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.

We drove up Highway 101. It was a Friday, the day before Valentine’s Day.

Friends, poets in town, had offered us their vacation home for the weekend. I guess he was some kind of nuclear physicist at Berkeley, with an interest in amber and disease DNA molecules and she, a poet of note, although by and large, incomprehensible to me.

We passed by the town of Gualala and noticed the big hotel there. It was then fronted by an old-style western portico with filigree and framed windows backed by lace curtains, visible and inviting from the road for its warm light from within.

I can’t remember if we went in that night and had the roast beef dinner. Maybe it was on the way back. It was good though, as was the Yorkshire Pudding, a dish I have never understood, nor really known  how — or more precisely, why — to eat.  I’ve been told that gravy helps.

We arrived, unpacked, made love, fell asleep, woke up, wrote some words and went for a walk. We weren’t talking much those days. In fact, we were both aware that whatever had been shining and sweet was drifting away in the distances between our homes, our aspirations, our decidedly different ways of life.

We had been friends for many years — “since the revolution,” as we joked to friends. In our forties we got together, a fishing trip in Baja did the trick and for a while it seemed we had both found the way home, a way to be together that worked, was shared, that grew.

Along the cove outside the house, the ocean spray over the rocks rose and receded, leaving a sparkling landscape, bare and sandy beach, treed up the cliff, bent in the wind and glowing in the back light of mid morning. We wandered down to the shore and along, kicking sand and talking from time to time, identifying the flora. Although now I can’t tell you what was there, only that it seemed strangely serene in what was a rough and gnarled environment.

A path led us up the cliff face to a stand of trees, madrone, I think, and of course, the coastal pines. We set out along the path at the top, away from the ocean, and came upon a house in the woods. Cedar shaked, falling down, gray and weathered, it stood among the pines with a tired but somehow sturdy appearance.

We went inside, the door being open and it being clearly abandoned. We each went to various rooms, separately, an unspoken team reconnaissance, aimed at coming back together with findings of interest. The kitchen was deserted entirely as, in fact, was the back room, which seemed like it must have been the bedroom.

We met up in the living room, both of us astonished, maybe chagrined, not to have seen that there was no roof on the living room. We had not seen that “feature” from outside. A large river stone fireplace stood long unused against a wall. It was filled with blown branches and weeds. As we looked through the open roof to a wondrous blue sky we noticed mist and small puff balls blowing across the opening. The ocean was a distant rumble, a complex counterpoint to the wind in the pines and the squeaking of the loose boards in what was once a window box.

Holding hands, we looked around. In the far corner, we spotted an old Pressback kitchen chair, weathered gray like the shakes outside, and worn through in the seat.

I went over to get it and brought it back to the center of the room. We both walked around it, re-adjusting it according to some unknown feng shui. Still holding hands, we sat down, she on my lap, my leg braced sturdy to the floor.

We sat that way for a what seemed a long while. Comfortably together. Quiet. The sun moved across the meridian, afternoon came upon us. Eventually we got up and headed back to our vacation home. It was getting dark, later in the day than we thought.

“That place had something to it, no?” she said. It seemed wistful, pregnant.

“Yes, it did, ” I said after awhile. “I suppose we could fix the roof.”

“And ruin the view?”

She went to the table in the kitchen, pulled out her notebook and began to write.

Later she looked up from the notebook, gazed out through the window to the darkening ocean sky and said, “Not much point to doing that now.”

I pulled out some eggs from the refrigerator, cut up some local shallots and mushrooms and made omelets for dinner.

 

Photo Credits

“When your mind’s made up” piermario @ flickr. Creative Commons. Some rights reserved.