Invincible Lovers Dressed Up Like Schlubs
Well, it ought to be easy, it ought to be simple enough
Man meets a woman and they fall in love
But this house is haunted and the ride gets rough
You've got to learn to live with what you can't rise above
If you want to ride on down, down in through this tunnel of love.
- Bruce Springsteen, ‘Tunnel of Love’
Arle stands at our kitchen sink with her phone pointed at the lake on side one. I am moving around, tossing trash away, putting pots and pans up on the dryer so I can clear the stovetop to cook pasta when I see that she is seeing the backup. More often than not, people with cloggy sinks, people like us, we adapt. You learn to live with certain things because the solution requires time or money or both, and that’s just not happening today. I see her moving her screen around, and I think I know what’s happening. The Christmas lights hanging above her are sparking off the three inches of floodwater as a couple dozen scattered Fruit Loop lifeboats have risen in the right basin of the two basin sink. I begin to imagine that the sight of it here/ on the heels of a couple sips of pineapple hard seltzer at 6:30 in the evening on another unspectacular Monday night/ it’s all slammed into her with the covert force of the endless art that lives and breathes/ even writhing with maggots/ down in the infinite shallow cracks of poverty, more or less.
What she must be seeing: I must see.
I float my eyes down from her wrists, down from the pale freckled skin of her arms where they slip up into the dark tunnels of her hoodie sleeves, to the screen of her phone itself.
There, in a place where each of us dies a little more every hour of every day/ out where the world becomes ignorant and cruel/ out upon those existential plains of a virtual reality where all of us piss and shit and slit our veins wide open to dowse nearly all of the literature and practically all of the poetry and damn near every single inch of all the progress our wildly imperfect ancestors struggled to even recognize let alone accomplish/ lies the lost canvas of our modern imaginations.
And on Arle’s personal copy of it, I see that I was correct.
She is zeroing in on the color-dappled suds. On the soggy cereal floating. On the clarity of our shitty untended plumbing.
This all happens in a single swish, mind you. There’s no pause in my movements, nor hers. I notice what I notice as I spin away from the paper towel roll sitting on the side of the sink. Fluid, we roll, in a house of so many; moving swift and delicate between child and great dane; each of us river dancing the living fuck out of even the most basic everyday cha-chas.
You get so good at it. I’ve become a master at sliding and sashaying/ barely grazing the shirt backs of others/ hardly feeling the family all around me. This makes something like what I’m experiencing here, right this second, more special, I’d say. As Arle shoots her shots, I’m am drawn up into the bright lights of the UFO. I see what she sees only because she is seeing it. I am gifted the strange gift of something beautiful from our common world.
Just because I happened by.
Right place, right time.
Everything melts into once-in-a-while.
_____
On the bed, the rolled-up cuffs of my Dickies emit unseen puffs of leaf dust and country dander. I climb under the covers with my work boots on and all of it. Zero fucks are given by me. I need to be beneath the big comforters, sense the heavy weight of them upon my bones. Childish as it may seem for some, I readily admit to my safe spaces at this point. There is no alpha male part of me knocking me back. I feel no lean tough rush making me snarl in the face of any of this.
It’s basic and simple stuff really. But it is such a rigorous journey to get to this place, you see. And that’s the thing. These enduring cottagecore needs I have, I missed them for so very, very long. Across my life, chasing all the wrong foxes. So many years gone by, me always wearing the wrong woods. What happened then, quite organically it turns out, is that all of these storm-damaged scraps of hard-earned wisdom mixed with all of these lucky paint chips, they rode together through cyclones and tornados. Fucking mice on a sardine can raft soaring high up in the wind, until eventually they find their way to me, whether that’s what they intended or not (no one knows, hoss). And then there I am. Here I am. Here I go again on my own. Going down the only road I’ve ever known.
Now then.
It’s maybe an hour before the sink water picture thing and I’ve come looking for my lady, guessing, correctly you know, that she might be up here in our haven decompressing from just walking in through the back door at the end of her own work day. The kids downstairs, their chaotic slam of presence. The dogs shooting in at the sound of the cowbells on the doorknob/ their eager eyes greeting her and begging her and needing shit. Beggar eyes as soon as you get home. I’m right too. Arle is already over there, under her side of the blankets/ her hoodie’s hood up over her head. Of all the parts of her she has successfully returned and rolled into this place now, I only spot her eyes peeking over the crest of the quilted waves. She is immersed in our private sea.
I need to be in there with her.
So I climb in unabashedly, without reservation or forethought. The thing I seek is so simple, so ancient and raw. I want to clack knees through our pants. I want to frisk fingertips, tug the lobe of her ear gently. There’s a euphoria that comes with all of this. We run into an early evening reunion and it unfolds like it does here not because we planned it or anything like that. It’s unscripted. Not part of the scene as directed. We are improv people moving across the stage now with total freedom and jaw dropping talent.
Death has missed us. Living remains. Punched in the face by our own raw realities repeatedly, we make our way back here like salmon or swallows or something. Drawn by what? Magnetic plates of dinosaur ghost steam shimmering up out of the Earth?
I have no idea. I’ve no fucking clue about love. About real love. True, true love. Overwhelming love dripped down on common people. I have no clue about magic unfolding. I only know that right now, unseen by anyone or anything- except perhaps the vulture squads above Millheim, who can see through human roofs and walls with a slightly murky clarity, as if they were made of Cling Wrap- we are both happy to see one another.
Hold me tight, motherfucker, on this late late afternoon.
_____
_____
Here, where once we proclaimed “bedroom for youth!” we now barely mutter “museum of disarray.” A slow peek in, rolling my head dramatically from behind the Victorian door jamb, I appear slyly in the frames of the open rooms, my eyes wide open as to take it all in. What hits me first, at least most of the time, is the noxious fumes of this kind of harsh bittery disrespect I can’t ever outrun, man. It’s just this thing that follows me around, I guess, taunting me like some real drunk muscle man, always keeping me edgy with no chance of winning.
I take in the clothes on the floors, the unmade beds. I notice special things I have picked up for certain kids/ books I felt they may like/ t-shirts with characters they dig/ some kind of fucking 6 dollar overblown fruit punch Powerade Mega Energy drink I got a kid who had never even had one before and didn’t think twice about carrying it up to the front of the store when I was ready to check out with a pair of IPAs and skim milk. They took maybe two sips and then laid that magic potion snake oil train robbery bullshit (that tastes like cat shit to their picky lips) right there on the desk by the TV in their room. For me to find, no mistake about that. Still filled with the drink, now ruined by exposure and, like, old kid skin booger dust flaking down out of the indoor sky here and landing quiet in the neck of the enormous ‘Fuck you, Planet Earth,” jug it came in. Polluted by the very ungrateful rat that insisted they loved that kind that day back in the minimart when I sighed, “Okay”, and paid for it even though I only had like $24 to my goddamn name.
There are pillow cases off the pillows. They are flung on the backs of chairs, pointlessly. I see Legos lingering in the creepy shadows at the edge of under the bed. There are teeny bits of torn toilet paper strewn across the de-threading rugs. I don’t know what that’s all about. I don’t want to know either.
I enter the vacant room now to check out a shiny pin dot I notice over by a south-leaning bookcase. Upon closer inspection I see that it is a Hershey bar wrapper, the crinkled chrome bit still heaving a half-melted scab of milk chocolate out onto the floor. I wonder why. How. Who would have just quit eating a candy bar and simply abandoned it with the kind of reckless careless drop usually reserved for the most arrogant of offenders: the dickwad who tosses their McDonald’s trash out in the middle of some rural stretch: the self-loathing troll who leaves their pissy toddler mattress leaning up against the midnight walls of the alley behind a grocery store. But my own kids?
I mean, why? How? I don’t get it. All we do is clean. All me and Arle do is work and cook and clean. And lay down on the bed to recover from the dozens of jabs we have been peppered with when we went walking through our own reality.
_____
On the couch sometimes, I put her whole socky foot in my goddamn mouth. Not because she likes it all that much. She maybe doesn’t. And not because I have some endgame in mind, either, because as you might guess when you encounter a dude in his fifties putting his wife’s left foot in his open mouth/ as much as he can fit in there/ scraping the tender sides of her toes with his teeth/ shoving it slowly, his hands cupping her heel, like he’s eating a hot dog in a contest, maybe? It lacks romance in all of the linear ways, but hold your horses there Judgy McJudgerson. There’s a roundabout way into every heart, I declare. There’s more than one way to yank a dagger out of her thumping bloody ticker.
Down the couch is where so much happens if you live and love a TV watcher. Not every pairing is lovely, mind you. I have been with TV people before and it wasn’t like it is now. It never ever occurred to me that I could rub a lady’s foot while we watch an episode of the Number 3 most popular show on Netflix at the moment, only to be overtaken by the primal desire to get that puppy up in my pie-hole ASAP.
It came to me once in a dust devil of pure and simple yearning. My strange urge would be one thing, I recognized right away. But the reaction from her would be something else all together. If she instantly recoiled and shot up and screamed “What the fuck, dude!?”, well, then I’d know that I had gone down the wrong path after all.
And, of course, that is the reaction a man in my position on the precipice of that first leap, long ago, had to be prepared for. Some might even claim I should have damn well been counting on it. But I had this shaky certain vibe kicking around inside me. Like, if I do this/ and it feels right/ feels interesting to her somehow/ then, I’ll tell you what, sir/ I think I might be breaking new ground here. I think I might be crossing over into virgin wildernesses vast and echoey and rife with the distant hollow calls of a woman unsheathed. Unregulated. And unpoliced.
I remember taking a sip of Rioja, letting it wash around across my tongue, bouncing it off the spicy walls of my mouth. I held her feet in my hands. I rubbed them gently, a man sure of himself and his passion and his commitment to her entire existence. I watched her watch the TV. I watched her yawn/ her quiet lips parting and then returning to one another. I felt the delicate threads of her socks on the raw skin of my hands, her strong slender feet playing wild rabbits in bags.
Now or never, I urged myself.
I sighed, resigned but hopeful. I tightened my grip on her left arch and raised the vessel ever so slowly, as one might coax the Titanic back to light. I steadied my jaw, spread my teeth, pulled her instep to my face, and slid my lips down so as to lock into her sensitivities and her memories and her allegiances. All of her shattered dreams, I lifted them unto me like corn on the summery cob, dog. In no time at all, I made contact/ her flesh/ her sock/ her cottony faux skin and her milky true one both experiencing the simultaneous tightening of my frontline incisors. I tasted the uniquely singular threads of her sock/ like individual dirt roads and footpaths in the jaws of a giant, I was awash in the glorious sensations of entire lanes standing out upon my tongue’s trillion nerves.
Each single thread gave way to a perfectly formed rope in my brain.
I could feel the epic existence of each and every worthless thread adding up to something magic and powerful!
In that precise splinter of an instant, never again to be repeated in the history of my world or anyones, I found myself in the throes of dire rusting anticipation as I rolled the side of her foot so that the entire front of it entered my mouth with the tight inimitable form of a roast beef hoagie from Gem’s Italian Deli (pronounced Jemz) at 9th and Fayette in the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Three (I was 12! She was just born!). What happened next, across the long lingering space and time continuum, might alarm you or repulse you or attract you or even turn you on, in the old country style, it’s not for me to judge, but instead of slap kicking my bottom lip off with her tapered gazelle foot (likely justified in almost anyone’s eyes), she actually made no real visible reaction whatsoever.
I held a good half of her left foot in my mouth, my entire body having shifted position somewhat on my end of the couch so that I might manage to boa constrictor her without fully disturbing her relaxed prostrate figure at all.
The show played on.
Both of my hands held her leg now, supporting the chosen foot in the chosen position as such.
It was, I swear to you, a single second that lasted years as I bore down with a bit of loving pressure against the form clenched in my jaws. Her eyes fixed still upon the screen across the room, I began to prepare myself for the lightning swift karate shit surely headed my way. Yet it never came. Instead, she slowly moved her brown eyes away from the show, shifting them onto me. She took in the scene unfolding in front of her. It was an occurrence she had doubtlessly felt prior to this first visual capture, but seeing, as they say, is believing.
What she in fact saw then must have moved her. Or intrigued her at least. Because without words, she kept her doe eyes dark and focused, as she does when she is trying to fathom the insides of my mind, the blueprints for my unplanned plans.
Then, softly, as if on cue, she nudged her foot a little deeper into my head. As if it were a sword in her fairy tale grip. As if it were a loaf of bread in her unexpected hands. My eyes saucer’d and I exploded with grin around her shifting extremity. Not a single word did she utter! And not a move to retract did she attempt! What witchery is this?! I garbled into her sock. What backwoods magic intoxicates me?!
_____
Poker face intact, eyes peering out across the blanket, I see how she looks at me not with shame/ nor judgement/ nor fear/ nor revulsion/ nor any of the ways one might expect a grown woman to look at her so-called seducer in the middle of a bit such as this. Instead of any of that, she fixes me with her level even brown eyes. And she invites me to forever.
_____
I starved in Paris for a while, but I learned something: for one thing, I fell in love. Or, more accurately, I realized, and accepted for the first time that love was not merely a general, human possibility, nor merely the disaster it had so often, by then, been for me—according to me—nor was it something that happened to other people, like death, nor was it merely a mortal danger: it was among my possibilities, for here it was, breathing and belching beside me, and it was the key to life. Not merely the key to my life, but to life itself.
- James Baldwin, ‘Take Me to the Water’
_____
And so it was that I detected, for only a sliver of moment, the distant muffled explosions. Then a heart on fire. Visually it was as if a moth had passed above my face, a quick twitch of illumination and flight from deep within her right eye. Then, in the nanosecond of time it took for it to appear, it was simultaneously gone. Backwards into the shadows behind her looks. Backwards into the places she mostly keeps to herself. But I saw it/ I know I did.
When you see it you see it. That’s the thing. The flash of light. The burst of understanding, of trepidation, and then of meaning.
The fire, some say. The flame, my brother.
That hunka hunka burning love.
_____
At some point the gritty powders I have accumulated in the tight folds of my work pants, they landslide out. Amidst the ecstasy of me slipping under the waves with Arle, I track a bunch of filth into our bed. Oh well. I note the grit of another man’s property dirtying up my own, though I pay it no mind in the end. With a flick of my wrist and a sweep of my hand, I might wipe it all away. Sever the work life from the home one. Shoot all that pounded leaf spice down to the floor. To our floor. To do whatever dust does when it comes to visit.
I put my face in her armpit and inhale. She pushes me away, taps the top of my scalp and muffles NO. We all have our limits and I understand that, of course.
But my intentions, with her at least, they are always so real and so sincere and so filled with wonder and need and the desire to shoot her body up with the kind of heavy dope only real and actual true, true love can bring you. In my never-ending slew of immature moments/ my unguarded array of voices and faces/ my touches, pinches and taps/ my ridiculous ‘what if’ scenarios, I defy my own mental gravity just to risk it all for love.
In my seeing her sleeping, my pillowed head eyes open watching her eyes shut, I realize the breathtaking frailty of such a powerful beast as love.
Move in close.
Feel her exhaling on your fingers.
The morning stars are fading.
The kitchen sink is art.
The rooms of this house are regenerating stages. The couch is a cabin. The TV shows are hills. Both dogs are what we came for. They are the living and they’ll be the dying. The old dishes are headstones. Our record collection is God.
Heaven is a potato chip.
The fridge is the ridge at the edge of this town.
And the moon, tweaking in the morning sky, is both of us at once.
Hello. How you doing? I hope you’re well, healthy, and feeling the spring in the air. Thanks very much for reading Thunder Pie today.
If you already are a paid subscriber, thanks so much. I’m very, very grateful. But if you’re not/ please consider this. Without folks like you shelling out cash in exchange for art, small-time writers and creators like me will be rapidly disappear as the coming AI Apocalypse unfolds. If the idea of that happening doesn’t bother you much… well, fair play. But if it does, then please sign on to my ‘Save the Fucking World with Thunder Pie’ campaign. It’s money well spent if you like my work and look forward to more.
That’s all. Thanks for being here. And have a great week.
Serge
Thunder Pie is edited by Arle Bielanko
Photos: Arle Bielanko, top pic. SB the rest.
Subscribe to Arle’s Substack here: Letter to You
Etsy.
SERGE BIELANKO’S AMERICAN ARTBOX SIDE HUSTLE
Below are some shots of my latest ArtBox (slightly fancier name for mixed media/ diorama/ whatever). Immediately upon receiving it in the mail, my buddy who commissioned it wrote this to me:
I am seriously beyond impressed with the John Prine piece. The quality of work and your killer vision is outstanding! Thanks so fucking much. Ya need to do a show in Philly. Make a bunch! I’ll help you. My buddy owns (a gallery)! You’d be busy for years!!
Damn. When a fellow human being being takes the time to express just how much they love something I created, it’s so uplifting. It’s almost spiritual. That message shot me fifty miles up into the sky. It made me want to keep going with all of my ideas/ even when a lot of days knock me on my ass, make me feel like ‘whats the point?’ Whether you make art or not, I’m guessing you know exactly what I’mean.
So let me make an ArtBox for you? I’ll make it to be a treasure you hang in your home or in your office or in your deli or your bar or your garage…and you look at it and your friends look at it and they’re like: Jesus Fucking Christ, man. That is actually really, really cool.
Things I Liked This Week.
Someone told me about the Merlin Bird ID app from the ornithology geniuses at Cornell University. Basically, it’s miraculous. Hit record out in the world and it starts listing the exact birds that are singing around you. I don’t know why I love that so much, but I do. And you might too. Also: it’s free.
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Arle made egg salad out of nowhere. I just didn’t see it coming. Egg salad. Where’d we even get the goddamn eggs?! She must have robbed a bank. Anyhow, it was magnificent. Egg salad is such a simple old timey picnic table under the willow tree kind of vibe. Which is also exactly my vibe from here on out. So bring it, babe.
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We started watching two shows on Apple TV. Your Friends and Neighbors is a humorous drama that shines a light on pukey American wealth and the vicissitudes that befall a rich man in trouble. Government Cheese is a brilliantly comedic look at an ex con trying to make his family’s dreams come true in the US in the late 1960’s. Both are superb. So pair them up with The Studio (tremendous) and suddenly you’re probably watching three of the best shows out there right now.
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Pro tip. Spring is a good time to listen to old school bebop jazz and also old school traditional bluegrass. I’ve been drowning myself in both in my car on my travels recently and all I can say is that I get way better gas mileage when I’m blaring Bill Monroe or Dexter Gordon than whenever I’m not.
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I bought a used copy of Harry Crews’ famous memoir, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. I saw something posted somewhere about it and it intrigued me and so I hunted down a cheap copy right away. Sometimes I do that and then the book arrives and I’m still intrigued, but something has faded, inexplicably, through no fault of the writer or the seller or me. But on rare occasions: the book arrives: I unwrap it: I hold it in my hands: the cover is wonderful: there is electricity thumping out of it into my palms: and I just know, without a doubt, that I’m going to read the shit out of this fucking thing. And I’m going to love it more than I probably ever imagined I could… or would.
bye.