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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

I liked the sharp pop of the tap shoes, and the rhythm that sounded like it came from a room full of drums and not a single pair of shoes.  Practice was boring though, and once I was signed up and committed, I didn’t know how to quit.  I was only 10.  Things got out of hand, beyond the control of a kid, and by the time I understood that I was to perform at a recital, solo, dressed as a hobo, with charcoal smudges on my cheeks and a paperboy cap it was far too late to back out.

All I remember now is the curtain parting and seeing all of those people out there.  The music started, New York New York, Frank Sinatra and just that quick I was hopelessly lost. You only get one chance to come in on cue.

The prickly heat of shame and a clumsy buffalo shuffle.  My shoes didn’t sound like they did when I was wearing them at home, dancing like a maniac in the empty kitchen.  When the song ended I don’t know if I bowed, or stood there, humiliated.

Now I can be fairly sure that the audience of parents and siblings did not give a rip if I was faithful to my choreography.  One hobo kid shuffling on a stage was the same as another.  To this day I can’t bear to hear that wretched song.  As a grown-up, anonymous in a hotel lobby, those first ba-bum-bump notes make my cheeks flush.

Saturday night was different.  I did it as a favor for a good friend, the kind of friend you don’t say no to for anything.  Will you be in my show? He asked.  You don’t have to do anything, but you are the only one who can do this for me. Like so many commitments in our lives, I just said yes, confident I would survive whatever consequences.

So, dressed as a walking nightmare- the horrible poisonous thing that grows like black mold in relationships- I followed him out on cue to the melancholy melody on a Wurlitzer, and crawled into bed on stage.  Underneath my mask I felt safe, belligerent, and dangerous.  I could see faces looking at me, mouths turned down, eyes blank- afraid to make contact with my monster.

When it was time to get up I missed my cue.  The final heavy note hung in the room, all of us now infected by the dark mood.  Hold tight to your dear ones, for they are safest up close, or far away.

My friend slapped my arm.  Get up. Confused still, I looked in his eyes, searching for direction.  That frightened kid hobo missing another cue.  Get up! His angry eyes said this, and the bum’s rush was coming.

I swung my feet to the floor and stood, imposing and fearsome. In my ugly swagger I straightened my collar and slowly swept the room, searching for cowardly eyes before I took my leisurely exit.

Juancho

I have a tablet.  It’s called an Ipad.  You stare into it and it tells you whatever you want it to tell you.  It is a total frenemy.  It never gives you a chance to tell your side of the story.  You can squeeze a word in here and there on social networks, where you are sold and quartered by interest and preference like cattle.  Amazon buys your backstrap.  The Democratic party is happy to buy the leftovers to make scrapple.  On Twitter you cruise by one another, high-fiving and chin ‘supping your bros, with no time for a conversation.  Twitter’s all like, “How are you man?”  But Twitter would cringe awkwardly if you tried to unburden your soul.  If you are lost in the crowd in Tahir Square when the lights go out and the bullets start flying, I hear it is a useful tool.  That’s why I keep my account active.  #mitigate.

My point is, I have a home base again.  A good old Desktop computer, provided by one of my sponsors here at the BRC, LoPo.  A folding table, a second-hand keyboard, and it’s like I never left.  I dismantled my station when LOVE moved in, which is the only acceptable answer.  LOVE is settled, and so I followed my heart.  It lead me right back to this spot against the wall, facing 17 degrees north, which if you draw a straight line goes all the way up to Nova Scotia, then across the ocean to Ireland, then over the flat edge of the earth across the blackness to arrive right back at this desk.  I can hear this exact transmission whispering across the universe and sneaking up behind me.

For two years I let the internet have the last word, and now I have something to say again.

Juancho