Jeff Against the Machine

And they still die, often in the deserts of the Southwest, sometimes at the hands of thieves and kidnappers and now, in a startling twist, apparently at the hands of a drug gang seeking money or possibly recruits, officials said, though nobody knows for sure. Mexican officials confirmed Wednesday that they were questioning a second survivor, a Honduran man, beyond the Ecuadorean who first alerted them to the killings.

Dear Mom: I am sorry for not standing by you these many years. I am sorry that I was a failure as a son until I was 30 years old. I am thankful you stuck by me all those years and I can’t believe how cold and heartless I was. I’ll probably never live it down. You were always the one to pick me up and tell me to keep going.

The first time I put myself in Charter you came and I was so glad to see you. I had been crying for about six hours. I never cried so much until you died and now it’s about all I can do effectively. The tears aren’t even salty anymore.

I wish you had told me about Robert W. Spaugh of Winston-Salem. I wish you had told me what he did to you in 1966 and how it broke your heart and how you never forgave yourself. I would have forgiven you mom. I would have understood.

Everybody is telling me to not dwell on it, that it was 44 years ago. They don’t understand that it wasn’t 44 years ago for me. It is the last 40 years. It is now. It will be tomorrow.

I can’t believe I feel like a speck of dust collecting in the corner of some abandoned house, like the one’s that stood in the woods behind our house on Philpark. I know you loved it there. I know you felt at home, finally. I’m sorry your daddy died right after we moved in. I liked him a lot. I am sorry that he didn’t love you as much as he doted on your half-sister. I guess like me, he felt you were big enough and strong enough to fend for yourself.

I did tell you that one time when you moved to Durham to the newer Womble Carlyle office that I would come stay with you so you would not be lonely. You were strong then and told me not to worry about it, that you had plenty of friends. I wish you would have told me the truth. I am sorry you could not make the friends you wanted and that you vented on them and they drove you away. I am sorry they made fun of you for living in Mebane. I never liked the Triangle anyway.

I am sorry mom that I didn’t buy into your Christianity. You really tried hard and I respected you for your passion and your learned study of the scriptures. I am sorry I embarrassed you that time when I did something really wrong as a teenager and the whole church knew about it but no one would tell you to your face.

The day you were waiting for me in the parking lot of the high school I thought you were going to tell me somebody had died.

I am sorry I couldn’t do better in school and live up to your high expectations of me. I just couldn’t do it mom with so many people telling me how ugly and stupid I was and calling me fat ass and fat boy and fat nerd all day. I found escape in my room with music until David gave me a joint when I was 15.

That sucked up the next 14 years of my life. But I still hear them laughing.

I’m glad that you got to see me graduate from college. I felt so good that day. Clean. Sober. Achieving. I know it only lasted five years mom, but they were a good five years and I had some money to enjoy life with from time to time.

I’m sorry I didn’t fire those boys and then the entire world said how much of a failure I was and then the locals here rehashed my failure and you had to go through it all again. I know that hurt you worse than it did me.

They still go on about it mom. Not the original ones, but some new ones, blue hairs from Eden mostly. We never liked Eden anyway. I’ve pretty much made my peace with the original ones.

I remember the day you came to see me in jail. I never saw you look sadder. I’m glad you took my phone calls at 4am when they let me out of solitary once every couple of days. I didn’t suffer. I deserved it. I learned a lot, mom. I read War and Peace and Brothers Karamazov and then that judge said I could go home after six-months. I’m glad you listened to me that first day when I asked you not to come back. I couldn’t bear that, but it would probably have been a breeze compared to what I am going through now. It was peaceful in solitary mom. There was a lot of yelling, but they weren’t yelling at me.

I am sorry I embarrassed you so much that you left town to go work in Durham. I thought I could handle working as a magistrate at that age, but I couldn’t. I used to come home and drink till I passed out.

I am sorry that I started doing coke on New Years Eve 1996. I was taped out then, and tired, oh so tired of feeling hollow.

We got through that phase mom, together, even when you were the only person besides my friend Jason who would listen to me so I could get stuff off my chest.

But you always were a good listener. I wish you were here now to listen to me. I need somebody to listen. I am sorry I couldn’t listen to you anymore mom. That really tears me up inside. My dad told me again that I am stupid. I can’t believe he still does that. I don’t blame him though. I know he saw a lot of pain when he was a kid.

My son sees pain, but he only sees it in me when he catches me crying and asks me what’s wrong. I tell him “Nothing, son. I love you.”

I hope I can keep it together long enough to see him grow up.

I’m sorry you had to make that choice in 1967. I talked to Dawn today and she told me all about it. She said you were a good friend, just like everybody who knew you does. I wish more people could have known you. I wish Robert W. Spaugh of Winston-Salem hadn’t known you. She said you loved him. Did you mom? Did he lead you on for a few weeks? A few months? I wish I knew. Maybe I will pay him a visit. Mema said the last time you talked to him your were sitting in the hallway crying. She said there was a song that year about “go away world and take this weight with you” I don’t know what she is talking about. She’s not doing well mom. She is so sad and angry and she even lashes out at me. J&J are doing a good job keeping up with her. She told me a few weeks ago that I never loved her. Can you imagine her saying that to me?

She does talk fondly of you now, finally. I think she feels remorse for what she did mom. I wish you had told me. I would have made it right for you.

Now I don’t know what to do. You are gone. Mema is half gone. Most of my friends think I’m nuts. The world says I’m nuts. I think the world is nuts.

I think the world is nuts when a young woman who just wants to be held and loved and told she is special gets abused by a man who has everything in the world going for him. I think the world is nuts when a woman has to give up her son because her mother says so. I think the world is fucking nuts when the man gets to go on about his “prominent” affairs and you have to live with guilt and shame and pass that on to your children, crippling two of us.

I think the world is nuts when it beats me down for the first 20 years of my life and then spends the next 20 telling me how fucked up I am.

I remember a guy in high school. He had “WTF” tattooed on his arm. I asked him what it meant. “Fuck the world,” he said.

Yeah, fuck the fucking world.

But the world doens’t care. Your half-sister told me to “find a bit of joy wherever you can.” I use to wish she was my mom. They seemed so together compared to our family. It’s no wonder they are all so successful. I send them emails and call them but they don’t ever return my messages. They probably wrote me off too.

So yeah, I turn 40 next month mom. Can you believe that. I was 18 when you were 40. I couldn’t imagine having a kid that old right now. I was careful mom not to do what Robert W. Spaugh of Winston-Salem did to you.

I called the newspaper. They looked up the article from 1962 when he had broken into that girl’s room and tried to get her. The clerk read me the story, with the judge telling him he was reducing the burglary charge to a misdemeanor because “he had good parents.”

Maybe if my name was Spaugh and my daddy was the chief of the synod I could have gotten malicious injury to property. But it’s not and I didn’t. Pete did a great job representing me. We were lucky he was there for us.

Most of all I am sorry for the last decade. It’s been crazy. August 2001 was so beautiful. The wedding was perfect. Everybody enjoyed the rehearsal dinner. Savannah was great. Even when I forgot my keys back in Winston and only realized when we got to Lynchburg it was no big deal.

I’m sorry you gave up. I’m sorry I couldn’t figure it out until it was too late. I would have been better. I really hoped you would like her. I hoped she would like you and you could be friends. I am sorry you could not. That really hurt me. But then nobody else knows you like I did, except J. I remember you standing over me to kiss me goodnight. I liked that. I remember longing to be with you when I was a little kid. I remember crying to go home with you after the kindergarten pick nick. I remember how distraught I was in the third grade field trip when they said I couldn’t ride in the car with you. We had good times then, going to Old Salem. I wonder if Robert W. Spaugh’s daddy was still the chief of the synod? Remember all the pictures I drew of the houses? Remember the parchment we made from coffee and regular paper?

Remember how I could never go to sleep? I still can’t mom. Unless I’m lit. What kind of life is that? I still toss and turn until three in the morning and then like to sleep until 10. I always look at the clock at 11:17. It really messes with my head. I don’t know what I’ll do this year when you don’t call me that day at 11:17. It was hard to take you out of my cell phone and delete you as a contact from my email.

I’ve been reading your emails. I am sorry it never got easier for you. If I had understood I would have been more compassionate. I am sorry you suffered even the day you had the stroke. You were tough mom. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

How did you bear all of that pain? I know how but I just can’t accept it. I guess I am rebellious like you. But if you are right and I am wrong it will be just like our life. Separated by some small circumstance beyond our control with a chasm driven between us that neither of us understand. I spent 15 years mom wondering why I was so fucked up that I couldn’t love my own mother. I am sorry for that. You deserved my love. You gave me lots of love, but the abuse was louder than the love and that’s what I remembered.

Your pastor took your bible and notepad for a week before the memorial service. He studied it and preached a good sermon. He said you marked “forgiveness” over and over in your bible and underlined it in your notebook. I forgive you mom.

I hope somebody can forgive me someday.

I realized recently that the very first poem I wrote in about 1978 was actually a meditation on the Tao.

I was eight and we had just moved into the house of my parent’s dreams, a simple ranch home with an acre of land. The house stood in stark contrast to the small worker housing both my parents grew up in. Clean, trees, no through traffic. Seemed like paradise to me. But I look back now and feel so naive to think my little world was somehow of importance.

My morose mind takes me back on these memories several times a day. But the point was my little poem. Being a recently professed atheist I can’t really go running back to church to alleviate my black mood. I’ve been studying on bitterness and overcoming that disease. I think I am making progress. I’m trying to forgive. I’m trying to forget. I’m trying to be more compassionate and to listen more than I speak. I’ve been through the nihilist phase and the flirtation with Camus and the absurd.

But the blackness is hard to live with my friends. I try lots of little tricks. The uplifting theme song. Change of scenery. Dope.

Since my worst days back in the mid to late 90s I’ve kept a wrinkled print out of the first verse of the Tao Te Ching in my wallet. It makes a lot of sense to me. So I trotted it out and reread the words again the other day:

The tao that can be told is not the eternal tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.

I spent some time reading up on the Tao and all I could really find out about it was that it was the unseen force in the universe which drives life. The rest seems to be meditation by men on what they think about that concept.

Which brought me to my little poem.

I can see the wind, hear it in the trees
I can see the wind, feel it on my knees
I can see the wind, it’s clear
I can see the wind, far and near
I can see the wind, it’s true.
I can see the wind, can you?

I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a late fall Saturday and I was doing what I was want to do on late fall Saturdays, namely, wandering around outside with my football. I must have been in the back yard and that was the first time I think I remember stopping to look at the tall hardwood trees that ringed my little house on two sides at the end of our suburban street. The crisp air moving with the pressure across the branches and leaves in an invisible symphony of physics must have caught my attention. I remember sitting on a stump and just watching. And listening. The chorus of leaves singing with the breeze across the untouched forest. The towering trees down the hillside at the end of my yard leading to the creek at the end of our property, all swaying back and forth with the rhythm of the wind.

I don’t know why. I just made up this little poem in my head. Then I went inside and wrote it down.

I can’t think of much now that doesn’t take me back there. My parents were happy. I was ignorant and blissful. And happy. I can’t remember lasting happiness since … well we might get to that at some point. Inevitably the memories take me there and then I start to well up. Most times it just lingers with moistness around my eyes, that pressure in my chest and the painful lump of sorrow in the back of my throat. A tear usually rolls off my right cheek and onto my shirt as I ignore it once again.

I think of my parents. I think of the things I’ve learned about them in the last few months. I think of my failures. Their divorce. My father and the bottle. My mother and the bible. His suffering. Her new life. My failures again. What happened to the quaint, peaceful family and the happy little people? Where did they go? Where are they now?

I know where I am. I’m still sitting on that stump trying to see the wind.

I was born in late September and I’ve always taken pleasure in the languid days of sweltering August. Don’t complain so much about the heat, I’d say, because in February it will be cold as hell. That doesn’t change the oppression of a 90 degree day in August when the humidity weighs on your chest like so many pounds per square inch.

I was outside this morning and it is delightful.

As my son would say in his still developing voice: “Absolutely!”

But heavy things are on my mind. And a lot of them. Dark and dirty things. The kind of things that keep a man tied to a rock at the bottom of a hole.

The delightful air outside is a welcome reminder of what is outside the hole, waiting to bring endless encounters with what lies beyond.

Get out man.

Just got paid today and got a pocket full of change.