Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt Two

I walk home and think about Martha Fitz’ hands. Her tiny, shaking, withered, wrinkled hands. Her veins that threatened to burst at any moment, her thin skin like saran-wrap. Shaking her hand goodbye I was scared to tear her.

Dad was the same age. How is that possible?

I find Matt sitting on the porch. He’s wearing jeans that are too big and a sweatshirt I haven’t seen since I was fifteen. He’s smoking, of course.

“Can I bum one?”


“Since when do you smoke?” he asks.

“Since today.”

He pulls out his pack of Camels and hands me a light.

“Where’d you get the money for Camels?”

“None of your business.”

“Matt, I’ll buy you smokes. Don’t steal from Mom. She’s too easy a target right now.”

“I didn’t. Christ.”

I holds the unlit smoke in front of me. It’s a peace offering.

“You have to light it for me,” I tell him.

He does.

“So, how’d it go?” he asks.

“Do you really want to know?”

He nods.

“Dad left her for another woman six months into their marriage. Sound familiar?”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.” I suck the smoke deep inside me. I cough, uncontrollably. “Jesus, fuck! This looks so much easier in the movies.”

Matt passes me some of his Coke.

“What else did you find out?”

“That he loved this other woman, even though he didn’t want to.”

“What’d she say he was like?”


“He sounded...different.”

“What do you mean?”

“He sounded cool. Hip, or something. She said he very was charming.”

“That was always true.”

“Yeah, when he wanted it to be.”
 I look towards the busy Queen Street just north of us. I want to go and be apart of those people, get lost in something else, quiet my mind and the questions and the visions and the pictures of my father.

“What’s wrong?” Matt asks.


“Nothing. Everything.”

He sits, sucking on his cigarette. Ribbons of smoke twist through the air.

“So, what was she like?”

“Old and goes to church.”

“Weird.”

There is one bible passage that has always stuck with me. I remember sitting in Church with my father, the one and only Christmas he made us go. The priest said something about the sins of the father being visited upon the son.

“Do you think that’s true, Dad?” I asked.

“Timshel,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means thou mayest in Jewish. It's your choice.”

Jewish wasn’t a language and he knew that, but he was always vaguely, lazily anti-Semetic. I realized in eleventh grade that he'd stolen timshel from East of Eden. I wondered, as I grew older, if he stole everything from great literature. If his whole personality came from Hemingway and Steinback and other men he was disappointed he never became.

Am I making that up? Why would a priest talk about the sins of the father on Christmas?

“I had a dream I killed Andrew last night.”

“How’d that feel?”

“Believable.”

Matt laughs and scratches at his tattoos. I watch him, and in my eyes he looks like a child, my child, and I want to hold him in my arms.

“How’d you do it?”

“I drowned him in a bathtub of my blood.”

“Jesus. Is that why you’re breaking up?”


“Probably subconsciously.” I look down at my hands. My smoke is two seconds from burning my fingers. “So, I’m going to call that lesbian.”

I throw my smoke out into the afternoon, and then suddenly miss it.

Now what are my fingers going to do?

I have a taste of my father. A taste is not enough.

"It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning adoration. She knew she had always feared it, for it left her helpless; she feared it still, lest if she adored him too much, then she would lose herself, become effaced, and she did not want to be effaced, a slave, like a savage woman. She must not become a slave. She feared her adoration, yet she would not at once fight against it."

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

Three weeks before he died I sent him an email, my first attempt at contact in two years. Women’s intuition, I guess.

'Hey Dad', I said. 'Is this still your email? Can you tell me the meaning of life yet? That’s really the only thing I’m still struggling with'.

I added a ‘Ha-ha,’ for good measure.

I have one photo of my father in my apartment in Hollywood. It’s tacked on my fridge next to a Dalai Lama magnet, which I bought because I thought it would make me seem smart. Cast in shiny Kodak paper, that photo is a beautiful and horrible memory. I know it was taken when I was small, from the period I like to remember. He’s thin, he’s wearing a flannel shirt and bluejeans. He has salt and pepper hair.

“Hair you and your brother gave me,” he always liked to say.

He’s jumping over a small wrought-iron fence, one that I recognize from my elementary school. I picture him running late for some school event. Some stupid thing Matt and I were singing Easter songs at.

My mother took it.

There’s sometime in his face. His most common expression was one of furrowed skepticism, but that’s not how he looks here. He looks surprised. His mouth is open, like he’s saying something to us. He looks happy, a part of something, one of us.

That was as good as it got.

I wondered if I should take it down. If I should throw everything out that reminded me of him, if that would make things easier.

Then I thought, what if I have a daughter one day? She’ll want to know about her grand father. What will I have to show her? This picture? Will I tell her that romantic love had nothing on what we shared? Will I tell her that I probably only loved her father because he was in some ways, a version of my own? Will she know, how all kids know things they are never told, that once my father broke my heart it never really healed?

Like a good captain, he went down with his ship. He never wrote me back.

I was positive he reply, “Easy. The meaning of life is whatever you want it to be.”

In times like these, thoughts come easy. Answers do not.

I guess everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.

Hollywood

Los Angeles is a city with no centre.

It sprawls, there’s no downtown. The city is endless and the vastness gets too much. It’s so powerful it can vibrate a room and shake walls, climb underneath a road and haunt a neighborhood. It passes through you and you catch it, no matter how much you try to protect yourself.

The giant aloneness.

You pass a woman walking her dog, she’s forty, you can tell in the sunlight. Her jeans are too tight and they probably cost three hundred dollars. Her hair is too long, like a teenagers, but it’s perfectly streaked. Her body is filled with a wiry energy. She spends too much time exercising. You can see how she looked once, that she was beautiful once, young and fresh and beautiful once.

It follows her like a shadow.

People look old trying to be young. People look ugly, trying to be beautiful.

I have thought myself out of happiness one million times, but I have never thought myself into it.

Follow the Leader

Matt is in the front room. Thought-provoking hip-hop is playing. My mother is lying on the couch, her face is covered in a blanket and I assume she’s sleeping.

“Is she okay?”

“She just took a Valium.”

It's a fucking mad house in here.

“She’s sleeping, right?”

“Don’t look so worried. I just checked her breath.”


“I think Andrew and I are breaking up.”

“What? He just came to visit you.”

“I know. So, Matt, do you want to come with me?"

He looks young and his eyes fold into his face, wanting to go back from where they came.

“I don’t know Marla. I get why you want to talk to Dad’s old wives but it was a lot of work to get a picture of Dad that I like. I don’t want to fuck with it.”

I nod.

“This is a good song.”

“You’re telling, me chicken-head.” He starts clucking like a lunatic.

“You’re going to wake up Mom.”

“Yeah, she’s sleeping so lightly over there.”

He takes my hand and we start dancing. We hop around my drugged mother, hop around the memories of my father, hop around the house we grew up in. We pretend we’re fish and we swim to each other through all the rooms on the bottom floor. Then he’s a fisherman and he casts his rod and hooks me. I swim towards him and we waltz for a bit until I tell him my dyscalculia makes it hard for me to follow the leader. After he does the running man for five minutes straight, I fall to the ground laughing.

I start laughing with such hysterical feeling that I feel like I’m breaking something inside me. I think if I decided to, I could easily start crying. I think whether or not I decide to, I might start crying.

Matt reaches down and grabs my hand.

“It’s time for the robot.”

I don’t want to get up.

Opaque

“Ours is the strangest meeting of my life,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because, I think you know me."

I would meet him every week. Get togethers, always with other people, that weren’t platonic and for a long time, not consummated. But the consummation was in the complicity; that we agreed to meet when I was not to be had.

Language is not transparent, but sex is.

He didn’t need to be inside me to see my infidelity, to see the sin of my new friendship. Sex was everywhere between us. There was sex in how he looked at me, sex in how I felt around him, sex when he put me down. Sex when I fought back up. Sex, and it’s sad uncontrollable movements in how we struggled just being near each other. Sex, in it’s service and it’s selflessness in how much I admired him, how desperately I wanted him to need me.

Sex, in all it’s intimacy, in all it’s glory, in all it’s human disgustingness.The alive vulnerability that is pushed through your body, fluids expelled onto another person.

I felt shy, desired and controlled when I was with him. I spoke with a higher voice, my breasts grew and I only felt beautiful in a dress. I became a woman just thinking about being touched by him.

The concreteness of genders stood between us like a person.

Touching him was always so important to me. It was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches. My fingers against his shoulder. The outsides of our thighs touching as we squeezed together on the bus. I couldn't explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other would it take to make love?

Finally, a week before everything changed, I let him make love to me. There was a violence in the way he touched me, but a gentleness in how I moved with him. I thought of Leonard Cohen as every breath we drew was hallelujah.

The first time he climaxed, pressed up against me in his bed with no sheets, my heart began to race. It hasn’t stopped.

In the beginning when I was with him, I was trapped in the feeling found when you use a word in a sentence that you can’t define, but it sounds right. I didn’t know what we were. I had a feeling I knew what we meant.

Still, I find myself locked in suspended breath, wondering what would have happened had it all turned out differently.