Jesus the Mexican Boy

The turn off on Interstate 40 right before the state line should have warned them of the inhabitants. The way that the sign, intended to display bountiful amenities, instead featured a winking pig dated somewhere in the middle of the 1930s if Amos was correct.

He’d pull off anyway. He needed a piss and rest and figured this was a good enough stop. A temporary stop over, to stretch his legs.

He found solace in the back of empty highway exits, and felt freedom in the lack of personal objects and the sheer amount of high desert sprawl, a spidery concoction of thorns placed just so against the empty tapestry of beach sand.

It was like the dead days of Hollywood out here, like things had never changed. He was born in Portland, but spent the most of his life trying to get out, living behind the flaws in a roadside diner, squeezing out the state’s dying past.

He had a Masters degree in History, yet to look at him Amos look like he just walked in off of the train yard. His beard was more of a permanent stain than stubble, and he foraged around in the dust left by fifteen years of scouting.

At night in the solace of hotels in which he was the sole inhabitant, he wrote what was an ongoing series of treacherous tales. His characters were drifters like the one he tried to be, yet with a more authentic background.

Sons of dude ranchers, lost in a search for a big city life of fidelity, and gamblers on the run from the local chain gang were his royal subjects.

If given the right amount of time between speeches at local community colleges, he could make a run last anywhere between two and six weeks, for he was capable and often did teach history to various schools, both as substitute and visiting expert to those who didn’t know any better. An unlike many of his fellow educators, he didn’t get into education for the kids sake, but as a way to keep his lifestyle going.

Always driving –the search of an anonymous life kept him alive and moving through shanty towns and scuttlebutt towns that were once bordellos, brothels and diamond mines, but now sat dusty, sacred and alone-- always in search of the perfect backdrop in which he could place his characters in front of.

His father passed just last year, but he didn’t attend the funeral. To go back would be to realign his present self with the history of flagrant disregard of his family. He couldn’t just go back, not the way he was right now. There’d be too much to get in the way before he could honestly grieve.

So he kept it up until he reached Miskaowie. It lay clear on the other side of a dirt road off of a feeder road to I40, right by the Idaho border. After the dirt road drifted out of existence like an old memory of prep school, he came upon a church, after wandering for hours looking at the distant shadow of a steeple.

1902. That was the last time someone was here. There weren’t any footprints and sign of any kind until he saw the candles.

Lit up like a Catholic Birth it was, as the interior of the church was vaguely Mexican. Incantations were written in Latin and Spanish.

At the back of the church, by the last pew he overturned the last Bible, intrigued by the gold leaf propped out of the spine. Exhausted from the drive and the news from back home that came via his post office box in La Grande, he sat down, took off his dusty cap and read the faded inscription on the gold leaf inlay.

Marylou,

I’m real sorry I couldn’t speak to you in person. Yer ma said you’d gone for the day, feeding the men at the mine. The cavalry came out to our Miskie, saying if we was going to join up now we’d best do it. We talked about this day when it happened, but I never thought. I didn’t want it this way.

Maybe I’m too late and you’ve fallen in love with a guy who leaves, and that’s the way it will be.

I’ll try to make it back someday, to visit you. Grammie’s got little Nathan and she’s real sorry you couldn’tve been there to see for yerself how proud she was of me, with a metal lapel pin to wear and the pony they’ve got me on. It’s a real opportunity to provide for you and the baby. I’ll be stationed in La Grande, getting the word out about the cause. Maybe someday I'll come back.

Love Always,

Daryl

Amos closed the book cautiously, slid it underneath the pew, stretched out on it, and fell asleep.

When he awoke hours later, most of the candles had gone out, and in their places the sullen faces of a hundred Mexican boys. As he staggered up and off of the pew, the boys’ hands reached out to Amos, who was now visibly weeping.

One of their own had died, and the boys, whose whereabouts were still uncertain, took Amos to a burial ceremony two hundred meters from the church. He drank something out of a hollowed out cactus, as the leader, who wore a coyote skin cloth around his torso, twirled around with a bloody spear.

The corpse of the coyote lay in the center of the pit, surrounded by what looked like one hundred tea lights.

The second in command (he had blood tracks on his face, and wore the blood of the animal across his face, covering one half like a crescent moon.) came from behind, and hoisted up the carcass revealing a series of wood planks, which must have contained the remnants of their leader.

The chants warped Amos's head, the swirling lights becoming blurs and the cacophony of voices were difficult to discern from the chanting, which filled his head, ringing out, growing in stature with each successive round of cactus water and singing.

By the morning the boys were gone, the pit covered, and the gold leaf still tucked inside the last bible in the final pew, in the abandoned, dark church.

Snap Out of It!!!

Snap Out of It!!!

It started as a moment and ended as one too, but instead of having felt good about the situation and its intoxicant inhabitants, I chose to dwell on the less saggy parts of the day, and as a result I puked almost instantly at the thought that living alone took after being divorced after sixteen weeks of marriage.

It took place, like most things, over a course of a number of years at which certain times I referred to them, the years as utterly unforgettable and possibly happy, If I was ever capable of feeling that strongly before.

And I knew that up until this point in my life... Ooh, this gets a bit sticky. I’m speaking in the past now to someone whose now quite young.

I’m sorry if I fooled you with my formalities. (Forever beats against more appreciating beasts to the general time continuum we have and how its ultimately a counter-part as to how we currently feel, at least this month in Quarantine Illustrated.

But after all of that, I knew I still loved him, even if his friendship was always far away, and during the past few months anyway, was always in another time zone when I had the thoughts that absolutely required a phone call at 3AM.

Because everyone had to know how you felt that night, when you saw the Lord demonstrated like that. But not in a sermon, not in the unnecessarily rigid environment of the Lutheran church but in the living room in 1978, that’s what still made him believe in love. It was the nostalgia of remembering a time when Love and Crushes still meant something, and how the sting of a crush could resonate days afterward.

These were things worth mentioning at the end of the day. At night he would light cigars out on the patio staring out at the humidity rising against the cold bay, and he’d catch the ribbon of wind that blocked out the oncoming sunlight, and made him realize how much he had missed the things that made him who he was, happy to live at that level, but embarrassed by it, in the worst sense.

All he saw was suffering all around him, yet of all he knew were prosperous and their hearts filled with the luxurious golden yarns of comfort.

His touch,and his congruent use of speech was, in itself a way of admission. To truly obtain the lease, and free the big man as a sort of beholder, a guard to the great gig in the sky, he must purge the feelings contained within the cool waters of his swim on each subsequent evening.

More often than not it was just what the doctor ordered; the golden ticket that brought us all home like kids, pretending to be adults in the Hospital, when their kid sister is dying.

You don’t really know until you’re outside Julian’s at 3AM, out of your mind on whatever is going 'round. Because for years its not about WHAT, but WHY that matters around these circles, even if people will feel the wrath, and repose, downplay the dread to their students, and eventually children.

Why make one miserable when you infect thousands?

It’s like PR, the way in which spreads like a disease, though you couldn’t see the infection through the calluses of addiction. The way you live through lightning and agree to talk about it on TV afterwards.

Lefty's Grey Canoe

Dashing out of the rain, from the café in your white Mary-Tyler-Moore outfit was the slow, fading crescendo I’d hoped for one day when I was younger, but when heartbreak came, it came with a rushing feeling that hurtling towards me was this feeling of dread, happy emptiness. I felt the camera pan back, like in a movie.

I stared at my bacon and eggs and tapped my folded up newspaper on the chair.

It was two o’ clock already, and she’d left me in the afternoon, with cold eggs, bacon and the sense that I had nowhere to go. As to her destination, well, I think I had a pretty good idea.

Shed been screwing Lefty now for well over a year, and you could see the look all over the guys puss.

Like powdered sugar on a French toast face this guy. Evident in the way death is subtle.
Strutting all over town, in the middle of the day just like that.

How bout it?

Flaunts it in my face at work all the time. He’s top man on the take. He's bought a brand new grey canoe, by Old Town, the same ones the yuppies from Maine trot in when they come a little too far south in the summer time.

Hes the only agent on the take period, so its real out in the open when he's paddling with my girl on those moonlit evenings. I stayed at home, pounding out my fears on a Smith Corona, wondering whether or not this "Soft Touch" I seem to have is gonna screw me out of the take, and mabye even my girl. This is before.

“Bit of the top of the pile this week, Jimmy. I’ll give something to the cops personal like.”

I’m standing there, pretending like I could give a rat’s ass. He’s making the whole transaction completely obvious, and when Carl finds out about this, he’ll be on the first boat to Tuna Town, underneath by the docks, the shark’sll make chum out of him., the rat.


I’d been separated from Sophie for a good six years when I met dollface out in the square one day while I was making the collections.

Im out at the pier, and she's dropping a care package to her old lady. She's a widow, and she paints these adorable little watercolors.

Im there again a few months later when I see her eyes meet Lefty in his big grey canoe. I know hes on the take, and the civies'd be real miffed if they knew one of theres was on a take so I dont say nothing, but I feel the jealous pangs like Im Cyrano de Bergerac or something.

He's got the stand up job and I'm looking back and wondering if it didn't all start years ago.

And on the night before Sophie left I bought an empty journal, a way to make notes on my manuscript.

I hadn’t thought of becoming a writer, really. It all just sort of happened, the way that you fall a certain way when you get hit in the chest with a pillowcase full of bricks. If and when the cards came down, there was little chance of me leaving anything else behind when I finally left the whole mortal coil years from now. I figured I’d give it a shot.

And ever since Sophie, I’d be up in the ‘crows nest’ – a little half-attic that my brother in law built back before, when I was married. Carmen’s brother Carmine built it.

He was going to leave the city, Carmine and he built half-attics all throughout the north eastern coast of New Jersey.

We were in the country version of the mafia, Carmine and me. We was wanna-bes, you know, prep-school gangsters who got away with more stuff because we were out here in the middle of nowhere, holding up bait and tackle shops, truckers with crates of beer, stuff like that.

See you had to be a real pro to lift the stuff coming into Newark, but up here in Paulston, on the New Jersey Shore it was a gold mine back then.

I could step into any grain silo east of West Orange and come out of there making some hillbilly piss his pants with a fist full of Farm subsidies. When Reagan cut subsidies even further, we felt a little guilty, but there was always something literary in our crime, that’s probably why I found myself writing.

I wrote all night after some of our big scores, up all night on coke. My writing was frenzied, morally ambivalent and impenetrable, I detected a certain immortal spirit, a foolish child who thought he was impervious to any physical violence.

Were in the middle of shit fields, and cattle ranchers, do you really think anyone’s going to go after a violent offender in the country. All of the cops were family from way back.

The corruption tied the mob together with us in the late 1980s, and I got out of the Coke and stolen bicycles angle and got into writing. Well that and cooked Real-Estate- Speculation, but my money’s now wrapped in a cocoon of paperwork and bureaucracy anyway what does it matter.

Those Enron guys had it right though.

My thoughts come back to her though, walking out in the rain in the middle of lunch, breakfast, whatever. Right there on Park Avenue.

When she walked out, it was the last dance.

No one comes around anymore to visit me. I’m living in a Retirement community years later, writing too many TV situations for Colombo. I’m drinking Yuban coffee in a large tubs that I can turn into ashtrays. My criminal status is defunct.

It comes and goes, and we never know how long it lasts, but we keep trying, even though we don’t know why.

Guided By Stewart

Cold hands touching my face
Don’t hide - the snake can see you
Old friends you might not remember
Fading away from you

These faithful words emanated from a scratchy piece of vinyl, weighted down by a copper penny in its fidelity. Guided by Voices "Bee Thousand" is one of those seminal records, where one can place their exact whereabouts, setting our chronometers to the wistful days of 1994. Summer exactly; living in a dilapidated green house with four other distinguished gentlemen, it was never far from our heavy rotations.

Walking from room to room, from Kris's wood-paneled fish tank room, to Steve's journalistic dwelling reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson's office, "Bee Thousand" and its sycophantic admirers could be found at every party, nestled by the stereo like thousands of children, waiting for the latest radio episode of The Green Hornet.

But it was The Gold Heart Mountaintop Queen Directory that really hit home. If asked, we could have all recited the song verbatim, culminating in the ultimate tribute, Guided By Stewart.

Stewart, a local legend made famous by the sheer audacity of personality that resulted whenever he entered the room, had received the ultimate birthday present, namely being awarded the distinction of lead singer of a Guided by Voices Tribute Band.

The band members worked hard trying to emulate the oscillating time signature on a batch of four or five songs. To be performed at a local party of which no one can actually remember, Stewart took the "stage" (Really a shag-carpeted cleared area in the front room of Stewart's house, with a gaudy orange Garfield clock staring down on the proceedings.)

And while some would say on the subsequent performances the band were to make in the years that followed, that Hot Freaks was their best song, replete with Bob Pollard "kicks", I'd place my money on The Gold Heart Mountaintop Queen Directory.

Old friends you might not remember
Fading away from you

Surrounded by forty of our closest friends, we'd sway to the song, drunkenly slobbering out the chorus, while wrapping our arms around each other.

It was as if we could look though a portal into another dimension, where we'd already moved on, moved away, and settled down to a world where Guided By Stewart no longer performed. And in the sway of that chorus (the whole song is really one long chorus) we found solace in ourselves at a time when loyalty and love were strange, elevated concepts that we reserved for evenings surrounded by friends and Guided by Stewart.

Ten years later I'm singing along to Guided By Voices playing the song for one last time (on the Guided By Voices Farewell Tour) and wondering how in the hell I grew up so fast.

Engaged and in Graduate School, the song did not fail me, and I felt the rush of emotions that came from the memory of all of us dancing together to the song that brought solace to all of us at a time when we most needed it.

The Guided by Voices farewell show in Portland was a farewell to a period of my life, where music was a constant companion, and I wandered around the country in search of myself. Ten years on and all the wiser, I can't help but think of Guided by Stewart and how, however awkward it was, represented all of us in our quest for love and personal expression.