Back When I Was Crazy

(Writing exercise at EDVP Adult Creative Writing Group, inspired by Roberto Bolaño's "The Romantic Dogs")

Back when I was crazy it was normal to put beer in my gut before breakfast, perched on a carved up picnic table with a warm, empty can of Miller Lite in one hand and a stale, untouched raisin bagel in the other, beneath a Seattle drizzle as common as air, drawing slow, easy stupidity down like a curtain in my brain before the experiment of the morning classroom proved me right.

Back when I was crazy it was normal to fight for hours with a girl I was making ugly and being made ugly by, shirking our costumes of cool to become red-faced lunatics over something that scarcely mattered anyway, something that was merely an excuse to strike at each other for loving someone so far away.

Back when I was crazy it was normal to drive cars down the black throats of liquored nights, telling myself lies about my ability and fate, as if simply knowing which direction a back road curved would be enough to keep my blood inside my body instead of painting the asphalt and trees like countless fools before me.

Back when I was crazy it was normal to fling a dish, upend a table, even press a knife to my fingers in a dish-filled sink, to hate walls and the limitations of fists, to hammer my spirit and hers with blunt words or pierce our minds bloodlessly with the filed down tip of insult.

Back when I was crazy it was normal to imagine myself at 32, far beyond the dangers and excesses and torn affairs of youth, to imagine myself bald and good-naturedly grumbling through a career, as close to happy as I'd get having left behind the violent bafflement of youth.

After the Humans

(A writing exercise from Youth Speaks writing circle, every Thursday from 5 - 7 at the Seattle Central Public Library, open to all youth 13-21 with word interest or passion!)

A few weeks after the planet shrugged—typhoons, tsunamis, a tectonic grind—and freed itself from the clammy grip of humans (and the planet felt bad about this, somewhat as a human might feel upon crushing a bumblebee that hadn’t yet stung, but whose presence seemed to be growing inexorably from nuisance to threat), the downtown Seattle library still stood—or, rather, leaned, tipped as it was by a filthy tidal wave that set it to rest against the neighboring skyscraper, one-third full of murky seawater, like an odd toy in the bottom of a drained aquarium. The Puget Sound itself had been spoiled by the spillage of countless metric tons of human civilization’s offal: diesel, sewage, chlorine, acids, gas and Freon and the half-solid waters that lapped at downtown’s waterfront hosted no marine life that any self-interested creature would consume. The gulls and hawks and the odd Peregrine falcon that used to feast amid the rain of tourist-tossed French fries and the bait fishes of the bay had grown weak with hunger and sick with the smoking wreckage of human life and believed themselves to be on the way to a similar end as the wingless fools who were now gone forever. Until one day an indefatigable gull named Simon caught sight of a flash of silver in one of the thousands of triangular windows in the a-kilter husk of the library. Simon veered in for a closer look and indeed, on what had once been reasonably called the third floor, he could make out not one but several winking bodies in the tepid sea that had poured into the library by way of the tsunami before poisonous ruin could occur in that celestial sized scoop of water.

Fish!

Elated but panicked to miss the chance, desperate to prove to himself it was real, Simon snatched a chunk of cement from the decay of 4th Avenue, soared to a strategic height, angled his wings for proper aerodynamics, and let loose his tool, which plummeted true and shattered the window nearest where he’d glimpsed his bounty. Simon banked tight circles as the green water fluted out of the side like a hole poked in a water balloon, till finally the arching bodice of a large steelhead was silhouetted against the blood red dying sun over what used to be the Puget Sound and he let loose a cry that humans would have thought desolate, but which actually articulated great joy and dove toward his prize, his survival.

Cowardice

I don't actually hate this cop. I do, however, wonder how it is that our bureaucracies are structured so that this man's conduct was within reason. Is there no room for social work in policing? And if not how is it exactly that we are different from any other nation whose police force is solely and merely a means of subduing dissent? Nearly every single American grandchild knows how to deal with a cantankerous old woman better than this pathetic, insecure bastard.

La Push, WA

A purple kite bedevils a gull. The ocean curls its lips like a dog dreaming.

The lips of foam! Like crashes that you want to hear. Crash has such a nasty connotation, but here the crashing makes me want to open another beer. I just did. Leonard Cohen sings about dancing to your beauty. Lili reads her farandula on a deck chair looking out on a tall rock island that is said to be the spiritual center of the Quileute people. They run this joint. Everything is possible: fishing for all kinds of big muscular white fish, whale watching, a Frisbee or bonfire permit. A developing country it’s not, but there are those parallels. Democracy is coming to the USA.

On this tall rock island in the foreground they are said to have buried their dead in canoes high in the trees. This is interesting beyond the obvious because of the Tibetan custom of chopping up their dead and leaving them on mountaintops. This possible descent of tradition is crazy intriguing because of the way that the indigenous people of this region originally came here: on the land bridge from Asia. I’m sure any freshman anthropology student would say “duh” but I maintain that it’s cool.

The Quileute people are also supposedly shape shifters. When my wife told me this we were roaring down the one lane highway to La Push and their land. First, wthe road vanished from the GPS screen. Then, immediately after, we spotted a brown owl sitting in the middle of our lane. The car ahead slowed and swerved and we did the same met his eyes as long as we could, but of course we couldn’t rotate our vertebrae like his ass.

Shape shifters that mainly shape shift to wolf form as I understand it. The enemies of vampires that now, thanks to Twilight, are rumored to exist just outside of the reservation in Forks, WA. Apparently—according to the easy to loathe Stephanie Meyer—these Indians have a deal with the vampires about territory and their integrity is respected, mostly. I wonder if anyone asked or told the Indians about their role in fictional folklore. I’m sure they don’t mind geeks coming through and buying fried clams.

Which is something that pisses me off. There are no fresh oysters or clams out here. The waitress acted like we were exceedingly boring people when we asked her. But they had a hell of a BLT. We did not, however, eat it. My wife is going to work wonders on the kitchenette. And life is good. Beyond good, really. Blessed to such an extent that I start to wonder when the shit is coming down.

They say it’s always twilight here (that’s where the name came from). It’s 8:09 and I could wear my sunglasses, reasonably. I kind of hope I’ll see a wolf or a vampire—or possibly one of each doing battle—silhouetted starkly on the top of that tall rock island of the dead when the moon finally comes out.

Two New Books to Devour

I tend to think that entries about "what I'm reading" are kind of tedious--that's why I have the "what I'm reading" corner over on the right! But recently I have had two dear friends and masters of prose published: Miles Nolte and Kimi Faxon Hemingway.

Miles' book, The Alaska Chronicles, is a memoir of fly fishing and much, much more.

Kimi's essay, Personal Belongings, in the anthology Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood, & Abortion will rip you asunder and piece you back together, as will several others in the collection--it's stupendous.

Plugged!

The Road to Quintana Roo (Part I)

Everything started up again because this morning a sewer pump truck hit a flatbed full of chickens, pulling a good seven other cars into the resulting tangle. Can you imagine four-dozen shit-spackled, terrified birds hopping through traffic, their owners bleeding from the head and trying to gather them up? A Pemex couple in a Lexus vomiting as feces slides down their tinted windshield? Campesino pedestrians laughing and using handfuls of the dusty road to wipe the crap of themselves? Well, if you can, you can imagine the size and the tension of the traffic snarl I had building in the worst fucking possible spot at eight in the morning.

The intersection of Encendido and Mex 2 is not just the center of town, but Mex 2 is also the route the goes northeast to the US border outside of Ciudad Juarez and south to…well, south to Quintana Roo if you want it to, I suppose. So you can imagine that a weekday morning in what has now become a “suburb of a border city” is hectic on the roads. And here I had traumatized chickens covered in shit and dozens of held-up vehicles, which swelled to hundreds in the ten minutes it took me to get there from the station. God knows I could have used every cop on duty, but between the intestinal flu of the last weeks, the higher ups’ refusal to go anywhere near such a scene, and the task force working all the missing girls files, after twenty-seven years on the force I got the special assignment of trying to straighten out the intersection on my own. Only in Méjico.

So I hustle up the block, the station’s burnt coffee sloshing around in my gut, making me think that I might have to hit a toilet, especially when I first catch whiff of the sewer truck. The truck climbed up on the back of the flatbed and tipped off and was then torn open, as if by a can opener, on the fender of the flatbed. The sewer pump driver is calmly talking on his cell phone, watching the chicken ranchers like they’re a boring sitcom. The Pemex Lexus is trying to back away from the mayhem but can’t angle through the mass of common cars, which are honking at them, the drivers howling curses peppered with laughs. Poop on the rich! Populism is like weeds in my country.

“Oye, Agente!” the head chicken rancher bellows. “Are you going to make this cabrón pay for my chickens?” When I begin my gesture of futility, he throws his cap to the filthy earth and stomps on it. “ And who will eat shitty chickens, sir?”

I turn toward the sewer pump driver who gives me a “hold-on” palm, with a finger pointed toward the phone and the mouthed explanation “el jefé.”

With a few shouts, a couple of negotiations and one quick palm to my sidearm, one side of the intersection is pretty quickly straightened out: vehicles maneuvered into rough rows, those furthest north able to reverse away. I hook a clean, renegade chicken by the feet and deliver him to the solemn rancher.

I move to the west side of the pileup and am just approaching the closest driver, who’s motioning for me to examine the thumb-sized dent in his fender, when it catches my eye: a waxed, dark blue Impala driving straight down the sidewalk to circumvent the accident. It’s not coming slowly either: street kids do monkeyish hops over hoods and trunks; a viejo with a table full of lottery tickets loses his wares as he saves his ass by way of a panadería’s doorway.

If anything, a well-insulated midsection is probably an asset in this situation but it’s in situations like this that I become aware of my years, the sag of my flesh, the atrophy of muscle groups, the moonscape of my baldhead. But what I’ve got are my eyes and my voice (which once stopped a knife fight) and I use all of them to halt the Chevy before its grill kisses my kneecaps.

“ALTO!”

The Impala stops but the engine races. The cacophony of horns has all but ceased. Except for the growl of the V8, the intersection is relatively silent. I count four occupants through the tint, all with sunglasses, all narcos, all young. I do not draw the .40 but I have it in my grip, my finger already past the trigger guard. A long plume of marijuana smoke issues from the passenger side as the glass sighs down. I put my faith in things one should not in Méjico: witnesses, my own gun, reason, negotiation.

I’m alarmed to see Emilio Herrera in the passenger seat. Emilio and I are acquainted in an unfortunate way.

“Good morning, officer,” he says to me in sarcastic, cheerful English. His long black hair is placed rather than combed back. It stays with mysterious obedience. His goatee is thin and carefully trimmed. A gold cap winks when he smiles. One black flake of ash from his enormous spliff rests on his immaculate white tee shirt. “This is quite a mess you have here. “

He sweeps his hand at the shit-spotted scene.

“You cannot drive on the sidewalk. You almost killed an old man back there.”

Emilio drops the shades to the end of his strangely thin nose, rotates his stocky torso, peers through the back window. He turns back around, takes a deep drag, aims his one blue and one brown eye up at me.

“Seems that we can. We did. And as for that viejo, he looks fine. Now: how can we help you Agente Companzo?”

Shoot him. Shoot all four of them if you can. It’s a ten round clip; fully auto. It’s practically drawn already. They’re stoned. Sure, you’ll die but you’ll be a hero—all these citizens will remember you. Thank you. Celebrate you.

“You can help yourself by obeying my orders, joven.”

The smirk dies on Emilio’s pockmarked cheeks. His free right arm dives out of sight. I draw the .40 and place it at the edge of his window, aiming at his sternum. I hear racks sliding in the backseat. My martyrdom suddenly looks duller.

“You can help yourself by stepping away from my car and clearing a path for us, cerdo.” Emilio hisses. “I do not know what has gotten into you but I will be insulted if I have to remind you of your place.”

I hesitate.

“I don’t even want to have to remind your boss of his place, old man. But I might not mind showing your wife hers—she is impressive for an abuela. And with an afternoon of phone calls I could find your cobarde son in el norte and finish that old thing.” Emilio’s voice has carried from vicious growl to singsong mockery in the course of these words. He pulls hard on his joint. “Now move.”

Before I can move, however, a hand with slender fingers, nails painted onyx back, slips through the window from behind Emilio. It deposits a gram of cocaine and a five-peso bill into my uniform pocket, pats my breast. The engine revs. Emilio pushes his shades up. The window disappears them all, along with their laughter. A Narco Ballad starts up. I stand squarely before the Impala, drop the coke and money and grind it into the sewage-covered ground with my boot. Then I lead them down the sidewalk, shooing pedestrians and bicycles and carts out of the way. I feel my teeth creak and shift in the back of my jaw.

Mea Culpa

Ok, so a sufficient enough time has passed, a sufficient amount of wine drunk, a sufficient obsession with Kris Kristofferson and his newfound humility and philosophy has developed. I realize that my entry of a couple months ago ("What the F(*#?: No to Blogger Hari Kari) was ill-advised, insensitive and all around assholish. My motivation was good, believe it or not--a twisty kind of way to express how much I love and miss those carriers of the heavy words with which I've shared so much over the years. But my methodology was flawed and, moreover, my dogged lack of realism got stuck in my mouth again. I know that everyone at whom I directed my loving guilt trip is a hardworking person with ever-increasingly responsibilities. I also realize that blogging itself is a half-assed way to "stay in touch." It was, however, half an ass that I enjoyed viewing. But the bottom line is that I withdraw fully and heartily apologize for my chastisement of all you wonderful, toiling souls that I could (and just might) pick up the phone and fucking call.