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“To practice magic is to bear the responsibility for having a vision.”
-Starhawk
There’s an uncanny magic inherent in the mundane. And all the more so, when
traveling outside of our immediate culture, immersing one’s self in exotic
notions with no known reference point, no common language, no “instructions
included” on how it was all put together. A certain level of enchantment, or a
tendency to be enchanted, comes with simple exposure to uncommon values and
unfamiliar costumes. The fur trimming of Nepalese coats, the feathered
waist-bands of the Shuar, the bright silk bodices of the Thai temple-goers— all
visual triggers, inspiring a willingness to be titillated, awed, intoxicated,
and delivered. And a readiness to believe.
When he first exited the raised
thatched hut, a sleepless Abel was stunned by the perfect lamentations of the
tree frogs, and the precise orderliness of the rows of rice plants in the
flooded fields surrounding him. More than anything else, he was amazed by the
sheer proliferation of stars in the so-black sky, reflected with equal
brilliance in the motionless water below. Easing down the ladder, he seemed to
be entering a hole in the sky itself, stepping off into a churning universe, no
holds with which to pull himself up out of this bottomless celestial pool.
The natural universe accepted him the way “they” never had. And so did the
shamans and healers of a half a dozen isolated indigenous populations. The
medicine people adopted him without reservation, for the exact reasons that
“they” had not. After the very first card trick, the Sami elders invited him
into their reindeer hide abodes and began to prod him for his trade secrets.
With a motion of his hands he made bright colors leap from the Ladakh campfire,
earning him a pass into their most exclusive rituals and ceremonies. Abel had
hit on one of the secrets of the shaman: sleight of hand, and the clever use of
tricks, could serve the suspension of disbelief, rendering the audience more
amenable to the very real magic ever unfolding around and within them.
Abel knew the condition of being civilized was the true “altered state,”
while what the “experts” called an altered state was actually the native
condition of natural humankind, the intrinsic hyperawareness of animals before
domestication, children before socialization, and communities before
civilization. Scholars described the shamanic journey as a venturing up into
the sky, but those that have been on one know such travel is lateral, in every
direction, penetrating all the many embodiments and perspectives of the Earth’s
constituent elements. The journey resulted in an intensification and
densification of experience, within the context of the Gaian body.
Even the
“aliens” had a concept of her, the Mother Goddess of a multitude of original
religions. They called it a “Gaia Hypothesis” as if it were but a testable
theory, rather than an experienced truth understood and taught by the elders of
virtually every primal society. It was, Abel knew, the truth of children before
their logic and training steal it away from them. And it was certainly the
inalienable truth of every other species besides homo ludicrous. Now the
scientists were postulating what every so called “primitive,” every crazy lady
playing in the park tulips, every youngster on psychoactive mushrooms knew
without question or proof: that the world was a whole, inseparable being, a
dynamic, living body. That the atmosphere was its breath, and the diminishing
forests its damaged lungs.
In the shamanic experience, one’s identity and
sense of reality was shattered by Thor’s hammer, crunched between the jaws of
the Mayan jaguar god, dismembered, consumed and spit out by a spirit and power
that contains but is greater than the individual self. The quester came to
know, at the molecular and atomic levels, that they were an inseparable part of
this whole, no more or less important than any other Gaian expression. Through
destruction and re-formation, through assimilation and acceleration, they would
come to know themselves as integral consonants of the mortal and sacred all.
They would know themselves as receptive, responsive, dancing cells of this
living planet body, in total membership within the myriad disparate tribes,
within the multitude of diverse life forms. Abel was stricken with that
experience of oneness that functioned as criteria for both papal sainthood and
clinical madness, an academic theory and experiential excommunication from the
norms and perceptions of one’s own kind.
Sometimes it takes the cool touch
of water on the feet to demonstrate which way is up— an extremely important
bit of knowledge when one functions as a seed, needing to reach down and take
root in the giving earth before reaching upwards towards the sun. In the
Dakotas, Abel had been seen wandering off for his own private Sun Dance, the
weight of the world hanging from a pierced chest. In Bali, they talked about
how he wandered off into the rice paddies one midnight.
Some thought it was
for a final rendezvous with the frogs.
***
"In the shaman's world, wilderness and the unconscious become
analogous: the one who knows and is at ease in one, will be at home in the
other."
-Gary Snyder
Sometimes it took no more than the slowest turning over of a found sherd of
pottery in her little hands before falling into a reverie heightened with angst—
before Kiva surrendered to the bitter genetic memories of when she belonged to a
tribe of Red-hairs, seated like the ancient ones of this very rivercourse in
circles and councils, sweating in rock lodges, questing on mountain tops for the
instructions of the gods. She missed the children that once climbed all over
her in bed at first light, the mate that fought circumstance and pride for her,
and the work of healing the hearts and bodies of her people as they shared a
common camp. She missed having elders around, longed for the wise matriarch
handing out keys for the crucial escape from dichotomy. She remembered how it
was on the “old” continent, but also how it was here in the place of the
Black-Hairs. Her molecules remembered sitting in council in the canyon as well
as in old Europe, and recalled the myriad forms her atoms took between. She
longed for what was, and for what she instinctively knew would be again. Her
agonies stemmed from being born in the last, lost generation caught betwixt the
paradisical past and a traumatic “Return-to-Balance.” Her sanity, her very
salvation, depended on the Gaian purpose that placed her here now, in the canyon
that had called her home.
Kiva longed for the time and context of the
matrifocal tribe, but for the time before humankind as well— when the red that
marked her head tinged fur instead, set feather hackles afire in the sun. She
ached for when she was as an animal, and nothing more, crawling on the warm
soil, leaping through branches, sounding from the saline fathoms of the world’s
oceans, carried great distances on the backs of the winds like music. As an
animal she was free of the tormenting distraction of thought, instead imaging
the present in all its depth, form, and unrivaled alacrity. Her bones
remembered each fluid shape they took, one manifestation flowing into another,
one species growing into another, pterodactyl into bird like boy into man and
child into woman, flowing, flowing. Hollow, supple wing bones that supported
the weight of the sky. Vertebrae birthed to flex like dancers in a samba line,
whipping about inside a great cetacean fin. Delicate finger bones that dug
into the ground for edible tubers, dug into a mate’s fur for annoying parasites,
then fondled the Muse in the ivory keys of her mother’s concert piano. They
recalled being the molecular material of rock, and the calcium carbonate of
shells deposited at the far bottom of the Pacific. They remembered the
sequencing of DNA, the sequential roll of life and death and evolution. They
knew the hallowed ground, seeded with bones that begat bones. They were the
bones of the ocean, the bones of the mountain. They were her bones too.
It was no different with Kiva’s blood, running like lava through her veins,
or with a stomach of primordial sea. Her vagina once held more shapes within it
than the human organ. There was a time when her squared teeth ripped grass from
the earth, and another when blood dripped from their sharpened points. Skin
that resisted being bound by cloth, that fought legislated separation from wind
and sun, skin that loved being naked also loved the feel of fur growing
sensuously from its pores, loved the sensation of goose bumps that once held
feathers fast. When she cried it was often over the loss of real family in her
life, the absence of tribe, the destruction of Nature— or the sorely missed
anticipation of the puma before the pounce, the owl before it launches itself
into the cold darkness of a Fall night.
Like all places of power, the
“Center of The World” had an inordinate variety and abundance of wildlife. Life
that was truly wild, untamed, and undiluted by the ministrations of “mankind.”
There was nothing domestic in the circle, no creature bent in obedience to
anything but its own inalienable spirit. Even the lizards darting about on
baking rocks had the preeminent quality of wildness, empowering their explosive
movements like tightly wound springs, exhibiting the mark of the dragon within.
“Wild” was the tonic that energized every animal there, read, if nowhere else,
in the flickering fires in the pupils of their eyes. In the eyes of the blue
herons circling overhead, with five or six feet of graceful wingspan. In the
eyes of squawking jays and redtail hawks, affectionate mated mallards, spotted
owls, turkey and road runner, mourning dove and mountain quail, hummers, plovers
and flickers. “Wild” could be found in the eyes of suckerfish staring up from
the river waters with the conviction of survivors, defying warming currents,
pesticides and predation. In the stark jet pupils of an unflinching
rattlesnake, the golden orbs of ground squirrel and deer. Black bear and
bugling elk. Ringtail and raccoon... and a particularly out-of-hand young
woman who’d come to be called “Kiva Rose.”
It hurt to remember her recently
vanquished neighbors of these Mogollon (Mo-go-yone) Mountains. One by one they
were banished into extinction by the impersonal forces of greater civilization.
Gone the grizzly. Gone the Gila trout. Gone el tigre, the savannah jaguar, two
hundred pound cat of the night. With the loss of the only carnivores large
enough to pose a “threat to man,” much of the intensity, much of the life had
gone out of the southwestern mountains. Gone their essential lessons of
awakeness and awe. Gone the paramount reason to stay in present time, open
eyed, nostrils flared to pull in the scents of damp soil and wildflowers,
searching through strands of air for the smell of jaguar or bear. Even within
the Gila’s four million acres of designated wilderness, it was only inside the
perimeters of the columné that everything retained its highest level of
response, the unrestrained, enlivened state of being that defined “wild.” Near
the Center, imposing spirits served awareness in the same way the giant
grizzlies once had.
The animals lived together in a world of brown rock
and blue sky, golden sands and the verdant greens of the plant world. The
scenery through which they flew and ran, and much of the food they took into
their bodies arose from a blend of dirt and rain, the products of
photosynthesis. They sucked sun and poured forth chlorophyll, breathed in
tainted air and exhaled cleanest oxygen. Twisted cedar, alligator bark juniper
and wild currants faced to the south, while hundred-feet tall ponderosa pines
dominated the north facing slopes. Situated at a point where the Mogollon rim
passed through the Frisco bottom, it exhibited the evergreens of the high
mountain ecosystem, alongside the cholla cactus and century plants of the
Sonoran desert biome. To the first two-leggeds, the animals were a growing
pantry of foodstuffs, a self-reproducing medicine chest and repository of
wisdom— teaching patience, perseverance, and rooted dedication to place.
Piñon nuts were plentiful. Acorns and black walnuts were ground along with
grass seeds to make a high-protein flour. Dandelion greens, stinging nettle and
coletus made up salads rich in B vitamins, while roots and cattails supplied
necessary carbohydrates. For dessert the seemingly hard land provided
mulberries in early summer, currants in the fall. The Healers collected rose
hips for their vitamin C, stripped the bark of the willow for a pain-killing
tea, and made a salve of the datura to ease pain and encourage dreams.
The
columné remained more like its original self than almost any area anywhere.
The same trees grew in twisted spirals from the fissures in the sides of the
cliff. The Rio Frisco, though wider, coursed as freely as it did before even
the Black-hairs settled in. At any given moment it could be a thousand years
ago, or even a million, so timeless was the space and experience within its
circle. It could be any era or age, that is, until the fighter-bombers streak
in just above the ridge-tops, ripping apart the very air, shredding the nerves
of the wild ones, firmly establishing that she existed in a time once called
“future”, and that the souls of industry ruled where angels and spirits once
flew. She trembled with the force of the jet’s painful passage, shook her head
from side to side as if to toss out the memory of its lingering ramifications.
The warrior in her heart notched an arrow in its bow, but she turned instead to
the giving ground.
Today she would make herself small again, so she could
see more without going so far. She learned this shamanic trick the way one
learned most magic, as a kid, out of necessity. “Why don’t you grow up?”, they
were forever asking her. Being “big” meant doing unpleasant chores out of
necessity, obligation or duty, ordering one’s life around the dictates of the
clock, being forced to answer to all the “dumb” demands of the adult world.
Being little one avoided the hierarchy altogether, got to play with bugs and
draw neat designs in the dirt while larger folk toiled at meaningless jobs
inside square buildings. Kiva was born hating to be indoors. Her “being
little” once explained why she was always late coming in for dinner, and now her
refusal to “grow up” was clearly the reason for her tardiness as an adult.
The dark evoked no fear in her. Only the fluorescent lights terrorized the
woman, inspiring such irrational dread as to furnish the ill-flickering
back-lighting for a lifetime of nightmares. “Being little” had made it possible
to hide beneath the holiday dinner table, listening to the patronizing comments
of her over-fed cousins, watching, like a cougar, the hurried passage of feet
clad in fake fur slippers, scurrying like pink rabbits across an acrylic-pile
meadow. But these days she no longer made herself “little” to escape reality,
but rather, to enter it through its tight passages, to encounter the miraculous
minutia making up the intimate universe before her nose and at her feet. Eye to
eye, on their own terms, in their own field of existence. Going small was a
journey into the sublime, allowing her to slide down the silky maw of the
datura’s trumpet blossoms, to investigate the activities beneath fallen leaves,
and to crawl into the smallest orifices in the volcanic rocks as if they were
caves to be explored, refuges to sleep in while the Earth gently rocked her with
its breathing. One could travel the whole wide Mogollon, or even the entire
globe, and see a lot of different places without seeing any of it up close,
without taking the next step of developing a relationship with either terrain or
terrestrials. Or one could choose instead to concentrate on the finite
particulars of a specific area, to learn its needs and nuances, and become
fluent in its language of being. Kiva chose the latter, shrinking down as
necessary in order to fit into the context and weave of this brilliant tapestry,
a tapestry in motion. She would linger on every odor, ease her fingers over
every surface, unhurriedly slide her bared feet into each recess and hole of the
dusty or grassy ground, until the land and its lifeforms came to know her as
their mate, and finally as an extension of their “self.”
Like her many
heroes, like those persistent dandelions sprouting up in the cracks of the
global city— Kiva had a calling. It was this calling that brought her home to
the center, every night, sleeping the sleep of the ancients in one of their very
own rooms. Before her coming, it had been the cave of the “Old Ones,” its
ceiling still marked by the charcoal strokes of the shaman’s cleansing fire.
***
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
-James
Joyce
Blue began his journal innocently enough, recorded on tissue with the lead
from a pencil returned without one— a pencil handed through the bars of solitary
confinement for the constitutionally guaranteed writing of a Writ of Habeus
Corpus, a legal, vestigial, constitutional nicety protesting "unlawful
confinement." They didn't let one write anything else in "the hole"— neither
letters to loved ones or poems for posterity. Child molesters and multiple
granny-killers shared with a certain young deviant in "solitary" this
right-to-writ. Nothing usually came of them, of course, but in this case they
provided the minimalist tool with which Blue juxtaposed the macabre and the
mundane. His journal unrolled from the toilet paper he used to pillow his head.
Eventually he was returned to "population," a term they used for being out
amongst the rest of the inmates, plugged into menial work and the various
programs promising reform and rehibilitation. Little changed, other that he
started filing his entries in those "Big Chief" tablets available from the
prison commissary. The handwriting was large, befitting the line spacing on the
hapless stationary, in different inks according to the Coyote's color-coded
moods. Black for intensity, green for nourishment and relief, blue for
yearning, and of course red for love and rage. What else, for the hue of blood
and fire?
The "Twelve Steps" counselor recommended the keeping of a journal
as an act of self-expression, a way to lighten one's load in a safe purging of
dangerously accumulating emotions. But these weren't even his words. Whatever
his thoughts on life and death, challenge and pain, magic and spirit, his
captors or his fate— it was nowhere spoken where it might be secretly recorded,
nowhere written where it might be read and entered into an already damning
volume of reports and evaluations. The words so jealously documented were those
of others, the "self-expression" of a cultural, historical, political paradigm
running amok.
Here was recorded the wisdom of the dominant paradigm, the
pronouncements of the System and the critiques of its appointed detractors. The
journal was a collection of the inane and ludicrous, the cruel and unfair,
gleaned from the fine print and back pages of dozens of newspapers and
magazines. Not the sensationalist press, mind you, which was unavailable inside
the walls due to its "ability to raise prurient interest and stimulate deviant
thoughts." These were the Systems approved organs of public information and
opinion that he somehow found so quotable.
He documented the piece-meal
neutering of the American Bill of Rights, the move towards ever more
technological solutions and values, and the destruction of the natural world.
But he also kept score for Mother Earth, pulling facts and quotes out on the
"natural" disasters that were so often human-precipitated. He clipped out World
Press Syndicate photos that caught his eye or tweaked his already twisted
curiosity: Surveys showing the popularity of protein puffball snacks and the
growing aversion to hair anywhere on the body. A Russian politician praising
Hitler. An Irish wolfhound stuck en coitus with a diminutive chihuahua. A
family in Bangladesh watching the news on television while floodwaters lap
against the legs of the table it sits on. Supposedly ancient petroglyphs of
Nordic symbols found etched into Colorado cliff-sides. Starving indigenous
South Americans on their knees before the beatific pope, with spotless white
"High on God" t-shirts, and nothing else. An alligator pulled out of a Miami
swimming pool. Sparrows caught nesting inside the red globe of a stoplight, so
that only the green could be seen. A flooded Salt Lake City resort that the
owner had to row to, and an Oklahoma bridge with no water beneath it. A broken
section of L.A. freeway overpass from which a speeding cop on a motorcycle made
one final leap for redemption and glory. It was a journal of the times, started
while the other inmates watched police shows on their day room set:
U.S.: "99.5 percent of the homes having electricity have one or more
television sets, 95 percent of the U.S. population watches four or more hours of
television per day, and the average American home has a television on for nearly
eight hours daily.
JAPAN: It has been determined that Tokyo has more
motorcycle hobbyists dressing up in California Highway Patrol uniforms than the
state of California has actual officers.
WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION: "The
origins of the AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) epidemic may lie with
Cold War researchers, during the development of new biological agents for
possible use in future battles. Some analysts point to a certain irony in the
idea that humans may have first contracted the virus from the green monkeys they
were experimenting on."
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA: "At an auction of cowboy-hero
collectibles this year, including Lone Ranger billfolds, and Roy Rogers ranch
lanterns— someone forked over $173 for a pair of Hopalong Cassidy boy’s
underpants."
SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA: "Fearing that whales could go
deaf, researchers and 'save the whales' groups opposed a program by the Ship's
Institute of Oceanography to blast 195 decibel sounds underwater. Considered a
novel experiment, giant speakers near the Monterey National Marine Sanctuary
began broadcasting the low rumbles six times a day, and would continue to do so
for up to ten years. These sounds could be detected as far away as the waters
off New Zealand, and the speed at which the sound waves traveled that distance
are being used to determine relative ocean temperatures, an aid to evaluation of
the 'greenhouse effect.' Marine researcher Raymond Boyd said the Fisheries
permit only allows the whales to be harassed 'incidentally'— if they come
within range. 'We're not paid to hurt animals,' he said."
PARIS, FRANCE:
"Recent research indicates a 76% higher rate of brain cancer, both operable and
inoperable, for individuals using the latest cellular telephones for a large
part of their business day. In response, Rod Dressler of International
Communications Inc. cites the 'shoddy methodology' of the consumer group's
research, and their 'failure to properly investigate other potential factors in
the test group.' "
U.S.: "Lawns now occupy more land than any other single
crop , including wheat, corn or tobacco. Americans spend $950 million on 700
million pounds of grass seed per year. Homeowners use 10 times more chemical
pesticidesper acre than farmers do. As much as 60 percent of the water in
Western cities is used for lawns; as much as 30 percent in Eastern cities."
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA: "Pet owners have been urged to coat their dogs and
cats with sunscreen and tie hats on them before they are allowed out in the hot
midday sun. '..not to take precautions is a form of cruelty because it’s
preventable,' said the RSPCA’s president, Dr. Hugh Worth. He said livestock
were also in danger from skin cancer, sunburn and eye damage as a result of the
increases in ultraviolet radiation."
WASHINGTON DC: "The administration,
responding in part to pressure from the
auto industry, has asked the
nation’s leading manufacturer of an ozone-depleting chemical used in automobile
air conditioning to reverse its plans and continue its production. The
companies had based their decision on what they said were increased risks of
ozone depletion and progress in producing substitutes for CFCs. EPA asked the
corporations to overturn that decision because it feared a shortage of CFCs
could force consumers to put expensive new equipment in existing cars to enable
them to use CFC substitutes for air conditioning. 'Our commitment to the
government is that we will produce as much CFCs as demand dictates' said one
CEO."
NEW YORK CITY: "According to cartographers, the mountain of garbage
at the N.Y.C. landfill is now the highest land form anywhere on the eastern
seaboard."
Washington D.C.: "Innovative laws to prevent counties from
shipping their garbage out to other communities, effectively forcing them to
deal with the realities of non-recyclable trash build-up, were found
unconstitutional. The court ruled that the regulations illegally impacted the
free flow of interstate commerce."
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND: "Officials today
incinerated what are believed to be the last remaining live strains of the once
dreaded Smallpox virus. Shrugging off the ethical questions raised by critics
of the move, scientists insist this is only the beginning of humanity taking
control over its health, and fate."
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA: In an apparent
copycat crime, animal rights activists seemed to follow a recent movie plot to
the letter in their release of whales and dolphins from Sea Land Amusement
Park. As in the blockbuster 'Free Lilly!,' a number of the expensive animals
were returned to the sea. 'It's a great tragedy not only for the whales, but
for the people who won't get to watch them do their tricks anymore,' Dr. Leslie
Kind insisted. 'Where they once performed for the applause of thousands in
their own safe environment, they now face the unsympathetic dangers of the open
sea.' Park officials have applied for additional capture permits to replace the
missing animals."
GLOBAL "Chances that a funeral procession in Taiwan
includes a stripper:1 in 3
Number of Japanese who committed suicide on
train tracks last year: 1,032
Portion of all war fatalities in the last 500
years taking place in this century: 3 out of 4
Percentage of Americans
describing themselves as ultra-liberal who consider S&M “an acceptable
sexual practice”: 6
Percentage of Americans describing themselves as
“ultra-conservative” who say this: 18
Gallons of Kool-Aid consumed by
Americans each summer: 204,000,000
ISTANBUL, TURKEY: "Methane gas exploded
at a garbage dump Wednesday, triggering an avalanche of stinking refuse that
buried squatter huts and killed at least 18 people. Police believe more than
30 other bodies remain trapped. 'There was a loud noise and a sudden stench,
and a mountain of garbage came at us,' an unidentified survivor told TV
reporters from his hospital bed."
SAN PAULO: “A venomous species of
caterpillar whose sting can cause fatal burns and internal bleeding has claimed
its fifth victim in Brazil’s Rio Grands do Sul state, heath officials said.
Joao Batista Torres, a doctor at the Porto Alegre Toxicology Center, said Lonoia
obliquia is known as the “fire caterpillar.”. The result of the venom is
internal bleeding and related complications that can cause death. Scientists in
Rio Grande do Sul said deforestation and the disappearance of wasp and fly
predators may have led to the increases in the stinging caterpillars near towns
and cities. There is no known antidote to the venom. ‘It is a consequence of
the destruction of wilderness,’ Louis Anselo pointed out. ‘Nature is known for
throwing a few Jokers in the deck.”
A few habits learned in confinement might follow him when he got out. Like
keeping things close to the bunk, his feelings close to himself, and a journal
of meaningless “facts” at his side.
***
“I was ever of the opinion, that the honest man who married and brought up a
large family, did more service than he who continued single and only talked of
population.”
-Oliver Goldsmith
At dinner the kids had always deferred to the “head of the table,” seated in
the largest, if least comfortable chair. It was an old oak throne, a Victorian
replica in a house otherwise furnished in “Early American” maple. A hand would
rise slowly from an ornate armrest, commanding earnest silence. Invariably all
would freeze in their tracks, Mom’s head lowered but eyes darting to take it all
in, neither the child Llyn or her several sisters daring to swallow until little
brother’s first pig-like choking sounds triggered the inevitable table full of
pandemonium, screeches erupting like uninvited anarchists at a Republican
picnic. Laughter put its fingers in the pudding and ran through the ravioli.
Laughter splashed on their Father, but predictably dried with no tell-tale
stain. Dad would wait, imperiously, for the waxen clamor to melt beneath his
glare, before signaling with a slow and studied bite that the meal could
continue.
The only discussion allowed between the sound of sawing knives
and slurped gravy were the occasional formal inquiries (“How did things go
today?”) and the brief and practiced response (“Fine, Dear.”). Given the robust
sounds of carnage, some music in the background would have been nice.
Tchaikovsky’s “War of 1812 Overture” perhaps, performed over the mutilated
bodies of young artichokes cut down in their prime. Vegetables that dared
imagine a world of uninterrupted flowering, of intact family pods, of blazing
summer sun and the vivid touch of rain on their happy green faces— only to have
their blessed botanical dreams erased, their spirits rubbed out on the cheap
platters of the Tupperware middle class. The “head of the table” ate first,
and told the rest of them when they were done. He told them what they liked
(“Quit fighting it. I know you like peas!”), redefined the few things they
dared say (“What she meant was that she’d rather enjoy this meal with us than
eat in front of that T.V.”), and what was important (“Protein, roughage,” and
“obedience.”).
When they were toddlers, Dad was the one to initiate
memorized prayers, insisting on their appreciation for the white bread from the
polka dot package, the nourishment that kept them alive and the pleasant
environment in which they got to eat it. The kids fought for who could sit
farthest from the “head of the table,” where they could avoid getting smacked if
things escalated, whisper unheard unpleasantries to each other, and stuff their
napkins with the canned peas. To understand the family dynamic, you would have
to know the following: Mother always asked permission to leave the table to
burp— but she managed unseen, to sneak whole-wheat flour into the gravy, and
little brother’s napkin-full-of-peas into the trash.
If Dad was the “head
of the table,” Mom was the heart. She never told Dad when the kid’s grades were
low, and continued to lavish him with love without ever a sign that he noticed.
She kept Llyn as safe and pampered as she could, running interference between
her and harsh reality. She supplied her with all the love any little girl could
ever ask for, and her favorite gelatin desert.
That was long before she
knew the grim facts, the nutritional and ecological indictments hanging over all
traditional American fare. Before she learned that this amorphous mass, this
congealed globulin glowing in geiger-counter green or hydraulic-fluid yellow,
artificially colored, artificially flavored in order to deceive their naive
little tastebuds into thinking “strawberry” or “lime”— was none other than the
mucus-like product of boiled horse and cow hooves (“Good for your long nails,
Angel.” Mom assured, as she painted hers). It was the plastic of the food
world, a substance remarkably similar to the packaging used to wrap it. Gelatin
itself was free of any native vitamins, tasteless, odorless, inert, dead. Like
the wretched, compacted butcher-block scrapings pushed on the guileless
consumers of the nineteen-forties as “lunch meat,” gelatin desert was another
sinister plot to profit from the waste products of the slaughterhouse. Like
plastic, gelatin could take any form, and Llyn’s mother served it in a host of
rounded shapes, jiggling, trembling at the approach of five eager spoons. The
kids loved it, as kids always loved artificial extremes over the mild and
natural. A real orange seemed bland next to tongue-tingling orange-flavored
gum, a bubbly “orange drink,” or their coveted orange-flavored dessert molded
into the shape of a bowl of fruit. There was no room for play at the table.
But there was “always room” for Jello.
They were lucky to be able to eat at
home. So many other families on the block went out every night of the week,
standardizing on the all-you-can-eat buffet , the Chinese restaurant with the
Hispanic waiters on Mondays, and a selection of various fast-food joints in
between. When they did go out to eat Llyn took every opportunity to get up and
get her father an ashtray, to refill the sugars (with something besides the
stuff in the pink wrappers), or to get a rag to clean up a mess. She forever
felt self-conscious about being waited on. To little Lynn, the waitresses
always looked tired, and they tried so damn hard.
“Don’t you worry, Angel,”
Mom tells her, misjudging her looks of concern, thinking it was fear for her
future.
“You’ll never have to do anything like that! With your looks and
intelligence, you’ll have the whole world eating out of the palm of your hand.”
Sometimes Llyn’s thoughts detached from their mooring like helium filled
balloons, the child inside fruitlessly jumping up to catch them, crying bitterly
over that which could not be retreived. And that which mom would never see.
***
"Made us nobly wild, not mad."
-Robert Herrick
The Joker was wild— as wild as a tornado.
The "Old Man" bid him
farewell, with one last bit of wisdom and encouragement: "Someone needs to be
the burr under their saddles. They're dying for the unexpected, the miraculous,
the unsettling. They need you on the outs."
"The Outs" was everywhere on
the other side of the concrete, the metal bars, the cyclone fencing topped with
the mad-dog froth of coiled concertina wire, barbed and hungry. He was trying
to make him feel less guilty for getting out, knowing his closest friend behind
bars would age and die within the grasp of its frigid steel tentacles.
Coyote Blue took a look around his residence of the previous two years.
They'd called his name on the cell block speakers, "dress-out for release." The
same speakers over which they'd call those prisoners with guests on "Visitor
Sundays." How many times had he jumped at the sound of his name, only to
realize later that they were calling someone else whose "handle" happened to
rhyme with his?
The front of their two-man cell was an iron grill, opening
electronically with an obedient signal wired from the guard in the protective
tier cage. It slammed behind him with the striking loudness of an automobile
crash, and the finality of a guillotine. The Old Man gave him the thumbs-up.
And for his starched escort, as soon as his back was turned, a furious pumping
of the index finger into the left fist— symbolic, no doubt, of his best of
intentions. Curious eyes shone in shards of broken mirror, thrust out into the
catwalk from each cell, hurriedly retrieved like the many polished tongues of
reptiles, as the guard and Blue made for the cell block door.
Without the
insulation of curtains or rugs, every step echoed like screams in a bathtub.
The guard's steps echoed patent leather, empty football stadiums, unsigned
paychecks, and the sobbing of a dissatisfied wife. Blue's steps were carefully
timed to a different cadence. He took faster, smaller steps. Then slower,
longer strides, always abreast of the officer, but never in step. He appeared
to be moving with society, as well, all the while doing a little dance around
them, through them, and over them. Blue’s steps echoed eagles' wings, the winds
on highest cliffs, the July rains that turned to flash floods on the mesas of
his childhood homeland.
They passed cell after cell, six by eight foot
rectangles. Every sunken face stared out at Coyote Blue with the combined look
of wistful yearning and personal betrayal, the desperate features of pound
animals as a lucky one is freed from the gaseous future they'd once shared.
They were the looks of hungry kids as some "stupid honky" wrong-turned his new
Cadillac through their barrio. They were the looks of the battered wives at
Sanctuario de Mojados, whom some said preferred a beating to being forever
ignored.
From the outside, cell block "D" looked like a four-story
graveyard headstone, an overcrowded tenement with gun towers at either end like
martial bookends, the rooks of chess, or the sordid towers of the dark castle.
They passed the still-stained spot where his distraught friend, a
slightly-built dope dealer raped daily since his arrival, did a swan dive into
the pool of oblivion from the third tier party. He made his mark, like a
Rorschach ink blot, and the only woman who could read its symbolic patterns of
red was twenty-five hundred miles away in Belize engaged to his former smuggling
partner. Blue-boy remembered the unfinished John Lennon guitar chords, the
sock-in-the-mouth pleading, as well as the thud of meat on unforgiving cement as
he landed like a hundred and twenty pound period at the end of an incomplete
sentence. Next they passed the shower room where under the cover of steam, Blue
too had the soap knocked from his hand, and heard the order to "bend over and
pick it up." He remembered lashing out wildly, threatening not just death but
foul cannibalism, and then shaking for days thereafter.
He wondered how the
rain, so sweet and pure, so necessary for the sustenance of all life on this
sacred planet, had allowed itself to be incarcerated like him. It had touched
the face of its lover, the mountain. Rivulets ran down in a tender tickling of
the mountain's sides. Streams mated to produce rivers — rivers above ground and
below, coursing towards the sea with whatever volume not swallowed by deer and
birds, tree roots and sunshine. Then they'd kidnapped it, arrested its flow,
hand-cuffed it into pipes, poisoned it with chemicals, then released it onto the
backs and into the soups of druggies and forgers, rapists and revolutionaries.
Blue tried to forget the fetid smells of piss and chlorine, of sweat and
desperation. But he was not a man to forget.
"So long, Joker!" They
called him "Joker" in the joint. It was the Ol' Man who had hung that jacket on
him. He was named after the only card in the whole deck that either of them
liked.
Blue hated poker, hated betting on anything but himself. The long
games were played for cigarettes, but tobacco didn’t interest him. He played
only to keep his mind off of freedom, and his hands off himself. Too much
masturbation could lead to a false contentment, a sickly, artificial
satisfaction, a substitute for resolve like a housewife's Valium, a retreat from
challenge like the business person's daily diet of Prozac. Most of all, Blue
played poker in order to appear slightly less different, introverted, and
eccentric, a bit less of a threat to his pacified but dangerous cohabitants.
He'd conspired to overturn the monarchies of King and Queen, and rejected
the obedient numinastics of the numbered cards. He liked the Joker because,
like trickster Coyote, like the strange hunchbacked flute player painted in
blood on his cell wall, it could play the part of any card in the deck. Without
buying into either the Jack's pretentious nobility or the Ace's strident
one-upmanship, the Joker could play their parts with ease, claiming their
plastic and tobacco victories as his own. He loved this intemperate, teasing,
playful card. He loved the Joker, most of all, for the same reason some had
once loved him ... Because the Joker was wild. Already he missed the Ol' Man,
already he reached back into the concrete hell for the advice he'd need in the
months ahead.
"All you got is your one shot on stage, boy— an impeccable,
irreplaceable five minutes under the ol’ spotlight. A two minute song and
dance!," the grizzled con liked to say. "The best anyone can do in this life is
to really go for it, unflinching. No surrender, no quarter, and no whining!
The best we can do.... is to make it a good story."
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