Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours: A Novel - Softcover

Goebel, Luke B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573661805 ISBN 13: 9781573661805

Publisher: Fiction Collective 2, 2014

Synopsis

A wild, sex-and-peyote-fueled road trip through heartbreak and the mythic American West, Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours is a fever dream and cult classic of love, loss, and self-destruction. Goebel’s grief-stricken adrenalized alter ego goes on a cross-country search for his sanity—crashing through relationships, memories, and mania from New York to Texas, Puerto Rico to Los Angeles, spiraling through the wreckage of a love affair that won’t stay put. Grieving the sudden death of his brother and a past that won’t let go, the narrator must rewrite his own story before it devours him. At its heart, this is a raw reckoning with loss, abuse, and madness, told in lyrical prose that feels pulled from the heart of a bard on fire. With echoes of The Dharma Bums, The Chronology of Water, and The Catcher in the Rye, this is an untamed, confessional Künstlerroman—a howl of desire, dislocation, and the burning need to belong to a world that doesn’t even exist.

About this title

About the Author

Luke B. Goebel is the recipient of the Ronald Sukenick Prize for Innovative Fiction and the Joan Scott Memorial Fiction Award. He earned a BA from the University of San Francisco and an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

a novel

By Luke B. Goebel

The University of Alabama Press

Copyright © 2014 Luke B. Goebel
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-57366-180-5

Contents

Insides, 
The Adventures of Eagle Feather, 
Drunk and Naked as He Was, 
Boot of the Boot, 
Before Carl Left, 
Tough Beauty, 
Apache, 
Hogs, 
Out There, 
The Minds of Boys, 
Girls in Heat, 
America, America, America, 
Chores, 

CHAPTER 1

INSIDES

IN THE HOSPITAL. In the gown. On the gurney. Strange me but I love it here. I like the inside. I'd rather be well, but I love to hear the people speak. An old woman in her room wants to speak sputum. I hear garbage bags being opened. I'm on a hospital bed not a gurney. I hear crinkling sounds. The rush and flock of life's little hospital-bound disasters. Even in my little room. I can't believe I get to be in the world. I have always felt like I'm getting away with something being alive. Even though it's the usual cases of shit—nervous breakdowns on peyote, cowering in my mind, getting myself back together with it, moving from hotel to hospital to behind the wheel.

How about a JOKE: A man, let's call him Harry. Harry goes into an interview in old New York City. There is a great big man behind the desk, an outdoorsman-looking man, even in his finery and top office. You can tell he is an outdoorsman, among other things, by the occasional artifact placed here or there, the pictures on his desk of his duck-hunting dog, by the duck-hunting dog itself, Buck, lying on his carpeted floor. Let's say the interview starts and Harry has terrible gas. He is trying to hold it. He's a young guy looking for a first real gig in the city. He has some good connections and a highfalutin education. He answers the first question fine but out comes Harry flatulating. Luckily, Harry thinks, Buck is nearby. He pins it off on the dog. Pretends nothing has happened. Looks at Buck briefly. Pretends to be polite about the indiscretion. Pretends he's hardly even noticed, he's such a guy, Harry is. Well, you know jokes. Every step of the interview, bwaaaarp, another fart from young nervous Harry. "What can you do for me," the old man barks, followed by a further line of questioning. "Qualifications?" "Fwaaart." The old man looks at Harry, Harry looks at Buck, disapprovingly. The interview is going great, Harry decides, as the old man thinks it's Buck. Pretty soon, Harry is sure he has it in the bag! He's bagged the buck by luck by Buck's being there in the room. What luck the old man had a dog! Right then, Harry can't hold it in anymore. He lets one go. "Buck, Buck," the old man shouts. "Bucky, B U C K! Get the hell away from that guy before he shits all over you," the old man says.

I am to have a CTscan.

See, I came to the hospital. No one or me knew what went wrong. Rib pain, lung pain, stomach pain, pain in the guts and groin. Groaning pain doubled me over.

See, I start to hate the old woman in the unseen room. I yell for her to quiet down. She gets sandwiches, I hear, which I don't get any of. She talks of Anus Parade Nursing Home. I miss so many words. I get others wrong. I have a life of taking trips with my little mind, all freaked over from long ago and still traveling from the ground out of my head, moving my body around like a Cracker Jack.

I can partly see a sign outside that woman's door. Can't make out the words or pictures. A doctor comes and wears a front plastic coating, gloves, eye gear.

He enters her.

I pick apart a newspaper in my gown. I find the inside pages with pictures of steak, potatoes, Mr. Clean.

We had an IGA we had called Wagner's in Ohio. That's where I grew up: Ohio. It was all pick-up trucks and football, basketball, baseball, then football again. My brother was there, older than I. My sister came next after me. Our church everyone went inside, sun or rain. All the seasons. We had crazy parents who were kids themselves, insane, sweating, shouting and watching everything in sight—Dad had a Connecticut Crusher hat in the hall closet which the hall had a beautiful cold stone floor made of different shaped real tiles cemented together and cobbled. He had suits and long herringbone coats. He had shoes in there. Hat and ties. Things in the coat pockets. Mints and money. He had a job at a fortune 500 company in the Midwest. He had our diesel Mercedes with the leather and the diamond patterns in the leather and all that road all over the place. He had cigs on the way to take us to school far away from where we lived, him gagging and spitting out the window, and crazed, dressed like a pro. Montessori was the school, and our mother found it for us—our mother who tried and tried, fought and hoarded the family money dressed in men's clothes. We had the '80s in America, America, America and the whole trip of being a self within a family within a nation of movies, vacuum cleaners, the whole nine yachts—Reagan, Dennis Hopper, real records on the wheel in a house, the house we bought from family within our family, with the wood stove with their last name's initial emblazed in gold, movies and no war, just politics, president wearing makeup, hardly any places to raise a chicken or grow a vegetable where most people were going and us with cornfields in the backyard, the little Ohio woods, still plenty of room for chickens and veggies, but also cold weather and the need to go to work for more money in the bank.

Who am I, now, but a weird patient part of all this world, in a little room with a sign about pain? It ranks pain from No Pain, to 1,2,3—Mild Pain, 4,5,6—Moderate Pain, 7,8,9—Severe Pain with faces that show increased crucifixion. 10 is Worst Possible and the face looks about right for the living. I can take the body's betrayal, at first, I think, but I think of Catherine and I'm done for, nearly.

I told her, when she left me, over the telephone, that I had memorized her feet, I told her. I had them sunk in my mind, I told her. I had lust on all over for them, I told her. She waited on me to prove it. She was always waiting on Yours Truly to win her, or I misunderstood. The first times we were together I sucked her feet whole. I licked her from crack to crack. I sat back on her couch, and she stood on the arm and the back of the sofa and lowered herself down to my taste. This was on a terrific street up above a China person's restaurant in NYC. I always feel like a little guy trying to prove I can. She is beyond immaculate. Then I went nuts along her. Mouthed everything.

A nurse puts the ink into me.

Do you know how nervous she makes me? They are going to look inside. Look inside of me. They are going to look inside. I prefer not to think about what's inside. Other than the heart, gut, words. You want to look? Hey, don't look! Hey, hey, don't look in there.

A stroke person is coming from below—being rolled around the halls.

* * *

I feel the ink. It is for the CTscan. It is warmer than my blood. It is like a whiskey, hot bourbon, in my lungs and stomach first without throat and I feel I've wet myself and am weak. I feel the warm ink reach my toes. Whiskey is a taste I haven't had since the snow coming sideways through Montana, blinding out the black mountain, long ago with a woman who worked the casinos and cooked beans for me. I'm a living thing in a hospital on my back.

Catherine is from Colorado.

I am from Ohio. Who wins, you figure? Aspen to New York? Or Ohio to hospital?

While inside the CTscan, Oh, I see Jesus Christ. I see serpents. I see lots of things with my eyes shut. Leftovers from mouthfuls of peyote. I wore a blanket around a bunch of Injuns for sixteen hours, plus. Up in Mendocino. Afterwards, we ate ribs out of Styrofoam, store-bought fried chickens, brownies, and Faygo Soda—I looked at the ice of vision on everything in the new day's sun moving—I still don't see like a person.

Now I know I'm not just going to die from suffering. That's what peyote is good for.

Catherine, I don't know?

For the past week I had broken ribs or lung and bone cancer. I went from doctor to doctor holding my side. Tied a dress shirt around my ribs to sleep right at night. The Docs said, "Muscular skeletal, from coughing, those ciggies, hold, it will heal." Bastards! I had only thoughts of Catherine and feeling the hurt side.

I'm Six Foot Five, Six, Seven, and have had pain.

A femur in half, my skull broke a few times, busted arms, some dog bites, cuts and minor burns, distemper, hyper this and that. Mentally unhealthy: family history of alcoholism, drugs, and whatnot.

My grandfather, his father was a banker who owned a bank. His father's father started the bank, made uniforms for the Union army, built engines for coal mining trains. All of them are severe or wild and entrepreneuring in black and white photos in suits. My grandfather started one of his legs on fire thirty-however-many years ago. He burned the eyelets of his boots black into the skin, green hickory fire lit with gasoline, gasoline, leg, Ohio. The old backyard. My origins. He made himself a roastbeef sandwich before he drove up to the hospital. Little horseradish, mustard, on pumpernickel. "They never feed you in those places," he said to his wife, my Mamma. His leg was smelling up the kitchen, the way she tells it—80 years old and clean—them still together humping across the weather. Those two my champion winners, keeping me upright and my family in order, mostly.

So, I waited out pain on a bare futon mattress on my floor at home until here. None of us have the same homes. We are all just looking around a lot of the time. Unless you count some of the great jumping beans I have known. Guys who grunt and hump and hope their way through life. All of them having done time in the nut house bin or prison before. All drugged up and half-drunk. I only did ever jail. I spent my early twenties in rehabs—got used to the music of shifts.

See, I adjusted to the pain, used Icy Hot, had pills and ciggies. Finally, it was thinking of Catherine did me in, and I decided to come to the ER for a jot of R&R. Catherine is in New York City. She says she needs to get herself figured out first. She says she needs to clean house first. She says all sorts of things. Bottom line, I'm suffering from love lost. I've waited till I was about thirty to do more than have sex.

I told her about her feet I'd memorized.

"Your first two toes peek from those red mules," I proved on a phone line to her. I was hunching over standing in my living room with no furniture, side in the kind of pain as one who has been stabbed. "Your bigtoe toenails are symmetrical, rising from their sides to a higher curve of middle," I said.

We had been all throughout New York City. Lived there together. Looked at fine things and plays and walked through talking—never got real sleep. I love how the pigeons will bank crazy with their wings spread high through the angles of a shadow on a summer day in Hell's Kitchen. A dollar slice. The bandaged smells of the subways that are all hers. I was smoking a cig in my living room in the woods. "Your second toes are long," I said, "but not longer. Your other three are nearly the same length as one another. You have high strong arches. Nice little heels. I want to suck on them Baby. Sex, Kitten." She didn't say a word or even giggle. I miss driving when I was fifteen years ago. When I was a jumping jack and didn't think but new pussy and highway. A clot of sun. The sky forever. A song. I hear the old woman coughing her sputum. Steak, potato, then a doctor comes in with no hair.

"Mr. Clean," I address him.

I ask him about the woman. Say I've had it with her. Say I'm not right.

He tells me she's paralyzed from the neck down. Gives me the look like he understands where I am coming from. I cannot remember where I'm coming from. I've been East a long time. I fell in love for the first time with a New York woman. I haven't had any steak. I think it'd be Christian to put that old woman out of this life.

Lately, I've been keeping lakeside in my cottage in western New York. I teach freshman college. The other day, middle of class, me showing them all who's boss, a woman's voice is climbing through the scales. She's singing up my spine. I got tears in my face. The kids are all staring at me. Sometimes it's unbreakable how the beauty of art comes after you, making you feel everything and bawl in front of the very people you're supposed to be hectoring. I felt every moment of her singing after she was finished, singing up through my spine. I had to walk home and leave everyone behind.

You know why we get sick?

Giving away what we should have kept.

A few days ago, before I came here, a fox showed while I was on the floor. It looked sick. He was on my porch and I am lying in the room on the floormat playing with myself naked to the fall, the whole great long stretch of my body. Since peyote animals come to me. I was playing with myself to shoots of orange like bayonets on majestic New York trees. The sliding door open to all the colors. I can almost get quiet, nearly, at times. Sometimes the sky opens in light through a window.

This is, it seems, all of any God, until moments when God comes near.

The little tail was thin and wispy, the eyes nearly closed, it wobbled from side to side. I was jerking off trying not to hurt the ribs. I'd been thinking of Catherine's big nipples, her Greek pussy, her big ass and tiny middle. Her green eyes her dark hair and pale skin with blue veins. She has golden circuits around each pupil. She rode on a motor scooter in the rain with me through Spain on a vast freeway. There is nothing outside of America. Semitrailers whizzing by. Love is when you start watching dirty movies and wind up thinking of someone you've had your penis in and wind up turning off the movie. Let me rephrase that: I had started a dirty movie and thought of Catherine and turned it off and thought more of her.

Once my father and me and my brother went to Montana. When Brother was a few years old, Carl, he had spinal meningitis. He snapped out of it. All that was left over was a twitch and a squeak. First cast, a trout through the eye, my brother! He was always so calmly brown eyed and beautiful. When I was a few years older than 7 or so, I broke my arm badly in several places. I was so impressed with the hospital, with the doctors, rooms, all the people, the fluorescents and smells, the difference between being inside and outside of a place, I forgot all about the arm. See, Doc starts telling me jokes and chatting up my mother, a real looker and rich, sets the arm, pulls the cast on the other. It takes hours to get home, and I realize the mistake—sometimes it's like that when I think of Catherine. Sometimes I wish I had more jokes.

I made another mistake and dated my first girlfriend. This was at eighteen. I thought I was a man and wore a woman's fur coat around with my hair long. A huge black negroid tried to hold me up for cash outside of the club where she worked. She worked taking off her clothes like a boy. That's how she looked on stage. Hey, it's work! I don't judge. Look, I told that man, flatten me. He was six-foot-ten and full of jails and sperm. He started laughing and gripped crotch. He shot his head toward me. Giant. He could have murdered me in one shot. I was impressed. He wound cloth around his knuckles. I couldn't wait for the jets overhead to knock me back. But he just starts laughing and shaking his head at me, and gets into his car and asks me and my girl, who'd come out and started smoking and yelling at me, if we needed to get to someplace. She had just come out the club's exit. Me and her crawled in. It was a great old Cadillac coach with a leather roof, but the interior was shot to pilling and ratty fabric, the foam busting through armrests. She was the kind of little girl who had a dildo that plugged into the wall and it had a long cord and the end she put inside her was a terrible color of skin. I hate that I tell everything, but it's all I got to work with.

After I saw her use it, and her paintings, I didn't really want to touch her or watch her dance, but we were together.

She and that man decided to make it. It was my fault. I had to walk all the way back home and eventually to my kin.

When I was 19 it was jail plus rehabs. When I was 20, it was rehab plus rehab. When I was 21, rehab again two more times. I am not a dainty soul when drunk and never wanted not to be not blacked out. This was the last time, at 21, but the night guards made such a nice sound walking around at night guarding us. I wish I could go back! Life was simpler. Here I am. Here you are too.

There was an Armenian man doing one rehab with me. Harry. He would tell me sometimes he couldn't get it up, but Harry's tongue always worked overtime, he said. He looked at me so blankly with trouble behind the blanks. He was enormous and showed me his tongue. It was full of bumps. That's all they want, he told me.

I've tried that approach myself, when I first started seeing Catherine. On account of I could not get functioning. That's how much I was in love. We met in our teacher's class, a wildly famous man with feathers and grease cloth for clothing in NYC. A real genius California Indian Gun Nut from NY. It took time to get over that and get it worked out. Me and her. Him and her.

There was another guy, he had a colostomy bag and got it all over our shower until I transferred up to a room with a view of an older British woman with pearls for her neck and breasts across the courtyard. At rehab with me and Harry. The man with the shit bag told me I had girly tits when we lived together. He tried to touch them. I punched his face. I still remember that. I still think that.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours by Luke B. Goebel. Copyright © 2014 Luke B. Goebel. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fiction Collective 2
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1573661805
• ISBN 13: 9781573661805
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 177