By the end of the following year, I had taught at five different colleges in the area. Clackamas CC not only was one of them, but had given me a full-time teaching position. How about that, I was thinking.
When the college issued me my ID card, my name was already in the system. That makes sense, I was thinking, because I had been hired a few months before actually getting my ID card. The first time I used said ID card at the library was when I tried pulling a copy of Neil Gaiman's
Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes
off a reserve shelf and claimed faculty privileges to do so. The librarian at the checkout desk swiped my ID card and told me I could do no such thing because I was a student. I turned the ID card around and showed the librarian my picture on the front and FACULTY printed above my picture on the front. How about that, she said, and she swiped my ID card again, and again she said I was a student. You should get a new ID card, she said, because there's already someone in the system with your name and you're not that person and that person was a student and you're clearly not a student. Right, I said. I'm too short and too fat and too old and not nearly photogenic enough to be a student. True, she said. No offense, she said. None taken, I said.
About a week after that, I met the college's athletic director for the first and last time. I shook his big hand and told him my name. How about that, he said. We have a bunch of track trophies with your name on them over in that building over there, he said. But I'm too short and too fat and too old and not nearly photogenic enough to have track trophies with my name on them, I said. True, he said. No offense, he said. None taken, I said.
It's now nearly five years later, Mr. Trevor Dodge, sir, and I live in the Portland, OR metropolitan area. One of the biggest daily pains in my life is having to drive US Highway 26 to/from just about anywhere I need or want to go. One of those anywheres includes Clackamas CC. I spend a lot of time on this stretch of road and I have been very lucky so far not to be maimed or killed while driving it. I am always thankful for that last fact, by the way.
Lately, however, one of us hasn't been very lucky as far as that last thing goes. Just a couple weeks back you were in an accident on US Highway 26. I Yahoo!-searched this and everything.
“After swerving to avoid collision with an errant driver, Trevor ran into the median, totaling his vehicle. Trevor ended up receiving only a few minor bruises and lacerations, with no risk to life or limb,”
The Internet said.
I am tempted, of course, to say How About That right now, but that would be crass and insensitive and I really really really want you to like me. I am also tempted to be all clever and solipsistic, of course, and to falsely claim that I was that errant driver who forced you into the median and made you total your vehicle, but that would also be crass and insensitive; not only do I really really really want you to like me, I am *dying* to know (figuratively speaking of course) what make of car you drive. Because if you were to say a Dodge, well, frankly, that would leave me totally speechless.
Yours,
Trevor
Go to the grocery store. Open/peel/use anything you like as you ski its aisles. Your children are dead so you don't require them for the distraction you normally had to make to accomplish this. But feel free to bring them along and share the bounty, the heaping of wrappers and sticky floors. After all you've put them through, they deserve to finally see you happy.
Do not underestimate how much local law enforcement absofuckinglutely wants nothing at all to do with anything even remotely related to any situation ending with you and or Sig.Other pushing the talk button on a grimy intercom terminal that's been pop-riveted permanently into the chipping brick facade of your closest police station, whereupon you and/or Sig.Other have to catch your breath and lean in close enough to kiss the star-shaped pattern of small holes in the metal plate and taste your blood in your lungs and begin uttering the possessive phrase “My Ex.”
a) Do not underestimate the number of times you think local law enforcement has heard that same possessive phrase. To be even in the neighborhood, you need to take your highest possible number and at least quadruple it. And that's just since noon yesterday, since you're almost certainly finding yourself in a situation where you're considering taking the trip over there to the cop shop when it's already evening, and quite likely deeply so.
b) Your local law enforcement personnel are trained and drilled and retrained and redrilled in very effective modes/methods of communication with impaired people of all forms of impairment. They are professionals. They are very good at being professional. Just because you and Sig. Other watched through episode 3, season 4 of
The Wire
doesn't mean shit, and doubly so if you are white, college-educated, and have set up a trust fund for your child and/or drawn from one yourself.
c) If you are legally separated or divorced, keep a copy of your decree/agreement/court order on your cellular device so that you and/or Ex and/or Sig.Other can literally read it and weep when situations present themselves. Do not assume that you have this document Memorized, Every Fucking Word Of It, because you most definitely do not. And you especially do not if you were the sole author/editor/ notary of said document.
d) If you are not legally separated or divorced, you, too, like the mentally incapacitated person, have no business reading this. If you cannot prove to yourself, Ex, and/or Sig.Other that the former relationship isn't legally severed, you stand no chance. None. The only thing you're lacking is someone to explicitly say this to you. So this is someone saying it to you. Right here.
I'm writing this from a place you haven't even the faintest clue exists, let alone think possible. This is a place where the life you know is unraveled all the way down to the thin cardboard tube where it has been spooled for years you can count but no longer can feel. You don't know the specifics, but you know what I mean, so you are compelled to trust me and there's just no getting around that. So please pay careful attention now and really read what I have to tell you.
I just came in from a long walk in the darkness out at your parents' place, the one with the quarter-mile driveway, just walked it with nothing but starlight and a rusting sliver-moon. You have been walking this exact same stretch in the daylight while you are house-sitting for them. You walk it every morning to grab their newspaper and check their mail, before you water their plants and mow their big floods of lawn on a spritely John Deere riding mower. This has been your routine since they left, and also since your wife left before them, and also since your children left after them. You have spent immense and deafeningly quiet stretches of time by yourself here, time that has thickened and slowed not only because you are writing again, but because you are using that writing in part to try and explain to yourself why you think you are where you are and who you are. But more specifically, trying to come to an understanding of just who the fuck you think you are and what the fuck you think you are doing thinking about these things in the first place. Because the fact of the matter is that you have simply never done this. I don't have to go into specifics. You know the thoughts you're having. And let's leave most of them at that. It won't be as messy this way.
But let's talk about something that does need a little specificity. In a little over 24 hours you will sit across from her for the first time in over 20 years. This is something you already know, because you know you are about to do this. What you don't know is you will leave this utterly and forever changed, and you will spend the next two years free-falling through/into possibility spaces that will smell and wrinkle like dreams when you first touch them.
That's right. I said touch.
Touch dreams. Read extra careful here. Don't mistake what I'm saying here as metaphor. I'm dead fucking serious.
It will happen instantly, by the way, when you see the years on her and reach for her hand anyway, in a kinetic moment that precludes any rationality whatsoever. You will be afraid of how she interprets this, and you will worry, and the two of you will talk through it, and there will be more moments that defy rationality, more moments than you can imagine, moments that build an entire castle upon an entire world that precludes the very act of thinking.
Because the two of you will fall desperately in love.
You will leverage everything. And in doing so you will lose everything, and in doing so you will also win everything. This will be the most exhilarating time of your life and it will also be the darkest. You will know beyond the shadows of doubt what possibility really is; you will wonder about things you don't want to wonder about; you will find you are largely alone and powerless; you will find you were never completely alone at all.
These aren't promises or rewards enticing you, no more than they are predilections or warnings discouraging you. I'm talking about things that
are
. This is simply what
is
.
I'm going to explain myself more clearly now. Look carefully. This is a picture you haven't seen for decades but can recall the tiny details of without prompt or prodding.
This
is
her
.
Wait. Let me back up a step because I need to be careful here: this is your favorite
image
of her. I know this because I know your past as well as I do, but I also know your future. And the next two years of your future will involve knowing a great deal about her, yet knowing sometimes very little. You will learn about the twinned natures of fate and faith, at times spun together in threads fine as cotton candy, that taste just as sweet and evaporate just as quick. It is not right to say that you will have her, because you cannot truly possess another person. Nor should you even want such a thing.
But this
image
of her, you can have it. And you will. From my vantage point, it very really hangs on your wall. You in fact possess this image, the original printed saturation of inks onto big, thick paper that recorded the way she bent the light all around her on the day the shutter of the camera paused just long enough for the moment to crawl inside its machinery and live there forever.
Just like she did inside you so long ago. I'm talking about the crawling inside and living forever part. See, you don't
know
this yet, but you can probably sense it, and I say that with such confidence because 24 hours from where I am, the three of us will join hands and bring a dream to full and real life. Crawling inside and living forever. Where the darkness meets the light, and the driveway recedes to a simple structure built of petals, wood, and hope.
Pepperoni and Olive?
At Bertie's Brick Pizza Oven, the servers sail through the open floor seating like wobbling frisbees, carrying spun metal trays with quarters and halves and sometimes whole spheres of fresh-from-the-brick pies, shoveling a slice at a time onto the melamine plates in front of their customers' eyes and stomachs, the dirty tables stacking with rows of partially-bitten crusts and carcasses of slices past, the road kill of carbs and red pepper flakes and parm cheese strewn like the wreckage of a traffic accident.
Ranch
Cheese?
Here they come, entire armies of families and co-workers, shuffling feet and eyes across the floor as they queue to pay their entrance fee, the magnificent shame of the all-you-can-eat gimmickery of it, all of them prepping to gorge and forget. This is the grand mastication, the literal chewing of the literal fat, two full floors and over 10,000 square feet of hollow metal-framed chairs parked in front of the dining tables that are fashioned like short prep stations, the chairs deceptively light, tubular aluminum like a racing bicycle, the walls aflame with plasma televisions and neon bar signs, the entire $6.00 wonder of it all.
Chicken Bacon?
The servers do their best to divide the space into columns, each responsible for a rough “I” which covers just over 3,000 square feet of each kill floor, three Is on the main and another three below, separated by a steep carpeted staircase fenced with real wrought iron with real spikes on the poles and fleur de lis snaking between. With a full crew, Bertie's brick oven can belch out a fully cooked pie in just under three minutes, and within another three minutes that pie will have traveled approximately 25 frisbee rotations through the serving area until all its pieces have been claimed by the crowd, forever waiting for that One More Slice, that magic one that injects the endorphins straight into their bloodstreams, pushing to their mainlines, up into their pleasure centers floating above all the grinding and swallowing below.
Ranch
Chicken Bacon?
The kitchen team keeps a short rotation of the most popular pies rolling, but sexes up the menu with wild combinations of vegetables, carbs and proteins that surprise new-comers and keep the regulars guessing.
Buffalo Chicken?
Dustin is the shift manager. He works neither inside the kitchen nor outside it, neither upstairs nor downstairs, neither behind nor in front of the cash register. He is both everywhere and nowhere; the owners trust him implicitly, which is why he's paid $1.50 more per hour than anyone else in their employment. Dustin looks more 31 than 21, and his servers more 26 than 16; this is going to matter someday in the future, especially to the owners, and especially a lot more than $1.50.
Ranch
Chicken Cashew?
Aimee, Trina and Veronica are the downstairs I's tonight. These aren't their real names. Dustin calls them these names and always assigns them to work downstairs together if he can at all accomplish it. Dustin makes the schedule. That's what the extra buck-fifty is for.