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.