The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 41. One Mouse Screams and All Others Vanish

I lived 3.1 miles from school, and on most days I walked.  That is because I officially lived out of my high school's zone, but in an area that still accepted students.  They just didn't provide busing.  The walk was long, but on most days I rather enjoyed it, especially in the afternoons when it was warmer.  After I got home, I'd change my clothes and walk another .9 miles to work.  Some mornings Lloyd gave me a ride to school, and on some days, I took the car, so it wasn't always like this, but frequently I walked a total of 8 miles during the day not counting the normal amount of steps one takes living.

My walks were my reprieve from the world, a time when I could just vanish in daydreams and notice shade and sunlight.  On the way home, I always passed one particular small apartment complex that had an enormous tree out front--so large, and so full that grass refused to grow underneath.  In the fall, the leaves fell and covered the moist dirt with layers of gold.  The low, winter sun left the place in blue shadow.  I thought to myself, If one has to live in an apartment, this is the place.  The complex was on a backstreet in an older part of town.  With some imagination, one could pretend one was in a small town, and by then, I was feeling nostalgia towards my former rural life.  One day, I saw a For Rent sign and told Lloyd about it.  Our complex had been purchased by a developer who bought up old rentals, painted the outside, planted a few flowers, and then raised the rent without making any improvements inside.  This was our chance to move out of the mold hole we inhabited, and we took it.

We moved into a second story apartment that had a sliding glass door that opened up onto a balcony that looked into that wonderful tree.  The place also had an open living room and dining room, and lots of light, even in the two bedrooms.  However, it also had mice, mice droppings, and that oh so strong smell that comes with lots of mice.  Had we been different people, we probably would have complained and made our landlord shampoo the carpets.  We weren't.  We didn't.  We were just happy to get out of the mold hole, and so we vacuumed up piles of poop out of the gold shag carpeting, set up traps, and moved in.

The mice didn't instantly move out.  We'd hear them in the walls, find little trails of poop now and then along the baseboards, and occasionally catch one in a trap.  But the smell was gone, life was good, and it seemed like as long as we could keep the mice under control, we could coexist with them.

Then, early one morning we woke up to the most horrible cry imaginable.  It was loud; it was shrill; but worst of all, it was filled with human-like agony.  We rushed to the living room, plugged our ears, looked towards the trap in shame.  We wanted to go rescue the animal, but neither one of us had the guts.  After what seemed like eternal damnation as punishment for our cruelty, the sound finally stopped.  We walked over the the trap.  That was one big mouse.  Not a rat, but almost.  The Goliath of its kind.

We were so disgusted with ourselves that we threw away the whole trap and buried it with other garbage to hide the evidence before the sun came up, at which time, we'd get rid of that bag as fast as possible.

We never set another trap.  We collected the other two and threw them in the garbage as well.  I'm not sure what we thought we'd do.  I guess we'd resigned to coexistence with them even if they started to slowly devour us.  We seldom spoke of it, for it was too real.

In the end, we were okay.  After about a week, we realized all of the mice moved out.  Where they went, I don't know.  I assume into the apartments around us, but from that long, blood-curdling screech forward, we were mouse free.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 40. Isolated in a Grocery Store

I have so many great memories of Texas, and yet those memories presented isolated aren't authentic.  It's not that they aren't real.  I had great times with my brother and my friends.  However, those memories are sharp points of light in an immense night.

Between sixth and seventh grade shyness moved in and stole away enormous chunks of life out of my future.  I now realize it made me a better person for I was really quite shallow and self-centered before it happened, but it also removed me, almost over night, from the comfortable ease I had felt living in the world.

As far as I can tell, there were no external causes of this--no traumatic family event, no move, and no change of schools.  No, rather one day I was blissfully unaware of myself--bragging, exaggerating, out-right lying, unaware of my relationship to the world around me; assuming, quite naturally, that I was the reason the cosmos was created; priding myself on my sarcasm and wit, unconcerned with how it might impact the recipients.  And then all of the sudden, I was acutely aware of the enormous space between myself and others.  It was as if some shadow had moved in over night that would never completely leave.

In fifth grade I fell in love with Kelly, a beautiful, blue-eyed girl from southern California.  In my hometown, which I'll call Sandstone, a small community in central Utah, kids were in the same cohort of students from kindergarten to twelfth grade.  There were very few move-ins and very few move-outs.  In Elementary, there were only two classrooms per grade-level, and in sixth grade there was just one large combined class. A new student from the outside world was always a big thing.  Unlike most places, being new to the school was a prestige, and instead of being isolated, you were embraced with open arms.  I had been the lucky recipient of that phenomenon myself when I moved into town in second grade.  So, we always noted the new kid with awe.  However, Kelly was different.  Awe simply wasn't a strong enough word, at least not for me.   The moment I saw her she was absolutely everything.

In sixth grade I had the good fortune of being placed next to her on the seating chart.  We got along great.  I was incredibly proud of the fact that we were always getting in trouble for talking.  I had this Peanuts book I had checked out from the Book Mobile (a library on wheels), and I was an incredibly slow reader; she used to love to harass me about the fact that I was always reading the same book, and a comic book at that!  I loved it.  For Christmas, I got two pens, a lime green one and a bright yellow one.  I took them to school.  She saw them and said, "You know yellow is my favorite color."  I said, okay.  I knew she wanted it, but I really liked those pens.  She kept it up for a couple of days, and my treasured yellow pen became hers.  I was so damn proud of my loss.

Eventually, our continual talking led to us being separated.  She remained where she was, and I was moved to the back of the room.  It should not have been a big deal.  We were still in the same class.  We still had recess.  She was immensely  popular, so it's not like I was her guy anyway, and I still hung out with her almost daily.  But over the summer, something happened.  I remember being out in the yard, and for some reason her parents came by, and she was with them.  I was in the front yard; I saw their car pull up; this terror came over me; I ran to the side of the house, watching her from a distance, yearning to leap out, run towards her, enfold her in my arms and give her a great big kiss.  But I couldn't do it.  I was frozen.  An enormous trench opened between us.  A black cloud formed overhead, and I was isolated forever after, not just from her, but most of the world around me.  I was this new creature that I had never experienced before.  I was shy.

It wasn't quite that dramatic.  I'd slip in and out of it--although I was never comfortable around Kelly again.  Sometimes I'd forget I was shy and blissfully slip into ease even with those who were not my friends.  However, sometimes I even felt a strange sense of separateness creep in even when I was with my friends--usually when I felt they were doing something wrong.  It wasn't that I didn't do things that were wrong.  I just became acutely aware of immorality, especially cruelty.  Before this strange occurrence, I could vandalize with the best of them and think nothing of it.  In sixth grade, I got in trouble for breaking a bunch of cinder blocks behind the school with a bunch of other boys.  I prided myself on my sarcasm and sharp tongue, and frequently put people down to entertain others.  I was by no means the most popular kid in the school.  I didn't like sports, so that hurt me, but I definitely wasn't an outcast either.  But after that day of hiding from Kelly, I sort of was an outcast.  Not completely, of course.  I lived in a small town.  We all knew each other.  I was still sarcastic and still put others down. But something had definitely happened.  By ninth grade, I was ready to get out of town.  When my parents announced we were moving to Dallas, they thought I'd be heartbroken; what they didn't know is that I no longer felt that I belonged in Sandstone anyway.

I innocently thought the move would end the terrible feeling of isolation.  It didn't.  Unlike in Sandstone, my new school in Texas did not welcome move-ins.  I was not some strange, new exotic creature.  I was just strange.  And rather than going away, the shyness climbed right in and basically occupied every corner of my being except the still small part of me that could cry out to God.  It was as if isolation had been forced upon me so that I could feel the pains of the world.  But it hurt, oh how it hurt.
   
My first job in Dallas was as a bag boy at a Tom Thumb grocery store.  I felt isolated at school, and I felt isolated at work.  When it was slow, the other bag boys hung out up front to talk to the checkers, who were generally a couple years older and female.  But not me.  I'd head as quickly as I could to front the soda aisle, where I'd stay until I heard "I need bagging assistance on aisle nine" over the intercom.  I loved that soda aisle.  It was a refuge.  When I was done, those six packs and two liters would be snug against the front of the shelves, forming this beautiful shiny solid wall of varying colors.  Often, as I worked, the manager would walk by, "Looking good, looking good."  What he didn't know was that not only was I dreading the call for bag boys over the intercom, but that I was also dreading his walking by and saying, "Looking good, looking good."  I dreaded any social interaction whatsoever.  What I really wanted to do was disappear; fronting the soda aisle was as close as I could get to nonexistence and keep my job.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 38. And So He Worked, As All Great Artists Do, Regardless of Circumstance

Much of this panel from Lloyd's 5-panel composition
Uptown Splash, Dallas, Texas is re-purposed abstract art
painted in the field across the railroad tracks from our first apartment.

As Marci and I headed west, we drove through neighborhoods I once knew well.  At one point, I could see that the first apartment complex Lloyd and I lived in was gone, but most everything around it was still intact, and so in a moment of passing, I was able to slip over a line and see myself as I once was through an old film-reel flicking granular pictures against the corroding stucco walls of my mind.

Things did not go well when Lloyd and I moved to Dallas.  Much of Texas enforced sodomy laws that did not allow two single men to live together.  The fact that we had the same last name and clearly resembled each other as brothers didn't make a difference.  Most places simply would not rent to us. 

So, rather than select an apartment in our price range that was desirable, we accepted the only place that would accept us, and it was very undesirable.  The manager was this nice, old lady.  The owner, whoever he was, at least wasn't sitting around in his underwear thinking about all the kinky things that could possibly go on behind the closed doors of his rentals.  However, the apartment was small, damp, and had rank, rotting carpet and deteriorating furniture that I assume was purchased from a motel that rents rooms by the hour.  It also had very low light--not exactly the artist studio my brother dreamed about when he decided to move to Texas.

We started our new lives out very differently than the ones we experienced when my parents were living in a nice townhouse complex with a pool, a sauna, a rec-room, and a BMW or Mercedes parked out in front of each house on the block.  This clearly was a different side to Dallas, though only a few miles away.

Still, we were excited.  Despite the reality before us, we were optimistic the way only the young can be.  The great thing about youth is that you have so much life before you, it isn't that irrational to dream big.  There simply is such a vast horizon of time ahead even the most self-doubting soul knows a lot can happen.  You can dream regardless of the current situation.

So, we unpacked the Mustang and hung up Lloyd's paintings in an apartment so dark, they were never really seen except under the tint of dull yellow bulbs.

And we put the stereo on the dresser in the bedroom and put in one of the only two 8-tracks that still played--Meatloaf and John Denver--and life was good.  At least life was good until a fitted sheet came off my bed in the night and once again I was faced with what I was actually sleeping on.  That happened often, and frankly, it was horrifying, as was the smell left after the carpet was vacuumed.

Outside was better.  The apartment complex was U-shaped and there was some lawn between the wings.  On the other side of the lawn was a Pepsi machine outside the office that emitted a crisp light that shined in the night.  I liked to look out the living room window--one of the only two windows in the apartment--and see the clean glow.  I put many quarters in that machine.  The Pepsi was good; the short journey was better.  If only for a few moments, it got us outside, and in a sense, away from poverty.  Perhaps that is why people who live in motels hang outside at night on lawn chairs resting in parking lots of gravel and shattered glass.  Poverty is less present with the smell of magnolia trees heavy on the wind.  Florescent light, and the moths flickering around them, provide a clarity not found under the dull yellow light inside.

Oh how I loved sticking two quarters in that machine and hearing the thud of a cold Pepsi.  It would have been much cheaper, of course, to just buy a six pack, but a lot less therapeutic.  We then used the empty Pepsi cans to solve a problem.  We only had one real window in the place.  It didn't let in much light due to the small courtyard and the balcony walkway above us.  Yet, the sidewalk to the complex ran right by our window.  We were basically living in a Motel 6.  If we left the drapes open, anyone walking by could stop and watch us like two fish in a tank.  If we closed the heavy, yellowed cloth drapes, all natural light vanished.  So, Lloyd decided we should build a screen of evenly spaced Pepsi cans.  We laid out a row of cans stacked three high, one-can width between each column, placed a 1" X 4" board across that, and started the process all over again until the window was filled.  It worked and looked cool.  Of course, it blocked out some light, but not near as much as closed drapes.  Of course, it didn't block out all possibility of seeing in, but at least we weren't living in a department store display window anymore.  It was a good compromise between light and privacy.

Still, outside was better.  Behind the apartment complex was a half-asphalt/half-gravel, pot-hole pocked parking lot with little bits of broken glass.  Behind that, was a story-high cinder and gravel covered berm topped with railroad tracks and an occasional passing train, and on the other side of that, there was a big open field of weeds.  That field became my brother's art studio.  There was space, and there was natural light.  Of course, some days there was also wind and flying shit, but he made the best of it.  Besides a few twigs and leaves stuck on your canvas can sometimes create momentum, some sort of active dialog between artist, nature and the canvas.  And so he worked, as all great artists do, regardless of circumstance.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 37. Entangled in Suburban Sprawl and Philosophical Ramblings

After White Rock Lake, Marci and I started to head north along a series of parks that should have taken us north to Richland College, but something went wrong, and we ended up on Skillman, and then Forest, and then N. Jupiter Road.  If you  know anything about the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex, you know that puts you in Garland, and once in Garland, you might as well be on Jupiter.  There simply is nothing substantial--other than size--about that town.  It's a giant spiraling mess of mostly lower-middle-class suburban sprawl.  The only aim in life once one gets into Garland is to get out, which isn't always easy, but LeAnn Rimes somehow did it.  Driving through Garland that day, I hoped Marci and I would do the same.

We eventually did escape.  We came out near a mall where I once worked at a Pier I-Imports-like store that I'll call Araby.  I did a lot of living in that small shop filled with the aroma of incense and candles.  I remember sitting on top of a high ladder, taking a break from hanging palm fans on those long metal hangers you hook into the holes of pegboard walls, and seeing Susie down below talking to whoever was cashier then.  Oh, she was stunning.  She wasn't working.   She'd just dropped by, as she put it, "on her way to go clubbing."  I had absolutely no interest in her.  She was too young to be "out clubbing," maybe seventeen at the time, but I don't think that was it, though I generally wasn't interested in the partying crowd.  She was immensely popular with guys, and that should have been it, for she probably had no interest in me either.  But, that wasn't it, either.  I'm not sure what my lack of interest in her was.  That's what made the moment so memorable.  I was just up there sitting; I heard talking; I looked down; and there she was, a beautiful Mexican-American woman--she looked to be at least twenty-one, all dressed up--wearing striking red slacks, a shiny black blouse, a red suit jacket, bright red lipstick and these giant red, circular earrings.  She looked up at me, smiled, and the light caught her big, brown eyes, and I thought Damn she's beautiful.   But nothing changed, and I knew nothing changed.  That's when I first became aware that whatever romantic attraction is, it is not simply a result of recognizing someone is beautiful.  It's not that generic.  There is some deeper pull.  Even if it is tied to the physical, it isn't simply the physical--at least not only the surface.  There is an undercurrent to love, a song below the song, a deep unstated knowing.  I don't think it's necessarily either there or it isn't there, although I did think that at the time.  No, romantic love, like all love, can be grown or diminished with the right action.  But, none-the-less, romantic love is a non-verbal connection that is more than simple attraction.  It is knowing a part of someone without any good earthly reason to have that information.  Sometimes it pulls both ways; sometimes it doesn't.

Sitting up on that ladder though, looking at Susie through an unmoved-awe, was an important realization for me.  I'd fallen in love with a good friend of mine, Andrea, and it was clear, except as a friend, that she didn't love me back.  I had an incredibly low self image and had assumed that her inability to love me was because of the way I looked.  In my mind, it had to be that.  Nothing else could explain it.  We spent hours together, almost every single day.  She clearly liked being around me.  The only explanation was that I was simply too ugly to love.  Sitting up on that ladder, looking down on someone who was clearly gorgeous and feeling nothing made me realize for the first time there might be more to it.  I didn't rule out being ugly; it just brought in other possibilities.  After all, I knew without a doubt Shideh had been attracted to me, and she was clearly beautiful; I had just sabotaged everything with my insecurities.

Writing this is somewhat of a lie, because up on that ladder, I could not have delineated a thought process anything close to the one I just wrote.  It was simply an instant of awareness: Oh you can realize someone is beautiful and feel nothing.  I had always assumed if you were beautiful everyone was attracted to you, and if someone wasn't attracted to you, you were ugly.  I assumed there had to be some flaw in me to create the hell I went through in junior high and high school.

Later, when I moved back to Utah, and was working at an indoor mushroom farm, I had the same thing happen to me in reverse.  In many ways, I was at the lowest point in my life.  I'd given up on becoming a writer, moved back home to a town of 2,000 people, and I was working as a janitor.  Each day I'd walk down this long, wet concrete hall, a distant light coming in from open-doors at the far end, usually a forklift coming up the hall, headlights reflecting in the puddles of water, and I'd desperately look for this one girl walking all alone, down the one side of the hall, or perhaps with her one and only friend.  She wasn't much to look at.  Long, stringy, dirty-blond hair, freckles, crooked teeth, not much of a figure--pretty much a body that just went straight down from the shoulder, no hips and insignificant breasts.  Yet, each day I looked for her.  I had to.  It got me through the drudgery of working another day at a job that I knew to my very core had nothing to do with why I was living.  I also knew that at least one person who the world found ugly, I found beautiful.

And yet, I never talked to her.  Part of me wanted to.  She, without a doubt, would have liked it.  It was clear that no other guy gave her any attention.  But, I also knew the world would find her ugly, and thought--no, that's not the correct word, because there was no reflection involved; wanted is a better fit--I wanted a beautiful woman to validate my existence, and she clearly could not do that.

Although my boys are much more socially skilled than I was and don't seem to have any issues attracting beautiful women, I observe in my children the same flawed thinking--way too much concern for what the world wants to ever experience complete joy.  Perhaps, like me, they will learn the skill of ignoring what doesn't matter as they age.  Still, in hopes to assist both them and my future grandchildren, I will insert here what should be obvious, but isn't:  at least ninety percent of all the people you encounter in your life will form temporary relationships with you, from a few seconds to perhaps a few years.  Do not live your life to please those who are insignificant to you--which is almost everyone.  Live your life for your God and yourself, and live by courageously giving yourself to the moment you are encountering now.  Had I not worried about what the world thought about me asking the droopy girl out, my days in that dismal mushroom farm would have been far less dreary.  Instead of looking back on days I could almost tangibly feel sucking my soul out, I'd be looking back and smiling at some small, fond memory.  I don't know why I thought that girl was beautiful, but I did.  I should have allowed myself to know her.  I needed a friend and she did too.  The opinions of people who don't matter--what a stupid commodity for which to trade away even one second of your life.  Yet, for most of us, learning not to give our lives away to mammon takes practice.  Exercise well; it will be worth it.  Life starts the moment you stop trying to be what others want and become instead who God intended you to be.  Only you can know who that is, and only you will know when life has truly begun for you, but until you find that defining moment (or series of moments) when the world around you largely dissolves, you are not truly living.   Life simply is one-on-one communication with the creator.  It simply takes on different forms, all connected to love.  We each have our own unique language with the divine, and it is that we are each here to discover. Satan's big job is to keeps us distracted from that moment (or moments) of discovery through all that doesn't matter.