the snow falls
too fast from the clouds,
and night is dropped and
snatched back
like a huge joke
-Dennis Johnson
Wherever you are is a country.
- Mikko Harvey
Ylide* 'na Car Ride
*Ylide- a compound with opposite charges
But of course I was cursed by beauty. Some writers are hideous. These learn easily and quickly that just saying something doesn't make it true because no one wants to listen to you, feo, but some of us are cursed by beauty and so most everyone naturally believes us because to see us is to be in our trance and it's only as our beauty fades that we realize that we were deluding ourselves and must ever be wary of doing so again. Some are seated at birth just inches closer to the column of truth, which is to say, hideous to behold, like my friend John.
Easy to ignore, with that execrable visage of his, the lazy eye, curlew nose, that turkey throat, his slump and uneven mosey. We've been friends since school, close at first, then not so much, then tenuously at best, and now moreso. I appreciate John's perspective, and how, tied to our shared history, it means that we can argue without it being personal, it's refreshing. Especially when compared with the ongoing battle that is my current living arrangment, which, despite a promising start has not been going well. So when John asked me to drive him to Reno to visit his niece I agreed.
A stiff south wind had kicked up Thursday morning, just enough to put people into their perpetual jackets, mine's green corduroy, John's is navy blue. That's not important, just checking to ensure you're listening. On Thursday afternoon, one of those mid-December early dusks, I seal up shop with my yucca plant and three tiny window cacti and head out to pick up John (he lives about an hour away) in my tiny two seater Ford Fiasco, a dark and rapid thwapping under the hood, feeling freaking cold. An acquired taste; the depression that is wintery weather, or winter, starved of color, that unmitigated cold embrasure of eigengrau, the night's air nothing but distant stars, promises of warmth too distant to realize. Although, some still reach for them. John opened the passenger door and plopped down "This is my favorite time of year," he said. I was worried he would smell the exhaustion in my breath after we were all nestled-in snug for the long haul with the heater on low, but he only said thanks and fiddled pointedly with the radio knob until he found the news, so we listened to that in silence.
The realization comes slowly that this is the closest we've been in a long timeâ gazing outwards at the same listless road, giving nothing away, making our way up into the mountains, over the pass, watching in the sideview mirrors as the glow of the chilly western horizon presses firmly against our backs. So long world! I remembered the bond I'd long felt with John, the closeness, an epiphany both lovely and fleeting, and it has charged my observations of the trip looking back on it now.
"Have you read anything I've written lately," I ask.
"I read the one about the chicken," John proffers.
"Myrta?"
"Yeah, Myrta- the fortune-telling chicken. It was good. You should publish."
"I should. But yet..."
"But yet..." he echoes dreamily, "but yet what?"
I change the subject. "How're things going for you?"
"Same ole same ole. I'm tired a lot. Late nights. Early mornings."
"Still at the plant?"
"Still. Always. It's what I was put here to do. I'll be honest though, after most 10-hour third-shifts I lay my middle-aged white-collar body on the couch and extinguish what spark of life I'vein the Stream, then the Streaming takes over and leads me to a net where all the stupid fish are caught."
"You probably go through lotsa coffee."
"NO" he shoots me an ugly look that means how could you forget this important fact about me and I remember that he doesn't drink coffee. The not-drinking-coffee I don't mind, of course, but what annoys me is this holier than thou rationale he affects every time it comes up âHow he insists on explaining his caffeine intolerance in posh British accent with phrases like 'it ill-befits my health,' or 'this wretched bean! It does not become me.' This annoys me. John says, "Rememberest thou, I canst not bedrink of it."
"Lest ye die," I retort, and the conversation wanes, idles down.
Into the foothills my thoughts drift off to my time in the Uttarakhand, how the mountains seemed to never end, and they filled up everything, even the sky, and filled me in the beholding. Now there's sky to see, but when I look up I see nothing. Clouds. Vaporous, perhaps but empty, as am I, everyone sees right through me. Cars pass me on the freeway, my life.
John clears his throat. "So tell me, friend, why are things going so poorly on the old love front?"
"It must be her fault." This is what I say when I'm not thinking clearly. John, of course, believes me because I am cursed by beauty so when I say it's not my fault there's never any second guessing. Why blame beauty?
"Who among you, or is it whom, first said 'I love you' first?"
"I think it's whomsoever."
"Fine. Whomsoever betwixt the two your first declareth love?"
"I don't know. Probably me. Must have been."
"But who truly meant it first?"
That's a stumper. Last autumn I heard a voice telling me that God wanted me to believe that I wasn't alone. This, I should have interpreted, in retrospect, as an admonition toward self-reliance but instead I went out to carouse. My buddy's band Bonerchai was playing at the gallery. What are the words, post-mud-grunge, perhaps. Don't judge. There she was, being introduced, the edges of the world disappear. What are the words? Lithe and supple? Fair haired and wide-eyed? Too good for me? She assumed I was what she was looking for because, well look at me, and I assumed that she was what I was looking for because guys as a rule are paid the slightest bit of attention and go giddy as fawns. What felt like thaumaturgy was actually astigmatism.
"Take a deep breath," says John, "and as your breast rises and falls, feel the blood course to your extremities. Now feel it retreat, like the tide." He can see the anguish on my face and suggests "How about stopping at the Love's?" and my mind goes all sappy with the implications until I see the roadsign for the truckstop and pull over. He gets out to take a leak and grab some yummies. I adjust my handsome mug in the rearview, but of course being cursed by beauty, there isn't much to do so I get out to fill up the tank and leave it filling while I pop into the truckstop as well.
Inside the man in the tie tells the kid in the paper hat to go home, "service levels are down. "
"Can I go home early boss?" another paper hat asks.
"Me too?" chimes a another.
"Me three?" chimes another.
"I probably meant it first," I say when we are flopping back into the car. "What did I know? About what love means, I mean?"
"It means you're willing to put up with a lot of bullshit sure in the knowledge that it leads to great reward," explains John while munching on a pita wrap that smells like plastic. "Life is better when shared with a partner. We know this. The divine sparks within each of us, once rocked together, kindle a fire."
"But there's also divine truth to be meted out from isolation, and beauty too! I could've pursued the eremetic tradition. The desert fathers. Written the next great American novel, a long great screed about individualism, Plymouth Rock, Walden Pond, yada yada."
"Who wants that? It's as self-serving as masturbation."
"Readers want conformity and communal equilibrium."
"Sure they do. Why not abdictate control of the narrative, of life, and become a unit in a grander scheme? All ego-less and crayon-colored! That's what you did, hm?"
God wanted me to believe that I wasn't alone but that belief turned me just another dog in the kennel, happy you're home master, pleased to show you this old dirty bone. I look at John. God he's ugly. I love him, but gosh! Taking off for Reno to visit his nieces, as gestures go it's as noble an endeavor as any, and it takes my mind off of the old chestnut, or, like Julian's disappearing hazelnut, the whole enchilada. Would that I could go back to that night at the gallery and look like John in that moment, so she could see through the mask to what I am, what I was, what I will become. We all become who we are.
"Last month we went to the planetarium. And sitting there watching her text her ex as the laser lights shot every which way the blue light shone on her hair and I realized that it's transparent. I could look through to her skull practically."
"What did you see?"
"I saw emptiness. I saw our flotillas of time together and I couldn't place any of my standard narrative around any of it. I saw scores of regrets and I saw the rotten core of all earthly efforts. I saw buildings burned and mountains laid waste and out in a space a fiery comet gone cold, caught up in the orbit of a sun that hadn't yet ignited, or a moon that only reflects the light of a distant star."
"So your girl's cheating on you and you're headed out with your old friend John to escape all that, eh? Off to the biggest little city in the world! Swing out into the darkness dark comet, and leave her spinning behind in an indifferent blaze!"
"Something like that."
"I would offer you some corn nuts," says John, holding out the bag, "but I don't want to sound too corny." Cars pass us on the freeway. "Why didn't you reach out?"
"I â because it's hard. Because â because everything seems to stand against the idea that â the enormity of the pain she has â that I felt like â I felt like it was mine to carry. Despite everythingâ and this is how art my remains possible, holding on to it."
"You and your idiotic attachment to sadness. Loss is inevitable. Change is inevitable. Get over it. Stop living under it. Make art from sunshine."
"What if I can't?"
"Then you can't. Do something else. You've identified the problem, now change it up. Take off the mask and take the stage again."
"I hope you're right."
"Hope is too passive. I know I'm right."
John says he can't wait to see his niece, his sister. I've seen them before. Don't judge. But of course, I was blessed by beauty, so it's okay for me to point out that they hit every branch face first while falling out of the ugly tree. Kidding, kidding.
"It's good you've got them so close, relatively. It's good to not be alone. I've been â I've been feeling pretty alone lately."
"To be less alone you need to be less alone! Love someone back. Lots of people like you." Then he adds, "Not me of course. I think you're a pompous ass. A really fucking arrogant son-of-a-bitch."
"Thanks buddy."
"Fuck you, pal."
"John?"
"Hm?"
"How do you start? Being... less alone?"
"You just start."
We stop for the night at our motel. The wind had really picked up and we clutch our bags and waddle to reception. I think about guarding my divine spark, somewhere deep in my chest. Like candles lit in a hurricane, we can't be responsible for keeping our lights bright for long, nor blamed for letting the light go out completely. The world is brutal and invective.
Later, John was asleep â it was late, probably about 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning â and I went over and just stood and looked out the window at this town. It's sad western lights on into the middle distance. Whence is one, cursed by the shallowness of beauty, such as I, encouraged to stew and ponder the depths? I could hear the trains mournfully passing through, that wholly winsome wail and my thoughts mixed with John's steady breathing I felt carried off by the throttle of his dreams, the man there still, and just inside he's the ignored little boy, abandoned to embrace some raw elemental vision or other, all while pursuing the boundless shelves of desire, hope, all just out of reach and yet reaching. That's hope. It's in reaching.
Labels: a french nissan, denis johnson, good cheer, inexpugnable, julian of norwich, Mystic CA, passion dies faster than hope, rare beauty, there is a God, wattle and daub, winter, yestertemptest
