The Archeology of a Life
"It is only with greatest care that memory can be kept from becoming a prison or a gallows." — The Orville
The giant area rug isn’t mine. This rug is her grandfather’s rug. It’ll be the last thing rolled up.
I’ve moved a lot in my lifetime. The process of culling through the barnacles that follow us from place to place can be bittersweet but necessary. This is familiar.
I’ve already purged every single photo of her. I don’t know if this is healthy, this cleansing of reminders of the past, but it’s the way I’ve done it with every other failed relationship so there’s no reason to doubt the act. I don't even know if the label failed is even appropriate. Certainly, if the promise was for life, they are failures. Maybe a more realistic way of seeing these adventures is to call them failed attempts with the emphasis on the attempt part. We tried, hard, but it didn't make it past it's sell-by date.
I don’t have a single photo of my first marriage or wife, only a few theater photos of my second, none from the four year non-marriage, and now nothing from my third marriage. To quote John Irving, it’s better to imagine something than it is to remember something. Pictures force the kind of remembrance that is diminishing, a forced revisitation of good times had that reopen the wounds of betrayal.
I look around and can only find a few tokens of these four big relationship attempts and I think that’s just fine. A leather jacket. A Las Vegas mug. A copy of a Tucker Carlson book signed by the author to infamous Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers signed to me as his snarky birthday joke. A quilt. A few pipes.
Existing reminders I can't get rid of are the tattoos. The first of eleven my mom got me just after the second divorce. It's a theater quote in German as representation that she and I were active in DADA theater for years. The Hunter S. Thompson quote refers directly to the non-marriage. One line of poetry written by the third. On my back right shoulder is the botched sixth anniversary tattoo she conceived of and had executed by a guy who was tremendously sexy but couldn't speak a word of English and has what looks like a young Donald Trump in a half shell rather than the intended baby. I can't see it so I don't think too much about but it is a great story in the vein of a Breaking Bad episode.
The IKEA shelves come down. We bought them when we moved into our Vegas apartment. She fought me, pouted in the store because I was going to get them anyway. I'm keeping them because they're cool and will fit nicely in a studio apartment somewhere else.
The artwork comes down. Like the rug, I'll drop some of this over into her patio before I leave town. When she initially moved out, she asked if I wanted a few pieces she purchased or was gifted while we lived in Chicago. At the time I did. Now, as I purge as many reminders we had ever met, I've reconsidered. The idea of eventually cracking open the moving pod to set up camp somewhere and being punched in the face with art she brought to the relationship isn't appealing.
My Bennigan’s wall of keepsakes and nonsense including mementos of trips taken and experiences had all go into a tub for the next time I have my own place. The devil mask given to me by Chuck Palahniuk. The Eiffel Tower I bought in Paris on our first anniversary. The London Bridge I bought in London on our fifth anniversary. The bobblehead of myself my mom had made. The ink drawing of Snake Plissken Joe gave me. Wild Wild West playing cards.
I'm like an archeologist of my own dig. I find in a tub that hasn't been looked at since maybe before I left Chicago two of my high school year books. I peruse them, remembering that I'll be, at least temporarily, moving back to Kansas and perhaps seeing some of those folks from forty years ago. A pair of bowls I purchased when I moved to Edgewater nearly ten years past. A mug given to me by Bill Kurtis. Brass knuckles I found years ago in Chicago.
Coming home from a show one night, I look down as I was walking to my door and saw, glistening in the rain, a true blue pair of authentic brass knuckles. Illegal in the city, someone must have been running from the cops or just ditched them in a hurry but there they were.
I picked them up, wiped them dry and stared in the palm of my hand at this archaic but still potent piece of metal designed for 1930's toughs to pummel the shit out of other thugs.
Maybe it was happenstance, a random encounter with an object in a world filled with such things. Perhaps it was destiny. And possibly it was the strange, comical Loki of the Mind giving me a clue to the jigsaw puzzle. I keep it on my Bennigan's wall next to the switchblade someone gave me as a gift. Not because I'll ever likely use it—those days are long past me now and thankfully so.
Not as a weapon but as a reminder. As I grow older and over halfway into my fifth decade on this tortured rock, as I spend my days writing and wondering, these knuckles marked A-R-M-Y across the surface are a reminder that I may yet still have some fights to fight. I may just yet have some life I have neglected to live.
"The book says, "We might be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us." — Jimmy Gator
I suppose I do my level best to erase certain aspects of my past. As I head to Kansas, I'll embrace the beginning again. Back home. The launching pad from which I shot out to Chicago in 1989 and, in many ways, that was a magnificent decision.
I'm at a crossroads. I have some choices to make. Which direction will I follow? What will the costs be and will the trade-off for my time be enough to keep me from wasting it in the pursuit of things unworthy of the marvels of life?
The overwhelming sense of leaving the pain in the dust, the refusal to suffer, and the new stuff I'll add to my tubs of stuff is nothing if not hopeful.
