The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 67. Lloyd Moves In

One.

Last night I had a dream. 

I was back in college.
Again.

My professor wanted me to read a paper 

I'd written on pacing

and structure.  

My printer was broken;   

I told him I couldn't. 

Then, while another student was reading,

I looked around the room and found 

a fine poem hanging 

on the wall, literally.

The words were three-dimensional--very three-

dimensional. 

A peer of the poet 

was up there on the wall also, in a fluorescent 

orange sweater. 

Very tiny she was, 

in a skirt and high heals, climbing 

around on stainless 

steel

letters.

It didn't seem to bother anybody.  She walked out on this one long, rambling line about drinking a very bright green Lime Rickey soda. Her florescent orange sweater looked amazing against the 

neon soda bottle popping 

out of the poem 

because of placement. 

(The fact that it was bigger and had neon light circling the soda bottle periphery like a shoreline around a tropical island didn't hurt much either.)

Anyway, she was out there dancing around in her bright red heals on SODA in NEON at the end 

of a very long line, when she knocked the "A" 

off and fell

on her own A. 

Everyone laughed. 

She was embarrassed; 

I felt bad for her.   However, 

I also knew I had my moment.

In the commotion, I'd noticed what my peers hadn't. As that stainless steel "A" had tumbled and the girl in the orange sweater and cherry red heals tumbled with it, the whole poem had slid

SKIWAMPUS

"That!" I said, standing assertively, 

pointing to the now skiwampus poem hanging ever so skiwampusly 

on a pin 

point

Period.

"That is pacing gone wrong before your very eyes, and 

You didn't even notice it!

A poem exists on placement. It either is or isn't, depending on where you place your images and break 

your lines.  If you turn a poem into prose, it says almost nothing.  It's not about what 

you say, but about how you go about your business of saying it.  

Poetry is gardening with words".

I thought I'd made my point. The girl's poem on the wall had once been beautiful. Now it was in shambles. All because some careless soul had knocked off an "A" with her cherry red pumps.

The class just rolled with laughter and went on about seeing Nancy--that was her name, I guess, as that's what they called her, over and over, as she tumbled, and tumbled again and again in their minds, that action just repeated ad nauseam, and they loved it.

Meanwhile.  

No one paid any attention to Imelda, the shy brunet poet in the back corner, or her rather remarkable poem with that wildly long line about drinking a green Lime Rickey soda from a bottle almost neon when glazed in the morning sunlight as she, the poet, stood, pop bottle in hand, and gazed out her second story apartment window on an old brick Victorian world shimmering in light as the actual old Victorians went about their business as if the world was made instead of asphalt, Walmarts and dumbass college students who don't know how vital even one letter can be, when placed right

 or wron

g.  Where am I goin with this?

Two.

I don't remember it this way, for I don't remember having a phone.  However, Lloyd insists that I did.  If that is true, one night I received a call.  Lloyd was on his way.  His wife Maxine had kicked him out of the house.  If you know anything about my brother, you know he did absolutely nothing to deserve this.  Still, it was what it was.  One day he was part of her life.  The next he was gone like a letter in a marquee of an abandoned movie theater blown off on a windy day or a neon "A" in a BAR sign blacked out on a very black night.  Red B.  Black space.  Red R. 

I was in shock.  Although Maxine had started to treat me differently, I wasn't aware there were any problems between them personally.  Although Lloyd and I normally had no secrets, out of respect for Maxine, my brother had not shared his marriage problems.  I had been locked out of part of his world without even knowing it.  When I found out, I knew that he'd done the right thing.  Yet, I was stunned--both by his dissolving marriage and by the fact that Lloyd had kept secrets from me.   

I really liked Maxine.  Although it was hard on me when she became the most important person in Lloyd's life, I was happy for them.  I thought she was the best thing that ever happened to him.  I wasn't losing a brother; I was gaining a sister.  Even after Lloyd showed up at the apartment, I still believed she wasn't capable of something so cold.   I didn't know much about relationships, let alone marriage, but I assumed they'd had a fight and that they'd work through it.  Yes, Lloyd was welcome to stay awhile.  Then he'd get that call and he'd say, "I've missed you too."  Things would go back to normal.

Three.

I have this problem.  I'm still working on it.  Whenever anyone is down, I take it personally.  I don't allow those around me the necessity of falling apart.  I somehow feel I'm to blame when the shit rains down on them and splashes a bit on me.  It's quite selfish really.  Sometimes you need to be there for others, to contain their pain for them.  You can't do that if you're always worried about your own standing.

Four.

Lloyd, of course, showed up not his usual self.  He hated my apartment.  It was too small; the bathroom faucet leaked; the toilet had hard water stains.  He wanted to get out of that damn cell I was living in.  That was his reality, not mine.  So, I'd take him on my long walks through Juarez.  He didn't really like walking for hours either, at least not to begin with.  I should have understood that.  I should have welcomed it.  He'd certainly put up with a lot of dissatisfaction from me when I was a teenager.  Many nights, he had to drop whatever artwork he was working on so that we could go to the dollar movie or to the mall to buy a CD.  He and my friends were always having to deal with my restlessness.  I was always pushing everyone around me to do something more entertaining. I was always seeking escape from the void gnawing away at my gut.  He always accommodated my dysfunction.

Yet, in Lloyd's time of need, I wasn't similarly accommodating.  I'd finally found the life I wanted--one where, when I wasn't at school or working, I walked El Paso and Juarez for hours at a time, taking it all in, and then came home late at night, and in the silence of my little apartment, which I loved, sat and wrote whatever came to mind.  I was finally discovering who I was, really touching that void for the first time, and all of the sudden Lloyd shows up very unsatisfied and needing a lot of attention.  I thought I'd found myself, but I really hadn't.  I was like a Buddhist monk who becomes irritated at a homeless man interrupting his meditation by tugging on his robes and asking for alms.  Still, that's where I was.  To be honest, I'm not sure I've progressed much beyond that.  The problem is that there is some part of me that accepts the crap I'm receiving when others are understandably lashing out as really being directed towards me instead of just a manifestation of their own pain.   I can't fully be there for them because I'm always assessing my own safety.  It's always about me.  

A wise man would have been able to say to himself, "Lloyd doesn't give a rats ass about my apartment one way or the other.  This isn't about me; it's about Maxine.  Just let him whine and complain until time begins to heal his broken soul."

Five.

We soon moved to another apartment.  It was much bigger.  On the surface, it wasn't much nicer.  Both had spectacular views, but both had old sinks, old toilets, and old tubs.  My first apartment was actually better maintained.  It had been remodeled and had new windows and new carpet.  It was sealed from the elements and had the fresh smell of a new home.

Yet, the move was important.  Lloyd chose the apartment.  We definitely needed more space.  More importantly though, Lloyd needed to take over.  He needed to assert himself, to have some say in the shape and space in his life.  He'd let Maxine run the show.  For her career, they'd moved wherever she needed to go.  He'd accepted her mom, who lived with her, as his own.  He stayed home and painted, his career carefully scheduled around her daily to-do lists: dog, dishes, errands, etc.  He'd sacrificed his world to become part of hers.  That probably would have all seemed worth it had the marriage worked,  but it hadn't.  Lloyd needed to establish himself again in the world.  My apartment simply wouldn't do.  A new place was more than a space; it was a symbol.

As dumb as I was, I did get that much, and the truth is, I liked it too.  It was on the fifth floor and had spectacular views.  It was unfurnished, and Lloyd got busy building a table, a bench, and then  purchased two nice chairs, and restarted his life with me.  

Six.

I've gone back and fourth on whether or not to include "Lloyd Moves In" in my book.  At first, it didn't seem to be my story to tell.  Then, I had that dream last night about pacing, and I realized, This has got to be here.  The pacing of my book simply will not work without it.  

Why?  That's not important now.  This section just needs to be here, like a period, a place holder, until meaning can be built up in what follows.  Its placement is like large granite stone above a trail in the high Sierra.  You see it there, above you, looming with significant shadow, looking like it's ready to roll.  You pass below, knowing that even after you pass by it, you will look back now and then, and see it still, even from a distance.  

There are markers in our lives, stories that must be told, even if not directly ours, simply because our path winds its way under the weight of them.

Everything is about pacing.  Placement.

Whether or not we have a choice in that positioning or not.  Lloyd dealt with his rock the way he had to.  Later, I would have my own.  Later, I would look back and understand the day Lloyd moved in better than I did when I was first under its shadow.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 66. Leslie

This morning, well before 6:00 a.m., I searched through Dreams by No One's Daughter and Natural Histories by Leslie Ullman looking for a quotation with which to start this piece.  It seemed only proper as it is about her.  Yet, as I've worked over each draft, she has stubbornly refused to enter the room.  It took me some time to figure out why, but I did it.  It's so simple:  I don't know her.  So, this morning I got up thinking I could attach a bit of her to this piece by finding the right quote from one of her poems.  Although I entered many, walked around, stayed a while even as I watched the clock  (My daily writing block is a bit confined by my life),  I didn't really seem to find anything that shouted, "Begin with this."  However, since I do keep coming back to two lines from "Running",  perhaps it would be dishonest to leave them out altogether, even though I don't know exactly how they will connect with what I have to say:

Sometimes I run in Louisiana
where I've never been

Leslie Ulman impacted me as a writer more than any other professor.  As her writing style is very different from mine, it wasn't an affinity for voice or structure that affected me so.  She was just a damn good teacher.  She opened up the world of poetry to her students two ways:  her writing workshops and her exploration of the standard works of contemporary poetry.   All of my peers loved her workshops, as did I, but they were less enthused about her Contemporary American Poetry class.  However, that is the class that impacted me the most.  

I'm not sure why the public understands that fields like medicine, engineering, or astrophysics require diligence to enter and comprehend the full glory of the content they explore; yet, that same public seems to think that fields like art and literature mean nothing if someone without a high school education doesn't immediately "get" the work.  No, your two-year-old cannot paint like Jackson Pollack.  You just think he can.  And no, it's not the work that's lacking.  No one is trying to pull the wool over your eyes.  Staff at art museums across the country dedicate their lives to making it accessible, but you've got to be willing to be present.  Art is not something you stand before and have an argument with without even getting to know each another.  Not that there aren't con-artists in the arts; there are.  However, without putting in the effort to learn the vocabulary, one is not qualified to make that call.  

Just because I don't understand quantum physics or can't meditate or do yoga doesn't mean they are empty worlds with nothing real going on inside that space.    

I'm not an elitist.  Sometimes the simple truly is the most profound.  My favorite writer is Bill Bryson, who is as accessible as anyone.  Other times, though, beauty is complex.  Just because I don't understand black holes doesn't render them insignificant.  Just because E = MC² doesn't mean much to me, doesn't mean it has no meaning.

When it comes to poetry, most of my peers were lazy.  They were happy enough to explore their own poems, the poems of each other, or even the poems of some of the more accessible poets like Lucille Clifton or William Stafford.  However, they were unwilling to put in the work required to enter the poems of someone like Robert Lowell, even with an extraordinary guide like Professor Ullman.  Her writing workshops demonstrated anyone can write well with a competent guide.  Her literature classes demonstrated that few have the discipline to become poets.  At the time I went through the program, there was only Michi and I.  Several other students had the natural talent, and there were a few fine fiction writers in the bunch also, but only the two of us had the drive to push ourselves beyond what came naturally.  

I too lost that dedication along the way, and only recently started to write seriously again. Yet, I was trained well.  One thing Professor Ullman did that facilitated entry into the poems we studied was that she allowed us to respond to a poem in one of two ways:  we could write a standard literary analysis, or we could respond to the work through our own work, not so much to mimic it as to dialogue with it.  I went back and forth between the two methods, but it is the latter method that really pushed me forward as a poet.  

Story Built from Galway Kinnell Bricks

God, I had been working so long,

until midnight I think,

but it felt like three.

I closed up shop,

dragged my weary eyes up the street to Village Inn

for a needle of coffee in each socket.

And then to,

there among the fat men with shiny badges

read Galway Kinnell,

it was like a dream, dark growing tall,

two small boys bearing cornstalk violins

--I swear I saw them!--

outside the Circle K across the street.

Above the Franklin Mountains the moon ate itself out.

Two young lovers sat on the curb,

their tennis shoes in the dusty gutter.

Headlights and hum zipped past

like lion eyes after zebra.

The young just sat there, heads trailed

by the beginning of necks,

shivering in the guarantee they'd be bodies,

flesh rivered by blue erratic wanderings

of blood, saliva passed back and forth,

hands running stone saint smooth stone.

I laid down my tip and lit

a cigarette, a small fire against

the loneliness that I knew would rain

when I tore open my bed like a polar bear

and climbed in and closed her up

to sleep in blood 

and pain.

The words in italics are Kinnell's, the ones not, mine.  Through this collage method of using bits and pieces of other people's poems to write off and respond to, I was able to get out of myself and expand my options when returning to my solo work.  The process, was, I suppose, something like playing jazz.

Lucille Clifton

is woman,

real woman,

so sure of her big, shouting,

swinging, mighty, magic, spell-spinning hips,

she doesn't have to kick me in the balls

to make me listen.

She needs no combat boots.

She's got roots

and God and babies and girls and boys

and collard and kale and kinship and roaches

and green trees and tree talk

and nations of wood and nations of words,

words galloping out of her mouth,

crazy and wild,

wild and root,

speaking loss,

deep, black loss,

cutting greens to give back life,

forgiving Daddy to get on with life,

calling the kids home from the movies:

"The picture be over.  Stop making some babies

and raise them!"

Her black breasts pressed against the windowpane

every inch of her woman converting me to myself, man,

making me run through the streets naked, crying in tongues

while she bellows WOMAN!

and invites me to join in the song and dance

in spite of Zora Neal Hurston's

Joe Starks (that bastard!)

telling Janie,

"Somebody got to think for women and chillun

and chickens and cows.

I god, they sho don't think none theirselves."

In that poem, I no longer even know what words are Clifton's and what are mine, and it doesn't really matter.  The voice is clearly hers.  That was the point of the exercise:  to expand my options as a poet so that I wouldn't always respond to my own previous lines in the same old predictable ways.  I believe it worked.  I'm a pretty versatile writer and can take on multiple voices even in the same piece.  I'm not sure how mature or significant I am as a writer; that is for others to determine.  What I do know is that I was good student, and that I had a great teacher, Leslie Ullman.  Those are prerequisites for most, if not all, good writers.  Artists are not born in vacuums.  They use and expand a language handed down to them.  It is a mentoring system.   Leslie Ullman was a master mentor, and for that I'm grateful.

That's why this post seems a bit odd to me, even disjointed.  Leslie Ullman the teacher is here, but not Leslie Ullman, the person.   Perhaps that is how it is with the best teachers.  While teaching, it's not about them; it's about pulling out the best in their students.

Of course, I do have memories of Leslie.  I did attend a few parties and social events where she was there.  I remember well how she carried herself, how she could command the attention of an audience, even college students not much more mature than high-schoolers.   I could describe her looks.  Bright blue eyes that danced with light but unlike some eyes didn't necessarily invite you to enter.  Not necessarily guarded--just enjoying the space between self and the outside world.  I realize now, I don't really know her, even as an acquaintance.  I know some shop keepers in town much better.  I don't rule out writing about anyone or anything, but I don't feel any particular need to write about them.  Whereas, I do feel any memoir about my time in El Paso must include a section on Leslie Ullman.  It's not that she never shared anything personal.  She did.  It was just that her class wasn't about her; it was about us.  She allowed herself to all but vanish in that setting so that we could grow as writers.

She did the same when she discussed the work of Anne Sexton, Mark Strand, or whatever poet we were studying.  The poems entered the spotlight full-bodied, as she, the presenter slipped back into the shadows.

Yet, because she taught me how to write, how to really read, how to do what I was put here on earth to do--explore life through words, I love her.  That is how it is with mentors.  Their greatness comes by not drawing attention to themselves but by bringing out the best in others.

For a time I was an ungrateful student.  I got too caught up in living life.  Like many of my peers were not willing to give the poems we studied their full attention, I was not willing to get up at 5:00 a.m. to write, and more importantly, to stick with something when it became hard.  I don't know if I'll be able to get this book published or not.  I'm not sure it's the type of book that can generate any interest outside close friends and family, but I do know this:  I'm almost there; it's almost done. I have almost completed this journey.  Soon, I will be able to say to myself, "I have written my first book".  That will make the next one, whatever it is about, much, much easier.  

Now, I understand why I was drawn to those two particular lines of Ms. Ullman's:

Sometimes I run in Louisiana
where I've never been

She allowed me to run in places I'd never been.  The poems she opened up and made accessible to me grew inside me and became part of me.  The way those writers handled words became ways I could handle words also.  I do not know if I'll get this book published, or even the next one, or the one after that.  I do not know if at some point many people will read my words or if my writing will vanish soon after my body.

But I do know this:

I can run with writers;

I am one of them.

But I wouldn't be without Leslie.  I'd write, I'm sure.  I did that before her class.  But I'd be like that hobby painter who picks up a paint brush now and then to paint a scene of the daisies in the back garden without ever having stood before a Claude Monet, an Edward Hopper, a Richard Diebenkorn, or Jackson Pollack and uttered "Damn!" totally amazed at possibilities formerly unimagined in his own work.

To grow, you must run in place's you've never been.  It helps to have a good guide.  Leslie Ullman was among the best of them.

References

Brown, Steve. "Lucille Clifton." Sell-Outs Literary Magazine 1993: 32.

Ullman, Leslie. "Running." Ullman, Leslie. Dreams by No One's Daughter. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987. 28. 

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 65. Driving Along the Rio Bravo

A Grocery Store on Mexico 2, Southeast of Juarez, Jan. 1992, mixed media diorama, Lloyd Brown

I don't know why I so often need to start my writing for the day grounded to where I'm physically at, but I do.  Perhaps place is my coffee, my starter for, my transition to, something more.

So here it goes:  It's 7:12 a.m., on a brisk Sunday morning in November.  The sky behind the juniper blobbed ridge outside my front window is a frosty, pale blue, with a yellow tinge towards the bottom, right above the juniper-splotches.  The crooked, knobby arms of an oak shatter the frosted blue like an untended crack in a windshield.  It is 33 degrees outside.  The heater hums.

Soon I will put hot water on the stove for a cup of Pero, my replacement for coffee.  Then, somehow I will have to get myself from here to the other side of the border, over 841 miles away, and to a time over 25 years ago.  Such is the work of a writer.

Perhaps what will transport me is the light.  Both places have that same unfiltered light that ignites and sculpts ridges and ranges with stunning clarity.  The low-angle winter light was even more intense there than here, for the ranges were far less vegetated, and light on stone told most of the story.  

On the Mexico side of the river, known there as the Rio Bravo, even the houses were stone--concrete block covered in plaster.  I have an image in my head now.  It's one of Lloyd's dioramas, A Grocery Store on Mexico 2, Southwest of Juarez, Jan. 1992.  I may not be able to take credit for the artistry of the work, but I can take credit for its existence.  We were clearly on that drive because of me.  I had to share my little slice of Mexico with my brother, as I will do here with you.

The painting is of a line of three connected buildings along a two-lane highway on a bright winter's day.  In the left hand corner there is an old rusted, red pick-up from the 50s next to an elm and a telephone pole.  To the viewer's right is a small haystack of old bales starting to erode at the edges.  Then there is a do-it-yourself combination car port and patio with an elm growing up the center of it.  The beams sag with the weight of time and of limbs laid across them for shade.  The house itself is white stucco well-aged with a flat roof and the stains of time, all tinged with that stark yellow horizontal light.  A homemade ladder, like what you'd see on a pueblo, leans against the house, as does an old screen door.  Electrical wires connect to long metal poles attached to the façade.  Below them rust stains trail down the stucco.  Old faded curtains adorn the two front windows.  The place appears to still be inhabited, although once can't be certain.  There is no car out front, and the screen door appears to be leaning against the front door, which would make entry difficult.  So perhaps, it is abandoned, although probably not for too long.

The building to the right, however, is another matter.  It is but a rock shell.  The roof is gone, and so is the back wall, and even part of the front.  It is made of rough stone.  

And then there is a store with a what appears to be red Coca-Cola sign on the white stucco façade and a matching red Coca-Cola machine on the right side of the front door.  I don't know if the store is open or not, but there is a mud-covered green Chevy pickup from the late 70s out front with two guys sitting on the raised tailgate.  Perhaps, someone ran in for drinks and snacks.  Or perhaps the old store is now a residence, and someone left the truck running and ran in for his wallet.  

Beyond these three isolated buildings are fallow fields and desert ranges, that though not included in the cropped surface of the painting, I know are sculpted by that same stark light.

This is the Mexico I know and love and spent hours upon hours exploring.  To be honest, it's not all that different on the U.S. side, but different enough that I was never satisfied with my knowledge of my world ending at the river.  Perhaps, in that regard, I was different than most Anglo-Americans living along the border.  They go to Juarez for business, for dinner, to take family members for a night out when they come to town.  Many of them even know the language.  I didn't.  But they did not know the streets and highways the way I did.  I knew those country roads almost as well as I know the county roads outside my hometown.  They are burned forever into  my memory.    I know the fields around El Porvenir almost as well as the fields in this valley.

Most of the Mexicans I met along the way didn't understand that.  Neither did the U.S. Border Patrol.  I always hated being asked upon return, "What were you doing in Mexico?"  I don't know why I always felt the need to be honest, but I did.  I'd say, "to take photographs".  They seldom believed me, and so my car would be searched very thoroughly almost every time.  If I had said, "to get drunk and laid," they'd have let me sail through unquestioned, unsearched, for that's what they expected of a single male my age crossing the border.  However, the border patrol agents were not the only ones to question my motives.

I remember once I was traveling from Juarez to El Porvenir along Mexico 2, and almost all by itself, among fields was this swimming pool.  If I remember right, it was near Guadalupe Bravos.  It amazed me to find such a place out in the middle of nowhere, and I have to admit some snobby U.S. attitude in me thought especially in Mexico.  The light was right, and it was beautiful, so I stopped.  There were some girls in their early teens diving, and I went up to the fence to take some pictures.  Just as I was aiming my camera, I heard, "You like girls young?  I can get you some."  I turned around and saw some guy in his twenties smiling a slimy, knowing smile.

I did, without doubt think the scene, including the girls, was beautiful.  And I was, without doubt, yearning.  Yet, he had totally gotten the wrong idea.  What I was looking for was a connection to my youth, for a way back home to my rural roots.  I felt alone, lost.  Though in an entirely different country, in a land where I didn't even know the language, somehow those country roads south of the border felt more like home than all of the years I spent living in Dallas.  The hay fields there could have been the hay fields out by the lava ridge west of my home town, and that pool, though in a field instead of the town square, called to me like the pool of my youth.  I wasn't seeking sex that day.  I was seeking something quite the opposite: innocence.   At twenty-something, I already felt very old and world-weary.

No one could know that though.  Both the Border Patrol and the Mexicans could only assume what they knew well from experience:  United States looks south of the border with ill-intentions.  No gringo crosses the border seeking for a route, if only psychologically, home.  Thus, I was relieved when a friend told me of a route through Sunland Park, New Mexico that avoided the official border crossings altogether, which although illegal, saved me from the shakedowns on my way back to the States.  I took it often, an outlaw in deed, but one only seeking peace and wholeness in a foreign land.  I'm not sure why I felt I couldn't find it at home, but I didn't.  Stubbornness,  I guess.  Too proud to admit that I needed Dry Creek like air, too proud to admit that I just wasn't built to make it anywhere beyond the fields, juniper and creek bottoms that were woven into the fabric of my soul from an early age.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 64. George's Way

I don't know why I'm struggling to write about George.  It should be easy.  He's a complex and fascinating individual: a tinkerer, a thinker, a strategist, an entrepreneur, and a guarded risk-taker.  He's creative, yet analytical;  he's scientific, yet open to mysticism.  

Perhaps that is the problem.  George defies all labels.  Writing, by its nature, communicates through stereotypes.  Even the most realistic novel is based on typecasts.  It's how the writer gets the reader to fill in the iceberg below the surface, to feel the unwritten story.  Writing uses shorthand to quickly connect experiences between the writer and the reader, to draw "Yes, I know that, I've felt that too" by compartmentalizing and condensing experience into archetypes.

Thus the problem:  George is like few others.  There are no short-cuts to developing his character.  No matter what I write here, I will fail to capture who he really is.  And unlike when I was writing about my friend Michi, there is no magic moment when I realized I was standing in front of greatness when I was around him, although I was.  Sometimes, I thought him a damn fool, and I know he thought the same about me.  We spent many nights drinking and arguing over politics.  Some nights these debates became quite heated, but usually they ended with us understanding each other better.  Often, we were driven by the same gnawing void.  One night we strapped little pieces of paper with notes to God to rockets and fired them towards Him to get his attention.  I wanted Him to assist with my love life.  George just wanted some solid answers to his usual question, "What in the hell is going on here?"  Actually, we never fired the rockets, but as we sat at his table drinking and discussing the plan, the vision became so real that even now I have to remind myself that our juvenile outburst towards God never actually occurred.  

However, I do remember us laughing hysterically:  God, you don't hear us, well how about this?  We'll shoot our prayers right up your almighty nostrils!  The God I believe in was probably laughing also, in an empathetic, enlightened sort of way--slightly-hurt, but also understanding the need for His spirit children to challenge authority, the way a father laughs when his teenager is making fun of his dad's age, belly size, receding hairline, taste in music, or inability to use technology effectively.  At least I hope that's what God was doing.  If not, I'm going to have some hard explaining when I get to the other side.

Quickly, here are a few things I remember about George.  I'll just rattle them off, in present-tense, for whenever I think back, I'm there: 

• A girl in our writing class makes a comment about how she thinks God is a woman.  George leans over to me, "I think God is a trucker from Milwaukee."  That's a great title.  I decide to go home and write the poem.
• I'm arguing with a customer at Jiffy Copies and George walks in, quietly listening to the two of us escalate.  After the customer leaves, George says, "You know, if I were your boss, I'd fire your ass right now."  I'm furious.  The woman was trying to get us to pay for her mistake.  She was lying.  I let George know this, my volume quickly rising again.  George calmly says, "It's better to lose money over one job, no matter how much, than to send her out into the world angry the way you just did.  You might as well try to collect your wages from every other copy store in town because she will spend the rest of her life sending business their way, so yeah, I'd fire your ass in a heartbeat."  As he is a successful entrepreneur with ten or twelve employees  at the age most people are finishing up college, I grudgingly accept his authority.   It just makes me want to slug him, although I know I'd lose the fist fight that would ensue.  
• George calls me up, says, "Hey, the magazines are all bound.  We don't have to do that now.  I just got El Paso Independent School District to bind them for free.  I was delivering a job to their print shop at closing and asked if they'd mind staying after hours to do a job for us if I supplied the beer.  It's done."  The magazine he's talking about is the second edition of our magazine, Sell-Outs Literary Magazine, which we started together,  on one of his whims. The first edition sucked--mainly because of my lack of editing skills--but the second one, in my opinion, holds up.  And El Paso Independent School District bound it, without their knowledge, for free!   I feel slightly guilty; yet, his subversive tactic makes me smile.  I also know, that although not legal, strictly speaking, he was fair.  There was a reason those employees were willing to stay after hours. Although George said it was for beer, I know it was because of much more.  I know he got them out of some bind, probably multiple times, that made them want to return a favor.  George used good deeds as currency.  No need to worry about taxes that way. 

Although I remember many specific moments with George, there are many more moments that I don't remember.  I spent far too many late nights over at his house drinking and talking about God and life to remember the specifics.  Sometimes it was just George and I.  Sometimes my brother Lloyd was there.  Sometimes George's best friend Mike was there also.  We never came to any conclusions or solved any problems, either for us individually or for society, but we sure had a hell of a good time trying.

Sometimes it was more than fun.  Sometimes it was an unspoken lifeline.  When either of our worlds were unravelling, we'd just show up in front of the other.  It was usually over our mutual inability to date women successfully, but not always.  Often George just wanted to play hooky from work.  That amused me, since he was his own boss.  He'd say things like, "I just need to get on a plane and fly to New York?"  I'd ask why New York.  "Because it's as far as I can get away from this damn place (meaning his company) without leaving the United States."   Not willing to go through the hassle of catching a flight, we'd head out into the desert instead.  Although George often had to drive into Juarez for business, he was opposed to leaving the country.  The world outside the United States was a scary place to him.  The world inside the United States was scary enough.  The world outside his home, period, was a bit frightening.  He hated going in stores, restaurants, gas stations--pretty much anyplace with people.  So, we drank at his house.  His world was his mind and his living room floor.  He'd sit on the carpet, his back resting against the couch, a can of Skoal by his side, a glass of Bacardi and Coke in hand.  He'd drink, dip, spit, and say, "You know, I don't think anyone knows what the hell's going on here."

In fact, he was going to write a book.  The title was to be: "What the F___ is Going On?"  He was going to interview people from all walks of life, simply ask them that question, and let them respond.  He'd ask entrepreneurs, philosophers, theologians, writers, scientists, gas station attendants, waitresses, and so forth, and simply record their answers.  Had he went through with it, it probably would have been a national best seller.  However, fame is not what he was looking for.  He truly wanted an answer to that question.  Looking back, I realize many of my poems were inspired by George's search for the answer "I why? / Why I?" as my one professor, Dr. Emory Estes, phrased it.

George didn't directly trigger all those poems.  But that's what drew us together.  We were both searching for some explanation for existence, some sort of meaningful answer to, "Why are we here to experience so much beauty and pain, sometimes simultaneously?" 

God

Just a memo:
we don’t sleep.
John’s on the front step again,
2 a.m.,
Reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,
Pepto Bismol in hand.
Last night it was 1919.
Alice is in the living room,
fat foot on the coffee table
next to a bowl of popcorn and salsa.
She has nightmares about worms,
says she feels their warm, slimy softness
climb between her legs and nest.
She’s staying up to watch old war movies.
I go to bed and wire myself to John Lennon:
“God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
I’ll say it again
God is a concept by which we measure our pain.”
Anna stumbles in at 10 a.m.,
Says she feels like she’s tied
to the bumper of her jeep,
wine glass in hand,
headed for the wall along Canal Street.
“They’ll sift through the broken bottles,
spilled ash trays and piles of beer cans,
find me down there somewhere
below some boy
trying to get to God
the fast way.”

I no longer write memos to God.  Our relationship is a bit more personal now.  These days I pray.  Occasionally,  I even find myself open enough to hear a reply.   For better or worse, I no longer feel pain as deeply as I once did.  I'm not sure about George.  I do know this: the neighborhood children frequently knock on his door and ask his wife, Gabby, "Can George come out to play?"  And when they do, George drops whatever electrical experiment he's doing in his living room (to Gabby's relief), and goes out to play with kids who are not his own because life is simply too daunting to face alone.  Who knows, maybe he's even strapped prayers to a rocket for some kid who lost his mom at far too young of an age.  "How about we fire these prayers up in her direction, Billy?"  I don't know if this has actually ever happened.  However, I do know it's George's way.

References

Lennon, John. "God." John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band. By John Lennon. 1970.

 

 

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 63. A Typical Walk to the Border

El Paso Street, El Paso

Today is a cool fall day here at Dry Creek.  A blatant blue sky cuts a sharp, jagged edge above the juniper-blobbed ridge outside my front window, just across the field and creek bottom crowded with oak, maple and cottonwood.  It's been a dry year, and there is very little color in the leaves, just a dry rattling reddish-brown rustle.  The trees are moisture-deprived and are slowly dropping their rusty loads without fanfare.

I have a cold.  My nose is stuffy and dry.  My mind is dry also.  It has been over two years since I went back to Texas, and I still haven't completed this book.  To be honest, I just want to finish it up without fanfare, to shed any obligation of getting it right, to drop rusty memories like so many dead leaves, and move on to my next project. 

I can't though.  There's no use putting words to paper that don't engage the senses.  The details must still leak out some color.  If not, writing is a pointless endeavor.

I had wanted to write about George, my best friend in El Paso, and one of my best friends throughout my life.  I made a good start.  Something was missing though.  I'm not sure what.  Color?  Life?

So, instead, I think I'll take a walk.  Perhaps down Yandell and then across the freeway at Santa Fe Street.  It is a walk I did often, gravity carrying me quickly downhill to a row of rundown, two story apartments perched on the edge of the freeway.  

Though run down, I loved those apartments.  They were old and adobe, with a very western-looking wood balcony running the whole length of the front, a black wrought-iron railing keeping the second story inhabitants from tumbling to the street below.  The building looked like a prop out of an old western.  I half-expected a bar on the bottom floor with swinging doors and to see gunfire coming from the balcony overhead as I walked by while some prostitute from the 1850's hung out the top floor window, waving her handkerchief, yelling out, "Hey big boy, it's awfully lonely up here. How 'bout giving a poor gal some company."  

Instead, there was only the rattling-roar of the freeway amplified under the Santa Fe Street bridge.  Then I was across that great raging divide and walking along the edge of the historic neighborhood, Old San Francisco.  Though rundown when I lived there, the architecture was still clearly significant, dating from the early 1900s and comprising of old mansions and what were once upscale apartment buildings. I loved walking back into where Missouri came to a dead end at the steep embankment of I-10.  I'm sure the neighborhood was once part of Sunset Heights, but cut-off by I-10, it became its own little secluded world.   Although run-down when I walked the area, it is now upscale, as it is right next to El Paso's new minor-league baseball stadium, Southwest University Park.

And on I would walk down Santa Fe towards the border, after zig-zagging over to Oregon Street and stopping to rest in San Jacinto Plaza.  It is there, I'd find a bench, usually in the southwest corner, near the Kress Department Store, which was still open then.  I'd sit in the park, depending on the day, for a few minutes or a few hours, listening to the street preachers rant and rave and froth at the mouth about the wicked ways of the world, which of course, were accurate.   Yet, it was still ranting and raving and frothing, for it was clear the preachers were caught in the same sins they wailed and gnashed so desperately against.  Hypocrisy spewed out of their ravaged minds and pooled about their feet.  It was also clear most of them had serious mental illness, and so it produced no anger in me or anyone else that I could see.  It was nice they had a place to be, and I liked listening to them in the way I like listening to a football game on Thanksgiving, the sounds of cicadas on hot summer nights, or the brakes of busses pulling into San Jacinto Plaza to unload and reload passengers.  I wasn't really focused on the words, but if the sound was suddenly gone in that environment, I'd miss it greatly.

And then I'd walk by the spectacular old brick Plaza Motel before cutting back over to El Paso Street, my route to Mexico. 

El Paso Street is one of the most vibrant streets I've seen.  Color and chaos beat from every rolled up metal shop door in a wall of commercial establishments that goes for six blocks, almost right to the razor-wire coils at the border: shoes, boom boxes, watches, alarm clocks, remote control cars, you name it.  It always amazed me that with all that stuff I never found anything I wanted to buy, although I searched diligently.  I always wondered if Mexicans think the the same about the tight alleyways of Juarez packed with Corona t-shirts, bright colored blankets, ponchos, and ceramic pots.  Cheap useless crap nobody could ever possibly use.  That's what I always thought about the stuff sold on El Paso Street.  All of it comes from China, Korea, Singapore, and so on.  The same is probably true of that great big clay pot "you got for a steal" in Juarez for your Spanish-tiled entryway of your home in Kansas City or the six matching sombreros you purchased for your grandchildren in Tulsa.  Thousands of Mexicans swarm northward for bargain deals on electronics and clothing that no American would ever own, and thousands of Americans swarm southward for bargain deals on "hand-crafted" goods no Mexican would ever claim as authentic.  It's great.  Two dynamic economies spurred on by stereotypes of what the other country has to offer--and all of it, mind you, not made in North America, but rather in China.  

El Paso Street:  Headless Stereotypes of USA
Welcome Visitors from Mexico
 

In the mornings, I usually stopped for breakfast at once was the Hollywood Cafe on the corner of El Paso and Overland.  By the 90s, it was no longer named that, but the building still had the old Hollywood murals painted on it, so that's what I knew it as.  The building, though architecturally stunning, was run-down and the food was lousy, but I didn't care about that.  Breakfast was cheap; I had little money; and most importantly, the place was loud with life.  One half of it was a diner--if it could be called that--and the other half was a bar.  That half definitely lived up to its name.  It even lived up to the old west image that the 1800s San Francisco style Queen's Anne and Romanesque styled façade promised from the outside.  It had everything the old western bar should have except swinging bar doors.  It even had rowdy drunks regardless of the hour.  I was always there for breakfast, usually around nine or ten, and the drinking would already be going strong.  I hadn't reached that point in my life yet, and so I stuck to the burned bacon and cold, runny eggs, leaving the morning drinks to the hardcore drunks.  The experience, however, was worth every penny.  Although most of the conversations were in Spanish, and as I didn't speak Spanish, I couldn't snatch anything good for my writing, I loved the vibe and felt like a writer there.  It was worlds away from the sleepy Mormon town I grew up in, and I felt like Hemmingway living in Paris.     

Hollywood Café in the Merrick Building, 1975

The real Hollywood Cafe opened in 1931 and ran through the 1950s.  It was a major restaurant and night club.  The building itself was constructed in 1897 as the Merrick Building (El Paso History Alliance) and housed a men's clothing store on the first floor and the St. Charles Hotel on the second and third floors (Carpenter) and is one of the oldest buildings in El Paso.

After my less-than pleasing breakfast and some heartburn, I left with symphonies of mariachi music, clanking-dishes, laughter and Spanish conversations swirling around in my head, and me hoping that someday I'd be able to get it all down on paper adequately.  Then I continued my march towards the boarder and the dusty calles carved into the foothills of the Juarez Mountains.

First, however, was the bridge.  I had been drawn to the border ever since my brother and I were driving from Houston to Big Bend National Park via U.S. 90, and at some point, which I believe was in Del Rio, I looked over and saw the cars lined up at the border and some unspeakable urge pulled me south to the other side while our car continued northwest instead.  I think Lloyd hardly noticed the crossing.  His pull was towards the cliffs he knew we'd see when we crossed the Pecos River some miles ahead.  But, I looked out my window.   Many blocks off, not close, but close enough I could still taste the flavor in the air, I witnessed a vitality at the border.  Even from a fairly great distance, it called to me.  In my head it looked just like the rhythm and words to Steely Dan's "Do It Again":

In the mornin' you go gunnin' for the man who stole your water

And you fire till he's done in but they catch you at the border

And the mourners are all singin' as they drag you by your feet

But the hangman isn't hangin' and they put you on the street

 

You go back, Jack, do it again, wheels turnin' 'round and 'round

You go back, Jack, do it again. (Steely Dan)

There was something in the vibrant, glinting, clanking chaos of the border that I needed.  I didn't know what it was then, and I'm still not exactly sure what I found there.  Yet, I do know living on the border changed me like no other place has.  I was drawn to the border like a climber is drawn to Everest.  The difference is that I'm not sure I ever summited the peak.  I seem to have checked a box off in my cosmic Bucket list by the experience, yet I'm not sure what I gained in the process.  Still, I do know this:  a void would be there without those frequent marches to the border.  Something that I needed to experience in this life was only obtainable there.  I just can't name it.  At least not yet.  Who knows, someday as my mind crosses that bridge once again, as it often does, it will come to me, and I will say to myself, "Ah yes, that was it."  Until then, in my mind, I will stand many times again in wonder at that concrete, wire, and cultural line drawn between two nations, where El Paso Street and Santa Fe nearly converge to meet Avenue Benito Juarez, suspended over a concrete ditch channeling the little thin ribbon of water known as the Rio Grande or Rio Bravo, depending on which bank you stand most firmly upon.  There I will be, standing between the flags of two nations, looking for the right glint of light to ignite that ah-ha moment that I can always taste but never quite slide to the tip of my tongue to send out to the world in some meaningful way.

References

Carpenter, John W. Merrick Building El Paso. n.d. 28 October 2020. <https://jackncb.wordpress.com/architecture/el-paso-area/merrick-building-el-paso/>.

Steely Dan. "Do It Again." Can't Buy a Thrill. By Walter Beck and Danald Fagan. 1972. vinyl.

El Paso History Alliance. HOLLYWOOD CAFE, 301 S. EL PASO ST., ESTABLISHED 1931. 20 March 2016. 28 October 2020. <https://www.facebook.com/elpasohistoryalliance/posts/hollywood-cafe-301-s-el-paso-st-established-1931the-hollywood-cafe-was-one-of-th/1343249935700511/>.

 

  

  

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 62. The Most Intense Eyes I will Ever See

 I still remember this well:  It's late afternoon and the sun is at a good slant, casting great shadows across a parking lot at the edge of UTEP.  I hear my name called out.  I'm not used to that.  I live in a city where nobody outside work knows I exist.  I could go missing for weeks, maybe months, or even years, and nobody locally would notice anything except for the fact someone would have to be called in to cover my shift.  I'm a loner, so it's partly that, but mainly it's because I just moved to El Paso.  I hear my name again and turn around.

There before me is a girl with the bluest eyes I have ever seen.  They are quite startling even as she is squinting into the sun, her eyes half closed, her face sculpted by that intense El Paso winter light.  Perhaps what makes her eyes so intense is that she isn't all that blond.  Blue water is significant off a beach but blatant in an isolated desert spring.  We expect blue eyes on blonds.  Imagine that famous National Geographic picture of the Afghan girl with the green eyes.  Keep everything the same, but turn her eyes blue.  That was my first real reckoning with Michi.  Those eyes made it clear she was a force.  Had it not been for her eyes, on the outside, she would blend into the world very well.  With them, she stood out.  

Later, I would find out her writing was as startlingly beautiful as her eyes.  Her eyes caught my attention; her writing held me.  I would become mesmerized, which is actually too bad, because it made it hard for us to stay friends.

I don't remember what she said that day.  I think she said she liked my poem.  It was about drinking rum and Coke from a clear glass with a big, white Snoopy head pictured on it.  The poem wasn't very good, and I only remember it because it was the first poem I wrote for the first of many writing workshop classes at UTEP.  I'm not sure why I had rum and Coke in that glass to write about in the first place.  I did drink occasionally back then, but not at home.  Still, there it was, a poem about a clear glass with a white Snoopy head pictured on it filled with what would later blur far too many of my nights.

I don't remember what I said in return.  I'm sure it was quick and that I just wanted to get out of there.  Girls didn't approach me.  Girls didn't try to talk to me.  I think they sometimes noticed me, but my shyness was a wall which they respected.  She either didn't pick up on the wall or didn't care.  Instead, she just hopped on over it.

I cared enough that she did to notice she walked to a little red pick-up when we parted ways.  On the tailgate it said "Toy" instead of "Toyota".  Later, after a couple of classes together, a couple of poems written off each other's work, and a short but significant friendship, I looked for that truck everywhere, desperately hoping to look into those eyes one last time.   When that chance never came, and most of my other connections to El Paso seemed to have ended, I moved back to my hometown in Utah and eventually found Marci and the life I ultimately wanted.

Yet, there is a ghost of me still standing in that parking lot, looking into those amazing eyes.  I never fully understood them, but oh how I loved them.  I still do.  Love never dies unless someone intentionally kills it.  Instead, it hangs there suspended in time, a prayer flag flapping in a high Tibetan wind.  Now and then, between the clank and clamor of daily life, you'll see it out there beyond the horses, carts and daily commotion, still flying strong.

I wouldn't give up my present life to go back if I could.  What I have is more meaningful.  Yet, I'm grateful that flag still flies.  Life is for loves, present and past.  Day to day living, like one thin layer of sand, doesn't mean much.  Rather, the meaning is in the layers of life laid down year after year--almost unnoticed--that when later lifted up unexpectedly by a random thought leaves us standing amazed at the rich life we have lived without even noticing we were part of a great creation.  In those rare moments, we know it's not what we did or didn't accomplish that matters, but rather the people we met and the experiences we took in along the way.  

It is in this light that life is most beautiful.  It is in this light that I see Michi standing before me, squinting into the sun, as I realize in an instant those are probably the most intense eyes I will ever see.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 61. Sunset Heights

 

Henry C. Trost home, Sunset Heights

As Marci and I had some time to kill before meeting Bobby and Lee, we drove up into Sunset Heights, my old neighborhood, where I reminisced over my former wanderings around this small neighborhood that looks over the chalky calle carved hills of the Fanja Del Rio of Juarez Mexico speckled with turquoise, pink and yellow box houses. 

Sunset Heights, which is shaped like a 45 degree triangle, with legs Schuster Ave and Mesa Street about a mile and half long and I-10 below carving a hypotenuse below the rock edge, is a culturally and economically diversified neighborhood consisting of historic mansions, apartment buildings, and small houses.  It is, in my opinion, one of the most unique neighborhoods in America.   Somehow, despite its spectacular views, its rich history, and its large homes, it has escaped complete gentrification.  It is the model neighborhood cities so desperately try to create and so desperately fail at maintaining.  Lawyers, professors, students, and working class families all live tightly together not only peacefully, but culturally connected.  They even share the same couple of neighborhood markets.

I ended up living there by chance.  It was Thanksgiving break, some friends and I were camping in the Guadalupe Mountains, and I only had one day to find an apartment before heading back to Dallas.  I didn't know the city at all, and just started searching neighborhoods around UTEP.  As I'd been falsely led to believe El Paso was an incredibly dangerous place to live, I was most concerned about security.  I looked at a couple of places that didn't meet my standard in that regard, and then I found a great old apartment building that had recently been remodeled.  There was a studio apartment available.  Although only a second-floor apartment, it had an amazing view of downtown due to the steep slope it was built into.  I was a couple of blocks from downtown and a few more from the university.  I could walk everywhere I needed to go.  It was perfect.

I loved that place.  As you walked in at street level, it was split-level.  One staircase led down to the basement laundry room.  There was a Coke machine and a pay phone there.  I don't think I ever purchased a phone in that apartment because I remember sitting on a plastic chair by the pay phone for hours trying to register for classes, having to stop and feed it coins over and over again.  Going up, half way, there was a little landing where the mailboxes were.  I'd stop and pick up the mail before making the turn and heading up the rest of the way up to the second floor which consisted of a long hall with apartments on both sides.  Each apartment had a iron gate door that had to be opened with a key both from the inside and outside.  I never understood how they got away with that with the fire martial.  Misplace your key inside and you'd be trapped banging frantically on the cage door as your apartment burned around you.  As I misplace everything, this was a very real threat to me. I constantly checked to see if I knew where my keys were.  I was on the second floor, but because of the terraced hillside, it was at least three floors down to the parking lot next door.

Inside, the apartment was small but freshly renovated with new charcoal gray industrial carpet.  You walked into what was designed as the bedroom, but as I wanted a living room, I made the walk-in closet off to the side my bedroom instead.    There wasn't room for a bedstead, and so I just put a foam mattress on the floor.  For the living room, I bought a bunch of black, plastic crates and turned them on their side for my small, but growing book collection that included Le Corbusier's Creation Is a Patient Search, Dostoyevsky's Idiot, Marguerite Duras's The Lover, Jean Dubeffet: A Retrospective, Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple.  On top the crates, I placed my portable boom box.  And that was it--the only thing on that wall other than the window, which was glorious.  The skyline of downtown glistened day and night.  The only other things I had in that room was the TV, which was set on some particleboard crates that I'd painted black and a black cloth and natural wood director's chair to sit on.  On the walls hung several of my brother's charcoal city and landscape drawings placed in white matboard and framed with natural wood that matched wood of the director's chair, as well as some black and white photographs by my friend Marsh framed the same way.  That was it.  Simple.  Gray carpet.  Black book cases, a single black chair, natural wood.  The only color in the whole apartment was the framed vinyl disc of McCartney's "No More Lonely Nights" which pictured McCartney in 1950's glam with a pink background.  My brother had shadow-box framed it with a mirror behind the floating record and lined the inside edges with matching pink fabric.  The whole thing was framed in a dark, polished wood.  It was quite stunning.  Unfortunately, I left it behind in one of my moves.  My brother had made it for my birthday without me knowing, and I still feel its absence today.

McCartney hung in the kitchen over a built-in white-wood breakfast nook, but was clearly visible from the living room.  I used the nook as my office and a hand-me-down Apple IIC computer sat permanently on the table.  The kitchen was small and dated with 1950s sink, faucet and appliances, but I liked it.  It matched the McCartney record well.

As much as I liked my apartment, I actually spent very little time in it.  I remember watching the first Gulf War unfold with horror on that TV.  It wasn't the war itself that bothered me so.  I actually thought we should help Kuwait.  No, it was the endless propaganda surrounding it--that somehow by getting involved we were saving democracy, which as an institution, would collapse all over the world if we did not go to war.  Never mind that Kuwait wasn't a democracy.  I protested once at the university, and then went back to quietly watching the propaganda machines spew lies covered by the nightly news but not really questioned by the media.

Other than that, I don't remember being in the apartment much.  I was in El Paso to learn to write, and in my mind, that meant being on the streets, taking in life, even if it was only as an observer.  Although I had a car at the time, I seldom used it.  I walked everywhere, and I mean everywhere, especially in Juarez.  If I wasn't in class or at work, I was walking.  Then I'd come home late at night and write.  I didn't have a plan.  I wasn't creating anything in particular.  I was just observing and putting into text the best I could at the time what I'd observed.

Border Storm, June 28, 1991

 

The whole night is thick

and unreadable.

 

Trees are dust clouds,

Dust Clouds trees.

 

I wonder what my amigos do

when dunes attack their plywood huts

And grains race through the cracks

Like water under pressure?

I also took pictures, lots and lots of pictures, and video.  For a while at least, it seemed I was quite satisfied simply to become the transparent eyeball Emerson describes in Nature.  I wasn't always content with that role though.  Today, in looking through writing from that time period, I came across the following: 

I want love

and I want it now.

Where in the hell is she?

and where in the hell am I?

I must be in here somewhere

buried below the photographs

and lengthy paragraphs.

It's a hell of a life 

being a great American chronicler.

 * * * * *

As Marci and I continued up through Sunset Heights, I had to stop and take a picture of one home in particular.  It always drew my attention on my walks to campus.  Although there are multiple large homes in the neighborhood, this one was clearly special--not by accident, as is sometimes the case, but by design.  I started out my undergraduate studies as an architecture major, and I knew from first glance the home was significant.  An extensive gently-sloped cantilevered roof floated over heavy, soaring brick columns and an oriental-detailed frieze.  It turned out that it had once been the personal home of Henry C. Trost, the same architect who designed the Bassett Tower where Marci and I were currently staying.  Completed in 1909, it is a masterpiece.  After a couple of years of walking by stunned by the subtle beauty, I would coincidently became friends with the son of the owner.  I always secretly wished to be invited for a look inside, but that chance never came until this trip.  Robert had inherited his father's home and I finally got to see inside.   It did not disappoint, but I'll get to that later.

Technically, other than for a couple of months when I stayed with my friend George, I lived all four years in El Paso in Sunset Heights.  However, as Mesa Street is on the other side of the hill, facing away from Mexico and the sunset, although views were still spectacular, it never quite felt like I was still in that historic neighborhood known for its large mansions, views into Mexico, and famous residents such as Pancho Villa.  Rather, it felt like I lived adjacent to the neighborhood and could still easily venture into its magic.

Whereas in that first apartment I felt I was there in the center of it all.  Across the street was an empty lot.  Concrete steps led up to a rock outcropping covered with broken glass.  There must have been a house there at one time.  Sometimes, in my mind, I'm still standing there.  It's sunset.  The sky behind the Juarez Mountains is tinged tangerine.  The dusty hills of Fanja Del Rio are muted to a soft, gray-blue and speckled with the first few luminated lights of evening.  A thin horizontal cloud of smoke spreads out from a dump above the houses.  The smokestack of ASARCO is silhouetted against a reddening sky, and the river blazes back a golden reflection.  Directly below me, I-10 hums with fervent activity, white lights in one direction, red in the other, as a train rattles just beyond it, between the freeway and the river.  I stand amazed.  

Sometimes, after all these years, in my mind I find myself still standing there, taking it all in, wondering what it all means to me--this line between two nations.  I wonder how to get it all down into words.  I never quite figure it out, but I also never quite give up either.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 60. A Dog Barks, an Old Man Sings "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"

I still remember the day that launched me towards El Paso.  It was late afternoon.  I remember it being in the summer, but it could have been spring.  In Texas heat hits early.  I sat on a picnic bench near a pond at the apartment complex of one of my professors.  There was a weeping willow down by the water, and its leaves glistened in the late afternoon sunlight as its long stringy arms swayed in the warm breeze. 

His last name was Cohen.  I don't remember his first.  After I'd requested to see him, he asked me to drop by and talk about an assignment I'd written for his modern poetry class.  He'd given me a choice: redo it or fail the class.  I was hoping for a third option, and that is why I was there.

The class had been given an assignment to write a one page definition of modern poetry.  Instead, I'd written an eight-page fictional account that began like this:  

As an experiment in aesthetic, I hammered myself down to my hometown.  My goal was to understand effect, what makes grade grade--you know--the texture of a line lick-able.

In the exposition of the narrative, I (the protagonist) went to the library and dug up some quotes about modernism, including, "The world in which modern poetry grew up in was neither Christian nor moral; and poetry in our age has felt little able to rely on any structure of belief outside itself" (Hough).

Not willing to equate modern poetry as simply a mirror of the banality of life, I set off on an adventure to prove that modernism is "a way of seeing, a way of making words lick-able, touch-able".  I wondered, "What makes a word so hard you can kill with it?  What makes a word nibble so softly, it tickles you like cold cream on hot skin?"  And then I set off for my hometown where, in the dead of winter, I nailed myself to the gravel road that leads to the cemetery.  

From the eight-foot-tall plate-glass windows of my parents home, I watched the snow cake on the hills above.  I turned inside, anticipating my mother's reaction when I told here I was going to nail myself to Cemetery Road.  

 "What?  Why?  You'll get a cold.  No, you'll die of cold!"

Determined, I went ahead with my plan, riding an ATV over to the cemetery in the dead of winter:

Then, just before the city limits, where the ice-packed road ends and the salted, black one begins, at first grainy like pepper, then slick like obsidian, I stopped cold.  I got off, walked to the back of the ATV, it's cherry red metal blue, reflecting the winter sky.  I attempted to unlatch the black rubber straps on the glove box without taking off my gloves.  It didn't work.  My skin was exposed as I drew out a steel hammer, metallic blue in in the winter light, along with two large tent stakes and two leather bands with silver rings attached.

Next, I walked to the center of the road, my big black boots sounding like slowed-down jackhammers on the metal ice.  I crouched down, so as not to slide and break my back, and laid myself down on the frozen road, hammer in one hand, straps and tent stakes in the other.  I slid the glove on the left hand, wrapped it in the leather strap, and turning on my side, hammered the stake through the attached silver ring.  I decided one secure arm was enough for effect, put the hammer down, and relaxed.

Looking up, the sky was so gray it was blue, and so cold,  it seemed to crack.  Bits of glassy ice fell to the earth and pelted me in the face, scarring it hot.  A quotation from Dickinson came to mind:

"If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.  If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.  These are the only ways, I know it.  Is there any other way? (Dickinson).

I'm glad to say that I'm not that intense, and that after five minutes of being strapped to an ice sheet, I quickly decided I could sit by a fire and enjoy poetry that didn't make me "feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off".  But, I did learn that modern poetry, is for me, undefinable.  It just is.  Some words grab, some don't, and it's not the word itself, but the surroundings, the words that neighbor the word, and the relationship between them.  Beyond that, I can't define modernism.

Professor Cohen had written something like, "Very amusing and well-written; now do the assignment as assigned or fail the class."

I, so stubborn back then, sat, watching sunlight glaze a weeping willow as I waited to make my argument against redoing the assignment.

He came down the grassy hill wearing Bermuda shorts and a dark green t-shirt.  He had dark wavy hair, glasses, and a thick, well-trimmed mustache.  I normally notice things, not people, so I'm not sure why this memory is so vivid.  Perhaps some part of me knew my life was about to change. Perhaps without me knowing it, my mind was savoring this volta in my life.  It has remained the pivotal moment between yearning to be a writer and becoming one.

He sat down on the picnic table and we talked.

Basically, it came down to this.  He saw that it was his job was to teach me to write literary criticism well.  I, on the other hand, saw that it was my job to learn to be a writer, not a critic.  He said I was probably at the wrong school then.  

And then he did the most amazing thing.  He said, "Drop my class, and go chase your dream."  He even provided me a route forward, suggesting the writing program at the University of Texas at El Paso as my entry into that world.

And that was that.  From that moment forward, I was no longer a literature major.  I was a writer.  I was no longer living in Dallas (at least not mentally).  Instead, I was headed for El Paso, right across the river from the corner of Calle 16 de Septembre and Ugarte which had so awakened my senses on a trip to Juarez not long before.  Sitting there, it seemed so right.  

The other night I had a dream.   I don't remember all of it, but in it, Marci and I lived in an apartment complex.  Our dog barked each morning and woke me up.  It aggravated the hell out of me, but when I got up to let him outside, I'd hear the most amazing rendition of George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps".  I'd look outside, and there on a balcony across the road, in the blue light of early dawn, was this old man with his guitar serenading the sleeping city.  His voice was thin, crackly, almost broken.  But the emotion it carried was thick, black and full-bodied.  It was so serenely beautiful.  On mornings our dog didn't bark, I'd sleep in and miss it altogether.

The artist's job is to be awake, to be singing, no matter what the world is doing.  I knew that well when I roamed the streets and calles of El Paso and Juarez, Mexico.  I'm not sure I always know it now.  But with this book, I'm at least sliding the glass door open and walking out onto the balcony.

References

Dickension, Emily. Selected Letters. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.

 

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 59. To Touch Ground Again in a Place I Spent So Much Time as an Outsider Looking In

Plaza Hotel from San Jacinto Plaza, Downtown El Paso

Travel Date:  September 13, 2018

The road into El Paso this time was much less bedazzling.  We entered the valley around 3:00, not a spectacular time of the day as far as light goes.  We stopped at a rest area just east of Fabens, and I got out to stretch in an unwelcoming heat.  Texas this trip had been unusually green, even the desert areas, such as the Davis Mountains.  However, we'd crossed some magic line and were now in the drought-ravished West we'd left behind in Utah and Colorado.  The creosote bushes had thin, waxy leaves that seemed curled in on themselves.  I was hot, tired, and as excited as I was to see El Paso once again, part of me wanted to turn back and head towards the verdant, cicada-humming Hill Country.  All summer long we'd experienced excruciating drought and raging forest fires that created smoke filled skies.  I wasn't sure I wanted to leave the almost tropical green of Texas this year behind.  However, one thing you always do on vacation is move forward.  You have to.  There are set start and end dates, and on my road trips anyway, there's a lot of ground to cover.  Reluctantly, I got back into the car and we headed into the West, that part of the country I once bragged about so often.  I eagerly agreed with Jim Morrison's stupid rhyme:  "The West / is the best."   It's harder to say that now.  Climate change is so blatantly real in the West.  It's impossible to pretend things are as they once were.  In a place where distance once took on so much meaning--mountain ranges often clearly visible eighty to one hundred miles away--it is incredibly disheartening to view that same world through smokey, dusty skies in the summer and smog in the winter.  I think I almost prefer to be east of the Rockies now, where the environmental devastation isn't as routinely obvious. I stay where I'm at because I have land and trees, and I'm determined to do my best to make my inheritance support as much wildlife as possible in these times of shrinking natural habitat, even through my efforts feel painstakingly futile during the long, unnaturally hot summers.

This trip had been a great escape from being a caretaker of 90 acres.  Now, we'd entered drought again, and I had this feeling similar to returning home to a house full of disease.  It may bring sadness being there, but it's still home, filled with ones you love.  You accept the love and the sadness as one.  That is how it is living out West in these latter days.  Sorrow, love and loss all mixed together--as you cling to memories of alpine summer days in cool, green forests while in reality viewing acres and acres of drought-ravished, bark-beetle devastated spruce dying before your eyes.

I got back in the car, grudgingly accepting the new reality, and off we went to visit my past.

. . . . .

My mood picked up as we entered the city and passed sights once so familiar to me.  El Paso is an amazingly unique city even discounting its location across the boarder from Juarez, Mexico.  It was built at the south end of the Franklin Mountains, and as the city grew, it wrapped itself around both ends, so now there are two branches, like butterfly wings, spreading out from the southern tip of the range.  It's a lopsided butterfly to be sure, as the eastern sprawl is far more expansive, but it's a butterfly all the same.  I lived on the west side of the range while my friend George lived on the east.  I spent a lot of hours driving back and fourth along I-10 passing the same street names and sites we passed now:  George Dieter, Lee Trevino, Yarbrough, and Cielo Vista Mall.  I was amazed the mall still stood and looked very busy as malls most places are now empty shells ready to be demolished or already wiped out for shopping centers or high rise office complexes.  Little did I know I was flying past the soon-to-be memorial sight of a mass shooting created by the hateful, divisive rhetoric of our president.  I was just glad to see the mall still there because when you return home to a place you always desire it to be exactly as you left it, for it to match the nostalgic views in your mind.  So far, El Paso had that wonderful glow of yesteryear, and I was quite enjoying myself.

We found our hotel downtown, which was the delightful Aloft located in the renovated Bassett Tower, a historically significant building designed by the notable architect Henry Trost, whose work is often compared to that of Frank Lloyd Wright, although personally, I often find it to be superior.  We are normally Super 8 or Motel 6 travelers.  However, our downtown, sky high room in this trendy chain of the jet-set crowd was only $89, and as Motel 6 was almost as much, it seemed like a good idea to spend the extra $15 and lodge like those-who-matter rather than feel like the poor peons we normally happily settle for because in the big, grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter.  I would never willingly fork out good money for luxury, but if they are going to give it to me for almost the same price as poverty, then, of course, I'd have to be a fool to pass it by. 

After leaving the hotel and driving around, for some reason that I can't remember, I had to have internet to contact Bobby Byrd, a mentor of mine.  The one and only downside to staying at the Aloft is the valet parking, and so I didn't want to head back to the room.  After driving around downtown for a while and seeing that many of the everyday eating establishments, Burger King and the like, no longer existed, I drove over to the library to use the internet and after some difficulties with my laptop starting up, I got Bobby's number.  It would be a while before he and Lee could meet us, and so we had some time to kill.  No problem.  

I once knew downtown El Paso far better than the back of my hand.  I only lived a few blocks away, and I spent every night either in Juarez or here.  For a while I also worked downtown.  It was my home and it was good to be back.  We left the car at the library and walked down to San Jacinto Plaza where long ago I spent many, many hours just sitting in the park, watching the ever-changing light and shadow play with the old masonry buildings as I listened to the preachers predict the fiery end of times.  I'd watch the buses pull in and out around the edges of the plaza and people watch until I started to drift off, and then I'd get up and move to another part of the city to avoid getting pick-pocketed during my slumbers.  Why I never just sat and wrote, I don't know.  I've always been somewhat intimidated with writing about where I currently reside.  I'm afraid I'll get it wrong, bring dishonor to its inhabitants.  Time and distance seems to be a necessary ingredient.  It's not that I'm afraid of getting lynched for something I write or anything like that.  I'm not published enough to worry about such stuff.  No, I worry that in over trying to get down the essence of a place, I'll miss it altogether.  Place matters.  Culture matters.  Visitors and new arrivals see the community through stereotyped eyes.   It takes time not only in the community, but also away from the community, to honor a people and a place the way they should be.  Even then, I'm not sure it can be done well unless you are part of the particular culture you're covering.  At least that is my fear.  So, although I loved Juarez, I have written very little about it.  I'm afraid I'll get far too much wrong.  I also loved living on the Navajo Nation, but as I have the same fears, I've written so little about there also.  You see, being a Mormon, I know just how wrong outsiders looking in on a culture often get it even when they have the best of intentions.  It's just hard to write about something you didn't absorb through your pores growing up.  Hispanic America is best written by Hispanics and the Navajo Nation is best documented by Navajoes.  I don't know why I'm so drawn to places I can't really understand, but it has always been that way.  I have a feeling that if I ever write a book that matters, it will be about here, Dry Creek, this inheritance I know as well as I know my own soul, if not better.  But I'm not ready yet, and so for now I'll travel, and get down as best I can places that I don't really understand.

It felt good to walk the short distance from the library to the plaza, to touch ground again in a place I spent so much time as an outsider looking in on a world I couldn't begin to comprehend.