Dead Ex-tra

I made contact with Dead Ex’s sister.  No, not that way---the way everybody does it these days, via Facebook.  I’ll probably never know why it took her six months to respond to my simple query---obviously she isn’t as addicted to social media as the rest of us.  Or perhaps the simple question ‘are you Rob’s sister?’ froze her for awhile.  I doubt it, though---there’s a hunger there, starting with the present tense of her reply: “Yes, I am.  How do you know him?”

Oh, let me count the ways.  I know him by the punched in plaster on the wall into the kitchen.  I know him by forgetting he always took his aspirin dry and the resulting glass of water flung across the bathroom floor.  I know him by his suggestion that I take up with the young blond who had a crush on me.  I know him as the first man to have me totally, and you don’t forget that.  And I won’t ever forget the thin blue January morn he appeared in the passenger seat of my speeding car to apologize.

She didn’t flinch at my surreal story, she only wanted more.  What did he look like?  What else did he say?  I tried to collect up suitable situations to share, but everything seemed a bit too personal and irrelevant to her.  When he comes up behind me from the right, he takes my breath away---just like the first time.  He doesn’t wear clothes anymore, he’s naked.  Wait, he was wearing clothes the first time he appeared---and so I describe them to her: the warm gray sweater vest, the white long-sleeved pinpoint oxford shirt with the pinstripe plaid pattern.  Suddenly I can recall each article as I pulled them from the washer at the Laundromat---ironed them, hung them, folded them---twenty two years ago.

Dead Ex died in a single occupancy hotel in The City.  These were nothing new to him.  We started our first days in one, unbeknownst to the landlord---sharing a twin bed, the feeble light from the window that looked out onto a brick wall and the toilet for all down the hall.  Quite a departure for this young man raised in suburbia.   The City had been shaken down by the Loma Prieta earthquake just a couple of months before; it was quiet and slightly emptied that January.  It was easy for me to find us a nice sunny little studio at a decent price---a studio that would soon have the wall with the punched in plaster.

The news that his last days were lived in a similar place matched a death scene that had been given to me months before.  She made no report that jived with the visual dramatics I’d seen in that room, though.  The coroner wouldn’t let her view his body due to decomposition.  This gave me a lead into the details I saw, though:  There was blood on the edge of the bed and on the floor, darkened with age.  I certainly didn’t offer this information to her---I may never know the time when it’ll be appropriate to do so.

My husband was going over my responses to her latest email.  I asked him to, least the various pressures put upon me were causing me to write inappropriately.  After all, Dead Ex died from alcoholism and my husband is an alcohol/drug rehab therapist.  At one point I responded that her report of where he died matched closely to a visual I had been given.

“I’m suddenly recalling the blood you saw,” my husband said.  “I hadn’t thought of it before, but you know, it’s likely he died from a ruptured esophagus.  It’s fairly common with chronic alcoholics from vomiting so much.  He would vomit a quantity of blood as that happened.”

I stopped pacing and felt energy shoot down my legs and into the floor.  I heard Dead Ex say your old man’s right on.  He seemed pleased we got it.

“This rupture would not be visible on his body, though, would it?” I asked.

“No.”

“So the visual of his wounded chest remains symbolic.  He was only giving me an interior view of what happened.”

My husband nodded as I went back to that scene.  Not of the room where Dead Ex died, but another time, in the living room of a friend I do spiritual work with.  It was much like the first time in the car, when the setting is very ordinary and real and then the dead appear in our midst.  He was clothed in the same manner.  He walked in, turned to me and ripped open his sweater vest.  Next he tore open his shirt, buttons popping.  His broad chest look like an explosion took place.  I thought he had committed suicide with a large caliber revolver.  After all, he died three days after my friend hanged himself, and Dead Ex had once owned such a pistol.  He had hocked it by the time we came together, but he still had the bullets.

“Does this scare you?” he asked me.

“No.”  I wasn’t scared, I was in awe.

“I didn’t think it would.”  He stepped closer.  “Touch it.”

I made no move to.  It wasn’t repulsive, but it seemed very alive---raw and forbidden.

“Go ahead, touch it.”

I slowly reached out.  I was aware of my friend watching me reaching out into thin air, but my fingertips touched flesh, wet and warm.  I shivered.  It was as sensual as any other spiritual meeting with him.

“You can do anything,” he said.

Domesticated Doll

I'm still famous for my meatloaf.  It's about the only thing that has survived the years when my friends used to call me the Happy Housewife.  Oh, I'm still a housewife and I'm still happy, but they don't go together in quite the same dust 'n' douche manner anymore.  The dining table is now covered with artifacts to write about and the dust is thick here at Rancho Notorious---gray in the winter, red in the summer.  Every so often I just have to invite someone over to dinner so I have an incentive to knock down the cobwebs and clean the whole house.  Well, most of it.

I just went to the Frigidaire to see if I had the secret ingredient for my meatloaf but found no half empty and half dessicated bag of frozen mixed vegetables.  Oops.  Well, there you have it: Starchy frozen mixed vegetables, ground down to a coarse crumb, is my secret ingredient.  One of them, anyway.  The ratio is to substitute about two to one, meat to vegetable.  Your fresh ingredients must be minced and your meat can be a combination of anything---and if you can't figure out the rest you don't like to cook so you don't care anyway. You're welcome.

No matter how delicious the meatloaf is sliced hot, it's always twice as good the next day in a sandwich---or, if your at all clever, served on crackers as a suburban pate of sorts to impress your neighbors.  Tell them to bring the wine.

So we're going to have to settle for a bit of broiled and glazed pork if anyone is coming to dine here at Rancho Notorious.  This always amuses our usual guest, since she's nominally Jewish.  Unusually I apologize beforehand for serving pork once again, but once I found some chicken in the interim and she seemed just slightly disappointed to find it on her plate.

Dead Ex

Life’s finger has been on the rewind button as of late.  I can press pause, but if I press again the scenery just continues in reverse.  At first the views are fleeting.  Words, significant or otherwise, blurt out midst the blur.  But as the days progress the past develops nuance, and I start recalling myself in that room---or on that roadside, standing so close to him that our foreheads almost touch.  It’s my silent plea for comfort, and he growls: “Don’t you know where we’re at?!”

No, not exactly.  Twenty-two years later I still don’t know where we’re at.  I only know you’re dead now, because that’s the only way you could slip into my car at sixty miles an hour.  It’s the only way you could tell me you’re sorry because pride, shame and physical distance came between us.  Some of the best times of your life, you said.  I’ll have to accept that as a gift, because I’ve come to believe the only way I can grow is to believe in what others can’t see.

It took me a month to look up your name, because knowing more is sometimes less.  You can only go so far on this planet, and then there are fees to pay or issues of privacy that block the way.  There you are---on some obscure interface called My Life.  But I’ll never know about Your Life after we parted, because a pop up insisted I become a member first.  Still, for a brief moment, I saw your face.  You looked back at me, older yet still the same---the same confidant gaze, like a movie star.  Your hair was now white---and not the expensive white we processed into your drab, graying brown.  You looked pink and healthy---and very much your Scottish ancestry. The only difference was your brows, which had gone brushy, like my husband’s.  Oh, the irony. 

And yes, you are dead.  Here’s the little en memoriam type remembrance printed in the San Francisco Chronicle---the paper you used to walk to the corner store to buy on Sunday morning, along with another pack of Marlboros.   The date surprises me.  You died years ago---well, two years ago, last October.  Your dropping in on me wasn’t exactly a courtesy call while on your way out like some people experience.  It takes me awhile to figure a startling correlation: you died within a few weeks of my friend’s suicide.

I start reading---and grow slightly incredulous, because this is not the man I lived with:

We mourn the loss of our dear friend, Rob Radabaugh. Rob was known and loved by colleagues and friends over several decades at UCSF, Genentech, Neurex, Elan, Medarex, and Avigen. Those of us who loved him were the recipients of his tremendous kindness and unstinting loyalty that extended over the years to many of us. Rob was warm and funny. He was smart and charming. He could be goofy and laugh at himself too. He was quick to spot pretense or hypocrisy, and was adept at lampooning it. He lived out the words of that old verse, "Life is mostly froth and bubble, but two things stand like stone: kindness in another's trouble; courage in your own." Rest in peace, dear friend.

I wonder who wrote this.  A woman friend, I suspect---not a man you laid with.  She could see all this in you, and send you home when it faltered.  Because as I read it again, I can recall you being warm and funny---and certainly charming.  You charmed my whole family.  And then you turned it off when things stopped going your way.  That horrible Thanksgiving when I said I couldn’t go on, you wouldn’t even speak to my mother as you got behind the wheel to take us away.  I cried for a hundred miles, and you showed no kindness for another’s trouble.  You had already seen in me the PTSD you saw back in ‘Nam, but you never spoke of it.  You never said: ‘Dan, let’s get you some help.’  We were both so afraid of our pasts.

I rest on that written phrase courage in your own trouble.  Did you stop drinking?  Did you face the memory of your abusive, alcoholic father head on?  Did you find a way from rage to a state of grace over that doctor that botched the operation that killed your mother?  Your career tangent suggests you did, and yet that’s a lot of companies in less than twenty years.  It’s a leap between wanting to be a drama professor to being a patent holding medical research librarian, but I am not surprised you took a scion from your past to grow a new future.  I hope it was a clean start, and that your friend was writing from truth as well as from her grief.

I’m thinking of your sister now, even though I can’t recall her name.  We met only once, you know.  I was nervous and she was kind.  I wonder if I found her that she’d speak to me---that I could learn how you died, and thus learn why my body aches so.

And I wonder if she found among your possessions that Polaroid of the time your cat decided to park on my naked lap.  I hope so.  I hope of all the things I left you and the money you took, it was the one thing you kept.

Author's note:

This was written a while ago, and Dead Ex's name was changed to protect the innocent.

In the interiem there has been several adventures with Dead Ex that I'll be exploring in the future. 

It Runs In The Family, Part Deux

At 6:00 PM on Sunday, May 21st 1939 my great grandfather Wilson K. Felton made his way into the radio studios of KFWB in Hollywood.  For now the name of the program is lost, but the content is not, for I have the radio script he was given to study beforehand.

Note the stations of the California Radio Service in the left margin

Wilson was no actor.  Apparently the show concerned missing persons, and he was there to recount the tale of one of his sons who disappeared sixteen years before.  The cover letter to the script is signed by Robert Dillon, who likely was the host and producer of the little program---perhaps only 15 minutes long.

Robert Dillon had a long history as a screenwriter in Hollywood, mostly in the silent era but continuing again in the mid-1930s for serials, Westerns and exploitation films for Poverty Row studios.  The only title most likely to be recognized today by film historians is the tasteless blackface silent Ham and Eggs at the Front (1927)---which co-featured Myrna Loy in one of her early and most thankless 'exotic roles'.  Produced by Warner Brothers, it may have been the allowance for him getting a program slot at KFWB (Keep Filming Warner Brothers) in the late 1930s.  At the time of this broadcast, Dillon had sold his last scenario two years before, but he was certainly qualified for spinning personal tragedies into radio entertainment.

1935

My family's version of the story of missing son Wilson Otis Felton had always been brief: As a teenager, he checked into the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco but never checked out.  Great grandfather Wilson hired a private detective, but a lead was never found.  Due to strikes at the docks at the time, the detective gave the one plausible exit he could think of: Otis had been shanghaied.

Of course the first question might be: What is a teenager doing checking into the St. Francis Hotel?  Without going too deep into a back story worthy of a miniseries, Otis had been left under the supervision of his older brother, Jim, after their mother died and their father ran off to Mexico in 1917 to escape creditors.  Since Jim was only about 16, it was hardly an ideal arrangement.

 Wilson K. Felton's Mexican passport photo, 1917.  Age: 50.

The discovery of this radio script does fill in a lot of voids.  Apparently Jim's supervision went quite well for a couple of years, as he and Otis lived together in Las Vegas and Otis worked as a clerk at the Union Pacific depot.  Then the script strays, either due to their father's hazy memory or lack of involvement, as it claims that Otis was transferred to the Union Pacific depot in Los Angeles.

Simultaneous to the discovery of the script was the one letter that survives from Otis to his bother Jim (or anyone else).  It's postmarked Dec 22 1919 and speaks of loosing a job on a dredger---presumably in San Pedro Harbor.  He then tried to get a job in the Los Angeles railroad yards, but had to settle for being a junior clerk again.  Why he left Las Vegas and the Union Pacific in the interim will be forever unknown.

However, the letter gives an oblique view of unpleasantness:

I don't know what the trouble was, but I was "canned".

Stout went to [illegible] on the seventeenth.  That night there was a poker game on the dredge.  (I wasn't in on it, however.)  I was sitting about two or three feet from S[illegible]tley, whistling lightly.  It's always been a habit of his to cuss me out when he didn't like the way things were going, so he cussed me out there and told me I could get my time [the] next day.

Next day I phoned Russell.  He only said he didn't want me on the dredge.  He didn't say why.

So I came up to  L.A. to go in[to] the R.R. shops.  "No could do" so I got in[to] the office.

Now that's the truth, so help me God.

Jim obviously had some acquaintance or at least knowledge of these men since Otis refers to them by name, but why this letter was saved and others were not suggests that Jim may have known more about "the truth" than the letter admits to.  Gambling is alluded to, but the reaction doesn't seem to be connected to it.  It's more like S---tley is annoyed by Otis hovering nearby.  Otis was making him nervous, as if he felt guilty by association.

The script continues with the fact that my great grandfather didn't know that Otis was in San Francisco until he received a letter from the St. Francis Hotel.  How they knew to contact him was another mystery, since the script claims he registered under the name of M. Couer.

St. Francis Hotel, circa 1925

I don't know why he used that name, but he was romantic sort of boy, and maybe it seemed adventurous to him.  He was only 19 years old.

So the date of his disappearance is 1923--- almost three years after the above letter.

Q:  How long did he remain at the hotel?

A: That's the strange thing about the whole matter.  He registered at the hotel, moved in his trunk and a couple of  bags, and never was seen again.  They say he had good luggage, and several good suits.  After several days went by, and no sign of him, the management entered his room to investigate.  They found that he never occupied the room.

Strangely, the script never gives a description of Otis but spends almost a page on his habits and scars.  Either a description was told beforehand or Dillon thought Otis's habits and scars were enough.

A:  [As a child] he swallowed a tube of ochre paint.  His mother was an artist, and he got hold of some of her paints.  It gave him lead poisoning.  As a result of that poison, he acquired a habit that will help identify him.  The lead poisoning left his joints rather painful, and he would close his hands into fists and bring them to-gether across his chest.  Then he would press the knuckles to-gether, real hard, and he said it relieved some of the pain when he did that.

Q:  That's a good point, Mr. Felton.  Now, does your son carry any scars?

A:  Yes. When he was in school, he went through a ring-worm epidemic.  Somehow or other, it got into his hair, and was awful hard to clear up.  It left several bare patches on his scalp, and he combs his hair so that they will be covered up...

 Wilson Otis Felton, circa 1914

The one surviving photo of him shows this.  Midst a motley crew of Imperial Valley grammar school students, his hair appears to be sporting a primitive layered look.  He is also darkly and heavily freckled, and for some reason I recall being told he was a dark redhead.  His mother was strawberry blonde, so it could be possible.  My grandmother---his sister---had dark brown hair and was lightly freckled at most.

Otis excelled in school, particularly in composition.  He won a prize for a poem he wrote at around the age of twelve.  It's hard to say what he could have accomplished if he didn't have to leave school at the age of thirteen or fourteen.

Which brings us back to Otis at nineteen years of age and checking into the St. Francis Hotel:  How does a railroad clerk afford good luggage and several good suits---let alone a grand hotel?  Obviously he had bettered himself since the last time we heard from him, but how remains yet another mystery.

A:  If the news isn't good news I want to hear it anyway.

Good suits can come from selling good bootleg liquor or having a good hand at cards. That's also a good way to end up on the bottom of San Francisco Bay.  There are also certain good gentlemen who will give a young man such things in spite of his peculiar hairstyle.  It could all be a clever ruse to get lost.  After all, he may have just been following his poorly spelled French m. coeur---'my heart'.

Roar With Gilmore

Tuesday morning my husband and I found ourselves some forty-five miles from Yosemite Valley---why would we not take such a detour?  It was a beautiful winter's morn, warm and dry enough not to make icy roads a big issue.

It had been some twenty years since I drove this stretch of CA 41.  It's one of the few remaining 1930s highways that hasn't been 'improved', with deeply banked curves to cradle a car along its way.  At its other end, between Atascadero and Morro Bay, CA 41 has recently been upgraded---which means it was nominally widened and the curves flattened.  I haven't the faintest idea why the latter is an improvement, since anyone who drove it regularly before (I had) and since notices that a car now wants to lean more towards the shoulder on a curve than it used to.  The natural track of a car is forward, and a flatter surface is only going to encourage that---much to the danger of bicyclists that supposedly most of the improvements were made for.

Back at the other end of the highway, we climbed over several 5 to 6,000 foot passes on our way to Yosemite Valley.  The declines between each pass are fairly small until the last, so the overall effect is a considerable gain in elevation from the floor of the San Joaquin Valley.  It's by no means a toilsome drive---unless it's high summer and there are a million other cars coming and going---but it is a mild to moderate workout for any car.

 1937 Hudson on Highway 41 during the Gilmore-Yosemite Economy Run

Which reminded of the 1930s Gilmore-Yosemite Economy Runs from Gilmore Stadium in Los Angeles to Yosemite Valley.  Gilmore was a Southern California petroleum company, and like most oil companies of that era they associated themselves with aircraft and race cars---Gilmore so much so that they built a stadium where CBS Television City now stands and invented midget car racing.  Hence Roar With Gilmore.

Starlets Betty Grable and Lucille Ball in a midget

racer at Gilmore Stadium, c. 1935 

Once you've drained your audience of all their adrenaline, you might as well soothe them with the purr of a motor off on some vacation.  However the Gilmore-Yosemite Economy Run wasn't a May Day drive but a January adventure over roads then minimally maintained in winter---at least for the last 45 of its 306.5 miles.

Sedans of each model from each auto manufacturer were used. For example, in 1936 Studebaker entered their Dictator (a name that would be changed in 1938 for obvious reasons), Commander and President.  After each car was inspected to insure that it was strictly factory stock, the hood was sealed shut---a thought that surely sent a chill down the spine of many 1930s motorists.  Then each car was loaded with passengers and luggage---after each piece and person was weighed.  This was an economy test that was the antithesis of our modern EPA computerized testing.

1939 Packard.  

Earle C. Anthony was not only the biggest Packard dealer in Los Angeles, 

he also owned the powerhouse radio station KFI.

The passenger in the front seat of each car was from a competing manufacturer so to police the driver against actions like coasting, although it's unclear whether cars equipped with free wheeling were allowed to use the feature or not.  Free wheeling was an automatic vacuum clutch that essentially put the car into neutral any time the foot was off the gas, putting such an equipped car at a gas-saving advantage.

1939 Willys-Overlands lead the way out of Gilmore Stadium

Climbing the three lane Ridge Route Alternate (US 99)

The cars already faced two minor passes, the Caheunga and Newhall, before they reached Castaic on US 99 and the formidable Ridge Route Alternate.  Opened in October of 1933, it was a huge advancement in motoring to Bakersfield, but it offered its own perils---mainly long relatively straight gradients at up six percent.  Keeping pace while climbing Five Mile Canyon was probably the biggest challenge of the trip.  That pesky front passenger and check points along the way made sure any one car wasn't dropping behind to save a little gas.

The Ridge Route Alternate had already been widened from two to three lanes---the third being the infamous Suicide Lane down the middle, used to pass slow moving traffic in either direction.  Within a few years the Grapevine section would be widened again to four lanes with the mother of all concrete freeway barriers down the middle to keep runaway trucks and cars from plowing into oncoming traffic.

Down the three lane Grapevine and cruising towards Bakersfield on US 99

The long gentle downgrade from the Grapevine to Bakersfield undoubtedly recovered the miles per gallon lost in the previous hundred miles.  The drive was very economical up to Fresno, where all cars stopped to be refueled and calculated before heading into the Sierras on CA 41.

Above Oakhurst the cars again faced relatively steep grades, but the curves and weather conditions didn't allow for the top speed of 45 MPH.  Lost traction on slippery roads and variable speeds while climbing would do their best to rob the cars of their miles per gallon.

Entering Yosemite at Wawona Gate on Highway 41

Studebaker rolled into Yosemite Valley and out with the Gilmore-Yosemite trophy cups in the three major categories in 1936.  Their six cylinder Dictator averaged 24.24 MPG, the larger six cylinder Commander 23 MPG and the eight cylinder President 20.35 MPG.  These were good numbers for the era, but they weren't the highest miles per gallon rated in the run.  Gilmore chose to award by the old fashioned, railroad-centric ton mileage moved per gallon, giving larger fully loaded cars an advantage.  The small for its era four cylinder Willys had the highest mileage at 33.21 MPG, while both the six cylinder Graham and Chevrolet averaged over 25 MPG.  In the end, the public was more interested in the initial cost of a car and how much it cost to operate (miles per gallon), not how efficiently it moved its own weight plus a load.  Depending on how a car fared, a manufacturer could claim a win either by the trophy it received or the actual mileage it attained on the run.  Studebaker could finally do both in 1940 when their new lightweight six cylinder Champion with overdrive attained 29.19 MPG while their Commander and President once again won trophies.

Gilmore was bought out in the summer of 1940 by Socony-Vacuum (Mobil Oil) and the event was revamped into the Mobilgas Economy Run, a much more ambitious three day event from Los Angeles to the Grand Canyon via Death Valley, Las Vegas and Boulder Dam.  By the late 1950s the route was stretched all the way to Kansas City, and the event was rife with corporate politics and shenanigans.  Professional drivers had taken over years before and the back seat passengers and their luggage were left on the side of the road.  The heavily larded Big Three (GM-Ford-Chrysler) were so embarrassed by Studebaker and Nash-Rambler's vastly superior mileage that they successfully lobbied to put those cars into their own condescending class.  The proliferation of imported cars in the 1960s further eroded American automakers confidence in the event as good publicity and so the concept  was abandoned after the 1968 Economy Run.

Studebaker Wins The 1952 Mobilgas Economy Run

Song of the Saugaro

My friends were well ahead of me on the Cactus Trail in Sabino Canyon.  Both were old enough to be my mother, but I was pleased with myself just for just for steaming along at my own pace.  No complaints here midst the long shadows of the saguaros.  The sun, a feeble winter flame, would go out shortly.

 “C’mon, buddy.”

His voice was in my right ear, and his hand rode up my right forearm and tugged me both forward and closer to him.  I turned and looked into that other prospective and saw a man that could be kindly called ‘local color’.  His hat was just short of ridiculous---measuring in at about five gallons, and the kerchief around his neck was as luminous as the precious stone it tried to copy, turquoise.  The vivid hue intensified the glow of his golden tan and hazel eyes---the later shining with both confidence and a most familiar manner.

For a boy who can’t say no, being picked up by a spirit does have its advantages.  There is no capitulation, no latter hour regret.  There was no secrets as the man in the five gallon hat's history unfurls back down the canyon and over the foothills into 1920s Tucson.  During the winter season, he was handy at most anything---from fixing a drippy faucet to filling out a dinner party.  Dessert was often a husband or son.  No time was wasted on seduction.  His survey started during cocktails and by the main course the exchange of suggestive glances was well under way.  He was so adept in these readings that he was rarely surprised by the positions he got into.  The men, whether they realized it or not, were grateful for the clarity of the act---and so there was occasional if not perennial reoccurrence, but nothing frequent enough to suggest emotional attachment.

The mistress of the house was sometimes more problematic.  He preferred the ones who didn’t like him in their kitchens, although he was gracious about mixing cocktails, setting the table or laying out a buffet.  Ideally he did chores for a slightly avant garde household, cutting out early to clean himself up and change into his evening persona of raconteur.  His ability to spin recent Arizona history into amusing stories of---yes, local color---was a highly regarded talent in these circles.  In return for his services he was given small amounts of money, hand me downs and expensive but useful gifts at Christmas---not to mention leftovers to tide him over for a day or two and a knowing grin on his face.
 
Since he knows I'm ‘reading’ him, he points out his new lace up boots---a Christmas gift from a couple he regularly assists.   The rest of his attire is worn and eclectic enough to suggest that he’s authentic to any outsider.  The fact is he has only been here longer ---and through all seasons---than the rest.  His youthful appearance points both to his lack of adult cares and the fact that he started living for himself at a time when some boys drop out of school for the factory.

I’ve caught up with my friends now.  They stand silently at a precipice overlooking Sabino Canyon, listening to the wind sing through the stubby needles of the saguaro.  He steps back, well aware that I’m listening to a slightly sexed up version of that song---the song that is called romance.  Not that he’s thinking of my husband any more than I am.  No dishonor harbored on our parts.  His intentions were never to destroy or possess---and although what little philosophy he had he left to his stories, he thought he was providing an amicable service of sorts.  If his actions caused household discord, he simply banished himself.

It is clear to him that even though my husband is removed by a thousand miles my emotional world does not evolve much.  Any broad male variation of the body beautiful can be installed in his absence and sensual situations played out, but even in this space it’s required that the body will remain to play out a new scene tomorrow.  It’s the fantasy of consistency more than anything else.

My friends and I murmur about the song of the saguaros and then start down into the shallow canyon before us.  He comes up to my side again.

“I know a man like you,” he says in my ear.  “We were buddies once, but I couldn’t live the way he wanted to.”  He flashes me a mental picture of a blond young man with a ruddy beard in a canyon bower. I’m intrigued, and his insinuation is that by literally going through him I could meet this young man.

I’m amused by his persistence.  There must be a reason for it---and not a superficial one like I experienced a few times in my younger and prettier days.  I recall a long forgotten courtyard fountain at a Hollywood restaurant and a handsome Latino of dogged determination that evolved into a good-natured argument.  Just why should I go home with him?

But I’m already at home in my body, and the man in the five gallon hat can play my record as much as I can read his.  We start at the beginning because for me this life is all about resolving the beginning.  Father and my crib as his alter.  There was a ritual from the beginning, but the idol was abandoned along with the religion somewhere along the way.  Ever since I’ve searched for a carnal type of loyalty.

to be continued