The Cavalry Only Comes When the Mortarmen Are Sleeping

I was asked to write this so I did. Jeff Buckley's arpeggiated Fender Telecaster cried reverb-soaked notes as he sang his rendition of "Hallelujah" in my ears through ancient headphones at least eight times in the process. Make of it what you will or won't. No holds barred, no punches pulled. I hope it's good enough, Babe.

"The Cavalry Only Comes When the Mortarmen Are Sleeping"

The American Dream is perhaps the biggest lie of the previous century. Americans, as citizens of a rising and ruling superpower, needed something to cling onto to justify their goal of global Manifest Destinty; something wholesome, something sweet, something different from the imperialistic continent from which they came-- so they centralized their goal and made it succinct: two-and-a-half kids, a dog, and a white picket fence. What honest person wouldn't aspire to that dream? It's humble, it's pure, it's seemingly obtainable with enough diligence and a democratic government to protect its existence. I, on the other hand, have far more honest reasons for wanting it: I missed it on the first time around, as did my parents, and I want to better the world that I call home.

Is it so wrong that I'm trying to break a cycle started generations before my life began? Stubborn, maybe; a small fish in a big pond trying to make a difference with a meager flick of the tail. But haven't you heard of the tidal wave on one coast starting due to a butterfly's flapping wings on the opposite shore? It takes some action, no matter how small, to start a revolution. It takes a family getting it right to make up for years of wasted effort, wasted youth, wasted potential, wasted space. Frankly, I've spent enough time being wasted. There were many things I never had as a child, one of them being a home. My mother didn't literally; she moved thirteen times within the same three neighboring towns during her childhood due to the tough economic circumstances faced by a single widow of three who couldn't speak the native tongue. My father, wherever he is, had a house on a hill in the nice part of town where his family owned a profitable tavern and restaurant. Regardless, it was no home. My grandfather, a drunk I never met and hope to never meet in any possible Afterlife, would come home from his establishment drunk on Puerto Rican rum, ironically, and beat the innocence out of the boy who would someday sprout me. Even the family dog would hide under the nearest bed. My dad, then a gangly wuss at a prominent Catholic private school in Westchester County, took it like a man-- more of a man than his father would ever be, World War II veteran or not. I never knew about my dad's struggle until six years ago, and even then it wasn't because he told me. My aunt and mother filled me in on those quiet years of which he never spoke. It broke my heart to hear how he ached, and it hurt even more to learn that he'd hidden it for so long. A true martyr doesn't show his stripes. I suppose my hobby denies me that status, but so be it; I'd rather use my talent. My father tried not to expose his anguish, but in the end his lack of a proper home cost him. He wasn't able to build the domestic eutopia he'd longed for as a young man; in fact, he did quite the opposite. His dream was like a feather floating on the water: the harder he tried to get closer to it, the further away it slipped. And for most of the first twenty-seven years of my life it's been quite the same. I haven't seen him for more than four years, but I know now why my mother left him when I was seven. It took years to understand her motives. Even though I know she did what was best for both of us, the lover of the underdog in me still weeps for that broken man who gave me the last name by which I've come to be known-- that is, to say, if anyone really knows me. I've walked in your tired steps, old man. I've made the same mistakes and curse myself for it.

But not now. Not anymore. Hopefully, God-willing, never again. I want to right those wrongs. I know the dangers of both traps: the physical and the emotional. I've seen both parents fail, but I've also seen them triumph. These eyes have witnessed a lot in their brief time on Earth. In some light they look like my mother's. I'm proud of that, the warm chocolate comfort that hers have always exuded reflected in my own; but more often than not they look like my dad's, those foreign dark globes which mine haven't met for over four years. They're searching, they're hurting, they're his. Maybe it's time to change both views. Maybe it's time to make them mine. Maybe I need to set my sight, my sites, on something bigger: painting that white picket fence that both parents failed to obtain. It's only a heap of wood driven into the ground, but I've yet to buy one. In fact, last week I ripped a few haggard sections of it out of the yard where I live temporarily since they were a peeling-paint disgrace to the neighborhood. But deep inside this cynical walking wound of a plumber I know that there will be a time, there will be a reckoning; and when that time comes I'll revel in its holy glory. Even the greatest sinner has his moment next to Christ. Ask the redeemed thief hanging by his hands on Golgotha. No; in ten years ask me.