July 26-27 - on the road
The one thing I like about the bus is that you get to talk to people. These are real people, getting around on a budget. I talk to a Lebanese truck driver from California. He's down on his home state. California is driving independent truckers like him out with their pollution regulations. He says LA is bad, pollution wise. He wants me that when we go over the mountain into LA, to expect a broad yellow smog to cover the city below. Still, the pollution cleaning devices the state is requiring all trucker to put on their vehicles cost about $14000. He can't afford it, so he and his wife are moving to San Antonio, where you can still make a buck.
I talk to a 40ish hippie lady. She looks road worn and not entirely there. She's from Tempe. She's spent the last 10 years in Florida waiting tables. She's wearing a huge back pack when she gets on the bus. I ask her if she's a experienced traveler. Surprisingly, she says no. She'd hitched east in late 90s to get out of Arizona. She's going him to take care of a sick friend. She says that like it's a surrender.. She packs like that cause she likes camping. But bus riding isn't camping; you have to pack light, not tall. The bus is hard on her and the cramped seats make her fidget. She gets off in El Paso and determines she'd rather hitch her way back to Arizona, even if it takes longer. She looks like she's spent a lifetime taking the harsher route.
The bus stops in Blyth, California for a 30 minute lunch break. A McDonald's and a Taco Bell are one block from the bus stationette. Two guys named Manuel and Carlos walk with me three blocks further in the dry midmorning heat to taqueria across the freeway. The food there is just like Taco Bell, but we feel better for our efforts at authenticity. I ask Manuel if Carlos is his nephew or his son. "No, we're just friends. We're both from Corpus and we're heading home California." Manuel is much older, at least late 60s, dark skinned with a salt and pepper beard, long and scraggly like an Indian's. He's buying Manuel's lunch. When Carlos brings the food back from the counter, Manuel tells us about a time he was young and penniless and some guy bought him lunch, only making him promise that someday, if he met someone in need on the road, he'd have to help him out. He makes Carlos promise to do the same once he has money. Carlos is in his 20s and eagerly takes this bargain; he can't imagine not having lots of money one day.
Manuel talks about his 27 years in the army. He's seen the world, starting with Vietnam, but no one place is his favorite. He says he might be going senile. He has 9 siblings back in Modesto. Everyone but me on the bus seems to be going home.
Gina is 16 and is traveling with her mother, who doesn't at first appear to speak English. They're returning to San Bernardino from visiting relatives in Taos. When we pass a huge wind farm out of Indio, California, she looks at the massive three blade propellers karate chopping the wind to harvest its energy. She says, "I want to be an engineer one day and work on them." I tell her that's a good goal; that's the future. "Well, if I can go to college," she adds on. "No," her mama interrupts in a heavy Norteño accent, "you weel go to college." Good for you, mom, I nod. The conversation has reached a comfortable end point and the ladies go back to watching their movie on Gina's laptop.
I probably look like a goober taking pictures of mountains out through the bus window. I don't care. I'm still blown away at the sight of the western mountains this up close. I embrace my goofiness.
Monday, July 29, 2013
Up and Down America
Friday, July 26 - New Mexico
I'm a flatlander. I don't apologize for that. Flattened lands, terrain without contours, a country with distant horizons, this is my comfort zone. I don't understand mountains.
I've been through the Appalachians a few times in my life. When I was a kid my family would drive east to visit relatives most summers, but those are friendly mountains. They ease you up into their heights with the rolling hills at their feet and give your ears a chance to slowly adapt to the lighter air pressure. They cover their naked elevation with a coy draping of trees. As you climb them, there is greenery and the hint of active fauna to make a human-friendly environment. They're not flat, but at least the eastern mountains don't throw their looming altitudes in your face.
These western mountains, however, seem to pop up out of nowhere. This struck me as I drove east out of El Paso and saw wide gray mountain ranges fade in all along the horizon. No sooner had they appeared, still 20 miles in the distance, but they raised the arc of the horizon at least 15 degrees higher. Soon clumps of smaller mountains rolled into view to the left or right, rocky and steep, but clearly inferior to the growing mountains ahead.
The ground level itself rose only slightly, judging from the occasional pop in my ears, before these great jagged walls came into full view. Road signs eventually named the Guadalupe Mountains. Their jagged rise and treeless slopes and scattering of boulders about tell a story of violent tectonics below, eons ago, convulsing the earth and giving birth to these giants. I drove into them wide eyed and dumbstruck by the steep faces and vestigial rockslides still gathered at their feet.
These are monsters made of rocks, surrounded by dramatic vistas and dangerous avalanche zones. They have a scattering of shrubs and desert plants on them, in spots, but not the full beards of green you see back east. These are adolescent mountains, patchy in their foliage, still awkward, and prone to tantrums. And yet to us, they are like gods. My car brought them onto me faster than the first humans could fathom, but even that advance of human mobility couldn't tame the awe the Guadalupes command.
Cars, like most technologies, try to make us love God less. But the Guadalupes mock technology. You can't help but approach and enter those mountains and not fall silent at nature's might. Paved roads that slice through the deserts have to bend to accommodate mountains of this rise and girth. Wending between two rocky clusters of sharp mountains, my eyes darted up left then up right toward the tops of the spires. I couldn't not look.
Circumnavigating the first peaks, a new clutch of mountains appeared around the bend. I was in a valley of giants, my mouth agape like a suckling infant. I felt small, but safe between the spiring rocks. The things that worry me didn't matter up here. Drunk drivers, angry strangers, shrinking bank accounts, and temperamental artists don't matter. Threatening bosses, rising insurance payments, self destructive friends tumbling drunk off balconies, capricious utility companies, manipulative politicians, and the slow creep of environmental destruction all lost their grip on my shoulders and fell away.
These mountains will endure the loss of all we know. The weight of being in debt, of being powerless, of not being good enough all fell away. Human things didn't matter in the high mountain air. We're just here while we're here and then we're gone. Only these rocks abide. The scope of the mountains shrunk my worries and fed me and made the world safe for one afternoon, even as I flew on black rubber through the falling rocks zone. The mountain air lightened all worrisome things and lifted them into the clouds. I cried at the sense of relief in these mountains and then laughed at how silly it was to cry about mountains.
But there's something bigger than human cares up there. For a second I felt it.
Beyond the Guadalupe Mountains the road persists into Carlsbad. I didn't have to use my turn signal once. Unlikely as it sounds, it's all just one street from the Coral Motel to the tourist traps outside the Carlsbad Caverns.
The natural entry into the caverns is a looping, dropping path down into the earth. On a hot day, the cool of the cave radiates off the dank walls as your feet tack you downward into the planet. Park rangers warn tourists about bats and not touching the stalagmites. But today there were only song birds chirping wildly and fluttering in and out of the cave's mouth. There were a hundred birds from several different species, each physically small—either because deserts keep their residents small or because the mouth of the cave was so large.
The park rangers do not warn guests about heavy scent of guano—bat poop—rising out the throat of the cave on the warm air of human tourists. For forty five minutes, you just walk down and down more, weaving like a doodle, into the dark cool. Eyes adjust as the indirect light above dissipates behind you. The occasional electric spotlight casts reliefs onto walls and triangular shadows onto the ceiling of the cave.
A sign along the path warns hikers not to touch anything off the pathway, not to make too much noise, not to drop trash that will stench up the cave pools or attract vermin. In other words, don't be too human. You are but eyes here, and you are ears to the quiet, if you can get away from others on the trail, and you are body heat that the rooms of the cave will push out to keep the balance. But you are nothing else.
Another sign further down makes it clear. Do not enter the deep paths in the cavern after 4:30pm. Do not remain anywhere in the caves after 5:30. They do not mention the government's secret treaty with the Mole People that allows them to carry off whoever they find after 6pm. But it is implied. This is not where you belong. Stay on the narrow path. Do not tire down here. We are not responsible for you.
Perhaps I've read too many pulp stories to be impressed by dungeony underground lairs. Bodies of stalagmites and collapsed boulders carry impressive names. The Dolls' Theatre, Iceberg Rock, the Whale's Mouth, the Twin Domes, the Hall of the Giants. I couldn't help but notice the obvious omission. The domes and minarets of mineral formations all have a distinctly phallic appearance. Perhaps God's great claw carved out these cathedrals and throne rooms from the Earth for us to explore. But before the apes shed their hair, naughty rock appendages rose out of the cavern floors and flagged down from the moist, spent ceilings. These are the halls of the penises. This is not Plutopolis; it is Priapusville.
Eight hundred feet down human commerce stops. It took me almost an hour to cover the length of less than two and a half football fields. At times I had to walk backwards, like an acrophobe, just to shift the
pressure off my ankles and onto my calves, both of which had an easy time of it. Another hour of milling about at the lowest, and most impressive, levels and I was overnourished on nature's beauty. I had a bus to catch back in El Paso. There's an elevator now that comes down to the 800 foot level—where Eisenhower and Krogthurgnert signed the secret treaty they don't tell you about. I gladly hopped on and shot back up to the human world. I bought a commemorative shot glass at the gift shop and drove away.
I'm a flatlander. I don't apologize for that. Flattened lands, terrain without contours, a country with distant horizons, this is my comfort zone. I don't understand mountains.
I've been through the Appalachians a few times in my life. When I was a kid my family would drive east to visit relatives most summers, but those are friendly mountains. They ease you up into their heights with the rolling hills at their feet and give your ears a chance to slowly adapt to the lighter air pressure. They cover their naked elevation with a coy draping of trees. As you climb them, there is greenery and the hint of active fauna to make a human-friendly environment. They're not flat, but at least the eastern mountains don't throw their looming altitudes in your face.
These western mountains, however, seem to pop up out of nowhere. This struck me as I drove east out of El Paso and saw wide gray mountain ranges fade in all along the horizon. No sooner had they appeared, still 20 miles in the distance, but they raised the arc of the horizon at least 15 degrees higher. Soon clumps of smaller mountains rolled into view to the left or right, rocky and steep, but clearly inferior to the growing mountains ahead.
The ground level itself rose only slightly, judging from the occasional pop in my ears, before these great jagged walls came into full view. Road signs eventually named the Guadalupe Mountains. Their jagged rise and treeless slopes and scattering of boulders about tell a story of violent tectonics below, eons ago, convulsing the earth and giving birth to these giants. I drove into them wide eyed and dumbstruck by the steep faces and vestigial rockslides still gathered at their feet.
These are monsters made of rocks, surrounded by dramatic vistas and dangerous avalanche zones. They have a scattering of shrubs and desert plants on them, in spots, but not the full beards of green you see back east. These are adolescent mountains, patchy in their foliage, still awkward, and prone to tantrums. And yet to us, they are like gods. My car brought them onto me faster than the first humans could fathom, but even that advance of human mobility couldn't tame the awe the Guadalupes command.
Cars, like most technologies, try to make us love God less. But the Guadalupes mock technology. You can't help but approach and enter those mountains and not fall silent at nature's might. Paved roads that slice through the deserts have to bend to accommodate mountains of this rise and girth. Wending between two rocky clusters of sharp mountains, my eyes darted up left then up right toward the tops of the spires. I couldn't not look.
Circumnavigating the first peaks, a new clutch of mountains appeared around the bend. I was in a valley of giants, my mouth agape like a suckling infant. I felt small, but safe between the spiring rocks. The things that worry me didn't matter up here. Drunk drivers, angry strangers, shrinking bank accounts, and temperamental artists don't matter. Threatening bosses, rising insurance payments, self destructive friends tumbling drunk off balconies, capricious utility companies, manipulative politicians, and the slow creep of environmental destruction all lost their grip on my shoulders and fell away.
These mountains will endure the loss of all we know. The weight of being in debt, of being powerless, of not being good enough all fell away. Human things didn't matter in the high mountain air. We're just here while we're here and then we're gone. Only these rocks abide. The scope of the mountains shrunk my worries and fed me and made the world safe for one afternoon, even as I flew on black rubber through the falling rocks zone. The mountain air lightened all worrisome things and lifted them into the clouds. I cried at the sense of relief in these mountains and then laughed at how silly it was to cry about mountains.
But there's something bigger than human cares up there. For a second I felt it.
Beyond the Guadalupe Mountains the road persists into Carlsbad. I didn't have to use my turn signal once. Unlikely as it sounds, it's all just one street from the Coral Motel to the tourist traps outside the Carlsbad Caverns.
The natural entry into the caverns is a looping, dropping path down into the earth. On a hot day, the cool of the cave radiates off the dank walls as your feet tack you downward into the planet. Park rangers warn tourists about bats and not touching the stalagmites. But today there were only song birds chirping wildly and fluttering in and out of the cave's mouth. There were a hundred birds from several different species, each physically small—either because deserts keep their residents small or because the mouth of the cave was so large.
The park rangers do not warn guests about heavy scent of guano—bat poop—rising out the throat of the cave on the warm air of human tourists. For forty five minutes, you just walk down and down more, weaving like a doodle, into the dark cool. Eyes adjust as the indirect light above dissipates behind you. The occasional electric spotlight casts reliefs onto walls and triangular shadows onto the ceiling of the cave.
A sign along the path warns hikers not to touch anything off the pathway, not to make too much noise, not to drop trash that will stench up the cave pools or attract vermin. In other words, don't be too human. You are but eyes here, and you are ears to the quiet, if you can get away from others on the trail, and you are body heat that the rooms of the cave will push out to keep the balance. But you are nothing else.
Another sign further down makes it clear. Do not enter the deep paths in the cavern after 4:30pm. Do not remain anywhere in the caves after 5:30. They do not mention the government's secret treaty with the Mole People that allows them to carry off whoever they find after 6pm. But it is implied. This is not where you belong. Stay on the narrow path. Do not tire down here. We are not responsible for you.
Perhaps I've read too many pulp stories to be impressed by dungeony underground lairs. Bodies of stalagmites and collapsed boulders carry impressive names. The Dolls' Theatre, Iceberg Rock, the Whale's Mouth, the Twin Domes, the Hall of the Giants. I couldn't help but notice the obvious omission. The domes and minarets of mineral formations all have a distinctly phallic appearance. Perhaps God's great claw carved out these cathedrals and throne rooms from the Earth for us to explore. But before the apes shed their hair, naughty rock appendages rose out of the cavern floors and flagged down from the moist, spent ceilings. These are the halls of the penises. This is not Plutopolis; it is Priapusville.
 |
| For a change of pace, a giant nipple |
Saturday, July 27, 2013
El Paso
Thursday, July 25 to Friday, July 26 - El Paso, Texas
Sign of motel I don't wanna stay at, no matter how much I'd like to use a microrfidge.
I love El Paso.
I ended up in a bungalow style motel from the 1950s (at least) called the Coral Motel. It's an odd choice of names. I can't imagine there was ever much coral in far west Texas. It doesn't seem to be a misspelling of corral. It was different in its heyday, of course. The interior wasn't designed for as many outlets as contemporary travelers expect. In one corner of my room, a small microwave and a half-sized fridge shared an old brown powerstrip to jack into the wall. The microwave needed an adapter so that its three-prong plug could work with the two-prong power strip.
Modern conveniences struggled to bridge a technology gap two generations thick. No one planned ahead for the future to show up at the Coral Motel. It just showed up one day, many days, one invention at a time, and the rotating cast of managers shoved things around to make room.
Half the accommodations in the room looked jury-rigged; the room has been updated on a strictly ad hoc basis. The shower head had a bizarre looping design from the 70s. The brown power strip was from the 60s. The microwave was at least 20 years old; the television at least 30. The fridge was brand new. It was not a microrfidge. The wall paper pattern was a shout out to the orange and avocado 70s; the bathroom sink looked like it was installed at the time of construction. Nothing, apparently, was thrown out until it quit working.
The accommodations didn't matter much, actually. I wasn't going to spend time watching HBO. I had a narrow window to look up Friday's travel plans, find something artsy or cultural to do in El Paso, type out a couple of journal entries, and swap emails with my people. But my primary mission was to spend some time not on a bus.
El Paso, or at least what I saw of it, is clean city. It's small, but struggling to have an arts scene. I missed the "Last Thursday" gallery stroll, but caught a couple of jazz sets at downtown bars. I was directed to Cincinnati Street for the best restaurants in town. There I had my best conversation in El Paso. Her name was Mercedes.
I found a bar and grill on Cincinnati that looked sufficiently El Pasoish and took a stool at the bar. I chased two pepper hot fish tacos down with a pair slightly dirty martinis—house vodka, of course, cause I ain't no James Bond.
Mercedes manages the bar and grill for her brother, the owner. She has a striking face and silver-streaked dark hair. She carried herself with the casual manner of an artist—I later found out she's a painter. Our conversation stretched out over an hour and a half. Of course when you travel, you rarely talk to anyone for more than an hour. There's always somewhere else to be and something else to take in. I don't think I quite captivated her, but every advance in our dialogue was interrupted by yet another customer needing attention or a waitress presenting another problem.
Mercedes as manager wasn't the boss-type. She was more like the mama of the waitstaff and kitchen crew. She mothered rather than ordering her crew around. She solved their urgent problems with suggestions instead of solutions. Everyone was hurried, but none of her people were frantic. Her calm was contagious.
"So, your brother owns this place?"
"Oh yes. He brought me back from California to run it... and also to help take care of our dad. He's ninety and still sharp as a tack. But of course he needs help to get around and manage things."
"What's it like working with family?"
"It's really not bad. In fact, I treat everyone here like family." She smiled at a waitress bringing a cake out. Suddenly the whole waitstaff converged on one of the cooks and sang him "Happy Birthday" with real warmth, not the manufactured birthday songs chain restaurants bombard customers with. The whole restaurant applauded and in seconds the crew had dispersed back to their stations.
Mercedes seemed to glide from spot to spot about her restaurant, sometimes appearing without warning right next to me and picking up our conversation where we'd left off. She was ethereal, nurturing her workers to handle their jobs cheerfully, never issuing orders. In a word, it was feminine power, delegating from the center out, rather than from the top down. The crew worked together, not like a well oiled machine but like a river, surging and ebbing in waves to meet their purposes.
Her crew included her daughter visiting from San Francisco. "Whenever she comes down," Mercedes explained, "she gets to pick up a shift here and earn a little money for school." The verb stood out. She didn't have to pick up a shift, she got to.
Her current art project, she told me, involved painting a portrait of a baby-to-be on the plaster cast of a pregnant mama's belly. She kept steady eye contact without staring. She listened with her whole body. She rifled through El Paso's arts weekly with me, directed me to stay long enough for a free downtown concert Friday evening, the Alfresco Fridays music series. She wanted to show off El Paso, her El Paso, like she had nurtured it herself from its infancy. No, she said, she couldn't make it to the concert herself; she had to work Friday. She was so smooth and gentle about it, I didn't even realize until an hour later that she'd shot me down.
After talking to a few locals Thursday and Friday, I saw what a family town El Paso is. A small city trying to fill the geographic shoes of where a big city should be. They make up for their size by pulling together. One bar worker graciously recommended a different venue. The old buildings of old downtown stand proud and undemolished—shocking to a Houstonian. The low rung worker, a car washer, at the car rental place who drove me back to the Greyhound station talked with equal enthusiasm about the city's new Triple-A ball club and the old and new museums El Paso offered. It didn't feel like salesmanship as he described the new stadium under construction. It felt like family pride.
Sign of motel I don't wanna stay at, no matter how much I'd like to use a microrfidge.
I love El Paso.
 |
| The Coral in Its Heyday |
Modern conveniences struggled to bridge a technology gap two generations thick. No one planned ahead for the future to show up at the Coral Motel. It just showed up one day, many days, one invention at a time, and the rotating cast of managers shoved things around to make room.
 |
| The Coral Today |
The accommodations didn't matter much, actually. I wasn't going to spend time watching HBO. I had a narrow window to look up Friday's travel plans, find something artsy or cultural to do in El Paso, type out a couple of journal entries, and swap emails with my people. But my primary mission was to spend some time not on a bus.
El Paso, or at least what I saw of it, is clean city. It's small, but struggling to have an arts scene. I missed the "Last Thursday" gallery stroll, but caught a couple of jazz sets at downtown bars. I was directed to Cincinnati Street for the best restaurants in town. There I had my best conversation in El Paso. Her name was Mercedes.
I found a bar and grill on Cincinnati that looked sufficiently El Pasoish and took a stool at the bar. I chased two pepper hot fish tacos down with a pair slightly dirty martinis—house vodka, of course, cause I ain't no James Bond.
Mercedes manages the bar and grill for her brother, the owner. She has a striking face and silver-streaked dark hair. She carried herself with the casual manner of an artist—I later found out she's a painter. Our conversation stretched out over an hour and a half. Of course when you travel, you rarely talk to anyone for more than an hour. There's always somewhere else to be and something else to take in. I don't think I quite captivated her, but every advance in our dialogue was interrupted by yet another customer needing attention or a waitress presenting another problem.
Mercedes as manager wasn't the boss-type. She was more like the mama of the waitstaff and kitchen crew. She mothered rather than ordering her crew around. She solved their urgent problems with suggestions instead of solutions. Everyone was hurried, but none of her people were frantic. Her calm was contagious.
"So, your brother owns this place?"
"Oh yes. He brought me back from California to run it... and also to help take care of our dad. He's ninety and still sharp as a tack. But of course he needs help to get around and manage things."
"What's it like working with family?"
"It's really not bad. In fact, I treat everyone here like family." She smiled at a waitress bringing a cake out. Suddenly the whole waitstaff converged on one of the cooks and sang him "Happy Birthday" with real warmth, not the manufactured birthday songs chain restaurants bombard customers with. The whole restaurant applauded and in seconds the crew had dispersed back to their stations.
Mercedes seemed to glide from spot to spot about her restaurant, sometimes appearing without warning right next to me and picking up our conversation where we'd left off. She was ethereal, nurturing her workers to handle their jobs cheerfully, never issuing orders. In a word, it was feminine power, delegating from the center out, rather than from the top down. The crew worked together, not like a well oiled machine but like a river, surging and ebbing in waves to meet their purposes.
Her crew included her daughter visiting from San Francisco. "Whenever she comes down," Mercedes explained, "she gets to pick up a shift here and earn a little money for school." The verb stood out. She didn't have to pick up a shift, she got to.
Her current art project, she told me, involved painting a portrait of a baby-to-be on the plaster cast of a pregnant mama's belly. She kept steady eye contact without staring. She listened with her whole body. She rifled through El Paso's arts weekly with me, directed me to stay long enough for a free downtown concert Friday evening, the Alfresco Fridays music series. She wanted to show off El Paso, her El Paso, like she had nurtured it herself from its infancy. No, she said, she couldn't make it to the concert herself; she had to work Friday. She was so smooth and gentle about it, I didn't even realize until an hour later that she'd shot me down.
After talking to a few locals Thursday and Friday, I saw what a family town El Paso is. A small city trying to fill the geographic shoes of where a big city should be. They make up for their size by pulling together. One bar worker graciously recommended a different venue. The old buildings of old downtown stand proud and undemolished—shocking to a Houstonian. The low rung worker, a car washer, at the car rental place who drove me back to the Greyhound station talked with equal enthusiasm about the city's new Triple-A ball club and the old and new museums El Paso offered. It didn't feel like salesmanship as he described the new stadium under construction. It felt like family pride.
Friday, July 26, 2013
Juan
Thursday, July 25 - lunch stop in Fort Stockton, Texas
Sturdy dude, about age 25, with arms full of tats, a neatly trimmed full goatee with pencil thin moustache, and a black baseball cap turned sideways. Looks a little bit chollo.
Dude: Hey, is that a good book?
Nerd, late 40s, absorbed in reading a book in the children's play area of the bus station Mickey D's because screaming brats are less annoying than "The View" on widescreen TV
Bucky: (closing book to show cover) Yeh, it's pretty good. It's about the decision to drop the Bomb on Japan in World War Two.
Dude: Oh yeh, we studied that in school. That was kinda fucked up.
Bucky: I guess. It was a war.
Small talk occasionally interrupted by screaming children falling off the tube maze. The young dude keeps steering the conversation back to war.
Dude: Yeh, war fucks things up. You ever been in a war?
Bucky: No. I'm a teacher. A lot of my kids joined military.
Dude: How you feel about that?
Bucky: I dunno. It's complicated. I mean, you see some kids, they really need the discipline. And they get something. They grow up faster, or maybe catch up growing. But, you know, all the wars these days.
Dude: Yeh. That part sucks.
Bucky: You ever join the army?
Dude: Naw, I'm a barber. I cut some guys' hair. Some marines, you know?
Bucky: Oh sure. They're always the hardcases. They're the ones with the most discipline, you know, based on what I've seen from my students when they come back to visit.
Dude: A lot visit you?
Bucky: A few. One of my ex-students came back from Iraq, and he was pretty messed up. He'd killed a young kid at a checkpoint once... and he found out later that little kid was his little brother's age. Fourteen. That messes up your mind.
Dude: (nodding) You know, the Japanese bombed us at Pearl Harbor. And then, later, we dropped a couple of Bombs on their cities, and that ended it. But then, after Nine-Eleven, we got bombed... and we went over there. But we didn't drop any A-bombs on them. And now that's still going on.
Bucky: Well, it wasn't quite that simple back then. They didn't know that dropping the Bombs would end the war. They were still gearing up for an invasion, and they were hoping, the generals were, that they could use the A-Bomb against the Japanese armies, and then send our guys in after a few days to mop them up. That was their plan.
Dude: Just a few days? That's fucked up too.
Bucky: Well, they didn't know much about what radiation could do.
Dude: But still, treating their own people that way... (pauses) But you know, the Bombs still ended the war.
Bucky: That's what us teachers are supposed to teach you. But that's not really the whole story. The Japanese were really ready to fight on. They were fascists and they didn't care that much about their own people dying.
Dude: But they surrendered.
Bucky: They surrendered cause they were afraid of the Russians. They didn't want to be occupied by the Russians, so they gave up only to the Americans.
Dude: Oh.
Bucky: You have friends in the army.
Dude: Not the army. My wife is in the Marines. She just signed up for another hitch.
Bucky: Wow.
Dude: She just made sergeant.
Bucky: She must be doing pretty good.
Dude: Yeh, I guess. She's real eager to go fight, you know? I tell her she oughta look for a desk job, but she wants to get in there.
Bucky: She's in a combat unit?
Dude: Not yet. But she wants to go. A lot of the Marines, I cut their hair, and they like want to go get into it. Fight and kill and all.
Bucky: You don't sound too up on it.
Dude: No. look, I support her and all. This is her life and I guess the Marines treat us pretty good. But our new base, there's not as many Marines there, so my business is pretty slow now.
Bucky: Do yall ever stay stationed long enough for her to take classes?
Dude: Oh, that doesn't matter. She mostly takes those online classes. She'll get a degree out of this. But, you know...
Bucky: You worry?
Dude: We got three kids. I'm having to take off to work with my cousin for a couple of weeks, just to get some extra money. He's got a construction business.
Bucky: She's deployed now?
Dude: Not yet. She's watching the kids. We don't know when she's gonna go back over. She's done two tours.
Bucky: And she upped for a new enlistment.
Dude: While she was over there.
Bucky: Afghanistan?
Dude: Kuwait. But she wants to go fight. It's their culture, the Marines. Everybody wants to go kill.
Bucky: Hardcases.
Dude: No shit.
Bucky: I don't think we're going to be over there much longer. Or we're not supposed to be.
Dude: That's what I was saying. If we had just dropped the Bomb on them, it would've been over.
Bucky: I think that mighta caused more problems than what we've got now.
Dude: I don't know. I think it needs to be over now.
Bucky: Amen. Of course it's always more complicated than that. There's always gonna be something going on somewhere in the world. You sound like a good father.
Dude: Thanks. (thinks quietly) No, that shit just needs to be over with.
Sturdy dude, about age 25, with arms full of tats, a neatly trimmed full goatee with pencil thin moustache, and a black baseball cap turned sideways. Looks a little bit chollo.
Dude: Hey, is that a good book?
Nerd, late 40s, absorbed in reading a book in the children's play area of the bus station Mickey D's because screaming brats are less annoying than "The View" on widescreen TV
Bucky: (closing book to show cover) Yeh, it's pretty good. It's about the decision to drop the Bomb on Japan in World War Two.
Dude: Oh yeh, we studied that in school. That was kinda fucked up.
Bucky: I guess. It was a war.
Small talk occasionally interrupted by screaming children falling off the tube maze. The young dude keeps steering the conversation back to war.
Dude: Yeh, war fucks things up. You ever been in a war?
Bucky: No. I'm a teacher. A lot of my kids joined military.
Dude: How you feel about that?
Bucky: I dunno. It's complicated. I mean, you see some kids, they really need the discipline. And they get something. They grow up faster, or maybe catch up growing. But, you know, all the wars these days.
Dude: Yeh. That part sucks.
Bucky: You ever join the army?
Dude: Naw, I'm a barber. I cut some guys' hair. Some marines, you know?
Bucky: Oh sure. They're always the hardcases. They're the ones with the most discipline, you know, based on what I've seen from my students when they come back to visit.
Dude: A lot visit you?
Bucky: A few. One of my ex-students came back from Iraq, and he was pretty messed up. He'd killed a young kid at a checkpoint once... and he found out later that little kid was his little brother's age. Fourteen. That messes up your mind.
Dude: (nodding) You know, the Japanese bombed us at Pearl Harbor. And then, later, we dropped a couple of Bombs on their cities, and that ended it. But then, after Nine-Eleven, we got bombed... and we went over there. But we didn't drop any A-bombs on them. And now that's still going on.
Bucky: Well, it wasn't quite that simple back then. They didn't know that dropping the Bombs would end the war. They were still gearing up for an invasion, and they were hoping, the generals were, that they could use the A-Bomb against the Japanese armies, and then send our guys in after a few days to mop them up. That was their plan.
Dude: Just a few days? That's fucked up too.
Bucky: Well, they didn't know much about what radiation could do.
Dude: But still, treating their own people that way... (pauses) But you know, the Bombs still ended the war.
Bucky: That's what us teachers are supposed to teach you. But that's not really the whole story. The Japanese were really ready to fight on. They were fascists and they didn't care that much about their own people dying.
Dude: But they surrendered.
Bucky: They surrendered cause they were afraid of the Russians. They didn't want to be occupied by the Russians, so they gave up only to the Americans.
Dude: Oh.
Bucky: You have friends in the army.
Dude: Not the army. My wife is in the Marines. She just signed up for another hitch.
Bucky: Wow.
Dude: She just made sergeant.
Bucky: She must be doing pretty good.
Dude: Yeh, I guess. She's real eager to go fight, you know? I tell her she oughta look for a desk job, but she wants to get in there.
Bucky: She's in a combat unit?
Dude: Not yet. But she wants to go. A lot of the Marines, I cut their hair, and they like want to go get into it. Fight and kill and all.
Bucky: You don't sound too up on it.
Dude: No. look, I support her and all. This is her life and I guess the Marines treat us pretty good. But our new base, there's not as many Marines there, so my business is pretty slow now.
Bucky: Do yall ever stay stationed long enough for her to take classes?
Dude: Oh, that doesn't matter. She mostly takes those online classes. She'll get a degree out of this. But, you know...
Bucky: You worry?
Dude: We got three kids. I'm having to take off to work with my cousin for a couple of weeks, just to get some extra money. He's got a construction business.
Bucky: She's deployed now?
Dude: Not yet. She's watching the kids. We don't know when she's gonna go back over. She's done two tours.
Bucky: And she upped for a new enlistment.
Dude: While she was over there.
Bucky: Afghanistan?
Dude: Kuwait. But she wants to go fight. It's their culture, the Marines. Everybody wants to go kill.
Bucky: Hardcases.
Dude: No shit.
Bucky: I don't think we're going to be over there much longer. Or we're not supposed to be.
Dude: That's what I was saying. If we had just dropped the Bomb on them, it would've been over.
Bucky: I think that mighta caused more problems than what we've got now.
Dude: I don't know. I think it needs to be over now.
Bucky: Amen. Of course it's always more complicated than that. There's always gonna be something going on somewhere in the world. You sound like a good father.
Dude: Thanks. (thinks quietly) No, that shit just needs to be over with.
2000 Words
Thursday, July 25 - across West Texas
Six hours of this...
to get to this.
I don't think we'll ever run out of Texas.
Six hours of this...
to get to this.
I don't think we'll ever run out of Texas.
Alamo Terminal
Thursday, July 25 - San Antonio, Texas
The San Antonio bus terminal was a nice reminder that I am a consumer first and a citizen second. My experience with Greyhound stations revolves around the Houston station, with its seedy downtown surroundings, screaming kids, and drunken hobos lurking about waiting for the cops to shoo them off. But if you look closer, the bus terminal is America at its finest.
The Houston station is a mash up of bored bureaucracy and the entrepreneurial hustle of the guys who hang outside the station hawking cabs and parking spaces. People mill about doing what they want. The ladies running the ticket counter are remarkably efficient, despite their obvious contempt for the human cargo they have to shovel along. The men hustling cabs are Adam Smith's bastards. Telling one guy "No, I've got a ride coming" will not stop the guy right next to him from asking you the same question. They are as relentless as TV commercials and as charming as freeway billboards. As harmless as they are annoying, they are in your face advertisers unapologetically racing for the next dollar. This is main chance spirit that built the Ship Channel and made a city 60 miles inland the second largest port in the country.
In contrast, San Antonio's station is the sterile face of the future, for all practicalities, a little police state. Customers are marched about to stand in line waiting the bus or waiting for an overpriced midnight snack. Rows of brightly lit drink and snack dispensers line the walls with corporate logos and the absurd pricing of a command economy—two-twenty five for a 18-ounce Coke. Giant screens spaced thirty feet apart blare out CNN at volumes that make independent thought impossible. Not the ideal place to try and write eloquent travel essays. But why should sheep write?
A poor black kid—he seemed to be about the age of 20, so the term "kid" is relative—obviously in some kind of trouble, was hustled to a side wall by the refectory (I won't call it a cafeteria). He was shoulder to the wall—no physical contact—with four beefy cops huddled up around him. They were from two different agencies—sheriffs and metro cops, maybe. It doesn't matter, every government institution has its own police force these days. They could've been UTSA and park police for all it matters. They had guns, uniforms, and the right to isolate "troublemakers" like white blood cells pouncing on a bacterium.
I set my bags down to get my camera out, but the kid and two of the cops were gone before I looked up again. Double-plus gone, Citizen Troublemaker, you never existed. The remaining two cops stood at the rousting wall, scanning the room. Wolf Blitzer's voice screamed about failed federal budget deals and a train crash in Spain. A mom with a thirsty 8 year old daughter, waiting for the next train to Dallas, finally broke down and started plunking change into the wide and brightly lit Coke machine. She came up short and asked me for a quarter.
I was a bad consumer and helped her out even though I didn't gain anything by it.
The San Antonio bus terminal was a nice reminder that I am a consumer first and a citizen second. My experience with Greyhound stations revolves around the Houston station, with its seedy downtown surroundings, screaming kids, and drunken hobos lurking about waiting for the cops to shoo them off. But if you look closer, the bus terminal is America at its finest.
The Houston station is a mash up of bored bureaucracy and the entrepreneurial hustle of the guys who hang outside the station hawking cabs and parking spaces. People mill about doing what they want. The ladies running the ticket counter are remarkably efficient, despite their obvious contempt for the human cargo they have to shovel along. The men hustling cabs are Adam Smith's bastards. Telling one guy "No, I've got a ride coming" will not stop the guy right next to him from asking you the same question. They are as relentless as TV commercials and as charming as freeway billboards. As harmless as they are annoying, they are in your face advertisers unapologetically racing for the next dollar. This is main chance spirit that built the Ship Channel and made a city 60 miles inland the second largest port in the country.
In contrast, San Antonio's station is the sterile face of the future, for all practicalities, a little police state. Customers are marched about to stand in line waiting the bus or waiting for an overpriced midnight snack. Rows of brightly lit drink and snack dispensers line the walls with corporate logos and the absurd pricing of a command economy—two-twenty five for a 18-ounce Coke. Giant screens spaced thirty feet apart blare out CNN at volumes that make independent thought impossible. Not the ideal place to try and write eloquent travel essays. But why should sheep write?
A poor black kid—he seemed to be about the age of 20, so the term "kid" is relative—obviously in some kind of trouble, was hustled to a side wall by the refectory (I won't call it a cafeteria). He was shoulder to the wall—no physical contact—with four beefy cops huddled up around him. They were from two different agencies—sheriffs and metro cops, maybe. It doesn't matter, every government institution has its own police force these days. They could've been UTSA and park police for all it matters. They had guns, uniforms, and the right to isolate "troublemakers" like white blood cells pouncing on a bacterium.
I set my bags down to get my camera out, but the kid and two of the cops were gone before I looked up again. Double-plus gone, Citizen Troublemaker, you never existed. The remaining two cops stood at the rousting wall, scanning the room. Wolf Blitzer's voice screamed about failed federal budget deals and a train crash in Spain. A mom with a thirsty 8 year old daughter, waiting for the next train to Dallas, finally broke down and started plunking change into the wide and brightly lit Coke machine. She came up short and asked me for a quarter.
I was a bad consumer and helped her out even though I didn't gain anything by it.
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Starting with a Funeral
Thursday, July 25 - LaPorte, Texas
We buried a clown yesterday, a comedian, a poet, an annoying thumb-in-your-eye egotistical truthteller. It's a strange way to begin a journey, a clumsy gallop into what was supposed to be a fun blog about me crossing the great American West for the first time in my life. But death doesn't wait for convenient moments to intrude itself into life. It slides at any hour, like a cockroach scampering across your bedroom ceiling right before bedtime. It pops up unannounced like a pothole on a rolling highway while you're singing Radar Love with the radio at 80 miles an hour. Death is a popped tire, blown gasket, a drunk driver lurching into opposing traffic. You dodge it or you don't, but you don't control when it arrives and you don't control how much tonnage its head-on collision brings down on you.
So, I began my vacation with a funeral. I'm supposed to go to Seattle and back with this blog, but I began yesterday morning with a side-trip to a funeral in LaPorte, Texas.
LaPorte is a chemical community on the outskirts of Houston. If Houston, with its Halliburtons and Bechtels and ConocoPhillips and Marathon Oils is a great vehicle of economic power and growth in America, LaPorte is the vehicle's engine block—a hot churning grease pit of petroleum refineries and chemical plants. Fat white spheres of crude oil and phallic gray cylinders of chemical treatment plants jut into the sky and punctuate the marsh and concrete countryside along the wide freeway that connects the head in Houston's inner loop to the grinding bowels of the Ship Channel.
Mortal air conditioners are insufficient to disguise the swelter of the July summer heat in LaPorte. You step out of the car but ten seconds and your body heats up and your forehead beads up with sweat. Humans, in their hubris, built LaPorte on a swamp and thought Mother Nature wouldn't notice. But mother brings the heat sopping down with humidity. By 11:10 in the morning, arriving at the Southern Baptist Church where we would lay our poet's flesh to rest, it was already 100 degrees—lose-the-tie hot.
Mississippi marsh hot.
Armpit hot.
Already ten minutes late, my party of four artist-types and an 11 year old destined for a life on the Rive Gauche himself—scampered for the door. It was the wrong entrance. We poets not being the church-cognizant types, we wended our way past classrooms and kitchens till we found a promising door, but this was a miscalculation. We'd found our way to an entrance to the wrong side of the sanctuary, the side the preacher commands.
A smiling Baptist gentleman in a navy blue suit—and they all wore navy blue suits—gave us a stern smile and escorted us out of the building, back out into oven, and around to the proper front entrance.
More smiling Baptist men manned the doors to the services. They were all forty or fifty in age, navy suited, and standing erect with hands folded before their crotches. They were not dressed like bouncers—I believe the Baptists call them ushers and the best of them eventually graduate to being elders. But that said, their mission in LaPorte was crystalline. God's House demands an honor guard and these guards wore navy blue.
Beckoned in, we scattered to seats in the pews like mice. Church mice: the church has the power to render even poets into meek rodents. Us wordsmithers know the value of a superior metaphor and cower before its might.
The sermon saying good-bye to our fellow poet was already in progress. In contrast to the perpetually late and scattered poets, a Baptist funeral starts on time. There are rules and precisions in their services that mock the chaos of a poetry reading. The batch of art-farters I associate with prefer their poetry in bars, often performing and audiencing well lubricated in form and functionality.
A smiling white-maned preacher was invoking God and the Lord Jesus Christ in calling down peace for the mourning parents of our dead poet. On stage, he had adopted the handle of "the Plastic Clown." He was a fat lush and frequent drug user and jolly groper of unwilling cabooses. But his father was a music minister for many years at this church and the preacher called him "Brother Al" and his dead son, "Gene" or "Al-Gene." The Houston poets, sitting in the back and to the sides of the church, shifted in their pews and giggled at things the LaPorte Baptists in the front of the church didn't find amusing. Amens and affirmations popped in-between the lines of the sermon from the front half of the Sanctuary while the poets stared off awkwardly at the certainty that Jesus—no, that the Lord Jesus Christ—had prepared a place in heaven for Al-Gene Junior.
Not a few of the poets and musicians who showed up to say good bye to our clown have deep spiritual beliefs; many talk of Jesus as a cool guy, and a beautiful teacher. But we fidget at proclamations of certainty. We traffic in doubt and ambiguity, metaphor and mystery, booze and the smoke of words left unsaid. The Baptists truck in absolutes and literal certainties. There are no mysteries where faith fills in the gaps.
We were visitors in this country, welcomed guests. His certainty gave the preacher the power of generosity to us. He gave us nods in his words before returning to the anecdotes about how much Al-Gene's family loved Jesus.
"Brother Al-Gene was a poet. And every poet is a philosopher," his mellifluous voice assured his congregants about these unshaven freaks in the back of their church.
"Now, Brother Al-Gene has a whole plethora of poems expressing his life and hope and dreams. So I'm going to say some poetry—not by Al, but from Psalms..."
The poets, being good guests, all stifled their laughter. The preacher's discretion was a good call. Al wrote poems of sex and control, dominance and abuse. When he wasn't writing about sex, he was using sex as a metaphor for drugs or angels as metaphors for orgasms. But he carved his poems of drugs and debauchery with as much loving precision as this Baptist preacher used to tap dance around the truth that Al-Gene drinked and drugged himself into such a stupor one week ago today that he tumpled over a fourth floor balcony and splattered his beautiful poetic mind all over the sidewalk.
As a tribe of poets, we've spent a week agonizing over the freakish details of the Clown's demise. Some of us obsess; some of us drink into stupors ourselves, though we're more alert this week about the need for designated drivers. Our Baptist fellow-countrymen seem more comfortable not delving into the ambiguities of Al's final journey to be with his Lord. Al-Gene, by all accounts, was a true Christian. He may have drunk and shot up and fucked around, but he believed with Baptist certainty that Heaven holds a seat for his needle-pocked caboose. The preacher reaffirmed that certainty.
There wasn't much talk of Al-Gene as a troubled man. He was a mess, as crack aficionados tend to be. There were as many anecdotes about the preacher's life and his faith in God as there were about Al-Gene growing up. This was a service not about the man we lost but about the comfort that his fellow Baptists, particularly his parents, could find knowing the soul of our Plastic Clown was up in Heaven.
It was splendidly dissonant, this Sanctuary of a stern forgiving God celebrating the Christianity and redemption of a drug addled groper of bar asses. Al-Gene, with his all-but-volitional suicide and incessant sexualization of all conversations and joyful cross dressing and self-mutilating birthday parties, was a pure poet. He wore his pain out on his skin for everyone to see and then screamed, "Fuck you, it doesn't exist. I'm nothing but strong and perfect." It was the perfect pastiche of the Baptist certainty and the dirty secret sins of God's chosen souls.
He reveled in every vice but illiteracy—he was a brilliant wordsmith—and poked every eye that looked at him askance. He spat out obscenities because, like all cussers, he wanted shout down his utter lack of control in his world. He buried his pain under whisky instead of sanctimonious Bible quotes.
And I don't speak here about the incredible generosity and benevolence of the man. If he saw a friend was hurting he'd bury him or her in his supernatural hug, almost a squeeze, as if he could strangle the hurt out. But Al-Gene hid his big loving heart behind the plastic clown's mask and I don't want to betray all his secrets here.
I'm writing because I miss him and because he lived the difference between Houston and LaPorte. We thought he was one of us, but he was bigger than us. There was a lot of LaPorte in him—not just in the toxic chemicals churning away in the shadow of Houston's capital hubris.
This is what made him different from the rest of the poets. We are scatter-brained Houston, while Brother Al-Gene was concretely LaPorte. We're always out there scratching our heads and wondering what to make of life's ambiguities. There was no ambiguity in the Clown. Al-Gene embodied that shut-your-eyes ethos of the perpetually certain. He trumpeted the lie that he loved life even as he slowly killed his health with excesses of booze and street chemicals. His gums were rotten, his hypertension astronomical, his teeth slipping away like army deserters. He drunkenly ranted at how brilliant—but inevitably expressed as how "fucking brilliant"—his poetry was, even as he stoned himself numb to kill the nagging doubts about his own worth as a human being. For all his gifts of words, his cursing was remarkably pedestrian. For all his wit of invention, his selection of vices was painful predictable. He held himself up as a big ugly mirror, but that too was a lie for the angelic soul and mountainous compassion he contained.
We buried a clown yesterday, a comedian, a poet, an annoying thumb-in-your-eye egotistical truthteller. It's a strange way to begin a journey, a clumsy gallop into what was supposed to be a fun blog about me crossing the great American West for the first time in my life. But death doesn't wait for convenient moments to intrude itself into life. It slides at any hour, like a cockroach scampering across your bedroom ceiling right before bedtime. It pops up unannounced like a pothole on a rolling highway while you're singing Radar Love with the radio at 80 miles an hour. Death is a popped tire, blown gasket, a drunk driver lurching into opposing traffic. You dodge it or you don't, but you don't control when it arrives and you don't control how much tonnage its head-on collision brings down on you.
So, I began my vacation with a funeral. I'm supposed to go to Seattle and back with this blog, but I began yesterday morning with a side-trip to a funeral in LaPorte, Texas.
LaPorte is a chemical community on the outskirts of Houston. If Houston, with its Halliburtons and Bechtels and ConocoPhillips and Marathon Oils is a great vehicle of economic power and growth in America, LaPorte is the vehicle's engine block—a hot churning grease pit of petroleum refineries and chemical plants. Fat white spheres of crude oil and phallic gray cylinders of chemical treatment plants jut into the sky and punctuate the marsh and concrete countryside along the wide freeway that connects the head in Houston's inner loop to the grinding bowels of the Ship Channel.
Mortal air conditioners are insufficient to disguise the swelter of the July summer heat in LaPorte. You step out of the car but ten seconds and your body heats up and your forehead beads up with sweat. Humans, in their hubris, built LaPorte on a swamp and thought Mother Nature wouldn't notice. But mother brings the heat sopping down with humidity. By 11:10 in the morning, arriving at the Southern Baptist Church where we would lay our poet's flesh to rest, it was already 100 degrees—lose-the-tie hot.
Mississippi marsh hot.
Armpit hot.
Already ten minutes late, my party of four artist-types and an 11 year old destined for a life on the Rive Gauche himself—scampered for the door. It was the wrong entrance. We poets not being the church-cognizant types, we wended our way past classrooms and kitchens till we found a promising door, but this was a miscalculation. We'd found our way to an entrance to the wrong side of the sanctuary, the side the preacher commands.
A smiling Baptist gentleman in a navy blue suit—and they all wore navy blue suits—gave us a stern smile and escorted us out of the building, back out into oven, and around to the proper front entrance.
More smiling Baptist men manned the doors to the services. They were all forty or fifty in age, navy suited, and standing erect with hands folded before their crotches. They were not dressed like bouncers—I believe the Baptists call them ushers and the best of them eventually graduate to being elders. But that said, their mission in LaPorte was crystalline. God's House demands an honor guard and these guards wore navy blue.
Beckoned in, we scattered to seats in the pews like mice. Church mice: the church has the power to render even poets into meek rodents. Us wordsmithers know the value of a superior metaphor and cower before its might.
The sermon saying good-bye to our fellow poet was already in progress. In contrast to the perpetually late and scattered poets, a Baptist funeral starts on time. There are rules and precisions in their services that mock the chaos of a poetry reading. The batch of art-farters I associate with prefer their poetry in bars, often performing and audiencing well lubricated in form and functionality.
A smiling white-maned preacher was invoking God and the Lord Jesus Christ in calling down peace for the mourning parents of our dead poet. On stage, he had adopted the handle of "the Plastic Clown." He was a fat lush and frequent drug user and jolly groper of unwilling cabooses. But his father was a music minister for many years at this church and the preacher called him "Brother Al" and his dead son, "Gene" or "Al-Gene." The Houston poets, sitting in the back and to the sides of the church, shifted in their pews and giggled at things the LaPorte Baptists in the front of the church didn't find amusing. Amens and affirmations popped in-between the lines of the sermon from the front half of the Sanctuary while the poets stared off awkwardly at the certainty that Jesus—no, that the Lord Jesus Christ—had prepared a place in heaven for Al-Gene Junior.
Not a few of the poets and musicians who showed up to say good bye to our clown have deep spiritual beliefs; many talk of Jesus as a cool guy, and a beautiful teacher. But we fidget at proclamations of certainty. We traffic in doubt and ambiguity, metaphor and mystery, booze and the smoke of words left unsaid. The Baptists truck in absolutes and literal certainties. There are no mysteries where faith fills in the gaps.
We were visitors in this country, welcomed guests. His certainty gave the preacher the power of generosity to us. He gave us nods in his words before returning to the anecdotes about how much Al-Gene's family loved Jesus.
"Brother Al-Gene was a poet. And every poet is a philosopher," his mellifluous voice assured his congregants about these unshaven freaks in the back of their church.
"Now, Brother Al-Gene has a whole plethora of poems expressing his life and hope and dreams. So I'm going to say some poetry—not by Al, but from Psalms..."
The poets, being good guests, all stifled their laughter. The preacher's discretion was a good call. Al wrote poems of sex and control, dominance and abuse. When he wasn't writing about sex, he was using sex as a metaphor for drugs or angels as metaphors for orgasms. But he carved his poems of drugs and debauchery with as much loving precision as this Baptist preacher used to tap dance around the truth that Al-Gene drinked and drugged himself into such a stupor one week ago today that he tumpled over a fourth floor balcony and splattered his beautiful poetic mind all over the sidewalk.
As a tribe of poets, we've spent a week agonizing over the freakish details of the Clown's demise. Some of us obsess; some of us drink into stupors ourselves, though we're more alert this week about the need for designated drivers. Our Baptist fellow-countrymen seem more comfortable not delving into the ambiguities of Al's final journey to be with his Lord. Al-Gene, by all accounts, was a true Christian. He may have drunk and shot up and fucked around, but he believed with Baptist certainty that Heaven holds a seat for his needle-pocked caboose. The preacher reaffirmed that certainty.
There wasn't much talk of Al-Gene as a troubled man. He was a mess, as crack aficionados tend to be. There were as many anecdotes about the preacher's life and his faith in God as there were about Al-Gene growing up. This was a service not about the man we lost but about the comfort that his fellow Baptists, particularly his parents, could find knowing the soul of our Plastic Clown was up in Heaven.
It was splendidly dissonant, this Sanctuary of a stern forgiving God celebrating the Christianity and redemption of a drug addled groper of bar asses. Al-Gene, with his all-but-volitional suicide and incessant sexualization of all conversations and joyful cross dressing and self-mutilating birthday parties, was a pure poet. He wore his pain out on his skin for everyone to see and then screamed, "Fuck you, it doesn't exist. I'm nothing but strong and perfect." It was the perfect pastiche of the Baptist certainty and the dirty secret sins of God's chosen souls.
He reveled in every vice but illiteracy—he was a brilliant wordsmith—and poked every eye that looked at him askance. He spat out obscenities because, like all cussers, he wanted shout down his utter lack of control in his world. He buried his pain under whisky instead of sanctimonious Bible quotes.
And I don't speak here about the incredible generosity and benevolence of the man. If he saw a friend was hurting he'd bury him or her in his supernatural hug, almost a squeeze, as if he could strangle the hurt out. But Al-Gene hid his big loving heart behind the plastic clown's mask and I don't want to betray all his secrets here.
I'm writing because I miss him and because he lived the difference between Houston and LaPorte. We thought he was one of us, but he was bigger than us. There was a lot of LaPorte in him—not just in the toxic chemicals churning away in the shadow of Houston's capital hubris.
This is what made him different from the rest of the poets. We are scatter-brained Houston, while Brother Al-Gene was concretely LaPorte. We're always out there scratching our heads and wondering what to make of life's ambiguities. There was no ambiguity in the Clown. Al-Gene embodied that shut-your-eyes ethos of the perpetually certain. He trumpeted the lie that he loved life even as he slowly killed his health with excesses of booze and street chemicals. His gums were rotten, his hypertension astronomical, his teeth slipping away like army deserters. He drunkenly ranted at how brilliant—but inevitably expressed as how "fucking brilliant"—his poetry was, even as he stoned himself numb to kill the nagging doubts about his own worth as a human being. For all his gifts of words, his cursing was remarkably pedestrian. For all his wit of invention, his selection of vices was painful predictable. He held himself up as a big ugly mirror, but that too was a lie for the angelic soul and mountainous compassion he contained.
Why I bother
Wednesday, July 24th - Houston, Texas
I cannot escape Houston. It clings to me. It is my rubber soles melted onto the sidewalk. It is the cement melting till it grips my ankles and spills down my socks into my shoes. I am footbound to Houston, knuckle-caged to Houston. I run for its exits and the invisible hand of Adam Smith slams the doors shut. Dinosaurs get drunk and slam their SUVs into my car. I pound at the walls till my pinkies chafe and my wrist bones ache with tendinitis. But the walls don't give and, while I brush the paint off my shirt cuffs, Gremlins steal my bus ticket and hide it in my sock drawer.
God smites a sacrificial lamb dead and sings a siren ballad to lure me back into the gravity well of staying put where I'm comfortable. Why do I go across the country when I already have it all contained in Google earth and a dozen map books on my shelves? Because I don't want to be comfortable. I want to push out against the unholy suck of Houston and the remorseless sloth of Southern humidity. Why do I go Greyhound? Because I want to roll with the bus over the roads, struggling to type as I travel and sway with the elevated weight of its aluminum sides. I want to feel the miles rush under me. I want to see the sun rise over dry western expanses, not a transplanted oak or a paranoid neighbor's fence. I want to smell the silica of the desert sand, not the caffeinated stench from the Second Ward factory that grinds coffee into profit.
I ride Greyhound because I do not want to be in control. I want to navigate through a dozen cities and brave the hustle-filled bus depots of Los Angeles instead of driving from point A to point B. I want to run into people, random bored, troubled, dangerous, unwoken people who share this big continent with me. I've not met them. I want to feel that Americans I never met share the country with me. I want to taste that it's not an illusion. I want to do goofy things and shoot pictures of landmarks I can't find in books.
Unlike David Byrne, I'm tired of being somewhere. I just want to travel. And I want it to be inconvenient. I want to embrace life, even when it sucks. I want the contrast. When people who cling too tightly to their conveniences ask me, "Aren't you afraid of traveling by the bus? Aren't you worried about the kind of strangers you might run into?"
I want to tell them, "No, it's only people."
I cannot escape Houston. It clings to me. It is my rubber soles melted onto the sidewalk. It is the cement melting till it grips my ankles and spills down my socks into my shoes. I am footbound to Houston, knuckle-caged to Houston. I run for its exits and the invisible hand of Adam Smith slams the doors shut. Dinosaurs get drunk and slam their SUVs into my car. I pound at the walls till my pinkies chafe and my wrist bones ache with tendinitis. But the walls don't give and, while I brush the paint off my shirt cuffs, Gremlins steal my bus ticket and hide it in my sock drawer.
God smites a sacrificial lamb dead and sings a siren ballad to lure me back into the gravity well of staying put where I'm comfortable. Why do I go across the country when I already have it all contained in Google earth and a dozen map books on my shelves? Because I don't want to be comfortable. I want to push out against the unholy suck of Houston and the remorseless sloth of Southern humidity. Why do I go Greyhound? Because I want to roll with the bus over the roads, struggling to type as I travel and sway with the elevated weight of its aluminum sides. I want to feel the miles rush under me. I want to see the sun rise over dry western expanses, not a transplanted oak or a paranoid neighbor's fence. I want to smell the silica of the desert sand, not the caffeinated stench from the Second Ward factory that grinds coffee into profit.
I ride Greyhound because I do not want to be in control. I want to navigate through a dozen cities and brave the hustle-filled bus depots of Los Angeles instead of driving from point A to point B. I want to run into people, random bored, troubled, dangerous, unwoken people who share this big continent with me. I've not met them. I want to feel that Americans I never met share the country with me. I want to taste that it's not an illusion. I want to do goofy things and shoot pictures of landmarks I can't find in books.
Unlike David Byrne, I'm tired of being somewhere. I just want to travel. And I want it to be inconvenient. I want to embrace life, even when it sucks. I want the contrast. When people who cling too tightly to their conveniences ask me, "Aren't you afraid of traveling by the bus? Aren't you worried about the kind of strangers you might run into?"
I want to tell them, "No, it's only people."
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