INT. GAMMA EXPANSION BASE - MAIN BRIDGE (2007)
Bridge is a control tower structure jutting above the base with windows on all sides. The room is round and the only entrances are by elevator through the floor: one in the middle of the floor-accessible only to the General and another closest to the views of the rest of the base-towards the back of the POV.
2 of Vuaron's personal guard stand at ease on either side of the back elevator doors. Some windows show views of other exterior parts of the base and others show space.
Except for the back elevator entrance, all other spaces below the waist high windows are covered in control panels and screens. These are perpetually manned by a D staff of security and defense technicians researching various projects or monitoring status of the base, communications and functions. There is a subdued hum of activity and soft voices in the background.
In the space on the far side of the side elevator entrance, between the General's elevator and the far window are 3 3-D displays which are cylindrical computer screens about hip height bordered all around with controls of various kinds, that project images into the air above. The middle one shows' Huascar's approach towards the area around the moon that can be scanned. The other two show other areas of space.
General Vuaron and his 4 advisors are standing around the middle display observing the action.
HESPAR shakes his head.
HESPAR: We were fortunate. Our freighter blundered into the enemy without getting caught.
KAROSH points his R finger up.
KAROSH points his R finger up.
KAROSH: Our scanners are blocked by the Gorgle star's radioactive cloud. Their communications and activity is unknown. We might have been missed, or let go by the Federation.
FERRAN: This mission is too risky. The whole area could be a trap. General Vuaron, are you sure Huascar can handle this?
VUARON: We all know his record. I'm sure, he's thought of more possibilities than you can dream of.
FERRAN looks sour. While KAROSH and NEMERON chuckle.
FERRAN: But, you saw, he's wearing his dress uniform. He's crazy!
KAROSH: He's got a plan.
HESPAR: Costuming won't make a difference.
VUARON: We'll see. He's the best Battle Commander, and strongest candidate to replace me next month. Maybe he'll last as long as I have.
HESPAR: Then he'd have to be both lucky, and gifted.
NEMERON scoffs.
NEMERON: Or a fast learner.
VUARON grins knowingly at NEMERON.
FERRAN: I still think it's dangerous to send only one Commander on this mission. The Trials are making everyone mad. We can't afford more rash blunders.
VUARON points his scarred hand at FERRAN.
VUARON: Necessary sacrifices.
NEMERON: I would love to be in Huascar's place.
VUARON gestures towards NEMERON.
VUARON: You see, that's the sort of attitude required.
HESPAR: I agree with Ferran on this.
HESPAR meets FERRAN'S eye and nods.
HESPAR: We don't know which Federation members are there, or their numbers. Their defensive capabilities are vastly different.
FERRAN: And only the Neethrupi wizards, can build a base near a radioactive cloud. We all know their battle prowess, and if the Special Force is there...
VUARON holds up his L hand to cut off HESPAR and FERRAN.
VUARON: We are the Drostivarian Empire! And those interlopers are building a base in our territory! The Lordavin Moon is an important strategic resource, but even if it was a mud ball, nothing will stop us from retaliating for this outrage!
The display shows Huascar's squadron splitting into 3 parts. 10 wait on the nearest side of the moon, another 10 heads towards the R: the point which would most likely intersect the arrival of other Federation ships.
VUARON: Hold your tongues and observe.
The image of the ships going to the R is cut off as they travel into a blank space-the radioactive cloud. Huascar's ship and the remaining 9 ships head around the L side of the moon, until they also are cut off from view.
EXT. SPACE NEAR LORDAVIN MOON
Drostivari Command ship, closely followed by nine android piloted stingers approaches the Loradvin Moon from the L.
INT. HUASCAR'S SHIP - BRIDGE
Voice overs.
Huascar is 37, his face is harder, with more angles, he has some vertical creases between his eyebrows and his hair is shoulder length with some layers.
He is standing in the bridge with his chin braced in his L hand in front of the communications panel.
He looks on the rocky, cratered face of the moon on the R of the window as they pass.
In the upper R corner of a small screen in front of him an icon of the D signet which was solid and grey, flashes red then goes clear with only the outlines showing, indicating the Gamma base has lost visual of the whole fleet.
He pushes a button.
HUASCAR: Squad Captains, is the Gamma Base audio line operational?
VORTAN and ORLAVE'S faces come on two small separate screens.
VORTAN and ORLAVE: Yes, sir.
HUASCAR: Good. Report if that changes.
VORTAN and ORALVE: Yes, sir.
Screens off.
HUASCAR: Stinger Team A, wait here. You know the signal to rejoin.
VOICES OF 9 ANDROIDS: Yes, sir.
The Federation base comes into view. It consists of a few dome shaped and curved buildings, with various sensor spires. It clearly is not finished, but 15 gun turrets are ready for action.
INT. HUASCAR, VORTAN AND ORLAVE'S SHIPS - BRIDGES (SPLIT SCREEN)
SIMULTANIOUS:
A brown skinned, amber eyed Tytreki female' s face comes on Huascar's larger screen. She's in her late 40s.
In the background are glimpsed other brown, long haired Tytreki and tall, pale, and furred Koru crew members.
All look official and busy, but some make subtle sideways glances towards the screen.
HUASCAR stands with his hands clasped behind his back.
VORTAN and ORLAVE'S computers have the same picture of the Federation bridge on smaller screens.
VORTAN and ORLAVE (to all squadrons): Delta formation.
END SIMULT.
INT. HUASCAR'S SHIP - BRIDGE
HUASCAR: Greetings. Who am I addressing?
ZENTORIL: Commander Zentoril. At your service, Huascar.
HUASCAR: We shall see. May I ask, why your Neethrupi masters...
ZENTORIL scowls.
HUASCAR:... have ordered this base in our territory?
ZENTORIL: Why do you think?
HUASCAR: To spy on us.
ZENTORIL is silent for a beat.
HUASCAR: We both know, this is a hostile act, and can not be tolerated. But, I am feeling compassionate...
ZENTORIL: Compassion, coming from a planet wrecker?
HUASCAR: I give you an hour to evacuate the base, before it will be destroyed.
ZENTORIL laughs-a braying laugh which flares her nostrils.
ZENTORIL: You come in a single ship, to threaten us? Hard to believe.
HUASCAR smiles.
INT. VORTAN AND ORLAVE'S SHIPS - BRIDGES (SPLIT SCREEN)
VORTAN and ORLAVE watch Zentoril on their screens
VORTAN and ORLAVE: (to all squadrons) Federation sensors are blind.
ZENTORIL: What has happened to the feared Drostivarian forces? Is it a holiday? And why this decorous garb? Have you come for tea?
There is some smirking amongst the crew behind her.
SIMULTANEOUS:
VORTAN glares while ORLAVE gapes.
END SIMULT.
INT. HUASCAR'S SHIP - BRIDGE
He smiles faintly.
HUASCAR: I'm here to talk.
ZENTORIL laughs.
ZENTORIL: I doubt it.
HUASCAR: Building this base is an aggressive act. It breaks the Treaty of Territory we made with the Federation. That cost many lives to form.
ZENTORIL: Huh! That's your story? You're here, because of a fifty year old Treaty, that your own leaders broke after only two?
HUASCAR: Those traitors were punished by Emperor Octivan.
ZENTORIL: Were they? Then, why has your current Emperor been dismantling the Treaty with alarming speed?
HUASCAR: In response to increasing pressure from your side. This base will start a full scale war. Is that what you want? I'm offering a short, and long term boon. You and your crew escape with their lives, and we avoid further escalation. In exchange, I ask that the Federation stay out of our territory.
INT. FEDERATION LORDAVIN MOON BASE - BRIDGE
ZENTORIL: As soon as you stop trying to acquire new planets in our solar system! We can not tolerate the thought of another planet suffering that fate. Arrogance and ignorance have been the Drostivarian pattern. All offers to share our sustainable techniques, are answered with warfare.
HUASCAR: It's been decades since the last offer.
Several crew members towards the back of the room are having a whispered discussion, unseen by Huascar.
ZENTORIL: You can't pretend Zorbane would care now! Your Empire's increasing aggression shows your true intent. Greed and waste, at all costs! And you are one of our worst foes. Yet, here you are as emissary? This, I can not accept.
INT. HUASCAR'S SHIP - BRIDGE
HUASCAR: Stereotypes and reputation. I am a sufficient Commander, following orders.
She snorts.
ZENTORIL: Huascar the Black Hearted is beyond sufficient!
He grimaces.
ZENTORIL: The death of hundreds, clog your soul's path! If we operated like your reactionary Empire, there would be a huge bounty on your head. Yet, you profess to be reasonable, sitting amongst your androids! You have no honor. This ruse is a waste of time.
He takes a deep breath.
HUASCAR: This is no ruse. I'm the one with a grievance here, your insults can't alter that. The past is over! Is there anyone else I can speak with?
ZENTORIL: You dare imply...? Here is your answer!
ZENTORIL turns off the com line.
SIMULTANEOUS:
HUASCAR: Shields up!
EXT. SPACE - LEFT OF LORDAVIN MOON
Stinger team A turn on their cloaking and speed towards Huascar's ship while the other squadrons wait.
INT. FEDERATION LORDAVIN MOON BASE - BRIDGE
ZENTORIL: Fire all guns!
END SIMULT.
EXT. SPACE OVER FEDERATION BASE
All 15 turret laser guns fire at Huascar's ship. They bounce off the shields and jolt the ship.
INT. HUASCAR'S SHIP - BRIDGE
HUASCAR: Return fire! Evasive action!
HUASCAR sits in his chair and straps instantly secure him.
He frowns briefly, then shakes his head to focus.
EXT. SPACE OVER FEDERATION BASE
His ship zigzags towards the base firing back.
INT. HUASCAR'S SHIP - BRIDGE
HUASCAR: Destroy their guns.
EXT. SPACE OVER FEDERATION BASE
Huascar's ship fires at the turret guns with missiles. A couple are destroyed.
Stinger team A's 9 stingers simultaneously de-cloak around him and begin firing.
INT. FEDERATION LORDAVIN MOON BASE - BRIDGE
ZENTORIL pounds the console with her fist.
ZENTORIL: I knew it! First defense teams, launch!
EXT. SPACE OVER FEDERATION BASE
The base begins to show explosions where the lasers hit. A stinger takes out a turret gun.
A defense of 8 Tytreki fighters launch from the R side of the base, while 6 Koru launch from the L, within range of Huascar's ship.
INT. HUASCAR'S SHIP - BRIDGE
HUASCAR: Stingers, mine spray those launches! Eliminate the Koru.
EXT. SPACE OVER FEDERATION BASE
SIMULT.:
2 Stingers which are nearest the launch areas spray out about 50 saucer shaped mines towards their targets. Some mines cause explosions on impact, while others linger in space in the path of future exits.
Huascar's ship fires 6 missiles at the Koru, who immediately take evasive action.
END SIMULT.
A couple of Koru fire quantum missiles at the D missiles. 2 Koru missiles hit their targets and instantly vaporize the D missiles into clouds of gas, one misses but vaporizes a passing stinger, leaving the android pilot helpless in mid space as it's ship's molecules change into gas. Then the android also dissolves.
One Koru fighter is clipped by a D missile, careens towards the base and explodes, taking out another turret gun. Another missile damages the launch where the Koru came from. The other 3 D missiles explode terrain of the moon near the launch.
INT. FEDERATION LORDAVIN MOON BASE - BASE
Red flashing lights and sounds of explosions. All crew intensely engaged at controls.
TYTREKI ON L: We've lost four turret guns.
ZENTORIL: Acknowledged. Focus fire on the Command ship!
EXT. SPACE OVER FEDERATION BASE
3 of the base turret guns hit Huascar's ship in the midsection.
His ship fires back and destroys 2 of the 3 turret guns, then swoops to the R.
INT. HUASCAR'S SHIP - BRIDGE
HUASCAR: Keep at the Koru, don't let them link up! Avoid the quantum missiles!
EXT. SPACE OVER FEDERATION BASE
Space on R side of the base is filled with Tytreki and D fighters attacking each other with laser fire.
2 Tytreki ships with 3 stingers firing on them from behind abruptly halt their forward motion and hover at 90 degrees above with a red laser web stretched between them and down into their previous location. This slices into 2 out of the 3 pursuing stingers, exploding them.
The last stinger evades the web but is damaged by crossfire from the base. It fires missiles at 3 Koru ships who were beginning to link up into an extra powerful ship. Then the stinger losses control and careens towards the launch on the L, and is blown up by D mines in the area.
The Koru ships shoot down the missiles and form a super fighter, which immediately sends 3 quantum missiles and a turbo laser blast at the D command ship.
The turbo laser hits Huascar's ship, causing the shields to falter and bigger damage. His ship sprays mines at the quantum missiles, while taking evasive action trying to avoid them.
The missiles hit the mines and dissolve them into blue fire. Another stinger is caught in the transformation into flames.
INT. HUASCAR'S SHIP - BRIDGE
HUASCAR: Destroy that super fighter now!
View from Huascar's window of the Koru super fighter on the R engaged by 2 stingers firing lasers from above causing some damage.
ANDROID ON HUASCAR'S L: Sir, our shields are at 45 percent capacity.
HUASCAR: Squad B, I need you! Squad C, take their place.
VORTAN'S face comes on screen.
VORTAN: Yes, sir!
Screen off.
EXT. SPACE OVER FEDERATION BASE
Huascar's ship gets hit from 3 Tytreki ships from below causing it to jolt.
INT. HUASCAR'S SHIP - BRIDGE
HUASCAR: Damn! Taking manual control!
He hits a button, and the ship's yoke projects itself from the floor in front of him, while his seat raises up a foot on a pole and footrests come out from the floor.
He grabs the yoke with both hands, and powerfully pushes it down.
EXT. SPACE OVER FEDERATION BASE
His ship surges upwards, while he fires the bottom magna beams at the Tytrekis.
It hits the one on the R, causing the ship on the L to be pulled towards it. They explode.
He fires four missiles at the Koru super fighter.
The Koru ship avoids 2 of the D missiles and destroys 1 with laser fire. The last missile is dodged, but destroys a Tytreki ship.
INT. HUASCAR'S SHIP - BRIDGE
ANDROID ON L: Sir, our shields are at 25 percent and only the aft missile launches are operational.
HUASCAR: Vortan, where are you?
EXT. SPACE OVER FEDERATION BASE
SIMULTANEOUS:
Vortan's command ship decloaks underneath the Koru super fighter and fires on it, causing more damage.
The super fighter splits up into 3 separate Koru ships and arc around. 2 fire on Vortan's ship, while one fires lasers on Huascar's ship, hitting to the R of the bridge and causing more smoke and explosions.
9 squad B stingers decloak and attack the Koru and the remaining 5 Tytreki.
END SIMULT.
INT. HUASCAR'S SHIP - BRIDGE
The android farthest away from Huascar has been destroyed.
The one closest to him is only a stump with legs and a pelvis, the rest of it had exploded. Their consoles are in flames, before a mist rains down on them extinguishing the flames.
HUASCAR'S R side has some gashes from flying debris.
He had thrown his arm up, to protect his face from the blast. The damage reflects that position, and extends from his hand, forearm, upper arm, shoulder, neck and face. The worst is his cheek below the cheekbone, which has shrapnel lodged in the flesh. It's obviously a piece of an android.
Oblivious to his wounds, he steers his ship through complex evasive maneuvers.
EXT. SPACE OVER FEDERATION BASE
The base turret guns strike the bottom of the ship, destroying the magna guns.
INT. HUASCAR'S SHIP - BRIDGE
ANDROID ON L: Sir, we've lost the magna guns.
VORTAN'S face comes on screen.
VORTAN: Commander, what is your status?
HUASCAR pulls the shrapnel from his cheek and tosses it over his shoulder.
His cheek bleeds.
HUASCAR: Shields are...
ANDROID ON L: 10 percent, Sir.
HUASCAR: You heard. And extensive damage. Prepare to be boarded.
VORTAN grins.
VORTAN: Yes, Sir.
Vortan cuts off screen.
EXT. SPACE OVER FEDERATION BASE
3 Koru attempt to exit the R launch only to be severely damaged by the D mines.
5 Tytreki manage to dodge the mines on the L launch and enter the fray unharmed. They immediately destroy 2 stingers and fire upon Huascar's ship, causing larger fires and smoke.
INT. HUASCAR'S SHIP - BRIDGE
ANDROID: Sir, shields at 5 percent.
HUASCAR nods and pushes a button which releases his straps.
HUASCAR: Enable the escape ship. Head to the base full speed, and fire all remaining weapons.
EXT. SPACE OVER FEDERATION BASE
Vortan's ship destroys 3 Tytrekis with missiles, but takes some hits from 2 Koru lasers. 2 more stingers are destroyed while taking out two more base turret guns.
INT. HUASCAR'S SHIP - BRIDGE
HUASCAR stands and salutes his crew. Then rushes out of the bridge.
EXT. SPACE OVER FEDERATION BASE
Huascar's ship barrels towards the base blasting missiles, mine sprays and lasers, which destroy 3 more Koru and 1 Tytreki on the way.
The base is riddled with explosions.
The Command Ship is very close to impact before Huascar's escape ship leaves.
The Command Ship plows into the base from the L and drags itself across almost the whole length of it with massive explosions surging in the line of impact.
2 more Tytreki ships are seen to exit the base from the R, avoiding the mines and the final explosions of it's destruction.
4 stingers cover Huascar, as his escape ship immediately boards Vortan's ship.
All remaining GF ships (8 Tytreki and 2 Koru) use warp speed to escape the scene.
INT. VORTAN'S SHIP - BRIDGE
HUASCAR runs in and stands on VORTAN'S L scanning the air space and seeing no more fighting, he sighs in relief.
The gash in his cheek has bloodied everything below it and his neck is riddled with small wounds and shrapnel.
VORTAN hands him a white cloth from an open first aid kit.
HUASCAR uses his R hand to press the cloth on his cheek and winces.
VORTAN: They've retreated. Warp trajectory...
HUASCAR: We will not pursue. Did more Federation ships exit, while I was boarding?
VORTAN: Two Tytrekis.
HUASCAR: I hope Zentoril escaped.
VORTAN turns to him with his L eyebrow cocked.
VORTAN: Why? She was outrageous.
HUASCAR takes the cloth away from his cheek and uses his L hand to swipe smaller shrapnel from the side of his neck and brush debris from his R arm.
Both stare at the wreckage for a couple of beats.
VORTAN: You did it, Sir. You didn't even use squad C!
HUASCAR: We did it. We were lucky, there was no Federation supply convoy after all.
VORTAN: But, we were prepared for that too.
HUASCAR: Depends. A squadron of nine stingers and one Command ship, against the Neethrupi? It could have been a disaster.
HUASCAR shakes his head, holds the cloth back on his cheek and watches the wreckage.
HUASCAR: The expense of this skirmish was too high.
VORTAN shrugs.
VORTAN: A few ships and androids...and some flesh wounds.
HUASCAR frowns and closes his eyes for a moment.
HUASCAR: How many lives?
A pause.
VORTAN: It wasn't a ruse.
HUASCAR opens his eyes and turns to him.
HUASCAR: Don't confine yourself to only following protocol, and the small picture, Captain. The Trial Period bypasses strategic consultations with superiors, but I would have made the case for my plan, otherwise. There are larger issues at play than removing this Federation base, or becoming General.
VORTAN: But they were in violation, and she was...
HUASCAR: True, but she was right, we are hardly blameless.
HUASCAR thinks: I am hardly blameless.
HUASCAR: There are decades of death, destruction and grievances on both sides. We are stuck.
HUASCAR sits tiredly in the command seat.
He lets his hand with the cloth drop to his lap.
VORTAN sits to Huascar's R, watching him.
HUASCAR: The ramifications of this so-called victory could take many forms, but the Federation does not forget. The conflicts will intensify. An even bigger cost.
He leans his forehead on his L hand.
HUASCAR thinks: And if I become General Huascar the Black Hearted, this sector will erupt with fresh hostilities. I'm trapped either way. Finding a new planet grows ever further...
He shakes his head.
VORTAN: Excuse me, Sir, but I disagree. This was a real victory. The Federation knew building the base was an act of war, so they hid in the radioactive cloud. They were lucky you didn't just ambush and kill them all, as many Battle Commanders would. Your attempt to diffuse the situation was far more nuanced and honorable. You even dressed the part! And if they didn't believe that, you allowed some to escape. More proof of your intentions. Maybe you de-escalated things after all.
HUASCAR: Perhaps.
VORTAN: Sir, I'm honored you chose me for this mission, and shared the motives beneath your plan. I too wish for a time of military restraint, so we can focus on more pressing matters. Zorbane's priorities are backwards!
HUASCAR smiles wryly.
His wound seeps a little blood.
17
HUASCAR: Vortan, do not freely air such sentiments. I'm a bad example. I wager everything on the chance that others are rational. Many, such as Zentoril, are not.
VORTAN: It payed off. I will gladly defend your actions here. I hope you become General, Sir.
HUASCAR sighs.
HUASCAR: Thank you. Now, let's leave this place. Retrieve all unused mines. Vuaron will have plenty to say before the night is over.
VORTAN: Yes Sir. At once.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Monday, April 26, 2010
Elsewhere: New Jersey to Chicago. by Samuel Need
Behold a drive of much courage and nobility. Two young friends pushing out West, new to the wide world of highways and byways and slanderous toads at rest areas in Pennsylvania. They set out to drive from the Atlantic Ocean to Chicago in a single day. Some said we were crazy, heretics of the highways. Old women gaped, swiveling in hair salon chairs. A pastor spoke some quiet words for our oil filter. Hushed whispers signaled facts that we chose to ignore. Isn’t that fifteen hours in a day? Hush, hush, hush. Isn’t that over four states! Too long, too boring, too much gas money for one day. Don’t they know the distance formula? 1400 miles = too much for one day. Obama himself texted us. “Get a hotel in Ohio” he said. “You’ll never make it. You’ll die and be buried in Ohio, right next to John Kerry.” Without a respite, he would have us amidst the road-kill on route 80, struck down. This drive will eat you, they said.
Nay we said. Nay. We would take this strumpet of a drive, this great whale of a drive, and we would squeeze it dead. And we would be laughing like fools as we drove into the Windy City.
And we did. 15 hours later and only our backs are sore.
Some thoughts about the drive: I always make fun of New Jersey, but I really had to eat my words as we travelled west on Interstate 80. Gorgeous, I mean gorgeous, hills and valleys that seemed whole continents away from the infinite industrial gray of Secaucus. Vine-like plants draping down towards the highway like North Carolina kudzu. They remind me of dreadlocks. Deciduous forests further off the road, looking like festive jungles with a popping, verdant shade of green.
I just kept thinking, “This is the same state that Newark is in?” That gaping dock of crumbling row houses, fish stench, egg stench, industrial miasma from the gutter to the airport, cringing internally as you drive past people for whom this is home. This too is Jersey?
Saw a strange thing towards the end of the Garden State road, out past the town of Netcong. As we crested a small hill, Adam noticed some unusually large spider webs in a tree to the right of the road. There was like a ridiculous amount of them, maybe fifteen or twenty, and big, big webs. Clustered all over the tree. Like acne, freckles.
“Dude. Dude. Dude.”
“What.”
“Look at that.”
“They’re just webs man.”
“No, you don’t see it.”
He points out the same thing in another tree, and another. Suddenly I realize that along this 100-foot path of road, every single tree contains about forty enormous cobwebs — hanging up, down, left right, out over the road, packed thick as sardines deeper in the insidious underbrush. I literally could not spot a tree that wasn’t jam packed with these ornaments. Fat webs, hanging like tiny clouds of moisture.
“How could this happen,” I wonder aloud. I mean, could there even be enough meddling insects in this square mile to feed such a ridiculous population? I spend some time trying to craft explanations, but nothing is works.
Who knows – maybe this is ground zero for spiders. The hub from which all other arachnids emerged in the primordial ooze. Something spooky, that’s for sure. A place people were not meant to stumble upon.
Didn’t expect Western Pennsylvania to be as beautiful as it is. Like the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, only without the excellent, FDR-era stone tunnels. My father told me that they call them the Endless Mountains, this stretch of PA, and it’s clearly for a reason. I-80 just kept looping up and down these beautiful hills and valleys, one after another for near on four hours. No visible industry. Gentle slopes bordering ravines that peek out from between the tree line. In the distance, in the fog, the outline of farmhouses looks angelic. I mean, these are some kind of blessed valleys. They just exude this awesome energy of virtue. Hard to explain where this comes from, but every time we crossed a ridge, I thought, wow, if God is in some places, he is for sure in this place.
Of course, when Adam and I stopped for gas in Bellefonte, my dreams were banished from the realm of the romantic by crude locals in ATVs. They leered at us with our long hair and bandanas. Our foreign license plate and Batman bumper sticker.
Ah but still, there’s something going on in the actual land of the Endless Mountains. It does the heart good to drive through an interstate like this. I mean, interstates are supposed to be these giant modern beasts connecting states, with shopping malls hanging to the left and right like ugly, blinking tendrils of hair. Well, not this road. Not a strip mall in sight. Not much development at all other than agricultural plots. Fields just full of wheat or these bright yellow wildflowers. State troopers lurking occasionally in the bushes on the median, but I bet they wouldn’t have chased us even if we deserved it. Not in a place like this. They were probably just bliss-ing out in the sunshine. No arrests. Just angel breath fog, a season turning to fall, a slightly colder wind ushering from somewhere, and these sparkling gems of farmhouses that still look as good as they must have looked fifty years ago.
<>
Saw a strip of tire on the side of the road,
Frayed at one end, curling upwards
It looked like the single antler of some great black elk.
It looked like the upside down root of a backwards oak tree.
It looked like old fingers, gently breaching the surface of a cool pond.
Things are always entering or leaving –
Each other, space.
Your self, mine.
<>
Ohio after these mountains was like a Port-A-Potty after a holy mosque. Ugly as sin. No rest stops anywhere. The road was in a noticeably worse condition than any other state. Bumpy, asymmetrical, decimated by innumerable potholes. The whole state just had this terrible energy. I’ve read about the decline of the Rust Belt for ten years in history classes, but I never believed a state could die until I drove across Ohio.
Still a lot of trucks on the road, I suppose. However, I couldn’t help but imagine that the freight trucks were aimless, sending bits of unused steel backwards and forwards on the interstate just to avoid boredom. What if that was the way to save old American steel? Sending truckloads of cargo back and forth on cold and rainy roads, without telling anybody. Orders to have orders and not to have nothing at all.
During this time, a cold front descended upon us, and I drove for several hours through a drizzling and gray downpour. Somehow it seemed appropriate. Cleveland and Toledo flew by in shrouded overcoats.
We ate dinner in a food court right off the highway. I spent too much on a turkey sandwich, but I am crazed with hunger so it’s a no brainer. There are only two purchases that I don’t ever for a second reconsider: coffee in the morning and food when you have not eaten for twelve hours.
At dinner, I hear someone at the counter ask for “diet pop.” In the flesh. What a fake thing to say instead of soda. Hah. Seems we have indeed switched regions.
Thoughts on Indiana: not many. If it were a food, it would be plain white bread. We cut through the state in forty minutes of waning light, and it does not leave even the smallest mark on my skin.
Finally, in the dark hours of the night, as we are going crazy at the wheel and laughing at everything, Chicago begins to rise out of the flatness of the continent. First the telephone wires start to cluster more tightly around Gary, which by all accounts is a city composed entirely of empty industrial parking lots. As we get closer to one of the biggest metros in the world, the streetlights increase, bunching into ever-larger communities. Squawking transistors loom with hundreds of Dollar Store Christmas lights dangled around their frame. Toll roads appear and charge hefty supplication. Crazier drivers emerge from off ramps.
To the left, what’s this? A McDonald’s, in the middle of a highway? Why not. Maybe you get hungry while you are fishing in your trousers for enough coins to pay the toll.
And just when you thought a city the size of Chicago couldn’t be around a place like this, when you thought it was all some cartographical mirage, the skyway opens up and you see everything. All of it.
America is a huge and small place. Cities rise urgently out of plains that still make me think that somewhere out there, somebody still knows about the land.
<>
The first twenty-four hours of the Windy City fly by with the hazed out glasses of a hangover. The fifteen-hour sprint the day before haunts us. We wander back and forth around my aunt’s place in Hyde Park, eyes at half-mast.
“Isn’t that Obama’s place?” we ask, down the block from where we are shacking. My aunt tells us yes, and points out the two police officers forever stationed at its mahogany front door, ready to dissuade tourists, terrorists. Apparently you aren’t allowed street parking anywhere when the royal He is around.
Hyde Park is an attractive, homey neighborhood. A lot of townhouses, nuclear families, golden retrievers. If you look at a city map, you can see that it is right on the edge of Black and White Chicago, and thus, a cagey choice for a politician like Barack to own a home. Oh, Obama, forever a pragmatist.
My aunt’s apartment is a single. It smells like my grandmother’s house used to smell. Kind of like fresh bread and kind of like a dish of plastic that has been left out in the sun. There is a small kitchen closet that is literally overflowing with Tupperware containers. Some of them remind me of the exact containers my paternal grandparents recycled for use when I was seven and living with them for a year. After some inspection, I realize with horror that these are those same containers. For some reason Barbara has preserved these objects. She’s not even putting them to use. Just keeping them to keep them, in some sort of ritual to the idea of an object and the idea of a parent.
An entire sunroom is filled floor to ceiling with leaning file cabinets and brown cardboard boxes. I don’t need to inspect them to know that they are chock full of Need family documents and paraphernalia. She has carved away a tight, rectangular space for a mattress. Barbara chooses to sleep there, among the detritus and memorabilia, in spite of the minimally furnished but considerably larger guest bedroom halfway down the hall.
There are no fewer than four locks on the back door. Barbara has fantasies of being robbed. My dad says that this comes from his mom, who used to generate similar fantasies of crime in Durham.
I feel sad for my aunt, all alone here. There is something awful about her sleeping amidst all those keepsakes. I think she is trying to get from them what people usually get from other people — from family, confidants, lovers – and I know she’s never had much in that department. But things? Things? They’re never going to be enough to fill that gap.
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Adam and I spend four days in the Windy City. And it is a windy city. Sometimes nicknames are more for flair than description, but this was not the case with Chicago. Brutal wind, all the time, all the time, all the time. Didn’t help that we were in the midst of a cold front. The first day I tried to battle it, figuring out where it was coming from (Lake Michigan) and shielding away, but it kept sneaking around the corners of walls, dashing back down the sides of telephone polls to pinch my face with icy fingers. This was the first city I have ever visited (and I’ve visited some cold ones: Augusta, Maine, and Boston, Mass) where I felt like I physically could not hack the weather. That kernel of me that is a rote biological animal was sending alarmed text messages to my brain:
“Organism cannot do this. Situation is too cold. Evacuate. Evacuate.”
I mean, it was below fifty degrees on the final day of August. My step mom tells me that winter is even more brutal, and it’s hard to imagine how many coats enduring it would require.
Other than the bleak weather, Chicago is a very charming city. Even though it’s world famous, and one of the really significant hubs for American cultural activity (like a New York or an LA) everyone seemed pretty mellow. I like to judge a city by the attitude of its regular service workers. Bus attendants, ticket office staff, paper boys. Jobs that must be done everywhere if a city is to run, but oh dear, oh dear, these jobs aren’t fun.
I also judge it by the people you rub shoulders with on the sidewalk, in line for coffee, in the actual corners of a human tapestry, where people allow a true nature to be uncorked.
In Chicago, all of these people seemed relaxed and polite. An “excuse me” as they sit down next to you on “The L”. A “how are you doing” from folks on the street. I see tourists asking bus drivers for directions without being shouted down for their non-“local” infraction. My aunt says that everyone gets nicer the further you move west in America, and it might be true. Now, this isn’t to say that Chicago had anything like good old fashioned, wait-in-line-chatting-with-the-attendant-about-the-weather-without-mean-looks-from-strangers aura of the American South. That’s some sort of friendly angel cloud. But you know, this wasn’t bad.
A little blond pixy gives me a note on the first bus we take in the city, headed to a downtown art museum on Madison Street. Says she thinks I’m handsome and have a nice day. How about that? You get something like that and you won’t feel raindrops for days and days.
I turn to flash my benefactor a smile, but she is already a shadow on the sidewalk. So it goes and goes.
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At the Art Institute, I am blown away by a collection of late period Monet landscapes. Adam doesn’t like them and leaves me be. I end up staring and gaping for nearly three hours.
Impressionism is quite the trick. Who would have thought that the most honest way to capture a landscape would be to look through a glass shakier, blurrier, with eyes just rubbed by knuckles attached to a body that just saw a field of poppies for the first time? Who would have thought that the task of recording a reflection in a current of water – of capturing a moment of partial sunshine on a group of gray pebbles, that precise instant in history and time and people’s lives and the world’s expanding breath – who would have thought that a fuzzier image would do the trick better than sharp lines and proper angles?
When I look at a Monet, I am instantly there beside him, on the French hillside, looking with his eyes on that exact day, at that exact minute. I see a landscape, clearly, clearer than I have ever seen a landscape that I have not myself witnessed. I see with eyes that are not my own, more clearly than realist painting, more clearly than still life, more clearly even than photographs. It’s the next best thing to seeing a thing firsthand.
“He captures the wonder of a beautiful scene.”
“No, that’s not quite right. He does that, definitely, but there’s more.”
“He captures the movement of light.”
“He does that too. But so do other painters. That’s still not enough.”
“He captures the sky. I mean, really, the sky. Not the sky as it would be categorized in a crayon box. Not a sky painted with a light blue pastel, uniform from horizon to horizon. But the sky as it is truly experienced by our own eyes, a sky that is not a blob of color but instead a tapestry of millions and millions of barely differentiated scraps of radical color: vermillion, emerald, brown, gray, green, turquoise, brick red.”
Were you to tell someone this, they would deny you. “No, the sky is blue,” they would say. That’s what I thought too, before. Sky = blue. Duh. You learn that in third grade. But then I saw a Monet, and I realized, wait a second. The sky is more than blue, always more than that, always always all colors showing up in unexpected places, always a brown flake in the heavens that you would never acknowledge with your conscious ego, always scraps that exist but go forth without recognition, that form a sky unheralded, unmarshalled, unmerited, always changing. An active prism on even the murkiest, smudged coin of a city day. It too is alive with color. And not just the sky. The grass is the same. Animals too.
Not just the natural world, either. Buildings, human space. Think of Van Gogh’s famous “Bedroom in Arles.” The most important strokes in that painting are the almost comical, bright green streaks on the floorboards. If you were to suggest such strokes at the outset of a portrait project, you’d be laughed at. Wood can look many ways, but bright, caterpillar green, and that much?? No way.
But the visionaries, these fellows who saw with eyes that deserve medallions immemorial, they somehow figured out the comedy of the actual world. A world where floorboards are actually light green, among other garish qualities. Where everything on the canvas is composed of outlines and touches of color that our eyes drink eagerly, but our brains would doubt.
A common reaction to a beautiful landscape is to wonder, “How am I going to preserve this beauty, this overwhelming, all around me brilliance that I couldn’t begin to capture in a photograph alone? How can I bottle this fleeting grace?” You try, of course, but when the photos are developed, you know in your heart of hearts that something is lacking. This is because the approach is wrong. To capture this bounty, to capture the truly comical and brilliant world where a bright green winks impishly, unnoticed, in a floorboard, you need to take a comical route, a less rational approach, with a glass fuzzier. Hence, impressionism.
We know they’re right. We do, when we look at a Monet and marvel at that “something extra” that we feel in the pit of our hearts. When it outstrips a photograph, we know they got it. Because, at the end of the day, that rogue green, that most outrageous complicated soup mix slash bang of a stroke among others on the canvas, that’s the world you’re looking at. Those are the right strokes, and they are also the most difficult to come by, because your brain is screaming that they don’t belong. But you know.
And because of that connection, the greats like Monet can reach through the channel of time, to a city in 2009, to a gallery and a curly haired boy, and they can pull me back to 1891, to that hillside, to that moment when the clouds finally broke after a cold front and something like god fell down from the sky onto the river port city of Vetheuil.
Finally there, sitting with him intimately in this place, I clap him on the shoulders and exhale at the beauty of a moment captured, truly captured.
There is magic here.
As I stand gaping in the exhibit, I turn my thoughts to the locations I will be fleshing out for the first time these next few months. The towering myths of Oregon, Washington, and California, wreathed in a wall of ancient redwoods. The American West, one of the last great destinations for dreaming in these awful days of men. I hope I can witness them with a similar gaze. I hope I can spot the garish green in their floorboards, and I hope I can find the courage to call it what it is. I would like to reflect some of this reality to others who cannot make a trip such as this. I would like to mirror some of the insane and paradoxical beauty of the real world and not something less. If I could capture one pure instant, I would be satisfied.
Adam shows up finally and asks if I’ve been here in this exhibit the whole time.
I say nothing, but inside there is an excited voice whispering. “Yes, I have been here. But other places too.”
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I see an old friend from China later that night in Lincoln Park, uptown. We do the wandering-youth-in-city-but-also-drunk-thing. Sit in an almost empty bar on a U-shaped couch somewhere. Talk to a guy from Yale who wants to rule the world. Watch his chubby friend inhale self-destructive brew because of the size of his stomach.
Later we wander the streets with these guys. At this point there are six or seven of us. All of us are five beers deep, a pack of dogs at this point, howling and leering and weaving back and forth from the store front to the curb, in front and then behind one another, synchronized as swimmers, debased as thieves, roaring always for attention. I won’t remember any of them in morning, but that’s fine. We can remain strangers and still perform this ritual the right way.
Later still, we meet a wild-haired guy in a different bar without front windows. He tells us his family owns part of the entire state of Montana, and that we should look for people with his last name out there. Sounds like we met the prince of the west. The only thing is, I can’t remember his last name in the morning.
The next night, we go to a movie. It costs too much money. Eleven dollars a ticket. I am already fretting, just clamping electrical panels onto the sides of my heart about expenses. We are spending too much money and the trip isn’t a week old. Gas is so expensive, and Adam’s Jeep does horrendously in the fuel efficiency department. I did not expect to be filling up as often as we have been. I doubt my coin will last until December. Yet here we are, heading away from home, away from safety. Stepping past the geographical region where you can still make an error and avoid complete punishment. We’re in the air now.
Ah, I swallow, and think of the talking heads of calmer folks. “You cannot sweat money this much,” they say, “or it’ll get a grip on your neck that it shall never let go.”
“Here we are,” I tell myself. “Here we are, however we got here.”
Adam, Barbara and I take a walk along the river after the movie. The skyline really pops at night. With the lights all on, and the fireworks bursting out off Navy Pier over the Lake Michigan, it’s mighty. Looks like Gotham, like super heroes belong here, jumping off the sides of crenellated gargoyles on top of the Tribune tower.
I tell this to Adam, and he informs me that the last Batman movie was filmed here. Makes sense. All the buildings are very antique and box-y with a distinct, gothic element. Strange how majestic they look close up.
Ah, but how quickly do I learn that this vision too can change in a fleeting moment. This glory is also conditional.
The next morning as we sail along an elevated freeway headed out, I look over my shoulder and imagine that the great big buildings are actually just tiny Lego rectangles on the floor of some kid’s bedroom, stacked up one after another in some rudimentary pattern. There is something strangely satisfying about such a basic geometric skyline, something tasteful.
I ask myself which one of these Chicago’s is the real one. The majesty up close, or the building blocks from far away on the freeway? The real or the myth, the close or the distant, the known or the travelled?
In a colossal baritone, the city responds. “What do I care? I swallow them all. I am them all.”
Nay we said. Nay. We would take this strumpet of a drive, this great whale of a drive, and we would squeeze it dead. And we would be laughing like fools as we drove into the Windy City.
And we did. 15 hours later and only our backs are sore.
Some thoughts about the drive: I always make fun of New Jersey, but I really had to eat my words as we travelled west on Interstate 80. Gorgeous, I mean gorgeous, hills and valleys that seemed whole continents away from the infinite industrial gray of Secaucus. Vine-like plants draping down towards the highway like North Carolina kudzu. They remind me of dreadlocks. Deciduous forests further off the road, looking like festive jungles with a popping, verdant shade of green.
I just kept thinking, “This is the same state that Newark is in?” That gaping dock of crumbling row houses, fish stench, egg stench, industrial miasma from the gutter to the airport, cringing internally as you drive past people for whom this is home. This too is Jersey?
Saw a strange thing towards the end of the Garden State road, out past the town of Netcong. As we crested a small hill, Adam noticed some unusually large spider webs in a tree to the right of the road. There was like a ridiculous amount of them, maybe fifteen or twenty, and big, big webs. Clustered all over the tree. Like acne, freckles.
“Dude. Dude. Dude.”
“What.”
“Look at that.”
“They’re just webs man.”
“No, you don’t see it.”
He points out the same thing in another tree, and another. Suddenly I realize that along this 100-foot path of road, every single tree contains about forty enormous cobwebs — hanging up, down, left right, out over the road, packed thick as sardines deeper in the insidious underbrush. I literally could not spot a tree that wasn’t jam packed with these ornaments. Fat webs, hanging like tiny clouds of moisture.
“How could this happen,” I wonder aloud. I mean, could there even be enough meddling insects in this square mile to feed such a ridiculous population? I spend some time trying to craft explanations, but nothing is works.
Who knows – maybe this is ground zero for spiders. The hub from which all other arachnids emerged in the primordial ooze. Something spooky, that’s for sure. A place people were not meant to stumble upon.
Didn’t expect Western Pennsylvania to be as beautiful as it is. Like the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, only without the excellent, FDR-era stone tunnels. My father told me that they call them the Endless Mountains, this stretch of PA, and it’s clearly for a reason. I-80 just kept looping up and down these beautiful hills and valleys, one after another for near on four hours. No visible industry. Gentle slopes bordering ravines that peek out from between the tree line. In the distance, in the fog, the outline of farmhouses looks angelic. I mean, these are some kind of blessed valleys. They just exude this awesome energy of virtue. Hard to explain where this comes from, but every time we crossed a ridge, I thought, wow, if God is in some places, he is for sure in this place.
Of course, when Adam and I stopped for gas in Bellefonte, my dreams were banished from the realm of the romantic by crude locals in ATVs. They leered at us with our long hair and bandanas. Our foreign license plate and Batman bumper sticker.
Ah but still, there’s something going on in the actual land of the Endless Mountains. It does the heart good to drive through an interstate like this. I mean, interstates are supposed to be these giant modern beasts connecting states, with shopping malls hanging to the left and right like ugly, blinking tendrils of hair. Well, not this road. Not a strip mall in sight. Not much development at all other than agricultural plots. Fields just full of wheat or these bright yellow wildflowers. State troopers lurking occasionally in the bushes on the median, but I bet they wouldn’t have chased us even if we deserved it. Not in a place like this. They were probably just bliss-ing out in the sunshine. No arrests. Just angel breath fog, a season turning to fall, a slightly colder wind ushering from somewhere, and these sparkling gems of farmhouses that still look as good as they must have looked fifty years ago.
<>
Saw a strip of tire on the side of the road,
Frayed at one end, curling upwards
It looked like the single antler of some great black elk.
It looked like the upside down root of a backwards oak tree.
It looked like old fingers, gently breaching the surface of a cool pond.
Things are always entering or leaving –
Each other, space.
Your self, mine.
<>
Ohio after these mountains was like a Port-A-Potty after a holy mosque. Ugly as sin. No rest stops anywhere. The road was in a noticeably worse condition than any other state. Bumpy, asymmetrical, decimated by innumerable potholes. The whole state just had this terrible energy. I’ve read about the decline of the Rust Belt for ten years in history classes, but I never believed a state could die until I drove across Ohio.
Still a lot of trucks on the road, I suppose. However, I couldn’t help but imagine that the freight trucks were aimless, sending bits of unused steel backwards and forwards on the interstate just to avoid boredom. What if that was the way to save old American steel? Sending truckloads of cargo back and forth on cold and rainy roads, without telling anybody. Orders to have orders and not to have nothing at all.
During this time, a cold front descended upon us, and I drove for several hours through a drizzling and gray downpour. Somehow it seemed appropriate. Cleveland and Toledo flew by in shrouded overcoats.
We ate dinner in a food court right off the highway. I spent too much on a turkey sandwich, but I am crazed with hunger so it’s a no brainer. There are only two purchases that I don’t ever for a second reconsider: coffee in the morning and food when you have not eaten for twelve hours.
At dinner, I hear someone at the counter ask for “diet pop.” In the flesh. What a fake thing to say instead of soda. Hah. Seems we have indeed switched regions.
Thoughts on Indiana: not many. If it were a food, it would be plain white bread. We cut through the state in forty minutes of waning light, and it does not leave even the smallest mark on my skin.
Finally, in the dark hours of the night, as we are going crazy at the wheel and laughing at everything, Chicago begins to rise out of the flatness of the continent. First the telephone wires start to cluster more tightly around Gary, which by all accounts is a city composed entirely of empty industrial parking lots. As we get closer to one of the biggest metros in the world, the streetlights increase, bunching into ever-larger communities. Squawking transistors loom with hundreds of Dollar Store Christmas lights dangled around their frame. Toll roads appear and charge hefty supplication. Crazier drivers emerge from off ramps.
To the left, what’s this? A McDonald’s, in the middle of a highway? Why not. Maybe you get hungry while you are fishing in your trousers for enough coins to pay the toll.
And just when you thought a city the size of Chicago couldn’t be around a place like this, when you thought it was all some cartographical mirage, the skyway opens up and you see everything. All of it.
America is a huge and small place. Cities rise urgently out of plains that still make me think that somewhere out there, somebody still knows about the land.
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The first twenty-four hours of the Windy City fly by with the hazed out glasses of a hangover. The fifteen-hour sprint the day before haunts us. We wander back and forth around my aunt’s place in Hyde Park, eyes at half-mast.
“Isn’t that Obama’s place?” we ask, down the block from where we are shacking. My aunt tells us yes, and points out the two police officers forever stationed at its mahogany front door, ready to dissuade tourists, terrorists. Apparently you aren’t allowed street parking anywhere when the royal He is around.
Hyde Park is an attractive, homey neighborhood. A lot of townhouses, nuclear families, golden retrievers. If you look at a city map, you can see that it is right on the edge of Black and White Chicago, and thus, a cagey choice for a politician like Barack to own a home. Oh, Obama, forever a pragmatist.
My aunt’s apartment is a single. It smells like my grandmother’s house used to smell. Kind of like fresh bread and kind of like a dish of plastic that has been left out in the sun. There is a small kitchen closet that is literally overflowing with Tupperware containers. Some of them remind me of the exact containers my paternal grandparents recycled for use when I was seven and living with them for a year. After some inspection, I realize with horror that these are those same containers. For some reason Barbara has preserved these objects. She’s not even putting them to use. Just keeping them to keep them, in some sort of ritual to the idea of an object and the idea of a parent.
An entire sunroom is filled floor to ceiling with leaning file cabinets and brown cardboard boxes. I don’t need to inspect them to know that they are chock full of Need family documents and paraphernalia. She has carved away a tight, rectangular space for a mattress. Barbara chooses to sleep there, among the detritus and memorabilia, in spite of the minimally furnished but considerably larger guest bedroom halfway down the hall.
There are no fewer than four locks on the back door. Barbara has fantasies of being robbed. My dad says that this comes from his mom, who used to generate similar fantasies of crime in Durham.
I feel sad for my aunt, all alone here. There is something awful about her sleeping amidst all those keepsakes. I think she is trying to get from them what people usually get from other people — from family, confidants, lovers – and I know she’s never had much in that department. But things? Things? They’re never going to be enough to fill that gap.
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Adam and I spend four days in the Windy City. And it is a windy city. Sometimes nicknames are more for flair than description, but this was not the case with Chicago. Brutal wind, all the time, all the time, all the time. Didn’t help that we were in the midst of a cold front. The first day I tried to battle it, figuring out where it was coming from (Lake Michigan) and shielding away, but it kept sneaking around the corners of walls, dashing back down the sides of telephone polls to pinch my face with icy fingers. This was the first city I have ever visited (and I’ve visited some cold ones: Augusta, Maine, and Boston, Mass) where I felt like I physically could not hack the weather. That kernel of me that is a rote biological animal was sending alarmed text messages to my brain:
“Organism cannot do this. Situation is too cold. Evacuate. Evacuate.”
I mean, it was below fifty degrees on the final day of August. My step mom tells me that winter is even more brutal, and it’s hard to imagine how many coats enduring it would require.
Other than the bleak weather, Chicago is a very charming city. Even though it’s world famous, and one of the really significant hubs for American cultural activity (like a New York or an LA) everyone seemed pretty mellow. I like to judge a city by the attitude of its regular service workers. Bus attendants, ticket office staff, paper boys. Jobs that must be done everywhere if a city is to run, but oh dear, oh dear, these jobs aren’t fun.
I also judge it by the people you rub shoulders with on the sidewalk, in line for coffee, in the actual corners of a human tapestry, where people allow a true nature to be uncorked.
In Chicago, all of these people seemed relaxed and polite. An “excuse me” as they sit down next to you on “The L”. A “how are you doing” from folks on the street. I see tourists asking bus drivers for directions without being shouted down for their non-“local” infraction. My aunt says that everyone gets nicer the further you move west in America, and it might be true. Now, this isn’t to say that Chicago had anything like good old fashioned, wait-in-line-chatting-with-the-attendant-about-the-weather-without-mean-looks-from-strangers aura of the American South. That’s some sort of friendly angel cloud. But you know, this wasn’t bad.
A little blond pixy gives me a note on the first bus we take in the city, headed to a downtown art museum on Madison Street. Says she thinks I’m handsome and have a nice day. How about that? You get something like that and you won’t feel raindrops for days and days.
I turn to flash my benefactor a smile, but she is already a shadow on the sidewalk. So it goes and goes.
<>
At the Art Institute, I am blown away by a collection of late period Monet landscapes. Adam doesn’t like them and leaves me be. I end up staring and gaping for nearly three hours.
Impressionism is quite the trick. Who would have thought that the most honest way to capture a landscape would be to look through a glass shakier, blurrier, with eyes just rubbed by knuckles attached to a body that just saw a field of poppies for the first time? Who would have thought that the task of recording a reflection in a current of water – of capturing a moment of partial sunshine on a group of gray pebbles, that precise instant in history and time and people’s lives and the world’s expanding breath – who would have thought that a fuzzier image would do the trick better than sharp lines and proper angles?
When I look at a Monet, I am instantly there beside him, on the French hillside, looking with his eyes on that exact day, at that exact minute. I see a landscape, clearly, clearer than I have ever seen a landscape that I have not myself witnessed. I see with eyes that are not my own, more clearly than realist painting, more clearly than still life, more clearly even than photographs. It’s the next best thing to seeing a thing firsthand.
“He captures the wonder of a beautiful scene.”
“No, that’s not quite right. He does that, definitely, but there’s more.”
“He captures the movement of light.”
“He does that too. But so do other painters. That’s still not enough.”
“He captures the sky. I mean, really, the sky. Not the sky as it would be categorized in a crayon box. Not a sky painted with a light blue pastel, uniform from horizon to horizon. But the sky as it is truly experienced by our own eyes, a sky that is not a blob of color but instead a tapestry of millions and millions of barely differentiated scraps of radical color: vermillion, emerald, brown, gray, green, turquoise, brick red.”
Were you to tell someone this, they would deny you. “No, the sky is blue,” they would say. That’s what I thought too, before. Sky = blue. Duh. You learn that in third grade. But then I saw a Monet, and I realized, wait a second. The sky is more than blue, always more than that, always always all colors showing up in unexpected places, always a brown flake in the heavens that you would never acknowledge with your conscious ego, always scraps that exist but go forth without recognition, that form a sky unheralded, unmarshalled, unmerited, always changing. An active prism on even the murkiest, smudged coin of a city day. It too is alive with color. And not just the sky. The grass is the same. Animals too.
Not just the natural world, either. Buildings, human space. Think of Van Gogh’s famous “Bedroom in Arles.” The most important strokes in that painting are the almost comical, bright green streaks on the floorboards. If you were to suggest such strokes at the outset of a portrait project, you’d be laughed at. Wood can look many ways, but bright, caterpillar green, and that much?? No way.
But the visionaries, these fellows who saw with eyes that deserve medallions immemorial, they somehow figured out the comedy of the actual world. A world where floorboards are actually light green, among other garish qualities. Where everything on the canvas is composed of outlines and touches of color that our eyes drink eagerly, but our brains would doubt.
A common reaction to a beautiful landscape is to wonder, “How am I going to preserve this beauty, this overwhelming, all around me brilliance that I couldn’t begin to capture in a photograph alone? How can I bottle this fleeting grace?” You try, of course, but when the photos are developed, you know in your heart of hearts that something is lacking. This is because the approach is wrong. To capture this bounty, to capture the truly comical and brilliant world where a bright green winks impishly, unnoticed, in a floorboard, you need to take a comical route, a less rational approach, with a glass fuzzier. Hence, impressionism.
We know they’re right. We do, when we look at a Monet and marvel at that “something extra” that we feel in the pit of our hearts. When it outstrips a photograph, we know they got it. Because, at the end of the day, that rogue green, that most outrageous complicated soup mix slash bang of a stroke among others on the canvas, that’s the world you’re looking at. Those are the right strokes, and they are also the most difficult to come by, because your brain is screaming that they don’t belong. But you know.
And because of that connection, the greats like Monet can reach through the channel of time, to a city in 2009, to a gallery and a curly haired boy, and they can pull me back to 1891, to that hillside, to that moment when the clouds finally broke after a cold front and something like god fell down from the sky onto the river port city of Vetheuil.
Finally there, sitting with him intimately in this place, I clap him on the shoulders and exhale at the beauty of a moment captured, truly captured.
There is magic here.
As I stand gaping in the exhibit, I turn my thoughts to the locations I will be fleshing out for the first time these next few months. The towering myths of Oregon, Washington, and California, wreathed in a wall of ancient redwoods. The American West, one of the last great destinations for dreaming in these awful days of men. I hope I can witness them with a similar gaze. I hope I can spot the garish green in their floorboards, and I hope I can find the courage to call it what it is. I would like to reflect some of this reality to others who cannot make a trip such as this. I would like to mirror some of the insane and paradoxical beauty of the real world and not something less. If I could capture one pure instant, I would be satisfied.
Adam shows up finally and asks if I’ve been here in this exhibit the whole time.
I say nothing, but inside there is an excited voice whispering. “Yes, I have been here. But other places too.”
<>
I see an old friend from China later that night in Lincoln Park, uptown. We do the wandering-youth-in-city-but-also-drunk-thing. Sit in an almost empty bar on a U-shaped couch somewhere. Talk to a guy from Yale who wants to rule the world. Watch his chubby friend inhale self-destructive brew because of the size of his stomach.
Later we wander the streets with these guys. At this point there are six or seven of us. All of us are five beers deep, a pack of dogs at this point, howling and leering and weaving back and forth from the store front to the curb, in front and then behind one another, synchronized as swimmers, debased as thieves, roaring always for attention. I won’t remember any of them in morning, but that’s fine. We can remain strangers and still perform this ritual the right way.
Later still, we meet a wild-haired guy in a different bar without front windows. He tells us his family owns part of the entire state of Montana, and that we should look for people with his last name out there. Sounds like we met the prince of the west. The only thing is, I can’t remember his last name in the morning.
The next night, we go to a movie. It costs too much money. Eleven dollars a ticket. I am already fretting, just clamping electrical panels onto the sides of my heart about expenses. We are spending too much money and the trip isn’t a week old. Gas is so expensive, and Adam’s Jeep does horrendously in the fuel efficiency department. I did not expect to be filling up as often as we have been. I doubt my coin will last until December. Yet here we are, heading away from home, away from safety. Stepping past the geographical region where you can still make an error and avoid complete punishment. We’re in the air now.
Ah, I swallow, and think of the talking heads of calmer folks. “You cannot sweat money this much,” they say, “or it’ll get a grip on your neck that it shall never let go.”
“Here we are,” I tell myself. “Here we are, however we got here.”
Adam, Barbara and I take a walk along the river after the movie. The skyline really pops at night. With the lights all on, and the fireworks bursting out off Navy Pier over the Lake Michigan, it’s mighty. Looks like Gotham, like super heroes belong here, jumping off the sides of crenellated gargoyles on top of the Tribune tower.
I tell this to Adam, and he informs me that the last Batman movie was filmed here. Makes sense. All the buildings are very antique and box-y with a distinct, gothic element. Strange how majestic they look close up.
Ah, but how quickly do I learn that this vision too can change in a fleeting moment. This glory is also conditional.
The next morning as we sail along an elevated freeway headed out, I look over my shoulder and imagine that the great big buildings are actually just tiny Lego rectangles on the floor of some kid’s bedroom, stacked up one after another in some rudimentary pattern. There is something strangely satisfying about such a basic geometric skyline, something tasteful.
I ask myself which one of these Chicago’s is the real one. The majesty up close, or the building blocks from far away on the freeway? The real or the myth, the close or the distant, the known or the travelled?
In a colossal baritone, the city responds. “What do I care? I swallow them all. I am them all.”
Monday, April 19, 2010
And You Smell Like One Too by Amy Chevalier-Webster
I count twenty-seven. Twenty-seven people have managed to squeeze themselves into 450 square feet. 450 square feet is the size of my efficiency apartment.
What do I expect? It’s my 38th birthday. This is my family.
I sigh, “Oh shit, it’s an intervention, isn’t it?”
For as long as I can remember, my family has ruined birthdays. Birthdays in general, mine specifically. It’s a tradition.
The Saturday I turned thirteen I already had my period for over a year, wore a size B-cup bra and more make-up than most hookers. My mother woke me up at noon, covered my eyes with her hands and we waddled down the stairs into the kitchen. Just after the sliding glass doors opened but before she uncovered my eyes and shoved me out unto the backyard, she whispered in my ear “it’s a surprise party.” Indeed it was. In front of me stood half of my junior high school class, and in front of them, I stood. I was wearing a Who Farted? t-shirt and a pair of my brother’s boxer shorts. But to amplify my shame, in the middle of the yard, was a circle of hay with four sad rented ponies. They were trudging around a pole they were barely even tied to.
Aunt Lucille was standing by the ponies with her coaxing carrots at the ready. She waved these at me and gestured towards the animals while mouthing something. I couldn’t understand what she was trying to say because she had gotten into the helium.
I heard my father’s always-too-loud voice from somewhere in the crowd, “she’s saying the first ride goes to the birthday girl.”
My mother began clapping and urging “Give it up for the birthday girl. Give it up for the birthday girl.”
There was some clapping. Mostly there was laughter and the high pitched squeaks of those who had joined my aunt at the helium tank. There was not a single balloon in sight.
As I stormed back into the house on my way to my room to kill myself, I passed my uncle Lonnie. “What, no clowns?” I cried in his direction.
He caught me in a bear hug and said “Are you kidding? Mr. Jingles is just taking a whiz.”
Six hours and forty hands of Gin Rummy later the hostage negotiations were concluded and I released Mr. Jingles from the upstairs bathroom. I, however, was unshakable in my last demand and remained another hour in the tub with the door locked.
Uncle Lonnie paid the clown an extra 200 bucks not to press charges. “Just take your donkeys and go” he told him. At this point Mr. Jingles was so stressed that he began punching Uncle Lonnie while repeating “they’re ponies you idiot.” Or so I’ve been told, repeatedly.
Later that night under the hum of the fluorescent lights in our parsley-themed kitchen my parents defended their party-related decisions.
“Well honey” my mother said, clearly confused, “I thought you asked for a clown and a pony ride for your birthday? It seems like you did.”
“Yes I did, when I was seven” I replied. “If I recall, that was the year you and Cousin Lou gave me the used Volvo.”
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
ELSEWHERE: The Tri-State Area. by Samuel Need
Before I could meet up with Adam and get the trip rolling in earnest, I needed to kill two weeks with my mother at her home in upstate New Jersey. Our relationship had been strained since she split from my dad and left town when I was in middle school, but things had been recuperating these past few years. She had found a new husband, a preacher man who listened to NPR and treated her with her respect. He was a better fit for her then my father or myself, for that matter. I suppose this is a strange thing to know with conviction. In any case, she is happier now, and that is always a nice thing to see with your family.
My mom lives in Ridgewood, one of the extraordinarily wealthy hamlets on the tippy top of the Garden State. One of the benefits of visiting her these past few years is the town’s extreme proximity to one of the truly wondrous destinations in America: New York City. NJ Transit runs a tenuously prompt train from the town’s central commons that takes you straight to Penn Station in forty-five minutes. Only costs $7 dollars round trip. It runs late too, till one or two in the morning, so you can get a real relaxed drink down in the Village but then still sleep in your own bed that night.
I did this routine a few times during these limbo weeks, visiting some friends in Manhattan that I’d made during my time abroad in Beijing. Two girls, young women at this point, I suppose I should say. They were six and seven years older than yours truly. One of them is an investment banker. Chinese heritage, long rich black hair; a face that is atypically beautiful but only from certain angles. Streamlined runner’s body. There is an air of dignity and composure that trails her as she moves, but she is always up for a rowdy drink, and the drink is always nice with her.
The other is in publishing. Twenty nine; another athlete. A rock climber in the Adirondacks on the weekends. Asian also. A short gal with a moon face, cute butt and that sort of particularly flat chest a weightlifter achieves. Always carried a generous smile and a pack of cigarettes. We mostly talked about books when we’d see each other. Kissed her against a wall in the Financial District a few years ago, on Pearl Street at midnight in the coldest part of winter, as time trickled to seconds and the snow rushed down upon us in droves.
It’s always interesting to see them both; at least it used to be. I viewed it like checking in with what life might be like when I get to my late twenties. This time however, talk about a buzz kill. Both of them did the job thing, the career thing, and now they are like burnt out like candlewicks. They can’t love anybody else because they have some moderate enjoyment of where they are and won’t compromise, but they despise being alone. Despite an instinct to do so, they won’t move because they enjoy the paycheck and cannot imagine even temporary poverty again. They are stuck — pleased with some acknowledgement of adulthood, but still spooked, empty, and without viable alternatives. Holy crap they brought me low.
All over the city we roamed in misery. One girl up near the UN building, where we walked and glowered at each other. Weird part of Manhattan, on the East River above 50th street. Not really any identity. Some Trump buildings. No activity on the street. As we walk, my rock climber friend tells me that she wants to come west and farm too, but I know she won’t do it. I ask her why she won’t and she can’t find a sentence to say.
I hoof across town in a way-too-expensive taxi to meet the other on the Hudson near Chelsea, on a frumpy boat full of the young, urban and wealthy. Burger and a beer and a lot of jostling shoulders. Nobody has a clue where the beef came from. Probably some sad sack feed farm down in Arkansas, no doubt. Stephanie and I sit at a metal wire table on the very edge of the front deck. She’s facing the water and I’m facing 11th avenue.
During the meal, she reveals to me that being “kind” isn’t important to her anymore. Being kind! Outrageous. “As long as I’m settled, I can be happy with that,” she says. “I don’t need to wind myself up with guilt about other people.” She says it as though it is an important lesson.
I look around wide-eyed, trying to commiserate with one of our dining neighbors, but no one is interested. If that is what this city is about, what being an adult in America is about, then check me the fuck out. I’ll never play that game well enough. Don’t want to play it well. Even if I dressed to the nines, they’d see something, some unbuttoned collar, some misplaced salad fork, to indicate that I was just a sheep after all. And then they would tear me to shreds. This isn’t what being adult is about. It can’t be. It cannot be. If it is, man, fuck.
Later that night, as I ride the New Jersey Transit home through the smog valley of Secaucus, Rutherford, Garfield, the great gaping asshole of the Garden State, I find The Tao of Pooh in my satchel and it calms my heart again. It reminds me that something more gentle can be grasped. Allow your fingers to loosen from around the edges of your grand purple dreams, and for select moments the entirety of the world’s rhythm will simply pulse in your arm without any pain in sight. The action will continue forward, undisturbed, and all you need do in worship is to blink, and blink, and blink.
The book is a library loan, and I find something written in pencil on page 32:
“Before you have said a single yes to some other, you have already whispered it a thousand times to a world that indulges your feet everyday.”
In the following hours, I encounter both Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and a Sigur Ros music video, both of which remind me that storytelling is more than just the narrative skeins of our identities. It cannot be shrugged off in such a manner. In it lies perhaps a measure of salvation, of peace, against the loamy tide that lies outside of our vision, attempting always to change us into something we did not agree to change into.
A story can bridge a big, wide fissure in your heart. And no paycheck can do that. Money is meager ointment. But the story - that is always there, I tell myself, after a day with the sad, downwardly spiraling adults of New York City. The story, the story, the story. It keeps my heart beating in some kind of sequence. It keeps the clouds above my head. The story, the story, the story.
I keep breathing, and then it’s the next day.
<>
It is later in the week. I am once again on the last NJ Transit train from Penn Station back to my mom’s house in Ridgewood. The time is one or two in the morning and it’s a Saturday night. Somewhere up ahead of me an enormous gaggle of teenagers mills about on the cement platform. No parents in sight.
A girl’s squeaky voice announces that she has, in fact, attended a sizeable number of Dispatch concerts. However, the songs that she proceeds to sing do not belong to Dispatch. I try to count them. Well, yes, there’s John Mellencamp, and yes, that’s Bon Jovi, although I suppose that sounds a little like…
I spit and smile to myself. The girl is not interested in Dispatch. She is interested in being interested in something. So it goes with teenagers. Trying so hard to be about something, not quite old enough to recognize the bells of life for what they are. In this case the subject is concerts, but it could be anything: food, clothes, political philosophies, drugs, ladies.
NY Jet’s fans are everywhere on the cement platform. “Hey Christa, doesn’t this town have a lot of whores?” one asks. Except, its pronounced, “Hoo-rahs.” His gums flap as he speaks. Christa is too drunk to respond. Baseball caps are everywhere turned backwards. The way these guys talk to women is disgusting. It makes me wonder after their fathers, almost certainly emotionally malicious individuals. I can picture them now, in front of their Tri State Area grills after some obligatory Catholic Mass, talking with other fathers about screwing their wives. “Who is the best at giving head? Who is the best at cooking? The best body?” The speakers perhaps did not expect to leave a mark, but a fossil of misogynist has remained in the aspect of their children.
These Atlantic City princelings milling about in front of me seem like such first class phonies. Silver spoons obvious behind their fierce glares. During the day, in suburban homes, they are doing push ups like big boys, imitating great warriors and urban slumlord kings; but all the while mommy is doing their laundry in the basement. Day turns to evening, and they hop into their sports cars, a daddy investment, and listen to rap tunes about killing innocents. As they speed towards the city, they roll down the windows and inhale the pure and non-toxic breeze of the suburbs.
Petulant, confident, handsome as statues. Everything underwritten by privilege. Not a one of them clever enough to feel ashamed.
One of them, their leader, standing directly in front of me, wears an Armani Exchange t-shirt with what appears to be a chain link fence rising to the middle of the abdomen. A not insignificant quantity of gel has been contributed to the scalp. Now he is not John Rockerford Gissupi. He is “John-neee” and he has blonde spikes instead of hair. And his friend is not Harold Drakenfold. He is, “Da Drake”, a man of legendary and scurrilous felatio tales.
Who knows where these kids go in Manhattan at night anyways? Some of them look like fourteen, fifteen, tops. And they are hammered – cheeks pale, foreheads sweaty, lips cherry red. How did this happen? Did Union Square catch on fire? Are all of the police asleep? How did this amazingly drunk ten-year old avoid bar security, NYPD plainclothes, a single bouncer?
I look around the train station, searching for some other adult to glance at, with whom I can share the acknowledgement that these kids are not where they belong. That the animals have taken over the zoo. But no one is around, and even over this din, I find a different voice in my head speaking.
“Since when are you an adult, a zookeeper,” it asks? “Since when is this not you, this drinking-late-night shouting-trying-to-kiss-that-cute-girl-on-the-back-porch-cacophany of youth, lust? Since when do you stand with the guards and not with the kids?”
I do not know how to answer.
<>
After an innocuous week, Adam arrives from South Jersey and it is suddenly the eve of the first drive. We pack his car in the afternoon, adrenaline coursing through our veins. It is a 2000 Jeep Liberty, named Bruce after the alter ego of that famous batty superhero with whom Adam is obsessed. It gets terrible gas mileage, but it has four-wheel drive and will save our butt more than once along the mountain roads to come. At this point I’d never driven an SUV before in my life. By December, I will know it like a sibling.
Our aim on this Jersey afternoon is to bring as little as possible, but when packing for four months, there is only so much one can do. We end up using about every square inch of room, leaving only twin caves of seats at the front of the vehicle into which Adam and I will wedge ourselves.
In addition to a long bag of clothes, I pack work jeans, flannels, boots, and old, stiff leather gloves – all hand-me-downs from my father’s days of travel. A shoebox filled with band-aids, hydrogen peroxide, flashlights, Neosporin and scissors. Toiletries. Shampoo, dental floss and a bottle of conditioner that becomes superfluous after one day of work. A boxy, industrial rice cooker that takes up as much room as a bag of clothes. This is easily the thing I regret bringing the most. We will use it on the trip a total of two times. I had this idea beforehand that we would be eating pounds and pounds of white rice every night, over various campfires, cut free from the world and those chefs who might offer us some calories, but I neglected an important fact. Campsites do not have electricity, and the rice cooker is a machine. Shame, shame.
Adam brings five pairs of casual sneakers and I give him the meanest look. I know that he is only bringing them to match the outfits he plans to wear when we visit the various cities on our agenda – San Francisco, LA, Chicago, Seattle, Portland. However, because we will only spend a total of about ten days in these locations, I balk. Fashion is not a good enough reason to be claiming valuable square footage in the vehicle. I complain at his vanity, and chortle about work and not play, but he slips them by me.
The items that characterize the two of us the most are the sheer number of books we bring. A boggling amount. Four stacks of paperbacks on the floor in the back, leaning off balance, each tall enough to reach the lip of the seat. I bet we bring between 35 to 40 books total. On a trip where we bring two medium density woolen blankets, no matches, no long johns, and go cold on far too many nights, we bring a freaking library.
Up front, we deck out the console for long distance travel. Wrap a plastic bag around the gearshift and call it a trashcan. Jam a book with the farm information and a soon-to-be-holy red journal where we will be recording expenditures in the glove compartment. We bring a road atlas but don’t really need it. Adam’s mom purchased him a GPS for the car before he left North Carolina. In the coming days, we will decide to give it the name of an old British woman. Phyllis. As we are setting her up, I think about what a device like this truly does to the human experience of travel, and I imagine a fortune cookie prayer for the 21st century.
“Thou shall not wander or stumble
upon the jewels of a spontaneous afternoon,
for thou shall never be lost,
even in some strange land,
far, far from home.”
Ah, how things have changed since my father’s day, when callow New England youths would set off for the Rockies with a pocket map and three or four baloney sandwiches in their back pocket! Adam and I have ten times the material goods, and we still forget some of the bare necessities. None of the superfluous items, the books or fancy sneakers. Those we remember, of course.
Blankets though, or matches? Long underwear?
Nope.
I told you we were green.
I finish packing the trunk of the jeep for the first of many times, stacking oblong bags and bags of cookery like Tetris pieces. This is one of the tasks I will be responsible for during the next few months.
Over the course of the trip, Adam and I split work as it arises, assuming various collective jobs without needing to ask or declare ownership. It’s nice that we don’t need to talk much about it. With old friends you can do this, can just slip into the right roles without much hullabaloo, because it is so abundantly clear to both individuals what sort of person their friend is – what sort of jobs he is going to want to handle, and which he would rather shirk.
Feeling completely known in this way, planned-for and correctly estimated without having to bark or apologize or tiptoe around the prickly shape of another’s pride – it’s one of the nicest results of being friendly with people at all. Sometimes they can figure you out, and it can still be safe.
My jobs on the trip are as follows: I handle cold introductions, pack the jeep on moving days, oversee directions, tackle the long desert driving shifts, and wash dishes. Adam cooks, shops, calls ahead to guarantee farms, drives the extra windy mountain roads, and generally keeps me from bolting the whole trip.
We’re a good team, the two of us. We fill in certain deficiencies in the other’s character. What’s more, we are perceptive enough to recognize all of this, and because of that there is mutual respect.
After I finish packing, we are jittery for a time. We try to wander the hamlet to cool off, but the energy is too tight and the Garden State never exactly serene. Eventually we return and go up to the attic, where we share some last minute thoughts about the colossal event that begins tomorrow.
“I just want to travel man,” Adam says. “I have been at this camp all summer, making money and listening to these middle school kids have their little dramas, but all I could think about was this thing that’s coming.”
He is sitting cross-legged on the bed. He is an extraordinarily skinny guy, Adam. A true ectomporh with a genuine, Scots-Irish heritage from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. The first in his family to go to college. A fighter in that way. Wears denim colored Converse sneakers, flannel shirts and a head full of curly yellow hair. A young director and artist.
“I want to see the West,” he continues. “The Pacific. The time zones that are not this time zone. Thank you so much for doing this with me.”
“Yes, yes, I hear that man,” I reply.
“What about you? What are you looking for?” he asks. “If you can put it into a word or phrase.”
I think for a second. “Salvation. Escape.” To problem-atize the ordinary path. Yes, that’s it.
“Salvation? What do you mean by that?”
I know I won’t explain it well, can’t ever quite explain my spiritual inclinations to him, so I just smile and wave him off.
“Nothing man. I’m just excited to go. The west, the west…”
“Yes.”
Together we step to the window, smoke a joint, look at the Atlantic stars for the last time, pump fists, then nod off for a long night’s sleep. The trip yawns ahead, unfinished and wild, ready to kill and to dazzle, dressed in a coyote’s crazy drunk grin.
My mom lives in Ridgewood, one of the extraordinarily wealthy hamlets on the tippy top of the Garden State. One of the benefits of visiting her these past few years is the town’s extreme proximity to one of the truly wondrous destinations in America: New York City. NJ Transit runs a tenuously prompt train from the town’s central commons that takes you straight to Penn Station in forty-five minutes. Only costs $7 dollars round trip. It runs late too, till one or two in the morning, so you can get a real relaxed drink down in the Village but then still sleep in your own bed that night.
I did this routine a few times during these limbo weeks, visiting some friends in Manhattan that I’d made during my time abroad in Beijing. Two girls, young women at this point, I suppose I should say. They were six and seven years older than yours truly. One of them is an investment banker. Chinese heritage, long rich black hair; a face that is atypically beautiful but only from certain angles. Streamlined runner’s body. There is an air of dignity and composure that trails her as she moves, but she is always up for a rowdy drink, and the drink is always nice with her.
The other is in publishing. Twenty nine; another athlete. A rock climber in the Adirondacks on the weekends. Asian also. A short gal with a moon face, cute butt and that sort of particularly flat chest a weightlifter achieves. Always carried a generous smile and a pack of cigarettes. We mostly talked about books when we’d see each other. Kissed her against a wall in the Financial District a few years ago, on Pearl Street at midnight in the coldest part of winter, as time trickled to seconds and the snow rushed down upon us in droves.
It’s always interesting to see them both; at least it used to be. I viewed it like checking in with what life might be like when I get to my late twenties. This time however, talk about a buzz kill. Both of them did the job thing, the career thing, and now they are like burnt out like candlewicks. They can’t love anybody else because they have some moderate enjoyment of where they are and won’t compromise, but they despise being alone. Despite an instinct to do so, they won’t move because they enjoy the paycheck and cannot imagine even temporary poverty again. They are stuck — pleased with some acknowledgement of adulthood, but still spooked, empty, and without viable alternatives. Holy crap they brought me low.
All over the city we roamed in misery. One girl up near the UN building, where we walked and glowered at each other. Weird part of Manhattan, on the East River above 50th street. Not really any identity. Some Trump buildings. No activity on the street. As we walk, my rock climber friend tells me that she wants to come west and farm too, but I know she won’t do it. I ask her why she won’t and she can’t find a sentence to say.
I hoof across town in a way-too-expensive taxi to meet the other on the Hudson near Chelsea, on a frumpy boat full of the young, urban and wealthy. Burger and a beer and a lot of jostling shoulders. Nobody has a clue where the beef came from. Probably some sad sack feed farm down in Arkansas, no doubt. Stephanie and I sit at a metal wire table on the very edge of the front deck. She’s facing the water and I’m facing 11th avenue.
During the meal, she reveals to me that being “kind” isn’t important to her anymore. Being kind! Outrageous. “As long as I’m settled, I can be happy with that,” she says. “I don’t need to wind myself up with guilt about other people.” She says it as though it is an important lesson.
I look around wide-eyed, trying to commiserate with one of our dining neighbors, but no one is interested. If that is what this city is about, what being an adult in America is about, then check me the fuck out. I’ll never play that game well enough. Don’t want to play it well. Even if I dressed to the nines, they’d see something, some unbuttoned collar, some misplaced salad fork, to indicate that I was just a sheep after all. And then they would tear me to shreds. This isn’t what being adult is about. It can’t be. It cannot be. If it is, man, fuck.
Later that night, as I ride the New Jersey Transit home through the smog valley of Secaucus, Rutherford, Garfield, the great gaping asshole of the Garden State, I find The Tao of Pooh in my satchel and it calms my heart again. It reminds me that something more gentle can be grasped. Allow your fingers to loosen from around the edges of your grand purple dreams, and for select moments the entirety of the world’s rhythm will simply pulse in your arm without any pain in sight. The action will continue forward, undisturbed, and all you need do in worship is to blink, and blink, and blink.
The book is a library loan, and I find something written in pencil on page 32:
“Before you have said a single yes to some other, you have already whispered it a thousand times to a world that indulges your feet everyday.”
In the following hours, I encounter both Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and a Sigur Ros music video, both of which remind me that storytelling is more than just the narrative skeins of our identities. It cannot be shrugged off in such a manner. In it lies perhaps a measure of salvation, of peace, against the loamy tide that lies outside of our vision, attempting always to change us into something we did not agree to change into.
A story can bridge a big, wide fissure in your heart. And no paycheck can do that. Money is meager ointment. But the story - that is always there, I tell myself, after a day with the sad, downwardly spiraling adults of New York City. The story, the story, the story. It keeps my heart beating in some kind of sequence. It keeps the clouds above my head. The story, the story, the story.
I keep breathing, and then it’s the next day.
<>
It is later in the week. I am once again on the last NJ Transit train from Penn Station back to my mom’s house in Ridgewood. The time is one or two in the morning and it’s a Saturday night. Somewhere up ahead of me an enormous gaggle of teenagers mills about on the cement platform. No parents in sight.
A girl’s squeaky voice announces that she has, in fact, attended a sizeable number of Dispatch concerts. However, the songs that she proceeds to sing do not belong to Dispatch. I try to count them. Well, yes, there’s John Mellencamp, and yes, that’s Bon Jovi, although I suppose that sounds a little like…
I spit and smile to myself. The girl is not interested in Dispatch. She is interested in being interested in something. So it goes with teenagers. Trying so hard to be about something, not quite old enough to recognize the bells of life for what they are. In this case the subject is concerts, but it could be anything: food, clothes, political philosophies, drugs, ladies.
NY Jet’s fans are everywhere on the cement platform. “Hey Christa, doesn’t this town have a lot of whores?” one asks. Except, its pronounced, “Hoo-rahs.” His gums flap as he speaks. Christa is too drunk to respond. Baseball caps are everywhere turned backwards. The way these guys talk to women is disgusting. It makes me wonder after their fathers, almost certainly emotionally malicious individuals. I can picture them now, in front of their Tri State Area grills after some obligatory Catholic Mass, talking with other fathers about screwing their wives. “Who is the best at giving head? Who is the best at cooking? The best body?” The speakers perhaps did not expect to leave a mark, but a fossil of misogynist has remained in the aspect of their children.
These Atlantic City princelings milling about in front of me seem like such first class phonies. Silver spoons obvious behind their fierce glares. During the day, in suburban homes, they are doing push ups like big boys, imitating great warriors and urban slumlord kings; but all the while mommy is doing their laundry in the basement. Day turns to evening, and they hop into their sports cars, a daddy investment, and listen to rap tunes about killing innocents. As they speed towards the city, they roll down the windows and inhale the pure and non-toxic breeze of the suburbs.
Petulant, confident, handsome as statues. Everything underwritten by privilege. Not a one of them clever enough to feel ashamed.
One of them, their leader, standing directly in front of me, wears an Armani Exchange t-shirt with what appears to be a chain link fence rising to the middle of the abdomen. A not insignificant quantity of gel has been contributed to the scalp. Now he is not John Rockerford Gissupi. He is “John-neee” and he has blonde spikes instead of hair. And his friend is not Harold Drakenfold. He is, “Da Drake”, a man of legendary and scurrilous felatio tales.
Who knows where these kids go in Manhattan at night anyways? Some of them look like fourteen, fifteen, tops. And they are hammered – cheeks pale, foreheads sweaty, lips cherry red. How did this happen? Did Union Square catch on fire? Are all of the police asleep? How did this amazingly drunk ten-year old avoid bar security, NYPD plainclothes, a single bouncer?
I look around the train station, searching for some other adult to glance at, with whom I can share the acknowledgement that these kids are not where they belong. That the animals have taken over the zoo. But no one is around, and even over this din, I find a different voice in my head speaking.
“Since when are you an adult, a zookeeper,” it asks? “Since when is this not you, this drinking-late-night shouting-trying-to-kiss-that-cute-girl-on-the-back-porch-cacophany of youth, lust? Since when do you stand with the guards and not with the kids?”
I do not know how to answer.
<>
After an innocuous week, Adam arrives from South Jersey and it is suddenly the eve of the first drive. We pack his car in the afternoon, adrenaline coursing through our veins. It is a 2000 Jeep Liberty, named Bruce after the alter ego of that famous batty superhero with whom Adam is obsessed. It gets terrible gas mileage, but it has four-wheel drive and will save our butt more than once along the mountain roads to come. At this point I’d never driven an SUV before in my life. By December, I will know it like a sibling.
Our aim on this Jersey afternoon is to bring as little as possible, but when packing for four months, there is only so much one can do. We end up using about every square inch of room, leaving only twin caves of seats at the front of the vehicle into which Adam and I will wedge ourselves.
In addition to a long bag of clothes, I pack work jeans, flannels, boots, and old, stiff leather gloves – all hand-me-downs from my father’s days of travel. A shoebox filled with band-aids, hydrogen peroxide, flashlights, Neosporin and scissors. Toiletries. Shampoo, dental floss and a bottle of conditioner that becomes superfluous after one day of work. A boxy, industrial rice cooker that takes up as much room as a bag of clothes. This is easily the thing I regret bringing the most. We will use it on the trip a total of two times. I had this idea beforehand that we would be eating pounds and pounds of white rice every night, over various campfires, cut free from the world and those chefs who might offer us some calories, but I neglected an important fact. Campsites do not have electricity, and the rice cooker is a machine. Shame, shame.
Adam brings five pairs of casual sneakers and I give him the meanest look. I know that he is only bringing them to match the outfits he plans to wear when we visit the various cities on our agenda – San Francisco, LA, Chicago, Seattle, Portland. However, because we will only spend a total of about ten days in these locations, I balk. Fashion is not a good enough reason to be claiming valuable square footage in the vehicle. I complain at his vanity, and chortle about work and not play, but he slips them by me.
The items that characterize the two of us the most are the sheer number of books we bring. A boggling amount. Four stacks of paperbacks on the floor in the back, leaning off balance, each tall enough to reach the lip of the seat. I bet we bring between 35 to 40 books total. On a trip where we bring two medium density woolen blankets, no matches, no long johns, and go cold on far too many nights, we bring a freaking library.
Up front, we deck out the console for long distance travel. Wrap a plastic bag around the gearshift and call it a trashcan. Jam a book with the farm information and a soon-to-be-holy red journal where we will be recording expenditures in the glove compartment. We bring a road atlas but don’t really need it. Adam’s mom purchased him a GPS for the car before he left North Carolina. In the coming days, we will decide to give it the name of an old British woman. Phyllis. As we are setting her up, I think about what a device like this truly does to the human experience of travel, and I imagine a fortune cookie prayer for the 21st century.
“Thou shall not wander or stumble
upon the jewels of a spontaneous afternoon,
for thou shall never be lost,
even in some strange land,
far, far from home.”
Ah, how things have changed since my father’s day, when callow New England youths would set off for the Rockies with a pocket map and three or four baloney sandwiches in their back pocket! Adam and I have ten times the material goods, and we still forget some of the bare necessities. None of the superfluous items, the books or fancy sneakers. Those we remember, of course.
Blankets though, or matches? Long underwear?
Nope.
I told you we were green.
I finish packing the trunk of the jeep for the first of many times, stacking oblong bags and bags of cookery like Tetris pieces. This is one of the tasks I will be responsible for during the next few months.
Over the course of the trip, Adam and I split work as it arises, assuming various collective jobs without needing to ask or declare ownership. It’s nice that we don’t need to talk much about it. With old friends you can do this, can just slip into the right roles without much hullabaloo, because it is so abundantly clear to both individuals what sort of person their friend is – what sort of jobs he is going to want to handle, and which he would rather shirk.
Feeling completely known in this way, planned-for and correctly estimated without having to bark or apologize or tiptoe around the prickly shape of another’s pride – it’s one of the nicest results of being friendly with people at all. Sometimes they can figure you out, and it can still be safe.
My jobs on the trip are as follows: I handle cold introductions, pack the jeep on moving days, oversee directions, tackle the long desert driving shifts, and wash dishes. Adam cooks, shops, calls ahead to guarantee farms, drives the extra windy mountain roads, and generally keeps me from bolting the whole trip.
We’re a good team, the two of us. We fill in certain deficiencies in the other’s character. What’s more, we are perceptive enough to recognize all of this, and because of that there is mutual respect.
After I finish packing, we are jittery for a time. We try to wander the hamlet to cool off, but the energy is too tight and the Garden State never exactly serene. Eventually we return and go up to the attic, where we share some last minute thoughts about the colossal event that begins tomorrow.
“I just want to travel man,” Adam says. “I have been at this camp all summer, making money and listening to these middle school kids have their little dramas, but all I could think about was this thing that’s coming.”
He is sitting cross-legged on the bed. He is an extraordinarily skinny guy, Adam. A true ectomporh with a genuine, Scots-Irish heritage from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. The first in his family to go to college. A fighter in that way. Wears denim colored Converse sneakers, flannel shirts and a head full of curly yellow hair. A young director and artist.
“I want to see the West,” he continues. “The Pacific. The time zones that are not this time zone. Thank you so much for doing this with me.”
“Yes, yes, I hear that man,” I reply.
“What about you? What are you looking for?” he asks. “If you can put it into a word or phrase.”
I think for a second. “Salvation. Escape.” To problem-atize the ordinary path. Yes, that’s it.
“Salvation? What do you mean by that?”
I know I won’t explain it well, can’t ever quite explain my spiritual inclinations to him, so I just smile and wave him off.
“Nothing man. I’m just excited to go. The west, the west…”
“Yes.”
Together we step to the window, smoke a joint, look at the Atlantic stars for the last time, pump fists, then nod off for a long night’s sleep. The trip yawns ahead, unfinished and wild, ready to kill and to dazzle, dressed in a coyote’s crazy drunk grin.
Friday, April 2, 2010
From THE MAGIC ELSEWHERE. by Samuel Need
…American emptiness, Buddhist brain, liberal arts education, sacred temple of Earth on the rose petal floor in a shop of machines that stand twinkling as false form above an earnestness again and finally. Yearning for the horizon of middle class middle school playgrounds as you drive by in your Volvo. Something sweet emerges on the insides of your cheek – hazy brown soil of an afternoon distance. You are two. Ten. Heartbroken. Older. Fifteen. In each case there is a stone in your chest that is suddenly not only existent but heavy. Scraps of chapped lips offered to another and then taken back in a flourish. Gesture of growth, wanton and delivered to the seeds in your palm like a careless 3pm dance. Getting blood on your knees in church, in the woods, in the football game, in the embrace of your first love. Where did the people run to when they decided to run? Was any of it worth anything? I read somewhere that you ought to crash a big motorcycle into your own gravestone. Out of anger about the whole business of it. Some poet said that. Tear off your business slacks. Cut the collar off your shirt with garden shears. Throw the razor blade in the clear mountain spring and watch it sail away into the valley below. Follow the hamster as it winks at you and rushes into the blackberry thicket. Lush, tickling hair on my ear as a snake speaks truth for an instant between sweet grass at the bottom of an oak tree. Find another season and do something with it. Another winter, another deep exhaling as the year grinds to a halt.
The great Oppenheimer hell bombs of the twentieth century do not make the fur on our arms bristle like it made our parents body-hair bristle. I saw a picture of my dad sticking his arms through a chain gate at a test site in New Hampshire in the late 1970s and all I could think was boy, not me. We have different fears, my friends and I of the 21st. Fears of food, of resource and responsibility. I cannot tell whether they are new or recycled. The cynical historian says don’t kid yourself junior, you’re all the same and you dream the same and lust the same and fear the same as the BC babes in Babylon, and you’re a fool to think otherwise. But I wonder still and in spite of it. Hopefully as I hustle along something will make itself out of the both of us…
ELSEWHERE
<>
Durham, NC
I sit cross-legged in the living room of my parents’ house and watch my father as he blesses me. Kneeling, he wears a short-sleeved flannel shirt and old work jeans. I am wearing almost the exact same thing. In fashion, as in most things, I have followed his footsteps as if they were a religious creed.
“Heya,” he cries, slapping his palms onto the floor.
We are in downtown Durham, in the split-level house my step mom has owned for several decades. It’s been “home” for me since my parents split at the turn of the new millennium, although homes and definitions have been shifting a lot these days. The neighborhood is in a strange location. Old quaint sort of Victorian houses a mere block away from the most legitimately life threatening streets in the whole city. Chock full of middle class White families who vote Democrat and get robbed every few months. Getting used to the frog croaks of car alarms as you drift off to sleep.
It’s a North Carolina August and the unbelievably wet summer heat is aching through the walls. Sick secret pockets of moisture collecting in porous caverns of paint. Wooden walls, slowly rotting in the American South. Kudzu vines frame the large bay windows on one side of the main landing. We sit in the middle of an immaculately cleaned wooden floor. Buddhist shrine in the far corner. Couple of elderly cats strewn around in a heap. Old time cast iron stove next to them, chugging along like the room’s giant black stomach. A laughing Dalai Lama in photographs leaning against a window. Rimpeshe. Dancing dust; square window shiny as a dinner plate, big as the whole void itself.
In a few hours, I will catch a plane up to New Jersey, where I meet my best friend Adam. Then, finally packed, we will drive across the country, in long loping horizontal strides, out to the Northwest Coast for a season of organic farming. Montana is the first destination, then Washington in September. Portland and Oregon in October. These were the places in general that drove the whole trip for me. I’d met many people who had sang its praises, assured me that my floppy haired presence would be met with likewise ambition. Tickling my ears with promises. But there was something more. I had always heard of Portland as a second tier city, a sort of humble pie place where people still act bashful about things. That intrigued me too. In November, we’ll bop down into Northern California, maybe tackling a grape harvest in the Napa Valley. And then in December, even further south, rolling down onto the parched skin of the great Southwestern desert. The empty esophagus of the Colorado River. So-Cal. The harsh spaces that no man should live but far too many do.
The system works like this: we provide a day of manual labor on these farms, and in return, the families feed us three squares and give us some sort of roof to lie our heads under. We’re planning on hitting seven farms, two in each state and one for good luck.
We hadn’t talked about return plans after the Fall. I didn’t tell Adam this, but I wanted to get stuck out there in the still mystery fogged West. I wanted to find a commune where I could simply sustain, where I could just be and be and be and not ever be bad and not ever pass off my burden onto some poor brick maker in Bangladesh. None of the curves and jumpy lines of progress and family that so regularly munch on the freedom of a human soul. I wanted something else out there. A different variety of life. I wanted to find work that would fill the shrines in my spine that keep ideals alive when my brain is reading The Economist and packing it all away for a neoliberal winter. I wanted to find truly good work that was so spiritually correct that not a soul could gainsay my engagement with it. I wanted to find something so intrinsically good that I myself would never doubt it, and then I wanted to give my whole being away to it.
<>
It is the summer after I graduated from college, and the fears of an adult world cloud my head in subtle strides. Two months ago, my anxiety was a ripple. It is now a torrent of things. It’s hard to count the exact instant when you shoulder a new responsibility, but they now number greatly. Bills, rent, groceries, college loans holy Christ college loans, insurance, insurance for the insurance of insurance. All these little daddy long legs crawling into the room, each with their own price tags.
So you start breaking down the future. Aught I go to graduate school, to ensure that all this work would pay off in some vestige of career? Should I give up on that and go teach at a high school or community college, because I know in my heart that academia is ivory laced with privilege. Should I give even that up and move to a monastery? Bashing the self like a driveway slate of December ice. Should I go to China, to start a new life on new terms? Or should I do even more service, signing myself up for the Peace Corps. Giving away my body and soul out of hatred for the disparity and unevenness in the world that shall probably never be resolved. Or a therapist for suburban husbands. I know I could help with their emotional side. How about writing? Writing kids books like Rohld Dahl. Colonizing dreams.
These are not innocent dreadles that I sing above my head. These thoughts have talons that rip into my experience of the present, dragging my attention forward, away from the view of sudden light on the backpack of a girl in the red Ford Bronco, away from my own experience of the cold stone underneath my butt as I type these words. For a moment, she looked like she had a nest of baby dragons on her shoulder blade.
We all react to graduation differently. Some of my acquaintances have already turned corporate shark, and will be buying expensive presents by Christmas. Some are in old Volvos headed towards graduate school. Others have moved on to the next city, the next thing. Hollywood. The Stage. Trying to just scrape by for a few years. And then finally there are others, the sentimental ones, who are moving more slowly, with good intentions but lethargic, as if in a daze, oppressed by a heaviness that they cannot place, and because of this, I call them my friends.
<>
“Heya,” calls my father.
He is a medicine man, you know. In a way, I’d always been aware of it. Over the course of 22 years together, he had spoken to the rocks, the stars, the wind, the ancient. He’d spent time hitch hiking in the 70s. Teaches South and South East Asian religion at Duke. Practiced Mahayana Buddhism in Western Massachusetts during his twenties. Worked as a dockhand in Boston. Lost a girlfriend to the band members of They Might Be Giants. When I was nine, he would yelp out ecstatically on the road to the grocery store, crying to the spirits of the stone, imploring them to rise up and fracture the complaisant concrete that our car glided over. When I was just born he kissed my head and dropped sage out the passenger side window. While I was crawling on the quilt, he was sitting next to me on the floor for hours in the basic lotus position, meditating. I’ve seen the pictures.
At times I’d notice it and think to myself, “Something different is happening here. Other people’s dads don’t do this. Other people’s dads don’t believe in ghosts.” I guess I was confused and doubted him sometimes when I was young. But today somehow, today, his song, his blessing, was more pungent. I mean, it was right on point, and I knew now more than ever, that I had a shaman as a papa. Even though his skin was as white as mine, and even though he had awful old Massachusetts Puritan in his blood. It’s just a matter of fact: he was with the medicine, and had always been that way.
“Hey ya!” he cries, ushering in the beings, waking the angel ears. He turns to the east and lit a candle. “Great East,” he intoned. “Spirit of land, of fire, of ground, the beginner of things. Hello. H-e-l-l-o.” He spelled it out, just like that. A poet’s cadence. There was a lyricism to his voice that silenced a room. I had seen it in action during his poetry readings, and I imagined his melody was one of the reasons he was a successful lecturer at Duke. Then he shut his eyes hard, and lines of perspiration crossed his forehead, as if with some shadow or secondary figure he was literally grabbing the spirit by the arm and pulling it from out of the ether and onto the living room floor.
He turned to the south and touched a clear glass of water. “Now I turn to the South, to the spirit of childhood. The spirit of children playing on playgrounds at recess. The spirit of imagination, of a kid looking at a spoon and seeing a light saber and not a cooking utensil. Spirit of the figurative goof off simile, like when you look at a tree and imagine it as the frilly fingers of a great underground hand. Heya! I give this water to you. Welcome.”
He placed a shell of some sort on the mat in front of the glass. “For all the times you need to shell the water,” he said. Still not sure what that meant, but as always, someday I’m sure I will.
He turned to the West, where I was headed. “Hey ya, thunder beings,” he said. I recognized these, the spirits of the wind and storm and sky, because I had recently read the memoir and vision of a Lakota Sioux man, Black Elk. This man called upon the great thunder beings more than anyone else during his ominous visions, said they were the number one deities out west, and now my father the shaman was calling on them too, pulling on the dangly skin of their earlobes to aide me as I set off on this bohemian fantasy. As a method of attracting their attention, he lit a stick of incense, obvious commerce with the wind. While the smoke made its progress towards our ceiling and storms that no doubt lay slumbering, I hoped that these beings, more than any of the others, heard my call. I would be in their territory soon.
Finally, my father turned to the North, tracing with his finger the ancient path on the edge of the dipper that points to the North Star, a path countless winded eyes had traced before in the fierce and murky black at the center of the woods. The sky map at the end of the world and in the stomach of a fresh kill. “Hey ya!” he said. “You are the oldest ones. You ancient ones, I’m looking at you.” “These fellows are so old we must seem fast to them,” he said to me. He smiled up and laughed. “Here we are, being fast again.”
We are fast, aren’t we? That’s what we do. We speed from one thing to the next, (from nursing to walking to eating to dreaming to school to internship to job to sweet bed to sweet child to bad habit to despair to rebuilding to despair again to alone to together to everywhere to peace), What flecks of infinitesimal fragments must we seem against the ancestry of a boulder? What tiny motes are our dreams in earnest?
And this trip is going to be fast. Make no mistake. Four months out on farms in western America, then a career and longer years in one place, then a death and the longest years there. These ancient ones had seen a hundred, hundred travelers set off, all the people who had ever lusted after something just beyond that hill. With sticks and stone, then bronze and iron, but all of whom carried in their heart some momentum. Many of these countless travelers were braver than I – great men, warriors, chieftains, geniuses, artists, shamans, healers, almost all with a skill set greater than an analytical essay and a bounce pass. And yet I am on my way all the same. I am moving. Carrying the legacy of motion that is passed down through the subtle crooks of a narrative bundle. And perhaps this sort of imprecise dreaming and wandering is that which distinguishes the people of this Earth from other things.
My father lit a small bundle of sage and waved it in front of my face. (My stepmom would later claim this smell was pot). I am always surprised at how slow some things burn. In my mind, the flame instantly immolates its subject and leaps to my hand. The bundle of sage, however, is a patient burner. There is plenty of time for my father’s thickly haired hands to wave it over my head in loose circles.
He blessed the following: my mind, my eyes that would see trees never seen before, that would see landscapes never scaped before, to erect into the boundaries of possibility new forms, new trees, new valleys. The world will expand with every step forward. It is almost like the process of breathing outward, the way a belly moves out; the way the West fills out beyond the Mississippi. Even the most careless drunken step is still an act of faith, an extension of realm. And with that expansion, a new drive. I hoped so dearly to be saved out in the farming hills of Oregon. To have an indelible part of my heart hooked into a stream, a state highway, a skirt. To have something guide my life, because I shrank from the task of guiding it myself. The unknown movements of my heart in response to the known movements of my feet. That’s the equation, isn’t it? No, never that. That’s the story. It is all story perhaps.
The sage moved to my lips, so that I would find these words. It moved to my body, to slender arms that I worried about. I was a string bean, an indie concert boy in a flannel shirt. Svelte, but hopefully not too svelte to lift a crate of logs. I was ambivalent about how I would perform out on these real, REAL farms. Would there be lifting? Of course, but how much? I could already see it. A barrel-chested man ordering me to bring up a wagon, only to watch in slack mouthed humor as I stumbled up a gently sloping hill. Would the ax be too heavy? I had done push ups all summer, but I hadn’t run enough.
We shall see. At the very least my body would be reconciled again with the crushing gravity of its ground. Would immerse itself for a time in some of the genuine gears of this world. That alone would be worth the price of admission.
“Oh I can’t forget this one,” my father said, last of all. “Go in peace son, and meet the great American Angels of the east, the south, the west, and the north. May you be refreshed 1,000 times over!”
I was refreshed just this once.
And I was ready.
The great Oppenheimer hell bombs of the twentieth century do not make the fur on our arms bristle like it made our parents body-hair bristle. I saw a picture of my dad sticking his arms through a chain gate at a test site in New Hampshire in the late 1970s and all I could think was boy, not me. We have different fears, my friends and I of the 21st. Fears of food, of resource and responsibility. I cannot tell whether they are new or recycled. The cynical historian says don’t kid yourself junior, you’re all the same and you dream the same and lust the same and fear the same as the BC babes in Babylon, and you’re a fool to think otherwise. But I wonder still and in spite of it. Hopefully as I hustle along something will make itself out of the both of us…
ELSEWHERE
<>
Durham, NC
I sit cross-legged in the living room of my parents’ house and watch my father as he blesses me. Kneeling, he wears a short-sleeved flannel shirt and old work jeans. I am wearing almost the exact same thing. In fashion, as in most things, I have followed his footsteps as if they were a religious creed.
“Heya,” he cries, slapping his palms onto the floor.
We are in downtown Durham, in the split-level house my step mom has owned for several decades. It’s been “home” for me since my parents split at the turn of the new millennium, although homes and definitions have been shifting a lot these days. The neighborhood is in a strange location. Old quaint sort of Victorian houses a mere block away from the most legitimately life threatening streets in the whole city. Chock full of middle class White families who vote Democrat and get robbed every few months. Getting used to the frog croaks of car alarms as you drift off to sleep.
It’s a North Carolina August and the unbelievably wet summer heat is aching through the walls. Sick secret pockets of moisture collecting in porous caverns of paint. Wooden walls, slowly rotting in the American South. Kudzu vines frame the large bay windows on one side of the main landing. We sit in the middle of an immaculately cleaned wooden floor. Buddhist shrine in the far corner. Couple of elderly cats strewn around in a heap. Old time cast iron stove next to them, chugging along like the room’s giant black stomach. A laughing Dalai Lama in photographs leaning against a window. Rimpeshe. Dancing dust; square window shiny as a dinner plate, big as the whole void itself.
In a few hours, I will catch a plane up to New Jersey, where I meet my best friend Adam. Then, finally packed, we will drive across the country, in long loping horizontal strides, out to the Northwest Coast for a season of organic farming. Montana is the first destination, then Washington in September. Portland and Oregon in October. These were the places in general that drove the whole trip for me. I’d met many people who had sang its praises, assured me that my floppy haired presence would be met with likewise ambition. Tickling my ears with promises. But there was something more. I had always heard of Portland as a second tier city, a sort of humble pie place where people still act bashful about things. That intrigued me too. In November, we’ll bop down into Northern California, maybe tackling a grape harvest in the Napa Valley. And then in December, even further south, rolling down onto the parched skin of the great Southwestern desert. The empty esophagus of the Colorado River. So-Cal. The harsh spaces that no man should live but far too many do.
The system works like this: we provide a day of manual labor on these farms, and in return, the families feed us three squares and give us some sort of roof to lie our heads under. We’re planning on hitting seven farms, two in each state and one for good luck.
We hadn’t talked about return plans after the Fall. I didn’t tell Adam this, but I wanted to get stuck out there in the still mystery fogged West. I wanted to find a commune where I could simply sustain, where I could just be and be and be and not ever be bad and not ever pass off my burden onto some poor brick maker in Bangladesh. None of the curves and jumpy lines of progress and family that so regularly munch on the freedom of a human soul. I wanted something else out there. A different variety of life. I wanted to find work that would fill the shrines in my spine that keep ideals alive when my brain is reading The Economist and packing it all away for a neoliberal winter. I wanted to find truly good work that was so spiritually correct that not a soul could gainsay my engagement with it. I wanted to find something so intrinsically good that I myself would never doubt it, and then I wanted to give my whole being away to it.
<>
It is the summer after I graduated from college, and the fears of an adult world cloud my head in subtle strides. Two months ago, my anxiety was a ripple. It is now a torrent of things. It’s hard to count the exact instant when you shoulder a new responsibility, but they now number greatly. Bills, rent, groceries, college loans holy Christ college loans, insurance, insurance for the insurance of insurance. All these little daddy long legs crawling into the room, each with their own price tags.
So you start breaking down the future. Aught I go to graduate school, to ensure that all this work would pay off in some vestige of career? Should I give up on that and go teach at a high school or community college, because I know in my heart that academia is ivory laced with privilege. Should I give even that up and move to a monastery? Bashing the self like a driveway slate of December ice. Should I go to China, to start a new life on new terms? Or should I do even more service, signing myself up for the Peace Corps. Giving away my body and soul out of hatred for the disparity and unevenness in the world that shall probably never be resolved. Or a therapist for suburban husbands. I know I could help with their emotional side. How about writing? Writing kids books like Rohld Dahl. Colonizing dreams.
These are not innocent dreadles that I sing above my head. These thoughts have talons that rip into my experience of the present, dragging my attention forward, away from the view of sudden light on the backpack of a girl in the red Ford Bronco, away from my own experience of the cold stone underneath my butt as I type these words. For a moment, she looked like she had a nest of baby dragons on her shoulder blade.
We all react to graduation differently. Some of my acquaintances have already turned corporate shark, and will be buying expensive presents by Christmas. Some are in old Volvos headed towards graduate school. Others have moved on to the next city, the next thing. Hollywood. The Stage. Trying to just scrape by for a few years. And then finally there are others, the sentimental ones, who are moving more slowly, with good intentions but lethargic, as if in a daze, oppressed by a heaviness that they cannot place, and because of this, I call them my friends.
<>
“Heya,” calls my father.
He is a medicine man, you know. In a way, I’d always been aware of it. Over the course of 22 years together, he had spoken to the rocks, the stars, the wind, the ancient. He’d spent time hitch hiking in the 70s. Teaches South and South East Asian religion at Duke. Practiced Mahayana Buddhism in Western Massachusetts during his twenties. Worked as a dockhand in Boston. Lost a girlfriend to the band members of They Might Be Giants. When I was nine, he would yelp out ecstatically on the road to the grocery store, crying to the spirits of the stone, imploring them to rise up and fracture the complaisant concrete that our car glided over. When I was just born he kissed my head and dropped sage out the passenger side window. While I was crawling on the quilt, he was sitting next to me on the floor for hours in the basic lotus position, meditating. I’ve seen the pictures.
At times I’d notice it and think to myself, “Something different is happening here. Other people’s dads don’t do this. Other people’s dads don’t believe in ghosts.” I guess I was confused and doubted him sometimes when I was young. But today somehow, today, his song, his blessing, was more pungent. I mean, it was right on point, and I knew now more than ever, that I had a shaman as a papa. Even though his skin was as white as mine, and even though he had awful old Massachusetts Puritan in his blood. It’s just a matter of fact: he was with the medicine, and had always been that way.
“Hey ya!” he cries, ushering in the beings, waking the angel ears. He turns to the east and lit a candle. “Great East,” he intoned. “Spirit of land, of fire, of ground, the beginner of things. Hello. H-e-l-l-o.” He spelled it out, just like that. A poet’s cadence. There was a lyricism to his voice that silenced a room. I had seen it in action during his poetry readings, and I imagined his melody was one of the reasons he was a successful lecturer at Duke. Then he shut his eyes hard, and lines of perspiration crossed his forehead, as if with some shadow or secondary figure he was literally grabbing the spirit by the arm and pulling it from out of the ether and onto the living room floor.
He turned to the south and touched a clear glass of water. “Now I turn to the South, to the spirit of childhood. The spirit of children playing on playgrounds at recess. The spirit of imagination, of a kid looking at a spoon and seeing a light saber and not a cooking utensil. Spirit of the figurative goof off simile, like when you look at a tree and imagine it as the frilly fingers of a great underground hand. Heya! I give this water to you. Welcome.”
He placed a shell of some sort on the mat in front of the glass. “For all the times you need to shell the water,” he said. Still not sure what that meant, but as always, someday I’m sure I will.
He turned to the West, where I was headed. “Hey ya, thunder beings,” he said. I recognized these, the spirits of the wind and storm and sky, because I had recently read the memoir and vision of a Lakota Sioux man, Black Elk. This man called upon the great thunder beings more than anyone else during his ominous visions, said they were the number one deities out west, and now my father the shaman was calling on them too, pulling on the dangly skin of their earlobes to aide me as I set off on this bohemian fantasy. As a method of attracting their attention, he lit a stick of incense, obvious commerce with the wind. While the smoke made its progress towards our ceiling and storms that no doubt lay slumbering, I hoped that these beings, more than any of the others, heard my call. I would be in their territory soon.
Finally, my father turned to the North, tracing with his finger the ancient path on the edge of the dipper that points to the North Star, a path countless winded eyes had traced before in the fierce and murky black at the center of the woods. The sky map at the end of the world and in the stomach of a fresh kill. “Hey ya!” he said. “You are the oldest ones. You ancient ones, I’m looking at you.” “These fellows are so old we must seem fast to them,” he said to me. He smiled up and laughed. “Here we are, being fast again.”
We are fast, aren’t we? That’s what we do. We speed from one thing to the next, (from nursing to walking to eating to dreaming to school to internship to job to sweet bed to sweet child to bad habit to despair to rebuilding to despair again to alone to together to everywhere to peace), What flecks of infinitesimal fragments must we seem against the ancestry of a boulder? What tiny motes are our dreams in earnest?
And this trip is going to be fast. Make no mistake. Four months out on farms in western America, then a career and longer years in one place, then a death and the longest years there. These ancient ones had seen a hundred, hundred travelers set off, all the people who had ever lusted after something just beyond that hill. With sticks and stone, then bronze and iron, but all of whom carried in their heart some momentum. Many of these countless travelers were braver than I – great men, warriors, chieftains, geniuses, artists, shamans, healers, almost all with a skill set greater than an analytical essay and a bounce pass. And yet I am on my way all the same. I am moving. Carrying the legacy of motion that is passed down through the subtle crooks of a narrative bundle. And perhaps this sort of imprecise dreaming and wandering is that which distinguishes the people of this Earth from other things.
My father lit a small bundle of sage and waved it in front of my face. (My stepmom would later claim this smell was pot). I am always surprised at how slow some things burn. In my mind, the flame instantly immolates its subject and leaps to my hand. The bundle of sage, however, is a patient burner. There is plenty of time for my father’s thickly haired hands to wave it over my head in loose circles.
He blessed the following: my mind, my eyes that would see trees never seen before, that would see landscapes never scaped before, to erect into the boundaries of possibility new forms, new trees, new valleys. The world will expand with every step forward. It is almost like the process of breathing outward, the way a belly moves out; the way the West fills out beyond the Mississippi. Even the most careless drunken step is still an act of faith, an extension of realm. And with that expansion, a new drive. I hoped so dearly to be saved out in the farming hills of Oregon. To have an indelible part of my heart hooked into a stream, a state highway, a skirt. To have something guide my life, because I shrank from the task of guiding it myself. The unknown movements of my heart in response to the known movements of my feet. That’s the equation, isn’t it? No, never that. That’s the story. It is all story perhaps.
The sage moved to my lips, so that I would find these words. It moved to my body, to slender arms that I worried about. I was a string bean, an indie concert boy in a flannel shirt. Svelte, but hopefully not too svelte to lift a crate of logs. I was ambivalent about how I would perform out on these real, REAL farms. Would there be lifting? Of course, but how much? I could already see it. A barrel-chested man ordering me to bring up a wagon, only to watch in slack mouthed humor as I stumbled up a gently sloping hill. Would the ax be too heavy? I had done push ups all summer, but I hadn’t run enough.
We shall see. At the very least my body would be reconciled again with the crushing gravity of its ground. Would immerse itself for a time in some of the genuine gears of this world. That alone would be worth the price of admission.
“Oh I can’t forget this one,” my father said, last of all. “Go in peace son, and meet the great American Angels of the east, the south, the west, and the north. May you be refreshed 1,000 times over!”
I was refreshed just this once.
And I was ready.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
COMMENTS ARE WELCOME
The posts on this blog are new pieces, by writers who are working seriously to develop their craft. I hope a lot of you who read them will want to post comments and get some dialog going. I know you'll keep in mind that, as in my classes, the idea is to support and help each other.
I’ll be adding some comments myself, although I won’t be doing any detailed critiquing or picky-copy-editor stuff here. The blog format doesn’t seem to me to be the most workable way to handle that.
So let's hear from you!
Joyce
I’ll be adding some comments myself, although I won’t be doing any detailed critiquing or picky-copy-editor stuff here. The blog format doesn’t seem to me to be the most workable way to handle that.
So let's hear from you!
Joyce
MORNING WITH NO COFFEE. By Jim Crawford
There are four women that have been important to me in different ways -I shared some time with them while exploring and living in the intermountain west. They are as different as planets, and separated by time, but the places we visited connect them like string running through beads. These are some of the things I remember: waking up in a gray canyon on a cold winter morning with hangovers, no food, coffee a three mile walk away; sitting on white Navajo sandstone, warming in the sun after an intense hailstorm forced us to hide under a tiny ledge of rock; skiing under a cold moon and a brilliant black sky while the temperatures dropped below zero; camping as an endless spring snowstorm trapped us around our fire for days, staying warm by sharing hot chocolate with our only neighbor, a friendly guy who tried to convert us, while we tried to keep the snows from collapsing our small tent – when the snows returned yet another day we picked up the entire sopping mess and carried it on our backs, dripping and freezing, to town and a warm hotel; making a nest, warm and dry, on a ledge in a canyon, keeping company with the ghosts of the Anasazi that surrounded us;
wading for hours through the narrow slot of the Virgin River – dark vertical walls rising straight out of the water, thinking we would never get out; walking softly through a quiet brown forest of ponderosa pine to sit and stare at the silence pouring out of the grand canyon, sleeping near the brink with no one else around, then hiking down the hot dry trail, following the rocks backward in time past endless cliffs and lizards, to find freezing cold clear water bursting in a waterfall from the rocks; bicycling to lakes in summer and Sunday brunch on fall afternoons.
Mostly I like to think of each of them, sitting on a slab of broken, red sandstone, framed by a burning blue sky, dusty shorts, dustier boots, sunshine on their shoulders and in their hair.
wading for hours through the narrow slot of the Virgin River – dark vertical walls rising straight out of the water, thinking we would never get out; walking softly through a quiet brown forest of ponderosa pine to sit and stare at the silence pouring out of the grand canyon, sleeping near the brink with no one else around, then hiking down the hot dry trail, following the rocks backward in time past endless cliffs and lizards, to find freezing cold clear water bursting in a waterfall from the rocks; bicycling to lakes in summer and Sunday brunch on fall afternoons.
Mostly I like to think of each of them, sitting on a slab of broken, red sandstone, framed by a burning blue sky, dusty shorts, dustier boots, sunshine on their shoulders and in their hair.
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