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:
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