Schizophrenia Inside My Skull

His voice knocks inside my skull, ricochets between my ears. His cries infest me with insomnia.

He wants to see his little girl again.

So I transcribe his story. Scribble what he dictates, tap insistent words and phrases into my computer. Intent on shutting him up.

He wants to picnic at the Parthenon in Nashville. Day after day after day, he buys carry-out hot fried chicken, a local delicacy, from a nearby stand, and he hoofs it to the perverse collection of concrete columns and caryatids. Grease and spices burn the back of his throat while he chews and scans the skyline through the perfect frame.

He sits on the south side right in the sun, but he doesn’t care about sizzling. Instead, his blue eyes scan the ancient dirt trail to his left. It connects to a narrow paved road and hopscotches across West End Boulevard, but it’s all the Natchez Trace. Oh, nobody really calls it that these days, but he knows.

The Trace’ll bring his little girl home.

He wipes slimy fingers on his jeans, walks his leftovers to the trash. A saxophone wails underneath the portico, its notes serenading another lonesome sunset. He sighs, runs his fingers through his hair, and turns his face east. After all, he can’t wait forever. He’s got a gig to get to.

Still, he hesitates, a two-dollar bill pinched between his right thumb and forefinger. Her immature scrawl blots out Tom Jefferson’s face. Meet me at the Parthenon, Daddy. He knows she means to show up.

And he doesn’t care how many days he parks his ass on that concrete bench and chows on hot fried chicken if it means he’ll finally hold his little Emmaline again.

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Most readers don’t know that early drafts of my novel To Live Forever: An Afterlife Journey of Meriwether Lewis included entire chapters narrated by Emmaline’s father Lee Cagney. He really loved Nashville’s spicy fried chicken, something I didn’t even know existed at the time. But damnation, he couldn’t STOP talking about it.

I dutifully wrote his chapters, including several scenes where he camped out at the Parthenon with another sack of greasy goodness, and I let him wait for his little girl to walk up the Natchez Trace and into his arms.

In the final version, Lee’s chapters didn’t make the cut. They were too mournful. Nothing happened, other than he ate a barnyard’s worth of chickens and moped. He stepped aside and yielded to the version of the novel you can read today.

GET To Live Forever HERE

And thanks to him, I finally enjoyed a picnic at the Parthenon. No hot fried chicken, though. Sorry, Lee.