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.