He spoke fast, broken, and somehow so violently methodical that night. An old man. Weathered by the great storms of turbulent years. Salty, wrinkled skin, gray, dry, cracked. But his voice held within it those same years. And it's a polar difference, the toll such time would take on a man's skin versus the character it gives a man's voice. His song. This voice, his siren, kept me in front of him that night, basking in the melody of his infectious phrases. The words left his mouth chopped up, furious, yet calculated. As he spoke he massaged those syllables through a great many gestures he'd made with those old, gray, wrinkled hands; as if to mold these ideas to his own proper standards, before letting the words reach me. He manipulated the language, tailored it to his own definitions, his own chaotic dialect, wherein he described himself as "porous." Not because his beaten old body sprung the occasional leak in the form of urine or drool or diarrhea, but because of the abundance of knowledge, vitality, creativity and monologue that went forth from it. I awed at his bravery, nay, his audacity, to so simply stomp the English language so unapologetically, and moreover, shape it into something so much more beautiful. His confidence shone in every breath. His advice was pure.
"Have you lived, son? Have you?" His eyes pierced me.
I nodded, "Yes, I, I think so"
"You think so," he scoffed. "How? How have you lived?"
I stuttered in the face of his radiating intimidation. He was not trying to intimidate me, but his domineering disposition was out of his control.
"You sit here at this table, cross-legged like some cowering Cinderella. What, twenty-five years of age? Oh you've lived within the very boundaries of the word, by its pitiful, tiny, definition. An unnamed drone in the ant farm."
He drank from his whiskey and his eyebrows raised in the delight as the ice cubes clanged a little melody in the tumbler. He set the glass back on the cracked wood of the table between us. I watched in silence, pondering my minute existence.
"Somebody, uh, mom or dad or some overpaid, under-qualified teacher in your youth." He paused and crossed his own legs. "They told you what life was. How to live it, no?" He didn't wait for a response. "You went to school and got graded on your retention. The institution wanted to know if you knew how to live. Did you retain anything else in those years? Sure, you, you knew how to tame the mighty Pythagorean Theorem, memorized world capitals. You were asked to do those things. No, you were told to. But did you retain the life in those years? Not by their definition. But by my definition...or, for the sake of this conversation, our definition. "
"Did you, kid? Did you retain the taste of her lips? The smell of your skinny fingers as they rose from underneath her dress? That's life, kid. There's a beauty unabated in the purity of virginity. Did your fifteen year-old, uh...impressionable...uh...psyche drown yourself in such a beauty? No, sir, I doubt it did. You got your diploma and that was your sense of accomplishment, yeah?"
I nodded and drank my whiskey with great apprehension of it's fiery burn.
"Of course, then you went to University and solved for standard deviation and reaped the harvest of another mis-education. And I'll bet, somewhere in that half decade of wasted dollars, you had a professor recommend some subversive author or progressive artist, Bukowski or The Marquis de Sade or some genius alike? Maybe you picked up the books, read a half a chapter or so and threw it aside in favor of the gloom and false security of institutional text. Yes, sir, I'm sure you, you said 'to hell with this starving artist bullshit and those losers who write woe is me! in their, their squandered allotment.' You, yes? You spat at their broken empires, their legacies doomed to wander the lore of the cults as Andy Warhol or Hunter Thompson.
He sat back and lit a cigarette.
"I've lived, kid. Kid...this I can tell you, kid. I have lived a life that a church-goin' man would burn in Hell for". He drew a long pull from the cigarette.
"I've lived in those same broken-down motels as Bukowski. Wrestled the same gin-soaked skanks whose breath could spark flame and whose wrath could start wars. I've bled my heart in longing for the flare and passion of such abominable women. I've watched as the last pony crossed the line spoiling my trifecta and swallowing that month's rent. Watched in agony, son. Again and again I've moaned in great pleasure, ravenous, in the basement orgies of the heroin slums. Neo-Sodom, boy. A realm all its own, unbeknownst to the masses. But I know, son, I know these things as I have lived them. "
"To know the enlightening freedom of roaming aimlessly in the thick forest of the Adirondacks, is what I know, boy This, boy, is a life lived!"
He spread his hands as if to say "voila". I nodded and finished my goblet of alcohol and winced. He'd reduced me to dust. And while my nodding met his approval, it was with half a heart that I conceded to his postulations and visions of grandeur. I hadn't thought my life so normal and unlived before I'd sat down in front of this prophet. Something inside my practical sense of maturity wanted to dismiss everything he'd said as bullshit, the senseless ramblings of an aged drunkard. But the overwhelming conviction in his voice, the poignancy with which he'd delivered his atheist sermon, made very clear its unmitigated validity. I was gripped with a feeling of discontentment and wanted to get into my car, or any car, and drive without any sense of where I was headed. I wanted to live! And not by their definition, but by our definition. I wanted the despair, the depravity. I wanted to journey the unknown, uninhibited by the trifled existence of the layman.
But he wasn't done. Just as I was perched to spread my wings and grab the world by the short hairs, he opened his eyes wide and wild.
"There it is, boy! I see it!" He looked hard into my eyes..."I see it in you, kid!"
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