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Keeping Easy Promises
And then there were those years where I moved between this room and Austin. I never spent a full summer here after leaving that first time for college. I spent the first summer in school, hoping to graduate in three years, but I burnt out on all that and ended up dropping out two successive semesters. And after that I was mostly just here for short visits. Back in the late seventies you could fly here to Dallas on Southwest Airlines, roundtrip, for $48. That was only $12 more than the bus and I never really favored travel by bus anyway.
I also hitch hiked here and back quite a few times and eventually my parents got used to it, maybe even riding along vicariously for the thrill of it. I think they understood that there was no point in not being supportive. They did make it clear that financial support was only coming if I was in school and I thought that seemed fair. Besides, I was living pretty comfortably in Austin, living with other slacker friends, or in a truck I had, in a cave at the end of Rio Grande, in condos in mid-construction, in a large doghouse on Blanco with Blueberry the Weimaraner and her nine pups, or in a friend's vacant two-story Victorian that his father provided and in which he would not live because he hated his father. The house had a very nice pool table but I never really invited anyone over to play. And then suddenly I was adopted by a swell young lady who was attending the University and things evened out for awhile. For several years my parents thought I was going to be ok because I had someone looking after me. My mom especially doesn't like for me to be single; she looks at my bachelor uncles in their old age and feels sad for them. I think a person can find sadness wherever they look for it. Possibly the reverse of that is true too.
But I was standing on the side of the highway where the road from Killeen merges into I-35 in Temple and this GQ looking dude in a shiny new dark blue BMW screeches to a halt in front of me. He asked me where I was going and I told him I was going to Austin and as if sensing that sixty miles would not be enough time for small talk AND large talk, he delved right in. It was like he didn't mean WHERE was I going in the geograhic sense but, you know, in the larger sense. I gave him a little bullshit from the mind of a 20-year-old and he told me about being a 30-year-old lawyer on the fast track to unhappiness. Unless you just like to be difficult the guy could only be described as handsome, and while sitting in his cool leather passenger seat I could smell the residual, exotic perfume left behind by his (she could only be) beautiful wife.
He had wanted to be an artist, had studied in Paris, and then had given up childish ideas to become a successful lawyer. And it seemed to be killing him. He all but begged me to stay disaffected even though he and I knew it was not exactly a course and I told him for sure I would, because I really could not, cannot, see any alternative. I wonder if that guy ever thinks about me because I think about him a lot. I wonder if he ever figured out the best trick of all, how to be an artist and a successful member of the mainstream.
Takes More Than A Note
My mom asked me to cash a check for her yesterday but sensing the possible difficulity of such a thing I told her I would rather not. She said she liked to have some cash on hand and I said, here, have some of mine. No, no, no, she did not want MY cash.
The check was made out to Tom Thumb grocery so I went over there. They have a bank inside and I went up to the counter with the check, my ID, and the little handwritten note explaining that I was the son of Clifford Louis. The teller gracefully explained how it would be better if the check were just made out to me, and also better success could be expected if I went to the bank the check was written on. But, of course. While I was there in the grocery I picked up nine bananas and some milk as I had been instructed to do, so the mission was not a total failure.
My mom was fit to be tied and said she would give them a piece of her mind the next time she made it over there. I begged her not to, explaining how I might like to start dating this year and did not want to rule out tellers in far away places. With a fair amount of difficulty and questionable patience on my part I explained about making a new check out to me and how I would go over to the bank itself, which is in the same parking lot with the Tom Thumb. Do you know where it is?, my mom asked me, and I said I thought I did. She gave me somewhat detailed instructions anyway.
The teller in the drive-thru gave me a happy electronic welcome and I was happy right back at her and stuck my check and ID in the little clear cannister. When I pushed the send button the cannister shot so rapidly up the clear tube that I flinched a little. I assured myself that anybody watching could have taken the flinch for a nervous tick or some sort of neural disorder and that I could still be considered a cool dude on some plane, somewhere, somehow.
The teller said, James?
Yes?
Do you have an account with us?
No.
You'll need to go inside to cash this.
Ok, I said, unclinching my teeth.
Ever since that Mobil station in Rappahannock changed over to a Shell station, who's mid-grade gasoline causes my engine to ping, I've been avoiding Shell gas altogether and pumping anyone elses high octane, no pings, higher zoomability. I zoomed around the corner, parking less than true parallel to the lines.
Can I help you, the teller asked.
I put the check and my ID on the counter.
Can I get two forms of ID, she asked me.
I flicked her one of my Platinum Cards.
Do you have an account with us?
No.
Would you like to open one?
No thank you.
Could I get a thumb print?
I'm sorry, what?
A thumb print, she said, pointing to the little thumb-sized print pad.
You're kidding?, I said.
She said she wasn't and like a criminal drawn to the booking process I printed my left thumb.
I'm sorry, she smiled, I need your right thumb.
Okeedokey, now we're getting somewhere. I pressed my right thumb onto the clear ink pad and then left my invisible mark on the front of the check.
The teller gave me two crummy-looking twenties and a wrinkled ten.
When I got back over here my mom was still thinking about past failures, I said, let it go, she said, but did you give them that note explaining who you were?
Reading Light
Up on the shelf in front of me is Jimenez, Swift, Hemingway, Brecht, Kerouac, Kafka, Joyce, some Kotzwinkle, a large chunk of Brautigan, the minor works of Hesse but including his big hit, Steppenwolf, and my cub scout handbooks. I used to have a vintage Elvis Gospel album up there but things disappear over time.
There was for a few years some mild concern regarding my sanity and during that period conservative elements of the family took action and one or two books disappeared as well, for example, Trotsky's Permanent Revolution, and one of those books that contain supposed satanic verses. To tell the truth I was scared to read that second one, the mad ravings of whatshisname.
Over there to the left used to be what I thought by now would be the complete works of P. K. Dick but that collection is apparently being enjoyed by someone else; no man, I ain't naming you, I'm just saying.
At some point this ridiculous flittering-around lifestlye of mine precluded me from carrying several hundred pounds of books around with me so I just left them here in this boyhood bedroom and started using public libraries.
And then as more time passed other premium books took wing and some less than premium books were added by others where gaps occured and up there now I see titles like How To Live With Yourself And Like It. What a long title that is. I see a Billy Graham biography and scattered throughout two or three books about Hitler.
I do not see that book that was offered during my faithful stint with the Methodist Youth Foundation, How Far Can I Go?, which I thought was going to be, based on the cover teasers, a literal guidebook telling me how far I could go with my girlfriend, but it fell way short of that expectation and I was left to my own fumbling devices, and a less than stellar success rate. And speaking of devices the book had no chapter entitled--Devices, Where, Why, and How.
There's an interesting title over there, 20 Million Careless Capitalists, I know I never read that; and Bulls, Bears, and Dr. Freud is a pretty snappy title also.
I'm not actually reading a lot of book length stuff lately, I just read the titles, so if you ask me if I have read Eleanor Early's, New Orleans Holiday, I will be able to answer honestly, oh yes, I sure did. Try to trip me up by asking what its about and you know I'm going to tell you--300 pages, or so.
Oh Yeah, Hey
It's all a blur now, the passing Waffle House signs, I can't even tell you where I was, but it was probably outside Lafayette, Louisiana. I forgot my reading glasses so I just pointed to that blurry image in the bottom left corner of the the laminated placemate/menu. It turned out to be cheese scrambled eggs, bacon, grits, and raisin toast, with coffee. It was barely 5:30 in the morning which really means nothing at a 24 hour joint.
The waitress called me "sweetie," bumping her up into top tier tip range and I was so happy that they had the chocolate cream pie I didn't even tell her that I meant I wanted it to go and just ate it for my breakfast dessert, forcing down the last few delicious bites.
Back on the road I set the cruise control at whatever the law allowed and danced in place sitting down a few times and did a little stretching when I got stiff over those seven hours before I got really hungry again. I was close enough to Dallas to where I could have waited to see what the cupboards allowed but then I saw the sign for Senorita's famous Mexican food and I salivated to the highway 19 exit. It turned out there were three popular Tex-Mex restaurants at this one little dirtwater miles from nowhere exit, and they were, Senorita's, Juanita's, and the Ranchero. I hit Juanita's, had the large bean and cheese nacho plate, followed with an enchilada plate with rice and beans and throughout snacked on the crispy bowl of chips and delicious salsa (never forget cilantro) and hot, freshly made (by the woman right across the way in front of me) corn tortillas. With iced tea.
I was a little sick after this meal but luckily had prepared with stage one prevention by popping a pepcid AC before going in. Back in the truck I popped a stage two, I call it the pepcid sandwich, acid prevention program. I fought off one or two tidal waves of acid before the meds properly kicked in, then I was good to go.
Shortly, downtown Dallas loomed before me and I exited onto Central Expressway, but south instead of north, so I had to make a U-turn and proceed in the direction of my mom's house, which is in far North Dallas, you might even say Farmer's Branch.
In the cupboards there wasn't exactly what I had in mind for breakfast this morning, oh yeah, hey, Merry Christmas, so I thought I would bop out to MacDonalds for two burritos and coffee but its Christmas you stupid idiot. My mom felt guilty and gave me twenty bucks for food. I looked at her derisively while rubbing the paper between my fingers and barked, "this all you got?" (I'm just kidding, how sacreligious, on Christmas morning no less, shoot me, shoot me dead.)
Alberston's grocery at Forest and Marsh was open though so I got some cereal, a couple of Vanilla Frappuccinos in a bottle, and some whole milk. In the parking lot walking back to the truck I heard this young woman scream out something about her baby on Christmas and then turned around to see her and her young husband and baby in a stroller walking out of the left end of the store over by the small bundles of firewood. She screamed again and picked up a bundle of firewood and since my default has been set for harsh reality I cringed at what I thought could happen but then she just acted like she was going to throw it into the plate glass and her husband voiced his protest and I turned around and ran into my truck.
I heard this young prick yell out to an old man, "hey it's not too late to ask Santa for driving lessons." Turned out the prick was me and I ain't that young.
There used to be in this house a little hand-carved sign that said "the family that prays together, stays together," but I don't see that sign and as if to prove the price of smugly ignoring homilies, there's not too many of us around for Christmas this year. Until this evening when we go over to my brother's house it's just me and mom by ourselves roaming around this big undecorated house. I sneak around a little to see what's up with her, what it's like when she's here alone like she is most days of the year. She naps alot. Standing on the front porch I called her from my cell phone yesterday because she doesn't hear the doorbell that well. She answered the door in her housedress with her gray hair gone wild and she looked a little like the freshly captured Saddam Hussein, without beard. This morning, sleeping to well past sunrise for the first time in weeks, I went down and saw on the dinner table a little scrap of paper with a scrawled red ink message from her long standing paper boy, it said--Merry Christmas Mrs. Louis.
Monday Evening
I saw some of the 6th Ward neighborhood boys yesterday, some of whom I used to know and used to hang around with on Sundays, and they all looked good, even in just five months they were taller, fatter, more grown up.
Some have been in and out of jail over the last couple of years but it seems everybody--the kids, the mothers, and the fathers--is out this year for Christmas.
One or two from the old group are sitting on stoops now, assisting those people in the neighborhood that have herbal and chemical dependencies.
"We can make them disappear just by going out on the porch," my two adult friends assured me.
"I hope you will be careful with that, nobody respects you THAT much," I said, and the one friend nodded knowingly and then the two of them mentioned the name of the new scariest bad dude around.
"He's scary," they both agreed.
The football player was standing down by the group that some consider malingerers and he called out and I called back and he came across the street and said, "We won the Conference, Mr. Jim," and I said, "I know, that's so great, you must have had a really great year, graduating from college and playing on a winning team and you're big as a house now so that may come in handy…"
"We were 12-1."
"I know, that's amazing. Are you gonna try it?"
"Well, one of my roommates is an agent so he gonna shop me around…but if it don't…you know, I have the degree for backup."
"I wish I was you."
"Sure, Mr. Jim. Hey, J calling you."
I looked down the ill-lit block and a shadow on a stoop waved to me. "All right J," I yelled. He came down and we shook hands. Even after a life altering multiple wounding he still holds himself up proud and confident and he's always polite. Even years ago before the multiple wounding when he was threatening to burn us out he was polite. He is one you can judge harshly and he is one you can admire and somewhere between those two is the truth of who he is.
Somebody must have shot out all the street lights because it really was dark, just at dusk, and I didn't recognize the little dude at J's shoulder, but then I did. "There you are," I said, and we shook hands but he didn't really say anything; light years have passed since those few years ago when he was an honor student and I'm sure he felt, perhaps correctly, that I know nothing about him. I heard a while later that he had just been bailed out so he was probably a little grumpy from all that. I remember the first time I yelled at him for misbehaving, seems like a lifetime ago.
One of the other kids from that core group of long ago is also working the block, but the other end, the more dangerous end, and is affiliated with a different boss. "He's making real good money," I have been told.
Keeping in mind that there is some temporal limitation to all things good and all things bad I report this last bit. Shelton has a job.
(I tried to post this earlier at the library on Canal in Lakeview but all four computers are non-responsive so I have this to add after reading today's--Tuesday's--paper, and then answering the knock on the porch--she can't climb the stairs.)
"I hate to ask this but can I get ten dollars, I'm so hungry and he ain't been around…?" I always go inside to get the money even though it's always on my person. "Thanks babe, I'll get you after New Years," she said. I bet she really missed me when I was gone. I said to her, "Hey, I was just reading the paper and one of our neighbors, a nineteen-year-old from one block over on Dorgenois, he…"
"Oh, cut that little boy…"
"Yeah, over a Playstation…"
"Uh huh, the police were all up and down here, and running through the alley back there…right after you left, I guess about 2 or so…"
From the Times Picayune Metro section, 12/23/03, paragraph one--"A 19-year-old man was arrested Monday and booked with attempted first-degree murder for repeatedly stabbing a 10-year-old boy who was fighting to keep the man from stealing a Sony PlayStation from his Mid-City home, police said."
In New Orleans
Under an indigo sky Sunday at sunrise I followed glowing white jet trails out of the Shenandoah Valley with the eyelash of a crescent moon and a purple pink and orange cumulus finger pointing the way South. I did not need a map with that kind of help.
I left the big house in Little Washington about five-thirty a.m., drove a good bit, marveled at the deep snow near Bristol, Tennessee, and slept eight hours in a fancy businessman's motel between Birmingham and Tuscaloosa. I saw the first sign for New Orleans about 7:30 this morning, Monday.
I stopped near Meridian, Mississippi at a Waffle House and had eggs and bacon and grits with the decidedly southern, somewhat creole, morning crew, who were all in bad moods. My waitress was wearing a Santa's hat and she checked both dessert cases before breaking the disappointing news to me that I wouldn't be leaving with my to-go request for chocolate cream pie.
Nobody called me baby but that's ok because instead of that I had a real nice conversation with the woman at the gas station next door and she waited a respectful amount of time before explaining to me how to reset the gas pump if I wanted the gas to be pumped faster than it was, which was at a rate about equal to one cent per second. "But you could probably get out of here by noon if you just want to wait it out," she said. I went out and reset the pump and came back in and bought two real-life looking snakes, which she said were a real popular item.
I would not describe the general mood in New Orleans as happy, Christmas around here in the ghetto only brings out the reality of life's constraints on those with lesser amounts of disposable income. But poor kids see all the same shit on TV and want it just as badly as rich kids, and so by these last few days before the big day, parents have had it with demands they cannot meet and might be heard to bark, "No, you is not getting that goddamn bicycle so quit buggin Santa 'bout it cuz he can't hear you, and I'm sick of hearin you."
My neighbor's friend got killed recently on the I-10 and two neighbor men have had serious medical issues in my absence. One broke both his arms and "has to have his wife wipe his ass," and the other guy might have more cancer than a person would like.
The new streetcar line up Canal is not running but is more or less finished and they have also repaved the street itself, which is a very good thing because all the construction equipment had torn it up rather thoroughly.
There was a nice young man named Daniel cutting down the trees on the side of my house when I arrived. I knew it was going to happen eventually, the two big trees up near the front were great shade providers but were actually on the Pentecostal's property. The mulberry and the elderberry trees, which were inside my line were also cut down but I'm not feeling it. Not to say that I won't play the hey you cut down my fuckin tree card later on. Perhaps on a day I feel the need to direct my enmity towards a religious organization. The church is getting ready to put up a fence. Mr. Clarence bought that little square of land to my left and is putting up a fence on that side too. Better Mr. Clarence got it than somebody else, I think.
Tomorrow I might drive to Austin or I might drive to Dallas or I might just lay about here and drive to Dallas on the 24th and when laying about is one of the options I would bet on it.
Rappahannock Out
Holy cow, four-thirty, did I oversleep, or what?
I've been getting up at four for a while now.
I must say after ten straight years in New Orleans this little five month sabbatical in Rappahannock suited me fine, and I do hope to come back in the spring.
Time to unplug, good morning.
Sequential Hippies
Herman's coming off the discount litter today, moving out of Rappahannock, and probably eating table scraps as we squeak.
Thinking about the suggestion of Herman as girlfriend I would say he was not exactly what I was looking for but in the end was a pretty ok cat and I think there was a give and take of respect between us towards the end.
I'm packed, tools and all, except for all this machinery. I'm going to pack the machinery last.
I found a well-referenced hippie who met the owner's needs to guard the hill and he tonight brought over sushi and Japanese beer. We talked awhile and I gave him the keys and showed him what's up with XM radio.. Then he left me to chill for those few hours before I exit Rappahannock. New Orleans for Monday.
No, Pickles
I had a dream last night and it wasn't about all of God's little children playing together in a field of daisies, more than that I cannot say. Of course I could say more, and have, but won't.
It doesn't look like the snow is ever going to melt.
I can't think of anything but a fried oyster po-boy, dressed, no pickles. I'm not talking about Pickles, the Santa Killer. I could talk about that but let's just leave it alone. But damn, poor Santa, eviscerated in the LES.
And some garlic mashed potatoes.
And a pickled string bean in a tasty Bloody Mary.
My mom's brownies.
Highway Dreams.
Raining bullets on New Year's Eve.
And all this sweet exhilarating uncertainty has got me groovin.
Kill A Cat, Save An Artist
I fell asleep watching Henry V. Which reminds me of falling asleep at the wheel on the way to Brenham, waking up on the left shoulder of the undivided highway with that sound of gravel crunching under tires and the lack of any other traffic at 3 a.m. being our salvation. My oilfield buddies were asleep. Anybody else want to drive, hey I almost just killed all of us? but they were dead to the world, heh, not even snoring. I kept driving for awhile, hit a kitty with bad judgement while going 70 mph, which woke me up, but soon I became sleepy again so 20 miles out I pulled over, and slept until dawn when the owner of the maroon Monte Carlo awoke and said, where are we?
We were in Texas, but I could have said Montana, another place I fell asleep, but in my own car, and I was in a rest stop in broad daylight. I was in the front seat with my legs stretched out past the open driver's side door when a State Trooper tapped me a few times on the feet with his baton. It seems I had become the worry of other resting motorists, some of whom thought I was dead.
No sir, not dead at all, I said while quickly scanning the mess of my car's interior, searching for any top secret documents I may have left laying about. Luckily, it seems I had safely stored all my top secret documents, the trooper was polite, I soon regained my wits, and continued in an easterly direction, where awaiting me was the chance to save a NY artist from floating away down the Potomac River, and over the Great Falls.
Which reminds me, back in the oilfields (I was on a seismograph crew, a doodlebugger), I tried once to swim across the Colorado River with my boots on. That almost turned out very badly and I won't do that again.
Questionable
I thought I saw bare footprints in the snow up on the White Oak Canyon trail yesterday and I wondered if maybe there is a local barefoot hiking club. And the idea of clubs always makes me think of the phrase--join, be a part. And then I wonder, right, exactly, which one?
I don't guess hiking several miles in wet boots with a cold has thrown me into a cold and flu season headspin, even though I do feel pretty stupid right now, I mean pretty stupid, and have some histamine I don't really need, or don't really want.
The night before I met a local at a bar who organizes full moon hikes in the park and he told me not to enter the trail from Skyline Drive but from the 231 side so that's what I did. It allows you to hike up to the falls and then down to the parking lot instead of the opposite, which is a hard way to end a hike, going up that is.
At the top I was sweating, exhausted, and unsure why I had made the effort. Many times going up I thought of K. heading for the Castle and felt the pointlessness of it while at the same time the compelling need to continue upward. Was it worth the effort to see the large falls, I don't know?
On the way down I slid and skipped and stepped carefully down rock ledges, but did not fall on my ass. I started laughing at one point, I'm not sure why.
Back in Sperryville I got some white bean and black olive soup (black olive, in soup? yeah, it's different, it's good, try it, the server said) at the deli and then back out in the parking lot I saw the proprietor and she said when you leaving, I said a few days, and she said, walking to her car, well, hmm, you sure kept to yourself.
So you wonder, should you start keeping to someone else?
Be There Now
Scantily clad like a Southerner in a snowstorm and with only my recently acquired Yankee/Canadian merit badge to justify me being in a truck, in the snow, going nowhere, on highway 211, I started fishtailing about forty degrees worth on a straightaway.
I'm cooler than cool though, that's right, ice cold, so I just relaxed and let the truck find its direction, which luckily was straight ahead on down the road. My heart though was palpitating at not so much an alarming rate but enough to make me dizzy with cautious glee. The words to the beat were--I'm not in a ditch, I'm not in a ditch, I'm not in a ditch.
I hated the idea of being stuck up here; I don't get stuck is a thing I lie to myself about all the time.
So I jumped in the truck and headed down the snowy hill which is the easy part. I drove the five or six miles to Sperryville but forget about it, I wasn't having any of that delicious coffee at Rae's this morning, everybody stayed in bed, the parking lot is not even plowed. I headed back to Litttle Washington thinking I'll eat at the diner across from the famous Inn. But dammit those people rest on the Lord's day. That's when I started fishtailing on a straightaway, and I didn't really need coffee after that.
My friend and master of the manor had come out the day before while I was high as a kite and freezing cold up on the new 28 foot aluminum extension ladder I had just bought for the farm. I was cleaning out the gutters, fingertips throbbing and numb, fingernails packed tight with frozen black sludge. I was chipping it out of the gutter with a putty knife, four or five inch sections at a time, trying not to shred my bare knuckles against the metal edges of the gutter, or the metal edges of the roof. It was like a cross between that Milton Bradley game, Operation, and that game we played in the elementary school yard, bloody knuckles.
"I came to take you to lunch," he told me, giving me the once over.
I settled on having him bring me something back, which he did, enough for a couple of days in case I got snowed in. I don't have to tell you he's a nice guy, he just is.
But the next day, yesterday, back from my unsuccessful feeding mission, I could not make it up the driveway again. Fresh snow I thought would not present a challenge, and I had put the weighted buckets in the back of my truck bed the night before. So I walked back up the hill for the cat litter. I fell down once, like Lee Marvin in the final scene of (Ernest Hemingway's) The Killers (which by the way did not have a single word of Hemingway in it, not that it suffered from that.)
Unlike Lee Marvin, I got up again, got in the truck and tried backing down and up the hill a few times to spare using the last of Herman's cat litter. I was successful at this.
In the end, truck back at the top of the hill, I had some kind of green vegetarian roll up for breakfast, instead of the lasagna.
This is my last week here, until Spring, or until after the opening of New Orleans crawfish season at least, and I have a fair amount of work to do, and I'm getting a cold, I think. I don't remember when I last had a cold and I'm unsure about what to do, although sleeping is good so I did some extra sleeping yesterday, in between reading, and watching the excellent, Red, from Kieslowski, and the less challenging but enjoyable, Lilo and Stitch.
Now, tomorrow is supposed to be beautiful, and, with or without a cold, I can't see how I'm going to resist going back up into the Shenandoah one more time, so, I had better get to work, now.
Doak Walker's Backup
Standing next to the tracks in San Antonio I watched my rail riding advisor disappear as the boxcar we shared traveled east. He said he had been backup to Doak Walker at SMU but when later I checked the roster his name was not there. Also I could not find any evidence that black men were attending Southern Methodist back in the late forties. Strangely, this did not make me doubt any of his stories, even the ones that could not be backed up with hard facts because most of what he had told me had served me well, like how to jump off a train without hurting yourself. Unfortunately he had told me this last bit after I had jumped once, and hurt myself.
I had to catch Interstate 10 to Interstate 35, the right side of my face was a black and red scab from temple to jawbone, and I was overall a dirty boy with rail riding grime coating most of my surface.
An amorous Native American picked me up and I told him I would be appreciating the lift but no nooky would be exchanged between us. The offers of man love had shocked me at first but I was coming to understand the game better and this guy was drunk, at eight in the morning, and I had a weapon, and I was tired, and that was that. He dropped me at a place that left me a short walk to I-35, which would take me into Austin.
I was a few days late for the start of the spring semester at the University of Texas. I wasn't a dropout yet, but in retrospect, I was very close. This train trip, it was already starting to wear the weight of a seminal moment in a boy's life.
I don't even think I was hitchhiking, I was just walking to the right spot, when a VW Beetle pulled onto the shoulder. It was Dave, this guy who had roomed next door to me at Kinsolving (a girls dorm) during summer school. He was a few days late for the start of the spring semester too. He asked me what happened to my face and I said I fell off a train and that became the refrain for the casual acquaintance regarding what happened to me. Most people thought I had just gotten my ass kicked and the train thing was me and my dry wit.
He took me to the apartment on West Lynn and Ninth that I was sharing with three other guys. Off campus, bigtime, grown up stuff. I got to see myself in a mirror for the first time in a week (we stayed in an El Paso mission that first night after the train accident and I saw myself there but it was one of those shiny metal mirrors and the detail was lacking.)
My roommates were all gone--presumably attending college--so I had a little time to collect my thoughts, wash up, shave around the scab, get dressed and...go to college?
It was too late for classes but I walked up West Lynn to Enfield, caught the Enfield shuttle bus, and walked the UT campus. I was tweaked, circuits sizzling. I wasn't who I was so who was I?
I entered the undergraduate library and took a seat by myself at a table for four. As soon as I sat down I knew I was done with the college thing.
I had taken another trip right after summer school, in August, with a friend named Billy, and we had hitchhiked together up into Telluride, for the Jazz Festival. That was a life-changing, life-affirming trip too, but more for Billy than for me and it was me telling him to hang in there, don't drop out, when he discussed his doubts about school to me in December, right before I hitchhiked to USC and came back on a train.
I went through the motions for awhile, attended a few classes, tried dropping acid before some of them to see if that would help, but it didn't.
At the end of January my father wrote to say he had opened for me what looked like official mail. As he was handling most of my "business" affairs I did not take issue with his felonious behaviour. He was sure this was a mistake but their was a ticket for me from Los Angeles, or Anaheim maybe, for hitchhiking. Oops, those damn CHiPs, I had forgotten all about that.
Home Away From Home
I went hiking yesterday up in the Shenandoah National Park. It felt like I was the only human up in there. I had to walk along Skyline drive for about half a mile to get back to my truck after the hike and not a single car passed by. I of course was travelling with an entourage of women--Missy Elliot, Gillian Welch, Francoiz Breut, (Miss) Catpower, (Miss) Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Neko Case, (Miss) Belle or Sebastian, and (Miss) Mick Jagger.
I wondered at first who's footprints I was following, a heavy person for sure, their prints had broken all the way through the hard packed snow to the dirt and rock of the path. They were old prints, that you could tell because they had no definite shape, the edges of the snowprints were melted, leaving a design that did not compute inside my humancentric frame of reference. But of course we are not alone and the prints belonged to a bear, this I realized when I saw a print with full definition, so I became super self aware for a few minutes, which did not hurt me.
But was this one last romp and feed before hibernation and am I edible? I can't see serving me up at a dinner party of people, or bears, you were trying to impress.
I just poked myself in the eye so I'm crying a little.
The path turned into a stream once or twice, water flowing out of rock, maybe not THE source, but a source, so I had to sit on a flat boulder at one point and consider it all. Actually there were two streams, both of them just began out of the side of the hill and flowed down the slope into the canyon into which I was descending. One stream was to my left and the other was to my right. The left stream had white water, the right stream, the stream that was actually the path, was more of a flowing trickle.
Just saw a shooting star out the window.
I think it was the Hughes River I kept having to cross, and the water was up a little and some of the large boulders which would normally rise above the clear cold water and act as stepping stones, were submerged. Others were coated with ice. I belabored over the idea of crossing each time, once crabwalking awkwardly over an icy log. Missy Elliot said I look like a bitch doin that, which hurt my feelings, and I told her I would not bring her back out here if she was going to talk like that. Neko Case smirked, she's a hard one to read. Miss Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, she kept wailing that she loved me like no one else did but she would not hold my hand, so I had to question just what was the good of that love.
There was a locked up cabin at the bottom of the canyon, the Corbin cabin it is called, and before and after it remain the faintest signs of a life long ago. A piece of a wall here, a diverted spring there. The park ranger at the Thorton Gap entrance had sold me a map after I asked her to suggest a nice five mile circuit hike and I kept referring to it but as simple as the map was I could not lock into it. It did not seem to relate to anything I cared about but at the same time I did not want to take a wrong fork and end up halfway to Old Rag. Francoiz Breut would look over my shoulder but she doesn't speak much english and when she pointed at the soft, rip proof, water proof map, and said, "we here," I had to wonder if she meant, "yes, here."
Hookey In The Park
Well my 21st century east coast tenure number one is about up, I just emailed someone that I was finishing up here and getting ready to leave next week, which now that I say it, I guess I need to contemplate my movements a little. Okay, done. I'll just do what work I can do and then pack my tools and stuff the day before I leave, and then leave. Assuming nothing weird happens, I'll probably come out this way again in the Spring.
You know, I think it is precisely that place between assuming that nothing weird will happen and knowing that something weird is going to happen is what gets me out of bed in the morning.
In bed this morning I did briefly contemplate that nothing weird was going to happen, ever again, and that we were all (sorry to include you) cardboard cutouts haphazardly positioned and repositioned and sometimes pasted to the manilla paper background drawings of a sweet but slightly demented child. A child with generic talent keeping it all inside the lines.
Yesterday was the first day in a week without snow on the ground and now they are calling for more snow and/or freezing rain off and on over the next week. I guess I've had a fairly good taste of real winter (not Montana or N. Dakota severe but still...), even though I'm leaving two days before winter starts.
I haven't talked to any of my New Orleans bosses in five months. They will be angry. They may not let me work with them. I may not care.
Another fence board blew off in the night. I may fix that later, after I get done playing hookey in the park one last time.
One last thing. I have seen that mountain to the north glow red in the morning but right this minute it is glowing purple. Purple mountain majesty, dig?
The Missing Ballerinas
Queen Noor was in Little Washington the other day. She signed her book and had tea with prominent locals at the Inn. I was not aware of it nor did I see about town members of the Washington (DC) Ballet, who were also here, at least partly to entertain Queen Noor. In retrospect I do remember the day though because a person (that would be me, I don't have a title, nor am I bitter about it, much) could not park to get his mail from the PO Box what with all the limosines and that tour bus lining the street on both sides of the only stop sign in town. The limos were parked tight like very expensive sardines.
The thing about sardines is, despite the fact that they may be associated with hobos and low end snacking, really, they are pretty damn expensive if you price them out by the pound. Of course a pound of sardines is more than a person needs, three or four ounces will usually suffice. I like the golden smoked variety from the Reese company.
Once, a more youthful me, staring at the warm glow of gas flares in the distance, shivered while eating sardines and oranges with a hobo in the El Paso train yard in January. We spent two and a half days together in the El Paso yard waiting for the right train but eventually succumbed to the idea of warmth and community and followed a psst in the dead of night to join some other hobos, who, cliched as it seems, were identifiable only when the sucked on ends of their cigarettes offered that most meager illumination.
Not that I had ridden on that many boxcars previous (or since), but that was the most fucked up boxcar ever constructed. We tried to bed down ("always leave your bag unzipped in case you have to move fast, " he instructed me) shortly after the train started moving but the suspension was all messed up and the car rocked and shook all night long, and into the next day, and however long it was before we arrived in San Antonio, where I saw the I-10 and bid my friend adieu, lowering myself properly and running before my feet hit the ground. I waved standing up and proud to his diminishing outline.
Before my success came my failure. Arriving in El Paso from Yuma he said we had to get off because if we got caught riding in those cars we would be in deep shit. We had boarded a slow moving flatcar in Yuma that was carrying a version of the Chevy Camaro, this would have been the '78 model, and we had broken into one, found the key in the glovebox, and started that bitch up. Cranked up the heat, played the radio. Not that comfortable to sleep in but warm.
So I just jumped, was on my feet for a split second, and then the right side of my face was scraping the gravel.
Which is to say, back on that other rocking boxcar with all those unidentifiable men, I was not so scared because I knew the glow of my cigarettes was offering up to the curious a pretty scary picture of a possibly very bad dude.
After my hobo friend consoled me a bit about my landing he said he thought I had done this before. I told him, no, I hadn't. That's when he told me about lowering yourself and hanging there with your feet just above the ground and then to start running like mad before you acually put your feet on the ground.
The day before the psst in the night we had found a half bottle of tequila lying on the ground next to a cold,dead, campfire. I was the only one of us who had money, I hadn't told him this until we found the tequila, but then I offered to walk to the nearest store, where I spent some of my six dollars on the sardines and oranges. The tequila buzz on top of the mild concussion, at midday eating oranges and sardines while shivering and staring at the distant gas flares, is a memory locked in good and tight.
I wish I had seen me some ballerinas the other day. I am capable of loving that look of practiced gracefulness.
Mom's Birthday
Almost ninety years ago on this day, which is almost a hundred years from this day, not far from where I have 12 acres of totally unused, highly taxed land, in Bastrop County, outside of Austin, TX., my mom was born.
Some stories say grandpa was a womanizer--he did disappear and is non-existent in family stories--and grandma went sick (in the head). No one much speaks of the heart. Mom grew up with an aunt and uncle.
You have all heard of or known people with names that can be either boy or girl, like Tracy, Leslie, Alex, etc. but there is no rhyme or reason or story behind the reason my mom was named Clifford.
Despite the unusual name she has done pretty well for herself. She was a country girl who went to college when not alot of country girls were going to college, in the late thirties, and received a journalism degree from the University of Texas, in Austin. She was a glider pilot instructor during WWII even though she had never flown a glider herself.
She married, had six kids--not all of whom cause her hearthache--and raised us in a fashion that I can honestly find no fault with. And she would never criticize me for ending a sentence with a preposition. She cried a little when I dropped out of college and went hitch-hiking cross country but once she realized I could survive even my most ridiculous choices she grew into an honest appreciation of my lifestyle.
All my other siblings have produced progeny and so my mom has somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty grandchildren and I think four great-grandchildren. She lives alone though, ten years ago my father was in the best health of his life when cancer ravaged all of his internal organs, at the age of eighty. She doesn't want a stranger living in the house assisting her and she doesn't want to go to that assisted living facility just up the road, where many of her old friends from church are now living. They try to get her to join them but she doesn't want to and anyway suspects their intentions are partly based on the fact that they get perks for bringing in new clients.
She worries about me being alone and I worry about her being alone. She once hinted that she wouldn't mind it if I lived with her even though she has scoffed at invitations at living in another brother's converted garage. "I am not living in a damn garage."
Unfortunately, that's the way I would feel about living in Dallas, or maybe just living in Dallas with my mom.
With all of us boomers getting old these are the questions that will face us. What do we do about ourselves? What do we do about what we love?
Happy Birthday Mom.
The Moonlit Night
So finally it gets dark a few minutes before sunrise. I was up a couple of times in the night, every nimrod (there actually is a Nimrod in my family tree) except me knows to stop drinking beer in the winter, instead to drink hard stuff, less liquid to the buzz, less challenging to the bladder, but I'm up doing what you gotta do and I look out the window and holy cow would you look at that.
I can't see the full moon but the night is lit by it and with all the snow on the ground everything is white and light, except that leafless walnut tree and it's black, but not black as night because like I'm telling you, this dead of night is different, like right before dusk or after dawn, although not that either because those things I've seen and this thing I'm seeing I haven't seen before.
This thing I'm seeing is comprised in part by a moon shadow and the moon which I cannot see is positioned such that the tree on the ground, the shadow, is the proportioned equal to the upright tree. The tree on the ground is so black I think I might be dreaming because there is no such all encompassing black in the world I have known up to this moment. Then I went back to bed and thought about the same old shit, some of it not altogether unpleasant.
Halfway Up The Slope
Yeah, right, Okay, I get it, snow.
Didn't get anymore accumulation last night so the four inches on the ground which has melted to about three inches, and then been assaulted by much colder temperatures so that it is crackly crunchy, is all there is. They say we could get more fresh stuff today but I don't believe it.
I have four rooms to paint, ceilings, walls and woodwork, over the next few days so I need to get on with it. One of the rooms is this one, yeah, and this red easy chair in front, or is it behind? the flat panel, often calls to me--sit a spell, stare at the screen, look for something. Don't take this the wrong way please but I could probably benefit from a light whipping. Just a get off your ass sort of thing, Ok, I don't want to dress up or anything.
I have paused in the reading of a friend of a friend's novel to finally read a friend's mystery novel that I brought with me but could never pick up due to all the noise in my head and the powerful lulling of that noise by the mountains and sky and green grass. My friend is hilarious though and gots great tempo and it's nice spending the evenings with her words and ideas.
I got stuck coming up the driveway yesterday, just inside the gate, my tires for shit on snow. I wanted to not look like a total pussy to all the four-wheel truck driving locals so I later made the 200 yard walk down the hill and with some effort and minimal expertise got the truck halfway up the slope, into the guesthouse driveway.
New Snow, Old P...
Ok, first, and I'm sure most of you already know this, but--the penis is 425 million years old. There is a lot of seemingly more pertinent stuff on Google News this morning but that's the one I'm bringing home.
It's a good thing I didn't shave my head recently--sure, all freaks think about it from time to time--because I needed something to cover my ears just now on my morning walk in the freezing rain crunching through four inches of fresh snow. Scarfs are good too but Southern boys don't always have a scarf handy so I wrapped my neck in a dirty long sleeve t-shirt. As it turns out I don't have a whole lot to say about my forty acres of virgin snow. It is pretty. It is white. And I don't have a tobaggon. I guess I can always take consolation in the fact that my penis is 425 million years old, give or take.
Weather And Football
It is not indicative of a state of boredom that I refresh the National Weather Service website periodically throughout the day. My duties as caretaker require a certain "step ahead" approach to the possibilities of inclimate weather. Rap a few hose bibs here, run a little water there, make sure the house animal does not escape to the outside and become a frozen catcicle. The last bit was really a joke. The cat is probably snuggled up under somebody's covers in one of those upstairs beds. He doesn't have any motivation to escape.
Also, it has been fifteen years or so since I have seen snow, since that Cool Breeze tour of 87 (that's right, I used to name my road trips; you can take the boy from wherever he is but you can't make him give up his irony), which had me living for a few months in Great Falls, VA, just up the road from Oliver North and other superstars from the politcal/industrial/military complex. It snowed five or six inches once. It was neato. And what a long chapter that was between then and now, where I sit in Rappahannock waiting for snow or ice.
A bunch of ya'll aren't from the South and so probably don't consider snow and ice all that neato. It probably isn't that neat and will be very un-neat if frozen tree limbs crash the power lines and I lose heat, and get all cold to my close to the surface bone and my spine starts feeling like railroad spikes are being driven into it with a ten pound sledge hammer.
What I wanted to talk about yesterday but didn't was the success of Eddie Green, a New Orleans kid who used to live across from me on Dumaine, who I watched for a couple of years as his nationally ranked high school basketball team went to state championships (and won once). He went to Southern University in Baton Rouge on a football scholarship. He's a senior now, six feet and one inch tall and 250 pounds heavy. His number is 44. He worked for the NO Recreation Dept. over the summer mentoring young kids. He's a linebacker mostly. He's really good at hitting people on the field. He likes to talk trash on the field too. It's part of the game. Messing with your opponents head. He's having a really good last half of his senior year, recovering fumbles and getting five or six tackles a game and Southern is having their best season in several years. I think they are 10-1 or 11-1. Eddie has been spending his New Orleans time--holidays, game weekends (the big Bayou Classic game at the Superdome against Grambling every year) and summers at the Dumaine house with M (his mom loves him is why she pushed him out of her nest), so hopefully I'll see him soon, and he can tell me stories. There will be no snow.
How He Cheers Up
There are things I have seen (crooked spines and autonomy-threatening infirmities) which make me question the wisdom of attaining old age and other things I have seen (the twinkling eyes of a ten-year-old in a seventy-year-old body) which make me think boy oh boy what a great thing the future will be. The fun really will never stop.
One may question my use of the word "ghetto" in describing the neighborhoods I haunt and live in--in New Orleans--but a few of you have been there and I think will agree that ghetto in this case is not an unfairly used noun/adjective. Unless for you "ghetto" is only evocative of the negative aspects of the condition and then I have to tell you, no, that's not what I'm talking about. Ghetto for me is synonymous with those who are surviving it on a daily basis with laughter and tears. The strength of its citizens inspires me way way beyond the words to describe it.
I don't know what it means for you. I don't know how much depravity you have seen. I don't know what you consider hardship. The words don't tell it and neither do the pictures. The gutter, the vomit, the blood, the needles, the vials, the baggies, the children pulling triggers, the crumbling schools, the children pulling triggers, the children pulling triggers, the dead, the walking wounded, all those single mothers and fatherless children. And the graceful, confident, intelligent, beautiful, lovely, eleven-year-old girl who responded matter-of-factly to my suggestion that the world was full of possibilities, with the words--"I'll never get out of here," with a tone and maturity that implied, "end of discussion."
Everyday in the ghetto can be like that, the two ideas colliding: I'm going to live life to the fullest, then die in the gutter.
So for me, the temporary citizen with the ability to come or go, the taster of alternate realities not just through drug use, I find it comforting that there is a place where all the vain, silly complexities of life are boiled down to the simple idea of surviving the day in front of you. Do something, love someone, hate someone, try, fail, fuck, be celibate, dig deeply. Don't brood, but don't forget, Death awaits. It doesn't get much simpler than that. Cheer up.
The Irony Storm
I feel that something has happened to upset the irony balance on the planet and so we should all be careful with our meanings until such a time I deem it safe to carry on. Why I should be in charge of such an important task I cannot tell you but something has to be done. Everybody, please be careful. Also, everyday, you might want to try to find somebody who really likes you no matter what, and utter a few proclamations of what you deem to be simple, literal truth. See what happens. But again, I implore you--be careful. You may find that the people you thought really liked you only like you when you speak about the weather and other subjects that in no way challenge the potential balance of the meaning of meaning. Or it may turn out that your friend cannot understand you unless your speech is peppered with irony. This is not just about drunken, awol, frat boy, mama's boy world leaders in flight jackets but you can use that as an example if you have reached this far and are scratching your head--irony?
Leaving this phenomenon unchecked we run the risk that simple truth will be lost forever. Our vacuous and vapid popular culture will rule the day, as it now appears to be--let's hope temporarily--ruling the world.