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THE DESERT SEARCH
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OLEANDER / SIGILS
It wasn't long after my brother died that I left for the desert. I had been planning the trip for some time, feeling the urge to sleep under the star-dome on the still warm sand, wanting to let the sun pound its potent common sense into my uncertain mind, needing to relearn the miracle of water and life.
When Paddy spilled his Harley and didn’t get back up, I was left with a hole in my spirit that cried out for healing. Confession, Absolution, Communion and Redemption, to put it in the easy Catholic jargon of my disintegrating family - my empty gesture, echo verse, hate-sprung love, ad hominem blood.
I use their words because they once were my words and my tongue stings from their taste. But Confession is the first station at the beginning of my inbred redemption cycle, so I have nowhere else to begin.
I was an “Altar Boy” until thirteen years old. Altar Boy/class clown - malleable and acquiescent, the way St. Boniface's nuns loved boys to be. "Surely Martin is meant for the priesthood! He has the Call!" Those tired Dominican women were hoping to hand select, groom and "show the way" to boys who might become the men who would eventually order their nunnery lives.
It took my fiery, red-faced renunciation of the tenets and dogmas of Mother Church to spare me from the horrors of LaSalle Military Academy, the Seminary and then a life of celibate service. During my repudiation, my own mother - the woman who sat at the kitchen table with me and led me through the Baltimore Catechism - finally broke down, teary-eyed, and whispered, "All right. It's okay. I don't believe it all either."
That stopped my young heart cold, but I continued to argue and struggle like a victorious prize-fighter, swept up in the heat of the bout, too busy dancing and jabbing, too punch drunk to let the referee lift his arm in triumph.
An uneasy moment blinked by before I realized that my hot words were now hollow, my protestations, unopposed.
The impact of her words was not a victory for me, not a triumph of honesty over blind faith or even a moment of shared empty-soul camaraderie between mother and first son. “We believe in nothing” was her message “as a family, we have no faith.”
The sobering chill of that thought re-wrote volumes of my memories. Mom's simple homilies? Meaningless. Dad's big show of "going to church" and belonging to all the right religious organizations? A sham. My time as an Altar boy? Jesus!
Those incensed mornings and weekends would have been better spent in the service of a stage magician, some tuxedoed illusionist, running props on and off stage, reacting with innocent-faced surprise when the body is finally beheld, unsawn.
Hoc est corpus.
But the framework of my life had already been Martyr-oriented, sacrifice driven, given to expect the trials of Job when all seems to be good and happy and prosperous. I want to spit in the face of the person responsible for rigging me this way, for putting my piece of cheese at the end of the electrified maze corridor, for setting up my savings account in the great beyond, so there is no interest, just penalty, but I would wind up wiping spittle from my mirror.
I know I can no sooner change my past than I can grow wings or live underwater. A man is a man built upon other men and their laws. So, to the desert - the wasteland that knows not waste - the barren, fruitful, empty, enriching, desolate, spiritual desert. Where we see our mortality in the evaporation of morning dew and the watchers watch the seekers seek.
As my departure day neared, I felt as though I was embarking on a pilgrimage, a spiritual journey with physical destination, under a full moon, with no god or goddess to please. This was to be my sojourn into the cauldron; alive, aware and open to whatever lies in my path.
Lies in my past.
I wanted to record everything I encountered, fearing that some tiny puzzle-piece might slip past me or fall thought the net of my senses, mixing with the dust-rake of my feet along the way.
I would bring video, film and audio recorders, notepads surely, but what of the touch, taste and smell? Could I trust my memory? Would it present itself to me in that way? Would what present itself to me?
My preparations questioned the goal of my search. What imprint on the senses does one’s soul make?
Days later, on the highway, each expectant mile brought jagged pieces of an unseen puzzle; casual observations of seemingly unrelated elements that, when held in concert, bore the mounting heart-tremble realization that there was surely some spiritual connection just beyond the reach of my reason.
Fields dotted with russet automobile skeletons, the breathtaking, tire-dodging scurry of road game, the toneless murmur of my wheels on the highway and the throbbing whistle of my radio antenna ripping through the pollen-heavy air brought on a warm, sun-dazzled intoxication – I was cast loose from the steering wheel and pedals and instruments of the car, that seemed somewhere far below me.
A rush of cool, dark shadow swept in through my window, climbed up the side of my face and spilled across the windshield so abruptly that I flinched and stiff-armed the steering wheel; pushing back into my seat to avoid the impact of whatever unimaginable object might have caused such sudden darkness.
Above me, up through the car’s moon roof, I could see a growling black shape rise, slowing as it wheeled upward, soaring into the brilliant noon; its voluptuous roar swooping into a disappointed groan that sent tremors through my cheekbones, back into my head, and down into my chest.
It fell back on itself, turning end over end as it dropped from the sky; an electric blue plume of smoke left at the vertex of its climb, another throaty growl swelling as it dove back toward my van like a great bird of prey having looped into attack trajectory with an effortless pirouette.
Its wings were trussed top and bottom strung with long cable sinews that thrummed and sang out their own cry as the weight and wind and speed turned mounting tension into deadly accurate, rock-steady flight.
Twenty-five, possibly twenty feet above my head I saw the face of the crop-duster’s pilot, calm and indifferent, as he rolled into straight and level flight above the highway, zoomed out over a bean field and spewed out a white spoor of death.
I felt gut-punched; panting, nerves tingling from the unconscious demon fear my mind had thrown down into my heart, an unwarranted, self-defeating emotion for a man committed to walk heavy in the heartland of spirits. I slid my foot off the gas pedal and coasted onto the fast lane shoulder of the road; scatter gravel over dusty packed clay. Each passing car created a highway speed slipstream at pulled at the van, rocking me, tugging at me to get back out onto the blacktop and continue on my way.
Stop here for a minute, take a drink of water, collect your wits -- miles to go before the high desert. But, truly, this is all desert.
The plane continued to swoop, roll and loop; plowing its mid-air field deep with insecticide and high octane exhaust that settled to the ground and wafted steadily back across the highway’s center-divide stand of oleander hedge, giving each shrub, in turn, the appearance of smoldering, like the burning bush that was ablaze, and yet not consumed, on Ararat.
I killed the engine and opened my door, letting a blast of dry heat lift the sweat from my face; drops evaporating quickly in the traffic-troubled breeze, cooling me with their sublimation into vapor, their absorption back into the endless cycle that falls from the clouds to be drawn up from the ground and pour from a bottle only to begin the cycle again through me.
My legs ached and I needed to stretch-walk, but when I swung my feet out to slide off my seat, I was stopped by a sight that once again brought blood rushing to my head.
On the litter strewn shoulder, under my boots, next to a strip of twisted retread, was a dead hawk. Had I slipped off the seat I would have stepped directly onto it; the tip of my toe at its beak. I spread my feet and, to my surprise, a gray field mouse struggled to get free of the bird’s clenched black talons - bleeding its life out into the parched clay, in the final spasms of death.
When I pried open the hawk’s death grip, the sunk-eyed mouse was unable to escape, so violent were its throes. I carried it into the oleander shade out of some sense of naked pity and vulnerability, so that it might grow cold before the earth sent up its horde of relentless scavengers.
I remembered the pet funerals of my childhood, when I learned the ritual and respect afforded even the smallest living thing.
And how my brothers, sister and I held sacred the miracle dark passage of house cat or yard dog or storm-struck bird or aged hamster with a shoe box and paper shroud, with life-photo, flower or favored chew-toy, in a garden grave and twig marker or cobble headstone – consecrated by our tears and prayers. For we already feared the inconceivable passage of our own Grandma and Grandpa, maybe even Mom or Dad or a friend in the hospital, car wreck, plane crash, that would bring not a few scant moments, but years of tear-stained bereavement.
Few of us, in our callow rehearsals of inhumation, ever stopped to consider our own frailty and hazard in such a precarious world and our own eventual mortal throes. But I did.
And I still do.
So, Mr. Mouse was laid on the shade cool earth and, as his life drifted off, I remembered that anything more that what he had right there, at that moment, is window-dressing and illusion.
As it was for Paddy. As it will be with me.
The moment the mouse’s death rigor came and passed, there was no more. I turned to the hawk. Using the knife left to me by my dead brother, I cut off the hawk’s legs just above the talons and wrapped them in a sheet of wind torn newspaper. I didn't know what purpose they might serve, but a compelling urge to take them along with me rendered the blood and gore merely color and particles on my hands, not the flesh and blood of a noble bird of prey that probably looped into attack trajectory with an effortless pirouette.
Then I stepped back up into my van.
I wiped the gore onto the leg of my pants before starting the engine, taking a brief moment before driving off to remember the beauty of the hawk and its magnificent birdness as it lie on the ground. I thought of the Cochiti legend of the neglectful mother Crow who abandoned her nest and lost her hatchlings to a Hawk that took pity on them. When I glanced down at the legless carcass looking for faint signs of that mythic devotion, a blast of highway car-wind rolled it into the oleander shade and I began to drive down the shoulder of the road.
At fifty, I nudged a front tire up onto the road's fast lane and turned on the radio.
A deafening thump shock wave hit the front of my car and mixed with a blare of Mexican accordion music, as a blue pickup truck exploded through the center divide; a spray of oleander leaves and flowers blasted high into the air as it set down onto the road in front of me sliding sideways.
Roaring, howling, its tires liquefied and burned furiously into white smoke as it cut a path
across my lane, out of control and about to roll over. My own tires screamed as I stood fullweight on the brake pedal, but we hurtled toward each other, locked on a course I knew I could not survive. For the briefest split-second I saw the pick-up driver spin his wheels into the slide, pointing the truck toward the cinderblock sound wall that at the outer edge of the highway.
This simple correction, this panic reaction, unbridled the pick-up's momentum and it rocketed through my lane, past me, and straight into the wall. I couldn't not look as he hit the masonry barrier head-on. The shiny metal fenders and hood of the truck crumpled, rammed back into its cab; chrome trim, glass and plastic erupting in a shower of fragments that rebounded from the wall and bounced across the roof and bedcover, then rained down onto the ground.
He's dead. I thought, skidding to a stop just past where our coal black tire tracks crossed.
I'll try to help him, but I'm probably going to watch him die.
The traffic slowed, but kept driving by and I had to dash across the blacktop to avoid a long line of cars. I stopped at the skewed door of the wreck when the driver kicked it open and
hopped out.
I said, he hopped out.
I watched, speechless, a sinking feeling in my gut, as he walked up to me, hand extended as though we had just been introduced. Short, five, five-two, brown with a thatch of hair that stood up like it had never known a comb. He was forty, maybe fifty. I couldn't tell because he was... intact, uninjured, perfect; a front gold tooth shining in the noon sun above a sparkling crucifix on chain that bounced against his coffee tan chest. He was happy!
"Milagro!" he shouted, "Viva los Angeles!"
We were hundreds of miles from L.A., so I assumed he was in shock or disoriented, shook into confusion by a blow that should have killed him.
The truck had punched a grotto into the cement block wall and steam rose from the hot fluids that splashed down out of the crushed engine compartment onto the clay.
His hand was warm and callused and he pumped it up and down with what must have been pure adrenaline overload. My hand started to hurt, but I was so amazed that I let him continue until I was sure I wasn't missing some tiny, vital fact that might drop him to his knees before the rush wore off.
"Amigo!" he shouted, "Hagame usted el favor de venir!"
He lead me back to the wreck, pulled a photo down from the visor and held it in front of my face. It was a stiffly posed portrait of him in a suit standing behind a chair where an angelic Mexican woman clutched a swaddled infant to her breast. In the foreground, a pudgy girl of eight or nine wearing a lacy white dress knelt on a pillow holding a bouquet of camellias. Her eyes were cast upward to a superimposed cameo of the face of Christ, bleeding from the thorn crown, above heavy-lidded eyes that showed the very soul of compassion.
"Mi hija. Se llama Pilar. Tiene nueve anos."
That was when I understood "los angeles". His angels; his little girls. He was alive and he would see his little angels again.
Milagro, miracle. No shit.
There was no way he could have been sitting behind the steering wheel on impact, for it was buried into the seat-back with so much force it had buckled back around its shaft under the pressure. And he couldn't have fallen to the floor, because the engine, still clicking as the heat ran out of it, filled the entire lower section of the cab.
Scattered around the interior were holy pictures, rosary beads, palm crosses and statues of Jesus and Mary as well as a few haloed saints I couldn't identify right off. It was a dashboard altar that had obviously served its purpose before being demolished. On the seat, a Spanish photo pamphlet from the DMV was splayed open, showing a posed shot of Hispanic drunk driver being arrested by a Caucasian Highway Patrolman with a streak of gray in his hair where the part might have been.
A Highway Patrol cruiser and a tow truck pulled up behind the wreck and their drivers got out in such perfect unison that I almost missed the significance of their arrival. It hasn't been more than sixty seconds since the crash. How can this be? Even a cell phone in the hand of the first person to see it would not have reached 911 yet, much less bring them both this fast. Speed trap? That wouldn't explain the tow truck. On the way to another accident? I can't imagine both traveling together, not to mention the remarkable co-incidence of passing right here, right now.
"Acabo de ver a diablo." the man whispered,staring into my eyes.
I went cold. "Diablo?"
He smiled weakly and straightened up when he saw the Highway Patrolman. I remembered the pamphlet in his truck and leaned closer to him to sniff his breath, but all I could smell was Sage and Manzanita smoke.
His eyes stayed on the cop and he spoke softly as though describing a dream. "Si, si. La Cabeza de Vaca. Ojos rojo. Diente amarillo. Pene enorme..."
"Where? Dónde?" I asked, trying to catch his attention, but he was pre-occupied with the
approaching Highway Patrolman.
"Sir! Please get back to your vehicle and be on your way," the cop yelled to me, "we can handle this."
I took the man's arm and asked him again, "Where? Cuando ocurri eso? Donde est Diablo?"
He stood ramrod straight, but pointed his index finger toward the cab of his truck. "Alli." he coughed, "Hace un momento."
"Return to your vehicle sir, and be on your way," the patrolman repeated. I glanced up at his face and smiled as calmly as I could when I saw the streak of gray in his hair where the part might have been. "We can handle this." he said, "Thank you for your concern."
When I got back to my van, I watched the cop lead the man back to his the cruiser and without so much as a question they drove off. Scarcely a moment later, the tow truck operator had hitched up the wreck and sped off behind them.
I sat there, lost in a flood of feelings and incongruities, watching the traffic pass as though nothing had happened. My heart was pounding and I had that singularly uncomfortable feeling that accompanies a brush with death. I had trouble forming a coherent thought, much less a question.
I started the engine and the radio blared up, continuing the same song that was playing when the truck flew through my life.
Three or four minutes at the most, and you wouldn't know that anything had happened at all except for the...
I twisted my neck looking up and down that road.
Where the fuck are his skid marks?
I looked in my rearview mirror.
Where the fuck are my skid marks?
The oleander hedge was solid and so unruffled as to give no indication of me where the truck had come through. Only a pale flesh-colored plastic crucifix, shattered, flattened in the fast lane, testified to the location of the truck's touchdown point.
I got back out of my van and took the Polaroid with me as I pushed through the green stick fragrance of the hedge to the other side of the highway. Again I found no skid marks, no debris, no evidence that anything had happened in the last five minutes. I reeled under the possibility that I was hallucinating.
Nothing looked out of the ordinary; nothing had changed in the dry heat, pollen heavy air, under the crop-duster sky field, next to the mouse-hawk oleander shade death bush. Just the heat-rippled, grease-striped asphalt crown of the highway and miles of tar patch squiggles that covered every crack, every fissure along the beaten wheel tracks, tar wiggles and lines that formed serifs and darts and wingdings following no logical pattern but suggesting the trembling cursive hand of an aged calligrapher or the squared ideoforms of Thailand or a bold flowing Arabic script revealing the vile name of some long forgotten demon; a sigil, an unspeakable name.
"Acabo de ver a diablo." the man had whispered.
I took dozens of Polaroids of the tar squiggles before a mounting fear churned in my stomach. I prayed to los Angeles for one more milagro as I climbed back through the hedge and drove away as fast as I could. The little square photos developed on the passenger seat next to me - deliberate black filigree on stained highway - and I knew I had passed into the desert, into the war zone... into my cauldron... and there was much to fear.
When Paddy spilled his Harley and didn’t get back up, I was left with a hole in my spirit that cried out for healing. Confession, Absolution, Communion and Redemption, to put it in the easy Catholic jargon of my disintegrating family - my empty gesture, echo verse, hate-sprung love, ad hominem blood.
I use their words because they once were my words and my tongue stings from their taste. But Confession is the first station at the beginning of my inbred redemption cycle, so I have nowhere else to begin.
I was an “Altar Boy” until thirteen years old. Altar Boy/class clown - malleable and acquiescent, the way St. Boniface's nuns loved boys to be. "Surely Martin is meant for the priesthood! He has the Call!" Those tired Dominican women were hoping to hand select, groom and "show the way" to boys who might become the men who would eventually order their nunnery lives.
It took my fiery, red-faced renunciation of the tenets and dogmas of Mother Church to spare me from the horrors of LaSalle Military Academy, the Seminary and then a life of celibate service. During my repudiation, my own mother - the woman who sat at the kitchen table with me and led me through the Baltimore Catechism - finally broke down, teary-eyed, and whispered, "All right. It's okay. I don't believe it all either."
That stopped my young heart cold, but I continued to argue and struggle like a victorious prize-fighter, swept up in the heat of the bout, too busy dancing and jabbing, too punch drunk to let the referee lift his arm in triumph.
An uneasy moment blinked by before I realized that my hot words were now hollow, my protestations, unopposed.
The impact of her words was not a victory for me, not a triumph of honesty over blind faith or even a moment of shared empty-soul camaraderie between mother and first son. “We believe in nothing” was her message “as a family, we have no faith.”
The sobering chill of that thought re-wrote volumes of my memories. Mom's simple homilies? Meaningless. Dad's big show of "going to church" and belonging to all the right religious organizations? A sham. My time as an Altar boy? Jesus!
Those incensed mornings and weekends would have been better spent in the service of a stage magician, some tuxedoed illusionist, running props on and off stage, reacting with innocent-faced surprise when the body is finally beheld, unsawn.
Hoc est corpus.
But the framework of my life had already been Martyr-oriented, sacrifice driven, given to expect the trials of Job when all seems to be good and happy and prosperous. I want to spit in the face of the person responsible for rigging me this way, for putting my piece of cheese at the end of the electrified maze corridor, for setting up my savings account in the great beyond, so there is no interest, just penalty, but I would wind up wiping spittle from my mirror.
I know I can no sooner change my past than I can grow wings or live underwater. A man is a man built upon other men and their laws. So, to the desert - the wasteland that knows not waste - the barren, fruitful, empty, enriching, desolate, spiritual desert. Where we see our mortality in the evaporation of morning dew and the watchers watch the seekers seek.
As my departure day neared, I felt as though I was embarking on a pilgrimage, a spiritual journey with physical destination, under a full moon, with no god or goddess to please. This was to be my sojourn into the cauldron; alive, aware and open to whatever lies in my path.
Lies in my past.
I wanted to record everything I encountered, fearing that some tiny puzzle-piece might slip past me or fall thought the net of my senses, mixing with the dust-rake of my feet along the way.
I would bring video, film and audio recorders, notepads surely, but what of the touch, taste and smell? Could I trust my memory? Would it present itself to me in that way? Would what present itself to me?
My preparations questioned the goal of my search. What imprint on the senses does one’s soul make?
Days later, on the highway, each expectant mile brought jagged pieces of an unseen puzzle; casual observations of seemingly unrelated elements that, when held in concert, bore the mounting heart-tremble realization that there was surely some spiritual connection just beyond the reach of my reason.
Fields dotted with russet automobile skeletons, the breathtaking, tire-dodging scurry of road game, the toneless murmur of my wheels on the highway and the throbbing whistle of my radio antenna ripping through the pollen-heavy air brought on a warm, sun-dazzled intoxication – I was cast loose from the steering wheel and pedals and instruments of the car, that seemed somewhere far below me.
A rush of cool, dark shadow swept in through my window, climbed up the side of my face and spilled across the windshield so abruptly that I flinched and stiff-armed the steering wheel; pushing back into my seat to avoid the impact of whatever unimaginable object might have caused such sudden darkness.
Above me, up through the car’s moon roof, I could see a growling black shape rise, slowing as it wheeled upward, soaring into the brilliant noon; its voluptuous roar swooping into a disappointed groan that sent tremors through my cheekbones, back into my head, and down into my chest.
It fell back on itself, turning end over end as it dropped from the sky; an electric blue plume of smoke left at the vertex of its climb, another throaty growl swelling as it dove back toward my van like a great bird of prey having looped into attack trajectory with an effortless pirouette.
Its wings were trussed top and bottom strung with long cable sinews that thrummed and sang out their own cry as the weight and wind and speed turned mounting tension into deadly accurate, rock-steady flight.
Twenty-five, possibly twenty feet above my head I saw the face of the crop-duster’s pilot, calm and indifferent, as he rolled into straight and level flight above the highway, zoomed out over a bean field and spewed out a white spoor of death.
I felt gut-punched; panting, nerves tingling from the unconscious demon fear my mind had thrown down into my heart, an unwarranted, self-defeating emotion for a man committed to walk heavy in the heartland of spirits. I slid my foot off the gas pedal and coasted onto the fast lane shoulder of the road; scatter gravel over dusty packed clay. Each passing car created a highway speed slipstream at pulled at the van, rocking me, tugging at me to get back out onto the blacktop and continue on my way.
Stop here for a minute, take a drink of water, collect your wits -- miles to go before the high desert. But, truly, this is all desert.
The plane continued to swoop, roll and loop; plowing its mid-air field deep with insecticide and high octane exhaust that settled to the ground and wafted steadily back across the highway’s center-divide stand of oleander hedge, giving each shrub, in turn, the appearance of smoldering, like the burning bush that was ablaze, and yet not consumed, on Ararat.
I killed the engine and opened my door, letting a blast of dry heat lift the sweat from my face; drops evaporating quickly in the traffic-troubled breeze, cooling me with their sublimation into vapor, their absorption back into the endless cycle that falls from the clouds to be drawn up from the ground and pour from a bottle only to begin the cycle again through me.
My legs ached and I needed to stretch-walk, but when I swung my feet out to slide off my seat, I was stopped by a sight that once again brought blood rushing to my head.
On the litter strewn shoulder, under my boots, next to a strip of twisted retread, was a dead hawk. Had I slipped off the seat I would have stepped directly onto it; the tip of my toe at its beak. I spread my feet and, to my surprise, a gray field mouse struggled to get free of the bird’s clenched black talons - bleeding its life out into the parched clay, in the final spasms of death.
When I pried open the hawk’s death grip, the sunk-eyed mouse was unable to escape, so violent were its throes. I carried it into the oleander shade out of some sense of naked pity and vulnerability, so that it might grow cold before the earth sent up its horde of relentless scavengers.
I remembered the pet funerals of my childhood, when I learned the ritual and respect afforded even the smallest living thing.
And how my brothers, sister and I held sacred the miracle dark passage of house cat or yard dog or storm-struck bird or aged hamster with a shoe box and paper shroud, with life-photo, flower or favored chew-toy, in a garden grave and twig marker or cobble headstone – consecrated by our tears and prayers. For we already feared the inconceivable passage of our own Grandma and Grandpa, maybe even Mom or Dad or a friend in the hospital, car wreck, plane crash, that would bring not a few scant moments, but years of tear-stained bereavement.
Few of us, in our callow rehearsals of inhumation, ever stopped to consider our own frailty and hazard in such a precarious world and our own eventual mortal throes. But I did.
And I still do.
So, Mr. Mouse was laid on the shade cool earth and, as his life drifted off, I remembered that anything more that what he had right there, at that moment, is window-dressing and illusion.
As it was for Paddy. As it will be with me.
The moment the mouse’s death rigor came and passed, there was no more. I turned to the hawk. Using the knife left to me by my dead brother, I cut off the hawk’s legs just above the talons and wrapped them in a sheet of wind torn newspaper. I didn't know what purpose they might serve, but a compelling urge to take them along with me rendered the blood and gore merely color and particles on my hands, not the flesh and blood of a noble bird of prey that probably looped into attack trajectory with an effortless pirouette.
Then I stepped back up into my van.
I wiped the gore onto the leg of my pants before starting the engine, taking a brief moment before driving off to remember the beauty of the hawk and its magnificent birdness as it lie on the ground. I thought of the Cochiti legend of the neglectful mother Crow who abandoned her nest and lost her hatchlings to a Hawk that took pity on them. When I glanced down at the legless carcass looking for faint signs of that mythic devotion, a blast of highway car-wind rolled it into the oleander shade and I began to drive down the shoulder of the road.
At fifty, I nudged a front tire up onto the road's fast lane and turned on the radio.
A deafening thump shock wave hit the front of my car and mixed with a blare of Mexican accordion music, as a blue pickup truck exploded through the center divide; a spray of oleander leaves and flowers blasted high into the air as it set down onto the road in front of me sliding sideways.
Roaring, howling, its tires liquefied and burned furiously into white smoke as it cut a path
across my lane, out of control and about to roll over. My own tires screamed as I stood fullweight on the brake pedal, but we hurtled toward each other, locked on a course I knew I could not survive. For the briefest split-second I saw the pick-up driver spin his wheels into the slide, pointing the truck toward the cinderblock sound wall that at the outer edge of the highway.
This simple correction, this panic reaction, unbridled the pick-up's momentum and it rocketed through my lane, past me, and straight into the wall. I couldn't not look as he hit the masonry barrier head-on. The shiny metal fenders and hood of the truck crumpled, rammed back into its cab; chrome trim, glass and plastic erupting in a shower of fragments that rebounded from the wall and bounced across the roof and bedcover, then rained down onto the ground.
He's dead. I thought, skidding to a stop just past where our coal black tire tracks crossed.
I'll try to help him, but I'm probably going to watch him die.
The traffic slowed, but kept driving by and I had to dash across the blacktop to avoid a long line of cars. I stopped at the skewed door of the wreck when the driver kicked it open and
hopped out.
I said, he hopped out.
I watched, speechless, a sinking feeling in my gut, as he walked up to me, hand extended as though we had just been introduced. Short, five, five-two, brown with a thatch of hair that stood up like it had never known a comb. He was forty, maybe fifty. I couldn't tell because he was... intact, uninjured, perfect; a front gold tooth shining in the noon sun above a sparkling crucifix on chain that bounced against his coffee tan chest. He was happy!
"Milagro!" he shouted, "Viva los Angeles!"
We were hundreds of miles from L.A., so I assumed he was in shock or disoriented, shook into confusion by a blow that should have killed him.
The truck had punched a grotto into the cement block wall and steam rose from the hot fluids that splashed down out of the crushed engine compartment onto the clay.
His hand was warm and callused and he pumped it up and down with what must have been pure adrenaline overload. My hand started to hurt, but I was so amazed that I let him continue until I was sure I wasn't missing some tiny, vital fact that might drop him to his knees before the rush wore off.
"Amigo!" he shouted, "Hagame usted el favor de venir!"
He lead me back to the wreck, pulled a photo down from the visor and held it in front of my face. It was a stiffly posed portrait of him in a suit standing behind a chair where an angelic Mexican woman clutched a swaddled infant to her breast. In the foreground, a pudgy girl of eight or nine wearing a lacy white dress knelt on a pillow holding a bouquet of camellias. Her eyes were cast upward to a superimposed cameo of the face of Christ, bleeding from the thorn crown, above heavy-lidded eyes that showed the very soul of compassion.
"Mi hija. Se llama Pilar. Tiene nueve anos."
That was when I understood "los angeles". His angels; his little girls. He was alive and he would see his little angels again.
Milagro, miracle. No shit.
There was no way he could have been sitting behind the steering wheel on impact, for it was buried into the seat-back with so much force it had buckled back around its shaft under the pressure. And he couldn't have fallen to the floor, because the engine, still clicking as the heat ran out of it, filled the entire lower section of the cab.
Scattered around the interior were holy pictures, rosary beads, palm crosses and statues of Jesus and Mary as well as a few haloed saints I couldn't identify right off. It was a dashboard altar that had obviously served its purpose before being demolished. On the seat, a Spanish photo pamphlet from the DMV was splayed open, showing a posed shot of Hispanic drunk driver being arrested by a Caucasian Highway Patrolman with a streak of gray in his hair where the part might have been.
A Highway Patrol cruiser and a tow truck pulled up behind the wreck and their drivers got out in such perfect unison that I almost missed the significance of their arrival. It hasn't been more than sixty seconds since the crash. How can this be? Even a cell phone in the hand of the first person to see it would not have reached 911 yet, much less bring them both this fast. Speed trap? That wouldn't explain the tow truck. On the way to another accident? I can't imagine both traveling together, not to mention the remarkable co-incidence of passing right here, right now.
"Acabo de ver a diablo." the man whispered,staring into my eyes.
I went cold. "Diablo?"
He smiled weakly and straightened up when he saw the Highway Patrolman. I remembered the pamphlet in his truck and leaned closer to him to sniff his breath, but all I could smell was Sage and Manzanita smoke.
His eyes stayed on the cop and he spoke softly as though describing a dream. "Si, si. La Cabeza de Vaca. Ojos rojo. Diente amarillo. Pene enorme..."
"Where? Dónde?" I asked, trying to catch his attention, but he was pre-occupied with the
approaching Highway Patrolman.
"Sir! Please get back to your vehicle and be on your way," the cop yelled to me, "we can handle this."
I took the man's arm and asked him again, "Where? Cuando ocurri eso? Donde est Diablo?"
He stood ramrod straight, but pointed his index finger toward the cab of his truck. "Alli." he coughed, "Hace un momento."
"Return to your vehicle sir, and be on your way," the patrolman repeated. I glanced up at his face and smiled as calmly as I could when I saw the streak of gray in his hair where the part might have been. "We can handle this." he said, "Thank you for your concern."
When I got back to my van, I watched the cop lead the man back to his the cruiser and without so much as a question they drove off. Scarcely a moment later, the tow truck operator had hitched up the wreck and sped off behind them.
I sat there, lost in a flood of feelings and incongruities, watching the traffic pass as though nothing had happened. My heart was pounding and I had that singularly uncomfortable feeling that accompanies a brush with death. I had trouble forming a coherent thought, much less a question.
I started the engine and the radio blared up, continuing the same song that was playing when the truck flew through my life.
Three or four minutes at the most, and you wouldn't know that anything had happened at all except for the...
I twisted my neck looking up and down that road.
Where the fuck are his skid marks?
I looked in my rearview mirror.
Where the fuck are my skid marks?
The oleander hedge was solid and so unruffled as to give no indication of me where the truck had come through. Only a pale flesh-colored plastic crucifix, shattered, flattened in the fast lane, testified to the location of the truck's touchdown point.
I got back out of my van and took the Polaroid with me as I pushed through the green stick fragrance of the hedge to the other side of the highway. Again I found no skid marks, no debris, no evidence that anything had happened in the last five minutes. I reeled under the possibility that I was hallucinating.
Nothing looked out of the ordinary; nothing had changed in the dry heat, pollen heavy air, under the crop-duster sky field, next to the mouse-hawk oleander shade death bush. Just the heat-rippled, grease-striped asphalt crown of the highway and miles of tar patch squiggles that covered every crack, every fissure along the beaten wheel tracks, tar wiggles and lines that formed serifs and darts and wingdings following no logical pattern but suggesting the trembling cursive hand of an aged calligrapher or the squared ideoforms of Thailand or a bold flowing Arabic script revealing the vile name of some long forgotten demon; a sigil, an unspeakable name.
"Acabo de ver a diablo." the man had whispered.
I took dozens of Polaroids of the tar squiggles before a mounting fear churned in my stomach. I prayed to los Angeles for one more milagro as I climbed back through the hedge and drove away as fast as I could. The little square photos developed on the passenger seat next to me - deliberate black filigree on stained highway - and I knew I had passed into the desert, into the war zone... into my cauldron... and there was much to fear.
Food Water Maps
Heading south along the Mohave Freeway, north of where Yemo Road heads south into Daggett, I saw the hand-painted sign; a weathered sheet of plywood, held high by two creosote-soaked railroad ties jutting up from the scruff-sandy shoulder of the road. It read FOOD WATER MAPS. The words food and water were crisp, black, block letters above a paintbrush-daubed scrawled maps — obviously an afterthought, added below the survival essentials in hopes of financial survival.
It was meant for those who found the vast horizon devoid of any comforting landmarks and the highways a confusing maze under the unrelenting, pounding heat of the sun.
Locals knew every rock and lizard, so the late signage add was explainable, excusable.
Of course the procession of mountains to my right lent some directional assurance that I was headed somewhere… if nowhere other than where the mountaintops eventually stretched south in a staccato parade toward Sheephole Valley and Joshua Tree.
Another, more distant hillside sign announced, Yarrow Ravine Rattlesnake Habitat Area. Pass. Years ago, a rattlesnake bite killed a friend’s Australian Shepherd and I never forgave the viper for this loss. The serpent produces deadly venom and, with some refining at a laboratory, anti-venom. Somehow there’s a divinely ironic joke in that.
So I leaned forward in my seat to let the sweat evaporate from my shirtback, signaled an exit-lane turn to the empty highway behind me, and began to slow down. When I opened my window, a blast of searing roadbed air dried my back and drew beads of fresh sweat from my brow.
The exit ramp ended at an oiled dirt road. I turned toward the hills where a small cluster of sun-scorched wooden buildings lay along a central, paved crossroad . Sand, desiccated shrub branches, and leafless weeds strewn across the oil-packed dirt became a turbulent scud as I passed. In my rearview mirror, they rose to join the SUV’s slipstream draft. I knew I was leaving a trail of sorts and it reminded me of the confusion I had left at home; a storm cloud of emotions and unanswered questions, arguments and tears.
Why does the passing of a loved one rob me of my leisurely, unexamined life? Why does death prompt ruthless introspection, inevitably becoming The Grand Inquisitor for heart-heavy survivors? Why do we casually embrace live for today and dismiss memento mori?
Focusing ahead, I saw a thick, black snake; a long coiled helix lying on the road ahead of me. I wrenched the steering wheel to spare it, but my wheels went directly over it with a soft thud. I knew it would be either dead or wounded. Dead would be regrettable. Wounded, it would be in agony and unapproachable. So I continued on, damning my carelessness - nearing a rattlesnake habitat, speeding on a rutted dirt road turn-off, and indulging in my addled, rearview musing as memories flashed by. Foolish. Hell, any one of those hazards could be enough to end my wayfaring into the wasteland and hence, my search for answers.
In the rearview I saw the snake roll over and over onto the side of the road – still in its corkscrew-spiral, seemingly undamaged by the impact. I slowed to a crawl.
It took a few moments to see clearly that my “snake” was merely a long shred of a tire tread, probably flung aside by a disintegrating truck tire as the vehicle limped off of the highway. I felt relieved, having not added more death to a place where death and life – in balance - hold authority over, and claim to, every cycle of existence. I also felt the flush of adrenaline.
I let the SUV coast up to the stop sign and sat there a while to take in the layout of the streets.
Ahead, the road just ended in a pile of rubbish. Beyond the litter, a simple stone wall encircled crosses and gravestones. Some had flowers placed on them, brown and brittle. I saw a child’s toy in front of one and a pair of work boots next to another. The ground was covered with dry branches and parchment-curled paper debris. Perhaps this place has been forgotten or maybe there is no one alive to keep it clean.
If I turned left, there was nothing of note, save a few tumbledown, clapboard buildings and the remains of wheel-less, derelict, fire engine on cinderblocks near the center of the street. The hulk had been stripped, shot at, and left to rust. Its dull red paint had given way to scab-brown rust that promised to eventually consume the entire vehicle.
To my right were several plank-sided wooden buildings, one of which had a few vehicles parked in front. There was another Food Water Maps sign nailed to the side of its lapstrake marquee that faced my direction – probably to attract other visitors who stopped at the intersection as I had. But this sign was newer than the one on the roadside – and the word maps was in bold, black letters that matched food and water. This bode well, since some signs lie, merely marking a point in the past before a business perished and its owners left the roadside invitation to succumb in its own ruination. In this instance, the sign’s offer looked promising.
I wanted something other than water to drink and a place where I could take a break from the road, so I headed right and parked next to the pick-up. On its door were the faded words, Valley Plumbing – Heating and Cooling. The sun was directly overhead, so I slid the moonroof cover shut, opened the widows a bit, got out, and stretched.
The sun, when it’s given a chance to carve its fury into wood is brutal but yields somewhat to the growth lineaments created when the board was still within the tree. Once the grain revealed by the sawyer these fine lines, smooth and cursive, hint at the complexity with. But after years of exposure to the unrelenting desert radiation, scorching 120-degree heat, and an infrequent quenching under brief, torrential rains; the paint curls and blows away, the grain is drawn out, the pulpwood shrinks back,and the board is left with deep creases and chines and cracks. These board have become tableaus, death masks of timbers; mummified lumber.
When I looked through the dozen or so windows that flank the building’s weathered door, I saw some shadow motion inside and silhouettes of a couple at a window table told me the place was open. So, I stepped up to the door.
The round, stained-glass window at eye level in the door was no bigger than a dinner plate and presented a leaded-glass mandala of faceted butterflies encircling a single red rose. The image seemed a bit out of place – bearing the only vibrant colors I could see on the building – but it was a recognizable cosmos representation of harmony, cast in silica sand, not unlike the sands that stretched for hundreds of miles around me. So, this was all a sea, at one time, and I am on the beach with no shoreline.
I turned the doorknob and stepped over the threshold.
Coffee and bacon, fresh bread, a faint floral scent, and the low murmur of hushed conversation set the moment. The room was entirely wood: walls and floors, and a long counter. Beyond that, a pass-through window gave a glimpse of the kitchen where a grey-haired woman was busy at a griddle. I heard someone else back there, but the pass-through window limited my view.
The counter was lined with wooden-top kitchen stools rather than pedestal-mounted cushioned seats usually found in a diner. And the room was a collection of mismatched dining room tables and chairs: straight-backs, cane-bottoms, modern steel, and plastic chairs, tabletops were Formica, enamel, and glass. I imagined these yard sale orphans must have been selected to fit a tiny start-up budget with all serving merely their utilitarian function rather than a costly thematic design. However, they were, at once, efficient and charming in a uniquely Mojave roadside café sense.
Two stools to my right, a tired-looking man in soiled khaki work clothes sipped coffee and pushed his sunnysides to the edge of his plate. He gave me a quick glimpse, set the cup down, forked a yolk onto a toast point and dispatched it with a single bite. He might have been a another traveler of seventy or so, or a desert resident in his fifties.
We all learn that the sun is not partial to working its art exclusively on wood.
Except for my neighbor’s meal, the counter was clear; no salt, pepper, ketchup or sugar. I glanced around, looking for a waitress and saw a menu on a nearby table. As I turned to stand, I looked back over my shoulder and saw the roses. A shelf ran across the front and side walls a scant foot from the ceiling. In all, it easily totaled eighty or ninety feet long and, lined on it, were bouquets of, dead roses, each laid on its side with blooms facing toward the door. Dozens of the stiff, burgundy sprays crowned the room bearing a light shroud of dust and, a few, some cobwebs. I was transfixed by the sight, puzzled how this studied assemblage could come to be. I only knew rose bouquets as an expression of love and, once dead, sent to the trash.
I picked up the menu and I got my second shock. Its cover bore a drawing of the stained-glass window I had seen at the door, below a calligraphy cadenza that read, ROSE’S.
The grey-haired woman was waiting at the counter, holding a menu, when I returned to my stool. Her weary smile spoke of long days and longer weeks. The lines about her green eyes had been etched by laughter, sadness, pain, and hope. Her hair, pulled back in a severe ponytail, had lost a few wisps that framed her face with a delicate resplendence. I held up my menu and managed a sheepish grin.
She said, “Do you need a minute?”
“Yes”
“Coffee?”
“Yep”
My eyes were still on her face as she turned to fill a cup and set it in front of me. She noticed my interest and, I managed an embarrassed head bow rather than saying thanks aloud.
The words on the menu were lost to me as my mind entertained thought after thought. Was she Rose? Were the roses given during courtship? Did they belong to her daughter? Why would a person keep so many expressions of affection on display? And, who was the other person with her in the kitchen?
I looked up and saw her standing at the kitchen refrigerator. Her shoulders were burdened and she shuffled to a prep table with a container of vegetables. I was captivated by her – not sexually, but in a desire to know her story, what had caused her pain, what life path she had chosen to overcome it, how she managed to smile, although weakly, and what lesson I might learn from her about grief.
We all have grief. I was lost in grief. We all go to pieces. I was fragmented.
Rose’s menu was bare-bones breakfast with a smattering of Tex-Mex burritos, enchiladas, huevos, chorizo and salsas. I figured this was a nod to the under-population that journeys north and south, matching the predictable maturation of field and orchard crops. A life of following the weather and the miracle of germination, growth, and flowering that is plucked before it begins anew – removed from its cycle to feed another’s cycle.
I saw no open/closed times on the menu or descriptions between the names and prices. This was a restaurant of opportunity – whose customers passed its exit at the right time on the right day or drove on to the next road sign. I had no questions about the bill `o fare and returned to looking at the bouquets.
When I turned back to the counter, the grey-haired woman returned, wiping her hands on a towel. No pad, No pencil. No need.
“Ready?”
I looked up at her wide-eyed and innocent.
“Two, over easy, hash, and wheat toast.”
The old guy to my right looked over, recognizing I had ordered the same as he had and grunted in approval. The woman glanced down at my coffee.
“You good here?”
“I’d like a hotten-up.”
She tipped the carafe to top off my cup. The towel was covering her left hand. I wanted to see if there was a ring – any ring – some indication that the bouquets had worked, that she had love or loved, and that there was some joy behind her less than joyful smile. Perhaps her love was her unseen kitchen companion. Perhaps her love was marked by one of the stones I saw beyond the rubbish heap. My need to fit this piece of desert life, and some lesson, into my desolation drive became a pre-occupation, interrupted by the old man clearing his throat.
He said, “Going north?”
“Nope, just going around… just around.”
“Wind’s picking up by Harvard, Mannix, Midway.”
The names he spoke bought up images far removed from his badlands map weather advice, so I nodded knowingly as if I understood. School, detective, battle - that’s all I got.
“Well, there you go.” I said, using my usual non-response phrase that allows me to avoid asking for clarification and encouraging a chat. I don’t need my SUV sand-blasted, but I sure didn’t need an extended discussion about local geography and wind warnings. A sandstorm might hold more wisdom at this point than the roses, but I was pre-occupied with the woman’s story.
I closed my eyes and let images flow and they coalesced in my imagination. I saw the bouquets fresh in vases; bright and dappled with dew upon a Formica dining room table. I saw the woman younger and beaming, tears of happiness pooled in her eyes. A faceless suitor, stood before her, shy and scuffing the wood floor with the toe of his unpolished cowboy boot. I was creating a scenario out of my selfless hopes.
My plate hit the counter and she was walking away before I turned.
“Thanks!” I called after her.
She waved the towel in response, one quick flick and she was gone.
I took stock of where I was and what I had experienced on the road so far: the desert is a sacred place, the wasteland wastes nothing, we are surrounded by danger, movement means survival, and love and life are inseparable – without either there can only be emptiness. People live here despite the hardships.
For all of my enlightenment, I still craved a word or thought that would free me from the illogical emptiness I felt in my life since my brother was killed. Survivor guilt, it’s called – the belief that surviving a traumatic event where others did not paralyzed the survivor. Psychologists have decided it’s not a diagnosis of mental impairment. It’s a significant component of PTSD.
Great. I’m piecing together the same shattered-spirit I brought home from the jungle long ago. I was sure I had compartmentalized those doldrums into an occasional bout of the Blues or a subdued afternoon of thumbing through old, faded photos and crying.
No luck. This is a chronic disposition as long as we live; the bondage of death shame.
The woman was rinsing off potatoes at a kitchen sink against the rear wall of the building. Above the water, a double-hung window offered a view of highway, shimmering in the distance, hovering above an undulating mirage pond.
When the sun tires of blistering the body, it devils the mind with illusions and disorientations; loosing familiar strictures of perception and logic. Reality blends with delirium until the simplest choices become disordered. Wanderers stray into crucial situations, with no guide other than their mounting uncertainty and fear. They reach for imaginary waters, shed the sun-shielding protection of clothing, dehydrate quickly, and buckle under mind-numbing exhaustion. Claimed by the wasteland, they find the sand cool to the touch and some attempt to drink the sand; the brain becomes incapable of recognizing madness.
There must be a way to move through sorrow and emerge, if only by changing. Once past the loss, life will be different. I will be too. If I am to shed my tears, shed my sadness, shed my skin… I must burn away that which is unnecessary for growth. My uncertain mind had lead me to this Hell-hot venture, where I dared to confront my disconsolate spirit on burning ground, sear away the unwanted hopelessness, temper my will, dry my tears, and drink beatific rain that falls, quenching my crematorium flames only to rise again, reinvigorated, to begin once again. I pray so…
The woman turned to set a washed potato on drain board. I could see her silhouette, her stance at the sink, and her casual grace while doing such a mundane job. She held her head high, and split her attention between rinsing the potatoes and the window view. Her left hand pushed back a wisp of undone hair and I saw something odd. Squinting hard to see the contour of her hand in front of the windows noon light, I see, on her finger, a sparkle; a jewel’s glimmer backlit by the Mojave’s overwhelming glare.
A story unfolds In my mind. She is Rose, the recipient of the roses. Romance found her and someone – perhaps the other person in the kitchen – joined her in creating this oasis in the hinterland. She may have endured pain, perhaps even soul-deep loss, but she has had a time of flowers and kisses and promises and love to ground her, to secure her. Isn’t that enough for one to keep a bit of happiness tucked away for intimate moments with a lover, neighborly greetings to strangers, wistful smiles while pouring coffee? Could it be enough to restore one’s yearning to live one’s life unencumbered by regret and continued lamentation? I see it now, and may have learned a small lesson. Could apply it to my bereavement and walk out of the desert renewed and refreshed?
The plate on the counter no longer interested me. I was searching for a path home where my life waited while I searched for myself. I turned to see the old man who had left, leaving an unobstructed view of a tall wire rack holding an assortment of sagging maps.
The woman returned.
“All done?” She asked, looking at my half-eaten breakfast.
I took the opportunity to look into her eyes. Her thoughts were somewhere else and I waited a bit too long before responding.
“Yes. It was very good.”
She held the dish towel in her right hand as she picked up the plate and I looked at her left hand.
No ring. Just a few droplets of water, left undried on her fingers. I must have seen the window light refracted by a few droplets of water. I looked down at the grain of the countertop. My story disappeared. My assumptions were my fears re-cast as another’s success. My lesson was clear.
We dream away our problems, expecting a magical cure. There is no timeline, no elixir, no remedy for one’s re-integration into the world they left. I had swallowed a placebo of my own making.
I left more than enough cash on the counter to cover the food, a good-sized tip, and the hope that the woman had a good life. My eagerness to graduate from this self-imposed learning had caused me to dream that a drop of water was a reason to live.
“Good morning!” I called out. “Have a good day!”
“Mornin’…” she said, and returned to her work.
The dining room was empty as I left, taking one more look at the rosy bower.
My SUV was oven-hot despite having left the windows open, so I opened the door and waited a moment. A man opened the front door and stepped out, holding a toolbag. The woman stood behind him in the doorway and gave him a smile and a hug. He nodded as she thanked him and walked to his pick-up truck.
I waited until they were both out of sight, feeling depleted and lonelier than I had before breakfast.
The highway waited – hot, dry, patient.
It was meant for those who found the vast horizon devoid of any comforting landmarks and the highways a confusing maze under the unrelenting, pounding heat of the sun.
Locals knew every rock and lizard, so the late signage add was explainable, excusable.
Of course the procession of mountains to my right lent some directional assurance that I was headed somewhere… if nowhere other than where the mountaintops eventually stretched south in a staccato parade toward Sheephole Valley and Joshua Tree.
Another, more distant hillside sign announced, Yarrow Ravine Rattlesnake Habitat Area. Pass. Years ago, a rattlesnake bite killed a friend’s Australian Shepherd and I never forgave the viper for this loss. The serpent produces deadly venom and, with some refining at a laboratory, anti-venom. Somehow there’s a divinely ironic joke in that.
So I leaned forward in my seat to let the sweat evaporate from my shirtback, signaled an exit-lane turn to the empty highway behind me, and began to slow down. When I opened my window, a blast of searing roadbed air dried my back and drew beads of fresh sweat from my brow.
The exit ramp ended at an oiled dirt road. I turned toward the hills where a small cluster of sun-scorched wooden buildings lay along a central, paved crossroad . Sand, desiccated shrub branches, and leafless weeds strewn across the oil-packed dirt became a turbulent scud as I passed. In my rearview mirror, they rose to join the SUV’s slipstream draft. I knew I was leaving a trail of sorts and it reminded me of the confusion I had left at home; a storm cloud of emotions and unanswered questions, arguments and tears.
Why does the passing of a loved one rob me of my leisurely, unexamined life? Why does death prompt ruthless introspection, inevitably becoming The Grand Inquisitor for heart-heavy survivors? Why do we casually embrace live for today and dismiss memento mori?
Focusing ahead, I saw a thick, black snake; a long coiled helix lying on the road ahead of me. I wrenched the steering wheel to spare it, but my wheels went directly over it with a soft thud. I knew it would be either dead or wounded. Dead would be regrettable. Wounded, it would be in agony and unapproachable. So I continued on, damning my carelessness - nearing a rattlesnake habitat, speeding on a rutted dirt road turn-off, and indulging in my addled, rearview musing as memories flashed by. Foolish. Hell, any one of those hazards could be enough to end my wayfaring into the wasteland and hence, my search for answers.
In the rearview I saw the snake roll over and over onto the side of the road – still in its corkscrew-spiral, seemingly undamaged by the impact. I slowed to a crawl.
It took a few moments to see clearly that my “snake” was merely a long shred of a tire tread, probably flung aside by a disintegrating truck tire as the vehicle limped off of the highway. I felt relieved, having not added more death to a place where death and life – in balance - hold authority over, and claim to, every cycle of existence. I also felt the flush of adrenaline.
I let the SUV coast up to the stop sign and sat there a while to take in the layout of the streets.
Ahead, the road just ended in a pile of rubbish. Beyond the litter, a simple stone wall encircled crosses and gravestones. Some had flowers placed on them, brown and brittle. I saw a child’s toy in front of one and a pair of work boots next to another. The ground was covered with dry branches and parchment-curled paper debris. Perhaps this place has been forgotten or maybe there is no one alive to keep it clean.
If I turned left, there was nothing of note, save a few tumbledown, clapboard buildings and the remains of wheel-less, derelict, fire engine on cinderblocks near the center of the street. The hulk had been stripped, shot at, and left to rust. Its dull red paint had given way to scab-brown rust that promised to eventually consume the entire vehicle.
To my right were several plank-sided wooden buildings, one of which had a few vehicles parked in front. There was another Food Water Maps sign nailed to the side of its lapstrake marquee that faced my direction – probably to attract other visitors who stopped at the intersection as I had. But this sign was newer than the one on the roadside – and the word maps was in bold, black letters that matched food and water. This bode well, since some signs lie, merely marking a point in the past before a business perished and its owners left the roadside invitation to succumb in its own ruination. In this instance, the sign’s offer looked promising.
I wanted something other than water to drink and a place where I could take a break from the road, so I headed right and parked next to the pick-up. On its door were the faded words, Valley Plumbing – Heating and Cooling. The sun was directly overhead, so I slid the moonroof cover shut, opened the widows a bit, got out, and stretched.
The sun, when it’s given a chance to carve its fury into wood is brutal but yields somewhat to the growth lineaments created when the board was still within the tree. Once the grain revealed by the sawyer these fine lines, smooth and cursive, hint at the complexity with. But after years of exposure to the unrelenting desert radiation, scorching 120-degree heat, and an infrequent quenching under brief, torrential rains; the paint curls and blows away, the grain is drawn out, the pulpwood shrinks back,and the board is left with deep creases and chines and cracks. These board have become tableaus, death masks of timbers; mummified lumber.
When I looked through the dozen or so windows that flank the building’s weathered door, I saw some shadow motion inside and silhouettes of a couple at a window table told me the place was open. So, I stepped up to the door.
The round, stained-glass window at eye level in the door was no bigger than a dinner plate and presented a leaded-glass mandala of faceted butterflies encircling a single red rose. The image seemed a bit out of place – bearing the only vibrant colors I could see on the building – but it was a recognizable cosmos representation of harmony, cast in silica sand, not unlike the sands that stretched for hundreds of miles around me. So, this was all a sea, at one time, and I am on the beach with no shoreline.
I turned the doorknob and stepped over the threshold.
Coffee and bacon, fresh bread, a faint floral scent, and the low murmur of hushed conversation set the moment. The room was entirely wood: walls and floors, and a long counter. Beyond that, a pass-through window gave a glimpse of the kitchen where a grey-haired woman was busy at a griddle. I heard someone else back there, but the pass-through window limited my view.
The counter was lined with wooden-top kitchen stools rather than pedestal-mounted cushioned seats usually found in a diner. And the room was a collection of mismatched dining room tables and chairs: straight-backs, cane-bottoms, modern steel, and plastic chairs, tabletops were Formica, enamel, and glass. I imagined these yard sale orphans must have been selected to fit a tiny start-up budget with all serving merely their utilitarian function rather than a costly thematic design. However, they were, at once, efficient and charming in a uniquely Mojave roadside café sense.
Two stools to my right, a tired-looking man in soiled khaki work clothes sipped coffee and pushed his sunnysides to the edge of his plate. He gave me a quick glimpse, set the cup down, forked a yolk onto a toast point and dispatched it with a single bite. He might have been a another traveler of seventy or so, or a desert resident in his fifties.
We all learn that the sun is not partial to working its art exclusively on wood.
Except for my neighbor’s meal, the counter was clear; no salt, pepper, ketchup or sugar. I glanced around, looking for a waitress and saw a menu on a nearby table. As I turned to stand, I looked back over my shoulder and saw the roses. A shelf ran across the front and side walls a scant foot from the ceiling. In all, it easily totaled eighty or ninety feet long and, lined on it, were bouquets of, dead roses, each laid on its side with blooms facing toward the door. Dozens of the stiff, burgundy sprays crowned the room bearing a light shroud of dust and, a few, some cobwebs. I was transfixed by the sight, puzzled how this studied assemblage could come to be. I only knew rose bouquets as an expression of love and, once dead, sent to the trash.
I picked up the menu and I got my second shock. Its cover bore a drawing of the stained-glass window I had seen at the door, below a calligraphy cadenza that read, ROSE’S.
The grey-haired woman was waiting at the counter, holding a menu, when I returned to my stool. Her weary smile spoke of long days and longer weeks. The lines about her green eyes had been etched by laughter, sadness, pain, and hope. Her hair, pulled back in a severe ponytail, had lost a few wisps that framed her face with a delicate resplendence. I held up my menu and managed a sheepish grin.
She said, “Do you need a minute?”
“Yes”
“Coffee?”
“Yep”
My eyes were still on her face as she turned to fill a cup and set it in front of me. She noticed my interest and, I managed an embarrassed head bow rather than saying thanks aloud.
The words on the menu were lost to me as my mind entertained thought after thought. Was she Rose? Were the roses given during courtship? Did they belong to her daughter? Why would a person keep so many expressions of affection on display? And, who was the other person with her in the kitchen?
I looked up and saw her standing at the kitchen refrigerator. Her shoulders were burdened and she shuffled to a prep table with a container of vegetables. I was captivated by her – not sexually, but in a desire to know her story, what had caused her pain, what life path she had chosen to overcome it, how she managed to smile, although weakly, and what lesson I might learn from her about grief.
We all have grief. I was lost in grief. We all go to pieces. I was fragmented.
Rose’s menu was bare-bones breakfast with a smattering of Tex-Mex burritos, enchiladas, huevos, chorizo and salsas. I figured this was a nod to the under-population that journeys north and south, matching the predictable maturation of field and orchard crops. A life of following the weather and the miracle of germination, growth, and flowering that is plucked before it begins anew – removed from its cycle to feed another’s cycle.
I saw no open/closed times on the menu or descriptions between the names and prices. This was a restaurant of opportunity – whose customers passed its exit at the right time on the right day or drove on to the next road sign. I had no questions about the bill `o fare and returned to looking at the bouquets.
When I turned back to the counter, the grey-haired woman returned, wiping her hands on a towel. No pad, No pencil. No need.
“Ready?”
I looked up at her wide-eyed and innocent.
“Two, over easy, hash, and wheat toast.”
The old guy to my right looked over, recognizing I had ordered the same as he had and grunted in approval. The woman glanced down at my coffee.
“You good here?”
“I’d like a hotten-up.”
She tipped the carafe to top off my cup. The towel was covering her left hand. I wanted to see if there was a ring – any ring – some indication that the bouquets had worked, that she had love or loved, and that there was some joy behind her less than joyful smile. Perhaps her love was her unseen kitchen companion. Perhaps her love was marked by one of the stones I saw beyond the rubbish heap. My need to fit this piece of desert life, and some lesson, into my desolation drive became a pre-occupation, interrupted by the old man clearing his throat.
He said, “Going north?”
“Nope, just going around… just around.”
“Wind’s picking up by Harvard, Mannix, Midway.”
The names he spoke bought up images far removed from his badlands map weather advice, so I nodded knowingly as if I understood. School, detective, battle - that’s all I got.
“Well, there you go.” I said, using my usual non-response phrase that allows me to avoid asking for clarification and encouraging a chat. I don’t need my SUV sand-blasted, but I sure didn’t need an extended discussion about local geography and wind warnings. A sandstorm might hold more wisdom at this point than the roses, but I was pre-occupied with the woman’s story.
I closed my eyes and let images flow and they coalesced in my imagination. I saw the bouquets fresh in vases; bright and dappled with dew upon a Formica dining room table. I saw the woman younger and beaming, tears of happiness pooled in her eyes. A faceless suitor, stood before her, shy and scuffing the wood floor with the toe of his unpolished cowboy boot. I was creating a scenario out of my selfless hopes.
My plate hit the counter and she was walking away before I turned.
“Thanks!” I called after her.
She waved the towel in response, one quick flick and she was gone.
I took stock of where I was and what I had experienced on the road so far: the desert is a sacred place, the wasteland wastes nothing, we are surrounded by danger, movement means survival, and love and life are inseparable – without either there can only be emptiness. People live here despite the hardships.
For all of my enlightenment, I still craved a word or thought that would free me from the illogical emptiness I felt in my life since my brother was killed. Survivor guilt, it’s called – the belief that surviving a traumatic event where others did not paralyzed the survivor. Psychologists have decided it’s not a diagnosis of mental impairment. It’s a significant component of PTSD.
Great. I’m piecing together the same shattered-spirit I brought home from the jungle long ago. I was sure I had compartmentalized those doldrums into an occasional bout of the Blues or a subdued afternoon of thumbing through old, faded photos and crying.
No luck. This is a chronic disposition as long as we live; the bondage of death shame.
The woman was rinsing off potatoes at a kitchen sink against the rear wall of the building. Above the water, a double-hung window offered a view of highway, shimmering in the distance, hovering above an undulating mirage pond.
When the sun tires of blistering the body, it devils the mind with illusions and disorientations; loosing familiar strictures of perception and logic. Reality blends with delirium until the simplest choices become disordered. Wanderers stray into crucial situations, with no guide other than their mounting uncertainty and fear. They reach for imaginary waters, shed the sun-shielding protection of clothing, dehydrate quickly, and buckle under mind-numbing exhaustion. Claimed by the wasteland, they find the sand cool to the touch and some attempt to drink the sand; the brain becomes incapable of recognizing madness.
There must be a way to move through sorrow and emerge, if only by changing. Once past the loss, life will be different. I will be too. If I am to shed my tears, shed my sadness, shed my skin… I must burn away that which is unnecessary for growth. My uncertain mind had lead me to this Hell-hot venture, where I dared to confront my disconsolate spirit on burning ground, sear away the unwanted hopelessness, temper my will, dry my tears, and drink beatific rain that falls, quenching my crematorium flames only to rise again, reinvigorated, to begin once again. I pray so…
The woman turned to set a washed potato on drain board. I could see her silhouette, her stance at the sink, and her casual grace while doing such a mundane job. She held her head high, and split her attention between rinsing the potatoes and the window view. Her left hand pushed back a wisp of undone hair and I saw something odd. Squinting hard to see the contour of her hand in front of the windows noon light, I see, on her finger, a sparkle; a jewel’s glimmer backlit by the Mojave’s overwhelming glare.
A story unfolds In my mind. She is Rose, the recipient of the roses. Romance found her and someone – perhaps the other person in the kitchen – joined her in creating this oasis in the hinterland. She may have endured pain, perhaps even soul-deep loss, but she has had a time of flowers and kisses and promises and love to ground her, to secure her. Isn’t that enough for one to keep a bit of happiness tucked away for intimate moments with a lover, neighborly greetings to strangers, wistful smiles while pouring coffee? Could it be enough to restore one’s yearning to live one’s life unencumbered by regret and continued lamentation? I see it now, and may have learned a small lesson. Could apply it to my bereavement and walk out of the desert renewed and refreshed?
The plate on the counter no longer interested me. I was searching for a path home where my life waited while I searched for myself. I turned to see the old man who had left, leaving an unobstructed view of a tall wire rack holding an assortment of sagging maps.
The woman returned.
“All done?” She asked, looking at my half-eaten breakfast.
I took the opportunity to look into her eyes. Her thoughts were somewhere else and I waited a bit too long before responding.
“Yes. It was very good.”
She held the dish towel in her right hand as she picked up the plate and I looked at her left hand.
No ring. Just a few droplets of water, left undried on her fingers. I must have seen the window light refracted by a few droplets of water. I looked down at the grain of the countertop. My story disappeared. My assumptions were my fears re-cast as another’s success. My lesson was clear.
We dream away our problems, expecting a magical cure. There is no timeline, no elixir, no remedy for one’s re-integration into the world they left. I had swallowed a placebo of my own making.
I left more than enough cash on the counter to cover the food, a good-sized tip, and the hope that the woman had a good life. My eagerness to graduate from this self-imposed learning had caused me to dream that a drop of water was a reason to live.
“Good morning!” I called out. “Have a good day!”
“Mornin’…” she said, and returned to her work.
The dining room was empty as I left, taking one more look at the rosy bower.
My SUV was oven-hot despite having left the windows open, so I opened the door and waited a moment. A man opened the front door and stepped out, holding a toolbag. The woman stood behind him in the doorway and gave him a smile and a hug. He nodded as she thanked him and walked to his pick-up truck.
I waited until they were both out of sight, feeling depleted and lonelier than I had before breakfast.
The highway waited – hot, dry, patient.
TALC
I had taken all the heat I could by late afternoon, cooped inside the SUV and its puny air conditioner. In the Bay Area, it had worked well; blowing flecks of ice from its dashboard vents and chilling me to the point of nose-numbness. Here in the barrens, it only cooled the one hundred and fifteen degree heat down to a begrudged ninety.
Despite the relative cool airflow from the vents, the dashboard and steering wheel were fiery-hot to the touch. At this temperature, the plastic interior surfaces released volatile organic vapors. They may be hazardous, but more importantly, I find them downright irritating. Without considering the consequences, I burned some cedar and sage sprigs in front of the vent breeze to supplant the plastic smell with something less noxious. The combination of heat and dense, sanctifying smoke, while a more fitting incense, compelled me to get out of the car and take in some fresh air.
Then the road widened enough to pull off onto a solid shoulder, near a sign that had lost its words to the weather. Behind it, two windblown shacks leaned hazardously close to toppling. I parked on the windward side of and set out to survey a high ridge that towered over them. As I drew closer, I saw a door set into the face of a blanched cliff.
The wooden door was marked with the word “CANCER” in flaking paint, the color of dried blood. The wood looked worse for wear; its grain raised high and splintery from the ceaseless progression of sun, wind, and rain. There was no lock or bar to prevent me from entering or restrain whatever hid behind the door. I had no idea why someone would leave such a warning. But, this was Death Valley – and death is responsible for more than half its fame.
Two small windows flanked the cancer door. Each was cross-framed with raw wood mullions and their panes, occluded with fine white dust, afforded no glimpse of the danger that waited within. More puzzling than the door and windows was their location; skillfully inserted in the waxy, gray wall of the escarpment that rose thirty-odd feet above my head.
Cancer? Oh well, cancer takes time. Time I have. Anyway, it beats swatting cave bats or spiders or snakes.
With barely a touch, the door swung open on sagging hinges, carving a fresh, hairline groove into the chalkpowder floor. A top hinge screw pulled out, adding a weary sag to the door’s sweep until it scraped to a stop. The room was lit only by the light of the doorway and a soft glow from the dusty windows.
The cave was a squared space with a domed ceiling, hewn out of the same gray-white mineral as the cliff face. Its surface was a mosaic of small indentations; dimpled cuts that suggested untold hours of hard labor with an adze or hatchet. Carved alcoves dotted the walls and an arched passageway opened to another smaller room. A large soot spot on the ceiling.
This was a dwelling; someone lived here.
The soot smudge must have been from a lantern, for there was no electrical wiring to be found. And no furniture, other than a wooden table made of rough-sawn pieces of packing crate lumber. It leaned to one side on a short leg, offering an inclined top that matched the unconventional geometry of the walls. More a grotto than a room; it had shelves and storage space carved into its soft grey walls. One large hollow might have been a place to sleep; others – smaller and at waist-level – probably provided space for storage.
Just below the beginning of the vaulted ceiling, I saw a long gouge, only a few inches high. In it I found a small stack of hand-drawn playing cards on scrap cardboard. I fanned out the crudely sketched; the diamonds and spades, clubs and hearts and held a hand, full of poverty, isolation, boredom, and the need to pass time with diversion to forget a bad deal. It was not a full deck, at most a couple dozen of the dog-eared pasteboards, and I thumbed through them in mild amusement at the child-like, inelegant pips.
Until I saw the face cards.
The Queen was drawn with marked skill; clearly rendered and precise. Her face bore the same, hardship-enduring grace that shines forth from black and white photos of dustbowl mothers, burdened with the weight of deprivation and labor, but somehow unbeaten by life’s dizzy dance with death. The Jack displayed a vulpine knave, eye’s squinting under hooded lids, smile twisted in a sardonic scowl that suggested cunning and immorality; a villain.
When I fanned out the rest of the thin deck to find the King, I stopped, transfixed, when I finally saw him. I might as well have been holding a mirror.
Beneath a simple, branch-entangled bejeweled crown was the face of a man lost in thought. His eyes set on some distant perimeter, not of his land; some future scape that was less barren and ephemeral than this cave palace; some other kingdom where men didn’t have to live in caves and scratch out their major arcana on scraps of paper. Where Queens don’t wither and fade, crushed by misfortune and ravaged by despair. The King longs for a rightful fiefdom where the Jack meets his better and is reformed by a stronger will; disciplined into lawfulness, and reconciled to trustworthiness.
The monarch was looking into the distance to find himself, his countenance burdened by the thorny brambles that snake through his royal gardens; the climbing ivy that endlessly pulls down the walls of his citadel – sucking away tiny foothold pocks of stone – dispassionate in its unknowing destruction.
All around there is discord. The cows gave sour milk. The mares birth monsters. The people lose their minds and their spoons and their way.
I know this man well. I know his abashed tribulations, his weighty heartache, his intractable distress as his kingdom turns to dust and the winds rise.
I wear that crown
But, by choosing to visit this desolate wasteland, I commit to enter the cauldron and willingly risk everything I left at home. This is my gamble to induce rejuvenation, find a new path, and belay my crippling bereavement.
I looked down at the floor and toed the pearly dust. This is not my fate. This is not my kingdom.
So, I carefully shuffled the cards, straightened the deck, and placed them back on the high shelf. The dust on my fingers felt familiar, like the baby powder I used when my daughters we infants. Talc. Another piece of the myth.
The archway before me opened to a smaller room devoid of niches and hollows in its walls. Here, the walls were less smooth, looking as though it was formed hastily and left unfinished. Very little light entered the room but, in the dim luminescence, I could see the floor was littered with papers and several more rusted tin cans. One large can, flattened at its rim, held a ragged scrap of its yellowed label. “Monarch Pork & B” it read, with just enough of the attending image remaining to see a cluster of the beans the tin once contained.
Who lived here? Who endured the inexorable heat? Who breathed in and coughed out the pearly dust? Who created the dim cave rooms and supped on pork bean meals?
I walked out thought the doorway and turned to reflect on what I had just seen. Once again, the faded, peeled paint CANCER on the door enthralled me. Someone had flagged the place with this warning; named it a death disease, conjured a painful lingering demise. A fear-filled realization shook me. Was I looking at the entrance to a crypt; a sepulcher with playing cards and tin cans? I breathed out a prayer – Requiescat in Pace – to no one in particular.
Some ingrained sense of responsibility took over and, out of a reasoned obligation to propriety, I secured the door as I would my at own home. I turned to leave the… dare I call it a home? It was a cave; a shelter. What is it that makes a shelter a home?
Back on the main road, crazed with tarred cracks, I drove north, looking for clues along the way. Perhaps a slapdash sign with a name or a ramshackle landmark that hinted at some piece of information that served the myth I was assembling in my mind. Anything new inclusion might fit in to my impromptu parable, even a forsaken cemetery with tombstones from long-gone years when brief descriptions were added to names and dates
“Remember man, as you go by, as you are, once was I. As I am now, so shall you be. Prepare yourself to follow me.” or “Beloved husband, lost to affliction.” or “To live in hearts we leave behind - is not to die.” T
There is no formal methodology to my shadow story search, just a willingness to breath it all in and let it settle inside my mind; swirling grains of sand from an endless beach.
And yet, my mind imposes a narrative; eager to force enlightenment. I am an impatient seeker, eager to settle my soul.
Many miles up the road there was a caboose, landlocked and conjoined with a long, tin-roofed cabin. Atop the caboose was a single word, formed of welded, scrap metal. “SPIRITS”
I parked at the caboose climbed metal stairs to the planked platform that served as a front entrance porch. Inside, it was a bare-bones liquor store with no one at the counter. Desert guide books filled a wall rack and
The rack contained little that anything about specific to local history. Most were geared to visiting popular area attractions. The door swung open and a gruff-looking man stepped in.
“Sorry!” he said, striding to the counter. “Bar’s full. I'm covering both.”
Bar? Maybe a cold beer is in order.
“Bar?”
“Yeah. Can’t serve and sell off-premises in the same building. Bar’s next door.”
“Let’s do that.” I said. “Hate to drink alone.”
We headed out to the place where the spirits were dispensed and, an hour later, I had let go of my story about the talc cave and slowly breathed in the truth.
A jangling door bell sounded as we opened the door and then again when it closed. The cabin was little more than a long oak top bar with a row of metal tractor-seat stools. A long steel railroad rail served as a bar-long footrest, set just above the floor. A couple of grubby day drinkers, cowboys by their attire, were hard at it; mumbling to each other about some common gripe. They looked like father and son – same weathered features below straw cowboy hats. The old guy’s hat had a fan of owl feathers on its front held by tooled leather band. He noticed me looking at it and, when our eyes met, he held his gaze a bit too long for comfort, then nodded almost imperceptibly; the silent howdy that rural folk do with strangers.
All the while, his son never looked up from the bar top and kept complaining, muttering something about surgery and pain. The old guy turned back to him and rejoined their grousing.
A window-mounted evaporative cooler blew dank air into the room, earning it swamp cooler nickname by filling the room with the stench of a roadside bog on a humid day. Mixed with years of spilled beers, dirty sawdust floors, and sweat, it produced the taproom’s miasma.
The first whiff of it foul breath evoked spirits far better than the booze caboose’s junkyard iron sign.
My desire for cold beer was mirrored by the cowboy’s long line of empty longnecks alongside the ones he was nursing. I felt like having a cold beer too – and getting some answers about the talc hovel. I might find what I was looking for by listening to local stories – usually the stock-in-trade small talk of bartenders. I sat at the far end of the bar, allowing enough distance from the cowboys to avoid intruding on their pow-wow.
The bartender presented well, with a haphazard toupee I had failed to notice in the caboose, a threadbare brown vest over an ordinary undershirt, and a mouth full of over-sized, overly-white teeth that pronounced a denture whistle when he spoke. His leathery face had enough sun damage and smoker wrinkles to identify him as a deep-rooted desert native. He had to know about the cave.
I called him over. “Excuse me. What’ve you got on tap?”
“Just bottles.’’ He said, a little too upbeat, as though that was a bonus.
“Then I’ll have what he’s having.” pointing at the younger cowboy.
“The two-fer?” he said.“They’re cheaper two at a time. Longnecks are a buck seventy-five each or two for three dollars.”
That’s weird. Hell, go with the flow.
“Sounds right. Gimme two.”
The walls were covered with old farm equipment, mounted hunting trophies, and train memorabilia; crossing signs, lanterns, and a battered station clock with hands in the predictable ten minutes to two o’clock position. Under the clock was a placard that read; “Last Call Is Two O’clock.” Jokers.
I chatted with the barkeep about the farm equipment and trains, then steered the conversation to the town and my travels. He was polite enough, introducing himself a Sonny, but seemed preoccupied with backbar set-up until I asked about the talc caves.
“Stay out of them. They’re dangerous. Did you see the sign?”
“Yeah I saw it from the road, but the words were too faded to read.”
“Nah, on the door… danger.”
“Yeah, that I saw. Cancer, eh?”
“No the danger door.”
I shrugged. “Must have missed it. I saw cancer.”
Then, he shrugged and shook it off with upraised palms and eyebrows.
“Anywho, those rooms can collapse and anyone in them would be shit out of luck. We had one give way two months ago. Cave nuts started picking at the walls and a big chuck of ceiling pinned one guy down. If there wasn’t two of them, he’dve been dead. No search and rescue here since the county went bust.”
I let the story hang in the air a moment, then asked, “What about the cancer?”
He looked at me, blankly, and said, “I don’t know.”
The old cowboy took interest in our conversation and spoke up.
“Stay the Hell out of them. They’re condemned and if you don’t get killed, you’ll wind up in jail. Thousand dollar easy…” having said his piece, his voice trailed off and he went back to grumbling with the other cowboy. The bartender turned to me.
“Stay out of them, I said. They’re condemned. You can get arrested. There’s a thousand-dollar fine.”
Struck by the repetition, I looked back to the old cowboy. He was gone. The young guy was still rambling, talking to himself. He was alone, but answering his own questions; sounding drunk and schizophrenic.
I didn’t hear the doorbell and the old guy would have to pass behind me to get back to the toilet… where the Hell is he?
My beers were warm so I drank, half-listening to the bartender tell me about the Mystery of the Lost Gold Mine.
“Here’s how it goes. Two Paiute brothers found a limestone cave next to a dry lake in Death Valley. It was a dome-shaped cavern with a dark pool of water at the bottom. Water gurgled up though a big hole in the ground, mixed with black sand that formed piles around pool. So, the water went up and down, splashing out all over. Well, they couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw gold flickering in the sand. Little nuggets, yeah, but lots of them! The water was cool and since it was really hot outside, one of the brothers decided to take a quick swim. The other guy saw all the gold, got greedy, and tried to drown is brother. Dove in and started shoving his brother’s head under the water. They fought for a minute or so and… suddenly the water got sucked back underground pulling the man to their death. Neither body was ever recovered. That’s the mystery. That, and where the cave is.”
“…and who saw what happened?” I asked.
“Well, somebody, I guess. But it is an Indian legend, right? So… who knows?”
The door opened, ringing the bell, and a deliveryman carried in a box.
“Aquirre?”
The bartender squinted at the box, “He’s in at six. I can sign for it.”
I took this interruption as a good time to leave, so I finished my beer and headed toward the door.
“Take `er easy!” the bartender said.
“Yup. You too.” I replied, glancing back at him and the deliveryman. I stood there staring at the mirrored wall behind them. There, on a glass shelf just above whisky bottles, was the old cowboy’s hat – owl feathers, tooled leather and all. Exact. And, from the angle I was looking at it, the young cowboy’s reflection was right below it, looking as if he was wearing the hat.
Must be a popular style. I thought, The old guy just leaves his hat? Makes no sense.
“Excuse me…” I said to the bartender, “Know where I can get a hat like that?”
He pointed to the young cowboy, who stopped mumbling and turned to face me.
“My father made it. Just a Bangora open-crown. Find your own feathers.”
“Is that one for sale?”
“No…” he snapped.
“Well, thanks. Have a good day.” I waved to them all and walked.
The cowboy called after me, “That was my Dad’s…”
A blast of heat smacked me as I opened the door. It made my face get pins and needles as the bell rang.
I drove back to the caves, thinking about the talc and its distant relationship to asbestos.
My grandfather was a shipyard insulation installer who handled mats of the fibrous mineral and developed pleural mesothelioma. Occasionally, talc can be contaminated with asbestos during the mining process. That might be the reason for the word cancer on the door. But the bartender would have known that. Why did he play dumb?
The sun was high when I got back to the tumbledown shacks and the cliffside door. Looking closer at the faded road sign, I could make out some of the faint letters that remained of the sunbeaten plywood, Contiene Fibres De Asbesto. So, that was it. Mesothelioma. Cancer.
I stood close to the door and focused my camera on cancer. I was wrong.
The raised grain of the wood had sloughed off more of the vertical lines of paint than the horizontal, which were sunk into the troughs of the grain. Two faint lines became clear in my viewfinder; an upright line rising behind the first “c” making it a lowercase “d” and a curving downward stroke after the second “c” made it a lazy “g”.
So, cancer became danger.
I drove off to find a place to bed down for the night.
Despite the relative cool airflow from the vents, the dashboard and steering wheel were fiery-hot to the touch. At this temperature, the plastic interior surfaces released volatile organic vapors. They may be hazardous, but more importantly, I find them downright irritating. Without considering the consequences, I burned some cedar and sage sprigs in front of the vent breeze to supplant the plastic smell with something less noxious. The combination of heat and dense, sanctifying smoke, while a more fitting incense, compelled me to get out of the car and take in some fresh air.
Then the road widened enough to pull off onto a solid shoulder, near a sign that had lost its words to the weather. Behind it, two windblown shacks leaned hazardously close to toppling. I parked on the windward side of and set out to survey a high ridge that towered over them. As I drew closer, I saw a door set into the face of a blanched cliff.
The wooden door was marked with the word “CANCER” in flaking paint, the color of dried blood. The wood looked worse for wear; its grain raised high and splintery from the ceaseless progression of sun, wind, and rain. There was no lock or bar to prevent me from entering or restrain whatever hid behind the door. I had no idea why someone would leave such a warning. But, this was Death Valley – and death is responsible for more than half its fame.
Two small windows flanked the cancer door. Each was cross-framed with raw wood mullions and their panes, occluded with fine white dust, afforded no glimpse of the danger that waited within. More puzzling than the door and windows was their location; skillfully inserted in the waxy, gray wall of the escarpment that rose thirty-odd feet above my head.
Cancer? Oh well, cancer takes time. Time I have. Anyway, it beats swatting cave bats or spiders or snakes.
With barely a touch, the door swung open on sagging hinges, carving a fresh, hairline groove into the chalkpowder floor. A top hinge screw pulled out, adding a weary sag to the door’s sweep until it scraped to a stop. The room was lit only by the light of the doorway and a soft glow from the dusty windows.
The cave was a squared space with a domed ceiling, hewn out of the same gray-white mineral as the cliff face. Its surface was a mosaic of small indentations; dimpled cuts that suggested untold hours of hard labor with an adze or hatchet. Carved alcoves dotted the walls and an arched passageway opened to another smaller room. A large soot spot on the ceiling.
This was a dwelling; someone lived here.
The soot smudge must have been from a lantern, for there was no electrical wiring to be found. And no furniture, other than a wooden table made of rough-sawn pieces of packing crate lumber. It leaned to one side on a short leg, offering an inclined top that matched the unconventional geometry of the walls. More a grotto than a room; it had shelves and storage space carved into its soft grey walls. One large hollow might have been a place to sleep; others – smaller and at waist-level – probably provided space for storage.
Just below the beginning of the vaulted ceiling, I saw a long gouge, only a few inches high. In it I found a small stack of hand-drawn playing cards on scrap cardboard. I fanned out the crudely sketched; the diamonds and spades, clubs and hearts and held a hand, full of poverty, isolation, boredom, and the need to pass time with diversion to forget a bad deal. It was not a full deck, at most a couple dozen of the dog-eared pasteboards, and I thumbed through them in mild amusement at the child-like, inelegant pips.
Until I saw the face cards.
The Queen was drawn with marked skill; clearly rendered and precise. Her face bore the same, hardship-enduring grace that shines forth from black and white photos of dustbowl mothers, burdened with the weight of deprivation and labor, but somehow unbeaten by life’s dizzy dance with death. The Jack displayed a vulpine knave, eye’s squinting under hooded lids, smile twisted in a sardonic scowl that suggested cunning and immorality; a villain.
When I fanned out the rest of the thin deck to find the King, I stopped, transfixed, when I finally saw him. I might as well have been holding a mirror.
Beneath a simple, branch-entangled bejeweled crown was the face of a man lost in thought. His eyes set on some distant perimeter, not of his land; some future scape that was less barren and ephemeral than this cave palace; some other kingdom where men didn’t have to live in caves and scratch out their major arcana on scraps of paper. Where Queens don’t wither and fade, crushed by misfortune and ravaged by despair. The King longs for a rightful fiefdom where the Jack meets his better and is reformed by a stronger will; disciplined into lawfulness, and reconciled to trustworthiness.
The monarch was looking into the distance to find himself, his countenance burdened by the thorny brambles that snake through his royal gardens; the climbing ivy that endlessly pulls down the walls of his citadel – sucking away tiny foothold pocks of stone – dispassionate in its unknowing destruction.
All around there is discord. The cows gave sour milk. The mares birth monsters. The people lose their minds and their spoons and their way.
I know this man well. I know his abashed tribulations, his weighty heartache, his intractable distress as his kingdom turns to dust and the winds rise.
I wear that crown
But, by choosing to visit this desolate wasteland, I commit to enter the cauldron and willingly risk everything I left at home. This is my gamble to induce rejuvenation, find a new path, and belay my crippling bereavement.
I looked down at the floor and toed the pearly dust. This is not my fate. This is not my kingdom.
So, I carefully shuffled the cards, straightened the deck, and placed them back on the high shelf. The dust on my fingers felt familiar, like the baby powder I used when my daughters we infants. Talc. Another piece of the myth.
The archway before me opened to a smaller room devoid of niches and hollows in its walls. Here, the walls were less smooth, looking as though it was formed hastily and left unfinished. Very little light entered the room but, in the dim luminescence, I could see the floor was littered with papers and several more rusted tin cans. One large can, flattened at its rim, held a ragged scrap of its yellowed label. “Monarch Pork & B” it read, with just enough of the attending image remaining to see a cluster of the beans the tin once contained.
Who lived here? Who endured the inexorable heat? Who breathed in and coughed out the pearly dust? Who created the dim cave rooms and supped on pork bean meals?
I walked out thought the doorway and turned to reflect on what I had just seen. Once again, the faded, peeled paint CANCER on the door enthralled me. Someone had flagged the place with this warning; named it a death disease, conjured a painful lingering demise. A fear-filled realization shook me. Was I looking at the entrance to a crypt; a sepulcher with playing cards and tin cans? I breathed out a prayer – Requiescat in Pace – to no one in particular.
Some ingrained sense of responsibility took over and, out of a reasoned obligation to propriety, I secured the door as I would my at own home. I turned to leave the… dare I call it a home? It was a cave; a shelter. What is it that makes a shelter a home?
Back on the main road, crazed with tarred cracks, I drove north, looking for clues along the way. Perhaps a slapdash sign with a name or a ramshackle landmark that hinted at some piece of information that served the myth I was assembling in my mind. Anything new inclusion might fit in to my impromptu parable, even a forsaken cemetery with tombstones from long-gone years when brief descriptions were added to names and dates
“Remember man, as you go by, as you are, once was I. As I am now, so shall you be. Prepare yourself to follow me.” or “Beloved husband, lost to affliction.” or “To live in hearts we leave behind - is not to die.” T
There is no formal methodology to my shadow story search, just a willingness to breath it all in and let it settle inside my mind; swirling grains of sand from an endless beach.
And yet, my mind imposes a narrative; eager to force enlightenment. I am an impatient seeker, eager to settle my soul.
Many miles up the road there was a caboose, landlocked and conjoined with a long, tin-roofed cabin. Atop the caboose was a single word, formed of welded, scrap metal. “SPIRITS”
I parked at the caboose climbed metal stairs to the planked platform that served as a front entrance porch. Inside, it was a bare-bones liquor store with no one at the counter. Desert guide books filled a wall rack and
The rack contained little that anything about specific to local history. Most were geared to visiting popular area attractions. The door swung open and a gruff-looking man stepped in.
“Sorry!” he said, striding to the counter. “Bar’s full. I'm covering both.”
Bar? Maybe a cold beer is in order.
“Bar?”
“Yeah. Can’t serve and sell off-premises in the same building. Bar’s next door.”
“Let’s do that.” I said. “Hate to drink alone.”
We headed out to the place where the spirits were dispensed and, an hour later, I had let go of my story about the talc cave and slowly breathed in the truth.
A jangling door bell sounded as we opened the door and then again when it closed. The cabin was little more than a long oak top bar with a row of metal tractor-seat stools. A long steel railroad rail served as a bar-long footrest, set just above the floor. A couple of grubby day drinkers, cowboys by their attire, were hard at it; mumbling to each other about some common gripe. They looked like father and son – same weathered features below straw cowboy hats. The old guy’s hat had a fan of owl feathers on its front held by tooled leather band. He noticed me looking at it and, when our eyes met, he held his gaze a bit too long for comfort, then nodded almost imperceptibly; the silent howdy that rural folk do with strangers.
All the while, his son never looked up from the bar top and kept complaining, muttering something about surgery and pain. The old guy turned back to him and rejoined their grousing.
A window-mounted evaporative cooler blew dank air into the room, earning it swamp cooler nickname by filling the room with the stench of a roadside bog on a humid day. Mixed with years of spilled beers, dirty sawdust floors, and sweat, it produced the taproom’s miasma.
The first whiff of it foul breath evoked spirits far better than the booze caboose’s junkyard iron sign.
My desire for cold beer was mirrored by the cowboy’s long line of empty longnecks alongside the ones he was nursing. I felt like having a cold beer too – and getting some answers about the talc hovel. I might find what I was looking for by listening to local stories – usually the stock-in-trade small talk of bartenders. I sat at the far end of the bar, allowing enough distance from the cowboys to avoid intruding on their pow-wow.
The bartender presented well, with a haphazard toupee I had failed to notice in the caboose, a threadbare brown vest over an ordinary undershirt, and a mouth full of over-sized, overly-white teeth that pronounced a denture whistle when he spoke. His leathery face had enough sun damage and smoker wrinkles to identify him as a deep-rooted desert native. He had to know about the cave.
I called him over. “Excuse me. What’ve you got on tap?”
“Just bottles.’’ He said, a little too upbeat, as though that was a bonus.
“Then I’ll have what he’s having.” pointing at the younger cowboy.
“The two-fer?” he said.“They’re cheaper two at a time. Longnecks are a buck seventy-five each or two for three dollars.”
That’s weird. Hell, go with the flow.
“Sounds right. Gimme two.”
The walls were covered with old farm equipment, mounted hunting trophies, and train memorabilia; crossing signs, lanterns, and a battered station clock with hands in the predictable ten minutes to two o’clock position. Under the clock was a placard that read; “Last Call Is Two O’clock.” Jokers.
I chatted with the barkeep about the farm equipment and trains, then steered the conversation to the town and my travels. He was polite enough, introducing himself a Sonny, but seemed preoccupied with backbar set-up until I asked about the talc caves.
“Stay out of them. They’re dangerous. Did you see the sign?”
“Yeah I saw it from the road, but the words were too faded to read.”
“Nah, on the door… danger.”
“Yeah, that I saw. Cancer, eh?”
“No the danger door.”
I shrugged. “Must have missed it. I saw cancer.”
Then, he shrugged and shook it off with upraised palms and eyebrows.
“Anywho, those rooms can collapse and anyone in them would be shit out of luck. We had one give way two months ago. Cave nuts started picking at the walls and a big chuck of ceiling pinned one guy down. If there wasn’t two of them, he’dve been dead. No search and rescue here since the county went bust.”
I let the story hang in the air a moment, then asked, “What about the cancer?”
He looked at me, blankly, and said, “I don’t know.”
The old cowboy took interest in our conversation and spoke up.
“Stay the Hell out of them. They’re condemned and if you don’t get killed, you’ll wind up in jail. Thousand dollar easy…” having said his piece, his voice trailed off and he went back to grumbling with the other cowboy. The bartender turned to me.
“Stay out of them, I said. They’re condemned. You can get arrested. There’s a thousand-dollar fine.”
Struck by the repetition, I looked back to the old cowboy. He was gone. The young guy was still rambling, talking to himself. He was alone, but answering his own questions; sounding drunk and schizophrenic.
I didn’t hear the doorbell and the old guy would have to pass behind me to get back to the toilet… where the Hell is he?
My beers were warm so I drank, half-listening to the bartender tell me about the Mystery of the Lost Gold Mine.
“Here’s how it goes. Two Paiute brothers found a limestone cave next to a dry lake in Death Valley. It was a dome-shaped cavern with a dark pool of water at the bottom. Water gurgled up though a big hole in the ground, mixed with black sand that formed piles around pool. So, the water went up and down, splashing out all over. Well, they couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw gold flickering in the sand. Little nuggets, yeah, but lots of them! The water was cool and since it was really hot outside, one of the brothers decided to take a quick swim. The other guy saw all the gold, got greedy, and tried to drown is brother. Dove in and started shoving his brother’s head under the water. They fought for a minute or so and… suddenly the water got sucked back underground pulling the man to their death. Neither body was ever recovered. That’s the mystery. That, and where the cave is.”
“…and who saw what happened?” I asked.
“Well, somebody, I guess. But it is an Indian legend, right? So… who knows?”
The door opened, ringing the bell, and a deliveryman carried in a box.
“Aquirre?”
The bartender squinted at the box, “He’s in at six. I can sign for it.”
I took this interruption as a good time to leave, so I finished my beer and headed toward the door.
“Take `er easy!” the bartender said.
“Yup. You too.” I replied, glancing back at him and the deliveryman. I stood there staring at the mirrored wall behind them. There, on a glass shelf just above whisky bottles, was the old cowboy’s hat – owl feathers, tooled leather and all. Exact. And, from the angle I was looking at it, the young cowboy’s reflection was right below it, looking as if he was wearing the hat.
Must be a popular style. I thought, The old guy just leaves his hat? Makes no sense.
“Excuse me…” I said to the bartender, “Know where I can get a hat like that?”
He pointed to the young cowboy, who stopped mumbling and turned to face me.
“My father made it. Just a Bangora open-crown. Find your own feathers.”
“Is that one for sale?”
“No…” he snapped.
“Well, thanks. Have a good day.” I waved to them all and walked.
The cowboy called after me, “That was my Dad’s…”
A blast of heat smacked me as I opened the door. It made my face get pins and needles as the bell rang.
I drove back to the caves, thinking about the talc and its distant relationship to asbestos.
My grandfather was a shipyard insulation installer who handled mats of the fibrous mineral and developed pleural mesothelioma. Occasionally, talc can be contaminated with asbestos during the mining process. That might be the reason for the word cancer on the door. But the bartender would have known that. Why did he play dumb?
The sun was high when I got back to the tumbledown shacks and the cliffside door. Looking closer at the faded road sign, I could make out some of the faint letters that remained of the sunbeaten plywood, Contiene Fibres De Asbesto. So, that was it. Mesothelioma. Cancer.
I stood close to the door and focused my camera on cancer. I was wrong.
The raised grain of the wood had sloughed off more of the vertical lines of paint than the horizontal, which were sunk into the troughs of the grain. Two faint lines became clear in my viewfinder; an upright line rising behind the first “c” making it a lowercase “d” and a curving downward stroke after the second “c” made it a lazy “g”.
So, cancer became danger.
I drove off to find a place to bed down for the night.
THE ISSUE OF BLOOD
As night fell, it was clear to me that the time had come to sleep out in the open, attentive to, and attuned to, dusk giving way to darkness. Near Joshua Tree, I found an unpaved road leading back to a wash lined with scrubby Juniper bushes, encircling a clearing where I could park. The cedar aroma of the shrubs was a natural incense to sanctify my twilight meditations and the ground was firm, flat, and clean. Less than half the blazing sun remained, squatting atop a rock ridge that ran along the wash toward the western mountains.
This is as good a place to stop as any.
I chose a place to sleep on the ground, set down a sleeping bag pad, and put my camera atop my camp cooler. Inside, a half-empty, plastic water bottle bobbed in its melted ice water. My first swallow tasted unnatural; warm and disappointing. so it remained imprisoned. I had a granola bar in my pocket, but I had no desire to taste its cloying sweetness.
The sun slowly disappeared behind the hogback, gradually turning the pure cerulean blue sky to a ruddy-clouded, purple landscape, suggesting a far-off indigo bay beyond a red, shoreline scud high above my head. My mind accepted the illusion, giving me the unmistakable feeling that I was hovering above this imagined estuary, looking down from an illogical perch. The disorientation was spellbinding, at once majestic and quietly troubling, blue and red, diametrically opposed and brewed into the royal firmament that surrenders to pitch black.
The ground pad felt soft and comforting as I laid back, relieved I had chosen the whisper of cooler night air flowing down from the shadowing mountains. The alternative was the ice-box chill and shuddering drone of a motel-room air conditioner. And, the crusty earth was infinitely cleaner than a broken-down, sweat-stained mattress – my every breath free from the acrid tinge of tobacco-sullied, stained furnishings. At every roadside flop, the room reverberates with the undulating, hypnotic, whoosh of tires and swishing airstream noises. Here, on the Joshua Tree ground, the highway was far off, a murmur, a distant, subdued, road-weary, highway sigh. No motel tonight.
The nighttime desert sky was bruised and pummeled, rudely trod upon by Helios’s sun chariot-transit of the daystar, which burns and is not consumed, above the cedar-incense bushes around me. Slender strands of cirrus ice clouds limned the ruts of his carriage wheels, stretching across the heavens. Before me was the inspiration for our ancestor’s creation of divinity and worship; the evidence of gods, the sun, the moon and all that nature holds in store from season to season. Elysium stretched across the bird-ocean above me - waiting.
My skin tingled; no longer the outer margin of my body. I was viscerally connected to everything around me; the ground, the sky, and the emerging, dim glint of gemstone lanterns in the deepening black-velvet, celestial dome. A staggered breath whispered out of my lips, mouthing a long-neglected, altar boy prayer: Munda quod est sordidum, riga quod est aridum, sana quod est saucium… Cleanse that which is unclean, water that which is dry, heal that which is wounded.
As the sun gave up its last rays, Joshua Tree’s nocturnal inhabitants awoke. Coyotes roamed across the far-off landscape looking to satiate their unending hunger. They howled into the night, barking and baying as they moved along the floor of what had once been an inland sea.
A dry seabed is a fitting home for these omnivore, bottom-dwellers who eat just about anything: rabbits, rodents, birds, snakes, lizards, even thick-shelled tortoises. In dire times, hungry coyotes resort to fruit, nuts, or grass of which I saw very little on my travels. Whether hunting freshly-captured prey or scavenging a long-dead, carrion meal, coyotes thrive, needing only a bit of water now and again. This parched sea bottom offers its sparse tears to quench thirst and grant life; a salient point to consider when unraveling the web of existence.
The waxing moon began its passage, set royally in a wispy corona, just before midnight and it cast gauzy, grey shadows where the sun had set down deep, dark penumbras. I knew the moon would be a full disk the next night, shining its lunacy light on this heartland of spirits. My cassette player provided a whisper-soft, heavenly score to accompany the show; Eno’s Thursday Afternoon with its ethereal ambience and seemingly random construction, soothing piano fragments blended into a spiritual, synthesizer groundwork. I was an audience of one, presented with the incomprehensible complexity of the performance.
Sublime.
As the coyotes drew close, I noticed a background chorus of whimpers within the pack, conveying the endless struggle for dominance that rules every community. Triumph or succumb; adapt or die; the dogged demand life makes upon each one of us.
I’m sure my scent extended a perfumed perimeter about me that signaled them to sniff inquisitively, but prudently skirt the area. I was an uninvited guest in their world, an interloper, an obstacle in their search for food, and possibly an outright danger. As they skulked away, roving out of earshot, I let the ambient music overtake my flooded senses until it enraptured my thoughts and I drifted off into a restless sleep.
I was standing at attention in a hot, intolerably humid metal building, burdened with sweat drenched clothes, heavy boots, feeling hopelessly abandoned. A fist-sized bloody hole in my chest revealed that my heart was missing; torn out, leaving arteries and veins in a bloody tangle. I felt no pain save pangs of loneliness and desperation so great my breath came in staggered heaves, my eyes burned with tears, and my chest ached.
“This is not where I belong.” I called out.
My sole desire was to return to the little brick, Tudor house where I grew up. I craved that long-missed security. I needed the safety and unity I felt in the company of my family.
I was alone in the dream, although it looked like many people lived in the building. None of the numerous beds, footlockers, or belongings were mine. I stood silent with the sad knowledge that my situation could never be any different; I would forever an orphan in a world others had abandoned.
I was in a boundless graveyard of tall weeds, in full summer swelter, surrounded by the drone of insects, punctuated by piercing bird calls. The tombstones around me meant I was about to die or had died and was waiting for my last glimpse of earth to fade away. That last living moment given over to a slow, unavoidable loss of sight, before loss of breath and sound. My boots, sunk well into the ground, had thick roots extending downward, holding me fast. Only with great effort, could I manage to dislodge them and lumber across the field, leaving clumps of dirt and small stones behind me. The exertion so overwhelmed me, I closed my eyes to summon the strength to continue.
When I looked again, the field spun and shifted its shape. It became a street and I stood at the walkway to my childhood home. I lurched forward, opened the front door and entered, stiff-legged and dismayed to see the trail of soil I left behind me. In the kitchen I could hear a young Mom and Dad, talking and laughing while they cooked breakfast. My brothers and sister - Danny, Maureen, and John - sat at the dining room table, just as I remember them when I was a teenager. I felt somewhat restored to a tranquil state of mind until I saw the table setting for breakfast. There was no place setting for me or my brother, Paddy.
“Where’s Paddy?” I asked.
No one answered. No one heard me.
“Where is Paddy?”
Loneliness gripped me.
“Where is my place?”
I staggered toward the kitchen on my wooden, trunkfeet, to ask my parents where Paddy was but, as I stepped through the doorway, I found myself standing in the backyard my current home in northern California at twilight, just as I had left it, days ago. My wife and daughters were having fun in our pool, playing and splashing. They saw me and called out, urging me to dive in.
“Come on in!” they said, showering me with cool water, “Come ON!”
“Where’s Paddy?” I asked again, to no response.
I saw them enjoying their play. I wanted the love and joy gave showered on me. My feet were bare, so plunged in, fully-dressed. The water caressed me with a refreshing chill as I swam downward, turning and tumbling as I went, weightless and thrilled by the pleasure it gave me. I was a zero-gravity aquanaut in my backyard ocean. I stroked downward vigorously to touch the bottom, but the deeper I swam, the more forcefully my buoyancy held me back, tugging at me, yanking me upward past the sparkling curtain of my breath and loose clothing bubbles, upward to gasp the surface air. My burning lungs prodded me, reminded me I must have that air to live, but I ignored the bouyancy’s attempt to save me, befriend me.
After touching the bottom, I surrendered to the upward deliverance and rose limply. My first breath was intoxicating. I exhaled slowly, blowing it out through pursed lips, then turned onto my back and floated, paddling with my hands to gyre in a lazy circle, watching heaven’s luminous superstars spin above me.
Cassiopeia, the North Star, and both Dippers were first to appear, and I looked for more constellations; Orian, Canis Minor, and Canis Major, the hunter and his hounds. I was seized by a momentary transport of rapture; I was a human, spinning in a pool of water on the surface of a planet, spinning like a top, racing through space, circling around our star. My familiar constellations fell away, now, no more than a scant connect-the-dots suggestion that spoke to long-gone sky-gazers and the world they knew.
The vast depth, height, width of space underscored my insignificance. The scatter of skydot outlines our ancient watchers associated with their everyday lives are a deception; viewable only from our position on this tiny planet for a dozen millennia or so. Stars are millions, billions of miles apart. Twinkles we see as the North Star are particles of energy that left that nuclear explosion before Galileo raised his telescope to the unexplored heavens.
“Where’s Paddy?”
Alone in the pool as daybreak relegated the far-off pinpoints to daytime obscurity, slowly outshining them, I let it all drift away. Soft light opened my eyes, and I laid on the rubber pad for a time wondering if the desert spirits had already taken hold of me. The sunrise flooded in, pushing the back the darkness and bathing everything on the ground in a most glorious golden luster.
My dream was a collection of emotions, a subconscious play, using the people, props and locations in my life – a constellation of distant experiences seen from a afar; loneliness, long ago and far away, in a land so sad I will not trouble you with its name. My childhood family and its sacrosanct unity, my wife and children immersed in the joy of our household, and my bleak estrangement when confronted with the ephemeral meaning of life were merged. In all, it was a composite sense-memory dream of being without spirit, without purpose, with emotional connotation alluding to rational denotation.
My life is an impossibly brief flash of awareness lost in the multi-billion year existence of the universe. And yet, there still needs to be a right and a wrong, some milk and bread, gas in the car, and a road ahead.
The thin groundpad did little to cushion my body during the night, leaving me with aching joints and a stiff spine. It took a moment to sit up, stretching as I rose; turning my head to free my neck cramp. Nocturnal animals had retreated to their cool habitations, and the daytime animals were reclaiming their province. I saw the rocky ridge before me had grown a tiny head. It stared in wonder, its black eyes fixed on me.
“Good morning, Mr. Squirrel I thought I was alone out here.”
I didn’t expect an answer, but the ground squirrel, scurried toward me, having set its fear aside for the possibility of a tourist-provided bit of food. He stood tall and looked about.
“You needn't stand up so tall.” Sit. Relax. We’ve got another day.”
Another day, that's how I see it. Each sunrise is a winning life-lottery ticket. We get through a day at a time, sleep through the night and, with luck, open our eyes to a new set of possibilities. That's why I'm here, in Mr. Squirrel’s home. He didn’t move, so I pursued a conversation.
“Do you dream?”
The furry sat, having done his due safety diligence.
“Did you have an epic reverie last night, too?”
My visitor cocked his head as though he were thinking about how to answer.
I hadn’t thought much about it; squirrel dreams that is. When my sleeping dogs woofed and flipped their feet, my daughters said he was having puppy dreams: running in the park, scaring cats, or chasing squirrels. I’d laugh, imagining what our pet was experiencing, but now I was thinking seriously about the dreams a desert squirrel might have. Were they fearful dramas of escape from a predator, vigilant excursions into unfamiliar places, or indecipherable montages cobbled from daily encounters?
My dreams, usually nightmares, are bits and pieces of my life assembled in emotionally-charged character plays and otherworldly incidents. Somehow the chaos of existence is loaded in, bit by bit, only to be structured and set in a framework I can comprehend. At a very basic level, my innermost drives prompt emotions that bubble up into my subconscious dramas to play out in deep sleep. The logic of each is difficult to ascertain upon waking, but there is surely a message embedded in my mind’s production. Reality is a blend of chaos and order, so we need to examine a blend of both to fully breathe it all in. I suppose the simplest explanation is that dreams are a mechanism to consume chaos and sustain our sanity with a modicum of logic and order.
My desert search is an attempt to flood my mind with the chaos, then allow it to create order I can understand.
Why would this function be different for a squirrel? Its dreams may be less complicated, less narrative, and closer to its survival drives, but nonetheless helpful in behavior conditioning; preparing the creature to learn faster and respond quicker.
Perhaps this is a holy animal whose presence will enlighten me in my desert quest and reveal the wisdom of its existence in such a harsh environment. While Mr. Squirrel waited patiently, I went to my car to find something for his breakfast. In the glove compartment I found a half-eaten granola bar, peeled back the plastic covering, and turned toward him, holding it at arm’s length.
“I’ve got something you might enjoy. Breakfast, Buddy?”
The squirrel stared, his little black eyes focused on me. We were both holding still, and unsure of what might happen next. I was determined to hand this little guy more nutrition that he'd probably see in a week. He darted toward me, only a few feet away. He knew there was something he wanted in my hand. Rather than scaring him by walking closer, I took a knee and set oat bar on the ground. Another standoff.
His wariness reminded me of a revelation I had years ago. As a child I was always told that squirrels and other ground rodents were excited and happy that their darting and leaping and running were unrestrained joie de vivre. I was disappointed when I realized that their behavior was prompted by abject fear. Those little guys were gray and bushytailed and lived in the soffits of the tract homes where I grew up. They disappeared in the winter, sleeping through the cold and slowly living off stored body fat.
This squirrel lived a very different life; his home was an underground burrow deep below the hot surface, safe within his dark subsoil shelter when the temperature was intolerable.
Mr. Squirrel you have me at quite a disadvantage here, seeing as you’re home and I’m just passing through. I know you have friends over the ridge and possibly something in the bush eyeing you, figuring to make a meal of you. Sometimes I feel like that. Sometimes I feel like there’s something on my trail, right around the corner, and there’s not much I can do about it. Despite knowing there is no one trailing me, there’s nobody around the corner, I still get the feeling there is and harm is near. That feeling takes over so completely; all the rational mind I apply to it I can’t dispel the gut-level notion things are going south. I guess that’s why I’m here, Buddy. Since I lost my brother, I suspect I’m next and wonder what my life is worth.
My friend scurried up to grab the granola bar. Two cautious sniffs later, he packed his cheeks with the sweet oats, almonds, wheat germ, and honey. The wrapper blew away on a soft ground breeze.
Holy animal. I understand this meeting only has meaning I choose to ascribe to it. If it fits into the story I need to learn, it is an experience that moves me closer to discovering what I want to know. The more ways something can be proven right, the more likely it is to be true. It’s even possible for a misinterpretation to supply a correct solution. In this internal reality, I’m dealing with shades of meanings and assembling unfamiliar structures. And you, Mr. Squirrel, you need to stay off the road. I’ve seen far too much death and the asphalt is stained with a record of impulsive scurrying.
The squirrel took off into the brush and I packed up my things to leave.
I drove down from Joshua tree to the Palm Springs airport to pick up a friend who had asked to join me for part of the exploration. Originally I had wanted to travel alone, but this woman was part of a spiritual transformation I had started long before my brother died. Her name began with a N.
My marriage was disintegrating.
Laura and I reached an impasse in our relationship. Parenthood had become increasingly difficult with two young daughters. The demands we struggled to meet changed us; made us assume new, more restrictive roles and attitudes. Other parents have occasionally mentioned dealing with this problem, attempting to best it with counseling, controlled addiction to alcohol or pills, or divorce. I believe it’s relatively common problem. Growth is painful.
When I first saw Laura, it wasn't her sexy figure, her `40's cocktail dress (!!!), her fiery long red hair, or her smile that made me freeze in my tracks and look deep. Her appearance spoke volumes to my heart and I fell into serious love, but it was her eyes that shook me. Not her sparkling hazel eyes themselves, but the lash line, waterline and under-eye. Here was a woman who laughed a lot and cried a lot. What more could a person want from a first glance? What attribute could further stir my curiosity to find out who she was? And, as I did come to know her, I pledged her my heart and soul to her, if she was enticed to have me, if she desired me.
We did not fall in love - we plunged into love.
Years later, after I had matured beyond being a madcap comedian in the San Francisco comedy scene to writing and directing films, television, and stage plays. Laura was no longer my wild-girl cohort; the Bagdad-by-the-Bay doll with a yen for love, life and champagne. She was now a working mom with two young daughters and a corporate career that set her apart from her carefree, single friends.
We found ourselves firmly bound by the necessary maternal/paternal responsibilities and stresses. Most damaging was the emotional distance we felt growing between us; presumably a side-effect of losing the carefree romance we reveled in when we were newlyweds. We hadn’t grown together, we grew apart.
One day, Laura told me that our intimacy felt robotic and unsatisfying. That brought our half-hearted charade to a halt. I could tell she was seething within; enraged that I did not understand her alienation. I couldn’t understand the full impact of her change until I found myself resigned to a cold marriage, a joyless partnership, which was nothing less than emotional torture. Laura said if I wanted sex I should find another woman. At that moment, I felt as if I didn’t have a friend in the world. Hugging was painful.
Those were our days of regret… and heart-rending mistakes.
I met N through a mutual friend. She was a tall, blue-eyed, brilliant career woman who worked in publishing and lived alone. I found her to be enchanting. We became friends and one evening, while discussing our literary tastes, she mentioned one of my favorite authors. He was due to visit a Haight Asbury bookstore for a reading from his latest work later that week. She graciously offered to arrange for me to dine with him before the performance. I did, and had the opportunity to ask him all manner of questions about his experiences and prolific output.
During that meal, one of the author’s fans entered the restaurant and presented him with a guitar case as a gift. They whispered a bit, shook hands and the fan left hastily.
“You play?” I asked the author.
“Yes.”
Rather than explain, he opened the case just wide enough for me to take a quick look inside.
I saw an AK-47.
“Ah yes!” I said, “I’ve played with those, too. Years ago.”
We talked about Southeast Asia; Vietnam, Thailand, and the back streets of Bangkok where I had spent a week of rest and recuperation. The author had spent months there, writing a novel. Later, at the bookstore podium, the author made several observations about his Bangkok stay with quips he lifted directly from my comments over dinner. The crowd loved him and their post-read questions were reverent and astute. I watched from my stand-up comedian point-of-view; he killed… and he could write as well as anyone I had ever read. I need to write.
The dinner had been delightful, the reading was powerful, and, after the event ended, I thanked the author for breaking bread with me. We jabbered about a scheduling a future dinner knowing it would never be arranged. Such is the world of publishing, publicity, and fame.
N and I walked down Haight Street talking about the dinner and the event. She was electrifying; smart, funny, and sexy. We were quickly becoming attracted to each other, so we stopped into local bar for drinks and a chance to talk a bit more. I became excited by her charming self-confidence, alluring blue eyes and long, wavy blonde hair. The drinks took hold and we spent the next couple hours captivated by our flirtation.
I wanted to earn her affection. I wanted sex with her.
Over the weeks, we became closer friends and spent more time together. I was enchanted by her and it wasn’t long before our affections grew until we gave in to our desires and our relationship became intimate. This might have been predictable, but N was primarily Lesbian. Despite that, our lovemaking was spontaneous and uninhibited. There was no kissing or cuddling; just passionate sex. This suited us both and we became more licentious and libidinous.
My marriage was in crisis, N and I were having an affair, and casual, romantic affections seemed inappropriate.
Eventually, N and I did come to love each other but, sadly, our affections were out of sync during that year; we were not free from our other commitments. Despite the relationship’s rocky end, I’ve never stopped loving her. She is in my pantheon of goddesses.
I was with her when my brother died. Her apartment phone rang and she answered brightly, looked troubled and held the phone out toward me.
“It’s your wife.”
I took it and said, “Hi.”
“I just got a call from your sister.” Laura said. “Your brother Paddy had a motorcycle accident and he died on the way to the hospital. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry.” I said. In my heart, I meant it as a humble apology for the awkwardness of her having to call me at N’s apartment. I knew Laura suffered that as a wound.
I hung up the phone and lost my self-control; tears flowed and I sobbed like a child. N put her arm around me and waited until I had composed myself.
“Go home.” she said, “You have responsibilities. We’ll talk when the time is right.”
I did as she said, and the following days were tumultuous.
Weeks later, still in shock over the loss, I mentioned my desert plans to N. She immediately wanted to be part of my journey. More than needing some time alone, I knew I might need her help if I became erratic. It was at this time that I felt the full force of her love.
“I’m planning on seven days, two weeks from now; one day down, one back, and five exploring, looking for myself.”
“I’ll fly in to Palm Springs and meet you for the ride back here.” she said, “two, three days, tops. Okay?”
“Yeah. Wonderful.”
She continued “But there is a good chance I will be on my period then, but it's like one drop and then nothing.”
Her wry smile said it all. I understood her acknowledgement and mocking tone.
“I don’t care.” I said, “I want you to be part of this.”
The trip was scheduled to coincide with a full moon so there would be some light for night photography. Later, I realized the moon was a significant element in a desert pilgrimage – in any pilgrimage. This would be an August Red Moon; a time of abundance, manifesting desires, sexuality, achievement, and protection.
The Goddess and Moon energy is at a peak; optimal for healing through spirituality. N’s menstruation was another piece of the developing mosaic; her cycle, the moon’s cycle and the unbroken cycle of life and death on the sandy frontier.
N would be in full aspect – astute, intuitive, and passionately sensual.
Suddenly a woman who had suffered from bleeding for twelve years came up behind Him and touched the fringe of His cloak. She said to herself, “If only I touch His cloak, I will be healed.”
Just before noon, driving through Palm Springs, I saw how money and irrigation had transformed the desert into a lush, upscale oasis. Date palms lined the streets and everywhere that public land gave way to private, grass, bushes, and golf courses extended in every direction. The dark red mission roof tiles shared ground space with the watered greenery, further disguising the desert floor. Vast villas with outsized pools and manicured gardens were protected by development walls and gate houses. Behind these, people enjoy the sun from within air-conditioned houses and cars. They imposed themselves on the desert, ignoring the absurdity of their own wastefulness.
The sheer civilization energy took me out of my recent desert emotions. Once again, I was within the throng, caught up in the possessions and activities I had left up in Marin County. I remembered my highway brush with death and the death of Mr. Mouse …anything more than what he had right there, at that moment, is window-dressing and illusion.
N was standing in front of the Palm Springs Airport when I got there. Her hair shimmered in the sunshine and I saw her in a way I hadn’t until then; she was gorgeous and a thrill ran through my heart. It the entrance of the parking lot I stopped to regard her for a moment. In this woman, I saw myself once again a madcap comedian, unrestrained and full of possibility.
I knew it was a fantasy, but without that delusion, I was empty.
I’m cheating on my wife, who said she didn’t care if I took another lover, but my heart is torn by desire and mournful sadness, deep regret and lust, confusion and uneasiness. I have no idea how this will play out, but I do not have the will to backtrack and resist the change – regardless of how I will be shaped by the things to come. This is a fait accompli.
N saw me, peering over her sunglasses, and nodded. She strode through the lot, pulling her overnight case. I studied her expression; the half-smile, half smirk that disclosed her singular style of enjoying a situation. It was part of the reason I was fascinated by her; she mixed enthusiasm with mock scorn. We played at being fun-loving nitpickers, sham grumblers who made every comment a comedic set-up or punchline. Our comic banter was a perfect complement to our physical desires; intellectual intimacy and satisfaction. I was in love with her and our unorthodox union.
She opened the car door, “It’s fucking scorching!”
“It’s early. Don’t worry, it gets hotter.”
She tossed her case over the passenger seat and climbed in.
“Do you have air conditioning?”
“It’s on.” said,
Her eyes went wide. “Jesus, FUCK!”
N was wearing a tan shirt and khaki shorts and her hair was pulled back into a long, wavy ponytail. She wasn't wearing a bra and she never wore make-up when we were together. Her face was naturally beautiful. Our greeting was no more than leaning together to press our cheeks together for a moment. This sufficed, both aware that she would find a kiss unwelcome; too awkward. Our intimate pleasures and satisfaction were purely sex, not tender lovemaking. Buddies with favors, was how she described it. I eventually came to understand her unspoken rationale; if one never falls in love, one can’t be forsaken.
Once, she asked me if I wanted her to wear lipstick to a social event.
“No. Why? You’re beautiful.”
N wasn’t referring to a beauty enhancement. She wanted to know if I’d like her to appear more feminine, more heterosexual, as my partner. I didn’t. I knew who I was with and I was satisfied.
I kept looking at the side of her face as we drove out of Palm Springs on North Gene Autry Trail headed north on Highway 10 toward Barstow to retrace my path with her. On the way, I filled her in on what I had experienced so far. N looked at me and smiled. She understood what I was were looking for, and what I wanted from her. A long pause ensued.
“A notion is beginning to take shape.” I said to her.
“Or has already done so.” she replied, glancing down at my lap, then back up to my eyes. “Do you want me now?”
We stopped, well off the road, and struggled in our hot confinement.
ALTARS AND SHRINES
N read from a book she brought along to fill the occasional moments when we tire of words and resort to sharing silence. It was a pre-publication review copy she needed to evaluate, a potboiler by the daughter of a renowned writer. She read a few pages and it was insufferably bad.
“Garbage!” I said.
“Pure crap.” she said.
I checked the rearview mirror. No one was behind us.
“N, throw it out the fucking window!”
“Are you serious?”
“Shit yeah. Toss it!”
N opened the window and flung the volume out onto the sand. Her resulting look of scandalous joy told me she had just stepped well beyond her normal behavior. She got a thrill.
“Atta’ girl!” I said.
“Now. Food?”
I agreed. She needed fuel. “Sure. Café or Car-afé? Stop or eat on the way? I’m sure Apple Valley has a Michelin-starred greasy spoon. Sound good? We’re about an hour from the Roy Rogers museum and Taxidermy Trigger.”
“The stuffed horse? I could eat one right now.”
I love this jesting.
N checks in with me. “Alright Hicama? Snack now, breeze through museum, then eat for real. Right?
“Of course.”
Hicama was her playful nickname for me. It evolved from Higgins to Higgs to Higg to Higgmuh then, after I made her a salad containing jicama, I became Hicama. I used various mutations of N’s last name, a taxonomic animal name, that lent itself to multiple comedic prefixes and suffixes. Our friendship went from last names to silly aliases as we grew more affectionate. It was as close to indulging in a lover’s patois as we allowed ourselves to foster. That’s how getting to know someone goes, right? Start with well-structured, respectful conversation and, as the formality dissipates, we moved to a less-guarded vernacular peppered with shared shortcuts, codes, inferences and arcane references. Verbal foreplay evolves with intimacy.
When I described the Roy Rogers Museum, N patiently let me go into disproportionate detail. The clothes, guns, vehicles, musical instruments, saddles, and tack,
“It’s weird that Rogers had his horse stuffed. Isn’t it weird?”
I screwed up my face in mimed agreement.
“Yeah. He stuffed his dog too. Bullet the Wonderdog.”
“He called his dog Bullet?” She said, reproachfully.
“Yeah, Bullet. And his horse was Trigger. He had a cat named Target for a while, but that didn’t work out all that well.”
I had her for a moment, but she caught on. “You are such a momo.”
“Hang on, Bullet was truly a Wonderdog! Understood complex English constructions, could add small sums and, as a mere pup, always went on the paper. Imagine that! Roy was an avid fan of taxidermy. Death be not proud. He packed his brainy horse, and his faithful dog of wonders – the easily-housebroken Bullet – with kapok and love!”
“Really?” She said, her tone indicating she was rapidly losing interest, “How very interesting... I’m all a-tremble with anticipation.”
I needed to entertain her – engage her, excite her. I waited to answer until my silence corralled her meandering attention.
“Yup. Roy is also famous for stuffing his wife, Dale Evans.”
She muttered sarcastically, “Oh, please, tell me more.”
“He stuffed her! And, if he showered first, she fucking LOVED it!”
N froze – wide-eyed and emotionless. That was how she laughed.
I loved it. “We’ll stop at the first snack shop we see, Okay?”
“Don’t you try stuffing me, Hicama.” She snapped.
“Me? I am a man of honor! Only turkeys… and cabbage.”
N fought back a faint hint of a coy smile, exuding sexuality, trying to be detached and stoic, which thrilled me. I wanted to stop driving, turn off the engine and turn my full attention on her, study her face, feel her eyes on me, and watch her breathe. I knew what I needed do to reach her heart and stoke her fervor.
It was an old lesson I had learned as a teenager.
In my junior year in high school, I had many female friends but remained an inexperienced virgin. Oh God, they loved me, sending me into wild fantasies of kissing, leading to petting, leading to what I could only sketchily imagine. But, at most, I only begot their sisterly feelings. I often felt miserable when I heard them proclaim “you’re the greatest,” or “I wish all the boys were like you!” My feeble advances were always met a wave-off with some version of “I wouldn’t want to spoil the incredible friendship we have!” What the hell was I supposed to do? I was sure being witty and full of fun was the key to earning the attention and affection of the opposite sex, the sex I so dearly craved. But in the parlance of aluminum-siding salesmen; I couldn’t close the deal.
That summer, while trying to improve my calculus grade in summer school, I met an amiable French exchange student, Baptiste Laporte. Bap handed me the winning ticket.
“Martin, it is in the eyes. It is all in the eyes. Do you care to know?”
“Well… YEAH!”
I sat with him in the lunchroom and took in his advice as I would a cold, wet, storm-lost kitten. At first, I had as much of an idea what to do with his guidance as I did the mewling foundling. Baptiste stared at me intently.
“I am showing you now. Look at me. Do not stop looking at me as I speak, do not even blink.”
After my self-consciousness abated, I was captivated by his advice and I have never forgotten his sage counsel.
“A woman must know you are talking to her, not looking about at shiny cars, or baseball players, or whatever is around your feet or, worst of all, another woman passing by. You see? So hold her eyes with your eyes. She will look to see who you are, and you will be speaking to her soul. Speak your heart. If she senses you are not being honest, she will push you away. If she sees honesty, she will respond with honesty. That is how one opens the door.”
He pointed to his eyes, “Windows of the soul.” Then to his mouth “The mouth is the door. To be graced to touch a woman’s body, you must first touch her mind. Let her see who you truly are. Let her choose you. Her eyes will tell you more than her lips. If she finds you desirable, her first kiss will tell you everything else you need to know.”
I so wanted that simplicity.
When we met, I told N Laura and I were becoming more and more distant. It was a foregone conclusion at that point that we would separate.
She said, “Are you okay with it?” but she knew by the way I stared off I was disconcerted. She gave me a blank look and spoke slowly and distinctly.
“Your… wife?” she asked.
“She knows.”
I nodded and swallowed hard. My saliva tasted bitter and I didn’t know what to say, how to start. I had several things running through my mind that I didn’t want to talk about, but what N consistently offered me was a chance to unburden myself of the heavy emotions that stole my presence. Besides, I knew I needed to be punished for failing as a husband and I saw N as complicit in my self-torment. I mean, what kind of man takes a lesbian for a lover?
“Divorce?”
“Laura and I were raised Catholic, we don’t believe in divorce. We cheat.”
“Convenient.” she said.
So this is how it came to be. N hand-grenaded me, exploded the fear lurking in my mind, sent pieces of thoughts and ideas in every direction only to coalesce back into a single focused point that included all of the feelings from all of the thoughts; a conceptual shock-therapy.
Christ, I loved her.
The ensuing silence gave us each enough to think about, so we let the road noises fill our ears for a few moments. Then she exhaled.
“I’m thirsty.”
“Yeah. The coolers empty. Need ice too. I’ll stop.
We drove along commenting on the hills around us or occasional bird, or passing motorist. I mentioned the sigil-covered roadbed and she unbuttoned her shirt to revel her bra.
“Hot.” She said.
Hot. No shit.
What perverse pleasure there is in illicit sex – lust without the burden of a commitment. I was beginning to understand how I could be in love with a woman without needing to have her love me. I may have never embraced this realization if I hadn’t realized I continued to love my wife but no longer was in love with her. At first, this brought on enormous psychological torment; feeling a profound loss fused with the jittery excitement of an unimaginable, divergent future. I was freed from my secure, but disappointingly predictable, path ahead. But my children were behind a looming wall of separateness. This distance caused my most harrowing anguish.
Up ahead, a roadside store sign read Fatima’s Bodega.”
“Fatima’s?” I asked.
N squinted. “Sure. Next stop is fifty miles, right? Stop here.”
I slowed and turned into its unpaved lot, sending up a cloud of dust. Painted milkcans marked the perimeter of the inside the store, N headed for the freezer and I grabbed a couple of beers and some bagged nuts, beef jerky, and a bag of ice. Behind the counter, an old man speaks to an older woman in a black mourning gown, lace mantilla over her head, chain-dangling crucifix at her breast, who sits motionless. She stares at him with rapt attention. His words held my attention as I stood there, trying to piece together my paltry grasp of Spanish to understand what he was telling her.
He speaks slowly and dramatically, “El fantasma de Gonzalo coloca una mesa en la parte superior de una tumba y sirve a Don Juan una comida de víboras y escorpiones. ¡Gonzalo mata a Don Juan!”
I got most of it. “Gonzalo’s ghost on a tomb makes Don Juan eat vipers and scorpions, then strikes him dead!” The death of Don Juan; the mythic seducer at the hands of vengeful spirit.
The old woman clutched her crucifix and closed her eyes..
“Hicama.” N said from the rear of the store, loud enough for me to hear.
The man and woman heard her and stopped talking and looked at me. I pointed to my chest and went to see what N wanted. She held a box of popsicles, and pointed at a doorway to a dimly-lit rear room where the flicker of candles made the shadows dance across the walls.
I caught N’s eye and nodded toward the room.
“Shrine. Come on…”
We stepped into a meticulously decorated sanctuary, an altar surrounded by statues, framed images of Jesus and Saints, plastic flowers, votive lights, incense burners, , and photos of young and old people. At its center, a tall plaster Mary, crowned with a halo nimbus of gold, hands extended in compassion, standing atop a half-dome of the Earth. At her feet, Angelitos, beaded rosaries, cloth scapulars, a silver chalice filled with long cactus thorns, painted papier-mâché skulls, a husk of dry brown bread, miniscule bottles, rings and keys, all arranged on a dusty Falsa blanket. The walls were covered with photos, posters, embroidery, and black velvet paintings: the Last Supper, Aztec warriors, and oddly, El Santo, the Mexican wrestler.
“Woof!” I said, looking for N’s reaction. She cocked her head to the side and her eyes went wide.
We took it all in, being respectful, knowing the old folks out front were still silent, surely awaiting our return to the counter. The photos were eerie, all looking as if they had just learned something tragic just as the shutter snapped. Aged couples, a gray-haired man holding an outsized bible, a smiling boy in white, a soldier in a carefully-posed portrait were closest to the statue. Their frames were adorned with palm leaves and holy cards, smaller photos of men and women, and feathers. The sheer intensity of the display gave us pause and we looked at each other, somewhat overcome. I lead the way back to the counter.
The old man had come around the counter and stood next to the ice cooler. He took our items from us, set them on the counter, and walked back around to the cash register.
Beneath the counter was a wire rack holding maps, pamphlets on desert safety, thin books on flora, reptile, and rock identification and one dog-eared paperback titled, The Garbage People; The Trip to Helter-Skelter and Beyond with Charlie Manson. I put it up next to the cash register with our other items. Manson was the demon who made Death Valley his home, stocking an abandoned movie location with lovers and lackeys to do his dirty work. I wanted N to give me a professional evaluation of the book and take her mind off of complaining about the temperature.
As the man bagged my items, the old woman closed her eyes and said, “Dios te salve, María, llena eres de gracia, el Señor es contigo. bendita tú eres…”
I knew this. My sixth grade teacher, Sister Seamus Eileen, believed that teaching the Hail Mary in Spanish would help to unify Holy Mother Church. My class recited the prayer in a sing-song that embedded the foreign words into my brain. I whispered along with the woman. “…ruega por nosotros pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte. Amén.” …pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. "
N stepped on my foot and hissed, “HUNGRY!”
The woman and held up her rosary beads and clutched the crucifix. She bowed her head and I instinctively bowed in return. Serving at masses, funerals, devotions, and weddings in my youth has left me with unconscious reactions and an inner respect for ritual; bowing when unable to genuflect, finishing prayers in Latin, and saying “God bless you!” when someone sneezes. My tabula is not rasa.
I paid the man and followed N to the door. Above it, a marker-pen cardboard sign read, “Plus Ultra”… “More Beyond.” I hoped that the sign was simply a motto and not a warning of what was to come. Whatever it turned out to be, it was probably what I needed.
N and I sat in the car, parked in front of the store, sipping the cold beers.
“Weird.” She said, “Fatima is an Arab name. She didn’t look Middle Eastern to me.”
“That’s probably not her name. It’s a nod to Our Lady of Fatima. The statue you saw in the shrine. Mary.”
She nodded toward the building. “What was all that in there? You and her.”
“She was praying the rosary. Asking Mary to ask Jesus for help.”
N grimaced, “She’s obviously a widow. The photo of her with that old guy in the room. A little late for prayers, isn’t it?”
“Maybe she was praying for a stranger; someone who is troubled and needs guidance.”
“Oh, Jesus. You believe that hoodoo? Prayers, statues and lucky lottery tickets?”
I thought for a moment before responding, “I gave up on it all years ago. I set it aside. But now I wonder if praying isn’t just asking yourself to consider your problems from an objective point of view. Maybe that helps. I don’t talk to statues and only buy Irish Sweepstakes tickets until I found out it was a racket.”
“Prayers?” she said.
“Yeah. You say `God bless you’ when somebody sneezes, don’t you?”
“No Hic…” N said, “I’m a Jew. We carry Kleenex and don’t ask God to fix allergies.”
We finished the beers and headed back onto the highway.
N wasn’t finished. “Noah’s ark? Two of every animal? Predator and prey on the same boat?”
“You’re focusing on the denotation, not the connotation. It’s allegorical. The message beneath the improbable story is environmental responsibility. Bible stories are metaphors derived from ancient lessons and observations. Education produces knowledge – experience creates wisdom.”
“People believe the denotation, Hic. The wisdom escapes them.” she said.
“I’m not them. I have my own problems.”
N rummaged through the clutter in the back seat, picked up the Manson book and inspected it carefully.
"It's a book," I said, "it's full of words and ideas."
"True Crime. First edition. The writer, Gilmore, wrote about the Black Dahlia murder. You want to know more about Manson?"
"I know all I need to know about him. I followed the story as it unfolded back in the seventies. An evil bastard. Nasty stuff. It's probably all in the book. I bought it for you. It’s probably better than the one you threw out the window."
"This was published in seventy-one. Oh, nice... here's the pull quote from Charles, 'Where does the garbage go, as we have tin cans and garbage cans along the road, and oil slicks in the water, so you have people, and I am one of your garbage people.' Sounds like a charmer."
I let her simmer.
“Why did you buy this?”
“Because we’re headed through Death Valley and we might stop at Charlie’s place.” I said.
“He killed people.”
“I know. Read on.” I said, “I’m sure you’ll find something we can argue about.”
I didn't want to discuss about Manson’s paranoid schizophrenia, coercive persuasion, and murderous, amassed “family.” Most people know only the Hollywood Hills executions carried out by his slaves, but he had a deep-seated desire to initiate a race war, conquer Los Angeles, and eventually destroy civilization. His group stole Volkswagen Beetles (and the occasional Porsche) to build stripped-down dune-buggies that could carry them in and out of L.A. without using the highways. Some were fitted with auxiliary gas tanks to outrun cops, machine gun mounts, and storage for ammunition, food, and dope. Others were sold to generate income. The desert hid a fleet of these provisional Warwagens, waiting for Helter Skelter.
Manson’s inspiration for these vehicles was a line from Revelations: “And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle.”
Manson’s inspiration for the race war came from the Beatles song, “Helter Skelter.” The group was referring to an amusement park ride of the same name, but Charlie’s fevered imagination interpreted the lyrics as a call for inter-racial war. The lyrics have nothing to do with such insanity.
Beatles misheard and Beetles stolen by beetle-browed Chuck. Depravity has its own, distinct resonance.
N kept skimming the paperback. There would be empty miles of road ahead to indulge in the morbid fascination of embodied evil.
I checked the rear-view mirror and saw a group of bikers gaining on us. A few yards from my rear bumper, they swung across the centerline into the oncoming lane and past us as I hugged the shoulder to give way. The unmuffled Harleys sent shockwaves through my floorboards as the dozen or so riders and their passengers roared past and leaned back into the lane ahead of me.
Each guy wore a sleeveless denim jacket with BANDOLEERS embroidered across the back and most had a woman sitting up high on the buddy seat clinging to his back. These were wearing skintight leather pants and sleeveless vest that revealed as many tattoos as the guys. They were a blur of illustrated, tanned skin, hair flowing in the wind, bedecked with gold rings, bracelets, necklaces. None wore makeup or made eye contact with N or me, which was a comfort. I have known motorcycle gang members to take offense at nothing more than a glance and things can get out of control in an instant.
How fitting that these modern nomads were on a caravan to who-knows-where. Metal camels, methamphetamine spice traders, carrying their wealth, gold and women – WAGS – Wives And Girlfriends. Another overlay of past and present cultures for me to ponder. Chopper gypsies adapted to the barren sand and tar world, headed to a trade or shelter or blowout.
I thought of Mix and Claudia.
Mix was a strange looking guy; I always thought he resembled a puppet, a carved marionette with exaggerated features. When he was young he was a motocross (MX) rider and he took the nickname Mix. We became friends after I returned from the overseas and he wanted to know everything about the war in Nam. So we drank beers, smoked reefer, and traded stories one-for-one; mine about the military, his about prison. Eventually I realized he wanted to know as much as possible about the Army so he could impersonate a veteran for fun, profit, and wangling out of legal messes. It’s called stolen valor and it’s shameful, if the impersonator has any shame.
His woman, Claudia, was a dazzling beauty with a Vargas pin-up body; full-breasted and wide-hipped. She was simply arousing. Somehow Mix had scored a living fantasy.
At that time in my life all I cared about was getting high, having a good time, and playing with my band. I owned a Honda 350 motorcycle which officially precluded me from having anything to do with his Harley-Davidson gang. So I was safe to smoke, drink, and goof around with Mix as long as I was willing to perform I Fought the Law and the Law Won, Folsom Prison Blues, and Murder in My Heart for the Judge. To me, they were songs. To Mix, they were the soundtrack of his life.
I was careful not to stare at Claudia when Mix was around. He was mercurial.
Claudia told me she had run away from her small town Nebraska home and headed for California when she was seventeen. After finding the Los Angeles streets way too rough for a pretty girl, she started looking for a guy to take care of her. She ran into Dave at a biker party and that night he claimed her. He was the burly sergeant-at-arms for the Steel Rangers, an outlaw motorcycle gang based out of Sacramento and deep into methamphetamine trafficking. Suddenly Claudia had money, drugs, and a party life as she grew into a statuesque beauty. Sadly, the more attractive she became, the more Dave grew jealous and possessive.
About that time, Mix was released from Chino after doing three and a half of hard time on an aggravated assault conviction. Within weeks, he fell in with the Steel Troopers and earned his bones by expanding their meth distribution well beyond the northern counties. The first time he saw Claudia he got so highly aroused he couldn’t conceal his erection. This brought out Dave’s jealousy and he made it hard on Mix; degrading him and forcing him to take the riskiest chances. Mix was told to “hold his mud” – and keep his eyes off Claudia.
One night, I ran into Claudia at a kegger while Mix was on a run. She was pretty drunk and in the mood to share her secrets, so I asked her how she wound up with Mix.
“I was with Dave for almost two years. The last year was Hell. He started cheating on me and chained me to his chop when he was with someone else. Mix hated him and Dave knew it. Once night, after a roadhouse rumble, Dave burned my thigh with his cigar to brand me as his property. Mix heard me scream and shot Dave dead with a derringer. Since then we’ve been on the run because the Rangers want him dead. He saved me. He cares for me. He loves me. I owe him my life.”
Weeks after the murder, the Rangers ran up on Mix and beat him so severely he almost died. He had a broken leg, six fractured ribs and his face was smashed severely – his eyes, nose, and jaw suffered multiple fractures. It took months of reconstructive surgery to piece his face back together with bone fragments, wire, and skin grafts. The surgeons agreed on one prognosis. Mix’s face could not be reconstructed again. The next attack could leave his face permanently malformed; a sagging, piteous visage. For now, though, his face looked like an approximation of a man’s face - and the Steel Rangers still wanted him dead.
Claudia ended her retelling of her rescue with a sobering twist. “We are always looking over our shoulders and I live in fear that I lose him. Mix saved me by killing Dave… who was his brother.”
I was taken aback by this fratricide committed by the guy I got stoned and drunk with. How does one live after murdering his brother? How did Cain kill Abel? How could Michael Corleone watch calmly as Fredo is motored out to the center of the lake, ostensibly to fish, but sent out to catch only a bullet to the head. As the man watches his line, waiting for the line’s bobber to bounce, he softly pleads for intercession, “Hail Mary, full of grace…” until BANG! and Fredo sleeps with the fishes.
My father used to deal with his family quarrels by repeating, “Blood is thicker than water,” which is only true until there is blood in the water, and the bloodline is drawn thin to bloodshed.
Oh, Claudia.
Claudius murdered his brother, King Hamlet, and Prince Hamlet attempted to avenge the fratricide. Ear, cup, sword, poisoned. Poison in jest. Poison ingest. In the end, all were poisoned by the deceit, betrayal, and corruption that rain down from the brother-killing.
But most of all, they succumbed to hate; the demon emotion.
The bikers were black smudges miles ahead, hovering over the highway’s mirage-lake, undulating in the heat haze, looking for all the world like a flock of crows taking flight.
“Where are you, Hic?” said my companion.
“Right here, woman. Right here.”
The crows blinked out of sight.
“Garbage!” I said.
“Pure crap.” she said.
I checked the rearview mirror. No one was behind us.
“N, throw it out the fucking window!”
“Are you serious?”
“Shit yeah. Toss it!”
N opened the window and flung the volume out onto the sand. Her resulting look of scandalous joy told me she had just stepped well beyond her normal behavior. She got a thrill.
“Atta’ girl!” I said.
“Now. Food?”
I agreed. She needed fuel. “Sure. Café or Car-afé? Stop or eat on the way? I’m sure Apple Valley has a Michelin-starred greasy spoon. Sound good? We’re about an hour from the Roy Rogers museum and Taxidermy Trigger.”
“The stuffed horse? I could eat one right now.”
I love this jesting.
N checks in with me. “Alright Hicama? Snack now, breeze through museum, then eat for real. Right?
“Of course.”
Hicama was her playful nickname for me. It evolved from Higgins to Higgs to Higg to Higgmuh then, after I made her a salad containing jicama, I became Hicama. I used various mutations of N’s last name, a taxonomic animal name, that lent itself to multiple comedic prefixes and suffixes. Our friendship went from last names to silly aliases as we grew more affectionate. It was as close to indulging in a lover’s patois as we allowed ourselves to foster. That’s how getting to know someone goes, right? Start with well-structured, respectful conversation and, as the formality dissipates, we moved to a less-guarded vernacular peppered with shared shortcuts, codes, inferences and arcane references. Verbal foreplay evolves with intimacy.
When I described the Roy Rogers Museum, N patiently let me go into disproportionate detail. The clothes, guns, vehicles, musical instruments, saddles, and tack,
“It’s weird that Rogers had his horse stuffed. Isn’t it weird?”
I screwed up my face in mimed agreement.
“Yeah. He stuffed his dog too. Bullet the Wonderdog.”
“He called his dog Bullet?” She said, reproachfully.
“Yeah, Bullet. And his horse was Trigger. He had a cat named Target for a while, but that didn’t work out all that well.”
I had her for a moment, but she caught on. “You are such a momo.”
“Hang on, Bullet was truly a Wonderdog! Understood complex English constructions, could add small sums and, as a mere pup, always went on the paper. Imagine that! Roy was an avid fan of taxidermy. Death be not proud. He packed his brainy horse, and his faithful dog of wonders – the easily-housebroken Bullet – with kapok and love!”
“Really?” She said, her tone indicating she was rapidly losing interest, “How very interesting... I’m all a-tremble with anticipation.”
I needed to entertain her – engage her, excite her. I waited to answer until my silence corralled her meandering attention.
“Yup. Roy is also famous for stuffing his wife, Dale Evans.”
She muttered sarcastically, “Oh, please, tell me more.”
“He stuffed her! And, if he showered first, she fucking LOVED it!”
N froze – wide-eyed and emotionless. That was how she laughed.
I loved it. “We’ll stop at the first snack shop we see, Okay?”
“Don’t you try stuffing me, Hicama.” She snapped.
“Me? I am a man of honor! Only turkeys… and cabbage.”
N fought back a faint hint of a coy smile, exuding sexuality, trying to be detached and stoic, which thrilled me. I wanted to stop driving, turn off the engine and turn my full attention on her, study her face, feel her eyes on me, and watch her breathe. I knew what I needed do to reach her heart and stoke her fervor.
It was an old lesson I had learned as a teenager.
In my junior year in high school, I had many female friends but remained an inexperienced virgin. Oh God, they loved me, sending me into wild fantasies of kissing, leading to petting, leading to what I could only sketchily imagine. But, at most, I only begot their sisterly feelings. I often felt miserable when I heard them proclaim “you’re the greatest,” or “I wish all the boys were like you!” My feeble advances were always met a wave-off with some version of “I wouldn’t want to spoil the incredible friendship we have!” What the hell was I supposed to do? I was sure being witty and full of fun was the key to earning the attention and affection of the opposite sex, the sex I so dearly craved. But in the parlance of aluminum-siding salesmen; I couldn’t close the deal.
That summer, while trying to improve my calculus grade in summer school, I met an amiable French exchange student, Baptiste Laporte. Bap handed me the winning ticket.
“Martin, it is in the eyes. It is all in the eyes. Do you care to know?”
“Well… YEAH!”
I sat with him in the lunchroom and took in his advice as I would a cold, wet, storm-lost kitten. At first, I had as much of an idea what to do with his guidance as I did the mewling foundling. Baptiste stared at me intently.
“I am showing you now. Look at me. Do not stop looking at me as I speak, do not even blink.”
After my self-consciousness abated, I was captivated by his advice and I have never forgotten his sage counsel.
“A woman must know you are talking to her, not looking about at shiny cars, or baseball players, or whatever is around your feet or, worst of all, another woman passing by. You see? So hold her eyes with your eyes. She will look to see who you are, and you will be speaking to her soul. Speak your heart. If she senses you are not being honest, she will push you away. If she sees honesty, she will respond with honesty. That is how one opens the door.”
He pointed to his eyes, “Windows of the soul.” Then to his mouth “The mouth is the door. To be graced to touch a woman’s body, you must first touch her mind. Let her see who you truly are. Let her choose you. Her eyes will tell you more than her lips. If she finds you desirable, her first kiss will tell you everything else you need to know.”
I so wanted that simplicity.
When we met, I told N Laura and I were becoming more and more distant. It was a foregone conclusion at that point that we would separate.
She said, “Are you okay with it?” but she knew by the way I stared off I was disconcerted. She gave me a blank look and spoke slowly and distinctly.
“Your… wife?” she asked.
“She knows.”
I nodded and swallowed hard. My saliva tasted bitter and I didn’t know what to say, how to start. I had several things running through my mind that I didn’t want to talk about, but what N consistently offered me was a chance to unburden myself of the heavy emotions that stole my presence. Besides, I knew I needed to be punished for failing as a husband and I saw N as complicit in my self-torment. I mean, what kind of man takes a lesbian for a lover?
“Divorce?”
“Laura and I were raised Catholic, we don’t believe in divorce. We cheat.”
“Convenient.” she said.
So this is how it came to be. N hand-grenaded me, exploded the fear lurking in my mind, sent pieces of thoughts and ideas in every direction only to coalesce back into a single focused point that included all of the feelings from all of the thoughts; a conceptual shock-therapy.
Christ, I loved her.
The ensuing silence gave us each enough to think about, so we let the road noises fill our ears for a few moments. Then she exhaled.
“I’m thirsty.”
“Yeah. The coolers empty. Need ice too. I’ll stop.
We drove along commenting on the hills around us or occasional bird, or passing motorist. I mentioned the sigil-covered roadbed and she unbuttoned her shirt to revel her bra.
“Hot.” She said.
Hot. No shit.
What perverse pleasure there is in illicit sex – lust without the burden of a commitment. I was beginning to understand how I could be in love with a woman without needing to have her love me. I may have never embraced this realization if I hadn’t realized I continued to love my wife but no longer was in love with her. At first, this brought on enormous psychological torment; feeling a profound loss fused with the jittery excitement of an unimaginable, divergent future. I was freed from my secure, but disappointingly predictable, path ahead. But my children were behind a looming wall of separateness. This distance caused my most harrowing anguish.
Up ahead, a roadside store sign read Fatima’s Bodega.”
“Fatima’s?” I asked.
N squinted. “Sure. Next stop is fifty miles, right? Stop here.”
I slowed and turned into its unpaved lot, sending up a cloud of dust. Painted milkcans marked the perimeter of the inside the store, N headed for the freezer and I grabbed a couple of beers and some bagged nuts, beef jerky, and a bag of ice. Behind the counter, an old man speaks to an older woman in a black mourning gown, lace mantilla over her head, chain-dangling crucifix at her breast, who sits motionless. She stares at him with rapt attention. His words held my attention as I stood there, trying to piece together my paltry grasp of Spanish to understand what he was telling her.
He speaks slowly and dramatically, “El fantasma de Gonzalo coloca una mesa en la parte superior de una tumba y sirve a Don Juan una comida de víboras y escorpiones. ¡Gonzalo mata a Don Juan!”
I got most of it. “Gonzalo’s ghost on a tomb makes Don Juan eat vipers and scorpions, then strikes him dead!” The death of Don Juan; the mythic seducer at the hands of vengeful spirit.
The old woman clutched her crucifix and closed her eyes..
“Hicama.” N said from the rear of the store, loud enough for me to hear.
The man and woman heard her and stopped talking and looked at me. I pointed to my chest and went to see what N wanted. She held a box of popsicles, and pointed at a doorway to a dimly-lit rear room where the flicker of candles made the shadows dance across the walls.
I caught N’s eye and nodded toward the room.
“Shrine. Come on…”
We stepped into a meticulously decorated sanctuary, an altar surrounded by statues, framed images of Jesus and Saints, plastic flowers, votive lights, incense burners, , and photos of young and old people. At its center, a tall plaster Mary, crowned with a halo nimbus of gold, hands extended in compassion, standing atop a half-dome of the Earth. At her feet, Angelitos, beaded rosaries, cloth scapulars, a silver chalice filled with long cactus thorns, painted papier-mâché skulls, a husk of dry brown bread, miniscule bottles, rings and keys, all arranged on a dusty Falsa blanket. The walls were covered with photos, posters, embroidery, and black velvet paintings: the Last Supper, Aztec warriors, and oddly, El Santo, the Mexican wrestler.
“Woof!” I said, looking for N’s reaction. She cocked her head to the side and her eyes went wide.
We took it all in, being respectful, knowing the old folks out front were still silent, surely awaiting our return to the counter. The photos were eerie, all looking as if they had just learned something tragic just as the shutter snapped. Aged couples, a gray-haired man holding an outsized bible, a smiling boy in white, a soldier in a carefully-posed portrait were closest to the statue. Their frames were adorned with palm leaves and holy cards, smaller photos of men and women, and feathers. The sheer intensity of the display gave us pause and we looked at each other, somewhat overcome. I lead the way back to the counter.
The old man had come around the counter and stood next to the ice cooler. He took our items from us, set them on the counter, and walked back around to the cash register.
Beneath the counter was a wire rack holding maps, pamphlets on desert safety, thin books on flora, reptile, and rock identification and one dog-eared paperback titled, The Garbage People; The Trip to Helter-Skelter and Beyond with Charlie Manson. I put it up next to the cash register with our other items. Manson was the demon who made Death Valley his home, stocking an abandoned movie location with lovers and lackeys to do his dirty work. I wanted N to give me a professional evaluation of the book and take her mind off of complaining about the temperature.
As the man bagged my items, the old woman closed her eyes and said, “Dios te salve, María, llena eres de gracia, el Señor es contigo. bendita tú eres…”
I knew this. My sixth grade teacher, Sister Seamus Eileen, believed that teaching the Hail Mary in Spanish would help to unify Holy Mother Church. My class recited the prayer in a sing-song that embedded the foreign words into my brain. I whispered along with the woman. “…ruega por nosotros pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte. Amén.” …pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. "
N stepped on my foot and hissed, “HUNGRY!”
The woman and held up her rosary beads and clutched the crucifix. She bowed her head and I instinctively bowed in return. Serving at masses, funerals, devotions, and weddings in my youth has left me with unconscious reactions and an inner respect for ritual; bowing when unable to genuflect, finishing prayers in Latin, and saying “God bless you!” when someone sneezes. My tabula is not rasa.
I paid the man and followed N to the door. Above it, a marker-pen cardboard sign read, “Plus Ultra”… “More Beyond.” I hoped that the sign was simply a motto and not a warning of what was to come. Whatever it turned out to be, it was probably what I needed.
N and I sat in the car, parked in front of the store, sipping the cold beers.
“Weird.” She said, “Fatima is an Arab name. She didn’t look Middle Eastern to me.”
“That’s probably not her name. It’s a nod to Our Lady of Fatima. The statue you saw in the shrine. Mary.”
She nodded toward the building. “What was all that in there? You and her.”
“She was praying the rosary. Asking Mary to ask Jesus for help.”
N grimaced, “She’s obviously a widow. The photo of her with that old guy in the room. A little late for prayers, isn’t it?”
“Maybe she was praying for a stranger; someone who is troubled and needs guidance.”
“Oh, Jesus. You believe that hoodoo? Prayers, statues and lucky lottery tickets?”
I thought for a moment before responding, “I gave up on it all years ago. I set it aside. But now I wonder if praying isn’t just asking yourself to consider your problems from an objective point of view. Maybe that helps. I don’t talk to statues and only buy Irish Sweepstakes tickets until I found out it was a racket.”
“Prayers?” she said.
“Yeah. You say `God bless you’ when somebody sneezes, don’t you?”
“No Hic…” N said, “I’m a Jew. We carry Kleenex and don’t ask God to fix allergies.”
We finished the beers and headed back onto the highway.
N wasn’t finished. “Noah’s ark? Two of every animal? Predator and prey on the same boat?”
“You’re focusing on the denotation, not the connotation. It’s allegorical. The message beneath the improbable story is environmental responsibility. Bible stories are metaphors derived from ancient lessons and observations. Education produces knowledge – experience creates wisdom.”
“People believe the denotation, Hic. The wisdom escapes them.” she said.
“I’m not them. I have my own problems.”
N rummaged through the clutter in the back seat, picked up the Manson book and inspected it carefully.
"It's a book," I said, "it's full of words and ideas."
"True Crime. First edition. The writer, Gilmore, wrote about the Black Dahlia murder. You want to know more about Manson?"
"I know all I need to know about him. I followed the story as it unfolded back in the seventies. An evil bastard. Nasty stuff. It's probably all in the book. I bought it for you. It’s probably better than the one you threw out the window."
"This was published in seventy-one. Oh, nice... here's the pull quote from Charles, 'Where does the garbage go, as we have tin cans and garbage cans along the road, and oil slicks in the water, so you have people, and I am one of your garbage people.' Sounds like a charmer."
I let her simmer.
“Why did you buy this?”
“Because we’re headed through Death Valley and we might stop at Charlie’s place.” I said.
“He killed people.”
“I know. Read on.” I said, “I’m sure you’ll find something we can argue about.”
I didn't want to discuss about Manson’s paranoid schizophrenia, coercive persuasion, and murderous, amassed “family.” Most people know only the Hollywood Hills executions carried out by his slaves, but he had a deep-seated desire to initiate a race war, conquer Los Angeles, and eventually destroy civilization. His group stole Volkswagen Beetles (and the occasional Porsche) to build stripped-down dune-buggies that could carry them in and out of L.A. without using the highways. Some were fitted with auxiliary gas tanks to outrun cops, machine gun mounts, and storage for ammunition, food, and dope. Others were sold to generate income. The desert hid a fleet of these provisional Warwagens, waiting for Helter Skelter.
Manson’s inspiration for these vehicles was a line from Revelations: “And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle.”
Manson’s inspiration for the race war came from the Beatles song, “Helter Skelter.” The group was referring to an amusement park ride of the same name, but Charlie’s fevered imagination interpreted the lyrics as a call for inter-racial war. The lyrics have nothing to do with such insanity.
Beatles misheard and Beetles stolen by beetle-browed Chuck. Depravity has its own, distinct resonance.
N kept skimming the paperback. There would be empty miles of road ahead to indulge in the morbid fascination of embodied evil.
I checked the rear-view mirror and saw a group of bikers gaining on us. A few yards from my rear bumper, they swung across the centerline into the oncoming lane and past us as I hugged the shoulder to give way. The unmuffled Harleys sent shockwaves through my floorboards as the dozen or so riders and their passengers roared past and leaned back into the lane ahead of me.
Each guy wore a sleeveless denim jacket with BANDOLEERS embroidered across the back and most had a woman sitting up high on the buddy seat clinging to his back. These were wearing skintight leather pants and sleeveless vest that revealed as many tattoos as the guys. They were a blur of illustrated, tanned skin, hair flowing in the wind, bedecked with gold rings, bracelets, necklaces. None wore makeup or made eye contact with N or me, which was a comfort. I have known motorcycle gang members to take offense at nothing more than a glance and things can get out of control in an instant.
How fitting that these modern nomads were on a caravan to who-knows-where. Metal camels, methamphetamine spice traders, carrying their wealth, gold and women – WAGS – Wives And Girlfriends. Another overlay of past and present cultures for me to ponder. Chopper gypsies adapted to the barren sand and tar world, headed to a trade or shelter or blowout.
I thought of Mix and Claudia.
Mix was a strange looking guy; I always thought he resembled a puppet, a carved marionette with exaggerated features. When he was young he was a motocross (MX) rider and he took the nickname Mix. We became friends after I returned from the overseas and he wanted to know everything about the war in Nam. So we drank beers, smoked reefer, and traded stories one-for-one; mine about the military, his about prison. Eventually I realized he wanted to know as much as possible about the Army so he could impersonate a veteran for fun, profit, and wangling out of legal messes. It’s called stolen valor and it’s shameful, if the impersonator has any shame.
His woman, Claudia, was a dazzling beauty with a Vargas pin-up body; full-breasted and wide-hipped. She was simply arousing. Somehow Mix had scored a living fantasy.
At that time in my life all I cared about was getting high, having a good time, and playing with my band. I owned a Honda 350 motorcycle which officially precluded me from having anything to do with his Harley-Davidson gang. So I was safe to smoke, drink, and goof around with Mix as long as I was willing to perform I Fought the Law and the Law Won, Folsom Prison Blues, and Murder in My Heart for the Judge. To me, they were songs. To Mix, they were the soundtrack of his life.
I was careful not to stare at Claudia when Mix was around. He was mercurial.
Claudia told me she had run away from her small town Nebraska home and headed for California when she was seventeen. After finding the Los Angeles streets way too rough for a pretty girl, she started looking for a guy to take care of her. She ran into Dave at a biker party and that night he claimed her. He was the burly sergeant-at-arms for the Steel Rangers, an outlaw motorcycle gang based out of Sacramento and deep into methamphetamine trafficking. Suddenly Claudia had money, drugs, and a party life as she grew into a statuesque beauty. Sadly, the more attractive she became, the more Dave grew jealous and possessive.
About that time, Mix was released from Chino after doing three and a half of hard time on an aggravated assault conviction. Within weeks, he fell in with the Steel Troopers and earned his bones by expanding their meth distribution well beyond the northern counties. The first time he saw Claudia he got so highly aroused he couldn’t conceal his erection. This brought out Dave’s jealousy and he made it hard on Mix; degrading him and forcing him to take the riskiest chances. Mix was told to “hold his mud” – and keep his eyes off Claudia.
One night, I ran into Claudia at a kegger while Mix was on a run. She was pretty drunk and in the mood to share her secrets, so I asked her how she wound up with Mix.
“I was with Dave for almost two years. The last year was Hell. He started cheating on me and chained me to his chop when he was with someone else. Mix hated him and Dave knew it. Once night, after a roadhouse rumble, Dave burned my thigh with his cigar to brand me as his property. Mix heard me scream and shot Dave dead with a derringer. Since then we’ve been on the run because the Rangers want him dead. He saved me. He cares for me. He loves me. I owe him my life.”
Weeks after the murder, the Rangers ran up on Mix and beat him so severely he almost died. He had a broken leg, six fractured ribs and his face was smashed severely – his eyes, nose, and jaw suffered multiple fractures. It took months of reconstructive surgery to piece his face back together with bone fragments, wire, and skin grafts. The surgeons agreed on one prognosis. Mix’s face could not be reconstructed again. The next attack could leave his face permanently malformed; a sagging, piteous visage. For now, though, his face looked like an approximation of a man’s face - and the Steel Rangers still wanted him dead.
Claudia ended her retelling of her rescue with a sobering twist. “We are always looking over our shoulders and I live in fear that I lose him. Mix saved me by killing Dave… who was his brother.”
I was taken aback by this fratricide committed by the guy I got stoned and drunk with. How does one live after murdering his brother? How did Cain kill Abel? How could Michael Corleone watch calmly as Fredo is motored out to the center of the lake, ostensibly to fish, but sent out to catch only a bullet to the head. As the man watches his line, waiting for the line’s bobber to bounce, he softly pleads for intercession, “Hail Mary, full of grace…” until BANG! and Fredo sleeps with the fishes.
My father used to deal with his family quarrels by repeating, “Blood is thicker than water,” which is only true until there is blood in the water, and the bloodline is drawn thin to bloodshed.
Oh, Claudia.
Claudius murdered his brother, King Hamlet, and Prince Hamlet attempted to avenge the fratricide. Ear, cup, sword, poisoned. Poison in jest. Poison ingest. In the end, all were poisoned by the deceit, betrayal, and corruption that rain down from the brother-killing.
But most of all, they succumbed to hate; the demon emotion.
The bikers were black smudges miles ahead, hovering over the highway’s mirage-lake, undulating in the heat haze, looking for all the world like a flock of crows taking flight.
“Where are you, Hic?” said my companion.
“Right here, woman. Right here.”
The crows blinked out of sight.
APPARITIONS
Much of the desert is populated by ghosts. Not the horror movie bunk; animated sheets of semi-transparent people, risen from the dead, wearing slightly less transparent clothing. To believe that the departed return to roam creation is to believe that jackets, pants, and gowns are also adept at resurrection. Imagine being haunted by a wrathful pair of extra-large jodhpurs or a levitating brassiere.
The hulks left behind when they the spirits scattered about, mislaid by fate, sinking into the ground, each piece paying tribute to what was once a functioning reality. But gone are the sun-baked people, the dusty mines, hardscrabble farms, roadside way stations, the stucco bodegas and garageless filling stations that only a few decades ago were bustling with the great-grandparents of those who are no were to be found. Ghosts.
So, I’m an erstwhile, alien, anthropologist surveying what remains of Earthly relics, hoping to determine who eked out an onerous life there; what did they did and why did they disappeared. The solutions to these riddles – some easy to work out, others latent in tottering shanty shacks that may have housed stoop-shouldered miners, doleful truck-farmers, parched mommas, dog-tired daddies, sunburned kids, meager communities of tumbledown ranches and caved-in warehouses, disintegrating farm machinery, and marooned vehicles. Here are my digs, my unexamined excavations, bloodhound scent trails, hidden histories, myths and parables. Only in this extreme immersion can I be assured that the meaning will be revealed; optimally blotting out my obsession with self-pity.
There’s not much salvageable here, other than heat-furrowed wood and oxidized scrap iron. Every metal object – road signs, automobiles, railcars, mobile home frames – lie abandoned in the wind-driven, shrouding sand, cinnamon-crusted and riddled with bullet holes. They occupy this unbounded, outlaw firing range, this uncontrolled shooting gallery, where lifeless targets embodying the dimming memory of long-gone lives, scarce vestiges of the past are destroyed by thoughtless thugs, meandering gunners.
Meanderthals.
And we, troubled visitors, cannot ignore the persistent allusions to death; skeletal fences, half-buried wheels, petrified trees, or a spray of fresh flowers laid carefully atop a century-old headstone. I imagine octogenarian children hobbling to their parent’s gravesite, surviving on recollections that were old before I was born. I wondered if local inhabitants knew who had driven the junk-hulk sedans when they shined and purred down new highways, decades before they became engineless, door-less, and surrounded by fragrant creosote bushes and pancake prickly pear cactuses. Were they optimistic? Did they reject the temperate clime of the fruited valley, the chill of the mountains, the pounding whisper of the sea shore waves?
Why did they stay? Or did they lose their way, blinded by the sun and sandstorms?
And, how does a driver choose where to let the car choose its final resting place when it grows old, or does an untimely motor-death randomly determine a fated parking spot? This arid land surely exerts some dominion over a vehicle’s untimely demise, leaving the driver to decide when to walk away, following a road toward the horizon - or a distant, glistening image of water.
On that horizon, heat diffraction shimmers make distant objects – cars, trains, people –ripple above the horizon, looking as though they were trembling, succumbing to the intense heat as they float above the heaving, apparition lagoons, complicit in a potentially-fatal deception. On that black-topped highway, an endless caravan of people and goods moves through heat, headed into the boiler or out of it for a lifetime.
I marvel that the desert can be called home – especially such a haunted home; a droughty country, replete with mummified phantoms, preserved by nature, left scattered about upon God’s acre appropriated by the devil, and favored by ascetics.
Those who believe they are being haunted believe they are being observed, followed, touched, or threatened. I admit that I have exhibited these neurotic perceptions from time to time in my life. I began talking to the departed when I wrote a eulogy for my brother.
Paddy, I'm just a storyteller, I know little of death, though I've seen its work and felt its breath on my face. But you know that by now brother -- how this life is all a show, made of so many acts and so many characters and too few happy endings.
I'm stumbling across that stage today trying to remember my lines, hit my marks, but all the while, I'm playing to the gallery, looking for that one bright face with laugh caught in my throat as tears burn my eyes.
Now we have some difficult lines, trying times, as the story moves on, beneath a tin roof, beside an old tree, or under a gold and rose sky, that says years, and means ages, but is endless and magnificent. Like you.
Paddy, when you made your exit and walked from this stage, the light shining back through the doorway fell like truth in our lives; harsh and alarming, yet honest and clear. For we saw that the tin roof was no more than cardboard, and the old tree -- a bundle of sticks, and our wide-open sky -- a dog-eared postcard from nowhere, and the theater -- just boards and some chairs.
So now we stand speechless, awaiting our cue, looking down to find our marks, empty, aching, wanting no more than to wake from this tremulous nightmare to the sound of your big laugh. Seeing you standing fearless and bold. And, blessed with one more chance to hold you, we’d tell you we loved you. We love you.
But the Light is gone and we are changed, the story changed, and the audience sits waiting for the rest of the show.
I will never forget who you were and why I love you.
Even if Paddy is now just a portion of my mind’s experience, I benefit from expressing myself about what concerns me. Again, it’s what I said to N in the bodega parking lot, “…I wonder if praying isn’t just asking yourself to consider your problems from an objective point of view. Maybe that helps.”
Paddy? Keep an eye on us, pilgrims with no fixed destination; no Mecca mosque, no Glastonbury Tor, no Spanish Synagogue, no Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Our destination is within us.
N roused me from my reflections.
She pointed to a roadsign, “Big Bear Lake 25 miles, Victorville, 23 miles. Oy! That’s where Roy stuffed Dale, yes?”
“Yes, in the motel right behind the museum. Are you happy now?”
“Supremely. Does Manson have a museum at Spahn Ranch?”
“No. It’s in his lockdown cell at the Pelican Bay Supermax. Shall we drop by for a quick visit?”
“No. I’m sure Roy’s junk will be sufficiently depressing.”
“We don’t have to go, you know. I’m not going to twist your arm.”
“It’s fine. I want to see the stuffed dog and horse and whatever else he crammed.”
“If I’m not mistaken, Buttermilk is there too. Dale’s horse.”
“The thrills never end.” She said, “Death, in all its glory.”
Yeah, death. That’s what all this was about; dealing with death, looking for ghosts, and wondering about an afterlife. Ghosts imply some sort of afterlife and mix fear and hope into an intoxicating, but nauseating, cocktail. Modern animism demands that we recognize a distinct spiritual essence in every living creature. Our understanding of ghosts and haunting is that a location — be it building, ship, forest, or home — is populated by a spirit or spirits unable to “move on” to their final resting place. Both concepts are based in a religious belief that our mortal end is the beginning of a metaphysical life.
I remember challenging Father Desmond about whether Catholics can believe in ghosts without straying from our doctrine. I was thirteen and my faith was beginning to unravel. He said, “No!” then shook his head looking more weary than dismissive. I asked, “What about the Holy Ghost?” That started a firestorm between me and the man I frequently served mass with; a firestorm that later cooled into a chilly distance.
He barked, “Don’t get wise!”
What of the Saints? We pray to them. Do they exist? Do they listen when we implore them? And the church’s preoccupation with Angels interceding on our behalf? Are these spirits or are they icons that dwell within the aspects of our mind and conscience? Tough questions for the weary Father.
My encounters with the metaphysical were all disappointing. One summer night, well past midnight, I walked the dark streets of my family’s summer town listening to the roar of motorcycles along the nearby highway. The full moon cast long, dim shadows behind me and I turned to see my shadow on the road. As I began to move away the shadow did not move. For a moment I was scared that perhaps I was in the thrall of some unseen force. I turned and walked quickly to my parents’ cottage.
The next morning I walked back to the same spot in the road. What I had thought was my shadow, was a long tar patch on the asphalt. Although it didn’t look much like a silhouette, my frame of right mind under the moon had made me accept a hasty judgment and my adrenaline flowed. Fear is a fight, flight, or freeze signal – helpful when warranted and a rational decision is called for. Fight for your life, flee, or freeze when movement would trigger an attack.
Trigger. Right.
We rolled into the Roy Rogers Museum parking lot. The museum building was an arbitrary mix of fieldstone-walled warehouse and Old West stockade. A giant statue of Trigger, rearing up, stood atop the entrance’s sizable marquee. I waited for N’s sarcasm.
“How big was Roy?”
“Got it. Noted and filed. Can we just roll with the punches here?”
“How big was the dog?”
Why do relationships go from loving affection to loving wisecracks? I’ve done it in every relationship I’ve had. When I was a stand-up comedian, I figured it was part of my personality. The common reasoning among other jokesters was that a troubled childhood lead to either a life of crime or a life of comedy.
My brother was far more sarcastically funny than I. Paddy could convulse people with laughter. He could also fight like a warrior when the need arose, but he preferred sarcasm and mockery to hostility. He was a natural comedian. My entire family was zany. They grew up facing adversity and enduring stress, yet all could lighten a heavy moment with comedy or outright mockery. We laugh at things so we can live with them.
Who cleaned up the poop on Noah’s ark? That’s not in the Bible.
Inside the air-conditioned museum, we plucked our sweaty shirts from our skin and let the cool air rush in. The building was packed with memorabilia and walls of framed black-and-white, eight-by-tens. Roy, Dale, their friends, and livestock looked out from them, depicting decades of film and television history. Display cases of rifles and pistols, mounted trophy animal heads, and saddlery set the Wild West tone; clothing, boots, guitars and movie posters humanized the collection.
Two automobiles caught my attention. Roy’s1946 Willy’s Jeep was the workhorse of his Double R Bar Ranch; stripped down and painted a utilitarian gray. Despite appearing in Roy’s series – which was set in the wild-west – the jeep was an unmitigated anachronism. But who cares about the denotation? The message was clear; Roy brought the bad guys to justice.
The other car was an ostentatious `63 Pontiac that had be stylized by Nudie Cohn, the tailor who designed decorative rhinestone-covered suits. Many Country Western stars owned a "Nudie Suit" to stand out onstage. Mr. Cohn went wild when turning the Bonneville into a “Nudie Car.” He had huge longhorn-steer horns mounted above the front grill, pistols mounted on the hood-mount and used as door handles, and an extended, continental-style, rear bumper with bucking bronco decoration on the encased spare tire. For Mr. Cohn, this was merely the drive-by decorations. The interior was tooled leather festooned with silver dollars and featured a saddle center console. The gearshift was a pistol and the directional levers were derringers.
Roy may have been a humble lawman, but he knew how to flaunt his wealth.
I was not a big fan, but some of my childhood friends wore Roy Rogers t-shirts, kid-sized white cowboy hats, a pair of pot-metal six-shooters in fake leather holsters, and cowboy boots with Roy’s image on them. Girls wore Dale costumes, decorated with printed horseshoes, cattle skulls, and Native American symbols. Below the fringed skirts, white cowgirl boots clashed with bare legs, so the girls never joined the kid-cowboy gunfights where cap guns fired rolls of paper caps as fast as the good guys and bad guys could pull the trigger.
Maybe that’s why the M-16 was so popular among U.S. troops in Vietnam. The full-auto fire option seemed natural and familiar. My good guy/bad guy time in the humid heat. I had heard from Southwest soldiers how “dry heat” is easier to tolerate than “wet heat.”
N was at a wall of trophies, looking bored. She had no interest in the weapons or vehicles, but Trigger and Bullet caught her eye.
“Uh-huh.” She said, walking toward them.
The hulks left behind when they the spirits scattered about, mislaid by fate, sinking into the ground, each piece paying tribute to what was once a functioning reality. But gone are the sun-baked people, the dusty mines, hardscrabble farms, roadside way stations, the stucco bodegas and garageless filling stations that only a few decades ago were bustling with the great-grandparents of those who are no were to be found. Ghosts.
So, I’m an erstwhile, alien, anthropologist surveying what remains of Earthly relics, hoping to determine who eked out an onerous life there; what did they did and why did they disappeared. The solutions to these riddles – some easy to work out, others latent in tottering shanty shacks that may have housed stoop-shouldered miners, doleful truck-farmers, parched mommas, dog-tired daddies, sunburned kids, meager communities of tumbledown ranches and caved-in warehouses, disintegrating farm machinery, and marooned vehicles. Here are my digs, my unexamined excavations, bloodhound scent trails, hidden histories, myths and parables. Only in this extreme immersion can I be assured that the meaning will be revealed; optimally blotting out my obsession with self-pity.
There’s not much salvageable here, other than heat-furrowed wood and oxidized scrap iron. Every metal object – road signs, automobiles, railcars, mobile home frames – lie abandoned in the wind-driven, shrouding sand, cinnamon-crusted and riddled with bullet holes. They occupy this unbounded, outlaw firing range, this uncontrolled shooting gallery, where lifeless targets embodying the dimming memory of long-gone lives, scarce vestiges of the past are destroyed by thoughtless thugs, meandering gunners.
Meanderthals.
And we, troubled visitors, cannot ignore the persistent allusions to death; skeletal fences, half-buried wheels, petrified trees, or a spray of fresh flowers laid carefully atop a century-old headstone. I imagine octogenarian children hobbling to their parent’s gravesite, surviving on recollections that were old before I was born. I wondered if local inhabitants knew who had driven the junk-hulk sedans when they shined and purred down new highways, decades before they became engineless, door-less, and surrounded by fragrant creosote bushes and pancake prickly pear cactuses. Were they optimistic? Did they reject the temperate clime of the fruited valley, the chill of the mountains, the pounding whisper of the sea shore waves?
Why did they stay? Or did they lose their way, blinded by the sun and sandstorms?
And, how does a driver choose where to let the car choose its final resting place when it grows old, or does an untimely motor-death randomly determine a fated parking spot? This arid land surely exerts some dominion over a vehicle’s untimely demise, leaving the driver to decide when to walk away, following a road toward the horizon - or a distant, glistening image of water.
On that horizon, heat diffraction shimmers make distant objects – cars, trains, people –ripple above the horizon, looking as though they were trembling, succumbing to the intense heat as they float above the heaving, apparition lagoons, complicit in a potentially-fatal deception. On that black-topped highway, an endless caravan of people and goods moves through heat, headed into the boiler or out of it for a lifetime.
I marvel that the desert can be called home – especially such a haunted home; a droughty country, replete with mummified phantoms, preserved by nature, left scattered about upon God’s acre appropriated by the devil, and favored by ascetics.
Those who believe they are being haunted believe they are being observed, followed, touched, or threatened. I admit that I have exhibited these neurotic perceptions from time to time in my life. I began talking to the departed when I wrote a eulogy for my brother.
Paddy, I'm just a storyteller, I know little of death, though I've seen its work and felt its breath on my face. But you know that by now brother -- how this life is all a show, made of so many acts and so many characters and too few happy endings.
I'm stumbling across that stage today trying to remember my lines, hit my marks, but all the while, I'm playing to the gallery, looking for that one bright face with laugh caught in my throat as tears burn my eyes.
Now we have some difficult lines, trying times, as the story moves on, beneath a tin roof, beside an old tree, or under a gold and rose sky, that says years, and means ages, but is endless and magnificent. Like you.
Paddy, when you made your exit and walked from this stage, the light shining back through the doorway fell like truth in our lives; harsh and alarming, yet honest and clear. For we saw that the tin roof was no more than cardboard, and the old tree -- a bundle of sticks, and our wide-open sky -- a dog-eared postcard from nowhere, and the theater -- just boards and some chairs.
So now we stand speechless, awaiting our cue, looking down to find our marks, empty, aching, wanting no more than to wake from this tremulous nightmare to the sound of your big laugh. Seeing you standing fearless and bold. And, blessed with one more chance to hold you, we’d tell you we loved you. We love you.
But the Light is gone and we are changed, the story changed, and the audience sits waiting for the rest of the show.
I will never forget who you were and why I love you.
Even if Paddy is now just a portion of my mind’s experience, I benefit from expressing myself about what concerns me. Again, it’s what I said to N in the bodega parking lot, “…I wonder if praying isn’t just asking yourself to consider your problems from an objective point of view. Maybe that helps.”
Paddy? Keep an eye on us, pilgrims with no fixed destination; no Mecca mosque, no Glastonbury Tor, no Spanish Synagogue, no Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Our destination is within us.
N roused me from my reflections.
She pointed to a roadsign, “Big Bear Lake 25 miles, Victorville, 23 miles. Oy! That’s where Roy stuffed Dale, yes?”
“Yes, in the motel right behind the museum. Are you happy now?”
“Supremely. Does Manson have a museum at Spahn Ranch?”
“No. It’s in his lockdown cell at the Pelican Bay Supermax. Shall we drop by for a quick visit?”
“No. I’m sure Roy’s junk will be sufficiently depressing.”
“We don’t have to go, you know. I’m not going to twist your arm.”
“It’s fine. I want to see the stuffed dog and horse and whatever else he crammed.”
“If I’m not mistaken, Buttermilk is there too. Dale’s horse.”
“The thrills never end.” She said, “Death, in all its glory.”
Yeah, death. That’s what all this was about; dealing with death, looking for ghosts, and wondering about an afterlife. Ghosts imply some sort of afterlife and mix fear and hope into an intoxicating, but nauseating, cocktail. Modern animism demands that we recognize a distinct spiritual essence in every living creature. Our understanding of ghosts and haunting is that a location — be it building, ship, forest, or home — is populated by a spirit or spirits unable to “move on” to their final resting place. Both concepts are based in a religious belief that our mortal end is the beginning of a metaphysical life.
I remember challenging Father Desmond about whether Catholics can believe in ghosts without straying from our doctrine. I was thirteen and my faith was beginning to unravel. He said, “No!” then shook his head looking more weary than dismissive. I asked, “What about the Holy Ghost?” That started a firestorm between me and the man I frequently served mass with; a firestorm that later cooled into a chilly distance.
He barked, “Don’t get wise!”
What of the Saints? We pray to them. Do they exist? Do they listen when we implore them? And the church’s preoccupation with Angels interceding on our behalf? Are these spirits or are they icons that dwell within the aspects of our mind and conscience? Tough questions for the weary Father.
My encounters with the metaphysical were all disappointing. One summer night, well past midnight, I walked the dark streets of my family’s summer town listening to the roar of motorcycles along the nearby highway. The full moon cast long, dim shadows behind me and I turned to see my shadow on the road. As I began to move away the shadow did not move. For a moment I was scared that perhaps I was in the thrall of some unseen force. I turned and walked quickly to my parents’ cottage.
The next morning I walked back to the same spot in the road. What I had thought was my shadow, was a long tar patch on the asphalt. Although it didn’t look much like a silhouette, my frame of right mind under the moon had made me accept a hasty judgment and my adrenaline flowed. Fear is a fight, flight, or freeze signal – helpful when warranted and a rational decision is called for. Fight for your life, flee, or freeze when movement would trigger an attack.
Trigger. Right.
We rolled into the Roy Rogers Museum parking lot. The museum building was an arbitrary mix of fieldstone-walled warehouse and Old West stockade. A giant statue of Trigger, rearing up, stood atop the entrance’s sizable marquee. I waited for N’s sarcasm.
“How big was Roy?”
“Got it. Noted and filed. Can we just roll with the punches here?”
“How big was the dog?”
Why do relationships go from loving affection to loving wisecracks? I’ve done it in every relationship I’ve had. When I was a stand-up comedian, I figured it was part of my personality. The common reasoning among other jokesters was that a troubled childhood lead to either a life of crime or a life of comedy.
My brother was far more sarcastically funny than I. Paddy could convulse people with laughter. He could also fight like a warrior when the need arose, but he preferred sarcasm and mockery to hostility. He was a natural comedian. My entire family was zany. They grew up facing adversity and enduring stress, yet all could lighten a heavy moment with comedy or outright mockery. We laugh at things so we can live with them.
Who cleaned up the poop on Noah’s ark? That’s not in the Bible.
Inside the air-conditioned museum, we plucked our sweaty shirts from our skin and let the cool air rush in. The building was packed with memorabilia and walls of framed black-and-white, eight-by-tens. Roy, Dale, their friends, and livestock looked out from them, depicting decades of film and television history. Display cases of rifles and pistols, mounted trophy animal heads, and saddlery set the Wild West tone; clothing, boots, guitars and movie posters humanized the collection.
Two automobiles caught my attention. Roy’s1946 Willy’s Jeep was the workhorse of his Double R Bar Ranch; stripped down and painted a utilitarian gray. Despite appearing in Roy’s series – which was set in the wild-west – the jeep was an unmitigated anachronism. But who cares about the denotation? The message was clear; Roy brought the bad guys to justice.
The other car was an ostentatious `63 Pontiac that had be stylized by Nudie Cohn, the tailor who designed decorative rhinestone-covered suits. Many Country Western stars owned a "Nudie Suit" to stand out onstage. Mr. Cohn went wild when turning the Bonneville into a “Nudie Car.” He had huge longhorn-steer horns mounted above the front grill, pistols mounted on the hood-mount and used as door handles, and an extended, continental-style, rear bumper with bucking bronco decoration on the encased spare tire. For Mr. Cohn, this was merely the drive-by decorations. The interior was tooled leather festooned with silver dollars and featured a saddle center console. The gearshift was a pistol and the directional levers were derringers.
Roy may have been a humble lawman, but he knew how to flaunt his wealth.
I was not a big fan, but some of my childhood friends wore Roy Rogers t-shirts, kid-sized white cowboy hats, a pair of pot-metal six-shooters in fake leather holsters, and cowboy boots with Roy’s image on them. Girls wore Dale costumes, decorated with printed horseshoes, cattle skulls, and Native American symbols. Below the fringed skirts, white cowgirl boots clashed with bare legs, so the girls never joined the kid-cowboy gunfights where cap guns fired rolls of paper caps as fast as the good guys and bad guys could pull the trigger.
Maybe that’s why the M-16 was so popular among U.S. troops in Vietnam. The full-auto fire option seemed natural and familiar. My good guy/bad guy time in the humid heat. I had heard from Southwest soldiers how “dry heat” is easier to tolerate than “wet heat.”
N was at a wall of trophies, looking bored. She had no interest in the weapons or vehicles, but Trigger and Bullet caught her eye.
“Uh-huh.” She said, walking toward them.