Episode 2

Episode 2: "Something, Everything and Nothing" Or, "Earnest Excursions through Time and Memory"   

           

            As you may know, either from first hand experience or by means of hearsay or rumor, time is a thing, a squishy moldable thing. I claim time is a liquid. But, that is not what I'm here to discuss. I merely mention this to soften you up for a confession I need to make, concerning time of course.

            Everything I've told you so far happened somewhere toward the middle of the trip. You know, with the tacos and the sister/brother brooding stuff. Some clarification is necessary here. I did not intend to begin in medius res, or whatever it is.

            The point is, this is no epic: no heroes here.

            However, this shouldn't discourage you. Plenty of nice and quaint things are absent of heroes, like Buddhism.1 2 3

            If this family, my family, were Buddhist, my uncle Tony (and perhaps my uncle Dale) would be its resident Bodhisattva. "Anthony Earl," as my father calls him, doesn't wear shoes if they aren't required.

            We Whitehurst's, despite some of our more affluent elements, enjoy the outdoors and the feeling of the Earth on and under our feet, be it mud, sand, gravel, hot concrete, or plush grass. We would make great nomads if we wanted to pursue such endeavors.         Keep this in mind.  Hold that stitch, please.

            Perhaps our family used to travel long distances by foot in the ‘wayback’ days. I've never been able to afford the $29.99 start-up fee for Ancestry.com, so I am not certain whether anyone in my family every walked anywhere at all. Further, I don't think I'll ever know.4

***

            Yes, when my father and I first arrived at the place Katelyn was already there, jamming out to (insert latest popular music artist) something with a steady 4/4 beat, with accents on the one and the three. My Dad and I had stopped at Wal-Mart for groceries and beer and one kayak paddle for my uncle Tony, who brought three nice kayaks and his fishing boat to the lake a day early. No doubt getting a lay of the lake and setting fish traps along the way.

            Anyways, we unloaded our stuff into the giant dining area because we didn't know what the sleeping arrangements would bee, yet. My cousin Kristen: eldest progeny of Ricky (Dr. Richard Marion Whitehurst, Jr., the eldest son of Richard Marion Whitehurst, Sr.– my grandfather– my father's eldest brother, the neonatal doctor from Mobile, Alabama, whose wife, not three years ago, figured out that she was a lesbo) whoops!

            That's a little tangled up.

            I'll make a diagram or something.5

            Either way, there's a girl, a woman, named Kisten who is related to me that sets the reunions up. They happen once every two years. She is obliged to do this because she is the eldest of all the grandkids/cousins, depending on which angle you view it from. I believe she bestowed this responsibility on herself. Good for her.

***

            We are technocrats; my family functions as a technocracy.

            Hobbits interested in robotics: that's all we are.7

Focus:

            Among the belongings we had strewn across a table in the dining room was a cooler: pick a color for it, any color you like: I don't remember. The cooler was filled with my beer.

            My beer. Not my father's beer.

            My dad had stocked up at the liquor store downtown before we left Birmingham: the ABC store down by Lou's Pub and On Tap Sports Bar and Grill. The noble employees of the package store know my father like they know all the other more-frequent patrons of their establishment. That is to say, they know a drunk when they see one. Especially, when they see one every three or four days, getting two handles of bourbon-whiskey every time. Yet, I believe my father is an enigma to them, as I'm sure he is to you, and as he sometime is to me.

            You see my dad is quite athletic despite his diabetes and rampant alcoholism. He cycles up to twenty-six miles a day, and sometimes more, for the fuck of it. This trend, hobby, shared by millions of people around the world is baffling to me. Don't get me wrong I enjoy a good bike ride from time to time. But, shit, I don't want it to be work. Sometimes, he uses his bike for small grocery runs and close-by errands. Otherwise, I drive him around. That was the deal: I get the car in exchange for occasional rides to Sam’s Club and Publix to stock my dad up with food until the next time he needed a ride. This is not a hassle for me. Although, I think my dad believes he is a burden on me and my time. I love seeing him, even if it is only for a brief two hours, while we shop for food, the same food, over and over and over, every two weeks.

***

            My beer was chilling in the cooler with the help of about 527 cubes of frozen water molecules and Freon, give or take a few hundred, or none. We left the giant house, the one with like five kitchens, in addition to the fully functioning restaurant-style kitchen located just off the dining room, the kitchen equipped with walk-in refrigerator and freezer, an eight-eyed gas stove, flattop grill, and a sink you could bathe septuplets in, all at the same time. If any of that gives you an idea of what kind of real estate this is.

            "Burke Cove" is what they call it.

            We left the mansion and walked to the supplemental house we had reserved for guest overflow and simply to alleviate the pressure of such, shall we say, "modest," living arrangements for the four days and three nights we would be required to persevere through.

            The second house was a bit more modernized than the one we had left our things in: All electronic kitchen appliances, flat screen televisions hanging from every place you could place a mounting unit, nice leather furniture, and a beautiful back balcony and porch that had a ramp affixed to it, which led directly to a personal dock, where Uncle Tony's kayaks and fishing boat were tied up, waiting patiently to be taken out by a fellow mass of congealed, concentrated matter with an affinity toward water, like myself.

            When we were done admiring the place for all of its "newness" to us, my father, Katelyn, and I found my Uncle Tony and my Aunt Carla preparing dinner that was to be served to the family for the first night's sustenance. Chili was the meal: the regular kind, and the healthier, pinto bean and chicken concoction, to create an illusion of both choice and healthiness: or, because people like those kinds of things, things like "white chili."

            I do not believe in "White Chili."

            It does not exist.

           

            "Did y'all bring beer?" These were the first words spoken to us upon our arrival, from one family node to another.

            "Yes," I replied with a giant, goofy smile. I was high on marijuana. "Reefer" is the technical term, I believe. My father and I smoke weed together.8 And that's pretty much the synopsis of the car ride down there, to the reunion.

            "Well, where is it?" He asked with a smile that looks like a frown. "Cause at that other house, you can't have no alcohol. It's a 'dry' house," he said, making the gesture for "air-quotes" with a Dr. Pepper in one hand and a wooden stirring spoon in the other.

            My dad said, "Matt, go get the cooler and bring it over here. And…" he got a little closer to me and whispered, "Hide my liquor in a safe place."

            This has always been the way with my dad. My father and I enjoy the pastime of "fetch" all the time. I play the dog, dad plays the enthusiastic owner, and the alcoholic beverage, the beer or a mixed drink9, plays the stick, or the Frisbee, or whatever you throw to dogs.  This has gone on ever since I was big enough to climb the counter to reach the liquor cabinet. It is my intention to use my children the same way: as extensions of myself, detached extensions, but extensions nonetheless. I feel as though my father, as well as other paternal units, alike or unalike10, have earned the chance to sit down for a few minutes at a time with limited interruptions from things like the necessity to move one's body to a certain place that is not where they are at any given present moment, but to where they need to be in the future if they are to acquire what it is they desire.

            So, I went to get the beer, my beer, with supplemental, outsourced glee.

            ‘Twas heavy, heavy ice and beer.

            Thirty Keystones would last me the entire four days and three nights, I thought.

            They would be gone by noon the next day

***

            When I returned, I put the cooler outside on the balcony, next to my uncle's cooler, fished out one of my beers from the icy depths and walked inside. My uncle looked at his wife, my aunt Carla.

            "Carla, baby, can I have one now?" he asked.

            "Yes, honey," she replied. She sounded both sarcastic and a little defeated.

            I instinctively grabbed a beer out of Uncle Tony's cooler as they completed this two-sentence interaction, and was in the process of handing my uncle the beer.

            "Can I have one of yours? Mine aren't cold yet, I don't think. What you got there? Keystone. Yeah, I'll take one of those if you don't mind," he asked

            "Sure," I said, aware now of the actual coldness of the beer I had offered him.

            Approximate temperature: Cold enough.

            I was happy to share my beer with my uncle. It was a little box I could check off on the scorecard of life (the paperwork, documentation, or whatever metaphor you like as long as it's got some kind of checklist of possibilities–infinite would be a preferable figure for the amount of these– that one could in essence "fill out," if my terminology is correct).

            It was a tiny victory for me, is what I'm getting at…

***

            After steady alternations between the cooler, the balcony, and the bathroom, I was sufficiently buzzed and settling into the place. The twenty-somethings arrived back from the grocery store with more booze, concealed in a cloud of chitchat and giggles, and thus went ignored or unnoticed. Their names, as separate entities, are Mindy, her new, first and only (let's hope) husband, Patrick, Megan (Carla's daughter) and her boyfriend, Joe. They aren't really important or interesting as individuals, and barely function in three dimensions as a group. Yet, I'll give them the dignity of calling them the "twenty-somethings" from now on.

            We hurled pleasantries at one another until some invisible, inner-self in each of us–the inner-self taking all the punishment from fakery and manufactured shit-giving (that is the act of giving a shit)– eventually gave in and finally forced that elongated "Well" out of someone's mouth, signifying the end of battle, I mean small talk. I believe this is the only exchange I had with the collective known as the "twenty-somethings" face to face. My other interactions with them were from a spy's perspective, or maybe a vampire’s.

---

1 It may be interesting to note that my father toyed around with the ideas of Buddhism for a while. The first time I ever heard him say anything about any kind of spirituality was when I was helping him move back to Birmingham from Denver, Colorado.

2 We were crammed into what is now my Honda Civic, a two door, relatively small car, driving across the country with all of my dad's belongings, well all of the ones that would fit in a two door coupe. When we moved him out there he had a big U-Haul truck full of stuff. As the story goes, he was secretly getting into trouble with those online gambling sites, with the Internet poker, and blackjack, and whatnot. He apparently lost a bunch of money. Enough to have to cut his losses and move back to Birmingham and pick up a job in a warehouse building shelves from different sized two by fours.

3 My dad's best friend, Mark Schmidt got him the job. He was a high-ranking administrator at Kirklin Clinic at the time. I.M. Pei designed the building that houses the Kirklin Clinic. I used to work at the Kirklin Clinic as a file clerk. I put files on the shelves my father built in that warehouse. The warehouse is connected to the Fish Market, a nice restaurant with decent seafood. Colleen Daugherty works a day job at the Fish Market as a waitress…

4 There is a rumor I've heard about a great, great, great grandfather I have that may or may not have invented the wick mechanism for the oil lamp, the kind you find on the table at most Cracker Barrels in the South.

5 See Figure 1.

7 My dad owns a Tolkien compendium, a tome that includes, The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. It is bound in red leather, or something resembling that. It is a big motherfucker that always fascinated the hell out of me when I was a kid. My dad has never been a huge reader but he's got to have read that whole thing up to twenty times. When I was little he would read these stories to me and act out the scenes.

8 This shared interest became apparent one time when I was over at my dad's apartment, just hangin' out, drinking a beer and talking to about my day at UAB– he lives right across the street from Ramsay High School, a mostly black, mostly affluent, and very prestigious school in the southside of Birmingham, AL.–when, amidst of his fantastic reminiscences from his very interesting life, he mentioned that he used to smoke tons of weed and listen to Styx or some shitty hair-rock-glam-rock band from the 80's all throughout college and even when he and my mother were married.

            He would roll joints the night before work, while my mother slept, and would keep them in a loose brick outside a window in their bathroom. Conveniently, this window comprised half of the wall supporting the shower. So he would just stick his head out the window during his morning shower, take the brick out, light up and be in a pseudo-sauna heaven. After he told me this I offered to smoke him up and he's been back on it since. The reason I smoke weed with my father is because he doesn't drink as much when he's stoned. Not to mention we have great conversations, connect more as human beings and as father and son. And we cook together and watch sports and movies. In general, we enjoy life together.

            And:

            I appreciate these things. You don't know how much that means to me.

            Thank you reefer.

With love,

            Matthew.

9 My father's drink of choice, or of necessity, or both, his poison, if you will permit one cliché, is Heaven Hill Bourbon Whiskey with a splash–or rather a dab–of Country Time lemonade.

            Prescription/Recipe:

            Step 1:Take one giant-ass (32oz-64oz-BigGulp) sized cup

            Step 2: Fill ¾ of the glass with cubed ice

            Step 3: Fill ¾ with Whiskey

            Step 4: Add ¼ Lemonade

            Step 5: Consume at the pace of one per hour and a half

            Step 6: Repeat until thoroughly sloshed

Warning: May cause lewd behavior and speech, slurring of said speech, loss of inhibitions, and the inability to lie effectively. Testing also shows this product to lubricate the truth out of some patients.

10 It has occurred to me that this may not be a word after all. If that be the case, I intend to suffer the consequences alone. No one helped me with this.