Rod Amis - Unbound

NEW ORLEANS - 14 December, 2003: My love, whenever you think of me, think of a man who is finally free. My voice, I hope, will remain in your heart. More than one person has told me that there is no other Rod. I have cultivated the man I have become over these years, guilt-ridden and sad as he sometimes seems to be.

His laughter, on the other hand, is infectious. I wish I laughed more.

(Yes, I know that I shift between the first and third person when referring to myself. It's part of the game I play with you and myself.

We, in the editorial sense, have the oblige to play those kind of games.)

World-weary, I guess is the word that describes me most. I carry the weight of the world on my shoulders like Atlas. But I would doff it all for your love.

Watch me wrestle with the angel. The Lord has sent an angel down to deal with me, to make me wake up, to handle the last rebel. I have the angel in my hold and I won't let go until my hip is broken or I am given the blessing.

That is the kind of man I am.

16 December, 2003: There was something amazingly charming and sexy about the way she pronounced the name of her hometown: "Memphis". (When she said it, maybe it was me, but it strangely sounded like "Menphis".) What is it about raven-haired women that makes you feel excited and dangerous. (Well, maybe not you, but me.) I've always liked women with dark hair the best.

I decided, surprisingly, to go to the Christmas party with Shawn because I'm his friend and knew he didn't want to show up alone. This is not something this old recluse would normally do. Just like asking this woman if she'd date me is COMPLETELY out of character. I had liquid courage, I guess, and - frankly - I was stunned by how charming she was. Haven't met a dame who made me feel that enticed in many a moon. Worse yet, I can't recall the last time I was drawn to anyone so - here it comes! - Southern.

I haven't ever hidden my disdain for the South, as you know, Love. As far as I've been concerned for most of my life, here there be tygers and barbarians, wastrels, the illiterate and the brutal. Coming here was a choice to leave civilization, as far as I'm concerned. I watch myself get dumber every day, but I can't go back to the real America anymore, I think. I'm afraid of that country. So I hide down here in the banana republics.

She told me she likes to travel. That's the password into my magic country. You might recall that my ex-wife told me the same thing. That, and the fact that she had run away with the circus, was enough to lock in the attention of Sir Wanderlust. Any woman who tells me she's not chained to one place and wouldn't mind getting on a boat/train or plane immediately gets my heart thumping.

Then she said she was planning on building a sailboat. Thump-thump-thump! You got two hours to kill sometime soon?

So I missed work today. The last thing Shawn said to me was, "All you can talk about is that woman."

Yeah. I know.

A woman like that could make me believe that God is still in his Heaven.

---

Did I mention that my hormones are raging?

Riding With The King

(Who decreed there would be no more subheads in this column? Never say never.) 20 December, 2003: The harder I run, the behinder I get. I've got nine new features for this edition, I promised the Publisher it would come out on schedule and all I've done so far is appreciate the articles. I should have edited them by now and begun designing their pages. I'm feeling the pressure.

BUT I have to go to work at my Day Job first, so that I can keep my pledge of paying off most of my New Orleans debts by Christmas. I'm down to only two now and shall make one of them by Christmas Eve. The other I'm making a payment on today and hope to clear shortly after the first of the year. Once those monkeys are off my back, I move on to my debts in California and Florida. Some people call this living.

This has been an unusual (for Rod) week. First, there was Ms. Memphis. Then my boss on the Day Job gives me a raise. (Hip-hip! Hooray!) I tried to squeeze too much living and obligation into too little time, as per usual, and it takes its toll on an old man. I keep trying to remind myself that I'm not thirty-six anymore, but Superman refuses to listen to me.

---

Dear Dad,

I know I should have written this letter years ago but I have a hard time dealing with anyone who points a loaded weapon at my head. I'm just glad there were two women there - Mom and Aunt Ruth - to wrestle that shotgun out of your hands long enough for me to pack up my typewriter and poetry and get the hell out of Dodge.

You know what a stubborn bastard I can be. I never came back and I never gave an inch of forgiveness, did I? Even after you apologized to me, I held onto that grudge as I've held onto all the others. I'm unrelenting, at least up until now.

I've had a lot of years to reflect on your life. Some of those reflections have led to me dredging up old memories of my childhood, many of which I'd simply blanked out, and talking to people in the family, like Rudell, to recover stuff that I can't let myself remember even now. So I decided it's time that we talked.

Let's face it, pal, your timing always sucked. You died on me before I could get to the point of understanding some things I should have. I wasn't old enough yet. When you died, I wasn't even thirty-six yet. I was only twenty years away from the day you promised to kill me and ‚ for me ‚ that wasn't enough time for the wound to heal. I hold grudges harder than Scrooge held a penny. You know that about me better than most. Remember how angry I was about how you treated your mother and the manner in which she died? I loved my Granny and you put her in a home! I couldn't forgive you for that, or not visiting her enough, either.

And then you go and die on me at an inconvenient time!

I was busy proving myself a hotshot Young Turk at the Rocky Mountain News, the flagship of the Scripps Howard News Service at that time. I was the leader of a cabal of young managers and in open warfare with my own boss's Old School faction of management and my marriage was just starting to unravel. I didn't have time.

I don't even remember who called to tell me that you were passing away, Dad. Can you believe that? It's true. I have no idea who was on the other end of that telephone call because it came as I was having a fate-filled fight with my wife because she hated Denver and my job and all my co-workers and friends. In the middle of this fight, I get the call about you.

I know, I know: "Never explain. Never complain."

So be it.

Here's the deal. I'm writing to tell you that I forgave you years ago. I let go of my grudge when I got old enough to put some pieces of the puzzle together. I actually started to pity you, Dad, I'm sorry to say. I realized, as my own life got harder, what a hard life you must have had. And I gained respect for all that you accomplished, instead of just considering you a failure like I used to. You took a lousy hand and still kept playing it out long enough to leave another legacy beside the dysfunctional children you and Mom produced. My sister Gerry told me, over a decade ago, that I was the only real survivor of Hell House - and that because I had left it - but she was wrong. No one survived Hell House. We just took it other places with us, each and every one.

Nick thought my rebellion was heroic, not to mention my ability to take all those beatings so stoically - both the ones I did deserve and the ones taken to shield the others - and felt that he was emulating me by being such a hellion. Did you know, Dad, that only four years ago he had a diabetic coma? Yeah, you passed that gene on to him. Even then, he was saying that he went on long walks because he remembered my walks for miles when I was a kid and how I said it let me have time to think and dream. He didn't know, I'm sure you didn't, that those walks were my way of having time to talk with God and write in my head. You never liked that I wanted to be a writer and Mom wanted me to be a doctor, but I guess I was a writer the day I was born. The more you both discouraged me from writing, the more it took over my heart.

Nelson, on the other hand, is almost exactly like you. He looks like you, or he did the last time I saw him. He still can't drive a motor vehicle, as Mom never could, because of your skill at giving driving lessons.

Remember what I did? I pulled the car to the curve and just walked away from you. I had no patience for your abuse. I took driving lessons at school instead. It will probably surprise you to know that I later drove for a living. I was a cabbie for a while after coming back from Egypt.

Now there's a priceless scene, Dad! Remember? I made a courtesy visit to you and Mom to tell you that I was going away to Egypt and what did you say? "What about getting married? Do you have a girlfriend? When are we going to have grandchildren? Do you own a suit? Are you going to be a hippie all of your life?"

I made that trek with my first glimmer of forgiveness in my heart, Dad, and you and Mom managed to extinguish it!

I was desperate for you both to finally understand me and the man I was becoming. Instead, you continued to attempt to douse my fire. That turned me for years to come. I decided that any forgiveness for you would only be a sign of weakness on my part.

It took me years to understand why you wanted to kill me, Dad. There was a lot of information that I couldn't process as a child that it took adulthood and a bit of detective work to suss out. I only learned on my last visit to Bermuda that Leon, my adopted older brother, didn't learn who his real father was until he buried him. Leon is older than I by twelve years and I once saw a picture of him holding me, your oldest son, in his arms shortly after I was born. But I didn't get, as a child, your animosity about my green eyes or that I don't look like you. Granny always said that she loved me and that I was the man you could have been. But I know that you and Mom resented Granny. I know you resented that I was so close to her, too.

But I had pieces of the puzzle to work with, to get back on track. I had the fact that you and Mom sent me away to be with Grandma and Grandpa Bean, Mom's parents. I had the fact that my brothers are balding and I have the full head of hair even now. I had the time you and Mom had that horrible, horrible fight when I came back. I still remember that and how much it frightened me and my younger brothers, the broken dishes, the screaming, the sight of Mom scratching your face. And the phone call. I'll never forget the phonecall she made us make as we cried. She put us on the phone, one by one, and made us say, "Daddy, if you love me, you'll come home." She insisted. We cried and she coached us.

"Say it!" she said. "Say, 'Daddy, if you love me, you'll come home!'"

You did.

I had nightmares for months after that. In my nightmares, the Chinese came to take you and Mom away. I walked through a long hall of doors where they said I could get you back if I found the right door that you were hidden behind. In my nightmare, I opened door after door in that long hall full of butler and maids (I still don't know why the butlers and maids were inserted into the dream) and I never ever found you.

I suppose that is why I have feared abandonment all my life. But, Dad, you and Mom abandoned me the day I was born, didn't you?

Well, Dad, now she, Mom, is gone, too. She went to join you in whatever there is after this veil of tears a couple of months back and I have not been the same since.

My friends, even my boss, are starting to notice that I am different, changed.

This magazine, which has been the core of my life, my obsession, for y ears, has suffered since Mom died. Superman, my sodden alter-ego, has gained the upper hand. I used to control him, now he controls me. Now that you are both gone, I have only myself to blame.

Honestly, I had always planned that at least one of you would outlive me. I'll tell you why.

There is a permanent scar on the back of left hand from a barbed wire fence you made me build on the farm. I used to have a scar on the back of my right, as well, when I was younger. Having both was convenient, because I could joke to my girlfriends, like Lynda, that they were my stigmata. Sorry for the digression.

I also remember that the first time I heard the Beatles' song "Hey, Jude" I was on my hands and knees with Nick and Nelson scrubbing the floor of some restaurant you had been hired to clean. I thought, Dad, hearing that song, that the Beatles were singing directly to me. I remember you looking down at me, I was enraptured, and you didn't understand why at all. I thanked the Lord for that radio being in that room at that moment. You thought that was another example of my "dreaminess" and that I should get back to work, Dad. You had no idea who I was.

And I remember the time, at another of your janitorial jobs, you trained me to use a buffer so that I could buff the long hallway in some high school for you, Dad.

Yeah, I remember being your workhorse, shedding blood and sweat and tears for that farm you had always dreamed of owning.

I was in my teens by then, huh? The beatings weren't so bad anymore. I had gotten used to those, having taken them all my life. They just made me tougher. But I never enjoyed the fact that I also had to work for you and your dream.

You said that the farm was the legacy. That it was important for a man to own his own land and that, after you died, the land would be there, passed on, to Leon, Nick, Nelson and myself. After all, I was a bastard, but I was still your oldest son.

I've forgiven you everything else, Dad, the beatings, your hating me, even trying to kill me. But I can't bring myself to forgive that last lie.

You forced me to work for something you claimed would be mine and it will never be mine.

You forgot about Mom and the Bermudian obsession with property. My grand-uncle Auggie's family in Cuba are facing the same problem. It's not just the Americans who get screwed. Bermudians are ecumenical fuckers.

I often wondered why Mom never came to my aid, before the attempted murder, but now I understand. The final piece of this long, convoluted, horrible puzzle fell into place with her death. All of her lies over the years, to me and everyone else, now make sense.

You see, Dad, you had two liabilities: the first, your explosive and irrational anger; the second, you Christianity.

Because you tried so hard to be an itinerant preacher, you made me an agnostic, you know. If your understanding of the Supreme Being, as you and Mom espoused it and Him/Her(Both) was anywhere close to the Truth, this world would be a mighty awful place. I saw that as soon as I was old enough to begin thinking for myself. When I once confronted Mom about her transgressions, her only response was, "I give it all to God."

Well, Pop, that's bullshit. Pure and simple. We have to admit when we do something wrong and harmful and not say God has to handle it. That's the difference between both of you and me. I admit I'm a fuck-up and deal with the consequences of my decisions. I don't have some unseen and unheard entity to fall back on. That is weakness and I've never wanted any part of that.

That's why I could forgive you so much, Dad. I remembered that you only had an eighth grade education, that you believed you had a calling from God ‚ at one point ‚ and that Mom was much smarter than you and on-the-Make. She won, you lost.

The sad part of the tale, I see now, as I approach my fifty-second year on this planet, is that your sons lost, too.

The sins of the fathers are visited on their children? No, Dad. That's not it. The stupidity of the fathers are visited on us. That dream farmland in Virginia you worked your ass off for and made me and my younger brothers work for? Guess what, Pops? It was all for naught.

Well, not exactly.

The Truth is it was all for the Bermudians. (Stop spinning in your grave! I know how you always felt the British side of the family looked down on you. I'm just explaining the why here, Dad. It's about time someone did.)

Mom was a master manipulator. Remember when she told everyone that I had died in San Francisco during the '80s? (Oops! Sorry, you had already died by then.) She played you like a violin, old man. And then she proceeded to do that same concerto with me. I was your eldest, after all. I bore your name. She needed to invalidate me in favor of her first child.

Long ago, Dad, you shared with me the story of Jacob and Esau. I found it quaint. I don't know what pottage is to this day, but any food with that kind of name doesn't sound appealing in the least.

So I wrestle with the angel now, Dad. That is the curse you have left on my life.

Nick - okay, in deference to you - Nicholas, told me years ago, when I lived in the east of the United States and before I went on this hejira, that Mom's first child had decided to exclude the American side of the family in every way possible. I thought he was having a paranoid fantasy. But I guess my youngest brother, staying involved with that sick equation, was smarter than I thought. The boy always did have street-savvy.

Well, Dad, here I am. Your first-born. Your namesake. The Oedipus of the family, in the sense you wanted me dead. But I was never your rival. The real question, the final question I asked you, in fact, was "I know you're my father, but are you sure you do?" Killing words, weren't they?

My facility with words is the curse. I know that. No family deserves a writer in their midst.

And Dad, I have known all my life, that our family's greatest fear, not just for you and Mom, but for everyone, has been the day Rod returns. My return to the family would mean a catastrophe. I knew that and dreaded it as much as all of you did, for a different reason. I am the auditor.

I also know that I've never had children because of you. I didn't want any child to face the prospect that I would be the kind of father you were. I have shaped my life around being the anti-you, Dad. Where you were all-too-willing to vent your anger, I swallow mine. Where you were physically violent, I have been non-violent to the core and don't tolerate violence in others. Where you were abstemious and devoutly religious, I have been the freebooting libertine.

I occasionally imagine a different past for myself, Dad. In that imagined past, you were not filled with uncontrollable rage, I didn't take multiple beatings, Gerry (Geraldine) wasn't abused and then sent back to Bermuda, Mom didn't base her life on a Machiavellian tissue of lies, and you both loved me. I never had the gun pointed at my head and I didn't leave home and sleep in the woods. In that imagined past, I had a happy childhood, Dad. You were smart enough to realize that genes jump generations and that I had gotten the legacy of some slave-owner years before either of us were alive because they did take our women back then. It would only be natural that those genes would pop up like mushrooms in some generation. It just happened that I drew the card.

In that imagined past, you and Mom might even have thought that having a writer in the family was a good thing. You might have encouraged me and helped me find a way to write about the history of our family that Granny tried so desperately to share with me. It was Granny who made me love stories, Dad. Your mother was the best storyteller I have ever known. When you would leave me at her house, before she had to live with us, before you put her away, she told me a story that haunts me until this day.

Your mother, Dad, is the only person in our family who ever told me about what it was like during Slavery Time. I am indebted to her for that, if nothing else.

There's one last thing I have to tell you, Father. Your Dad gave you a name you didn't like, right? Face it! Why did you tell everyone to call you "Syl"? And then, what do you up and do? You pass that name onto me. Thanks a lot.

We were both bequeathed the name of the rebel. We both changed our names as adults, Dad.

That's not all we have in common, I know now.

But Mom didn't fool me.

Sincerely,

Rod

---

You know, Baby, that's a letter that people have been telling me I should write for years. But you can't write the letter until you are done. So you can sitck a fork in me now, as the colloquial saying goes. It took me over thirty years to get all that out of my system. My Dad used to tell me that I was dumber than dirt and that I would amount to nothing. He said I wasn't a real man, at all. So it took this long for me, after - I hope - proving him wrong, to stand up to him and tell him the facts as I see them today. (I might see them entirely differently tomorrow.)

Does this remind of you of anyone? Maybe you?

Until next time.

Things I Need for the New Year

1. To learn that My Platonic Lover's Christmas"Care" package was not stolen by my gutter punk neighbors downstairs.

2. A new lover.

3.To finish the Web site project for my client and friend Out East so that I can pay off my last debt here in Nawlins and the one there at the same time.

---

Thanks for coming back this week.

"Work like you don't need the money,
"Love like you've never been hurt,
"Dance like no one is watching ... "
Rod

Search www.g21.net [ ] Our Link Partners the Web for

ROD AMIS has published this magazine since 1990. It first appeared as a hardcopy 'Zine. In March, 1996, he launched it here on the Web. Rod was a Contributing Editor at Suite101.com, where he wrote the " 'Net Publishing" feature. His work has been featured in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, NRV8, and at WebLab's Reality Check site. Rod was also a contributing writer on technology for Faulkner Information Services. He wrote on Web issues for MethodFive.com's Hyper newsletter.

Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was also principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He was a contributing writer for ACCESS magazine, which appeared both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Rod was the US reporter for Silicon.com, a division of Network Multimedia Television in London, UK, reaching 3.5 million European readers, until May, 2001.

Last year he worked as Assistant to the General Manager of a Big Easy company that does restaurants and nightclubs. (Think: The Boy.) Oh yeah, Rod's had Day Jobs working construction. Mostly renovations of old New Orleans structures, houses and a bar. Sometimes he designs Web sites for other people so that he can get his creative juices flowing the way he can't at a staid publication like this one. And he's been the instructor in Editing for Internet Publications at the Novi Sad School of Journalism in Yugoslavia. Our Resident Philosopher is back to working construction again for a boss he likes. It's tough on an old man, but bills need to get paid. In his spare time, he chases women in the manner that a fly pursues a spider.

Rod lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. This town is eroding his normal sense of driven purpose. He wants to live somewhere civilized when he grows up. Wish him Luck.

Rod is "noodling" with idea of a Glass House book. (Are you listening, Timothy?)

He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.

---

| HOME | THE PREVIOUS GLASS HOUSE | THE NEXT GLASS HOUSE |

CREDITS || AWARDS || SEARCH ENGINES || LINKS ||
VOX POPULI is YOUR PAGE to talk back to us. I'm glad you're not bashful. Keep those cards and e-mails comin', Kids!

Search our Site:

sitemap

RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE

---

Our Editor does listen!

© 2003, GENERATOR 21.

E-mail your comments. We always like to hear from you. Send your kudos, brickbats and suggestions to rod@g21.net.