W) The Western Lands

W- West

Part 5

Where seldom is heard

a discouraging word

Go west young man. These words echoed from our past, words carved in stones, in the wind tunnel of experience that led countless young men, myself included through many days and over many a lonesome mile. I had the window rolled down and the cold air fan turned up as the yellow line whooshed beneath the car passing through Los Alamos headed north remembering the significance of the place that birthed both the atomic bomb and Burroughs’ first boy love years before he would write of The Western Lands prompting me to discover it in an empty California Gold Country Library and begin writing the story which had gotten me published (or would soon) and into the troubled sojourn which I was now pounding on the accelerator in a desperate attempt to outright flee.

Go west young man. The words both encouragement and challenge. Had I been more sober when I’d made my way back home and packed a bag to go and see the girl I loved in Utah, I would have realized that the unideal route, the route I had in mind would actually bring me 7 hours primarily north, out of my way, but I didn’t care. West, after all, was a region, not a direction. A state of mind, not a coordinate course. I’d made my way home and a weary dog was patiently waiting with his head in his paws to be let in. When he saw me he jumped up and licked my face and I let him happily. It was nice to be seen. I wanted to be seen, not to run away. And to that end, I was running away.

Go west young man. Go west and become a man. The West as freedom and catharsis and solitude and redemption all wrapped in dusty uninhabited vistas of dirt, sage, and lonesome vastness. If anyone doesn’t like the grubby way I look or act or smell they can try and walk the 100 miles from anywhere of consequence to find me out there. The West! The dashboard covered in ash flakes like a mad internal snowstorm while the tape deck plays Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and I lean my right arm preternaturally across my chest to the open window in order to engineer a more even tan. We mustn't lose our vanity, oh western lands, we have girls to impress.

Two brown boys in sportsclothes standing idly in the brown median of the interstate highway system. I wonder what it is they are doing. Whatever it is altogether insignificant in the enormity of geologic time. I take a pill from my pocket and consume it. A woman drives by with absolutely no neck. Geometrically absent is any deviation in pitch from her chin to the protrusion of her chest. It takes all kinds. Big Country.

Go west and the land grows flat. My mind wanders like unto a dream. What was I doing? Another pill at the state border and a swirl of dust. A cloud enters my eyes. I become the dust of the west, sprawled out everywhere all at once, laying high and floating. I become myths of comfort and absence, present and all eddying. Edifying. Suppose she doesn’t really love me? Who is it she doesn’t really love? The Masked Man, my character? Why had he been masked for so long? What was it that he was hiding from--- that I was hiding from? Perhaps it wasn't me that was masked, but Time. I had expected time to enter my life suavely, to come in that way one day, smooth and cool and happy to see me, but the truth was that time was cunning and had come and gone, already, unnoticed, repeatedly. Like the help. Here I was, almost 30 and with what to show for it?

Stupid fucking Time. My adversary. My adversary who’s main objective had been to convince me that he wasn’t my adversary. I was going to see the girl. I was going against time. Tears of angel down my window. I pulled aside and turned off the car. Watching a rainbow precede the storm, which came and passed, happy I was not afraid of thunder anymore. I had spent storms like this cowering in gutters and dying thousands of deaths to become, who? What? Ancient? I felt old and young at the same time. Timeless. The rain stopped. I raced time by remaining still. Sat on the ground, leaned against a tire. Lit a cigarette, looked up at the stars. When it is dark there are stars.

So many stars. A shooting star too, two, no three. Such a misnomer. They aren’t really stars. To have some stars burn forever and shine whilst others extinguish in a momentary wishful flourish. Perhaps the name ‘shooting star’ was the result of a propaganda campaign by meteorites themselves, hoping to be categorized with their more talented cousins. Jealousy. I empathized. I felt crazy. The stars bent over me, burning, smothering me in their coldness. The only sounds were the squeeking chirrups of the crickets, a supple rustle of breeze, and a hollow train weeaah somewhere in the cloudy glowing distance. I huddled back into the car and drove on into the mad darkness.

Go west young man and become a vegetable driving a car. A vegetable with an erection unwavering away from all the bright lights of acceptance, fat throbbing phallic highway erection leading creosote lined and throbbingly aching for everything, hungry for anything mountained west. Drive away from any desire to be saved. Go deeper and deeper and deeper, deeper still.

Stopped at a sad neon diner for an extremely untimely breakfast where a big old man sat in the booth across from me as I fiddled with the sweeteners. I thought of talking with him. Hi, I would say. Or, Nice weather. And off we’d go. A man that size would surely have sizeable certainties to impart. He’d tell me something profound about existence like without repentance we’re all stuck pulling a life sentence in the prisons of our selves. But I said nothing, and he said “Git me mah use’ouhl fore I eat mah right arm” to sad eyed wolfish looking waitress. His double chin unshaven and fingernails greasy. Burnt scars on his knuckles, hair unruly beneath a faded cap which he removed when his food came. Perhaps we had ordered the same thing. No. He ate and left.

The orange sun came up slowly covered in mists that shined iridescent and slowly burned away, all the gray and purple darknesses of the world receding further west as the eastern sky got brighter, hotter. A beautiful slow heat that eventually saturates every blade of grass. As the sun rose the world rushed by my window. I was going to see the girl. My girl. The country lifted to the clouds and the clouds glided in to greet it. Brooding, overcast sky, low-lying marshmallows crowding a wide-open landscape ringing all things tighter together, manufacturing a momentary illusion of kinship between the car and me, the road, the land, and the sky. I drafted a letter to my ex in my head. The ex who I didn’t love but loved. This isn't meant to be a locus of indictment, it said. It's not your fault it's mine. I should have been happy and with you, not trying to be with you and trying to be happy.

I didn’t feel better, but I felt better. I felt exhausted and faraway. Wide awake I called an hour out to tell her I was soon coming. I could imagine the look on her face as the line lay silent. When I arrived she came up to the car and gave me a hug. A gorgeous house, far from everything. Her Dad walked toward me, I recognized him. I had forgotten in my haste that she would be surrounded by family. Jesus. Nervousness manifesting itself in meekness. I averted my eyes.

“Well now isn’t this a surprise. Hello son, we’ve heard a lot about you.” He stuck out his strong hand. “Come in, have a drink. Y’hungry?” The house was magnanimous, wide windows opening out onto a resplendent spread of mountains. She sat next to me on the sofa while the others busied themselves in the kitchen.

“Where’s Dennis Rodman,” she whispered.

“Left him with Bellamy. Where’s the rest of your family, I thought this was a reunion.”

“They headed out this morning. Reunion was only last week. The rest of the time it’s just us.”

Her father entered with a tray of iced tea. I thanked him, eyes lowered. He sat down looking relaxed and powerful. “I hear you’re going to school. What are you studying?”

I confessed that I didn’t know.

“Then what’s the point of school?”

“I was figuring I’d find something remunerative once I had a basic degree.”

He smiled and eyed his daughter. A reprove? The intricate silences of familial language.

“Well it’s a pleasure to meet you. A surprise pleasure.” Everyone smiled. Oh, her smile...

“We’ve sure got plenty of room,” her mother said, gliding in with a tall dark drink of unknown provenance. She sat demurely, ankles crossed exactingly, upright looking right at me and smiled the smile she’d given her daughter. “Do you ride horses?”

“Horses?”

An hour later we were horseback and gone on a dusty trail in the wilderness. Her mother, brother, niece, and I: feeling nervous and sick at first which gave way to the primeval rhythm of the thing and my mind began to chart off on its usual peregrinations. It’s not often anymore I sit astride a creature without breasts. Or this much hair… Good riddance. Horses, like most of the earth’s beasts do not lie. Save one, said Twain, or was that blush?

“His name is Tio,” said a little voice. The niece, but I did not hear. “Because he is the color of a tea.” I was daydreaming, the turn inward that only great western sights can bring about.

Such a nice red house. Such gorgeous country. Such a gorgeous girl, riding up ahead, her hair bouncing fluidly across her shoulders. She had given me a puzzling look but she didn’t ask me to leave. Although I had practically invited myself over. Perhaps it would have been rude to ask me to leave. Rude of me to show up like this. But I wanted to see her. Needed to see her. To tell her… what? Perhaps I was trying too hard. Perhaps this wasn’t right. I surveyed the hillside.

We rounded a switchback in the pass and the view beyond the heavenstretched branches of the cool fragrant trees reached towards the infinite west. High lonesome, they call it. Clear air and empty sky and I, staring into space in some private world of words. I could tell her about the story, my success...

When we returned to the house her brother and sister-in-law busied themselves banging pots and giggling in the wide kitchen, nominally preparing dinner. Her mother stole away muttering something about taking a nap. Liberation hits you when it hits you. Alone, together, down the narrow hall she pressed me to the wall with a soft thud and kissed me hard. I put my hand on her breast and she moaned in my mouth. We fall into a dark white room and she locks the door behind us and pushes me onto a yielding squishy bed. Imagine a smiling crowd waving happy happy goodbyes.

I slept better than I have ever slept. I dreamed clearer than I have ever dreamed. I was riding a horse with Burroughs and all the west was made of letters. We had written it. There I was, asleep young and beside the beautiful girl, and I was her father too, old and balanced, balancing, and I was the earth and the trees and the horse and Burroughs and he said “I’ll show them something to remember” and I woke with the morning sun filling the bedroom like a cathedral, and I remembered sad things far away from me, and went happily back to sleep.

Go west young man and see everything that you can see. See the clouds from above and the clouds from below and see the wonder of the end in sight and know that fear, it is the end. Don’t be afraid. Sometimes you know what will happen before it happens. You know?