Sunday, December 29, 2013

You’ve heard it all before.


From Cindy Lou Who, when she told the Grinch and all of Whoville. From Jimmy Stewart every year, trapped in his black-and-white wonderful-life time warp. Charlie Brown said it. Even totally lame shows on the SyFy Channel try to get the point across.

I don’t think any of them succeed for more than a few seconds. About the time it takes for viewers to pretend they’re not a little choked up—or that they are—and get off the sofa to hit the head or pour some more eggnog. Dad grabs another beer and Mom dabs the corner of her eye with a tissue while Sis rolls hers and fires up the smartphone to check her Facebook. Little Bro wants to know can they watch a movie now. And those are the people actually tuning in to the yearly Ho-Ho-Jingle-Bell Blah, Blah together, in the same room. Imagine that.
So there’s this little moment where something tries to sink in. Then it passes, and it’s business as usual. Another year and another big glitter-ball set to drop in a near future we almost have the foresight to envision. Almost. I suspect if they did away with the Super Bowl a big chunk of America would lose their año nuevo compass altogether, drift around with zombie eyes like folks north of the arctic circle in January, their needles pointing in all directions and none. Stars and moon and seasons don't cut it any more. Got to be big and gaudy and well-lit to be seen over the horizon these days. Otherwise Miley’s tongue might eclipse you.
Who cares, says a large slice of population. It’s all marketing. Get real. And in a way they’re right. It is. But, like a lot of marketing, it’s actually trying to sell you something good. Unfortunately, we’re so inundated with people trying to sell us bullshit that it’s safer to just assume it all falls into that category.
And it must fall into a category. That way you know what to do with it.
But I digress. The category in this case is Holiday Cheer.
Snappy, huh? Pulling Your Head Out Of Your Ass And Seeing What Really Matters, not so much. Honesty makes shitty marketing, for the most part. This isn’t anything new. Even Jesus had to market his teachings to the masses, and I’m pretty sure he understood that meant selling out to human nature. I could list all the adjectives covering that, but you probably get it. People who show up at the ER with a candy cane stuck in their rectum. Or worse. Jack Ass goes to Washington, with stops in L.A. and New York along the way.
The end result is that we pay the obligatory lip service to what this “season” is supposed to mean. But looking around makes it pretty clear it’s just that.
Us blowing ourselves.
Oh, there are always people who get it. One of my favorite authors had his first post-surgery radiation treatments to battle brain cancer around this time last year. He sits down with family and friends, dude gets it. He probably did before all that, but he's an exceptional guy. Most of us aren't. 
So I’m sitting around in my slippers and fleece pajama pants writing this post. I can’t go back to work for a few more days due to mechanical issues, and that’s going to kick my ass financially. Been off since Tuesday evening, and you know what? I love it. Yesterday, I did some major surgery myself, on a peach tree that broke under the strain of wind and ice. Then I pruned its little cousins. Four days and counting of being with my wife and our little family of fuzzy-butts, cooking good food and watching good movies and listening to good music, doing chores around the place, smelling the earth and fallen leaves and wood smoke and feeling the sunshine or the cold wind on my face.
And yet I got up this morning worried about how taking a week of is going to affect us. Then Victoria asked what was wrong, and looking at her with the covers up to her neck and a puppy on her head, I realized nothing was, and it didn’t matter. We'll get through like we always do.
So I think I’ll go see why our bathroom plumbing is backing up, prune an apple tree, maybe prep some beds and plant next summer’s garlic. Nothing like getting your hands dirty with someone you love to celebrate the days.
All of them.    
How about you?



SR       

Monday, December 16, 2013

She was dressed like a lumberjack,


and she made it look good. Black and blue checked flannel tucked into tight-fitting Wranglers, long black hair and not much makeup, an easy smile as she sidled up to my table and asked if I wanted to dance.

I did, and we did, one of those slow Eagles numbers, Lying Eyes maybe. Apropos, though I didn’t know it yet. She sat with me after the song ended, bought us a round, and I thought, okay then. It was Friday night in Bozeman, Montana, and I was a cab ride away from the K-Mart. Freshly showered and shaved with a lot of time to kill, I’d told the driver to take me somewhere with live music. An hour later I was three beers into a hell of a night and no longer alone, twenty-two and stupid, but who isn’t at that age?

Her name was Robin, and she was older than me. Quite a bit older, she told me later, when we were naked and sweaty and spent.

 Forty. And married.

Knowing none of that at the time and glad to have a woman to talk to about crazy shit like coyotes howling to make you cry and the way the stars move in a circle that's too big for us to see all of, and to sway to the music with, our respective holds growing tighter as the night wore on, I felt pretty good. After we closed the place and the cab took us back to the K-Mart and she bounced me off the walls of my Kenworth, I felt even better. Then, like a dumbass, I started asking questions. Too curious to just have fun and take the moments as they came. I’m still that way, I guess, only these days I ask the questions up front. Maybe there is some benefit to growing older.

She was from Cody, Wyoming, and her husband was back at the hotel with the friends they had come with and the other friends they had all driven up to see. He was probably fucking somebody, she said. I had no idea if that meant they had some kind of open thing or he was just a shit and she was getting even. In the end it didn’t matter. I was doing someone’s wife, or she was doing me. Both, I guess.

I felt like a piece of shit.

But I felt really good too, because of the way she clung to me as we danced, the way she looked into my eyes as we moved together, and the way she laughed and nodded her head in four-four time while Bonn Scott wailed from the juke.

Forty, I thought the next morning as we ate biscuits and gravy and drank gallons of coffee, both a bit fuzzy around the edges but not too bad, considering. Wow, I thought. Looking back I still have to wonder what was missing from her life. She seemed to have it together, a lot more than I did, if the conservative gold bracelet and matching necklace and hundred-dollar hairstyle were any indication. I wondered where her wedding ring was, and how long it had been since it had graced her finger. No mark there, not like the one on my finger now, engraved into the flesh after almost ten years.

When the cab pulled up to her hotel I expected to see some grizzled biker-type waiting at the entrance, pissed as hell. He would rush over and yank open the door and I’d have to put up or shut up. That didn’t scare me much, I knew a little about fighting, real fighting, not that movie shit or even some on-the-mats sport kicking. Down and dirty, short and sweet. I’d fought a guy in his forties when I was fifteen, and come away without a scratch. Not that I’d kicked the guy’s ass. But he hadn’t been able to land anything, and I figured I eventually would have. Like I said, twenty-two and stupid.

But there was no husband waiting to jump us, only the cold wind and the blinding sun and the long miles between both of us and the places we had to go next. She kissed me and got out of the cab then leaned in the open window and handed me a slip of paper with her phone number on it. Call her when I got to Cody, she said. Then she was gone, and a half-hour later I was rolling east on the interstate, headed for the high-line and North Dakota.

I got to Cody a lot with that job.

All these years later, I still wonder what I had that she was looking for, beyond the obvious. Did I make her feel young again? Was her old man cold or distant or broken? Was I a fool?

Sure I was. We all are at that age, and maybe at any age.

The night I met my wife, Victoria, at a little Texarkana dive bar behind the Flying-J, I recognized something in her eyes, though I didn’t understand it at the time. She was slinging drinks and her smile lit the place up, her crazy mane of flaming hair drawing my gaze as though it were a moth. But she had to ask me twice if I wanted to hang out and shoot some pool after her shift was over. Older and wiser maybe, or just more scarred, and therefore more scared.

But I agreed that second time. I’m glad I did. No one else could have gotten me playing air-drums on their dashboard while doing my best Diamond Dave doing Ice Cream Man.

I still feel like a piece of shit every time I think about Robin and the husband I never saw. But I also feel good, just like I did twenty years ago. Because that tall redhead with the kind eyes and the sexy shoulders peeking from her blouse cut-outs directed her room-lighting smile toward me the night we met, and thinking about that one day I realized what it was I saw in her eyes, and in Robin’s.

It was them seeing something worthwhile in me, and not being afraid to grab hold of it. And if you ask Victoria, she’ll tell that the good ones don’t let go.

She's right.
 

 
SR

Saturday, December 7, 2013

The doe in the the road was dying,



huddled upon itself the way they do, curled around the pain. As I got closer it tried to stand, its broken back legs folding before the deal was done. I grabbed a gear and rolled on past, the deer collapsing, a median-strip planted with something that was probably colorful in the summer momentarily screening it from view. Through this neat row of skeletal symmetry, a pair of oncoming headlights burned.

In my side mirror, steam was rising from the deer, marking its position, right in the middle of the passing lane. It saddened me to see. I couldn’t help wondering if the poor creature understood what was happening. Then I was eyes-forward again, my mandatory second’s worth of checking my six complete, telling myself I wasn’t rubbernecking. Then I looked again. The doe stayed down. The headlights came on.

It was one of those minivan taxis, the kind that makes you shake your head and wonder how it came to this. The driver was running in the left lane, him and me the only traffic for miles, jumping puddles of sickly sodium glow.

I shook my head, hating the nature of a fabricated world. My eyes flicked the mirror, searching for brakelights and not seeing them.

Asshole, I thought.

Too late, those twin red eyes flared, and the minivan lurched and veered right and swerved left and yawed back again, and did the exit stage left thing, making a drunken beeline for the trees, all in less than two seconds.

That’s how fast it happens. 

Unless you’re the doe. I guess it drags out a bit longer from that angle. No smartphone to distract you, no tweets to keep you entertained on that long highway crossing, just the cold and the sudden glaring noise and the pain, and in the end, the same confusion as us. The same futility. It comes at you in plain sight, and you miss it every time, and it rolls right over you.

I wondered if the great green pasture in the sky was a reality now, no wolves and no deep snow to bog down in. Then I wondered if the stupid taxi driver was okay. Half a mile ahead, a possum waddled across the road, one twentieth the size of a hunkered doe, and I marked its passage.

Hard to miss. Lots of things in the road are.

But we drive blindly toward whatever demands our attention, we try to hold in our hands the things we tell ourselves are important, make them real with the press of a key or the swipe of a soft finger across a touchscreen, and we miss what’s in the road.

Sometimes the movie has a fast-forward button, and if you hit it because you aren’t paying attention you go right to the end.

It’s hard to have much sympathy for that.

And from most places on the road, it’s a long way home. So I topped the hill and grabbed another gear.


SR

Monday, November 25, 2013

We knew what Anthony would say before he did,



because it was what he always said, and maybe it was true. Thing was, nobody cared. I don’t mean just Julio and I, but the world. It didn’t give a shit. So we didn’t either, not because we were callous--which we were to a degree because life forces you to grow thick skin in the places where it rubs you raw--but because we had heard it before, too many times to count. You grew callouses or you blistered. Anthony didn’t seem to get that. He expected the world to give when he crashed his head against it.  

It didn’t. But the people around him usually did, for a while at least. It was just Anthony.

But there comes a point when you have to stop giving, no matter how sorry you feel for someone, because if you don’t, you turn into them, ramming your skull against a wall. It’s not a wall made of bricks or stone but of forgiveness. You let things go that you shouldn’t. Then you do it again, and again, until somewhere along the line you realize there’s nothing left, and you just can’t give any more. We were at that point, Julio and I. Some things you can’t forgive, and everybody has their line.

Anthony hadn’t learned where ours were yet, but he was about to.

He came rolling up in his beat to shit Ford Maverick, gunning it hard into the turn onto the wheel-rut trail leading down to the campsite. He almost lost it, cutting the wheel too late and fishtailing, no doubt caught somewhere between a grin and a grimace as he fought for control. I’d been in the car with him when he pulled a similar stunt once, two summers ago, as the Fourth of July bash Nancy and Grover had thrown was winding down. We were on our way to Leonard’s place, to beg a doobie from the grizzled ex-con. Anthony piled it onto a big rock that time, and we walked the rest of the way. I stayed outside when we got to Leonard’s. Janet, Leonard’s wife, answered the door and tried to tell Anthony to come back tomorrow, Leonard was crashed. He barged past her into the trailer and about five seconds of banging and cussing later, came bouncing back out, blood gushing from his nose and the promise of a cut throat following him into the yard.

He said it then, as we were walking back to Nancy and Grover’s. He always said it.

Now he killed the engine and hopped out of the Maverick, sashayed over to the fire and sat on one of the stumps across from us. Julio handed him a beer, asked if I was ready. I shook my head and lit the joint I’d been rolling and passed it to Anthony. He grinned and took a long hit, nigger-lipping.

Nobody said anything until the joint was gone, more beers opened. Then Anthony broke the silence. You could always count on that.

“What’s up?” he asked.

Julio shrugged, looked out across the lake, anger smoldering in his dark gaze.

“Fuck you, Anthony,” I said.

“What?” Like he didn’t know.

He did, I saw it in his eyes, flicking back and forth between Julio and me, never stopping on either of us for more than half a second. They found his feet.

Julio said, “Suzie told me.”

Anthony watched the scuffed toes of his boots dig in the sand, hoping for purchase. They would never find it, because the world was too slippery for Anthony, and he wasn’t slippery enough.

“Finish your beer,” Julio said.

Anthony did, in one long pull. He was a trooper, I’ll give him that, only he had no fucking idea in what army he belonged, or in what war. Nobody had the heart to tell him there were neither. That shit was for the TV news, boardrooms and back rooms where the cigar and single-malt crowd did the quid pro quo shuffle. In real life, where real people had to do or die, there were only skirmishes whose meaning fled before the dust had settled, and sides that were never really drawn so much as roughly sketched.

Anthony let loose with a booming belch.

Julio nodded and stood. “Get up,” he said.

Anthony got to his feet and Julio hit him between the eyes, the sound of it ringing out across the water. Anthony stumbled back and Julio belted him again, a jabbing left, followed by a powerful uppercut that put Anthony on his ass. He sat there, legs splayed, a stupid expression on his face, like he had no idea how this had come to pass. Julio stepped in, his foot reared back to kick that face with its ridiculous chin beard. Then he stalled, his foot slowly dropping back to earth, his anger burning out, leaving disgust in its wake.

“Shit,” he said, “asshole.” He went back to his stump and sat, Suzie’s honor defended and its marring avenged. Steam rose off his shoulders in the chilly air. He opened a beer.

Anthony looked at me as I got to my feet.

I wanted to pick up where Julio had left off, kick that stupid face to mush, leave his mouth a bloody toothless door swinging on broken hinges. He deserved it. At least then he’d have an excuse for not keeping it shut. My uncle was sitting in the Holbrook Hilton because of that mouth, the lack of brains behind it.

But I couldn’t. He was too pathetic. It would be like kicking a retarded dog to death.

“Shit,” I said. “Get up.”

Anthony shook his head, looked away. That really pissed me off, almost enough to say fuck it, start kicking, but not quite.

“Get off your ass or I’ll boot you into a coma, Anthony, I swear.” I took a step forward and Anthony scooted backward, all heels and elbows.

“I mean it,” I said.

He met my eye and saw that I did, that I hoped he would make me angry enough to do it, and he scrambled to his feet, turning over so his bony ass stuck in the air. It was tempting, but I held back.
When he got turned around I was right there, in his face. Before he could move I grabbed his belt and the front of his lined flannel shirt and heaved, and he was up over my head, his whole buck-thirty. I took two lunging steps and threw him into the icy water of Fool Hollow Lake, as far out as I could. His head missed one of the slabs of volcanic rock jutting from shore by two or three inches. Pity, I thought, as I turned and went back to my stump.

Julio handed me a beer and I drained it, took out my bag and rolled another joint. Anthony splashed and cursed his way to shore, sat on his stump, dripping and shivering. Julio threw some more logs on the fire and it reared up, flooding the drowned canyon with that eerie glow only campfires throw, making our shadows into mad dancers.

Capering was the word. Like the dude that lived in Anthony’s head.

I grunted and lit the joint while Julio passed out beers. Anthony took his and grinned. All was forgiven, that stupid grin said. It wasn’t and never would be, but you couldn’t tell him that, could never make him see. He’d served his penance. Like some Catholics. Someday, somebody would shoot him.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Fuck you, Anthony,” Julio and I said, in stereo. We didn’t laugh, because we knew what was coming. It wasn’t funny, not anymore.

Anthony didn’t disappoint.

“Tough job, but somebody’s got to do it,” he said, and tilted his beer, Adam’s apple bobbing.

I looked at Julio, his black eyes like holes in his dark face. He gave a little shrug, an involuntary snort puffing air from his nostrils. Futility, it said.

But maybe Anthony was right, and if so, I wondered why, knowing I’d never find out. God works in mysterious ways and all that shit. Apparently the world needs its walking disasters to remind the rest of us how thin the knife-edge we walk really is, how easily they could be us, we them. Or maybe they exist to serve as an analogy for the entire human race. It’s a good one, I sometimes think. Then I wonder what kind of fucked up God would delight in such absurdity. And then I shrug, just like Julio had, that same little snort escaping me.

Tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.



SR


***

We've all known someone like Anthony at one time or another. What did you learn from yours? How far did he or she push you until you pushed back?


Friday, November 15, 2013

We got a lot of strange looks,



the old Navajo and I. He didn’t fit in at Denny’s. The hostess wrinkled her nose at his eau de dumpsteur when she seated us. He cackled and coughed as she walked away, her double-wide hips swishing in their polyester casing. My eyes watered, and I wasn’t sure if it was from breathing last night’s Thunderbird or the broken heart seeing always gave me. Bearing witness. I wondered what Kit Carson would make of this, any of it. All of it.

He ordered the Grand Slam, over easy, and I drank a pot of coffee while I watched him eat, his fingertips emerging from their gloves of layered grime, grease running down his proud chin. He was old, and I wondered what had broken him. Then, recalling the two summers I’d spent on the Res working a landscaping and irrigation crew as a supervisor in my late teens, didn’t have to wonder at all. When you spend a lifetime searching for who you used to be, who you’re supposed to become, finding neither, it isn’t hard to slide into a bottle. Those curved walls offer the illusion of clarity while they warp the world, the way a smile warps a politician’s face. Two-hundred years of grief and loss creasing nut-brown faces deeper than twenty centuries of sun and wind.

He wasn’t getting a piece of the casino. Twin arrows had pierced his heart, and the hearts of his land and people. Their names were progress and profit.

The rumble of eighteen-wheelers passing on the interstate shook the air while overweight drivers waddled across the lot to the pizza buffet. Wal-Mart hustled and bustled next door. I needed to get going. It was a long way to Pomona, and the sun was setting the western sky afire. Somewhere out there the old man’s family might be sitting on a hill watching sheep graze, curl-horned rams nuzzling the ancient earth for sustenance. I could feel them, like ghosts sinking below the horizon, pulling wool blankets tighter around themselves as the digital age declared them obsolete and the cold deepened.

When he started licking his plate I ordered him another Grand Slam and drank another pot of coffee while he got himself around it. Later, after I was in the wind, he’d go in search of some liquid warmth, the sort of help I wouldn't offer. I hoped he would find it, and that was goddamn sad.

He’d scared the hell out of me when he popped up from the dumpster while I was tossing my bag of garbage. I’d probably beaned him in the head with it. He was applying his tongue to an empty Snickers wrapper in long slow strokes and never stopped, even as he did the jack-in-the-box.

His eyes settled on mine after a momentary effort, as if he had to concentrate to focus on me, as though I weren’t real, not part of the world. I guess I wasn’t, not for him.

“Hungry,” he said. No shame, just fact.

I stared at him, my heart subsiding into something like a normal beat, if there ever was such a thing. I could smell him from ten feet away, beneath the broiler smoke and fryer steam wafting on the breeze. A raven circled overhead, waiting its turn.

“Yeah?” I said.

He nodded, slow, eyes never leaving mine and some kind of dark amusement in them, as if he could at least find a minimal satisfaction in frightening the white boy skipping along the edge of his former range.

I thought about that, remembering the twenty guys we’d kept in beer money and gasoline back in ’91, how they’d amounted to something like two-hundred faces filtering through our three job sites, how a few had stuck for the whole gig, how we’d become friends, hitting the bootlegger’s for a buck a beer and foil-wrapped dimes of diesel-soaked weed. Peyote meetings and fishing at Tsaile Lake and a desperate groping toward companionship with a dusky beauty ten years my senior, fueled by lust and the Sweethearts of the Rodeo and Bud Light, and that searching for definition that I understood was actually our only real common ground.

“Yeah,” he said.

I thought about the looks we’d get, the whispers and behind the hand comments and maybe the manager coming over to tell us we had to go. The affront my new friend and I would hand them, the dare to show themselves. I recalled a stray bitch in a parking lot two-thousand miles away, teats heavy and sagging, ribs showing, eyes darting, a can of tuna and a small hunk of cheese and a whole lot of sorry for the human race. I wondered what it all said about me.

The old man took my measure, waist-deep in refuse. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was just curious to see what I’d do.

I stared back for a moment. Then I gave a little upward nod and pointed over his shoulder at the Denny’s with my lips and said, “Come on then,” and turned my back while he scrambled over the side.


SR

***

Like most of these posts this little tale is more memory than story, and that's because it stuck with me, and that's because its not little at all. As the horizon of the past recedes into the distance, it looms above the other landmarks, a milepost casting a long shadow. 

What looms large in your rearview mirror?

Saturday, November 9, 2013

Forty-two years later,



evening light slanting through crimson leaves, the tang of wood smoke in air gone just the right amount of chilly, a passionate woman’s shower-damp hair cool against my neck and smelling of flowers, puppy fur banging my nose, the delicate thunder of electrified guitar strings, the sting of golden needles brewed with care in the back of my throat, these things still amaze. They bring me back to life, in the sense that the road brings me back home again, and again, and again.

I’ll quote Bilbo Baggins this day that is just another, but whose alignment of season marks my own personal anniversary:

The road goes ever on and on…   


SR