Tree Shades of Blue

The pounding on my door accompanied by loud babbling woke me up from a fitful sleep. My vociferous late night visitor turned out to be my next door neighbor. He told me he needed to use my phone. The reason being I thought he said was that his roommate, M, had hurt herself. I asked him if she was depressed. My question was due in large part to a conversation I'd had earlier that evening with a suicidal loved one who, when not out and out trying to kill herself, had a propensity for wounding herself with knives. He looked at me queerly and dialed nine one one. It was then when the operator came on the line that I heard him correctly: My roommate he said has hung herself.

He had not checked to see if she was alive. The sight of her hanging limp in his kitchen had triggered him to turn around and bolt. We hurried back to his apartment. As soon as we stepped through his back door I saw her. She had an electrical cord noose around her neck and was slightly up on her toes with her back against the kitchen door. Her tongue was sticking out. I opened the door and she slumped to the floor.

She was cool to the touch. I loosened the cord from around her neck and did what I'd seen on oh so many television shows. I tilted her head back, pinched her nose closed, placed my lips to her mouth and blew into her what I hoped was the breath of life. When the air escaped from her it did so with a low volume "Ahhhhh." I thought I'd saved her. But my exaltation was quick lived for she did not otherwise stir. I breathed into her a second time and once more the air left her with a disconcerting "Ahhhh." I blew several more deep breaths into her. Each one escaped her with its life like sound. Then, again with my television viewed expertise, I switched off from breathing into her to press down on her chest rhythmically, one hand atop the other. After several moments of pumping away I placed my thumb to her forearm. There was no pulse. I returned to giving her breath. But I knew it was in vain. She was dead and beyond human intervention. When the paramedics arrived they labored intensely for a quarter of an hour before placing her in an ambulance that sped off with its sirens blaring, a false urgency for a mission without hope.

Back in my bed I thought about the two times I'd interacted with M. Once we'd talked light heartedly for several minutes about my playful and friendly cat, Skinny. On the other occasion she'd invited me cheerfully to have a beer with her and the gathering of her friends. Both times she was fresh and vibrant. She was, as Richard Cory seemed, one beyond such despondent ends. What I wondered went through her mind just before tightening the noose around her neck.

In the minutes leading up to my second suicide attempt I was giddy with thoughts of my exit before me. For I was finally going to end the depression that had corroded everything with suffering. And in those last would be moments I reasoned in bleakness that I would destroy along with myself every creative endeavor I'd ever undertaken. Into the dumpster went my torn apart photos, drawings, journals, and manuscripts. I then doused it all with a gallon of insecticide. I wanted to leave nothing but a body behind. I went back to my bedroom, placed the plastic bag over my head, and stretched the packing tape around and around my throat. Then I laid down with a pillow beneath my head. I thought that I would go peacefully, slipping into death as if into sleep. But soon I was struggling for breath and awash with cold, panicked sweat. I held my arms tight to my side and strained for air. Unnerved and gasping I tore into the bag and faced the ugly and beautiful fact. I was alive and going to live.

With a fractured will I returned to my shrink with an urgent request to alter my meds. Over time, through trial and exploration, we found a combination and dosage that brought about for me a tenable self. Thus I was in the ensuing months resigned to living. Then my neighbor came pounding one night, a night it just so happened when I'd earlier spoken with someone precious to me who was in the dire straits of contemplating self destruction.

The following day I spoke once again with my loved one. The gloom of the day before had somewhat abated. After much cajoling she agreed to take the daunting step of seeking help. Before signing off with endearments we gave voice to just how close we both were to M and the precarious void. That night M and her family were in both of our prayers.

Anecdotal Labors And A Would Be Footnote

When I dropped out of high school at the age of sixteen I took a job peeling vegetables in the cellar of our town's best restaurant, the Mountain Laurel. On my second day of work I brought in a black, plastic, transistor radio that I'd borrowed from my mother. (The first day without music had been such a bore.) I tuned into my favorite station and the job didn't seem so bad. I got into a groove and peeled away. I hadn't been at it too long when the head chef came down the creaky wooden stairs and took one look at my mother's radio and asked, "What's this?" He then glanced in the washtub at the potatoes I'd so far peeled and found the sum to be a paltry one. "Less music, more work," he said before going up stairs. I shrugged it off. When I was done with the peeling I put the radio out of the way up on a shelf and huffed my load of potatoes up the stairs.

The next morning my mother's radio was not where I placed it. Without music peeling vegetables was once again a bore. I was a sulking half-hour into it when the chef came down the stairs to check on my progress. I asked him if he knew where my radio was. He told me there had been a burglary during the night. This surprised me. I ask him what else had been stolen. "Nothing else," said the chef. "Just your radio."

At seventeen I white-lied that I was eighteen with a steady work history. It was a Man's world into which I sought entry so I fibbed away on job applications and, when I was lucky, in interviews. The secret I had learned was to tell would be employers exactly what they wanted to hear. On one such occasion I took my place at the end of a long line of applicants. In the next room over I watched a gruff interviewer dispatch one job seeker after another. Nearly an hour passed before it was my turn.

I'd barely gotten comfortable in the seat when he asked the question. "Got any plans for college?" "Yes," I lied, showing him I had ambition. Instantly he raised his two arms together with my application held between his hands. For a brief moment he looked like a surly conductor bringing an orchestra together for a final dramatic chord. He ripped my application in half, lengthwise. "College boys I don't need," he said. He crumpled the two halves of my application together. "What I need," he said, "is men who want to work." He tossed the wadded paper into his waste bin. He had no more to say. The interview was over. I stepped out of his office thinking if there was a lesson to be learned here I wasn't sure what it was.

A few years later four of us were living out a van at Huntington Beach, California, when I got hooked up with a job as a carpenter's helper through the California Department of Labor. I'd fudged the facts by claiming I had experience. I figured how hard could it be? I imagined I'd be like a nurse in an operating room. But instead of handing a surgeon a requested scalpel or sponge I'd be handing a bidding carpenter a hammer or a saw. When I showed up at the job site the first thing the foreman did was ask me where were my tools. When I told him I'd left them in Connecticut, his eyes narrowed. He handed me several dozen L shaped pieces of metal and told me to borrow a hammer and "install these braces in the joists." I thought he said "Joyces" and I asked the guy I'd borrowed the hammer from if he happened to see any Joyces around. He pointed to a support beam over my head. "That's a joist," he said. "Oh, right," I said, as if I'd momentarily forgotten.

I was hammering in around the fourteenth brace on a joist I'd picked at random when the foreman came charging over. "What the fuck are you doing?" he barked. Apparently each joist only required four braces. If he hadn't stopped me there was no telling how many braces I would have pounded into that joist. "Gimme the hammer," he said. I was demoted to sweeping and fetching lumber. At the end of the day he fired me and I was once again unemployed albeit in the golden land of opportunity.

Two years after that I was driving along in my brother's Dodge Dart looking for work and listening to the Sex Pistols as loud as his stereo would go when I saw a sign: Help wanted. I pulled into the parking lot and stepped inside. After I made quick work of the application the manager came bounding out of his office and shook my hand with vigor while laying his other hand on my shoulder. "Come on. Let me show you the plant," he said, giving my shoulder a squeeze.

When he pushed the two gray swinging doors open I saw up on a raised metal platform a half-dozen women of color in pink uniforms and hair-nets who all turned to gaze our way. And in that moment that lasted perhaps a fraction of a second it seemed to me that each one of those women had a look in her eyes that said,"Please rescue me." In a flash the look was gone.They returned to the work at hand, processing chickens. "Not to worry," said the manager. "We provide you with hip booths." He'd been talking about the job non stop since he'd laid his hand on my shoulder but this was the first thing he said that made an impression: Did I hear him right? This is a job that requires hip boots? I gazed up at a slow moving conveyor of chain with hooks from which chickens dangled in various stages of postmortem, some with feathers, others without. "Don't worry," said the manager, describing one of the rooms in which I would be working. "You'll get used to the smell." A red alert went off in my head. It flashed, "No fuckin' way will you ever get used to the smell." "So," said the manager. "Are you ready to start? You can punch in right now and get to work." I feigned a need to go home first. "Alright," he said. "But hurry back."

In the safety of the Dart I mulled it over. I'd been out of work for quite awhile and was nearly destitute. And here was a job being handed to me. But I kept seeing the looks on the faces of those women and hearing the voice of the manager. "You'll get used to the smell." I drove on, giving it serious thought. When at last I'd made up my mind I cranked up the Sex Pistols and sang along, "No future, No future..." I didn't need a job THAT bad.

I was living in Boston, Massachusetts, some years later when I took a job with a temp agency. I was sent to work opening envelopes for a well known radio based evangelist. We worked in a small vault-like room in a bank. There were surveillance cameras overhead and an armed guard in the room at all times. There was no music in the room. Those of us who did not work directly for the evangelist had to roll up our sleeves, don hospital smocks, and sit with our bellies pressed against tables stacked high with various sized envelopes. If we happen to drop anything on the floor we had to announce it to the guard before bending down to pick the item up.

We were not supposed to read any of the written material in the envelopes. Our job was a simple one. We were to open the envelopes and stack the enclosed money governed by denominations, except for Fifties and Hundreds. These we turned directly over to the woman in charge. I could not help myself. I read some of the enclosed material. The appeal letters were varied. One boasted that the Evangelist had had a dream in which the computer generated undersigned had donated a specific amount of money and "All your dreams came true." There was another letter in a large envelope that contained a stiff paper "prayer rug" with two knee indents marked L and R. Another letter contained a piece of fabric that was to be placed under a person's pillow for one night, AND ONE NIGHT ONLY, and then returned in the envelope provided with a donation in a specific amount. There were individual numbers too that were noted as amounts to be tithed. The age that Jesus died, thirty-three, was one number a letter stated boded well as a dollar amount for the bearer to mail in.

Along with money many of the envelopes contained correspondence of desperation and pleas. A number were scribbled on scraps of paper. And because the reverend was paying for the postage and there were those who cared not to hear from him a couple of the envelopes contained heavy weights. Others carried porn and scrawled rants filled with curses and racial slurs. In one envelope was a bullet. In another a sheet of shit smeared toilet paper.

In the waning Clinton years I was working as a banquet server at the Cater Center when President Clinton stepped out of a side room with a small retinue. I was standing aside a buffet table ladened with breakfast baked goods. He and his group were some twenty feet away when the thought took hold. I saw it as clearly as the black and white footage of Ruby gunning down Oswald in Dallas. The President drew nearer. I imagined the heft of a baked good projectile. There were dozens upon dozens at my disposal. A few feet closer. I saw the New York Post headline, Prez Beaned With Biscuit. I looked at the biscuits. The president was ten feet away. I had a clear shot. I could see myself explaining to the world that it was not so much a political act as a bit of irreverent performance art. There he was. Take the shot. Do it, do it. But no. The President and his yes men swept by and I was left in his wake, a disgruntled waiter who was, I like to think, almost a historical footnote.

The mystery of coincidence

One crisp Fall night as I walked home to my apartment in one of the student ghettos of Boston, I was wrestling with a fledgling belief in a Higher Power otherwise known as God when I all but cried out, "If you exist, God, show me a sign." At that very moment in the distant sky over my right shoulder a firework exploded in brilliance. Stirred by the coincidence, though still the agnostic, I asked half in jest, "Are you always so subtle?"

Some years later my therapist and I were in uncharted territory. I was for the first time broaching my deepest and most secret fear that I might one day stab or otherwise slash myself with a knife. As I gave voice to the words something I can only describe as an other self erupted from me sending me and my chair skidding backwards. It could not have been any more dramatic than an exorcism. My slack jaw therapist had to ask, "What the hell was that?"

At the end of our fifty minute hour I lumbered away from the office of my therapist. I wanted only to sit in the sun for a few precious moments to regain my equilibrium. Fortunately the Boston Common was only a block away. When I got there I started to lower myself on to a bench that I had picked at random when an inner voice said, "Not this one. That one." There was no difference between the two but I listened to that voice and took the other bench some twenty feet away. I collapsed into a sitting position with my elbows on my knees and my head hung down. In this way I noticed something between my feet. I could not believe my eyes. I bent down and picked it up. It was a toy knife, one that a child might get from a bubble-gum machine. The blade I noted was folded safely away.

Some time later in a ritual of self cleansing and opening the soul to unconditional love I took a moral inventory by writing down every aspect of myself, both good and bad, on several sheets of paper. I shared this with a mentor who suggested that I offer my reckoning to the gods and then give light to all that I'd written. I did so, placing the pages in a tin can sitting on my kitchen table. I gave light to my inventory which was shortly ablaze... and smokey too. My two fire alarms went off. I fanned at the smoke and filled a glass with water and poured it into the can. After quieting the alarms I looked inside the can. All was ashes except for a speck of paper the size of my thumb nail. I scooped it out and gave it a look. On it was a word and one word only. The word was "love."

A couple years after that the temp agency I was employed with sent me to work as a courier at the Deaconess Hospital. It just so happened, as coincidences do, that my mother was receiving experimental out patient treatments there for a lethal lung ailment. Two weeks into my job my mother was admitted to the hospital with the understanding it was for a short stay, just until she regained her strength.

Because of the nature of my job I had lots of free time. I spent quite a bit of it at my mother's bedside, at times holding her hand. As the days progressed I watched her weaken. At night after visiting hours I blubbered in the arms of friends, "My mother is dying."

There was so much to be said, grievances to be aired and rectified, apologies for past rancor and misunderstandings, grudges and hurts and words hurled in anger that needed to be addressed. But my mother was on oxygen and struggling to breathe. The last thing she needed was an emotionally charged exchange. I held my tongue. On one of the last days she was alive as I left her at the close of visiting hours I said "Sweet dreams, Mom." Removing her oxygen mask she replied,"Then I will dream of you." What a balm that has been over the ensuing years.

I have read that using words to describe magic is like trying to carve a pot-roast with a screwdriver. And surely if anything coincidences are magical. They appear out of the ether as if guided by a deity, and this is how I have come to see them, as gifts from a Higher Power that I can not explain or adequately give voice to. I can not make plain the mystery of coincidences. I can only revel in them and give thanks humbly before the great unknown which I choose to see as the nature and embodiment of God.

Meat Service Team Member (Retail)

You never know what questions you'll face when you open your eyes in the morning. Those of us with a suicidal bent are often greeted with existentialist queries such as "Can I go on?" And "Is there any purpose in my being alive?" For some however the morning's first question is as simple as an inquiry of puppy love. "Do I want to get up to let the dog out?" There are those too of a feline proclivity who must ask upon awaking, "Is it time already to feed the cat?" The pet free bear no such burden. They can reflect on inquires germane to the self such as "What shall it be? Coco Puffs or Frosted Flakes?" Or "What socks go good with this tie?"

I can only imagine the questions faced by those with their very own brood. And it is not a pretty sight. I've no tolerance for early morning kiddy clamor and questions of why? Why? Why?

For the past ten plus months my mornings have begun with the opened eye inquiry, "How shall I fill the hours of my jobless day?" Some times the question has weighed upon me with enough brooding force to pin me to my bed. And there I have lain, staring at the ceiling, until boredom or inspiration whispered, "Get on with your day." There have been other mornings too when I slipped easily from bed and on to my knees to make my daily supplications. I feel more centered when beginning my day by humbly asking for help from a power beyond my human comprehension. It is a question with faith the answer.

Thusly fortified I surf the net looking for a job while nursing that age old question, "What do I want to be when I grow up?" Today while perusing the goal of employment I came upon an advert for a position as a Meat Service Team Member (Retail). The images that ad conjured were both red and graphic, bloody aprons and mounds of cold dead flesh. It certainly in no way invoked the thought that this is the answer to who I want to be, a man who works with meat.

If our time above ground is as the wise have said down through the ages to know thy self, then I have this going for me. I know I am not a man who wants to labor with deceased animal flesh. If only my questions of meaning and purpose were as easily answered. I would rejoice and give thanks upon my knees.