The Art of Losing Car Keys

My journey in recovery through art, writing, and a dad to three boys

[theartoflosingcarkeys]

The Art of Losing Car Keys

September 4th

I awake from a dream about my father at 3:06 a.m.  I have had this very dream before.  In my dream, my father is younger than River is presently, and I am somewhere in my 20’s.  Somewhere familiar. Somewhere intimate. Somewhere close.  My mother is also still alive in the dream and she tells me frantically over the phone that my father is lost and that I need to find him before the colder weather draws in from the distance before nightfall. I cannot recollect when I started driving, but I am in the truck I drove in high school (94 Ford Ranger) and I searched, turning along Riverside and Peoria.  The roads should be familiar, I should be able to recognize where I am but somewhere in my mother’s hysteria it occurs to me in the dream that I am drunk.  Each road I turn down, each side road I venture I am more lost. A great numbness feeling washes through me and I know he is out there, and I cannot protect him from what is heading his way.  By the end I finally stop the truck and realize my father is out there and I am unable to find him in all those familiar roads, and all those side streets I have ventured.  Somewhere in all that distance.  Somewhere in all my familiarity.  Somewhere in my inevitability.  I am still out there lost.  I wake up and Jackson’s breathing sounds congested. 

Jackson wheezes through night so at 4:45 a.m. I message every mother in the history of the world, this message, “Jackson is slightly wheezing, it is freaking me out, should I be freaked out?”  The coalition of; Mothers Keeping Neurotic Fathers Calm’ message me suggestions and feedback.  I watch Jackson for 30 minutes without blinking.  Afterwards, I step on Kayla while looking for my phone charger, her eyes dart and shift like a rodent sifting through trash when unexpectedly you flash a light on, in a finger flicker, illuminating the area and those sharp eyes peer back at you, so you apologize for interrupting, and vow to be more cognizant of their privacy.

Like George Orwell’s ‘1984’ River’s mind is boggled in new school bus procedures, tearing his 6-year-old mind to pieces, and placing them back together in new shapes from the schools choosing.   We role play these procedures in different masks pretending to be different people, in different scenarios, knowing fully one day we may wake up as different people that we do not recognize with all our concealment.  They say wearing ‘Masks’ is the new wearing under garments.  They say ‘Purging’ is the new ‘thinking thin’.  They say homeschooling is the new craze.  They say public school is the new ‘alternative learning’.

Bus Procedures: All students must wear a mask.  Always wear the mask. Never not ever ever, ever not ever, never take off this MASK. And in bold italic in the public-school handout, “Masks are the new letterman’s jackets” Masks are the new personality the manual implores.  Masks are the new humiliation the procedures declare.  Masks are the new individuality of the procedure manual scribes. 

MASK CLUB

First rule of wearing masks, is you do not take of your mask.  2nd rule of wearing mask, you do not take off your mask.  Third rule; Get on the bus and look straight at the camera and state your name. 4th Rule: if you do not have a name, describe your mask, and that will be your label.  River’s mask has an array of superheroes depicted, so he goes by the new label, from the new shapes in his tiny mind the school has chosen, and his name is, “Captain American” until college.  Before Captain America gets on the bus, before the procedures funnel him in like drones and cattle, I almost cry seeing him off to school but I remind him, “Hey forest, I will be right here waiting for you when you get off.”  And with the winding belch like squeeze from the school bus door, Captain America is gone.  I watch the bus until it decreases into the great wide-open horizon.  I am your Forest Gump and Captain America is my Forest Gump Jr.  Phoenix pulls on my shirt as I have this imminent imagery running through my head, and I say, “Okay, you can be Forest Gump the 3rd”

My time with Phoenix without River is strange.  My time with Phoenix without Jackson is odd.  I realize him being my middle son, if it were not for getting sober, I would have never realized how independently unique he is.  He is wild and beautiful.  Perhaps the most beautiful of all the wild that remains.  We play games together, we mostly talk trash back and forth, and other than the dimple in his chin that they say looks like mine, it is in this jargon of gibberish back and forth banter that I know we are related. 

Everything around the boys and I is changing and evolving and adjusting and adapting in the first week of our new roles.  In many ways it is like America, everything is happening too quickly.  (I think Hubbard wrote that line in the Way We Were… we will keep it in because let us get real, Robert Redford has an amazing narrative and flowing blonde hair.)

We have upgraded cubicles for lockers, and masks for identity.  We have upgraded an absent father to a present co-parent and fictitious names of our own inventions.  Behind those masks are the real versions of us, yet we all wear so many masks and walk into and out of so many different worlds; Some days we are the last beautiful remaining wild things.  Other days we are Captain America.  There are days we are absent, and there are days we are present. Sometimes we fall, and other days we are strong.  But behind all these different masks are versions of us searching and seeking for something.  Purpose maybe.  Love of course.  For some of us we are searching for redemption.  Searching to make things right from our past.  Some days we are so remarkably close, and some nights we lose our fathers on the familiar roads, fading off into the distance of our dreams.

[theartoflosingcarkeys]

The Art of Losing Car Keys

September 2

It is early Spring of 2000, the sun is just coming up, the trees are arched like a canopy, and the earthly leaves are thinly separated. The infant light is illuminating rays of the sun through a large window, scattering, willowing the light against posters in my bedroom.  The poster hanging above my bed is Nirvana, it is yellowish with burnt rose images and on the other wall is scattered words in pink and purple obscurities from Pearl Jam lyrics and Counting Crows that I have injected, overlapping the off-white house paint.  I wrote a few words that morning in a loose-leaf notebook that read on the cover in fire engine red ink in my handwriting: “Rage Against the Dying of The Light.”  I write that morning, as I have done every morning since the day, I could write my first word.  On that day I would have told you I was never going to stop writing.   

I do not wake up to a shrilling alarm clock resembling a baby nor to a tyrannical dictator in a smog riddled concentration camp working us from flesh to sunken emaciation, vanishing to the bone.  I awake to Jackson, and he is utterly alert, and his eyes are large, and inviting. I carry him into the kitchen and just as I think I am rested for the first time in weeks, I step in a red acrylic painting that I must have knocked over, with a trail of size 10 shoe that resembles Fred Flintstone, I make noticeable indentions into the carpet and it looks like a murder scene from a horror film.

 I do an inventory of the bathroom as I clean off the red paint from my skin (Jackson now an extension of my right arm) 1-pink toothbrush, 3 residents. 1 of those residents has not a tooth in his head and the other two are in their 30’s.  In my full and complete awareness, it occurs to me we are sharing a toothbrush.   Then for an uncomfortable amount of time I try to recall Kayla’s middle name but Jackson is fully alert and I am rested and I am unsure if the pink toothbrush is the tool I used to clean mud off my running shoes two mornings ago.  Jackson in all his alertness has kept this vow of secrecy.  Jackson and I listen to The Beatles before I head off to the gym. 

At the gym I am reported from a Mario Kart looking contraption that my blubber has dropped to 5% body fat, and it also reads my fortune but the words are in ‘Mandarin’ so I assume and make assumptions in my favor.  I lift intensely as if somewhere in me must make up for the misspent time I wrangled in addiction.  I watch a young father carrying his daughter to the daycare, his arms wrapped firmly in great protection and his eyes focused in a way almost animalistic towards some great survival timeline; he kisses her softly and kindly, and I watch his focused eyes hold open without resistance and in that look, in that moment, is everything beautiful about the human condition.  In that moment he watches his daughter's entire life unfold, he watches her scrape her knee, eat a snack in 1st grade and he watches her fiddle awkwardly in a dress on prom night, and he watches her get married and he watches her being his child. 

2 Hours later, I arrived to pick up my boys for River’s teacher conference. Phoenix has accelerated attempts to annoy me and he succeeds.  He speaks babble intentionally, and then he prays for more attention by pulling on my shirt, and then dancing like a lunatic.  Then he calms down and I take a breath and he unravel his energy with diplomatic immunity.  Attention seeking at its most prolific.    They are in full tilt of being spastic little boys, fighting and telling on one another’s trespasses.  River tells me Phoenix said a cuss word (but he said it in riddles, and in babble language, perhaps in ‘Mandarin’) and Phoenix tells me that River punched him when I was not looking.  River tells me that Phoenix has been hiding his shoes, but Phoenix tells me that he is hiding his own shoes, and by the time we need to leave I cannot find the left shoe. Phoenix has hidden my car keys and neither listen as they drive me up the wall.  Phoenix dances and jumps around, and he will not put on his shoes.  River laughs and does not listen, and he talks smartly to me.  They most likely have planned this; they can feel me unraveling.  They are like an Abbott and Costello act and the more I unravel, the more the banter is intense.  I scream like the soup Nazi in Seinfeld, “No Milk Shake for you!!!”  They laugh and begin pestering one another, I enjoy the reprieve but like a surprise-twist ending to an M. Night Shyamalan movie you know there will be much more nonsense.

River sits in the barber seat for a haircut and I recognize that he is almost seven years old. This is my first time to know where his school resides, I will meet his teachers, and I will no longer be absent but in a new position of co-parenting with Brittany.  When the stylist asked me which haircut he preferred, I told her a little boy and River called me ‘lame’ and told her he wanted the sides blended with a 3-inch blade. Phoenix hears the song ‘Thunder’ by Imagine Dragons and is dancing around the hair salon. 

Phoenix lives his life the way most people wish they could live.  He lives in a different world than the rest of us.  He lives in howls, and he lives in wild abandonment.  Where he lives there is no fear, there is only dancing and attention seeking and movement.  I think sometimes when I look at him, he may be the last of the wild things remaining on this earth. 

We go to River’s school and meet Mrs. Guthrie. Phoenix runs up and down the hallway howling like a mad man, like some character out of a Hunter S. Thompson novel.  There are rules because of Covid-19; bringing your own water bottle and not sharing snacks.  I picture Phoenix eating off other kids’ plastic plates and they quarantine him like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.

At lunch River is wearing a mask because of the signs reading ‘DISTANCE’ and he wonders about this half open and half-closed world.  He wants to know honestly if people are miserable because of the Covid-19 or did Covid-19 give them another reason to be miserable?  He wants to know why people want to be closed off, yet want to be openly seen?  He looks at me and lifts his mask, and says do you think that when people realize that they may not die because of this, they will try to live, or is it easier for them to just see it all miserable?  I tell him no matter how people act, we are going to live our lives, and he asks me the same question I asked my mother at his age, is it scary to die?  And I tell him what I believe and I say no buddy, we create ideas and notions and abstractions but underneath all of it, is a bunch of terrified people afraid of something they shouldn’t be afraid of.  When you were born, you were not afraid.  We complicate things River.  Phoenix spills his milkshake in my lap, and I cuss behind my mask. River ends our lunch by saying I do not want to live scared or hiding behind cloth. 

 The sun is just going down and I look at my handwritten notes from this day, and as I reflect upon it I pause for a moment, and in that moment I am in the spring of 2000, and I know I stop writing for 14 years.  I watch every single day I lived in my addiction.  My entire life I can see in this pause, and in stillness, I can see all the hard days, and sad days but I also can see the beautiful moments.  The moments where focused eyes watch over our children with love and kindness and worry and fear.  I watch my son's wonder about this half open, half closed world, and I know that one day I will be gone and the only things remaining about my time on this earth will be my words I have written and placed in the desk drawer of time within their memoires.  Everything I am doing is so they never stop living even in a world that is so utterly closed off.

[theartoflosingcarkeys]

Name Tags

The Art of Losing Car Keys

September 1

  Like shift workers on a conveyor belt assembly line of mass production, Kayla clocks in for her permeant shift work. I clock out like an onsite maintenance man at an apartment complex always on call, never paid for overtime. Always ready for the phone to ring like the sirens of mythology, luring him back to work though he lives at work and is prohibited to use the recreational novelties of community living( he never takes off his work clothing and the name on the shirt is a euphemism, Head Grounds Operator though we know secretly he is a janitor).   Jackson is a 24-hour business ran with tyranny and oppression with little positive feedback.  I think he smiled at me today and it felt amazing until I read infants cannot smile so I wrote a lengthy letter to ‘HR’ about the working conditions signed anonymous.   The rhetoric of propaganda makes Kayla look like one of those workers in a sweat shop (I noticed she wore a bandana to work this morning and it looked like Friedrich Nietzsche silhouette imprinted and the words “Fascism killed the machine” in italic sweat).  I clock in proverbially, and when I do, the boss lets me know in a discerning manner that he needs to be feed and at 3:34 am I say words that haunt me even as I write this journal.  I say this with baby spit decorating my shirt and baby powder in my hair, words as powerful as battery acid running through my veins, and I see the words in warm neon lights and the words are a euphemism to the tyrannical boss dictating our every move, and the words I utter for the first time in my life are “OMG”.  I feed Jackson, and I nod off while doing he makes squawk toyish peeps, and he whistles over the speakers for me to get back to work.  It seemed to me as if Kayla and I have begun to speak in bows and nods.  We speak in a zombie like language with nonverbal cues that have never been so clearly understood.  Jackson wakes up, Jackson falls asleep.  He wakes up to a new world, he falls asleep in familiar arms. Everything is already coming quickly for Jackson.  The way he takes in his surroundings, the way he seems to know Kayla and I in a deeper sense than the three

inches in front of his round face.  The way he trusts, the way he seems to know he belongs with us.  Even when River and Phoenix hold him is in a familiar manner.  The way the boys seem to look down at their baby brother in a way that connects them to something larger that the brevity of introductions.   As if taking in the world is also a reflection of the world in totality of understanding. I am tired and I have not clue what I meant by that last sentence but if it sounds insightful go with it and if it doesn’t, I blame it on the longs shifts and the lack of oxygen seeping to my brain.  I left the refrigerator door open since 239am.  

I go to the gym at 5:30am, Jacob my artist friend shows me his work, and his art is lovely.  I ask him the same question I have been asking everyone, “what if the world was according to you, anyway you like to see it, what would you hope for, if it could take place? What is hope to you? Why do we hope? Do any of us even matter?”

 A guy with muscles living on muscles and skin so tan it looks like Mikey Mantels hall of fame glove, lifts a thousand pounds in the air and looks at me and says, “I eat weights.” I hear from another gym member he is a pediatrician for a living.  Perhaps we are more than just the cars we drive, and the luggage we shuffle from experience to experience. Perhaps we are all more than one thing.   I imagine him with all those muscles living on muscles in a lab coat curling newborn babies.

I call Jackson, Phoenix. I call River, Jackson.  I call Jackson, River.  Phoenix that I accidently call River, limps with the non-injured leg. Moments later I catch him dancing to the song ‘Sunflower” his limp has dissipated.  I call Jackson, River.  I get the names all backwards, and we fall forward with our daily rituals.   We clean up the toy box and sweep the floors while listening to Bob Segar.   Phoenix calls Jackson, Michael Jackson.   By the end of the day I just call them all buddy. A generalization and euphemism for there a lot of you prowling around.  We listen to Kings of Leon, I read George Carlin and compile my own list of things I like, things I dislike.  THINGS I LIKE; WHEN SOMEONE TELLS ME, I LOOK LIKE VAL KILMER FROM WILLOW.  THINGS I DISLIKE; WHEN SOMEONE TELLS ME, I LOOK LIKE WILLOW FROM WILLOW.  THINGS I LIKE, A WOMAN THAT FISHES. THINGS I DISLIKE; THE EEKING NOISE I MAKE WHEN THE WOMAN THAT LIKES TO FISH ASKS ME TO BAIT THE HOOK. Worms have an odd texture and I always worry its my father reincarnated so I sit the fishing out and any chance of picking up the girl.  

We do a spring cleaning, Phoenix limps on the leg that he did not have the knee injury again, but he tells me that Michael Jackson injured him but not his brother Michael Jackson.  

We color together.  

Brittany watches as I talk to the boys and she thanks me for being present.  She tells me later I am their favorite person and that they missed me while I was gone.  She always strived to great lengths for me to have a relationship with River and Phoenix. She aides me on the gaps of time that I have missed or drank through.  She reminds me, she nudges my memories.  She colors in my paint by numbers sedated amnesia. She helps me to forgive myself for my absence.  Addiction is funny in that way; you are the most self-gratifying person alive, yet you hate yourself immensely.  You are an emotional cannibal eating everyone around you alive, and as they are all devoured, you think, why did everyone leave me?

The boys and I have a contest, to see which can stand on our heads the longest.  Phoenix wins but I call him River, and River tells me Phoenix cheated on the contest, so we chalk it up to a tie.  

I rock Jackson and sing to him to sleep.  I pack a gym back and remind myself that tomorrow I have a teacher’s conference at River’s school and that he needs a haircut for his first day of school.  I place my car keys on the bag, and I clock in for the evening shift so Kayla can rest a few hours.  

I think in life we are all looking for where we belong.  We are all searching endlessly for a door that leads to the space where we feel celebrated for who and what we are, and behind that door holds the gathering, dreaming, and hoping of others that love us.   I think we look so far out in the vague distance that we miss the very things right in front of us.  I know what I was seeking in booze and drugs was to feel apart of something, to belong, and then to not feel things when I felt I belonged nowhere.  Jackson takes in the world in awe and startlement while River and Phoenix accept their little brother with familiarity and a hope greater than introductions.  AS if we belonged together before we ever found the door that lead us to one another.    

And as if Doogie Howser went  on a 14-year drug binge hiatus and pick up where his journal last was written, I write about all the things around me.    

[theartoflosingcarkeys]

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Phoenix Turns 4, Jackson Shrills

The Art of Losing Car Keys

Written by Dustin W Bailey

August 31st

The alarm shrills and sounds like a crying baby.  I pause for whatever reason but then I realize it is my child, yet I think about the pause and then pause again.  Jackson’s cry is high pitched, the sort of alarming sound one thinks of when a traveler is mauled by an animal in one of those videos circulating YouTube.  It is 4:32 am and I have been asleep for two hours. I know this because we have done this before.  See also 2:32 am.  See also 12:32 am.  It is my turn to get up, Kayla is snoring. She has returned from her weekend with Aiden.  Aiden caught a fish.  I make a bottle of Similac (Sensitive) with two scoops of formula, and I add 4 ounces of water.  I pause as I did when the strange baby crying wakes me from a dream to realize this odd sounding baby shrilling is my child.  I change Jackson’s diaper, I sing to him, “You are my sunshine” and I feed him the bottle of formula.  I burp him, he spits up. I pause, thinking about the fact I did all this without a shirt on and burp rag.   We have grown to like one another I think, though I read he cannot see passed a few inches in front of his face, so he really does not get the full effect of my presence.  Jackson falls back to sleep.  I grab my gym bag already prepared the night before like I did when I was in the 5th grade.  It is still dark outside, as I open the door to escape like a cat burglar, I knock into the television, and again I pause, like when I woke up uncertain who is making that shrill and the second pause about the ratio of water to formula.  Jackson wakes up.

Twenty minutes later at the gym a friend of mine practicing Buddhism asks if I want to know the secret to life, and of course I say yes, and he presses his finger to my forehead and says you are only right here.  Then he accidentally forgets his password to Facebook and screams out loud (It was probably telepathy). I buy River’s school supplies. I forget half the list.  I misplace the car keys in the trunk and lose 15 minutes.

Phoenix turns 4 years old today and he dances in the moment.  We listen to Tom Petty; Phoenix tells me Jackson’s name is Michael Jackson. I play the song “Beat It” Phoenix says mockingly that it is not Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson cannot even talk yet.  I change diapers, I use my gym shorts when Jackson spits up.  I wash and dry clothing but halfway through it occurs to me, I have not used Laundry soap.  Wash. Rinse. Repeat.  I rock Jackson, I watch Phoenix dance and River tells me about his favorite day on earth.

I clean the house; I lose my car keys (they are in the refrigerator).  I paint, I throw a canvas off the balcony and I change a diaper. I watch how beautiful it is at this moment.

Some days we are lost in our heartache, while other days we are lost in our past.  Some moments we get lost in a bottle of booze.  Yet some moments we dance on our 4th birthday.  Some moments we just want to be held or rocked.  Some moments we talk endlessly about a moment and sometimes the moment is so good, you hope it will last forever.  But you know it cannot, so you pause, and you embrace your baby’s cry, and you finally grasp that you are alive, and the moment is yours.

I edited a picture montage video of the boys. I clean the apartment. I get hired to write a memoir that resembles the movie ‘Mean Streets’ so I explain the difference between fiction and nonfiction and even meta fiction.  He asks can you write it, and I say why not, I plagiarized through college.  

Today I realized that for the first time in my 37 years of existence I have taken ownership over who and what I am, this is my life and I stand by it.  As I come to this realization, I hear a shrill from Jackson, I hear River chatting endlessly about a game and Phoenix seeking my attention and I know that I belong to something bigger than my own creative thoughts.

Moments after, Phoenix falls and cuts his knee, so his mother (Brittany) calls me to take him to the minor emergency room which I rebuttal it is my job…Though

It takes me a moment to find my car keys