Man of Action

I woke up this morning and my car was gone.

October mornings are blue, and October skies are bright blue and covered with rolling gray clouds that slide above us in the wind.

When you're a passenger, the world slides by. Desperately tired from a weekend of work and a night without much sleep, Chack ponders aimlessly as he goes to retrieve Icarus.

The sun shines brightly down, casting large shadows where leaves drift aimlessly down through the atmosphere. From one cemetery to another, Chack recounts the privilege of autonomy as he travels into his past. Along the highways and past the churches, under the bridges and through the trees aflame, in silence he swiftly moves until he comes to the top of a hill, overlooking a different vista- a cemetery on a hill, banked sharply downwards revealing under the rapidly thinning sun the massive sports-complex of the Meadowlands, and numerous industrial sites filling up the area below for miles around. Lights begin to flicker on; an eerie juxtaposition of graves set to the modern oil industry.

Upon arrival, standing in the waiting room, Chack stands face to face with a blue Oldsmobile sitting in his father's lot, an Eighty-Eight or Ninety-Eight; he is unsure which. For a moment, just a moment, time holds still. It lacks a grille, and much of the front is sitting in the lot, silently destroyed, its front components twisted or missing - dead or dying. How long it had been there, or what fate it had met, he was unsure; and yet, he knew what those moments must have been like.

Along darkening roads, from a routine repair, heading east away from a setting sun, Icarus rode home, sharing new vigor with its pilot.

The Red

"Do you have work today?"
"Yea."

We coast along at 40 in a 25 jogging the daily milk run, by way of Forest. Work right after school. The day will end for me whenever work ends, some time around 9:30. "So I won't be able to take you back home."

Of course, when 2:31 rolls around, the difference between work at 4 and work right after school becomes clear. How could I condemn someone to the School Bus? The threat is real.

Flashes of darkness. The lights that flash and emerge from them, often across the twilight, too often across the snow. February mornings waiting for the bus remain the most vivid - beyond the end of the old year, beneath the hope of the holidays; cold, in the season of death, where the world waits to be born, to be reborn... My season.

And so, I can't let that happen to flesh and blood.

Across the September asphalt- Icarus, wide and white, rounds a bend, and in a last minute attempt, follows the School Bus to its stop. Late, just like it always was. A living memory removed. Students begin boarding, and my sister is moments from getting on.

An arm extends, two taps, a gesture. The thumb points home.

'Round the bus, past the past, and on to the future.


Darkness settles across the eastern seaboard, the temperature cools. At a stoplight, somewhere, for one second, staring out the window, September's threat is breathed in, and perceived in peace for one moment, before being stolen again by the bass and the horses. Again, into the night, to await the day.

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Napoleon Solo: Part II

Looking back North on 17-S, the rain fell. This became apparent to Chack as the sky's gradient faded a dark grey as it fell into the earth. It became especially apparent as massive waves of rain pounded the back of his capsule like tiny asteroids, and as the forces that held him to the ground began to slacken, inertia became more of an issue, threatening to slide the aft of the car a bit too far on turns, unless obeyed and respected. But distance was on his side.

1:37 PM. Running parallel along a cemetery being buried under countless layers of rain, Icarus rides with wipers on full. Rounding a corner and drawing into a driveway, Chack walks through the rain those last steps, home.

1:49 PM. The rain dims and the sky brightens. An opening in the storm has appeared. Emerging from the house, a dark figure in a trench coat sits back inside his car. A key turns, and soon the engine follows. Meanwhile in the atmosphere, passengers in a plane overhead, looking straight down onto the world below, observe a small hole puncturing the clouds, revealing a few houses, some trees, a bit of a cemetery, and a white car sliding back onto the slick surface.

Under his breath, Chack mutters something about fast moving storms. The "Star Wars" Theme comes on rotation in his CD player. Thirty feet ahead, a massive wall of rain is about to smash into his windshield. The instant before this happens, a number of clicks turns the wipers on to full. Easing down to 25, the rain has destroyed what was behind him, and most of what lay ahead. The cemetery he runs parallel to is ominously dominated by a mausoleum covered by a veil of rain.

1:56 PM. McDonald's. The seventh consecutive fast food meal. Chack hasn't had a good meal since Butterscotch had her final animal crackers. A hand extends forth as a window lowers and grabs two cokes and two bags with two sandwiches, French fries, and chicken selects. Off and onto the highway. Loop around over the bridge, and fly straight into... peace. Suddenly the wipers serve no purpose, and like a fish stuck on the shore, are shut off after producing several stunned squeaks across the windshield.

2:08 PM. Delivery and Deus Ex Machina. No customers. Time to eat as the rain returns. Outside, minutes before arrival, an Oldsmobile station wagon and another car had also run into the storm on that street, and each other. The opposite of Chack's experience was present outside.

The rain hadn't been his enemy. He began to recollect his run-in with fate six months prior.

Napoleon Solo: Part I

8:30 AM, Saturday the 21st of August, 2004. The time the alarm was supposed to go off.

9:18 AM, Saturday the 21st of August, 2004. Momack walks into her son's room. The door opens with a bit of a lift and a creak, and a faint sunlight held back by the clouds pours in. The room noticeably brightens. "Don't you have work?"

With a start- "Oh Crap. That's where I'm supposed to be."

9:32 AM, Saturday the 21st of August, 2004. McDonald's. The sixth consecutive fast food meal. Chack hasn't had a good meal since Butterscotch had her final animal crackers. A hand extends forth as a window lowers and grabs a coke and a bag with two small sandwiches. Off and onto the highway. Loop around over the bridge, and fly straight into the heart of the beast that lay in wait.

9:41 AM. An Olds 98 rounds behind the store, through the parking lot people pay hundred's for monthly, and into the free spaces available to workers only.

9:42 AM. Punch-In.

By 1 PM there have been just three customers. The clouds darken, the birds seem to fall from the sky. The heat is oppressing, while the humidity rises like a missile from a silo, pointing its payload at those unsuspecting below. There are no customers to entertain either the interest or disinterest of Chack for an hour and a half prior.

1:08 PM:
Frank: Want to go do something more fun than this?
Chack: Hell yes.
Bryan: Have you ever seen a cat that doesn't like fish?
Chack: I had a rabbit that likes Animal Crackers.
Frank: Maybe you can get Mortimer the giant bucket of the crystals, but not the regular litter.

1:11 PM. An Olds 98 backs out of the parking lot, and onto the avenue ahead. Upon reaching the highway, immediate acceleration almost brings him past PetGoods, but a sharp enough turn and just the right application of breaks and magic, yes, magic, brings Icarus into a strip-mall, one of the many that countless that litter Paramus, like money picked up from an overzealous buyer and swept into the four winds.

1:26 PM. A phone call, short but to the point. "Don't come back- it's like a tornado out here. Either stay where you are or get to a building."

Ballad of the Fallen Angels

Long before I could drive, long before I flirted with getting a hearse, before I settled into who I am today, Butterscotch, a Holland Lop, had been part of our family. She had a spirit tough as nails. She'd stared down her share of vacuum cleaners and housekeepers. I would catch her on autumn days, staring out the sliding door out across the deck, and into the woods that border our backyard. In spirit, she was there with the rabbits that lived and died with that freedom and danger. Today, that spirit is free.

We found out in November 2003 that she was ill, and the amount of time she had was limited. As time went on, her condition worsened, but she always had that spirit. You could never quite unnerve her.

Today I came home, and she couldn't stand up. I saw pockets of air drifting aimlessly around her stomach, distorting the skin above in the most unnatural way. I'd always rejected that it was her time, and she lived on, touch and go. Today we both knew it was her time.

As I sat stroking her fallen head with those unique ears I miss, my mother, her mother, came home.

Momack: You don't have to stay here and see this.
Chack: I think after all the shit I've done to her over the years...
Momack: No, you've been good to her.
Chack: And she was the best of them. I'm here to the end.

Nothing was as cold as that room.

With heavy hearts, Icarus became her burial ship, and I a benevolent Charon. Ridgewood Avenue became her river Styx, and she rode home with us in silence, one final time. And so she awaits her final resting place among the grasses that her distant relatives call home, and live a life she never knew. But perhaps, she will.

May 2001 - August 18, 2004

Hackensack Blues

Here's the thing- the car itself isn't magical. The car doesn't have rockets. The car doesn't talk to me. The car's not sapphire blue. It's just a car.

But that doesn't stop me from writing about it. These are the voyages of the Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight, I refer to occassionaly in my head, but rarely aloud (save for poetic license), as "The Icarus".

I got my new insurance today. What fun New Jersey is. I always figured points were good, something like a reward. Well the reward is a new insurance company. But, that's another story, I guess, for another day.