Discover more from Thunder Pie

Throat Punch Essays

Two Wood Boxes Lyin' Side By Side

Serge Bielanko

Sep 9, 2022

“You are wonderful.”

- Arthur Conan Doyle, at age 71, standing in his garden one summer afternoon, turned to his wife and said, simply, “You are wonderful.”

Then he clutched his chest and died.

What started innocently enough ended up defining the galaxy.

In the working-class charcuterie fields laid out on the Ikea kitchen island or out on the old bar I’d bought from a WWII vet once upon a time. Around the house, we sat together and picked our way through the chilled wedges of broccoli and the cool slivers of red pepper/ dragging them through the supermarket hummus/ careful not to leave tiny gloops of it on our chins or our lips.

Silver dollar sized slices of genoa salami. Dijon mustard. Pretzel chips. Vegetable chips. Feta cheese dip from the nicer market and baby pickles from Walmart. Small melon buildings tossed by an earthquake/ whole towns ravaged and dumped down into tight glass containers with locking lids. Pineapple apartments. The strawberry dead. Civilizations crumbled to the ground and I could see it all laying there before me as the Rioja landed in my veins and the warmth of falling in love moved down over me/ over me/ over me/ and through me/ pushing through me like spears/ like bayonets/ hard bars of evening sunshine jamming through my ribs and heart.

We would play the records then. Taking turns spinning what we thought so long and hard about. I would stand at the turntable by my kitchen while she kept her back to me in her seat, just a few feet away and I felt scared and nervous and impossibly curious. But also sure that it could never happen to me like this. Not now. Not after everything that had happened/ that was still happening. The hauntings of a past life. The relentless pursuit of the hyper-starved ghost. The Life and Times of the Trauma Bond Boy.

He felt unable to move.

Unable to speak.

Then: here she was. The Red Headed Stranger.

Someone new. Someone gentle. A shipload of soul that I could sense before I even touched her. Steaming off of her/ the just knowing/ the just feeling it/ when you don’t want to trust anyone and you have every right not to/ but fuck. I mean: oh fuck, man. Now what, you know? ‘Now what?!’ I was screaming to myself when we sat together on these Friday evenings when her kids were with their dad and mine were at their mom’s and it was Billie Holiday and Billy Idol/ Bob Seger and Bob Dylan/ John Coltrane and John Cougar/ Bright Eyes and The Nils. Half a house rented on a country town street where so many had lived out their days gone by.

Now this.

Salami coins dipped in hot sauce.

Wine burning on my lips as it slid across the Sriracha.

Me trying not to think about it when it was all I could think about in a thousand years.

Something possible. Could it be?

This soft opening of a brand new shop.

I only wanted everything.

And that’s exactly what I got.

_____

I get the feeling that love will be the last thing standing. When the sun is moments from bursting and this world is seconds from nothingness, I get the feeling that - if there is anybody or anything still here living some kind of life - that they will glance over at this other one that they have stared at and glared at and held and hurt and died for a thousand times/ a thousand micro deaths all over the goddamn house or the cave or whatever/ and that will be it. A squeezed hand. A squeezed paw. All the words unsaid. All the things unspoken. All the strata from down in the dark cavity/ from The Heart’s Lair/ creaking off the bloody walls/ a little chip at a time at first/ and then raining here and there in simple sudden bursts/ shattering down on the heart itself like morning ice off the slanted roofs of a time so long ago when the kids would wait for the school bus on February days when the snow had already come and gone and the nights went on forever/ and the stars were ignored by the young hot fever.

Instants are underrated. Popping-off milliseconds? I say: think of life as nothing more. And, oh, to stand there in the ultra-fire of the dying sun. You and her. You and him. You and them.

Calm, hard, on-and-off squeezes from an old familiar hand.

Onetwothree.

Iloveyou.

Onetwothreefour.

Iloveyoutoo.

Then the thunder sky eats itself as the violet waves roll down out of the smoke. The sharpest cracking starts and never ends. The land evaporates. Your skin liquifies. Your bones fly off in a dustbowl puff that is over before it even has time to register in the Book of Time. You melt into one another like perfumes colliding.

Late Summer Lilac and French Avenue Breeze.

The Christmas Eve Sea and The Still Summer Trees.

A Wisp of Bread Baking and A Peach Whiskey Tart.

The Dr. Pepper in the Straw.

Wet Twenties Falling Apart.

Somewhere from down in my nervous breakdown wilderness, at the worst time of my life, freakin’ Arle walked out of the Apocalypse with a bunch of vinyl under one arm and a bag of charcuterie under the other.

Smiling her nebula smile/ her Northern Lights tap-tap-tapping out messages on the dark over my head/ her tender smile/ that smile baked up out of some drunken Pirate’s stash of epic pearls/ and her brown eyes molded so very carefully with freshly plowed medieval Earth/ and then her pink lips carved out of the strands of muscle staring up out of the gaping wounds of dying Civil War soldiers/ and then her lean tapered fingers descended from the dripping wax of the gnarled fists of the old Scandinavian witches/ and then her red hair tenuously dripped down from the hard wine mixed with seal blood leaping from a Viking’s chin/ and then her endless legs fever dream traced from lost island sand by Amelia Earhart right before she dies/ and then her mind dropped from the talons of a wild English falcon onto the thatched roof of a poet in a village by a river in the morning one cold winter many, many moons ago.

Then the sun explodes and we are one.

Ta-da.

_____

_____

In bed this morning, we stretch the minutes so to play with time. She returns from a false leave and climbs back under covers even in the wake of both of our alarms having sounded some time ago. She settles in and I can feel her waiting for me to begin.

To move towards her and want her.

Or to touch feet in the spirit of later on.

Or perhaps to say things/ mindless things/ or maybe important things/ anything really/ but just to begin/ as the beginner often does/ as the chatty caffeinated bright morning star often does in order to help the dark night star slip back into this harsh reality of another school day. Another work day. Another day in paradise.

But I am unable to connect with my love at this juncture, I guess, because the Wi-Fi is acting all wonky and it is making me mad. Mean. I feel deserted by civilization and left out in the middle of a downpour as the tiny fan of bars at the top of my laptop screen that shows I’m fully connected is caught in a frustrating loop of connecting only to disconnect a moment later.

And all of this right when I am in the middle of trying to purchase a sweet vintage wooden crate made into a three-shelf unit from some lady down in Mifflin County for ten bucks. It’s a really good deal and I need this for our art workshop. Halfway through this official FB Marketplace Messenger communication/ I find myself panicked/ unable to respond to her last terse, no bullshit, unfriendly ( I immediately suspect she is suspicious of my ‘foreign name’) ‘CASH. I DON’T DO VENMO’ message. I type a response but it won’t go through. Then I try again and there is no signal so it does’t work again.

Arle is quiet, sipping the coffee I brought her earlier. I don’t know if she is clocking me or not. I cannot see what she can see from her side of the bed so I don’t know if she can tell I’m on Facebook Marketplace or not. I suspect she can. I suspect that she is waiting for me to tell her what I’m up to. She will be happy for me. Me and my old wooden box fetish. Me and my super fucking weird ways.

I don’t tell her shit, though.

I just freak out and go on a loud morning rant about how I hate living in the goddamn backwards ass countryside where the internet companies all compete to make the country people suffer the most with candyland Wi-Fi created by sending each of our precious FB Messenger Chat Bubbles into space tied to some uber-wealthy fat fucking asshole CEO’s Scotch farts. Like an index card tied to a helium ballon. I hit SEND and there is no technological miracle. There is no specialized instant connection with the world at large. Pfff. Hell no. I send my messages and they go drifting out of my house real slow and they fly down the block and then land out in some Amish farmer’s cornfield as he’s walking down the road with a plug of tobacco in his jaw laughing at my dead message to the lady about the wooden crate shelf. It’s just laying there on the edge of the field like an electrocuted pigeon under the power lines.

It’s such bullshit and I declare war on the world right there in the bed beside the love of my life. Poor Arle. I don’t know. I don’t understand how she puts up with my crap.

She just sits there sipping her coffee, unable to block me out, but slack-faced and non-responsive. This is an expert move on her part as she has long ago learned what no one else could ever even come close to understanding.

That is: you just have to let me blow my top a little and say completely ridiculous things that have little connection to the situation whatsoever.

Like, say for example, I can’t read an email on my phone because my eyes are fading again and my current contact lenses no longer work like they used to. So reading stuff up close is no longer possible for me. And so it may happen (not always, mind you/ because I’m on meds and therapy and Melatonin and Hemp extract and less caffeine, you motherfuckers!) that I just can’t make sense of some little hang-up. The kind that comes with being alive and holding down a goddamn fort. You know what I’m saying?

So if I can’t read the email because my contacts aren’t working anymore then I might say something like:

“These fucking contact lens companies just slice up Saran Wrap and put it out in the sun until it’s stiff and then they sell it to the working class as some kind of miraculous vision cure but it’s all a crock of shit!”

I don’t believe that, I guess. I mean. Well. Come on.

But still: sometimes I need to strike back at Corporate America from down deep in my soul. Even if they had nothing to do with what I’m flustered about. I am still going in for their jugular.

But then in a matter of moments, it passes, and I’m cool. So if you didn’t come at me and tell me to chill out or that I need meds (I’M ALREADY ON FUCKING MEDS!!) or some ignorant shit like that/ then you roll through it relatively unscathed. And I notice you’re ignoring me as a show of both your own inner strength and your unwavering support of my existence in your world even if you could most certainly do without this kind of nonsense.

That’s what goes down this morning then. Years into our thing together. Years into something I would lay down and die for instantly. Without question. My life for her. Take it. Make good on the promise. Let her be. I stand before her this morning: a man madly in love. Trying to show her the honor she deserves. Trying to let her know each and every day now that her coming into my life and my kid’s lives has been everything. EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING!!!

Ahhhh, but oh well.

I fuck up a lot too.

I scream at the computer. I holler at the bedroom that I wish I lived back in civilization again… where people vote for Liberals and the Wi-Fi works and you can get a hoagie that isn’t made on a godforsaken giant hot dog roll. And she lets it roll off her back/ morning rain/ a gust of wind.

Then I’m okay.

Except the lady selling the box crate shelves actually blocks me on official Facebook Marketplace Messenger for some reason. I have no idea why. I guess my odd name looks like a scam. Now I want to find her house and put a Walmart bag full of Great Dane turds in her mailbox.

I wanted that box.

I don’t get people sometimes.

_____

_____

Yes, yes, yes, of course this is a tale of finding true love.

That’s why I’m telling you all this.

Grrrr.

Don’t you see?

____

_____

At the antique mall, I lose Arle. The joint is vast. It’s an old mill and it reeks of old times, with its massive heaving timbers glaring down at you from the ceilings and the walls. In some spots: grand gorgeous bygone fixtures hang right above a makeshift stall that someone rents, apparently, to try and sell overpriced ‘vintage’ old lady hats that smell like musty basement depression.

How much would you pay for that time capsule?

Whatever.

I lose Arle in the sprawl of tired knitting wheels and Victorian death dolls. I take too long, you see. I linger, freakishly, in stall after stall, picking apart everything in there until my head starts to eek a whistling out my ears. Like a teapot ready to explode. My heart races and I get so excited when I enter a stall, but then I drive myself mental trying to spot lovely, mysterious old wooden boxes or cool collectible Civil War books or a lock of John Brown’s hair preserved in rounded glass inside an oval Tramp Art frame. But I can’t afford any of that. Well, except for some of the boxes.

I love the boxes so much. I feel connected to old wooden boxes because I see worlds unfolding within them. Art being born. Scenes emerging from out of the murky shadows down in there. Little soldiers fighting. Little cowboys searching. Little Joey Ramones walking their pet pig in the city. I see things in the boxes and I pick them up and I stare at them and I can feel the energy from the garages and workshops and old classrooms and the cellars and the attics where they once lived. And then the energy of the people they once belonged to. And then the idea that no one ever before bothered to see the boxes as art. As giving birth to art. To birthing art into this world in small wooden box like fresh babies being born in Upper Missouri River Fur Trader wilderness canoes, motherfuckers!

So.

All of that head jazz. I mean, that’s why I guess Arle ends up moving through the stalls in the antique malls way quicker than me. It’s like, she’s not possessed by the demons that have me. She is normal/ collected/ chill. She is seven stalls down the way looking at something truly interesting like a preserved crow’s head with a wee acorn in its beak in a shadowbox while I am way back there.

Sniffing an antique wooden box.

It smells like Old Wagonmaker’s Rusted Nails. It reminds me of of this Little League dugout fence during a rain delay once. I tasted it when no one was looking. It tasted like pioneer leather. It tasted like American buffalo pee.

I touch my tongue, ever so lightly, to a crazy cute little dovetailed number.

Just then I spot the round dark orb with a reflection of light pinging off of it.

Jesus.

They must see me in the security cameras.

I put the box back next to an overpriced copy of JFK speeches on vinyl and I head off to find Arle. It isn’t easy for me; I have to pass what seems like thousands of stalls, each with fine aged wooden boxes calling out to me like prisoners from their cells.

“Hey Chica!”

“Looking good, Mamacita!”

I prance a little bit. But I ignore them. I have to. I have to find Arle. I need to see her now. I miss her. I miss my wife in the antique mall on the hot summer day when the world seems blurry and I feel so fat. I want to eat a wooden box. A nice leathery looking one with a copper-ish patina. I want to break it half and find Arle and offer her a chunk.

Some stalls have other people in them. They move sluggishly as if they are stroking out. It’s the antique mall crawl. Your eyes are fixed on the junk/ peeling apart the vision before you with the hopes of spotting treasure. And for each person that treasure is different. Some covet old crockery. Some dream of autographed Yankee balls. Some seek the exact train set mountain tunnel pass that they once owned long ago/ when they were young and careless and free. Some are all eyes for the find of a lifetime… just so they can sell it on eBay for way more than they paid.

Me, I couldn’t give a shit about their stuff. I would take an old piece of crockery and whack one of these slow moving shit-for-brains right up side the head with it if I knew that their melon would bust open like a piñata and a carmel-colored 10-inch wooden box with lid intact would fall out of their stinky skull.

I don’t know. I get dehydrated in there and my pulse goes insane. My eyes water sometimes and I curse the booths with nothing but expensive 19th century window shutters and tin metal signs that cost as much as a really good guitar. I go in to these places feeling so alive and I end up lost and feeling kind of sick. Looking for Arle. Searching for the one thing I already have.

Love.

True love, hoss.

I spot her at long last down at the end of a row of records by a row of old LIFE magazines. She is looking at a Fleetwood Mac album. I move into her orbit slowly, without making a big fuss. I don’t need her to know I was stumbling across this goddamn place looking for her everywhere. I don’t need to let her on to the fact that at one point I was wondering if it was possible that I had lost her somehow.

That maybe she had walked out the front door and climbed into her minivan and pulled away/ her Bright Eyes bumper sticker and her Pennsylvania Wilds bumper sticker and her faded ghost bumper sticker all waving their silent goodbyes at me still wandering around between the wood boxes trying to find the very thing that is leaving.

Or that maybe she is taken hostage by some awful monster and she is in a trunk as we speak.

Or that she is watching me from behind a rack of vintage prom dresses (Smells like Teen Spirit!). Watching me tongue a righteous mini-crate with the Coke logo painted on the sides/ witnessing the truth that she has long known but held down within her in order to survive.

The truth: that the man she loves is rat-shit crazy.

Her slender, long, fragile frame kneeling down behind the turquoise sparkle gowns, seeing me talk to little boxes as if they were lost children.

Because they are!

_____

_____

Monday is Arle’s birthday. She has told me that all she really wants is to have breakfast with me at a local diner we have never been to. It’s called The Choke & Puke Diner. I’m serious. That is what she wants.

So we will do that.

I don’t know what I will have. Eggs maybe? An omelette? Bacon. A fucking bucket of bacon for the birthday girl. This birthday lady. This light of my life and I mean that so much. She loves bacon. And I will give it to her at the Choke & Puke.

I know we will laugh there. I know because she makes me laugh. And I will smile out the window at times, satisfied with how the meds are working. Keeping it real still, I am for sure, but without all the mad edge I used to swing like hammers I could not keep from swinging. Inside of this love story, born up out of an Instagram message she once sent me when she was drunk, we both now reveal ourselves to another human being for the very first time in our lives.

It is possible, this thing. This kind of love. I once smirked at the idea. I was sure it was not. Not for me, at least. But somehow, between nervously dipping the carrot sticks in hummus and getting up to flip to Side 2 of Born in the USA, I heard in her voice the one thing that I never imagined I would hear.

I heard her heart.

Beating like a punk drum. Slamming like a freight train clacking. Hammering hard at the vein. Looking for the silver. Searching for the gold.

Arle has a heart that beats to the song of this whole excellent galaxy. She moves like a sudden universe. She grins like a Greek God hiding inside a wharf rat. And she rolls over me with iron wheels like wagon trains at dawn/ catching me up in her rattling spokes/ moving me out towards the thunder of the battle just starting on the far side of those trees.

Every day/ pushing me to fight.

Every day/ rolling me up in her arms.

Every day/ hearing me pass in and out of my blues.

Every day/ listening to my dreams.

Every day/ telling me hers.

Every day/ feeling my breath in her ear. Hot words I long to tell her. Feeling my nails in her scalp/ lightly/ always moving/ raking the tired and weary off her crown/ with small circles I spell her name.

I write her name in the roots of her hair.

I carve my name in the pale skin by her brain.

I trace out words in the sand piled over her sleepy skull.

I write our names.

Arle & Serge

And I write Forever.

And then I smell her hair/ deep and long/ breathing it in.

Winter Morning/ Summer Night.

And it smells like all the wooden boxes at once.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

If you like my writing, please hit the button below and become a paid subscriber. It’s easy and it’s worth it, I swear. Only $120 a year or $10 a month means you get every single essay I write. That’s 4 brand new essays a month/ one every Friday morning at 9am EST. That’s about 50 original works of art from me over a single year. That’s like several books or album worth of stuff!

Plus you will have access to almost two years worth of a back catalog of writings as well. And last but not least: you truly help support me and my family by paying for my work. Okay, that’s it!

Thanks so much. Much love to you.

Serge

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::