Kevin Keck - Are You There, God? Its Me. Kevin.

Are You There, God?

Its Me.

Kevin.

Are You There, God?

Its Me.

Kevin.

A Memoir

Kevin Keck

Copyright 2008 by Kevin Keck

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Map by Dave Rohr.

Lyrics from Two-Headed Boy, Pt. 2, by Neutral Milk Hotel, reprinted by permission of Jeff Mangum.

A portion of chapter 7 appeared in a highly edited form on Nerve.com. A small portion of chapter 9 appeared in a very different form on Largeheartedboy.com.

Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
Distributed to the trade by Macmillan

All papers used by Bloomsbury USA are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Keck, Kevin.

Are you there, God? : its me. Kevin. : a memoir / Kevin Keck. 1st U.S. ed.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-1-59691-830-6

1. Keck, Kevin. 2. Conduct of life. 3. North CarolinaBiography. 4. Syracuse (N.Y.)Biography. I. Title.

CT275.K3975A3 2008

170dc22 2007033741

First U.S. Edition 2008

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Typeset by Westchester Book Group
Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

To Patrice

Her children rise up and call her blessed;

her husband also, and he praises her:

Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.

Proverbs

Decalogue

Fantastic doctrines (like Christianity or Islam or Marxism) require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions. Thus the fear and the hate; thus the torture chamber, the iron stake, the gallows, the labor camp, the psychiatric ward.

Edward Abbey

And when we break well wait for our miracle

God is a place where some holy spectacle lies

And when we break well wait for our miracle

God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life

Neutral Milk Hotel, Two-Headed Boy, Pt. 2

A Note to the Reader

The events in this book bear resemblance to my life; thus, the characters and occurrences are quite real. However, in the interest of protecting the privacy of various individuals I have changed the names of those involved. In the matters of such artistic liberty the reader may rest assured that I have drawn freely from reality. I ask then that I not be judged as a writer given to whimsical tale-spinning, but as one possessed to record the hard truth for my neighbors, and to hope they stay awake for it.

New Years Eve 1999. It was three in the morning, and I was parked at a gas station in Scranton, Pennsylvania, checking my temperature with a rectal thermometer. I was concerned about a fever because Id had a wisdom tooth extracted the day before, and I was paranoid about an infection. I was so paranoid that Id been stopping every hour or so to closely monitor my vital signs. The drive from my parents house in North Carolina to my apartment in Syracuse was an excruciating twelve hours, with ten of those hours spent on a depressing and sparsely populated stretch of 1-81. My frequent stops had pushed my drive time toward the fifteenth-hour mark and I was still two hours from where I needed to be.

It had not been my plan to return to Syracuse for the New Year, but my girlfriend at the time, April, had a complete meltdown when I told her I was thinking of welcoming the Millennium in my parents basement some seven hundred miles away from her.

How could you fucking do this to me? She was alternating between sobbing and yelling. You are such a fucking bastard if you arent here to kiss me at midnight! I fucking hate you! She was a practicing Buddhist; wed been dating for almost a month.

Id been longing for a woman for quite a whileor at least a relationship that didnt smoke and melt away as quickly as a witch doused with water. The relationships Id briefly been in over the past few years collapsed because my increasingly erratic behavior tended to exert its gravity on those people who were in my immediate orbit. The hourly thermal rectal readings I was taking as the twentieth century wound down were the least of my problems; that bit of weirdness was confined to my solitary drive. Doorknobs, polite handshakes, sick people, an obsessive fear of being stricken with food poisoning at any momentthese were the daily labors of my unquiet mind. My efforts amounted to frequent hand washings and a stern avoidance of any place I deemed dirty, and that was nearly everywhere I went. The visit to my parents home aside, my world was confined to my apartment, the apartments of a few friends, a coffee shop, and the two eating establishments in Syracuse that passed my standards of cleanliness and palatability. I was propped up in those days by the generosity of a federal student loan system that doled out money to anyone with a pulse who could prove he or she was enrolled in college. One neednt attend classes to receive three large checks a yearId long ago finished my course work and I simply had to type my thesis (titled Some Poems Mostly About Getting Laid"it was meant to be ironic; if you have the time to write a book of poems, you arent getting laid with any frequency) in the proper format with two-inch margins and submit it to my adviser in order to graduate. But this seemed like such a tedious process to me, and so I was in a strange purgatory with the universityit was assumed I was working on my thesis because I had not yet submitted it, thus I was enrolled in a phantom class for people in my situation that kept me technically full-time, though I in fact did nothing. I collected checks that allowed me to live a semi-lavish life (plenty of beer, plenty of dinners out, but little else) and spent the rest of my time worrying what horrific pestilence was about to be visited upon me.

When did I become so fucked up? I seem to recall thinking that as I waited for the digital thermometer to signal that it had determined the temperature in my assthis may have been in Scranton, or possibly during any of the other dozen or so stops Id made prior to that one, maybe even all of them. I knew it was positively insane to be worried about an infection resulting from an extracted tooth. People were not dropping dead daily from their dental procedures. Furthermore, even if I was that worried about an infection, why not just take my temperature as a sane man might?

Im not entirely sure I was sane. As I was fearful of a mortal infection from a simple dental procedurea procedure so simple that it took the dentist longer to wash his hands than to extract the toothit naturally follows that germs and illness freaked me out in general. (Also, I had complicated matters somewhat by passing out when injected with the Novocain... my mind slipped into a wonderful dream where I paddled a canoe slowly through a lush swamp with the ripples of unseen amphibians following my drift under webs of moss, and then I was disoriented and confused while the vaguely familiar woman lay a cool rag across my forehead and my dentist, Dr. Card, of whom Id been a patient for over twenty years, with his back to me said that it was quite common for peopleusually women but occasionally mento feel woozy after an injection; I appreciated his polite way of letting me know I was a pussy.) It never entered my mind to use an oral thermometerId have to be touching strange gas pumps along my route from North Carolina to New York, handling money, grasping door handles (and God forbiddoor handles in