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Doak Walker's Backup
Standing next to the tracks in San Antonio I watched my rail riding advisor disappear as the boxcar we shared traveled east. He said he had been backup to Doak Walker at SMU but when later I checked the roster his name was not there. Also I could not find any evidence that black men were attending Southern Methodist back in the late forties. Strangely, this did not make me doubt any of his stories, even the ones that could not be backed up with hard facts because most of what he had told me had served me well, like how to jump off a train without hurting yourself. Unfortunately he had told me this last bit after I had jumped once, and hurt myself.
I had to catch Interstate 10 to Interstate 35, the right side of my face was a black and red scab from temple to jawbone, and I was overall a dirty boy with rail riding grime coating most of my surface.
An amorous Native American picked me up and I told him I would be appreciating the lift but no nooky would be exchanged between us. The offers of man love had shocked me at first but I was coming to understand the game better and this guy was drunk, at eight in the morning, and I had a weapon, and I was tired, and that was that. He dropped me at a place that left me a short walk to I-35, which would take me into Austin.
I was a few days late for the start of the spring semester at the University of Texas. I wasn't a dropout yet, but in retrospect, I was very close. This train trip, it was already starting to wear the weight of a seminal moment in a boy's life.
I don't even think I was hitchhiking, I was just walking to the right spot, when a VW Beetle pulled onto the shoulder. It was Dave, this guy who had roomed next door to me at Kinsolving (a girls dorm) during summer school. He was a few days late for the start of the spring semester too. He asked me what happened to my face and I said I fell off a train and that became the refrain for the casual acquaintance regarding what happened to me. Most people thought I had just gotten my ass kicked and the train thing was me and my dry wit.
He took me to the apartment on West Lynn and Ninth that I was sharing with three other guys. Off campus, bigtime, grown up stuff. I got to see myself in a mirror for the first time in a week (we stayed in an El Paso mission that first night after the train accident and I saw myself there but it was one of those shiny metal mirrors and the detail was lacking.)
My roommates were all gone--presumably attending college--so I had a little time to collect my thoughts, wash up, shave around the scab, get dressed and...go to college?
It was too late for classes but I walked up West Lynn to Enfield, caught the Enfield shuttle bus, and walked the UT campus. I was tweaked, circuits sizzling. I wasn't who I was so who was I?
I entered the undergraduate library and took a seat by myself at a table for four. As soon as I sat down I knew I was done with the college thing.
I had taken another trip right after summer school, in August, with a friend named Billy, and we had hitchhiked together up into Telluride, for the Jazz Festival. That was a life-changing, life-affirming trip too, but more for Billy than for me and it was me telling him to hang in there, don't drop out, when he discussed his doubts about school to me in December, right before I hitchhiked to USC and came back on a train.
I went through the motions for awhile, attended a few classes, tried dropping acid before some of them to see if that would help, but it didn't.
At the end of January my father wrote to say he had opened for me what looked like official mail. As he was handling most of my "business" affairs I did not take issue with his felonious behaviour. He was sure this was a mistake but their was a ticket for me from Los Angeles, or Anaheim maybe, for hitchhiking. Oops, those damn CHiPs, I had forgotten all about that.
Home Away From Home
I went hiking yesterday up in the Shenandoah National Park. It felt like I was the only human up in there. I had to walk along Skyline drive for about half a mile to get back to my truck after the hike and not a single car passed by. I of course was travelling with an entourage of women--Missy Elliot, Gillian Welch, Francoiz Breut, (Miss) Catpower, (Miss) Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Neko Case, (Miss) Belle or Sebastian, and (Miss) Mick Jagger.
I wondered at first who's footprints I was following, a heavy person for sure, their prints had broken all the way through the hard packed snow to the dirt and rock of the path. They were old prints, that you could tell because they had no definite shape, the edges of the snowprints were melted, leaving a design that did not compute inside my humancentric frame of reference. But of course we are not alone and the prints belonged to a bear, this I realized when I saw a print with full definition, so I became super self aware for a few minutes, which did not hurt me.
But was this one last romp and feed before hibernation and am I edible? I can't see serving me up at a dinner party of people, or bears, you were trying to impress.
I just poked myself in the eye so I'm crying a little.
The path turned into a stream once or twice, water flowing out of rock, maybe not THE source, but a source, so I had to sit on a flat boulder at one point and consider it all. Actually there were two streams, both of them just began out of the side of the hill and flowed down the slope into the canyon into which I was descending. One stream was to my left and the other was to my right. The left stream had white water, the right stream, the stream that was actually the path, was more of a flowing trickle.
Just saw a shooting star out the window.
I think it was the Hughes River I kept having to cross, and the water was up a little and some of the large boulders which would normally rise above the clear cold water and act as stepping stones, were submerged. Others were coated with ice. I belabored over the idea of crossing each time, once crabwalking awkwardly over an icy log. Missy Elliot said I look like a bitch doin that, which hurt my feelings, and I told her I would not bring her back out here if she was going to talk like that. Neko Case smirked, she's a hard one to read. Miss Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, she kept wailing that she loved me like no one else did but she would not hold my hand, so I had to question just what was the good of that love.
There was a locked up cabin at the bottom of the canyon, the Corbin cabin it is called, and before and after it remain the faintest signs of a life long ago. A piece of a wall here, a diverted spring there. The park ranger at the Thorton Gap entrance had sold me a map after I asked her to suggest a nice five mile circuit hike and I kept referring to it but as simple as the map was I could not lock into it. It did not seem to relate to anything I cared about but at the same time I did not want to take a wrong fork and end up halfway to Old Rag. Francoiz Breut would look over my shoulder but she doesn't speak much english and when she pointed at the soft, rip proof, water proof map, and said, "we here," I had to wonder if she meant, "yes, here."
Hookey In The Park
Well my 21st century east coast tenure number one is about up, I just emailed someone that I was finishing up here and getting ready to leave next week, which now that I say it, I guess I need to contemplate my movements a little. Okay, done. I'll just do what work I can do and then pack my tools and stuff the day before I leave, and then leave. Assuming nothing weird happens, I'll probably come out this way again in the Spring.
You know, I think it is precisely that place between assuming that nothing weird will happen and knowing that something weird is going to happen is what gets me out of bed in the morning.
In bed this morning I did briefly contemplate that nothing weird was going to happen, ever again, and that we were all (sorry to include you) cardboard cutouts haphazardly positioned and repositioned and sometimes pasted to the manilla paper background drawings of a sweet but slightly demented child. A child with generic talent keeping it all inside the lines.
Yesterday was the first day in a week without snow on the ground and now they are calling for more snow and/or freezing rain off and on over the next week. I guess I've had a fairly good taste of real winter (not Montana or N. Dakota severe but still...), even though I'm leaving two days before winter starts.
I haven't talked to any of my New Orleans bosses in five months. They will be angry. They may not let me work with them. I may not care.
Another fence board blew off in the night. I may fix that later, after I get done playing hookey in the park one last time.
One last thing. I have seen that mountain to the north glow red in the morning but right this minute it is glowing purple. Purple mountain majesty, dig?
The Missing Ballerinas
Queen Noor was in Little Washington the other day. She signed her book and had tea with prominent locals at the Inn. I was not aware of it nor did I see about town members of the Washington (DC) Ballet, who were also here, at least partly to entertain Queen Noor. In retrospect I do remember the day though because a person (that would be me, I don't have a title, nor am I bitter about it, much) could not park to get his mail from the PO Box what with all the limosines and that tour bus lining the street on both sides of the only stop sign in town. The limos were parked tight like very expensive sardines.
The thing about sardines is, despite the fact that they may be associated with hobos and low end snacking, really, they are pretty damn expensive if you price them out by the pound. Of course a pound of sardines is more than a person needs, three or four ounces will usually suffice. I like the golden smoked variety from the Reese company.
Once, a more youthful me, staring at the warm glow of gas flares in the distance, shivered while eating sardines and oranges with a hobo in the El Paso train yard in January. We spent two and a half days together in the El Paso yard waiting for the right train but eventually succumbed to the idea of warmth and community and followed a psst in the dead of night to join some other hobos, who, cliched as it seems, were identifiable only when the sucked on ends of their cigarettes offered that most meager illumination.
Not that I had ridden on that many boxcars previous (or since), but that was the most fucked up boxcar ever constructed. We tried to bed down ("always leave your bag unzipped in case you have to move fast, " he instructed me) shortly after the train started moving but the suspension was all messed up and the car rocked and shook all night long, and into the next day, and however long it was before we arrived in San Antonio, where I saw the I-10 and bid my friend adieu, lowering myself properly and running before my feet hit the ground. I waved standing up and proud to his diminishing outline.
Before my success came my failure. Arriving in El Paso from Yuma he said we had to get off because if we got caught riding in those cars we would be in deep shit. We had boarded a slow moving flatcar in Yuma that was carrying a version of the Chevy Camaro, this would have been the '78 model, and we had broken into one, found the key in the glovebox, and started that bitch up. Cranked up the heat, played the radio. Not that comfortable to sleep in but warm.
So I just jumped, was on my feet for a split second, and then the right side of my face was scraping the gravel.
Which is to say, back on that other rocking boxcar with all those unidentifiable men, I was not so scared because I knew the glow of my cigarettes was offering up to the curious a pretty scary picture of a possibly very bad dude.
After my hobo friend consoled me a bit about my landing he said he thought I had done this before. I told him, no, I hadn't. That's when he told me about lowering yourself and hanging there with your feet just above the ground and then to start running like mad before you acually put your feet on the ground.
The day before the psst in the night we had found a half bottle of tequila lying on the ground next to a cold,dead, campfire. I was the only one of us who had money, I hadn't told him this until we found the tequila, but then I offered to walk to the nearest store, where I spent some of my six dollars on the sardines and oranges. The tequila buzz on top of the mild concussion, at midday eating oranges and sardines while shivering and staring at the distant gas flares, is a memory locked in good and tight.
I wish I had seen me some ballerinas the other day. I am capable of loving that look of practiced gracefulness.
Mom's Birthday
Almost ninety years ago on this day, which is almost a hundred years from this day, not far from where I have 12 acres of totally unused, highly taxed land, in Bastrop County, outside of Austin, TX., my mom was born.
Some stories say grandpa was a womanizer--he did disappear and is non-existent in family stories--and grandma went sick (in the head). No one much speaks of the heart. Mom grew up with an aunt and uncle.
You have all heard of or known people with names that can be either boy or girl, like Tracy, Leslie, Alex, etc. but there is no rhyme or reason or story behind the reason my mom was named Clifford.
Despite the unusual name she has done pretty well for herself. She was a country girl who went to college when not alot of country girls were going to college, in the late thirties, and received a journalism degree from the University of Texas, in Austin. She was a glider pilot instructor during WWII even though she had never flown a glider herself.
She married, had six kids--not all of whom cause her hearthache--and raised us in a fashion that I can honestly find no fault with. And she would never criticize me for ending a sentence with a preposition. She cried a little when I dropped out of college and went hitch-hiking cross country but once she realized I could survive even my most ridiculous choices she grew into an honest appreciation of my lifestyle.
All my other siblings have produced progeny and so my mom has somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty grandchildren and I think four great-grandchildren. She lives alone though, ten years ago my father was in the best health of his life when cancer ravaged all of his internal organs, at the age of eighty. She doesn't want a stranger living in the house assisting her and she doesn't want to go to that assisted living facility just up the road, where many of her old friends from church are now living. They try to get her to join them but she doesn't want to and anyway suspects their intentions are partly based on the fact that they get perks for bringing in new clients.
She worries about me being alone and I worry about her being alone. She once hinted that she wouldn't mind it if I lived with her even though she has scoffed at invitations at living in another brother's converted garage. "I am not living in a damn garage."
Unfortunately, that's the way I would feel about living in Dallas, or maybe just living in Dallas with my mom.
With all of us boomers getting old these are the questions that will face us. What do we do about ourselves? What do we do about what we love?
Happy Birthday Mom.
The Moonlit Night
So finally it gets dark a few minutes before sunrise. I was up a couple of times in the night, every nimrod (there actually is a Nimrod in my family tree) except me knows to stop drinking beer in the winter, instead to drink hard stuff, less liquid to the buzz, less challenging to the bladder, but I'm up doing what you gotta do and I look out the window and holy cow would you look at that.
I can't see the full moon but the night is lit by it and with all the snow on the ground everything is white and light, except that leafless walnut tree and it's black, but not black as night because like I'm telling you, this dead of night is different, like right before dusk or after dawn, although not that either because those things I've seen and this thing I'm seeing I haven't seen before.
This thing I'm seeing is comprised in part by a moon shadow and the moon which I cannot see is positioned such that the tree on the ground, the shadow, is the proportioned equal to the upright tree. The tree on the ground is so black I think I might be dreaming because there is no such all encompassing black in the world I have known up to this moment. Then I went back to bed and thought about the same old shit, some of it not altogether unpleasant.
Halfway Up The Slope
Yeah, right, Okay, I get it, snow.
Didn't get anymore accumulation last night so the four inches on the ground which has melted to about three inches, and then been assaulted by much colder temperatures so that it is crackly crunchy, is all there is. They say we could get more fresh stuff today but I don't believe it.
I have four rooms to paint, ceilings, walls and woodwork, over the next few days so I need to get on with it. One of the rooms is this one, yeah, and this red easy chair in front, or is it behind? the flat panel, often calls to me--sit a spell, stare at the screen, look for something. Don't take this the wrong way please but I could probably benefit from a light whipping. Just a get off your ass sort of thing, Ok, I don't want to dress up or anything.
I have paused in the reading of a friend of a friend's novel to finally read a friend's mystery novel that I brought with me but could never pick up due to all the noise in my head and the powerful lulling of that noise by the mountains and sky and green grass. My friend is hilarious though and gots great tempo and it's nice spending the evenings with her words and ideas.
I got stuck coming up the driveway yesterday, just inside the gate, my tires for shit on snow. I wanted to not look like a total pussy to all the four-wheel truck driving locals so I later made the 200 yard walk down the hill and with some effort and minimal expertise got the truck halfway up the slope, into the guesthouse driveway.
New Snow, Old P...
Ok, first, and I'm sure most of you already know this, but--the penis is 425 million years old. There is a lot of seemingly more pertinent stuff on Google News this morning but that's the one I'm bringing home.
It's a good thing I didn't shave my head recently--sure, all freaks think about it from time to time--because I needed something to cover my ears just now on my morning walk in the freezing rain crunching through four inches of fresh snow. Scarfs are good too but Southern boys don't always have a scarf handy so I wrapped my neck in a dirty long sleeve t-shirt. As it turns out I don't have a whole lot to say about my forty acres of virgin snow. It is pretty. It is white. And I don't have a tobaggon. I guess I can always take consolation in the fact that my penis is 425 million years old, give or take.
Weather And Football
It is not indicative of a state of boredom that I refresh the National Weather Service website periodically throughout the day. My duties as caretaker require a certain "step ahead" approach to the possibilities of inclimate weather. Rap a few hose bibs here, run a little water there, make sure the house animal does not escape to the outside and become a frozen catcicle. The last bit was really a joke. The cat is probably snuggled up under somebody's covers in one of those upstairs beds. He doesn't have any motivation to escape.
Also, it has been fifteen years or so since I have seen snow, since that Cool Breeze tour of 87 (that's right, I used to name my road trips; you can take the boy from wherever he is but you can't make him give up his irony), which had me living for a few months in Great Falls, VA, just up the road from Oliver North and other superstars from the politcal/industrial/military complex. It snowed five or six inches once. It was neato. And what a long chapter that was between then and now, where I sit in Rappahannock waiting for snow or ice.
A bunch of ya'll aren't from the South and so probably don't consider snow and ice all that neato. It probably isn't that neat and will be very un-neat if frozen tree limbs crash the power lines and I lose heat, and get all cold to my close to the surface bone and my spine starts feeling like railroad spikes are being driven into it with a ten pound sledge hammer.
What I wanted to talk about yesterday but didn't was the success of Eddie Green, a New Orleans kid who used to live across from me on Dumaine, who I watched for a couple of years as his nationally ranked high school basketball team went to state championships (and won once). He went to Southern University in Baton Rouge on a football scholarship. He's a senior now, six feet and one inch tall and 250 pounds heavy. His number is 44. He worked for the NO Recreation Dept. over the summer mentoring young kids. He's a linebacker mostly. He's really good at hitting people on the field. He likes to talk trash on the field too. It's part of the game. Messing with your opponents head. He's having a really good last half of his senior year, recovering fumbles and getting five or six tackles a game and Southern is having their best season in several years. I think they are 10-1 or 11-1. Eddie has been spending his New Orleans time--holidays, game weekends (the big Bayou Classic game at the Superdome against Grambling every year) and summers at the Dumaine house with M (his mom loves him is why she pushed him out of her nest), so hopefully I'll see him soon, and he can tell me stories. There will be no snow.
How He Cheers Up
There are things I have seen (crooked spines and autonomy-threatening infirmities) which make me question the wisdom of attaining old age and other things I have seen (the twinkling eyes of a ten-year-old in a seventy-year-old body) which make me think boy oh boy what a great thing the future will be. The fun really will never stop.
One may question my use of the word "ghetto" in describing the neighborhoods I haunt and live in--in New Orleans--but a few of you have been there and I think will agree that ghetto in this case is not an unfairly used noun/adjective. Unless for you "ghetto" is only evocative of the negative aspects of the condition and then I have to tell you, no, that's not what I'm talking about. Ghetto for me is synonymous with those who are surviving it on a daily basis with laughter and tears. The strength of its citizens inspires me way way beyond the words to describe it.
I don't know what it means for you. I don't know how much depravity you have seen. I don't know what you consider hardship. The words don't tell it and neither do the pictures. The gutter, the vomit, the blood, the needles, the vials, the baggies, the children pulling triggers, the crumbling schools, the children pulling triggers, the children pulling triggers, the dead, the walking wounded, all those single mothers and fatherless children. And the graceful, confident, intelligent, beautiful, lovely, eleven-year-old girl who responded matter-of-factly to my suggestion that the world was full of possibilities, with the words--"I'll never get out of here," with a tone and maturity that implied, "end of discussion."
Everyday in the ghetto can be like that, the two ideas colliding: I'm going to live life to the fullest, then die in the gutter.
So for me, the temporary citizen with the ability to come or go, the taster of alternate realities not just through drug use, I find it comforting that there is a place where all the vain, silly complexities of life are boiled down to the simple idea of surviving the day in front of you. Do something, love someone, hate someone, try, fail, fuck, be celibate, dig deeply. Don't brood, but don't forget, Death awaits. It doesn't get much simpler than that. Cheer up.
The Irony Storm
I feel that something has happened to upset the irony balance on the planet and so we should all be careful with our meanings until such a time I deem it safe to carry on. Why I should be in charge of such an important task I cannot tell you but something has to be done. Everybody, please be careful. Also, everyday, you might want to try to find somebody who really likes you no matter what, and utter a few proclamations of what you deem to be simple, literal truth. See what happens. But again, I implore you--be careful. You may find that the people you thought really liked you only like you when you speak about the weather and other subjects that in no way challenge the potential balance of the meaning of meaning. Or it may turn out that your friend cannot understand you unless your speech is peppered with irony. This is not just about drunken, awol, frat boy, mama's boy world leaders in flight jackets but you can use that as an example if you have reached this far and are scratching your head--irony?
Leaving this phenomenon unchecked we run the risk that simple truth will be lost forever. Our vacuous and vapid popular culture will rule the day, as it now appears to be--let's hope temporarily--ruling the world.
Thanksgiving 2003
The idea of looking for meaning in a meaningless world was underscored by the kid in the pantry when he said, "what's the use?" in response to his mother's admonishment and subsequent offer of compromise.
I was going to tell the kid the use but it gets complicated and its hard to be sure how to say it exactly and it really gets difficult when trying to explain it to someone so much closer to immortality, as children know themselves to be.
But kid, as I see it, the use is to simply be, to survive every onslaught, and absorb as much or a little more than as much as you can stand and then give something back so that you don't become a human black hole.
I celebrated Thanksgiving with other humans this year. Contrary to my affinity for solitary existence I enjoy humans pretty well, obviously some more than others, but the repetitive action of interpreting new personalities and approximating appropriate response has left me feeling, while somewhat satisfied, totally frayed.
Of course I medicated throughout with deep breaths and alcohol, one day having my first Guinness shortly after noontime, and my last shorty before 10 pm. And then there's that surprising emotion of missing people once they are gone which I am not as experienced dealing with as perhaps I should be.
I called my nearly ninety-year-old mother Thanksgiving night, ashamedly I admit only after being prodded to, and she is doing fine but seemed a little frail, and the deterioration of her memory is not a completely new thing but I hated hearing it over the phone, my least favorite communication device. I guess she was forgetting that rarity of rarities, my recent writing to her, with return address clearly marked on envelope, and we danced shyly and awkwardly around the fact that it was proving to be a rather difficult task for her to hear, remember, and write down the five numbers of my Rappahannock zip code. Of course why should any mother have to remember so many addresses? Why won't that son just stay put somewhere?
As I think of all the addresses I may inhabit over the next several months I look forward for better or worse to the blur of uncertainty. If I just remember to keep those frayed edges trimmed I'll be okeedokey.
Welcome Home
Not having anything to say, why should that stop me?
My nephew got back--is back in America-- from his job as a military grunt, flying around in helicopters, in Iraq.
So many helicopter headlines these days that I can't tell you how relieved I am. Some things are no fun to consider.
Hi, welcome to my wordless world.
I'll have the baby cakes and bacon, ok, more coffee?, please, cold enough for you?, yes, very much so.
Where do thoughts go?
I See Colors
Fall colors, yeah, that's one thing. A thing like the top rated TV show or the weekend's top movie or the bitchin' automobile driven in the weekend's top movie. But if you are looking for real color wait until all the leaves fall down. Wait for that low lying winter sun to cast upward shadows. Wait for those colors that have no name.
Kid Not
The thing about working for yourself is that not only is your boss an asshole, your only worker is a no good slacker.
It's Friday in Rappahannock, latter part of November, and the day is looking too perfect for working.
Who's in charge here?
I am
You're fired.
I will miss the park when I leave so I should go there today, work tomorrow when all the weekenders are flooding in.
You got beaten up with premonition the last time you went to the park.
Jesus, I know, and it all came true.
You scared?
Are you kidding?
What then?
I'm going back.
The Calendar
Wow, Okay, another great sunrise. What have I got, what have I got?
There's this, that calendar thing: it has sprouted new tentacles.
Some clergymen have told other clergymen to lighten up and even the Rappahannock News has not so subtly implied that the Baptists are a little overboard on their anti-nudity stance.
The calendar, conceived as a fundraiser, and which I finally got the courage to look at, is black and white photographs of local Rappahannock men, some old, some young, nude but with essentials covered up. There is one shot of naked butts, younger men, that may titillate some, somewhat. Otherwise, the calendar is totally tame and even has one or two shots which in my unschooled opinion contain some artistic merit.
One of the anti-calendar preachers offered this bible verse, which I really like, and so here it is: "Whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy--meditate on these things."
The anti-calendar preacher who offered the bible verse ( from the apostle Paul, fourth chapter of Philippians) meant to imply that the calendar was not something to meditate on.
Obviously, we all must decide for our ownselves what is "lovely."
And good luck to each of us.
Wait For Me
To the person living under my house in New Orleans I have to warn you that we have called the police.
--I don't see any phone wires under here--
You can't stay there.
--Why not?--
First and foremost because you snore, mane.
--I can sleep on my side, if you had just told me earlier...--
No, I'm telling you now, go find a shelter.
--People f with you in them shelters, they steal your shit, and I got beat up last time.--
You probably got beat up because you pissed somebody off not doing what they ask you to do.
--Man was trying to handle me.--
And you're driving the neighbor's dogs crazy. So you snore and the dogs bark, it's no good.
--I could sleep on your couch?--
No.
--People aren't nice to me.--
It is unnatural for some to be nice.
--I won't snore, please...--
Look man, I'll give you a ride to an uptown shelter, that's the best I'm going to do for you.
--You're not here to give me a ride.--
I will be there.
--When?--
Soon.
--Ok, I'll wait for you.--