An Irish Tale

An Irish Tale… (after Dick Farina) Though we were all several generation American, our family reunions were typically Irish. My siblings and I would commiserate about our dysfunctional family by immersing ourselves in it. Generous amounts of alcohol were imbibed, and wild driving on the country roads and various escapades were almost always involved. On one such occasion my brother said he’d seen an ad for “Jim Morrison” night at our favorite local tavern, “The Wild Turkey” As it was owned and operated by a drug dealing Deadhead, we thought it might be fun. Armed with glow-in-the-dark squirt guns, full-face,dark wraparound ski goggles, military-issue ammo belts, half-laced hiking boots,we strode through the door. We looked like some wild-eyed South American revolutionaries. I’d found this 1940’s “zoot suit,” with peg legs and wore it over my “Che Guevara” t-shirt. The “Abbie Hoffman” American flag vest I’d constructed was hidden beneath too–the matter to be flashed at the right moment. Several pitchers later, consensus was reached and I removed the grey, outer suit coat and, shouting Viva la Revolution! and squirting everyone in range, I jumped on top of the bar…. Even my buddy the bartender thought that went a wee bit too far, and we were escorted out the door. Down the street was one of the 21 watering holes in a town of 5,000–and a stone-cold redneck hangout. Nobody quite knew what to make of us when we sauntered in and sat down at a table. We didn’t know what to make of the change in music–from Jim Morrison’s come on baby light my fire… to this inane C & W song about ya pissed me off, ya fuckin’ jerk (then something about so it’s off to the rodeo!…And maybe we were a wee bit disoriented. In any event, neither side took a liking to the other, and licketedy-split, as the locals liked to say, the barstool row of belly`d up to the bar good ole boys roused themselves, as a unit, from their squinty-eyed stupor and managed to give chase… One night we all took magic mushrooms and walked all over the little town–finding overlooked oddities which became objects of fascination. Passenger trains had become a thing of the past even before our family had moved there, so we walked the abandoned railroad tracks undisturbed. The rails were rusted, but the oiled, machine-pungent wooden tees beneath were faintly luminous in the moonlight. The gravel bed crunched from our otherwise silent footsteps. At the boarded-up station we found an old sign indicating “Owego.” With the rotting wood having blistered the paint, though, it could be Omega–with the right lambent angle and “doors of perception.” Thus was formed our “Omega Club.” And having properly initiated ourselves, we giggled our way to the local kid’s park and took turns pushing the “Zen Merry-Go-Round” till nearly dawn… But usually in that area somebody would find a way to turn things nasty–resentment, hard-scrabbling lives, third-generation on welfare ignorance, whatever… One afternoon we were coming back from an afternoon in Ithaca–where Jim was thinking of going to Cornell after his stint in the Navy. We were in great spirits after a day of hiking the gorges and visiting such old staples of our youth as Camp Barton, our Boy Scout camp along the shores of big Cayuga Lake. We were doing the back, scenic dirt roads and encountered an old American van in front of Jim’s new little Toyota sedan. The driver slowed to a crawl and wouldn’t let us pass–swerving left or right to cut us off. When we finally got by Jim laid on the horn, and, family tradition, we all flipped him the bird. He responded by trying to ram us and run us off theroad. When we reached our house, we pulled over; the guy tossed a beer bottle and hit the front fender (narrowly missing me in the passenger seat). We tried to cut him off, but heard get the guns from inside. So after a brief confrontation, we let the clown go. But, later that eve, Jim–he’s got a Navy buddy along, we’re all drinking beer– and I looked at each other; nodding in agrrement we shouted “Commando raid!” His buddy had led a rather sheltered suburban life and was not ready for the routine–all black Navy sweaters and knitcaps, dark pants, burnt-cork faces and boots. We were pros from years of teenaged raids on the local farmers–who’d sit all night watching television with shotguns loaded with rock salt. You had to be slick and fast or you’d catch some very painful particles that would burn for days. We picked the lock on the passed-out old man’s gun cabinet. As he’s a card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association, it’s an extensive collection. I grab my favorite, a Mossberg 12 guage with which I’d been a crack clay-skeet shooter. Plus these special “M-80’s,” explosives loaded into shotgun shells that could be shot and launched a good hundred and fifty yards… Some recon from an old friend still local had given us a target–Weiss Road “Hollow,” a place on this dirt road a half-mile down the hill where several trailers had cleared spots from the swampy land around a creek and set up camp. We were advised to be careful,though, they had a rep for being nasty hillbillies. I had the Mossberg, Jim a Smith & Wesson 357 pistol, and his friend a lever-action 22. “Cool,” he’d gushed, “I get to be The Rifleman“. Clouds have pretty much bocked out the moon–just faint pink and blue swirls–but we know the land well. The old man never used the farm for anything–he just liked the notion of being a country squire–and the roads and fences are in the state of entropic decay all too typical of the region. I tell Jim’s friend to watch his step and we head for the far southwest ridge. Soon enough we cross a rusty old barbed wire fence marking off our land from the neighbor’s to the north. From the safety of brush on the crest above the “hollow” we do a survey. There are three trailers on this side, a couple on the other. They hadn’t been there when we’d grown up, but already the backyards were cluttered with the usual local lawn ornaments: hulks of cars in various states of disrepair, old fashioned washing machines gone to seed, & other strange junk seldom otherwise seen. Jim’s friend, excited, starts giggling. Down in the hollow a dog–big-looking, in the back yard–barks and growls. It makes a run towards us and the hill,a chain rattles than snaps the beast into the air at its end. I’ve got both barrels loaded with M-80’s and I launch the first towards the trailer at far right–we were looking for the telltale van but the dog getting wind of us changed our plans. At it’s thunderous boom–too far wide to the right–the dog shuts up. Next shot went too far to the left of the one at left end–even with altitude correction. I reload and for my third I say Fuck it and launch it straight for the back window of the middle trailer–it hits and explodes, shattering the window… After a momentary silence–as “incoming” these M-80’s are mighty impressive–we hear, as we’re hightailing it back up the hill to the safety of deeper cover, the grinding and spluttering to life of pickups and the van. A few head wildly in one direction, the rest mudslide off into the other. By the time they reconvene–from high atop a couple-of-hills-over vantage point we see the beams of light–its too late. No way in the world are they going to risk coming into the thickets after us; even the dogs had been whimpering too much to give chase… While we’re hiding out and moving about, we see several Sheriff’s cars arrive at our house and try to arouse old John. Lights are off, looks like nobody’s home, so they give up and leave… I think that was the night that, after a few more celebratory beers, we shot up the family canoe. For years it had sat uselessly on its side, with leaks in the aluminum from exposure to the elements–wintertime freezing and cracking–that had made it unusuable for even our farm’s pond. As we were on an “expedition,” we were talking about how dictatorial our father John–with his Hemingway-esque white-beard, i.e., the Great Sportsman used to be on our canoe trips to Canada’s Algonquin Park. Our first year, before he got hip to the ways of the wild, he’d made us carry, on portages, this very heavy wooden chest– coated with lacquers and decorative Formica–in which were too many backpacking taboo’s to recount (big heavy metal grill, too big cast-iron frying pans, etc.). With nothing but square wooden handles on each end, the thing quickly became utterly unbearable for Jim and I as we’d hike the sometimes several mile long portage paths carved out of the pristine wilderness between lakes… Too, John used to use the matter of inheritances–that mythical masculine influence over the world of material things–as a power control trip. All senex embittered he’d say things along the lines of “I know that none of you have any likings for me, but you better do what I tell you or you won’t get a penny of my money when I’m gone…” At various stages, each of us had gotten the “that’s it for you!” trip. Yet, we’d managed to counteract, all having made a solemn vow to make a four-way split no matter what the damn words on paper said at the old man’s demise… Though at our school I was the All-American Kid, when it came to John I was very much an early-on given to be written off. The worst came while I was a student at SUNY Buffalo, for my refusing to drop my Marxism and “free thinking” classes. I’d done a 70 page paper on “Why Are We in Vietnam” my freshman year that had my Poly Sci teacher a bit taken aback at my enthusiasm. I’d turned the paper in late and he’d called to make sure I picked it up from him at his home; I’d wheedled the old man into dropping by on our way home from my dorm’s moveout day. As we stood chatting my old man laid on the almost innocuous horn of our VW van (as an engineer he admired German precision), the professor had sadly smiled, shook my hand and made my promise to look him up next fall. When I showed John the “A+” he–annoyed at the title–grabbed and almost tossed it out his window. Our brief discussion ensuing almost got me having to hitchhike home from Buffalo. I’d also taken a “History of Consciousness” class known as a “mick,” in which we read Aldous Huxley and Carlos Castenada. The final had a legendary reputation, the professor would pass a joint around and, at each student’s toke, go, “great, another A!”. .. John’s ultimate temporal machination, however, was his refusal to allow a lawyer to represent me after a motorcycle accident my freshman summer. Several lawyers back at Buffalo had told me that I should get compensated a bare minimum of around 50 grand, and were willing to take the case without a retainer, but the old man did his grinding teeth drunken monkey grin in my face and said, No way!. Being under the legal age of 21 then, I could do nothing about it–except transfer to Berkeley and California’s legal age of 18. Looking back the money didn’t matter to me–what never healed was my track and hoop careers–my track coach had plans for me to star in the pentathalon and my hoop coach called me “the best natural defender he’d ever seen, if you owrk hard you got a shot at the pros…” So that night, perhaps remembering all these things, we jump up, grab guns again, go into our big side yard and fire all kinds of volleys into the hapless and most innocent canoe. … Over even more congratulatory beers, Jim’s buddy is highly impressed. “Wow, do you guys do stuff like this every time you get together?” That sad look of Irish recognition arises between Jim and me, as we look over the tears and gashes of the burst-marks in the canoe. It lays right between the old rusted-out swingset and the big oak tree with a tire swing where we’d spent many a happy summer afternoon in our idylic youth… Yes, I’m afraid so… TaMo, a.k.a. Tom (not the actor) Noonan… summer of 2001, revised 2006

The Judean Terror

THE JUDEAN TERROR

For one-hundreth of the price that had been paid by the freeman Atilus to bring this gladiator into his ludi, another man would fatally betray him…

Yet this time was still to come. In another land, far away from this ampitheater. One just a short journey from Rome, filled with munera fans eager to see the games neglected by the Emperor Tiberius.

As The Judean Terror wrapped the long linen straps to pad his ankles and calves, others of his ludi watched. At first mockingly billed as The Judean Terror, this one in short order had become the featured performer. Outside, up the dreaded ramp to the hot, shifting sands of the arena—always burning the soles of one’s feet no matter how callused—cries of impatience jeered the preliminary event’s contestants.

This one’s tenure had almost been short-lived; in his very first victory he’d refused the crowd’s insistent iugula!, iugula!, iugula!

The editor had become furious, standing upon his seat to give his modest form more stature, he’d repeated the dreaded thumbs up! In all directions the crowd continued to respond. This one, billed as The Judean Terror, had just delivered what looked like the death blow! The stacked rings of the wooden scaffoldings—weaving and shaking with the surges of the tightly packed crowd—had oo’ed habet!, habet!, then shrieked with displeasure when they realized that he’d not jammed his trident into the neck of his fallen foe, but had merely pinned his right sword arm to the sand instead.

The man had stood, calmly gazing upon the waves of spectators groaning the stands this way, then that, the faces in the crowd one blur of blood-lusting froth, then had dropped to his knees and bowed his head. There he’d remained, awaiting the editor’s hand motioning his beheading by the stadium guards

But the editor had feared this one. Not only was his prowess almost supernatural but too many stories had accompanied him. And too much official attention had, having already run them out of Rome, unwelcomingly come their way again. So, at first, the editor hid in his box, trembling. Of course he did not wish to upset Atilius but he was all too aware of how the promotor’s greed often clouded his wisdom.

Then, as if the gods really existed, the crowd had settled into silence. The murmurs of missum, missum, had rippled here and there. Soon all were waving their hems of togas and cloaks in approval. At this call for mercy the editor jumped to his feet again and gave the thumb’s down signal to have the contest ended, both gladiators escorted back to their barracks.

Thus had this man become their leader. Though his face held the features of a Roman patrician he indeed was from Judea. He’d grown up with his brothers, family and friends as a Jew under Roman rule. Sometimes the centurians and other Roman soldiers could be cruel—treating the Jews as dogs, donkeys, beasts of burden. A childhood game they’d played with the fishermen’s nets had turned into more—together with tridents, an unusual form of self-defense.

When their mother Mary, in her sons’ view cursed with gleaming cheeks of beauty, had been insulted by a particularly savage centurian, they had hunted him down. As their forebearer, that sun of Judgement, Samson, had done in fire-branding the foxes, they’d awaited opportunity. Their nets and tridents were already making their presence felt among the occupying army; their soldier’s issue of shield and short sword proved no match for the swirling skills of distracting nets, the sharp swing of a blow to the helmet by the trident’s butt that would leave the transgressor’s head ringing for days.

That night, though, James, his brother, had gone too far. He’d pierced the cringing fool’s throat with his trident and left it as a warning.

The slain soldier’s commander was a shrewd military man. Bribery had gotten him the identity of the renegade Jews; he’d had them all rounded up and threatened with execution unless the one who’d done the deed was identified.

The man now known as The Judean Terror had stepped forward, said, “I am the one you seek.”

The commander had sentenced him ad gladium. He’d arrived in Rome, and the fat jolly man running the gladiator school had given him net and trident—as a suggested jest—and pitted him against one of Rome’s best.

Though later the ludi-master would claim that the sun had gotten in his man’s eyes (perhaps Rome’s gods wished to humble his prize gladiator a bit, as well, for his recent boastful behavior] those in the stands that day saw a man enchant another with jaguar-like stealth and suddenness, the swirls of the net hypnotic before his unseen swoop and capture of the feet, sudden tumble into the burning sand.

Rome’s fans had whooped with laughter, the Judean had stood upon his foe’s chest, awaiting his instructions. The fat jolly man had squealed in protest and managed to save his best. When the profitable sum was offered for the Judean he was only too glad to be rid of him…

Now The Judean Terror picked up each greave, fastened tight the criss-crosses of leather behind his calves and ankles. He hooked the leather-lined, broad strip of bronze around his corded-muscle mid-section. Massaging his torso with his fingers he breathed deeply, let his eyes soft gaze. Past the wooden ceiling—already acrid with dry rot. Past the guards at the square of light at the entrance to the arena…

One day soon—unknown to him, unknown to all—disaster would strike here. The slap-dashed together ampitheater—overfilled for the sake of profits by Atilius and his backers—would collapse one sultry dog day of summer and leave 50,000 bodies lying dead, gape-mouthed in astonishment.

The Terror, too, in the arena, would drop his shield and sword to the sand in amazement. The Senate in Rome would investigate, Atilius would be put into exile. This mysterious gladiator known as The Judean Terror would be sent back to Judea.

And though a patrician benefactor would purchase his wooden sword of freedom this man would never receive it; his skill had earned him too many enemies—as a final joke from Rome’s hidden quarters he’d be sent to Judea as a war-galley slave…

What happened next would only fuel the rumors, for some time to come, of the Terror indeed being blessed. A more straightforward explanation existed, however; the very network that had gotten him into this trouble would get him out. His mentor, a white-haired man from the Essene Therapeut colony in Alexandria known as Philo, would arrange a surprise freeing of him when the galley reached Judea. Not hard, as the guards, glad to be ashore again, were soused to the gills.

After some time in retreat at their desert hideout at Qumran, where the aches and wounds and memories of savage blows landed, the endless pulling of drum-cadenced oars, would all be washed away beneath the hidden spring’s waterworks cascading upon him, he would be safely able to reenter day-to-day Judean life.

And for a time the news of the ampitheater’s collapse—a fear that the Jew’s god had caused it—would keep the Roman jackels at bay. When mysterious mishaps would happen, he would be the first interrogated. Raising his palms to the centurians, he would tell them that he was a man of peace now, surely they’ve heard that he’d retired? Grunting, they’d insist that he help them—reminding him of the official favor he’d once received in Rome. He’d roll his eyes heavenward, sigh in his act of exasperation, and tell them that it must be my kid brother Philo. A description of Philo as a wild-eyed, dark-haired irrepressible youth would follow. Too, the Terror’s confession that he’d been unable to restrain him of late—that the kid had slipped somewhere into the desert, avoiding the man’s admonition to become (as himself) peaceful, a man of Heaven.

With all the sincerity he could muster he would assure the centurions that once he caught up with this renegade, why, for the safety of their tribe he’d indeed turn him over to their custody.

Eyes glinting at The Terror, mistrusting, but not really having anything to use against him, they would disperse to his goodbyes of friendship…

All this, and, sad to say, too much more, still awaited the Judean Terror as he readied himself for combat. They’d told him today he’d be atop a bridge, to be attacked from each end by threax. As he’d refused to fight his own school, barbarians—from lands where he’d not yet been heard about—had been imported.

Heavy footsteps came down the ramp towards him. “Now Jew!” the guard barked. “Remember, no net and trident until you knock each one off the bridge first with swordplay.”

He signaled his acknowledgement, reached down for his helmet. A fierce griffin rose in a crest from the bronze bowl, white feathers adorned each side—at the hinges for the cheek-guards, a primary target, yet, in his case, the feathers never touched. He put it on, swung down from the sides the cheek-guards, fastened the metal latch tightly. The soft gaze of his eyes vanished as they adjusted to the metal grates prisoning and protecting his eyeholes. With one long exhale his visage became as rock-solid as his muscled mid-section.

Vir fortis! He turned to acknowledge the salute of his school—each pounding right fist of combat to heart. One day one had ventured forth to ask the source of his mysterious strength, as his body, though supple, seemingly was no match for some of the hulks thrown at him. He’d pointed to Heaven, saying his God was a merciful one, that no matter what was taken from him or done to him, all that was ever asked of him was never to lose heart. Dignity, he’d explained, can never be taken from one, only surrendered. Die upright, he’d said, like a man.

He raised himself to full height, bowed his head in gratitude to his

comrades, turned and walked up the ramp, into the light…

The Bitter Gall of Heaven

THE BITTER GALL OF HEAVEN

—in homage to Homer’s Iliadⁱ

Vaulting towards Heaven, the Sun emerged from the deep, slow currents and still depths of Oceanus. In the cool of cypress trees, tented next to sleek black warships, oars at rest amidst the heating sand, lay—luxuriant with pillows—Achilleus and Briseis.

“You don’t look so fierce now,” she said, curling a finger in his chest hairs.

“Too hard to be so around one so charming as you,” he replied, easing his head deeper into the sweet valley of her breasts.

“Tell me what it’s like,” she said. “In battle. As women all we get to do is pray for our men. Even when alive you never talk about it.”

His eyes rolled up, amused yet dispassionate. “You wish to hear of the threshing-floor of battle? Men winnowed like wheat? The hooves of war-horses thrashing one and all, whitening with dust, like aged bones left in the whirling to Heaven’s firmament?” His face grew tender as he gazed into her widened eyes. “Not much to say.”

Chin dropping, she looked away and said, “You are indeed as arrogant as they say. When we were captured I feared the worst.” Her eyes misted, silken-lined, like the Doe-Eyes of Hera. “Our men are not like you. Simple and plain-speaking; most of the time good but sometimes coarsened, calloused, no matter how many oblations and cleansings. Your hands are strong but gentle. Alive with tenderness.” Her chin still dropped, cheeks weighted with tears, she added, “I suppose that makes me lucky…”

The canopy’s entrance stirred and in walked Patroclus. “Are you two planning to lay about all day?”

“What do you propose we do?” Achilleus eased hands behind his head. “You wish to help old Dog-Faced One? No thanks-to you or that cowardly idiot…Last night at council Diomed spoke truly; Agememnon is jinxed-whether by scheming Saturn or not. For some reason given Jove’s honour and aegis to rule us, but how bereft of valour…”

At those words Patroclus assumed a stoop, squinted his eyes and bobbed his neck.”H-H-How dare you!” he stammered in a high pitch of outrage, thrusting feet at half-angles outward in waddling walk.

“Ooo-oh!” Briseis jumped upright and clapped her hands, “Yes, Agememnon the Mum-mer!” Glee shone full in her eyes. “Do Nestor! Patroclus; or Odysseus!”

At her side Achilleus raised an eyebrow. “Friend I do indeed think she favors you better than me…”

“Now, now,” noble Patroclus gently chided, “Play you your lute, why even your savage heart is thus calmed…Yes, do your complaining with fanciful notes…”

On Achilleus the trace of a scowl broke the heightened smoothness of his cheeks, “No, I think not-though that pleasure be most pleasant and without conflict; I’ve no use today; as most hateful to me is the arrogance of Agememnon the two-faced-the grievance has soured me, too deeply.”

Though Patroclus knew how poorly their council had gone, he could tell that Achilleus had not told his dear Briseis… When he and Achilleus had captured her home city, the poor woman had been shrieking with madness upon the sight of her dead husband and three brothers returned to her; blood having barely dried upon the wounds, cooled forever now, faces fixed in the death mask of agony.

When she was brought to the presence of Achilleus and Patroclus, with fierce beauty she’d hurled insults at them, Yes, I know all about you, heartless Achaean, do you wish to slake your lust and kill me too?

Patroclus had watched as for the first time ever, he saw his good friend taken aback by a woman. It even seemed as if he were to cry-at least it looked as if his eyes had grown moist beneath the metalwork of his war helmet, which he removed and set aside. With both hands outstretched, he then reached down to the huddled Briseis, and, beckoning for her hands, helped her rise. I am most sorry, he murmered, I vow I will care for you now…Patroclus had then said, And I will be your brother…

Now as Achilleus rose from his bed and gazed down upon Briseis, Patroclus saw the same sorrow.
“Friend, please entertain our dear lady, I will be back,” Achilleus said. Bowing deeply, he backed through the curtained entrance and was gone…

Waves gently loamed upon the sands before him—the sounds as soothing as his mother’s voice.
“Oh Thetis,” he murmered, “What am I to do? How is it I am to have no wife? I swear Briseis is an honourable woman and she is my choice…”
A full moon hung in all soft glory off the horizon. Across the sea—all molten, deep midnight blue. The skiffs of waves spangled as if silver.
“To be first among the foremost—this matter have I always been taught…For what, mother? To die an early death for the sake of that skulking dogface who now steals my wife after having stolen my honor? He was to be only our principal chief, how is it none of the other Acheans can see the error of his ways? Why, Mother? Why has our Heavenly Father Zeus forsaken me so?…”
His voice faded to a whisper. Before him the slow roll of waves lulled him as low, steady thunder…
“Yes, I truly see your rides, kind mother,” spoke Achilleus, as he drifted off to sleep…

When the mighty chariot of Phoebus again pulled the sun’s constant globe all ablaze from the depths of Oceanus, Achilleus opened his eyes, brushed the sand from his face.. In front of him was a smoothly rounded, polished cedar chest.

He lifted the lid—stiff with finely-crafted hinges—and found inside, wrapped in silken cloth, a chalise of exquiste beauty. Silver embroidered with a ring of delicate leaves, the body inlaid with rubies…

Outside the tent now sounded footsteps through the sun-hardened earth. Standards announced Agememnon’s emissaries and waited, ill at ease, for response. “Yes, yes, come in,” said Achilleus, gesturing both with eyes and hands. “We’ve been expecting you.” Wary and tense, the king’s heralds advanced. “Orders from the king,” clipped one, “The oracle predicts victory from Zeus upon return of the daughter of Apollo’s priest and award of Briseis to our king.”

Hands neared swords as Achilleus widened eyes—flashing sparks of rage before softening like embers.
“Come, come,” he gestured, overly gracious, “Enjoy a good feast, good cohorts, before your dictum falls.”

Patroclus, made suddenly humble, laid cuts. Briseis, whom Achilleus had told, as best he could, upon his return that morning, emerged from the rear room of the tent in full fury. “Are you a coward?” she screamed at Achilleus. “Defend me if you are indeed a man!”
Achilleus averted her eyes, unable to speak. “Dear Sister,” Patroclus said, gently taking her arm, “He can do nothing right now, he is powerless to go against our war council. I told you, by all and utmost sacred vow, when he is able to secure your rescue and return he will…”
Made deeply uncomfortable, out of respect for their great warrior, the standards proffered excuse to decline the feast table. Achilleus shrugged, gestured for them to gather the chests of Briseis in the rear of the tent. When he walked to Briseis, palms outstretched, beseeching forgiveness, none was granted—she strode to the standards, departed, her head held tremoringly high, not looking back.

Void of utterance, the night sky—imperturbable Heaven-radiated stars…Not a breath of air…While a thousand watch-fires gleamed down upon the plain; gesturing men gathered round each, their war-horses, cleansed of the day’s hardened blood and mud, coats spangling anew, crunching oats and corn beside the darkly gleaming war chariots…
Inside the gently rustling canopy of his tent, Achilleus, his newly found chalice in hand, sat drinking the mead of Zeus…Sipping, careful not to unman himself…

They shall seek and they shall not find.

  1 Italicized phrases allusions to and quotations from Homer…

My Little Town

MY LITTLE TOWN

T hough some twenty-five years ago, the memories that I have of upstate New York still have such piercing intensity…

I began high school in 1968, the year of the student riots and strikes in Paris, France, yet, in my isolation, those events, and the rest of the super-mythical Sixties, were as if occurring in another universe. My hometown was a small, depressed rural town. Most of my classmates were the sons and daughters of hard-working, struggling-not-to-go-under, farming families. Many had been further reduced to “weekenders” with the Eisenhower-era “social engineering” arrival of an IBM “think tank.”; the Great Corporate Father had acquiesced to the wish to escape into some kind of pastoral fantasy of city folk like my foster-family. So not only had these new, mostly urban arrivals doubled the size of the town—greatly changing it’s cultural makeup—but too, many of the original population of a couple thousand had found work in the accompanying chipboard manufacturing plant.

The hubbub beginning of my tenth grade I decided— having shot up to 6’2”— that I was going to play basketball for our school team. I wheedled out of my folks a hoop and net from the mail-order catalog of Sears & Roebuck, my annual fall clothing lifeline as well, and, out of the various pieces of scrap lumber haven fallen about our once-functional farm, mounted the hoop on a backboard and raised it onto a wooden platform. In the middle of the hayfield that, after the summer cuttings by neighboring farmers, doubled as my archery range.

Given the fall chill the ball of course would not bounce. The act of shooting, too, was made difficult when the frosts caused moisture to glaze up the ball. My practice time was the steadily diminishing light remaining after my hour-plus ride home on the Football players “team bus”; after zig-zagging through the district’s dilapidated farms—most acrid with ammonia from chicken manure—our driver Mr. Whalen would hand crank the door open, bid me, the last one, a good night and head back to the bus garage…

When the oak’s brilliant red and gold plumage had faded into darkness for my ride home Basketball season had arrived. Our coach was the inimitable Mr. Murphy—not the drinking kind of Irish but an ex-Marine drill sergeant and here to tell you all about it.

Our first practice Mr. Murphy—failure to address him as Mister got you ten wind sprints right away—held a basketball in his hands and said, “Gentlemen, this is the ball. Take a good long look, as you men won’t be seeing another for two weeks.” No smile broke his face, no sardonic grin, just straightforward imparting of the news.

After all these years, I’m one of the few proud ones who was able to say, At least I didn’t phewck my guts…We did nothing but conditioning exercises for two-and-one-half hours, with pathetically short “wind breaks,” during which absolutely nothing but breathing hard and harsh was allowed, as the theory was that water would bloat us and make us sick.

Most of those trying out for the team dropped, as the locals had a habit of saying, like flies on manure. Primary culprit was the dreaded wind sprints, gentlemen!…toes touch the foul line, turn back to the baseline, toes touch the mid court line, turn back to the baseline, toes touch the over-and-back line, turn back to the baseline, toes touch the opposite foul line, turn back to the baseline, toes touch the three-feet line, turn back to the baseline, toes touch the far baseline, turn back and finish baseline…last one in the group runs with the next…

Or if you missed a line with your toes—or if Mr. Murphy thought you needed an attitude correction—you’re up again son…Now!

So engrained were the protocols of the drill routine into my consciousness that just three years later, when I tried out for the State University of New York at Buffalo team as a freshman (all teams together) I had a coach tell us, the first day, to run “the weave” and everybody but me, with practiced ease, lined up to run the drill…

I’d already felt a bit intimidated, as most of the kids were from New York City—a tight clique that already knew and had played against each; furthermore, my flat, neutral accent gave me away as a despised upstater (said like hinterlands).

As my turn among the 100 or so assembled approached, my brain went on standby; I asked, “Coach, how exactly do you want me to run?”

Immediate raucous laughter broke through the ranks.

Coach said, “The weave, son. You never did this drill in High School?”

“No sir,” I blurted. “Our coach was long on windsprints and conditioning.”

With a slightly incredulous look on his face, he then told me, “Pass, cut outside and around; receive inside, take a dribble, turn and hit the cutter, continue, and, if you’re in the position, take the lay-up. Got it?”

I said Yes and, managing to calm myself, ran the drill. Towards the end of the court I could see that I’d be doing the lay-up so I mentally readied for a show-off dunk (my growth had continued to 6’4”, 185 pounds with weight training).

Then, with a look in his eyes that I’ll never forget—an icy-blue spiraling of sorts—a beefy, crew-cut, football player deliberately stumbled into me with a forearm shiver. So, just as I’d begun focusing on my redeeming slam-dunk, I was instead knocked asprawl to the shiny wood…

I was used to this kind of hostility. My senior year in High School I’d gone from looking, in my yearbook picture, like the president of the Young Republican’s Club to having (perhaps) become the Fifth Beatle—stodgy, black-framed glasses replaced by cool new “wireframes,” my short “Princeton” haircut grown out as long wavy hair…Though white and straight, I was thus tagged in my rural area as Spearchucker ; when my “long-haired hip-pii freak” friends went to the few clubs playing “our music,” we were often in danger of being jumped by the greaser gangs—always nearby, mulling around the fast-food joints looking for some female hawg banging.

So, that tryout day, I picked myself up off the floor and stayed cool. Nobody said anything.

Upon arriving to the next day’s practice, my gut tightening, I checked the cut list. My name wasn’t there…

I threw myself into the workouts, recovering my poise, shining on defense when I picked clean a couple of the hotshots…At week’s end, the Coach and an assistant motioned me over after practice.

Where’d you go to High School, son? the Coach asked, telling me, too, that he’d never heard of a Coach that didn’t run the weave. I told him the school was tiny, “Class C,” but that we’d been a powerhouse in the State Sectionals. He chuckled and told me that I was the best natural defender he’d ever seen, and that’s something you just can’t teach, you either have it or you don’t…I was to report for special weight raining session to an assistant and start eating 10,000 calories a day, son…

Riding a bus, a big yellow “Blue Bird” school bus, on our way to Cincinnatus, a tiny little town the farthest distance from my little high school in our athletic conference, almost to Syracuse. Scrunched into the dark green seat, smelling of new car—bus #50, brand new, the biggest in our fleet, even equipped (the only one) with a cassette tape deck…My knees pebbling from the protuberated metal seat back directly before me as I awaited my music…(Mr. Whalen, our driver, had said he’d play the cassette I’d brought as soon as we got rolling; our new coach, Mr. Ryder, had said we could listen to music as long as we won…)

Then the plaintive flute and lamenting voices of “Simon and Garfunkel,”…I’d rather be a sparrow than a snail…Yes I would…. If I only could…I surely would…”

As I quietly sang along, lying low in the seat, a teammate popped his head over the seat in front of me. “Tom, you are singing. Is this the tape you said you were going to bring?” Joey, our good-natured off-guard, my best ally on the team.

“Yeah,” I said, made self-conscious. Joey and I usually played one-on-one to warm up before practice; he was the only teammate who’d still play me, as I always won and the others grumbled about my taking everything too seriously.

I mumbled something to him about the singing loosening me up for the game; his broad-faced easy grin only grew wider…

“La-dee-dah” crashed the sounds of the new song’s chorus, as the duo sang of a “boxer in the clearing all alone…la-dee-dah-da-dah-da-da-la-dee-da-da-dah…”

At the school we were to play awaited my old Boy Scout summer camp friend Jeff. For both of us, the month that we’d spend along the shores of Cayuga Lake as young boys was just the escape we needed. Both of our families qualified as what is now called “dysfunctional,” but in those days that wasn’t considered “the norm,” like now; most adults we encountered—never talking about one’s homefront difficulties—truly wished to see one succeed. Just as at my first winter campout, when, a mere lad of eleven, I went out with my patrol into a 13-degree-below-zero snowfall and returned after the weekend—guided by our kindly Scoutmaster Mr. Sibley in such manhood matters as building a pine branch lean-to—I’d gush Neat!

Camp was the same way—shale creek-beds, long ago cut by glaciers, to explore, the archery rang,. waterfront and sailboats. Thick green Army “surplus” tents, treated with moisture repellent that smelled strangely when warmed by the sun, that were erected on wooden platforms equipped with four metal-tubed bunks—the kind one always had to check to see if a prankster had set the ends hanging on platform edge for a bang of a surprise…All kinds of “merit badges” to earn that were actually a lot of fun…

I was one of the youngest in our state to earn the highest rank—“Eagle Scout.” I never missed a Monday night meeting; held in the basement of the large, made beautiful with stained glass windows, Presbyterian Church, it was where I attended Sunday School as well. We were in transition, from bubbling kids rushing to the nearby Italian Deli for Cream sodas and licorice to more measured young adults. “Community Service” was not only a required merit badge but too a quality now expected of us…

As such I became the “Flower Power” Patrol Leader for my local troop—despite the adult leaders’ trepidation at the choice of name—then the “Owl” Patrol Leader for the 13^th World Jamboree, an international gathering in Japan, where we camped for a month, at the base of Fujijama…

At our game, on the sidelines, pre-game, I managed to talk a bit with Jeff. We mostly joked about how we almost became the first Boy Scouts “86’ed” from a World Jamboree—you see, we were both 16 and already tall, so one night we scaled the Tokyo Olympic compound’s fence—after tossing over bags with out “civilian gear”—and went exploring in the night districts; the few places we tried had no difficulty with serving us beer and soon we were wandering miles away from our compound…Some fascinated locals—down one of those very clean residential streets—ventured “Hello” to us, and, trading bits and pieces of language back and forth, we managed to talk well into the morning…Our new hosts even called a cab for us and pre-paid the driver—with a wagging admonition to him not to cheat us…

Upon our return, however, not more than fifty feet after rescaling the fence, two security guards nailed us. Our absence had been noticed during bed-checks, we were hauled off to a high-level interrogation…

Courtside, that night in Cinncinatus, the memory—as well as the flush of glee at how neither of us “cracked” in our separate interrogations—brought such laughter that each of our Coaches frowned our way, each motioning for us to rejoin the team warm-ups…

During the game I exploded into action. By halftime I had 18 points, most of our production and pretty good given the slow pace of our games—patterned offense, deliberate play.

In the locker room our Coach was upset—despite our double-digit lead—and was holding forth like a country preacher “You all think you’ve got this game won; well I’ve got news for you: only one man is playing with intensity and carrying the load for the rest of you and that’s Tom.”

His words surprised me as much as they did Joey, sitting next to me on the uncomfortably narrow wooden benches. I was known as the team rebel and shunned for my aloofness…

In fact later that season I would quit the team, allegedly over my refusal to cut my hair—in those days we had to wear suits and ties as well to away games—but in reality over what I felt was shabby treatment for the team’s best producer. My specialty was those all important “boards” or “rebounds” of missed shots; when we were allowed to open things up, my snagging and whipping out the outlet pass often meant an easy bucket on the other end…

Something that I could not help but notice lacking when I watched—from the stands, as a spectator—our team lose in the state sectionals to a team we’d beaten when I was still playing earlier in the season. Enraged, our Coach punched Joey in the locker room after the loss—yelling at him, “I don’t want to see you ever hanging out with that traitor out there again!”

And what I did not know at that time were two developments of major import. Just up the road from where we were playing was Syracuse University—with a new Head coach, Jim Boeheim, who’d been hired from a junior college close to my little town. The other matter was that my real parents—a matter unknown to me then—were sitting in the stands, right next to Coach-to-be Boeheim…

That night, all that mattered to me—what I remember still—is that sheer immediacy that just seems to go on and on… Just like the when I ran those most-difficult-to-master 120-yard High Hurdles for Varsity Track season. That following spring, after a half-dozen races in which I’d lost concentration and broken stride, I finally ran a perfect race. We were at our arch-rival Spencer Van-Etten, and, before my race, were behind. My three strides over the ten yards between hurdles had never before found such degree and order as I glided over each black-and-white striped barrier; I was bereft of time, space, distance—even sound. My time, 15.6 seconds, was a school record—still not beaten—though some grumbled that it was “Wind-aided’ and therefore didn’t count.

The first of many times since I’ve found some kind of grace, that state of just being. On the court, not only becoming beyond an opponent’s anticipation but too alive with this panoramic awareness expanding and sharpening details with astoundingly subtle clarity. No end, no beginning…

Every once in a while some guttural roar from the crowd or screech of sneakers

making a sudden halt. Other than those interruptions, one long smooth flow. Hands

arched around the ball with fingertips as points of light guiding the shot…all net…

T hose hoop drills that our Coach had us do, over and over again in practice, came to life that night. One in particular—where you had to drive to the hoop, from one sideline first, then the other, and, at about eight feet from the hoop, take off, twist to the right around one stationary teammate, then twist to the left around the other positioned teammate…finishing with a full extension of the ball hand to gently make the hoop…

Driving through the lane that game, threading the defenders, seemed effortless. As a big man I was not expected to shoot the ball—especially in our patterned offense, where the other low post man and myself would cut to the high post/ shooting guard area on either side only for the sake of making a pass to the cutter down the middle. But the other team had started out collapsing and leaving me open, so I’d taken the shot, as we’d been instructed, to draw out the defenders and free the lane. When they came out on me I spontaneously went into the drive…That sudden half-step quicker, no matter who defended…

So at half-time that night I’d been very surprised not to be criticized by Coach Ryder. He had a habit of calling “time-out” during our games for the express purpose of hitting a numbskull over the head with a clipboard for being a hot dog. Joey was his favorite target—the clipboard often breaking, causing him to reach for a courtside stack of reserves he always brought.

When we took the court again, after our warm-up shots, I readied myself to win the jump ball tap. I never lost, our Assistant Coach had taught me to start really low in a cat’s crouch before springing, then reaching to flick the ball at the last moment to one of my guards I’d sense behind me.

The crowd booed me as I entered the tap circle. I was used to this treatment, as well; for holding a rival star to just two buckets the whole game an opposing coach, quoted in our local paper, termed me, The Animal.

On offense I was confronted with a “box-and-one.” One defender was assigned to me, man-to-man, wherever I went, while the rest played a rectangular zone. I was playing “team ball,” making my passes in our set plays disguised and crisp…

Yet, at one point, my teammates not hitting, our point guard dribbled down towards the baseline corner where I was posted for the play we were supposed to run, and swung a half-pivot for screening my defender, tossed me the ball and implored me to shoot!…One of my only two buckets that half.

Years later now, I still have such perfect memory of that moment…You see, I never even got to meet Coach Boeheim—let alone my real parents—the matter tossed away by my foster father, a mean drunk who muttered to Boeheim something about the kid’s not worth your effort and forbade him from contacting me—the “rules” in those days followed very strictly…The old man had tried the same stunt with my Varsity Track coach in High School. My track Coach, a devout Catholic who believed heavily in the concept that not living up to your potential was a sin against God, had shown up at his place of work, and—not intimidated by all the suits and ties in the old man’s engineering department—had picked him up and put him against the wall, saying, Your kid’s got God-given talent and he’s going out for my team, understand?

These matters all gone in the swirl of memory…would have’s and could have’s and should have’s all signifying nothing now…

I still play hoop, even at age 43. My right leg aches a bit from the compression plate I still have from a career-ending accident my college freshman summer.

I was riding a motorcycle from my one job as a lifeguard to swing-shift at the IBM circuit-board manufacturing factory—nice humid, late summer richness of a day—when a woman in an old station wagon broadsided me, dead in her sights, at a crossing in a county road…

Back at Buffalo that fall, hobbled still by crutches, my College hoop Coach went ballistic when he saw me: What in the world were you doing on a motorcycle?

Getting a good run in these days is often difficult. The younger crowd all style themselves after the pro thug ball game—trash-talking, trying to intimidate. Though few have the talent, let alone rep with those necessary referees, to get away with it. Most wonder What are you doing on the court?, especially given how I’ve regrown my hair long, into a yogin’s ponytail.

As one ages, you learn to make up for the decrease in your kinesthetic output with an increase in court sense. Though I don’t have the time or inclination to explain the matter, I could tell the youngsta’s how I’ve beaten such pro players as Michael Cooper—who played with “Los Angeles Lakers.” When we played he’d just finished at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. My college sweetheart and I were visiting her sister. While they caught up on old times, I’d wandered off looking for a game. Finding the University’s big athletic fieldhouse, I’d walked onto the game court and called Winners. The first looks of disbelief were dispelled when but then my three beat Cooper and his teammates, first game. Second game, him yelling at his teammates not to fuck up, they won. Rubber match, game point, I faked a drive down the lane—with which I’d been scoring, then drove left and faded away, just out of reach of Cooper’s attempted block, a fifteen footer. All net.

In the silence he’d angrily said to me, You ain’t from around here, are you, Well this is my court, so don’t dome back…

Too, I’ve bested players from the local team “Golden State Warriors” in pick-up games—some on the very same court on which we play, right next to the new “Haas Pavilion” built for our Cal team. I miss the old “Harmon Gym,” though. For a period of about ten years you could not get a better game anywhere in the Bay Area. Despite the court time being limited to lunch hour on Monday, Wednesday and Friday (sometimes an extra hour) everybody who was anybody would show. The picking of teams was so competitive that often somebody would call Winners and, instead of picking up an asking newcomer, would wait and snag ringers off the losing team on court. Thus, the joke became—when three or four players mulling around had all the next games locked up—So where’s your team, coming in on the bus from Sacramento or something?

Games were fought hard—usually the first one lasting a half-hour or more—and any “calls” hotly disputed. One time a guy, nicknamed “Crazy Dave,” who could leap for days but had absolutely no touch on his shot, walked off the court in rage after having his version challenged. After stopping at his ‘Stang illegally parked outside to pick up his “45,” he walked nonchalantly back onto the floor, right up to the guy who’d made the call on him, and put the piece upside his head, asking, Who right now?

The very surprised guy—a Cal student—blurting and raising his hands with the others in unison, You the man, Dave, you the man…

So, like everybody who’s ever played the game, I suppose instead of playing I could tell ya all about it. (Crazy Dave met his demise by the same ploy in a playground argument a few years later, by the way). Instead, I just try and get a good run in—making sure that I get the ball at the point guard position, the source of most difficulties in casual games, and demonstrate How to pass the ball. Especially in to the big man, a trick of disguise requiring dexterity and quickness; for some reason, most guards in pick-up games assume the big man is “slow” or something and telegraph the pass inside with such woeful obviousness that “my grandmother could steal it,” as the court banter goes. And, as even the supertanker pro centers like to show—especially during the All-Star games, there’s a point guard inside every big man just waiting for the chance to play…

Of course, when I return to working the paint, the big man’s turf, I still never get the ball…

But no one can take away or screw up that feeling, standing on the foul line, all alone, just like on the court that day in my High School game…My buddy Joey on one side, the point guard Bobby on the other…Two great teammates (Bob’s the High School Principal now) the likes of whom, like those days, I’ll never see again…

A couple of bounces of the ball…Shake out the looseness in the feet, set them shoulder width for stability, then, just like our Assistant Coach Hinell used to say—you gotta make yourself tough, give yourself a rock-solid foundation. Gathering the ball at your solar plexus, where your breath is centered, make your shot all one motion, ball leaving your hands and arcing from the graceful wrist snap—perfectly into the hoop, a sound never forgotten,

swish…

1

Against a Falling Fabric

AGAINST A FALLING FABRIC

(Shakespeare, Coriolanus)¹

Even the doe nuzzling the old Chinese man—seated upon a rock in the tree-lined shelter of a cool glade—was no consolation to him.

“Ah, I am just an old man now,” he sighed, the muscles in his broad chest shaking with grief. “Nobody pays me any mind any more.”

Several squirrels who’d scampered in from the forest shook tails like plumes, then, with soft, almondine eyes, resumed watching him. The monkeys who’d swung down from the branches regarded him too—tipping heads first one way, then the other, holding feet in hands and gently rocking. The doe went back to grazing.

The chin of his big bald head nodded inwards as the large luminous eyes that used to sparkle with mirth when he was teaching softly teared.

He’d taken to coming here for respite when he could no longer handle the camp of monks and nuns. Though his eyesight was failing (his hearing, too, getting even worse) he knew that his distracted inability to pay attention to his pupils—or even the mundane matters of seeing that the supplies were properly gathered, the meals cooked—lay elsewhere. He was troubled that he just did not know why.

Perhaps he no longer knew what to do…

He remembered how at one time he would lecture to 1,000 people on Vulture Peak, with people traveling from far provinces just to hear him discourse on the Dharma. How in the world had things become so different?

In front of him one of the monkeys stood, did a backflip, then reseated himself to the chattering approval of the others. Usually these tricks made his eyes grow wide with wonder, his belly shake with amusement. But not today. Another tear slowly ran down his cheek.

For too long now he’d found that no matter which way he led the camp they could find no monasteries remaining.

Perhaps, he thought, that when Emperor Wu’s troops had arrived at their own monastery he should have done things differently. Yet he could not believe his ears when the captain had confronted him—as he was the senior teacher—and demanded that, according to new proclamation, they renounce Buddhism as a foreign superstition and convert the monastery to a center for studies of native Confucianism. He’d been sewing a rip in one of his robes, and, not wishing to be distracted, had simply nodded his head No.

The troops had brandished swords and lances and prodded everyone out of the buildings and courtyard. Then they had gathered all the religious statues, thangka paintings and other sacred objects forming the shrine’s alter and, denouncing it all as demonic idolatry, smashed everything into a pile of rubble.

As all watched in astonishment, next the buildings were torched. Flames leaping high behind them the troops then left—coarse laughter resounding among the horses’ hoof beats…

Since that time—six years that have seemed like an eternity—they trekked to Lung Hsing Monastery, then K’ai Yuan and a dozen others outlying their region. At each one, rubble. His scouts would return—eager with news of one in an area not yet plagued by the mad Emperor and his cadres of Confucian court scribes—and each time, with high spirits, they’d set out as if seeking the promised land of Heaven.

Yet too many times now they’d crest a hill and discover, in the distance, columns of billowing black smoke. As if the troops had awaited their arrival before destroying. Still more crying refuges with tales of fresh destruction.

They had even had to take on groups of nuns—wandering in utter bewilderment. The older ones wide-eyed with fear, unable to speak of the savagings the younger ones had had to endure as each was bounced roughly along from one soldier to another.

Of course he knew that monks and nuns in the same camp would not be a wise idea, thinking now of new difficulties, but what choice had he had?

In the branches above him birds chirruped, startling him. The squirrels and monkeys before him still sat regarding him.

“So, you are my pupils now. Hmmn, yes, I see,” he chuckled.

His thoughts returned to the source of their plague—Langdharma the heretic! The heretic’s brother, who’d administered the province before him, had been most favorably disposed towards Buddhism.

He himself had been invited to the capital to discourse the Dharma and had delivered what he.d thought had been a not bad sermon. He’d told the tale of mountains and rivers: at first in practice, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers. Then one begins to notice mountains in everything. Rivers in everything. If one looks, for example, at a peak when the sun is just right, it glimmers like a river. When one gazes into a stream, seeing the cool deep rock bed beneath the spangling surface, then relaxing the eyes with mushin, no gaze, no concepts, no form, no emptiness, one sees the surface of the water as being as solid and of great form as a mountain. Then mountains become rivers and rivers become mountains…

The governor had then asked, But then what happens?

He’d flashed his famous inscrutable smile and said, The ox returns home of itself…

Out of jealousy, a desire for greater power, Langdharma had then murdered his brother—claiming in secret it was necessary because as governor he’d gotten out of control, had become seduced by the foreign devils. Shrewdly, to ensure protection, he’d then sent a scholar, Han Tse, to the Emperor Wu with this nonsense of return to native Confucianism, expel these foreign devils.

The propaganda was quite elaborate: the Chinese in their innate wisdom should have known better when this tall, gaunt figure Bodhidharma, the First Patriarch of Buddhism in China, had appeared from India several generations ago. Wrong body style for the more corpulent and sensual Chinese. One too aggressive as well—this light-skinned devil Bodhidharma was possessed of unnatural abilities and unnatural quickness and strength and had taught his demonic martial arts to so many since that the very security of the nation-state was threatened!

Too, this devil’s gaze—piercing with intensity—would enter the softly focused, unsuspecting eyes of the Chinese and subtly brainwash them with sorcery! Before one knew it, one would wind up in Hell, with one of the Confucian Mandate from Heaven scribes holding a long list of sins committed (albeit unconsciously), the scribe’s face sad in recounting, as help would not be available now…

Never had he heard such claptrap! Such perversion of the Dharma! Why, the monkeys when they chattered made more sense! Cannily the right idea had been stolen from holy writ and dissembled as the false piety of another!

Still that part had not been the worst. Cloaked words can always be brought to the light of Truth by the subtle use of dialectics in debate. No, this Langdharma had become the very embodiment of depravity. Palace orgies went on for days—and he was especially fond of despoiling young Buddhist women. Mad Emperor Wu did not seem to care—if he even noticed at all, it was said that when messengers from the Court visited Langdharma he was the very model of piety…

The squirrels and monkeys were chattering in alarm now. He was sobbing mightily. Ah, it was all so intolerable. And he could do nothing to stop it. Langdharma would send spies, posing as refugees, into his camp, and like a subtle poison, they’d be too difficult to detect until the damage was done. Stooped with humility around him or the senior monks and nuns, these spies would then turn licentious in private, seducing the unsuspecting with tales of how much better life was at a place nearby—of which he, whom they called the Old Fool, was oblivious.

According to this script the minions dutifully deployed, he, the Old Fool, was being punished by Heaven for his youthful arrogance and other such alleged shortcomings—each newly minted disaster cleverly incoporated. Tales of Heavenly Consorting that brought instant enlightenment were snake-tongued into the ears of the young females—who would disappear with the spies to face virtual sexual slavery with Langdharma.

At least that was what his scouts loyal still reported. This dog fattens itself by feeding on our human flesh! But perhaps not. Perhaps he indeed existed in complete delusion, his dislike of Langdharma misfounded. Perhaps he had indeed failed his people. It would be better if the dog simply killed him off instead of allowing him to wander in abject misery as an object lesson to all…

A branch overladen with monkeys crashed suddenly to the ground—sending them leaping and howling into space, scampering away upon landing.

Yes, he thought, Manjushri stood before Gautama with a drawn sword!

He closed his eyes and the whole plan became clear. In the nearby village a farmer sympathetic to them had a sturdy white mare. He would put Young Grasshopper in charge of the camp—telling him to move only if necessary—and go to this farmer and borrow his pony. He would gather some garments to disguise himself as a beggar and outfit a bag with fresh clothes and some black dye. His folding bow and an arrow, too. Then he would ride like the wind to Langdharma’s capital; reportedly the little fool’s arrogance had reached such heights that he strolled about without a care, as his subjects were either obsequiously flattering to him or hid in stark terror from him.

When he crossed the last river before the capital, he would dye the mare black—upon his return the river crossing would wash her white again.

Then, with the bow and arrow in the folds of his robe, he would reach the capital, tether the mare and sit and beg alms. It would be just a matter of time before the opportunity presented itself.

Deep, deep within his mind’s eye he saw himself stealthily click the bow into place, rise to his full height and with the strength with which he once, as a young man vajra proud with the dharma, practiced hitting the target, he would draw his great bow until the string was taut against his straining chest and stilled chin…

When he released the bowstring he could not tell if it was the arrow or him speeding to its destiny with such strength. No matter. When it hit the heart of the heretic the grief in his own heart burst. Void and emptiness…

Leaves gently rustled as a cool breeze stirred, brushing his cheeks, bringing him back into awareness. Standing, he opened his eyes, turned and set about.

Mountains would again be mountains…

1 Some italicized phrases allusive to or quotations from Shakespeare or Zen Masters past…

Happenstance

HAPPENSTANCE

“Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be monopolized and traded in by tickets and statutes and standards.”

—Milton

One cold clear night, I was sitting in a large open window of a high-rise dormitory, listening to the crystalline stillness, outside, of winter in suburbia. Nothing but the sound of distant streetlights crackling through the chill…And the realization, as Rilke once said, that You must change your life…

I’d been reading Marx and Hegel, about the misappropriation of one’s labor, how the hard-won victories wrested from Hera’s earth are inevitably taken from one, palmed off by another, and then “compensated” by some pittance…How the senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, sound—all once divine, pure, ringing and clear, shimmering like some eternal prodigy ,you and your labors, one and the same, slipped away…Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” turned some thief in the night…

Looking over the sterile bedroom community I’d once envisioned myself a part of—as a lawyer with the two-and-a-half children, some Golden Retriever dog abounding and the requisite wife-chattel awaiting with dinner— some deep unspoken sadness befell…words from my state-of-the-art stereo loudspeakers drifted…Nights in white satin, never reaching the end…Beauty I’ve always missed, with these eyes before, just what the Truth is, I can’t say anymore…

The song from the “Moody Blues” stirred unsettled feelings: in my heart the stormy romances with stubborn women mirroring my soul, loosing the moors of male-female, yin-yang; despite my solitary pursuit of that All Important Grade Point Average. Lonely nights of study having driven away those most important—usually standing right before me—in favor of those ephemeral goals of some scholarly professor’s alleged Understanding…

Love had come and gone…traces still wet upon my lips…I’d found and lost Beauty…Now I knew I must leave, set out for the Coast, for that long arduous search for Truth…

Written in 1980, Ithaca, New York about freshman year at SUNY, Buffalo;

Revised 1990-98, Thomas Francis Noonan

Some Kind of Grace

SOME KIND OF GRACE

 

The basketball spins off the rim into a crowd of hands. Beneath the basket one player is banged out of bounds. The game stops.

Picking himself up the player walks back onto the court and confronts another player. Both are tall and thin, but muscular. One is black, the other is white.

“Hey, cut the bush-league stuff,” the white says. He’s smiling, yet it’s intense. He does not seem to care that, as the only white player on the court, he would have no allies in a fight.

His opponent’s eyes flicker downward; in an attempt to be cool he grins. No one moves to step between them. One of the white’s teammates, standing at the top of the key, begins to bounce the basketball. Others raise eyebrows and move into positions. The game resumes.

Next time down on offense the affronted man calls for the ball. Holding it low to the floor, his hip to the defender as a shield, he moves the ball side-to-side rapidly then lifts up, his body extending into a smooth shot—right wrist flicking the ball away in a rainbow arch that flutters through the net some twenty feet later.

Each time on offense now the man calls for the ball. One of his teammates refuses to give it up, but the other three, sensing something of interest, pass the ball to him and then watch as his now-sullen defender has problems with this guy—who’s a bit older and seemingly no quicker yet is somehow beating him to the hoop every time. The way the man sets up; misdirection or something as he seems relaxed and off-guard, as if he has no intention whatsoever of making a move towards the hoop, and yet, as his opponent’s awareness slips just a bit, the man seizes a half-step advantage and slips by on a drive to the basket—or, as he was doing to his opponent now, veering off the drive and pulling up for a ten-foot fadeaway jump shot.

“Whoo!” one of the man’s teammates says, laughing, “Face, trick!”

Two of the defender’s teammates have angry words for him, as they have been trying to help him by double-teaming the man to cut off his drive.

At the other end of the court, the defender is out to salvage his bruised ego. He tries his favorite shot—an eighteen-foot jumper from the top of the key-but the man blocks the ball, spins around him and drives the court’s length for an easy slam-dunk —right arm swinging up, bent wrist cradling the ball as the forearm brushes against and down the rim, the ball shooting through with a resounding whoosh.

“Good game gentlemen,” the man says to his teammates, “That was last game for me.” He walks off the court towards the locker room.

 

Showers hiss and steam. Heat-flushed bodies scamper across the tiled floor, as naked men become little boys, snapping towels at each other, yelling ho and hee. Bare feet hurry over the cold, grey-blue smoothness to the steamy entrance of the showers.

On one of the wooden benches running between banks of grey lockers the man sits. Slowly he unlaces stiff leather sneakers—tightly crisscrossed to above his ankles. A sharp pain flashes in his knee. Already it is swelling. The broad nylon strap of his knee brace crackles as he separates the velcro fastenings, unwraps the outer gear and loosens the thin tubular frame. Splitting the mold around his knee the slips the brace off and sets it on the bench.

He knows he should get his knee ice-packed at the trainer’s room. Yet he sits, forearms on thighs, and stares at the raised vents in the lockers before him. His frame fills the bench. He is six-foot-six or so, with dark hair trimmed short yet still unruly. His high cheekbones and thin jaw-line look a bit delicate above the muscular neck and shoulders, the broad flat plane of his back. Except for his rippled abdomen, there are no abrupt bulges in his muscles. Long smooth contours. Even the legs, the thick hard thighs, are sleek as a. greyhound’s.

Fifteen minutes pass, finally he dresses. He shoulders his bag of gear, tightens his face into the stoic’s mask and strides by the faces—casting glances at him (though discreetly); some puzzled at a faint recognition.

He takes the stairs two at a time and walks onto the Columbia University campus. He’s headed towards Broadway, to the subway station and the safety of anonymity. His knee naggingly reminds him that he shouldn’t have lost his temper. It was just a pick-up game—nothing on the line. Yet when he felt the two hands push his hips while he was in the air, his hand about to drop the ball in the hoop, and instead the ball spun off the rim as his body fell off-balance out of bounds—well, that was it. He was tired of being hammered by hacks.

Recalling the incident has angered him and quickened his pace; as he rounds the corner of a building and steps onto Broadway, he bumps into a short black man wearing a dark porkpie hat and carrying a battered saxophone case, nearly knocking him down. in a flash of temper he sidesteps the man and strides away.

His name is Sean MacFinn. He’s twenty-five. On the official “New Jersey Net’s” arena program he’s listed as six-foot-seven, two-hundred-and-ten pounds,, but he knows it’s six-foot-six, one hundred-and-ninety-five pounds. Which figures are right no longer matters; he will not be listed on the upcoming season’s program. Two weeks ago the Nets cut him. His injured knee had not responded to rehabilitation. Or at least it didn’t respond well enough for the team physician, who termed it “not 100 percent redeemable.”

Where he is hurt most is on defense, when he has to move suddenly to match the player he’s guarding. The mind will sense where to move, but his knee, suffering from the shock of a second cartilage operation, lags slightly—slowing him just a fraction of a second. But at the level of the “National Basketball Association,” where every player not a superstar becomes marginal, where the filling of a team roster has become a science—in short, when the role you’ve fought for is seven minutes a game of harrying some high-scoring opponent, Sean knows a micro-second may as well be an eternity.

Because knees are to basketball players as hooves are to horses—this thought strikes Sean as he stares at the back page of the “Racing News” being read by the man across from him on the subway car.

A grimace creases his face as he pictures the team doctor plying his trade at the track—perhaps spiking the horses oats with his cure-all painkillers. Called “butes,” these drugs are quite effective; Sean barely felt his knee snap. Drifting along in that seemingly magical state of being there, he was at the peak of his game. A quality having nothing to do with the pharmaceuticals and everything to do with being smooth and natural. With some kind of grace. Time seemingly slowed. everything sharp, intense, crystal-clear.

He sways forward on the handhold as the train lurches to a stop. Eighty Sixth Street. He joins the line of people filing out and ducks through the exit.

Long slants of light greet Sean as he emerges onto the street. He turns to the right, towards Central Park. The sidewalk is crowded, a throng slowly herds. He attributes the people to a rumor that Elizabeth Taylor, Dustin Hoffman and other glitterati have decided that the neighborhood is tres chic and are snapping up the aging brownstones.

A mischievous grin breaks. “My God, it’s Woody Allen!” he says.

Several people stop and look around. Where?

Not making eye contact, looking far down the street, Sean keeps walking—his face taciturn, features inscrutable.

He crosses Central Park West and enters the park. Every morning at six A.M. he rides his bicycle here on a five-mile loop. At least he did until he was cut. When he was given the bad news from the front office by phone—by that public relations jerk Tom Wilbur, not even by the coach!—he was sitting with the bicycle directly in his line of vision and he slammed down the phone, jumped up and grabbed the bike—ready to take it to some junkyard in New Jersey and have it compacted into a small cube.

A stiff breeze sends a few leaves scraping across the sidewalk and he shrugs his overcoat tighter around him. At the fork he bears left, back towards Eighty Sixth Street, to his apartment,

Freshly-polished shoes click off large chunks of sidewalk. A closed umbrella taps in accompaniment. Sean, dressed to kill, walks rapidly. The creases of his pants snap smartly forward, cutting the night air.

From the shadows a lanky figure steps. A woman, dressed in a short skirt, her slender thighs showing a hint of baby fat as the stockings whisk back and forth. Leather boots reach just below her knees; well-polished, the shine of each boot is creased by laces crisscrossing the exposed backs.

Stopped by her “Hi there,” Sean says, “Hello.”

“What’s a hunk like you doing out alone?” She smiles, coyly.”Want a date?”

As though considering he looks at her. A slight flutter of her blouse, three buttons open, reveals an upturned breast, smooth and soft, and a nipple wrinkled like a walnut by the chill.

“I’m sure you’re worth it. But no thanks.”

Behind her he sees a bent-over woman in a faded overcoat who has stopped about twenty feet down the sidewalk.

Turning, spotting the old lady, the hooker says, “Bitch! I thought I told you to git. Damn old hag. What you want, this?” She slides up her leather skirt and flashes a bare ass.

The woman’s red eyes water with hate as she reaches down for the two overflowing bags at her sides.

“Git!” the hooker shouts. The woman turns and waddles off, a low moan escaping as her head bobs, the bags swing, sneakers plop.

Shrilly laughing the hooker turns back to Sean. “Well if you change your mind let me know; I’m usually around.”

Sean has drawn away a step. ‘Yeah.” Distracted, he stands motionless. She tilts her head suddenly and, backing off, studies him warily. He nods goodbye and walks away.

Once, he supposes, he was in love. She was a woman he kept seeing at the comer market. Something about the way she carried herself attracted him—the tilt of her chin, the poise of her shoulders, perhaps (he wasn’t sure).

He’d said hello, finally, and walked her to her building, just a few blocks from his.

At first they saw each other quite often. They found an ease of intimacy with each other neither had ever experienced before.

Yet in less than a year the romance began to founder. Everything got difficult; she was under a lot of pressure at her advertising firm; he had the frequent absences of road trips. There was never enough time, when they met the sense of urgency saddened rather than satisfied…

Ahead of Sean now is the sign for the ‘Village Vanguard.” He crosses the street and checks the club’s billboard, where reviews of the jazz trio playing are posted. He changes his mind about going to this show and walks towards the subway station.

Annoyance creases his brow. He’s thinking that in Europe, where he played ball for two seasons before making the Nets, he never had to think about what type of jazz the act was. They were all good. Many of the musicians were Americans, drawn to Europe by the better pay, better audiences. There was much camaraderie, an easy rapport. The common bond of exile.

Green and red glimmerings dance on the wet oily tarmac . Two lines of traffic, engines idling, wait at the far side of the intersection.

Exhaust fumes mix with engine steam and rise through murky shafts of headlights. Then the signal light changes, engines roar and the cars are off to the next light.

People on the sidewalk take down umbrellas and shake beads of rain from the limp folds of fabric. With brisk strides they weave between the metal poles of construction scaffolding covering the sidewalk.

Through the shutters of the ‘West End Cafe,” Eagle Russell watches people work through the rusty maze. Faces, flushed pink, hurry past the window—heads tossed back in thin-lipped laughter, the teeth glinting.

Eagle turns back towards the stage. Past the tables of patrons huddled in conversation is the service bar. Two waitresses stand, shifting weight from one foot to the other as they talk and joke with rapid gesturing of hands and gleeful looks.

To their right, on the other side of an archway, are pinball machines and video games. One man, short, balding, his feet splayed wide, ducks and bobs his shoulders as he jams a joystick from position to position on a basketball game. “Whoee!” he says, “I got more moves than Ex-Lax!”

From the stage, Eagle, his mind elsewhere, distractedly watches the man’s pregnant belly bounce around.

A waitress walks by, says, “Five minutes, Eagle.”

He checks his watch, searches the bar for his musicians. They disappeared at the end of the last set with the stage manager, for whom Eagle has an intense dislike. The manager thinks the world of Eagle, though, always acts like a puppy dog trying to please. With a faint smile Eagle remembers the time the boy offered him some cocaine. He declined, to which the kid responded, ‘You sure, I mean this stuffs as bad as your daddy’s dick.”

At the kid’s not quite getting it right Eagle had laughed.

Across the room from Eagle a thin crack of light broadens as the Manager’s door opens. Three members of the quartet, escorted by the manager, walk towards the stage.

“About time boys,” Eagle mentions.

At the sounds and motions of the band warming up the audience quiets. The manager—a tall, thin man wearing a dark, loose-fitting jacket and white sneakers—steps up to the microphone, slips it out of the gleaming pole, and, gesturing towards Eagle, says, “Welcome again ladies and gentlemen. For those of you who just got here, tonight we are proud to present one of the all-time greats in jazz…”

Eagle’s cue. He walks into the spotlight. He hates this part; he has to stand there and grin like a monkey while the kid goes on and on about Eagle’s twenty years with the Duke in that damn affected accent of his.

From a few rows back comes, “Man, how about letting them play?” The interrupter, a man dressed in a sky-blue, silken suit—his broad upper body too big at the shoulders for the chair in which he’s tipped back—is a fresh arrival.

The stage manager pauses, glares down his nose.

Eagle nods thank you to the kid. Clarinet in his right hand, he turns to the band and motions a four-count.

They run through an old standard. Nothing very challenging. Easing into a set is what he tells the band, George, usually on the baritone sax, calls it easing through the set.

Finishing the song Eagle says, “Thank you. Now we’d like to do ‘I’m In a Bad Way and That Ain’t No Good Way,‘ also by the Duke.”

The man who interrupted before laughs and says, “Yeah, that’s the song now play it.” He twists sideways and holds up his glass. A waitress, on her way up another aisle, catches his signal, hesitates, then nods curtly and continues to the bar.

Eagle, not amused, nods to his band and they begin to play. His face is flushed; he saw that smile tighten on George’s face. The thin mustache arched in contempt. High and mighty George. He’s been with Eagle the longest—almost five years—but lately he’s been distant, perfunctory. Besides being newer, the other boys are quite a bit younger than Eagle, so he hasn’t expected much closeness with them. But with George it’s always been different. They were in the Duke’s band together. They were young, cocky and oh so cool then. Eagle can still see the faint smile of amusement on the Duke’s face as, checking the tour bus before a gig, he would ask if the two badasses were on board.

Smiling himself at the memory he wraps up the song and moves into the next one on the set list.

“Jesus.” The man sits forward, shakes his head. “Hey waitress, another Johnny Walker Black.”

Nervous laughter races through the crowd. Eagle starts the band, tilts his sax up, as if wailing, and his suit coat sleeve slides down so he can check his watch. He decides to run straight through the set list.

In his younger days he never let hecklers or drunks bother him. He always had a reserve he could call upon, what he called his bank account—all the time he put in practicing, the highs from good gigs, those were the deposits. These days, though, it’s as if a big rubber stamp, Closed for Lack of Funds, had come down hard. Too many gigs in holes like this one. Too many nights of playing—as legend had it Charlie Parker once did—to a gum-blot ground into the dance floor. Blowing at some mythical illusion, some fanciful wad that one imagined had far more sensibility than the so-called audience…

The band winds up the set and they take a break. Eagle heads by himself to the bar. He sits alone; his dark almond eyes, the set of his face, say Do Not Disturb. At a table to his right is his heckler.

“So you’re saying I made a mistake playing in that game,” the man is saying to a friend. “But it’s the third game of the playoffs, for Christ’s sake. We’re talking the motherfuckin’ N.B.A. No wimps allowed!” He takes a long sip of his drink.

His friend shakes his head and chuckles. “I’m not arguing that point. What I’m saying is that you knew your knee was banged up; you said it took a pretty good shot in practice. With one operation under your belt I would think you would know enough not to trust some team physician.”

“Aghh,” the man says, dismissing him with an imperious wave of his hand. “Easy for you to say.”

“Look, I’m your friend, I’m just telling you what I think.”

From the stage Eagle listens with amusement. He always likes to hear someone boring somebody else with talk of the glory days. Especially white boys. They always think they got it so tough.

A tap at his shoulder. George motions towards the stage. Eagle slides off the stool, they walk in silence, pick up their instruments, go through the motions of checking them out. The drummer and bassist show up. Before the manager can make his appearance Eagle launches into the last set.

They finish the song to scattered applause. Eagle sees his heckler throw a palm up, sigh with exasperation.

“It’s all a matter of being there.”

“I know what you’re…”

“No you don’t. You don’t know anything about what I’ve been saying.” The man looks to his right, sees the couple at the next table staring at him. The women leans away, the man grips the arm of her fur coat to him. Both faces are drawn tight with displeasure.

“You don’t have a clue either,” he says to the couple, shaking his head, returning his attention to his friend.

Eagle has been staring at the man, so George steps up to the mike and announces the next song. Eagle pretends not to see George and gives the cue to start.

When they wrap that number the manager and the man are engaged in a discussion about whether or not he should have another drink. Made nervous by the sudden quiet the manager says, “Well, okay, one more. But only if you pay attention to the musicians.”

“Why? These niggas can’t play.”

The man holding the woman in the fur lets out, “Oh, God.”

“God? Dr. J—Mr. Julius Erving to you, he’s God,” the man mutters, his head down. Then he raises up and looks at the couple. “What do you know about God, about being there, huh? You ever play on the same court as God? Well I did.” His eyes widen in glee. “Hah! I guarded God! What do you think of that?”

A large, tee-shirted bouncer has arrived to assist the manager, suddenly bold. “Sir, you’re going to have to leave. Now I’ve seen you here before and I’m afraid I’m going to have to ban you for life.”

“Whoo! Ban me from this hole. ” He tips his chair forward until the legs are back on the floor. “Pal, you’re doing me a favor.”

The bouncer huffs his shoulders and moves to grab the man.

Eagle, still amused, says, “No, it’s all right, he’s not bothering us.

Let him stay.”

George raises his eyebrows and stifles a grin, then busies himself with fingering the valves of his sax. The bouncer stops mid-stride. The manager looks to the stage, his mouth hanging open in confusion. “But…” He looks around. About a third of the audience has left.

“We’ll play some Coltrane, see if we can’t liven things up for you,” Eagle announces. He feels his musicians staring at him behind his back. They’re nowhere near the set list now. He picks up his tenor sax, tells the band, “My Favorite Things.”

The sax is slippery in his hands. Rivulets of sweat drip from his chin. He doesn’t know why he picked Coltrane; he’s always found him difficult, and, in fact, he usually stays closer to shore and avoids that territory—the so-called anti-jazz all the kids seem so hung up on now. For Eagle playing Coltrane is kind of like being in bed with a real fine woman but there’s this chalkboard on your back and she’s scratching her fingernails up and down on it. Beauty and the screech.

With a sidelong glance he sees the man watching him. He feels anger growing and he moves into the dark, brooding, farther reaches of Coltrane’s melody. No longer is it notes he’s reworking, it’s whole chords now—fragmenting them, shifting the tonal centers, the notes becoming fresh echoes of the whole as he finds the unfettered…

A slow dull ache, something tucked away in forgotten corners within him, begins to build. Anger and ache rumble and mix, way down inside, and then move up his spine in a now familiar way, getting cooler and lighter before reaching his mouth, finally, where, blossoming like a flower, the feeling floats away, light as a breeze.

He’s home now. He glides through the end of the composition and, his sax sweet and soulful, eases back into a ballad.

When he finishes, what’s left of the audience applauds. He turns to the band and murmurs, “Not bad. Meet me at the bar, I’m buying.” Stepping up to the mike, he says, “Thank you. Good night.”

He unclips his saxophone, disassembles it and gently places it in the case. He lets it shimmer in the stage lights a moment, then closes the top. He feels suffused with strength.

Behind him in the audience he hears a soft low whistle. It’s that man, sitting by himself. “Now that’s there,” he says to the seat where his friend used to be.

Eagle steps down from the stage and walks towards the man. His features have softened; with rapt attention he stares at the tabletop.

Then, as if struck by something, the man chuckles, raises his head.

Reaching him Eagle stops. His right hand draws back, then he pushes an open palm forward. Two hands move together, spread fingers connect, lightly, as they rise up in a high five…

The Last Night

THE LAST NIGHT

One never believes the last night, even as it’s happening… 

I’d met her through a friend—a man who was the cook at the resort where I was working as well. Both he and I were featured readers at a poetry workshop that first night; in those days our resort’s motto was time out—for not only special writing weekends and artist exhibitions but too massages, nude sunbathing and other sensual feasts for body and mind.

Afterwards I’d wandered, and she’d found me, on a moonlit “Grasshopper Bridge.” The day’s faineant heat hung still. I was leaned against the newly oiled redwood rail, listening to the stream’s lambent murmur below.

For the way the new footbridge pierced midway into the other bank—the criss-crossing span some twenty feet above the streambed, looking like a railroad trestle, its scale far more vast than the rope and plank crossing it’d replaced—the staff had taken to calling it The Bridge Too Far…

She’d found that bit of info funny. I was fairly sure that my friend had kept her apprised of the resort politics; the owner had gone from a Sixties’s peace & love Esalan-Big-Sur-style guru to a born-again capitalist—just as clichéd with his grandiose new schemes for the place. It was billed as a “modern mega-European spa.” It was fueled by the overnight success of his “addiction therapy” once-a-month program—catering to well-to-do, stressed-out casualties of Silicon Valley. What it would mean was that our sleepy, turn-of the-century hotel, with its thick, cool stone and stucco walls, sweeping verandas, kerosene lanterns and wood-burning stoves for the bone-drenching winter night downpours, would be razed and replaced.

Sycophantic former clients of the good doctor, no lack of Iagoian iniquity in the sportive devising of each, now surrounded him as constant coterie; the resort’s history of artists-in-residence, bohemians, naturalists all to be swept into some sanitized future with such a shaky financial basis as to cast the entire matter, in the minds of those who lived and worked there, as ambition destined to be gain which darkens.

So that night, curiosity unwisely peeking forth from my stoic’s countenance, I asked her what her connection with the good doctor was. Her face assumed that demure, smooth-cheeked visage I would come to find impenetrable. Then a smile, the smoothness of her lips parting over the teeth ‘s even beauty. Quite frankly you’re the one who worries me… I’m told you’re the dangerous kind…

I shrugged, said I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.

Another smile, her eyes—crystalline, deeply azure—twinkling as she panned her gaze unto the stream…

T ruth be known, I did know what she meant. I’d been part of the resort’s outdoor staff for two years now. Three days on, four days off. On weekends I was the relief shift—the resort’s on call emergency man. Our grounds were part of an old Ohlone Native American powerspot on the Central Valley side of the Mendocino Coastal foothills. We advertised in all the New Age journals circulating the San Francisco Bay Area as a nice, gentle place to unwind. Big redwood decks by the tubs for “clothing optional” sunbathing, miles of surrounding open space for hiking …

Breathe! as the owner’s constant mantra went.

A very unique place, but, too, very isolating. So at least once a month most of the staff would see fit to visit such former stomping grounds as Berkeley—the favorite target for sarcasm among the addicted yup’s, who’d sneer, Oh, I see— still living in Berkeley…

On summery weekends, those seeking us out as a nice, gentle place to unwind would pass—opposing lanes on the same curving two-lane canyon road, in some counterpointed yet correlative way—those seeking a little Peet’s coffee in Berkeley while perusing the Bay Area’s weekly rags offering way too many choices of things to do.

Winter, of course, was another story. Not a single storm passed in which I wouldn’t have to get the big ¾ ton four wheel drive truck and, at some besieged point of our seven mile dirt access road, pull some guest out of the ditch. Poor guy and his wife or girlfriend he was seeking to impress would show up at our lobby—soaked, muddy, shivering to the point of speechlessness after trekking miles in a darkly whipping storm–and nod with sheer gratitude when I’d ask, So, looks like you got stuck. Made me more popular than our guru of an owner himself…

That it was my other duties piquing perhaps too much interest in me has become all too plain to me since my exodus. On the weekends, when our three, twenty-foot long concrete tubs filled with mineral glistening bodies, checking tub temperatures three times a day became crucial. Gravity flowed the 140 degree springs water down a pipeline into a holding tank and then through the tubs in sequence, the water cooling along the way. A flow-valve from the holding tank regulated the rate at which the water would circulate through each tub in turn before draining into the creek. Too fast a flow and those sunburned would really feel scorched; too slow and the lukewarm waters would never loosen those bunched and corded muscles.

While waiting for the thermometer to register in each tub, one could not help but notice its occupants. As this was the early 1980’s, before those obnoxious sexually-transmitted diseases reared ugly heads, we were host to a number of single women who, while professionally secure, seemed, nonetheless, unable to find a decent guy for companionship.

At least that line was what I was told. When the coolness of the evening arrived in the summer—the fine dust of the road, browned hills all around still shimmering heat—off in the distance the coyotes would wail. While doing the evening temp check, I loved to walk onto the rear deck and await them. Sometimes all that stirred were the tall stalks of bamboo, from the bank below, beneath an immense ink-blotted sky; at other times a touch gentle as a breeze would manifest to my side and a towel-wrapped woman still exultant from her bath would ask why do the coyotes cry so?…

Still, that night with my curious new woman, I told her that I was afraid she’d heard wrong. The last six months or so I’d been holing up like a hermit on my days off—I had a great room off the main veranda, and I’d built a custom desk out of the antique bits and pieces remaining on the resort from years before. My little battery-powered LCD typewriter hummed away one sweetly silent hour after another. A kerosene lamp flickering in the hints of breeze, the ever-present sound of crickets outside, I was finally writing the way I’d envisioned—as if the hills cradling our resort had granted me infinite support as well…

Not that night, but the summer she and I spent together. Her schedule as an RN at a local hospital was hectic, but we escaped whenever we could. Hiking among huge sun-heated boulders, with her two sons who’d visit glistening like salmon in the Sierra stream; climbing fire lookout towers…Camping where our only neighbors were bears.

At our resort, what had once been Paradise had now become overrun with huge grasshoppers. Among ourselves we joked (in protective whispers, of course) that it was a Heavenly sent plague of locusts due to the good doctor’s born-again greed. But the fact remained that these whirling clouds of winged furies were, day after day, descending, covering everything—countless tiny mandibles chewing up the entire grounds…

The good doctor flipped out. From a “no chemicals” hip and cool policy we’d had suddenly he was ready to call in an army of exterminators—big trucks to roll all over everything with huge, rear-mounted spraying nozzles…

A musician Resident Artist made a wooden, lacquered plaque of a huge grasshopper, with Japanese B-movie multifaceted, eerie looking eyes, and we rechristened our new trestle as Grasshopper Bridge. When one of the good doctor’s entourage, now present with his obnoxious clients two weeks a month, made discovery of the new plaque the good doctor was infuriated. During a marathon staff meeting he demanded to know who was behind this bit of treachery. We all expressed wide-eyed innocence. Afterwards the tensions at our once peaceful little sanctuary remained at a low boil…

All these newly unfortunate matters were forgotten when I was with her. Backpacking brought a certain luminescence to her eyes. She wasn’t one for a lot of conversation—you’re the word person, she’d say, that faint, inaccessible amusement dawning, for just a brief gleaming moment, on her cheeks.

As I learned to read her gestures—more reliable, I found, than our collection of trail maps we’d transverse—she managed to take apart, chink by unnoticeable chink, my big tough guy armor. Bits and pieces I’d tossed together along the way , after Id bailed out of the academic hothouse of graduate school…

One day, mired in the existential angst perquisite to grad students, I’d seen a flyer on my mentor’s bulletin board for the Naropa Institute’s Twenty-Five Years of On the Road celebration of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation. Though my mentor had managed to break me of my journalism—do you want to write puffery or do you really want to write?—this one looked too good to pass up, so I wangled a press pass from one of my former editors and headed to Boulder, Colorado. Afterwards, I never made it back to the East Coast—instead I traveled on, through the Southwest and into Mexico before making my return to the Bay Area.

Times were tough, the big chill of the early ‘80’s had hit hard; the only journalists left from my old crowd were sportswriters. A friend told me about the resort’s Artist-in-Residence program; when I completed that three-month residency another artist—the plaque maker—and I managed to wangle a staff position into two three-fifth’s ones. Like the Randy Newman song we loved to sing, My life is good…

And then one day, as if woe had been forerun with woe, all came to change. A wan look keening her brow, she announced that no longer would she nurse the sick, the dying, the monstrously ungrateful. She’d found she no longer had any time for her painting—so she was moving to Homer, Alaska, where she’d been accepted into an artist’s colony.

Neither of us cried our last night—though if I’d finally showed some real emotion, it would have been too late. Her house let to friends, we were camped in her back yard. She gave herself to our lovemaking with such frenzy that afterwards the night air stilled into pure suchness…

Summer nights as that one sometimes I fall silent. In the quietude I see her walking a comely-curving beach amid moonbeams of gently breaking sea foam…

I see her happy…

Waylon-solstice

 

“Waylon & Willie & the Boys…”(1)

 

You walk into the “Texas Tux Lounge”—all Halloween theme-decorated (a month early) with sprayed cobwebs thick in every corner.

You’ve heard all the jokes—how being “deep in the heart of Texas” is an oxymoron, how down yonder here the good ole boys think that “Deliverance” is a luv story…

At least that’s the way the current lover of your lady’s mother has been spinning it over here, during the car ride—in a Cadillac, what else? Now, seated at a bar table, you’re approached by a big bubba; he’s the Karaoke and music DJ, his wife’s the manager. You’re asked to play pool in their tournament…It’s just an itty bitty thing, he aw shucks, but we like it….

They all know that you’re a Yankee. Beneath the façade of broad grins, heads tipped to one side then the other, the “Ahm jus a sheetkicker” pose of false modesty, you know there’s this pain-in-the-neck pique, some unspoken bitterness each has picked-up along the way and now share in sullen camaraderie. Too many times some deal just didn’t go down. Just didn’t have the clout of all that downtown Dallas big oil money….

Most of these men married now to some sarcastic reminder of each and every one of those setbacks along the way…From once-upon-a-time-just-cute-as-all-get-out blonde little honey—to, of late, being broke down, with no spare, no gas, way out on some deserted, potholed, dusty road….

Like what’s going on just to the left of you now—the sweet young thing putting her high heel on the top rung of the barstool, letting the lingerie she’s modeling slip, silk rustling away, to reveal a spa-toned, tanned thigh gleaming pearl like in the bar lights…The garter belt, slid to that man-maddening darkness of her crotch, stuffed with fives and tens…

Or the blonde behind the bar, wondering which one of the misanthropes she’s serving booze to now she’s gonna wind up paired off with—when her looks, along with her dreams, fade into that flat plain of a sunset….

So when Bubba, whom you drew for the first round, says in that good-natured way, “Now, don’t beat me too badly, ya’ll hear,” you smile, say, “Not to worry….”

Your play is nothing fancy—you leave one of your balls on the table so he can make a short run and win …It’s double elimination, you see…

Next game you win the coin flip and right to break. As you manage to clear out the couple of cowboys managing to stand—storm-dumb as cattle—directly behind you, taking up your maneuvering room, you notice that your lady is watching you from the rail. With that one quick strong stroke that, unlike most people you’ve ever known, has never managed to fail you, the pack breaks. The sharp crack momentarily distracts the bar from its karaoke…

You step up, look, fire…

But before you’re too far back in the days—with a pal taking bets on the bar and keeping your Johnny Walker Black flowing—you remember where you are and leave one of your balls and the eight near corner pockets.

Your opponent—made soft spoken, and, you feel, respectful— compliments you and sets about the task of clearing the table for a comeback. You stand in the shadows, try your best aw shucks, but it ain’t flying with the pretending not to watch good ole boys. The sound system plays something about Hank Williams pain songs and somebody else’s train songs…

You can feel the constant smoldering—only partially quelled by the bottles of Bud, shots of Jack. They’re all thinking how the hell did this tall drink of northern water wind up with one of our fine fillies; your lady having made forty without the fate of too many women in this land of down yonder—torn up all too early in the truck stops and honky tonks by rough-handed rednecks rutting in the trough…

Now you step up to the table… An easy roll on that eight awaits you and it really is back in the days again…You’re in this little rice-growing paddie in Northern California, in town playing pool with the locals. You’re the staff member of a nearby health sanctuary—one that used to be a hippie commune.

Suspicious per se—and not exactly the type that the local Sheriff’s Association would accuse of being a ringer when they lose this charity fundraising basketball game. Which they did, just an hour or two before. But, like a hot knife melting butter, you’d been on, driving the lane with impunity. Side bets were lost and, as you left the gym, you’d been fingered…Plenty of hostile glares, too—at the guy who’d recruited you, one of the few Messkins tolerated ‘round here.

To complicate matters further, you’ve going through one of those bad breakups with, as Sir Mick liked to sing, a woman of wealth and means…The type that somehow, back in the days, you were always bumping into, a woman with a siren’s call as dangerous as the Symplegades themselves. Breakups like boulders, clashing—but through the grace of the Argos dove’s tail feathers, perhaps, made survivable…Matters maybe not easily translatable to C & W parlance, but something to which you could attest the pain being the same damn thing…

One night, at your resort, you were looking up at the pure, perfect full moon—and a huge black sky pricked only by distant starlight. Coyotes, padding the old mining roads, wailed in the distance. So you drove the twenty or so miles into this town, the closest sign of life to your resort. Perhaps in some cosmic balance to your resort’s health food regimen, you wandered into one of the four dives keeping the local population of several hundred happy and started tossing down double Scotches…

 

So on this night you’re in a good mood—that male victory thing of still being young and oh so cocky. Your amigo, who’s amazed at not only your court play but too how you match his cerveza’s with Scotch, is even having a good time.

When this guy appears at your side, breaking into your conversation, and challenges you to a game of pool, you accept.

I hear you’re good, he sneers. Nearly a foot shorter than you, nonetheless he’s got quite the swagger on (maybe military, fly boy?) As it’s always the little lapdog types barking the loudest you look to the bar, where four of his buddies—corn-fed and beefy, hard little eyes in those puffy cheeks—are sucking down longnecks.

Wanna play for a twenty? His voice pipes like a banged-up flute. And he’s twirling the quarter for the break flip over and over in his left hand, in his right, lightly bouncing the cue.

You tell him, Sure. As bar tables go, it’s not bad, so you can shoot softly, trust the table to roll fairly straight. You call heads, win the break.

Before you know it you’re looking at an easy corner shot on the eight. He’s been kind of prancing about in your field of vision as you shoot, pretending to compliment you but seeking to distract. He pulls a twenty-dollar bill out of his jeans, lays it down on the table and snarls, Make it yer dead…

That night, maybe you were fueled by one too many Scotches. You step up and look down, out past the cue, then up at his jagged blue eyes and scruffy blonde hair glowering at you. But you focus on that one pure point shining for you, on the black curve of the eight ball, then tap the cue—soundlessly it rolls, as if on a rail, over the bill, the eight dropping dead center into the pocket.

You pick up the bill, stash it in your shirt pocket. Your eyes and arm raise in time to catch the pool cue suddenly swinging your way.

When he launches himself at you, a half turn of your body, grab and assist to the back of his plaid Pendleton sends him sprawling. But the two goons, pile on you from behind, knock you down to the dank stench of the dark, dirty floor…Before they can grapple a hold you stand, feeling just a few scrapes and nicks, as an angry Mars breathing heavenly fire.

Even your amigo—slinking into his beer at the bar—is afraid to look at you. You dust yourself off, sling your coat over your shoulder, and, all senses forced alive, walk out the shithole’s door…

So now you’re deep in the so-called heart of Texas, and, yeah, you’re still playing bubba’s game of pool. Guess that you could tell them of your having been one bad hombre in the old days, but down here, fifteen hundred miles from any homies in either direction, you know it wouldn’t do much good…

You see, you’re really one of the ancients. You’re of the Celts, a people whom the mountain people used to kidnap, during the Roman Empire, and force to work the Halstatt salt mines. In those days most Celts traveled the old “silk routes” in small bands. Many of the men over six feet, like your self; riding in chariots drawn by star gazing horses, they feared nothing. Yet, when the narrow mountain passes were blocked—by the four-foot Lilliputians native to the xenophobic interior—their usual strategic advantages were nullified. Bound tightly with thick cord, starved and beaten, these Gullivers were put to slave labor, mining salt for trade to the Empire, until—one eventual day—they’d go berserk and were killed…

Down here in Dallas, now, with your lady, you do the tour. Through the newly burgeoning arts district, downtown—the Hard Rock Café, with all the 5’10” wannabe supermodels in hot pants, tossing teased blonde hair and pouting at the shiny new Cad’s cruising past…

You even take a look at the damned grassy knoll, where Japanese tourists have their pictures taken atop…The scratchy voice of some homeless guy with a sandwich billboard advertises the nearby JFK museum…

Then you do the sultry, long drive out of town—navigate a hodgepodge of rippling reflective mirrors, curves and triangles tossed together any which way around the octopus-drunk freeway tentacles, still under construction, at it’s center. Find some flat open country—a long two-lane road over the heat-miraged horizon to some place called Texoma. Little town—one gas station, boarded-up houses weathered permanently grey.

Far cry from downtown Dallas, from all the oil money on Turtle Creek Drive—big riverside park, elegant wrought-iron benches placed about the carefully cultivated expanses of green. Architectural marvels of mansions well set back behind the brick walls, security-camera’d gates…

Turning down the Red River graveled road, to where a lake has been created by the Army Corps of Engineers, you’re glad to be beneath the bank’s willow trees. Out of the heat. It’s so peaceful here, you don’t even mind it when your lady asks you to bum a cigarette from three cowboys—drinking a case of beer in the cab of a nearby pickup truck.

A bit later you’re at a low slung roadhouse where your lady claims, as it’s Sunday, they give out free beer. It’s like a religion here, she says, with that easy smile of hers—the one you fall asleep in the peacefulness of night looking at, her head cradled in your arm.

Country karaoke as well. Some 200 songs in the book the waitress brings you—along with request slips. Big wide-screened television that flashes the bouncing cue ball lyrics for the cowboy-hat’d and booted guys who kind of stumble up, mid-afternoon buzzed, to the mike, plop their beer bellies down on the stool, and proceed to butcher, what you’re seeing, maybe for the first time, is some guy’s tender and eloquent words of love…

When your lady’s teenage son finds a “Beastie Boys” song, “Licensed to Ill,” and raps it out to polite applause you shoo him and her to the door, load up the Volvo—too much of a curiosity in this parking lot of pickup trucks with shotguns rear-window racked—and head on back to Dallas.

That night, back at the “Texas Tux Lounge,” your play at the table wins some fancy silk lingerie, risqué enough to make your lady blush, and you excuse yourself and retire …

When your lady’s mother wants you and your lady to go country line dancing to the break of dawn, you look at how tired your lady’s face is beginning to look, decline politely and head home…

The next day you’re back on the road again. The big reconciliation between mother, having called from her “deathbed,” and daughter never really happened. And the step-dad’s all grumpy about this, that & the other thing…

When you’d driven down, the sun danced all day along the
ribbon of tarmac stretched to the horizon.
On this the return trip, a hint of fall now nips the air. Though the Volvo’s done this trip half a dozen times, the engine’s hum doesn’t seem so certain. Sure enough, in the middle of West Texas, three shipping days from the Dallas Volvo dealership, the water pump goes.

 

Back cruising through the night, the engine’s temp staying low, the bright carnival lights of Las Vegas—lost wages, as Steely Dan sang—appear on the horizon.

On the way down you managed to bypass this town, looking at sprawling new subdivision after subdivision carved into the desert, casino after casino honeycombed with gleaming semis, weather-beaten RV’s, cars, trucks—all like worker bees around this artificial hive, some monument to however long shot it may be, a possibility…

So you coast the Volvo past the Venetian citadels, mini-Eiffel Tower, even half of a huge Harley-Davidson, hurtling through a wall, V-twin engine hanging over the strip. Slow cruise in the midst of the tourist pack, taking in all the other bizarre icons of this baroque pastiche. At the Palms Casino you turn into the parking lot. Your lady, you see, claims it’s the best shot…

You park the car, herd your group into the rest of the crowd—all eager to pay homage to this modern Wheel of Fortuna…You’re thinking about back in the days of ancient Empire… Those Annals you’d once read come alive; you’re seeing one of the white-toga’d ruling elite—having just heard of some inferior’s ill-fortune, he shrugs, palms upward, and looks helplessly to the skies, pretending to bewail Fortuna’s beclouded wind of bad luck … Ah, what can one do about Fortuna and the Fates…

You shrug jacket tighter and head towards the big glass doors. The water pump, your lady’s necessities (French Vanilla cappuccinos and cigarettes) ate up the return budget. You know you’ve got to win. Dumbstruck as the others milling randomly about, you clutch your last ten in your pocket as a lucky rabbit’s foot. You sit down at the blackjack table and toss that bill down for a hand.

You look around at all the bland faces drawn tight—not cool, not sophisticated, not having fun, just uptight. The dealer acts like a refugee from an Interstate truck stop—raspy voice calling everybody honey.

More than her voice grates at you. Too much on your mind, all the work you’re going to face upon your return; matters all dropped for your lady’s spur of the moment emergency trip. You’re wondering how the things once simple in your life—stuff you used to be able to take for granted, or maybe even the stuff some normal citizen does, going about that sit back and enjoy the movie! the fool’s been told is his or her life—all somehow have gotten so impossible…

First hand your two face cards beat the dealer’s eighteen. But you and your lady’s sigh of relief settle into a pattern of little up, little down…

Fatigue catches up with your lady—you can’t remember a road trip as exhausting as this one—and she goes back out to the parking lot to sleep in the car. You pace yourself with the free Scotch and settle down to get into the groove…

As you chuck the “counting cards” system a college friend showed you, back in the days, and rely on sheer instinct your chips begin to fill your well…

You’re trying not to think about a conversation you had a few nights back—sitting outside, under the stars, sipping beer with your lady’s ex. Personable guy, but one always with a con going.

He was telling stories about your lady’s used to be wilder days. One time she supposedly took off with a bunch of Hell’s Angels when she was with him in a bar—he said he had to go bang on the door of the clubhouse to, the next day, get her back. He claimed, too, that she’d ruthlessly spent all of the little chunk of oil money his daddy had given him…Yessiree, that woman goes through money and men like water…

Yeah, well that was back in her days, which didn’t mean much—hey look, a good looking southern gal deep in the land of down yonder?

By the time you’ve met her, she’s gone though a painful divorce and then to school, finally—getting her MFA in San Francisco…

Now she’s that artist you so love—hiding out behind her Wayfarers on your trips up the coast to Mendocino. Reminding you of what the gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson once said, to an aspiring writer, Son, crazy is a term applied lovingly to artists…Insanity, well, that’s a legal term…Make sure you know the fucking difference!”

And she’s the artist with such deep colors of vision—most important, the space between. The resourceful one, who, before she met you, upon having had her brushes and paints stolen by a fool mistaking more, proceeded to paint the canvas she saw in her head with sticks as brushes…

Now you look around at all the tits and ass threatening to flop out of flimsy outfits, all the squint-eyed men flashing, in grubbly little pinkie-ringed hands, clips of bills, chips, as some kind of ritualistic license to not only ogle but to purchase what obviously is new inventory and all that fatigue you haven’t been able to afford over the past few months hits you—as too many tons of cascading bricks, blows mapped and marked out by some damn little fool without a clue……

A new dealer arrives. He flashes a grin of silver-capped teeth and arranges his card shoe. His eyes have that now familiar look of the dead, of having gone past the point of caring. But not to that point of being at peace.

Maybe peace is another one of those illusions in this land of tis of thee. Does anyone feel it anymore? After passing all those Marilyn look-alikes, hiking fluffy, little-girl dresses, on the neon-heated sidewalks you know that, for a price, they promise the matter, but isn’t it, or maybe, didn’t it used to be, more?

All the jumbled, overcrowded morass begging for attention out there on the main drag sweep past. You can’t help but notice that this new dealer looks like somebody you’ve seen in a movie. But not, say, Gary Cooper on a white horse. No this guy looks just like the snake-skin-cowboy booted, knuckle-tatoo’d thug in Quentin Tarantino’s Wild at Heart—the unadulterated evil that got such a kick out of tearing up Lulu & Sailor. No matter how pathetic their life already was.

Same rotted teeth and gums as the movie when he smiles, says, “Senor, how is Lady Luck treating you tonight?”

“Not bad,” you respond. Truth is that you haven’t counted your chips—old superstition.

You watch him feign clumsiness as he deals—your King and Queen lose to his blackjack. You toss in a couple of more hands without betting. Gathering your chips—they stretch from your thumb to middle finger—you do a count. $215, enough for a room and gas home. You exhale, for the first time in hours, and rise to cash-out.

But on your way to the parking lot the creep dealer turns back up like a bad penny. Five of them, actually. Four punks on BMX’s— bouncing pool cue bottom half’s off the greasy tarmac—and a fat white bubba. All early twenties, wearing T-Shirts captioned “SECURITY.”

“Where ya goin’, champ?” the fat white boy drawls.

“Home,” you yawn. “Through for the night.”

“Tha’s right you’re through. We been watching you—you must think you’re some Hollywood movie star or sumpin.”

The BMX punks chortle.

“Well yer reel done ended.”

You’ve been here before too. And not just back in the days. Through your fatigue a lightning flash of a memory strikes. You’re a wee one, sitting on your Irish grandfather’s knee. In between sneaking up the back steps from the basement den to the kitchen to acquire—without your good Catholic gran taking notice—more warrior meade for him, you listen, raptly, to his Boston Brahmin brogue intone tales of King Arthur and his Round Table of Olde….

And there he stood, lad, on that promontory overlooking the eastern sea of the Motherland. Naked to the waist, midnight blue war clay streaking those high-boned cheeks. Left hand shielding his eyes—brown as the Mother earth, deeply piercing as a falcon’s—he’d watch the advance boats from yet another Saxon war galley oar in, and, when they’d catch sight of him and pause mid-stroke,

why he’d boom out , “Well, are we going to have at it or what? I don’t have all day you know!”

More times than not, the boats would put about, return to the war galley, hoist sails and disappear…

Now those were tough times, laddie. So many miles of coastline, so few able to defend. The warriors were spread so thin that their scouting was most often only solitary. So having that Celtic presence of mind—as when an old Irishman and his two sons bluffed an entire Roman legion into backing down from seizing a key pass—was most important.

Now see yourself standing your high ground in the fading light of day—not wanting to look around behind you, wondering if this time, truly, would finally be the one on which you were all alone…

But our good King Arthur never gave in to that fear…

At this point your Grandfather’s eyes would grow large with meaning, his voice would soften, drop in pitch a wee bit more…

You see, lad, he was not the type to bluff…

“Hey, this is Vegas, right?” You smile, but it’s slow and real—that of a man with nothing left to lose.

The littlest one snorts with amusement. “Dang fool don’t even know where he is!”

“You got that mayor who’s a Mafioso, right?”

The BMX’s, which have pushed themselves into a circle around you, pull up. “Yeah, so what the fuck?” Tall, dark sullen one.

“Yeah, well, I got family back in New York, ya know? The real city, not this piece of paper-mache shit you got here.” Eyes warily dart to the big bubba, looking for a signal. “Diamond district, lower Manhattan, They hear I get disrespected here I’m sure your mayor gonna hear all about it, too, capiche, you motherfuckin’ little fronzio’s? ”

You’ve been in a ready position, hands with palms in, low and loose just in front of you. Big Bubba’s eyes look a little glazed, he’s kind of staring at you and not at you…

You laugh—an easy deep belly release—turn and walk.

You see, like good King Arthur, you never look back…

 

Inside that air-conditioned sterility we in this country call a motel your lady sleeps—kind of sprawled about the covers. You’ve been up, sitting in the big, overstuffed chair and doing a little meditation. You rise, unbutton shirt and pants and drape them over the chair. You pull back the covers on the bed, slide your lady in, get in bed yourself. Tears on her cheek, she turns towards you, slides her arms around your waist, says Hold me…

and you do.

 

 

 

1. “Luchenbach, Texas,” Waylon Jennings