Johnny Wraith Stories

Sometimes I wake up in a state of confusion, as if I’ve fallen into a river somewhere far away, drowned, been carried downstream through slow currents and rough rapids, spit into a deep ocean to drift, or to be tumbled about. Somehow, I come back alive from the depths! By kicking my feet and flailing my arms I’m able to ascend from the deep, pop my head up out of the water, gasp for air, and clear my eyes. But really, my head just pops up off the pillow when my pulse and breath have been as close to death as dreaming will allow, and for what seems to be an eternity I don’t know where I am, or when. Am I still a boy at home with my loyal Labrador at my feet? Is it winter or spring? Am I still in college? Which job will I be driving towards this morning? Am I alone or is there a woman at my side, and if so, which one? Is she a girlfriend, wife, or one night friend? For the gods’ sake don’t tell me I’m already 85 years old. With a few blinks and breaths I’ll shake it off, regain my full consciousness from sleep and suddenly be remembering my entire life has already passed, for it is all memories now and I’m counting the remaining days.

The other day I went to Phoenix for a boring seminar. I had to wake up at 5:00am in order to have my coffee and a shit, shave and shower off, then drive the distance from Tucson to get there at 8:00am, 125 miles, Highway 10 West, then sign in, enter the conference room, pour a cup of coffee into Styrofoam, and find my seat all before some lawyer started talking about something to do with recent legislation in connection with perpetuities, easements, eminent domain, and other confounding miscellany which did nothing but put me to sleep. 10 minutes in, my head was bobbing, my consciousness waxing and waning, and each time I looked up over all the heads in the rows in front of me, I was certain the suit and tie presenter was flashing looks of disdain my way. At 10:45am we broke for 15 minutes. I rose from my seat, exited the conference room, shot through the automatic front doors in the hotel lobby, traversed the parking lot and found “Old Bessie,” my 1994 Nissan Sentra. I call her that because, as I continue justifying my driving her when I could have a newer car, “she may be old and ugly, but she never says no to giving me a ride when I need it.” Modern men have lost the concept of loyalty, but I still stay loyal to both man and machine. And never fear, I got full credit for the seminar. I called in and explained that at the end of the day, when the program finished at 5:00pm, I couldn’t stand in line to get my certificate because I had a family emergency. So, the certificate was mailed to me and is now in a folder in my desk, and no one will ever question whether I stayed at the seminar all day to the end. Besides, I later read the seminar handouts, which said, word for word what the speakers that day threw into the sleepy air, sans the suits and ties.

So I went to the mall and plopped down on a bench and sat there. Mostly I watched the naked legs of young girls go past, followed by their supple asses wiggling off, walking away in short shorts and mini skirts to disappear into the masses of shoppers. It brought back fond memories of this and that girl, like the one I met on the 4^th of July, a decade before, at a house party. I remembered how I rolled her panties off to discover her mons shaved bare. And another passing short skirt – she reminded me of another girl I’d dated years before. She and I’d lived together for less than 2 months in a run down apartment. So long ago. For preserving-myself-for-marriage reasons, she wouldn’t have sex, but she compensated for the vaginal abstinence with blowjobs. Just go to bed, talk for a minute and start kissing, and next thing I knew she was making love to me with an eager mouth that felt better than most pussies. If I remember right, she was a fringe Born Again Christian, and not once did I see her with her flannel pajamas off.

Don’t get me wrong. Taking together all the recollections of girls gone by, it really isn’t the sexual interludes, the swapping spit and cum, the flesh flexing together, the sweating and grunting, or the orgasms that sit most fondly with me. It’s the shared nature hikes, the laughter, the camaraderie, and the hope; it’s the actual build up to the physical climaxes, not the climaxes themselves. The spiritual element of it all holds the most weight; the encounters of boy and girl together in the world, in the same space and time. All the memories, the sum of it all, how my youth has been spent in the company of so many wonderful delights! I loved them all. With each I discovered something ineffable, another priceless token to carry in my pockets to the grave. Precious time is often shared between two people, and then the time ends. The challenge is to look upon that time passed with sweetness and not bitterness.

And as I was sitting there, watching, remembering, rejoicing, reminding, smiling to myself and thanking the gods for all I’ve had and lost, or wishing I had a Time Machine to revisit a few of the most precious moments, a young man’s voice interrupted me.

“Dad?”

Dad?

I looked up from my feet, my memories.

“What?”

“Dad?”

A young blonde kid, skinny as a rail, more than 6’4” was standing there. He couldn’t have been more than 18 and was wearing nice clothes, pressed pants, polished shoes, a button down, cotton shirt, and his face was spotless and sharp, a boy of perfect German descent.

“Dad? It has to be you!”

Oh fuck.

“Sorry man. I’m not any kid’s dad. I must look like somebody else.”

“Johnny Wraith, right?”

The blood left my face. It was a moment of terror. My brain flashed through all the women I’d banged before the vasectomy I’d had many years before, the one smart thing I’ve never regretted. Was it Grace, or Mary, or Linda, or Sheila, or Mindy, or Viji, or Samantha, or Tanya, or Rose? Fuck. I drew a blank. How did this kid know my name?

“Dad! I’m Thomas! You used to be married to my mom!”

Oh god. Thomas. He was the 5-year-old son of my second wife, Lauren, 13 years ago? Already 13 years? That kid was crazy. His father had been in the Navy and had left his mother for a stripper, or so the story was told. Lauren had shown up in town freshly divorced and with a kid back when I was in law school, and she hypnotized me into marriage vows with pussy (I’d known her from college and somehow she’d looked me up, but that’s another story). And her kid. Jesus. Thomas. All I remembered about him was how he was always knocking on the locked bedroom door with little knuckles, “rap, rap, rap,” crying “Mommy! Mommy! I love you!” All while I was trying to get a piece of ass. It never failed. No matter how quiet we were, no matter how soundly we’d put him to sleep, as soon as we were locked in and I was about to stick it in, here it would come: “rap, rap, rap,” crying “Mommy! Mommy! I love you!” If you think that’s bad, one Sunday when his mommy and I were trying to fuck, good old Thomas snuck outside the apartment and set the community dumpster on fire. That day the sirens from the fire department interrupted me from getting my nut. Long story short, the kid was fucking crazy, and I was always worried that if I stayed with him and his mother for too long, I’d get my throat cut in my sleep. Too much Oedipus shit for me. Nevertheless, Thomas was only one of the many, many reasons I divorced his mother. It all turned out for the best anyway. Within a year she remarried some millionaire 30 years her senior. The last time we talked was shortly after her getting hitched to this old dude. I asked her how the sex was, and she said it was pretty rough. He’d just throw her down and stuck it in without doing anything to make her wet. I was good at getting her wet, but that was the only thing I’d done right in the marriage, she said. I told her we could still meet and fuck behind the old man’s back, but she declined. Too much was on the line, she said. And as far as my relationship with Lauren went, that was the last I’d heard from her, but for a call from Child Protective Services, in which I was interviewed about how Thomas had been treated by his mother during the marriage. Apparently Lauren had been reported for abusing Thomas in public a few times. She always did spank him a lot in public, and at home she’d slap him in the face whenever he acted up. I never saw any blood, but it still seemed a bit brutal. I just cast a blind eye to it all. After all, Thomas was her kid, not mine. Besides, at 23 I didn’t know shit about kids and didn’t know how to hold a baby without fear of dropping it. I still don’t know how to hold babies.

I stood up and held open my arms. It just felt the right thing to do. “Shit... Thomas, sorry I was a fucking shitty dad.”

Without even a pause Thomas clinched his arms around me and kissed me right on the forehead. “You were an awesome dad,” he whispered.

And somehow, we just stood there holding one-another, one tall slender young man and one middle-aged with lots of weather on his face and missing hair. We didn’t let go for what seemed forever, taking turns tightening our embrace. When we finally let go, both of us had sad eyes ready to drop tears.  And so we caught our breath and sat, side-by-side.

I still felt I needed to explain. Somehow guilt was gurgling up in me. “Thomas, I never was ready to be a dad to you, or a husband to your mother. Hell, I wasn’t much older than you when we first met.”

“Dad?”

“Shit, I’m amazed how you can call me that. I was anything but.”

Thomas looked me square in the face and clasped his big hand over my shoulder. “You will always be dad to me because you read me stories every night. That was the only time I ever felt like I was loved as a kid. For years I’ve missed how you used to always carry me to my room after I’d fall asleep on the couch. Then I’d wake up and demand a story. You’d never say ‘no.’”

“Oh yeah, I remember now. That story about the farting dog. It was all you wanted to hear.”

“That’s the one! Mom would never read it to me and a couple times she tried to throw it away, but you always got it out of the trash and yelled at her!”

“Sorry about all the yelling. I yelled a lot about everything.”

“You might not realize it, but I always loved it when you let her have it!”

“But you always ran into your room when I started yelling.”

“You don’t know it, but I always ran into my room to stay away from mom. When you were yelling at her, I was lying on my bed with my pillow over my face to keep her from hearing how hard I was laughing!”

“Jesus. That’s crazy, but you’re right. I remember her slapping you in the face whenever she caught you laughing about something dealing with her shit.”

“Shit dad, she slapped me today even. But I’m used to it. I need her and my step dad to pay for my college, so, I’m just going to keep taking the punches.”

“Man, being a kid can suck. Why did she slap you today?”

“I told her I wasn’t sure about being a Mormon. That it was my decision, and not hers. I’m kind of tired of all her Mormon bullshit. Going to church for 3 hours every Sunday is driving me crazy.”

“Don’t tell me you’re not buying into that bullshit. Usually you Mormon kids are raised to believe and so you do. There’s just no question about it. How did you escape the brainwashing?”

“Remember how you used to drive me to kindergarten every morning?”

“Yeah, I do. We had a lot of good talks. You asked a lot of great questions for a kid so young.”

“Remember how I asked you about Jesus?”

“Not exactly, but I remember we talked about religion a lot. You were really curious about that. And I do remember always making you promise not to tell your mom about anything we talked about.”

“Well, I remember asking you if Jesus was real, if The Church was real, and if Joseph Smith was a prophet of god.”

“Oh god, what did I say?”

“You said: ‘Don’t ever tell your mother this, but never listen to anything adults tell you about religion. No matter how hard it is, wait until you are a grown up to figure out all the religion stuff so you can make up your own mind.’ Then you said something about how math was hard and asked me if I knew how to do multiplication yet. I said ‘No.’ And you said, ‘Religion is like a hard math problem you can’t figure out. That’s why this Jesus, Joseph, and Mormon stuff needs to wait until you are older. So you can make up your own mind about it then.’”

“I said all that?”

“You sure did, dad.”

“Well, I can’t take it back. I still feel the same way. You know, by the way, it was all the religious bullshit that caused the divorce. It wasn’t anything you did.”

“I know.”

“Son?”

“Yeah dad?”

“You don’t have that farting dog book anymore, do you?”

“No, mom threw it away right after you left.”

“Let’s go down to the bookstore and get you another copy before I disappear for another decade or two.”

Sometimes I wake up in a state of confusion, as if I’ve fallen into a river somewhere far away, drowned, been carried downstream through slow currents and rough rapids, spit into a deep ocean to drift, or to be tumbled about…