Things Were Really Moving

My banishment from Tommy's trailer park was more a blessing than a curse in most ways.  Tommy came out to the little cracker box house I was living in with my father, but it was no worse than staying where he was, so there was that.  We played guitars and wrote songs and began to read The Hobbit, the first time Tommy had ever read anything, I think.  But he was enamored of the story as was I, set as it was in a mythical world of adventure where anything was possible.  We both longed for escape from the lives we led, and the stories helped  

One of the things it gave us was a fascination with pipes.  It was the silliest dumb thing we ever did, but we went to a tobacco store downtown and learned about what made a good pipe, how the shapes and sizes made a difference, what was good wood and how it cooled the smoke.  We bought books about pipes and pipes themselves and settled on smoking Balkan Sobranie, a Turkish tobacco that had been cured over slowly smoldering camel dung to give it a distinct flavor.  Like Bilbo and Gandalf, we sat with our pipes, reading The Hobbit, then the trilogy.  

There was a benefit, though.  I quit smoking cigarettes.  

I made new friends at school, too.  There were some smart kids who were emerging from the crowd, kids drawn to the ideologies, kids challenging the status quo, "disestablishmentarians" as we had recently learned.  They were outsiders by choice, social rebels, outcasts, Quixotes, perhaps, fighting the dumb rules of law with deviant and sometimes outrageous behavior.  It was fun.  The dangers were different than those associated with the half-wit brutes and quick criminals I had only half-voluntarily grouped myself with in the past.  Actually, there seemed to be no danger at all.  We followed Thoureauvian dictums of social disobedience, willing to accept the consequences of our very public actions.  I led a walkout of the student government elections, for we had evidence that the results were fixed by the administration.  In the middle of the Vice-Principal's address, we stood up and walked out of the gym, gathering to sit beneath the flagpole at the school's epicenter until the fiasco was over.  Next period, we were all called into the principals office, but he was an older hipster, a fairly famous figure in jazz music who had his own syndicated radio show.  Why he was a high school principal was a mystery to us, but he was rarely there, so it must have been a good gig for him.  And when he had us all gathered, he simply listened to our complaints good-naturedly and sent us all back to class.  No harm, no foul, we guessed, feeling as if we had really done something though we had not changed the outcome of the election.  But we had made a stand and we felt good about it.  And so did the best of our teachers.  

The annual school play was upon us, and Jill was preoccupied and nervous.  She was a first year teacher, young, and perhaps too much identified with the students for some of the other teacher's sensibilities, but we all loved her and saw her as a champion.  I wanted to do something for her, to win her attention.  She had mentioned once that she liked to drink Cold Duck.  I had no idea what it was, but I got someone to buy a bottle for me and I put it in my car and took it to with me on Friday.  The play was that night, so after school, I rushed to my car and then to her room, waiting long enough for all the other students to leave, hoping to catch her alone.  She was packing up her things when I walked in with the bag in my hand.  

When she looked up, I could see the distraction in her eyes.  My coming had not the impact I had hoped for, and suddenly I felt a foolishness, felt myself a boy on an impossible mission standing before a real woman, a teacher, someone whose life was far beyond what I could imagine.  Even  before I spoke, I could see that everything was unfolding awkwardly, not at all like the half-imagined scene that brought me here, a golden moment bathed in gauze and soft light.  

"Hi," I said.  I could hear my voice, cracking, adolescent.  The floor began to sway beneath my feet in growing waves.   Vertigo overtook me.  I felt panic and a growing nausea.  "I brought you something for good luck tonight." 

I thrust the bottle before me, holding it by the neck in the twisted, brown paper bag.  

Her eyes grew large as she looked toward the door uncertain of what to do.  She opened the bag just a bit and peaked in.  

"Oh," she said with half a start.  "This is my favorite.  But you shouldn't have brought this here," she managed, quickly putting it out of site.  "But thank you," she said, more warmly now that the evidence was hidden.  "How did you know I liked Cold Duck."  

"You said so one day," I proffered, not knowing what else to say, just standing there, looking at her, hoping she would do something but not knowing what.  

"Well thank you," she said, touching me on the shoulder and kissing my cheek.  "It was really sweet.  Are you coming tonight?"  

Yes, yes, I would be there.  What else was there in life now.  I would come to see Jill and to watch her favorite play, The Fantastics.  I'd never been to a play before.  Things, it seemed, were really moving.  

Visitors from Google

Since I put up a post that mentioned The Great Gatsby, I've had a lot of hits for people searching Google for "Gatsby's shirts," or something of that ilk.  People want to know why Daisy cries.  I imagine that most of these people are high school students who are writing papers for their English classes as was I in the period about which I was writing.  It is nice to know.  But I think about the confusion I am causing them if they stay on the site and read about my high school years.  It is not an audience I imagined at all when I began writing.  It is just another thing to consider.  

I also get a lot of hits from people searching for "Liliroze," my photographer friend in France.  I say "friend" because she was so wonderful when I got those prints, but we do not stay in touch.  I need to write her an email, I guess.  I sent her a Christmas card and she responded, but nothing since.  Yes, I will write to her.  

Lots of visitors come only for the photos.  Many are searching for nudes.  Those people do not stay long.  It makes me sad a little.  I don't know if they are disappointed in my photography in general or if they are only interested in seeing naked girls.  I know the nature of that, of course, but it saddens me nonetheless.  I like the bold honesty of portraits of naked people, but there is a lot of that on the internet. It is difficult to do well, more so than portraits of people with their clothing on.  Peter Gorman did a fantastic project that resulted in the book Naked in Apartment 7 that pictured women who answered his ad photographed in his New York City home.  Natasha Merritt's book Digital Diaries was the culmination her fascination with the new digital photography and her own graphic nakedness.  Peter Hegre focused his camera on his wife's intimate life in a most revealing portrait resulting in the book My Wife (and a divorce).  Around the same time, young women began exposing themselves in public in large numbers and the internet was full of smiling, healthy, seemingly happy girls flaunting the beauty and their youthfulness.  All of this (and more) at the turn of the century made "the nude" seem silly and redundant, though the works of Sally Mann and Jock Sturges continue have the power to inflame.

Still, people like looking at nakedness.  As long as we wear clothes, I guess, it will remain something of an exotic taboo.  

In truth, I'd like to photograph all of you naked.  I'll come to your house and stay awhile just hanging about and seeing what you do.  And then, after I've photographed you for a couple of days in the courses of your lives, we will make a portrait.  It will be a document of those days.  That is what I would like to do.  

I've rambled and strayed from my original purpose today, but it OK.  Everything is. 

Nature and Adventure

I settled in to the new routine.  I lived far from my high school now, and I didn't tell anyone about it.  The place I lived in with my father was crummy.  Nobody would be coming out.  

But there was a sort of idyl about it, too.  It was rural, or almost so, and I drove through wonderful as yet under-spoiled landscapes every day.  My father had grown up on a farm and had seen little until he joined the navy in World War II.  He served in the Pacific, but like most fathers who were in the war, he rarely spoke of it.  More than anything, I think, it had given him the travel bug, and several times in my life he quit his job and loaded up a trailer full of travel gear and took the family cross-country to camp and hike and explore.  Back home, he was the local equivalent of Lowell Thomas, and he enjoyed the near-celebrity status, inviting people over to sit in the dark and watch the flickering 8mm travel films he had made, documentary comments included.  I had watched those films my whole life and the narration never changed.  He would tell the same stories in the same places and laugh exactly as he had before.  My childhood memories were made up of those films and those stories and of my father's "itchy feet."  

Travel and adventure were what he craved and what we talked about now.  In the summer, the little cracker box house was too hot to inhabit, so we would go to dinner at a fancy French restaurant in a redneck town and sit in the cool of the air conditioning for awhile, but it was really a torture going back into the heat after dinner, so we took to buying some quick food like Kentucky Fried Chicken and going to the big lake that was part of the big, famous river to eat, to sit in the shade, and to look at the boats in the harbor.  Dad wanted to buy a sailboat, he said, and go sailing for awhile.  For me, of course, he was a sailor having been in the navy in World War II and having owned a couple of motor boats over the years.  It was of course a fanciful misconception on my part, but necessary, perhaps, or at least desirable.  

One night, he struck up a conversation with a man on one of the larger sailboats in the marina who was happy to tell us his harrowing tales of crossing the Gulf Stream in a storm, of getting blown off course, of giant waves that threatened to sink the boat, a tale and a storm and a heroic survival.  It was dangerous out there, he said, and not for everybody.  

When he was gone, my father gave me a look and bobbed his head up and down saying nothing.  I felt happy and emboldened by this second hand adventure.  

During the time I was living with my father, there was a tremendous series on television that we watched religiously, "The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau," and for that hour, I sat enraptured.  Escape, I thought, to sail around the world for adventure, to be part of that would be the most glorious of things.  There were National Geographic specials and the weekly "Wild Kingdom" with Marlin Perkins and other outdoor shows we watched together, something unspoken passing between us, some understanding of what real life was and meant, a life lived outdoors and outside the bounds of social convention.  

Driving home one sunset past a field of wild grasses that went on forever, the sun's last rays firing the field in orange and crimson and gold, a small red fox stopped and stared at me, straight into my eyes.  I was only a boy in a passing car, but for a timeless instant, we seemed conjoined.  Everything at that moment seemed to slow, my vision becoming telescopic, zooming in on that fox, bringing it closer.  There are moments you can never forget that seem random, even inconsequential, but that somehow have a greater meaning you never decipher, the stuff you read about in legend and lore.  For nights, that fox, that field, that sunset were in my dreams.   I've never talked about it or tried to explain it.  It was just something my father gave me.  

A Dirge for Happy People

How can the days go on being beautiful when we are not or do not feel ourselves to be?  But they are there, wasted on us.  There are others though, and we forget, for whom the days are memorable.  Unseeing eyes, our ears stopped up with dirt.  What endless road is this that we shall never travel?  Trudge on, trudge on.  Selah.  

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

(from "Abaude" by Phillip Larkin)

New Digs

The photo has nothing to do with the story unless you want to pretend that this is that of which I dreamed.  But it wasn't.  My dreams were empty, hollow, unknown things, the dreams of someone who suffers less because he has much ahead of him, who still believes in unlimited opportunity.  The photo is another from what I shot this week, the Polaroid adventure. 

I made it through the week sleeping in my car at Tommy's.  I washed some clothes in the trailer park laundry, but on Friday morning, just before I went to school, something crazy and improbable happened, a misunderstanding, a mistake.  I was lying in the back seat of my car when Tommy's sister came out.  We talked a little bit and she went back inside.  I don't remember what was said.  It was a throw away conversation and I was dopey with sleeping poorly in the car the past few nights.  But after school, it would be the weekend and I knew that Tommy's mother and step-father would be drinking, and it would all be the normal chaos and I would be able to come and go in the trailer, eat and shower and relax.  

But that wasn't to be.  In a little while, Tommy's mother came storming out of the trailer making a bee line for my car.  I thought that maybe she was going to ask me if I wanted some breakfast, but instead she flew off the handle and started yelling at me like a maniac, telling me that I was a no good shit, that she had always liked me and let me stay over on weekends and she couldn't believe I would say such things about her and she wanted me gone and not to come back.  She would NOT be insulted that way.  Then she began to cry.  

I didn't know what was going on at first and still didn't know what she was talking about, but I had gotten a grasp on the tone of things and knew she was complaining and then the shock began to settle in, but long before I had gathered my wits enough to speak, she turned on her heels and was gone.  I just sat there like a bombing victim trying to make sense of what had just happened.  

In a few minutes, Tommy came out, sheepish, and said his mother was really mad.  I had said something to his sister that she had repeated to her mother out of context, and the rest was what had just happened.  I told him that wasn't what I meant, that I wasn't meaning to insult his mother, and he said he knew that but I had better stay away for a few days until she settled down.  And so there it was.  I would need a new place to sleep.  

School that day was a chore.  I was about worn out and feeling hollow, though I thought I was proud of myself for enduring, too.  I was my own man, I felt, able to do what I like, calling my own shots.  But things were going to shit.  And my money was running out. 

After school, I drove out to visit my father.  He wasn't living much better than I was.  The place he was living was a cracker shack divided in two.  He had already heard about things when I drove out, though.  My mother had called him.  

"What the hell," he said, "I left the house to your mother so you could live in it.  Jesus Christ."  

And then there were two of us living there in that divided cracker shack with the table for two in the small kitchenette and the tiny, moldy bathroom that never dried.  I got the couch that came with the rent in what was referred to as "the living room."  Still, it was better than sleeping in the car.  It was only for a few months, I said, only until I graduated from high school.  Then I would get a job and I would get my own place.  

That night, a train passed on the rails that ran next to the house.  I lay in the dark and listened to the screeching of the metal wheels and the bumping rumble of the cars.  It was a long train that ran through the middle of the night.  It just seemed to go on forever.  

Here or There?

"There is nothing that competes with habit."

Aimee Mann, "You Could Make a Killing"

In your dreams, you are whole again, all pains and miseries gone.  A woman comes to take you away somewhere, smelling of herbs and spices and exotic oils.  But you are hesitant.  Rather, you ask her to stay.  Impossible, she says, and you must make a choice.  You want to go, but not forever.  For all its imperfections, you like it here. But once she's gone, she won't come back.  

You wake in the darkness.  What, you want to know?  What did you choose?  It's difficult to break with the old attachments, but we long to go.  What are we willing to leave behind?  

Here and There

"There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste." 

(T.C. Boyle, "Greasy Lake:")

"Man, I don't understand young people today."  

There it was, the common complaint.  I wasn't interested in what was to follow, but he was determined.  I couldn't stop him.

"I've been seeing this girl who is younger, and everything has been great.  She's something, really, tall, raven black hair, good figure, and she's smart, too.  She's going back to school in the fall.  All of the sudden, though, she gets like weird, you know, and acts like I've done something bad, which I haven't, and she won't answer my calls and when she does, she's like really cold and distant and nothing I say seems right.  She's got like a snotty attitude about everything."  

"Well, I'd say you're done," I said, knowing right away it was the wrong thing to say because he would go on explaining things that I didn't care about and about which he himself hadn't a clue.  He was just thinking out loud.  

"But why?" he pleaded as if I were the one making the decision.  "What'd I do!""

"You were you," I wanted to say, but I didn't think he'd have much of a sense of humor about it, so I kept quiet and let him talk.  I could have told him that it was because he dated a younger woman, but that wasn't it exactly, either.  It was more of a culture clash than a matter of age, though I supposed the two corresponded.  

"Do you watch Reality television shows," I asked him? 

"What do you mean?" 

"You know, shows where people form temporary bonds and then break them and form new ones so that they can stay on the island or in the house or in the running to marry someone?"  

"You mean like Surivor?"  

"Bingo."  

"Yea, not much." 

"Well, there's your problem.  You don't understand the rules.  Drama is important.  Bonds are meant to be broken.  Life is a giant reality game.  You want stasis.  You want things to go on the way they are.  Boring.  Crisis is cool.  She probably wants a little drama. Watch more TV.  Get into some social networks.  Twitter.  Or else date somebody your own age." 

"Ahh, bullshit."  

"OK."  

Of course the best advice is to avoid emotional attachments, to float above the mundane, to concentrate on the internal environment.  Chant.  Meditate.  Contemplate.  Simplify.  

I'm good for a couple of laps, but the damn thing is a marathon.  


I've been working with Polaroid and hoodoo again. This is the first scan from about thirty photos I took the other day. I am excited about them. "Postcards from Nowhere." I was there. You should have seen it. It is all changing now.  Soon, it will be just like Everywhere.  

Prodigal Son

He was a desirable young man. The girls said he was handsome, but I could never see that.  He was privileged though, and maybe that had something to do with it.  His father was an architect of some reputation and had made a lot of money.  

And so the young man grew up with aplomb and developed a casual, easy manner.  He laughed much and seemed very happy.  Life looked good on him.  

After college, he travelled, going to the exotic places to see the world.  Traveling through Central America, he got very sick and was hospitalized.  Afterwards, he was very weak and had to rest for months.  He had the adventurer's disease.  The girls were thrilled.  It was all very romantic.  

Some time later, after he had decided to use some of his father's money to begin developing real estate, he took up with one of the women who had admired him for so long, part of a group of a group of girls who had helped to mythologize him.  I had known the girl since she was young, the daughter of one of my friends.  Her father had been an architect, too, but had gotten divorced from her mother and had moved away to another state where he remarried, had two children by his new wife, and had prematurely died.  My friend's daughter had followed in her father's footsteps, though, and had recently graduated from an architectural college.  She was working in a firm and studying to take her board exams when she and Bo started dating.  Her mother was ecstatic--he was a catch.  She would coo and purr when she spoke of him.  It was what every mother wanted for her daughter.  

The two of them moved in together in a house not far from me. They got a dog, a big, yellow lab, and I would see them walking him in the evenings, a handsome young couple and their dog.  Occasionally they would stop by for drinks, and I'd ask Bo about his travels while she looked on happy and admiring.  

They decided to get married and moved into one of his properties, an older wooden house with a big wide porch in one of the up and coming neighborhoods in town, and I did not see them much.  One day, however, I stopped by with a mutual friend.  They had been married a while, and talking to them there on that wonderful old porch, I thought that they did not seem happy.  Domestic life, being what it is, had brought a calm to his life.  They had both put on weight, she more than him who was genetically thin.  He had not travelled much since they had gotten married, and he did not seem as casual or carefree, but just then he was making plans to sail with some friends to Micronesia.  He would be gone awhile, and she would fly over to meet him when he arrived they said over a very good Pinot Noir.  But when she spoke, there was a tension in her eyes.  "Would you like some cheese," she asked me passing a silver plate.  "It is from Spain."  

A month or so later, he left on the long voyage, heroic, or nearly so, again.  But when he finally arrived, she did not fly out to see him.  There had been some change of plans, she said, and the boat was going to sail around the islands for awhile.  She wasn't certain when he would be back.  

When he did come back, he seemed his old self again.  Everyone wanted to hear about his trip, and he would tell it with the familiar demure grin of one who knows more than he says while she sat to the side to listen to his tale told one more time.  Eventually, I guess, she quit listening.  

One afternoon, I saw her in the grocery store and asked her how things were going.  She told me that she and Bo had separated, but they were going to a marriage counselor and hoped to work things out.  A few months later, they were divorced.  

That is when she got razor thin.  With her shock of brilliant red hair and her almost blue eyes, she was magnificent.  The sadness of the divorce was still with her, of course, but work was going well and she still had the dog.  And then she met a man.  He was from Eastern Europe and was a very nice fellow if a bit odd in his looks.  But he was in love with her and she with him and before long, they were married.  She got pregnant right away and had a difficult pregnancy that kept her in bed for the last part, but both mother and son came through wonderfully.  Her husband had been very attentive.

I saw the prodigal son yesterday walking down one of our city's fashionable streets and leaned out my window to wave.  He had changed, of course, as we all do.  His hair was now cut short and beginning to gray.  He was dressed as if for business, expensive worsted wool trousers, matching leather belt and shoes, a tasteful pinstripe shirt open at the collar.  When he smiled, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes were visible.  The smile was automatic.  He seemed in a hurry, perhaps late for a meeting.  I watched him as he walked away, the stiff, quick stride, and laughed quietly to myself.  I was happy in a guilty way.  I think I was always a little jealous.  

It Is All Just. . .

Half waking with the light, skin stuck to the seat, the tearing sound it makes as I move.  Half dozing all night, thinking dreams, my breath fogging the windows, everything damp, windows cracked to let in the mosquitoes.  A large back seat is never large enough, unable to straighten my legs, back cramped, shoulders.  Rolling over to stare at the gray light, I smoke a cigarette.  Furry teeth, bad breath, greasy hair.  Cars drive slowly by, the crunching of tires on the cheap roadway.  People going to work.  

In a little while, lights come on in Tommy's trailer, and a bit later, his step-father comes to his car to go to work.  We both pretend I am not there.  Tommy comes to the car and looks at me.  I let the window down.  It is awkward.  I know not to go into the trailer to disrupt the morning ritual.  His brother and sister get ready for school, his mother in her nightgown making breakfast.  There is a bathroom by the park entrance, and that is where I go to pee, to wash my face, to brush my teeth.  The sink is dirty with old stains, old complaints.  I feel the grit on the cement floor beneath my shoes.  I get ready for school.  

A carton of milk and a package of little sugar coated donuts at the 7-11 mini-market.  I buy a pack of Marlboros.  I'll need money soon.  

I sit through my classes without saying much, tired, numb.  I do not despair.  It is all just left behind me.  I'll be eighteen soon.  Half  a year of school left, I think.  I will finish.  Whatever happens, I will graduate from high school.  

The school day over, I drive to Tommy's.  He is not home yet, so I wait in the car.  It is afternoon.  I fall asleep.  When he comes home,  I get to shower.  He and I will hang out.  That much is clear.  Other than that, nothing is.

Moving Out

A New York Times article this morning says that people who have friends are healthier than those who don't.  Research.  Bad news for me, I think, notoriously a loner.  There must be more to it than that.  Surely genetics sends you in a direction and to fight that is bad for your health.  Or other's.  I've always been enamored of the single-handed sailor at sea, of the lone monk on a mountain top.  Of course, there is a difference between being lonely and alone.  

I don't know.  The article has me spooked.  

At school, people were growing up all around me.  I could see it.  Something happened to them.  And you could tell which direction they were headed.  Some maintained the stiffness of their parents.  Others were rebelling.  Some were college bound, others bound for the working docks.  Those kids just seemed to fade away while others emerged.  Consciousness.  I felt caught between, an observer of both worlds belonging to neither.  

It was a shock to me when I began to find out that the kids I grew up with--those who had not grown up around the margins of life, had not stood at a girl's window while she took her clothes off, had not gone to black night clubs at fifteen, had not been around drug dealers and demented murderers--were drinking and smoking and making love.  When had it happened?  It was sudden, I thought, overnight.  The prettiest girl in school had gotten pregnant and had gone to live with her aunt.  She was pregnant by a fellow who wanted to be a fireman, but the boy who loved her was the star of our basketball team, a fay boy, I thought, who wore black and white saddle shoes and madras shirts.  He was one of the few boys in school whose family had money.  He was a snotty little prick, but when she came back from her aunt's, he hung onto her like a baby monkey.  Even the Homecoming Queen had had a scare, and when it was over, she broke up with her longtime boyfriend.  It was too much.  It broke him and he never recovered.  I had gone to school with him since the first grade, and it was always assumed that he was a boy with a future, one of the bright ones who fit in well socially.  But suddenly, in a matter of months, just shy of graduating from high school, that had fallen apart.  You could see it as clearly as the gathering of storm clouds.  His life was unutterably altered.  

At home, what there was of it now, my mother had begun seeing someone, a merchant marine from Mississippi who spoke the most illiterate mumble imaginable.  It was impossible.  He was barely human, scum scraped from the bilge of one of those ships he worked on.  My mother actually brought him home and introduced him to me.  That night, I packed some clothes into my car and left.  I didn't know what to do about my dog, a Weimaraner I had had since I was twelve.  I would get settled and come back to get her, I said.  I would get a job and move in somewhere.  I would come back and get it all.  

That night, I drove over to Tommy's.  It was the middle of the week and there was no idea of staying in his trailer with him, his mother and step-father and brother and sister.  I just needed a place to park.  The back seat was big enough, and that is where I slept.  I would figure it out, I thought lying there in the humid night listening to the whine of mosquitoes.  I'd do something.  

Balm

One morning you wake up and are just not right. The early morning light looks metallic. You understand that this will be a mechanical day spent going through the motions, waiting, waiting. You try to write. The faucet drips, the second hand on the analog clock seems amplified. For a second, the two sounds coincide. There is so much to do, you think. You've left things undone and it is all adding up. Suddenly, money worries you. You do not have enough to cover all the expenses, but you are thinking about buying a luxury item, something to make yourself feel better. For the millionth time in your adult life, you tell yourself that you will have to become more self-sufficient. You've done it before, painting your own house, building your own deck (always with the help of someone who knows what he is doing), but you fall away from it time and again. You must buy and spread twenty yards of mulch, you think without joy. It will cost you eight hundred dollars AND two days of labor. The yard needs work. You must weed, another weekend lost. The yard man chops off the heads of your sprinklers on a regular basis, and as always you tell yourself that you will learn how to fix them. Everyone says that it is easy, but you can always find ways to make things hard. You need a new car and the money guys on television say it is a great time to buy one, but you want to keep your old car running another year. Not just old, but really old. Seat covers, you think, and maybe someone can fix those patches of rust. The floor in the kitchen needs to be replaced. The house needs a new roof. The neighbors don't have these problems, the doctors, lawyers, and architects. They look so happy.  You watch the anesthesiologist across the street pull away in his Benz. Time has not made things easier. Your mind is made of lead. Sand pours through your veins. It should have been different, you say. You've made mistakes. It is hopeless. You are certain you will buy the luxury item today.

Venus

I watched Venus rise through the bedroom transom window this morning in the cobalt sky.  There was that, then the rising, and the coffee, and the coming light.


How such things happen is a mystery beyond mysteries. Life just short circuits, the wires cross, and suddenly nothing is normal, or rather, normal is nothing. Tommy and I were going with his sister and Russell, who was on leave from the army, to stay in the hotel of a small town of clairvoyants and seers and mystics for Christmas. I hadn't told my father, hadn't the need since he was not there, and my mother didn't mind. I'm sure she had plans of her own. I'd be back in time to see my father Christmas day, but we were determined to stay Christmas Eve in the spooky old hotel.

We drove up that night full of stupid, crazy excitement and before we did anything else, we took a turn around the town. It was small, and it seemed to us that faces were appearing in the windows of houses to watch us drive down the street just prior to our getting there. Next we drove through the town's small graveyard, parked, and walked about in the darkness. But not for long. We half-heard and half-saw everything one is supposed to see and hear there, the moaning of corpses, the specters of translucent light, and finally, when we spied a solid shadow heading our way, we jumped in the car and fled. We headed straight for the hotel.

An older gentleman came out to greet us at the desk in the lobby. "What can I do for you," he said to us in an uninviting way.

"We want to get two rooms for the night," Russell said in his most adult voice.

"We are closed now," the older man replied. "We have no rooms."

In another room, people were seated on old chairs and sofas.  There was an old, heavily patterned carpet and thick drapes.  Curious faces glanced out at us then turned away.  There was something going on in there, a seance, perhaps, or something worse.  I thought of corpses and sacrifices and the raising of the dead.  

We queried him for a bit trying to find a way to break through his resistance, but it was no use.  He wanted us gone.  There was no way we were going to get to spend the night.  So disappointed, we headed back to the car. 

"Did you see that?" we all said at once, and excitedly everyone began to report and to speculate.  We had stumbled upon something for sure.  Man, oh man, oh man, we were saying over and over, not sure of what else to say, shaking our heads in pride and fear, convinced once again that faces were appearing in windows of houses before us as we drove the narrow streets.  

And so we headed out of town and pulled out onto the interstate wondering what to do next. It was late and the area was rural and it was Christmas Eve, so we were practically the only car on the highway. Then suddenly, we were caught in a pair of headlights. It was the police. The car followed us for a long, nerve-wracking while. Then suddenly, we were caught up in the flashing red lights. Shit, I thought, what had we done? I wasn't speeding.

"I want everyone out of the car." There were two of them. They weren't even highway patrol. They were local cops from a neighboring town. "Where are y'all going," asked the bigger of the two in a harsh, southern drawl.

"Home," I said.

"What are y'all doing out here?"

I told him we had gone to the town of seers and mystics and soothsayers.

"What were y'all gonna do up there?" he wanted to know.

"We were going to stay in the old hotel tonight," I answered.

He turned to Tommy's sister. "How old are you?"

"Fifteen."

He looked like he had something now. "And y'all were gonna lay up in a hotel room with her?"

"We're friends," I said. "That's her brother."

"We got a call that y'all were up in the graveyard. What were y'all doin' up there?"

I was too innocent to lie. "We wanted to see ghosts or something."

"Y'all are lucky tonight," he said. "It's Christmas Eve. Now we watch out for the people up there, and when anything happens, they call us. Tonight, they called us about y'all, and we could make y'all pretty miserable, give y'all a pretty bad Christmas present. Now I don't ever want to see y'all up here again, y'understand? If I see this here car again, I'm going to run you in. You got that?"

I had it.

And so we piled back into the car. Nobody laughed. Thank god we hadn't been drinking. Now what? What were we going to do now?

It was Christmas Eve. We were convinced that there was something terrible going on in that town that night. We had almost witnessed the Devil's Christmas, we thought. We were more than certain.

Christmas Eve. All around us, sleepless kids were in their beds listening for the sound of harness bells in the big, hollow night. Too early they would be at the Christmas tree and later they would eat turkey with relatives and friends. I guessed that I would drop off Tommy and his sister and Russell at his house. I guessed I would go home.

Moon

"She's so cool," the girl sitting next to me in my drama class said. "She's not like the other teacher's at all." We were outside supposedly practicing our lines for an in-class performance. None of us were. It was just good to be outside in the sun, on grass, away from the classroom. This was unusual. I felt a sleepy dopiness coming over me as I listened to the voices without thinking, hearing their tones and notes and letting them wash over me, my body a floating mass, narcotized.

"Moon went over to her apartment," another voice put in. Moon was the hip new kid with the loose Afro. "He's gone over a coupe times. He says she's real cool."

How had he managed it, I wondered jealously? I didn't dislike him, really. He had never done anything to me. It was just that he seemed more mature, somehow. There was a loose happiness about him as if everything came easy. People were attracted to him, kids and teachers. "How cool would he be if he got stuck at the trailer park with Judson and those guys one Saturday night?" I thought to myself. "He would shit himself."

That's all I had. I could hang with murderous thugs without dying. I needed more.

Jill called us all back inside. The period was just about over. She was thin, almost too thin, really, with long dark hair that she pulled behind her ears. Her teeth were a little crooked, her eye teeth a bit in front of the others giving just the slightest hint of fangs.

"OK," she said, "as you know, I have chosen "The Fantastics" as the school play this year. It is my favorite play and I'm nervous and excited. We will be having tryouts next week, so if any of you are interested. . . ."

I knew I wasn't. I wondered if Moon would be trying out. He probably could do that well, too.

Perfect

I read this morning that women with high estrogen levels have higher voices. The height:width ratio of a beautiful face is 1.6:1. The face should be divided equally in three planes, from the top of the head to the bottom of the forehead, from the bottom of the forehead to the bottom of the nose, and from there to the bottom of the chin. I also have read that movie stars have larger heads, that we are more attracted to people with big heads in pictures. Babies stare longer at pictures of pretty people than at photos of others.

Depending upon our hormones mixtures, we are more attracted to the way some people smell over others.

The article "surprised" me this morning by pointing out that sexual attraction and love were not the same thing.

I work with several people who met their mates on eHarmony. I guess maybe they have the love thing figured out, too.

I've learned that if I try to make my face have the same expression as the person I'm looking at, I can feel what they feel. OK. I've not learned that, but I believe it. It has saved me a lot of trouble, I think. I can tell by making the face if the person will respond to me positively or not. I know. You don't believe me. Try it.

The point is. . . . OK. I'm just free associating, but I prefer my soft science somehow. I am impressed by the science of attraction and love, but it doesn't make me happy. I'm not going to measure my face. Alright. It is tempting. But I am not. I hate disappointment. Besides, I think I have to be as attractive as Humphrey Bogart or Jack Nicholson. I have a big head.

And I'll never do eHarmony. I certainly don't want someone who is a good match for me. It would just be too disappointing. I don't think I could live with that much self-knowledge.

Zackary Canepari

I was reading The New York Times online a couple days ago and saw some photos by Zackary Canepari that were really good, so I googled him.  I was smitten by his website, smitten with admiration and envy.  He is doing what I would like to do and doing it well.  I thought I would write him a fan's note and ask him if I could link him here.  


You never know what people will think of such things, if they will find it common or brash or if they will be amused or even that they will appreciate the compliment.  Zackary didn't take long in responding with a very nice email.  


His photos are documentaries, but they are something else, too.  You can go to his website or to his blog.  You can't lose either way.  

Gloomy December

My father moved out.  That is how things change.  He moved into a duplex about fifteen miles away, not really a duplex, but an old wooden house that had been divided in two.  One bedroom, a small, half kitchen with a small table, a tiny living room, and a half-sized bathroom.  It was dreadful.  He had left the house to my mother and that was that.  I didn't see my mother much from then on.  She was out at night.  

All the old things transmuted.  I went numb.  

I sat on the couch at night alone watching television, watching the Christmas specials that came on each year, watching the Christmas specials and variety shows with Bing Crosby and Perry Como, schmaltzy things that showed a rich, full family life and the happiness of being together at the seasons, parents and grandparents, music and quiet smiles, the rapture of children. . . . 

Tommy and I went out.  Our town had gotten a bright, brand new thing, a shopping mall that was enclosed, all the stores under a single roof like that miracle Astrodome in Houston.    We would go there and wander around just to watch the people.  They made us laugh.  It was our defense against the rottenness of our own lives, I guess, to sit and watch the people, to pick out the odd features and comment on them, to become quietly hysterical.  We were there and not there, floating above the pedestrian mass, spirits, cynical observers who saw what they did not, holograms without substance. 

We went to Pier One, an import store with thousands of cheap items.  We liked the carved and painted wooden figures the best, hideous statues of pirates and organ grinders and monkeys.  Who would buy such junk, we wondered hilariously, thinking that we would buy them for Christmas gifts just to watch the inner contortions on the happy faces of the people who opened them.  Yes, yes, yes, we thought, to do such a thing, to really do it, to turn it upside down.  

Everywhere it was Christmas, the colors of the season, dark and rich, houses trimmed with lights, the closeness and the sharing.  It enveloped me, entered me.  The days, the nights, full-throated, heavy-limbed.  

I watched television, listened to the carols, heard the happy voices.  At school, there was anticipation.  Boys and girls stood closer as the air cooled.  December.  There were dates, parties.  There was Jill, the drama teacher.  She was going to Kentucky for Christmas, she told us.  She would see her family.  I wanted to give her something, I thought.  I would give her something.  I would.  

<

Doll House

Judson had gotten into rolling queers. So I heard, but not from him. Donny said that he did and that he was strange about it. Judson, Donny said, would go home with a guy and take off his clothes and get into bed with him, and let him kiss him just once before he pounded him. How would Donny know this? Did Judson tell him? I wasn't about to ask.

I did hear Judson tell another story, though. I had gone with Tommy and Donny to the VFW post. That is where their parents were drinking, and Donny had to get something from his mother. I had never been in a VFW hall before. It was terrible and dim, old browns and metal grays, and it smelled like old drunks. There was a long bar with cheap spindle backed stools lining it and a large, empty dance floor with a small stage. There was dancing there on the weekends and bands of one sort or another would play. But not this night. The hall was mostly empty except for the drunks sitting around the bar. And there in the middle of them was Judson. We were talking to Donny's parents when Judson came over. Judson wasn't twenty-one and had never been in the service but he looked like he was thirty-five so I guess nobody questioned him.

While Donny was talking with his parents, Tommy and I talked to Judson who told us a surprising tale. He said that he had taken Donny's mother to a hotel and they had made love. He said she was really weird about it, though. The hotel was a cheap, crummy one out on the highway, a place where you could go just to do such things.  She insisted he take a shower first, he said, and after he was done she took a shower, too, and took a very long time about it before she came out. Then when they were done, she took another. Tommy and I just looked at one another saying nothing, but I know my eyes looked like Tommy's which were trying not to look startled. Sitting in the VFW hall with the smoke and the liquor and all the old drunks, just walking in and seeing Judson there as casual and natural as you'd like, that and the story he told--nothing seemed real. It was like I had entered one of Rod Serling's episodes of The Twilight Zone. Maybe I wouldn't have believed the story if it didn't seem so accurate.  There was no stretch of the imagination here.  Donny's mother was queer about cleanliness as if she were warding off the life that lay about her.  She acted as if she were above it all, as if she were a traveller visiting some foreign land, just to see, royalty, perhaps, traveling through the empire.  No one was allowed into their trailer, though Donny had let us come in once when his parents were gone, just for a minute while he got something from his room.   The trailer was immaculate looking like a photo in a brochure for trailer homes or trailer furniture, everything small and neat and carefully organized.  And that is the way his mother looked, too, pretty like a doll, and that is just the way her husband treated her.  You never saw her without her makeup done, her hair coifed.  Judson seemed an unlikely candidate for her fantasies, but who the hell knows about such things.  Jesus Christ.  Judson.  

After he told us the story, Judson walked over to Donny's parents with a big, disingenuous smile that was matched by Donny's father. Even if he knew, he wouldn't have wanted to tangle with Judson.  

When Donny was done and we were leaving, Judson came over to tell us one more thing. He was going home with one of the women at the bar, he said. I looked at the sad sacks sitting there, but I didn't say anything. Judson looked at us like a kid at Christmas and exhorted, "This is going to be something. She said she can take her teeth out!"  I don't think there was anything normal about him.  

It wasn't until later that I understood the last part.  

Cougar

My senior year was not shaping up. I would need an operation for a pilonidal cyst at the base of my tailbone. It was painful and it was embarrassing. Afterwards, there would be sitz baths and heat lamps and packing. I stayed home rather than going to school until I could sit comfortably. And there were the drives to the doctor's office. I stayed on the couch all day and read and watched T.V. There was a loneliness to it, but a comfort, too. I was left alone.

It was strange to return to school after being away. Life had simply gone on without me. I went back to work at the pizza parlor. While I was gone, Gene had taken up with a woman working there who had a son almost as old as we were. She was a crazy looking bleached blonde who wore too much makeup to hide her age but who had a pretty good figure. When Gene told me what he had been up to, his eyes looked like a feral cat's when you try to feed it. It likes the food but is ready to run. He was like that, all wonder and nerves. I had gone to school with Gene since Junior High School and he had always been a background sort of kid, one you didn't think about, whose life seemed bland. His clothes were nondescript as was his hair and his general appearance, but he was fairly clever sometimes and liked to laugh. He had grown quite a bit in the last year and was bigger than I was, taller and bigger boned, big enough, I guess for the pizza woman's taste. Gene told me he fucked her one night in the restaurant when they were closing up, and since then, he had been going over to her house. I couldn't imagine any of it, but being so close to it, I was envious. It was crazy. She was crazy. She had to be nearly as old as his mother, though she didn't look like most of our mothers, and they would not be working in a pizza parlor. That is what made her odd to me, really, this working at the same job as us at her age. In some ways she was an adult, but in other ways she was ditzier than the girls we went to school with. There was a nervousness about her that infected everything. I had an image of her with her skirt pulled up, standing on her right leg, her left wrapped around Gene's hip, her mouth on his, her lipstick smearing his face, her perfume penetrating his clothing. I couldn't get it out of my mind.

Gene had certainly jumped out of the background, that was for certain.

All that excited me, of course, but I wanted no part of it. Still, I couldn't quit looking at her, either.

Easter

Sacred time, sacred space.  A church at Easter.  Pilgrims seek the eternal return, sacred history.  It provides context and meaning, displacing randomness and chaotic disorder.  Touchstones.  Collective memory.  

Churches and the deep, textured tragedy.


Pastel counterweights.

There is a power in remembering. There is a beauty in decorating.  

Power and beauty. The sacred and the profane.

The signs of carnage were everywhere, I thought.  Even television was changing.  I loved the new because I was young, but I liked balance, too.  I liked old things, touchstones.  Some of them, anyway.  I didn't care for Lawrence Welk, of course, and did not weep when it was gone, but I did not like "The Partridge Family" at all, either.  There were things that I did grow up with that were disappearing, things I had watched with my mother and father, shows and characters that had entered my forming psyche permanently.  the Jackie Gleason and the Red Skeleton shows were cancelled.  Gone.  There would be no more "Good night and gawd bless," no more "How sweeeeet it is!"  Ed Sullivan was cancelled, too, a whole lifetime of Sunday nights.  And so were "The Beverly Hillbillies."  

And NFL football was going to be on Monday Nights!

There were new shows, hip shows and socially conscious shows about lawyers and psychiatrists, and there was "Mary Tyler Moore" and "All in the Family."  

And there was Nixon.  

Everywhere you turned, there was revolution.  

My mother and father decided to get divorced.  They had been married for twenty years, but things had been very bad.  I didn't know how to feel.  There would be no more fighting.  There would be no more family, either.  My father was leaving and my mother was getting the house.  I felt numb the way you do when you get hit hard by something, waiting to see how badly you are hurt.  

I got a job at a pizza place that sold square pieces of pizza by the piece.   I liked working there.  It was something to do.  

Gatsby's Shirts

My English teacher was young and reminded me of Jordan Baker.  We were reading The Great Gatsby.  Her only resemblance was that she looked athletic.  She hung around with one of the girl's gym teachers and probably played tennis.  That is what I imagined, though I couldn't see her seemingly floating above the couch on a sweltering summer's day as Daisy and Jordan appeared to Nick to do.  There was a limit.  

Gatsby was a revelation for me.  There was splendor, there was love.  And there was transformation.  Gatsby had done it, even though it did not end well for him.  More troubling for me than Gatsby's death, however, was the scene where Nick brings Daisy to Gatsby's mansion, the scene where Gatsby attempts to impress Daisy by showing her his shirts.

"He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them one by one before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel... shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly with a strained sound Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

"'They're such beautiful shirts,' she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. 'It makes me sad because I've never seen such--such beautiful shirts before.'"

The shirts were important, our teacher suggested. Why did Daisy cry? What was wrong with the shirts?

The question would stay with me. Transformation was possible, right?  

A young, poor boy such as I would stand befuddled before Daisy and her tears.  What was the teacher trying to say?  

I would be forever haunted by those shirts.  

The New Cool

The Vice Principal wasn't in, so the lady at the desk let me go back to class. The hair hat, for now, had done its job. What to do, though? If I wore the wig today, I would have to wear it all the time. Better, I thought, to take it off. Coach's class was over, and I wouldn't see him until the next day. Perhaps he would have forgotten about it by then. Or I might wear the damn thing only to his class. I wasn't sure yet.

I walked in late to my Marine Biology class and handed the teacher my note and she told me what the class was doing. She was youngish and didn't care about the hair policy. She wouldn't rat me out.

Most of the teachers were that way. There were only a virulent few who were invested in the old ways enough to make a kid's life miserable. Coaches, of course, and a few of the math teachers. I had one who particularly hated me, I knew, because she told me. I don't know what set her off. I didn't even know she thought about me let alone hated me, but one day as we were leaving class, she told me that I was the most immature person she had ever seen, that she hated seeing me walk into her class. She looked around to some other students with mad eyes as if she had done something heroic for which they would thank her. One of my friends looked at me with a smirk. He rather enjoyed that, I thought. But my mind was racing. Why would she say that to me? What had I done? I was a pretty bright kid and didn't think I ever caused her trouble. I certainly didn't go out of my way to. When I looked at her eyes, though, they were filled with bitterness and loathing, and I knew she would have had me turned into a lamp shade if she could. Her face right then became the symbol of ineffectual rage for the rest of my life. I would try to steer clear of her as much as possible for the remainder of the term.

My favorite class that year was Theater. Our teacher was pretty and young. She had just graduated from college the year before, so she was closer in age to us than to most of the people she worked with. She was thin and quick and excited and every boy was half in love with her. Everyone wanted to be in her class.

Theater class wasn't much. We'd read parts of plays and g0t into groups and talk about it and were supposed to act them out but usually we did little more than read the parts aloud. It was a good time of the day, though, sitting in groups, relaxed, not hassled or harangued at all. Her name was Jill. That is what we called her. And for some reason, I wanted her to understand me. She wasn't the girl in the songs I listened to, not that holy grail I drove my car to find. But she was closer to it than anything else around me and she often filled my thoughts.

My big break came when Coach quit teaching history. He was promoted to Assistant Vice Principal over the sophomore class, and another teacher took his place, a woman who had helped teach Americanism vs. Communism. She was actually a history teacher, so our days were filled with that, but she never hassled me at all. It seemed the year would just go by.

For the first time, though, there were kids who were thinking about the world outside, kids who were going to concerts and wearing funky clothing and letting their hair grow and reading, and in a way, it bothered me. I had been alone there and had suffered for it, I thought, feeling I had discovered it all myself, and there was an ownership in that. These people were late comers and squatters. They hadn't gone through the ordeal of being an Outsider. They were only celebrating the new coolness of it. And suddenly, being different seemed competitive. It was a challenge. Even the Student Government kids, the ones on Homecoming and Prom committees, were "weekend warriors," showing up places on Fridays and Saturdays wearing things they didn't wear at school, costumes, I thought, sometimes smoking dope or drinking a beer, participating in the growing milieu of fun-seekers who were not ideologically committed. There was music, there was dope, there were festivals and head shops. People had access. It was easy to do.

One fellow in particular got to me. He was new to the school that year and wore his hair in a loose Afro. He read and wrote poetry, and his clothes were understated but hip. He was smart and he was nice and the other students liked him. He became the poster boy for cool. Nothing ever seemed to ruffle him.

And it was said that he was palling around with Jill.

Hierophany

Full moon. Patterns. Rhythms. Harmony. Tonight is the Pink Moon or the Fish Moon. That is what the Farmer's Almanac says. Other places, other names.

I watched a documentary about Philip Glass last night on PBS's American Masters. I stumbled upon it but saw it from the beginning. An unsuspected gift. Though it seemed the filmmaker was a bit lost, shooting random footage that he tried to organize in twelve parts, Glass or the image of Glass. . . well, that phrase is funny enough on its own. In the end, I wondered why Glass had agreed to participate. But it provided me with two good hours.

Glass and the Moon. Minimalist, repetitive, iconic. Glass the Buddhist.

I slip and slide away from what I want to be. Life requires balance. I forget and am brought back to notice when things have gone out of whack. I have tried, but I have not paid enough attention.

Lent. Passover. Hierophanies. A universe of rhythms. Another full moon. The sacred life.

A Senior

Tommy was trying to get out of the house without leaving. He rented a trailer with some other fellows in the same park as his mother and stepfather, but there was trouble and Tommy and the others were forced to leave, so he moved into an apartment building with Donny and two other fellows I didn't know. He got a job working in a Tenneco gas station and mini-mart. He was working nights and giving away gas and beer to all his friends, so we al thought it was great. Tommy liked it because he didn't have to bust his knuckles every day.

But the crowd that came to that apartment was a strange one and growing. Donny was always able to attract the worst people imaginable. Being around the twisted and disturbed made him feel more normal, I thought. But the effect on him wasn't good. He was beginning to seem no more than a step away from the penitentiary.

The drugs were becoming harder, too. Randy and Rhett were dealing in heroine. Fellows were beginning to put needles in their arms, depressing the plunger, falling, falling. Tommy spent his time listening to The Moody Blues.

I went into my senior year. This was it. All I had to do was make it through. We were top of the food chain, and there seemed a liberation in that. When we walked through the hallways, there were no older kids. We were it.

Overnight, it seemed, there were hippies, kids with long hair and new attitudes. Some had become political. Our classes were. We all had to take a course called "Americanism vs. Communism." It was taught in an auditorium that combined three classes. I had the football coach for mine. He was an idiot. We learned that we didn't want to be communist because you were told where you would live and where you would work and you would have to wear shoes made out of cardboard.

In contrast, I had Sociology with one of the oldest faculty. And the most radical. Everything we learned in that class seemed to challenged what we had been taught before. Those of us lucky enough to be in his class looked at one another with eye-popping surprise. The man was a wonder. One day we were asked to break into groups for a long term project, and he let us come up with our own team names. The group I was in decided on the moniker "Panama Red." We were shocked that he knew what that was. He told us to watch a new television show called "All in the Family." He would spend part of every class talking about it the day after a new episode came on. He seemed to know everything that our other teachers did not. He liked us, we thought, and that was something.

But I had history class with the same coach who taught "Am. vs. Com," and he was a jerk. He spent most of every class talking about the football team, and if not that, something equally mundane. He didn't like hippies and was always on the lookout for hair that was too long, so I had to slither into and out of his class and try to make my hair look as if it complied. One day, however, I caught his attention, and he sent me to the office. Again, I was sent home to get a haircut.

But there was a boy that year who had refused to cut his hair and instead had bought a short haired wig and put his own hair into that. When he left school, he would take it off and his hair would fall to his shoulders. I decided to do the same. Rather than going to get my haircut, I went to a department store and bought a wig. I, too, would wear the hair hat. I would not get my hair cut. I would let it grow.

But when I went home and put it on, I looked ridiculous. My wig was cheap and looked it. The other fellow had gotten one that was much, much better. But all I had to do was get back into school, I told myself. After that, I would take my chances.

After the Curse

Lent.  Passover.  Easter.  The First Communion.  Crime.  Punishment.  Redemption.  Trials and Tribulations.  

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

("Loveliest of Trees," A.E. Houseman)

It is a silly poem, I know.  But it goes with the image.  

The first full moon of Spring is Thursday.

Engram

It is funny in remembering--how you can't. Memories come soaring up out of the depths and surprise you. Sometimes they are impressionistic and sometimes they come back in great detail. I am sure, though, that neither is to be trusted. Well, you have to "trust' them, for they are the stuff by which we live our lives, our roadmaps to the future, etc. But the mind alters details and conflates things. I read in the New York Times today that scientists have found a chemical that will suppress memories. I know that alcohol and recreational drugs do that, but this is different. You can read it here.

This morning, I want to write just dialog that I might have heard in high school, but I can't remember anything. I try to remember anything, but I am having no luck. Not with words. I remember the hallways as they come back to me in nightmares, those cement block walls and concrete floors, hallways lit by weak fluorescent lights, forever dim and dirty hallways lined by metal lockers with vented doors, two rows of beige metal lockers one atop the other, hallways full of rushing students and echoing voices. I can still feel the grit of sand on concrete beneath my shoes and see the dark stains and blotches of gum. Green doors opening from classrooms, swinging out into the hallway when opened.  You had to watch out. There were open hallways between buildings covered by corrugated metal roofs held up by hollow metal poles painted brown, the sidewalk standing four of five inches above the eroded sand on either side.

Passageways. I don't remember having a conversation with anyone.

Summer. Someone had a boat. We were skiing. Some of us floated in the lake, treading water, while the boat pulled a skier far away. We tread water and talked. I was amazed that we could do this so long, and thinking about it made me panicky. It seemed I would just tire out and drown. I was only worried about being embarrassed by it. But the boat stayed out and we continued to float and talk and laugh, the tension remaining with me.

Tommy helped the trailer park owner build a seawall. I was amazed. How did Tommy know what to do? I knew nothing of tools and materials. Tommy was good with his hands. He could draw. I always received bad grades for penmanship. No dexterity.

But I could think. I could sit anywhere and watch and think. I didn't know people who could do that. I was happy thinking and watching people. I was intuitive. I knew more about people than others, I told myself. I loved the hum of uncrowded public places.

I had a car and everything was new. I loved driving down roads and highways. There was so much to see.

Weekends at the beach. There was promise in it. Long, broad, white beaches running forever. There was an inlet, a lighthouse, sea grapes and palmetto lining the dunes. A marsh, a brackish river. We stayed too long. Everyone got sunburned.

One night, a fellow had an eight millimeter projector and some porn movies. I'd never seen one before. They were on small reels and didn't last long. They were not really porn, just women doing striptease, taking off their clothing, sitting under bright lights on beds and couches. Tick tick tick tick tick. Everyone hooted and hollered.

The differences between minds was becoming greater. Some were coming to consciousness, all taking positions. Politics. Woodstock and the Kent State shootings were discussed in classes. Even the Tri-Hi-Y and Civitan crowds were forced to reckon.

I try to remember what was said. I hear tones and intonations, but not words. Not this morning.

Summer was coming to an end. It would be my Senior Year.

"There's No Place Like. . . ?"

Woodstock.  Suddenly everybody wanted to be a hippie.  At least after the movie.  Kids who never knew suddenly found there was a revolution going on.  Power to the people!  

My junior year was ending with me in the crossfire.  At the trailer park, things had gotten weird.  Donny was bringing in a lot of strange people.  He was dealing drugs and the new guys were older and even more violent.  Some of them were Vietnam vets and they carried guns.  There were two gay guys who lived in a trailer near the entrance to the park, and one night a guy I stayed away from shot his pistol through their trailer.  They moved out within days.  I think it was the acid that was making everyone so crazy.  God knows what Donny was selling as drugs.

I was in a car with Donny and the vet one night downtown.  Donny was trying to hook up some drugs with a black guy he knew.  We were all sitting in the car when the vet got weird and pulled his gun.  The black guy got out of the car and started to go, but he said something that got him into trouble.  The vet leveled the pistol and took aim.  That is when the black guy started running.  The vet raised the gun a little and popped off a round a little bit above him.  I was in way over my head.  I kept thinking about Dorothy clicking her heels together and repeating her mantra, but I wasn't sure where I wanted to get to.  I just wanted to get out.  

Tommy's sister's boyfriend had joined the Army Reserve and had to go to training for six weeks.  When he came back, he knew how to make pipe bombs.  At first they were small, but they kept getting bigger and bigger.  One night he brought a big pipe stuffed with gun powder and rags. We all looked at it with fear and wonder.  It was too big.  We all knew that.  Russell laughed, but I could tell he was unsure about this one, too.  That night, he took it to the woods.  Tommy and I did not go with him.  We sat, though, in anticipation just to see what it would do.  When it went off, it rocked the whole park like an A bomb.  Russell came running and we all jumped in the car and left for the night.  There was sure to be police for this one.  There was sure to be trouble.  

One day, Russell showed up with a handful of military IDs.  He had slipped into an office at the Reserve center and pinched them.  He was taking photos and making IDs for anyone who had some money.  Suddenly, everyone was going to bars.  While the drinking age was twenty-one, members of the military only had to be eighteen.  If they were old enough to serve their country, the logic went, they were certainly old enough to drink.  

There were two gay bars in town.  The big one was downtown.  It wasn't advertised or anything, for it was illegal to be "queer."  But it was there in the bar of an old hotel and Russell and Donny had gone.  They had devised a scheme.  As soon as they walked in, guys were buying them drinks, they said, and one of the fellows had invited them back to his house.  Donny and Russell went, and when they got there, they had another drink and then robbed the fellow's house.  What was he going to do, they asked?  He couldn't call the cops.  

This went on from time to time, this "rolling of queers," as Donny called it.  But of course, it led to big trouble.  One night, Russell was alone with a fellow and was going to rob him, but the fellow resisted.  Russell had him on the floor and he put a knife to the poor guys throat, but the fellow wouldn't quit fighting and the blade went in a bit so that there was blood.  It was too much.  There were police, an arrest, and then a lawyer.  It was going to cost Russell a lot of money.  

When it was over, Russell went into the service for two years.  He would be a "regular" now.  Tommy's sister would wait for him.  

And that's the way it went.  Woodstock at school, Vietnam in the trailer park.  And I knew which way I was leaning.  All that time that Tommy and I had spent learning to pick guitars, all those hours spent with Tommy's father playing country music, the learning to sing harmonies, it was all coming together.  Crosby, Stills, and Nash had made it cool.  And suddenly, people wanted to hear us play.