I’d joined the Army. It was February 1975, I was eighteen and I was hitchhiking from Solana Beach, California to Minneapolis to visit my mother before riding the big dog to Fort Knox for Basic Training. It was evening and dark, six or seven o’clock. I didn’t own a watch. I was standing on a ranch access onramp to Interstate 15 some miles east of Mesquite, Nevada, the country around me was desert. A guy in a ’55 Chevy 3100 stepside pickup, Trademaster V8, 3-speed transmission with a column shift; a twenty-year-old ranch truck, the meadow-green paint faded and the fenders, box and doors wrinkled and banged from the work, had left me there.
Harlan, the guy driving it, a hard-lived fifty or so, cowboy lean, saddle-leather complexion, sun-chapped lips and broken, whiskey-colored teeth, his sweat-stained Silverbelly Stetson on the seat between us, pulled regularly from a bottle of Jimmy Beam he held jammed between the thighs of his jeans. His left hand, a Camel Straight wedged between his nicotine-stained little and ring fingers, his middle finger amputated to a stub just above his palm, he draped over the wheel to steer the truck. His right hand he used to shift and raise the bottle. He’d picked me up just north of Las Vegas.
The level of the whiskey in the bottle had been dropping steadily as we rode the miles. It didn’t seem to have much effect on his driving, he kept the truck at forty-five miles-an-hour and mostly between the lines. He offered me a pull and I took it, seemed like the polite thing to do. When he reached to take the bottle back, he let his hand rest on my thigh for a moment before he took it. When we got off at the ranch exit, he invited me to spend the night in his trailer, said he lived alone and had a hot shower, more whiskey, burgers and beans in the fridge. Cowboys, I knew where that went; I’d once traded with a cowboy for my life. But that’s a different story.
I got out of Harlan’s truck at the bottom of the exit and watched as the red round taillights and the grumble from the little V8 disappeared into the dust of the gravel road toward the mountains on the north horizon. Cold, windy, hoary skies and getting dark, I stood on the on-ramp for maybe an hour and six or eight pickups and a long-nose Peterbilt hauling hay accelerated past my thumb. The warm from the whiskey gone, the chill was starting to dig in. I thought about Harlan’s invitation and wondered if I’d made the right choice, a burger, whiskey and a warm place to sleep sounded good. And maybe worth the swap. But that decision was made. I checked to make sure the zipper on my jacket was all the way up and stuffed my hands back in the pockets of my jeans.
Hitchhiking on the freeway is illegal, the law is posted on a black and white aluminum sign on every on-ramp in America; violating that law risks you a ticket and maybe an overnight in the local constabulary on a vagrancy charge; I had almost ten bucks in my pocket. But it was dark and the cold was coming through the soles of my boots and I was shivering and I walked up the ramp and down the shoulder and kept walking, the muscle work taking some of the bite off the wind. The freeway was almost empty and I’d walked a couple of miles when a Cadillac a few years from new, gold paint, gold vinyl top, ski racks and skis, braked hard onto the shoulder.
The passenger side window rolled down and a woman’s voice yelled at me from the driver’s side.
I couldn’t hear her, “Ma’am?” I said.
A guy my age sitting in the passenger seat exhaled warm cigarette smoke in my face, “She wants to know if you can drive in snow.”
“Yes, Ma’am. I’ve driven through Minnesota winters.”
“We’re from Bel Air. We’re going to Salt Lake City. Do you have a drivers’ license?”
“Yes Ma’am.”
“Can I see it?”
It was dark and I was cold and I pulled out my wallet and handed the card through the window. She clicked on the dome light and held up my Minnesota license as she considered my face and my facts. I looked over the car; a four-door Sedan de Ville, glossy dark wood trim on the dash, gold brocade seats with brocade buttons. The idle had the deep, quiet lope of GM’s 472 cubic-inch big-block. They were young, the guy wore a Hansen surfboard’s t-shirt (my first stick had been a Hansen), shades, shorts, blond beach dreads, baby smooth skin, cigarette pinched between his fingers, his flip flops braced against the dash, a box of Marlboros and a Zippo between them. The woman wore a filmy gold blouse with no bra and white culottes. Her hair was long and straight, the same blond as her passenger’s maybe with a little color, her skin under the dome light almost the same baby smooth. She gave me a long look through the open window as she handed me my license, “If the snow gets bad, I need you to drive.”
“Happy to do it.”
The back seat was the same gold fabric and buttons as the front seat, I threw in my bedroll and closed the door and she chirped the tires and accelerated hard up to eighty-five miles-an-hour, I watched the speedometer over her shoulder. The speed limit was fifty-five.
“This is Norman. I’m Esther. We’re going to Salt Lake City.”
“People call me Luck.”
“That’s not the name on your license.”
“It’s what my mother calls me.”
“Luck. That’s fine. We’re going to need all the luck we can get tonight; there’s a blizzard coming, that’s what the radio’s been saying.”
“Good skiing,” I said from the backseat, not knowing shit about skiing.
“I’ve never driven in snow.”
“I can drive,” Norman said, his voice pouty.
“No. Absolutely no. No more lawyers, no more judges, no more POs. No, you’re not driving.”
“Rollers ain’t out here.”
“’Aren’t,’ Norman, please. Texaco next exit.”
The canopy at the Texaco was brightly lit, three pumps underneath; two red pumps for regular, a silver Sky Chief pump between them for ethel. There was a faded red Studebaker Commander parked on one side of the pumps, two flat tires on the driver’s side. Parked on the other side with the hood up was a mist green Ford F250, most of the paint baked off by the desert sun, orange rust climbing from the running boards up the doors and fenders, mid-fifties truck, heavy-treaded tires, a flatbed made from steel plate and angle iron with wood two-by-eights bolted down for a bed. The steel work was rough like somebody’d fabbed it up in a hurry with a cutting torch and a buzz-box. They’d used a lot of 6010 welding rod to do it, I recognized the spatter. The welds weren’t pretty but they were straight and the penetration was deep; that bed was going to last a lot longer than the truck. A guy wearing a straw cowboy hat, flat-soled farmer boots and faded jeans, and the Texaco mechanic in his army-green bus-driver hat and uniform, the back of his jacket and the butt of his pants caked with oily dust, leaned on the V-grill and a round fender and fiddled and studied under the hood.
Esther pulled the Cadillac in behind the Ford. Both the red pumps had cardboard taped over the glass, “Out” hand-lettered in black marker. Norman slammed the door and angled for the men’s room at the back of the building. I got out and followed him.
The floor was grey-black concrete, puddles under the urinals, the stool stained with shit spray. The mirror was broken and the beige walls were covered with names, pictures and commentary done in colored markers, spray paint and ballpoint pen, a lot of it sloppy or stylized and unreadable. There were comments about Nixon, McGovern, Viet Nam, women’s names and proclivities, n****rs, sand n****rs and OPEC, hearts and arrows, swastikas, the Hells Angels’ logo, red and white banner above the skull and feathers, a blue pen calling somebody’s mother a whore, hippies with locks and beards and hairy armpits, enormous dicks, tongues, and dangling ballbags, lady crotches, people sucking, licking and screwing in ways that defied gravity and the human body, all painted with varying amounts of creativity, talent and color. The piss stink made my eyes water.
The Texaco mechanics used the sink to wash up, an open tin of Goop mechanic’s soap, mostly empty of its creamy goo and smeared black with grease, sat balanced on the edge of the sink. Norman unzipped at the urinal, I stood next to him. There were no partitions. Above the urinals sprayed in swooping letters in red paint over the words and pictures drawn before was a message, “Sometimes, luck is all you need.” I thought about that, about how much our lives depend on which side the lady takes in the flop of a spinning coin.
“Stay away from my mother, Luck.”
“What?”
“I said stay the fuck away from my mother.”
“Who?”
“Esther. My mother.”
“She’s your mother?”
“Don’t talk to her.”
“What do I say when she talks to me?”
“Fuck you,” he said, shaking it off and zipping up and not bothering to pull the handle. While I was still pissing, he pulled a mirror and a folded paper packet out of the pocket of his shorts, razored out a couple of lines, horned them straight off the glass, a line into each nostril, and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
As we came around the corner of the building and into the canopy light, Straw Hat slammed the hood and climbed into the Ford. The starter cranked slow and hard; the guy had the door open and I could see him toeing the starter button with his left boot, his heel on the clutch, and working the gas pedal with his right, and yanking the choke knob in and out until a brown-grey cloud of raw gas and burned oil coughed out the tailpipe and the engine caught and hacked itself into a rough idle, an inline six by the sound of it. Straw Hat revved it a few times to clear the idle and let out the clutch and pulled away from the pump. The wind had picked up and snow had started to fall and swirled in the truck’s wake as it disappeared into the dark. Esther pulled forward and got out. Her culottes were lacey and thin and whipped around her legs. She was wearing flip flops, too.
“Normie, come pump the gas.”
“Make Luck do it. He’s your driver.”
I said, “Glad to,” As I walked around the back bumper, the Texaco man stepped in front of me, “I’ll do it, kid. What’ll it be, Ma’am?” he asked her as he cranked Straw Hat’s gallons and dollars back to zero and lifted the handle. He had the red Texaco star stitched above the brass-zippered breast pocket, his name, Lemuel, embroidered below the zipper in the same red thread. He wore black-rimmed glasses and had the scrawny build, leathery skln and big hands of an old man who’d spent his life working outside.
“Fill it up, please.”
“We’re about out. All we’ve got left is ethel. Should be enough to get you on your way. We’re supposed to get a delivery in the morning if the snow holds off. Check under the hood?”
“Please.”
I glanced at the motor as he was pulling the dipstick, the 472, just like I’d heard.
An hour later, we were back on the freeway and the snow was blowing sideways, heavy enough that it reflected the headlight beams back into the windshield and the road ahead was hazy grey against the swirling white and I had to squint to judge our place on the lane. Esther was driving sixty-five, Norman was dialing the radio knob through the AM stations, the only sound in the car was the slap slap slap of the wipers and preachers preaching about sacred taxation, Brigham Young’s beard, the holy wrong of criticizing church leaders, how black folks represent Satan and white folks represent Jesus; station after station, mile after mile. There weren’t many stations that time of night in that part of Utah, preachers on all of them, their voices rising and falling all with the same sexy rhythm; a just-you-and-me whisper rising in urgency and volume to a final fevered, “Jesus!” then falling back to pillow talk, the same voice, the same erotic tempo, every station, over and over, for miles. I stretched out sideways on the brocade and tried to fall asleep. I used my bedroll for a pillow.
I wasn’t sleeping when Esther said, “I think he’s asleep.”
“I can’t stand that fucker.”
“Honey, stop it.”
“Let’s drop him at the next exit. Fuck, let’s drop him here. Right now. What’s he going to do?”
“Your language. And no, I’m not dropping him off, I might need him to drive.”
“You’re driving’s fine. Let’s get rid of him.”
“Why don’t you like him?”
“I don’t like the way you look at him.”
“Honey.”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“Honey, no.”
“Fucking forget it.”
There were no exits and the blowing snow was fingering onto the road and giving us a hard thump in the lower back as we sped over its digits. The wind was strong enough that it was pushing the car around and I could feel the tires losing traction then grabbing then losing it again. There was almost no traffic and no light except the glare of the headlights reflecting back through the windshield lighting the gold seats and leaving black shadows. We passed a semi on its side in the median, no cops or wreckers, and we kept going. We passed another semi rollover and then a car in the ditch and another and still no flashing lights, and still Esther didn’t slow down. What little traffic there was, stayed in the right lane. When we caught up with a car or truck, she’d merge into the left lane, the Cadillac slewing side-to-side as it wallowed through the deep snow, and once past, she’d merge back into the right lane, the car slipping back into the deep tracks that grabbed the wheels and steered us north.
Still driving sixty-five, we’d just passed a semi, when suddenly we were spinning, the car whirling counter-clockwise down the middle of the freeway so fast the force threw me against the passenger side door. Then we hit what must have been clear concrete and the tires hooked up and the Cadillac rolled up on the passenger side wheels so I was looking straight down through the window at the snowy road on the other side of the glass and I thought, “Oh, fuck.” And then the tires lost traction again and the car slammed back onto four wheels hard enough that the springs and shocks on the driver’s side hit bottom with a loud, steel-on-steel crunch that sounded like damage and I was thrown back across the seat to the driver’s-side door and we continued to spin.
I heard Norman scream, “Mommy!” as he was flung against the passenger door and then against her. She sat silent, both hands on the wheel, elbows locked, all four tires skidding. When finally we stopped, we were in the middle of the interstate the car facing backwards in the lane, Esther frozen at the wheel, Norman scrunched tight against her and quiet, both of them staring through the windshield into the brilliance. In the silence, the sound of the big motor idling too deep to hear, a pair of headlights blinked through the glare and the slow-moving semi with a box trailer we’d just passed eased silently onto the shoulder and motored around us and kept going.
From the backseat, I grabbed Esther’s shoulder and shook it, it was rigid in my hand and she didn’t move. I got out and opened her door and stood in the blowing snow and leaned in grabbed both her shoulders and shook her and still she didn’t move, her elbows still locked, her hands frozen on the wheel, her eyes wide and staring. One clenched finger at a time, I loosened her grip on the steering wheel all the while looking for headlights coming toward us. When her hands were free, I reached across her and gave Norman’s dreads a shove, he’d been staring into the glare while I pried Esther’s fingers free, he turned and looked at me like he was surprised I was there. “Give me a hand,” I said, “We’ve got to get the fuck out of here.”
He came around and stood next to me in the blowing snow in his flip flops and shorts and we pulled her out from behind the wheel. She dropped a flip flop as we muscled her into the backseat, I threw it on the floor by her feet. She moaned and turned her head side-to-side on the seatback until she saw Norman and whispered, “Normie, Normie. Are you okay? Are you okay, baby?” She held out her arms and Norman slid into the seat next to her and she hugged him with both arms. I shut the back door and got behind the wheel. She was short and I had to move the seat back, it was the first time I’d used a power seat.
I drove north at twenty-five miles-an-hour. The car pulled hard to the left like she’d bent a tie rod or maybe a control arm. The Cadillac had power steering and that made it easier to keep it in the ruts. The wind continued to blow the snow sideways across the windshield and the interstate remained a brilliant white and gray blur. In the rearview mirror, Esther and Norman sat close, Esther in the middle, Norman against the door behind me, his head on her shoulder, his eyes closed, his hand resting on the filmy fabric covering her right breast. She gripped his hair in the fist of her left hand, the other she laid on top of his hand cupping her breast, her eyes were closed, her head leaned back against the brocade seat.
It was 4:30 in the morning when I started seeing exits for Salt Lake City, the snow had stopped and the plow trucks were starting to catch up. I reached over the seat and woke up Esther and she gave me directions to the apartment.
It was a small one-bedroom apartment, second floor, neatly raked gold shag carpet, wood-frame couch with square gold and white stripped cushions and matching chairs opposite a coffee table. The rooms were painted a low-lustre gold; dozens of movie posters and photos of people, black and white and in color, with scrawled notes and signatures and framed in tarnished brass hung square and level throughout. Across the living room, as you walked in the door, hung a full-size poster for the movie Duel; a collage of sepia-tone photos, Dennis Weaver’s eyes open wide in panic above the long-nose Peterbilt semi-tractor, the star of the show, with its streaked and dirty windshield, glinting headlights and terrifying rusty train-rail front bumper, “The most bizarre murder weapon ever used!” The poster was signed by Steven Spielberg in Maybelline-red marker across the grill of the truck, “Thank you, Esther,” he’d written, his signature below illegible but for the two Ss.
“Normie,” she said, “you sleep here,” she patted the couch. “Luck, come in here.”
The bedroom had the same gold carpet as the living room, the curtains were a sheer white fabric with embroidered gold flowers, the bedspread and pillows were gold, the sheets were silky white. There was a brass incense burner and a box of incense on one of the nightstands. Esther lit a stick, I read the label while she was in the bathroom, sandalwood, patchouli, rose, bay and vanilla: Tapping into the powerful energy of the earth to attract abundance, healing, and overall well-being; Creating an environment perfect for manifesting desire; Drawing prosperity, good luck, success, and blessings; Removing blocks, setbacks, and obstacles preventing you from accomplishing goals. It smelled good, too.
Esther knew what she was doing and didn’t seem to care that Norman could hear her moans and loud-whispered commands, or that I hadn’t showered in a week. When she was done and her breathing was quiet and I thought she’d fallen asleep, she rolled suddenly on top of me, grabbed my hair in her fingers and pressed her palms into my temples and in the dim light stared into my eyes like she was trying to recognize me, her L’Oréal tresses covered my nose and mouth. She stared at me for many seconds, the pupils in her hazel eyes slowly shrinking and focusing, her lips pulling back into hard rails, her expression becoming one of rage. She rolled off me and turned her back and whispered over her shoulder, “Get out.” I was too awake to sleep, too tired to ask questions. Her tone left no room for conversation. I slid on my jeans and boots and grabbed my bedroll. As I walked out, I saw Norman still dressed in his shorts and Hansen t-shirt lying on the couch. In the morning light coming through the curtains, I could see his eyes following me. I didn’t say goodbye. He didn’t like me, either.
* * * *
It was morning rush hour when I got to an on-ramp to Interstate 80, the sky was deep-winter blue and clear and it was cold. Standing on the ramp with my thumb out, the second car, a faded dark green, two-door VW Squareback, air-cooled boxer engine, 4-speed transmission with a cue-ball shift knob, black leather-wrapped steering wheel, Nevada plates, picked me up. The car stunk like cigarette butts, coffee, burgers and sweat. Ziggy, the smiley guy at the wheel, early thirties, clean shave and getting bald, was a professional pool player on his way to New York for the Eastern United States Championship. When I was in high school, I hung out at the Pit & Paddock, a biker bar in St. Paul, and learned to play 8-ball. I’d never heard of 14.1 Continuous or 9-ball and so Ziggy explained the games and I tried not to fall asleep.
From Salt Lake, Ziggy and I headed up the interstate into the mountains and for a few hours the road was plowed and we were driving seventy on the flats, forty in third gear up the hills. We were climbing a steep curving grade in third gear when we caught up with the blizzard; as we drove past the apex, the freeway was suddenly covered with snow and the snow was blowing straight at the windshield and the road was invisible.
Ziggy screamed, “I can’t stop. I can’t stop. I can’t stop.” As he was screaming, he banged his chest and shoulders violently back and forth between the seat and the steering wheel all the while stomping the brake pedal hard enough so that I could feel it through the floor. For many seconds, I didn’t understand his panic, there was no reason. And then I saw what he was seeing, the snow blowing straight at the windshield and buffeting the car so it rocked on its springs made it seem to Ziggy’s senses that the car was racing backwards down the interstate. In that moment, Ziggy went from rational guy explaining the rules and strategies of 9-ball, to a man feverishly insane, his body bouncing uncontrollably between the seat and the steering wheel, his eyes bulging, his breathing fast and shallow, his mouth agape, his words, as he continued to scream, disintegrating into meaningless syllables.
His screams hurt my ears and I tried to calm him down, “Ziggy, we’re okay. We’re okay. It’s blowing snow. We’re fine.” When I put my hand on his shoulder, he flinched away from me, clicked open his door and rolled out of the car onto the snow-covered freeway and on his hands and knees crawled frantically toward the center median, screaming, crying, trying to stand up and run, slipping, falling back into the snow, trying again and falling again. As I watched through the open door, the car started rolling backwards on the grade and I yanked the emergency brake lever between the seats and the car stopped and idled quietly. Ziggy reached the shoulder, still on his hands and knees, and looked back at me, the blowing snow making his features hazy and gray.
The road was deserted and I got out and clumped through the snow across the lane to the shoulder, he was still on his hands and knees, “Ziggy, we can’t stay here. Your car’s going to get hit. We’ve got to get moving.”
“Luck, help me. Oh God, Luck, help me.”
I reached down and took his arm and he shook it off, “I don’t want to die out here.”
“We’re not going to die. Let’s get off the fucking freeway,” I grabbed his arm and he yanked it back again.
As we were arguing, a late sixties Chevy C20 pickup, four-by-four, fleetside, I couldn’t see its color in the dark, idled to a stop beside us. Because of the heavy snow and the howling wind, I hadn’t heard it coming, “You guys okay?”
“Oh my God. Oh my God, help us, please.”
“The blowing snow is fucking with his head. Give me a hand. Let’s get him in the car.”
“I’m not getting in the car. No. I’m not. No.”
Guy in his twenties, Carhart coveralls worn through at the knees, leather and beige Sorels, the laces untied and hanging loose, a beige knit cap, got out of the truck and the two of us grabbed Ziggy’s arms and pulled him to his feet. “No,” he screamed, “No.” In his panic, he swung his fists at us and I took a hard blow to my cheek, the Chevy guy took a punch, too, and cussed about it. Ziggy got away and fell in the snow and rolled away and we picked him up and he kept fighting and fell again and finally we wrestled him to the car and shoved him into the passenger seat and slammed the door. He opened it and I slammed it again and he didn’t move.
“Thanks for stopping,” I said.
“That guy’s fucking nuts, you better get him some help. Good luck.”
The Squareback is a light car but its engine is in the back, the weight directly over the rear wheels, giving it good traction in snow. As I drove us east further into the blizzard, the snow got deeper and dragged against the bottom of the car and the winds howled and raged around us and the gusts of snow blinded me so I couldn’t see the hood. The drifts were getting deeper and when we hit them, the snow would explode against the grill and the windshield and the wipers would take several swipes before they cleared it, and until I could see the ghostly profile of the road again, I was driving entirely by feel. I stayed in second gear and didn’t dare take my foot off the gas.
The wind buffeted the car but with the deep ruts from the invisible cars and trucks ahead of us and the steady push from the rear wheels, we stayed on the road. When we were ten miles or so out of Cheyenne, it was dark by then, a snowplow passed us, blazing headlights, flashing amber lights, loud scraping blade, the salt spreader pinging pellets off the side of the car. There were thirty or forty cars, pickups and semis stacked up behind the plow and we merged in at the back of the line. Ziggy was unconscious on the seat next to me.
* * * *
The plow led our convoy to Little America, a truck stop with a motel, a restaurant, a bar and a hundred and eighty gas pumps, that’s what the sign said. The motel lobby and restaurant were crowded with travelers led in by the plows. Truck drivers hauling diesel, lumber and laundry detergent, salesmen selling office supplies, farm equipment and helicopters, Viet Nam vets in their dress greens humping duffel bags and headed home, parents yelling at little kids playing hide and seek, people traveling alone and in couples and threes, people going skiing, people moving and starting new jobs, people going home.
Those days, Irving was the General Manager of Little America, beer gut, no wedding ring, acne scars, crewcut going bald, yellow-tinted glasses with polished brass frames, blue sport jacket over a beer-stained white shirt, no tie. He stood behind the receptionist gal holding a half-empty glass and watched us stomp the snow off our feet as we came through the doors. Rooms were sold-out for those who asked and Irving had to explain to people unaccustomed to sleeping on the floor that there were no beds, listen to their complaints and threats with sympathetic nods, then explain again, for the second, third and fourth time. The freeway was closed for three days, for three days Irving walked the hallways and venues of Little America with his bleary eyes and hospitality smile and begged us all for amity, and kept his shirt stains damp.
Ziggy and I walked into Little America together, he was stumbling and leaning heavily on my arm. People were staking out places to sleep, laying out jackets and suitcases against the walls to mark their spots. Ziggy and I claimed a piece of floor between a cowboy hauling horses to Bitter Creek and a couple of guys in jeans and ponchos with long hair and beards hitchhiking to San Francisco. Every person in the room of roughly legal age had a cigarette in their hand and the air was thick with smoke and loud conversations about the snow and the roads as we negotiated for places to sleep. I leaned my bedroll against the wall and held Ziggy’s hand as he slid down the wall next to it and I went back to the car for his suitcase. The leather case for his pool cues lay on top of the suitcase. I left it in the car. When I got back, Ziggy was sleeping; I set his suitcase down next to him and leaned against the wall and I fell asleep, too.
Outside, the wind blew the snow in swirls and eddies and the drifts piled up against the windows on the west side of the building and the windows were dark to the ceiling other than a faint blue light filtering through the snow from the wall pack lighting and the floods in the parking lot. The windows on the east side were clear, the pump islands blown clean by the wind except around the cars abandoned at odd angles and the drifts piled up in their lee until they were buried entirely. For three days, the flickering fluorescent ceiling lights in the lobby and the canopy lights glowing dim and gray through the blowing snow and the east windows offered no hint as to the hour asserted in roman numerals on the railroad clock above the reception desk.
When I woke up, the lobby was stirring awake. Ziggy sat leaned against the wall next to me with a cigarette looking out the east windows at the dark gray dawn and blowing snow. The hippies and the cowboy were still snoring on either side of us.
“Sleep okay?” I said.
“Good enough.”
“Hard day, yesterday.”
“What do you mean?”
“The snow?”
“What about it?”
“The blizzard, the car going backwards, the guy in the pickup, you don’t remember that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t either. Let me buy you breakfast.”
As he was talking, the cowboy sat up, rubbed his face and pulled on his boots, “Better feed and walk the horses, going to have to borrow a snow shovel just to get in the damn trailer. Owner wanted them two days ago. He’s going to be pissed. This storm ain’t letting up.”
Sitting in a booth with fake leather seats and a dark wood-grain Formica table top, a pile of pancakes in front of me, I said to Ziggy, “You sure you’re okay?”
“What are you’re talking about?”
“I was there. I pulled you out of the snow. I shoved you back in the car. I drove you here.”
“That never happened.”
“I was there, Ziggy.”
“So was I, Luck.”
I stared at him across the Formica then pointed to my face, “The bruise, the split lip, you did that.”
“We’re not having this conversation. You drove when I was tired, I fell asleep. That’s our story.”
When we were done with breakfast, we walked over to the bar. It was 7:30 according to the railroad clock above the reception desk. It was a big bar and it was getting crowded, bar stools and a bunch of high-tops already full. At one end, there was a 7-foot Valley pool table, a four-foot chandelier with fake leaded-glass light panels that said “Billiards” hanging above it. Two guys shooting, eight, ten guys holding drinks and talking about the blizzard and watching; a long line of quarters queued up under the cushion over the coin mechanism. Ziggy stopped and watched a few shots, walked over and slid two quarters into the queue then turned his back and went to the bar and I followed him, “The second quarter’s for you, thought we’d play a game. Rum and Coke?”
“Sure.”
“You play much?”
“Hung out at a biker bar when I was in high school, played some eight-ball.”
“Got a rating?”
“I won some beers.”
Sitting at the bar, we could see the table and we watched as Ziggy’s quarters inched up in the queue. At the same time, the line of quarters behind us was getting longer as people woke up and realized the freeway was closed and the blizzard was raging and they weren’t going anywhere and there was nothing to do but drink, sleep, argue and maybe play pool.
When Ziggy’s first quarter came up, he jostled and bumped his way through the crowd to the table and said hello to the guy who’d won the game, shook hands like they were old friends, and pulled a cue off the wall rack, glanced at the tip but didn’t bother to look for a weight or roll it on the table to check it for straight, put in his quarter and racked the balls and chalked the cue.
It was an ugly game. The other guy dry broke, Ziggy got up, open table, missed and sat back down. The other guy pocketed the ten and missed, Ziggy sank two balls and missed but hid the cue ball behind the eight. The guy tried to hit one of his balls with a bank but missed and fouled and gave Ziggy ball in hand. Ziggy ran two balls and hooked the guy again and he fouled and Ziggy ran the rest of his balls and won the game. Luck, that’s what I was seeing.
I was up next. Ziggy dry broke, I ran four little ones, Ziggy knocked in two but left me hooked and I gave him ball in hand. I won the game, anyway. And the next two. The third guy I played, Chuck, broke and ran and I was done. Chuck was a bald guy maybe thirty; he had a two-piece Palmer cue with a linen wrap and mother-of-pearl inlays. He talked a lot of shit, “Hope this kid’s ready for an ass whoppin’” he said to the crowd just before I broke. He shot hard, every ball hitting the pocket with a plastic crack and rattle you could hear across the bar. Chuck was drinking Jack straight up with a beer back. His wife was sitting on the floor in the lobby with a glass of bourbon on the carpet beside her. It wasn’t 10:00 yet.
Ziggy put up two more quarters and when he got up, Chuck still had the table. Ziggy won the game when Chuck scratched on the eight; Ziggy’d missed a shot and hung the eight on the lip of a side pocket and Chuck knocked it in to lose the game. When I got up, Ziggy said let’s put some money on it. I told him I had six dollars to my name and he said don’t worry about it and laid two fives on top of the chandelier. He told me I’d win and I did and he handed me the two fives. The next guy wanted to bet on the game and I put one of the fives back on top of the light and won the game and another five bucks. I lost the next game. But from then on, every game had money on it. And I had sixteen dollars in my pocket; I ate and drank for three days on that.
Interstate 80 was closed and for most of us marooned in Little America, it was a three-day drunk, there was nothing else to do. Except smoke cigarettes. By noon the first day, the smoke had overwhelmed the motel’s air handling equipment and a blue-grey cloud hung head-high from the ceiling. The staff was exhausted and Irving quit trying to keep up with the lobby ashtrays and by afternoon the first day, they were overflowing onto the carpet. The smoke and the stink made my eyes itch and my throat raw. We coughed constantly, all of us.
The first afternoon, a woman going home to her parents in Pittsburg and leaving her husband in Salt Lake City, stood in the middle of the lobby and told her story, the lost jobs, the foreclosure, the wrecked car, the lost friends, the bloody noses, the AA meetings, the being broke and the crappy apartments getting crappier. Tall, blond, heavyset, thirty-five, maybe forty, orange lipstick smeared around her mouth, she told us she wasn’t going to be married to the loser bastard any longer. Her words were slurred and hard to follow and she struggled to stand and not spill her Johnny Walker. When she was done, the crowd around her cheered and raised their glasses. She passed out in a corner by a window, her feet pulled up to her butt, her drink on the carpet beside her, her head leaned back against the snow-blue glass and the tears ran down her cheeks.
The afternoon of our second day, a guy sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall, puked a frothy cream-colored puddle into his lap and passed out and sat with the puke in his lap for hours and the Bacardi stink surrounded him. A drunk woman spanked her screaming kid and the kid screamed louder and she dragged the kid to the door to shove her out into the blizzard. Another woman stopped her at the door, talked to her quietly, and sat in one of the lobby chairs with the kid in her lap until the kid fell asleep. A woman gave her boyfriend a blow job, her head in his lap under a jacket pretending to sleep and thinking nobody was watching.
As we got drunker, there were threats and shouted arguments and a couple of fist fights with haymakers and clumsy kicks and guys grappling and rolling on the floor with bloody noses. During the first fight, Irving called the cops. They told him they couldn’t get to us. That evening, the snow stopped.
Our third day, Ron and Terri got engaged, they were from Cambridge and driving to Pasadena for graduate school. The two of them stood on a table in the lobby to make their announcement. They were both drunk and after they announced and toasted and we all cheered, Terri fell backwards off the table. She was fine. It was Kristi’s birthday and the cooks made cakes and we sang Happy Birthday and she blew out the candles, there were six, and we all had a piece. Her father was there, her mother was sleeping in one of the lobby chairs.
All three days, Ziggy hung out in the bar and drank rum and cokes and played pool. After the first night, I don’t think he slept. A lot of cash got set on top of that light, four or five twenties on some of the games, and the pool table got to be the center of the carnival, drunks crowding the players and yelling at them for good shots and bad and throwing bills on the table and crowding around so players had to push the people back to take a shot. Ziggy kept shooting, winning a few games then losing one and cycling back through the line of quarters under the cushion. That third afternoon, the freeway was still closed but the rumor was that the plows had it almost clear and they were going to open it later that night.
Before they opened it, Ziggy played a final match with Chuck, eight-ball, race to five; the first person to win five games wins. It was a five-hundred-dollar game. Chuck had to take a leak and while we were waiting, Ziggy took me aside and gave me his keys and told me to put our luggage in the car, fill it with gas and park it by the door and to let him know when I was back. Most people were in the bar watching the games and only a tired-looking mom bouncing her kid on her knee saw me pick up our luggage and carry it outside.
The crowd was loud and drunk and they’d been waiting. They saw Chuck as the guy to beat; for three days, he’d won every game he’d played except the one the first morning against Ziggy and another one or two the next day. Ziggy’s wins were just luck, we all saw that. When I got back, I nodded to Ziggy. Chuck had just won the lag and got the break; the lag is where the two players both shoot from one end of the table, bounce the ball off the far rail and whichever ball ends up closer to the near rail wins. I had nothing riding on the match; all the same, I was disappointed but not surprised when Ziggy lost the first three games, Chuck pounding the balls into the pockets as though hitting them hard earned him extra points. He was on the eight-ball about to win his fourth game of five, Ziggy had three balls on the table and hadn’t won one when he said to Chuck, “Want to make it interesting?”
Chuck was drunk and didn’t see it coming, none of us did, “Fuck yeah, I’ll take your money. How much you got?” Ziggy pulled five neatly folded hundred-dollar bills out of his shirt pocket, counted them so Chuck could see them and set them on the light. Chuck waved his wife over, she was drunk, too; she turned her purse upside down and wadded bills, ones, fives, tens, twenties, spilled onto the table and Chuck smoothed them out and counted them and set the stack on top of the light next to Ziggy’s hundreds. Now it was a thousand-dollar game.
When Chuck fouled on the eight ball and Ziggy won his fifth game, he bellowed into the crowd, “Lousy, cheap fucking win” and demanded another match, double or nothing. Ziggy shrugged and Chuck’s wife dumped out her purse again. With all the ones counted, there were sixteen hundred dollars and change on the table. The truckers, ranchers, sales guys, vets, hippies, college students, moms, dads, me, all of us drunk and in need of a shower, stood packed so tight around the table it was hard to move. We all knew who was going to win; the side bets were running two-to-one. To make Chuck whole on the bet, one of the guys staked him the four-hundred, he was that sure. We were all that sure.
In the next five games, Ziggy missed shots twice, both times because he narrowly missed cue ball position for a following shot. In game two he was forced to shoot a long bank that he just missed, in game three he missed an impossible combination. Both times he missed, he didn’t leave Chuck a shot and when he got back up, he ran out both games. He was shooting with the bar stick. Chuck, sitting on a stool with his Palmer between his knees and a bunch of guys standing around him, didn’t sink a ball the entire match. In game five, the final game, as Ziggy trickled the eight-ball into a corner pocket on an easy final shot, Chuck crashed over his stool and lunged to his feet. He was drunk and since the second break he’d been cussing Ziggy to the crowd around him and getting steadily louder as he lost games. Now he’d lost the match and a couple of thousand bucks. “You son of a bitch. You sorry son of a bitch. You hustler motherfucker, I’m going to break your fucking neck.”
Ziggy grabbed the cash off the chandelier, caught my eye and I shoved through the crowd toward the door, Ziggy’s hand on my shoulder pushing me forward. The yelling and Chuck’s threats got louder behind us; a lot of people had lost money on that match. “You drive,” Ziggy said as he pushed me through the door. The big thermometer on the wall just outside the door said the temperature was six degrees.
I still had his keys and as the engine caught, I jammed the cue-ball shifter into reverse, stomped the gas and side-stepped the clutch. The tires spun in the snow as Chuck, roaring curses and swinging his cue stick, burst through the doors and the lobby light and the blue smoke and the yelling drunks spilled into the parking lot behind him. Chuck swung the butt of his cue at the hood of the car and missed and slipped in the snow and fell and dropped the stick and picked himself up and kept coming and about then the rear tires of the VW hooked up and I drove us the hell out of there.
“Jesus,” I said, “Where we going?”
“That Palmer’s an eight-hundred-dollar stick. He’s lucky he didn’t hit the car. Freeway’s open, been open for a couple of hours. The announcement’s at 10:00. Irving told me that’s when he kicks everybody out.”
We hadn’t gone fifty miles before we were out of the snow and the freeway was clear. I drove all night while Ziggy slept. We got gas in Ogallala, Grand Island and Omaha. We hit Des Moines at morning rush hour and stopped at Donut King. We sat at a booth and we both ordered coffee, black. I had a cake donut with sprinkles. We talked about Little America and our thrilling getaway and Irving tipping him off about the freeway (that tip had cost Ziggy five bucks). He pulled Chuck’s wadded bills out of his pocket, counted out ten twenties and handed them to me, “Luck happens sometimes.” he said. I’d never held that much money before.
“How much did you win?”
“A little over six.”
“Hundred?”
“Thousand.”
“Jesus Christ.” Ziggy dropped me at a ramp to northbound 35. That night I ate dinner at my mother’s house. And took a long shower.
I sat on a basalt stone in the warm sun and light breeze under a cerulean-blue sky in the New Mexico high desert and talked to Shelly and Ranger; Ranger the dog. Shelly’s from Minnesota, Spring Valley, and now she lives in New Mexico where she’s a campground host at a private campground some miles up the road. Short, dark hair, fifty or so and trim, she’d walked up the same two-mile rocky path as Remi and me to get to the top of a small hill overlooking the snowcapped mountains, a life-fit path if not a CrossFit path.
The years hadn’t been easy, I could see it in the grey wear on her face and the tired in her eyes. She’d lived in Oregon, Alaska, Louisiana and other places she told me and I don’t remember. She asked me, “How familiar are you with the bible?” In both hands she held the book, grocery bag cover held together with yellowed scotch tape, the title neatly lettered on the front in faded-black Sharpie, dozens of tattered scraps of paper sticking out as bookmarks.
I shuffled my feet in the red volcanic dust and thought about the question, about the beauty, history and geology that surrounded us, about the billions of years it took for our planet and our species to be not ready for that question. “Let’s talk about dogs,” I said.
And so we talked about dogs; until we didn’t. Ranger was a rescue dog, he was a year-and-a-half old. He appeared to be some mix of German Shepherd, lab and basset hound (the floppy ears). He wore a tattered grey bandana for a collar. He and Remi were instant playmates.
Shelly’s husband committed suicide thirty years ago that day. He was from New Mexico.
September 1977, NATO Campaign Reforger, I was twenty-one years old and I hadn’t a shower in as many days. I sat in my Jeep in a cold rain, no doors, rainwater drizzling off the canvas top, a poncho over my lap and the engine running for heat. I was reading Critique of Pure Reason and trying to understand the nature of a priori knowledge. I’d read about Kant in a crappy novel and bought his book. It was a big read for a guy with a lousy high school education, no thoughts on rationalism or empiricism, and who’d never heard of Hume or Descartes. I was driving a Jeep for an umpire, Captain Sawyer, an M151A2 with its gutless four-cylinder engine, 4-speed manual transmission, knobbed tires, drum brakes, no seatbelts and no roll bar. Our mission, Captain Sawyer’s and mine, was to make sure nobody cheated at war.
Reforger was an annual NATO exercise spread out across the West German countryside commandeering roads, barns, farm fields, forests and small towns and leaving behind broken concrete, damaged crops, Germans cussing us in German, and an oily diesel-stink that hung in the air long after a unit had moved on. The Army hadn’t recovered from Viet Nam and moral, discipline and attitudes were poor. A favorite way for tankers to share their discontent was carving the letters FTA, “Fuck The Army”, into farm fields with their tracks, neat pivot steers at the intersecting lines of the squared letters so that the crops were ground into the soil and the letters stood out clear and neat against the field; the only people who could read them were the officers and crews chopping over us in Hueys. Lots of butt-chewing at the unit level about maneuver damage, but command ranks never knew which track commander and crew inscribed those notes in the German dirt. But we knew, we all did, and we fist-bumped the philosophers and scriveners for leaving our mark.
* * * *
I went through Basic and AIT at Fort Knox with Cal and God. Basic Training is where recruits get physically fit and learn the fundamentals of war-fighting: how to salute, make a bed, hot wax a floor, wash a pot, peel a potato, spit shine boots and low quarters, polish brass, stand at attention, march and run in formation. We also learned to use radios and the phonetic alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie…), shoot and clean various weapons, throw hand grenades (pro tip: don’t use your teeth to pull the pin), use a gas mask (training that included several long minutes in a concrete building filled with tear gas), bandage wounds, crawl through sand at night under concertina wire and red tracers shot from an M60 machine gun, and all the rest. Also, in Basic Training, I ran a 5:36 mile in fatigue pants and boots, maxed the PT test, two of us in the company did that, God and me, and shot Expert with an M16 rifle and M60 machine gun; the high moments in an otherwise unremarkable three-year military career.
AIT, Advanced Individual Training, is where we were trained in our Military Occupational Specialty, “MOS” in Army speak. Our MOS, Cal’s, God’s and mine, was 11D, Armor Reconnaissance. We learned to drive and fire M551 Sheridans (shitty aluminum tanks with a 155mm main gun that mostly sank when we tried to swim them and were mostly broken the rest of the time) and M113 APCs (aluminum boxes with tracks), observe and report enemy action, read a compass and topo map (and learn the difference between a kilometer and a mile and the importance of contour lines, especially when they’re close together), fire and movement, call for artillery, search and destroy, harass the enemy with tanks and small arms, rear guard delay actions, advance and retreat under fire, and blow things up with C4, bangalore torpedoes and claymore mines. In AIT, God and I got tattoos, God lost his virginity, Cal drove.
Cal was from Berkeley. His father was a doctor and a college professor and taught at UCSF. His mother was an artist, she used a spare bedroom with a view of the bay for a studio and drank for inspiration. Cal was a couple of inches over six feet and pasty with wavy blond hair, blue eyes, and flouncy butt cheeks; he looked like a paunchy white Jesus. He went to Berkeley High and spent his junior and senior years protesting Viet Nam and Nixon on the grimy sidewalks of Telegraph Avenue waving signs, smoking weed, and fucking hippie women in People’s Park. After he graduated, he spent a couple of years at UC studying physics. His sister Cece was killed in a helicopter crash in Viet Nam, she was a nurse and a captain. A few months later, over Christmas break his junior year, he signed a recruiter’s papers. He didn’t tell his parents he’d joined the Army until the morning he got in his Porsche to drive east, a faded yellow ’67 911S with an air cooled flat six, five-speed transmission with first gear left and down, wooden steering wheel, low-back black vinyl seats in front, little vinyl seats in the back. It had been his father’s car, he’d bought a new one. His mother hugged him on the driveway, there was bourbon on her breath. His father had a class.
God, the name stamped on his dog tags was Godefredo, grew up in his great-grandfather’s wood shack on a bayou in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, cooked on a cast iron stove stoked with wood he’d split and from kindergarten, piloted his grandfather’s flat bottom wood bateau with its ancient two-stroke Evinrude outboard to the school bus stop where he ran it up the bank and tied it to a tree. He dropped out of school when he was twelve and started mudbugging full time, that’s what he called crawfishing; setting the traps after dark with fish heads for bait and in the morning selling the catch out of the back of the pickup to neighbors and restaurants so he had money for food, 2-stroke oil for the Evinrude and gas for the truck.
God’s father was a construction superintendent. Before work, he’d pour half a fifth of rum into his coffee thermos. By lunch he was tripping over building materials and cussing the trades, by quitting time he was sound asleep in the cab of his truck, a faded red 1960 Apache C10 with a white top, 235 inline six, three-on-the-tree transmission and wrinkled door and fenders on the passenger side from banging it into the live oak in the front yard coming home drunk. At home, he’d keep drinking into the night and there’d be arguments with God’s mother. Sometimes he’d bloody her lip or yank her shoulder out of the socket and a couple of cops would show up and say hello by name and take him outside and lecture him in soft and gentle tones so God and his mother couldn’t hear the words and his father would sit on the hood of the patrol car and cup his face in his hands and cry and say he was sorry over and over and the cops would pat his shoulder and leave and the next week or the following week it would happen again just the same, except maybe she wouldn’t call the cops.
When God was eight, his mother left. She didn’t leave a note. About that time, too, local contractors quit hiring his father; he’d earned his reputation. He took a job as a traveling superintendent remodeling motels around the country; he left a five and some ones on the kitchen counter when he left. He left his truck, too. At first, he came home every couple of months or so; as God got older, he came home less frequently until he stopped coming home at all. On his seventeenth birthday, God joined the Army; his father sent him back the signed enlistment forms without a note; he was on a project in Salt Lake City when God got on the bus in front of the recruiting station in Orange, Texas, just the other side of the Sabine River. He left the pickup in the parking lot.
God was short, five-two, maybe five-three, and wiry lean so in the barracks barefoot and wearing just skivvies, you could see the blue veins and long muscles in his arms and legs and abs ripple and bunch under his skin as he made his bed, dressed and undressed and polished his boots. He had deep green eyes, wavy dirt blond hair, shoulder length and greasy before the Army cut it off, a broken front tooth, black crescents under his ripped and jagged fingernails, and a nose that was French and narrow at the bridge, wide and African at his cheeks and twisted like it had been broken and never set straight. Living alone, he hadn’t bothered much with personal hygiene.
At Fort Knox, barracks for Basic Training were open-bays with a 10’ center aisle, double grey steel doors at one end. On both sides of the center aisle, 40 grey steel wall lockers and 20 steel bunk beds with Army-green wool blankets, folded sheets and pillows stacked at the ends were aligned straight and square with the beige-on-beige checkerboard floor tile. The room was lit by flickering 8’ fluorescent lights. Cal and God were assigned bunkmates, I shared the next bunk with Freddie, a guy from St. Louis who doesn’t figure into our story. I had the bottom bunk and we didn’t argue.
“I’ve got top,” I heard Cal say.
God, who’d been living alone for years, had lost the habit of negotiation and even conversation. He glanced at Cal then he put a hand on the on the top bunk, jumped and spun and sat on the mattress in one effortless move and made it his.
Cal said it again, the top was his, and God looked down at him.
“Fuck you. I’m not sleeping down here.”
God slid off the bunk and stood in front of Cal looking up and in that moment of exasperation, Cal put a hand on God’s chest and shoved him. I doubt he meant to, but he pushed him hard enough that God tripped over his foot locker and fell backwards. But instead of sprawling on his back, in the four tenths of a second before he hit the floor, God twisted in the air so he landed on his palms and toes with his legs cocked and in the remaining six tenths of that second, he bounced to his feet and faced Cal in a crouch. He held his fists low and curled into hard knots and there was no hesitation; as he was on his feet, he started to jab and cross with punches too fast for my eyes to follow. He didn’t fight like he had training, he fought like he had experience and he punched into Cal like I imagine the prop on that ancient 2-stroke Evinrude cut through swamp weeds, small, fast, powerful and relentless. Cal kept circling away, trying to negotiate a truce, “Hey, be cool, be cool. Hey, man. Hey, take it. Take it, take the damn bunk, I don’t give a shit. Hey…,” all the while he was yelling for peace, he was trying to block punches and taking blows to the head and gut until the floor around them was spattered with blood from his nose.
Cal slipped in his blood and fell to his knees. He grabbed God around the legs and dragged him down so the two of them were rolling and wrestling on the floor. We circled around, a couple of us tried to separate them, most everyone else cheered and catcalled, “stomp that motherfucker,” “beat that white boy’s ass,” until somebody called “ten-hut,” and Sergeant Leonard in his starched fatigues, spit-shined Corcoran jump boots, Smokey the Bear hat pulled low over his eyes and his swagger stick tapping his calf, strolled down the center aisle and surveyed Cal and God standing next to their bunk and the blood smeared on his floor and Cal’s face, “Formation, gentlemen. Boots and trousers. Two minutes.”
That was our first night in Basic and it was a long run that none of us was in shape to do, except maybe Sergeant Leonard and God. As we ran, Sergeant Leonard taught us the first (of many) call-and-response cadence chants, “If I die on the Russian front, bury me deep with a Russian c***….” He was a baritone and he’d carol the words and we’d chant them back, 41 boots hitting the dirt on the syllables. Every few minutes, as we ran through the night, he’d bark, “Platoon halt. Drop and give me ten.” As soon as we were done with the pushups, we were back on our feet and running again.
Cal and God, they became friends during that run; while I was focused on the growing sweat stain on the fatigue shirt in front of me and the panting and cussing around me, both of them were admiring the sky, it was clear, no moon, the stars just out of reach.
Back in our bunks, exhausted and pissed, I heard God say from the top bunk, “Bèl ciel ce soir.”
“Fuck you.”
“Down Louisiana, you don’t see Orion that clear.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“We’d go in the bayou nights, set traps, my mom and me. When the mist was clear, she’d point to pictures in the stars and tell me their names.”
There was a silence for many seconds and I heard springs in their bunk squeak as one of them turned over, “When I was a kid, five, six years old, my mom would drive us up to Tilden, that’s a park up on top of the hills in Berkeley, and we’d lie on the hood of her VW bug and she’d point to the stars and name them to me until I fell asleep then sometime in the night, she’d wake me up and drive us home. Betelgeuse was on fire tonight.”
Some days later, I came into the barracks, the two of them were entwined in tendrils of smoke from the Kool and Marlboro cigarettes poking out of the ashtrays on their bunks beside them. God, in fatigue pants, dusty boots and no shirt, sat with his legs dangling over the edge of his mattress as he read out loud a story from Stars and Stripes, Cal sat on the bottom bunk brushing Kiwi polish into his boots and helping him sound out the words he couldn’t figure out himself. I walked around their bunk so I wouldn’t smell God’s body odor.
“Cal.”
“Let it alone.”
“Last week, God wiped the floor with your face. Now you’re teaching him to read?”
“What the fuck’s it to you?”
God kept stumbling down the columns, one syllable at a time. Until that evening, I hadn’t heard God speak more than a few dozen words besides, “Yes, Drill Sergeant” and “No, Drill Sergeant.” He was a tenor with a drawl and an accent that from time to included some French words, “Piké twa,” he said.
“He just told you to get fucked.”
“Fuck you, too,” I said. God went back to reading the newspaper.
Except for letters and care packages from moms, almost always chocolate chip cookies and sometimes shared, and Stars and Stripes, we were cut off from the world we’d grown up in, no newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, or telephone. Our conversations were bragging, bitching and gossip; we had nothing else. The runs, the marches, the blisters, the lack of sleep, the sore and strained muscles, the over-explained and poorly-explained classes, the drill sergeants for their unfairness and cruelty, the lousy tents and backpacks, the leaky gas masks, the air mattresses that went flat in the night, rifle and machine gun if-not-for excuses (if not for screaming drill sergeants, lousy weapons, crosswinds, poorly zeroed sights, target malfunctions, buzzing flies and any number of other the-sun-was-in-my-eyes reasons for shooting poorly), hand grenade throwing scores, PT test scores, the rumored saltpeter in our food (reduces desire for sex, or so went the story), KP, guard duty, bunkmates, the latest guy to DNF, letters from girlfriends, girlfriends gone silent, cars sold and missed, bad and good plays at spades, cribbage and poker.
We graduated from Basic Training, the three of us. On the final PT test, God ran a 4:20 mile.
* * * *
In AIT we were allowed to have POVs (Privately Owned Vehicles) on post, although most of us had sold (or abandoned) our cars before we got on the bus. In Alpha Troop, Cal was the only guy I knew with a car, he’d paid to store the Porsche during Basic. The first night we were allowed off post, we took it to Louisville, Cal and God in front, me twisted sideways on the backseats. Before we left, we stood at attention in front of the barracks while Sergeant Leonard inspected our uniforms, ‘c**t-cap’ sitting square, slice-a-knuckle creases in our khakis, glistening brass, low-quarters spit-shined so you could trim a teenage mustache in the mirror. He gave us the lecture; ‘Don’t get too drunk, don’t get the clap, don’t be stupid, be here for morning formation.’ Even God had taken a shower.
We went to Trixie’s, a strip joint in Louisville, permanent duty guys told us it was the place to go. We spent the night banging shots of Jack and chugging beer backs while watching women get naked and dance and sliding bills into their G-strings; the Army paid new E-1 privates $344.10 a month less taxes, enough for boot polish at the PX and candy bars and beer from the vending machines on the first floor of the barracks. The bills we had were mostly singles, not a lot of action for a buck, even in those days, even less if you were throwing quarters and nickels onto the stage.
Cal’s mom sent him checks. He took a stool at the raised stage and waved a ten at the gal on the pole and she sashayed over in her red stilettos, her shoulders and hips swaying in time to the base line as Tommy James whined about teenage lust. She stood over him and let him stare at her shaved crotch then squatted with her thighs on either side of his face and ran her fingers over his shaved pate and whispered in his ear and Cal squeezed her butt and pulled back the elastic strap as it slid between her cheeks and slipped in the ten and she stood up and turned around and bent over with her ass a foot from his face and give him a long gawk and shimmied away. The other dancers caught on and Cal got attention. God and I stood behind his chair and basked in his money and the clouds of cigarette smoke and the stinks of overflowing ashtrays, cheap perfume, sweat, vag, butthole, whiskey, beer and vomit and stared at the strings as they disappeared into the abyss.
Cal whispered in one of the girl’s ears as she was squatted in front of him and she nodded and turned around then shimmied away with two twenty-dollar bills bow-tied into her butt floss and when her set was done she came around and Cal pointed at God and she took his hand, you could see his face turn red in the bar light. He pulled back and she stepped close to him and whispered in his ear, she was a couple of inches taller than him and skinny, shoulder-length straw-blond hair, smoker skin, red lipstick smudged around her mouth, saggy little breasts with a dark mole centered on her chest between them; she was maybe twenty and naked except for her spike heels and her thong tucked with bills. He whispered back to her and she tugged at his hand and he looked away, more whispering and tugging and then he took a step and another and she led him through a curtain and disappeared backstage.
I went back to drinking whiskey and beer and watching Cal’s private show. An hour later, the woman led God back into the bar. He wasn’t a virgin anymore; the lipstick on his neck, the wrinkles in his khakis, the grin on his face told the story. Cal waved the waitress over and ordered beer and whiskey, “There’s only one first time,” he said.
God lit a Kool, the cigarette shaking between his fingers, “She’s nice, Angela, she’s really nice.”
“She do what you needed her to do?”
“I was the first guy she ever did it with for money.”
Cal laughed, “She told you that?”
“We’re going to a movie next week if I can get a pass.”
“She’s a whore, God. She dances naked and fucks for money. That’s her job.”
“You don’t know her.”
“Where’d you do it?”
“Backseat, her car. We talked after we did it. She said she thinks she loves me.”
“God, she fucked you for your money. Actually, she fucked you for my money. What in hell did you talk about? Did you use a rubber?”
The waitress showed up with the beers and shots balanced on a tray, “To God and Angela,” Cal said and the three of us pinched our shot glasses and threw back the whiskey.
“Cal, she’s his girlfriend, show some respect.” God looked at me hoping I wasn’t joking. I didn’t know whether I was joking or not.
“She wants out of here; she wants out of Louisville, out of Kentucky. She wants a life.”
“I’m sure she does,” Cal said. “And we’ve got PT at oh-six-hundred.”
“I love her.” God turned toward the backstage curtain, he was staggering drunk.
Cal grabbed his arm, “It’s 1:30. We’re out of here.”
God yanked his arm, Cal held on, “I’m going to marry her.”
I grabbed God’s other arm, “She’ll be here next week.”
“Let go, she’s going to be my wife.” He struggled for a few seconds with both of us, pulling hard against our arms, “Piké twa.”
Together, Cal and I pulled him out of the bar; I don’t know that we could have done it if he wasn’t drunk. Still holding his arms and wrestling with him to keep him from falling on the asphalt or going back in the bar, we staggered around the parking lot until we found the Porsche. As we were pulling out of the parking lot, God, in a drooling slur, said, “I want to go to Charlie’s.” Tattoo Charlies was a storefront parlor right on Dixie Highway, we had to drive by it to get back to Knox. Permanent duty guys showing off their ink bragged about it.
I said, “Let’s get some fucking sleep.”
“We’re stopping at Charlie’s,” Cal’s voice was slurred, too, and he was hunched over the steering wheel staring through the windshield like he was trying to figure out what he was supposed to be doing.
“Oh-six-hundred,” I said.
“It’s God’s night. Let’s get him a tattoo.”
God was sitting with his head leaned back against the headrest. “I’m going to marry her,” he slurred the words then started to heave.
Cal slammed the brakes and skidded the little car to a stop. God pitched forward against the dashboard then somehow got the door open and started blowing his guts on to the shoulder, I tried not to smell the vomit or listen to the heave and splash. After a while, he sat up, “She gets a life.”
“Let’s get some sleep.”
“Big night for God. Let’s help him remember it.”
Charlie’s was open for the bar rush. When we walked in, the slinger was finishing a tattoo of the Keep on Truckin’ dude on a guy’s forearm, there were buck sergeant stripes on the collar of his fatigues, “Gentlemen, have a seat,” he waved at chairs near the door. Shaved head, black goatee and mustache, stubble cheeks, wife-beater tank top, a two-inch curved tooth hanging on a gold chain around his neck, and all his skin I could see covered with ink. He handed me a binder, “some ideas if you don’t know what you want to do.” I took it and handed it to God who shook his head, “I know what I‘m getting.”
I handed it to Cal. He shook his head, his eyes half closed, “Too drunk. Not doing it.”
“We could be in our bunks.”
“Only one first time,” he muttered like he was falling asleep.
I leafed through the pages and pages of color photos of tattoos on every body part, male and female; flags, helmets, skulls, Hueys, Cobra gunships, fighter jets, the Statue of Liberty, the sun, hummingbirds, tigers, snakes, wolves, flowers, sheet music, geometric designs, women’s names and portraits, Chinese characters, military branch logos and unit crests, Sheridans and M60s, an M16 on a bayonet sticking out of the ground with a helmet balanced on the stock, plain and fancy Christian crosses, wavy hair Jesus nailed on a cross, sailing ships, the Keep on Truckin’ dude (various colors, poses and legends), clenched fists, rosaries, eagles, lots of eagles. I got an eagle soaring in front of a red sun tattooed on my right shoulder. In all the life I’ve lived since, that eagle has been a ready reminder that drunk decision-making makes for drunk decisions. The red sun has long since faded away and all that’s left is a crudely drawn pale blue bird.
After we graduated, Cal accepted a post at West Point, God was assigned to the 2nd Armor Division at Fort Hood, Texas, I was posted to the 1/1 Cavalry Squadron at O’Brien Barracks, Schwabach, West Germany. We got drunk and shook hands. I figured I wouldn’t see either of them again. We weren’t letter-writers.
* * * *
I saw God again at the field headquarters for the 2nd Armor Division; command tent, medical tent, open air mess, division recovery and maintenance. The 2nd AD had come to Germany for Reforger, they’d shipped over from Hood. There was a couple of dozen or more deuce-and-a-half and five-ton trucks clumped together by section, Jeeps scattered haphazardly around, APC’s, five-ton wreckers and M88 track recovery vehicles, POL (fuel) trucks, tool trucks and trailers, water trailers, Gama Goats, and broken M60 tanks and APCs and trucks. For air cover, the bivouac was scattered under the trees in a dripping wet wood outside a little town. Loops of concertina wire surrounded the area. The wire didn’t keep out the local kids and after school they’d come by and laugh with us in German and spotty English and climb on the tracks and trucks and bounce on the seats and we’d give them the Chiclets from our C-rations.
In a clearing in the wood, the cooks set up serving tables for chow and around the clock they kept a wood fire going under a twenty-gallon pot hanging from a steel tripod and a chain, the pot filled with boiling coffee. A dipper hung from one of the legs of the tripod. When the coffee ran low, one of the cooks would dump in another five gallons of water from a jerrycan and a No. 10 can of ground coffee and stir it in with the ladle. The coffee was hot and bitter and you had to spit out the grounds that stuck to your lips and teeth. We were wet, cold and exhausted and we’d stand in the mud and drink that coffee out of our canteen cups and warm our hands and feet at the fire and cuss the Army. Best coffee I ever drank.
We didn’t bathe in the field except sometimes in our helmets to scrub the gear, and a lot of guys didn’t do that. And so, we were immersed in stink; mud and wet trees, wet canvas, wet clothes, the damp gray stink of cigarette smoke, wood smoke from the cooks’ fire, reeking breath (sometimes with an after-waft of bourbon or hashish), unwashed ass and pits, diesel exhaust, diesel fuel, gasoline, and the oily steel stench of our machines that engulfed us always. Our fatigues were clammy and wrinkled and bagged at the knees and elbows and stained with food and coffee from eating standing up or in moving vehicles. Our underwear, too, got sticky with the damp and the sweat and the cold and would bunch and chafe and most of us didn’t wear any. Our socks and boots were wet and cold, too, no matter how often we changed them and tried to dry them with the diesel heaters in the tracks.
God was standing next to a Jeep under the dripping trees in the 2nd AD bivouac. He was some distance away and at first he didn’t see me. The hood was up on the Jeep, he had his sleeves rolled back and his hands were black with engine oil and grease. In his right hand, he held an adjustable wrench. When finally he saw me, he laughed and waved. Even at distance, I could see Angela’s name tattooed on his forearm in a fine and delicate cursive surrounded by red hearts and colored flowers and smeared with grease. Through the grime, the light flickering through the wet leaves reflected the gold on his finger, “Piké twa, motherfucker,” he yelled at me. I didn’t yell back, Captain Sawyer was calling for me. I never saw God again.
I’m 67 years old, I’m a US Army veteran, I’ve lived overseas for many years in both Europe and Asia, and I’ve traveled the planet including 13 months riding a motorcycle around the world, the Sahara Desert crossing sticks in my memory. I’ve been married to the same woman for over 30 years, I founded and ran a business for 28 years (you know that, you worked for me), I put two kids through college without debt, paid off our house and had enough money left over to retire. I spend my summers traveling the southern states on my motorcycle talking to people I meet and writing about them (last summer I was in Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama (including a NASCAR race at Talladega!), Tennessee, North Carolina, West Virginia and Ohio). I subscribe to several newspapers including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Guardian, BBC News and Al Jazeera; I read a lot and I am passionately and unabashedly liberal in my beliefs.
Having laid out a little of my history and perspective, and you know me as a co-worker and an employer, besides, I have to ask: Do I seem delusional? Do I seem like a person likely to be seduced by propaganda, false media and angry friends? If I do, stop reading. You shouldn’t read shit from delusional people.
If you’re still reading, here’s a quick thought experiment for you: apparently, a lot of people believe that Trump’s 4 indictments and 91 felony charges in 4 different jurisdictions are a “deep state” operation orchestrated by Joe Biden or his henchmen. A scenario like that would require that literally thousands of people be able to keep a complicated storyline absolutely secret not just for years but for the rest of their lives. Nobody, not attorneys, not juries, not court officials, not clerks, secretaries, police officers, or janitors can disclose their secret enterprise, despite the fact that revealing the secret would earn them thousands (or millions) of dollars and hours and weeks of TV fame. Does that seem likely? Really? People are people.
Now, let’s talk about you: I assume from your messages that your news sources are primarily Fox, OAN, Newsmax, Qanon and the various other websites, blogs and social media outlets that inform the MAGA faithful as well as the friends and people you choose to surround yourself with. And from those sources and associates, you have taken on a world view that is both false and destructive, a world view that is vengeful, bigoted and cruel, a world of lies, partial truths, conspiracy theories, self-dealing, self-aggrandizement and nonsense. The MAGA arguments are not something you will convince me of; in fact, it is not a conversation that I’m willing to be part of. But it is something you should reflect on.
And so, my former friend and co-worker, I wish you the very best. I warn you that outside the media and social bubble that you now live in, the world looks much different, it believes in science, humanity, justice and equality, it believes in an imperfect country forever working to better itself. That’s the America I believe in and want to be part of. Let’s go our different paths.
The Red Roof Inn in Montgomery, Alabama is a U-shaped motel facing Zelda Road, a busy four-lane thoroughfare named for Montgomery-born Zelda Sayre, a rich white woman who knew how to party, married somebody famous, took his name and Fame, and wrote a lousy book; to celebrate those accomplishments, the city put her name on street signs. Montgomery was also home to Big Mama Thornton, Rosa Parks, Howard Johnson, Nat King Cole, Martin Luther King’s kids Martin III and Yolanda, and Octavia Spencer. Fast food signs light up both sides of Zelda’s road. Rooms were forty-eight dollars. I stayed two nights.
The front side of the Red Roof Inn is freshly painted and well-lighted and the parking lot is shiny black with a fresh sealcoat and crisp yellow stripes. A bright new pylon sign with the new company logo faces the street. My room had been newly remodeled and reeked of latex paint and old cigarette smoke. The sides and back of the motel were unpainted and unlit and the rooms abandoned, stacks of stained mattresses, wadded up bedding and overturned furniture visible through the windows.
Room 121 is the first-floor corner room to the right as you face the building. I canted the Hog onto its side stand on the shiny asphalt outside the door. When I went out to get some dinner, there was a guy selling product in the shadow around the corner from my door. He was sitting in a chair facing three handicap parking stalls, faded blue stripes, blue concrete wheel stops, oil-soaked and crumbly asphalt. He asked me if I needed anything, cookies, lollipops, weed. He had a joint pinched between his fingers and he saw me looking at it and handed it to me. He said his name was Iz.
Iz’s pants hung below his butt cheeks, he used one hand on his belt to hold them up when he walked. The pants were shapeless and red and tattered at the bottom, his underwear was plaid blue. On his feet he wore black socks and red rubber slides with dirty white Adidas logos on the straps, the strap on the left one was torn and made a little slap-squeak noise when he stepped on it. He had a limp on the same leg and used a cane. He had short-cropped hair just visible under his hoodie, the hoodie was black, and a curving pink scar that started under his left eye and sliced through his cheek and shade of a mustache and notched his upper lip so you could see the glisten of a silver tooth when his mouth was closed. Several of his upper teeth were silver. Under his right eye he had cross tattoo. He was thin and medium height and twenty-two.
His office, two oak chairs with motel-stained, faded-to-pink fabric and loose and squeaky glue joints set side-by-side in the dark shadow and protected from rain by the second floor balcony above, faced the handicap spots. Guys would idle into the spaces in dented pickups and rusty sedans, roll down a window and exchange cash for whatever it was they were buying. He had walk-ups, too, hookers in lipstick and spike heels, guys in sweat pants who looked like they’d slept on a cardboard box, guys in nice cars who parked under the lights in front of the motel and seemed to always leave a pressed pant leg and an expensive shoe outside the shadow while they did their business with Iz.
As we passed his weed back and forth, I asked Iz about his foot, “Concrete work. Mix truck backed over me, crushed my leg. Nine yards of mud on that truck.”
“Can’t work?” I took a hit.
“Can’t work where I gotta stand.”
“Office work?”
“What company’s going to hire a crippled n****r with crying tears sewed into his face? Nobody wants to see that every day.”
“You from Montgomery?”
“Natchez, Mississippi.”
“I’ve been there. Pretty town.”
“Slave selling capitol of America; that town got rich auctioning off black people, built some nice houses with the money. Mostly white people own them still.”
“You grow up in Mississippi?”
“I grew up in a lot of places, Greenville, Baton Rouge, Gainesville, Atlanta for a while, my mom had a bunch of boyfriends and a bunch of jobs. Went to tenth grade in Oakland, California. That’s where I got my face cut and my teeth busted out. Spent a year in JD riding a broom around in the Harry Potter books. Never did go back to school. But they got me a library card.”
We were quiet for a minute and I handed him the joint, “I’m going over to Captain D’s get something to eat.”
“Do you.”
Captain D’s is a fast food fish joint across Zelda Road from the Red Roof Inn. I ordered the Giant Fish Sandwich Combo; “two Batter Dipped Fish fillets on a toasty bun with tangy tartar sauce and shredded lettuce, served with your choice of one side and a refreshing beverage.” I had a refreshing Coke and fries. When I got back to the motel, Iz was with a customer and I went to bed, long day on the bike.
* * * *
On a Friday afternoon ten years ago, Ron Davis was sitting on the curb in front of a Subway sandwich shop; he asked me for money for something to eat. I bought him a sub and chips and asked him if he was looking for work and he said yes and I gave him money for the train and the next day he came to my house. Ron had big hands with thick fingers, walnut-size knuckles and square cut nails. He had the letters RIO tattooed in blue ink on the back of his left hand in capital letters; Spanish or acronym, I never knew.
That first day, my wife Jane asked him to move hostas from the front yard to the back. He held the shovel in his hands like it was fragile, gently nudging it into the soil around a plant then lifting the hosta out of the ground as though a sudden move would damage it. He would then dig a hole in the backyard where Jane pointed and set the plant in its new home, carefully arranging the roots, patting the soil into place with those hands and brushing dirt off the leaves. Later, Jane asked him to take out a small scrub tree and he came back to tell her that he couldn’t dig it out, that it was still alive. He told her afterwards that he’d said a prayer over it before pulling it out of the ground. That fall he did work for neighbors up and down the block.
When I met Ron, he was thirty-one, schizophrenic and living in a homeless shelter down the street from my office. He’d stop by from time to time and we’d chat. I’d talk about my business and projects, he was born in Chicago and liked hearing about our projects there; he’d talk about his kids, Sammy and Ronelle, and girlfriends and problems in the shelter, drugs and alcohol and stuff getting stolen and people getting beat up. Once in a while, he’d bring a friend. Jamal, a polite, lanky kid he introduced as the next welterweight champion of the world. Jamal was training hard and his coach had promised him the title. I don’t what happened, I don’t follow boxing.
Ron and his sons spent Thanksgiving and Christmas at my house with Jane and our teenage kids and a dozen or so friends. To watch him change a diaper was no different than watching him put a plant in the dirt, those powerful hands holding and moving that baby as though a bump or jar would damage him then carefully arranging the diaper before patting the sticky tabs into place and then a tug snap zip with the pjs, Ronelle giggling and squirming the whole time, Ron laughing with him. We gave Sammy Legos and he and Ron sat on the floor and made whatever it was, those big hands carefully selecting and squeezing and snapping the plastic bricks. Sammy was Ron’s ex-wife’s child and unrelated to Ron.
In the coming years, I introduced Ron to construction companies that gave him jobs before they fired him. I sold him an old Chevy work truck to get him to job sites; he never could pay me for that truck. Eventually he crashed the truck, he was driving back to St. Paul in a blizzard, back from a weekend with the boys in St. Cloud, seventy miles northwest. The truck was wrecked. He’d been sleeping in it in the parking lot of the shelter because of the theft and violence, the truck idling all night for heat.
While we were friends, Ron spent six months in the workhouse for B&E, he and another guy broke into a Verizon store; it was more of a smash and grab then a scripted movie heist. Security cameras caught their faces and the license number of the getaway car. It took a few hours to round them up, the loot was still in the backseat. He didn’t tell me about getting arrested and his time in the big house until he was out, he just disappeared and reappeared. Mental health problems, drug problems, legal problems, ex-wife problems, girlfriend problems, child support problems, debt collector problems, job problems, lost and stolen and broken cell phone problems, un-bankable, uninsurable, fights and thefts in the homeless shelter, crashing the truck, and all the rest, and for all the time I knew him, his big break was ever just over the horizon, get through today, tomorrow’s gonna be great.
Ron had a schizophrenic episode and had a knife and a white St. Paul policeman shot him and he bled out in the street with his head lolled back on the curb and the cop cam rolling. The local TV news covered the story for two or three days, it was clear, well-focused video that followed the action and allowed the pretty newscasters to deplore the violence. The cop was a hero. There was a dozen or so people at Ron’s funeral; a couple of people who worked for the funeral home hustled the rest of us for donations, they were white. An old black man, I don’t remember his relationship to Ron, advised me, “Don’t give them motherfuckers shit.” Ron’s new wife and widow, Missladybee Davis, was there with her five kids and her mother.
That Ron and I became friends was luck, more mine than his. He showed me that the world I live in, the tidy, white-man world of trust and camaraderie and easy correlations is not the real world or to the extent it is the real world it is a very partial and insular world. In the larger world, food, warmth and safety are luxuries. That was Ron’s world and he let me see it full-frontal. What he showed me was that duress inspires humanity; that his gentleness, generosity and optimism were products of who he was born and where he came from, not from schooling, a good book, a pampered upbringing, certainly not from having more than enough. To the contrary, he taught me that privilege obscures humanity, that the smelly and poorly dressed are not our threat; our threats wear cologne and Brooks Brothers. He taught me that beneath our wardrobes, we are all smelly and naked. A lot of that he taught me after he was killed.
* * * *
The Legacy Museum examines Ron’s history over the course of four centuries. It tells the story of the two million black people who died in ships crossing the Atlantic their bodies tossed overboard and continues on to connect the lynching, beating, rape, and separation and sale of families of our past with the segregation, mass incarceration, unequal law enforcement and brutality, and apathy of our day. it shows us who were and who we are, that flowery words about justice for all are just that, pretty words, fairy tales that for all of our history we’ve told ourselves to ease our sleep. It’s a terrible history and there are no words. I’m an old white man and I wandered through the long, long galleries of quotes and images and multimedia displays and shelves and shelves of thousands of canning jars filled with soil from lynching sites each with a name and a date with tears on my cheeks unable to meet the eyes of other visitors. And white visitors, tears on their cheeks, weren’t lifting their eyes to meet mine, either. They shared my shame. Black visitors had tears on their cheeks, too but it wasn’t shame in their eyes, their response seemed more nuanced, more complex, a mix of familiarity, rage and resignation that they shared in their glances amongst themselves and in their soft conversations. They didn’t look at me and I don’t blame them.
* * * *
That next night when I got back from the museum, Iz was in his chair, “How’s business?” I asked him.
“Slow.” He was smoking a joint and handed it to me. He did have good weed. “Wednesdays always slow, motherfuckers broke waiting to get paid on Friday, then come over here and sit in traffic in the parking lot waiting to buy shit for the weekend.”
“Cops fuck with you?”
“Mostly no. Long as white folks ain’t getting rolled or shot, cops in this town don’t give a shit. Except they’re looking to make their own score. Minnesota,” Iz said, pointing at the Harley. “Damn.”
“That museum’s in your face. I was there a couple hours today and had to leave, that was all I could take.”
Iz turned his head and stared straight in my face, “Motherfucker, black folks been taking that shit for hundreds of years. You spend two hours in an airconditioned house looking at pictures and you walk away because that’s all you could take? Centuries now, black people had all they could take, too. But they couldn’t walk away. And they sure as fuck didn’t have no fucking air-conditioning.
“Here’s the thing about that museum, it ain’t history. It ain’t even yesterday. That same shit you’re seeing on the walls there is going on right now, today. Same shit. You didn’t have to ride a motorcycle a thousand miles to see black people getting beat and killed by cops and scared-stupid white people; you can see that right at home in Minnesota. The thing that’s different between then and now is white folks quit doing your own lynching, ain’t charming to have your picture in the paper standing next to a dead n****r like it used to be. Now you hire cops to do your killing and send them to jail when they embarrass you.”
“You’ve done a lot of thinking about this shit.”
“You saying you’re surprised that a black man knows some history, read some shit. You thinking we don’t know what’s been done to us? I told you, I got the fucking library card.”
“I’m just down here to learn.”
“Learn? Learn what? Learn that your people whipped and raped and killed my people for centuries, that you bought and sold my people like cattle, like our families and kids and bodies didn’t fucking matter? Learn that black people built this country, made it what it is, and never got paid? That we didn’t get jobs or schooling or a vote? That we were only a little more than half a person, you didn’t learn that? There’s nothing new at that fucking museum. Where the fuck you been?” His voice was getting loud.
“I don’t want to argue.”
“That’s because you got no fucking argument, white man. You knew it all before you got here. You’ve known it your whole fucking life. Maybe you came down here for proof, some words and pictures and numbers, the bloody hand prints of your history. Or maybe you came down here to say you’d done your bit, that you’d seen it for yourself. Shit, all you did was spend money and time to ease up on your shame and take a motorcycle ride. The proof has been in front of you motherfuckers for hundreds of years and you’re looking for more?”
“I came down here because that history is my history,” I handed him the joint.
“Hang on to it.” A blue F-150 with rattle exhaust and a crumpled passenger-side front fender, white guy in a baseball hat at the wheel, pulled into one of the ADA spots and rolled down the window. I stood up and Iz reached up his hand and I pulled him to his feet and stepped around the corner so he could do his business.
After the pickup clunked into Reverse and clunked into Drive and rattled away, I stepped back into the shadow and handed him the joint and he kept talking, “You ain’t hearing me. You and your motorcycle and your house someplace that ain’t here and me standing on the curb selling dope to crackers and risking getting killed or going to Alabama jail every fucking day just so I got something to eat. That ain’t new. You don’t need a museum to see that. You just need to open your eyes. You’re not going to see something in those pictures and words that you don’t see standing in front of you. You’re looking at me right now and you don’t see me; I am it and you don’t see me.”
“I’m going to get something to eat.”
“That’s right, walk away, bitch.”
“I ain’t walking away, bitch. ”
He looked at me, his eyes squinted into thin lines and his lips pressed together so I could see the pulse in the scar on his face, and he reached for his cane like he was going to beat me with it and struggled to get out of his chair, he was nobody’s bitch.
“I’m walking over get a Big Mac. Want one?”
He grinned through his silver teeth and slumped back in his chair, “Quarter pounder, no cheese, bitch.”
When I got back with the clown bag, we sat in the dark shadow at the side of the motel and ate burgers. The little bags of fries had dumped over in the big bag. I set it between our chairs and our hands rubbed together reaching down and rustling for potatoes. They were hot enough to burn your fingers, greasy and gritty with salt.
“Fries are fucking awesome,” that was the weed talking.
Iz ignored me, “What’s different now you seen that fucking museum?”
“What do you mean what’s different?”
“What makes your motorcycle ride to Alabama worth your time?”
“I know more. I understand black history better.”
“Two hours this afternoon taught you the history of black America? Fuck. What are you planning to do with that new learning?”
“What do you mean, what am I planning to do with it?”
“Just what I said, all this time, all this money, to come down here and get you educated. What the fuck you going to do with it? You ain’t the first white man to come down here and get slapped hard by his history. What are you going to do? Vote? White people been voting for hundreds of years and I’m still selling dope. What the fuck are you going to do?”
I didn’t say anything for a while, “I don’t know that I thought it through, Iz.”
“Then think this through, I’ll be dead in a year. There’s nothing you or I can do about that. I’ll be shot by cops or some dude high on shit, or some motherfucker’ll cut me up with a switch knife and steal my product, or I’ll peddle some bad dope and some pissed-off prick will come looking for me, or maybe I’ll put some bad junk in my own veins. That’s the business. My story is not a Harry Potter story, I don’t have a wand and nobody’s coming to save me. But it’s a human story and it’s big, bigger than me, and I want it to be remembered. You’re a writer, write my story, write my fucking legacy. You owe me. That museum taught you that.”
* * * *
The conversations attributed to Iz and Ron above are an assemblage of my notes, memories, observations, learnings and imagination.
* * * *
The difficulty in writing about The Legacy Museum is the writer’s complicity in the history it reveals, particularly white writers, particularly white male writers. The museum presents an American story that is unflattering and unfinished. It is who we were and who we are. Our lack of empathy in dominant culture, our lack of reason, our lack of ironic perspective, our lack of curiosity, our inability to step back and see that the opposing jaws of apathy and oppression are the vise crushing both our neighbors and ourselves; as we destroy the lives of those against whom we bring our violence and apathy, we destroy ourselves. We the oppressors are also our victims.
