After I got rid of everything I
owned, I sent a single small box home to my mother. Inside of it was everything
I thought important enough to keep and in a way remember. Love letters from
Chuck Palahniuk and women who had grown to know me. Photos of us kissing,
strife, my life working in the motorcycle industry, the three years I spent on
Warped Tour. Manuscripts I had written, original catalogues from my clothing
company, masters of the four albums I released, notes, lyrics, and more notes.
A sheriff’s badge, a Freemason belt buckle, my missing teeth, and a birth
certificate I assumed to be mine.
In this box there was some room and
I put more things from my trip thru the world. Sunglasses from a wedding in
LasVegas, a bracelet from a girl I almost married in Peru. A small can of
salted nuts from a childhood friends reception in Tucson. A slingshot engraved
with a detailed account of my psychedelic trip on ayahuasca in the Amazon. I
put the socks I was wearing when I almost died trying to cross the Antarctic
and last I laid a photo of Ben and I at the top of the high Andes. I wished my
brother well and did the holy trinity the way I had learned it in Colombia but
perfected its kiss in Portland.
What I had originally gone in the
box for I did not find. I was looking for a mailing address so I could send a
letter I had already written. 1 of 5 letters actually. The address wasn’t a
pretty one. I knew it read Nebraska State Penitentiary, marked with the inmate
number of one of my oldest friends, who was doing a 40 year bid for things
it wasn’t up to me to forgive him for. So I did not judge instead I sent him
books before I left Portland on astral projection. I imagined that is what I
might want if I were locked up in a cage fighting for scraps from the drain.
I battled with my letters trying to
decide how much I should tell him in them. What would seem like boasting, what
was boasting, what would let him live vicariously, and what was vital to the
vicariousness. In the end I decided to tell him nothing I had said before to
anyone. All the stories that had been kept just for me to know, to give him an
account of all my secret strengths, to tell him the things that I had saved
because they would only get watered down in the repeating of them. I knew he
had no choice but to keep them safe, so I selfishly gushed.
As I dug for the address that I
could not find, I found something else that I had forgotten. I found that I had
accomplished much that I did not give myself credit for, that I had put in more
work than I had remembered. That this small box was a time capsule of hundreds
of memories, heartaches, and hard won triumphs. That beautiful women had loved
me and beasts had become my kin. By the time I got to the bottom drawing only
dust under my fingernails I knew that the mailing address was no longer
important. It had never been in this box, it had always been with me. It was
the part of me who was exactly the kind of man to pick up and head to Nebraska,
deliver these last letters myself. Post office for a pair of legs, tears for
gasoline stamps, hands balled in fists, envelopes.
