I am half-lucid, should be asleep. I am as usual thinking about my impending disasters: unpaid taxes, legal disputes with the ex, a daughter who didn't come home this weekend and I don't know where she is, etc., and as I lie here thinking these near-fatal thoughts of shit about which I can do nothing but which is of course endlessly compelling, each impending disaster takes on a cinematic [though somewhat fragmentary and kaleidoscopic] image, a sort of visual theme. For example: my back-taxes take the form of, or my thoughts of it are accompanied by, an image of an immense groaning black-iron dirigible, its trusswork backlit by coalfire, its riveted ironplate siding leaking black smoke, venting enough heat that the entire skyfilling sun-eclipsing monstrous mass is coming down. It is lowering above me and is too vast to outrun.
And the legal nonsense with [or against] my ex: she and her pitbull attorney have hybridized, or sort of violently combined into one malformed carbuncular asexual sort of butch matriarch wearing the battle fatigues of the U.S. Marines. He/she/it is standing above me with a wet towel. I am in something like a dentist's chair, totally immobilized. He/she/it asks me, in a tone of hostile contempt, a series of demented questions, like this one: Can you prove, with documentation, that these groceries [it holds up a receipt] benefited the marital children? and as soon as I try to answer, or to express my outrage, this monstrous virago slaps the dripping towel over my mouth and nose and I lurch from the brink of sleep gasping and adrenal.
So go my nights. My days are somewhat less dramatic and sometimes less lucid. I think that my planning brain has been routed. Too much stress. Too many demands on my time made by people with needs I can't begin to meet. I can't get myself to sit down and rationally and systematically plan my life these days. I have so much happening and the stakes are so high and my needs are so continually unmet, and my life here in Salt Lake City Utah is so muted and pointless that it takes an act of will to even list what I need to attend to, and for six months now I have not got beyond a simple list. I just deal, more or less, with whatever current crisis.
All of which is dreary and, dream-imagery aside, so colorless and typical of the human condition as to be unworthy of note. Which is why I want to tell you a story:
Monday, September 26, 2011
Thursday, September 22, 2011
The Kolob Tabernacle Gets Under His Skin
By prophet seer and revelatory fiat it was built at the crossroads, not at the corner of one quadrant as ever since cardo and decumanus first had it so but at the geometric centerpoint at the very intersection of the centerlines of the two roads in the perfect as-drawn crosshaired bullseye of what would have been a roundabout had more urbane planners had their way but which evolved in fact to become a rough rutted swerve of trafficked bare hardpan and later a merely expedient sweep of asphalt in the midst of which the Tabernacle now stood autonomous, alone and to appearance arbitrary so that what began as fiat ended up as apparent mistake, the certainty of the prophet seer and revelator coming finally to light as hamfistedness, the way what is white and bloated and fishbitten finally slips its chains and surfaces to indict. He thought: this is a likeness of our discomfort with the social order: that the Tabernacle, meeting place for the propagation of edicts, the leveling of censure, the knitting of the congregation, the buttressing of values and family and general cohesion, should so whelm the townplan that all roads must needs finally go their near-heedless way around it lest it govern overmuch the hurried passage of the people who no matter their allegiances must get where they are going. And that in delaying them every day by looming there omnipresent, unaware of its architectural solecism, a shadowing reminder of their oaths and contracts, it so chafe and irk that they tire of the order it was placed there to keep and become wild. Thus the rough expedient looping of the blacktop where the prophet had designed a neat-compassed circle did for him, for this modern man this century later, symbolize the accommodations people, individuals all, make to live with each other else the social contract so irk and chafe that at some personal culmination one of the overregulated citizens mix fertilizer with diesel and bring down the Tabernacle. In this vast country at least it is in no one's nature to be so overseen, stared-down on and disapproved of, by this kind of unblinking panoptic presence of distant authority. It loomed there and he imagined it circled with a wind-rippled God-sustained red banner declaring Non Annuit Coeptis. One may love the church and resent its nagging.
Then one moonless night in the deadwinter the man ran off the expedient asphalt, well into his fifth of Jameson's, and came up in the ditch in the deep snow, tires frictionless, and the headlights bore an upangled wedge of light through the snowfall directly at the facade of the Tabernacle. For a long few minutes as he reeled behind the wheel it glowed alone and faceless in all the night and as the man noted how its fine old stone was now nearly hidden in the aluminum and vinyl of the expedient costeffective tithebought recent remodel and the whiskey sidled up his esophagus in unctuous laminar flow then he became convinced of his night's work. He offed the headlights, lurched the two blocks home, and returned with paint and roller. In the near-complete dark he overturned a trashcan, chinned the gutter over the new storefront entry, made the roof, and considered his canvas: an uninterrupted upper wall of squared blocks of red sandstone maybe forty feet across and taller than he could reach. He marked the very axial center of the wall, the spot bisected by the cardo of Kolob Town, and drafted in white oil housepaint a vast eyewhite, almond, symmetrical, and stylized. Then an arm-compassed iris of barnred, then a pupil in stoveblack, which he drew purposely smallish because he imagined it would seem to squint its contempt. He stood back, woozy in the cold, disordered by the gusting of the snow. The eye was plain even in this moonless solstice, fairly done, clear and simple, iconic. He threw the paint buckets down into the snow and jumped after. He worried briefly about the footprints in the snow between his truck and the road. He left the paint to freeze, fetched a shovel from the bed and began to dig and sometime later, with the whiskey wearing off, he drove home.
Then one moonless night in the deadwinter the man ran off the expedient asphalt, well into his fifth of Jameson's, and came up in the ditch in the deep snow, tires frictionless, and the headlights bore an upangled wedge of light through the snowfall directly at the facade of the Tabernacle. For a long few minutes as he reeled behind the wheel it glowed alone and faceless in all the night and as the man noted how its fine old stone was now nearly hidden in the aluminum and vinyl of the expedient costeffective tithebought recent remodel and the whiskey sidled up his esophagus in unctuous laminar flow then he became convinced of his night's work. He offed the headlights, lurched the two blocks home, and returned with paint and roller. In the near-complete dark he overturned a trashcan, chinned the gutter over the new storefront entry, made the roof, and considered his canvas: an uninterrupted upper wall of squared blocks of red sandstone maybe forty feet across and taller than he could reach. He marked the very axial center of the wall, the spot bisected by the cardo of Kolob Town, and drafted in white oil housepaint a vast eyewhite, almond, symmetrical, and stylized. Then an arm-compassed iris of barnred, then a pupil in stoveblack, which he drew purposely smallish because he imagined it would seem to squint its contempt. He stood back, woozy in the cold, disordered by the gusting of the snow. The eye was plain even in this moonless solstice, fairly done, clear and simple, iconic. He threw the paint buckets down into the snow and jumped after. He worried briefly about the footprints in the snow between his truck and the road. He left the paint to freeze, fetched a shovel from the bed and began to dig and sometime later, with the whiskey wearing off, he drove home.
Monday, September 5, 2011
Tomasz, Grand Arch Ranch, Pierce County, Utah, Summer 2010
There's not much to say. I grew up in Wisconsin. My parents came from Poland. My dad is a dairyman, and I thought I would be. He wanted me to get an Ag degree so I could help with the dairy expansion, now up to two thousand head. I went to Purdue, and then I got interested in beef and came out here on a study exchange when I was working on a research grant for dryland grazing. My dad still wants me back in Wisconsin, but I am having a good time here learning to cowboy and enjoying no early mornings and hardly any mosquitoes. I think I will sign up for a year and stay. It's going to be hard on my folks, but they have help and I just can't see dairying my whole life, which these days is 6 days of paperwork and one day of wading through the muck every week. Here I'm on horseback pretty often, and running the tractor a bit and keeping fences, and this is mostly eight-hour days, probably the easiest work I'm going to find around bovines, I guess.
When I first came out here I had been reading Aldo Leopold in college, required for a land conservation class. He is not a hero to many Midwestern commercial operators, to say the least. But then I went and saw his place and got very excited about his trips in the west. I had never been out of the Midwest. When I saw this exchange spot open up I just set aside my nervousness and jumped on it. If they'd of known that I didn't ride I bet they would of past me up. One word of advice I have is do not show up day one on a Utah ranch saying you came because of reading a conservationist hero and that you can't ride. Good thing they were looking for help giving shots, because that I can do. I do love working the lots and culling the animals. I gave up my wellies and John Deere hat, and now I'm in ropers and a straw wide-brim that I bet my buddies back home would laugh at, but it's the right gear for here. So, like I said, I'm staying on for another year. After the drive I am going to work hard on my riding. My foreman has a big quarterhorse just my size, and I do spend some time nights thinking I might buy that horse and settle here. Everyone is real decent and I can't think of a bad word to say about any of this except I feel bad my parents will not like this new life I'm working on.
When I first came out here I had been reading Aldo Leopold in college, required for a land conservation class. He is not a hero to many Midwestern commercial operators, to say the least. But then I went and saw his place and got very excited about his trips in the west. I had never been out of the Midwest. When I saw this exchange spot open up I just set aside my nervousness and jumped on it. If they'd of known that I didn't ride I bet they would of past me up. One word of advice I have is do not show up day one on a Utah ranch saying you came because of reading a conservationist hero and that you can't ride. Good thing they were looking for help giving shots, because that I can do. I do love working the lots and culling the animals. I gave up my wellies and John Deere hat, and now I'm in ropers and a straw wide-brim that I bet my buddies back home would laugh at, but it's the right gear for here. So, like I said, I'm staying on for another year. After the drive I am going to work hard on my riding. My foreman has a big quarterhorse just my size, and I do spend some time nights thinking I might buy that horse and settle here. Everyone is real decent and I can't think of a bad word to say about any of this except I feel bad my parents will not like this new life I'm working on.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
I Will Try to Tell It Straight, Katie Donelly, Kolob, Utah, Summer 2010
I have tried everything, I mean for my age. I had no idea in high school. Maybe be an art teacher? I was good at drawing. Then I graduated and I got a job in the art store in Flagstaff, thinking that would be a chance, but all they had me do was stock shelves. All my coworkers there had been to art school and most were older, and when a teacher --they had classes upstairs?-- when a teacher came down and needed help teaching or setting up for a class or whatever they always went to the art students, which I wasn't and I felt I would never be. I mean, even after just one summer working there it was pretty clear I would never save money to go to school and maybe I didn't plan well for art school anyway. My grades were not good. Maybe in other towns I wouldn't have even graduated, but in Flagstaff they just want you through your four years and out the door. So I felt pretty stuck, but I did work there a whole year. They never had me do anything but inventory, not even work the register.
Then Blaise, who I knew from sangha, asked me if I wanted to work at Daisey's, the college bar by NAU? And I had to think about it because of my vows to never drink. I mean, I have the most Irish family and I wanted to be the one to not drink, to not do that instead of everything else. So I hesitated to take the job, but then I did because of the tips and the night hours. This was good and bad. Not all good, but not all bad either. I started out doing inventory, which I knew how to do by then of course, but they promised when the students came back at the end of the summer I would work tables, which is what happened. I would get their orders and take them to the bar and then take the full tray back to my table and hand the drinks around. This you're supposed to do all flirty? because that's how you get tips from the college boys, by making them feel you're their one special bargirl! Just for them. I had to get some sort of embarrassing coaching from my boss and the other girls, on what to wear, how to talk, how to avoid the trouble boys, stuff like that. Even how to move for them! It was embarrassing, but it was also nice to get advice from the older girls, who it really felt like were looking out for me. They called me little sister and always had nice things to say and when Daisy's was full and loud and it was the end of the evening so the boys were rowdy they would encourage me with sly winks and tell me how much they envied my ass and liked my jeans and stuff like that. I really liked that job. Every day I looked forward to it. I mean, sometimes it was hard? Like, there was this one boy for a while he was tipping me so much I started getting nervous and then he grabbed me a couple of times, but then he apologized, actually really nice like a gentleman. I didn't want to make a big deal out of it but he started coming every night and sitting in my area, and you don't move out of your area because of the regulars? So: he started chatting me up and I was having my premonitions about this and getting worried, like when I left to walk home I kept thinking he'd be there and I was freaked out. Then one day Bobby Seau, our sort of doorman and bouncer, who is, like, a bear? I mean, he is like six feet tall and so thick I could not reach around him and he looks fat but he is all hard as wood. Anyway, he saw this college boy grab my wrist one night and I did get a little upset, and he was just suddenly there looking at the kid and he says pretty polite but strong let go of her and go home. And the kid starts to say something but Bobby Seau just shakes his enormous head and the kid takes the tab and leaves, no tip. Things like that could stress me out but mostly I loved that job and the people who worked there.
After I think two years? Blaise left to open the restaurant here in Kolob. I really missed her. She was really the person who made Daisey's work. She ran the place and everyone loved and respected her. Plus, I had rented a room from her for a year, so we had gotten close outside of work and she was a good friend. One day she called me from Kolob and offered me a job here. She said it would be a pay cut, but that she would love to have me here and that she had a trailer I could stay in, stuff like that. I had finally bought a car with what I'd saved from Daisey's, so I hesitated a while not sure that I could make payments with lower income, but here I am. Some of being here is like Daisey's, but really not much. I'm serving food, and there isn't much drinking here, mostly just wine with dinner, so that suits me. I have to dress a little fancier, but that's not too expensive. I already love my coworkers. There's a girl I knew a little in Flag, and some of the kitchen workers are my age and they're nice. This is a pretty good buddhist community, too, so I don't have to explain my dzi bead and my vows and stuff.
There aren't many men my age in town. Actually not many men at all! One thing I was really sad about in Flag was I kept meeting really good guys but then nothing. We would go out like two or three times and nothing. I was pretty down on myself, romance-wise. I learned how to flirt working in the bar, and I got to where I could predict a man's response to what I was wearing and how I acted and moved. But then after we'd gone out a couple of times they just stopped calling and lost interest, which made me feel pretty sad, or like I just didn't have what they wanted. I went through that whole pathetic girl thing? Where you keep checking your breath and re-doing your hair and asking the other waitresses if your ass looks fat, stuff like that. When Blaise asked me here I thought it might get worse, romance-wise, with so few men and most of them Mormon, which, I used to be Mormon, but not really because of all the drinking in my family, but I know it doesn't help the romance, so I hesitated on account of so few men-prospects. When I first got here I was okay being celibate for a while. I went into retreat for four weeks when I left Daisey's before I came here. I went to New Mexico and meditated and received teachings for those four weeks, and when I got to Kolob I kept that focus for a while, but really I was lonely. I went down to Blaise's, she had fires in her yard some nights, and I was really happy to have all these new girlfriends, but I did get lonely. One thing I did was start reading again which I hadn't since my dad made me when I was a kid. And I read not crap but real books, like Huck Finn and even Moby Dick and stuff to pass the day before my shift in the evening, and I kept the trailer extremely clean! There is one boy in the kitchen who came by for a while and I'm pretty sure he liked me, but he is so awkward and boring I just didn't see that going anywhere.
But I really love this job, too. They money is pretty good, especially with the trailer so cheap and nothing here to buy! And I am working through the guidebook of all the trails in this area and I really think this country is beautiful. And so I think I will be here for a while and I hope it just keeps working out.
Then Blaise, who I knew from sangha, asked me if I wanted to work at Daisey's, the college bar by NAU? And I had to think about it because of my vows to never drink. I mean, I have the most Irish family and I wanted to be the one to not drink, to not do that instead of everything else. So I hesitated to take the job, but then I did because of the tips and the night hours. This was good and bad. Not all good, but not all bad either. I started out doing inventory, which I knew how to do by then of course, but they promised when the students came back at the end of the summer I would work tables, which is what happened. I would get their orders and take them to the bar and then take the full tray back to my table and hand the drinks around. This you're supposed to do all flirty? because that's how you get tips from the college boys, by making them feel you're their one special bargirl! Just for them. I had to get some sort of embarrassing coaching from my boss and the other girls, on what to wear, how to talk, how to avoid the trouble boys, stuff like that. Even how to move for them! It was embarrassing, but it was also nice to get advice from the older girls, who it really felt like were looking out for me. They called me little sister and always had nice things to say and when Daisy's was full and loud and it was the end of the evening so the boys were rowdy they would encourage me with sly winks and tell me how much they envied my ass and liked my jeans and stuff like that. I really liked that job. Every day I looked forward to it. I mean, sometimes it was hard? Like, there was this one boy for a while he was tipping me so much I started getting nervous and then he grabbed me a couple of times, but then he apologized, actually really nice like a gentleman. I didn't want to make a big deal out of it but he started coming every night and sitting in my area, and you don't move out of your area because of the regulars? So: he started chatting me up and I was having my premonitions about this and getting worried, like when I left to walk home I kept thinking he'd be there and I was freaked out. Then one day Bobby Seau, our sort of doorman and bouncer, who is, like, a bear? I mean, he is like six feet tall and so thick I could not reach around him and he looks fat but he is all hard as wood. Anyway, he saw this college boy grab my wrist one night and I did get a little upset, and he was just suddenly there looking at the kid and he says pretty polite but strong let go of her and go home. And the kid starts to say something but Bobby Seau just shakes his enormous head and the kid takes the tab and leaves, no tip. Things like that could stress me out but mostly I loved that job and the people who worked there.
After I think two years? Blaise left to open the restaurant here in Kolob. I really missed her. She was really the person who made Daisey's work. She ran the place and everyone loved and respected her. Plus, I had rented a room from her for a year, so we had gotten close outside of work and she was a good friend. One day she called me from Kolob and offered me a job here. She said it would be a pay cut, but that she would love to have me here and that she had a trailer I could stay in, stuff like that. I had finally bought a car with what I'd saved from Daisey's, so I hesitated a while not sure that I could make payments with lower income, but here I am. Some of being here is like Daisey's, but really not much. I'm serving food, and there isn't much drinking here, mostly just wine with dinner, so that suits me. I have to dress a little fancier, but that's not too expensive. I already love my coworkers. There's a girl I knew a little in Flag, and some of the kitchen workers are my age and they're nice. This is a pretty good buddhist community, too, so I don't have to explain my dzi bead and my vows and stuff.
There aren't many men my age in town. Actually not many men at all! One thing I was really sad about in Flag was I kept meeting really good guys but then nothing. We would go out like two or three times and nothing. I was pretty down on myself, romance-wise. I learned how to flirt working in the bar, and I got to where I could predict a man's response to what I was wearing and how I acted and moved. But then after we'd gone out a couple of times they just stopped calling and lost interest, which made me feel pretty sad, or like I just didn't have what they wanted. I went through that whole pathetic girl thing? Where you keep checking your breath and re-doing your hair and asking the other waitresses if your ass looks fat, stuff like that. When Blaise asked me here I thought it might get worse, romance-wise, with so few men and most of them Mormon, which, I used to be Mormon, but not really because of all the drinking in my family, but I know it doesn't help the romance, so I hesitated on account of so few men-prospects. When I first got here I was okay being celibate for a while. I went into retreat for four weeks when I left Daisey's before I came here. I went to New Mexico and meditated and received teachings for those four weeks, and when I got to Kolob I kept that focus for a while, but really I was lonely. I went down to Blaise's, she had fires in her yard some nights, and I was really happy to have all these new girlfriends, but I did get lonely. One thing I did was start reading again which I hadn't since my dad made me when I was a kid. And I read not crap but real books, like Huck Finn and even Moby Dick and stuff to pass the day before my shift in the evening, and I kept the trailer extremely clean! There is one boy in the kitchen who came by for a while and I'm pretty sure he liked me, but he is so awkward and boring I just didn't see that going anywhere.
But I really love this job, too. They money is pretty good, especially with the trailer so cheap and nothing here to buy! And I am working through the guidebook of all the trails in this area and I really think this country is beautiful. And so I think I will be here for a while and I hope it just keeps working out.
Saturday, September 3, 2011
They Came Like a Ragged Circus
They came like a ragged caravan, clowns and grotesques and desparate ones too long-gone to think on their goal, as well as pregnant girls and beaten women and fugitives from state and church and family, but over years, spread so thin upon that scant mountain two-track that only their gradual pooling in the town told of their dripping arrival, as though at a drain at the bottom of the world. One came while the outer country burned, that long hot summer before they put men on the moon, the summer of love and of riots, while he was young, jerking against the stakes every sun-baked rut the cattle truck rattled and bucked, his backback and mandolin case lashed into a steer-shat corner with baling wire. Some weeks later the first couple, starved-looking and sunburned, retching, it seemed, some fell language and heaving like luggage an enormous, black, bawling infant, the first of its color the ranchers had ever seen, arrived by Volkswagen, also a first. Through the Nixon years they came, one lurching displacement after another, exhausted, alone, despirited, mostly secretive and afraid. Some looked for houses. Some slept in caves. A few built remote cabins in the woods, and these still dot the area, but most were so poor-built and exposed to weather they no longer serve as shelter. Most camped around the town.
For a few years a strange transaction seemed to change the place: young men, all Mormons, left the ranches and took their shooting skills to Viet Nam, while a shadow-town of long-haired and talkative, strange and effete men of the same age came and lived and worked and bartered, and the old order seemed to come apart, an unravelling at first, and then a rending, because the old people saw the new people as a mockery of their sons' service overseas, as a challenge to the order of their church and families, as parasites and freeloaders of a kind never welcome on a frontier.
For a few years a strange transaction seemed to change the place: young men, all Mormons, left the ranches and took their shooting skills to Viet Nam, while a shadow-town of long-haired and talkative, strange and effete men of the same age came and lived and worked and bartered, and the old order seemed to come apart, an unravelling at first, and then a rending, because the old people saw the new people as a mockery of their sons' service overseas, as a challenge to the order of their church and families, as parasites and freeloaders of a kind never welcome on a frontier.
Friday, September 2, 2011
Simon Doolittle, Boston, Massachusetts, winter 2011.
In response to your e-mail of November 6, please receive the following with my apologies for my dilatory response:
1. Regarding Fox's whereabouts this last summer, I know almost nothing. I saw him a few times in Kolob and once in Grand Arch in April and May, and spoke briefly with him. As I recollect, the topic of our conversations was purely quotidian, treating mainly of greetings and idle smalltalk. We were cordial. Of course, as you have doubtless surmised, the rumors concerning his activities in and out of the bedrooms [and sleeping bags] of Kolob's female population had been circulating and rising in temperature for some time at that point, and I was of the impression that he was making himself scarce, lest one of the affected men make good on a promise to secure his demise by gunshot, or, in one case, by crossbow-bolt and strangulation. I neither asked him where he'd been, nor received from him any indication that he was living elsewhere, but please understand that he is a cagey fellow, private and elusive, and, furthermore, I am not one of his very few confidants. After May I do not recall having seen him at all.
2. To speculate, as you requested, on who might share Fox's confidence, I shall require anonymity. It appears to me that Fox, despite his many heterosexual assignations and his remarkable facility in flirtation [an example I have attempted to emulate, thus far without notable success], does not confide in women. Indeed, to my lamentably inexperienced eye, his conquests, though involving every rumored physical intimacy, do not include personal revelation of any kind. He is often described as maddeningly unknowable. However, I have seen him many times in apparent profound conversation with Lauro, that other one-monickered man of mystery often spied in and around Kolob. It would behoove you to engage Lauro in your project to discover the one true Fox. With your guarantee of anonymity, might I also be so indelicate as to suggest that Lauro's "wife" "Eve" may have, shall we say, deep knowledge of Fox's comings and goings, though I suspect that to suggest so to Lauro himself would be to invite a rage of jealousy that you might presume to be endemic and stereotypical to the Latin masculine temperament, but multiplied. Having had the dubious distinction of witnessing Lauro's reaction when he learned that the ____________ County Sheriffs had shot his dog, I can vouchsafe that eliciting his ire would be folly indeed.
3. And, finally, addressing your questions concerning my social position in the veritably arachnid interweavings of Kolob slander and hearsay: I arrived to warm reception, but discovered too soon that the extreme deference I show the estimable work of Mr. Roget was nearly bereft of social benefit among the primitive-skills and wilderness-survival cliques I voyaged to Kolob to study in the first place. A Doctor of Philosophy candidate in Semiotics might suppose that a facility with the more recondite and Latinate philology might stand him well is his attempts to ingratiate himself with the young, nubile, Medusa-maned groupies of the Survival School, but said candidate has misjudged female alacrity so often in his almost monastic tenure as a gynophile that he is no longer in the least surprised that his polysyllabic inclinations have functioned most efficaciously as prophylactics.
Yours,
Simon Doolittle
Northeastern University
Boston
1. Regarding Fox's whereabouts this last summer, I know almost nothing. I saw him a few times in Kolob and once in Grand Arch in April and May, and spoke briefly with him. As I recollect, the topic of our conversations was purely quotidian, treating mainly of greetings and idle smalltalk. We were cordial. Of course, as you have doubtless surmised, the rumors concerning his activities in and out of the bedrooms [and sleeping bags] of Kolob's female population had been circulating and rising in temperature for some time at that point, and I was of the impression that he was making himself scarce, lest one of the affected men make good on a promise to secure his demise by gunshot, or, in one case, by crossbow-bolt and strangulation. I neither asked him where he'd been, nor received from him any indication that he was living elsewhere, but please understand that he is a cagey fellow, private and elusive, and, furthermore, I am not one of his very few confidants. After May I do not recall having seen him at all.
2. To speculate, as you requested, on who might share Fox's confidence, I shall require anonymity. It appears to me that Fox, despite his many heterosexual assignations and his remarkable facility in flirtation [an example I have attempted to emulate, thus far without notable success], does not confide in women. Indeed, to my lamentably inexperienced eye, his conquests, though involving every rumored physical intimacy, do not include personal revelation of any kind. He is often described as maddeningly unknowable. However, I have seen him many times in apparent profound conversation with Lauro, that other one-monickered man of mystery often spied in and around Kolob. It would behoove you to engage Lauro in your project to discover the one true Fox. With your guarantee of anonymity, might I also be so indelicate as to suggest that Lauro's "wife" "Eve" may have, shall we say, deep knowledge of Fox's comings and goings, though I suspect that to suggest so to Lauro himself would be to invite a rage of jealousy that you might presume to be endemic and stereotypical to the Latin masculine temperament, but multiplied. Having had the dubious distinction of witnessing Lauro's reaction when he learned that the ____________ County Sheriffs had shot his dog, I can vouchsafe that eliciting his ire would be folly indeed.
3. And, finally, addressing your questions concerning my social position in the veritably arachnid interweavings of Kolob slander and hearsay: I arrived to warm reception, but discovered too soon that the extreme deference I show the estimable work of Mr. Roget was nearly bereft of social benefit among the primitive-skills and wilderness-survival cliques I voyaged to Kolob to study in the first place. A Doctor of Philosophy candidate in Semiotics might suppose that a facility with the more recondite and Latinate philology might stand him well is his attempts to ingratiate himself with the young, nubile, Medusa-maned groupies of the Survival School, but said candidate has misjudged female alacrity so often in his almost monastic tenure as a gynophile that he is no longer in the least surprised that his polysyllabic inclinations have functioned most efficaciously as prophylactics.
Yours,
Simon Doolittle
Northeastern University
Boston
Sunday, August 14, 2011
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.
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.
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