t r a n s c e n d e n c e

"How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it, why was I not
informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I
had been bought by a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get
involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved?
Isn't it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is
the manager-I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom
shall I make my complaint?"
-Soren Kierkegaard-

"If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to
dance."
- George Bernard Shaw

Based on a true story

Section 1: Call my Bank, Cancel the Check

There is a good chance that the Universe is ever expanding and at some point
the sun will fall out of the sky and the human race will cease to exist.
Most theories propose that in about 5 billion years our sun will burn out
and further down the line the universe will tear and every single molecule
will just break from structure and get sucked out into the nothingness. So
what then? Did any of this shit matter? We all are made up of the same
particles that make up the cosmos and the molecules that make up Lucky
Leslie Congress are the same as the ones that make up you and me. Some day,
when all of our molecules return to their original state, we'll all be mixed
together like a sea of jellybeans floating in a vast nothingness.

"My Dad: Donald Edward Congress. He is 6 feet, got a little fat around the
edges. He was a disciplinarian, tough, but he was a lot better of a father
then his father had been. He had this whole other life that I didn't know
about until I was a teen. He worked for the airlines in his 30's and flew to
the orient over 107 times; he lived in Iran, Indonesia, all over. He rode
airplanes for fun. Got a job at the airport so that every night he could
wake up in a different city. He'd catch the eye of a stewardess and know he'd
found his next lay. New place, new girl. He asked the usual getting to know
you bullshit questions that every guy has to ask in order to get into a
chick's pants. This chick had a sob story. Like any man he said what he
needed to say in order to comfort her. Soon she stopped sobbing and Donald
said 'Don't worry baby, how much do you need? I got it covered; I'll write
you a check.'

In disbelief all of her anxiety and worry was gone, all she could think was
'this man is amazing.' They proceeded to the nearest hotel and fucked like
rabbits. The next morning, before the sun had even come up, he left a
message with the bank to cancel the check he'd written the night before."
Donald Congress was a Spiritualist who grew up following the faith force fed
to him by the Hungarian Church in Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland was one of the
top hellholes in the United States according to Lucky. In 1952 or 1953,
Congress was sick; they thought he was going to die. The story was that a
lost soldier's spirit from the Korean War inhabited him, sucking his
life-force. Through mediums and spiritualists he needed to show the lost
soul how to proceed into the afterlife.
"He was a prick" Lucky said.
"Who was a prick?" they asked.
"My father's father. He just treated everyone like shit; he was not a loving
person."

Lucky continued about his Father: "The spiritualists sort of performed an
exorcism. His energy was depleted but doctors could find nothing wrong."

"Donald traveled the world. In Hong Kong, he was with a buddy, a Swedish
guy. I guess he used to fuck hookers a lot. He was in one of those Asian
taxi things, I forget what you call them, where they pull them. They saw 2
gorgeous Asian hookers and told the cab to pull over. The cab driver
insisted that they not pull over, but with some convincing he finally did.
They told the cab to wait. Dad said they were absolutely gorgeous. The
definition of beauty and grace, the cream of the crop. The women escorted
the men into a room hidden from the street. The chick starts giving my dad
a blowjob. Turns out they were dudes. The Swede punched out the he/she and
both of their wallets were stolen. So my dad got a blow job from a dude. It's
not gay if you wear a glove. You know, 'cause then it's medical. Like if a
dude jerks you off and he's wearing a glove it's just helping you with a
common medical practice. I mean what other choice do you have really? If
that shit gets all backed up it could make you crazy. Donald wasn't wearing
a glove though, so I think that was kind of gay."

It was Father's Day, Mankato, Minnesota. An incredibly hot Sunday that could
melt the pavement. It was day 5 of a cross country trip. You could almost
feel your brain cooking inside your head. Lucky left the bar to call his
Father and wish him a happy Father's Day. Lucky acted like he was the Father
talking to a small child. There comes a time in every person's life when
their parent actually becomes the dependent one, the one who needs
instruction, the one who needs parenting. Lucky still had questions about
life in general that a parent should answer, he needed guidance or just a
sane person to talk to, but his father was not a person who could be counted
on. Lucky actually worked with his father at the same gas station as an
attendant in the convenience store. As a kid Lucky was always frightened to
death of growing up and being unqualified to do anything but pump gas. The
world needs gas station attendants, but save that job for the junkie who
dropped out of school and spent years high and finally got his life together
and now success to him is just working a day job and not getting high. It's
not for Lucky.

Section 2: The Road to Excess

As Lucky walked the grounds that held ancient Mayan Ruins in Tulum, Mexico
he wondered how people could have built this all by hand. The tour guide
pointed upwards to the top of the limestone monument to explain how the
Mayans would cut a man's heart clear out of his chest and hold it up, still
beating. This was their sacrifice to their Gods. Their Gods who could not
protect them from the diseases of the white man, which in turn eventually
wiped out their civilization. Now others might have stood there awestruck by
the beauty of these ruins, resting on a shimmering coastline of turquoise
water and palm tree laced beaches. However Lucky saw nothing but the ruins
of a civilization of barbarians. While these animals were hacking each other's
hearts out, people in Europe were living in castles and using indoor
plumbing. Their culture had been around 1,000 years and they were still
living in stone huts. Lucky understood their blood lust, though, and often
he pondered how it must feel to crush another person and extinguish their
life using his bare hands or rocks and sticks.

Lucky had no love for technology; in fact, he cursed most things that were
invented after 1970. Lucky had been a normal child up until the 5th grade.
He spilled his guts one drunken night at about 2am in a filthy, crowded
kitchen in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Lucky was a leftover artifact from the
1960's. Everything about him seemed vintage, even though he was born in the
1980's. He had this look like he could have been part of some 60's rock band
or a member of the Charles Manson entourage. Dirty army shirt aged 30 years,
holey jeans and greasy hair that was about chin length.

Lucky is drunk, not a stumbling hard alcohol drunk, just a buzzed slurring
his words beer drunk. He mentions the girl from Montreal over and over
again. Some deep dark secret is looming and Lucky is not suffering from your
standard chick problem. It's crazy but even the smartest man in the world
can be brought down and turned into a depressed sack of shit all because of
a girl. Einstein at least once or twice in his life sobbed into his pillow
because some smarmy bitch wouldn't give him the time of day. The girl from
Montreal is a musician on her way to super stardom. She was a sweet, small
girl, with a petite voice. She often serenaded Lucky with love songs in her
native French language. Lucky could not commit to moving to Canada. Was it
possible that he loved his job at the local gas station far too much? In a
room filled with drunken buffoonery and people downing beer, eating pizza,
no one realized someone was spilling his guts all right there and then.

The problem was not the girl. The girl was the least of his worries. It was
the feeling of nothingness that Lucky felt on a daily basis that consumed
his life and gnawed at his peace of mind. Lucky had hoped that this girl
would fill the void, somehow get him motivated. Where as any normal man in
love would drop everything and move to Canada, Lucky could not. Something
was holding him back. It was this fear, the fear of moving to Canada and it
not working out and him having to return back to his gas station job. He was
afraid of putting himself out there.

It was William Blake who said "the road to excess leads to the palace of
wisdom," and it seemed this was Lucky's mantra. Through self medication and
excess drug abuse, Lucky had reached a state of pure being. By pure being I
mean Lucky would like to exist as a piece of mold or a dining room chair; he
wanted to just exist in this world and not feel anything at all. This was
achieved through the use of painkillers, drugs and alcohol. This stopped the
gears in his mind from churning. Lucky never slept and always had some kind
of drug in his system, sometimes prescribed, sometimes not.

In 5th grade, everything was normal. That all ended when Father Congress
abruptly pulled Lucky and Sister Marjorie out of school for fear of a
forthcoming Apocalypse. Father Congress received this information from his
Spiritualist guide. A Spiritualist, for those not in the know, is someone
who believes the dead are speaking directly to them through a medium. Not
just any spiritualist either, he was receiving instruction from Elwood
Babbitt, a sort of prophet of the spiritualist religion, a man who had
claimed to channel Lincoln and even Jesus. Apparently, the dead informed
Father Congress that the end of the world was near and he needed to take his
son, daughter, and wife far, far away and prepare for the end of days. This
is when Lucky swore off technology and learned to live off the earth. Lucky
learned to shoot an AK-47 and was forced to believe that soon the world
would be in a state of disarray. Just a boy, he was forced to become an
agricultural engineer and learned to live off of vegetables he grew
himself.

Now when you build up the end of the world and fill the head of a 5th grader
with all sorts of colossal lies and then the world doesn't really end, what
are you left with? Lucky had been preparing for death since the 5th grade.
Years later he stated that Elwood's words were beautiful and maybe he was
right but Father Congress fucked it all up and misconstrued the meaning of
everything.

This in some strange way relates to the Mayans who as did nothing but wait
for the end of days while giving physical sacrifices to the Gods. Lucky was
like a sacrifice to the dead. These mediums demanded Father Congress move
his family out of civilization or this somehow would anger the Gods. The
Mayans, though, had no clue what they were missing out on. All they knew was
worship and bloodshed. For Father Congress to turn his back on his family,
move them away from the advances the world was making and transport them
back to simpler more violent times seemed like something only the Amish do.
Well, gun wielding outlaw Amish, I guess.

Section 3: Finding One's Proverbial Self

Lucky was a man now and he had no plans for a future. He thought maybe "I
could be normal, maybe do the girlfriend thing. You know, like the normal
people do but the girl from Montreal would not have it." Who the hell was
she to turn her back on love? She must have thought that his lack of
commitment was exposed by Lucky's reluctance to move to Canada. He was too
scared to go to a foreign land where he'd have to make new friends, learn a
new language and make her his whole life. One can only speculate that she
wanted Lucky to find himself and then return with conviction, convinced that
there was no other option but her.

It was earlier that year that Lucky had gone on a trip through Europe in
order to find his proverbial self. The trip at some point led Lucky to a
small bar in Eastern Europe that he ducked into to get out of the rain, a
wicked downpour that seemed like the spit of god. Figuring why not buy a
beer since here American money is worth enough to make him a king. When he
ordered a drink the bartender led Lucky to a back room. The long narrow bar
led to a back room cloaked and hidden by a dark curtain that separated it
from the rest of the bar. As the bartender barely speaking a word led Lucky
to the back and pushed back the curtain it appeared like a scene out of a
Fellini film. A room filled with naked women everywhere all sitting at
tables waiting for unsuspecting victims.

As Lucky pulled up a chair one
woman demanded, "You buy me drink."
"Uh, yeah, no, I don't have that much money on me."
"You buy me drink and I let you fuck my mouth."
"Lady, I'm all set, I'll buy you a drink, but aside from that we're all
straight."
"You buy me and friend drink, you ever have two ladies at once. You buy me
and friend a drink."
"Fine, fine, fine, what do you want a beer?"
"No, honey," she said in her broken English as she ordered top shelf aged
whiskey.

Lucky checked his pockets. He bolted to the bar and just asked to pay his
bill so he could get the hell out. The bar and the bartender rang up the one
Heineken he ordered and whatever concoction his lady friends were drinking.
The grand total was close to 30 US Dollars. He had nearly shit himself when
the scary oversized Gorilla that bounced at the bar asked for the money.
Lucky tried explaining that he didn't have that kind of money on him. He was
led outside.

He quickly rescinded his remarks and said "Wait I have money in my ATM
account."

It appeared the closest ATM was a long walk away so as Lucky was led out of
the bar, a huge Hungarian Gorilla followed him outside into the pouring
rain. Lucky walked 5 feet ahead of the monster dressed in a black suit,
white shirt, brandishing an umbrella to shelter himself from the rain as it
pummeled Lucky.

He was sure this was the end. It was funny all those years waiting for death
and he never pictured it as a Hungarian Gorilla. He had only imagined global
destruction and a fiery, explosive, poetic death, not a one bullet to the
back of the head for a beer death. As they approached the ATM the oaf made
no attempt at small talk and his demeanor and expression did not shift in
the least. Lucky soaked to the bone after walking what seemed to be a
million miles in the rain finally reached the ATM and tried as hard as
possible to conceal his PIN as he punched it in feverishly. He handed over
the money as his thoughts raced and waited for a shot from a gun or a punch
in the gut. As he handed the thirty dollars over, the oafish henchman
finally spoke.
"You have good time? You come back anytime you want."
"Thanks.thanks."

Section 4: You Can Pick Your Friends, But Your Family Is Like Terminal
Cancer.

It was a drunken late night call on a holiday weekend; it was Mother's day.
"It was my sister. We came over for a cookout, dad ate the most pot cookies
I have ever seen a human eat. Not aware that they were pot cookies he piled
7 to 8 cookies in his mouth. Sis dosed it with the intention of getting dad
fucked up. The first thing Dad asked was, 'is there pot in these cookies?'
Dad's eaten opium cookies before and passed out at a business dinner, passed
out in his food. I'm not sure how Dad ingested the opium cookies. A
Co-worker noticed it and just kept nudging him." Lucky added, "My Dad is
still in love with my mom although they are divorced. He said 'I'm in love
with her, I'll always be in love with her.' I talked to him in a dream
before I was born. Dad told me this."

Of course someone asked the obvious "And you remember this?"
"No, how could I? I wasn't born," Lucky soon after ended the conversation
awkwardly as he sounded a bit too smashed to continue with story time.
Lucky had a vast knowledge of everything from the blues and early jazz all
the way through 60's garage and up to date indie rock. Lucky made a
conscious effort to stay off drugs, well illegal ones anyway. The access to
constant alcohol was his downfall; that's why he never joined a band. Lucky
became a beast and drank to excess every time he was within site of alcohol.
Full bottles of whiskey gone in a few hours. Lucky never stumbled or even
showed signs of drunkenness, a sure sign he was a pro. He would wake up the
next mornings and ask what he had done the night before because all he could
remember was blackness.

Lucky walked the streets of Chicago. Lucky was on the phone yelling at his
father. When he called into work, just to check in, he heard the rumor that
his father was extremely upset. Upset because his son did not call him on
Father's Day. Lucky was the adult in this relationship and perhaps this wore
him down; he couldn't focus on anything else. His father insisted that he
did not get a call on Father's Day. He took it as far as to not pick up
Lucky from the bus station when he returned home from his trip because his
ungrateful son had not called on the holiest of hallmark holidays.

"Mom's normal. Her dad died when she was 10 and her mom was always crazy.
Grandma decided to stop doing everything like paying the mortgage after her
husband died. She's nuts. It started before my mom was 10 but it got worse
after her Dad died. One day she came home from school and all of her shit
was on the front lawn. She was kicked out of the house at 11 years old,
forced to stay with a girlfriends parents, but the state never proceeded to
have her put into protective custody because Grandma could always pull it
together and seem normal in front of state officials. Mom married at 18, to
the son of wealthy business owner. As her husband suffered from mental
illness, Mom was forced to run the family business for her husband. Shortly
after they divorced. That's when the two lovebirds I refer to as parents got
hitched," Lucky explained with enthusiasm as he continued on with this
family history lesson.

Lucky was curious to meet the monstrosity of a grandmother that he had
ignored all these years. Lucky would meet her face to face on his visit to
Chicago. All the while Lucky seemed to be living a life that was a cross
between a Stephen King Novel and a Hunter S. Thompson drug trip story.
Walking the streets of Chicago for what seemed like hours in the blistering
summer heat, Lucky drank an entire bottle of Makers Mark Whiskey just before
he left for the journey. He said there was no way he could pull it off
sober. He walked through a poor area of Chicago and finally arrived at low
rent apartments. Lucky's Grandmother had no connection to the outside world.
She had no phone and he had no way of communicating with her directly. Lucky
had to phone ahead to a landlord that kept an eye on her. That was the woman
who he buzzed to let him into the building.

The building smelled of decay. The décor of the lobby was vintage 1965 with
an awful modern day mural of flowers strewn about the room as a decorative
border. Lucky ordered his companions to wait in the lobby; he'd been warned
his grandmother did not like people. As they sat in the lima bean green
leather chairs in the lobby an array of freaks and atrocities passed
through. It was quite awhile before Lucky came down. Every time they heard
the stairs creak their eyebrows raised as they anxiously awaited Lucky's
arrival. They assumed that there was always the possibility of a stabbing
death, either Lucky having to stab his grandmother in self-defense or her
stabbing him but still they waited. Finally he emerged with a look of, "Holy
shit, I'm wishing my eyes were TV cameras so I could show you what I just
witnessed."

"Compliment her on her garden" was the first thing Lucky said. "Also, she
really doesn't like people so please be super polite. Oh, yeah, she thought
I was dead." His friends watched him, anticipation in their eyes, expecting
some kind of story, and he obliged. "So the landlord told her that her
grandson from California was here. Either she misheard me say Massachusetts
or my grandmother misheard. She started to yell as I knocked at the door
that her relatives from California were dead and that I must be dead and why
was I knocking at her door." Finally Lucky calmed her down and she
remembered his face and let him in. Lucky went on to explain that he looked
identical to his mother so that helped jog her memory.

They walked up the long narrow staircase to the second floor; Lucky was pale
like chalk. The hallway looked as though they were visiting a mental asylum.
They walked partially down to an open door and finally they met the woman
that they had built up in their minds as a raving lunatic. Lucky was so
sweet to this woman, which awed and shocked them. Lucky was not known for
his kind heart, but he talked softly and gently held her hand as he led her
back into the apartment. The apartment stank like death; they had to breathe
through their mouths for fear of gagging. The smell was some combination of
unclean bed sheets, molded, rotted food and body odor. The apartment was a
10-foot by 10-foot room with peeling white paint on all four walls. A broken
oscillating fan propped the window open and blew warm air in. The room had a
bed, refrigerator, a 1970's TV set, and a kitchen sink.

A massive wardrobe poured out of the closet and covered
most of the floor. Lucky hadn't dared ask to use the toilet but could only
imagine the kind of decay that lay beyond the bathroom door.

Grandma Congress was dressed as you'd imagine any grandmother to dress, in
an awful multicolored shirt, head to toe in shades of purple. Nothing
unusual aside from that. Oh yeah, except for the goiter that was the size of
a basketball protruding from her stomach like she was an expecting mother.
It repulsed and fascinated them. They couldn't take their eyes off of it,
and their fingers itched with the sick need to poke it.
The woman was polite and seemed to speak intelligibly. As Lucky had put it,
his grandmother could always pull it together and make you think she was
completely sane. However through prior experience Lucky had seen poor sweet
granny terrorize an entire hospital when she had to go in for a routine
surgery. She made claims of getting raped by staff and told crazy stories
about how everyone was out to get her and keep her locked away for good.
This is why this woman was allowed to reside in a residential home for so
long. First, because she refused all help and would not go to a state run
facility, and second, if they tried to put her there she was smart enough
to pull it all together and make it look like she was completely sane.

Lucky had told her he was traveling for business. She plied him with
questions like what kinds of places do you visit on your journey's and to
keep up the charade of Lucky being a perfect little angel he would answer,
"Oh you know upscale swanky places and that sort." When she asked if he met
with mixed crowds, Lucky said, "Never, only with high society types."
Apparently she was asking if he met with other ethnic groups; she was stuck
mentally in 1957, so they just played along.

Her explanation of her everyday life fascinated Lucky to no end. They had an
entire conversation about her trips to the store and why she bought certain
items at certain stores and others at another store. She said that her
liquor store made most their money off of liquor and sold products like Coke
and Pepsi at a discount. So it wouldn't be fair for her to go to the liquor
store just to buy soda without buying hard alcohol. It was only appropriate
the she bought soda from the liquor store if she was going to buy hard
liquor. The same went for places that carried dairy and so on and so forth.
Her shopping had to be split up into several trips to the appropriate stores
so as to not offend anyone in the neighborhood. She also explained how she
could not lift more then a small amount anyway. This didn't make all that
much sense to them. Later they learned she was wealthy beyond all belief and
lost it all in the great depression.

Uncomfortably, one of them said, "Oh what a beautiful garden you have
outside." This seemed to be like a switch that ignited a tiny flame inside
of her. She seemed a bit angered. She explained how a percentage of the
money that all of the tenants paid went, whether they wanted it to or not,
into building this garden at the buildings entrance and it pissed her off
because of all the interior work the place needed. She went on to say how
everyone in the building raved over this garden and she eventually just gave
in and would rave as well. Then on top like rubbing salt in a wound she had
asked Lucky to have his friends ask about the garden. At one point she said
"How old do you think I am?" They were thinking 120 but before they could
she anything said, "I'm 77. Don't I look good for my age?" They all just
nodded in astonishment that she didn't say a number in the triple digits.

They spent about half an hour of humoring her while Lucky just sucked up
like he was trying to win her imaginary inheritance. She told a story at one
point about German beer and she was talking to Lucky about water beer. When
asked what water beer was she said "You know like Bud Light." She spoke of
beer so cold that there was no possibility of it being any colder without
freezing, making Lucky's mouth water as the temperature in her small
apartment seemed to rise by the minute. She offered some ice cream, but god
only knew what the hell anything coming out of that ancient icebox would
look like. It was not a tempting offer even though the apartment felt like
the bowels of hell. Lucky politely declined and said his goodbyes.

"Lucky, that is going to be you if you don't learn to take advice. I see you
feel bad for her, you feel bad and you wonder with all these crazies in my
genetic tree, how long before I'm there? She could be living in a clean nice
facility. She could be taken care of, never have to lift groceries, with the
benefits of air conditioning. She is grade A bat shit crazy if she thinks
being in a state run facility is terrible compared to the utter squalor she's
accustomed to. You think this woman is a genius because she can fool
everyone into thinking she is sane? She is a total nutbag in need of heavy
medication and around the clock care." Lucky planned to be dead way before
he ended up like her.

The initial shock wore off somewhere around 10 blocks away. Lucky found a
liquor store and bought 40 ounces of Pabst to drink in a nearby alleyway.
Leading up to this meeting, Lucky had hoped that this would be the kind of
encounter that gave him the answers to questions like, "Where do I fit into
this world?" Lucky left with more questions then answers.

Section 5: A Hail of Gunfire

Sister Marjorie was like a guiding light and a saint in Lucky's life.
Marjorie rented a farm house with Lucky and they lived somewhat like the
Amish. Stacks and stacks of old records littered the house along with
antiques and musical instruments. Marjorie was his younger sister but she
acted the mother role. This was home for now. It was often while at home
that Lucky in a state of boredom would drink and pop pills until he couldn't
see straight. Boredom was his worst enemy.

When asked about heroin he said "I'd never do that shit again.. It's too
fucking good."

He had pretty much tried the gambit of everything under the sun. He tried to
use uppers when he was down and when he got to up he used downers to get
down. It's like a balancing act; every druggie thinks the exact right combo
of drugs will put them in the right frame of mind permanently. They try to
find this perfect combination then just repeat use of that perfect
combination on a daily basis. It never works out right because the body
adjusts and you need more and more to get high and the whole while it just
fucks up your system. Nobody wants to end up like Elvis with miles of shit
backed up in their gut and then kick the bucket while trying to squeeze a
terd out, but that's the common end of the pill popper.

Everyone had hoped that they would call one day and Lucky would be gone,
moved far away to do something he deemed purposeful or moved away to find
love. They wanted to hear him say "I'm moving to Montreal and me and my
chick up there are going to work it out." On some level they felt it was
their mission to find Lucky's purpose in the universe.

That was the last time they saw Lucky. Perhaps his service to the universe
had already been served. Perhaps he was needed just as a pawn in the game
and was meant to be nothing else. Lucky didn't want to live up to his legend,
The New American Hero. Lucky hoped it ended with him dying in a hail
of gunfire or driving into the sunset in a convertible but alas it just ended
where it began, somewhere in the middle of chaos.