from my pin prick glow.

"Aaaaargh." I hear Henry in his monitor. He talks his gibberish and I wait for it.

Small thump. That's him popping his forehead off the slats of his crib. He's standing up then, I know. Pulled himself up the wood, into the nightlight haze where he can see a little bit of his room. I clock all this through the tiny speaker and I suck down some more coffee and I forget all about the mountain and the deer and all that and I smile like a motherfucker.

"Waaaaaaahhhhh." Crackles of something real and definite.

Here I come, bro.

Thump/thump/thump. He headbutts the cage.

Here I come.

==========================

Henry rides a pink chair because that's what his sister rode and I easily spend thirty bucks on half-decent bottles Rioja but have never even once actually thought about forking out for an unpink seat for my man. That's how it goes, I guess.

Before I had kids, right before Violet was born, I remember having a shitload of one-sided conversations withy my maker, me telling him all this stuff about how gracious I was to be getting a daughter and how I was gonna live my life for her and take all my petty bullshit and toss it to the four winds. Listen, I told him, you don't know me as well as you might think, man. But you watch. I am going to live my life for this kid. Whatever she needs, I'ma get it. Somehow or another.

And we got her the pink chair with plastic buckle straps so she couldn't fling herself out of there. And I would sit there in the mornings and in the afternoons, in the nights, and I would spoon her out little clumps of peach moosh, little clumps of green pea moosh.

God, how I loved her. And I still do too.

And with Henry it's the same thing all over again, you know? So much love. Overwhelming Crazy Love. Exploding hearts while I wipe the crap off his nuts with half a dozen Wal-Mart unscented wipes at once. I fill landfills with dirty wipes all on my own and I don't think twice about it because it's all so massive and I would ruin a hundred Earths just to clean the #2 off my boy's wee.

But, sometimes I wonder if it's enough though.

Or is it ever gonna be enough.

I wake up and suck down half-brewed coffee and listen for their cackles coming across the two Sony Monitors I drag around and then I go fetch the boy when he wakes up and starts fussing and I bring him down in my arms and set him down. And man, he smiles up at me like I'm the only face in the world he ever wanted to see this morning.

Guy Smiley.

Guy Smiley sitting there in a used pink-ass baby chair while I pop the BUY IT NOW button with my fat finger and order another dumbass record off Ebay and drink my coffee by a wild mountain.

All before the sun, yo.

All before the sun.

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My daughter is half a year from three now and she talks a lot. We'll be in the Honda, cruising down the road towards the Home Depot or the beer distributor and she'll be back there in her seat all strapped in, the summer gushing through the window/making her curls medusa, and out of nowhere she'll holler,"AIRPWANE! AIRPWANE! OVER DARE! IT"S AN AIRPWANEOVERDAREOVERDAREAIRPWANELOOKANAIRPWANE!"

And sure enough me and her mom will lean out over the dash and look up in the sky and see some jet high out over the world, dangling from a cloud.

"There it is!," we'll say.

"AIRPWANE! DARE IT IS! OVER DARE! IN THE SKY!," Violet will say.

Airplane: full of people; full of businessmen with tilted necks gazing down into reflectionless laptops; airplane full of LAX-bound Sikhs; full of peanuts and Diet Pepsi. It ain't our airplane. We ain't riding on her and probably never will. We don't know anyone up there probably either. Probably won't ever meet anyone who was taking that particular flight. And, even if we did, how would we ever know they were way up that afternoon, soaring above our little car/little ant down between the cornfields?

Still, the plane becomes a wonderful little part of us, and of our proverbial ride. This little girl who melts my chest open and dumps my molten heart out all over ten differnt floors a day: she called it out with such lovely gusto.

Aiplane.

Airpwane!

So, in some ways, that thing is ours now. Forever. We rode on underneath her, living our life as she passed us by. Then, one of us tore through the wind in her eyes and saw that bird cutting across the bluebird sky and pointed her little right index finger/marzapan stub and announced it like it was something she'd lost long ago and just re-found.

And so: shit. That makes it as much our airplane as anyone elses, I guess.

Maybe even more.

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Violet in the morning. Six-ish. Seven-ish if I'm lucky. Standing at the peak of these carpeted stairs in a house we barely even know yet, Violet grins a little: like a bashful grin, something shy coming over her. She nudges a pillow-matted curl out of her eye and giggles a little, nervously.

I know what's up.

I know what's up down here on my perch on the fourth step down.

My sweetheart is scared.

We touch eyeballs for a sec, but it doesn't last: and almost instantly she throws her look back down the long stairwell.

She doesn't want me to know. That she might be scared of these deep old stairs.

I act smooth. Or I try to.

"Remember to use your butt, girl," I tell her. "Slide down like we practiced. One Cheek. Two Cheek."

She rolls around on the upper landing and pretends to be getting in to a conversation with a plastic Wal-mart cow.

I let them have a couple private words before I come back in.

"Hey Violet, you can do it!", I tell her, a little pep in my tone. A fat bald little coach standing there on the tip of my tongue, his whistle dangling down a red lanyard, his clipboard curled up in his one arm like a sleeping baby.

"C'mon Violet, you can do it!"

She grins/her eyes give her away/she looks for a way out.

"A COW!" she screams.

She holds up the plastic heifer and looks him in the face. "A COW A COW RIGHT HERE A COW!!!"

Whadya do, you know?

"Oh yeah," I say. I know I sound dejected too, but this is before coffee and I'm bursting with old piss and I just wanna get down these steps and walk out into the kitchen, into the new day. But, I sound like a douche.

I pump some DaddyNeon up from my guts, up into my face. I get more interested.

"OH LOOKY THERE; IT'S A COW! RIGHT THERE IN VIOLETS HAND! SHE FOUND A COOL MILK COW!"

She digs that and I can see that right away.

I lay on some thick butter.

"Why don't you give Daddy that cool cow and I will help him down the steps while you come down on your own because you are a big girl and you can do it, Violet!"

"BE CAILFUL BOOTS!", she hollers as she slides her tiny ass down a step. And then another.

Boots is Dora's monkey friend. Duh.

"I got the cow!", I assure her after she gives him up to me to sherpa down the morning slope.

"CAILFULBOOTS!", she says.

We slip our asses down from one carpeted step to the next. Same as we did yesterday. Same as we'll do later this afternoon.

At the last step, I turn around and watch her descending just behind me, concentration smeared all over her face like her jelly gets.

I love her so much. So fucking much. I hand her the cow as her feet hit the floorboards.

She brushes him aside with a wave of her hand.

As if to say: what cow, daddy?

As if to say: that never happened, Holmes.

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Fear wells up in me all the time and I try not to let it show, but I know I suck at that and my wife would confirm that. You can't keep your kids from falling down off shit or splitting their lips open on the very tables we set up to hoist their small dinners toward the heavens. Bees are gonna find that soft skin and they are gonna be fucking excited as hell when they hold their asses in the air and wave 'em around and then send the stinger home some early evening when you're all relaxing out in the yard, putting flowers in the dirt and feeling all good about yourselves because you're such a quality time family and look at us out here digging in Mother Earth together but not in some dirty hippie kinda way but more in a Beekman Boys vibe and aren't we just so....BAM.

The kid gets stung. Hell comes calling.

I can't stop it. I can't stop anything, really.

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I would give anything to have all the dope in the world out in my garage. And all the fast cars and all the bees. I wouldn't care if taking the bees away fucked up the planet. I wouldn't give two shits if their missing honey started making it rain hot glue balls.

I would give all my limbs and my eyes and my teeth if that was the deal, if I could stave off all the goddamn possible bee stings. 

Not being able to makes me crazy. And super sad.

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If you YouTube Amy Winehouse you can see what you wanna see. You can watch her in Serbia, all messed up. Her eyes seem like some lighthouse miles away over rough rough seas. You see a moment, a flash of glow. And then it's gone/out/blocked by raging whitecaps. People boo her/a new song kicks in/the people sing the words/it falls apart/people boo her/

You can check her out just a few hours before she died too. Dancing her kooky dance onstage over in London, a few blocks from her house, cheering on her teenage friend as that young girl sings a good song. Maybe Amy was loaded that night. I can't tell. She seemed happy though.

Or you can watch her sing back before she got stung bad.

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Goddamn, that little girl could sing.

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They will have burned her body and her bones by now. And now, no matter how much you maybe wanna stop it, there will be nothing left but the songs and some dust and whatever she left there on her nightstand, on her kitchen counter.

It won't be a half-written song or anything like that, either. It'll be something way more sad and way more heart-breaking.

A half-eaten bag of salt'n'vinegar chips. A novel with a bookmark in it.

A pencil with tooth marks in the wood.

Then, we smiled and talked and kept looking over at the plastic bassinet, at the new baby sleeping off the long strange trip. I'd break a wad of feta off the block with my fingers and shove it in my mouth, watch the door, sip my beer, tuck it down in its hiding spot on the cold tiles.

Letterman came on. The Letterman music. Happy horns. I wasn't paying that much attention.

Then I heard that announcers voice say Hank Aaron.

My heart cannonballed into my gut pond.

I screamed.

Monica looked at me, startled.

Hank Aaron, I said. Hank Aaron! HANK FUCKIN' AARON!

It was all just too strange, too cosmic to believe. I'd never seen Hank Aaron on Letterman before. Or on any late night shit really. I'd seen a lot of Foo Fighters. And a tractor trailer load of Seth Rogans. But, Hank Aaron: no.

My chest started caving in on itself. I really couldn't talk or understand what was going down.

I slugged down the rest of one beer and ripped the cap off another. I stopped worrying about the door, about the nurses.

Sometimes things happen for reasons. Unexpected, surprising you with hot blasts of synchronicty and kismit, you are sitting there exhausted next to your sleepy wife in her hospital get-up and all of the sudden God or the Gods or somebody decides that you've been cool today, you been decent somehow, and they tilt over off the side of a throne the size of a dozen suns and they jiggle their fat God fingers and sprinkle a little magic glitter dust down through the stars. Down past the spinning planets and the martians zipping around out there in their Le Cars, down through the solar winds whipping across the black wilderness of forever, so that by the time it rains down on your tiny unimportant soul breathing in and out between a jug of supermarket Kalamatas and lukewarm brewskis, its just a few flakes is all.

But, man, a few flakes of that shit is all you need. Trust me.

So, my gift came in the form of Hammerin' Hank. The same dude I'd spent the entire morning watching on YouTube videos swatting drug-free pure rockets into the sweltering Atlanta nights long ago, as the chemicals slow dripped into my wife's veins and my boy began the long slide home. I'd been obsessed with Hank the last few weeks, as we'd settled more and more on naming our son Henry. We'd toyed with other names: tossed them around and felt them in our hands and our heads, trying to figure out whether he was maybe a Charlie (Charlie Brown). Or an Oliver (Oliver Twist).

But Henry was the name that kept showing up neon.

Henry: the son of a friend, an eighteen year old kid, gorgeous kid with a mop of black hair and an acoustic guitar under his arm in a million pictures I'd seen of him.

Henry: Hank. Hank Williams: the greatest loneliest voice who ever sang a song.

Henry: a king's name if there ever was one. Henry The Fifth. A Shakespearean guy. A name with power, and infamy.

Henry: the conflicted soldier in the best Civil War story ever written. The Red Badge of Courage.

Henry:  Hank. Hank Aaron. The greatest long ball hitter who ever played the game. And more than that, a young guy who stared hate and odds in the face with dignity and quiet peace. A beautiful guy, I kept thinking. A great great American.

When all of that swirled up in my head, I just turned to Monica one Saturday afternoon about three weeks before her due date and told her we had to name our little buddy Henry. It just made all of the sense in the world. His name was Henry.

It always was.

It just takes awhile sometimes.

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Monica got a little grin on her when she saw how giddy I'd become. I was a little buzzed on my beers and my new daddyhood and she could probably see a little boy there right beside her on either edge of her mechanical bed for a minute or two. She didn't say much that I remember. She just watched me. I liked it.

I kept talking through Letterman's monologue and the commercials and all. I kept jabber-jawing about how I just couldn't believe what a sign this was. How the hell did these people come up with Hank Aaron as a guest on the night our boy came into this world. How the hell did they know. Hank didn't have anything to promote. No books or salad dressings. He wasn't the new coach of the Yankees or anything. Hell, spring training was just getting underway; baseball was still just some tapered icicle hanging off the carport for cold weeks now.

But there he was. Here he was. Hank Aaron.

I don't even remember what the hell he said, to be honest. I remember he was charming and radiant. I remember his big beaming smile and his soft southern drawl washing over me and my new son and my wife and our cheese and our flowers, as if the room was pumped full of real night air, real chilled lovely natural air. Letterman was bigger and better than ever too. He knew what he had there on the couch. He knows shit like that. He likes Bradley Cooper and all, respects them and all. But still, after all this time, he knows where the gold is hid.

I remember Hank's big grin when his time was up. Him and Dave shook hands. Then they cut to a commercial and just like that he was gone from the room.

I slipped another cap off another bottle and eyeballed the door. I changed the damn channel too.

Monica understood.

Little Henry, he understood.

They weren't gonna march out some band or some actress that we were gonna give a shit about after all that.

We just watched the late news instead, my heart doing little girl cartwheels, one right after another, way down inside of me tilted back in my hospital chair.

I look past the weatherman talking. I look through him, really.

I look through him and through the television and the wall behind it and out through the trees beside the house, and straight through the mountains hovering over there. I push my eyes through the pine trees way out on the high ridges and press them against the visible sky like you might press your fingers through some plastic wrap in the kitchen, just to watch it stretch, then give. I keep pushing until the sky breaks apart and all of my focus goes gushing through the holes I've made; knotholes in the firmament, so I can push my eyeball against the fence and watch the action from far away.

No one knows who comes next.

No one ever had any clue who would arrive eventually. And no one ever will.

Whole galaxies get whipped up in mama's good guts and there is no telling whether he's gonna want pancakes on the morning of his first day of school or what book he might end up reading up in the jet the first time he flies over the rough dark sea. Down in there, mama's hot gravy seeps into his veins and rolls up into his tiny heart and then out again, rollercoastering life all up and down his world.

His lungs are birthday ballons with just one or two weak puffs in them, but someday they could be the same lungs huffing and puffing as he rounds second base in a playoff game or chases a purse snatcher down Broadway, dodging taxis and stuff. Maybe he'll use them to sing songs on stages. Stranger things have happened.

His fingers are just soft twigs, tickling across the inside of her belly when he does his little dance down in the darkness. But someday before long, those fingers are gonna wrap around the hand of someone he met in Algebra or at the mall or somewhere, and he's going to squeeze them tight to that other hand and he's gonna feel that zip through his chest: that same bolt of lightning that I have felt in my life, and that you have probably known too.

Those feet kicking out against his mama's insides, someday those feet might parade him down the halls of some great university or through the wild bustle of an African market. Or they might jog him across the terminal, to grab ahold of his old man from behind, and surprise him with a saw-ya-first squeeze.

I hope his little eyes are rested now. Because pretty soon he's gonna be shooting out into the lights that don't stop until the end. Hospital lights over your sweet new face and headlights coming around the corner to pick you up at 7 in the evening on a Friday night and the neon lights of Manhattan and the flashing lights of the cop pulling you over. The lights on Christmas trees sparkling off the glassy blinks of someone he's falling in love with down the road.

It's been hard to focus for me lately. Everyday things I get to doing, it seems like someone else is doing them and I'm just watching over a shoulder.

Every other second I wonder about who we're gonna meet, who we're gonna get to love.

I stand in the kitchen cutting green onions on an old bamboo board, Violet scurrying around the linoleum at my feet, your mama paging through the celebrity magazines and eating melted cheese.

I hear you saying things in your small voice before you even own it. Nonsense words and coos and stuff.

I'm cooking food and opening bottles of wine out here, little man. I'm cooking food and popping corks and clinking dishes down in the sink, but really: I'm looking at you/staring at you from a galaxy away; every second sparking off the sides of our battered spaceships as we keep barrelling at each other, closer and closer and closer.