Fox, Tucson, Arizona, Summer 2011

I had been going through this crazy shit for like three years, ever since I went to the Barranca the first time after my father died, that time on the train out of Sinaloa.  I was back in the States, in Tucson, mostly hanging around the U of A doing this and that for coffee money, for food trades, sleeping sometimes in the parks, sometimes just behind bushes on campus, off and on crashing at friends' apartments.  For a while I was house-sitting for some frends' parents, but that was way out of town and I had no car, etc.  So this crazy shit I started mentioning: I just could not stay still for very long.  I mean in one place.  I would find a place to sleep, quiet, private, shaded, clean, no fucking drunk fratboys nearby to piss on me which did happen once, and I would be there max three days.  Day one: settle in.  Day two: feel good about my 'house'.  Day three: get fidgety and all insomniac.  Day four?  Somewhere else.  I just could not spend four nights in even the most honey sleeping spot.  One thing about my particular version of homelessness is I chose it and I do it like an art.  I am clean and neat and I do not turn into a bum.  Of course, I am always open to a new lady-friend, and long hair and no belongings and my crazy-ass scars are hard enough for most of them to take already, and if I added filth and stink and yellow teeth to the mix I would never get any again.  So I showered every day, almost, and brushed my teeth after every meal, and kept my clothes as clean as an all-outdoors life allows.  So pretty soon after I got to Tucson I fell into this pattern of always moving, at least every three days.  It felt like my sanity depended on it.  My life started to revolve around my second night in a honey sleeping spot, after the first night of settling in and before the third night when I got fidgety.  By fidgety I do not mean that I was slightly off or irritated, or that I was just distracted or bored and drumming my fingers.  I would wake up middle of my third night, start tossing and turning, start having panicky thoughts, the kind that cycle over and over and play out in the worst scenarios of death and murder and humiliation and frustration and dread and immobility and my heart would start pounding and I'd sweat and then maybe punch the ground and yell Fuck! and pack my shit and untie the anti-theft lanyard that connected my backpack to my wrist, and start walking.  Usually I'd just head to the Butterfly, which opened at 6:00, and wait.  Sometimes I'd just go over to the cactus garden on the U of A  mall, but campus cops were always around within minutes.  Sorry, I've got rambling habits now.  Back to my crazy shit: one girl I knew from high school, who I will call Dolores because of how that is totally not an apt name for her of the sunny and affable disposition, was rooming right behind the business school and had a honey old house that needed a new roof.  So I made a deal with the roommate's daddy, the landlord, name of Lloyd, to roof the place in exchange for free rent in a tiny old outbuilding behind at the back of the courtyard.  People trust me, and he was happy to have materials delivered and lend me the tools.  And I was happy to have a room just a couple blocks from the Butterfly and a short walk from the concert halls and the library, so I moved in, built a Mexican cot, and dove into work.  I tore off the old shingles myself in one day, in like sixteen hours, which is fucking heroic, and I was determined to impress the landlord and maybe Dolores, et al.  Day two the shingles show up and I am flashing and nailing as soon as the girls go to school and I do not let up except for brief breaks that day or the next despite Tucson heat, maybe 110 degrees, much more on the roof.  Trouble is night three: damned if I don't wake up, have the terrors and sweats, and end up sleeping the rest of the night behind a mesquite in the alley.  I finished the roof faster than the landlord thought possible, and I do dead-straight work.  It was perfect and Landlloyd, as I had started calling him, said so, very happy.  Right away he has me staining some beams and refinishing the front door, etc. etc. etc.  I was his new maintenance guy for his rentals, and I had a free room.  He even gave me an iPod which I loaded in the library.  All good, except I was still homeless because I couldn't sleep anywhere more than three nights.  One night I was getting all fidgety behind a bus stop on Mountain when fucking cops pulled up and told me to move on, then the fuckers followed me with the spotlight on my back for blocks and I was fucking steamed.  Sun was breaking, that time of early morning when your heart gets light and you breathe deeper and you feel all vigorous?  So I get this sudden urge to run and I cinch up my pack and tighten my sandals and then I run, and I am perhaps the fastest white boy you will ever see.  Of course the cops immediately sped up and when they pulled alongside me and as the loudspeaker started to squawk I go over a fence like nothing and and the fat fuck donut-assed cop cannot get over behind me.  I was like four backyards away before I heard him slam back into the car and they peeled out and around to the side of the block I was hurdling fences behind so I just ran back and right back over the same fence and across Mountain and over another fence into the middle of the next block, etc. then spent an hour under some oleanders reading Amulet again and happier than I'd been in some months, which was saying a lot, seeing how my life was nearly perfect, or, I should say, frictionless except for the goddamned fidgets every third night.  Like I was saying, I was employed, liked my boss, had a honey room and a good angle on Dolores, but I was unable to, not allowed to, sleep in my room.

So most of my friends tend to be hippies because I like affable people and I like to smoke and not many people will let you crash on their floor and drink their Coronas except hippies.  One downside is their weird gullibility or lack of critical power or whatever it is that leads them to believe all sorts of crazy flaccid shit.  Dolores' particular hippie thing was a half-assed mash-up of shamanism and tarot.  Both predictable enough, but sort of a weird combo, i.m.o.  So one day I was in the house patching some plaster and Dolores is meandering around in her underpants with her wild mane of blondish hair all over the place and her nipples quite visibly refusing to be shy, and I was starting to chat her up a bit, pretending to be totally cool but actually in a state of hard-to-hide sexual excitement.  She offered me a hit, which I of course accepted, sitting bent forward over my plaster tools and my excitement, wondering if today was my lucky day, when open pops the front door and it's this middle-aged like old witch wearing predictable silver and turquoise and some kind of Nepali or Guatemalan smock and with a big velvet bag and an aura of Nag Champa and flowers.  I get to see Dolores' quite excellent ass flex half out of her underpants as she tip-toed to hug the witch, but then it was just me and the witch and my boner as Dolores disappeared to get dressed or something.

I'm Ruth.
Hi.  I'm Fox.
Good to meet you, Fox.
Good to meet you.
Etc.

The kind of exchange that makes me all crazy while it lasts and that I avoid so assiduously that going to parties or whatever can be a pinche nightmare.

Anyway, within a few minutes I found myself sitting out in the courtyard, still shirtless, which means scars exposed, across from Ruth, who spread tarot cards across the table.  She closed her eyes [she had turquoise eyeshadow] and murmured something fluently in some language I don't know, and then lit incense and then then smiled at me.  I was slightly high, so I didn't feel totally irritated, but this is the kind of banal mumbo-jumbo I can't abide.  Makes me want to jump up and run for the hills.  Then Dolores mushed into the same chair with me, now in a skirt, alas, and I took another hit and settled back for the reading, trying to remember not to smirk.

Ruth flipped a few cards, moved them around , etc.  My mind couldn't follow it at all, like a magic trick.  At some length, during which I was entirely focused on the slippery film of sweat forming between my leg and Dolores', Ruth spoke:

Your father is dead.  Dolores told me, don't think the cards had that.  She smiled, winningly, really.  He was an artist, a musician.  When he was young he was the best in his school, then in the clubs, a kind of hero, really.  He loved Django and was crazy for the old folk tunes out of Appalachia.

How much of this did Dolores even know?  I wondered.  Ruth continued:

When you were born he took a day job to pay the bills and played clubs on weekends but he stopped improving.  He did his job, which was boring, and he was involved in the family, in raising you, which is rare.  Or precious!  She smiled at me again.  She had a very kind smile.  Your father did what most men do: he spent years doing what he thought was his duty, and neglected the great gift that the Universe gave him. 

I winced at this, I hope unnoticed.

And then he died young, with regret and some bitterness.  You knew this but couldn't name it.  When you were young.  And the cards and my vision of you as your father's son suggest, quite clearly, or, rather, insist that your wandering and your inability to settle are the unsettled energy of your dead father who lives in you.

She paused, eyes down, her hands ancient on the table's edge.  I just sat, breathing in shallow gasps and, goddamn it, I started crying, like some soft dumb fuck, or, to be honest, like I missed my dad, which I certainly did.  So Dolores puts her hand on my leg, and her short-bitten nails are painted like ladybug carapaces, and Ruth says:

You you will have to keep wandering and making do out of doors until your father's ghost is satisfied.  She shrugged and did a surprisingly girlish sort of wince, as though embarrassed by her gift, or the personal nature of what she's said.

We sat for a minute in the incense smoke, and then Ruth stacked her cards that I'm not sure she even really consulted, and she left and I got a beer and stood in the sun by the orange tree and while I was there Dolores came up behind me and put her brown arms around me and her wild hair was like a hundred gnats on my back and then we went inside to her room, an incredible mess of a room that smelled of dirty clothes and rosewater and patchouli soap, and gradually, as though suspended in warm saltwater, we helped each other out of our clothes and fucked each other into a stupor abetted by the grass and beer and heat but more stupid and free of thought that those things alone could ever accomplish and again the next night, and on the third I got fidgety and packed my stuff and left a long sweet note and I walked to campus to see if I could settle in one of my sleeping spots from the previous summer.