Overloaded

The Nash, cut down into a truck of sorts and overloaded, rolled along on three tires and a rim that wailed a constant complaint.  Each expansion joint in the concrete punctuated the protestation with sharp metallic blows.  For all the noise there was not quite enough to fill the big quiet caused by a motor silenced by the lack of gas.  A hot breeze sanded over the sunburned faces of those passengers perched on the patched canvas covered remains of their lives.  Their dirty hands gripped the canvas tightly, their fate on the downgrade, brakes burning.

Al looked over at Floyd, but they were strangers again.  Their night on the Colorado River was a couple of hundred miles ago, and the Mojave had since sucked all the juiciness out of the memory.  Floyd looked resolutely ahead, knowing he was being watched.  The increasing wind whipped at his open shirt and the sunlight counted his ribs.  He was as dark as an Indian, except for his knuckles.

These mountains offered no reviving waters, no reliving the recent past.  They passed into them easy enough, but now they were being pitched forward---not into the green garden below, but off into eternity.   This family was not Al’s but something he bought with his canteen of water somewhere before Peach Springs.  At the river they had all given thanks but asked for more and so they were given this.  Al looked away from the curve looming ahead.

A flash of color registered out of the corner of his eye, and a sweet scent just barely broke though the stench.  The taste of Nu-Grape filled his dry mouth, and Al looked down to see a large shrub waving wands of lavender and white, like a frothy freshly opened bottle of pop.  These shrubs dotted the steep barren slope below, increasing in number as quickly as the pitch of the wail of the naked rim.  And then he saw why the stench had been momentarily replaced:  The brake beneath him had burst into flames.

Floyd screamed for his father, dead for several years.  Al knew it was Floyd, for it was the same strangled passion that rang in his ears that river night.  Time to let go.  Al’s hands relaxed and he started to float as the Nash dived.  For a split second he watched the car hurtle ahead of him, and then he dropped into the sweetness.

Al bubbled back to conciousness, smelling Nu-Grape and tasting blood.  Bees buzzed around him.  He could see the swath his body had cut through the shrubs and hear voices above him and then around and below him.  Slowly he turned his head, feeling twigs poke and comb his scalp.  Blossoms waved over his face, between him and the deep blue sky---and then, a wisp of smoke.  His head, unbroken, completed the radius and took in the view of shattered remains strewn far below him.  There was nothing left of the back of the Nash, only the differential remained, wicking a small dull orange flame and greasy thread of black smoke.  Only a few brittle branches held him back.

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.

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. 

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