The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 36. Marsh Had a Camera and I Had One Too

Marsh (left), me (middle) and Phil trying to look like U2 in Big Bend National Park
Probably 1988

Marsh had a camera and I had one too.  It was really that simple.  He was already part of the gang.  We were already friends, but it is the times together alone at White Rock Lake, or down on Swiss Avenue, or downtown Dallas trying grab that right spark of early morning sunlight that I remember as cementing our friendship.  I don't recall much of anything we had to say.  I just remember being in my maroon colored Plymouth Reliant, stopping the car and getting out to catch the sun's first rays.

I think that at first I was perhaps the better photographer.  I had the advantage of growing up with an artist.  But, it didn't stay that way for long.  Marsh had the natural talent that I lacked, and once given fertile ground to see, he took over--especially after he went off to college to major in photography.

Marsh was younger than Phil and I, and he was still in high school when we were well into college.  Phil and I had already partially found our adult selves.  I'm guessing Phil found his adult-self sometime around Age 12 as he seemed like an old soul when I met him in ninth grade.  Mash hadn't.  Therefore I don't know one Marsh; rather I know several evolutionary stages of Marsh becoming a man.

The first time I met Marsh, I didn't know what to think.  He talked a lot about squirrels and dropping acid.  I could kind of get the squirrels--they are cute--but I didn't think they were cute enough to photograph.  He showed us picture after picture of the fuzzy beady-eyed creatures sitting on stumps holding nuts, which all looked the same to me--the stumps, the nuts, and the squirrels.  And I wasn't interested in dropping acid.  Life was scary enough for me without reality being more distorted than my mind naturally made it. I didn't need substance to whack out my life more than it already was.  So, like I said, I didn't know what to think. Now I realize that Marsh was no more into drugs than I was into hating Jews when in ninth grade I rolled pennies down the hall and yelled "Jew!" at anyone who stopped to pick them up.  He was just giving us a face he thought we wanted to see.  That is what middle school and high school are all about--acting out who you think the world might like until you find the version of yourself comfortable enough to wear permanently.

The second Marsh I knew was lonely and always miserable because of some girl who he liked who did not like him back with the same intensity.  That Marsh I could fully relate to because that was my life too.  We spent many hours walking around town moaning about how bleak life is, and about the exquisitely sweet pain of dejection.  Based on the details of his stories, he at least had some relationship with the girls before the inevitable "break-up" would occur.  I just skipped the whole relationship thing and went strait for the pain.  It was quicker, easier, and I didn't have to deal with my shyness.

The third Marsh I knew was Lucy's boyfriend and Andrea's good friend.  He was relaxed and simply himself.  That is the Marsh I took photographs with, and the one I became best friends with.  I didn't get as much time with him then because he was also hanging around Lucy and Andrea, but the time I did get was real.  Behind the camera, the lens pointed towards a perfect reflection or just the right spec of light, and life was good.  Then there'd be the walk or drive to the next location.  I don't remember a thing we talked about, and so there are no good stories to relate here.  I just remember it meant something.  Those were good times indeed--the realness that we are here on earth to experience.  Not necessarily deep or dramatic, but grounded in the simple movement from moment to moment naturally and without pretense.

I was deeply jealous of the fourth Marsh I knew, and that is the one I want to focus on here.  Often the best writing comes from hard places.  Unsatisfied, the mind absorbs images at difficult moments intensely, perhaps trying to make sense of a world perceived at the time as falling apart.  Bright days go by unnoticed.  The hurricane gets etched into the gray matter of the brain, grain by grain.

Anyway, I had moved to El Paso.  Marsh had moved to Commerce.  Life had broken up that old gang of ours, sending us all in different directions.  He was pursuing his dreams as a photographer.  I was pursuing my dreams as a writer, some 700 miles between us.  Somehow an opportunity had opened for me to make a trip back to to visit him and I took it.

The drive east was amazing.  The Texas sky was big and blue, the road open, the hill country wild and green with growth, flowers galore growing over water-saturated prickly pear cacti,  morning glory climbing up leaning barbed-wire fences, the low hills alive with the riot of cicada.  I stopped the car frequently, snapping away--click, click, click.  This was the life, and I was on my way to see a good friend and brag about the life I was living and the writer I was becoming.

And then I arrived.  I walked into his apartment and reality hit hard.  When he opened up the door to his apartment, there was a beautiful girl, the girlfriend of his roommate.  I don't remember her name.  I remember her as looking like Jill Gibson of the Mamas and Papas: long, slightly stringy blond hair; loose, casual, almost limp body movement, projecting a complete ease; a slight pout projecting a jaded outlook on life, broken now and then by these amazing smiles that projected a willingness to take life all in,  no matter how difficult it might be.  Rob--if that was his name--wasn't there at the time, but I immediately sensed Marsh had found the bohemian lifestyle I so wanted.

We didn't stay.  We went out to his car, cameras in hand, and headed for the country.  He had this long, black behemoth of steel with a red velvet interior.  Malibu comes to mind, but it could have been any long two-door sedan from the 70's.  How they got so little room into cars as long as buses back then baffles my mind.  Some Nazi with a ruler must have walked around the design room slamming the drafting boards--Whack!  "Damn it, Jim, you could easily fit a couple of adults comfortably in that back seat.   Tighten that space up back there, tighten it up.  I want their knees up in their chins.  Just add another couple of feet under that hood, why don't you, and while you're at it, make sure you can comfortably toss a couple of dead people in the trunk.  You've got way too much interior space, I tell you, way too much."  It's not that old cars aren't roomy; it's just that it takes a football field to get enough space for a comfy love seat.  It's like a tardis in reverse.  You walk into Walmart only to find out you're in a phone booth.

So off we went down the highway in sleek black and red velvet luxury, headed towards some verdant thicket by a deep black-water creek.  I remember we parked on some moist dirt road with thin wet blades of grass growing up the center.  We got out, and there was a spider web strung between trees jeweled with silvery drops of dew.  It was hot; it was steamy; it was lush.  The creek sat still beneath a deep red-earth bank, growing algae quicker than a teenager produces zits, snakes slithering across the slick obsidian surface.  But camera out, I just couldn't get my heart into it.  So, instead, I probably bragged a lot about a life I wasn't living.  I did that a lot back then.  It was easier to live the life in my head than the real one I was experiencing.

El Paso was an ideal place for a young writer--visually spectacular and culturally rich--and I was even getting some recognition for my craft, which I'd never received before.  I only had a couple of creative writing classes, but it was clear my professors and peers liked what I wrote.  During the hours I was in class, I had what I wanted.  But then there was always an empty apartment to return to and an immense city strung out across two nations where nobody knew my name.  I missed my brother and I missed my friends.  It was good to be becoming the writer I knew I was meant to be, but it was frightening to be doing it all alone.  When I moved to El Paso, I dreamed of finding some sort of avant-garde writing community where I'd fit in.  Instead, I found myself walking the calles of Juarez all alone .  When I showed up in Commerce and saw Marsh's life, I was jealous.  I didn't like Rob.  He was too artsy, too cool--in my mind, not the "real" thing.  In fact, I think I hated him.  He was simply too at ease, almost flippant.  But, I would have liked to have been more like him.  After all he had the cool, bohemian girlfriend.  Feeling uncomfortable, I wanted a drink.  I tried to talk Marsh into taking me somewhere to buy alcohol.  He was no more interested in that than I was in dropping acid when I first met him.  The roles had reversed.  He was becoming who he wanted to be, and I was losing my sense of self in a desperate search of some version of me that wasn't shy.

Later that night, we decided to go on a drive with Rob and his girlfriend.  The way I remember it, we were in her black convertible--perhaps a Chrysler LeBaron--and we stopped halfway out on a bridge high over a deep, almost-still black river.  Halfway out, the wood planks of the bridge were missing, and we just sat there in the car, headlights shining forward onto the rusted metal truss and casting dramatic shadows on the thicket of tangled trees beyond.  The stereo was blasting CCR's "Green River" as Rob told very cool stories, and the heavy heat and dense night closed in on me like cancer.

I wanted to be on the road again, on my own, headed back to a life that although not perfect, at least was somewhat comfortably mine.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 35. Slate Gray Rain at White Rock Lake

We stood on the bridges by the restored boathouses and watched the rain pelt the lake, the drops punching temporary craters into the surface and ejecting little silvery moons.  It was cool, wet and wonderful, and the park was also surprisingly alive with people for such a dark day.  White Rock Lake once was primarily mine.  In the 80's the south end was all but abandoned.  The Art Deco boat houses constructed by the city of Dallas in 1930 were by then empty shells of graffiti-covered concrete.  I used to walk through them early in the morning and watch the gold-lit black-tagged white walls ripple inverted as reflections in the boat bays, everything gleaming with light dancing.  I spent many days and evenings here.  If the DMA was my second home, then living most of my Dallas years in apartments, White Rock Lake became my backyard.

This day Marci and I entered the park at northwest edge, prior to the start of the heavy rain, and there we found lily pads jeweled with water drops floating just off a shoreline daggered with sharp, bent grasses inverted black against a heavy sky.  Mirrored life is sometimes intensified by the distortion of the medium: colors darkened, details sharpened, unneeded clutter cut ruthlessly away.  The mind, too, can be a mirror that way.

Other times, memory softens things--blurs everything out in smudges, which makes writing about ones past so unpredictable.  How do I get my mind where it needs to be to really see what it needs to see on this morning when my head is stuffy, my ears are clogged, my eyes are gooped-over, and my brain feels like it is wrapped in cold spaghetti?

Look into the mirror, look into the mirror.  What do you see?  

Gold.  I see liquid gold gently slapping the sunlit edge of the dock post.  It is sunset.  My friends and I are on the east side, near the sailing club.  It is sunset and the water blazes.  Who's there?  Phil, for sure.  I think I see Lucy, wearing shorts, gold glazing her skin, her head tilted down, her denim cap shadowing her glasses, the sunlight picking up strands of her long dark hair and coloring them bronze.  Marsh is there now, wearing a frayed, faded blue denim vest over a white U2 Joshua Tree t-shirt.  He stands straight and angular against the sun.  Phil sits on one of dock posts, slightly slouched over, long shaggy bangs in his eyes.  He's smiling.  What about, I'm not sure.  I can't quite get where I need to be.  Where am I?  Was Jim there?  Andrea?  All I see is the intense sunlight.  Ripples and waves of yellow, orange and red.  Dancing, sparking light--a flick, a fleck, a flake.

Across the road is a couple of pick-up trucks, loud music, people drinking.  The northeast side was like that then.  The south-side was abandoned, the graffiti covered vacant pump station rising dirty and industrial-looking above the long, earthen dam, a deep-wooded swamp below.  The northwest side had preppy joggers, people on bikes, below extravagant homes that sat way back on the hillside.  And the northeast side had the rednecks.  We usually avoided that side.  I preferred the abandoned boathouses and dam, felt mildly comfortable among the rich, but totally out of place among the pick-ups, sweaty guys without shirts wearing dark sun glasses, and giggling girls wearing daisy-dukes, Lynyrd Skynyrd on the truck stereo screaming anthems to Alabama and wishing Neil Young would die.

Still, there we are on a dock over a lake of fire, as close as one can be visually to heaven and still be alive, while across the street, no doubt, someone is bent over, vomiting into the bushes.  Each one of us, I guess, seeks transcendence in their own way.  Later, I would try the alcohol route too.  But on that dock, on that day, it was simply enough to be witness to the glory of the world around me.

Glory has many colors.  Sometimes it is colored steely gray.  The day with Marci was visually just as marvelous--long stretches of granite water stretched out before us.  And although that golden day long ago made me smile, I knew it couldn't compare with what I was experiencing with my spouse of twenty-one years.  When you live with someone that long there is a quiet comfort of just standing next to each other in the pouring rain, an ease--no need to be anything other than yourself.  I'm not quite sure what keeps us together, but whatever it is, it is grand.  No lake of fire--no matter how spectacular--can replace even a simple evening of watching TV together.