Sits quietly. Pondering. Looking outside of his kitchen window into the blackness of a cold, winter night.
It is two in the morning he observes, casting a glance at the microwave to his right, the warmth of a baseboard heater blasting at his feet, the cold bottle of a seventh beer held loosely in his grip.
Tonight was no different than any other, he thought, barely able to form words in the dizziness of his drunken mind as it flashed images from the Rolodex of his life.
His daughters, Amy and Poe, smiling as he pushed them on a swing more than 50 years ago appeared as a projection before him, his heart seizing momentarily, sending a rush of blood to his addled psyche, stirring in him the many painful emotions he wished deeply to suppress.
He was all alone, his wife had left him eighteen years ago for which he was glad as he could not endure her incessant belittling of his station in life. A trucker for forty-four years, the old man both resented and appreciated the long hours away from home, freed from the screeching harpy but estranged from the nourishing innocence of his daughters.
They were grown up now, living in different cities, living lives of their own with children he could not get to see as often as he would have liked. His legs were frail and numb, his toes without sensation, he no longer trusted himself to drive and his alcoholism kept him from enduring long flights in which a needed beverage was denied.
So he sat. Alone. Drunk.
Feeling the wash of memories skip through his mind like a broken record in which he had to continuously reset the needle.
The view outside of the window displayed a crowded parking lot filled with cars covered in ice and snow. Branches of an old tree poked across his line of sight and in front was a neighbor’s vehicle staring menacingly at him, blinking it’s blue warning light from the dashboard.
At 77 years of age, Dwayne could not seek for a reason to keep on living. Sports no longer interested him, the television shows have grown repetitive and without imagination, movies were empty soulless and unapologetic filth projecting violence and immorality into eyes that once consumed such entertainment with rapturous excitement and pleasure.
All he had was a crate of old records from the 1950s to the 1980s. Sounds that weren’t contaminated by crass commercialism and recorded by amoral performers who cavorted about the stage wearing the least amount of clothing they allowed themselves to get away with. Elvis, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, Perry Como, Dean Martin and the Rat Pack, Steppenwolf, Three Dog Night, Electric Light Orchestra, Liberace, Peggy Lee, Timo Yuro…
…Were all that he had left. Ghosts. Ghosts whose audible presence manifested themselves at the flick of a switch, bringing with them memories of times long gone, some inextricably attached to moments in Dwayne’s life that reminded him of the emotions he used to have, emerging from the fog of his deteriorated mind.
A mind broken. Crumbled like foil, framed with jagged corners he dared not probe closely less they frighten his heart and induce yet another stroke for him to bear the unseen consequences of, for the last of what he endured had rendered him a cripple barely able to bath himself and denied him the restfulness of a good night’s sleep.
He wanted to cry out in silence, to fill the room with a type of sound that did not come from the loudspeaker on the table. He wanted to make his pain disappear, placing them inside of runny tears, wiping them away in the futile hope that they would not return.
Regrets, he’s had many. The years as a trucker has kept him from being the father he aspired to become, eyes wide at the sight of his first child, yet in years to come his wife usurped the authority of the household and would disallow him the means and influence to direct the course of his own life or that of his children. He could not bear the thought of his daughters looking upon him as a little more than a nuisance with a pocketbook, as his wife frequently reminded him of being.
So he drank.
And drank.
And continued to drink throughout the years, until one day when arriving from a 14 day stretch, there was no one at home to welcome him inside. She had left him a note on the kitchen table, saying that she would be moving in with her sister and that she was filing for divorce.
Dwayne knew the request was inevitable. Inspired by curiosity, he drove to his sister-in-law and did not see his wife’s car so he knocked upon the door only to discover that she was living at a different address and to his lack of surprise, found it to be occupied by a man, whom she had met more than a year ago and engaged in many romantic liaisons with.
And so he drank.
And drank.
And drank some more.
And then, he could feel the lightness of his spirit begin to detach from his body as he felt the loud thunk of his head slamming onto the kitchen table.
The last thing Dwayne remembered, was the sullen smile which preceded the whispers leaving his mouth.
“Thank you God.” he said, “finally.”
“Finally.”
His eyes closed to cast out the vortex that was spinning wildly before him.
As he then entered heaven.
Away from this hell.
Dwayne William Logan (1945–2022)
