casitas tumble down the backs
of breast-like straw dough hills
that delve fingers between
bodies mourning
while we sad cats
lay it down in Castro
when you walk the disco
you dance on the balls
of your flat feet
milk-wean me
on Grand Marnier
spoon-feed
ganache
from its paper cone
brush a torrent from
your furrowed face
make a landslide take
residence in my room
from the ledge of the couch
sweep a dream from your mind
and make your lips sound,
you, you, you:
all laced and lovely.
and in the aftermath
of all that panicked flight,
as if the red dusk willed
a concentration of its light:
a falcon on the sill.
It scanned the orchard’s bowers,
then pane by pane it eyed
the stories facing ours
but never looked inside.
I called you in to see.
And when you steamed the room
and naked next to me
stood dripping, as a bloom
of blood formed in your cheek
and slowly seemed to melt
I could almost speak
the love I almost felt.
Wish for something, you said.
A shiver pricked your spine.
The falcon turned its head
and locked its eyes on mine.
For a long moment I’m still in
I wished and wished and wished
the moment would not end.
And just like that it vanished.”
-Postolka, Chritsian Wiman
Someone dims the lights and a few people near the doorway pause to see the new arrivals. I look up and there is a silhouette that I couldn’t mistake, even after all these months. I hear scattered greetings and look away to bury myself in the music but he comes over and whispers a hello stranger into my hair like a spaghetti western but it’s with such casualty that I’m compelled to mouth a sideways greeting as he ventures out into the party. A few minutes later, he wanders over again and this time he announces that he’s leaving. He says he doesn’t know what he’s doing here, as if it’s not a comment but a suggestion; and the remark is kind of to me and kind of to Kimya because she’s standing next to me. Then I look at him with a sulk and say, “I thought you were in Prague”. But he just shrugs and so I reach up, up six-foot-two feet and put my arms around him in an inebriated baby-koala-bear manner (Kimya says this is what I am) and I give him a kiss on the cheek and he leans down, down and nestles his face in the mess of tangles close to the nape of my neck near my cotton shirt with his lips pressed to my skin and there he holds me for what seemed like a long, long time because I am drunk; although it is just a brush. Then he is gone. Gone for good, actually, aside from a postcard he sent from Europe some months later, addressed to lil’ Steph Previch and Her Cat:
“Hey there. I stepped on my belt the other day and there is a hole in my foot, so I’m finding it difficult to walk. The view on the front of this postcard is the castle that I can see from the balcony where I smoke cigarettes; I’ve been smoking a lot lately. No use in quitting. It rains constantly and the feeling is dismal. Hope you’re doing well in Gainesville. Love.”
Then Wyatt counts down to a: one, two, three and Dancing in the Dark comes on and Bruce Springsteen’s voice is a holy spirit that shakes and moves us in ways we didn’t know we could. Somebody yells Happy New Year and the squatters from next door show up and holler at their dogs and the lights come on and everybody goes wild.
Friday, I think, I was moving out; collecting things that were to go or to stay, mostly to be thrown out for Thursday’s trash or picked up by the roadside. I found a flurry of postcards and in that pile was the one from Prague that lacked a return address. It didn’t say much, and it was fitting that it held so little, because there had never been much said between its sender and recipient. Perhaps, though, slightly more was penned in that brief paragraph than ever was displayed on location in the short period that I quietly observed its author, most nights having fallen asleep halfway through a bad foreign film and who lay beside me on several occasions, snoring with the thick scent of vodka spilling from his mouth. The volume was on low, though the conversations never pertained to anything important.
Though the name is insignificant, in my mind these memories have feigned similarity with others of the sort, with plots as parallel and thinned. And I find it unfortunate that my address has since changed, several times, as I may no longer look forward to postcards that may reveal that my name lingers, sometimes still, on the minds of those who send them.
These things barely escaped disposal as I stuffed them in a cardboard box that I carried downstairs where my roommate was cooking twin eggs in a pot on the stove. I tried to remove the glue from the lid of a jar and while scrubbed I asked where he was from and what he did; not because I cared, because I’m leaving and probably won’t see him again, but because they are usual, commanality-banality, getting-to-know-you questions. He said Bulgaria and told me advertising; worthless.
“All things are worthless, though. You see, I’m just here until I find some place better to be. But what’s the point? It’s all shit.”
What a shame I said to myself and wandered out to my car, and pulled out into the street where I stopped because two men where standing in the median huddled over a small warm thing covered in a blanket. As I got closer, it was a dog. One of the men, the older one, looked up at me from the place where he was kneeling.
“They saw him. Going fifteen miles per hour. Rolled over him, real slow, with both sets of tires. Didn’t stop. This little asshole just ran right out into traffic.”
The other one, a young guy in a bulky cable-knit sweater, has got his sleeves rolled up and he’s pacing there in the turn lane. He has got the owner on the phone and he’s giving him directions. He puts his palm to the phone.
“He’s at Las Margaritas. Sounds like he’s had a few drinks, and it’s gonna be a while before he can meet us here.”
He starts shuffling towards the corner and the decided meeting place. I’m left alone with the older man, and he start’s cursing the dog again. He decides we’ve got to move him out of the road, and begins to pick him up, but I interject and run back to the house to find something stable.
The Bulgarian roommate is drooling over a plate of blanched ouefs, in a stupor and I run in like a mad lady straight for the stove to grab a big basting pan.
” They hit a goddamn puppy”
What a night to hit a puppy. I try to rationalize with the back of his head, but he keeps on staring at the plate, those ugly little impotent eggs, and so I take the pan and hope Dee won’t notice it’s missing until I’m long moved out.
Back on the asphalt, the dog is drooling a mess of foam and blood and the old man is cursing a storm. We lift him onto the basting pan, one-two-three, but it’s not coordinated at all. We walk in awkward synchronisity to the sidewalk and lay him down. The old man keeps calling the dog an asshole and in paradox he’s stroking his coat, meanwhile telling me what a shame it is, that it could have been a kid, and that the damn owner shouldn’t have let him out. The way that the dog is on the pan, his head is hanging off the side so I’m kind of cradling it the way I do for people, except the dog is a mangy mutt thats gurgling a growl through his spit. I feel a little less appreciated than usual and a bit annoyed at this man. I get the feeling that both of us are really trying. Trying our darndest to be altruistic. There’s really no point, though, except to prove our own good will, because the dog is looking better-off-dead and his owner will mostly likely keep on buying shitty cocktails at happy hour long after he’s gone. We’re not saving any souls, here.
The young guy comes back with word that the owner is around the corner, and the old man’s wife swings onto the side street with an Alterra. She yells at him concerned, Is he going to be okay? to get in on the helping.
Then someone else tries to pull past on the street and hollers at me for parking my car there, with the emergency lights on.
Then a woman creeps up behind us in a big jacket smoking a cigarette and says, hey man, have you got any change or crack or cigarette lights and she says, awww hell take a look at that damn dog the poor thing is going to die don’t you know; everyone is talking up a storm and the owner pulls up, too, and slams his car door and walks right up to the middle of chaos and grabs his dog off the basting pan and without thanking any of us walks away. I yell after him, Hey where are you taking it and volunteer to help but he doesn’t answer.
So we all return to our cars, silently, and drive off. I continue down University towards the new house. At a stoplight I look over briefly and the guy is stalled next to me with his dog; without all the panic of our little party he seems pretty concerned, and I can see him mouthing something urgent and encouraging over the struggling body.
The light changes, and I pull forward, and my mind wanders again to that postcard. To places past, and to friends with whom I’ve lost contact; to a collection of things that were tragedies in their time but have lost their weight, and have been tucked into files as letters and clippings and forgotten. To the animals I’ve seen scattered across highways as litters of bones and flesh, and of friends that I’ve lost in the same manner or as feathers that flock to the curb when they were tugged from the little thump of a bird on the windshield. These things that go unnoticed at fifty-miles-per-hour but some time later are pulled from a pile of thoughts as the things that could-have, might-have, probably-didn’t happen; I ponder the brunt of my own accidents and finger the broken collar bone that protrudes under my skin.
I wonder if there are moments I’m still in, because sometimes I find myself trying to recall these things though they’ve since changed or healed; and worse yet I try and capture them on the page when I know it’s a frivolous attempt at extending their existence into wornout, burntout metaphors. In this sense, artists are fools, its true; those who try and recreate their own perceptions a thousand times, never quite getting it right.
Then again, that is the beauty of art; the interpretation so precarious and tragically unlike it’s first impression that it may be the closest we ever come to representing, tangibly, the useless and imperfect nature of our memory.
Leaving amarillo feels weird, like shedding skin. ‘66 takes a long, departing rendevous through the industrial section: bottling companies, textile factories, and a helium plant. Julian informs me as we pass it that Amarillo is the helium capital of the world–helium having been discovered in abundance lurking under the great plains. In the years prior to the first world war, it was imagined that the massive supply of helium would be a godsend to float thousands of derigibles during warfare.
’66 rides the back of I-40 through the suburbs and out into the cowland. I get the sense that we’re nearing the place we’d stopped yesterday with LBK and Melissa. I look to the distance, and across a sea of fuming, idling engines I can see the chassis of those ten steely cadillacs, bellied-up and buried to their waists. Before Amarillo, those Cadillacs were one of the few, vague things I knew of the mother road. Seeing them now I felt a sense of intimacy beyond an old song, beyond a mode of architecture or a collection of maps. I thought of the hundreds of roadside tourists stopping, snapping a photograph, kicking the mud off their shoes before returning to their minivans; LBK leaning, his back to the giant Suburban, arms akimbo, greeting them with a nod.
Julian starts to sing Amarillo by Morning, except this time he is singing it in Spanish, pausing at the things that don’t translate easily, and his singing sounds like laughter, as if the translation invites euphemisms. I cut through the verses impatiently, in English, tagging his lyrics with apostrophes of my own. I sing loudly to compete with his voice, and I realize that it is the first time I’ve sung audibly since we’ve been on the road. We try and piece together other songs, something reminiscent of Bob Dylan, a hint of Neil Young–it’s been so long since we’ve heard music.
Out of the city, the road comes up easy, jumping from left to right across the interstate. The land is flat, verdant. Along it, fields pop with windmills, hundreds of them, dancing. We continue to tango with the exits; over, under, over; threading our way through the landscape. The road bucks a little in places; dives down towards gullies and thrusts up again to level with the interstate. Further along it grows dry again, an eczema of cracked asphalt and old paint. There are snakeskins here, dead rattlers and tufts of fur from long-rotted carcasses. Down in the culverts between the fingers of clay there are live snakes, tensed, and vermon. We pass too swift to notice them, really, though I shudder at the thought of the ones we’ve hit.
I am feeling optimistic. The sky is cloudless and abundant. It is an expectant sky.
We move fast and stop in Vega for a mid-afternoon break.
Adrian, a heel. A dense, dried blister that protrudes from the hinterlands: among throngs of dried sage, the dregs of the Great Plains. Adrian is the midpoint of Route 66, roughly, and so it has struggled to survive when other towns floundered after being choked off by the interstate. Adrian is the last place before you fall off the geographic Midwest, into the desert. It is the divide in idealogy, between the old, ancient east and the unknown expanse to the west. Behind us, people have planted sprinklers in their lawns. They ride tractors and yell from their front porch at children and passersby. In the summer they ride bikes and there are parades on Main Streets in July. In the East there is a standard of living, a tradition; there are places that are familiar and safe. To the west, there are no lawns to water. To the west, there are vast, barren landscapes with veiny, dry rivers running through them that flood sometimes in spring, and the spring floods flow through the desert down into damns, and the damns sow electricity that spawns cities and collect populations. These cities appear as clusters of light from space, with hundreds of miles of darkness in between. Adrian is at the edge of all of this. It is a good stopping place.
Adrian is milky in the late afternoon. It is near five, and nothing is open. Dog sounds ricochet off silos; tractors retire from harvest fields and the fields themselves casting off dust shadows that play with the particles of light and create a dense and violent sunset. There are echoes of machinary and no sign of life, so it appears that things are pendulous, independent. In the distance along the interstate the cars have already begun to cast their headlights; at length and before the horizon they drop out of sight, and I imagine that is where the landscape changes. Here, we are nestled in a place so remote and intrinsic that I feel safe to settle in the grass and fall asleep. A man about ninety is in his front lawn and we surreptitously ask him if he knows where we can camp. To our surprise, he points us to a city park which he explains is rarely used. After we expalin in lengthy detail who we are and where we’re going, he seems thrilled.
We ride our bicycles to the end of town, and find the park, which is weedy, but not overgrown. There are bleachers, picnic tables under an awning, and bathrooms which we are informed are locked. We decide to pitch our tent under the awning. Along the far edge of the park and just before the end of town some children ride an ATV up and down for a couple of hours. A small dog is insistent on barking at us but doesn’t come near. We unload all of our provisions and sort through what we have left. Julian lights the stove and puts on some spaghetti. The son of the man who we asked drives down to us in a truck and brings a cooler full of water, and cups.
Outside the Gallup city limits
there is a lot of dry space,
not the ruddy stuff
but a real sandpaper effigy.
Great ghetto canyons ,
trains lugging through ‘em.
Gophers, popping outta their
mud slum whatsit’s galore;
imitating us, as we’re crisscrossin’
the interstate all the way
to the border. Teasin’ us it is,
that death trap;
the goddamn whore,
I can’t forget it, even
for a minute.
Then Arizona! Quick as a jack rabbit.
& just as barren, but with a trading post
cropped outta the desert right smack
in the middle of everything , so you
can’t miss it: a fiberglass teepee, painted
up in wildlife animisms; I don’t know.
How goddamn ridiculous. We stop
here a while and chew gum.
I walk inside, get slapped by
air-conditioning and hope someone
will yell at me for being
a hot sweaty mess and not buying anything
but no one does, and it pisses me off.
There’s a raincloud that looks
damn ominous,
just hanging offa the far end of a mesa.
I just sit and watch it.
About one in the afternoon,
I say, well shit.
We’re in Arizona.
then we get on our bicycles
and I stick the gum to my tire
for good luck. We keep on,
on the left side of the interstate,
important only because we’re not
on it, yet. Thank god.
Actually, it’s gorgeous out here,
and quiet, too, though the interstates
a murmuring beast that cuts through it
with bulging arteries—you get the imagery.
But we are to the left of it, and it’s beautiful.
Us, and our last leg of old ’66, through the Rez;
the clouds hanging behind us just dim enough
to cast a boorish purple bruise on the mesa façade.
We are in a high spot, and to the left of us,
the landscape falls off into a vast basin.
Behind, those buttes; in front just looks
so damn hot, and sweltering:
the road, a tall man swaggering,
a mirage if you will.
A barbed barrier between us
and the highway
to make amends with my nerves.
And those impending clouds,
cool; that’s the crux of it:
you don’t feel hot out here
as it is a dry heat, but you see it.
That blessed shadow,
a respite in its trickery.
For a long while, she has been holding him hostage in her breast pocket. Now, she takes him out and un-smothers him from the fabric of her shirt, smoothes out the crinkled edges, lays him flat on the table. She studies him, his creases, the wrinkles that have begun to form from familiar laugh lines and the gather between his brows. She knows that the dry heat can do this to a person. He is an exoskeleton, a snakeskin that begat vacancy from its leather carcass. He has lips like books: parched pages that have separated from exposure; and a rasp that escapes from deep in his chest when he speaks, in the rhythm of rattlebox seeds, like the sound of parchment shifting, little pods from a Missouri tree shaking; les levres aiment les livres:
“Don’t let us die out here, in the cottonmouth canyon land. This is big desert ache; this here place where John the Baptist came to dine on locusts and hang with saints.”
“Please,” he begs, “Keep this gaping wound from swallowing us, from getting us way down and lost in the starved belly of the States from which there’s no return; please, keep us from the harm.”
And she considers him, then, as he is, and not just as he looks on paper. To look at him like that, a lifelike countenance in front of her, after having gotten used to the well-worn impression of his sun-stroked silhouette, is like pins and needles waking after a slumbering silence. What a face! It appears wiser, for its wear. She begins to think of Los Angeles, reeling outside a cheap motel in China town where she can make love, if she pleases, for three days straight.
She is thirsty for this existence that she’s begun to manifest, and she is anxious to see the other side of the desert and to finish this map she’s mostly crossed to get there. She is calculating distance in her mind: not numbers, which may be understood as many miles between, but as scheme and happenstance, those estimates referential only in retrospect: of thought drifts, velocity, and muscle mass. He is the map in her pocket, having known the road and acquired its traits. The edge, already somewhat visible, is fate. She is not yet willing to admit this, though she thinks it.
She knows that she will have to accept an end that is premature; because she can already feel a fetal curling for it in her belly. The loss of it is a familiar, warm waste that shrinks her dreams in defeat: this thought she has, has consequence and its birthing pains are felt long before their context is expelled:
Softly, she leans into him,
“Alright, be free. But don’t tell John. Don’t tell. I couldn’t keep on living out here, without you, love, on just sweet wild honey and tumble weeds.”
And the part I just added:
Past the buildings there is a lot of dry space, not like the ruddy stuff we’d just come from, but a real sand paper effigy with great ghetto canyons with a train lugging through ‘em. There’s gophers popping out every which way like whats-its galore. Great goddamn. And we criss-cross the interstate all the way to the Arizona border, tagging in and out, left and right; with it teasing the whole time, the badger that it is, like a goddamn whore; and I can’t get it out of my mind, even for a minute, that goddamn death trap! The Arizona border comes up like a jack rabbit. Just the way Dan Manke wants it to.
Just as barren as the rest of the fucking desert, but with a trading post cropped out right smack in the middle of everything, so you can’t miss it. It is the most absurd scrap of architecture that I’ve ever seen. A teepee, how goddamn ridiculous—with plastic animisms emblemed on the cliff above, lifesize—deer, eagles, some other fanatic wildlife shit—I don’t know.
We stop here a while and chew gum and I walk inside hoping someone will yell at me for being a hot sweaty mess and not buying anything and just filling my water bottles but no one does and it pisses me off. There is a rain cloud that looks damn ominous hanging on the far end of a mesa, but I just sit and watch it. About one in the afternoon I say, “Whelp, we’re in Arizona now. Shit.” Then we get on our bicycles and I stick my chewing gum to my tire for good luck and we keep on riding, now on the left side of the interstate– important only in that we’re not actually on the interstate yet, thank god.
Actually, it’s pretty fucking beautiful out here and quiet, too, although the interstate is a loud, sinister beast with bulging arteries and you get the imagery. But we are to the left of it, and its beautiful. Just us and our last leg of old ’66, cutting through the Rez; the clouds hanging behind us for some reason and just dim enough to cast a boorish purple bruise on the mesa façade. We are in a high spot, and to the left of us the landscape falls off into a vast basin, behind us, of course, are those buttes, and in front of us just looks so damn hot and godforsaken and sweltering—the road itself is swaggering, a mirage if you will. There is a barbed barrier between us and the highway and it sort-of makes amends with my nerves. The impending clouds keep us cool, and that is really the crux of it—you don’t really feel hot out here, because it’s a dry heat. But you see it; and so the shadow of a cloud is a blessed respite in its trickery.
