Two Punks In Love

Cracked Windshield

Trace

The news reports the same old shit. All of it bad. All of it slanted. It's hardly better than the tabloids.

I click off the tv, and strain to hear the sounds filtering from across the penthouse. The other bedroom door is still open, and I heard Kat moving around about an hour ago, now I can hear nothing.

I don yesterday's clothes and I step across into her bedroom.

Christ, this is fucked up. Her bedroom, my bedroom. Is this how it's going to be at the farm?

I decide to delay thinking about how I want our sleeping arrangements to be, and I decide to delay knocking on the bathroom door because I can hear her showering. I want to delay all thoughts of Kat naked. Any thoughts of her like that might turn into thoughts of her with him. I don't trust my newfound evenness. I can feel the rage simmering inside me, and I need to keep it from boiling over at all costs. I'm desperately hoping it will just...cool off over time, if I don't stoke a fire underneath it with unproductive thoughts and musings.

It's a good thing I have a lot more work to do back at the Clink. I compose mental lists while I automatically fill my pockets and  head downstairs to hire a car and pick up the purchases I called for last night.

It takes a while to get the car set up to be delivered, the concierge relaying tedious information back and forth between me and the service. I am annoyed. I should have had the PA do this. Then I remind myself I'm not too good to relay my own name and address to someone. Christ I'm gonna be a father. Am I going to be the kind that never fills out a school form, doesn't know the number to his own kids' pediatrician?

I know plenty of celebrity dads like that, including my own. That's not the kind of dad I want to be. That's not the kind of dad I grew up with. Despite the hell they raised at each other, my parents were all over each other in the life details, too. My dad is a meticulous financial planner, and he was always annoying my mom with some  better way of organizing bills and budgets and rewards programs for miles and hotel points. Likewise my mom was a serial reorganizer, and she was always implementing some new household scheme to make life run smoother.

My childhood home was a goddamn nightmare to me because of the rapid and frightening pendulum swings. I never knew from one day to the next if I was walking into a 1950's sitcom where everything was perfect and safe and stable or coming home to what felt like a  Quentin Tarantino movie—a scene filled with gratuitous violence.

As I stand here repeating my driver's license number for the second time—why they need my DL I have no fucking clue, I'm hiring a service not renting a car—I have a sudden epiphany as to why that was.

Why my home was either perfect or a nightmare.

All those plans, all those tedious details about how to make things run smoother? They were trying to avoid the daily petty squabbles that could blow up into the horrific fights.

A flash. One horrific fight. Shattered glass and spraying beer and a golf club in my dad's hand.

My own mundane plans made, I cross to the elevator, ignoring my increasing agitation while nodding at the security guys hanging out in the lobby, keeping the paps away. In the elevator, I can feel a childhood memory washing over me, tensing me, triggering me.

I hear the shouts, hear the battering of the windshield until it cracks. My head roars and my heart pounds and I see the scene with a frightening clarity, sharpened by the simmering rage I now feel.

Marley taught me long ago that when I have a flashback, I'm supposed to dissociate from the memory and ground myself in the present. Feel the surfaces around me. Listen to the sounds. Bite into a lemon to jar my brain away from the memory and into the sour-tasting present. That kind of thing. Or I'm supposed to seek another person, bring another person in to help me ground myself.