It was three years ago today when I arrived home
from a split shift at work, coming in the back door, hearing the hiss of the
stove, a pan of water making plosive sounds ready to erupt into a pre-mature
boil. I saw him on his reclining chair in the living room. His eyes were
shushed. His faced titled, as if chocked. His lips had this expression—as if
his lips were made out of putty and he was trying to form cursive letters with
his lips. As if he were a little boy pirouetting in front of the water faucet in
a park, not quite tall enough to reach the stream of liquid, pursing his lips
to get a nourishing slurp.
I touched the
back of his neck and found it tepid. I
touched his forehead and it was still warm. I chanted his name. I shook him. I
thought he was playing a joke—Mike loved to joke. One time I came out of the
shower and entered my bedroom naked and there was melanoma on the drywall and
then it turned out to be a bat whispering at me in nylon hushes. I ran out,
dressed up like an eskimo and killed the bat with a shovel. The next day Mike
had (somehow) found twenty fist sized
plastic bats , opportunely stationing them atop the blades of the illuminating
overhead oscillating fan in my room so when I entered my chamber the next night
after my shower and hit the switch plastic bats soared at me from every which
way direction, but.
The water hissing on the stove was not yet at a
boil. I slap my hands as if instigating a slow-clap in an 80’s teenage movie. I
yell out his name. I start cursing. I tell him to quit fucking with me. I tell
him to cut it out. I grapple my hands on his shoulders and shake him several times. There is nothing. His eyes are still stapled
in a crunch. His lips are still contorted in a rubbery posture.
Something happens to the body in moments of extreme
chaos and disorder. A calm ensues. I grab the phone. I dial the three digits. I
tell the operator on the other end that my roommate is unresponsive. He asks
for my address. He tells me that he is sending the paramedics over. He states
that he is going to instruct me how to perform CPR. I tell him I am already
certified.
I reel Mike’s body off the recliner. In the process
Mike’s head hits the floor. It kills me. His glasses are crooked now. He is
lying in supine posture, his head titled back so that his mouth is open. I
close my eyes and breath into his body like hell, as if I am Aeolus. As if I
can pour something from my body into his that will animate his senses.
There is nothing, I begin to press down on his
chest. I’ve been certified in CPR for three years but one thing they neglect to
tell you when you practice the pumping the standard ABBA ‘Staying Alive’ theme
song on the Red Cross dummy is that, when you first press down in the center of
the client’s chest, usually you hear a snap indicating that there ribs are
broken.
I’m not used to hearing this snap. When I press down
there is a crackle. In the last five minutes I have found my roommate
unresponsive, I have shaken him, I have said that he was bluffing, I have
inadvertently knocked his head on the living room while trying to resuscitate
him, I have kissed him, I have blown Carbon-dioxide into his body and know, I
have cracked his anatomy even more.
I continue to thrust up and down like a piston.
Mike’s body continues to listlessly flap. I continue to curse. I can hear the
sirens in West Peoria echo into a reverberated shrill. Five minutes later two
officers enter the living room. One officer says he’ll continue to push if I
blow. We are working his body, kneading our fingertips and our lips into his
body, as if he were a musical instrument, trying to get him to make a sound.
The paramedic will arrive flooding the house. In the haste two lamps are overturned,
casting elongated shadows against the wall. I am trying to give the West Peoria
fire chief his name with the correct spelling. There is a defibrillator hooked
up to him that keeps on exploding. The
paramedic is holding the clamps like maracas and for some reason I keep
expecting him to say the word clear but he refrains. The neighbor enters the
house and I tell him to go upstairs and stay with Anthony. The next thing I
realize there is a gurney and Mike is being hoisted out the front door, the
door with the blue porch. The door we never used. The ambulance seems to be
aided by the aegis of thrusters as it shoots out from the gravel of our
driveway taking a hard left on Heading Avenue. I ride downtown to Methodist
with the fire chief, the same fire chief with the handle bar moustache I spoke
with while watching Haddad’s burn down on New years eve. He drops me off and I enter the ER. In the room I can see Mike’s shadow. There
are eight doctors huddled around him as if discussing a play on third and long.
I hear more snaps. More bleeps. After a five minutes of frenetic activity there
is a lull. Slowly doctors exit the room. Slowly they are swiping their heads.
For some reason I seem aggrieved how everything in the hospital is almost too
damn white. The doctor in the ER with the curly hair turns to me and asks me a
question, he asks me if I am the son of the old man.
***
I first met Mike Truskey in spring 2001, I had
dropped out of college to write full time. I had 500 pages of a manuscript
tucked under my arm so often friends thought I was wearing a cast. I lived on
High street (note) in an apartment
located in a historic 1844 mansion, the coolest house in Peoria. I had a
loveable gay roommate. I taught children English in an alternative high school.
I smoked cigars and drank single malt scotches. I dated classy women who
listened to opera.
Somehow life was that of a fairy tale. When I moved
into the castle on High street there was a prince, Dave Thompson, my classy
gay roommate. There was a King, Larry Reents, who was my high school English
teacher and who lived next door in his Versailles-adorned house. There was a
troubadour, my brother folk singer Dave McDonald who rented what was once the servants’ quarters house
from Larry and there was Mike Trusky, the Psychic, the magician, the trickster
figure who lived down the street.
I first met Mike one spring day when I was
walking down High Street to Moss, then to Bradley library to get a couple of
hours writing in. Mike waved at me from his front porch. He was an older man.
He wore thick glasses and wore a ring with funny hieroglyphics dancing on the
front.
He had a baseball diamond goatee. He kind of
resembled Black Stone the magician who sold all the magic kits in late
seventies kids would perform at Gradeschool talent shows, He walked with a
haunch. His legs were birch-stilts. His body, body, mismatched, like trying to balance a bowling pin
upside-down. He head eyes that looked like piercings 8-balls that would balloon with inscrutable eeriness when he transitioned into psychic mode.
He told me that he was looking for someone to help
out (ie, mow the lawn, housework) for him over the summer. I told him I was a
writer and intended to spend the entire summer slamming out sentences for my
novel.
He then kept on appearing. He would honk. If he saw
me walking by he would wave me inside his apartment and offer me a plate of
food.
He would keep appearing as if steeping out of a
time-hole in sync with his intuitive gait. The Labor Day before 9-11 I went to
the gas station to use the phone and a prostitute accosted me, claimed she
would give me a blow job for twenty dollars. I turned to her and inquired if
she gave hugs and told her that I would give her twenty dollars if she gave me
a hug. I then felt the overwhelming need, somehow, to save her. Ran back to my
apartment on high, quickly filled a bag with provisions, including boxes of
Tofu from my crazy ex-girlfriend, ran down back to the gas station, only to
find her gone. When I turned around there was beep.
It was Mike.
Thus we began a relationship where, if he would see
me walking, he would honk twice and I would get into the side wing of his green
Cadillac and he would aimlessly drive. He had stories that were mystic and
inscrutable and kind of eerie. He had given psychic readings to esteemed
clairvoyant Greta Alexander. He had visited sites that were quote, “haunted”
and possessed performed a series of prayers and, with an inexplicable gush of
wind and a clattering of stationary furniture a peace with come over the abode
and the house would be cleansed. I was dubious. At times he would talk and
there would be a glow around his Blackstone-the-magician face. A metaphysical aureole
would cocoon around his visage in blinks of lights. If we would be having
dinner at a restaurant he would be talking about an old ‘pioneer’ or mystic
friend who had passed-on and the lights in the building would suddenly stutter
and wink, Mike would look north, nonchalantly say that said person is in the
room with us, before returning back to his meal.
He also traveled the world teaching the Baha’i
faith, which, in my theological insouciance mistook for the B’nai B’rith home
downtown. He was reluctant to tell me anything about the faith. Finally I
badgered it out of him, Mike uttering the names of Islamic-sounding prophets,
none of which I have heard of before.
The next was nine-eleven and there were Islamic-sounding names plopping around everywhere.
Boy was I confused.
He lived in a house
near where High Street rolls into the edge of Moss. It was a large house and
Mike sold it to the neighbor and moved into their apartment. I had known Mike
for maybe a month when he saw me tramping down the street in between a writing
session. He waved me over, told me he could see me walking before I left my
apartment then inquired if I could move a few chairs. When I entered his new
apartment he got silent then he pointed.
He then told me to look
around:
“Look around, you’re
going to be living here someday.”
Living with a crazy old
man-psychic was the furthest thing from my mind.
I would later learn more about this peculiar man
with crazy abilities. I would learn that when he was a kid in southern Illinois
he was raised by his grandparents and that, one night when he was like five, he
had a nightmare where his grandfather died which scared. Young Mike then
clambered into his grandparents bed only to be awaken several hours later, his
grandmother screaming.
His grandfather had endured a stroke in the middle
of the night and was dead.
I learned that Mike had a vivacious
loveable-eccentric mother and that he only saw his biological father once (“he
was eating bread with whipped butter,”)
I learned that he attended Illinois State and enrolled in the Airforce
before attending seminary because he wanted, “to find out if there was a god or
not.”
I learned that, shortly after exiting the seminary,
he became a Baha’i, after living next to Baha’is named Dick and Anne in
Bloomington. Anne was an artist and there were no curtains on their windows.
People were coming over at all hours and always leaving with heaps of food. A
lot of the people who were coming over to the neighbor’s house were artists,
but some looked like they could be homeless and there was always a huge ethnic
array of genealogies present. Mike was baffled.
He couldn’t understand what was going on. He was sick of always seeing people
come in and out of a house with no blinding’s or shades ferrying heaps of food,
laughing. Mike later went out and bought shades for the convivial neighbors,
knocking on their door, handing them the shades, telling them to cover their
window. Mike arrived in the middle of a festival called Feast. The house was full of people
mingling and laughing. Anne graciously accepted the curtains thanking Mike
before telling him he needed to come back another day and talk because they
were in the middle of Feast, vexing Mike even more.
Mike then quoted a well-anthologized verse of
scripture about the return happening like a thief in the night.
Anne then turned to Mike and said, “How do you know
when a thief has arrived in your house.”
When Mike looked back at Anne perplexed she responded,
“By coming home and seeing that everything you have is gone.”
Mike then went next door, mulled the Baha'i faith,
read everything he could about it. One night when he couldn’t sleep he turned
to his roommate.
“I don’t get it. This makes more sense than anything
I ever heard in my life.”
The roommate concurred.
The next day both Mike and his roommate both became Baha’is.
I would learn that he loved the Baha’i faith. That
he traveled the planet teaching his beliefs which, to me, is intrinsically,
putting others needs and beliefs ahead of that of your own and fostering the
growth of this arboretum of human consciousness we call the planet.
I would learn that he loved spending time with Baha’i
kids in the area and that they would always refer to him as Uncle Mike.
Uncle Mike.
***
When I was living in the mansion on High Street my
father died rather suddenly. I was in the hospital watching the sallow features
of his face crunch out the last vowels of his time here on this planet. I hadn’t
spoken with Mike in a couple of months. I was kind of avoiding him because he
would always start sounding like Yoda. He would glow. Sometimes he would start
talking about the Baha'i faith or about friends of his who had passed and time
would envelope and slow down and I would experience what Uncle Mike would refer
to as ‘Vibratory rates.” Every time I walked through the Victorian brimming
houses dotting the sidewalks of High-Vine I would feel like he would spontaneously
sprout, honking at me in his Cadillac insisting that I get in the car, breaking
into long narrative using an arcana I was unfamiliar with, always insisting
that I have dinner with him ( he liked to eat), always stopping by, usually unexpected,
at other Baha’is domiciles in the area,
dropping off gifts, always giving me ten bucks when he dropped me off at my
house to ensure I had food for the week, telling me to “put the funds in my
pocket now so I don’t lose it.”
He was also weirding me out because he was always saying prayers for friends of his who had died, informing me that eternity is closer than we could ever fathom.
In the hospital the night of my father's untimely demise I was surrounded by
people I love. David Hale and David Thompson and Pat McReynold’s (the
protagonist of my novel, holding the author of the text up) and my classy
girlfriend at the time. Somehow I got the idea that I would call Mike and tell
him that my father was dying and that he wasn’t expected to make it through the
night. When I called him up I asked if
he could say prayers for my father. He told me not to worry. That everything
was going to be fine and that my father would pass peacefully from one world to
the next. Mike then called back fifteen minutes later and told me that he
called other Baha’is in the area and that they were praying for my father’s
passing as well.
Still to this day the gesture of people I hardy knew praying for my farther on his death bed means so much.
Mike then pointed down the room and told me that I bed was already made.
Later that I night I remember how, when I was helping him move in, he told me to look around, because I would be living here some day
***
Thus began my relationship with living with Uncle
Mike. The old man and the Hippie. Gandalf to my Frodo. During my first three years living as his roommate he never charged me rent. There was always
food. We would go on long aimless drives in the country and Mike would share
mystic stories, stories about the early Baha’i pioneers, stories about his
mystical teacher Pearl, stories about his paranormal encounters. Again and
again Mike would tell me that he knew I was coming to stay with him.
That the Concourse had ordained that it would be so.
Mike loved to cook and invite people over to the
house and entertain. Some of recipes are legendary. He would describe his meatloaf
as being sinful. He made this greek chicken that would melt off the bones.
Every night there was a full meal. On the weekend he would have guests over and
cook a feast. Instead of praying Mike had an unwritten mandate that everyone had
to go around the room and state what they were thankful for that day.
Mike insisted
on sleeping on an air mattress in the living room. I was still working around
the clock and going to school full time. I was working the grueling 11pm-3am
shift at the library. After a day of classes and writing I would arrive home at
five and he would have dinner waiting. I would then give his a backrub (he
loved backrubs) and crash on his couch before he got me up at ten informing me
that it was time for me to go to work.
The first
year I lived with Uncle Mike (2003-2004) was the most prolific of my literary
career. I pissed out over 500,000 words, joyously blowing my wrists out in the
process. I drove up to St. Paul and attended
(my mentor) Garrison Keillor’s 30th anniversary broadcast of a
Prairie Home Companion. I published my first story in a local literary journal,
even though I wouldn’t let him read it because it was about a cross dressing PrinceCharming a la Cinderella fairy tale.
While crashing with Uncle Mike I witness kindness
and giving on an unparalleled level. Everyone he met he seemed to give them something.
While living with him I’ve seen him give away at least three vehicles. He would
buy furniture for families who needed it. Every week there was someone else he
took out to dinner.
True Psychics’ tell you shit you don’t want to hear.
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