Payphone

I left the Marble Mountains with sore knees and a stomach raw from too much ibuprofen and fried salami.

The lightning storm from a few nights earlier momentarily scarred the surface of Ukanom Lake with ordered ranks of quivering pines, wavering in their sessile salute to death.

The next morning we were wrapped in smoke.

Driving south on Highway 5 the yellowed teeth of the sky opened just enough for me to see Mt. Shasta, almost unrecognizable without its usual turban of snow.

Four years ago, on that very same payphone there, I had a wonderful conversation with my dad, having no idea it would be one of our last.

“Why you so good to me, Pop?” I had asked, after he had offered to fund me on some then-important road trip to Utah.

“Because I love you, you dope.”

After last night, while sleeping in a puddle near Castle Lake during a mid-July downpour, with frothing indigestion from bad tortilla soup, Shasta is once again a pure white grizzly hump piercing the stratosphere.

Just as annual events give time a set of false teeth, so to does returning to a place for the second time after years of being elsewhere.

Perhaps that payphone still houses your voice somehow.

In the months after you died I would pick up the phone every once in awhile and start to dial your number, only to remember that you weren’t home.

Some day, years from now, I’ll probably return to this little town, and that payphone will be gone. Perhaps then, I will finally begin to believe that you are gone as well.

July 2007
Mt. Shasta, CA

The Be Good Tanyas

That tobacco-stained bear tooth was setting like a ship over the ruffled Western Sierra.

Waribu and I drank whisky to stay awake for the last winds of that bumpy drive.

Up and up we went, away from the parched throat of the Owen’s Valley, and into the cold ache of 11,000 feet.

The White Mountains.

We wound past the caramel-colored, corkscrewing wrinkles of the bristlecone pines, who range in age from sapling to the 5,800 year old Methuselah tree.

Just a few hours earlier, we had been huddled in that bright world of dust and fire, the Joshua Tree Desert, watching the Be Good Tanyas pick their magic.

They looked flushed, and over-hot from the sun, and drank margaritas out of quart-sized cups. They sang like little warblers, just passing the time away while sitting on the eggs.

Sometimes the world seems too big. I keep on coming across people who I want to spend my entire life with. There are too many choices now that we no longer stay in the worn pockets of our small villages.

Corina and I went to see them play in New York City last fall. We showed up late to the show, and had to huddle outside the curtains just to listen.

Now the Kate Wolf Memorial Festival in Northern California. A canvas of yellowed grass stretched and broken by the gnarled, massive hands of the black and valley oaks.

The Be Good Tanyas played just before sunset. If I could give the entire planet the feeling those women gave me, while they picked that subtle, seductive magic, like a hot, southern pie, I would.

Music festivals always make me wish that I was in love.

But for now it seems that I’ll just keep on meeting people that could make me happy for the rest of my life if I had been welcomed into a smaller world.

And when I say I want to spend the rest of my life with them, it’s not that I’m imagining making love on a screened-in, wrap-around porch on a humid, Indian summer night, surrounded by fireflies.

No, that would be too easy.

What I imagine is those moments. Those precious moments when we become nothing more than human things.

Rushing late in the morning and watching her hop and struggle across the bedroom with her favorite pair of socks.

Surprising her with homemade chicken potpies and having them turn out like little cylinders of concrete foundation with string beans poking through, and watching her take a bite and giggle ‘til she snorts, try as she may, unable to pretend I did a good job.

Waking late on the weekend and hearing her voice trailing through the curved sunlight, yapping on the phone to all of her friends like my mom always would on Sunday mornings.

And of course, my hand pressed wide against the kicking globe housing our soon to be born baby.

The oaks hung heavy in robes of gold and green, with watery trickles of old man’s beard.

Those sweet, sweet women warbled those honey-suckled songs, and love felt far away, sitting with its feet up in some fire-warmed cabin in Canada. Far away, but still, safe and cozy.

And just knowing its out there staying warm somewhere is enough, and life never tasted so crispy-sweet, as it baked just right inside the golden crust of that late evening sun.

June, 2007
Black Oak Ranch, Northern California

Limantour

An unusually high tide washed up this beach a few hours ago, and now the mostly dried sand feels like a warm crust of brownies beneath my feet.

The inter-tidal is covered in crab carapaces and probing sandpipers. The tops of the soft and lethargic waves are capped in rose quartz.

The sun is a golden shield in the sky and an orange dagger in the water.

The same sun that is playing too close to the horizon again, and will soon be pulled under by the flexing currents, left to tumble and toss in the darkness until it is spit back out on some distant shore in the morning time.

The salty musk of the sea smells like my dad, and the little crab boats have just turned on their lights.

The entire continent stretches off my back like a giant horned and channeled shell, and to stand with my feet in the ocean seems an especially noteworthy achievement right now.

Thoreau said that every compass points west, but he had the advantage of being in Concord, Massachusetts, while I have exhausted west, at least as far as walking is concerned.

For me south along the edge of the continent will have to do, until I make a quick punch left through the dunes spangled in salt grass and coast lupine, back towards that mighty eastern parking lot.

January 2008
Limantour Beach, CA

I Am Without Socks!

For Pete and Cindy

Bridal Veil Falls guzzled like a drunk over the cliff edge only to burst into long ribbons of falling silk.

The ceremony took place the day before on top of Telluride Mountain.

The bagpipes, quivering and proud, wiggled around in my DNA, and made Willy cry.

The aspens lit up the autumned hills from within, gigantic quills shoved wildly into the earth with plumes of over-sized buttercups and gold coins.

What courage to be deciduous!

We all stood, grey and windy, waiting for the bride, and as she came into view the sun poked its long ring finger through the wallpaper and lit Cindy from behind like a billowing cluster of cherry blossoms.

During the ceremony Pete, Cindy, Beau, Megan, Sophia and Ryan all had their hands tied together, a tradition as old as a bagpipe, woven like a sash they are bound in symbiosis, as a sphinx moth is fasted to a primrose.

Back down the mountain Cindy and Pete walked through the streets littered in gold coins, drinking Veuve and shining like the sun-drenched moon.

And just to further prove his love, Cindy’s ring is an umbel of diamonds, like some undiscovered salvia growing low and quiet in the underbrush of the Sierra Madre, only once found by the scooped hand of a little girl, who dares not tell, for she knows that science may try to convince her that it is not a headdress for angels.

During the reception Uncle T-Pot’s “Hip Hip Hoorays!” broke me open like a chickadee egg in late spring, and I smiled through my sternum and out of my collarbones thinking about how much Dad would have loved Cindy. “Jesus!”

On this day, October 12, 2007, your love became an anchor that winnowed and sunk, heavy and fast, into the depths of the chests of all who surrounded you.

And to quote my dear brother Peter, the groom: “You knock my socks off.

“I am without socks!”

October 2007
Telluride, CO

Another God-Damned Love Story

Another God-damned love story. I went to the movies alone, and when I left it was dark, except the sky was pink and the air smelled like anti-freeze, as if the world had spent the past two hours thinking about ending it all but couldn’t quite follow through because it’s a fucking romantic like the rest of us.
Now I’m going to sleep in an abandoned building, because I’m just that kind of guy. I’m going to buy two hamburgers and a quart of beer to make it all a little more epic, so that being alone feels somehow important, even cool, instead of plain old sad, and lovesick for no one in particular.
You want to know what inspired all of this? What movie it was I just went to see? I wasn’t going to tell you because it’s embarrassing, and honestly I didn’t even think it was very good, but damn it all, the love story was convincing, and the ending sweet, and oh what the fuck, it was Zach and Miri Make A Porno, alright? Fuck you!
And now I’m full of: “When’s my turn?” and “What if it never happens…?” and “Can it really be like that?” And you know what? Fuck yes it can, because the sky doesn’t dress in pink for just anyone, and if the whole world is holding on to the possibility then why shouldn’t I?
I’ll give up when she does, and it’ll be one hell of a bloody apocalypse when that cloudy eyed bride sits in the tub and opens her wrists for all of us to fly through, but until then, it’s beer and hamburgers for me, and sappy romantic comedies, and the belief that there actually is the truest of true loves out there. Motherfucker.

November 2008
Alviso, CA

The Day I Fell In Love With Scotch

After you died I became a terrible driver for over a month.

And if that doesn’t give you a few extra pocketfuls of compassion for strangers, especially shitty drivers…

In the week following the ceasefire in your chest, while you were out getting cremated in Santa Rosa, the six of us kids had the sickeningly tragic chore of divvying up all of your belongings.

A job that can only be accomplished by those recently welcomed into the hazy, softly-gnawing jaws of shock.

We drew names from a hat, and it was revealed that I, your youngest, would get the first pick from the things.

There were many treasures, but the top choice was obvious to all: the ostrich egg that you found in Ethiopia forty years earlier that rested like a moon in the huge abalone shell that you peeled off of the floor of the Monterey Bay as a boy my age, some fifty-five years prior.

I walked out to the backyard with my new gift, a reminder of a fatherless world more potent than a coffee can full of ashes.

I lined the inside of the opalescent shell with a handful of magnolia leaves so that the two boons wouldn’t clank together, and then found myself screaming with tears like only a newborn can do, realizing the full extent of the tragedy they had just signed on to, and knowing that there is no turning back now.

We spent the entire day picking through those bones, with frequent trips to your still-stocked liquor cabinet.

10 year-aged Laphroig Scotch Whisky. The heavy smoke of the peat tasted like some sooty birth canal as it chapped my tongue.

Amazing how we can only become drunk in times of dullness in our lives.

I must have made that 12 foot pilgrimage from the dining room table spangled in memory, to that cabinet full of liquid tombstones thirty times that evening, taking strong, healthy pulls from the many bottles, but most affectionately from the Laphroigs.

My bellyfuls of liquor did nothing to me, besides perhaps to give me a slight aid in keeping my feet plastered to the rocking, salty planks of the earth that felt like it was ready to flip me upside-down and let me go with its next lurching turn over itself.

I fell asleep with smoke pouring out of my eyes, knowing that I must have made a true friend, because the day I had threatened to despise this world forever, I fell in love with scotch.

July 2007
Mt. Shasta, CA

The Executioner's Executioner Feels Sorry For The Moon

Yeah, and what’s it to you?

I wasn’t only watching porn. I was splitting my attention between the blonde girl on her stomach getting fucked from behind, and the flock of juncos taking their evening meal just out the window.

Her bleached Hollywood asshole was pointed skyward, looking like nothing poop had ever come out of.

Those brave little Passeriformes picked at the ground, the last meal of the day before the long January night would have them huddling in the underbrush, slowed in torpor, not feeling sorry for themselves.

I quit with the porn. Too cold to jerk-off, and uninspired anyhow. I stepped out back to feed the dogs, last meal of the day before I drive off this mountain, leaving them here in this safe house, lying in front of the warm fire, feeling sorry for themselves.

In the puppy’s eager little mouth was one of the juncos. “Drop it!”

I scooped the trembling bird off the ground. One wing hanging slack and twisted, no tail to speak of, one eye bulging and bloody. It was still alive, but no hope. I laid it on the wooden rail and picked up the hatchet from the kindling pile.

I couldn’t help but think that if you were an owl, or a hawk, or a human being, you would certainly be offered an attempt at saving. So why not you little junco? I don’t make the rules.

A soft thwunk! of the hatchet across the neck, just to break it. It stopped trembling. I threw the bird in the nearby brush and two things happened simultaneously, well actually three things.

The first: as the body flew towards the brush its head flipped casually off and landed a few feet in front of me.

The second: as the headless junco sailed into the thicket, a flock of roughly twenty living, still intact juncos flew out of it.

The third: Planet Earth kept right on tangoing with the sun, never missing a step.

The Dark-Eyed Junco has a black head, or hood, and is likened to an executioner in the birding world. I picked up the decapitated head by its beak. There was no blood, no change of expression, the cross-section was all feathers except for a tiny gristle of spine.

The executioner’s head.

I threw it as far as I could, and filled the dogs’ bowls with kibble.

As they began to eat I walked back inside, feeling sorry for the little bird who got chewed on for awhile before getting its head chopped off.

Feeling sorry for all the other birds who thought they were resting in safety before their mutilated friend flew unnaturally into the bush.

Feeling sorry for the cowardly dogs who would be left alone during the storm all night.

And yes, feeling sorry for myself, obviously.

The moon
stepped in for a dance
and was turned instantly to shadow.

January 2008
Lagunitas, CA