Leftcoast Adventure

Thursday Night Safeway Parking Lot

2012-02-03T13:01:00.000-08:00

Thursday night Safeway parking lot
Empty excepting a few cars randomly
Waiting for their owner shoppers, clerks
And zombie-looking all night stockers

After a meander along empty aisles
Frozen food boxes stacked liked coffins
Vegetables stacked like bright corpses
Show my nagging hunger the door

Trading small bits of metal and paper
For small bits of metal, paper, plastic,
A small amount of strange green juice
Jill the clerk says something polite

I smile and say something polite too
And drift toward the automatic door
This side of Out is lit for a party
That side of In is lit for a funeral

From in I pass to Out leaving thoughts
Scattered among Hollywood magazines
Of faces everyone wants to know
Living the lives everyone wants to live

In the out emptiness reigns silent
Women vanish with their dome light
A young man scurries to hide
In the darkness of a battered car

Blacktop splattered with food, soda,
Coffee, water, oil, coolant, and some
Of my automatic steering fluid that
Escaped from its warm engine box

I grasp a plastic bag with C-batteries
Naked Green Engine drink with right
A key bundle and receipt with left hand
Smelling warmed liquids on asphalt

Pieces of torn cardboard and an orphaned
Receipt from Safeway’s companion stores
Maul my ankles briefly in a slight breeze
Then flit away toward shadowed night

My sore feet slog macadam smells
Mysterious floating streetlights push
My shadow against curbs blurring its line
Multiplying my name in rhythmic time

Memory Under Snow

2012-01-31T20:31:00.000-08:00

I never care for the breezes of winter’s cold
I’ve always wanted to spread my non-existent wings
Migrating to some warm place near your heart

The surprise of a silent morning glazed in snow
Colored like Christmas lights and awaiting fresh tracks
Chill even my warmest memory of your smile

The freeze will end, out there over that white horizon
Where a mirage of rapture rises slowly on the wind
Summer borne by your burgeoning blossoms

The Work of Angels

2012-01-23T22:45:00.000-08:00

Angels in many guises and disguises
Wander hidden among the dying
Offering some a gentle prompting
Some a most fearsome brand

Angelic entities not confused
By remembrance of past deeds
Guide with a silent presence
Away from clamorous memorial

These graces terrorize the disinclined
To achievements beyond frail passing
Until these same reluctants gladly
Release death to mortal silence

... a kind of quiet resting

2011-10-16T14:59:00.000-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2011

... a kind of quiet resting
keeping pace with thoughts
rolls along wave tops

Pacific is thinking today
gray matter drifts past
with fishermen

how is it so simple
and yet complicated …

now my thoughts and waves
compete for magnificence

Accident

2011-09-20T20:14:00.000-07:00

Flickering green light stampeding through my eyes
Traveling vague dream roads with fleeting people
Whose luminescence stretches night shadow longings

Wearied ruinous sleep discomfits future meditations
Hammered by fluttering black walnut leaf breezes
Solitude creeps across the day like a missing jigsaw piece

Flickering like the light my thoughts struggle for solidity
Yesterday is gone again today has happened relentlessly
Tomorrow might see me speaking a new language

I am seeking new words to throw at my computer screen
To break my head into tiny pieces of immaculate sound
But the banging of leaves is asking foolish questions

Who delights in my walk at youthful tempo?
In what cupboard is my old face hidden?
What blood type is required to speak in prepositions?

Gathering my toys I drove west toward respite
In a vehicle too fast and too slow for thought
Once again reality interbred with my fading dreams

For greeting a bend in my road waving men
Thickened thought progress with semaphore arms
Circling their hands in downward spirals

Begging my senses to consider some new event
Directing my thinking into lower gear to observe
Single file traffic around an accident scene

This quiet rural highroad sun dappled
Wounded now like a broken blood vessel
An automobile rests turtle-like on its roof

Flipped to prevent escape from fate
One side imploded from sudden impact
Its armor of steel and glass shattered

Here and there other turtle like creatures
Strained necks or hove to along my road
Watching a dying creature pass on

Holding cellular devices aloft with concern
Waiting the arrival of emergency hands
Excited in the act of participation

One pacing pretty, a one-armed tigress
Charged a passing ad covered van reading
“Website development and maintenance”

Announcing to the driver her friend
A broad smile out of sync with events
That she was the messenger to 911

Our passing motorcade shook its heads
While someone on their knees spoke
To a life still inside its broken shell

Brilliant sunlight broke like a mirage
On the silver carapace with fat bloodied limbs
Waving slowly trying to achieve rightness

Gathering thought from the mottled light
And speed from a spinning earth
I pulled my head into the afternoon

Moment on moment dragged my road along
Under wheel memory purging memory
Rising gorge to crown despair

Jodorovsky's Principles

2011-08-25T13:04:00.000-07:00

Using Jodorovsky’s principles
I might raise the Titanic just to sink it again
Or maybe I could reanimate Walt Disney
So he could see what’s happened in Tomorrowland

Wouldn’t I need to kill my father and fuck my mother
Like Pasolini’s Oedipus in an artistic tour de force?
I’d have to surface my unconscious longings
In boxing matches with Marcel Cerdan.

But really, really, couldn’t I just murder
CEOs of fortune’s five hundred plunderers?
I know a slaughter wouldn’t be surreal or sublimation
But it might just be murder fun in the first.

Using Jodorovsky’s principles
If I move my fingers into magic mudras
I conquer my primitive and murderous lustings
By simply steepling my fingers into a cathedral.

Sight

2011-07-04T17:28:00.000-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2011

July 4th’s vigilant gaze above leftcoast cliffshores
Probe passions inside from landside an outside
Buddyless lone surfer surveys cold western swell
Where seafoam tidelines mark California edgerock

Green Pacific waters dissolve to grey Pacific mist
Fogs waft north to hide Marin and Point Reyes
Boredom of onshore hours in flat sessions
Send Buddyless and board wheeling homeward

Can the dragon guard of an approaching stormfront
Hear whispers of struggle between angry friends
C'est une question morale ancient exemplars adjure
Green eyes seek new horizons beyond the Farallones

Love Is Madness

2011-06-09T11:15:00.000-07:00

This piece was commissioned for a wedding.

Love is madness

Bright sun entering my every pore
Must be your heat invading my senses
A cool tree shadow across my face .
As you look a question my way

Love is madness

Strange voices speak and I turn
Hearing echoes of you singing .
Any silhouette etched against the sun
I see your passing shadow .

Love is madness

Windows jumbled with exotic rubies .
I will throw them at your feet .
To moons above and seas green with longing .
We will ride paths of discovery

Love is madness

The blood red taste of new perfected wine .
It is naught a trifle to your briefest kiss
The shadow caress of floating silk
A hammer blow to your every touch .

Love is madness .

But here are we together now .
Fantasy at last wanting time
All my mad and fallow dreams .
Come bursting into bloom .

Fever

2011-05-27T12:16:00.000-07:00

In the middle of my fever I see you play at understanding
My aching head repeats, “Mankind needs understanding”
Insects and elephants

And I hear Mr. Shah’s deep English inflections saying,
You need understanding in both ways, to be understood and to understand
Insects and elephants

I know you want to be understood, now desire to understand
My fever-racing thought of slaughtered terrorized millions
Insects and elephants

Recall this planet, the earth, The Earth, is an ark, The Ark
Not just to carry pairs of beasts of every kind, but you too, all
Insects and elephants

Of us, strange dark bushman strange pale American , them
Strange homo sapiens strut abilities for terror and empathy
Insects and elephants

But your capacity for them versus us fills you with pride
You understand who are the innocent and what is real and what is just
Insects and elephants

You know the who of we the why of them and the because of that
Our destinies never seem to intertwine our fate never to see
Insects and elephants

My fever speaks to consider shipmates, arkmates, them is us
Every strange I is you is we is us and to them we is us
Insects and elephants

Lost and Found

2011-02-26T13:03:00.000-08:00

A chirping green light banner
Proclaim the caller searching
Our mislaid treasure, glass, steel, gold
So politely do I answer, surely will I seek?

Once upon a time in a seat
Still warm of transmitted body heat
I learn the seeing, learn the feeling,
Learn knowing the how of knowing.

Thwarted fingers, searching,
Climb through knots of hair
Seeking to loosen curled thoughts
Disturbed from a stream beneath.

The caller the seeker the search
Moving to a strange design
Breathing together across space
On the way to a weird objective.

Traveling tile to culmination
Our dance passes distractions
Reward for an unconscious
To bid a tender submission.

Gated together we succeed
To see a feeling of knowing
From under the shadow throne
To realize time under the sun.

Treasure

2010-05-22T12:01:00.001-07:00

Looking for poetic feet in electric lit darkness and noisy silence
You hear one thousand cacaphonic sounds in rattling rooms
And you announce, “This is treasure!”

Holding your plunder aloft and shouting of its value
“This is gold!” and childlike your cupped hands
Loose the dust within to float onto the breeze

What answer shall I give? To you the wind is ink
And desert sand a place to write your history
The sea an endless fountain of wine

How Many Did You Say?

2010-05-10T12:55:00.000-07:00

How many did you say?
There are the hundreds in Grand Central Station’s living room
And thousands more like rugs in store front doorways

Unwelcome welcome mats. San Diego treats them as rubbish
To be carted away out of sight out of mind and, always walking,
They look so out of place in LA.

How many did you say?
DC has them and they must be Detroit’s largest natural resource
If only Motor City could learn how to use them.

They’ve been seen in Minneapolis in the dead of winter
And Phoenix at high noon in midsummer’s heat
They seem to thrive anywhere.

How many did you say?
In Des Moines and Sacramento the bourgeois walk by
Comforting themselves with platitudes

Like “There but for the grace of God” and telling each other
In restrained voices how badly “those poor things smell.” Then
Laughs when bourgeois ears hear them ask for money.

How many did you say?
Tiny Hangtown has dozens hidden among the trees and along
It’s polluted creek they stride one way then another.

Travel Google Earth and see them laying quietly in Kansas City
Or Wells, Nevada or wandering the highways of the southwest
Talking to themselves and gesturing at the sky.

Bureaus full of Census is trying to count them.
Will they herd them through counting gates livestock like?
How many will you find Mr. Republicrat?

How many did you say?
How many did you estimate?
How many will you forget after counting?

Pursuit

2009-12-16T15:00:00.000-08:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2009

My search for you begins anew
In futures between silver linings

That veil’s razor-bright edges
Slicing through my armor

Sending my bloodfall surging over
The distant rim on a far horizon

First blood of agon is yours
Triumph is eternally yours

The coup infuriating my slow pulse
Waking all my meteoric pursuits

In early days my chases
Crafted an impatient make off

I hear soft laughter
Behind your fingers

Now you hide because
I so willingly bleed

Past seasons remain like your
Garments thrown in the mud

Your watery footprint
No signature of return

I know you return to prove
Devotion is irresistible

Yesterday

2009-10-28T12:07:00.000-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes

Yesterday, a last vestige of summer lingered
Like warm arms and a farewell kiss

The trees were green still hardly a tint
Of autumn color stirring under bird trills

California still golden under a gentle sun
Just taking in a final passionate breath

Today October’s wind blew from the west
Knocking red and yellow leaves to ground

Chasing birds into flight toward Mexico
The cool breeze tendrils chill late grapes

Cold weather friends are smiling again
Jeering summer’s hasty departure

They will be gleeful and grateful for frost
After winter rains transmute dust to mud

I will be grateful for rain to hide my tears
My heart never tires of flying in the sun

Birthday Party

2009-09-30T12:30:00.000-07:00

A neighboring table was set for a party of ten with an enormous Victorian epergne almost hidden under tropical flowers and orchids in an arrangement of red, yellow and black while one of the eternally cheerful cherubs of the epergne held a small dowel with a banner attached reading ‘Happy Birthday Wolfgang’ in English and German jammed into its tiny bronze hand. A sad looking woman of about thirty, over-dressed in a white evening gown, was sitting alone at the table with her back to a spectacular equatorial sunset.

As I had approached our table in the early evening light of the rapidly sinking sun, I thought the dress might have been cream colored but Elena informed me it was from last season and pointed out faintly marked sweat stains under the woman’s arms.

“How do you know the sweat stains aren’t this season’s; or maybe they are just some sort of fashion detailing? And how could you possibly know what the current fashion was here last season?”

Elena never misses a chance to point out my ignorance of such things in the kindest possible way, “If you ever paid attention to what I wear, you would know that I have a gown exactly like that minus the sweat stains. I wore it to the Black and White last year.”

“You did? Hmm … the only thing I remember from that event was that you wore Kelly green shoes, for which by the way, I would like to thank you. Those shoes helped me find you in the crowd all evening.”

“I thought you said you liked them because they matched my eyes?”

“That too.” I paused and looked back at the woman at the next table, “I sure hope Wolfgang brings a crowd with him. I am not sure I can bear to watch a scene like that all through dinner.”

“Just watch the sunset and think about that trickle of sweat running down your jaw.”

“That isn’t sweat. It’s water. I used a little too much combing my hair a moment ago. You know what? The men’s room here has wallpaper!”

“You combed your hair?”

A waiter came to take our drink order and Elena asked for an extra dry white wine from California. I ordered something I invented in the moment, confusing the waiter briefly, but he recovered his poise and simply wrote down the combination.

The woman at the next table was leaning on one hand and studying a couple of pages in a small booklet, turning the page and then flipping back to the previous page. Her head came up quickly at one moment to watch a waiter walk by asking if madam wanted anything. She said something I couldn’t hear after looking at her wristwatch and the waiter departed, returning a few minutes later with a large glass filled with something alcoholic looking and littered with tropical fruit, two straws and an oversized pink drink umbrella.

Elena brought my attention to a motor-sailboat heading in toward one of the piers from the direction of the sunset. I hadn’t even noticed the sails until the moment the waiter set the drink down. But there it was, large and impressive, a motor-sailer with blue sails, now being furled, and a white hull. The waiter said something to the woman in white and pointed in the direction of the boat.

The woman’s careful blond highlights flipped over her shoulder as she turned her head quickly to see. Standing, she placed the booklet in her handbag, rearranged her table setting, carefully making it match the others, then saying something in a low voice to the waiter, to which he inclined his head, she took a breath and grew a very broad smile. Pushing her hair behind an ear with one hand she walked quickly out a seaside entry of the restaurant and almost skipped down to the pier where the boat was being moored.

While the crew was busy with mooring lines a crowd of men and women were rising from the boat’s interior cabins and carefully making their way along the main deck toward the gangway. The men were wearing white tuxedo jackets and black pants, while the women seemed to be clothed in the tropic light itself, jewels and sequins flashing and glittering in the red and gold light of the sunset.

“Looks like an animated jewel box,” I murmured louder than I intended.

“It is an animated jewel box,” Elena’s hand touched my arm, “I wonder which one is Wolfgang?”

The waiter had just then appeared with our drinks and heard her question, “Mr. Wolfgang is a guest here in the bungalows, madam. Your drinks; a very dry white wine for the lady and for the gentleman … the gentleman’s … cocktail.” He looked doubtfully at the drink as though it might not be the right thing, and then asked, “Please sir, would you try the cocktail and tell me if it is correct?”

I took a slug and making a face said, “Yep. That’s the ticket!”

Looking relieved, he nodded his head smiling and said he would be returning momentarily for our dinner order. I looked at him with a deadpan face and said, “Oh, we won’t be having anything to eat, we’re just going to get drunk and spill our drinks on the other guests.” His startled face actually brought an uncharacteristically sympathetic response from Elena who quickly interjected, “Don’t listen to him. We are having dinner and he’s just joking.” Relief again flooded the waiter’s face and he laughed saying, “Ha ha ha … The gentleman is being funny ... ha ha ha! I will be right back.” Then he scurried away, almost running.

Then she added to me, “Please pick on someone who can’t put ipecac in our food. If my dinner comes out strange because of you, you can dance by yourself.”

“You couldn’t let me dance by myself. What would people think?”

“They’d think you were dancing with an invisible partner. They’d also think you are a little touched, and they would be correct. How’s that drink?”

“I think I’m getting a little touched.”

“It serves you right for teasing the waiter and ordering … well, whatever that drink is.”

“Do you think I could get a copyright on this recipe?”

“Tell me again what’s in it?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Then, no.”

“Sadly, he said, I should have written it down.”

“Pity, she said, he never learned to write.”

One by one the party from the boat was finally making its way down the gangway and toward the woman in white waiting on the pier. Many of the men waved to her as they walked down the brow and took her hand as they stepped onto the pier, occasionally kissing her on the cheek while the women gave her slight embraces and a cursory air-kiss on one cheek. When the last man stepped onto the pier a brief conversation took place and the woman indicated the restaurant with a wave of her hand and the party began to move up the pier toward the seaside entrance.

Elena made the observation that from where ever they had sailed, all the guests must have dressed on the boat because their freshly groomed appearance couldn’t have been achieved otherwise. “Can you imagine me sailing in a dress like one of those for an entire afternoon in this humidity?”

“I can’t imagine you sailing at all. The thought of a mast protruding from your oh so lovely cleavage, with or without a dress, is too much of a stretch for even my twisted imagination. And where would the passengers sleep?”

“Have you thought of going into advertising?” she asked sweetly.

“We should advertise for Wolfgang. I think this shebang is for him, and that banner says “Happy Birthday Wolfgang” and it says it in two languages and that big fancy chair is just sitting there empty. I don’t know, but it just seems to me that when you throw a birthday party for someone with all this hoorah, they ought to be there to make fun of it!”

“Maybe Wolfgang doesn’t like hoorah.”

Elena is mostly, but not always, right.

All the guests had arrived. The seating seemed to be quite a problem because someone wanted to sit somewhere other than next to Wolfgang’s chair and a quiet girl of about 14 must have been an unannounced arrival and a place setting had to be added even though there were more than enough chairs which threw the woman in the white dress into a small panic. A moment or two of eavesdropping convinced me no one at all wanted to sit next to Wolfgang and that caused me to wonder aloud to Elena if perhaps he was flatulent.

“Well, it has me wondering too. But I was wondering if the fellow throws food?”

Elena wasn’t far wrong.

Our waiter returned and asking what we would like for dinner smiled when we ordered an entire kitchen full of food. Elena has a good appetite and my eating habits frequently are compared to that of large omnivorous beasts.

“Would the lady and the gentleman care for our special appetizer this evening?”

“And what would that special appetizer be this evening?” Why is it that when Elena asks those questions she makes it sound like she’s talking about herself?

The waiter stuttered a little under her green gaze, recovered and responded with, “Madam would truly enjoy our appetizer this evening. We are offering a thinly sliced crostini with bitter endive and …”, he lowered his voice, “Beluga caviar.”

Elena’s perfectly straight white teeth flashed a devastating grin and absolutely awash with enthusiasm she took the waiter’s hand saying in an alto voice, “Madam would be delighted if you, yourself served it up.”

The waiter blushed and his slightly tanned Asiatic coloring turned vaguely purple. “It is my pleasure!”

“How do you do that? I am sure you were talking about food and I think you gave him an erection.”

“Did I? I hope so. It builds my self-confidence.”

“I wasn’t aware that you lacked self-confidence. Are you sure you aren’t building self-aggrandizement? You are the only woman I know who can make trained monkeys forget their acts.”

“You are the only trained monkey I’ve ever spoken to … perhaps in my entire life,” she said in an aggrieved tone.

The birthday table had settled into a series of conversations mostly relating to the circumstances of the boat trip. The young girl who showed up unexpectedly, simply sat and occasionally laughed at other guest’s comments. Elena told me quietly she was literally dying to find out who the young lady might be and was absolutely certain her presence was going to cause some drama. Elena is always correct about such things, well, almost always, and that perception was pitch perfect in this situation.

Our caviar-laden crostini laying on its mattress of bitter endive made its entrance and bowed its final exit with not a crumb left behind to the extreme delight of our waiter. Before the caviar’s appearance he had asked if we wanted a different wine with our appetizer, and when Elena had quickly told him we each wanted a shot of vodka instead, his smile stretched halfway to his ears and when she named an obscure but extremely expensive brand, his molars were finally seeing his own earlobes. “Yes, madam. We keep that brand for special occasions, but confidentially, the chef sometimes uses it for a better flambé effect on some dishes.” He looked doubtful when he asked if we wanted it on ice, but Elena’s horrified look told him everything he wanted to know and this time, the smile’s stretch had almost pulled his nasal lobes into his sideburns. “Very good, madam, very good. I will be back in a moment.”

“Yew shore know how ta git ‘em movin’ señorita!”

“Why, darlin’ it’s mah specialty!” Elena has a way with anything with external sex organs. Truthfully, she also has a way of engaging her own sex without intimidating them with her startling film star looks. Our neighboring table kept sending surreptitious looks in our direction, well, truthfully in Elena’s direction, and I knew she was enjoying the attention, so when I mentioned to her that they were probably just wondering if they could get the special appetizer, she snorted an unladylike sound resembling a leaking balloon and almost guffawed. I enjoy making Elena laugh because I know it’s sincere. When she is truly amused she has a loud bray like Tallulah Bankhead.

The neighboring table had relaxed into a gentle buzz of conversation although no food had arrived for them and Elena and I were halfway through a salad of lettuce young enough that eating it might be considered infanticide and it was garnished in julienne vegetables and a lemon vinaigrette so sparse it almost forgot to show up, rather like Wolfgang. But Elena’s enthusiasm for the food had prompted an invitation into the kitchen to advise the chef, then asked to give service instruction to the wait staff and even requested to be the godmother of all the first-born children in the district. After all that, Wolfgang still hadn’t arrived.

The fancy chair for the birthday boy, resembling a baroque throne, sat empty, expectant, with the chairs on either side empty as well. It seems no one wanted to sit next to Wolfgang, and that worked out very well as Wolfgang wasn’t there to sit next to. The woman in white presided pleasantly, if a little formally. She didn’t seem to be experiencing any extraordinary anxiety. The centerpiece with its inapt presence and flag-bearing cherub kept cross-table guests busy stretching their necks to address someone opposite. The birthday banner fluttered in the light breeze from the sea assuring the guests that it was indeed still Wolfgang’s birthday whether they spoke German or English and whether or not he ever showed up.

I suddenly realized that none of the guests had had even an appetizer, although many of them had had a cocktail or two. Elena brought it to my attention that there had been some small rows about whether ordering cocktails would be inappropriate.

“Really?” I asked.

“Oh yes. In fact, it was the lady in white who told them why not, she had one.”

“She certainly did! That pink umbrella thing. But I’ll bet it wasn’t as good as our vodka.”

“Probably not. Do you suppose there’s a vodka drink that comes with one of those umbrellas?”

“Certainly not! Vodka drinks come with fur hats!”

“And fur tongues if you drink enough of them!”

There was no way I could top that.

The sun had dropped well over the horizon and the deep black night of the tropics had enveloped the bright lights of the restaurant. Tinny German music from the Weimar Republic and 1930’s Berlin had been playing over the in-house music system thinly since our arrival, meanwhile blue lights for the purpose, occasionally snapped with the electrocution deaths of flying insects. The restaurant had filled and emptied and filled again and mostly emptied of its first and second seatings and still Wolfgang hadn’t made his appearance. Maybe he didn’t like birthdays but Wolfgang certainly wasn’t demonstrating Germanic timeliness.

Elena and I had stretched our stay across two seatings and grazed our way through a vast set of courses while our neighboring table watched the arrival of every one like starving pets. A different glass of wine accompanied each course and our waiter had the look of a man who had found the treasure of the Templars. The woman in white though, barely seemed to know we were there. Her initial poise was beginning to wear thin and every so often her eyes drifted toward the bungalows facing the beach, a strange look of fear invading them as they glanced in that direction, and seeing nothing, a flicker of relief like breath came back into her entire body.

The quiet girl suddenly speaking loudly, announced that she was going to order and a silence fell over the table. She didn’t care, she was hungry and he was rude. He had kept everyone waiting for hours and those people, she indicated Elena and I, had finished their entire dinner (not quite true) while the birthday party was still waiting.

The Maitre’d hurried over and began speaking in a low voice in the young lady’s ear, but she pulled away saying she didn’t care; she wanted to order now. The Maitre’d shrugged his shoulders but something caught his attention and he looked toward the bungalows where his stare caught a movement and everyone at the table followed his glance.

Against a background of incandescent lights from one of the nearer bungalows and its reflection off the wings of hundreds of flying insects the silhouette of a large man could be seen walking through the tropic blackness toward the restaurant.

“Now we get to see who all the fuss is over,” Elena said matter-of-factly.

At another table one of the other guests overheard her and said, “he sure likes to be fashionably late. Very fashionably late!”

And fashionably inappropriate, I thought.

Wolfgang entered the restaurant with a deliberate slowness. There were two or three steps up from the grass leading to the bungalows and his steps seemed designed to bring more and more of his being into view. His entrance was cinematic.

The woman in white stood as he reached the top step and some of the others automatically responded by also rising, which brought the remainder to their feet except the young girl, who crossed her arms and refused to even look in his direction.

Oddly, a few other tables also rose and applauded his entrance. I am not sure whether they knew him or were applauding his incredible entrance or were relieved that the guests at his table could finally eat. I would have bet on the entrance.

Wolfgang stood about two meters tall from his strangely sandaled feet to the crown of his head covered with long, rather shaggy blond hair. It was clear from the carefully managed display of his muscular figure he worked obsessively on body-building and physical fitness. He was wearing a loose white shirt unbuttoned to his navel revealing a tautly muscled chest and abdomen with the barest hint of a tan. He had carefully rolled his sleeves up about halfway to show off his lower arm development. His shirt barely covered a pair of brief style bathing trunks revealing massive, carefully shaved leg muscles. Most disturbing was a set of deeply carved creases, like a sargent’s chevrons, running upward at an angle from the bridge of his nose parallel with his eyebrows, giving him a perpetually angry expression, like an unfortunate Klingon.

In his passage across the restaurant floor he was forced to pass on one side or the other of our table and it seemed to annoy him but he kept his focus. His path took him behind me forcing him to look at the people impeding his progress. I’m guessing it was Elena’s brilliant auburn hair that caught his eye because he stopped briefly and stared. It wasn’t a stare of recognition of beauty but seemed to be more a look of competition, as if something in the room was drawing attention away from him and he did not take it well. As he stopped behind me, a whiff of expensive cologne stopped with him.

The guests at his table were silent; in fact, the entire restaurant was silent except for the tinny sound of 1930’s Berlin cabaret music floating with insects in the air.

When he reached his chair, one of the restaurant staff pulled it away from the table for him. I thought everyone would wait to sit until he had seated himself but it wasn’t that formal. For nearly a full minute he ignored everything but the epergne and its decorations, finally nodding his head in satisfaction. Wolfgang didn’t seem to notice or care that the chairs on either side of him were empty and while he had a brief greeting for most he very pointedly ignored the girl with her arms crossed and asked if everyone was ready for dessert.

The girl blurted out that they hadn’t even had dinner and that he had kept everyone waiting for over an hour to which Wolfgang merely looked at her until she leaped out of her chair knocking it over backward and ran from the restaurant. Laughing heartily, Wolfgang said in his heavily accented English, “Who invited her anyway? Ha ha ha!”

The restaurant staff must have been forewarned because one of the staff merely righted the downed chair. Wolfgang announced that everyone would be having his birthday dessert and, nodding, the staff member retreated to the kitchen. A low murmur of conversation enveloped the table and I watched the woman in white shrink into herself. Words floated toward our table about business and the accommodations and the boat trip but it was clear, Wolfgang was rather like a lion that had arrived at a fiesta for gazelle and the gazelle were very nervous.

A noticeable tension descended and the air in the restaurant seemed to be thickening around that rather tinny music and Elena noticed it as well.

“Why does that music sound so … saccharine now? It didn’t sound like that before, did it?”

“Let’s see if we can’t get them to find an alternative.”

Signaling our waiter, who almost ran to our table, I asked him if he could please change the music to something more contemporary. He looked a little doubtful, but nodded and gave a thousand watt or so smile moving off in the direction of the kitchen. Moments later he and the Maitre’d appeared together in the kitchen doorway with doubt in the Maitre’d’s eyes. The waiter seemed to be reassuring the Maitre’d it was those people who had ordered the special appetizer making the request and even pointed in our direction. They returned to the kitchen and a few moments later the music changed to Elvis Costello followed by some contemporary American Jazz.

I was expecting an argument from Wolfgang but while Wolfgang’s face underwent a brief loss of color, whatever equanimity he possessed returned and no comment was made although the other guests at his table seemed to be holding their breath until he started to speak again.

Elena and I had ordered a rather fantastic dessert, naturally with its accompanying wine, and when our waiter with his now perpetual smile arrived, Wolfgang seemed to be giving his complete attention to the cherub holding the banner, but his guests watched the progress of our dessert across the restaurant floor. The deep creases on his forehead seemed to grow deeper when he saw his guests’ attention was elsewhere. When he turned to see what they were watching, a russet color invaded his face and seeing it, a young man touched his partner on the arm and she in turn touched the man to her right and the touching went around the table like a little ballet until everyone had their attention focused back on the birthday boy.

Moments later, a birthday cake arrived at the table and Wolfgang’s face was wreathed in smiles as he explained what was in the cake and how important it was to eat a healthy diet. The waiters for the table began cutting and serving the cake. I believed the guests were hungry enough to consume Wolfgang himself whom, judging from the pained expressions his guests had after they started to taste the cake, they probably would have preferred.

Elena and I concentrated on our tropic fantasy dessert and toasted each other with its accompanying wine while Wolfgang loudly exclaimed how grand the cake was; I don’t think his guests concurred. One woman arose and left in the direction of a restroom and a waiter began to lift her plate with its remainder of cake to which Wolfgang said, “Leave it. She’ll want more.”

Lingering through our wine, Elena leaned over and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “Let’s have espresso!”

“Deal.” I whispered back.

Elena told the waiter we were not in a hurry and he replied, “Yes, madam. No rush, madam.”

At the next table the entire cake was being consumed. The guests looked vaguely nauseous and Wolfgang looked triumphant, but one guest must have marred poor Wolfgang’s evening because he wouldn’t accept the last piece, and in spite of his gusto for whatever kind of cake it was, Wolfgang wasn’t having any more either and a rather quiet row ensued growing louder until Wolfgang, leaning toward the guest and extending his powerful arm flicked the plate with its contents onto the floor.

A waiter hurried over and without much apology in his voice, Wolfgang said, “I am sorry. A mess for you to clean up.”

“This is the part of the movie where I always eat lots of popcorn,” Elena said.

“This is the part of the movie where I always go to the restroom,” I replied, “You were right. He throws food.”

“Don’t let it bother you. Think of it as all part of a grand experience.” She was all smiles.

“I’ve been around food throwers before. They just raise my dry cleaning bill. Why can’t we just enjoy the insects and the humidity?”

“This is better than incest and humility,” she malapropped, “I can’t wait to see who wins!”

Fortunately, our espresso arrived with a national debt sized bill and a smile from the waiter wide enough to cause ivory poaching. It was great espresso and I asked the waiter how it happened that such good espresso occurred south of the equator. What I didn’t notice was that Wolfgang’s table had grown completely silent, they may have been praying for all I know, but Wolfgang must have overheard my question.

After the waiter finished explaining that they received training from an Italian barista and left with my watch, ring, wallet and bankbook, Wolfgang sat forward in his chair leaning on its arm and turned to face our table wiping the corners of his mouth rather delicately with his napkin then said a little louder than necessary, “You know, coffee is bad for the complexion because it affects the liver function. You mustn’t drink coffee. American coffee is high in caffeine and that is ruinous for blood pressure and the heart. With dairy products included it is also bad for the veins and the arteries.” He continued on in this manner for a few minutes and then having finished his lecture, turned back to his guests and said, “I am always the spreader of truth. It is necessary for me because it is who I am.”

“What about popcorn?” Elena quipped loudly.

Wolfgang simply ignored her, but it seems he and I were destined to come into brief contact again. He left his party as Elena and I were getting ready to leave the restaurant and as he walked by our table I just couldn’t help myself saying, “Happy Birthday, Wolfgang,” and restraining myself from throwing a sieg heil instead stuck out my hand for him to shake.

He paused momentarily, looking down at my outstretched hand but instead of shaking it, brushed the back of his hand against the back of mine and then continued out of the restaurant. Elena hadn’t noticed because she was gathering her handbag, but when I told her she giggled and said, “Well, now I am sure of one thing. Wolfgang is very kinky!”

Gratitude

2009-09-23T20:58:00.000-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2009

A dor da minha alma
Foi marcada em mim porque
O céu respira
A chuva impetuosa

Os anjos sozinhos
Souberam porque deus
Queimou nossas pegadas
Na terra

Desvaneçeu-se a música do carnaval
Como o fumo após o fogo
Que deriva ao céu
Esquecido aqui na terra

Como uma faca a luz solar
Cortou a noite para dar
A cada fantasia
Um desaparecimento ideal

E cada fantasia
E cada fantasia
E cada fantasia
Como o sonho desapareçeu

Todos os suspiros
Todos os gritos
Todos os rasgos
Todas as pétalas caídas amor

Você o perigo dão
Porque posso confessar não
Recordar eu posso não
E eu posso não esqueçer

Brother

2009-09-15T15:28:00.000-07:00

My brother appears
Occupied in occupations
He rarely or never filled.

The last time he was dressed
In a tuxedo like James Bond
Holding a martini glass.

He raised his glass to me
Overhead in a noisy crowd
Excluding them for a moment.

Once I sat while he rowed
A tiny dory with just he and I
Out on a secret quiet sea.

A rowboat?
Surrounded by mist
Rising from the water?

The sea was calm green
The fog gray and warm
With steam room odors.

That pea green water
The sea flat and reflective
As a well-polished mirror.

Never speaking words
He just rowed the oars causing
Quiet splash sounds.

Once I saw him sleeping
Just quietly breathing
The moonlight.

Then his apparition was
Rounding a corner
On some busy city intersection.

Traffic lights were flashing
While he removed a cornerstone
Containing a clock, a rusted tool and a note.

He never fails to smile and wave
And I never know quite
Why I am there.

He always appears youthful
Almost dapper jaunty
Full of curiosity.

Source

2009-09-06T22:31:00.001-07:00

Source generates sound
Sound generates thought
Thought generates word
Word generates speech

Hear the speech and the word
Hear the word and the thought
Hear the thought and the sound
Hear the sound and the Source

Find the speech from the word
Find the word from the thought
Find the thought from the sound
Find the sound from the Source

Island

2009-08-24T10:16:00.000-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2009

A secret voyage
In the untold long ago
Across immense seas
Unknown and terrifying
Currents carried our ship
To a hidden island
On the very edge
Of eternity

Peaceful suns
Warmed our lives
Amid green leaves
Sitting at the tide line
Of a golden beach
We didn’t hear
What was said
By whispering sand

“A great wind is blowing
Centuries of seasons
Across your lives
And the river is drying
The caravels weighed anchor
Set sails and departed
On the west wind
While you were playing”

Now night comes
And the savage moon
Is masked by storm
It cannot find us
I fell into a mirage
Remembering your kiss
And the deepening shadow
Has taken you

Folk Tale

2009-08-03T00:04:00.001-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2008

Last night I was talking with a friend about the phenomenon of epiphany and today, as my mind returned to our conversation, I was reminded in my own odd way of stories like those of the brothers Grimm and other transformational folk tales. This train of thought led me eventually into a sort of thoughtfulness about the human voice (I know you are wondering how I got from folk tales to human voice?), and that got me to wondering about why it is that we, at least here in the west, still do not know how the human voice produces the quality of pitch, which led me still further into remembering something from a favorite author.

The tale of a shepherd who was overheard by Moses talking to God about wanting to comb his beard and mend his sandals and so forth, which caused Moses a great deal of consternation. Actually, it made him quite angry and he began to shout and belittle the shepherd for his ridiculous assumption that he could comb the beard of God or mend his sandals, which, in turn, shamed the shepherd and sent him off in a blue funk.

Naturally, the tale is cautionary and at that point Moses hears the voice of God coming from heaven, or from where ever such voices are supposed to come, saying, “Moses, you’ve just treated one of my most loyal servants wrongly. He was worshiping me in the manner he knew.” Etc., etc., all of which sounds rather whiney, but Moses, himself a faithful servant of the divine, realizes his error and sets off into the desert seeking the shepherd to deliver an apology and after finding him, Moses is rightly contrite and profusely apologetic but the shepherd interrupts this outpouring saying, “No, no, really, Moses, it is quite alright. You were correct, I now understand what you meant and I no longer want or need to comb God’s beard or mend his sandals.” Even though Moses protests that God told him it was okay for the shepherd to comb God’s beard and mend the sandals, the shepherd reaffirms that Moses’ sudden attack had given him a shock and the energy of the shock of this transformation had allowed him to make a spiritual advancement so he really didn’t need the old worship pattern any longer. All’s well and good. Now God has two faithful and advanced servants wandering the desert.

Here is where my own thoughts started interfering and wondering about the human voice pitch thing again and I told myself that perhaps here was an area that needed to be studied and researched and in the way of my usual brain activity, immediately began wondering about the word ‘research’.

Re search. Look for again. So something that was previously known seems to need the re-knowing or re-finding because somehow that knowledge has been lost. Perhaps the idea of how to make pitches in the human voice was known once upon a time and a journey must be made and a kind of archaeology performed to find that lost treasure. How could such a thing, an important idea, a knowledge possibly have become lost? Actually, if one looks at the etymology of the word research, one will find that it comes from the French and the ‘re’ prefix is an intensifier of effort or energy; therefore an intense search. That is very like one of those cautions found in folk tales. Nonetheless, we can both look again and do so intensely.

Well now, that isn’t such a difficult thing to understand.

Perhaps somewhere in the dim and distant prehistoric and ante-technical past some remote ancestor of us all discovered a way to change the pitch of his or her grunts on purpose and taught the family and tribe and they taught their families and tribes and so on and then pretty much everyone figured it out and it didn’t seem like a such a big deal because everyone could change pitches and all it took to teach them was a simple kind of mimicry. This sort of thing happens all the time. Consider the automobile for example. At first, the only people to move around in them were the people who could actually build one. Then those master mechanics taught others to drive and maybe a little about the inner workings, which were more or less promptly forgotten and those second generation drivers taught someone to drive but left out the mechanical workings and so on, and now it is difficult to find a driver that knows anything at all about the mechanics of his conveyance.

But for the first fellow, the fellow who discovered pitch in the human voice that is, it was a really big deal. That legacy gave us all voices and speech and words and sentences and languages and writing and reading even though no one now knows how pitch is created. There are some who might argue that it might have been better if we never learned to speak but I prefer to think of those persons as rather cranky misanthropes. It is this technology that allows us to communicate with one another across all kinds of barriers although it has caused problems for translators of various stripes.

But I have digressed from my original thought regarding folk tales, epiphany and inner reality.

When I was very young I used to make ‘deals’ with whatever I thought was god. I frequently made a request of the divine to, “Please do this and I will do that.” In other words, I was performing my own ritual of combing the beard of god and mending his sandals. Rather marvelously, many of my requests were miraculously answered (even if they might have happened regardless) and so I continued to comb tangles out the beard of god and rivet and glue those well-worn sandals, but in the meanwhile something else was happening. Let us call it a proliferation of litter.

In many of the folk tales I’ve come across, the protagonists, male and female, are told by the wise, “Yes, you can get/find/recover/arrive at the goal of your choice but here are the problems involving the progress of your journey,” and then the warnings and problems are clearly laid out for the protagonist by the cautionary authority. Every transformational tale has these roadblocks: an ogre with an appetite for just such travelers as the protagonist, a number of magical totems or gifts, an irritable companion or even a personality quirk of the hero or heroine.

Eventually though, in the best of these tales, the protagonist sets out and indeed, finds the way to their heart’s desire and they live happily ever after. Sometimes. In some tales the protagonist must effectively rerun the journey from a different perspective and in many tales the protagonist is only the last in a long line of pre-protagonists who have attempted and failed to achieve the desired outcome, so what happened? Here is my opinion.

In combing the beard of god and mending his sandals many of us ask for a trade, a bargain, a deal. Quid pro quo. If you, God, do this for me, I, the undersigned, will promise to comb beard and mend sandals. Occasionally, however, we are so overwhelmed by the quick response and complete fulfillment of our stated desire, we forget our part of the bargain, which is roughly equivalent to what happens in a folk tale when the protagonist forgets a caution about listening to what order of events to follow to reach the heart’s desire.

It is my idea that those cautions and traps are still there waiting somewhere deep in our minds to trip us up and prevent us from reaching our heart’s desire and because we keep making bargains, we keep leaving more traps for ourselves and pretty soon our mental landscape looks more like no-man’s land after a battle and truly is not fit for mental habitation. This is not to say that such an area cannot be reclaimed for useful purposes, but to do so requires a great deal of effort. That is why there are so many pre-protagonists and so few of the more familiar and successful heroic type.

Here is a very great secret; that source usually labeled god or the divine does not want or need placation or payment. But it does need attention.

Mastering The Heart

2009-07-22T13:13:00.000-07:00

Mastering the heart
Opens all possibilities …

Waiting terrified
Not knowing why
I watch
Serene fields worked
By invisible hands

In the quiet rest
Of evening
I watch
My father rise
Crippled and lame

Mastering the heart
Opens all possibilities …

From darkness beyond
Crystalline glass
I watch
My grandfather
Scream silent curses

Never a reply
To betray shame
I watch
Grandfather’s son
Limp into death

Mastering the heart
Opens all possibilities …

Muscle blood sinew
Holding stillness
I watch
Generations
Compromise futures

Breathing out darkness
Golden dawns break
I watch
Shining stars fade
The Work continues

Mastering the heart
Opens all possibilities …

Interface

2009-07-19T20:02:00.001-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2009

I am trying to crack the hardness surrounding my mentality, or at least a piece of my mentality. I remembered this morning the incident of the “missing exercise record” from my youth.

In brief, I heard and became quickly enamored of an exercise recording at school one day with a catchy tune called “Chicken Fat” that was probably a product of some physical fitness campaign. Some fellow brought the record to school and put all of us fourth graders through all of its eight minutes of exercises and being thrilled with the thing I immediately ordered a copy for which I had to pay out of my allowance some outrageous sum…probably four or five dollars.

So thrilled was I with the record that I took it home and played and exercised over and over, stretching the eight or so minutes of exercise into something like maybe fifteen or twenty. Not a bad aerobic workout for a fourth grader. I must have really got the exercise bug, because I remembered faithfully going through the routine every afternoon for about a week.

However, my mother wasn’t as thrilled with either the record or my exercising, and I couldn’t say which bothered her more but she did say that if I wanted to exercise I could go out and dig in the garden or cut wood or rake up leaves or some such thing. Whatever it was I cooperated fully and completed the task because I knew that her “suggestion” was a command. I will not say I did whatever it was cheerfully, but I did it.

So after that final routine I carefully put away my record in its sleeve and did my chore. The weekend went by and the following Monday I went back to school actually looking forward to getting home, not a common occurrence, and once again exercising to my record.

Upon arrival at home however, I could not locate my record anywhere and I put in a great deal of effort looking. It took me years to realize that my mother had most likely thrown it into the garbage and because I was always suspicious of my parent’s actions, it was a place I checked. What I didn’t realize was that she probably buried it in the garbage knowing I would dig through the top layers of the stuff.

What does this have to do with me today?

I have recently tried to inject an exercise regime into my life. Exercise is not difficult; I am not overweight and while I am slightly ‘jiggly’ around the middle, I am certainly not fat. I need more to move weight rather than lose it; in fact, I may be a little underweight. To accomplish this, I have joined a website that promotes fitness and has a social networking aspect to it as well. More importantly, it demands a certain mindset of positive energy and its founder speaks eloquently about spiritual aspects of health and fitness.

So what is the problem? The program has certain requirements. There are a series of ‘assignments’ to be read and carried out and the founder has carefully laid out a syllabus for students to complete. Therein lies the big hurdle for me: I am essentially a terrible student. I think I like to learn but learning takes effort and somewhere I learned that effort isn’t worth the effort.

I live almost completely upside down and backwards from the average American, whatever that is.

I have difficulty competing because competition wasn’t allowed by my parents or in my family environment. For example, when my siblings and I played the game Monopoly (which we all blithely called Monotony), no one ever won because it would mean someone was trying to win! The only way anyone was allowed to win any game was by complete chance; skill and strategy caused too much dissention and anger. So every ordinary game we played was a chance-driven game like a strange little card game my grandmother taught us given the curiously aggressive name of “Beat Your Neighbors Out Of Doors”. Games that were completely driven by the roll of dice such as board games were pretty much okay, but games like chess stopped being played as soon as someone seemed to start improving beyond the abilities of my parents.

Some of us did eventually learn to play whist and gin, but these were games which had such long stretches of time between playings that they had to be relearned every time or were actually learned long after my parents had lost any interest at all in games. There is certainly skill to games like cribbage but that skill has to be taught and my parents had no interest in losing and taught only the barest of fundamentals of how to count the cards and when and if they started losing, they stopped playing.

I mention games because I have heard that the learning of games is one method of learning how to interact with and deal with the complexity of a society. If this is true then an individual living in a complex, competitive society needs to learn how to compete and understand the social complexities and these skills are most easily taught and learned during formative years. What happens to the individual who does not learn the skills needed in his society?

I remember one evening my brother and I sitting at the dining room table, which was where school homework was usually done until we finally acquired a desk for our room somewhere during my middle school years (and even then my brother tended to pile books and papers on it in such a way that it couldn’t easily be utilized as a desk). I do not remember what we were actually involved in but I made a comment something like, “well, I need to strive to achieve (it)…” using the word ‘strive’ because I had read or heard how striving to reach ones goals was how things were done. My brother, who had been listening to my yammer suddenly interrupted me saying, and I will never forget this, “Oh no! You must never strive for anything!!” His interruption shocked me. To this day I am not sure whether he said it because he really felt that way or because it was his way of breaking the ‘non-competition’ rule of the house.

I later asked him about it and he seemed to indicate that he actually believed in non-competition but many of his actions seem contrary to the idea. He did tell me one afternoon sitting by the American River in an almost confessional way that my father had spent a lot of time comparing my supposed grace to his clumsiness and apparently gave him the idea that I was favored in some way. This completely took me by surprise because I had always thought that he, as the elder, was the favored one! Some time after that event my father began to reveal some aspects of his personality that astonished and depressed me.

He revealed a certain bitterness about some events early in my brother’s life that my mother and her parents developed a monopoly on my brother’s time and only allowed my father special access when it suited them, taking my brother to watch my maternal grandfather in his workshop or taking him to his place of work, never allowing him to see my father at his place of work.

When my brother was registering for the Selective Service he told them he had seizures and was listed 4-F. My father was angry and told him and me, and then told me again later that my brother had been “stupid” and “should have lied”. Again, this astonished me, because we had always been conditioned, sometimes violently, to “tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”. I rather confrontationally asked my father where we would have ever got the idea that under some circumstances it would be okay to lie? He didn’t seem to care that my brother’s circumstances could endanger another human.

At the time, I tried to smooth things over by saying, “well that wouldn’t have been a good idea because (my brother) wanted to be a pilot and it could have been really dangerous…etc., etc. … He really wanted to go into the Air Force Academy … you know, to become a pilot, an officer...” To which my father replied, “Oh, he just wanted to surpass me.” I was and am shocked that a parent would say this about his child, and the offhand way in which he said it and the gleeful relief in his voice that it hadn’t happened still stirs my ire.

Which brings me to another problem: my parents didn’t seem to believe in or want a future, or maybe even a goal. The future, and its corollary, goals, were either nonexistent or at the very least, suspect. “Why do you want to do that?” was always the question. “What’s the point?” Recently, one of my sisters told me she isn’t sure there is a point in thinking about the future. The question arose again while I was filling out a job application recently and came across a question, which read, “What do you want to be doing in five years?” It took me a few days to think up a response and I can’t even remember what I wrote.

My elder sister, toward the end of her high school years contacted a school that trained airline personnel to become flight attendants, ticket agents and the like and a representative of the school came to our house to interview my sister and talk with my parents about enrollment. I was really hoping my sister’s excitement would carry the day and she would get hired by one of the airlines, mostly because I thought maybe I might get to fly somewhere exotic. It was a beautiful spring day; I love to fly so I went for a walk to daydream about flying to Honolulu or Rome.

At the very moment I returned to the house, my sister came running, crying and screaming out the front door and, not too far behind her, the woman from the school tightly gripping a briefcase came striding, angrily, red-faced, toward her car. Then she stopped, turned and yelled something back at the house about what “…you are doing to your daughter’s life…” I stopped abruptly in the yard to watch her throw the briefcase in her car, slam the door and speed away, nearly running the car off an embankment opposite our driveway, but just before she got in her car and slammed the door, she yelled at me in a rising crescendo, “Don’t have any dreams!”

A moment later when I warily entered the house, both my parents were sitting comfortably in our living room, my mother looking like she had just won the academy award and my father had an unfathomable grin on his face, rather like an agent whose client had just won an academy award. I knew in that moment that any plan I had for any kind of future for myself must be kept completely secret until it became fait accompli, Worse, any plan or goal I might have had up until that moment completely evaporated. To this day I have difficulty visualizing goals unless they are extremely short term, but practice has given me an ability, however slight, to anticipate consequences.

But this disability hasn’t stopped me from continually trying to reformulate my future.

Today, I was monitoring my body because of the program I am trying to accomplish and suddenly realized that pursing my lips has become habitual! I love to laugh but I have forgotten, if I ever knew, how to smile! When I started trying to loosen the musculature around my mouth, I noticed my eyebrows were either in a mild frown or slightly raised in surprise, or maybe fear. What is happening here?

Here is my theory.

We are, all of us, creatures of habit and some habits form without our knowing it. We may all be born in beauty and joy and surely some of us develop in beauty and joy but what happens when our development is skewed away from it? I think a kind of anger forms from the loss and that anger is expressed in various ways, perhaps the least of which is a habitual form of facial expression.

I think it is our nature to “wear” our bodies into a shape that satisfies our most constant mental and emotional condition. This isn’t anything new; actors and dancers have been using an enforced technique of this idea for thousands of years. The Greek comedy/tragedy masks are a good example. But what is necessary to alter that conditioned stance?

My answer is some kind of readjustment that has as its genesis an alteration of the inner mental/emotional/spiritual condition. This isn’t new either. In fact, nothing I write here is new, even the fact that I myself am involved in an attempt to alter my inner climate. I previously wrote about how I got the idea to enter the Navy but I did not write about the ideas that kept that idea on track.

In high school and even before, I developed a way of interfacing with my universe. I use the word interface because I saw myself as a unique system that could not operate with any other system without a special program operating. After I developed my ‘interface’, I could interact. Part of that program allowed me to mentally slip out of one personality mode and into another, usually without anyone noticing very much. Those who did notice usually didn’t comment. To anyone reading this, I know how this sounds. My brother actually called me “a little schizo” (and he meant small not ‘just a tad’…) once and my mother quite belligerently told him that I wasn’t because that is what she was diagnosed as being and I couldn’t possibly be the same. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. However, I am not schizophrenic nor do I have multiple personality disorder.

But let me return to my interface technique.

This self-developed program allowed me, like an actor, to put on a personality or character if you will. In school, I necessarily developed what looked as close as I could reckon to what I thought a “shy person” must be like. I used my siblings and shy schoolmates as patterns and worked very hard to keep up this appearance and it was quite difficult because I am not natively shy at all. It was also this ‘character’ that I most often slipped out of accidentally. Another ‘character’ was a kind of spy I used when I felt I wasn’t getting enough information or I felt there were sides to a story that hadn’t been expressed completely. I used ‘the spy’ to ferret out what I thought of as the reality of a situation. I used detective and espionage novels and movies to learn spy characteristics and learning this ‘character’ was also useful in learning to listen.

The most difficult part of developing this interface was the problem of being alone. First, it was lonely, and second I didn’t know what ‘character’ I needed to play to interact with myself. It was a very thorny problem because I knew on some level I had to develop a way of listening to myself. I had read and heard many times that we all have ‘that little inner voice’ and unfortunately, mine seemed to be missing or, at the very least, muffled. My paternal grandmother was the first person I remember who told me about listening to my inner voice and while I am fairly certain she meant something altogether different, because I was quite young, I took it to mean and began listening for a voice inside my head that sounded like a voice outside my head. Thankfully, this did not happen.

What I did notice though was that when I slipped into one of these characters, my proprioception changed! I have always been fairly ambidextrous, even to occasionally writing with both hands. Changing hands can be forced but hand dominance stays the same. This is difficult to explain to most people but there are also moments when the dominance changes and using the opposite side is much easier and, more importantly, it can be sensed. It is an odd sensation that feels a little like I am going through a minor earthquake, but when the sensation passes I am seeing differently or feeling the need to use the opposite hand from moments before. These changes of hand or eye dominance however, have nothing to do with slipping in and out of character other than my ambidextrous dominance changes primed me for being able to feel when my body had ‘slipped into character’.

What that means is that when my mental/emotional inner climate had changed, something about my body changed. What changed might be my tension level, or the slump of my shoulders, but the inner change always occurred first. However, occasionally in forcing a physical change, I could promote a dominance change and that seems to mean that changing a physical posture might also change a mental attitude.

Now many years later, having learned a great deal of cynicism and not needing the interface any longer, I have misplaced the ability to use it. Perhaps I don’t really need it but isn’t it also possible that if I can alter either physical or mental posture my demeanor to others will be altered as well?

What I now need is to reacquire some beauty and joy and release some mental and physical tension from places it has longed called home. I wonder if it is too much to ask for an epiphany?

Shrine

2009-06-02T18:20:00.001-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2008

An elderly nun sat
Under a shade cloth
Like a shroud
Surrounded by a cage
Of cast-iron bars

Dreaming on her hand
Awaiting requests
Demands or questions
Her companion
In dark habit

Ushered each
Supplicant forward
Into her presence
Holding back a tide
Of queries

Pilgrims crawled
On hands and knees
Up tiny marble steps
Steep and white
Strewn with rose petals
And dry bloodstain
Reminders of previous
Penitential passages

One by one
Into that tiny iron cage
Surrounded by smells
Of rose and old bone
We slowly crawled
Staring longingly
At the saint’s relic
A broken skull

Wanting answers
From the sleeping guardian
A Sister of Pythoness.
That tired face
Wanted sleep and dreams
But I turned away
Request unspoken
To leave her
Floating in sleep
On the scent of roses.

Where Fallen

2009-05-13T16:25:00.000-07:00

Where fallen, a pelican
Perfectly displayed in wind drifted sand
Spread wings and feathers,
And spine extended, dies
Headless like a fallen angel
Forgotten and forsaken
By all except the flies.

View

2009-05-13T16:23:00.000-07:00

Sitting on Choirbench I
Watched you roll the tribe
With some kind of sculptured toys
Even though you promised
Macking corduroy
Buzz went aggro in the drop
His nose kick tripped up
On a speedbump hidden in the bowl
Then Hatch tried to hang
But every digit missed the rail
And he face planted in a gnarly perl
With his stick going ballistic
On the back swing his pintail
Nearly sent him mystic.

Signal

2009-05-03T17:33:00.000-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2009

There is that alien light again,
Drifting around the port periphery
Floating in the offshore fog.

Waves crawl the quay wall
Channel markers are flashing
Harbor Master consent has gone.

A surfer is chasing down his stoke
A camera gathers scattered light
A heart is pumping blood.

I keep thinkin’ they wants to land
To browse this ‘ere exotic port o’ call
To muck about with rum and riot.

But they are still waiting out there
Now lightless and without signal
Silent as rags on the Dutchman.

A mooring awaits and pinnace
The telegraph marks a welcome
A maiden longs for converse.

Heading to a pineal pier
Or outbound for celestial psyche
The captain seems uncertain.

The tide is high and channel clear
Either way, naught thwarts or bars
But a call of beat to quarters.

Thieves

2009-04-24T22:39:00.000-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2005

There are special kinds of thieves
Not that kind who long
For the solid clink of coin
Or the dry hiss of currency
No those are simple types, ordinary thieves

There is another much grander kind of thief
They do not long for economic power
Or tradeable baubles
Of mineral or metal
Those are easy targets

These are special kinds of thieves
Who enter with hungered looks
Slack-jawed they whisper for time
Once fed they chew furiously and ask for more
With great staring still hungry eyes

Mistress

2009-04-23T13:33:00.001-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2009

San Francisco
My mistress
Told me today
To take off
My sunglasses
And look at her
In full color
She was wearing
That veil of fog
And carrying
A bouquet of flowers

This Little World

2009-04-22T19:55:00.000-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2009

I used to carry pictures each of my siblings in a wallet
And showed them with pride to my fellow travelers
There is the oldest this one is the middle
That one our youngest member of the tribe

I don’t carry a wallet anymore or pictures
Season my Grandmother called those special papers
I discovered early on wallets accumulated stuff
So much became unreadable and indecipherable

And sitting on my siblings just seemed wrong
But sometimes I wonder whether pitching the pics
Destroyed a something in the living maybe
Somehow I threw a something away I shouldn’t have

There is no comfort in comforting my turmoil
Just sit quietly and listen with everything you’ve got
My beautiful intelligent sister still beautiful still intelligent
Lives in an idea world from a land of fantastic otherwhere

Some mind authority told me we could give her drugs
Another said you have a right to be mentally ill
Eyes of the lay just dim with incomprehension
Have you seen anyone they all inquire they all ask

What to do what to do what to do a jazz song sings
On foggy days in foggy old towns all upon a foggy night
You need to pay you need to pray you need to let go
You need a miracle you need god on your side

Sighing and giving a retelling of the tale told and told
Went here went there went here and there again
Talked to Dr.X Dr.Y Dr.Z M.D. PhD. D.D. LL.D MFCC see?
First it was sympathy and roses then U.S. dollars

It was kind of fun to see all those alphabeted people smile
The same kind of knowing well well well grin lean in
With the all-knowledgeable looks gravely visaged
Nodding heads all with deep voiced ‘very sad indeeds’

Then came the international internet research buttons
Looking for a magic pill a magic cure a spell
To wave at my sister up and down bibbity bobbity
A guardian angel winged fairy complete with wand

The mystery in the ruin of minds is mesmeric
Those demon guarded intellects draw weaponless knights
From across immense galactic divides to battle
But for the present those fiendish spirits prevail

Remembrance

2009-04-19T21:59:00.000-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2009

A throbbing beat of tropic drums
In sunlight spectrum split on the horizon
Wakes a mysterious green light under stars.

A voice sliding over light glinting
Off the western sea edge, remembers
Friends riding the sparkling edge of earth.

Scattered hither and yon the friends
Like flower petals on wedding paths
Gaze on a passing era conclusion.

Our green light sinking sun slips
Into the rising wind over eyes
Catching final moments of days.

A yearning holds our calm pledge
Inviolate against the way
Anchored in ancient origin.

Five Beer History

2009-04-15T14:08:00.000-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2007

It would be hard to forget that first time
I saw You walking jerkily at the
End of that ‘host’s’ arm like an unwilling
Dog on a leash with your friend and You gig-
Gling into your hands every guy in that
Place following You with his eyes every
Guy except that Southern Boy sitting at
My table he was watching me with a
Deep hunger an appetite my naiveté
Couldn’t recognize at the time and I
Only saw for a moment because I
Was looking at You crossing that room
Like a beauty contest winner Southern
Boy and I both had our San Miguel sit-
Ting in front of us mine with my ever
Necessary lemon and he had sat
Down at my table when he found me there
Solitary sure that I needed com-
Pany sure that I needed his compan-
Ionship he asked so enthusiastic-
Ly if he could buy me a drink just like
I was one of your fellow working girls
Of course I told him I already had
A beer coming while I looked around the
Room for someone to dance with someone the
Most interesting faces the most in-
Teresting posture the most interest-
Ing vignettes and way over on the o-
Ther side of the room I saw Vince the fu-
Ture Mafioso catch my attention
Because he was teasing one of your fel-
Low working girls with slight of hand tricks ma-
King money appear and disappear and in
The darkest corner away from the floor
Show floor the married guys who worked out to-
Gether competed to see who could car-
Ry the most soda cases always want-
Ed to be assigned together they were
Sitting in that dark corner with a cou-
Ple of your fellow working girls who had
Small glasses of something in front of them
And had boredom engraved on their heavy
Make-up probably because those two mar-
Ried guys were fondling one another un-
Der the table that was kind of like a
Great secret little story going on
Which I lost the thread of because the ‘host’
Whom Southern Boy called a pimp arrived and
In an insistent tone asked us if we
Wanted a girlfriend and we told him we
Were having beers and he just repeated
Do you want a girlfriend he repeated
And Southern Boy and I said at the same
Time at the very same time Southern Boy
Said no and I said yes and I laughed be-
Cause it sounded funny so the pimp guy
The ‘host’ said to me again do you want
A girlfriend not like it was a question
But more like a necessary access-
Sory and I laughed and said Okay but
She had better be beautiful … in fact
She had better be drop dead gorgeous and
That guy had a look like you know is that
All? Like Woman Beautiful was in
Every corner and under every ta-
Ble a look that said Too Easy Give Me
A Challenge but I still thought and thought that
It was going to be interesting
To see who he came back with and then he
Disappeared and Southern Boy was starting
To lecture me about how they cheat in
Those places and the girls only drink tea
Instead of alcohol and ask stupid
Questions and want us to buy them stupid
Helicopters and didn’t I want to talk
To him wouldn’t I rather talk to a
Civilized man instead of a monkey
And he smiled and leaned across the table
And put his mouth on the neck of his beer
Slowly and after taking a slug of
Beer looked at me with droopy eyes and beer
Wet lips and then that guy the ‘host’ the pimp
Arrived with You and your friend in tow and
Southern Boy told him I told you I told
You I didn’t want one of your whores and
That pimp guy, the ‘host’ just ignored him and
Sat You down next to me and I couldn’t
Speak You were so beautiful I couldn’t
Stop staring at You and Southern Boy got
Mad and marched away left me alone with
You and your friend and I just kept staring
And that guy the ‘host’ the pimp said buy her
A drink so I asked if You wanted a
Drink and not to listen to that guy the
Pimp because he was a jerk and he said
Again you have to buy her a drink or
She can’t stay here and that was enough for
Me so I said whatever You would like
You can have tea or coke or whiskey or
Water I don’t care and then your friend laughed
And said something in Tagalog and You
Looked at that guy the pimp the ‘host’ and so
Politely said You’d have a coke and he
That guy the ‘host’ the pimp was mad because
You didn’t order something expensive and
I said Here and I handed him a lot
Of pesos and said go buy yourself a
Girlfriend then your friend laughed so loud every-
One looked at our table if they hadn’t al-
Ready been looking at You and You laughed
Softly and that guy the pimp the ‘host’
Was mad but took the money and said it
Was extra to buy the girls out of the
Bar I said I didn’t want to buy the girls
Out of the bar I wanted to drink my
Beer and listen to the band and he just
Flipped the money through his fingers and said
It was extra to buy the girls out of
The bar and your friend laughed and said something
To him the ‘host’ the pimp in Tagalog
And he the pimp the ‘host’ looked mad he looked
Stormy and walked away and that was the
First part of the story to keep and I
Laughed and I don’t know how she knew but your
Friend said to You that’s Gypsy and Gypsy
Was my nickname in one of the bars a
Bar somewhere else in the town because I
Read palms the lines in palms there but that was
Another bar on another night and
You weren’t there but your friend said that’s Gypsy
And You wanted to know why I was called
Gypsy and she told You to give me your
Hand I could see your future in the lines
I would look into the future of your
Lines and even though You looked doubtful You
Held out your hand and it was beautiful
So beautiful too so I leaned in ve-
Ry close so I could smell your scent and to talk
In your beautiful ear with the little
Earring because the band was playing some
Loud rock anthem and I could see your lips
Moving and they were beautiful too but
It was like a dream because they were mov-
Ing they were talking to me and what was
Coming out was loud rock anthem and I
Tried to hear but the band was trying to
Speak for You so I leaned in very close
So I could smell your scent and talk in your
Beautiful ear with the little earring
And said I don’t want to read your palm I
Want to kiss it and I was so embar-
Rassed because instead of something ro-
Mantic or intimate You said really
Loud WHAT because the band was playing a
Loud rock anthem so I couldn’t repeat what
I said because I wanted to kiss your
Palm so I took advantage of your poor
Beautiful hand and ravished it with my
Aroused fingers I reached into every
Line and I ran my fingers around the
Outline of your nails and folded your fin-
Gers together with mine so I could feel
Them touching the webbing between my fin-
Gers and I made your hands and fingers dance
On mine and I could tell You didn’t quite know
What to do so I made up some bogus
Future for You when the band got quiet
And then I was shouting in the quiet
And I kept staring at You and asking
If You wanted another drink and You
Hadn’t even finished the first and I kept
Wishing the band would start up again be-
Cause I wanted to lean over very
Close so I could smell your scent and talk in
Your beautiful ear with the little ear-
Ring and ask You why You were wearing that
Strange prim little blue dress with the white col-
Lar and not what the other girls wore those
Clear plastic shoes with glitter embedded
In the plastic and low cut dresses with
Glitter embedded in the small buttons
And those bright colored stockings I wanted
To ask You why You didn’t wear those things I
Wanted to but I didn’t I just kept fin-
Gering your hands and creating your faux
Future fortune and pretty soon You laughed
At something I said and your laugh was too
Beautiful and when You laughed I could tell
You were relaxing because You gave me
The littlest hit on my hand and then my
Arm and told me I was bad I would have
Bought You and your friend out of the bar right
Then but your friend knew everything I didn’t
And told me if I wanted to leave then
It was more money and the guy the pimp
The ‘host’ would get it and I would have to
Wait or come back later but I was a-
Fraid You were like a rare sale item that
Would disappear if I left so I couldn’t
Think and while I couldn’t think I thought of ways
We could just sneak out or leave that place or
Push that guy the ‘host’ the pimp off the bal-
Cony because I didn’t want to stay there
And I didn’t want to leave and I didn’t want
To stay and I didn’t want to leave and then
The band started playing a loud rock an-
Them and I ordered another San Mi-
Guel and I hated it and I hated
The band and I hated that guy the pimp
The ‘host’ and I hated your friend for being
So sensible and I stared at You try-
Ing to not be able to think and I
Did silly things like looking through the beer
Bottle at your beautiful chin and eyes
Wiping the sweat from the cold brown bottle
Onto the table and writing stupid
Made-up words and stupid made-up al-
Phabets and yelling questions at You o-
Ver the loud rock anthem about where You
Were from and why did You leave and how come
There was a war and did You like this loud
Rock Anthem and did You like the band and
How did You get here and did your whole fam-
Ily come and why couldn’t we just leave
And You were very patient and You answered
All my stupid questions two or three times
Over the sound of a band playing a
Loud rock anthem just like You were taking
A test in school then your friend said we should
Dance and I really really wanted to
Dance and You really really didn’t want
To dance and because I really really
Wanted to do what You wanted to do
I said it was okay but I really
Really wanted to dance with You and I got
Kind of mad and asked your friend to dance but
She said I ought to dance with You but You
Wouldn’t so I couldn’t and I got kind of mad
Because I could still see the married guys
In the dark corner holding hands under
The table and all I could do was play
With your hand on top of our table so
I pulled You toward me like I was going
To talk in your beautiful ear with the
Little earring or tell You something a-
Bout your faux future and I couldn’t help
Myself I kissed inside the crease of your
Right elbow and smelled it at the same time
You jerked your arm a little but then You
Relaxed when I put my head in your lap
And You put your left hand onto my head
And brushed my short hair back and forth and your
Friend laughed and I could see the girls with the
Married guys looking across that room at
Us because they had to keep tilting their
Heads and craning their necks one way then the
Other to see around the crowd on the
Dance floor where I really really wanted
To be dancing with You but You really
Really didn’t want to dance and I really
Really wanted to do what You wanted
Even to the music of a loud rock
Anthem so I had my head in your lap
And your friend was laughing and the married
Guys were feeling each other and the girls
With them were watching us not dancing and
Mafioso Vince was doing tricks and
Then my friend showed up he started looking
At your friend like I was looking at You
And he bought her a drink she said something
In your beautiful ear with the little
Earring I couldn’t hear because the band
Was playing a loud rock anthem but You
Looked at me while she was talking like You
Were afraid I could hear and then You said
Something to your friend in her ear and my
Friend asked what was going on and your friend
Told him he was going to dance with her
And I really really wanted to dance
With You but You really really did not
Want to dance and I really really did
Want to do what You wanted to do if
Even to the sound of a band playing
A loud rock anthem so my friend and your
Friend they gathered the floor under their feet
Under the flashing lights flashing to the
Rhythm of the loud rock anthem and faces
Flashed and feet moved and hips moved together
Then apart and turning and I just looked
At You and asked more stupid questions a-
Bout where and how and who and You asked how
I became Gypsy and I asked when and
How and who and if You liked to read and
You said no and I didn’t care because
I was looking at your beautiful face
And your beautiful eyebrows and your strange
Prim little dress with white collar and
No glitter anywhere I kept thinking
About how your face disappeared in the
Black light while your white collar glowed and my
Black jacket vanished except for speckles
That glowed like my white shirt that showed bright blue
Then the house band stopped playing the loud rock
Anthem and the dancing stopped and my friend
And your friend came back to their drinks and our
Table with the beer bottle sweat rings and
The chairs with padded bottoms and that guy
The ‘host’ the pimp came back and asked my friend
If he was going to take your friend out
‘On a date’ and your friend said my friend was
Going to buy her another drink and
My friend did and then he bought me ano-
Ther San Miguel and asked if You wanted
Something and I said You didn’t then You
Said You did and I got a little an-
Gry because I wanted to buy You a
Drink and You said no and I asked if You
Wanted to dance when the music started
Because I really really wanted to
Dance with You and I wanted to dance slow
But You really really didn’t want to dance
Fast or slow and I really really would
Do whatever You wanted me to do
So the music started and my friend took
Your friend and they danced under the flashing
Lights and they slow danced and I grabbed your hand
And kissed the palm but You pulled your hand back
You pulled the palm back I kissed and picked up
The drink my friend bought and touched it with your
Beautiful lips and put it back down in
It’s very own sweat ring while the house band
Played a loud rock anthem so I said once
Again I begged again I pleaded a-
Gain I asked again to dance to slow house
Band loud rock anthem and your face changed once
To a silly smile and You said okay
But first I had to dance alone You told
Me I had to dance alone so I took
Your beautiful hand again and said and
Then asked and begged and pleaded and pleaded
So really really first I’ll dance alone
Then You’ll dance with me and You said sure yes
Go dance and then dance alone and I will
Really really dance but I really don’t
Want to dance but dance alone and then You
Pointed with your beautiful finger to
Some place under the flashing lights dance there
Alone and then I’ll dance with you and You
Know I jumped up to dance and the music
Changed and flashing lights slowed and on the floor
All the people left the dance floor even
The married guys who danced with the girls who
Drank at their table then danced together
And neither knew who was supposed to lead
But it was funnier when they danced hard
Because the girls got drunk at their table
Then I could hear a Mafioso laugh
And the lights slowed down and the music slowed
Down and the people sweating slowed down and
Everyone but me left the slow music
Dance floor and walked with drinks in their hands or
Hands in their hands or empty bored eyes and
Everyone walked through the slow flashing lights
And back to their tables that were close to
The door or close to the corners or on
The balcony everyone except me
Because You said dance there dance there alone
And pointed your finger and You said You
Would dance with me if I first danced alone
And I really really wanted to dance
With You but You really really didn’t want
To dance then You said You would if I danced
Alone by myself in the slow flashing
Lights to the slow moving music alone
With everyone watching I danced slowly
Like Fred waiting for Ginger I stood still
For a moment then gathered my courage
Because when I finished You said You would
Dance and I danced to slow lights and I danced
In slow motion and I danced alone and
I turned and I made my hands into strange
Monsters and touched the floor that was dirty
And I crouched and I stretched and I
Reached for the lights but I couldn’t reach so
I jumped up and I made my arms swing like
Apes in a forest and I made myself spin
And I almost forgot You were watching
But You said You would dance with me and I
Wanted to dance and the lights stopped flashing
And I stopped moving and the music stopped
And You were looking at me and your friend
Talked in your beautiful ear with the lit-
Tle earring and your friend and my friend pushed
You into the lights and onto the floor
And into my arms and a light flashed and
Some music played and my leg touched your leg
And your beautiful body and I put
My head down next to your head and smelled your
Scent and looked at the floor behind You and
Remembered it was dirty and wiped my
Hands on my pants then put my arms under
Your arms and You hardly touched me with your
Arms or your body but I pulled You close
Because I really really wanted to
Dance with You then the music changed and You
Walked away and went back to the table
Where the beers and drinks my friend bought were there
Waiting in their very own sweat rings and
The married guys were feeling each other
Mafioso Vince was doing tricks and
The house band played us a loud rock anthem

Indolent

2009-04-09T10:34:00.000-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2008

I was lying there in your light
That warmth you always have
When you grace the known

Dozing through your daydream
Conversation concerning shadows
You asked me to explain

Places alien to your nature
Foreign to your sightline
But how could I tell you

Your bright presence invented dark
Creatures you never see
They shape quick fantasies

Conjuring strange visions
With a memory of your radiance
Swindling the unregenerate

My comfortable luminous torpor
Augment my witless intemperance
Please ask me again tomorrow

Reclining against your day
Those fiends and ogres of shadow
Seem so exceedingly far away

To Float Upon The Sea

2009-04-03T12:07:00.000-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2008

To float upon the sea
We must make ready
To leave dry land.

Floating on the sea
Treasure is my vessel
And air to breathe.

Floating on the sea
Storms and current stir
The voyager to alien shores.

Floating on the sea
Cast overboard your coin
Acumen crafts purchase.

Floating on the sea
Answers have doubt
Packed in the hold

Floating on the sea
Needs launch and harbor
A mystery to solve.

To float upon the sea
I do not need a name
But a course wants plotting.

After The Leaves Have Fallen

2009-04-02T22:26:00.000-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2008

One sunny spring day, my brother and I were riding on the open tailgate of the family station wagon, bouncing along the long dirt road that led to our rural home. I remember most of the ride as being like a roller coaster or carnival ride, without the safety bar of course.

The dusty lane was filled with potholes from every preceding winter rain and innumerable automobiles and trucks passing over it. Some family drivers living on that road drove carefully and slowly around the holes, while others simply drove as fast as they dared, leaving great clouds of dust in the dry season.

My father was one of the more cautious drivers. Asking him one day, why some drove so fast, or rather, why he didn’t drive faster, he told me there were two theories of driving over potholes. The first being the way he himself did, driving the road slowly and avoiding many of the holes by driving around them and when that wasn’t possible, driving as carefully as possible through them thereby avoiding possible damage to the car. The second method was much simpler. Just drive as fast as possible, hitting only the tops of the bumps.

That particular day our ride felt more like my father was using the second method, and it was quite exhilarating until we rounded a particularly sharp corner and I lost my grip on the hinge of the tailgate. In turning the corner the car had hit a rather deep pothole and launched me skyward, forcing my hand loose from it’s anchor and as the car sped forward, I merely remained where I was, poised in the deep blue sky for what seemed like an eternity.

Then my electrifying flight ended abruptly as I hit the dusty road, somersaulting endlessly backward in the direction from which we had come. Now a number of things went through my mind as this happened, the first being, this hurts. Another thought was about the steepness of the hill whose downward slope I was traversing rather acrobatically. The last thought was really about whether I would survive my tumble, but that was interrupted by the sounds of my brother and someone else in the car yelling that I had fallen out.

The strangest thing was I don’t remember if my father stopped the car or just kept going. It was only a matter of few dozen more yards to our driveway and it wouldn’t have been unheard of for him to simply look in the rear view mirror, see me moving and think something like, “he’s okay, he can walk home.” He had done similar things before and certainly afterward. I believe he stopped; I’m just not sure. I may even have waved them homeward, or returned to my seat on the tailgate. I seem to remember the car continuing its progress homeward and walking the rest of the way.

What has occurred to me is this: even if he did stop, there was no examination of my possibly abraded body or even a questioning of whether I might be seriously hurt, even while moving. My father did say later while laughing, that he had seen me rolling down the hill in his side mirror.

I have realized watching parents lately that when one of their children, whether self-induced or otherwise, has had an accident, there is at least a cursory examination to determine possible injury. My parents lived by a very different philosophy I think and, while it may have had the appearance of treating their children in a ‘rugged pioneer’ sink or swim manner, as I look back on it, it seems more psychopathic than anything else.

In another incident, as I was coming out our front door one day, the family dog came to greet me rather enthusiastically and tripped me, pitching me into a decorative rock wall erected by my father at my mother’s request. The stones were sedimentary shale with the rocks laid with the layers perpendicular to the ground, giving the edge a scalloped look. The shale’s edges were also razor sharp. Although those walls have since been relayed in a more conventional manner minus the shale, it is clear that at the original erection safety wasn’t a primary concern.

As I fell, my hand slid along the edge of one of the stones, slicing into my right palm deeply. The blood immediately began to flow copiously out of the cut. I ran to an outside faucet and started to wash the hand free of dirt and realized how deep the cut was by how far into my hand I could see, muscle tissue and sinew exposed to open air. What I did was try to pinch the cut closed with my left hand to slow the blood flow, which didn’t work, so I cupped my right hand, which actually seemed to have an effect. I knew, even at the time, I needed stitches.

Since I knew my mother would not appreciate me bleeding on the floor, I tried to get someone’s attention by yelling but that didn’t seem to work. I also knew that moving quickly would increase my heart rate thereby speeding the bleeding, so I slowly walked into the house to the kitchen where the family wall-phone hung near the breakfast table.

My mother was in the kitchen occupied in something like washing the dishes and saw the blood cupped and over-flowing from my hand and asked what I had done. When I told her that I had been tripped by the dog and fell on the rocks, her response was as close to boredom as I ever saw in her. It almost seemed she didn’t believe the cut was deep enough to warrant inspection and that maybe I had been saving up the blood in my hand for some unknown purpose. When she told me to open my hand flat, internally I was worried about getting blood on the floor, and rightly so, because when I opened my palm, the blood seemed to form a waterfall and the cut began to hemorrhage quickly.

Her first reaction was the statement; “You’re getting blood on the floor, close your hand.” Then she said, “You may need stitches.” She edged her way around me and the pool of blood on the floor and picked up the phone to call our family doctor’s number, but as this was the weekend probably got an answering service that referred her to another office. She then called that office and every once in a while looking at my hand, described the situation in tones that sounded to me like I was interrupting her day’s activities. At one point in the conversation she asked the person on the other end, “well, yes the cut is pretty bad, but can’t I just put a bandage on it? Do you think that would do?”

Evidently the answer was that I’d better be brought in so the doctor could examine the problem first hand. We had to wait for my father to return from somewhere and then I was taken into town for a visit to the only woman doctor then practicing in our county. She was an older woman who looked like an owl with large glasses and iron-grey hair piled into a large bun on her head. The receptionist saw my father and I enter and said, “Doctor will be right with you. Sir, you need to fill out these papers.” Then she did an odd thing to me; she requested to see the cut and exclaimed rather excitedly, “Oh! It looks just like it was made with a doctor’s knife!”

After the subsequent five large stitches, my father and I returned home where dinner was waiting. When we were all seated the conversation turned to the event of the day and the only part that my father seemed to remember rather scornfully was the receptionists comment, which he misquoted as scalpel. When I corrected him he brushed it off with, “Who cares? What a stupid thing to say.”

When one of my siblings asked how I was supposed to wash my hands, my father answered. My mother commented after hearing how many stitches I’d received, that, “Your brother needed seventeen stitches in his finger when he got it caught in your grandfather’s saw.” Then the rest of the conversation was about injuries my parents had received, and another retelling of how my grandfather was blown off a truck and burned.

I admit, rehashing an injury is not the most interesting or stimulating conversation but I am still amazed at how quickly the subject turned back to my parents. When I try to remember the initial conversation with my mother, I try to keep in mind that I was probably in shock and maybe the conversation wasn’t as casual as I thought it was at the time. But I am pretty sure I am not misremembering the words she used, or my father’s strange commentary on what the receptionist had said. Were those comments just prompted by panic and used to calm some internal dread?

I sometimes ask myself that if some of the things I saw my parents do I might have given too much significance in memory. Here’s one example.

My parents, I believe had developed a kind of us against them mentality and the ‘them’ was everyone other than themselves, including their children. I state this merely as belief, not necessarily fact, because they are dead and cannot argue for themselves. They did argue between themselves a lot.

After we moved to the Sierra foothills, my mother stated in an announcement whose tones suggested a Sibylline prediction that ‘we’ were going to start a herd of cattle. My father must have agreed because he bought rolls of barbed wire and numbers of cedar fence posts and my brother and I assisted him inclosing about five acres. He also reused some of the ancient fencing already laying about the place and built a ‘corral’, which was actually just a wooden addition to the end of the pasture with a gate made by sliding wood six by two planks across the opening. The planks could be easily removed if an animal needed to be led out or in.

The ‘herd’ consisted of two bovines, which they bought as calves. One was a bull calf and the other a heifer. I don’t remember where they purchased them, but I remember being taken along in the back of the pickup as some kind of wrangler and had the job of steadying them and keeping them from falling out of the truck. Even though the calves were small, they were still big enough that had they fallen on me, or against me (and they did) I would have had difficulty getting them off. I remember they were quite frightened.

Those two cattle were actually terrific breeders and between them had two offspring, one that we aptly named Ribroast. The bull was temperamental and both my brother and myself had run-ins with him where he tried to finish us off. He caught my brother unawares walking through the pasture one day and mauled him. On the day I was caught by him he had gotten out of the pasture and in trying to bring him back, he flipped me into the air and butted my chest with his head, which doesn’t sound bad as I write it, but one thousand pounds of angry bull pushing on your chest wasn’t fun. In flipping me to the side with his head, I landed with my back against some sheep fencing with my right leg twisted so far under and behind me that my foot was pressed between my back and the fence. My youngest sister, who had followed me, saw all this and came charging forward, yelling and waving, what I seem to recall was, a surveying stake like a scimitar.

I guess two against one didn’t seem fair to the bull and he ambled off to return to his previous occupation, watching a neighbor’s cow on the other side of a more escape-proof fence. It was a bit of work but my sister helped me stand and the pain was excruciating. It was like I had done the splits and then some and to get to the standing position I had to drag my leg from under and behind me. I do not know this but it could have been dislocated because I couldn’t put any weight on it without blinding pain and then there was a kind of adjustment and while it still was a ten on the one out of ten pain scale, at least it wasn’t a twenty. Using my sister as a crutch, I limped back to our house and as we were making our way to the door, my mother leaned out her upstairs window yelling, “Did you bring that bull back?”

At that question, I wanted to throw a rock at her head if I could have bent to pick one up. I angrily asked her if she was paying attention and that I could hardly walk. Her reply was to tell me that I needed to go back and bring the animal home, to which I replied, “If you want it so bad, tell Dad to go get it.” I will never forget her very angry response.

“Your father hasn’t had his breakfast yet!”

I was so angry I couldn’t speak but my little sister, bless her heart said, “Neither have we.” In a united act of disobedience we continued into the house. I limped painfully for months afterward.

I try to excuse my mother’s actions and reactions because she spent so much time in and out of mental hospitals and wards, but what I saw my father do, I have no reliable explanation for.

Many years after the bull attack, on a late summer day, the cow had become trapped in some fencing near the house. She had a hind leg entangled in the wire somehow and was bawling loudly and continuously. I think I must have just arrived home from a walk because I heard the ruckus and went to see what was going on. When I rounded the house I saw my father, trying to disengage her leg from the fencing. I ran up to assist but he didn’t seem to want my help much, and when I started to go around to the cows head to lead her forward, which is easier to do with a cow than pushing them from behind, my father became quite agitated, angry even and demanded that I return to where he was to assist.

I asked if maybe it would be easier to cut the fence but he very angrily retorted that he wasn’t going to fix the fence because the cow was stupid enough to get caught in it. We spent the next few minutes trying to get the cow to pick up her hind leg or pushing her to see if she could walk forward and drag the leg out of the fencing but nothing helped. Again, I said maybe if I went around to her head and put a rope on her I could pull her forward, or at least encourage her to come forward, but he got even angrier. There wasn’t any exact thing the cow did or didn’t do differently that provoked him but at one moment he just seemed to pop.

My father habitually carried a Buck clasp knife in a hard leather case on his belt. The case had a snap cover that was difficult to unsnap and the knife itself was difficult to unclasp. I say these things because what he did looked vicious to me. He had to stop pushing the cow or whatever he was doing to accomplish what he did. He had to turn, and using one hand to hold the case and the other to pull that hard snap loose then remove the knife and using both hands pull the blade away from the handle, very deliberately. Then he stabbed the bawling cow in the haunch rather like it was something he really wanted to do, and not because it would get the cow to move her leg or maybe make her panic her way to freedom, but just because he wanted to and could. Because she was already panicked, it was useless as a motivating action, and then he stabbed her again and maybe because that didn’t work or because he hadn’t got the response he was seeking, he calmly refolded the knife, which was even more complicated than unfolding it because a lock button had to be pushed very firmly, and he put it away in the snap case.

I remember watching him struggle a little to close the snap because it was designed, I think, not to open easily, and thinking why did he do that? Why did he do that? I have no answers.

I honestly believe that it was because he didn’t get the reaction he wanted that he said, “Well then, she can get herself out, unless you want to help her. But do not cut the fence! I couldn’t tell if the last was a reminder or a warning to me. He then gave the animal a last disgusted look and walked away. I know I got the cow loose but I don’t remember how, but I do remember him asking, and me just saying ‘yes’.

Another incident of this variety caused me to make up my mind to enter the Naval service.

On the occasion of my graduation from high school, a notice had been sent out from the school that only parents were to be guaranteed chairs in the audience section and anyone else would need to stand, so I invited only my parents. This was in some ways unnecessary because when my brother and older sister had graduated the only other family members to attend was our immediate family. But it was obvious from the crowd that many people other than parents were attending.

During the procession to our seats I was paired with quite possibly the most desirable girl in the graduating class and I received at least a half dozen offers of payment to trade places from male classmates. One so lucrative, I asked the young lady in question if she would rather walk with the fellow who made the offer; I received a resounding negative response and she grabbed my arm and said, “Don’t you dare! He’s a creep.”

When the ceremony was over, my mother’s first question was, “Who was that girl you were walking with?” in a strangely suggestive tone. I know that parents imagine their children with various partners, but this was the first time she had ever asked such a question to me. I tried to laugh it off at the time, but her insistence in knowing also prompted a rather ingenuous addendum to her first question, which was, “Have you had a date with her?” (The only dates I had ever been on had been group dates.) I explained several times that we were simply put in alphabetical order and our pairing had been a complete accident.

When the conversation ended my best friend Mike walked up with his family, including an uncle, aunt and brother, as well as his mother. His mother made the statement that if she had known the true situation she could have gotten a lot more family to show up and made an apology to Mike.

In response, my mother said that it wouldn’t have mattered in my case, no one else would have wanted to come. My father said, “Congratulations, son.” When my father called my brother or myself ‘son’ it was his way of putting us in our place; it was not an affectionate recognition of blood connection.

After saying a cursory ‘nice to meet you’ to Mike’s family my mother said with finality, “Okay, let’s go home.” I must say I did not expect very much but the abrupt treatment of my friend’s family and that ‘we’re done here’ kind of attitude placed another black mark in a book already filled with them. Mike had just previously invited me to dinner with he and his family and I simply told them, “Mike invited me to have dinner with them and I accepted. I will see you later tonight.”

I think it was my father who said, “Well, you’re eighteen, I guess you can do what you want.” They both turned and just walked off. I wonder if they thought I was being snooty.

The look on my parents’ faces was so startling that Mike asked me after a few minutes if everything was all right. I remember taking a breath and saying that even if it wasn’t, it didn’t matter, I’d made my decision, and I have never regretted that decision once.

The dinner was delightful and it was one dinner I remember for the chief reason that there was not even one little argument; it was actually fun. Afterward Mike drove me home and wished me well and told me to keep in touch. I did the same and braced myself for an unknown reaction when I entered the house.

My parents were sitting at the table, drinking the red wine that anaesthetized so many of their nights, when I walked into the dining room. My mother’s first words to me on seeing me enter were, “Your dog is dead. You'll have to bury him.” That was my greeting.

I know they had not planned any kind of special graduation dinner for me at home. They had not given my brother or my sister any kind of graduation present and I certainly was not expecting one. There was no ‘hello’, no ‘how was dinner’, there were no other words of congratulation, just, “Your dog is dead. You'll have to bury him.” I knew in that moment I had broken through some unspoken and unwritten rule they had about parental precedence and this was a kind of revenge. I could give a number of reasons why I believe this to be so but I will not.

That night I lay in my bed unsleeping, wondering what I was going to do now that I no longer had school as an escape and after hours of thinking of the dog’s bloated body and the efforts made by my two little sisters and myself to transport that corpse somewhere away from the house, and hearing my mother’s words burning in my ears and trying to blot them out with the rock-and-roll of Wolfman Jack, I finally changed the station to listen to KCTC.

KCTC was an easy-listening station, elevator music, that I hoped would put me to sleep, and the inspiration came from there. As I listened to the boring violins of Mantovani and Hugo Winterhalter into the night I counted bars of music and tried to breathe quietly to avoid bothering my brother. At around two or three in the morning, a rather insipid choral version of a Noel Coward song played that I had never heard or known of:

Matelot, Matelot,
Where you go my thoughts go with you
Matelot, Matelot,
When you go down to the sea.

I do not even remember what the rest of the song was about but in that moment I made the decision to enter the navy, and for that night at least, gratefully entered sleep.

In the years since my mother’s suicide and my father’s slow death from alcohol, smoking and pulmonary emphysema, I have asked myself many times what kind of people were these? I still wish to know.

I haven’t forgotten that both of them liked to laugh, and were creative, gifted, intelligent people, neither have I forgotten nor forgiven their cruelties, and this is what I wish and seek to do.

The Lemon Tree

2009-03-30T15:38:00.000-07:00

Photo: Unknown

It seems dreamlike to me now as I look across a sea of intervening years, but as a child, comforted by the warm light that typified California summers, I remember feeling adventure lay around every alley corner and down every tree-lined street. Adventure is still important to me. As a boy though, almost anything was an adventure, even if the adventure was recreated a second or third time around. One of those adventures involved meeting innumerable relatives, grandparents, great grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins.

A return visit to my cousin Ida, with my grandmother, meant the best lemonade in the world and lemon meringue pie I have yet to see equaled. These goodies were made from giant fruits that hung from a glossy-leaved tree near Ida’s back fence. The pie was always made beforehand, but lemonade meant a run through the rainbird sprinkler and across a postage-stamp sized lawn, every blade of grass holding a sparkling, jewel-drop of water. At the end of my run waited the lemon tree.

Before picking any of the fruit, I was given strict instruction as to how many and how the best lemons would feel and look like. "They will just fall into your hand," were Ida's instructions, "They will feel very smooth...no dimples! ... And don't get too wet in the sprinkler!" As I picked each fruit, I would smell the brilliant yellow rind and almost float on the scent of lemon oil. That smell lingered on my hands and clothing for what seemed like hours afterward.

When the lemon tree bloomed, the fragrance not only filled the garden, but floated into the little house and added an exotic hint to cookies filled jam, and pão doce, a Portuguese sweetbread usually made at Easter with colored eggs nestled in the top, which cousin Ida always made for visitors. A scent of lemon blossom pervaded it all. My cousin said the lemon tree and its fruit are a parallel of life, an apposite. Life being a thing to explore and enjoy, all of the bitterness, all of the sweetness. There will never be a guarantee: you must taste and you must explore to know the truth. That is the promise of the lemon tree; to know, you must taste. Cousin Ida seemed to know about life and she certainly knew about lemons and the lemon tree.

Ida was my grandmother’s age, maybe older, and when my grandmother and I would arrive she always asked, “Who’s your little friend, Maddie?” and without waiting for a reply, she would ask me, “Que é seu nome, menino?” What’s your name? She knew my name; she probably just wanted to be sure it was the right one. After reminding her for the millionth time, she would usher grandmother and I into her living room where an old, old upright grand piano filled one wall. On top of it were tiny porcelain animals, collected over the years; one was a figurine of Saint Joseph only three inches tall. Cousin Ida also collected glass hats, a habit she shared with my grandmother, and more than dozen in different colors lined some small shelves above her old fashioned sofa.

In a white wire cage there was a canary, a male that would hop wildly from a swinging perch to the bars and back, all in an instant. Occasionally he would burst into song filling the house with a silver trill and causing Ida and my grandmother to break into laughter. Ida had silver white hair, but she used to flit around like the canary, a dynamo. Ida seemed to be able to produce almost anything at a moments notice. My grandmother dyed her hair black and looked so young, people would ask if I were her son, a real live wire, my grandfather used to say. Ida was an even more electric personality. She was an indefatigable shopper who encouraged anyone to “buy it if you want it, it’s just money. Live dangerously!” My grandmother would exclaim, “I don’t know where she gets all that energy!”

After pulling my grandmother around the room to show her some newly acquired possession, Ida and grandma would perch in chintz-covered armchairs and ‘discuss’ family, with my grandfather always being the first target. Then other cousins, unnamed and uncountable, and in-laws would be examined under their verbal microscope; one female cousin usually bearing the brunt of their contempt; “if I acted like that I’d kill myself”; “that woman is impossible”; “what would her mother (a much loved Auntie Erminha) say if she were alive today?” They would pat each other on the arm and reminisce about my great-grandmother’s philosophies of life; “if your bed is made and your dishes are done, your house is clean.” Through it all I was expected to just sit quietly and respectfully, especially respectfully.

I sat on the sofa. It was an overstuffed affair, covered in a rough but slippery material that poked me through my trousers and would not let me sit still, and even when I tried the slipperiness of the fabric sent me sliding unwillingly toward a colorful rug. I don’t think I was really expected to listen, but I knew the time would come when the language would slowly shift into the musical tones and abrupt accents of Azorean Portuguese. I thought it was the most beautiful language in the world.

Its words used to send me on strange flights of fancy, mentally flying over the nine green islands and beyond to Lisboa where they sang the fado that old Auntie Erminha used to sing so quietly as she sat. Finally, even that, and watching the canary would begin to pall and I would ask if there were any lemons on the tree.

What Happened

2009-03-28T01:15:00.000-07:00

I didn’t watch the red sun set today
The sky was blue till stars appeared.

I went inside my head to visit
A recollection wavered viciously.

I saw passing seasons of pleasure
Memory kept still hemorrhaged.

I motioned to a passing thought
An emotion permanently frowned.

I didn’t touch the green grass afternoon
The road was gray in shadows.

I passed a wondrous song
An idea promptly shattered.

I spoke an extraordinary word
A theater revelation burned.

I stirred an astounding dance
A paralysis emerged triumphant.

I didn’t hear a darkness sleeping
A bed had primitive awakening.

Night Owl

2009-03-25T22:03:00.000-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2007

Like a large school of fish, a crowd of people is leaving a southern California movie theater. The lights from the lobby behind them turn the crowd into a bobbing, waving mass of silhouettes, each indistinguishable from the other. As the throng of people reaches the sidewalk, it breaks into smaller groups, couples and singles. The cake batter bowl pouring its final drops into a baking tin. A final drop remains poised on the edge of the bowl. A young man deciding on the direction he wishes to take from the theater.

It is the weekend but tomorrow he has promised work to one superior or another. He has no thought of trying to avoid the work, neither has he the desire to return home immediately. The film was very good and has left him with a pleasant excitement which could be nicely capped by a short stroll to the 24 hour restaurant up the street and thirty minutes or so just sipping the rest of the day away with a cup of hot coffee; no harm, the bus wouldn’t be available for another forty minutes anyway. The decision made, his easy stride takes him to the coffee and a window booth in five minutes. He smiles as he remembers his way through the film. After a third cup of coffee his mind suddenly jumps to the present and his eyes find the hands on a wall clock indicating the passage of forty minutes. Almost violently, he throws money on the table for the coffee and tip. Pushing his way through the two sets of glass doors to the street, he notices the way his reflection on the doors tries to escape back into the restaurant. On the street again his dismay mounts when the taillights of the bus pull away from the stop across from the theater. His sudden anger at himself propels his body into three running steps then pulls him to an abrupt halt. His stormy countenance changes to a grin. There’s nothing he can do about that bus now; perhaps there’s a later one. Feeling once more in control, he strolls to the bus stop and reads the schedule for that evening; the last bus of the night is another forty minute wait. He returns to the restaurant.

A smile and an explanation to the sympathetic waitress regains him his former seat at the window and a new but free cup that apparently refills itself magically as the young man returns to his reverie. A buttered cinnamon roll joins the coffee. Thirty-nine minutes later, the young man again bounces money on the table and runs for the doors. He waves to the pretty waitress as he departs. As he pushes through the final set of doors the bus passes in front of the restaurant toward the stop in front of the theater. With an incredible burst of speed the young man follows the bus up the street, knowing he can make it in time. He must make it in time.

The bus does not stop. Even pounding on the bus doors, a shout and an extra burst of speed do nothing to slow its progress. Inside the bus, the driver hears the shout to stop but smiles to himself and says to a young lady in the front seat, next time that guy will be at the bus stop on time. The young lady simpers; the driver is her new boyfriend and she is very fond of him.

Angry with himself and the bus driver, the young man throws himself on the curb and sits cross-legged with elbows on knees and hands supporting chin. The green light from a streetlamp gives him the appearance of a brooding beast. The young man’s anger does not last long; he is not given to worrying over things he cannot change. He is young and he is rather naïve, but he is not unintelligent and as his temper abates he takes stock of his situation. His pockets reveal that a taxi is out of the question. He must walk, or hitchhike. He has never in his life had to hitchhike or felt the inclination to do so. The walk has been made before, but during the day and a warm day at that. The evening is cool and a faint mist is beginning to show itself in bright halos gathering about streetlights. He does not like the idea of hitchhiking. In his mind it feels the same as begging or panhandling. The decision is made to walk. His goal is seven miles away.

Two and half miles of walking in the chilling air and thickening mist convince the young man that perhaps hitching a ride might not be so bad. Five minutes of riding in a heated automobile would not be seriously indebting himself to anyone. It is now two-thirty in the morning a bank sign informs him. Two-thirty; fifty degrees; zero six percent. Six percent?

There are very few cars on the road. Ten or twelve pass him, headlights appearing out of the mist suddenly, some even veer wide to avoid him. A few more autos go by and then a city policeman slows and pulls to the curb in the inverted white cone of a streetlamp. Just my luck, the young man thinks, now I’ll be arrested for hitchhiking. The policeman is very friendly when the young man tells him of the situation. Quite a predicament agrees the officer. I don’t suppose you could or would give me a ride, the young man asks hopefully. The patrolman shakes his head, we aren’t allowed to give rides … your best bet would be to keep your thumb out, sorry. Have a nice evening. Pulling away from the sidewalk and the streetlight, the red taillights of the patrol car fade in the ever thickening, swirling mist.

Well, the young man smiles, at least he didn’t arrest me. More cars, he thought, more cars.

Another mile. Another mile. Two more miles to go. Where are the cars, this is a big city, where are the cars?

Under another streetlight he stops and waits for a moment. His breath is beginning to tear a raw spot in his throat with the effort and the cold air. Looking behind him two headlights float in the fog, an unblinking stare, a great bird of prey, pinpoints of light unattached to anything, pinpoints of light slowly growing into great beacons. The mist seems to rush toward their center then vanish. Even at fifty feet the car is still invisible, but it begins to coalesce around those warm beams of light, a white car, a large white car. The young man cannot identify the make of the automobile. A large white car has silently found him in the fog.

Inside the automobile the driver sees the pool of streetlight and a young man with his arm out and thumb up. He gives a short laugh and to himself thinks how strange the fog makes everything appear. The young man wouldn’t have been visible if not for the glaring white of his t-shirt and the headlights reflecting off his arm. He must be cold. T-shirt, corduroy pants, deck shoes, he must be cold. The driver pulls to a stop beside the young man. A nice looking young man he thinks, a nice looking young man.

Pulling up beside the young man, the white car glides to a silent stop. The young man hesitates. His mind races; someone finally stopped; I’m only a couple of miles from home; my first successful hitchhike; why did this guy stop? No one else did. I am so cold; if I accept the ride, will he ask for gas money; what if he’s turning at the next street? The window hums as it slides downward a couple of inches into the car door. The young man can see his reflection in the glass from the streetlight.

Do you want a ride? Where are you headed? An anonymous voice asks.

Don’t hesitate, just tell the man where you want to go and he’ll tell you if he’s going that way. Yes, I’m going to Seventh Street, is that a long way out of your way?

Get in. No problem.

Get in, the driver said, no problem. He said get in, no problem. It must not be out of his way. The young man opens the door and almost jumps into the car. Thank you, thank you, thank you, the young man overflows thankfulness.

You’re welcome, you’re welcome, you’re welcome, the driver laughs at the young man’s enthusiastic thanks.

It is really cold out there, especially since I forgot to bring a sweater or something, I really appreciate this. The young man pulls the door shut as he seats himself. The car’s heater must have been turned on full because the young man feels his feet warm almost at once, then as he rubs warmth into his arms all his senses become alert. The softness of the car seat, is it velvet? It is like a very soft easy chair. He smells a heavy musky masculine kind of what? Perfume, cologne? And underneath the musk, an odor of, was it sweat? At the moment the young man, though he could not say why, thought of the pretty waitress at the restaurant where he’d had coffee. Coffee sitting so bitterly now on his taste buds.

The young man becomes aware of two other senses almost simultaneously. In his ears, a kind of dull thump or click, and his eyes see in the yellow light from the massive dashboard, the driver.

The driver is a big man. A very big man. A man with arms borrowed from Hercules or Atlas. The driver is wearing a kind of t-shirt with a collar and buttons. A ribbed t-shirt. In the strange light it looks dark blue. A t-shirt with a collar. The driver has very pale colored hair, is it blond or white or platinum? The young man can’t tell. The big man’s face is outlined, his profile outlined in yellow light from the dash. But the young man can’t concentrate on it, just a face in darkness, a normal face on a very big man.

The young man cannot concentrate because the driver wears no trousers, no shorts, nothing. He just sits quietly behind the wheel of his large automobile, his huge muscular thighs spread comfortably apart on the bench seat, his dark blue t-shirt with a collar and buttons straining its seams over his well-developed pectorals, with nothing else on. The young man feels like he has been punched in the stomach. The young man is almost hypnotized by the size of the driver’s erect organ; is hypnotized.It sprouts like a ship’s mast, a skyscraper from the driver’s groin, a groin furred with hair that looks red in the odd light, each testicle is the size of a chicken’s egg. The young man can see, stares at, the driver’s genitals; an enormous organ and testicles like a bull’s, because the driver has no pants on. The young man tries to imagine, to will pants onto the driver but the driver has no pants on, the driver …

Do you like it? The driver says calmly as he pulls away from the curb.

What was that sound, says the young man, what was that sound I heard? The young man feels himself shaking, trembling, fighting for air. What was that sound, the young man repeats.

It’s okay. I just locked the doors, it’s electric. I locked the doors here from my master switch, says the driver, here, do you see? He must have been pointing at his master switch, but the young man is looking at his own door for the lock and the door latch handle.

I don’t think this is a good idea says the young man. I think I better get out here; would you let me out here please. At the next light is fine. I’d like to get out at the next light. Could you let me out at the next light? Thank you for the ride.

Do you like it? I think you probably like it, says the driver. Why don’t I pull over where we can relax, you know, and you can feel it, touch it. Touch it all you want. You a very nice looking young man. Would you like to touch it?

No, he doesn’t really want me to touch it. He doesn’t really. This is not really happening, this man has no pants on and people always wear pants when they drive cars. You can’t get out of your car if you have no pants on. Where are his pants? No, I don’t want to touch … I don’t want to touch it; I would like to get out at the next light please?

The big man, the driver, sounds angry, don’t play innocent, you like my cock, you want to touch it.

Please, sir. Mother always said to say sir. To say yes sir, no sir. Yes ma’am, no ma’am. I am not trying to play innocent; I just want to get out here at this light, if you will please open the door. I can’t find the door handle. How do I open the door? Please sir, please open the door. The young man can feel himself losing his air. The car is very hot. He can smell the driver’s desire. He can see the driver’s desire. The driver has no pants on.

The young man takes a deep breath as the big man turns away from the main road. I have to go that way sir, I have to work tomorrow. Please.

The young man finds the door handle and pulls but the door will not open. The door will not open. The driver chuckles. A friendly chuckle, I have to unlock it from the master switch. The big man sounds very kind. I like you, young man. I think you look very nice. I want you to like me, am I so bad? Look at me, am I so bad? The young man could not look at him. Come on, says the driver, very softly, look at me, I’m not so bad. The driver watches the road casually while a heavy right arm moves gently across the space between them and a massive hand locks around the young man’s chin. The driver turns, forces, the young man’s head slowly toward himself. You see, I’m not so bad.

The young man tries to pull the driver’s hand from his chin, but the driver slowly tightens his thumb and fingers into the face, the jaw of the young man. The harder the young man pulls on the driver’s wrist the tighter the driver squeezes. The pain is terrible. The young man finally lets go; the driver still holds his head but stops squeezing his fingers into the young man’s cheeks. See, I’m not so bad, am I?

Somewhere along the road the lights on the street stop being there. There are no more streetlights. It is dark except for the headlights and the yellow light coming from the dashboard. The driver turns the big white car to the side of the road and then turns into a circle of trees. The driver must have known the place.

When the car makes its final stop, the driver lets go of the young man’s face. I want to be nice to you he says. I want to make love to you.

Why, says the young man, why do you want to do this to me, I just wanted a ride. I just wanted a ride. The young man feels tears running down his cheeks and wipes them quickly off. Mother said men don’t cry. The driver is watching him cry in the yellow light of the instrument panel. The big man is watching him cry. Men don’t cry.

The driver pulls the young man toward him maybe to hug him, but the young man beats at the huge arms and says don’t touch me, don’t touch me, don’t touch me. Then the young man slides as far away from the big man as he can get. I don’t want to hurt you says the driver, I want to make love to you. I want you to like me, but I will hurt you if you make me. I will hurt you.

The young man is more frightened than before, more frightened than he has ever been in his life. Why do you want to do this to me? Why are you doing this to me? I just wanted a ride. I just wanted a ride because it was cold. I have to go to work tomorrow, please just let me out.

The big man just looks at him and says sadly, I don’t want to hurt you.

The young man takes a deep breath and says calmly, please let me out, I’ll walk home from here, please.

For a moment the driver just looks at him, then he slides his arm slowly across the back of the seat until his fingers are just brushing the young man’s cheek, then he slides his body a little closer, then he puts his hand against the young man’s ear. Then with his whole hand against the side of the other’s face, he gives a sudden push and the young man’s head hits the car window. I don’t want to hurt you he says. The young man’s nose is bleeding. The driver reaches over with his left hand and wipes the blood from under the young man’s nose. He does it very gently. Then he wipes the blood on his leg. I want to make love to you, not hurt you. The young man is silent.

The driver wipes more blood from the young man’s face and looks at it in the yellow light. Then he looks at the young man. This is your blood, he says. The big man slides his body just a little closer, I like you, I want to make love to you. He puts both of his huge hands on both sides of the young man’s head. The driver leans his head forward as if he is going to kiss the young man but when the young man says, you’re sick, he pulls his head back calmly as if he is thinking about it, then slaps the other very hard with his left hand, the one with blood on it. More blood comes out of the young man’s nose and splatters against the big man’s arm. The young man can see it in the dim light. Black spots on a big pale arm, like the man hadn’t been very careful when he was painting his house. But it isn’t paint, it is blood. The young man’s blood, and his right ear is ringing from the slap, he isn’t crying now, but tears have spurted from his eyes when the big man hit him.

Why are you doing this to me? Why? I just wanted a ride, I just wanted a ride. What is happening?

I saw you by the road and I thought you looked cold. The big man looks like he has tears in his eyes. Why is he crying? I think you are beautiful, I want to make love to you. Am I so bad? I don’t want to hurt you any more, but I will if you make me. I’ll take you where you want to go, but first I want to make love to you. I want you to take off your clothes so I can make love to you. If you don’t do what I want I will rip them off, and I will hurt you very badly.

The young man says something rude, but when the big man starts to move very quickly he screams wait, wait, I’m sorry, I’m sorry and in one motion pulls off his t-shirt. He holds out the shirt to the driver like it is a gift and says again I’m sorry, this time more calmly and then again, I’m sorry.

The big man puts his hands against the young man’s chest like it is something he has never seen before and makes a small sound in his throat. The young man is shaking so hard he nearly throws up. Please sir, I think I’m going to be sick he says trying hard to hold back the vomit.

The big man says then like a policeman or a doctor, you are not going to be sick. And it is almost like magic, the young man doesn’t throw up but he is still shaking and still very scared. Please don’t make me do this the young man says, please don’t make me do this. The big man smells the young man’s t-shirt like it is something holy. Both hands holding the shirt pressed against his face. How old are you, the driver says, you smell like a little boy, you smell like a beautiful little boy.

Please don’t make me do this. Let me go, I promise I won’t say anything to anyone, I promise. Please.

The driver knocks the young man’s head up against the window again but not as hard as the first time, and then he slaps him again but not as hard as the first time. I want to make love to you, not hurt you. Don’t make me hurt you again. Take off the rest. Take off everything. I want to see all of you. You are very beautiful. Take off the rest.

The young man starts to say please but very quietly, like a priest, the big man says every time you say please I will slap you. Do you understand? If you say please, it will be like you said please slap me. Then he says give me your hand and when the young man holds out his hand the big man takes it and puts it under his t-shirt against his chest. The young man can feel the massive muscles under the shirt move. Does that feel good, I have no hair on my chest, does it feel good? Then he slowly, slowly moves the young man’s hand down toward his groin. The young man tries to pull his arm back but the big man keeps a very strong hold on it and when he is just touching the course of hair that runs from the navel downward the young man pulls extra hard and says please … the big man just lets go of his arm and makes a small tsk-tsk sound, shakes his head and with his right hand pushes the young man’s head up against the window again, this time very hard.

The driver pulls his t-shirt over his head and gazes at the young man for a moment. He seems even bigger without his shirt. In the pale light he fills the car. Then he leans across the young man with his enormous body and holds him against the seat while he pulls the young man’s shoes off.

Wait, wait, the young man cries. What have I done, what have I done? He can feel the inside of his cheek has been cut by his own teeth. I just wanted a ride, a ride. The young man can taste blood in his mouth and feel tears on his face. The driver has unfastened his corduroy trousers and is jerking them down over his hips. Even though he is kicking his legs and trying to hit the driver with his pinned arms the other man is so strong it is like an adult with a small child. His underwear has come down with his pants and when the big man has them all the way off the young man urinates from fear. The driver does a strange thing; he wipes the urine on himself like it is cologne. Then with one arm holding the young man against the seat and another arm pinning his legs the driver lowers his head to the young man’s sex. The young man is so frightened he is seeing bright sparks behind his eyelids and can feel his heart pushing against the driver’s arm. The big man’s mouth is sliding on him and saliva is running down between his legs because there is so much of it.

The young man hears himself screaming as though from a great distance. Stop. Stop. Stop. Why are you doing this to me? Why are you doing this to me? I wanted a ride. I only wanted a ride. What is happening, what is happening to me? Oh God, I only want a ride. Stop. What is happening to me? Stop. Stop. Please stop. Please, please, please, stop …

He is seventeen and it is the young man’s first sexual experience.

The Book Of Lies

2009-03-25T12:11:00.000-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2003

Starting in the mid 1980's I went through a horrific period of insomnia and strange happenings which included out of body experiences and what were to me, strange coincidences. I am aware that when I say out-of-body experience a few people will immediately turn away in disgust and ask what my drug of choice was at the time. I do not ask for belief. Beginning in about 1983 and continuing until the mid nineties, I experienced a period I call Chapel Perilous or my Insomniac Period. I have since had other insomniac periods and we are, all of us, currently in Chapel Perilous. Do not believe me; look around. The following poems are from that first mass in Chapel Perilous. Ave Eris.

My Room

My room needs reform
To mend the error of its ways
My room is like a Mexican bus
Crowded with people and belongings
None of them seem to be me
None of them seem to have me in them
So I am looking for me
In my blue cold depths
Where breathing stops
Life drops away.

The Mighty Pen

I know I have the wretched thing in my hand again
It keeps making these bug like marks marking
On page after page and telling bottomless stories
Stories that make no sense and making colored lies
Into steel colored real words and it’s just
A pen all right a pen which traps me but I can’t seem to
Control it I can’t I just grab it when it jumps from
My pocket my notebook wherever it’s
Hiding and it clicks and starts to go off like
I threw a match into a Chinese fireworks
Box and I keep hearing these explosions
Like old battles inside my head explosions
Just above the pituitary gland so when I hear it
When I hear it moving around I pretend to sleep
I just pretend to be sleeping and I lay I lie in
My bed queen-sized trying to go back to sleep real sleep
There in my queen-sized bed that folds into a couch
A couch shaped great big origami dragondog so I lie I lay
There and I sweat and I pulse and I try not to think
I try not to think with my eyes closed I try not to think
About my brain-igniting pen I try not to
Think about how close it is to my hand but I do
I think about it and how close it is to my hand so I
Keep reaching for it I keep reaching even in the dark
And finally I make my feet my legs kick and kick
And kick again and my legs and my feet kick my hand
I can see my hand is reaching for that damn pen
So my legs and my feet kick and I use my head
To bat my pen-grabbing traitorous hand
Away but I bang into the wall with my head so
I know at last my hands struggle to find the pen and
The electric black panther light is won and
The electric black panther light goes
On and one of my hands one or the other grab
The damn pen even when I don’t want to
I don’t want to grab the damn pen I don’t
But it’s just jumping and squirming like a fish there
In my hand and finally lands splat splash hard on a
Piece of paper from my notebook a paper towel
A Restaurant napkin anywhere it wants anywhere
Anytime it wants even when my eyes are closed
Especially when my eyes are closed it just jumps
Right in and starts another battle for the
Last word.

Old Folks

Old Mary’s scary
Old Fred’s dead
Old finicky Tom, gone
Old Becky’s peckish
Old folks just passin’ on
One after another
Dads sisters brothers mothers
Old folks just passin’ on
Tellin’ stories to no one
In particular, just talkin’
To kill time before it kills them
Old folks old friends laughin’
Carryin’ on till memory ends
Pleasant old folks
Just keep passin’ on.

Impossible

I take sudden contemplative moments,
Little incidents where I steeple my fingers.

So I can feel, I can sense, even in the dark,
The pads of my fingers balancing.

Leaning against each other, pointing outward,
Into space, away from earth and me, into

The unknown, the divine, the poetic,
Really I’m just sitting here feeling myself.

Fingering my own pulse, a thumping rush
Of heart blood, through a universe of me.

I watch these same lumpy fingers move,
Move at my command, writing some words,

These words, just as I tell them they must,
And it is impossible, it is impossible.

While I Was Out

How do I explore insanity
Except by going there
On my days off?

I have come to pick bone.
Tell me if it’s strange as it seems:
A sign said “Personalize the Unknown”
(Leave a beer can in someone else’s dreams?)

Say it loud, say it clear!
“I do not wish to hear!”
Because then it’s true your fear
Won’t even take you near.

Overheard

How’s by you?

said wall to floor.

Says ceiling, I got a good deal.

I get to see all.

Window breaks in, I see clearly

from my point of view.

It’s just a trick of gravity

that keeps you there at all, said floor.

Says door, do I let in

or do I let out?

Your function is to swing,

agree the others,

between what is us

and what ain’t.

In Time

Under Hecate’s argent shield
Silver Septembers flow like fabled Nile,
Past and Present Future toward history.
This image fades and drowns
Under October’s dying crimson leaves,
Piled like Khephren’s monumental effort
Against the blood red struggles
Of the three million days, dead and gone.
That end of millennium, the gift
Nearest to the heart of man,
Apocalypse, the final onomatopoeia
Will not from any mortal lips issue.
Those hopelessly desiccated yea-sayers hear only
A canted and cacophonous hosanna,
And nay-sayers embarrassed beliefs
Fall away to reveal the core of nothing.

Slowly toppled
By the gravity of gravity,
Clinics of cynics,
By the slime of time
And the attention span of man,

These histories become mysteries,
Forget their creators,
And bury their makers under acres
Of waving green grass,
And birds sweetly singing.

The Device

Red velvet mask of beauty,
Jewel-riveted to the laughing skull.
Each eye, the flame of a million suns
Maw, portaling star-studded void,
Rage of Law, lotus flower
Boon child-friend plaything, awesome benefactor.
To what altar does this gift purchase itself?
How purposed, to shadow
The Mother; the mute Mother?

Whisper, sacrifice.

A child of her womb
Wields the killing blade.
Wherefore have they this tool,
When to them ceremony is unknown?
Who has deeded these devices
To the unschooled?

Gods may demand appeasement thus.
Against such hunger but caution them;
Worship never nurtures from fields of stone.

Read them this epilogue:
Weed wrapped in astral dust,
Of ice these tortured arms enfolding
Herself the sepulcher;
The Mother stands
Tearless, intestate.

The Lover

When do you come from?

Do you know?
I’ve seen you before
And I’ve heard your voice.
I am afraid to touch you,
For fear that you would vanish
Or that I might be never able
To let you go.

When do you come from?

Do you know?
I saw you and I felt a fire
Raging in me from long ago.
Your gaze unsettles my head
I want to fall inside your eyes,
Follow that dark tunnel
Until I lose my name
Inside of you.

When do you come from?
When do you come from?

Do you know?
Do you know?

I see you next to me
In back-to-back mirrors
My chest grows tight
I hardly breathe
My hands shake.

Manhattan Trilogy

They sewed a great dream
into the stone of Manhattan
and now it rusts.

Stroked by silver gloom
I am scarred with its flail
I lay floating in black night
waiting for death that overtakes
us all.
My promise, an endless golden river,
flowed over the street stones
of my paradise
left the infant dying of thirst
I told lies in charity’s name
I opened my arms to the hungry
and devoured them.

Broken glass streets
Litter of high excess
Blood of stars symbolic rapture
Staining minds with old wine smells
Sparkling with taste, merry-hued
Textures still sanguine, warm.

The Generation Of Me

I am ancestored in Greatness.

Part of my Illustrious Me survived
The siege of Bangalore

Part of me was born in Bangalore

Part of me survived the Charge
The Charge of the Light Brigade

Part of me loved through a shipwreck
In the Irish Sea

Part of me found enough to eat
In the Great Potato Famine

Part of me made a dangerous trip
A Trip Around Cape Horn

Part of me fought in icy seas
Fought in icy seas to kill whales

Part of me lived through a migration
A Migration Across North America

Part of me fought and survived
Though wounded in The Boer War

Part of me fought and survived
Though wounded in the First World War

Part of me survived not fighting
Though not wounded in the Second World War

Part of me survived the telling of all
These tales of the Greater Me

I marvel I am here at all.

Conditional Man

If a man,
Made millions
Millions of dollars
Then he gave those million dollars
To all the starving charities

If a man,
To starving charities
Gave all his million dollars away
His life savings all his million dollars then
He’d be a Gave It All Away Philanthropy Hero

If a man,
A Gave It All Away Philanthropy Hero
To fill his empty stomach to eat stole
His next meal a piece of fruit an orange
Then he’d be a thief.

Summertime Love

I wish
Oh I wish
I had moments to spend
Looking for flowers
And time wouldn’t end
Time wouldn’t end.

Summer
Oh Summer
For lovers is best
Laughing in sunshine
But pleasure’s a jest
Pleasure’s a jest.

Oh Summertime
Summertime
Summertime Love
Green grass and tall trees
And moments for kissing
Won’t you come be my
Sum-Summertime Love

Oh Summertime
Summertime
Summertime Love
Old clothes and warm days
And youth we’ll not miss them
When you come be my
Sum-Summertime Love

There’s seasons to tease you
There’s seasons to please you
But Summertime Love
Is the best love I know

Oh Summertime
Summertime
Summertime Love
Our sorrow will start when
The leaves are a’fallin’
So won’t you come be my
Oh will you come be my
Sum-Summertime Love

Migrant

Heavy odors,
Of unwashed clothes
And the sometime sweet, wet broken earth,
Blows me along a dusty farm road
In a hot wind of late summers
Across Florida, Indiana, California
a sandblaster wind grinding me,
To smooth bone, away.

Heavy odors,
Of the bountiful earth, miserly man
tying me with orange blossom ropes
to a burning harvest sun
fading my jeans, fading my hope
suffocating my futures
all in Mother Nature’s love.

Quaking Children

Tigers crouch under the bed
Poison snakes coil in the blanket
Shadows of dread wait in the closet!
Breezes from an open window
Stir cobweb draperies;
Monsters of infinite strength lurking
On bedposts remain unmoved.

Quaking children fear evil
Only sun power can dispel

Routed in daylight, It waits till nightfall
Where, formless, It waits
For tiny groping hands
Reaching for familiar shapes
Find only terrors
In darkness draped.

Shivering child, says Blackness Whispers,
Your mother lies near; will you … go to her?
I, will show you the way
Only infinite miles of my corridors,
Laughs the Dark

Come, small one, your trembling tickles me,
Such a short way, a little to the left,
… A little to the right, a little to the left,
And then straight
For as long as your heart beats …
I only laugh because you tickle me.
Child, leave your cave of blankets
Where sheet caverns outside your ken
Freeze the ends of your tiny toes
I only want to play with you,
Emptiness whispers,
I only want to play …

FLEE! Says Teddybear, and run for your life!
Please, but don’t leave me behind!
Swing the cave open and jump from the bed
FLEE! Says Teddybear, take your friends if you can
Whispers Darkness, if you can … if you can …

Right behind you, says Terror, I’ll stay right behind
I know a game comes the Whisper
We’ll make it a chase!
Isn’t it sad though,
That even my snakes
Slither and crawl faster than you in this race?
Don’t look around Child, don’t look around.
Is your heart beating faster?
Is that sweat on your brow?
Oh, did you notice,
Little one on the run
I’m not laughing now?
My shapes all surround you
They tear at your clothes
You may reach your mother with your friend the bear
But Child, whispers Darkness,
Have you thought what you’ll do
If you find she’s not there?

Residuum

2009-03-19T15:12:00.001-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2009

The heart of darkness beat
A pulse in my dream
Damp in tropic heat.

Dread Word’s iron hold,
Sweeps me from the wakeful
Toward sanguine fantasy.

Surging through adamantine forests
A great green river swirls
Twixt heart and lungs and head.

Dive I must into that verdant stream
My breath padlocked for safekeeping
My nerve steeled against discovery.

The surface ripples origined
Of an abatis of corpses
Lost to atavistic impulse.

Bodies snagged in the past
Strangers and friends
Gone, dressed in memory.

Destiny, a cruise companion
Had bought drinks all around
Laced with primitive venom.

Surfacing, I found allies vanished
Lights darkened; myriad death
Turned them all legend.

A hero, a suicide, a mystic
Fouled against martyrdoms
In a theater of ages.

Distemper painted souls
Hung drying from sky balconies
To horrify the living.

Voyage

2009-03-17T14:57:00.001-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2009

The future, like the silver sea,
Is riding invisible somewhere outside.
The eye of my heart peers forward.

That unknown and limitless land
Collides against a raven shore of history.
Where my memory lies enchained.

The ship to far shores rests,
It’s anchor weighed in this moment.
A gangway bridges murky experience.

Its captain stands ready for a signal,
Longshoremen have cast off most lines.
Boatswains caper about the deck.

Yet the cargo is not fully stowed,
Full provisioning incomplete.
I await a manifest item.

The Sun Was Shining

2009-03-12T23:09:00.000-07:00

PHOTO: Diego Fernandes 2007

The sun was shining today
And I wanted to writhe naked,
I wanted to roll like an excited dog
In all that early green grass.

I’m ready for the itch.
Feeling tiny blue flowers
With white and yellow centers
Here and there on the hillside.

The meadow, once hidden
Is now surrounded
Civilization moved in with
Windows looking watchfully.

The hills around up and down
Near and far house littered
Every one crowding the open
Staring furtively from the trees.

Grand McMansions with
Hilltop window disdain
From up and up, to near and far
Spying on the open fields.

My hidden dell isn’t.
I wanted to sprawl naked
Absorbing sun like a sponge
Feeling those hot fingers.

I wanted a sun massage.
I know it’s still winter but
The sun was shining today
And I wanted to lay naked.

All those windows gave me
Guilt and immodest modesty
Got the better of me
So I merely strolled.

Reflection

2009-03-02T00:29:00.001-08:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2009

Our strange passage through times
Reveal naked silence under clamor’s cloak

Sound dressed to drown
Ominous inward silence

Silence driving fearful life
Toward noisy oblivion

Din the garb of every
Emptiness of dark silent space

Silence a hidden cadaver
A shape hidden under racket

Sound fills an empty room
With echoes off nothing

A question recoiling
Drawing back from answer

Touching electric shock silence
We’re thrown against chaos

My Card

2009-02-20T21:58:00.000-08:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2009

I know you’ve heard the system,
The Big System is failing,
Some banker messed up.

I keep getting notices, letters,
From the bank, my bank, about
Breaches in security.

They ask me if I want
A new card, an unbroken card,
An unbreached card.

They tell me they can solve
The Problem of Security
Giving me a new card.

I went, I bought, I played
The old card is brand new.
The new card’s on its way.

A new card from the zombies
Walking the dead walk
Up and down Wall Street.

Are you ready?
The system is failing,
Or so I hear.

Kalani

2009-02-15T03:13:00.001-08:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2008

I can’t remember exactly where the place was, except someplace northwest of Pearl and Waianae and it was ‘locals only’. I couldn’t tell you anyway because I was laying down in the back of the station wagon on the way and I couldn’t see where the turn-offs were. If I had seen the road, I still couldn’t tell you because Kalani and his buds only let me go because I had enough money to rent three boards, and the spot was “the spot” and the break supposedly didn’t have a name. Well, it had a name to them, just not a name to the wide world, like the famous North Shore spots.

I actually ended up renting four boards for five guys, which was so typical of Kalani. He would say, “Oh no, there’s just gonna be you and me. Nobody else. I’ll have plenty of time to show you the ropes so you can get the place wired.” At first, I was naïve enough to believe him, but I got wise. If he said two, it meant at least four; if he said four, it meant ten and it didn’t matter if it was people or money or screws that fell on the floor.

I thought at first maybe he just consistently underestimated everything. I got wise to that too. Whenever I questioned his numbers he always answered, “Don’t worry ‘bout it, bud. Don’t worry ‘bout it. Too much worry’ll kill you. ‘Specially you haoles.”

That was another of his tactics. People were drawn to him because he abused them. I know that doesn’t make much sense but he would call you racist names to your face and you would take it as honesty or something. He said haoles made worry a science, whereas native Hawaiians were the soul of laidbackness. Nothing could bother a Hawaiian. Everything bothered anyone else, especially Mainlanders like myself. “You always wanna know how far, how much, how many…but you need to take it light, brah.” Kalani never talked any kind of pidgeon-surfer slang like that anywhere but near home. Everywhere else, his English was almost punctilious except for his use of ‘Bud’.

I remember talking to him once when he was home and drunk on Saporo beer and asking him about what it felt like to be a ‘real’ Hawaiian. I was reading a book about the overthrow of the last queen at the time and the whole concept had surprised me. The book had been written by, if not a Hawaiian nationalist, then at least a sympathizer and it revealed a different history than I was taught at school in California. Kalani muttering expletives under his breath about the haoles and the puka people, his word for Asians, because he said you could always find them in lines and they all looked alike, said, “fuckin’ haoles everywhere …” Then he made a slip, “even me! I got mostly haole in me, brah!” He giggled a little and then went back to swearing about pukas.

He didn’t look like a Hawaiian or a Polynesian at all. He had wavy dark chestnut colored hair and his eyes and eyebrows were the same color. He had beautiful teeth and a hesitant smile set in incredibly pale skin freckled with spots that were also the same color as his hair. It was actually kind of disturbing to look at him; the color looked dyed or fake because it was so even and there was so much of it. It wasn’t that he was bad looking or ugly or anything, cause he really wasn’t. He just looked kind of over-the-top dramatic. Intense would be the best description, really intense.

Kalani also had a thin, hairless and very short body, barely topping five feet and there was always sloppy casualness to the way he dressed. His hats always had odd bends in them and everything he wore had sat too long in a dryer with dozen of wrinkles running in odd directions. But he always wore leather shoes and they were always polished to a mirror finish. I tried to tease out the reason for those brightly polished shoes on a couple of occasions and he just shrugged me off.

Kalani claimed to be a Christian and spent a lot of time chatting up girls using religion as a line of attack. The rest of the time he spent trying to get them in the sack. He hung around regularly with one of four or five guys who he called his ‘buds’. All of those guys told excuse-like stories about why they were Kalani’s friend and they all complained about him whenever he wasn’t around, because he just seemed to absorb energy and resources. Oh yeah, he always had good ideas, but why did someone always have an accident or get in trouble?

One guy said while watching Kalani from a distance, “don’t go out with that fucker, you’ll end up in the hospital or the morgue. See this scar? That came from playing ‘follow-the-Kalani’”. I wanted to know what had happened and the guy, his name was Tyler, told me he had climbed on a highway bumper and fell off, tearing the skin off his leg.

“What? Did Kalani knock you off or something?”

“No,” he stated flatly, still staring at Kalani’s antics in the distance, “no, I climbed up and then I fell off.”

“Okay, I’m confused. How did Kalani have anything to do with it?” The guy was staring at Kalani with what looked like near hatred.

“He didn’t have to do anything. He was just there. It’s like he’s bad juju, or something. Stuff like that happens whenever he’s around. People will be having fun, that asshole shows up and suddenly someone’s being eaten by a shark.”

“Uh…like…um…bad luck or something?”

“Or something, alright.”

I didn’t pursue it with Tyler, but I got really interested for some reason and later asked one of the real ‘buds’ if he had had something like that happen. His name was Joey.

“Oh yeah! It happens to everybody that hangs around with him. Just bad shit, ya know?” he was nodding his head emphatically.

“You?”

“Shit, yeah! That little fuck and Pat and me went down to the International Market Place to score some pot and there was a bust goin’ down when we got there. We just thought it was funny, ya know? We were watchin’ an’ shit, laughin’ and suddenly this big Samoan cop is wrestling with one of the guys their trying to arrest. The guy takes off at a run and the cop throws … THROWS his gun at the guy and hits Pat in the side of his head! He needed…fuck…he needed like twenty stitches or something.”

“Well, where was Kalani?”

“He was standing next to Pat.”

“Yeah, okay, but nothing happened to you, right?”

“Not that time.’

“So what happened to you? I mean, you know, when Kalani was around?”

He suddenly looked a little glassy and got kind of pale, “It’s kinda hard to talk about.”

I made a laughing sound that wasn’t really laughing and waited.

There was a long silence while Joey just stared off toward the Pali highway.

“So, are you going to tell me? Or what?”

“I’m not … it’s kind of embarrassing, ya know.”

“Did Kalani do something?”

“Oh no. No, it wasn’t anything like that. He never does anything. He’s just there when shit happens and a lot of shit happens when he’s around. A lotta shit!”

“So tell me!” I tried to keep my voice neutral like I wanted to know but didn’t care if he told me.

“Remember that girl, Angela?”

“Angela? The one … you met at Kaneohe?”

“No, that was … what the fuck was her name? Anyway … no … Angela came from the mainland. Was over here on vacation. Long brown hair. Funny. Was looking for a job at one of the hotels.”

“Oh yeah! Now I remember! About five-seven, brown hair, blue eyes?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, me, Angela, Tyler and that slut he was hanging out with and Kalani and some rental he’d found were all supposed to go up to the Pali and then over to North shore. Well, first Tyler and co. decided they were going to party with some tourists on a boat over at Ala Wai and Kalani asked if he could use Tyler’s car because they weren’t going to need it if they were going to be on a boat and Tyler, you know this was after he fucked up his leg falling off that highway rail, said who’s going to drive, and Kalani said it didn’t matter, he could or I could, whatever Tyler wanted. Well, I wasn’t there and Tyler was scared Kalani would fuck up his car so he said, okay, but Joey drives and has to meet us over by the harbor. And Kalani says sure, sure and then he asks, can I ride with you over there ‘cuz it’d be closer to where he was going to pick up his date. Well, Tyler says okay and he and that slut and Kalani all get in the car to go over to Ala Wai, only they never get there because some asshole runs a red and smashes in the side of Tyler’s car and breaks the sluts leg. So now Tyler has to go to the hospital with her and, you know, Kalani, once he decides he’s goin’ someplace, he’s goin’, but he’s late to his date so she won’t go. So he calls me and tells me Tyler and the slut are in the hospital but he still wants to go and do I know anyone with a car?”

“Oh fuck! Angela?”

“Yep.” “She was driving a rental,” and here Joey started talking in a girly voice. “Oh that’s okay Joey, I’ll drive, I don’t mind, I hope Tyler and the slut will be okay and get better soon and blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, shut up, you idiot, don’t say anything.” Joey was kind of laughing and waving his hands remembering everything.

“So then Angela and I get in her rental and head over to pick up Kalani and drive up Pali Highway. Big mistake. Everything is okay driving to get Kalani but as soon as he gets in the car shit starts happening. Angela sideswipes a cement bumper in the parking lot scratching the hell out of the fender, then we have to stop to put up the roof because it’s started to rain and the fucking thing gets stuck half-way up! Well, we finally get the goddam roof up but only after we’re all soaked and I’m like, shit, ya know, and Angela is pissed off because something else got fucked up. I don’t remember what, and then Kalani tries to calm things down and Angela says,” and Joey breaks into his girly voice again, “Oh Kalani, that’s so sweet! You are such a sweet heart. That’s so sweet! You are so wonderful and blah, blah, blah. And it really pissed me off, but then she starts asking him if he thought she and I should get married!! And I thought, FUCK! I just met you lady, I like you and all but Jesus fucking Christ, what the fuck! And asking Kalani, that was what really sucked! Like he would know about shit. Anyway, I got madder and madder and when we got up to the Lookout, I kept getting madder and made a stupid joke about jumping off or something and that dumb bitch said, go ahead Mighty Mouse, let’s see how well you fly.”

Joey turned really red just then and stopped talking. He just sat shaking his head and then grabbed his neck like it hurt. “This always bugs me when I think about this.” He just held his neck and sat quietly for a while and then said, “Fuck it.”

“I don’t know why I did it, okay? I just was so mad, I guess. Anyway, she said that Mighty Mouse shit and I popped. I turned around and ran to the edge and jumped over.”

“Fuck,” I said quietly.

“Yeah…man…I just ran and jumped. I heard her scream and Kalani yelled something and then, no shit, the wind, the fuckin’ wind, blew me ass over melon back up and right on top of fuckin’ Angela. Well, my legs hit her in the head or something and I went down hard on my shoulders and neck and smacked my head against the ground. Knocked myself colder than snot. It was fucked up. Angela caught something, maybe my foot or something on her lip and split it; had to have stitches. Got a huge fucking black eye. I got a dislocated shoulder and the doctor said I was lucky I didn’t break my fuckin’ neck. Well, he didn’t say ‘fuckin,’” Joey laughed a little, “and her elbow or her head or something, caught me in the balls as I went over her head and all I can say is I’m glad I was knocked out when it happened because when I came to all I could think of was that somebody had played a round of golf using my balls with the worst fucking handicap in the world.” Joey was a caddy part time at one of the golf courses.

“Youch!” I cringed in sympathetic pain, “Fuuuuck!”

“Dude. I was in the hospital for two days or some shit.”

I was still cringing and holding my crotch. “Jesus.”

“That little shit, Kalani, just stood there and watched me fly by too. His fucking stupid-ass, bent melon cover didn’t even come off. And ya wanna know what? He was fucking pissed that he couldn’t go to North Shore! That little scrap merchant asshole was fucking mad cause he couldn’t do what he wanted to do! I don’t know why the fuck I even still talk to that little fucker.”

Trying to be humorous, I said, “good ideas?”

“Fuck his ideas.”

That was months before the surfing trip and I had a lot of time to worry about what might happen to someone. But I worried more about Kalani’s numbers. Just you and me, he said. I figured that would mean four people. There were five. Negotiating on surfboard rentals, he said one because we would share. Kalani was always saying ‘Buds’ share. You weren’t a ‘Bud’ if you didn’t share. Pat asked him one day if that meant underwear too, because Kalani’s would be really tight on anybody else.

That was the only time I ever saw Kalani lose his temper and he expressed himself clearly but exactly like the boy who owns the ball. Kind of like, you have to be nice to me or I’ll take my ball and go home. The oddest thing was, it worked somehow. Pat listened and even though Kalani never drove, never helped carry stuff, never organized anything, and very, very rarely ever paid for anything, and his company was, well, dangerous, he came up with idea after idea after idea. I’m pretty sure no one exactly liked him, but Kalani’s ideas seemed to be gold, even if they mostly benefited Kalani.

There seemed to be only a couple of things Kalani really liked to do and one was surf. He wasn’t that great but he really liked it. He had had the idea of this trip for a long time and he got Pat to organize it, Joey to drive and me to pay. When I asked Pat why I had to rent surfboards when everyone had at least one board, I got the distinct impression a scam was involved when he told me to ask Kalani. Kalani would never have cheated his friends by selling their boards but he wasn’t above “losing” a board store’s sticks, especially if his name wasn’t on the rental slip. I made it really clear to Kalani that if I had to pay for rentals, I was going to pick the store. He tried to insist on some whack job place where there was a great deal because it was low season and I told him he could pay for a board or bring his own. He just gave me that dark red stare and shrugged.

When Joey and Pat showed up in the station wagon, Kalani started grinning because Tyler was with them. “The more the merrier!” He always liked it when unexpected people showed up.

“There’s only four boards, numb nuts! You told me four, dumbass!”

“Whatever.” That was Kalani’s answer. Whatever. I hate that shit.

“Whatever means you, dickweed, are staying on the beach, till someone decides to come in!”

“Fuck you, haole, you can stay in.”

“Let’s get something straight, butt munch, I fucking rented the boards and I’m fucking going out. I could give a shit what you do.” So I grabbed one of the boards and my leash and went straight into the water, which was fucking stupid but I’d gone crazy and wasn’t thinking.

None of those guys were unfriendly toward me but likewise they also weren’t real buds to me. They were Kalani’s buds. Joey and Pat were the best surfers with Tyler aggressively ready to try anything but without their skill. Kalani was okay, I guess, but he always seemed to wait for a certain kind of wave, letting plenty of good ones go.

They knew this break and I didn’t. It was a reef break but it was only a short paddle out and that day the waves weren’t really very good. They headed straight for the reef then jacked up fast and broke more on top of the reef than across it. The tide was somewhere midway between high and low but working toward low, which made the situation worse. I didn’t know the break; good-sized waves breaking on reef, upset, not good.

Of course, I had to be the dumbass. There was a couple of ways to get past the reef and I took the worst. I was sure of it when Pat got out ahead of me even though I’d started first. Naturally, he had to rub it in when he told me I should have gone the other way. Like I knew there was another way. Then Joey arrived and said the same thing, which pissed me off even more.

I could see Kalani and Tyler having a conversation, I guessed about who was going out first and Kalani must have won the argument because Tyler just went over and sat on the tailgate of the car.

Joey had already caught a wave and rode it right through the opening in the reef and Pat hooted for him. Pat asked me if I wanted to go ahead of him and I said no because I wanted to watch him go through that break in the reef to get a feel for where to start and in a couple of minutes Pat caught one and without any tricks sailed right through.

By that time Kalani was through the opening and outside. He didn’t say anything to me but he was looking at me with an expression I’d never seen before. It’s hard to describe but once you’d seen it you’d never forget. He was just looking at me like he was reading a book or something, maybe like he’d just seen what he wanted for lunch. His face was totally calm, empty, really, of everything. His dark red eyes were just looking at me. I was a little spooked.

It changed when I asked him if he wanted to go first. He just shook his head and said, “Go, bud.”

I think I was more spooked than I realized because I caught the first wave, the good one, too late and missed it as it passed under me so I just kept paddling like a barney and caught the next, which had me way out of position but I caught it anyway and did a really good pop up. But my desire to get away from Kalani had me on a collision course for the reef and sure enough I could see it coming. I don’t know why I didn’t just kick out or dive off the board but I didn’t. I just didn’t.

I felt the wave jack under me; saw the reef ahead and an area that was completely exposed by the ebbing tide. I knew I was going to wipe out. My balance was good, my trim was good, but I was going to wipe out on a reef on my first and last ride of the day. Then the road got really smooth, too smooth. The wave just dropped out, vanished, from underneath me. I still had my balance and forward momentum. I just had no wave. I was flying.

I even had momentary feeling that maybe I could fly completely over the reef and land in the lagoon on the other side but I didn’t. I was in a sort of crouched Silver Surfer position when I hit the coral. There was a grinding noise and I heard a kind of cruuunnch, then a loud popping snap. My momentum carried me in a run right off the nose of the board and onto the coral. There was an immediate stinging sensation just before another breaking wave caught me from behind and pushed me further on the coral and sent the board whizzing by my head. At that point I could feel the coral digging into my hands as well as my feet and then just as suddenly, I was swimming in the lagoon with the board floating upside down next to me.

With the salt water stinging my hands and feet, I reached out to grab the board and realized the leash was still caught on some coral so I painfully tugged it loose and in doing so, I guess the board was being pushed or something because when the leash came loose the tail hit me in the back of the head. Not hard, but enough to give me a bump. When I turned my body to right the board and slide onto its deck I noticed the skeg had snapped off.

I was about halfway back to the beach when I turned my head and saw Kalani come flying through the opening in the reef.

I had to pay for the broken longboard, and I only got a slight infection from the coral cuts. Joey and Pat stopped hanging with Kalani and I don’t know what happened to Tyler.

The last time I saw Kalani he tried to get me to give him a hotel room I had rented because he had a ‘girl friend’ and his new buds were playing poker in a room they rented together. I just told him to rent his own room and he told me I wasn’t a bud.

Duh.

Lunatic

2009-02-11T12:02:00.000-08:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2008

The flaming moon chases my feet
Through that entire slippery world.

I heard some exotic scents lingering
As I climbed toward scattered light.

The odor was flying there yesterday
And tomorrow it will again.

Thoughts slipping and tripping on guilts,
Trailing shadows, pieces of nights I don’t sleep.

I told you my insomnia was back,
At least, I meant to tell you.

All that shadow and light
Keep tearing at my frontiers.

Phantasms fingering the rags
Fluttering from my failings.

It’s like that top I used to have
Just jerk the string and spin.

Every little sound keeps following me
Trying to shoulder out others.

You want to know where
All those guys came from.

You don’t know the poet,
That’s what you said you wanted.

Well, you didn’t use the words “I want”
But people don’t, do they?

Maybe there was some underlying anger
And I didn’t tell you everything.

Naturally, no one tells everything.
No one ever has the time.

The big things really get me,
But it’s the little things that won’t let up.

Intellection cut off somehow,
Orphaned in an overcrowded space.

My scattered mental notes and memory
Stuffed into that one solitary room.

I think it started when I was trying
To reach maximum efficiency.

I pulled everything into that one room,
Everything within an easy arm’s reach.

I always knew there were other spaces,
Other rooms, other places for storage.

After a while though, I forgot about them
Until one day I banged my head on the ceiling.

Yeah, I was sitting at the top
Of my very own midden.

Oh, I invited some in to look around
Tried to interest them in the sights.

But mostly, they’d look around and say,
“Say! Think you could keep something for me?”

And then they’d give me something
I’d given them years ago as a gift.

It’s okay, they’d say with stiff smiles,
I don’t need this anymore.

And I’d stand there stupidly,
Holding a relic of a dead friendship.

Anyway, I banged my head on the ceiling
And there was a kind of booming sound.

Wow, I thought, that’s right!
I forgot there are more rooms in here.

There are other rooms in my house,
I can tell from hollow-sounding knocks.

So I started moving things around,
And there were some very upset sounds.

I found some little side rooms and
Large closets with hanging skeletons.

Then I remembered, really remembered
There was another floor to this place.

Well, right, I thought, of course there is!
And I looked quizzically at the ceiling.

Well, there’s an upper room alright, but
The damn thing’s locked and the key’s lost.

So I wade through all those souvenirs
While I’m looking for a crowbar.

But my long and curious glance keeps
Breaking ground-floor windows.

All those views keep falling inside
Cluttering up the clutter.

Desertor

2009-02-07T20:00:00.000-08:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2007

Vejo-me estar

Eu mesmo que está

Eu mesmo sozinho

Em uma planície do deserto

Na fora do tempo

Estou entre

O futuro dos futuros

Eu vejo a passagem do passado

Eu bebi este momento para molhar a poeira

O momento molhou a poeira

Agora molharia a poeira

Poeira do está do ritmo dos sem

Nada que nada está molhado

O tempo é poeira agora

Nossas vidas estavam molhadas

Mâs o tempo e você negar-me-iam

Nega-me

A vida quebrada afastada

Tempo passado

Você passou

Esqueceu-o mim

Esqueceu-o tempo

Você esqueceu o futuro

Seu passado prevê seu futuro

O passado prevê o futuro

O futuro faz o tempo

O tempo é você

Você está lá

Estou aqui

Gone

2009-02-06T16:52:00.000-08:00

Ave Maria, gratia plena;

Another good friend died, just shrank away
From cancer, like all the others.

Still making little jokes last week,
Now she has stopped breathing.

Dominus tecum:

Mary wasn’t the most tragic case,
Nor one who passed quickly, easily.

She had cancer for so long,
We forgot how sick she was.

Benedicta tu in mulieribus

She had health care with a big HMO,
Advertising smiles of health for years.

We get ‘em better and you enjoy ‘em longer.
Insure with us, live longer with us.

Et benedictus fructus ventris tui [Jesus].

Health Maintenance Organization with slogan,
Empty and hollow sounding like an oil drum.

Best put yourself in hospice care,
That’s what we recommended.

Sancta Maria, Mater Dei,

We do all that can be done.
We count this as a success story.

She made it through the treatments,
We did our part well.

Ora pro nobis peccatoribus,

HMO said more people are surviving
The big C, the dread C.

Is anyone alive today who
Hasn’t had a victim relative?

Great Aunt Nora, three grandparents,
Great Uncle, who else?

Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

Before Napping

2009-02-01T14:34:00.000-08:00

There’s always a promise that if
You sit long enough something will happen.

I’m sure whatever that is or was or must be
Is as close to death as not breathing.

I came to sit in this chair to write
About filling human needs and wants.

Well, more about my needs and wants
That need and want filling feeling.

So I hold up my hand and
Count on my fingers.

This may be important
So I enumerate.

First, I gotta breathe, I know this
But occasionally I forget.

Like when the sea is so clear,
I should be able to breathe it.

Second, I gotta eat, I think.
But I forget to do that too sometimes.

I have friends who ask me constantly
“How can you forget to eat?”

And they ask so incredulously,
I get embarrassed and stammer.

“Well, well, I don’t know…I”
Then I add a word that means forgot.

Third, I am pretty sure sleep is third.
I don’t sleep very well either.

I hear noises in the rooms and noises
Inside my head and then I think.

If darkness doesn’t wrap me up
Like a lightproof blanket, I’m awake.

All those little noises and little lights
May as well be poking me with little fingers.

Fourth might be those automatic things
We never notice unless we don’t do them.

Like moving and blinking and sweating
And feeling and excreting.

Now I hold up my fingers to start
Counting again but I don’t.

I want a lot of things like a car
That comes with a parking space.

I want an ocean beach with perfect waves
That comes with a new surfboard.

I want that little voice in my head
To come with an off switch.

So here I sit in this chair telling you
I didn’t sleep well and held my breath.

I ate something but forgot what it was.
But everything else; I did that.

Procrastination Proclamation

2009-01-25T18:29:00.000-08:00

PHOTO: Diego Fernandes 2009

It wasn’t ravens and gulls
Floating sideways along on sunset clouds.

It wasn’t the colored afternoon
Moving south toward Santa Cruz.

The Pacific was speaking again
Trying to get in a last word.

Arguing with all that color
Painted by the sun’s brush

Every wave-tip running under
Clouds passing aloofly overhead.

I did get distracted a little
By all that cinematic movement.

But it wasn’t any of that wondrous
Display by nature and her children.

It wasn’t that perfectly fresh wind
Filled with all those negative ions.

Who was it that used to talk about
The benefits of oceanic negative ions?

Oh yeah! That redhead always looking sly
And brushing her hair against her hand.

But it wasn’t’ negative ions rushing
Passed my negative ion sensor.

It wasn’t any of those things
That slowed my departure.

It must have been the temporary
Freeway closure on Highway 80.

Because driving away from all that
Maritime beauty is always easy.

House

2009-01-24T13:56:00.000-08:00

I woke up wondering
What I was doing back here/there, again?
I thought I left there long ago.
I thought I was taken from this place, that place.
I thought, I thought, I thought.
I thought it was real once.
It was real once.
Now it’s ‘real’, it’s a dream, which means it isn’t real.
Once, it was surrounded by trees and grass and buzzing
And humming and roaring and scent and sun.
I lived there, I ate there, I breathed there, I played there.
Now it is gone and then gone again.
It is still gone like a persistent memory.
Now gone, it just sits there brooding,
Appearing again, slowly solidifying, again.
Only it doesn’t brood, it just stands there,
Like my mother with her arms crossed,
Looking implacable and striking and ready to strike.
It isn’t there because it isn’t there.
We removed ourselves,
I was removed with we.
It was removed by progress … and dealers.
But it’s still there, like missed evidence.
An artifact of journeys that might be saying,
You may as well have stayed.
It was a strange place.
It followed the sun like a sunflower,
Groaning and creaking and we would watch doors
Swing open or shut dependent on shafts of sunlight.
But now that I’m back/not back again,
The sun has vanished, and it just sits there expectantly.
All the suburban blue paint is gone.
All the white paint around the windows is missing.
But the wood looks healthy, like it’s still breathing,
Or maybe it has put down roots,
Drawing food, sustenance, nutrition, something,
From where it doesn’t stand.
But it looks like it needs a tan, a little sun.
Wherever it is, there isn’t any sun.
It looks like it needs to get out and play,
There … there isn’t any sun there anymore,
Where ever it is it must always be overcast,
But it doesn’t say anything about the sun,
Or leaning, or groaning, or shrieking
Like it used to, it just says matter-of-fact lies,
Like your great-grandmother is living here now,
Or, there is a trunk upstairs you forgot to take,
Or, the cat is still around here somewhere,
Or, so there you are, what did you do with your little car,
Or, don’t worry, the dealers will be leaving soon,
Or, look out back, your friend Miguel is out there.
And in last night’s neverthere I found my way back
And a window that was never there,
A window that opened in the middle
And had a little turning latch,
That would never keep out a dealer,
With a perfect window frame like a perfect picture frame,
Perfectly carved, perfectly molded, perfectly gleaming,
And the right side was open,
Letting in no breeze, looking out toward
A sunrise and one of those dealer tilt-up knockdowns
That was too big and too small
And some men were working and I tried to close
The window quietly but a man heard it
And I know he came over to ask me,
Ask me what I was doing inside that place,
And he looked at me from outside the outside
And I looked at him from inside the inside
And I stared and he stared because
It really was Miguel, a grown man, and he said,
Wow, I haven’t seen you for a while,
You aren’t supposed to be in there.
But always a loyal friend, he said
Get out of there before something happens.
I wanted to stay and talk, but he looked over his shoulder
And said, better leave, so I disappeared into the dark.
There were places inside that still had light,
But I don’t know why.
It kept telling me lies about who lived there.
There weren’t any rugs or furniture or books.
There weren’t any sounds from the wood.
There weren't any people.
The tile is gone, the kitchen is gone, the smells are gone.
The deafening silence is hanging like a suicide
In the middle of everything, and no one wants
To touch it, or move it, be the first to mention it.
Thoughts and words just swirl around saying
Oh, that used to be there and that might make a nice,
How cozy if you changed.
I’m listening to those echoes now.
It hasn’t moved from where it stands/stood,
Even though it was the first to go,
Well, maybe the second,
The double pie-wagons were first.
But that was hidden too,
Old Mrs. Jones gave me that ceramic squirrel
And I think she gave my sister an angel
And maybe she threw a final rock over the fence
At my grandmother. But she’s gone too.
The dealers got them all, one after the other.
It’s sister died under a bulldozer,
Its mother went through a facelift
And a tuck and then another tuck
And then some organ removal
And finally, someone wanted firewood
And they paid the dealer to haul
What was left to the fire.
That corner was alive with neighbors once,
Mrs. Jones the pie-wagon lady, and Leo and Virginia,
And Carol and Phillip and Dave and Mac,
The gravel pit gave out. and Elliot’s,
And Uncle Ted Leung all left.
Dealers of stuff built tilt-ups and knockdowns and do-overs,
Windowless places so the sun can’t touch them.
Dealers made the little lane vanish, go away,
But they did it gradually, they thought no one
Would notice and no one did; first buildings
Closed it in, then a fence with a gate,
Then another building, and finally
The house went missing and there was no lane.

The Visitor

2009-01-22T20:33:00.000-08:00

PHOTO: Diego Fernandes 2009

I live searching
For quiet breaths
At your shoreline.
My intemperate life
Slowly drying, fading
In winter’s sun.
Your water's clear
But passing floods
Of passing years
Left scattered detritus
Sunken dreams
Treasure from strangers
Thrown overboard
For future discovery.

I glance behind
My future where
I had yet left
No trace print,
Where my soles
Impressions wander
Bereft of weight.
Little shrines built
Where the recent
Living found long
Dead forests grown
Matured, vanished
Root and branch
Twig and leaf
Before their time.

I chase waters
Toward the sky
And simple nimbus
Reflect vaguely.
My path beckons
Urging flight.
Become a river
In the desert
Whisper skeletons
And broken glass.
Remember nothing
Save Hesperides.
Can memory
Injure the path
If it does not
Injure me?

La Puebla

2009-01-19T23:07:00.000-08:00

PHOTO: unknown

There's ideas floating in LAs lights. Los Angeles. La Puebla de la Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciúncula. Tiny little ideas riding on beams of light, sunlight, electric light, starlight, moon light, reflected light. Sunlight is so filled, so jampacked, with ideas in Lahss Anjeleez, her sunlight light looks used, pre-owned. Reflected light ideas are recycled. So crowded with ideas is light in LA that both light and LA, overflow into places where light and ideas never meant to go and should have never gone. But Lohz Angehlehs needed cool and hot lights are cool.

Light crowds tight little spaces and spreads like oil, like gasoline, like fluid on anything in any space. When light disappears, little idea dust lays around, rubbing off on passing brains. Ideas are viruses. They ride light, they wiggle their sometimes-obscene little selves onto whatever host they contact. Not every host, of course, is fertile ground for an idea. Not every dark space should have light.

Light ideas get spread by neon and incandescent and florescent and lasers and tricked into performing kind of a high tech dog and pony show. Sunlight, yeah even sunlight, gets re-used, more light and hotter water and colder water and electricity and environmentally green machines and very tricky solar power light. Sun to sun. Lohs Anglehs basks in sun. El Lay gets tan every day. No stars, no light. No light, no movies. No movies, no money. No money, no people. No people, no Stars. Starlight starbright, ain’t the stars right fine tonight? Ain’t they grand? Ain't they cool?

And where do Stars, and I mean Stars with capital 'S', get ideas? I'm telling you, in the light. All that light floating around the City of Angels. The town around the Angel Queen. The City of the Queen of the Angels. Light Town. City o’ Lights. Sure as shit ain’t Paris, but gotdam its got lights! Hot cool lights.

The sun shines down on us all, everybody, not just la bella encantada la reina de los angeles, but everybody. As long as PCH is basking in sunlight, all the fashionistas, baristas, servers and sailors, producers, potheads, directors, deadbeats, builders, best boys, gonzo girls, grips and actors, and even some little toad in east LA is probably hiding under a rock to keep moist and every crack and smack dealer inside city limits is hot and trying to keep cool. Not be cool. That’s different, very different. But keeping cool helps anyone be cool. And being cool in La Puebla is way important, muy importante. To be in LA is to know the way of cool.

Get this idea. Being cool means know when the lights are on. On you. And lights on you, don’t mean sunlight. In sunlight's bright light you wear cool sunglasses. Sunlight gives you a hot tan and that's cool. The other lights you put on cool and sunglasses for are Klieg lights. If there're no Klieg lights, you put on cool and sunglasses just in case. Just in case someone sets up Klieg lights, or someone aims camera laser lights at someone, or someone wants someone to think someone is pointing camera laser lights at someone. And if they do then you move, you move like all the Klieg lights in La La Land are on you, focused on you, lighting on you, lighting you. That’s what cool is. Hot. Hot lights, hot nights, hot bodies, cool ‘tude dude. That's cool.

Remember Double Dubuque? No. No one remembers Double Dubuque. An LA that never was. Angels with no cool. A non-cool, no cool LA. A Puebla de angelinas imperfectas misremembered by WWII dogface returnees who hated La Reina's fine figure. That was, well that was a long time ago, before cool was cool. Yeah, Double Dubuque. Just a way to remember somewhere someone wanted to forget. Dubuque, somewhere back east. Double Dubuque, somewhere out west. West of the west. Double Dubuque. An easy way to put down two places for the price of one. But sad Dubuquers out east could get, and did get, and were lost in Double Dubuque and Double Dubuquers couldn't, wouldn’t, shouldn't help Dubuquers find their way home. Because out west Double Dubuquers live in The Big Orange and they don’t know where Dubuque out east is and they don’t care, won't care, and if they did, they couldn't, wouldn’t, shouldn't say, to be cool, and that’s cool.

In the City of Angels, angels roll over the, on the, under the freeways. Angeleno angels in the LaLa Land of la automobíl carry guns and gun for cool by the glide in the pride of mechanical stride. And angels shoot when one angel don't want to go with the flow. In Southland that ain’t cool. You ride with the tide, cause if you do, an idea riding light finds you. When ideas find you, Starlight, Starbright, you join the light in the night. You get to be hot and that’s cool.

Starlight starbright lights wandering around down in Tinseltown, they all know. They all breathe in all that light filled with all those ideas, they all start the glow. They all breathe their fill and they all fill with a will. They all grow on the glow. And their glow's a glow all around the globe. They're hot and that’s cool.

Luminescent, incandescent, florescent, phosphorescent, fill the fine night with idea light. The angelenos de la puebla of Mrs. Queen of Double Dubuque Southland La La Angels are feeding, la gente will swill their fill of Big Orange hot idea cool. They got cool. And they work it in La Puebla. And that's cool.

Today Is Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Birthday Celebration

2009-01-19T19:08:00.000-08:00

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday celebration and a U.S. “Monday” holiday. I do not know what his actual birthday was because Martin Luther King, Jr.s birthday now floats from Monday to Monday, depending on the year, but I know it is in January. I know it is his birthday today because I tried to do banking today because I forgot that today was his birthday celebration. Perhaps it is because the holiday hasn’t been around long enough that it seems to have little emphasis in the country other than for Black African-Americans.

I told a friend today I thought perhaps to truly acknowledge a day with special significance I could perform some act in honor of the man. She suggested, as the day has been designated a day of service for the black community, volunteering in a homeless shelter or writing something. Since the shelter near me has volunteers signed up long in advance and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday had popped like a balloon in my face, I decided to visit one of my favorite retreats, take photographs and write this bit.

I’ll skip talking about how beautiful a day it was today in California. We have a lot of beautiful days; this was one of them. It was Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday and I thought I would spend a little time reviewing information I remember, or think I remember, of his life and career without looking him up on Wikipedia or some other online biographical site. Please feel free to correct any details, I am not checking for correctness.

I seem to remember offhand that he was born in 1939. Why that year sticks in my head is one of those mysteries to which I will never know the answer, but I am pretty sure it was 1939. Two years before the start of World War II. I don’t know where but I make an assumption in saying somewhere in the southern U.S. I know nothing at all about the early years of his life, his mother, his father, his siblings. He had a wife Coretta, and two children. His wife died fairly recently and I do not know what became of his children.

I remember the mention of his name in connection with a place called Selma, but maybe that was someone else. I remember mention of a march, a bus ride, and a strike. I recall sit-ins and peace-ins but I don’t remember whether he had anything to do with any of them. I recall news of his suspicious behavior monitored by the FBI. I do not know if any of the official allegations were based in truth or one of J. Edgar Hoover’s paranoid chases, like the one he had instigated against John Lennon.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Baptist minister. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a man who improvised his speeches in poetic form from any pulpit. I remember very clearly his great rolling voice that always seemed to be addressing the listener personally. I remember the “I have a dream” speech. I remember he mentioned the Sierra Nevada and he said again and again, “Let freedom ring.” Martin Luther King, Jr. always spoke for non-violence. I know I still can recite parts of that speech from the memory of its delivery. I know the speech has been turned into a symphonic piece with chorus.

I remember another speech of King’s where he talked about “reaching the promised land” and then he added, “I may not get there with you.’ I do not think Martin Luther King, Jr. was afraid of consequences and I believe he knew the possibilities and consequences of his path.

Then one day, somewhere in the south, Tennessee, I think, Memphis, I believe, somebody named Ray assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr. on a hotel balcony. I remember, much later, the Congress of the United States put together a committee to investigate his killing and that of the Kennedy brothers. The House Select Committee on Assassinations. I seem to remember controversy. Because some believed that his killer acted in concert with unknown other people. I think they caught the killer, but why do I recall an attempted escape. Did the killer escape? Did he belong to cabal of killers?

Why did he want to kill Martin Luther King, Jr.? What did the killer fear? I wondered when I heard of the assassination whether the killer had ever heard Martin Luther King, Jr.’s voice? I believe the killer must have feared an idea because Martin Luther King, Jr. always spoke of non-violence toward your fellow man.

In the wake of his assassination I seem to recall several riots. Were there riots following the death of a spokesman for non-violence?

After his death many cities renamed streets Martin Luther King Boulevard, which inevitably was shortened to MLK.

What I recall about this man who brought to consciousness a light of non-violent equality seems pitifully insignificant and I know there are those who believe that itself is too much remembrance. There are still those who believe in their own superiority by reason of the color of their skins, any color, any skin. There are still those who believe in the superiority of their belief form structure, any form, any structure. Martin Luther King, Jr. believed in egalitarianism. He believed it could be practiced without violence.

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday celebration and I would like to encourage you to think about egalitarianism. I would also like you to think about non-violence. I would like to request that you think about your own concept of equality and solutions to social disparities. I would also like you to think about love.

Today is the official United States holiday in celebration of the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today I will not shorten his name.

Quality Time

2009-01-15T13:10:00.000-08:00

PHOTO: Diego Fernandes 2007

It wasn’t that you were evil
Or a bad kind of person.

Those were my feelings afterward,
When I found my heart bleeding.

When my illusions about eternal bliss
And unbounded joy were laying stone dead.

I needed serious therapy so I went
Seeking perfect counsel.

Every single one, even one I liked,
Acted unprofessionally.

Acted unprofessionally is my way
Of saying they just wanted sex.

Well, that’s not quite true,
They all wanted money too.

The first one was the woman
Who had me sit in her lap.

Then one after another, they all
Whispered their pent up desires.

I take that back, there was one guy,
He was very militaristic.

He very clearly ticked off
Restrictions on his fingers.

He kept looking at his watch
And stood, one foot raised on a chair seat.

He got sixty bucks for telling me
What I couldn’t talk about.

Oh yeah, I forgot, and the religious guy,
He wanted to convert me.

What can I say?
I was naïve.

It was all so strange because I thought
It was just therapeutic technique.

And it was just all so subtle,
Sly innuendo and odd touching.

The first few times I, very trusting,
Cooperated for my greater good.

Then I realized something about humans,
Even therapists; they’re human.

They all want eternal bliss
And unbounded joy.

Those therapists were just doing
What every other human does.

Humans have rules they break
And they hope they don’t get caught.

Oh yes, when they’re caught
They scream and weep and claim insanity.

And the rules are still broken,
Nobody puts Humpty-Dumpty together.

But none of that ‘technique’
Kept me from being a second choice.

Eumenide

2009-01-08T19:25:00.000-08:00

PHOTO: Diego Fernandes

A sound, a kind of noise
Is always there in my head
So I go looking for silence
A joy of the dead only

So my running my speed
A silent meteor fills
The braincase space
With a piece of peace

The fury after the Furies
My still life is motion
So faster and faster I go
Chasing eumenides

Until I stop
That’s when they turn
The chase on me.

Horizon

2009-01-04T11:13:00.000-08:00

PHOTO: Diego Fernandes 2008

From here
Lights from
Lighthouses
Fishing boats
Sailing boats
Cargo ships
Jet planes
Helicopters
Small planes
And buoys
All glow
At night
They appear.

From here
Lights from
Lighthouses
Fishing boats
Sailing boats
Cargo ships
Jet planes
Helicopters
Small planes
And buoys
Are gone
At day
They vanish.

They move
And move
Tiptoeing
Balancing
Along that
Line there
Over there
That line
Over there
The line
Right there
Left there
And always
Out there.

A Bridge To The Real

2009-01-04T11:02:00.000-08:00

Quite a while back I started a post about discovering, or maybe rediscovering, in a book a concept I have seen stated frequently in books by all sorts of people from the Sufis to Shakespeare in one way or another. Here is the statement in the raw; be in the world, but not of it.

Be in the world, but not of it.

I have read this statement in one form or another for many many years and knew it to be an important component, perhaps even a commandment for those who desire to be what is called enlightened, compleat, self-actualized and many other terms. I have frequently turned it over unsuccessfully without ever coming to any conclusion. Occasionally, I have made an attempt to concentrate on the phrase or meditate on it, but my efforts ended inconclusively or, humorously, I just fell asleep. Not a particularly enlightening event, but restful.

This last summer, I re-read a novel called Star Bridge, which I have had for many years and which I periodically re-read because I always seem to find something new hidden in its content. The book was written in the 1950's and a brief synopsis might be in order. The plot follows a soldier of fortune, a mercenary, who has been hired by a mysterious individual to assassinate the head of an enormous star empire. The soldier falls in love with his victim's daughter, brings down empire, sets the stage for a new social order to address new threat to mankind, happy ever after.

The title of the book comes from an invention of the authors to allow the humans of their story to occupy a vast area of space without having to fly space-ships at or near the speed of light, or faster than the speed of light, which seems to involve a lot of physics problems which the authors found unacceptable as a solution to galactic empire. So the authors invented a system of "bridges" which is powered by a star, Canopus to be precise, which all lead to one planet, Eron, and through and from which all travel and transport and energy must flow, making the race of humans inhabiting Eron the automatic rulers of the empire because they know the "secret". Fairly prosaic as a story with lots of adventure and action suitable for the era in which it was written.

These "star bridges" are the key to everything in the story and for my own purpose here. As a device of the story, a bridge could only be activated by one being, the last member of an alien race whose relatives were wiped out by the carelessness of greedy humans looking for treasure. In the story the alien is personified by anthropomorphising it as a female, even though the creature can take on pretty much any shape it wishes, as long as the size is compatible. The authors call her Lil. Lil is thousands of years old and was, in fact, saved by a Chinese man (incidentally the last member of his race also in the story), whom she has kept alive longer than the normal human life span. Why she has assisted the man seems to be an ultimate act of generosity, but her assistance has led to this star empire which now must be brought down for plot purposes and she will assist in that also.

Plot aside, it is the nature of the bridge that fascinates me. To travel between stars humans must enter a ship which must enter a gate to be pushed into a lock which then pushes the ship into the "tube". The story has the color of the "tube" gold and the race of Eron are called the "golden" people because somewhere in the past there was a mutation to humans on the planet which made their skin appear golden. The great myth and mystery which binds this star empire together is that only the "golden" folk, someone of pure "golden" blood, can activate one of the tubes. Inside the tube, as we learn from our hero, whatever exists outside the tube does not exist and inside what exists is only consciousness. Outside the tube, anything coming into contact with the surface of the tube, which is of course, some sort of energy field, is immediately destroyed, deadly but beautiful. People traveling in ships through the tubes are put to sleep ostensibly to avoid them learning the "secret" of the tube. Our hero, in desperation, escapes through the tube fully conscious and nearly goes mad, but does indeed discover that secret. Everything inside the tube is equidistant from everything else. Nothing exists inside the tube except consciousness aware of itself, self-observant consciousness. In the story, the tubes can only be created through the alien, Lil, using her "mind as the matrix".

"An organizational structure in which two or more lines of command, responsibility, or communication, run through the same individual" is one of the definitions I found for the word, matrix. The planet Eron is described in the book as holding all the myriad strands of humanity together through the commonality of the tube. The tube which is nowhere, but goes everywhere it wants with caveats. The story never really explains how long it took to get to the planets to be able to build the tube structures, although it hints that the time involved would make communication inter-generational. So the structure of "the empire" is of the mind of Lil and the tubes are where consciousness exists of itself, and consciousness exists outside the universe but inside it, indeed is shielded from it, as well.

In the world, but not of it.

Safety

2009-01-02T16:26:00.001-08:00

PHOTO: Diego Fernandes 2009

Wave and wind one, unified,
I see the Friend on a far horizon,
He found a treasure
Hidden in the deep.

Ages ago safety deserted
The Friend and took Him
Further than encircling
Shores that comfort me.

I do not see His scars.
I see the Treasure at His feet.

The Dream

2008-06-17T14:34:00.000-07:00

In a dream, I looked for a secret in a mine, precious metal, a jewel.
In a dream, I asked for a taste, a sample, of the sounds of paradise, of heaven.
In a dream, I sang for a vast crowd.

The crowd vanished one by one.
I could not understand the harmonies of heaven.
The mine collapsed, killing all the miners.

The Secret protects itself.

Na Rua Calma

2008-04-16T22:52:00.000-07:00

Na rua calma
da beira mar
espero
Eu sento-me na luz solar.

RELIC

2008-04-11T14:06:00.000-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2008

The day was tropical sticky wet with the thinnest of cloud cover. The air felt damp enough for rain but hot enough to boil eggs. Thin yellow skies hung over the islands like translucent sheets of silk.

I was restless and bored on the ship and I wanted something to do; I wanted something new, to go somewhere I hadn’t been, do something I hadn’t done, anything but whatever I was doing, but the humidity and heat made my imagination dull. Generally I like the heat and even the humidity but that day was just like being in a steam cooker.

I kept wandering outside onto the deck and looking at the sky hoping it would change. One of my shipmates finally asked me why I didn’t just go into town and do what everyone else did. What everyone else did just wasn’t my style. I didn’t even like beer and all the “hostesses” were irritating with their constant demands to buy them drinks or a helicopter. They thought the latter was funny and it may have been the first time, but the great seventeen block triangle of bars, upstairs and down, filled with hundreds of girls repeating the same joke quickly wore out my not very substantial patience.

Worse, as a kind of social lubricant I had, once upon a time, learned to read palms, and actually got quite good at it. One evening, to entertain myself as much as the girl I was buying drinks for, I decided to read her palm. Apparently I was so successful, she left and told every girl in the place, all of whom came running to my table, leaving their not so happy “boyfriends” and literally pushing the shipmate sharing my table out of the way so they could have their hands read. He was mostly unhappy because they wouldn’t let him get to his beer, although one of the girls finally picked it up, and without even turning, handed it to him over another girl’s head. After that the girls in town called me “Gypsy” and it was difficult to find a bar where a girl wouldn’t know the nickname, or, if one of my shipmates saw me coming, he would ask me, politely, to leave.

Some of the sailors maintained “permanent” girlfriends and even paid for apartments if they thought they could afford them. They measured their success with the girl by how loyal she seemed to be to their efforts at making her domestic. The girl’s loyalty was mostly demonstrated in cooking for her “man”, meaning the guy who paid for the food or her apartment. During the evening, it was an even bet that she would be at home or working in one of the dozens of bars. The girls knew what the priority was, and extreme poverty kept them working for any of the dribs and drabs of cash that found itself their way. Many women had out-of-wedlock children. My shipmates from the Midwest and the South called them illegitimate, even when the children were theirs. They didn’t care. Their wives back home had kids (of whom they would frequently share snapshots) and those were legitimate. These other children, “half-breeds”, were relegated to a class similar to cracked pottery. With one sole exception, a fellow who cared for, and tried to adopt (I never knew whether his adoption efforts ever paid off) two children that were left mostly to their own devices by their mother, I do not remember any of the guys with kids paying any attention at all to them; each man’s concern was the availability and loyalty of his woman.

No sailor I knew would go into town in the middle of the day, even for his woman. It wasn’t unheard of, but it was rare, and in the middle of a day like that, exceptionally rare. Deciding steam-cooked adventure was better than boredom, I got dressed in my civvies anyway and made my way topside. At the brow, the OOD and the enlisted guy on watch looked wilted, large sweat stains showing under their armpits and in the OOD’s case a massive sweat stain at his groin. I do well in heat. I only sweat lightly even in humid conditions, so I started to make the obvious joke about his sweat stained crotch but he cut me off with an abrupt, “…don’t say it! I’ve already heard the same thing about ten times.” So I cheerily waved and told them to drink plenty of water, and in spite of the heat and my rather oppressed mood almost bounced down the gangway. I heard the enlisted man yell something after me about getting some, or getting him some, but I really didn’t pay any attention.

The first thing I decided to do was get a haircut at the base shop where for a very small fee, servicemen got haircuts, facial and torso massage and manicure, all in one convenient chair, and it was cool. That day I got the works, even the manicure.

The barber was a local who wasn’t inclined to chat, which I appreciated. He was also the most precise of the men who worked in the shop. He not only knew the legal requirements of military haircutting, he knew the way around those rules which was important in those days when men in civilian life all had long hair. After cutting your hair he gave meticulous attention to removing all the loose hair. If you needed a shave, you were shaved rapidly with a strait razor that moved so quickly I am sure some clients feared for their lives.

Having accomplished the shave the barber would wrap a hot towel over your face and while your pores were opening or whatever it was they were supposed to do, he would massage neck and shoulder muscles until the towel cooled. Replacing the now cooled towel with another hot one, he massaged arms and hands. Then he removed that towel and pushing you forward, would massage your back down to the waistline and when finished there leaned you, by that point you were usually the consistency of wet pasta, back into the headrest, placed another hot towel on the face and massaged your chest and abdominal muscles. He removed the final towel and spread a thin layer of green or pink clay on your face and with a hair dryer on cool, blew the mud dry. Afterward he took another hot, wet towel and thoroughly cleaned the mud off. Then almost slapped a cold wet towel against your steaming face.

He would finish with the manicure. Nails, cuticles and, when requested, clear enamel were worked with a rapidity that seemed unreal. When I asked him one day why he worked so fast, he said, “…done this long time, sailors always in a hurry.”

I was never quite comfortable with the abdominal massage. It was just one of those procedures that seemed strange and too intimate but I never failed to let him do his work. I hesitated asking in any case because I thought it might disturb his routine. That day was the only time he commented on his work on me. “You more work here,” he said as he kneaded my midsection. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant. I thought for a moment he was telling me I needed to do sit-ups, then because of the way he changed the movement of his hands, became fairly confident that he meant he needed to do more work.

“Too much time sit. You go walk.” That last was a command. He pushed me out of the chair and with a couple of quick swipes of a soft brush cleaned any remaining hair off my neck and clothing. When I paid him I always left a large tip. That day he just pushed it back at me and said, “go find nice girl.” I laughed and told him nice girls probably wouldn’t be taking money and lay the tip on his counter. He said gravely, “you good man. You go church, nice girl pray.” Then he turned to help another customer and I left the coolness of the shop and stepped back into the tropic sun.

The moment I first found myself in a tropic zone I knew I was home. Most Americans have a “nice for a visit, but wouldn’t want to live here” attitude about tropical climates. Come to think of it, that attitude persists no matter what the climate unless one was talking about one’s native region. My Midwestern buddies always exclaimed about the seasonal changes and the variety of weather; Southerners spoke rather fondly of their bugs for some reason; Northeasterners didn’t speak about their environment so much as the variety of activities that could be had in their part of the world.

I am a Californian. We like speed and change; we don’t care about climate much. If it gets too cold we build a fire of one sort or another, if it gets too hot we take off our clothing or invent a remote control air conditioner. When neither of those is an option, we migrate. If the climate seems extreme, then we write stories and make movies about it, it’s fun. The tropics are extreme in themselves. They require no embellishment or exaggeration; the tropics simply need to be experienced and lived.

When I stepped out of the barbershop and into the street that day, I was ready for another tropical experience. I really had no idea where I was going or what I was going to do. I just knew it was steamy hot, and I had just been told to go to church. I was certainly not about to visit the base chapel, so I did the next best thing, I walked over the bridge and into town and went looking for a church.

As I walked I tried to remember if I had ever even seen a church in town, and nothing at all came to mind. Not that I had ever come into town with the objective of going to church, but churches are usually pretty obvious. We sailors came into town at night with the lights from the bars glowing and the sound from the bar bands blaring into the streets. At that time the streets would be filled with vendors selling barbequed meat on sticks or pickled eggs; touts would be standing in every doorway waving any who would respond, inward toward “the best band” or “the prettiest girls” and occasionally “the best floor show”. The 'Strip' was crawling with small boys learning how to become pickpockets, mobbing an unwary serviceman and relieving him of all accessories and 'Brownshirts', the Federal Police, ready and willing to shoot them on sight. The air was redolent with the smells of polluted water, roasted meat and dust and unwashed bodies, vomit, feces and urine. Separated into component parts not particularly pleasant, but as a whole experience, rather exotic and exciting. You wouldn’t be able to spot a church easily at night. But I wasn’t walking through the town at night.

It was one o’clock in the afternoon. The streets were empty of sailors and marines. Many of the bars were shut against the day with metal pull-down gates. In a few open doorways, girls leaned against the doorjambs trying to look sexy to entice the occasional passerby inside. I watched as one girl, looking sadly forlorn at her street post, perk up when joined by another who seemed to materialize out of an interior darkness, turn happily to her companion; they talked briefly then the first, replaced by the second, vanished within. As soon as the first girl disappeared, the second took on the demeanor of the first girl, dejected and bored.

Leaving the bar district, I entered into an area of small shops selling fish and rice and produce for the local population. This wasn’t an area commonly seen by servicemen. The mid-day heat was keeping even most of the locals indoors, but a group of six or seven children were playing a game that looked like Ring Around the Rosie, only with a soccer ball being passed back and forth through a puddle. All the children were uniformly poor and were dressed in ragged pass-me-down clothing. One little girl with curly bright blond hair stood out among her dark-haired friends. As I passed the group they cautiously moved aside and stared at me. I wondered if they had ever seen a serviceman in the middle of the day, but after they knew I wasn’t stopping to talk, they all waved and smiled and one of the boys kicked the ball in my direction, to which I simply kicked it back and continued onward.

The town was built in a river valley running roughly east west between some low hills. As I walked, I could see the treeless condition of the north ridgeline. To the south, rain forest made it’s way right up to the edge of town, but the northern ridge had only a few small shrubs trying to survive in a deeply eroded desert-like hillside.

I stopped to make sense of this and was staring at that sere landscape when a voice behind me asked in a rather comically gruff voice, “what’re yew doin’ in town? I thought I tol’ ya this town ain’t big enough fer th’ both of us.” Turning, I saw a friend from the ship, Brian, smiling his lazy smile at me and peering over the top of his sunglasses.

“Couldn’t help myself. Mad dogs and Englishmen, doncha know.”

“Huh?” Apparently, he had never heard the song.

“Song…my grandmother used to sing. Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noon day sun.” I sang merrily.

“Mad dogs and Englishmen huh? And us. What are you looking at?”

“Well, look over there,” I pointed to the south, “covered with jungle. Totally. Right? Now, look over there,” I turned to the north, “nothing.”

Brian looked back and forth from south to north for a moment and then grunted, “looks like they stripped that hillside for some reason.” Then he paused and looking at the northern side, squinted and asked, “what’s that?”

“What? Where are you looking?” I tried to look in the general direction of his glance but the glare from the street was too bright and I asked him for the loan of his sunglasses.

“They’re prescription,” he warned, but handed them to me.

“They sure are,” I drawled, “how do you see through these things?”

“Better question is how could I see without ‘em.”

“I can’t use them, they’re way too strong for me,” I said, handing them back. “Now try and point where you’re looking.” So he held up his arm and I sighted along it to the mountainside. Shading my eyes by completely cupping both hands around them, I finally saw it. A rather large crucifix planted more than half way up the hillside. "How have I missed that?" I wondered aloud, and then answered myself, "I’ve never been here during the day ... Do you suppose we could get up there?” I asked.

“Sure,” Brian responded heartily, “if only we had climbing gear and supplies for what? A week? Sure!”

“Brian,” I whined a bit, “that isn’t even a mile away from here. That would be an easy, easy walk.”

“Yeah,” he said in a flat voice, “On a perfect spring day! Haven’t you noticed? It is really, really, really hot out here. I vote we go get something cool to drink.”

“Right there, my friend, on the other side of this very street, is a store where you may buy something cool to drink. And all the fresh fruit you could ever want.”

“Uh… I meant something cool to drink, as in say, alcoholically cool. Back that way,” he pointed back in the direction of the bars.

I began to cluck like a chicken and then stopped abruptly. “What are you doing here in the middle of the day anyway?” I asked rather peremptorily.

Grinning, he said, “I saw you come out of the barbershop on base and just thought I’d follow you and see where you went.”

“You followed me all the way from the base?”

“Yep. And I almost turned back when I saw you pass the Strip. I’ve never been this far into town, and I’m not sure I ever want to come back this way again either.”

“Let me guess; you’re broke and you were hoping I’d buy you a beer?”

“Nope, but if you’re offering, I accept.”

“I am not offering…yet. Go with me up there, though” I pointed at the crucifix, “and I’ll buy you a couple of beers.”

“I don’t know why you want to go up there. It’s just a cross with a Jesus built in the middle of a … a desert. And it’s hot! It’s hot! I could fry an egg on the sidewalk out here.”

“If there were any sidewalks, you mean. And anyway, your eggs would probably be steamed instead of fried. Come on! Where’s your sense of adventure?”

I don’t know why he agreed to go, but he did. He complained about every hundred steps and when we got to the edge of the hillside, looked up at our destination and said, “we, oh Lord, are going to need your everlasting help, to get our sorry butts up this fucking hill!”

“I don’t believe,” I said thoughtfully, “I have ever heard anyone petition Jesus’ help to get their sorry butt up a fucking hill. But your point is well taken. Where does that path up there start?”

Glancing back and forth across the hillside, Brian pointed at a spot about a quarter of a mile further east, “still sure you want to do this?” he said querulously like an old man.

“I,” and I paused for drama, “am as fresh as a daisy. A very hot fresh daisy. A very hot fresh tropical sort of daisy. A very hot fresh tropical sort of daisy with …”

“I get it,” he interrupted.

Unfortunately, with buildings and houses and fences built smack up against the mountain we couldn’t follow the hillside directly to the trailhead and had to backtrack another quarter of a mile to a street running parallel to the mountain. Then we panted our way to take another street eastward, to find the small side street which lead to the beginning of the trail, which street, also unfortunately, we had to search to find, adding what probably only seemed like miles, to our trek. Brian was sweating heavily and quite red in the face when we finally reached the trailhead.

To cool off, we asked a sympathetic older woman if she had anything to drink. Leaving us sitting cross-legged on her tiny porch she hurried inside her corrugated tin house and brought back two cold colas. How she kept them cold was a mystery, which neither Brian nor I ever solved, but she was truly sympathetic, especially when she learned we were trying to reach the hillside crucifix. Brian offered her money for the drinks but she steadfastly refused. I asked her if there was anything we could do before we left to which she just shook her head and in her heavily accented English told us to just say a prayer for the town.

When we left the shade of her small porch facing the mountain, Brian was silent for about five minutes, which I attributed to the heat but then he suddenly asked, “why do you suppose she wanted us to pray for the town?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she just thinks the town needs people praying for it.” Even I was feeling a little cooked, so I spoke a little shortly to him.

“She seemed … I don’t know … she seemed like … she seemed like the town needed something. Protection maybe.”

“What? Where did you get that? She just asked us to say a prayer for the town.”

“It was how she said it, you know? She kept looking over that way,” and he pointed inland toward the rain forest.

“She was pretty old, maybe she remembers the Japanese coming from over there …”

“Japanese came from the sea, dork. Over there!” and he pointed toward the base.

“Well then, maybe she wanted something from over there.”

As we talked the trail rose precipitously westward and rather unlike the streets of the town, was litter free. When I made a verbal note of this to Brian, he laughed, “not a lot of Americans up here.” But it was an irregular climb and totally washed out in places. Wide gullies had to be climbed around or through and the loose gravel and dirt made treacherous footing. In a while however, we overlooked the rooftops and a soft breeze from the bay was blowing in our faces. “GOD! That feels good!” Brian exclaimed to the waiting crucifix, still an eighth mile or so distant.

“Wow. What a view up here.” I said in a quiet counterpoint. “Look. There’s the ship!”

“Who cares? We see the fucking ship every day. But look over there; you can see those islands at the mouth of the bay and the shuttle boats. This is such a nice breeze, I’m not sure I want to go back down through that again,” and he pointed at the town, “I think I’m staying.”

“Gotta. How else will we get back? Jitney? I don’t think they make it up here too often. What would you eat? Those thorny looking bushes? Nope, you’ll go back, even if it’s only for the beer.”

Brian flipped me the bird.

“Speaking of beer, I wonder if Jesus will turn the dirt into beer ... for you, of course.”

“I’m thinking not. Just a guess, of course, but I just gotta feeling.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right. We’ve been using way too much profanity on our pilgrimage.”

“Pilgrimage?”

“Well,” I wasn’t quite sure when I had first started thinking of this as a pilgrimage, “isn’t it kind of like a pilgrimage? Think of everything we’ve gone through to get here.”

“You mean, a couple of side streets and over a couple of mud puddles? Or rather, a mud puddle? All that?”

“Mud puddle? Oh, you mean that one where those kids were playing. No…I just meant, we came through all this heat in the middle of the day when no one else, even them,” and I waved at the town, “seems to want to be outside. So we gave ourselves a little challenge, and here we are!”

“I have to admit, the heat is a big challenge for me, I am fried. Even you are beginning to get a little red.”

“Oh crap! I forgot to put on sunblock!”

“Guess what, genius? I’ve got some right here.” With that Brian reached in his pocket and pulled out a tiny tube of sunscreen. “I didn’t forget.” Then he held it out, but when I reached for it, he pulled back his hand in a teasing gesture. “What do I get for some of this?”

“I already have to buy you a couple of beers. What else do you want?”

“Let’s see … I’m not sure right at the moment. I’ll think of something. I want it to be something good.”

“How good? I can survive a little sunburn.”

“Let me think.” We were approaching the crucifix, and breathing heavily from the last rise in the trail. Brian looked at the cross, handed me the tube and said, “I’ll get back to ya.”

The crucifix was standing in a saddle of the mountain about fifty feet across. The monument itself was placed as close to the rising hillside as the builders could get it, with the rest of the natural saddle leveled for spectators. The crucifix stood about twenty feet high with the cross painted white and the naked flesh of the Christ figure in an almost flamingo pink and wearing a bright blue loincloth. The figure’s hair was painted in shiny black enamel and around his head was a delicate wooden crown of thorns painted in an unnatural brown color, so unnatural, I wondered why they hadn’t simply left the wood bare.

The most startling aspect to the piece wasn’t the brilliant red paint dripping from the wounds made by the crown of thorns and the nails in his limbs, but rather the look of sheer terror and agony on his face. In the distance, the crucifix had looked like a pretty standard Roman Catholic monument. Up close, the colors looked silly until the viewer looked carefully at the expression on the Christ’s face. The figure was staring into the town below and the sculptor had caught pain, fear, in a terrifying intimate way. There was no calm benevolent glance in the face; it was a cry for mercy.

Brian and I were silent as we stared at that tortured visage. Brian made a small noise in his throat and walked closer. “Look at the crown of thorns, Jim.”

I walked closer and realized that what I had thought was painted wood was some kind of rusted bayonet wire with three to six inch long spiked points thrusting into the statues head and the viewers mind. I was staring up at the INRI scroll which was moving in the breeze when I started to say something smartass, but then I noticed Brian had moved suddenly to the base of the monument and looked to be suddenly caressing the statues feet, or holding them with his head resting in the crease between the legs.

At first I thought maybe he needed something to hold onto because of heat stroke or dehydration. Then with his hands still clasping the feet he had sagged limply to his knees. Then I could hear him muttering something quietly but couldn’t make out what he said. I stood quietly paralyzed for a moment then scurried over and put my hand on his shoulder, “are you all right?” I was genuinely concerned. Because of the heat I couldn’t tell if he was shedding tears or sweating. He nodded and pulled his shirt tail up to wipe his face.

“Something about the face. I … saw ... felt.” He was obviously shaken, but stood up still holding the Christ's feet.

I wanted to ask what he felt but doing so seemed wrong. “Should we say one for the town, now?” I asked quietly wondering if we shouldn't just go back to town. Again, he nodded. To my surprise, Brian got down on one knee; I just closed my eyes, tried not to think about Brian's seeming collapse, and bowed my head.

I don’t remember what I asked for the town, but as flippant as I sometimes can be, I participated as fully as I knew how. Brian seemed to know what he was doing so I just took my cues from him. I don’t think he was especially religious or even particularly Christian, I certainly am not, but in that moment, we were as sincere as Believers.

When I opened my eyes I was staring at the ground in front of me and as I moved, I caught the glint of something mostly buried in the red dirt. Reaching down I pulled an intact green glass rosary with a tiny gold-colored metal crucifix out of the dirt. I rubbed some of the dirt off while thinking the piece must have been dropped because it was somehow flawed.

I don’t know why, but I kept looking at it thinking there must have been a part of it broken or damaged for someone to have dropped and left such a pretty thing. The rosary was completely undamaged. The beads were a deep emerald color and made in the shape of hearts and the circular part met at a piece made of the same metal as the crucifix with the image of the sacred heart on both sides. The tiny figure of Jesus rested against what looked like an inlay of the same green glass as the beads. The little banner reading “INRI” was tilted almost jauntily.

When Brian asked to see it, I rubbed a little more dirt off on my pants and handed him the rosary perhaps just a trifle anxiously. I wasn’t sure why, but I was afraid he would do something like pull it apart or throw it over the precipice facing the town. He just took it though, examined the metal Jesus and handed it back to me.

“What are you going to do with it?”

I couldn’t tell him why, but I looked around the empty saddle of the mountain expecting the owner to come up and say, “excuse me, but I dropped my rosary and I would like to have it back.” When I told Brian this strange thought, he just laughed a little and said, “nobody here but us chickens.”

“What do you suppose happened?”

“Don’t know, buddy. Maybe … I don’t know.”

“I just had this thought that somebody came up here and got really disappointed, or disgusted.”

“You mean because it “didn’t work”?” He used his hands to make quote marks in the air.

“Something like that. It looks like a girl’s rosary … maybe she came up here and was saying her rosary and … maybe nothing happened, or she just dropped it and couldn’t find it.”

“Then she must have been up here at night. That would be pretty hard to miss if it was just laying on this ground.”

“Yeah, I guess so. I don’t know, the whole thing just gets my imagination going.” With that I put the rosary in my pocket and forgot about it.

Facing away from the giant crucifix, Brian and I walked to edge of the cliff over-looking the town and stood trying to pick out landmarks. What we saw were the buildings of the town, crammed so tightly together, the location of streets had to be guessed. The entire city looked like someone had jammed all the stovepipe chimneys on all the roofs of all the messy looking rusted tin shacks up against the river where it was force-fed a view. Across the river in a bright contrast, were the clean strips of black tarmac streets, neat white stucco walls of barracks and other buildings, all separated by the perfect patches of green clipped lawns and waving palms of the naval base.

On our side of the river, inside the town not one spot of green, grass or tree, could be seen. The town was a desert just like the side of the mountain where we stood. From the vantage of the crucifix, one side of the river looked like a raggedy man begging for the attention of his wealthy brother on the opposite shore. Brian and I were silently sharing an unforgettable experience.

“No wonder they think we’re all rich,” Brian spoke suddenly bitter, “look at that! Compared to any one of them, we are rich.”

I was thinking the same thing and told him so. “And tonight, we go into town, spend all the money in our pockets, tell them we’re out of money, go back to the base and repeat the whole thing tomorrow night. It must be like magic to them. Run out of money? Just go back and get some more.”

“I heard one of the chiefs talking with someone about how we improve their economy. Look at that, Jim. How have we improved their economy? Bars and hookers? Why don’t we offer to level the town and put in housing and air conditioning or something? Why don’t we clean up that fucking river? That’s just an open sewer! And those little kids swim in it. Do you know what happens to you if you fall in that river? The fucking Navy gives you every inoculation known to man, that’s what! Those little kids jump in that crap for coins that we throw at them …”

“ And miss on purpose,” I interjected. I was feeling disgusted with myself. I didn’t want to remember throwing coins into that river.

“… and miss on purpose …” Brian’s voice choked and he stopped speaking abruptly. Running away from me to the west, I could hear him gagging and trying to control the impulse to throw up. I stood listening and felt the gorge rising in myself, looked out over the town and felt my knees buckle, and both of us were vomiting into the chasm.

“Brian, I …,” I started to say something and vomited again.

He laughed weakly and said, “yeah, I know. … Jim,” he interrupted himself, paused and struggled for the words, “Jim,” he repeated, “I was looking through his eyes … I don’t know how … I was looking from up there!” Brian’s voice was catching as he tried to speak. He was crying but seemed to be getting through the experience.

It took me longer to regain my composure. Ever since I was little, vomiting made me cry. This time I had a reason. Brian stood waiting patiently though and leaked tears with me.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” I sniffled a little angrily, “this is just stupid!”

Brian, wiping at his tears, laughed a bit saying, “I know what you mean. It’s too hot to cry like this.”

We both started laughing and crying at that, and started walking back to town wiping our faces with our shirttails. We passed the woman who had given us the colas and we waved and she waved and we smiled and she smiled showing us her missing teeth.

COMING SOON...

2008-03-30T08:57:00.000-07:00

COMING SOON…

Tony was staring at a vacant lot between some houses in the distance. He thought that space on the other side of the freeway looked like a once perfect, but now gap-toothed smile; yeah, he thought, it’s a small town with missing teeth. It was a town where its image began to come apart with its economic health. Boarded up windows on Main Street, real estate signs with pictures of smiling agents advertising businesses and houses for sale had appeared as money dried up. Another house once stood in the breach. The house was consumed in a conflagration that left some burn marks still visible on houses on either side. One developer made a modest attempt to fill in the gap and regain some of his fortune and a little tax revenue for the city by an attempted re-zoning of the lot to commercial but that had ultimately failed. Neither the developer nor the city seemed to have the energy. A sun-faded sign was the only remnant of the effort.

It was a wooden sign originally built in two parts The top banner read, in large capital letters and nearly cursive print, COMING SOON . . . The bottom piece named the future effort some fantastic suburban dream like Forest Garden Mall or North Tree Gate; it fell away shortly after the sign was placed and no one, agent or broker or vandal, had the time, the energy or the will to remove or replace it. All of the neighbors had objected to the project and the city council never passed the zoning change or allowed a variance; this fact Tony wasn’t sure he should even think about. The gap was his guilt, and his shame, and his glee, and his success, and he saw it everyday he worked, all there in the one big, street-side, restaurant picture window.

Tony’s home town, like many small California towns, started for one reason and when that reason gave out, found another reason to survive and then another and so on until reasons to survive as a municipality gave out, but it still had its own city council and mayor, city police department, city public works department and all the rest. Because the town had survived it became “historic”, with a center section consisting of buildings more than half of which were “landmarks”. With economic downturn the “landmarks” became a liability in need of a great deal of repair and restoration. Since restoration was expensive and the halcyon days of premium rents had passed, landlords simply let them deteriorate, letting roofs leak and upper floors be taken over by bats and mold.

Although he was forced to move several times by incipient deterioration, Tony had loved the days of living in upper floor apartments and experienced fleeting moments of nostalgia for those days. He had enjoyed the views tremendously.

Tony had lived mostly in upstairs studio apartments after graduating from his community college. The best ones had views of the street. He loved watching pedestrians and automobiles passing below him; it gave him a feeling of privacy that he enjoyed. Just secretly watching like that also gave him a feeling of angelic benevolence. The last upstairs apartment also developed a mold problem, which Tony’s sensitive sense of smell picked out almost immediately, so he called the landlord but never got a call back. He tried to acclimate himself to the smell because he didn’t want to move again, but it got worse. Then Tony came home one evening and there was an eviction notice from the public health department and he was forced to vacate his last upstairs apartment. The landlord just vanished and a bank repossessed the building.

Tony was now living in another studio but it was a tiny downstairs apartment, at the back of a building, looking on a narrow alley with a gray cement retaining wall, covered with brightly spray-painted graffiti reading things like ‘Viva Che’ and ‘Whatever happen, happen for a raisin’. He thought frequently about painting over the graffiti but always reconsidered because he wasn’t sure it would improve the view. But he was quite proud and guiltless of the apartment’s internal appearance, which was as neat as a ship’s stateroom and fairly dust-free. Tony hated dust.

He cleaned the floor once a week and made sure he moved furniture. He made a habit of always making his bathroom gleam, cleaning behind the toilet and between all the tiles. All of his toilet articles were carefully arranged in an extra large medicine cabinet covered with a mirror he kept free of toothpaste and water stains, and though the shower stall was quite small and dark when he moved in, he installed a battery light in its ceiling and scrubbed its walls down regularly. In the main room he had placed a side table next to the door and a comfortable armchair next to the table. On the table was a rather fantastic lamp that an elderly aunt gave him and he treasured as a relic from the mid-twentieth century. The few furnishings, other than the lamp and a couple of other inheritances, were thrift store pieces he found nearly new that he’d accumulated over a period of a few years. A sofa he had really cherished had to be sold when he moved from the last upstairs place because it just wouldn’t fit in the new apartment. It wouldn’t even fit through the strangely narrow door of the new place.

His ex had left him because she didn’t want to live anymore in small places and would have especially disliked the new downstairs alley flat. She had vanished out of his life sometime before his last move. She’d always told him a larger place would be better for him because there would be room for more comfortable furniture and maybe an extra room would be nice for his weights and gym equipment. They had seriously looked for something bigger, even outside of town where Tony really didn’t want to live. He couldn’t afford to drive even if he had a car, and the larger places were either too large or too expensive. So she just packed up, said, “see you next lifetime,” and left.

He hadn’t thought there had been any hard feelings on her part, so one day he called her just to say hello and find out how she was doing, but her responses had been a little short and when she finally told him she had to go, he just said, “well, it’s been nice talking to you. Can I call you later?” She had said simply, “no,” and that was that.

When he thought about their relationship, he never could quite understand what the problems had been, and he would look, not too forlornly, around his apartment, for things she might have left behind. There wasn’t anything nor had there ever been. She had been extremely thorough in gathering her things. He had been grateful she didn’t have a lot to pack.

After he had been forced out of the last upstairs apartment by a growing stench of mold and the eviction notice, he’d moved into the back-alley place. He carefully installed his few pieces of furniture, which hadn’t left enough room for his gym equipment, so he sold a table and four chairs and a cabinet he had used for CD and DVD storage. Realizing that not having space for the CDs and DVDs meant they would be stacked or lying along a wall creating less space, he sold them also.

When he moved in there was an odd little hole in the new apartment’s only wall, which separated the tiny bathroom from the rest. So Tony expanded the hole until it was large enough to fit his old television, reinforced the space with some used lumber and surrounded the entire opening with some inexpensive picture framing, stapled the cable lead to the wall and plugged the TV into an outlet in the bathroom. His landlord was a little startled by the change but he didn’t really seem to mind and mentioned politely that it looked like Tony had a flat-screen TV.

He had been enculturated as a Roman Catholic, even though he couldn’t have responded at mass with any degree of accuracy. His family generally only attended mass on holidays like Christmas and Easter and he found himself making up responses for which he later felt guilty. He did know the Ave Maria and the Pater Noster, but sometimes got confused with the latter’s ending because he had so many protestant friends. When he sometimes absently recited the prayer in the protestant manner, he immediately felt guilty. Somehow he had offended someone somewhere. Tony was the kind of person who didn’t sin much, because he disliked feeling the guilt that went with it. So he tried to carefully organize guilt out of his life and his home environment.

To that end he was rather organized about pretty much everything in his personal environment, and since he seldom felt guilty, he also felt relatively successful. He had a routine for getting ready for everything. He’d developed routines in grammar school with the nuns and carried it over into public grammar school when his father decided they were a bad influence and took him out of Catholic school. Tony thought it was really because the school raised its fees. His mother had no objection at all however because she thought nuns were crazy. Nonetheless, even in the transition, Tony managed to maintain his rather tightly organized world and when he entered public school, it may have even grown a little tighter.

As a waiter, Tony maintained an immaculate appearance. His black work pants were always fitted with a belt, which hung correctly, just above his hipbones, gathering themselves tightly over his buttocks instead of hanging loosely, which was current fashion. Tony always bought expensive white cotton shirts and always washed them with bluing and starched them to a medium stiffness. He was meticulous about buying shirts with French cuffs so he could wear cufflinks, which he thought added elegance to his appearance. When he put his shirts on he always managed to create two perfect pleats in the sides at his waistline so the shirtfront would remain flat. He wore a bow tie that had to be tied instead of a clip-on because he thought having a tie like that gave him bragging rights of sorts, although when he did brag, he felt guilty. His work shoes he bought one half size too large because he always wore two pair of stockings, a white pair underneath and a dark pair on top. He had heard somewhere that dyed stockings were bad for feet but he didn’t want white stockings showing between black pants and black shoes, mostly because Tony the manager wore his that way. Tony the manager always noted Tony the waiter’s dapper appearance with a bit of a leer, which made the waiter uneasy.

“Lookin’ good, Tone,” the manager would nod his head approvingly, and then repeat, “lookin’ good…gettin’ laid tonight?”

“How can you always be thinking about sex?” the waiter would ask.

“How can I not think about sex? Some guy told me the other day that if you weren’t thinkin’ about sex, your mind was wandering. Ha haha ha haha.” The manager had an odd laugh that sounded like he was laughing while driving with a flat tire, and when Belladonna started her laughing in the restaurant, the manager was almost always the first to pick up the infection and because his laugh was almost as loud as hers, it could be easily heard everywhere like a misfiring engine.

He recalled his life in the upper floors as time when he knew nothing about Belladonna. He hadn’t really had time to grieve, Buster the busboy had told him. That sounded fair to Tony but he knew that Buster belonged to some fringe religious association that Tony didn’t understand, even though Buster seemed nice enough, he was also kind of touchy-feely which Tony did not care for at all. He actually told Buster that he would prefer it if Buster wouldn’t be so chummy all the time and Buster seemed to understand. Tony warmed greatly to Buster when the busboy asked his advice on weight training. It didn’t hurt that Buster shared his opinion of Belladonna.

It was about the time he moved that Belladonna made her first appearance at the restaurant. Belladonna’s sudden appearance and over-dramatic persona had driven old thoughts of the separation and the new apartment away like leaves before a hurricane.

Belladonna, La Donna to her closest and very few friends, was a strange mixture of beauty and ugliness all wrapped in one immodest package. Like her namesake plant, she had a kind of kinship to humanity that belladonna has to the tomato. It is rather pretty in some ways and one knows it is in the same family but there are differences that shouldn’t be ignored.

La Donna liked to wear tiny flowers in her glossy, French-rolled, jet-black hair, which remained resolutely the same color as she aged. Her favorite blossoms were always tiny and strange, baby’s breath, but more commonly the little blue flowers from filaree, or yellow ones from tarweed, or even the tiny purple blossoms from her namesake. On rare occasions, she could even be seen wearing blossoms from purple star thistle. She had beautiful flashing black eyes and a wide, well maintained smile, which showed often.

In public she always laughed distinctively loud and told jokes so everyone could hear. Her large bosom would leap up and down with her guffaws and so infectious was her laughter that other people near her would begin to laugh for no reason other than it seemed she was giving everyone permission. Everyone knew La Donna as a very happy person.

Belladonna had always been large but once had carried her weight, and looked rather like an opera star. But that day had passed, and now she was shaped like a potato sack with the potatoes in it. The year and a half of Tony’s acquaintance with her was after she received the gastric bypass surgery. She lost a great deal of weight, but she never followed her doctor’s orders and refused to exercise or monitor her intake of vitamins. In fact, she believed that if she paid for the surgery she should be able to eat whatever she liked, whenever she liked and did. When she lost the weight, she complained to her doctor that all that loose skin made her look like a Shar-pei in a dress and couldn’t he do something? The radical procedure only slowed her eating for a while. It also developed a habit for eating small portions. But the small portions kept becoming more and more small portions and she regained a lot of the weight, but just didn’t seem to carry it the same way.

La Donna also lead a secret life about which even her few friends knew nothing. She made much ado about animals in general and pets in particular and continuously joined committees to end animal cruelty and in public cried out loudly and in great distress when she saw or thought she saw a pet being misused by its owner. She herself had a medium sized dog and a cat, which were rarely seen. Her public protests about animal cruelty did not find their expression inside her home. Which, perhaps, is why the cat rarely made appearances anywhere near her. During her morning regime, she would call the dog sweetly to her side then thrash it with an old taped up roll of wallpaper because it had slighted her by perhaps not eating all of its food which she would blame for attracting ants or cockroaches. (This was true, but certainly not a primary reason she found vermin in her house.)

Belladonna hadn’t paid her housekeeper one month and then another month went by unpaid and then the housekeeper quit and never showed up again. Belladonna had never tried to hire another. “Waste of money”, she told herself. At any rate, housekeepers were too expensive it seemed and since La Donna wasn’t about to clean house, it never got cleaned.

The dog would almost always cheerily follow her barking to the door and receive a heel in the face because La Donna thought it was trying to escape; when she returned in the evening the process was only reversed in that instead of a heel the animal received a toe, for the same imaginary reason.

For nearly thirty years Belladonna worked for a government agency whose primary mission was doling out food coupons and writing checks to other agencies that in turn doled them out to someone else. She was very proud of her career, her “service” as she called it. She was helping people to help others. She was a giver. Except on the days when she ate at the restaurant where Tony worked.

The restaurant where Tony waited tables was one of those old fashioned Italian places where there are candles on the tables and the tables are covered with red and white checked oil cloth and there always seem to be red cloth serviettes folded into fancy shapes and stuffed into a water glass for the diners to admire before tucking one under their chin. There were old Neapolitan songs playing on the overhead speakers quietly enough that people eating could just about believe they might be in Naples, or if their imaginations were good, Capri. Colorful murals, track lit, painted with little sense of perspective filled an entire corner with a view perhaps of Portofino and the menu was extensive with all of the old favorites and variations for every taste, except Belladonna’s.

Tony knew, he always knew, the moment he saw a customer, what kind of customer they were going to be, a picky eater, a big eater, just an appetizer, just a glass or two or three of wine, or what he referred to as ‘a taster’. Belladonna was a taster. Tony hated tasters.

Tony’s first encounter with her was not pleasant, she smelled musty. She was a public jokester and for a large person moved very quickly when she wished. On that first evening Tony had seen her, sized her up, and unable to avoid her, took a breath and requested her to please follow him, which she had, with alacrity, too much alacrity. She made the trip across the restaurant into a conga line, holding Tony’s belt or grabbing his sides with a pinching grip. Occasionally, she would see an acquaintance and whirl him to the side while keeping a grip on his belt. He valiantly kept his cool and his patience. Tony the manager had assigned her to a table on the complete opposite side of the restaurant and for Tony the waiter, it was like running a gauntlet.

Around every table she never missed an opportunity to give him a hip or bump into him from behind, or, for that matter, to rub his behind, to which she would loudly proclaim to the other diners what a forward young man he was, and once, bumped him from behind and let go of his belt, knocking him into the lap of a pretty young woman who was just about to receive a proposal of marriage from her boyfriend, yelled loudly, “masher!” Tony found his face in the young woman’s crotch with his hands and arms, initially stretched out to save himself from the fall, still holding the menu but pushing rather painfully into the boyfriend’s groin. La Donna bellowed laughter and everyone except Tony followed suit, even the nearly engaged couple. Tony the manager was barking his missing piston laugh as loudly as Belladonna.

Tony had blushed scarlet and more embarrassed than he had ever been in his life, wanted desperately for someone to come to his rescue. Reading the distress on Tony’s face, which looked so helplessly from the woman’s lap, Buster the busboy rushed to his assistance. The busboy was always ready to help Tony. Buster was also the only other person not laughing.

With Buster’s help he righted himself, Tony muttered thanks and found his way to the table the manager had assigned where Belladonna suddenly screamed, “not here! This is where my ex-husband told me he wanted a divorce! I can’t sit here! What? Are you crazy? Take me to another table!!”

The laughter trailing from Tony’s fall died away suddenly and a deadly quiet seemed to gather around the perimeter of every table. “I’m terribly sorry. I’ll find you another table, miss!” Tony murmured very quietly. “HA!” cried La Donna, “did you hear that?” the voice called to everyone in the room, “he called me Miss!! Oh, that’s rich!” and once again she burst into her uncannily infectious laughter and everyone laughed again, nervously at first but then it built and built until even Tony felt a tiny urge to giggle.

It was, however, Tony the manager who came instantly and showed Belladonna to another table which many people thought was always reserved, but in reality was simply left open in case there was a celebrity (never had been) or the owner wanted dinner. Belladonna nodded her head in approval while jutting out her chin. Then she spread her arms wide and announced to the room in a bad Italian accent, “atsa nice, no?” Tony the waiter was of Italian heritage mostly and wanted to tell Belladonna talking like that made him a little uncomfortable but he was more concerned she would do something like knocking him into another table again so he said nothing.

Then Tony brought her water but she said the glass wasn’t clean enough. So he brought another glass but she didn’t want ice. So he sent Buster with another glass with no ice, but she said she had changed her mind and wanted ice after all and told Buster to send the waiter next time, I am not leaving you a tip.

So Tony brought water with no ice and before she could change her mind again asked her if she would like a glass of wine. La Donna looked him squarely in the eye and with a big booming laugh said; “Now you’re talking my language! Waddaya got?” Tony pointed to the wine list on the table and once again she boomed laughter, screamed laughter and proclaimed, “all the time this was here and we were fighting over water? HA HA HA!” She never touched the water, but as Tony walked away she grabbed his buttocks.

That first evening seemed endless. Belladonna would order a dish, Tony would bring it, she would taste it and push it away saying in a loud critical voice things like: “doesn’t have enough garlic!”; “good lord, don’t they grow any oregano around here?”; “this doesn’t have enough sauce, does it? HEY YOU! BACK THERE IN THE KITCHEN! WHADDYA DO WITH ALL THE SAUCE?” But she always took at least one bite, pushing the plate away afterward like she was allergic to it.

Belladonna had the time of her life. When she laughed everyone laughed. On that first evening she must have ordered twenty different dishes, all menu specials with special instructions, and never ate more than one bite from any of them. She tasted. She laughed and she tasted.

In spite of never seeming to like anything the kitchen turned out, La Donna decided it was her favorite restaurant, which she proclaimed loudly. It may have been because Tony the waiter was so patient or it may have been because Tony the manager never charged her for anything except the ten-dollar bottle of wine she drank. The last cup she swallowed directly from the bottle then belched loudly, which set people into gales of more laughter. When she finally left, Tony found three coins of foreign origin on the table, and a little scribbled note, which read, I’ll be back!

He told Tony the manager he needed a short break and almost ran to the dry storage room for the restaurant, where he sat down on a plastic milk crate and wept. Buster wandered in to get something, saw Tony’s tears and stuttering an apology, backed out of the storeroom, immediately forgot what he was supposed to get, went to the restroom and also cried.

Neither man knew it but that first visit was easily the most pleasant evening they would spend with Belladonna.

During one of her return visits, she insisted loudly that Tony call her La Donna, the very same night he saw her entering a house on the other side of the freeway. He asked Tony the manager if he knew where she lived and Tony asked him why, was he getting interested?

Tony the manager was the most sexually driven man Tony the waiter had ever met. On three occasions the owner had interrupted the manager while he was having sex in the restaurant. Once with the owner’s ex-wife, once with one of the waitresses, and once with a woman who came in to get a to go order. On this last occasion, the couple got so energetic they broke the toilet seat in the employee bathroom, infuriating the owner because he said stuff like that drove up cost of sales.

Naturally, after the third time, the owner ordered Tony the manager to pay attention to the business and stay away from girls. Tony took him literally and cooks and busboys often found him amusing himself with vegetables and melons and sometimes even bread. Buster frequently told Tony the waiter how freakish this looked. So when Tony the manager asked Tony the waiter if he was interested in La Donna, Tony the waiter nearly gagged.

“No,” he said. “I just want to know if that house over there is where she lives. That’s all.” He didn’t even really know why he was asking but he felt the stirrings of an idea, a feeling.

Tony the manager said, “maybe”, and also said she might be interesting to fuck, so Tony the waiter took his leave and tried not to think about La Donna again until the next time she would appear at the restaurant. He did know he would never have asked her directly because she could turn the question into her idea of an evening of comedy, telling everyone in the restaurant as loudly as possible, and bat her eyes coyly.

So instead, he watched her very carefully, observed her over the months. Belladonna always played all her usual tricks of bumping into him and on a few occasions “accidentally” spilled her water (with or without ice) somehow directly onto the front of Tony’s pants, swiftly grabbing her scarlet serviette would begin rubbing him. She invariably did this when he was holding a plate or two and was slow to react. She endlessly repeated ordering dishes she didn’t really want and never paying for anything except wine and then leaving a useless tip.

Tony had asked the owner about the situation and he seemed to shy away from the question. Tony asked if they couldn’t just refuse her service or something? The owner always demurred, or started talking about his last trip to New Jersey, or gave Tony excuses, like not having enough time to discuss this. On one occasion, the owner just told Tony to stop asking stupid questions and do his side work.

It was on that evening Tony finally asked the owner if Belladonna lived in the house across the freeway. The owner looked a little startled but admitted that she did indeed live there and then told Tony to go help the busboy clean the bathroom. As Tony carefully wiped all the water stains from the large mirror of the public restroom while Buster cleaned the toilet stall he admitted to Buster that the owner had told him where Belladonna lived and he wasn’t quite sure why, but he had developed a vague interest in her. Buster seemed disturbed that Tony had any interest in Belladonna at all, but Tony reassured him that he hadn’t developed that kind of interest; in fact, he wished she would just go away, or get hit by a bus or something. Tony had an almost psychic feeling that just knowing some information was going to make everyone’s life easier, he just didn’t know how. But that he didn’t tell Buster.

Belladonna’s visits never got any easier, nor did her loud and raucous laughter embarrass Tony any less, but Tony started to gain confidence in some mysterious manner he didn’t understand. He would look across the freeway at Belladonna’s dimly lit windows while he was serving her or after his shift and just wonder. He even started to answer her loud cries with an almost imitative behavior, to which Belladonna, at first startled, grew ever louder and more raucous. The owner told him La Donna must like him.

Accompanying Belladonna’s behavior came a coincidence where the more food she pushed away and complained about everything, the busier the restaurant became, not only on the nights when she plowed through hysterically laughing guests but also on week nights when the restaurant had been so quiet the owner had considered shutting down.

Mondays the restaurant had always been closed, Tuesdays had a good lunch crowd but dinner was very thin and Wednesdays only very slightly better than Tuesday. Belladonna limited her appearances to Friday or Saturday with the very occasional Thursday exception. But Wednesdays and Tuesdays picked up so much that the manager told the owner he would need to hire more servers and at least one other busser.

The owner hired one more server and a busser. Tony got more shifts and began to make some excellent tips, except, of course, from Belladonna, who continued to leave foreign coins of small denominations, subway tokens from eastern cities, gambling tokens from Nevada casinos and occasionally the punch-out slugs from electrical breaker boxes. Tony kept up a barrage of complaints to the manager and the owner.

“She doesn’t eat anything! She orders ten plates of food, eats one bite and says it isn’t done right and then drinks a whole bottle of Chianti by herself. And then you don’t make her pay for it? Why? Why not just refuse her service?”

Tony the manager would usually walk away in the middle of Tony’s tirade without responding, although he would sometimes ask Tony when he got laid last, to which the waiter walked away without responding. The owner always hemmed and hawed over Belladonna and told Tony over and over that this was the last time he would discuss the subject. On her penultimate visit, he just looked Tony in the eye and said, “look kid, she’s good for business.”

Tony responded by telling the owner that that was just superstitious, stupid, it was probably just an upturn in the economy, or maybe new people were just discovering the restaurant and found they liked it and were returning more often.

“Upturn? Kid, you haven’t been paying attention. There ain’t any upturn in the economy, look at all the For Rent signs posted around town; look at all the boarded up places; shoot, I was thinking about abandoning this place before it started to pick up, because I sure couldna sold it. I’m tellin’ ya, the more food that cow pushes away and the harder she laughs, the better business gets; who knows why?”

“Then can somebody else please take her when she comes? I’m sick of it!”

“She always requests you, Tone, always. If I was you I’d just take it in stride.”

“She leaves crap for tips…look at this. This is what she left for me last time. A fuckin’ coin from some country that doesn’t use the alphabet and they make their money from aluminum cans! She won’t let Buster take away the dishes until she’s finished drinking her bottle of wine and then burps and farts her way out the door. She’s disgusting! She’s slugged Buster in the shoulder so many times, he’s got a permanent bruise and she’s grabbed my ass so many times I’ve probably got her fingerprints…her fingerprints embedded permanently, not to mention the times she rubs my crotch, tries to put her hand inside my pants or knocks me into someone’s lap. I should take it in stride!!? I should sue!” Tony was nearly yelling by the time he finished.

“Don’t do that! It’d just cost ya a lotta dough. Maybe she’s lonely, Tone.”

“Maybe she should get a cat.”

“Dincha know? She’s got a cat. Dog too. Maybe she needs human company?”

“Maybe she should grow a human form then.”

“ Tony, Tony, Tony. Ain’t you been doin’ pretty well here?”

“You mean on the days she isn’t here? Well, yeah, yes, of course I have.”

“Think of it this way; she comes, what? Twice a week? Sometimes three times? Right? Well, there’re at least four other days in the week for you to cool off. So? Cool the hell off! I’m havin’ this conversation with you because I don’ wanna lose your great service. If I lost you, I’d lose her. If I lose her, I’d lose all the business that’s built up. See what I mean?”

“That is just screwy! She hasn’t built up business! The rest of the customers wouldn’t know her from a dead cockroach!”

“Relax Tone. Cool down. She’ll probably just go away on her own.”

“Yeah? When?”

Tony had dozens of fruitless conversations like these previously with other workers in the restaurant but the only truly sympathetic person was Buster, and he hated Belladonna as much or more than Tony. But it was during this particular exchange with the owner that something changed. It was just as he said ‘fingerprints’ and saw Buster rubbing his shoulder that Tony got his idea, his plan, because he just happened to glance over the owner’s head in frustration. He was looking in the direction of Belladonna’s house and a light in one of her windows flared to life and with it, brought inspiration. It was a relatively simple plan, a simple criminal plan. Tony just had absolutely no experience in crime however, even petty crime.

The day before her last visit to the restaurant was completely unremarkable. So too was the day of her final visit. Customers poured in for lunch and the owner decided that the evening prep could be helped by calling in Buster early to assist the chef. The owner had also wanted to call Tony in early but for the first time since Tony had worked there he was unavailable to answer his phone.

Tony was unavailable because he had developed a kind of madness that when he thought about it later, surely came from his Italian ancestors. Over the months he had developed a powerful urge for revenge on La Donna. Nothing the owner or anyone else said could alleviate the feeling. Not that he actually stated he wanted revenge. But frequently, in conversations with people at the restaurant he spoke of “feeling strange”. Buster had attempted to get Tony to talk about the feeling and what it was and where it came from and how meditation might help, but Tony wasn’t sure, so Tony attended mass once and even started to go to confession then decided the line was too long and he wouldn’t get to work on time, so all the conversation and intellectual exercise seemed futile because the feeling for vendetta restarted every time he looked across the freeway at Belladonna’s house. The force of emotion and his lack of guilt surprised Tony. So he let himself plan because his father had always said it’s good to have a plan.

That last day Tony walked across the pedestrian bridge and over the freeway with an almost jaunty stride; though he slowed a little when he approached Belladonna’s door, he still felt nothing resembling guilt. He wasn’t sure if she was home, so he knocked rather politely and waited. Receiving no answer he gripped the doorknob tightly and turned it until it broke off in his hand. Looking at it there in his large palm, he suddenly had the urge to giggle, and then he gave the door a tremendous kick.

The sound of the doorknob being broken upset the dog and it came rushing to the door probably expecting Belladonna’s familiar kick, instead the dog found itself hurled backward through the air by the door itself. Its high yelp was ended suddenly when the poor beast landed on the antlers of an ornamental iron stag grazing on a small rug. The cat, frightened by the noise, exited through a partly open window at the rear of the house while Tony strode into the hallway. It was five years to the day from the housekeeper’s departure when Tony found himself in Belladonna’s hall. Tony began his tour by saying an Ave Maria for the dog.

When he had opened the door, he found himself confronted by his own image in a full-length mirror placed exactly opposite the front door. His wavy dark hair had fallen casually over his forehead but his blue eyes had a steely competitive look.

He studied his image for a moment and then approached the mirror very closely and studied himself a little more by pulling up his tee shirt and looking at his abdominal muscles and checking his obliques. He thought for a moment that his obliques needed a little more tone, but just in case he flexed them tightly and realized the mirror had a bad horizontal distortion. Smiling to himself he suddenly got an idea and stripped off his tee shirt and kicked off his flip-flops and as he began a barefoot tour of the house, he noticed very little of the small house had been cleaned in a while.

Stepping into La Donna’s living room he accidentally knocked over a torchère, breaking its deco glass shade, giving him another idea. Walking directly to the old fashioned fireplace he caught sight of himself again in a mirror above the mantel and paused to push the drooping hair off his forehead. He picked up one small china animal and pitched it at another small china animal and scored a direct hit. Giggling at his prowess, he picked up an armchair and started to swing it like a bat, changed his mind, picked up a piece of the broken pottery and slashed the back and the seat, then carefully took the fireplace poker and rather quietly destroyed the chair. Using the poker as an arm extension, he swept all of the objects off the mantel.

One of the porcelain pieces landed on another chair seat, bounced, and freakishly came to rest unbroken staring at yet another china object on a small table completely smothered in dust. Tony used the poker as a pool cue and announced his shot quietly, made a quip about introducing the two pieces, then destroyed both objects in the collision. “And game,” he announced to the air as he tore the hook of the poker lengthwise through the fabric of the sofa. Finding a somewhat neat stack of old newspapers, he flipped all of them into the air and let them fall anywhere. Balling some of them up, he began throwing them at various targets around the room, at one point hitting the only thing that had been altered fairly recently, a vase of flowers. The wilted flowers flew toward the front window while the vase took a direct hit on the edge of a stone dog shattering into hundreds of pieces and loosing on the air a foul smell of decayed vegetation.

When the smell hit Tony’s rather sensitive olfactory nerves he gagged and vomited loudly, giving him yet another idea. Since he felt a little nervous, somewhat like stage fright, he could feel the pressure of activity in his bowels and bladder. He neatly removed and folded his pants and had a movement in the middle of the floor, then ran to the kitchen, his bare feet making splatting sounds on the linoleum. Stopping to push over La Donna’s table and break off its legs. Holding one of the legs in one hand and himself in the other, he urinated over as much territory as he could by whirling like a dervish where the table had once stood. With the table leg held like a baseball bat, he smashed everything breakable and dented what could be dented, paused and then broke some of the already broken things even further.

Standing in the middle of the wrecked kitchen filled him with a sense of pride; naked with the table leg held loosely in his hand he thought he probably looked a little like the classic statue of Heracles only without facial hair. Tony began to step forward and saw he would have to walk through broken china and glass, stopped and made a cat-like move to the top of a counter on his knees where a piece of dented metal pushed into his flesh. Feeling a little angry, he swept the metal away and examined his knee where only a slight dent revealed where the metal had been. Standing on top of the counter, he reached his arm across to an adjoining wall and pulled a small whisk broom from its peg and carefully climbed back to his position on the floor.

Carefully sweeping away the shards, he worked his way to Belladonna’s small bathroom where he checked himself in the medicine cabinet mirror and flexed a couple of times while he admired the sheen of sweat on his pectorals. He then removed everything from the cabinet and threw it all in the toilet. He ripped down the plastic shower curtain and pushed as much of it as would fit into the toilet also. Wondering how upset La Donna would be delighted and inspired him. His face lit up when he got onto the idea of completely breaking the toilet away from its floor bolts and dropping it into the bathtub. Straining like he was performing squats, he rocked and pulled until the toilet broke free at last. Tank and all were lifted into the tub and thrown where the porcelain reservoir lid broke, which disappointed him, so he pulled the medicine cabinet off the wall and dropped it where the toilet had been mounted. The toilet's broken water connection started to shoot water across the room.

Giggling, he rather carefully pulled the lavatory away from its moorings and to his delight more water began shooting from the broken fixtures. He put his foot up like he was testing bathwater and received a slight burn from the hot water side so he simply put his toe under the cold water and held it for a while. While he was holding his foot under the cold water spilling out from the wall, Tony looked downward noticing he could see part of his foreshortened reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror, which hadn’t broken. Since he had never seen himself from that angle, Tony became fascinated by the view up the inside of his thighs. Straddling the cabinet, he checked his calves and his quadriceps then made them move individually. He rather absently played with his genitals and examined the way the hair ran in a dark nearly symmetrical stream around his anus and then trailed away up the darkness between the cheeks of his buttocks.

Tony took a last look and thought this must be how it looked to sail under the Colossus of Rhodes, then turned and picking his way back through the kitchen returned to the foyer. He stepped carefully into the living room and retrieved his pants and carried them back to the foyer where he picked up his flip-flops and tee shirt. Opening another door across from the living room, he discovered another short hall with two bedrooms, one off either side. So he placed his clothing on the hall floor in a neat pile near the foyer.

Each bedroom was littered with junk La Donna had failed to dispose of and smelled of mold and dust. One bedroom had obviously not been entered in quite some time; Tony’s damp feet were making themselves slippers of dust. He rather casually tipped over the dresser so the drawers could fall out and upended the bed, which tore a huge gouge in one wall and broke the headboard. Dust and paper went flying causing him to sneeze repeatedly. There was nothing in the dresser even though the room was full of papers from Belladonna’s work. From the floor he picked up an opened letter and started to rip it in half but changed his mind when he saw the restaurant owner’s name in the return address corner.

Tony pulled the letter from its envelope and read the contents. How in all the paper and debris he had found this letter must be beyond coincidental and he made a mental note to ask Buster about coincidence.

The letter was some kind of apology from the owner of the restaurant for not paying some money on time and it seemed that Belladonna had loaned him money from her job or her supervisor’s job, that part wasn’t quite clear. But what was clear was that the restaurant owner was late in paying and Belladonna had made up the difference and now the owner owed a large debt of gratitude as well as the sum and ‘slush’ agreed upon. Some relative of hers had visited the restaurant to insure the debt was going to be paid. The owner was very cordial and almost subservient in his tone and restated how grateful he was for Belladonna’s assistance. He also added a postscript saying her cousin would make a fine manager. When he finished reading the letter Tony absently scratched his nipple with the envelope.

Tony tucked the letter back in the envelope, then tucked the envelope between his thighs and brushed some of the dust off his arms and chest; he had begun to itch a little. He placed the letter on his clothing stack and returned to Belladonna’s bedroom. He then casually but systematically pulled out every drawer and every hanger and wrapped everything into a comforter and flipped it all into the dusty bedroom across the hall. He found what he thought must be a photograph of Belladonna as a young woman and spindled it on a bedpost. Once more feeling the urge to urinate, he simply walked and wet whatever caught his fancy.

Stepping back into the foyer, he checked and flexed a couple of times in front of the mirror. Tony studied the planes of his face for a moment, then flipping his hair once again back from his forehead, he redressed himself and carefully put the letter in his pocket. Tony was feeling quite relaxed when he returned to his apartment. “Good workout”, he thought as he showered and readied himself for work.

Tony arrived at work with the letter in his jacket pocket and kept its content in his mind continually as he did side work and helped a few early customers. Slightly earlier than usual, Belladonna arrived full of her usual banter yelling for her “guy”. Tony was occupied with another diner who wrote as he ate so the manager told her she would have to wait for a moment. La Donna had had a tough day at the office and started screaming for Superman to get his cute little butt over there, and stop wasting time.

All through her “dinner” she yelled and laughed at other customers asking them why they had ordered thus and such, and they should really have something else and if they didn’t like it, send it back. His sense of eagerness was so keen Tony wanted to caress her cheek and tell her sweetly he had a surprise in store, but he nonetheless avoided her pinches and crotch grabbing behavior not only for the reason that he hated it and her, but because he didn’t think trying to behave differently would have helped his anticipation.

With La Donna’s wine bottle at last empty, and her boisterous laughter still infecting the customers, she finally left. Her tip that evening, a game marker from an old board game, Tony flipped into the air and caught on the back of hand. With a lightening quick motion, he slid his flattened hand from under the piece and caught it between his thumb and forefinger. Then he dropped it into his pocket. A lone customer, the writer, applauded.

Buster shook his head as she left and said, “I really hope I never see her again. I feel bad saying that, but I really do.” Tony looked at Buster and felt such a rush of affection for him he actually hugged Buster’s shoulders and said, “me too.” Buster blushed, picked up his bus tub, and looking very awkward hurried away to the kitchen.

The shift came to a close with all of Tony the manager’s usual sexual innuendo following female customers to the door and the owner rubbing his hands at the evening’s take. Tony the waiter was watching for the light to come on across the freeway. When the owner came over to ask Tony what he was watching so closely, Tony, his gaze toward Belladonna’s house unwavering, reached in his pocket and handed the owner the letter.

The restaurant owner said nothing and walked away into the kitchen.

Tony finished his shift and still no light showed, so he waited, sitting on a bench outside the closed restaurant talking to a now very animated Buster about training routines and supplements. Tony laughed when Buster complimented his physique and thanked him, gently removing Buster’s double-handed grip from his bicep muscle.

Exhilarated, Buster told Tony he was going right home to start planning his workout routine and Tony waved goodbye. Tony leaned his back against the brick wall and watched the busboy disappear down the street. A brief moment later a flicker in one of the house windows grew larger and larger until the house was engulfed in flames. Tony wondered if he had broken a gas main.

Far away sirens began to wail.

Picking up his jacket, he slipped into a narrow alley between the restaurant and a lawyer’s office and returned to his apartment where he removed his work clothing, did his workout, took another shower and then sat in his chair by the door and read a magazine, wondering if Buster would make a good workout partner.

END

So Live

2007-09-28T00:07:00.000-07:00

What is liberation?

Is it in food?
Protein
Lipid
Carbohydrate
Eating?

What is liberation?

Is it in a word?
The shelves of books
The playwright’s pen
Soundtrack recording
Music?

What is liberation?

Has it got a place?
Has it got a sound?
Has it got a movement?

What is liberation?

Is it only in living?
Passion
Spirit
Art
Is it Pasolini’s murder?

What is liberation?

Is it the coming of a season?
The falling of leaves
The burst of flowers
Drying grass
Frost?

What is liberation?

Is it in a city of millions?
The frowns of friends
Wondrous strange window displays
Highrise graffiti
Gridlock?

What is liberation?

Is it in a small town?
The faces of strangers
Familiar storefronts
Sidewalk graffiti
Traffic?

What is liberation?
Is liberation what is?
What is liberation?
Is liberation what is?
What is liberation?

Whose chains are these?
My courageous world’s
My culture’s hand
The family’s arm
Mine?

What is liberation?
When all cry
When all suffer
When all starve
When all die?

What is liberation?
When every god speaks
When every god lies
When every god laughs
At freedom.

Fantasma

2007-09-26T00:33:00.000-07:00

Photo: Diego Fernandes

I wrote this while listening to Anita Baker.

My dream of you floats

In that place between places

Where I am so comfortable,

So capable, so balanced.

Every note is always perfect,

Every brushstoke carries

The painting to completion.

I am a passenger

Inside the warmth of you,

Your embrace.

Under your touch

Paradise waits around

A turn in the road

Across a rainy sea,

Over there,

Just beyond a kiss.

After Sundown

2007-09-08T00:35:00.000-07:00

Waiting for evening

For after sundown

For dark lights

Star lights

Some strong sense of passing

Waiting.

Watching the sun cross over

Watching the sun pass by

Watching the sun fall

Fall closer to you

And where you dream

Remembering smells

Of you on your pillow

After sundown

Remembering to remember

Forgetting to forget

After sundown

Somewhere out east

Behind me

Under night shadow

Such scenes ache

To hold on to time

Rhythms hard shaking

Of mine as yours

And nothing mine

All

After sundown

But waiting hurts

Morning sun burns

That steam of shadow

Till after sundown.

The Antique Store

2007-09-01T00:51:00.000-07:00

This short story was originally written as an assignment for a writing class. Its genesis was a cross-country road trip taken by two of my sisters, a roommate and myself. It has gone through many versions and has never been accepted by a publisher except a tiny community newspaper that went out of business before it could be printed. With exceptions, I have received mostly favorable feedback. I still like it.

Tucumcari, when we visited it had an aura of Bagdad Cafe about it and, while it has an "active" side, I describe what I saw. The tumbleweed, the grass growing in the street and the antique store were really there. As for the rest, well, New Mexico is a Land of Enchantment.

* * *

Late afternoon is falling like a party ribbon across eastern New Mexico. The vivid color, sprayed onto the landscape by an overzealous sky, works no comfort on my malaise. A shoulder shrug, the sunset and its brilliant color give up trying to amuse me. A gusty wind is blowing from the east, a tired god trying to blow the flaming sun out. A tumbleweed hurries westward toward some unknown destination; little flurries of dust follow, trying to keep up. I wait, a lone traveler, for denouement, that I may take my final ride into the sunset. We are, the wind, the tumbleweed, and I, clichés of the western desert.

But where are the villains, where are the Indians? The only Indian I had seen was a small boy with holes in the knees of his pants and a blue and green striped t-shirt, all generously dusted with the red and yellow desert dirt. He had been sitting outside the only building having an automobile parked in front, making, or attempting to make, some sort of play guitar from a cereal box, surveying stake and a box of rubber bands. When I stopped to watch his effort, he collected his nascent guitar pieces and vanished into a space between two buildings. The budding Stradivarius did not wish to be a tourist sideshow.

I am walking through Tucumcari, New Mexico, watching shadows stretch and waiting for climax so I can make my way into the sunset, but no one else is on the street. Tough desert grass and thistle have elbowed through the cracked pavement. Tucumcari’s main street is the back of a diseased hermit. Tucumcari is a leper. It lies dying in the desert, not from its disease, but neglect.

Tucumcari and other towns, like San Jon and Glenrio, found a kind of ecstasy in the great prosperity following World War II. These desert shrines astride Route 66 were visited by thousands of pilgrims making their way between Los Angeles and the District of Columbia. An end to their corpulent summer came when interstate 40 freed the way for non-stop travel from coast to coast. The travelers left Tucumcari and her sisters and old route 66 abandoned to the desert. So now, even the tumbleweed is trying to escape.

Off to my left, an electric bulb is glowing inside one of the few shops left to Tucumcari. The sun is not completely set but the shadows are almost strong enough to overwhelm the single bare bulb. It is in an antique shop situated at the corner of two overgrown streets. My attempt to enter is met by a muffled voice requesting me to come back tomorrow. Trying to ascertain if return is warranted, I press my face against the glass of the door. A face appears abruptly and repeats, “come back tomorrow.” Then a window shade, hand lettered, CLOSED, is pulled down and once again I am alone in Tucumcari. So I will return and the showdown will be tomorrow. High noon.

* * *

Cold morning in the desert was the same as it had been for thousands of years, probably. The sun spread its light across the Staked Plain like the breaking of a dam, probably. Nocturnal animals hid in their burrows or where ever they hide during the burn of day, probably. I do not know.

I dream on the shoulder of a naked giant. He crouches on a cliff above an inland sea. Near the rocks beneath us, Tucumcari swirls at the periphery of a maelstrom. Pieces keep breaking off the town and disappearing into the center. The giant begins to stand and from his shoulder I fall into the very center of the whirlpool. I am pulled beneath the surface and I can see the giant smile as his body transforms into the land and sky of New Mexico. I know by his smile he meant for me to fall. The only sound is the rushing of the wind.

* * *

It is noon. I am walking the deserted streets of Tucumcari. Gusts of wind and my feet scraping on broken pavements are the only sounds. It is noon, the sun, balanced on my head, is a giant olla overflowing with heat and light. I find myself on the Street of the Indian Boy, and he is again working on his project, only now, he has retreated to one of the covered wooden sidewalks. He is sitting cross-legged on a bench, trying to will the pieces together. Seeing me evidently embarrasses him, and once again he disappears between the buildings, this time leaving the pieces of his industry.

I can hear the music of a piano. The tune is ragtime, Scott Joplin, but it sounds slow. It is not distorted; rather, it sounds as if someone with perfect rhythm is playing at a deliberately reduced speed, the pace of a walking horse. I feel lighter stepping into the shade of a covered porch. Tucumcari can now support the weight of the sun. I am walking in time with the music, with my ears following the scent of each note to its source. The music is coming from the antique store.

My senses are peaking in the same stomach-surging inevitability of the sex act or an automobile crash. Slight nausea and the heightened awareness of an adrenaline surge are forcing my sensory antenna to full extension. Every fractional second fills with minute detail. An ancient hunter is ready for the kill; the gunfighter is ready for the draw.

In my peripheral vision I watch my image waver and flicker in the warped window glass of the antique store. I see through the sets of windows at the store’s corner to mountains beyond Tucumcari. Between that unknown territory and myself are black silhouettes within the store. One of the silhouettes is a head, the head of a woman moving within.

In an act of supreme nonchalance and vanity, I stop and check my reflected image. As I turn to face the window, a piece of broken glass in the street glints brightly in sunlight dazzling my eyes, a stage light. I find my audience in the glass. I take a small bow. Thank you, you are wonderful. Without conscious decision my focus shifts: my image, window display, black silhouettes within, twice filtered sky and desert beyond, my image.

My focus flicks from my reflection to an object, almost lost in the careful clutter of a fussy window display, an antique store memory startling like a flashbulb explosion. I am wading the river of Tucumcari’s history and in this slowly dwindling stream a bit of my own past is floating. As I look into the heart of my reflection in this antique store window, a private and exotic rhythm beats.

* * *

She is singing. A sea gull weeps about the sad power of love, the tragedy of nostalgia, of capture in the rough hands of the fate-song. She sings in a voice husky from cigarettes and age.

She is my cousin from the old country.

Her husband died many years before, but she still wears the black of widowhood. Around her square thin shoulders a soft black shawl is wound. Against her breast she fondles and caresses, with long fingers, a small guitar-like instrument. It has twelve strings and, in her affectionate hands, a sound like a small stream, tumbling and splashing down a European hillside. My seven-year-old mind is amazed so many sounds can come from only four fingers and thumb.

She is my cousin from the old country. She stills speaks with a strong accent, even though she immigrated to California as a fifteen-year-old bride and now she is an old woman. Her once jet-black hair is now silvery like weathered wood. She came to marry her cousin, twenty years her senior and a man she had never met. She became a farmer’s wife. She learned to do all the things someone married to the earth must do; she bore her husband’s children, she cleaned, she sewed, she knit, she killed and cleaned rabbits and chickens, and when her husband could not do it, she plowed.

I asked her once if she would show me how to kill and clean a rabbit, an activity she accomplished when I wasn’t present or by turning her back so I could not watch.

“No,” she said, “it is the work of women.”

And plucking chickens?

“That too.”

What is men’s work? She shrugged, “it is the work that men do.” But what is it that they do; I was insistent.

“If a man is a farmer, he plows; if he is a soldier, he shoots a gun; if he is a priest, he prays.”

Can a man play the guitar?

She thought a moment, then nodded. Sometimes, she said men love too much to play the guitar; that was bad. She would not teach me to play.

I would then try to trick her into admitting that a man hunting alone in the woods must know how to clean a rabbit, to pluck a bird.

No, she would shake her head, he would bring it home for his wife to clean.

But what if he did? It was my best seven-year-old manner.

“He should not do that,” she would state mildly, her green eyes not seeming to look at me, but through. Then she would light a cigarette, and holding it like a pipe, blow smoke in my face. Go away, she would demand, next time we will play cards.

But would she play the little guitar too? Yes, yes. Now go away.

Our meetings were brief and few. But always she managed to tell me something. Always she played the guitar, always an introduction to some new thing. Coffee with chicory, it’s bitter, I complained.

“Life is bitter, don’t waste it, drink it.”

Apricots straight from a tree, the sun still hot inside them, these are very sweet.

“Life is sweet, eat quickly or you will lose the juice.”

Teach me the guitar, I begged, then remembering my manners, please.

“Do you see how the guitar is shaped like a woman?” I nodded. “It is better to hold a woman shaped like a woman.”

One day she sang a song about a woman who suffered a disease. The woman in the song knew the disease would kill her. What disease does she have, I asked. (An elderly aunt had just died of cancer.)

“Nostalgia,” my cousin replied.

“What is nostalgia?” It sounded very bad.

“Love,” was the flatly stated answer. “Love like a lemon tree.”

I didn’t understand.

“Always you think love is something it is not.”

“Can you die of love?” the eight-year-old me asked incredulously.
For a moment, the lights in her eyes got bigger, then her husky voice said, “yes. Yes, boy. You can die of love.”

“When I am gone,” she smiled suddenly, “you may have the little guitar.”

* * *

Somehow, I am inside the antique store. I am asking about the music. The ragtime music is coming from a player piano. Why does it sound so slow?

Materializing from shadows that denied corners to the room an elderly woman, the shop owner, tells me the roll was made by a process that recorded the artist playing the piano by some arcane mechanical transcription. Some machines could actually record dynamics; you would need a special player. This particular piano was not capable of that. If I cared to check the roll when it was finished, she tells me patiently, I can actually find out who played for this particular cut.

Faded print on the edge of the stiff paper reveals that the artist performing on this specific roll was an S. Joplin; the tune was also written by S. Joplin. 1904. I am listening to Scott Joplin play his own music. His ghost fingers, fluttering over a keyboard in a western desert town, are winging their easy, graceful way across more than one hundred years.

My mind is still rolling in the mundane miracle of Scott Joplin’s piano playing, but I ask casually, how much she wants for the little guitar in the window. I look at the owner as I slip the piano roll into its box; I fit another into the piano. She is an older woman with iron-grey hair pulled tightly back and fastened in a neat chignon at the nape of her neck. There are heavy grooves above the mouth and around the eyes. It is not an old face, I think, it is an aged face, like cheese or wine. At present it is also a puzzled face.

“The guitar?” she looks toward the window. Perhaps she is puzzled by the abrupt change of focus.

“Yes, the one with the colored inlay around the sound hole; has a scratch on the neck?”

* * *

My cousin handed me the instrument, and I looked up at her slowly. “Are you going away?” I mumbled.

“I told you, when I was gone, you may have the guitar.”

“But you didn’t teach me to play; are you coming back?”

Her face seemed at a great height above me.

“God will teach you to play. That is how I learned.”

I threw the instrument from me and ran to sit in the family car. It was summer and the closed automobile must have been furnace hot, but I shivered. I was lost in an Antarctic storm. Someone had turned the summer heat off and opened a winter door to the polar winds.

The car door jerked open and the strong arm of maternal law yanked me from my freezer chest, and in the next moment a stinging blow landed on my cheek. “What the hell did you think you were doing?” The knifelike voice cut into an already deep wound. “Do you have any idea how much that instrument is worth? It came around the Horn. You had absolutely no right to throw it like that. I don’t know shy she wanted to give it to you anyway, you’d probably just break it; as it is, you put a huge scratch in the handle. Did you hear what I said, young man? That instrument is valuable, it came around the Horn!”

“It’s a neck, not a handle!” my boy soprano shrieked.

Another blow landed and I was promised a long stay in the automobile I had just been pulled from. My father would hear about this.

My grandmother arrived to second my mother’s low opinion of me and ask had she seen what I had done to the guitar-that-had-come-around-the-horn-that-was-incredibly-valuable wasn’t-another-in-the-world; his father really ought to talk to him; a long talk.

My cousin came slowly across the grass leaning on a black cane, her hair flashing in the summer sun like broken glass.

“I will talk to him,” she made it a demand.

My demons were banished to hell. The tormentors departed into the small house.

She looked at me a long time. Did I remember the shape of the guitar? What was it? What would happen if I had thrown a real woman like that? Did I know her neck would have been broken? She told me a story of a fisherman, who took his guitar to sea, and frustrated with what he called its bad temper, he had tossed it overboard and when he returned home, his wife drowned in the tide waiting for him.

“You mean she drowned because he threw his guitar in the water?” I asked in disbelief.

My cousin just shrugged.

* * *

“It’s not really in very good shape,” the storeowner pulled the guitar from its resting place. “The strings are gut and need to be replaced.” She held the instrument out to me. Without reaching for it, I asked the price again.

* * *

My cousin again offered me the guitar, but my anger at her leaving returned, and I climbed back into the car. She nodded slowly at me through the window then turned and disappeared into her house.

The last I saw of my cousin was the skirt of her long widow-black dress dragging up the shallow front steps, the light flashing on shiny material as it flicked over each tread, a silent valediction.

Later, I repented and asked my parents if I could have the guitar after all, but one or another of numerous relatives had taken, or sold it, along with the rest of my cousin’s belongings, and nostalgia became my disease.

* * *

“Why don’t you make me an offer?” the owner smiles, a coquette, and pretends to play the guitar. The southwest trader has found an item a customer cannot do without. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”
I laughed, almost hysterically. Yes. Oh, yes.

“Thirty bucks,” I say, not hoping she will accept.

“Thirty bucks!!” she is rattled for moment, then begins an arduous few minutes of haggling in which we return to my original thirty dollars, and, because she says I am such a great haggler, takes off an additional five.

Handing her the money, she looks vaguely disturbed and offers to wrap it in some paper. My decline of the offer seems to bother her, so I quickly leave the antique store’s darkness for the heavy sun of the eroded empty street. Scott Joplin’s ‘Easy Winners’ follows me out the door.

Wandering through the streets, I talk and caress the voluptuous curves of the instrument. When I find a half rotten bench, I sit, still talking to the guitar. I tell about intervening years; I waltz and pirouette it on my lap.

I grow gradually less voluble and just begin examining its surface. It must have sat for a long while in the window of the antique store because my fingers are grimy from its accumulated dust. The guitar’s once glossy finish is entirely gone and the underlying wood looks grey and tired. The strings are so old and dry the sound they make is harsh and cracked, a voice hoarse with age. It is not an instrument that should ever be played again, or at least, only in pretend, like the storeowner had done.

A small paper sticker is attached to the back of the instrument near the rounded bottom, a tag with the price written in faded ink. Five dollars. I laugh and cry thinking about the price of modern medicine.

I am still laughing when the Indian boy comes out from between the buildings. Seeing me, he starts to return between them, but turns when I call.

I hold out the guitar. He smiles.

END