Miles Before Sleep (Excerpt I)

Inconspicuously woven within the deep fabric of the great divide, the expanse that reaches beyond all borders, there is an intricately spun beacon of light; an ominous flicker in the heart of dark shadows . . .

The pictures hanging proudly in the Grand Shores Community Art Gallery seemed to taunt him with zealous proclivity as he aimlessly ambled through room after room trying to process the news. “Pregnant?” he mumbled trying to convince himself it wasn’t true. The half pint of gin he had hastily consumed in the parking lot began to coalesce with the pot smoked earlier that day. A slight wave of displacement washed over him making it hard for him to focus on the bronze plaques next to the correlating artwork. The oil-based murals and aqueous mosaics fused in bright, Brazilian colors filtered through his peripheral. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette.

“You can’t smoke in here,” a robotic voice admonished.

“I wasn’t going to light it,” he snapped spinning around to meet his faceless accuser.

“You can’t smoke in here, son.”

“What the hell is this, Big Brother?” he protested sticking the cigarette behind his ear. “Fuck it.”

He staggered through the open glass doors separating the cubist works from the Impressionist exhibit. The selected paintings of Claude Monet were currently on display as the museum’s main attraction for the month. In the corner of the room, a thermostat sat nervously monitoring the atmospheric temperature of the air like a cultural electrocardiogram, ready to discover abnormal drops in pressure at a moment’s notice.

He had never been much of an art lover, though he once took a summer course on Ancient Egyptian art at the local community college. The class fulfilled a general education requirement for school. It must have been during the summer because he was home from college and recalled wanting to get a class or two out of the way before he returned east for the fall semester. He couldn’t remember the exact grade he received for the course, though he recalled just passing.

He paused in front of Monet’s "Le Pont d’Argenteuil" trying to recapture the girl’s name he sat next to in that class. God, it seemed so long ago. Had it been three years already? The class had taken a study tour to the Art Museum in Chicago that summer.

He had snuck back onto the bus with her to fool around, while inside the museum the other students were being lectured on the underestimation of Van Gogh during his lifetime. She confessed that the only reason she had attended the trip was because she didn’t have anything else to do that Saturday afternoon. Her beautiful auburn hair fell carelessly into her inviting, emerald eyes. It came to rest just below her shoulders covering the tiny freckles speckled across her fair-skinned chest. He reminisced about the way she giggled as she undressed on the back of the bus in broad daylight. The people walking by didn’t seem to notice her naked body pressed against his, writhing with teenage lust before kneeling in front of him to majestically deliver the most memorable blow job ever received in the history of mankind. God, what was her name? BJ queen of the century, that’s for sure. Beth . . . Becky? “Fuck it.”

Outside the gallery, the sun was beginning to descend shooting azure stripes of calm mirage over the mauve print western sky. Shadows began to sprawl across the concrete as he gazed beyond the parking lot toward the shore of Lake Michigan. The hillocks of sugar sand seemed to stretch from one end of the horizon to the other providing refuge for the children’s laughter that could be heard distantly splashing in the early summer surf.

West Michigan was perfect this time of the year. Pristine beaches and the clean air of a small, Midwest town made Grand Shores a premiere tourist spot. Visitors enjoyed the rows of harbored ships and quaint shops along the town’s remarkably unsullied coastline. Emporiums specializing in homemade fudge offered free samples to passing pedestrians while a century old cinema house played silent, vaudeville movies accompanied by a live orchestra. The town used these attractions to accentuate a more “congenial” reputation needed in order to attract the budding tourism industry.

The kind of reputation a city needs to boast in order to convey the spirit of an All-American town; an essential reputation for a city who depended on tourist expenditure to hold it over during the cold, cruel winter months when the city folded up like a ghost town. The kind of reputation needed in a state where unemployment had been on the rise since the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” had been initiated. The kind of reputation needed in a state whose largest city had been named Most Dangerous City in the nation for the third year in a row. The kind of reputation needed to create the illusion of communal pride, of a town committed to the growth and development of the nuclear family.

There was always plenty to do around Grand Shores during the summer months. Days were passed lounging on the beach or hiking along one of the numerous nature trails stretched along the coastline. At night, the city converted into a pulsating vein of ostentatious activity. Hip nightclubs, a bustling casino, a drive-in movie theater, and dozens of beachfront bars came alive after the sun went down. The city even had a nationally renowned, annual Coast Guard celebration which would gasconade an attendance reaching into the tens of thousands. Grand Shores was, without a doubt, the Mecca of the Midwest.

A town where families flourished and apple pie sat in the window sill of every home. A town that proudly claimed to have been a summer destination for Hollywood’s leading silent film actors such as Buster Keaton and Big Joe Roberts, and vaudeville greats Mush Rawls and Max Gruber. It was the birthplace of a well-known rock icon, bragged residency to more millionaires during the lumber boom of the late 1880's than any other US city, produced a nationally recognized little league baseball team and was the origin of a Republican Senator who headed the Energy Committee during Bush Sr.’s presidential administration. It boasted the largest paper mill east of the Mississippi and a sign on the edge of town that read “Welcome Home” as you entered.

Al Capone had even hung a pennant of the Grand Shores High football team in his Alcatraz cell because he was so fond of the town’s low key reputation and alluring, whimsical charm. In short, Grand Shores possessed all the provisional settings found in a Stephen King, sleepy town murder mystery. A town where neighborhood barbeques were as frequent as catfish bites on a lazy, summer afternoon and little old ladies who had lived in the same house for fifty years could keep their doors unlocked at night. A town where everybody smiled when they walked by you and no one said a bad word about anybody. Not to their face anyway. Most importantly, Grand Shores was a town with money. Lots of money. And if you had enough of it, you too could own a slice of the proverbial American Dream. He lit a cigarette and started to walk through the parking lot towards the submerging sunset.

At twenty-one, Julius Keller was a slender young man with sandy brown hair and a face that made him look fifteen when clean shaven. He had lived in Grand Shores his whole life. Born, bred and nurtured in the breadbasket of America’s Midwestern Family Belt. Julius Keller’s greatest attribute and biggest detriment was his habit of trying to convince himself that it was his destiny to escape the clutches of Grand Shore’s mundane grasp and recapture the elusive essence of true existence. That one day he would break out of the city’s vacuous black hole and boldly join the ranks of the various men and women who had gone before him to experiencing life as it was meant to be experienced. Seize the day and never look back. Expound upon the talents of his renaissance nature and finally inhabit a world rested upon the laurels of his own devising and creativity. The only problem was, he could not fully evaluate what talents he possessed that would allow him to rest unobtrusively upon his laurels. He managed brief hiatuses, but still could not wholly elude the far reaching tentacles of Grand Shore’s noxious clutch. The city always seemed to find a way to pull him back.

The Keller family had made their fortune in the boating business. The boat storing business to be precise. John Keller ran the largest marina in Michigan on Lake Michigan The company’s profit margin was enormous and the dividends produced were quite substantial. Enough to allow Julius’ mother Sandra to quit her job teaching and pay for Julius to attend four years of higher education at one of the most prestigious private institutions in the nation. John Keller was a classic tale of good old-fashioned American ingenuity and entrepreneurship. And one day he hoped to pass on that family tradition to his only son. But Julius had no intention of taking over the family business. He had never really acquired his “sea legs” so to speak.

Sure he had learned to sail at an early age, even participating in the Queen’s Cup on his father’s boat a few times. Back then it was all quite exhilarating. A twelve- year-old boy sailing with his father alongside his father’s drinking buddies across Lake Michigan from Grand Shores to Veterans Park on the eastern shore of Milwaukee.

The yarns they would spin within the walls of their favorite watering hole, The Lakeside Tavern, were some of best stories Julius could remember. Like the time Billy accidentally shot his neighbor’s dog because he thought it was a raccoon digging through his trash, or the time Pete got so completely stoned at the Blue Parrot Bar in Plya del Carmen that he beat the hell out of some pitiful Mexican barfly. “Poor bastard kept calling me Pedro. It took five wet backs to put me down,” he beamed every time he told the story. “Helluva dive that Blue Parrot, helluva dive.” But those days were a long time ago. Before the commandeering of the veneration.

He had temporarily escaped its insidious grip when he first moved to Vermont, but it would return the moment he stepped foot back in Grand Shores. It would lay dormant for a day or two. Then, like pernicious clockwork, it would consume him again, wrapping its cold and calculating combustion of holy malice around his very being until the claustrophobia was almost too much to bear. A sliver of guilt followed by a strand of fear morphed into a shroud of panic finally combusting into full-blown veneration. Its origin was not certain although Julius could trace it back to his father’s “sacred discovery of the Almighty” - his father’s exact words - shortly after the family fortune. The conversion always puzzled Julius since it seemed like most people found God during the hard times.

John Keller was never a religious man until that day. That fateful day that would occupy the dark annals of the Keller family history for generations to come. The day John Keller pulled his truck over on the way to work, knelt down on the side of that deserted stretch of road and accepted Christ as his personal savior. Julius was ten.

From that moment forward, things within the Keller family were executed in strict accordance with the benevolent wrath of God’s law. The first two years of the transformation were the worst. John Keller wielded his sanctified, tyrannical backhand across the face of injustice with a swift and merciless fury. This included but was not restricted to: bedrooms not cleaned to spec, back-talking, heretic wives, and improper pool cleaning. Even Nicky, the family’s beloved cocker spaniel, felt the extended foot of a just and jealous Lord every so often. Religion had changed John Keller into a delusional and abusive prophet who ranted on about how “the gate to Heaven is narrow” and how “few there would be that shall pass.” It all made Julius physically sick to his stomach. Sunday mornings meant being forced into the family sedan and escorted to the Grand Shores Baptist Church under the chaperoning of religious preaching courtesy of the car stereo. When Julius reached high school, the physical nature of his father’s punishments ceased (thanks to the counseling he and Sandra sought after she threatened to leave John taking Julius with her). But the mental depravity continued. Grand Shores Baptist ran a private school.

The Kellers had not made their fortune in the marina business yet, so the high cost of tuition insured Julius stayed enrolled in public schooling. John and Sandra Keller were however, staunch supporters of the church school’s teachings. One day, the State Board of Education threatened to close the doors to the school due to curriculum being taught which did not adhere to state guidelines. Julius could remember one Sunday evening service when the men of the church vowed to chain the doors shut and take up arms if the state tried to impose its secular ways upon their children.

He could still envision Reverend Mills pounding the podium with his fist as he berated the corrupt system of scholastics, vehemently insisting that the curriculum provided by the state allowed the devil to get a foothold in the mind’s of the church’s “holy future.” John Keller had been one of the most adamant supporters of the church’s resistance movement. But Sandra Keller, the ever inspiring actress that she was, diplomatically reasoned with her husband that he could have more of an impact on the system from the inside, thus coaxing him to withdraw from the forefront of the rebellion and seek out more employable methods of ohmage. A scandal involving molestation charges combined with Reverend Mill’s confession to John and Sandra that he had secretly prayed for a local businessman’s death (where a few weeks later the man actually died) prompted the Keller’s to leave the church and seek out holy instruction elsewhere. After a few months of church hopping and soul searching, the quest for spiritual enlightenment was abandoned and life returned to normal. Almost.

The incubation of the veneration had commenced and would build its foundation upon the precocious holy bantering Julius had endured during those traumatic years. His subjection to detrimental doctrinal teachings and prejudicial parables had become programed into his rationale. He had become the victim of a cult-like pesticide spreading holy terror in the wake of normality. The side effects had left him slightly “reticent” as his shrink put it.

In the absence of structured indoctrination, John Keller invented new ways to impart his hollowed principles. In his business he found new religion. He delved into the marina’s existence with an almost unholy fervor, spending almost every waking moment expanding the success of the business. By the time Julius turned sixteen, the marina had become the most successful creation of individual entrepreneurship the city had ever seen. And it was all waiting for Julius. The greatest gift a father could give his son, barring eternal life, was a prominent future. John Keller felt pretty good about the fact that he had single-handedly created such a solid foundation for his son. At times, Julius swore he saw his father giving himself a pat on the back when he thought no one was looking. On the other hand, Julius felt a necessity to overcome his silver spoon syndrom by developing his own rite of passage. He wasn’t content to take the easy road by running the family business. He had a deep-seeded urge to find his own voice, his own name. He was now old enough to stop chasing the dreams of childhood impossibilities, but still youthful enough to believe in a world that still offered him the opportunity to fulfill his upmost potential. Whatever his upmost potential turned out to be.

Strolling down the broken slabs of sidewalk along the beach, he found an empty bench to sit on and lit another cigarette. He was watching three teenage girls in bikinis toss a frisbee back and forth when his cell phone rang. “Dude, where the fuck are you?” He immediately recognized the voice on the other end. Byron Sinclair was Julius’ dope dealer and best friend. In that order. They had known each other since fifth grade. The Sinclairs had just moved into town and Byron was new to Grand Shores Elementary. When Mrs. MacArthur asked the class who would like to share their locker with Byron, Julius volunteered. It was a gesture Byron would appreciate for years to come. The two started to drift apart the summer after graduation. Julius would go to school out east that fall and Byron would stay in Grand Shores. He worked mediocre jobs bartending and hanging drywall before landing a pretty good gig dealing drugs. He built a solid fan base and eventually the income he raked in selling medicinal party favors to high end clients made it possible for him to quit the nine to five grind permanently. Everyone went to Byron for their drugs - junkie judges, coke head lawyers, smacked up doctors, tweaked out politicians, psychedelic students, stoner soccer moms and cracked out dads, - everyone. Whatever you needed, Byron had: weed, coke, crank, smack, crack, morphine, meth, painkillers, LSD, shrooms, microdots, peyote, PCP, brown heroin, white heroin, uppers, downers, fuck me sideways, Byron had it all. He was the E.F. Hutton of the Grand Shores drug scene and had earned his well-deserved success.

Julius didn’t know anyone who worked harder or networked better than Byron Sinclair. He had his own car, his own house, and his own life. And he had acquired it from the ground up. A true rags to riches story if ever there was one. His parents were a completely different matter. Mrs. Sinclair was known to be the wife of the most renowned and unaffordable plastic surgeon in the state. She was also known to adore large quantities of Pinot Noir and Vicodin, and had slept with almost every one of Dr. Sinclair’s colleagues. There was a rumor going around town a few years back that Bob Densmore, one of the Midwest’s best known anesthesiologists and Dr. Sinclair’s fishing buddy, had knocked up Mrs. Sinclair. It was also rumored that she had gotten an abortion and that Dr. Densmore had performed the operation. Byron never really talked about it, but Julius knew it ate him up inside. The Sinclairs simply told their son that people “in their circle” were addicted to drama, that the rumors were bullshit, and that he should forget about it entirely. Byron knew the rumors were true. Everyone in town knew they were true.

Dr. Densmore moved his family and practice to Chicago six months after the rumors began to surface. He was interviewed over the phone in his Chicago office by the Grand Shores Chronicle shortly after the move. The paper quoted him as saying that there was “more career opportunity in the Windy City.” That may have been true, but Bob Densmore had lived in Grand Shores his whole life. He had an almost phantasmagoric affinity to the area and financially contributed to its growth on a regular basis. In fact, he had been solely responsible for saving the Grand Shores Playhouse from demolition after years of poor ticket sales had propelled the locally owned and operated theater into foreclosure. Through Dr. Densmore’s charitable giving, the playhouse was able to pay off its creditors and hire a reputable marketing analyst to help re-establish the theater as a pillar of culture within the community. The revenue from increased ticket sales even allowed the owners to revamp the entire interior of the theater. The authentic remodeling resurrected the original domestication of the building’s inner sanctum. Complete with a richly stitched burgundy-colored velour grand drape and crushed velvet fly draping, the theater’s stage came alive once again with the sights and sounds of local enthusiasm. The Densmore family move came as a complete shock to the city of Grand Shores. Dr. Densmore never told anyone he was leaving. One day he just packed up the family and drove away. The Densmore home never went on the market. Hospital administrators were notified of his departure via email which simply stated that he was sorry for the inconvenience and that Dr. Lisbon would be seeing to any appointments he had an existing commitment toward. All in all, it was a pretty shady scenario. But in the town’s best interest reputation, the community never discussed it (in public) and the rumors eventually fizzled.

Life can change a person. Julius was proud of Byron. He missed him as a friend, but knew that this was as good as it would ever get for him. Byron was never really cut out for school, and college was definitely out of the question. His parents had shipped him off to reform school midway through their ninth grade year at Grand Shores High School. It seemed that Byron never really fit into his parent’s plans for a stress free and financially independent future. Reform school seemed a fitting solution for getting him out of the house, and out of their lives. They covered it up well. The Sinclairs were a real Ward and June Cleaver on the outside. The parents who pretended to care.

The experience left a bad taste in Byron’s mouth. From that moment on, formal institutions were viewed as “prisons” in his eyes. He had no interest in vocational jobs or technology. He was good at one thing and one thing only. And he did that one thing extremely well. It didn’t matter what city he was in, whose party he was at, or how strange the rave was he attended, Byron knew someone from somewhere or would meet someone who knew someone he knew from somewhere. He was a beautiful networker to watch in action. He moved through crowds of people with the style and grace of a socialized cheetah; slick and stealthy and stopping at different circles of integrated gatherings to make his presence known and to get caught up on the latest happenings around town.

He would relive insane stories about someone he would recognize in bar or club. He would point them out from across the room and say things like, “See that blonde chick shaking her beef curtains on the dance floor? That chick is crazy, man. I was at a house party once and saw her suck coke off a nigger’s dick. Right in the middle of the living room. Everyone stood there and watched her suck this dude’s cock, balls and all. Coke and cum all over her lips. It was pretty fucking amazing . . . man.” And that would be the story. Period. Byron always told the parts of a story that he thought were the most important cutting off the crusts of detail that didn’t matter. That was the beautiful disaster that was Byron Sinclair. Right to the point. No fucking around. Straight business.

“I’m down at the beach. What’s up with you?”

“Shit. I just got back from Detroit a couple of days ago. Pretty flat run. Dust for the bunnies, tea for the hunnies. I told Cakes you were back in town. He says hi.”

“That’s cool. What are you up to tonight?”

“I dunno. Allison Chandler’s home from school and her parents are in Barbados for the next two weeks. She’s having some big blowout tonight. Wanna go?”

“I didn’t know Allison Chandler went away to school. Where does she go?”

“Brown I think. Or Dartmouth. I don’t know. She told me but I can’t remember. Do you wanna go or not?”

“Sure. Why not.”

“Pick you up around eleven?”

“Eleven o’clock. See you then. Ciao.”

Julius snapped the cell phone shut throwing one more coup d’oeil in the direction of the frisbee girls who were packing up their towels and suntan lotions into their designer Hermes beach bags. They slipped on their pink and yellow halter tops before strutting off giggling down the beach. Twilight began to recline, stretching its grayscale shadow from under the base of trees standing in straight lines like stoic toy soldiers along the sidewalk. He turned back toward the city whistling Elvis Costello’s ‘I’ll Never Fall In Love Again’ under the faint hum of the illuminating street lights.