The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 77: An End and...

1.

Some memories are hard to write about because you want to get them right.  You don't want to misrepresent someone else, and you don't want to be misunderstood.  It can be a painful memory, but it doesn't have to be.  I've had very few traumatic experiences in my life, and the few that I have had, I haven't set out to write about.  Often, they had been all but forgotten.  Instead of intentionally recording them, they have crept up on me in the course of writing about something else, and once I noticed the pain breaking through the crusty soil, I was willing to follow it down until I discovered the root.  That is where the best writing often is--in discovering a buried hurt which longs for release.  Tears are shed, but it's wonderful to unexpectedly face your own fragility.  It's like standing at Glacier Point in Yosemite, being so small among great granite monoliths:  I am here, but very small among immensity, and isn't that amazing--to be aware of how frail I am, yet still thriving.

That seldom happens with me, although I don't shy away from the experience.  Rather, it's because I've had a fortunate life.  A few weeks ago in a writing workshop we were asked to write about metaphorical snakes, in other words, human vipers in each of our lives.  I wrote something.  I always do when given the opportunity, but I didn't write about human snakes.  I couldn't; I haven't had any real contact with that type of people.  So, instead, I said something like, I 've been hurt, sometimes deeply, but never by anyone who set out to harm me.  That's true.  No metaphorical snakes in my life.  The very few people who have hurt me were my friends and still are.  The only pain they ever caused me was by not loving me in the way I wanted them to love me at that time.  Yet, I never doubted their friendship, and still don't, so I only have good memories.

Yet, I'm reluctant to write about past loves.  I don't want to be misunderstood.  I don't want Marci to think I have some void I'm trying to fill now.  I also don't want the person I'm writing about to somehow think there are unresolved emotions that I need to work through.  Writing about my friend Andrea was like that.  I half-felt like I was betraying Marci in taking a couple of days to mentally once again drive down long, straight, gravel roads outside Denton, Texas with someone with whom I once desperately wanted as more than a friend.  Yet, I'm glad I did it.  This ultimately is a book of gratitude, and I would be disingenuous to skip over experiences which touched me deeply. 

I think I have a fairly undistorted view of life.  I lived in some pretty real neighborhoods in my twenties, heard the domestic violence through the walls, passed the homeless and prostitutes daily, spent some of my own nights trying to drink away deep loneliness, and dealt with my own addiction to pornography. I've always been aware that most of human history has been a story of war, bondage, death and disease, which continues into our times.  I'm also keenly aware of the environmental peril we are putting ourselves through even as I write this.  If I were to step outside my front door and look to the northeast right now, I would see a hillside covered in dead juniper, trees just recently killed by bark beetle.  The beetle are always there.  Long extended droughts, however, are new, and human-caused.  The trees can't handle both the beetles and us.  I worry about fire.  It seems almost inevitable.  Our forests are sick.  They can't handle the massive change we've imposed upon the climate through our addiction to fossil fuel.  The west is a vast funeral pyre to nations of dying trees. 

Even so, ultimately, I view life as beautiful.  I believe it's a designed event: a temporary experience to school ourselves in subject of ourselves so that we can be better throughout the eternities.  Although this wasn't always the case, I think now that even if I thought I were just a chance occurrence, a happenstance of billions of years of lucky chaotic connections and evolutionary adaptation, I would still be stunned to find out I'm here now to hear my dog snoring and the fish tank gurgling while I prepare to relive a memorable afternoon with my old friend Michi almost thirty years ago.  Isn't it amazing that most of us see, smell, hear, touch and taste, and most of all, that we are not only cognitively aware of it, but that we can replay experiences in our head years after they occurred? Or that we can imagine experiences which never occurred so vividly they not only become part of our history but the history of whole civilizations?  Take Pride and Prejudice, Their Eyes Were Watching God, or even Seinfeld.  That is so amazing--people who never actually existed become so real that they live on in the mind of not of just one person but entire civilizations.

In this light, to not go back an smile over a long conversation and good coffee with one once loved deeply seems like a crime.  We are here to give gratitude to those who have touched our lives.  Because I'm an insecure, jealous person, I don't like the idea of Marci thinking back on past loves.  I want to be the one and only to occupy her mind.  But it is important that we take in and are aware of this beautiful thing called life, that we enjoy our own personal, profound, little intricate niches that God has carved out for us in the grand cathedral of creation.

2.  Here, now, the oak outside my window spreads tight branches of clumpy, little spring leaves silhouetted against a silver-blue morning sky hosting streaks of pink-tinged clouds.  Equally vivid in my mind is the lightening sky east of El Paso, the lemony-tinge at the edge of  the blue-gray hulk of the Franklin Mountains slanting hard down into the valley like a whale returning to her watery depths.  I can see the edge of the great lit star on the mountain right above where the Rocky Mountains officially end.  I can see the city lights spread across the valley beyond.  I can see the plumes of smoke from the Chevron refinery lavender-blue before a silvery sky.  

I'm up early, standing on a fifth-floor balcony above Mesa Street.  I do this fairly often, although probably not often enough.  These moments of watching the city awaken amaze me.  I stand, holding my cup of coffee.  I'm chilled by the morning breeze, anxious to get this Saturday going.  I have a day planned with Michi, a day, which in my mind is to be our first date.  I have tried for this Saturday frequently, but she is always working.  Now it is here.

The morning breeze is crisp.  No, it's down right cold.  Too cold to continue standing here without a jacket.  I may be in the desert southwest, but it's only April.  I take one last look at the glow along the horizon, at the streaks of orange-edged clouds, knowing that in a moment, molten light will erupt over the low, jagged Hueco Mountains, knowing that within a few more minutes light will flood the entire valley, backlighting each and every silhouetted structure to the east with a golden glow along the edge.  Sparks of light will ignite and vanish instantly, only to reappear and disappear again and again, as traffic moves in and out behind the shadows of buildings.  The palm fronds in front of the cathedral will sway, glazed by the intense desert light.  

Yet, I go in.  It's cold, and we human beings seek escape from anything unpleasant, regardless of the reward that would be gained by staying put and experiencing the sting of existence.  It's just how we are made: to seek comfort over understanding.

3.  Last night I found out my brother-in-law Jeff filed for a divorce from Marci's sister Charlsia.  It bothered me more than I would have thought.  They live miles and miles away in Kansas, and we hardly ever see them, though we did visit on this trip we took in 2018 that I'm still writing about here.  Why it bothers me so, I'm not sure.  Perhaps somewhere deep down I know I was more damaged by my own parents' divorce than I realized.  

I think what really bothers me is that we humans get so many things wrong in this life.  By nature, we're always in fight or flight mode.  That biological response, though saving us from temporary pain, removes us from what matters most--deep involvement in life.  We're wired biologically only to preserve the self.  That human instinct left unidentified and unchallenged robs us from not only from fully experiencing life, but also from our own potential.  As I age, I become more and more aware we're not here simply to experience a biological response to life.  We're here also to experience a spiritual response to life.  That transcendence comes only through forgetting the self.  The lesson we're to learn here is I am therefore I am not.  Not that we don't exist.  Not that we don't matter as individuals.  No, not that all.  But that we are part of something so much greater than the sum of our individual parts.  My existence has meaning, but our existence together is what it is all about.  Happiness is found not through protecting the self, but rather by letting the self go.  The ego isolates us from creation; left to our own devices, we're consumed by it.  

I'm four.  Shadows move across the bottom of the tub.  No that’s not right.  Light moves across the bottom of the tub—shadows remain, weaving in and out of the light.  There is a window, I think, high and horizontal on a cracked plaster wall.  The window is frosted, light unfocused, yet focused enough to still allow this play of light and shadow across the tub.  I hear voices, metallic, yet warm, distant, perhaps from the apartment on the other side of the wall of the duplex ringing through the faucet.  I can’t hear what they have to say.  I’m probably too young to care.  To me, they sound like congregations of angels, remembrances of a time before I was.

In my twenties, I felt incredibly disconnected from life.  I felt this great void gnawing at me from inside. I'd lost contact with something that I'd felt so strongly as that four-year-old watching light and shadow move across the bottom of the tub.  I don't know if I heard voices from the house next door while in that tub and they reminded me of angels, or if I actually heard the angels themselves.  What I do know is that I was connecting with something transcendent--that I felt a connection to a love greater than anything I've experienced on earth.  I've since wondered if perhaps I slipped under the water and was drowning and the voices I heard were not from the pipe at all.  I have no idea if that's true or not.  I get glimpses of that moment, but nothing concrete enough to say, This is what happened.

As I was saying, in my twenties I felt this great void gnawing at me.  I interpreted the feeling that life felt fake as there is no afterlife and that life has no meaning.  It paralyzed me.  I couldn't finish college.  I sought escape through addictions.  I related to Hemingway deeply:  "Our Nada who art in Nada, nada be thy name".  

Biology is definitely part of our essence.  We are animals, products of evolution.  Fight or flight is part of who we are.  But the reason life once felt so false to me is that biology is only part of who we are.  I'm certain of this.  We are also spiritual beings.  That feeling we get of being acutely removed from life is a deep awareness that this is not our true home.  Spiritually speaking, we are off to college; we get homesick;  we want to return home.  Our day to day reality--the one we're supposed to be so entrenched in--doesn't seem real because a part of us remembers there being more.

This is just school.  Ego is what separates us not only from others but from creation.  People yearn for childhood not because of some lost innocence.  That is just the label we've given what we yearn to feel again.  I can't remember a time when I wasn't selfish and didn't make bad choices.  I've actually become a lot less selfish and make fewer bad choices with time, as do most.  Innocence is the wrong label for what we yearn to return to in childhood.  No, what I do remember from childhood is long periods of losing awareness of myself and just existing in a state of awe at everything around me,  that feeling of being the transparent eyeball that Emerson describes so eloquently in his essay Nature.  What people label as yearning for the innocence of childhood is really yearning for a time when they weren't so disconnected from the wonder of existence.  If we're not careful, life numbs us to the reality of I Am.  Ego is that great separator from the divine.  And yet the panic of the ego is so strong that only a few, like Gandhi, slip away from its great, grimy grip and touch a deeper is.

Divorce, I believe, is usually nothing more than a fight or flight response.  It's fleeing emotions too painful to handle--insecurity, numbness, boredom, whatever.  But it's a response to fear.  Escape. 

Escape is not what we are here for.  Living is.  Divorce is a deep betrayal of our purpose on earth--to lose ourselves in the service of others.  Family is that divine unit where we are forced into very close quarters with other egos, other wishes, other desires, so that we can truly learn to love and let go.  When that gets hard, we seek escape, and through that escape, miss out on the ultimate purpose of life.

That doesn't mean divorce never needs to happen.  We can only learn what we're ready to learn, but divorce is ugly for a reason.  It's a betrayal not only of the family who gets left behind; it's also self-betrayal of the one doing the leaving.  It's dropping out of college without obtaining that masters degree you were born to obtain.  Life goes on, but it isn't the same.  Deep wounds and permanent scars cannot be avoided when we flee from the obligations of our existence.  We are here to push through hard stuff.  That's where all the growth occurs.  The rest is just distractions.  Divorce is betrayal not only of loved ones, but ultimately, betrayal of love itself.  It cannot have anything other than deep consequences for everyone involved.  

Like so many, I am a child of divorce, a divorce which turned out well for all parties: two marriages that were ultimately better than the ones they grew out of and children (including step and half-siblings) who get along and care for each other.  Yet, buried beneath all that is the pain of a failed union.  

A Train following a great, gentle bend in a wide valley of golden grain suddenly goes off the tracks.  Or so it seems, Suddenly.  Perhaps it was headed towards that conclusion of crunch and carnage before it left the station, driven by egos that would not bend with the path.  We scramble out of the wreckage and wander off to find new lives, even the little ones, not knowing which way to go, which parent to follow.  One so small not knowing what in the hell just went wrong, baffled by an event beyond his capacity to measure the significance.  

This is the story of the modern world, the story of us collectively.  We live it, we repeat it, and we wonder Why are our children so damaged?  

I can imagine a culture where the second child is served up and eaten on his/her fifth birthday.  In such a culture, somehow everyone (except the second child in each family) would adapt and carry on.  They'd have to.  It would be the only realistic outcome.  We are evolutionarily built to adapt to whatever horrific situation we are poured into.  Prevalence of a phenomenon doesn't make it benign.  Even in a war zone, the human spirit carries on.  That doesn't mean humanity flourishes best under the bombardment of tanks and torpedoes.

Some marriages must end.  Most should not.  Our ego-driven cultures are eating us alive.  Divorce is only one small symptom of a perverse system driven by the glorification and preservation of the ego, a system which we don't recognize as devastating to the human spirit because like the characters born into a world where every family eats their second child, we assume that because its prevalent, it's natural and right.   

4.  

I have this memory of my friend Michi sitting in golden light in a booth at Village Inn in El Paso, Texas:  

She is squinting, looking out on a world that dazzles her, her hand raised, as if saluting, to shield her blue eyes from a reality outside too intense to take on directly.  Normally, her eyes are piercingly sharp and drill into you with deep, unspoken questions.  But right now, watery and squinted, they feel frail, paper-thin, translucent and unguarded.  Although we've been sitting here all afternoon talking, I can tell at this moment, I am gone.  I shouldn't even be sitting here.  It's time to get up and leave.  I don't know if she'll get up also to follow.  I don't know if she'll pull out a notebook and start to write.  I don't know if she'll just sit here and continue to gaze.  I'm not sure she's even aware she has slipped away from me after a day of deep conversation.  But I get it.  I know that time.  I know that light.  My life has been dedicated to follow it, wherever it leads me.  It's why I'm here in El Paso in the first place.  I get up and say my goodbyes.

That day was perfect.  It lives on alongside a few other perfect days.  What made it perfect was the ease I felt sitting across from another person who I liked very much--just talking, dreaming and scheming about our futures.  I don't remember everything that we said.  I remember Michi said something about how she wished our generation had some cause to rally around like the Vietnam War.  I have since thought how she got that wish.  There are definitely causes to crusade. There is so much going wrong in the world currently, it's hard to even focus on where we need to help, let alone how we need to help.  What's more important?--to save our crumbling democracy, our dying planet, or just any notion of objective truth?  How does a writer even help in a country where half the population doesn't believe in facts, and the other half is dead to any whisperings from the divine?  How does a writer make his or her mark in a world where everyone has access to the media--both as readers and writers--but How to put on your makeup or The perfect keto shopping spree attracts more attention than something as big as the Great Salt Lake or the Louisiana coastline vanishing right before our eyes.  And then there is the realization for my generation that we are old and that all we really want to do is retire.  Our time to make our mark on the world is for all practical purposes over.  The world that is literally burning before our eyes is the world we either helped create or didn't put enough energy into changing for the better.  If there is a way out, it will not be through us, but through our children and grandchildren.  Hopefully we have given them the tools to tackle a reality too strong for us to handle.

Anyway, that day with Michi stands out almost in singularity, a rare moment of ease around another person.  A moment of just being, not unlike what we mistakenly label as the innocence of childhood, not unlike what I felt watching light and shadow and water while hearing the voice of angels through the veil.

Perhaps, that is what this book is ultimately about.

Perhaps, writing this book was an attempt to do the impossible:  recover time.  It's not an attempt to capture the time spent living though--  No, not those magic moments, like that afternoon with Michi; or similar moments with my friends in Dallas and my brother; or the countless, quiet unspoken moments with Marci and our boys since then.  No, those moments stand strong.  They are solid, eternal, real.  No need to recover them.

No, it's the lost time that I now realize I sought here to recover.  All that I lost because of a divorce I was too young to remember--the life I never got to live because I was always protecting myself from hurt from the loss of a father who never gave up on me, just his marriage.  But, as a toddler, one can't sort the two out.  One can't figure out why a dad once there is there no longer.  There is a rip in the soul as gravity pulls an enormous part of you away out into space to follow your father.

For years some unknown part of me floated out there beyond my reach, cut off and crisp in eternal light, yet unconnected, a rock suspended above the earth it belongs to.

There’s a little black spot on the sun today
(That’s my soul up there)
It’s the same old thing as yesterday
(That’s my soul up there)
There’s a black hat caught in a high tree top
(That’s my soul up there)

I didn't know what the Texas trip would mean to me when we set out for Green River, Utah in September of 2018.  I didn't know where writing this book would take me when I sat down to write that first blog post upon our return from our thirteen-day trip to and through a state that is so much a part of who I ultimately am.

But now I do.  Naming has power.  I needed to name a hurt I didn't know I had so that I could move on.  Although the road goes on forever, this particular journey is through.  The energy that pushed my pen forward has run its course.  There is much I never covered.  I had planned on writing more about my friend Lucia, about one lovely night across the border and a magical journey along the edges of Lake Superior way, way up in Minnesota.  I had planned on writing about lonely days in all but empty topless bars and driving a 1981 Datsun Maxima wildly through the desert while listening to U2's Zooropa.   I'd planned on writing about getting drunk Halloween night at a party with Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top and refusing to believe it was him because it was Halloween and people show up to parties in costume.  (In the version I tell, I repeatedly pull his beard, saying, "That ain't real; this is a costume!") I planned on writing about bailing out of a cab in Juarez, Mexico because I had spent my last dime catching a bus back from Casa Grande.  All of those would make great stories, but that is not what a book is.  A book is about discovery, about finding out what you needed but didn't know you were looking for.  Books fill a need in others only by filling a need in the author.  Good books are not planned, they are created.

I needed to name that I regret of not being more connected to life.  I had my friends in Texas--very good friends.  I had my places in Texas--sacred places, at least to me.  But I always felt so damn disconnected.  I hated God and I hated myself because of an isolation I didn't understand.  I probably still don't.  Perhaps I never will.  But, at least it's named.  

Dad, when you left me, you left me un-whole.  That is not unique.  It's profoundly common.  Fathers do it all of the time.  But, for me it meant living for years with a shyness I didn't understand.  

Texas is where the void grew wide enough I had to construct ladders and set them across the gulf.  Those ladders--the art, the music, the poems, the long drives, the yearning to be complete--ultimately became who I am.

All I am is because of you: poet, writer, dreamer, husband, father. All I am not is because of you:  socially at ease, driven, successful.  For the first time, I'm thankful for all of it.

I'm also grateful Texas gave me the space and distance to find not only myself, but also my way home again.  

It was a good long journey.  Both the thirteen day road trip and the eleven years I lived there.  Many fine sights, many fine people.  Mostly though--just heat and sky and a highway home--the world the way I like it.

References

Police, The. "King of Pain." Synchronicity. By Sting. 1983.

 

    

  

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 76: Sell-Outs Literary Magazine

Front Cover, Sell-Outs Literary Magazine,

Vol 2, Issue 1, 1993

1.  

Next to where our home at Dry Creek now sits are the remains of the old farm.  Not much is left of it.  The hay barn is gone.  The cattle stanchions are gone.  The shed and outhouse are gone.  The corrugated metal grain silo is gone.  The chicken coop is gone.  There is a strip of concrete I cling to that runs along the edge of where the great expanse of the hay barn once was.  I keep planning a garden path there, a memorial garden of sorts.  These losses, and the loss of the old green John Deer combine that sat in the field--they are the only real complaints I have against my stepfather and mother.  My parents should have let the old farm stand until it would stand no more.  Not bad, I guess, when not keeping up the old farm is the most resentment a child can cling to against his parents.  Clearly, I have been blessed.  I should just let it go.  Perhaps, I have.  

Still, when I moved back, I was not willing to lose anymore of the old barnyard than had already been lost.  So, when we built our house, I was determined the last farm remnant, the pig shed, would stay.  The new road to our home, however, created a problem.  It opened up the view into the lean-to shed.  We'd always used it as a dry place to stash whatever we didn't know what to do with but didn't want to throw away.  Unless one ventured back into the weeded remains of the farm, the mess was dry and out of sight. Now all those piles were in plain view as one circled the barn to approach our new home.  

So, one warm day in the early summer, I went out to clean things up.  There were old crates and old canning jars, some still filled with rotten fruit.  There were boards and tables and tires.  I happily went through all of this.  However, there were a couple of boxes I dreaded, reminders of old sin.  I knew they were there, so it was no surprise.  I just didn't want to be confronted by them.  They were boxes of envelopes.  Submissions.  Poems, stories, photographs, even uncashed checks.  They were the remnants of Sell-Outs Literary Magazine.

I should have went through them.  I now wish I did.  With permission, I could include some of the work here, as well as send out some very late apologies to writers and poets who'd put their trust in me and mailed me not only their checks, but their hopes and dreams.  Good or bad, what a writer craves most is an audience--someone else to hear the music and nuances the same as what was in his/her head at that moment of creation.  I'd made a covenant to read their words, and if I liked what I saw and heard, to do my best to give them that space to let their words take on some little slice of the world and astound the eyes and ears of others.

I had broken that covenant.  Twenty-something years later, here were their submissions in a couple of open boxes covered in dust and mice urine in an open-faced lean-to pig shed.  I'm sure many of the contributors had just assumed they'd been hooked by some scam, especially the ones whose checks I'd cashed long ago and never sent out a notice of acceptance or rejection.

2.  

It wasn't a scam though.  George and I had gotten off to a good start, and I intended to go big.  If I remember right, the magazine was originally George's idea.  After all, he was the one who owned a printing company.  He had the means of production.  I think for him it was more of a technical challenge.  Could he produce a quality magazine in an establishment that was designed primarily for printing labels?  George loved to tinker, and he was very good at it.  His company could get the same results as other companies with far inferior equipment, which meant at a very competitive cost.  The ability to print a magazine on his current equipment opened up new opportunities.   Plus, he just loved the challenge.  

However, I was the one who really grabbed onto the idea.  In my mind, Sell-Outs Literary Magazine would be what I would be doing for the rest of my life.  I put my heart and soul into it, put aside my shyness, and went after well-known regional writers, and in the second volume, opened it up to writers nationally.  For the third volume, I had my sights set internationally.  To go along with our theme of selling-out, we even had t-shirts created.  I even dreamed of creating Sell-Outs Literary Soda.  It would have the logo and required ingredients and nutrition information on the front label.  On the back would be a poem.  A pop and a poem.

I don't think I realized this at the time--we were just moving forward intuitively--but I think I was taking my cues from Elton John.  Thanks to my brother, I'd been listening to Elton John seriously since I was eight or nine.  There are at least two sides to Elton John and Bernie Taupin--the flashy, pop icons and the deep, serious bohemian song writers.  The pop image allowed them to hook teens on classical, blues and jazz music, and astonishingly good lyrics, poetry really, that teens wouldn't naturally be drawn too.  I know that wasn't the intent.  The intent was for Elton John to become big.  But the metaphor allowed for the pop image and the artistic integrity to live side-by-side.  Yet, I don't think it was a totally crafted thing.  Both Elton John and Bernie Taupin loved pop culture, especially TV and movie stars.  They also loved jazz, blues and classical music.  Reginald Kenneth Dwight easily took on the character of Elton John.  Bernie easily immersed himself into the mythical world of the silver screen.  Similarly, George and I wanted to expand out the world of serious literature to an audience who wouldn't normally be interested in such works by creating a flashy magazine, that in a sense, was a fictional magazine, which in the myth was one comprised of the work of writer's who'd given up on their ideals and sold out for money.  In reality, it was comprised primarily of the work of writers who could only dream of having such an option.

I laugh at it now, thinking back.  First off, because we were just undergraduate students with very few writing classes under our belt.  Who were we to think we knew what serious literature is in the first place?  Who am I now?  To be a writer is to live in a world of suspension of belief.  Based on your day job, nobody believes you have the talent to make it at all.  Everyone plans on writing that novel someday, even if they have never actually read one.  They just assume you are the same.  Half the time you believe them--that is, when you're not writing.  However, when you write, you know you've got what it takes.  So, you live a life of fantasy.  You drudge your way through the visible, practical life, and then write like the whole world is tuned into what you have to say.  You have to do this, or your words would never actually make it to the page.  Some, of course, do end up with stardom, or the writer's next best thing--a series of published books.  But all serious writers, published or not, hear the greatness in their words and imagine a world where their work matters, or they'd simply give up and die as miserable, loathing creatures who hate the world and everyone in it.  It's either dream or die.

Sell-Outs, even with all its very real poems and stories inside, was a fictional world.  It was Madonna.  What would it be like to be lucky enough as a writer to even get the opportunity to sell-out your ideals for fame and fortune?  That was the fiction.  What writer gets that choice?  Oh so few.  So the title was meant to be ironic.  An indictment on how little America cares for the arts.  But also embracing that.  Get over yourself and just write.

My own bio as an example of our format.

It seemed to work.  By our second issue, we were receiving three to nine envelopes crammed with submissions each day.  It was getting very difficult keep up with all of the reading, especially as I began to drink more and more.  Towards the end, we even started pulling in $200 to $300 a month in magazine sales and contest fees, which isn't bad for such a young enterprise by two undergraduate students who didn't have a clue about what they were doing.  The time was right, and I think if we'd kept going, it would have lasted.  The momentum was there. I just wasn't in a place where I could follow it.  

Lloyd's bio and artwork as an example 

of our presentation of the visual arts

Perhaps, the introduction best captures the mood and tone of the enterprise:

About our format.  We've received strong views about it from two camps.  The first camp doesn't really have an argument, just a strong enthusiasm that boils down to this:  "God it looks great, and I got so interested in the biographies, I had to read the literature too."  Of course, since most of our letters come from contributors, writers, men and women of letters, kneelers before Dostoevsky, Eliot and Pound, they're not worded just that way, but there is an open, honest love of the photograph and biography.  Who is the person who made this?  One contributor was even honest enough to say, "It's the first magazine I've read all the way through."  She got even bolder:  "Usually I only read my own work."

Isn't there something wrong with this?  Shouldn't a literary magazine be about the writing rather than celebrating the writer?   The second camp thinks so.  Andrei Codrescu could be their spokesperson.  In his introduction to Up Late:  American Poetry Since 1970, Codrescu takes on academics for taking themselves too seriously.  He damns American Poetry Review, saying, "every poet, big or small, whether represented by one or twenty poems, has his or her photograph above the poems."  Then he hits hard:  "All issues have ceased.  In their place we have the photograph, the grant and the degree."

Wow!  I jumped back.  Was Sell-Outs guilty of this?  I didn't eat for a day or so.  Then it hit me, "Shit, no."  Hell, I've never even read American Poetry Review.  And I just learned the second generation of gods--Robert Lowell to Robert Bly--a year ago.  Now, I was onto Codrescu and his anthology of outsiders, which by the way, is read in the universities.  And frankly, it's just another "ism".  If anyone is an outsider, it's me.  And Lloyd and George too.  Lloyd and I come from a family who basically doesn't read.  And Popular Mechanics is what fills the bookcase at George's parents' home.  I learned to write listening to John Lennon.  That's not knocking education.  I love it.  Eat as many books as I can stomach.  But who is taking literature too seriously?  In the end Andre Codrescu is A. Poulin Jr. (Contemporary American Poetry).  Literature is a sacred thing to be guarded, kept clean.

I think a good poem is a good poem, on fine parchment or on the bathroom wall.  If the photos and bios get someone, anyone, to read even one page of work, we've done our job.  Poets and writers are the scum of America.  We work without pay.  Our parents wonder, "Where did we go wrong?"  For those of us who don't become professors, Sell-Outs provides a format that says, "Hey, Look Mom, I'm important; I've got my picture in this book; I'm more than just a burger flipper."

In the end, anyone doing anything, has got to take the advise of Frank O'Hara: "You just go on your nerve.  If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, 'Give it up!  I was a track star for Mineola Prep'".  And so, fans and critics alike, here's your copy of Sell-Outs, hot off the press.  Stick a fork in it.  Turn it over.  It's done.

3.

Standing in the pig shed that day staring over two big apple boxes covered in dust and mice urine and busting at the seems with old unopened submissions was like finding the corpse of a loved one in a dream and looking closer and realizing the corpse was me.

It was an admission of failure, of walking away from something so important because at the time I didn't have what it took to carry on.  I didn't realize it that day, but I think I do now.  I think I felt something similar to how my real dad felt when he looked at us, his kids.  I had always thought he felt I didn't live up to his expectations.  I realize now that nothing could be further from the truth.  No, I was a reminder that he couldn't live up to his expectations.  His love for me may have came without expectations, but his love for himself did not.  He wasn't disappointed me; he was disappointed in himself.  And because he never got over it, he could never fully accept me.  I was a dirty apple box filled with uncompleted work covered in rat urine, along with my siblings, a reminder of what he left behind because he wasn't up to doing hard things.  I imagine that was especially hard on him as he himself came from a broken home and once promised my mother that his children would never have to go through what he went through.

That day staring down at the remains of Sell-Outs Literary Magazine I was no more courageous than my father.  Instead of digging through the pile, and writing an apology, one by one, to all the writers whose work and submission fees disappeared with no explanation, I simply hauled them off to the dump.  I was too young to remember it, but the story goes, Dad did the same with us.  He hauled us to my grandmother's, his mom's, told a few lies, and then was gone.

I wish I'd been in a place to not give up on my magazine.  I loved it, believed in it, as I did my own writing.  I couldn't stand any reminder of my defeat.  So, first I hauled it to a pig shed and then, finally, to the dump.

If only divorced parents could honestly and successfully communicate one thing to their spouse and kids, there would be so many less broken people in this word:  This isn't about you.  It's about me.  I wasn't strong enough to follow through with what it took to be your husband, your parent.  I'm sorry.  Please forgive me.

When those words don't come, we just stand there in the wind wondering why we don't have what it takes to follow through with our own dreams, whatever they be.

I forgive you Dad.  Let's both move on.

Back Cover, Sell-Outs Literary Magazine,

Vol 2, Issue 1, 1993

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 75: The Eternal Now in a Bar in Las Cruces, New Mexico

Although it's been twenty-seven years, I believe it was every Thursday night that I experienced something akin the to eternal now.  Moments so perfect, so right, they linger on still, every once in a while.  Nights of methodical words, things said slow and right.  We usually took the back road through the pecan orchards that trail northward along the Rio Grande.  Sometimes it was just my brother and I; sometimes it was just George and I; usually, it was all three of us.  In the winter, it would be dark.  Outside the window, where the orchards closed in tight against the road, lines of bony-armed soldiers would file in from the black void towards the bright alien light, reaching upward towards a star-studded night in Pegan prayers to powers long forgotten.  At least that's how it seemed leaving the lights of El Paso in the rear-view mirror, heading into those long orchards.  Compared to many other places, I'm sure the light pollution was still quite substantial as the city didn't so much stop as dribble off.

In the summer, the sun would be at a great slant, intense liquid orange pouring through the perfectly straight rows of orchards in molten bars flung across the road, now and then igniting a white adobe facade of a house or store blindingly bright beside the roadside. 

In the fall and spring, yellow-tinted methane gas from nearby industrial dairies would ooze through the orchards making the landscape resemble the fields of France during the Great War.  I half-expected to come across a gutted cathedral, or a trench littered with twisted, partial corpses.

Yet, even on those cold fall and spring evenings when pollution hung low and heavy as the rusted husk of an old automobile, I loved that drive.  There was enough of a rural feel to recall my rural roots.  More importantly, on the other side, was a place I could hear the rhythms and sounds of others as well as refine my own voice.  A mic is sacred space for one working with words.  A piece never fully comes into being on the page.  The print is just the score.  A reading though, well that's picking up an instrument and translating scribble into something oh so fine.

It was a small bar in a very pedestrian place, a Holiday Inn if I remember right, visually soulless, very corporate--a place for weary travelers too tired to seek out any real night life.  Yet, I loved that place.   I still remember some of the readers, even the sounds of their voices, and how they played their instruments--where and how they paused, where and how they proceeded.  Each voice different.

I even remember some of their names:  Joe Somoza, Donna Snyder, Katie McLane.  

Joe read poems slow and even, often with surprising, lightly humorous twists at the end.  He would run his finger through his gray beard and peer out into the audience with intense eyes as he carefully moved forward one line at a time with long pauses in between each carefully crafted image.

Donna was working on a novel then.  Working class.  One could use the words "white trash" except that would be a complete lie.  That bombed-out-muffler Ford Pinto and single-wide trailer reality was definitely there.  The humor one must have to survive day after day, month after month, year after year, of getting nowhere was clearly there.  But so was human dignity,  royalty leaking out into the eternal night through an open screen door of a single-wide trailer along a curbless paved road among magnolia trees as big and blooming as small-town dreams before being dashed by year after year of time-clock reality.

Then there was Katy.  Short poems.  Funny as hell.  Sometimes print didn't do them justice.  But orally, bust-a-gut sweetness poured out about a life of pushing pharmaceuticals across the drugstore counter.  The things we all think dealing with customers (or vise-versa) but never have the courage to say aloud.

In between there'd be rum and coke.  The waitress, I don't remember her name, but I remember she always made sure I got both the cherry and the lime because that's how I liked it.  I appreciated that.

Not everything was pure poetry.  At least not the verbal type.  There was a girl who liked to read in a loose summer dress and no shoes.  George liked how she crossed here feet as she read, leaning on the podium for support.  I wasn't sure about her words, but I had to agree her presentation was marvelous.

She came with a friend who was short, had short black hair and coal-black eyes intense as fire.  I thought as a writer she had great potential, but I also knew I probably had no objectivity at all.  She looked like she could be that young revolutionary spitfire I was looking for.  If a woman didn't quite fit all my dreams, I would just rewrite her until she came close.  It wasn't about discovering who they were; it was more about dreaming who I could be.

Maybe that's all right.  Youth is blinded by forward thinking--scheming, dreaming, yearning for who we might become.  In the process, there is a lot of pain, a lot of missing out on who and what we should really be seeking instead.  But who would have it any other way?

Not I.

Once we come to a standstill, and our dreams fall off, leaving us naked and alone for real, we take a look around and decide what we really need instead.

Yet all that dreaming and all that scheming comes back like gentle wind in the eternal now.

Take me back.

    

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 74: The Village Idiot, Part II

1.

For some reason, I don't remember the night that I decided to save Robert from homelessness.  It seems reasonable that I should remember the moment of  that simultaneously egotistical and generous act.  I remember so many vignettes from my life in El Paso in extraordinary detail, including rather mundane scenes, like eating breakfast at the lunch counter in the old Kress department store.  For instance, I hated that they didn't have bottles of catsup for your eggs.  Only in El Paso would such a standard of American cuisine be left out.  Instead, they had salsa, lots and lots of choices of salsa.  Although I loved then, and still love now, Mexican food, it seemed then, as it does now, that the only patriotic way to eat the standard American breakfast of two slices of bacon, two eggs, hash-browns and toast is to smother the eggs and potatoes with catsup, Heinz Ketchup, that is, if at all possible.  I wanted my Mexican food spicy and my American food as bland as a drive through Kansas.  There was no place in El Paso where I could eat as if I lived in the upper 48, and although I loved the sound of clanking dishes and random conversations I overheard while I sat at that counter, watching steam rise out of big pots of caldo tlalpeno (a chicken soup with fresh green beans, big chunks of potato and whole cobs of corn floating around in it), breakfast without catsup made me homesick and lonely.

Thousands of such details combine to create the movie El Paso running in my head.  So, it is strange that I don't remember the night I decided to rescue Robert.  I assume it was cold and rainy.  I identify with the scene in The Blind Side when they first pick up Big Mike.  Get rid of the suburbs, the wealth and the large house, and it was probably pretty much the same.

Robert didn't talk though.  That must have created some difficulty at first.  He did, however, understand English.  Quite well, I would later learn when I gave him my Alice Cooper Goes to Hell cassette to go in the Walkman I bought for him.  I could tell he enjoyed the lyrics when he put on the headphones and started laughing a big, giant, missing-tooth grin.  That was the next day, which I remember better.

I know I told him to shower first thing.  I would have had to.  There would have been no choice.  He slept on the living room floor.  I always used the walk-in closet of my studio apartment as my bedroom anyway.  I know I didn't sleep well.  Letting a homeless man spend the night is not the safest choice one can make, which is why I assume it was cold and rainy.  Something pulled my heartstrings more than usual.  Vagrants were part of my neighborhood, part of my life.  I didn't go around trying to rescue everyone that I saw.  I was as numbed to their humanity by the abundance of human suffering as anyone else.  I tried to keep change in my pants to help out, but other than that, I walked on by.

But Robert was different.  I'm not sure why.

2.  The next day, I took him to go shopping.  We went to the mall, Sunland Park Mall, on the west side.  I remember that.  I also remember I wasn't sure how I could cover everything.  It turns out, I couldn't.  Later, I had to call my parents and ask them to cover a few checks, but at the time I didn't worry about that.  I just took him shopping.  We bought two pairs of pants, two shirts, underwear, a coat, and something akin to a Sony Walkman.  

That evening I took him to the homeless shelter.  I remember it was someplace down by the river, right along the border.  I don't remember what it looked like.  I remember the people were not overly friendly.  I thought they should be.  When I was in high school I volunteered for a few weeks at a shelter in Dallas.  They weren't overly friendly either.  They didn't want me working while I was there.  They said the homeless people needed to learn to take care of themselves.  I got chastised for picking up a broom.  I wasn't allowed to volunteer to do things at a place I was a volunteer.  They treated the discarded as if they were discarded.  I felt sick to find out this place was no different.  I'm no sociologist but it doesn't seem like the best way to bring a broken person up is to constantly really remind them that they are really down.  It's bullshit.  

I left Robert there anyway.  What else could I do?  I liked my privacy too much to give it up for another human being, and a stranger at that.

3.  A couple of days later, Robert was out on the street again.  At first, clean and in the new clothes I bought him.  I was angry at the shelter; I was angry at myself; I was angry at Robert.  I asked him why he left the shelter.  He didn't tell me.  He showed me that he still had his Walkman; he opened it up, showed me the tape, Alice Cooper Goes to Hell, and smiled that toothless grin and then walked off.

Each day I saw him, his clothes were a little less clean.  One day, his Walkman was gone.  Any music, other than what was in his head, had come to a stop.  Outwardly, my actions had been futile.  I hadn't changed a thing.

Yet, on cold nights, when it rained, he no longer sat in the parking lot outside my work, drawing circles on the pavement with a stick.  Instead, he stood under the awning, and when the wind was blowing rain against the window, he would even come in.  I took some flack for that.  From customers.  From my boss, even though she was about as kind as anyone could be.  But I wouldn't budge.  I'd made a friend.  He seldom talked, and when he did, it was three word sentences spoken very softly.  He seldom requested anything.  He just came in to get out of the cold now and then.  Most nights he would just stand outside and wave through the window, the image of him walking around in a long trench coat, thick shaggy black hair blowing in the wind, bleeding in with the reflection of the neat copy machines inside and the passing lights of the traffic and the night.  Occasionally, I'd buy him a Subway sandwich from next door or a burger from up the block.

Then, one day, he was gone.  A hole was left.  The music had stopped.  I don't know how much I changed his life.  I do know how much he changed mine.  Alice Cooper Goes to Hell became a hymnbook of sorts to the man who said so little and yet said so much.

Break a heart of stone, open it up, don't you leave it alone.

 

  

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 73: After Hours

The Blue Door Bar, our family hangout here at Dry Creek

It was late when we left Bobby and Lee's place.  Marci and I were tired.  I wanted to avoid I-10, so we took Piedras down under the interstate and over the railroad tracks to Texas Ave.  The city had that eerie late-night vacant look that I've always loved.  Recently, I painted a forgery of Night Hawks on my shed, and many years ago, when the boys were young, I turned the shed into the family bar with neon lights inside.  We'd go out on warm, summer nights, make milkshakes and watch movies in our own little hole-in-the wall establishment.  When we have company, I still turn on those lights, and when I'm out and about the property, I see a blue glow emitted from the large plate glass window through slatted metallic blinds.  Even here, at Dry Creek, the shed not much more than a stone's throw from the dark wooded creek-bottoms, coyotes yapping from ridges on the other side, the Milky Way spiraling overhead, town a couple city blocks west, I couldn't quite leave those empty urban streets behind.  I had to recreate such a scene in my own very rural yard.  

My love affair with late-night diners and bars on empty avenues half-lit on lonely nights began when I was in college.  I'd drive the old highway between Arlington and Dallas, Texas 180, which was dotted with scattered independent diners that had been built before the Dallas-Ft. Worth Turnpike was completed in 1957.  How those establishments hung on all those years, I'm not sure, and some didn't, but there were still more than a few open late into the evening.  They all served the same food, indistinguishable but descent, and within my budget.  Chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes was the norm.  I'd sit in one particular diner on Division late at night on a regular basis, reading books and writing poems, imagining words would get me somewhere in life.  On Friday nights, I'd take Texas180 into Dallas and stop at a different diner each time.  Same food.  Same drip of the coffee maker.  Same smell of burnt coffee.  Same fluorescent lights.  Same window looking out on the night, bleeding reflections of the inside world with the outside city lights.  It was my peace, my stillness, and also my loneliness.  In such places I touched the abyss.  I found that somehow reassuring, like looking up and seeing a moon hardly-ever-walked-on, stone white and steady in the night.

In El Paso I'd walk down Mesa Street at 5:00 a.m. after working graveyards at All Night Rapid Fire Copies.  The street would be almost empty, parallel lines of street lights descending down the hill past the lit-up red brick cathedral to the skyline of downtown, Juarez blinking magnificently in the background.  There'd be the occasional passing car, and a couple of drag-queen prostitutes hanging out on the corner by my apartment building.  They'd say "Hi" in their shockingly deep, smoker voices as I passed them to enter an old brick building right out of a film-noir movie, complete with lobby of stained casino carpet and a brass-doored elevator (which didn't work).  I'd climb up five flights of stairs to an apartment that looked out on that same city, only from above.  The sky would be turning pink above the Franklin mountains, the waking birds beginning to rattle the morning with their chaotic song, when I'd climb into bed just as the freeway and Mesa street began their daily drone.

Urban nights have always enchanted me.  So much so, in my imagination, I have lived them across the centuries.  

Blue in a Baroque World

Through some worm hole
there is a cobblestone lane
lined with oil lamps
and pocked with rain.

Galaxies of light unfold
in ripples spreading out
in gathered darkness
puddled at the bottom
of a high hill.

The ragged man
with the blue glow
hears a violin in his soul
cut a coarse chord
that says I'm so damn tired

of this. It isn't his loneliness though
he knows as well
as high halls
and crystal chandeliers.

He'd like to pound a harpsichord
until it squeals like a pig. For
some reason he can't explain
he knows traces of God
puddle in the mire

at the bottom of the high hill
where a long tide pushes in

to fill the mud flats
obsidian pocked
by cold hard rain.

It was good to be driving down an empty Texas Ave late at night to our hotel.  It was good to enter a marble-floored entry and stand before a brass-doored elevator and rise to a room that looked out on that same lonely urban night from above.  I sat there for a few moments just looking out on the streets I once roamed late into the night, after hours.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 72: The Village Idiot, Part I

Although I'm not proud of many of the daily choices that I made in El Paso, I'm deeply proud of one.  I reached out to a homeless man, Robert.  I'm reluctant to use the title "The Village Idiot" for this post because of idiot's current meaning, "stupid."  However, originally idiot meant a "private person".  I use it that way here, as does Van Morrison, in his song "The Village Idiot".  The song honors someone like Robert, which is my intension here, and so, despite its common meaning, it is the perfect title.

I first saw Robert sitting on the curb outside the copying service I worked at on north Mesa Street, which I'll call All Night Rapid Fire Copies.  I left work, and there he was sitting on the curb, bent over, long black hair, dangling over his face, almost touching the wet pavement at his feet.  He had a stick and was drawing an invisible something on the ground.  He wore a dark green trench coat and reeked something awful.  It was winter; there was a cold mist that gathered around him, the pavement wet enough to reflect back the city lights in streaks of color and for the passing traffic to make soft, swooshing sounds.  I wondered why he sat there getting soggy instead of finding shelter under the awning.  And then I walked past and got in my car.

I was headed to Burger King just up Mesa Street to get my dinner.  I must have been tired because I went through the drive-through, which was not my thing.  At the last moment, I decided to get two meals instead of one.  On the way home, I stopped back at the store, parked, got out, and walked a meal over to the man I would later learn called himself Robert.  He glanced up, parting his thick black hair from his eyes and smiled a missing-tooth smile as I handed him his dinner.

Then I drove home, ate mine, and sat at my kitchen table before my old Apple IIC computer, writing and watching the green text move across the monitor as the faucet dripped.  

I don't remember what I wrote.  I don't think it had anything to do with Robert.  Yet, I know he was there.  Not because he was homeless.   Vagrants were common to my neighborhood.  I'd pass them walking all of the time.  Sometimes I stood with them and watched the sun set behind the Juarez mountains from the gravel lot across the street and up the steps of a hill to a foundation where once a house sat.  I-10 would be roaring below, a stream of white in one direction, a stream of red in the other.  The transients would offer me drink from the community bottle, which I would politely decline, and they'd tell me about the train route between El Paso and California.  I wouldn't judge them, and they wouldn't judge me.  Neither did we care about each other's fate.  

Robert, however, was different.  Something about him drew me in, made me care.  I'm not sure what it was, but he would remain a small but significant part of my life over the next four years.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 71: Sin and Addiction

 Ah, I knew that title would get your attention.  I was going to simply title this "Addiction".  That too would have had its pull.  Even the clinical label for losing control of one's choices pulls eyes in like a smoking tangle of steel along the interstate accompanied by flashing lights, ambulances and stretchers.  Add to that the Biblical label, sin, and you've got people.  We don't readily avert our eyes from the sordid details of life.

Sorry to disappoint you.  You won't get much of that here.  The best way to leave sin and addiction behind is to do just that--leave it behind.  There has to be some understanding about the personal pull, what the repetition of destructive behavior provided the addicted, and an awareness that those connections which were forged in the brain through repeated stimulation are still there, yearning to be reconnected whatever the cost to you and those around you.  And that's about it.  After making amends if need be (when and where possible), walking away from the wreckage is simply the best course.  Crawling through the steel shards, glass gravel, and hot coals on your hands and knees, or fanning the flames of the inferno just to keep the scene alive so that you can analyze how everything came unhinged, will not set you free.  Standing up, noticing that the sun is still there in the sky, and that there is a road to walk down, away from the heat, one step at a time, may. 

I walked that road, and I'm not turning back.  But I think honesty here requires saying, Yes, my life in El Paso included long, wonderful walks through the magic of borderland.  Images, sounds and smells I will never forget.  Late afternoon sunlight on a stark white storefront along a back street of Juarez, dogs barking, three kids playing in a vacant lot of garbage and rubble, laughing as sunlight glistens the girl's long black hair amber, and they all squint into the intense light towards some gringo with a camera. 

 And Yes, there were the best of people--sitting on George's living room floor, listening to his great stories, and his constant wondering about how it's all got to add up to something, doesn't it?  Or is there nothing at all?   Maybe this is just it, maybe we sit leaning against a sofa, trying to figure it all out, forever, and then we just die, and they put us in a hole, and worms devour us...  But I don't know, there's a lot of space out there, and galaxies, and supernovas, things exploding, and there was the time my friend and I put a pipe bomb under a palm tree on base and blew it all to smithereens.  Talk about cool.  Hey you want another drink?  

And there was Bobby and Lee.  Bobby's great big, life-loving politics.  His anger against unrighteously-poweful men doing dirt to the powerless poor.  His love of life and pomegranates.  Lee's quiet appreciation of sunsets, neighbors and children.

Yet, with all this, there was also me at the topless bar, the strip club, the XXX-rated video store, or up in my apartment all alone, feeding my addiction.  There was also me sitting by myself at the hole-in-wall club on whatever given corner trying to drink myself into oblivion.

Those do not need to be a detailed part of this narrative.  All that I love about El Paso is something other than that.  I'm not running from who I was.  But I'm not going to stand around the wreckage either, trying to sort through the unsortable.  Redemption is redemption.  The atonement is a get-out-of-jail-free card requiring only humility to obtain it.  I've learned happiness comes from a willingness to use those gifts.  I will only bring up my choice-stained past when it serves the purpose of this narrative: to show gratitude towards all those who made Texas memorable for me.  Sometimes the sin and good get entangled, as do the joy and the pain.   When that happens, I'll feel free to bring up what I need to.  It's a matter of focus--not running, hiding, or burying the past.  

Yet there needs to be some accountability.  Otherwise, the memoir isn't an honest one.  This post is to get that out there.  Texas wasn't all heat and blue skies and roads that go forever.  Dallas wasn't all shiny glass skyscrapers, parks, museums, and tree-lined suburbs.  Juarez wasn't all quaint little eateries with chickens spinning on rotisseries in open windows, happy mariachi music playing in the background.  There was pornography and pain, bleary nights, and hangovers.  Some of that pain was handed to me by brutes in high school who victimized me to fill their own black-holes, pain they did not know how to handle, so they pushed it forward.  But most of it, I chose, a willing participant in the dinging and denting of my own soul.  Now on, with what matters:

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 70: An Evening with Bobby and Lee

Travel Date:  September 16, 2018

A cool but not unpleasant breeze stirs while Marci and I sit on Bobby and Lee's front porch and eat gourmet pizza with them, watching the fireworks in Juarez. A shimmer of city lights rolls out below a crackling sky.  For a minute, all of us wonder what the festivities are for.  Then Bobby says, "Ah, Independence Day," and I remember also.  

Sidewalks lined with tables outside the small eateries.   Wonderfully, chaotic symphony of sound.  Competing mariachi bands serenade each and every little eating establishment.   Aroma of competing foods.  People weaving in and out of tables, making their way up and down Av. Benito Juarez, stopping, eating, and drinking, and talking to friends all along the way. A chaos of conversations.  A unity of joy.

 I used to go to Juarez on Mexico's Independence Day. 

For a brief minute, I think Marci and I should be over there.  I should have known the date.  I should have planned this trip better.  I should have gotten passports--something that was never needed before 911.

It's not that I don't want to be here on the porch with Bobby and Lee.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  It's just that I want to show Marci as much of my life here as possible, and there part of it is, right now, across the river, going on, and I'd totally forgotten about it.  A mariachi band is very different live than on the radio.  On the radio, I turn the station.  Live though, it's very hard to walk on by, no matter how much of Juarez you want to taste and see.  On September 16th, though, one doesn't have to make that decision.  The mariachi bands are everywhere.  One band just bleeds into the other as you move down the street of brass sounds and copper-colored lights, whole chickens spinning on rotisseries in restaurant windows reflecting back the city lights.  And, oh those smells!  It's like we're here in New Orleans, sitting on a porch in some back neighborhood, having totally forgotten Mardi Gras is going on, the lights and music shut out by a cloak of dark, sweating trees.

My moment of regret is brief though.  It's too peaceful here on this porch with windchimes tinkling, and the distance sounds of fireworks popping, for me to hold on to any We should have...  The moment softly demands our presence.  Lee and Marci do most the talking.  Bobby and I join in now and then.  As always, I don't have much to say.  There is a difference though from years back.  I'm at peace with who I am.  I am no longer running from something I don't understand.  This is not the first time I've been back to El Paso.  Each time was a little different.  The first time I was anxious to show off our new born baby son, Everest.  The next time I was anxious to show off his three older brothers, who didn't come previously.  But each time, as glad as I was to be back on this porch, I was still anxious.  I wanted to prove something.  What?  I'm not sure.

This time I just sit and listen to the conversation and the wind chimes.  

I'd like to say that there was some grand change in me, perhaps, that my religion had changed me, or that I'd done some heavy emotional lifting, and that I'd overcome.   My religion has changed me.  Perhaps I've overcome some things.  But mainly, it's just been time.  I don't know why the bullying I received in junior high and high school affected me so.  Many people go through far worse trauma seemingly unscathed.  Physical abuse.  Addiction. Rape.  War.  Statistically speaking, I've been about as lucky as one can get.  Yet, one doesn't totally get to choose how one reacts to the world.  We like to think we do, and certainly choices are ours along the way, but not unlimited choices.  Our biology and our environment together confine our options even as they teach us.  That confinement is an illusion, but it is a strong one.  

I showed up in El Paso broken.  What Bobby and Lee had to teach me was built for the future.  I was capable of writing good poems back then, perhaps far better poems than what I write now, but I wasn't capable of sitting on a porch in the company of others, at ease with those around me, and at ease with myself in their company.   I could observe life, but I couldn't live it.  My shyness removed me from everything.  I stood outside the world and watched, walking around this giant glass cylinder, looking in.  I'd try to enter, and every time I did, the glass would push back.  Sometimes the people inside the cylinder would even be waving, welcoming me.  But I couldn't enter.  My fear was just too overwhelming.  I had the choice to go to a party, and I often did.  But I didn't have the choice to be part of the party.  I never was.  I was always on the outside looking in.

That night with Marci, Bobby and Lee, I was not only where I wanted to be, I was actually there.  Still shy.  Still not having much to say.   But the glass tube was gone.  I was no longer outside, looking in.

I have a strong belief in God, but I don't think he always works the way we think he does.  Mainly, he just gives us time.  Some people, not so much.  Perhaps they don't need as much.  Some people, a little more.  But, except in the case of infant mortality, everyone gets some time and some experiences.  Those experiences, and that time, softens us, transforms us, without us really being aware of it.  We dream and make plans along the way.  Dreams of stardom, dreams of wealth and fame.  Some get it.  Some don't.  We work.  We accomplish.  We show off our success--whether it be our poems, our family, or our new boat.  Some of us have a lot to show; some not so much.  But what we all learn sooner or later is that we all fall short, that we just don't quite live up to our desires, and if we do, we desire even more, so that we still fall short of our own expectations.  And that softens us, makes us kinder.  To what degree?  That depends on the person, how open they are, but nobody gets out of this life without being a little more understanding and a little less selfish than when we showed up.

Life teaches, in varying degrees, that we are less important than we ever could have imagined in our youth, and once we realize that, ironically, we also become aware that we are important beyond measure, as is everyone else.  God gives us experience to break us down to the point where we can recognize the divine.  There is no transcendence without pain.  No one gets out of here unchanged.  And that change always comes from the same realization:  Oh, I'm not the center after all.  

Those moments of recognition are the moments we truly live.  People like Bobby and Lee are the rare individuals who have let those moments sink in and become part of who they are on a regular basis.  I always felt that peace around them.  I just wasn't ready to let that peace in.  What they had to teach me was built for the future.

That time is now.  At least while I write this.  A few moments from now I might be ranting and raving over the most trifling thing.  I often do that.  I've seen Bobby do that plenty of times also.  But thanks in part to Bobby and Lee, once I can talk my ego down from consuming me, I know how to return to the front porch and the stillness of my being.  That peace is available to everybody if, and when, they are ready for it.

God gives us life so that we can become ready for the peace that he provides through porches, and windchimes, and conversations with those we love.

He also gives us life so that we can become ready for the peace that he provides through revolutions, pandemics, wars, and famine.  Far fewer of us are ready for peace in those moments, certainly not me, which is fine.  He gives each and everyone his/her own timeline regardless of what some madman is doing across the water or in our very own backyard.  

Yet, whatever our individual timeline, transcendence is what we are here to experience.  A moment might occur while slowly tuning into the slow drip of the kitchen faucet on a warm Thursday afternoon while home from work with the flue.   A moment might occur while facing down hate on a bridge near Salma, Alabama.   Yet, those moments of knowing that we are both nothing and everything simultaneously are ultimately what we are here to experience.  Knowing God well obliterates any notion of I individually without you, whoever you are, whatever you think, whatever you do.  The moments those glass tubes shatter are the moments we are truly living.  Everything else is the dream.  Transcendence is real.  Mortality exists so that we can tell the difference.

   

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 69: The El Paso Municipal Rose Garden

Although I walked every block of Sunset Heights and Downtown hundreds, if not thousands, of times, as well as Skyline Drive and even parts of the Five Points neighborhood, I'd never been to the El Paso Municipal Rose Gardens until this trip.  It was like I was tourist in a foreign city.  I always wonder why so many people love to travel to other cities, and when they do, they go to museums, theaters, and municipal parks and gardens, but when they live in the city themselves, their life is confined to the freeways, the shopping centers, a few favorite restaurants, and home.  They put up with all the bad that comes with city living (the traffic, smog, and congestion) without reaping the benefits.  The grand parks, zoos, museums and aquariums seem to be for visitors, outside the holidays, or when company comes.  The cities that I resided in, I owned.  The Dallas Museum of Art was mine, as was White Rock Lake and the Fort Worth Botanical Gardens.  I claimed them.  If I was going to put up with Central Expressway, LBJ, and I-30, by gosh I was getting something in return.  The same was true with El Paso.  I knew the border like few others.  Yet, somehow, I'd missed this jewel of a garden.

Even though we hit the garden off-bloom, with only a sprinkling of color here and there, it was still wonderful.  What we missed in blooms, we gained in light.  It was late afternoon, and the light sculpted the Italian cypresses magnificently, throwing beams of shadow across the tight, formal layout of the garden.  The air was warm and sweet with the faint smell of scattered blossoms.  

I didn't expect much, as grand parks is one thing El Paso is lacking, despite the city's abundant culture and history.  Most of the parks are little squares of grass trying to hold on under the intense heat, and unlike Phoenix, the city isn't willing to squander ballfields of water and risk the survival of future generations in an attempt to turn the desert into Kentucky.  Yet, they also haven't invested the money to return their outdated parks into natural spaces set aside for native species.   Therefore, most of the parks are dirt patches with sprigs of yellow grass clinging-on for dear life.

Yet, walking down those long, stone walkways of the rose garden, in the late afternoon light, shadows thrown from the the very architectural cypress trees, I felt like I was is in Italy.  I felt a low melancholy sweep over me as I realized this space could have been mine too.  How many wonderful afternoons did I miss sitting among the fragrant scents and bright colors, distractedly reading a book, my eyes now and then drawn to butterflies and hummingbirds, my ears pulled into conversations of people from other places?  I could have owned this place the way I owned the Plaza.  

I never want to live in a city again, but if by chance life forces me to, I will make that city my own, whether it be Provo, Utah or New York City.  Wherever you live, don't let the tourists know your city better than you do.  Life is short.  Experience more than the line at the checkout counter.  Hit those clubs.  Hear that music.  Taste that food.  See that art.  Know the city that is yours for-the-taking better than the tourists do.  You pay the taxes, you breath the air, you spend mind-numbing hours waiting for red lights to turn green.  Get something out of the deal.

 
 

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 68: Bobby Byrd

 

Poet and publisher Bobby Byrd stands in front of one
of the many great works of art at Cinco Puntos Press

"Bobby is like a second father to me".  That would be a true statement if I didn't already have two dads, but I do.  I guess that puts him at number three.  Maybe.  I'm not so sure.  Writing isn't simply a vocation; it is a way of being.  It is impossible to separate who I have become as a person from who I have become as a writer.  They are one.  Bobby played an essential part in my growth as a writer; he also played an essential part in my growth as a person.  Through mentoring, he became part of me.  That's how it works in the arts.  My brother had a painting instructor who did the same for him.  Bobby himself had a mentor, the poet Paul Blackburn.  There is no way to overstate the importance of a mentor on a young writer.  It's about more than just learning the craft.  It's about learning to allow words to fill some need, complete some fragmented part in oneself, not all at once, but in bits and pieces.  It's about openness.  And the process doesn't end.  Or usually doesn't.  If it does, the good writing stops.  That's because the best writing doesn't come from putting down well what is already known to the writer; it comes from the writer touching the unknown.  The magic is in the awe of discovery, a startling arrival at the answer to some need, known or unknown.

Need is complex.  It doesn't arise out of a vacuum.  Or perhaps it does, but not one giant void.  That is more often the source of terror, which halts creativity, rather than fueling it.  Instead need forms from little absences here and there, that ooze together to form larger voids.  A mentor doesn't replace the emptiness; a mentor shows the mentee how to use it, and in the process, complete it little by little.  If I needed Bobby as a third father, it wasn't because my father and step father failed.  Quite the opposite.  It's because they gave me enough to know I needed something more.

1.  Joe

My stepdad was too good of a father for "step" to be included anywhere in his title; he was always just "Dad" to me.  He gave me my love of working in the yard and my eventual sense of ease with myself.  That last one took a while, but I eventually got there, using his example as a path forward.  He had this innate recognition that we are here to enjoy ourselves. I had a perfect role model of how-to-be despite my struggles with shyness.  He never preached that.  I'm not sure he was even aware he encompassed that quality himself.  Later in life, he talked an awful lot about the financial success of his biological children.  From words alone, it could seem he idolized wealth, but he was just a proud father.  Actions speak louder than words.  He got up each day and enjoyed life effortlessly.

Winter 1981.  It's a cold, blue Friday afternoon after a Thursday when blistering white came ripping through.  It's about 4:30 and the sun is at a good slant, firing up the sandstone and concrete-block facades of the homes around town.  Right now the sun angles in on our living room window with such intensity that a bird doesn't see it and knocks her little brains out against the glass.  Sassy, our cat, jumps up on the couch to look out the window.  She is meowing, wild with excitement.  I give the bird a few moments to come to.  When she doesn't, I let Sassy out to dispose of her.

As I am opening up the door to let the cat out, Dad drives up in our old, beat-up Mercury.  Wilbur, our pig, hears him from the side-yard and comes ripping around through the snow, wildly oinking.  He is still small, but smart as can be.  He's snorting and pounding his snout against Dad's legs.

"Well hello, Wilbur, you being a good pig?  You want to go up in the mountains and see your mommy?  Okay, now go on, get!  You're getting mud all over my good clothes.  Steve, go in and ask your mother if she wants to go to the canyon.  With the snow and all, tonight's a good night to burn tree limbs."

I go in and ask Mom.  She has been making chili for dinner, but we can cart it up there and heat it on the cabin stove.  We are packing food in a cardboard box, happy, happy, happy!  Dad comes out from the bedroom in his winter overalls and asks the two little dogs, "Do you want to go to the mountains?  Want to go in the car?   Yes, yes, yes, you do!"  They yelp and wiggle, and they are happy, happy, happy! 

Dad could have been a very rich man, and he was for a short time, a couple of times in his life, but each time the money slipped out of his hands, he accepted it rather easily and moved on to what really mattered to him--which always was the same thing.  He loved pruning trees, raking leaves, building fires, and making trails on our land.   He passed the land on to my brother, sister and me, as his children already have ranches.  Yet, his greatest gift was waking up each morning with a natural smile.  He'd wake up singing, and he wasn't much of a singer, but his off-key tune was full of joy and acceptance.  

Winter 1977.  My sister Kim is sleeping on the couch.  She got in late last night (actually early this morning) and had a fight with Mom.  Dad said nothing.  Instead, he's up early this morning, singing.  Kim rolls over, hides her head in the pillow.  He dances around the living room.  I think he's singing "It's So Easy" by Linda Rondstadt, but whenever he sings, it's hard to tell the song source.  He goes high, and then deep down low, completely spontaneously, with no regard for the original song, and so a tune is a very hard thing to recognize flowing from his mouth.  Even with his singing, Kim has not yet risen, so he comes by and tickles her feet.  She kicks at him and groans.  Mom's way to handle her strong-willed teenage daughter was to rant and rave.  Dad's way of handling her is to amp up his natural morning joy a little.  No judgement.  No lecture.  Just a simple strategy to make the morning hangover a little too real to be relived comfortably on a regular basis.  Deterrent without judgement.

2.  Larry

My biological father, although more complex, was pretty amazing also.  He gave me the woods of northern California, my love of the road, and eventually, through a challenge, my relationship with God.  I knew he loved me deeply, which has always meant a great deal to me.  Christmases were big because he couldn't be there.  Maybe it would have spoiled other children, but somehow we always knew the gifts were telling us what he couldn't say personally.  He was making sure he was part of our lives even in his absence.  During the summers, he shared that same love through his almost weekly camping trips, as well as one annual two-week vacation.

Late afternoon shadows are thrown across a long, narrow red, cinder-paved highway edged on both sides by forests of tall ponderosa pine.  John Denver on the stereo sings--

Life in the city can make you crazy
The sounds of the sand and the sea (I'm of the sea)
Life in a high-rise can make you hungry
For things you can't even see

Fly away, fly away (fly away) (Denver)

Dad's sucking on a mint, as always, and as soon as it's gone, he asks, "Can you hand me another one?"  I reach in the bag.  I pull out a Brach's blue mint and grab a couple of caramels for myself.  He unwraps the mint smoothly with one hand while steering with the other and pops it in his mouth.  He doesn't say much.  He never does, and he doesn't need to.  The ticking of shadow and light rolling across hood of the truck, up the window, and across our faces, making us squint over and over again says enough.  It's hypnotic.   Sandy (my stepmom) and Bobby (my half-brother) are in the camper behind the cab.  Bobby knocks on the sliding-glass window behind the seat.  He wants more Brach's too.  He's playing cards with Mom as he's bored.  I'm never bored on the road though.  Neither is Lloyd, nor Kim.  Dad is at peace here on these long highways cut through deep, tall forests that seem to go on forever, and so are we.    

Genetically, Dad gave me his explosive temper (which sometimes even erupted amongst his beloved trees), his shyness and his tender heart, as well as his critical nature.  Dad was pretty sure most of what humanity was up to (both individually and collectively) was not good, and I have to admit I agree with him on that, but he also cared deeply about those around him.   He loved fiercely, but acceptance of himself or others was much harder.  It is in my nature to parent like him, and I have had to work very hard to not do so.  Both love and acceptance are necessary for us to grow, but having strong examples of both, I can tell you this: out of the two, acceptance is the most important gift a parent can give a child.  

Winter 1986.  Lloyd and I sit on the brown sofa of the split-level home in Salt Lake terrified.  Icicles, slightly visible behind the lacy living room curtains, hang before a deep purple evening sky.  Dad sits in the gold flowered beige chair in front of the window, a lamp on the end table beside him.  We have no clue what to say. We never do.  Unlike in our younger years, the quiet no longer sits comfortably between Dad and us.  It is filled with unspoken disappointment on his part and unspoken apprehension on ours.  He's never hit any of us.  I've never even been spanked.  Yet, there we sit, guarding our words carefully, deciding which ones to suck back down and which ones to carefully let out.  The pressure is so intense that every time we come to Utah, Lloyd gets physically ill upon our return to Texas, absolutely exhausted by the trial he's been through.  Dad always asks Lloyd how things are coming with his art.  Lloyd always tells about whatever show his work has recently been in.  Dad always asks, "Have you sold anything?"  Lloyd tries to explain it's not about the money.  Dad gives him advice on how to make it about the money.  I sit there quietly feeling Lloyd's pain but hoping the focus stays on him, least Dad turn his assistance towards me.  I'm more volatile, and unlike Lloyd, I have no accomplishments whatsoever to share.  Still, I know how to use words as weapons.  So does Lloyd, but he's more disciplined.   I fear Dad, but mostly I fear myself.  If I let go, there may never be a way to get back what we had on those two-lane roads in northern California. I don't want that to happen because I know that as much as I love Dad, my love for him pales in comparison to the love he has for us, his children.  I don't want to hurt him.  I am counting the minutes before I'm safely in bed with the knowledge that this time I didn't strike back with the same judgment he lays on us.  My judgment wouldn't be through slow probing questions.  It wouldn't be wrapped-up as verbal care packages.  Nope.  I'd hand over a word bomb.  Here you go Dad.  Have that. 

As Dad aged, he softened.  I think he knew all along he was doing more harm than good.  I think he tried constantly to change, but change is difficult.   To be fair, he moved the mark of effective parenting considerably forward.  His father was an alcoholic.  Unlike us, he was physically beaten as a child.  He had a lot more to forgive his father for than we did.  And we knew it wasn't that he hated us.  Quite the opposite.  He loved us so much that he couldn't accept us for who we were.  We'd say and do things he thought were far below our potential.  He took our failings on himself as his own: If I'd not left them, everything would be different.  It was really quite unfair.  He always had to correct our mistakes because of his one big mistake.  And believe me, compared to those of a normal teenagers, our mistakes were quite small.  No drugs.  No screaming at our parents or throwing things.  No slamming doors.  No cigarettes.  Kim drank for a very short time in junior high, but I don't think he even knew about it.  We were good kids; he just needed to over-parent because of his choice to leave his family.

Yet, in my younger years, I was unfair to him also.  He was critical, but not abusive.  He seldom yelled.  And though we never could live up to his expectations, we knew he loved us deeply.  That's what created all the silence in his living room when we visited.  If we hadn't felt his love, it would have been easy to fight back.  Love stifled our natural resistance.  

Over time, he did change.  After he moved to the Oregon coast to be among his beloved trees near the sea, the questions became softer, less frequent.  He talked instead of the church books he read, not to convert us, but because that was his interest.  Mainly, he spent time acting as a tour guide to the lakes, woods, sands, rocks and churning sea near by, sharing his love once again with fewer words and less criticism.

Winter 2011.  Rain beats heavily on the skylight as I follow Dad through the utility room of his modular home near the Oregon coast.  He opens the back door and cool, moist air meets us.  Rain thunders on the aluminum porch covering and drops over the edge in sheets.  I follow Dad into the garage.  He has something to tell  me in private.  I fear that after several years of having a good relationship, he's going to lecture me once again on something he feels I've done wrong.  Instead, there in his garage, rain thundering down on the roof of a small modular home in a small development along a big bend in a river near the churning, wind-swept sea, my dad tells me that he's dying.  Love that I never knew I had for him bubbles up in torrents from the cellular level.  He explains his disease--how long he's had it and how much time he has left--but I can't really take it in.  This can't be happening.  Then he says, "I don't fear death, you know.  I know there is an afterlife, that we continue.  I'd like you to have that same knowledge".  He asks me about my feelings towards the church.  I tell him that I go regularly, that it's a good thing, but that I don't believe.  He asks if I would put some time and effort into finding out for myself, one way or the other, for sure.  As all the judgement is gone, I promise him that I will.  The rain, though very much still alive, seems to have silenced.  The only thing present is all the love we could never put into words.

3.  Bobby

Although having two fathers, puts Bobby Byrd at number three, words don't capture how much he means to me.  I'd entered a poem in a poetry contest and he was the judge.  He liked it, awarded it first place, and asked me if I wanted to work for Cinco Puntos Press.  He gained an employee, and I adopted a father.   He didn't necessarily adopt me; he had his family. I'm the one who had the need.  Lloyd and I were born artists in a world absolutely unconnected to the arts.  My mother, a gifted, self-taught pianist, always played by ear, and I grew up in a house filled with music.  Yet, she wasn't schooled in the arts.  She was born to be a concert pianist but was never given that opportunity.  Her words were the notes soaring out of the piano.  We never sat around the dinner table and talked about books, music, or art.  I'm not sure exactly what we talked about.  My step-dad told great stories.  We listened to his stories.  Life was about our small town, the garden out back, and our property up by the canyon.  But I needed a home where people sat around and talked about music, poetry and painting.  I'd listen to Elton John, hear Bernie Taupin's lyrics, and think there had to be so much more out there:

Tune me into the wild side of life
I'm an innocent young child sharp as a knife
Take me to the garrets where the artists have died
Show me the courtrooms where the judges have lied

Let me drink deeply from the water and wine
Light colored candles in dark dreary mines
Look in the mirror and stare at myself
And wonder if that's really me on the shelf.  (Elton John and Bernie Taupin)

Bobby and Lee were able to provide for me what my family could not:  a model of how to live life normally and fully as an artist.  The University of Texas at El Paso taught me how to write; Bobby provided an example of a sustainable pathway forward in the arts.  So many of the writers I knew (only through their words on the page) lived miserable lives.  From the books, it seemed to write well one had to drink oneself into oblivion, and then at the end of your truncated career, place an exclamation mark after your best work by taking your own life.  Yet, here were Bobby and Lee, clearly writers, clearly happy, clearly sane, and obviously lovingly-kind to each other.  Despite the biographies of the writers in the anthologies, the Byrd's demonstrated that in order to create, one did not have to drink obsessively, snort cocaine, or have affairs.  Yelling, screaming and insanity did not have to be a biproduct of the arts.  Instead, one could go out to the back shed (converted into a writing studio) and write for a couple hours and then come in, do dishes, steam vegetables, and sit down and have dinner as a family.

I didn't realize it until quite recently, but when I moved to El Paso, I was experiencing something akin to PTSD.  I'd been bullied pretty heavily in junior high and high school.  I had a few good friends, and so I did okay then.  But, I started to fall apart in college.  I had one year I basically didn't talk to anyone except Phil, my best friend and roommate.  I worked.  People there tried to be nice to me.  I remember one girl going out of her way to invite me to go out clubbing with her and her friends.  I knew she was asking me out.  She was very pretty, and I liked her, but I just couldn't do it.  Had she come right out and said, "Hey, I'm asking you out," I would have said yes.  But because of all of the teasing I received in high school, I just couldn't make myself believe she was interested in spending time with me.  What if I'm misunderstanding her?  What if she's just letting me know what she and her friends are doing Friday night and that I might enjoy it?  That isn't the same as saying, "Would you like to come along?"  I don't remember what I said to her in return, if anything, but I know I didn't do the normal thing, and say, "That sounds fun," so that she could actually invite me out.  After she quit the job, I pretty much spent the rest of the time working there in silence.  I went to my classes in silence also.  I was living as a monk on a crowded college campus.  My only verbal outlet was my writing and conversations with Phil.

I moved to El Paso as a means to intentionally get away from myself, to learn how to not-be-shy, if that was even possible.   It worked for a short while, and then somehow the shyness that overwhelmed me in Dallas discovered the route to El Paso and showed up at my doorstep.  I didn't have any choice but to let him in; he was after-all, kin.  Shutting down had become second nature, and I was terrified to let my silence go, no matter how miserable it made me.  I caved in, and grudgingly let myself in, like a relative who constantly puts you down.  "Oh, Hi" (forced grin) "Good to see you.  Come on in."

I'm sitting at the Byrd's dining room table.  It's the day the maid comes, and she's out in the office.  So, here I am, working on Bobby's laptop.  He's in the kitchen, cutting up asparagus.  He talks of Memphis, his mother, the nanny he so loved.  He talks of the Memphis sound--jazz, blues, country, and early rock and roll, and the heartache he caused his mother during his late nights out.  He talks about how when he goes back to Memphis, he starts out in El Paso as a grown man, and gets younger and younger with each passing mile, so that by the time he reaches his mother's house, he's once again that teenager with all the same insecurities and rebelliousness he ever had.

I want to say, I know the feeling, but I don't.  Instead I yawn.  Bobby goes on, talking about Harvey Goldner, his partner in crime, and the one who introduced him to jazz, blues and poetry.  I yawn some more.  This goes on for a couple of hours.  Bobby is telling me his life story and I'm yawning all the way through it.

Finally Bobby says, "You sure do yawn a lot."  I want to tell him, "Sorry."  I want to tell him that it has nothing to do with his stories.  I want to tell him I just do that when I'm nervous.  I want to tell him I'm not nervous because of him.  Well, I am, but not because of anything he's doing.  I'm constantly in fear.  The only time I'm comfortable is when I'm in my own company, or with George.  In Dallas, I had my brother and my friends.  But mainly this is just who I am--absolutely terrified to be in the company of people.  I do well as a stranger in a crowd.  I love Juarez.  There I can't speak the language; there I can be verbally invisible.  

However, I do notice something.  When Bobby said, "You sure do yawn a lot," it didn't sting.  I'm still nervous, but not hurt.  I sense that there is no judgment in it.  It's like he's pointing out a detail in the landscape.  "Look at the light on that yucca over there."  He might be annoyed that I'm yawning through his stories, but if he is, it doesn't affect me negatively.

I don't remember what I said, if anything, that day.  I do remember that I needed to hear Bobby talk about Memphis, music, politics, poetry and art.  I needed to hear the back screen door slam on warm summer days, to lift up the door in the floor in the living room, and go down into the cool partial basement where the stacks of extra books for Cinco Puntos Press were kept, to put data into the computer out in the shed--the door open, bees buzzing around the flowers along the fence--and then have Bobby come in and say, "Damn, it's a beautiful day; isn't it glorious?" 

I remember once, after Cinco Press moved to the office downtown, a space we were sharing as I was trying to get a copying service started, Bobby came in and said, "Isn't it a glorious day?  Do you ever just walk around downtown and enjoy the day?"  I did that often after work and every weekend, on both sides of the border, but I didn't say anything.  So, he said, "You should just go; these orders will wait until tomorrow.  Get out and enjoy the city."  

What I really should have done was walk around handing out fliers for my business, but that involved talking to people, so I took his suggestion, grabbed the book I was reading, and headed out to find a warm bench in the sun on a fine spring day.  I remember it because it is the only time in my life I've been told to to leave work so that I could fully enjoy the moment. 

Those days come back often when I least expect them.  I lost a brother in-law a couple years back, the only other writer and Democrat in Marci's family.  He committed suicide.  We never said much to each other, but we understood one another well.  We were mutual admires of one another's craft.  When I tried to write a tribute to him, I was immediately taken back to El Paso:

Poem for Michael Flynn

I don’t know what to say,
other than I can hear your laugh.
I'm not sure how this fits yet, but I'll tell a story
and hope meaning comes around eventually.
I used to despise the anthology
Top 500 Poems edited by William Harmon
because he called every third poem “robust”.
It sounded like he was describing a can
of Dennison Stew or Hormel Chili
instead of poems that are to English
what the sequoia is to trees,
what Mahatma Gandhi is to men,
what Mother Teresa is to women,
what Blue Bell is to ice cream.

I would sit in a Chinese buffet
across from 109 N Oregon
in El Paso, Texas,
a tall, old sleek blond brick building
with an elegant brass elevator
and a smoke shop on the ground floor
that smelled of sweet pipe tobacco.
It was watched over lovingly
by a short man with a thick beard.

Other than his height,
his beard,
his big, brown eyes,
he wasn’t anything like you.

He hated everything but tobacco:
Mexicans, gays, lesbians, liberals,
Republicans, corporations,
Asians, tortillas, chocolate,
Juarez, tequila, America.
But he liked rum,
Cuban cigars and rum.

If you asked him discreetly,
for the right price
he could get you some Cubans.
Not the people. Cubans
he despised. But the cigars, oh now that—

Anyway, I would sit across the street and fume
while slurping noodles
over that damn William Harmon
and his over use of “robust”.
I’d write volumes in the margins
about how idiotic William Harmon is,
and the thing is, I think you are
one of the few who would understand.
The irony is, when I think of your laugh,
the only word I can find
that describes the rich deep
brown coffee colored
biting joy in your voice
is “robust”.

Had a wrinkle in the universe
made us contemporaries
and found us wandering
the streets of El Paso
or the calles
of Mexico,
I’m sure we would
have found each other
and fumed together
over words and politics,
compadres in contempt
of mediocrity.

That was long ago
before I metamorphosed
into a Mormon.

I am not sorry for my transformation.
It has only brought me joy.
But I am sorry I let God get in the way of us
being as close as we could have been,
as we should have been.

That is my fault, not His, and certainly not yours.

You may or may not have believed in God. Still you knew
God should be a window,
not a wall,
religion an opening,
not a closing.

I’m sorry Man.
We all are still learning.
If I am ever back
in El Paso, a city
I know you would love,
I will bring along that damn
anthology by William Harmon and slurp
Chinese noodles again and fume
over the word “robust”
and how it is the only word I can find
to describe your laugh,
deep and strong
as black coffee.

Somehow
I know that is enough.

Peace
be
my brother.

The river that divides earth and heaven
is as thin as the silver sliver
of the Rio Grande.

See you on the other side
of the border of life
if Trump doesn’t erect a damn wall there
also.

After I wrote the poem, I wondered why the suicide of my brother in-law took me back to El Paso.  Over time, I realized it was because of Bobby.  Michael reminded me a lot of my younger self.  I was bit jealous of him, because at least for a while, he wrote for a living.  The pay was dismal, but he was earning money and respect for his writing, which was very fine indeed.  I eventually realized I imagined him into a place he might have received the help he needed.  Perhaps Bobby could have reached him the way he reached me.  I don't know what I would have done without Bobby and Lee.  I needed more than El Paso could provide me at that time.  I needed to come home and make peace with who I am, a small town boy from Mormon America.  But Bobby and Lee provided me shelter from the storm whirling around inside me at the time, safety from PTSD I didn't even know I was experiencing.  I'm not sure what Michael's storm was.  He wasn't at all shy.  But whatever his storm was, I wished he'd found a way through it.  El Paso was my safety; I imagined it could be his.

Thank you Bobby for helping me make it through the storm.  Thank you for your poems.  Most of all, thank you for providing a model for living the mundane marvelously--a way to sit comfortably in reality, whether the world be blooming butterflies and good vibes or torching all that is substantial and praise-worthy with lies and bigotry.

You put the life into living.

References

Denver, John. "Fly Away." Windsong. 1975.

John, Elton and Bernie Taupin. "This Song Has No Title." Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. 1973.