Author Archives: Juancho

I am not really good at separation.  I like my friends to stay close and not be drawn by their own will towards some chimeric life that takes them out of mine.  It is a selfish thing.   I understand that means I carry a forever and perpetual disappointment.  Grief is the honor and reward you receive for connection.  We don’t miss those we do not love.  Whether divided by time, distance, or the sheer and gauzy curtain between death and life, to miss a person is to feel the absence of a presence, like a rock in your pocket that slips through a hole.

It is always startling.  The moment when you learn that things are going to change.  Sometimes there is a ceremony, the gift of a broken alarm clock, wound to the minute that is passing handed over in the leeward hours of a house party outside on the curb.  “Cheers brother.”  Then New York City.  Then Singapore.

In Spanish we say “Te echo de menos” which means “I miss you,” but literally it is far more interesting.  I feel the pain of your absence. 

So it is true, I feel the pain of many absences.

It is a shame that we can only live one life you know?  Only pick one path?  I go back to a time when I was part of a crew that was all on the same path for a little while.  The Florida Boys, people called us, as we marauded about the planet.  What kept us together back then was an affinity for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, the Beastie Boys, and for me at least, a real yearning to see what kind of salt I had in me.  We moved west first.  I always knew I would come back to Florida, but for many of the Florida Boys it was a one way trip.  I was just a tourist, but they were settlers- now some are more settled than others.

I talked to one of them yesterday.  I write about him here frequently, mainly about his bike skills, sometimes about his artwork.  That is the easy stuff that is fun to celebrate.  Through him I still travel the west from Blackcomb peak to Los Barriles.  Through me he gets to write grants, draft up some sweet policy and procedure, and know the joy of an apricot poodle shrilly defending the home from the breeze as it disturbs the screen door.  Through my friends I live so many lives.  I am a Chief Petty Officer in the Coast Guard, a deer hunter.  I play bass and lead a Latin jazz quartet.

So on this call yesterday I learned that I, through the corporeal body inhabited by my brother, crashed on a mountain.  6 broken ribs and vertebral facets, a clavicle shredded like snapped bamboo, a knee twisted backwards and freed of it’s tendonous mooring, and most arresting a head injury that left him (us?) unconscious in the dirt and for the long journey from dirt to hospital bed.  The cost of living is sometimes quite high.  I am sure he has heard “You better slow down.” “Are you done now?” Lots of patronizing options to choose from I am sure.

Those folks must not know us.

Today raise a glass to the broken, the hurt, and the healing.

Hang in there Todd, Neighbor Ed, Sasquatch and whoever else.  You can’t be kept down.

Juancho

Two hours on the interstate from Gainesville to Tallahassee, or 5 hours easing the van along U.S. Highway 27 poking your head in springs of the first magnitude pouring their sweet water into the Suwanee River.  Beleaguered by bad hotel pillows and cheap plastic chairs I tin-manned down to the Ichetucknee river in a pouring thunderstorm.  The blankets of rain and the accompanying roar made for a private, intimate setting like a corner table in a raucous bistro.

A tree limb was down across the timber walkway, about 15 feet of snarled, moss-covered Water Oak bridged across the rails.  I ducked it and stashed my possibles in a corner of the deck slightly sheltered from the rain.

Nobody around, and the most visited river for a few hundred miles all to myself.  The water was up and moving fast, not what I expected as I eyeballed the best spot for a quick baptismal.  One bare foot onto the moss-covered ramp and I was on my back and moving seaward wits scattered about me but within arms reach.  I braced myself out flat in self-arrest fashion and conducted the physical inventory. Finding no injury I flopped over the side into the rushing water, hanging to the bottom rung of the ladder as I flagged out into the current.  Looking downstream all I saw was wetness and jungle and someplace I didn’t want to be around the bend.

Sloppy wet I did my best to insulate the driver’s seat, admittedly my best wasn’t much to account for, and I trundled down the road to the next hole.

Lafayette Blue and the rain just finished, I slipped into the first pool and stood to my chest feeling the relentless push of millions of gallons towards the underwater tunnel 25 feet to the next pool.  Above me a stranger says, ” if you find yourself going under there, don’t fight it, just go with it.”  I nodded agreement and backed away to an anchored nook with a Cypress knee armrest and watched my arm hairs stream towards the Suwanee.

The day before I pedaled around the trails of San Felasco and found myself staring across a hundred yards of murky runoff submerging the trail below the power-lines.  It was getting on late so the turn around option was less possible than appealing so I hoisted my feather light bike and tromped ahead, eventually sinking up to my thighs.  “You’re being really brave right now Juancho” I comforted myself.  Snakes don’t hang out in flash flood ponds I don’t think.  What could live with such uncertainty?

After the ride, but before the fall, I met up with the Lost Poet in person and there he was, sitting across from me at the Thai restaurant, even dropping a little Sawadee and what not from his days in uniform.  Crazy though, 19 years of mutually unexcused absence.  He looks like he has held his own whatever transpired.  I turned over some archaic documents and felt like I had completed some solemn task, but all I really did was have a few beers with this walking ghost from my memory and watch the color run back into his being until there we were, just living in the shared space of modern time shaking our heads and laughing.

My neck is stove up, I guess from that fall, but for a 24 hour adventure I reckon I got away pretty clean all things considered.

I refer you to the image on the left for verification of how things are done when you live in a big ring circus.

Juancho

I don’t remember the last time I saw this guy, but he says it was at the SE 30th and Belmont house in Portland, OR.  I guess I sort of remember that, a conversation about moving onto San Francisco, Marin County anyway, and getting on with life.  I was young and did not give one eff you see kay about getting on with life.  I just wanted to get down with it.  This dude, Bill, was a good bit older and therefore locked out of my perspective by an invisible decade or so that stood between us.  The Great Magnet itself could only tell you what compelled him to spend that winter in that little mountain town.  Broken-hearted, or maybe just so, so pissed off about his busted  Florida marriage that a tiny redoubt of an apartment with a Meerschaum pipe and a wool army blanket above a snow-covered Main Street seemed like a good place to sort things out.

He was not the only one hunkered down in  a month-to-month spot in buildings called The Fairfield, or The Lovelace.  There was a retired Special Forces dude with an escape rope anchored to the radiator below his 4th floor window, and a few mountaineer hovels so piled with mouldering sweaty polypropylene that it made your eyes burn when you opened the doors.  These places had cheap red wine and smokes on top of mini-refrigerators, next to wrinkled copies of Freedom of the Hills Volume IV .  Next door to that might be the muffled sounds of flanger pedals rocking against a towel beneath a brass-knobbed door.

So Bill the poet, he got a dish-washing job and he just hung out.

We would sit up in his room and swap stuff we were writing, spinning out big ideas and listening to Neil Young and Dinosaur Jr records.  I was 25 and did not know shit from shinola if you plopped them in my hands so my writing was all bluster and plagiarized style.  Bill would write Free Verse poetry and I thought he was the next great undiscovered Delmore Schwartz.

So that was it man, no social media, and barely an internet to speak of, so by the time I left the West Coast, the country, and returned a few years later there was nothing to be found of old Bill but the blue essay comp books full of poems I managed to stash away in my hopeless chest.

And now he turns up, making keys at a hardware store in Central Florida, and talking like the writing never mattered, a childish thing to put aside while “making a living of making a living”  he says.   Well I say, what the eff ewe si que Delmore?

Juancho

I blame Louis C.K. I watched one episode of his show, (Season 4. Episode 2- Model) and it rattled me. As Louie, playing himself stood on the shore and watched a shimmering vision dance naked into the surf, I was struck with a thunderclap of existential self-awareness- a true peer over the edge and into the void where your horrors are realized. The bony hands of time clawing their way up to you. Such writing. Such art. It knocked the pen out of my hand and under the family credenza, where I have only now managed to retrieve it, what with this sciatica.

It is time to end the stalemate. I resign this match to Mr. C.K. and have no choice but to saw away at my own tinny reel and keep the dwindling crowd on the dance floor.

So my wife, my main squeeze, “Baby Girl” herself is on a mountain bike, and attacking the problem with her standard forthright earnestness and relentless pursuit of the facts. For a man who attributes all biking success to the magic of turpentine and the tensile strength of barbed wire, I am afraid actual science may have her dropping me in short order. Like all others though, she will have to come through me to do it.

What else? Finding a sweet friend who moved away in a crowded theater- that quick and unexpected hug an elation.

The heat? There is always the heat.

But we don’t come here to talk about the weather now do we?

-Juancho

She stood six feet tall you know, so even leaning on her cane she loomed over us on the stage. The three of us– myself, and the only two kids in the shelter who cared who she was, sat up in the center balcony which she was quick to refer to as the colored section in the theaters of old.  To see anything, a janitor sweeping the floor, or dust motes swirling in the spotlight, is a treasure at Ruby Diamond Auditorium on the Florida State Campus.  My sister worked there for a time and I remember her saying she watched Ray Charles from the rafters, but maybe I made that up?

It is a vaulted theater with red carpeted stairs and and I don’t care who you are- it has to feel special to take that stage.

The kids I brought, a 13 year-old boy and a 14 year-old girl, both black, bright, and abandoned at the time, made such a ruckus when she came to center stage that she put her hand over her eyes and peered up at us and said, “It’s good to hear the children up there.  Children need to be heard more.” So before she even started she had accomplished what she was known for, shining a light on the overlooked, and finding joy out there in a miserly world.

After that, we settled in and listened to her, the whole audience so in love, so seduced by her words and her low, bawdy chuckle when she spoke of the sexy sway of a woman’s back.  We sat there in the dark, blushing, or at least I know I did.  I remember thinking to myself, so overly self aware, that getting my shit together to bring these two kids to see her might likely be the pinnacle of my professional life, if not more.

After the show, the kids dragged me around to the back door to wait for her exit to a waiting limousine.  There was a knotted crowd, enthusiastic hard-cores who couldn’t get enough of whatever poured off of her.  There was a corridor taped off, to keep the crowd at a respectful distance.  While people were snapping pictures, and telling her they loved her, she waved and smiled that broad grin with a mouth full of big teeth.  She turned her back to the car and squatted her aging lanky frame behind the tinted window and there was one of the kids– the girl, right in the car with her, hugging her neck! Being a kid raised in a nightmare of public systems she understood the power of forgiveness over permission.  They shared a word, just the two of them, before the mortified security team gently hustled my charge back to me.  I just shrugged at the officer, like, “What do you expect me to do? Kids man!”

So that is my Maya Angelou story, and I’m just so sad she’s gone.

Juancho