The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland -- 1. In a Time of Confusion

It has occurred to me that we may be so confused about the present that we avoid it because it is not clear to us.  But why should that be a deterrent?  If this is a time of confusion, then it should be the subject of a good writer if he is to set down his time.

--John Steinbeck to Elizabeth Otis, 1954

In a Time of Confusion, acrylic on canvas, 14" x 10 1/2", Steve Brown  2022

Wednesday, April 6, 2022

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Somewhere in Ukraine:  An older woman, perhaps in her late sixties, wearing a baby blue flannel jacket, walks down a street strewn with metal fragments and bits of concrete.  She is hunched over, carrying a plastic bottle of water.  She could be almost any woman of her age, many places, including the United States.  She could be in a forest or national park campground headed back to camp after filling up the water jug.  In fact, she looks a lot like my stepmother looked later in life.  She could be my mom, but she's not.  What makes this apparent are the massive heaps of metal, which appear to have once been tanks, although that's not absolutely clear, as well as the unidentifiable bits of debris on what once was a lane lined with electrical poles on the left and fine straight winter trees along a park's edge on the right.  

Grappling

The scene is a fauvist nightmare, a vibrant vision gone wrong.  Spills and splashes of color are torn from the tendrils of reality--brick and biology, flower and foam packaging, steel panel and fine scarf--all genetic fabric stretched beyond capacity to repair--fragments of bright color everywhere, but no semblance to substance, to light, to what once was, or is, or should be.

Just a woman alone with a jug of water in a world unraveled.  If God shut off the switch to gravity, the rest of us would come unhinged as we floated away into a void too vast to comprehend while still mortal.  But she would hardly even notice.  The human mind can only handle so much disruption at once.  

A fauvist vision works based on light and beauty.  What is left when the black seed of Satan has stitched himself into the fabric of humanity and dislodged our spiritual tendencies--those beautiful flecks of light and color that unite and bind us to the beauty of us together as a whole?

Narrative

Salem, Utah:  It's a bright morning with a bitter wind. Marci and I walk across a parking lot to a new stone and glass building that looks more like a ski resort hotel than the hospital that it is, Revere Health.  A former architecture student, I admire the alternating horizontal runs of light and dark stone in the façade contrasting with the vertical runs of stainless steel in the huge plate glass window that showcases a strong diagonal in the two tier staircase on the other side of the glass cascading down from the third floor.  Also not to be missed is the prominent horizontal entrance canopy that seems to float above the ski-lodge-like wood posts that support it, all of which is topped by giant stainless-steel letters spelling out "Entrance".

The inside also resembles a fine hotel rather than a hospital, which, I guess is as it should be, as almost no resort can equal the cost of one night's stay in an American hospital.  Even a day visit is likely to set you back thousands of dollars.  I think all the rooms should come with hot tubs and there should be a 24-hour buffet and a cocktail lounge in the lobby.  Then, perhaps, we wouldn't always come out feeling as if we were asked to bend over in our open-backed gowns as something foreign and plastic is inserted very uncomfortably inside us.

We check in at a central station.  A receptionist sits behind a wrap-around counter behind wood divisions that form five or six semi-cubicles, each with a large touch-screen tablet mounted at a forty-five degree angle where patients enter their check-in information.  We pick one and follow the digital prompts, which includes scanning my drivers license and insurance card.  I like the process.  It's so much easier than filling out a bunch of forms with a pencil.  However, I'm also aware that it probably allowed personnel to eliminate one or two receptionist positions, and while that doesn't really impact anyone during this post-COVID boom, sooner or later, it will.  As a society, we are quickly automating our way out of livelihood and purpose.

After checking in, we walk up the long, two-tier cascading staircase that I so admired through the glass curtain wall and stop at the second level landing.  It's a long, airy hallway.  On the left are the offices, and on the right is a series of lobbies set against a ribbon window overlooking the Utah Valley and the snow-capped Wasatch Mountains, which even in this year of extreme drought, are impressively rugged and white.  The hall reception area is divided into four sections, each decorated and labeled for a season:  Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter.   Each section has an automated self check-in area like the one in the main lobby and a place to sit down.  However, the entire floor is void of a receptionist--a small glimpse of the future.  We sit down in comfortable silence in the Winter section and wait to find out if I have kidney disease as my lab tests have suggested.

After a few moments, a nurse comes out.  Angela, a friendly Hispanic woman.  She has me get on the scales.  It seems to me that I'm feather-light.  This may be partly from my new diet, but mostly it is just my perception.   I haven't adjusted to my weight in kilograms.  Every I time I go to the doctor, it seems I'm dwindling into a void, slowly vaporizing.  As I know this is not the case, my weight means nothing to me.  The scales could give me the mass of the moon, and it wouldn't be any more or less accurate than this new kilogram weight of mine.  It's the same with the blood results and urine analysis I received last week.  They mean nothing.  I don't even know what a healthy blood pressure score or pulse reading is.  They are just numbers I have always ignored because I never felt I needed them.  I have always been interested in the weight of a pigment or the bluntness of a word, the impact of a slight musical rest, or the singe of a a sharp orange marigold amongst a bed of deep blue baby's breath.  Art has been my interest.  My body, though I have not badly abused for most of my life, has never mattered much to me.  I took it for granted that it would always work.  I felt there was no need to understand it.  And I don't.  I don't even know how to read the meters and spinning dials, so to speak, that tell me whether or not I'm about to blow my engine.  It's a very, sudden and uneasy feeling.  I barely know how to change the oil in my car, but I have cared enough to watch the dials.  Not so with my own body.

However, one thing I've always believed in is specialization.  As a writer, I know working well with words doesn't fall into place over night.  People often get reasonably good at what they dedicate their lives too.  I don't know why in the hell a career politician is considered a liability in America.  Who wants a senate and congress comprised of members who know nothing about the law or the constitution?  I certainly hope the doctor I'm about to see is absolutely obsessed with dedicating her career to one thing, and one thing only--kidney disease.  I have no qualms about placing qualified people in high positions.  We should want smart, capable people running our country--people as well-trained and dedicated to preserving democracy as I hope this doctor is well-trained and dedicated to preserving me.  The problem is, instead we have people smart in propaganda running the country, and what they do best is flip the world upside down, and call good evil, and evil good.  Inquiry, thought, education, observation, humility, compassion and reason--these become vices.  Mindless rebuttal, close-mindedness, ignorance, disdain, arrogance and stupidity--these become virtues.  Democracy cannot sustain itself against such an attack on its foundational principles indefinitely.  I am aware my body isn't functioning normally.  I am aware my country isn't functioning normally.  I hold steady.  Usually.  What else is there to do?  I am not afraid of tears.  I am not even afraid of dying.  Release is release--but it should be for something.  Or should it?  I don't know.  Maybe freedom ultimately is just an acceptance of reality, whatever that may or may not be.  Enlightenment may have more to do with understanding than action.  No, that cannot be.  We do not exist simply to understand something that is beyond us, an observer only.  We are an intricate, if small part, of creation.  Doing has got to account for something.

Marci and I wait alone in a small room together in silence.  I'm not sure what she's thinking.  I'm not sure what I'm thinking.  This morning has been wonderful.  We went shopping at WinCo for our camping trip to California, which is to be an early celebration of our 25th anniversary, revisiting the places we inhabited fully for brief, glorious moments during our honeymoon all those years ago.  I see a golden light shimmering off the crest of waves as I hold my baby with the sea in front of us and a rock between us and the shore, knowing at any moment we could get soaked by an extra bold wave, and then it happens, and it is cold and sharp, and fun and glorious, and we laugh and head in to higher ground, a bit wet but not too drenched.

WinCo is a big store with lots of fruits and vegetables and things like cereal and grain and spices sold in bulk from bins.  It is why we have come here.  We are looking for foods that I can safely eat on our vacation.  I have spent weeks building the itinerary, making reservations, and planning a menu that will keep me here on earth as long as possible.  Now is the moment.  This is the day to select the biggest, greenest bell peppers I can find.  We have already stopped at the Red Barn, an orchard store in Santaquin, for apples--usually the best in the state.  Now it is time to pick through bins of green and identify all that is good and delicious to and for me.  When faced with immediate fear of dying, either every moment takes on significance or nothing has meaning at all.  It seems quite natural for a human under duress to fluctuate quite naturally between the two extremes, although I've been fortunate so far to spend most my moments bathed in golden light.  I'm not sure why.  I think it is probably the gospel because I haven't always been like that.  Much earlier in my life, I spent most moments under a lid of darkness even amongst the best of friends.

And then, now, there are moments of silence, of stillness, of openness to not knowing, like here in this office with my loved one waiting for a diagnosis--a moment that could confirm or deny that our lives have been changed forever.

The doctor walks in--Dr. Lyles.  She is sharp looking--thin, athletic, piercing blue eyes.  She radiates a casual confidence--nothing to boast about because there is no insecurity, and nothing to hide because she knows what she's doing.  She sits on a stool and tucks her feet casually in, resting them on that circular foot bar.  

I do not carry that confidence, and I never have.  I don't expect it in myself, and I don't expect it in others.  In fact, some of the people I love most in this world, including myself, wear insecurity like a badge of honor even though nobody enjoys doing that.   Yet, I admire people whose very body language asserts that they belong in any given social situation.  It must be amazing to always be comfortable with who you are and know your value regardless of the setting.  I dislike boasters--people so afraid or unaware of who they are that they have to hide below layers, although I do understand a pain deep enough to create that need.  But natural confidence is an amazingly attractive quality, even just visually. Still, I'm more comfortable around others like me, who aren't.   I love how gloriously Paul Simon captures being inhabited by uncertainty in many of his lyrics:

Fat Charlie the Archangel
Sloped into the room
He said I have no opinion about this
And I have no opinion about that
Sad as a lonely little wrinkled balloon
He said well I don't claim to be happy about this, boys

And I don't seem to be happy about that...

I have always known I'm smart.  I have always had strong opinions.  But there is a deep shyness in me that refuses to let go--a strong feeling that I just really don't count for much.  I get ignored easily.  Part of me hates that.  Part of me prefers it.  People listen most prominently to the sloping boy, as he is the most dominate part of me.  I once spent a few years trying to drink myself into someone more confident and outgoing.  Instead, I drank myself into someone mean and willing to compromise my principles in the moment with self-loathing and disgust.  Luckily, Marci pulled me out of that phase of life quite quickly when I realized she loved me for exactly who I was.  That has been the single most important event in my life--her full acceptance of me for who I am.  I hope I have usually given her that same grace.  Slowly, I have befriended the Fat Charlie in me.  In fact, I have come to love him.  He is the one most open to empathy.  

I receive the news I already knew I would.  Doctor Lyles confirms that I do have kidney disease.  Marci, I know, has been holding on to the hope it would be something else.  I wonder how she is doing.  My father died of Amyloidosis, which causes kidney disease, as well as the failure of other internal organs, and I am hoping that at least that can be ruled out.  Doctor Lyles lets us know that Amyloidosis is a rare disease, and rarer still in patients as young as me (in my mid-fifties).  Still, she notes, it can be genetic, and although unusual, her father died in his mid-fifties from it.  She definitely doesn't rule it out.  I know Lloyd, my brother, has been doing that.  His mind has been working out all of the reasons I cannot have Amyloidosis.  He's rational, so he's using numbers, and facts, and statistics, but his frequent return to the subject is to either reassure himself or me, or both.

Dr. Lyle's blunt dealing with the fact that Yes, it looks like you could possibly have Amyloidosis, actually provides release.  One of the hardest things to deal with is unnamed fears--things that scare you so much you aren't willing to name.  I have wanted to name this thing, to acknowledge that I had a higher than statistical average of dying soon, and to come to know exactly what that means to befriend death if I have to, to learn from it, for myself and others.  The comfort of others, though well-intended, stops that light from coming through.   Faced with imminent death, you want to choose how you spend every minute of your remaining days very carefully.  You have to be strategic: allocating enough time for others; enough time to help plan for the future of others without you (finances, etc.); but also enough time to relax, rest, and complete the things that are important to you.

Here is a doctor who seems to get the need to honestly name the possibilities without slanting things towards the most favorable outcomes.  When facing death, what one likes least of all is dishonesty.  What left is there to deal with other than an end to this life itself?  We all live and we all die.  Time, though relative, becomes everything.  There simply isn't time left for bullshit.

 

   

 

 

 

     

 

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.