It is not easy to buy flowers on a Wednesday here in Browngrass. The bulbs have been up since February and most of the spring flowers are on the way out, save some late blooming lilies and the occasional iris.

This Wednesday I had flowers on my mind. I don’t usually. The kind of work that I do is the kind that rarely allows flowers as a business expense.

You might say I’m an investigator. There are days when that description is accurate. I look for lost things. Most of the time I look for intangibles that are lost — love, time, sometimes money, and almost always, dreams. It often takes the shape of divorce work, or embezzlement or, for the most part, missing children. In the latter case the intangibles get lost along with the very real possibility, too often the case in the meth-addled days in which we live, that the final losses — of life, health, possibility — are the acknowledged outcome of the investigation.

I tell my clients, that closure, that knowing, is better than not knowing. But the truth is, as far as I can see, that with knowing comes the death of hope, the end of dreams, the loss finally, of happy endings.

Victor Frankl, a survivor of Auschwitz, talked about how having bad dreams was not worth the cost of waking the man up when his life was to be found in Auschwitz. Frankl said, with astonishing clarity, that without the dreams, horrible though they were, the man had nothing left to live for. More kind to leave him to struggle in that world, than to deny him the dreams in this world. I have a hard time arguing with that.

This Wednesday had nothing to do with a client though. I was looking for guilt flowers. I had just jacked up a good friend, a woman about whom I care deeply, someone who brought out things in me I thought had died long ago.

I met her almost a year ago through a mutual friend. I sometimes take personal pictures for friends; weddings if they are truly informal, soccer games, marathons, you know, the stuff you want to have done well but can’t really see paying for. The personal pictures often act as refuge from the strain of the other work, the divorce stuff, the blood.

I took some pictures of Jake’s soccer game. Jake is Zach’s son whom I have known all his life. Zach for much longer than that. One of her kids was on Jake’s team. In taking pictures of all the future Pelés, Ronaldhinos, and Mia Hamms, I always try to take crowd shots to round out the day. You never know when something beyond Saturday morning soccer will show up.

I came across a picture of her in a pink fuzzy toque with a designer name on it. She was in profile, starting to speak to someone out of the frame. I couldn’t take my eyes off the expression of intent in her face; the teeth bared not in anger, closer to passion, her eyes sparkling, alive.

The rules don’t allow for hitting on the moms, so the picture would just have to do. I sent it on to Zach and thought no more about it.

Not exactly true. I thought about her from time to time, mostly at sunset, purple fires streaking over the mountains, Dexter Gordon playing in background. It had been a very long time since me and Dexter dreamed those dreams together.

Life got in the way, my work got ugly and the skies turned springtime misty before she surfaced again. Turns out that she had some pictures she wanted taken as record of her body art. I hadn’t figured on that. I suggested we get together to talk about it. We agreed to meet the next week at a local java joint.

In conversation she has an almost hidden face, the kind you might not take note of on first glance. It didn’t take very long to notice that her eyes are attentive, her smile welcoming, inviting more, her presence an attitude of repose but paying attention.

She told me that she got my number from Zach after he showed her the pictures from the game at a soccer related event. We agreed to meet again the next week the same place.

I asked Zach what he knew about her. He told me he thought she taught somewhere, that she was married with more than one kid and that sometimes he caught a look at her and could not help thinking that something was wildly out of keeping with the tended lawns and German cars in the neighborhood. What, how, why that was he didn’t know. He thought it might be the long, braided, dark hair that hung to her waist. Maybe he just needed something to take his mind off the tedium of getting from here to there with a retirement plan intact.

I took the pictures on a cloudless day in late March. The background walls were yellow, the sky cerulean blue and bright. The body art, sleeves of tattoos, colorful and active, imagery straight from La Dia de los Muertos, made for quite a contrast, but somehow it all worked.

This gal was not a model but there was something in her that the camera loved. Maybe it was all the hidden stuff, as if her life was in her back pocket. In my experience, the people who know that best are the ones who know how pain comes from right close in, how love is never an equal exchange, who know that only the young die young.

We met for lunch a few days later. We had agreed that I would hand over the pictures; she would pay for them with a chic lunch at a local joint with the same name as her daughter. Somewhere between the green salad and the crème caramel, she let me know that she was ”not monogamous”.

I almost choked. When I found my voice again, I asked her if her husband knew that he wasn’t monogamous. It was a trick question I guess but it spoke to my work and the horrors that I had seen come from such situations.

Lunch was clearly over. Whatever hesitations I might have had, wanted to have, disappeared minutes later. We played a little clutch and grab on the street under the budding poplars and agreed to meet the following Tuesday. It didn’t work like that. By the time Friday had come and gone, so had she and not very much would be the same for the next several months.

She does indeed teach and equally does aid work in South America. The teaching, the work on an article, the upcoming three-month fieldwork expedition began to take all of her time. From every day at lunch our meetings started to be separated by days at a time. I was going into some emotional places I hadn’t been since I put away the crack pipe and the Jack Daniels several years ago.

Things were growing deeply complicated. An act of kindness, of intimacy became the doorway to the addict in me who always wants more. She had been here before she said. Not me. Not sober. Even so, we were doing fine until the first argument about getting together. Her life was taking over and it flat out pissed me off.

One day — well, Wednesday, to be precise — I called her to ask her what time she was coming over. We had kind of decided that we could grab one day a week of four to five hours, given her schedule and play the rest by ear. That lasted a week. I felt everything slipping away, her words of reassurance and her request to just let her get the work done so she could be present, fell on my “I need more, you don’t get it” ears. I said as much in a phone call at mid morning.

I heard the anger, the violation in her quiet response. I ignored it. In the end we agreed she would get there at 12 for three hours. There wasn’t much about it that felt good.

I went out almost immediately to get a sticky bun of some sugary walnut caramel thing that I knew she liked and thought to add some flowers. Looked for roses, got irises but it took three stores, some judicious, “what do you mean you don’t have fresh cut irises” negotiating. Irises in hand, sticky bun in the box I got back to house.

She came over; we fought; it got mean. I had put the irises in a hand blown glass coffee maker that doubles a vase in my bachelor house. I had pointed them out to her early on. She didn’t exactly ignore them but they certainly did not get in front of the runaway train that was our anger and frustration.

I had forgotten how my anger gets rolling, how it takes no prisoners, how it uses therapy terms as clubs. I become the bully I track down for others. Where it comes from is another story not for now, but it was there. She didn’t back down an inch. Quiet, controlled, in the end, mean as only the truly wounded can be, she gave as good as she got.

Eventually we got to a sweet place and after awhile she left. The irises were still in the vase on the kitchen table. When I mentioned it to her later that night, or maybe the next day, I said they were for her, her office or whatever. She said she left them because they looked good there.

We met up at a lecture on Friday that week. I was tired from an 18-hour day to that point and not thinking very clearly. She was uncomfortable with my being tired, likely with my being at the lecture in that condition. We went for coffee.

The fight that followed was cowardly on my part, an act of desperation. I felt criticized, cut down, abandoned. In fact she was married. And committed to it in her way. There was no changing that. What the hell had I been thinking? I told her I was going home to get fucked up, the junkies’ only good answer. The fight was over.

We parted, neither of us able to make this right.

As I came through my door, I saw those fuckin’ irises. I took them out to the deck and threw them as far as I could. I went back inside and lay down.

I awoke in the freezing darkness. Far off the sound of crying, the smell of salt. Slowly it came to me, I was lost, the tears were mine.

The next morning I found the irises in the garden below. I cut the stems on a diagonal, wrapped them in wet paper and tin foil and put them in the trash.

Photo Credit

“Iris” (matt) @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

It’s been raining hard all day.

I’m driving south on Main Street towards Marine Drive. I’ve got some bills I have to pay. Roy Rogers and Norton Buffalo are playing on the radio. It sounds like the lost nights and the window skies from so long ago. They were sweet and endless like youth itself — and now, it seems, over. Rest in peace Norton.

I stop for a red light. I catch sight of the Honolulu Café on the eastern side of the street right there between the New Antique Market with a “new” container from Belgium and the Come-In Enterprises Emporium, featuring stamp collections and “super healthy” food from Hong Kong.

Honolulu, I think. Hotels, beaches, Pearl Harbor, beautiful Hawaiian girls, the Pipeline. The palm tree sign out front has fallen over. The place looks wet from the inside out, shrouded in the rain like Noah’s final port of call, a last chance hole in the wall wait it out ‘til paradise kinda joint.

I get to thinkin’ how maybe Miles or ‘Trane played here some long ago lost night on the road but that’s romantic tripe. My guess is that nobody ever played anything at all at the Honolulu Café.

I feel lucky I don’t know anyone in there and it is lucky they don’t know me. On a rainy day up here, north of the original Skid Row, every passerby is a convict, every customer is a saint. Every driver is an innocent bystander. According to a local ordinance, every act of kindness will be revenged.

Behind the fallen palm tree sign and the worn out yellow light the shadows drift behind the fading yellow window. From where I am you can’t tell whether they are convicts or saints but I’m guessing that one thing is for sure: Every act of revenge will be a kindness tonight at the Honolulu Café.

Outside the Honolulu Café an old man staggers against the blowing rain. I imagine for a moment that he is remembering how the decks were awash in the South Pacific swell and the hold was full of tuna, or maybe it was Toyotas. The Southern Cross was all but gone as the winds picked up again from the southwest. As he ran for the wheelhouse he prayed that it wasn’t another one of those killer waves rolling up from the South China Sea.

From behind the wheel it looks like that storm is right here, right now. Watch caps and John Deere hats don’t keep you dry up here. The streets are wet, his pockets are empty. My guess is that there ain’t nobody home waiting up. He turns to look at the oncoming rain. It slashes his worn face but even from here I can see that he is remembering his last good day. I’m guessing it was somewhere east of Solomon Islands, running for home in front of the storms coming up out of the southwest.

At the Honolulu Café you got to figure that since they don’t say anything, they got to know something.

A memory inside the rain pounding on the roof carries the sounds of chairs scraping on the wet floor and dishes hitting the bus box. A deserted hotel kitchen long after the meal service was done, a voice, pure and clear, a gnarled figure singing, “you’ve lost that lovin’ feelin’…” over and over again. He was back lit in clouds of steam and endless stacks of dirty dishes. He wasn’t young like me or old; it seemed from where I stood he was just worn out with the distance between here and there.

I went to look for him the next night, to talk a little, to ask him where he’d been, to ask him what he knew. He wasn’t there. I guess what he knew best was being gone.

I’m waiting for the light to change. I can hear the wipers on the windshield, the rain on the roof, the road wet tires and the sound of passing by. I’m heading south, paying some bills. I’m waiting for the fog to lift, waiting for sunrise over the islands. I’m waiting for the phone to ring. I’m waiting for the waiting to be over.

Photo Credit

“Neon Palm” Fred Davis @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved

I met her at a media party where she was meant to be the surprise big-time journalist who shows up and makes the party the one ‘not to have missed’. I was there because the host wanted to populate the crowd with local poets; for “intellectual ambiance” is how he put it.

Free drinks, pigs in a blanket, homemade sushi and a famous journalist. Not a bad payoff for years of loneliness, bad debts and the occasional book signing.

I suggested we meet for dinner at a Greek joint where I knew the owners, had done several favors, but mostly a place where I could run a tab. From the first sentence, which had something to do with Lebanese freedom fighters, her last unfaithful journalist boyfriend from a good Arab family here in town, the correlation of UN Food Programs with an integrated approach to human rights for Muslim women in the Sudan, it became clear that dinner was likely to take a long time and end at the check.

I was surprised when she told me that she would love to meet again.

When we meet again a couple of nights later she tells me that she is happy to be here in town, happy to be among her kind again: I think she means writers. I tell her that I read a piece of hers, in the New York Times, the one on women playing soccer in the war zone inside Kabul. I don’t tell her that I can’t figure out, sitting here in a  high-end Greek joint, on what, under other circumstances, would be a romantic misty spring night, why the piece read so well and why she seems so distracted by her own words?

She tells me that her true love, other than the endless string of bad relationships and war zone liaisons, is writing and reading poetry. Would I like to hear/read some of her work? Sure, says I, thinking that the chances of lasting through another dinner, on my dwindling tab, are about as good as flowers growing in February on Mount McKinley.

At one point I ask her if, when she says war zones, she means her love affairs or her news assignments. “Either way,” I say, “they seem to leave you broken hearted.” Her response takes up all of the grilled rack of lamb and the better part of two bottles of cheap red.

She certainly is engaged tonight, although in what I am not at all sure. Is she really interested in writing as she says or is it the adrenaline rush? Maybe it is in always being the best looking woman in every room she goes into. She says the assignments she hates most are the fashion week pieces she has to do in Milan and Paris. Maybe she is the most totally self-involved, insecure person I have ever talked to. But damn, she can really  write.

“Let’s read together,” she says suddenly. “We can go to Bukowski’s open mike. That’s what you said, right?” I guess I had mentioned that I read there from time to time though I don’t remember saying it.

I really don’t want to read with her, or any one else, to tell the truth, but she seems to want to so badly. What the hell, I think, maybe it’s just another war zone liaison for her.

“Let’s read together,” she says again. “You know, Ditmars and LeBeau, here, one night only. It’ll be fun.”

“Ditmars and LeBeau. Hmmm.  Sounds like an import export company to me,” I say, maybe hoping that she will ask me what I mean or decide that I’m right and poets deserve better than to be marketed as commodities. She raises an eyebrow and smiles.

Sounds like import and export I think again. Something foreign, exotic, alluring. Something made there and shipped here, sold there and brought here. You know, trade routes, The Silk Road, Marco Polo, Venice. Like something offered, something taken. Clipper ships are opium bound, running for home in front of the Pacific trades. Messages from lost sailors are cast overboard in hand-blown blue glass bottles rolling up years later on the western beaches. The glass becomes fireplace decoration. Ink clouds drifting on the sand are castles in my imagination.

“Yeah,” I say finally. “Let’s read tonight. It feels like rain.”

Photo Credit

“chair street #3” goldsardine @ flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

“FF Trixie HD-Not the Best Typewriter Font” Font Font @ flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

Previously published on May 1, 2010, www.blog.longrunpictures.com

Part I

When the war came we all left home. Some of us joined the army and went to Vietnam. Some of us stayed in college and went to law school. Some of us went to Canada or stayed hidden away in the cracks. Most of us came back, but we were not the same as before. Some of us left and never came back. The war changed everything for all of us. Along the way we found out that the dead don’t change.

My friend Ira and I dreamt of glory and death while we played war. When we were six, seven years old we saved the world from under the dining room table. I carried the Republican flag south of Teruel; he died in a hail of Franco’s fascist fire. No Passerans! we said to anyone who would listen.

Ira and I held the line in the snow at Bastogne; we stormed ashore at Tarawa, died inside at the gates of Buchenwald. We rode with Stonewall Jackson at Fredericksburg and Teddy Roosevelt on San Juan Hill.

We died with glory; we killed for peace. We were American sons of American fathers who had taught us what we needed to know. We made the world safe for democracy, safe for truth, justice and the American Way in 1953.

I was playing pool in an upstate bar — Swat’s, it was called — when an old man started in on me about the hair and the beads and the music. Grow up boy, it’s a man’s world, that’s the way it is, that’s the way it always has been, always would be…men go to war, and just who the hell was I to think I had the right to change that.

I felt like I always felt in those days, like I was nowhere, like I was no one who mattered much. Like I was just so much cannon fodder.

“Eight ball in the side pocket,” I said.

I saw Ira again in March of 1968. We were on a green Army bus at 5 a.m. We were on our way to Fort Hamilton to take our draft physicals. The draft call was 68,000 that month, the largest of the Vietnam war. The bus was crowded, but we recognized each other. We didn’t speak. There wasn’t much to say. No one was saying much of anything.

It was the first day of the rest of our lives.

Ira and I went through the physical together. We shared a laugh at the absurd quality of it, the glimpse of things to come. There were the screamers and the raving fags, the fierce warriors ready to die for God and country. These were the same guys who were sharing piss for the urine test because they couldn’t piss in public.

A platoon of sergeants carried us forward, yelling, berating, full of disgust, hurrying us from station to station so we could stand in line. After the first couple of hours most everyone was talking about the war and how this physical really sucked.

Some were ready to fight because that’s what you did or their fathers did or because the Judge said so. Most of us were there because our time had run out. Before anything else could happen in our lives, we needed to deal with this thing; with this long, dreaded, morning.

We were odd companions, full of false pride and bravado. We didn’t know it at the time but we were very young and very scared. Six hours later we got back on the bus.

Ira and I got off the bus in front of the Draft Board and stood in the freezing rain. After awhile, we shrugged and said good luck. He got into a yellow Valiant and drove west along Flushing Boulevard. It was 11 a.m.

I went home and packed my things. I called Susie Hoffman, a college friend who was living in the city. We got together and started to drink. Eventually, we tried to have sex. She was uncertain, almost unwilling, like she always was with me. I was too drunk to care. We drank until there was no more whiskey, no more cocaine, no more time. We were not friends when we said goodbye.

I left for Canada in the morning. I planned on staying there a short time and taking things as they came. Thirty-three years later I came home.

Part II

I was in Washington last Christmas Week and I made it a point to go to the Vietnam Memorial at sunrise. I thought it would bring some resolution, some closure. Maybe I was looking for absolution.

Red was patrolling the Wall when I got there. “Name is Red on account of I got all this red hair, you see,” he said when he introduced himself. He was nearly bald, but he could smile.

We started talking.

He told me he would have gone to Canada…too.

Instead, he did three tours in-country. Now he has PTSD and is a retired firefighter in treatment.

Could he help me find what I was looking for, he asked?

I told him I was counting off 12 weeks of basic, then maybe a couple of weeks of leave and then some time to get assigned in-country, say, October ’68. Then I added in 13 months, the standard Vietnam tour of duty. I told him how I had started counting the names in each month, how I was doing my own personal body count. I wanted to see how many there were, figuring, just for the hell of it, what my chances might have been, checking out whether or not I would have been my own childhood hero.

“Pretty sick?” I said.

“I’ve seen worse,” he said. “See anybody you know?”

Ira died in the Ashau Valley, in March of ’69. Outside of Currahee Ta Ba. We were 23.

Red and I walked over to the “Linc”, as he called it. The sunrise through the mist made it seem…holy. The Lincoln Memorial stood quietly in the rising light, its weathered stone bearing witness to its majesty.

Red said goodbye and wished me luck. He strode back to the Wall, walking point, it seemed to me. I went up the long steps, past the signs that said it was closed, over to the wall where Lincoln’s words “With malice toward none, and charity for all…” were bare, stark in the low light.

I had seen them first as a 6-year-old, and many times since, although not for many years. “With malice toward none…” said I, out loud.  The words echoed through the empty memorial, down the broken years to those days so long ago.

Then came tears and later, silence.

Part III

No more made-up heroes for me. I came down to these nowhere hills near Brown Grass, Texas to start over. Childhood is long gone now and much of what came after drifted away in the smoke of lost rooms, in a parade of uncertain mornings on the Northwest rain coast.

I have done what I’ve done. I’ve run for cover until the skies rained down blood, lived as if I were Death, walking in Dante’s eternal cold. Somewhere over the rainbow, they say, it’s always paradise. I say if you’re looking for paradise, ask any junkie.

I have become who I am, who I set out to be when I started down the road to meet my fate — or was I looking to find my destiny? It doesn’t really matter I suppose. When I think of that six-year-old’s dreams of doing right, of how they went so wrong, I know now that they are better left under an ancient gate-leg table. I still have the table and sometimes, when I’m not looking, I have the dreams.

Photo Credits

“Crack troops of the Vietnamese Army in combat operations against the Communist Viet Cong guerillas.”

“Fort Hamilton, Nov 2, 2008” fonchis @ flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

“Vietnam Memorial”, Tommy Canu Hearme, The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, The Wall-USA

“Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool” Wikipedia, GNU Free Documentation License

The storm knocked out the power several months ago.

A branch from the silver poplar in the yard hit the wires.

“Should have been pruned back years ago,” the power company guy was saying that morning.

“Where do you want the wood?” he asked me.

I told him to pile it up over by the lower deck while I went to call the owner of the house and the trees in question.

Days later the owner came by, an older guy with a shy smile and a slow country walk, even here in the middle of town.

“Let’s leave it there,” he said. “I want most of it for my stove and heater this winter, but you keep some of it for the fireplace. I’ll come by and get it in a couple of months.”

I said thanks and left the wood where it lay.

The rains came early this year. The pile sat below the hill and while it was in a good place to dry in the summer sun, it was now getting more wet with the hard rain that falls steady here during the fall and winter.

No sign of the owner or his crew, no response to several messages to come and get the wood. Seemed a good time to move the pile out of the weather.

I picked up the first round. Oak, I think — heavy like oak, anyway — and moved across the deck to a spot under the stairs. Walked back and did it again. I moved steadily, if slowly, over the afternoon.

The wood pile became a stack of rounds piled under the stairs, lit up by the now setting sun.

I was tired and sore. I’m not used to hauling wood rounds much these days. I ate some soup and went to lie down on the couch. I turned on the Jazz Show on the local NPR station. After awhile I got up to light a fire in the fireplace, using kindling from last year and several pieces of the summer wood.

The fire caught. I lay back down, listening as Chick Corea returned from nowhere on the radio. I smiled at the idea of smoke drifting across this particular room. It seemed, well, almost holy.

I awoke much later in the cold, dark, early morning. The smell of burnt oak and poplar in the room, and maybe sage from a long lost Cheyenne prayer relic, caused me to wonder where I was.

Who was this old man whose back hurt and whose arms were sore as if he had worked all day in the woods, setting choker in the first growth cedar out by Poets Nook on the Alberni Canal? Where was the sound of the ocean as it broke on the reefs in the outer channel and washed up on the beach, nearly a hundred yards away? Where was the Franklin with the dented kettle on the burner, steaming slowly into the quiet breathing of his sleeping newborn son, and his own coming days of fatherhood?

I went to sleep in my bed then, as if it had all been a dream.

 

Photo Credits

“Woodpile” rachaelvoorheees @ flickr. Creative Commons. Some rights reserved.