She followed me back down the hill

babbling the whole while

I couldn't get rid of her

Then you woke up and nudged me right in the ribs

asked me why was I tossing and turning

I tried falling back asleep with no success

all I could think about was my lost whistle

A hole opened up in my chest

She

Him? No. Are you kidding? He'll wind up just like his father. You wait and see. Babbling away to himself in the corner of some motel lobby in Lubbock. They'll wonder where he came from. How he arrived. What he was doing in the middle of the day with no ID, no phone, no recollection whatsoever of who he was or where he was headed. They'll give him a bowl of soup and a job washing windows with a squeegee but he won't even last a day. You wait and see. He'll wind up just exactly like his old man. Dead on the side of the road with no witness. I can see it clear as day.

Majesty

(Highway 101 South) We stop in a place called Smith's in Paso Robles and order turkey gumbo soup and lemon meringue pie with black coffee. This ensemble somehow fits together although it sounds as though the tastes might clash. The theme from Godfather I is playing on the jukebox; very dreary and always reminds me of that shocking scene with the decapitated horse head. What goes on in Coppola's mind? How could a guy come up with that? You must have to be Sicilian or something. The skinny waitress here has the worst skin I've seen in a long, long time. She seems to be drowning in Clearasil, poor thing. Already suffering and she's barely sixteen. The decor in here is very weird: old-time meat hooks hanging from the ceiling, unless maybe they're ice hooks. Either way it's incongruous for a roadside cafe, it seems to me. After blowing laboriously on his gumbo soup, Dennis, out of the blue, starts telling me how his aunt had a stroke recently and can't remember the names of things. Some sort of aphasia or something. She seems to recognize the object itself but can't remember the correct name for it. Like door might become key in her mind or dog might turn into bug. Close but way off. I remember that happened to me once when I was a kid-not a stroke but the confusion about naming a thing. My mother became very alarmed about it and marched me over to the icebox. She threw the door open and began hauling out things like a cube of margarine, for instance, holding it up close to my face and demanding that I pronounce the name of it. I knew it wasn't butter because we never had butter but I couldn't remember the other name so I called it "majesty." I remember the panic on her face; as though she suddenly thought she had a cabbage-head for a son on top of everything else she was worried about like the old man and taxes and the price of milk. I think it may have also been the extreme heat back then. We were having one of those desert heat waves that summer where it would sit and swelter around a hundred and twelve at midnight for days on end. No rain. And this was in the time before air-conditioning was even thought of. The hills were all black and smoky from wildfires and when you breathed in you could taste the ash on the back of your tongue. At night I would have dreams where the clouds would just ignite into flames. Anyway, I don't know why it was I suddenly had this little spell of not knowing what to call things. It didn't last long but it was as strange to me as it must have been for my mother. I absolutely could not remember the name for margarine. That's all there was to it.

Bright Spots

Yet another frantic futile car alarm. Shrieking sequence. Vacuumed up the street. A long hollow moan like you're listening just after your heart stops cold. Somewhere above the body, looking down. Maybe on the ceiling. Sometimes I picture bright spots on roads way west. Clearings. Round bales and barns caved in from nothing more than time. That's all. Nothing more than wind and rain. No telling why these fleeting spots come surging up. Could be just the eyes aging. Spots and wriggles. Little white worms projected on the retina. Or maybe it's the mind hunting for another way out. Just seeking the blacktop once again. Flight, is all.

High Noon Moon

(Highway 152, continued) It got pitch black on the highway and the moon was cut in two. Dennis said it had to be right in between full and new; a kind of High Noon moon. Dennis has studied these things. We turned off 101 at El Capitan Beach, went under a viaduct, but couldn't find the ranch sign we were looking for. We stopped by a Little League baseball diamond and took a leak. (It must have been for Little League because the fences seemed short.) We pissed in silence. The moon was the only light around. We could hear the surf crashing out past the wooden bleachers but couldn't see the white breakers in the dark. I could picture them though and that seemed enough. The wind smelled like seaweed and dead fish. We piled back in the Chevy and finally found Doug's ranch two miles farther down the road. Doug was one of those guys I'd known from high school who'd wanted to train Thoroughbreds but wound up running a beat-up boarding stable out here on the edge of nowhere. We went into his kitchen and asked Doug's wife who had won the 49er-Giants game since we hadn't seen a TV in days. She was fixing salad at the sink and told us she was not a fan of baseball. We tried to explain it wasn't baseball but then quickly gave up on her. You could tell she already had her mind set against us and the bad influence we were about to bring on her husband. Then John and Dennis got involved in a card game with Doug around a heavy iron table with blue and yellow Moroccan tile on top and a bottle of light amber bourbon set next to a candle. I think it might have been Woodford Reserve. I'm sure it wasn't whiskey though because Doug made a big distinction between the two. He was quite the connoisseur about bourbon, saying it was in an entirely different class because of the Kentucky springwater it was made from. Same water that made the strong-boned racehorses that won the Kentucky Derby; fed from deep limestone aquifers that pulled calcium and mineral nutrients up through the bluegrass where the horses grazed and switched their long black tails. I remember as a kid wondering why in the racing program, every horse that seemed to win a major stake at Santa Anita was bred and raised in Kentucky. I'd never been east of the Mississippi, back then.

I had no interest in blackjack so I walked down to the stable under the cut moon and visited Doug's horses. A barn owl looked straight down at me from the rafters with his big white bib. A Tibetan monk once told me that the owl was a portent of death but I've never felt that way about owls. As I stared at the bright yellow eyes I realized it was a dummy, planted to scare away mice and varmints. It fooled me, that's for sure.

Next day, in L.A. we check into the Tropicana and call home. "Home." I'd forgotten about home. Reporting in to the women on our whereabouts. I'm not sure how curious they've been, to tell the truth. Quite possibly they were glad to get rid of us for a while. Here we are, the three of us in a room the size of a shoe box, taking turns on the phone; staring out through the sliding glass doors at the steaming swimming pool and the palm trees. My wife tells me that Marin and Sonoma counties have completely flooded. Three straight days of torrential rains. They're calling it a disaster zone in the news. Hard to believe since we hadn't experienced even a drizzle the whole way down. All the women and children are totally stranded on the second floor of the house with all the dogs. The basement is under three feet of water. After we hang up, John remembers his collection of rare pornography, his Time-Life historical photography books, and, of course, his precious Ansel Adams sitting on pine board shelves below the water level. He calls back and asks my wife to move them to a higher shelf since his wife would refuse to go anywhere near them. She tells him she's going to have to put on rubber boots and a bikini to get this done and what if the books were already completely ruined? She'd be wasting her time. John tells her he thinks they'll eventually dry out if she'd just please make the effort. He even offers to pay her. After he hangs up I suddenly remember the flood we'd had up there two or three years ago where one of the neighbors had been instantly electrocuted when she swung out of bed and hit the water with bare feet. An electric fan plugged into the wall was sending out a deadly current. I call back and tell my wife to make sure she checks the water first before stepping into it. She asks me how she's supposed to do that without getting a shock and I suggest she throw one of the dogs in and see what happens. Very funny, she says, and hangs up on me just like the Mexican women up in San Juan. Now Dennis calls home but there's no answer. He lets it ring for a long, long time. Now I remember that my family album from my dad's side of the family is also in the basement, probably well below flood level. Why would I suddenly feel this strange attachment toward these ancient crumbling brown photos of my great-grandmother sitting on a buckboard wagon behind two dark plow horses, struggling through deep mud somewhere in rural Illinois; my father as a little boy, no shirt, smiling brightly with a string of perch; my mother feeding pigeons from an army Jeep? But then I pull myself together and drop all these pictures in my head and see exactly what's right in front of me: our white feet on the green synthetic carpet, our empty hands, and our fatherless faces.

Orange Grove in My Past

I thought I had done my level best, done everything I possibly could, not to become my father. Gone out of my way in every department: changed my name, first and last, falsified my birth certificate, deliberately walked and swung my arms in exact counterpoint to the way he had; picked out clothing the opposite of what he would have worn, right down to the underwear; spoke without any trace of a Midwestern twang, never kicked a dog in the ribs, never lost my temper over inanimate objects, never again listened to Bing Crosby after Christmas of 1959, and never ever hit a woman in the face. I thought I had come a long way in reshaping my total persona. I had absolutely no idea who I was but I knew for sure I wasn't him.

Then, in the fall of '75, I discovered a bottle of Hornitos tequila; pure white, green label. I just stumbled across it like you do some women. I was swept off my feet. I became so completely enraptured that the rest of the world fell away and I never heard the pounding on my door until it was too late. As I reached for the knob to see who it was the entire door exploded and came off its hinges. My father crashed in through the splinters, face red, enraged, and threw me up against the wall. He demanded to know why I had forsaken him. Why I had trained myself to walk the way I did, speak the way I spoke, wear the kind of clothes I wore and why in the world I had never gotten married. My mouth was dry. I told him in a whisper that I had no answers to any of it. I had no reasons. I was as dumbfounded as he was. The red washed out of his face. He stood there and stared at me for a long time then a slight smile appeared but it wasn't for me. It was an "I'll be darned" kind of a smile and I half expected him to scratch his head but he didn't. He just turned and stood there with his back full to me and looked through the ripped-out door frame to the orange orchard across the road in perfect weedless rows. The sweet smell of the blossoms made me feel like throwing up. The perfume was everywhere that time of year. He walked away from me, straight toward the orange trees, and kept the same steady pace as he crossed the road. A car almost hit him but he never wavered. The driver leaned on the horn and kept it up all the way down to the highway. You could hear the horn fading away as my father disappeared between the trees.

Kingman, Arizona

(Andy Devine Boulevard) I distinctly remember Andy Devine on a little bay horse in the Rose Parade, back in 1950-something. He played a character called Jingles on black-and-white TV. A big convivial man, always grinning and waving. He'd cock his wrist on top of his immense belly and twiddle his fingers as though he were tickling you from a distance. The gesture was reminiscent of Oliver Hardy. In fact Andy could well have "borrowed" it from Oliver. They both had the same impish smile too. Andy was the proverbial sidekick and always rode between Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, who were very straight and proper; their fringed Western outfits pressed and glittering with rhinestones. They rode ramrod straight in their matching silver concho saddles while Andy slouched in his plain old bullhide one. I don't know if the slouch was put on or if it was an actual manifestation of his character but he seemed to enjoy being a sloppy guy. He liked his juxtaposition. He had a high squeaky voice that my uncle Buzz told me was the result of Andy's having accidentally swallowed a silver whistle when he was a kid. I always believed that story. Why not?

Van Horn, Texas

(Highway 10) Little waitress doesn't get it when I push my half-eaten steak away and ask her for dessert, that I really want dessert. She thinks there's something wrong with the steak. There's nothing wrong with the steak. I'm just ready for dessert. Another thing she doesn't get is that I have enough cash in my left boot right now to buy a small car or half the town and when I ask her if she wants to take a spin around the dusty block she doesn't understand that either. She thinks I have ulterior motives. I tell her I've just come from the "Land of Milk and Honey." She backs nervously away with my half-eaten steak on the plate and bumps right into the chef coming out of the swinging chrome doors of the kitchen. Chef wants to know what's wrong with my steak and I tell him nothing-nothing's wrong with the steak. All I want is dessert and she giggles as though the implication is that she's the "dessert" and the chef picks up on this and decides I'm seriously demented road trash and starts asking me to leave. I tell him I haven't finished my lunch yet and that I was very much looking forward to the butterscotch pie. He says the pies just came out of the oven and they're too hot to cut and I tell him I don't mind waiting but he says he can't cut into any of them because it would sacrifice the whole pie just trying to get a single slice out of it. I tell him, sometimes sacrifice is necessary. I can see them all steaming behind him on a Formica shelf; lined up like little locomotives-puffing away. He tells me it's going to take quite a while. It's going to be at least an hour. I tell him that's fine, I'll just go out and buy a paper and come back. I'll stroll around the town and take in the sights. He says there are no sights; there is no town. But I tell him I'm a big fan of desolation. I'm fascinated by the way things disintegrate; appear and disappear. The way something very prosperous and promising turns out to be disappointing and sad. The way people hang on in the middle of such obliteration and don't think twice about it. The way people just keep living their lives because they don't know what else to do. He says he has no time for small talk and leaves me staring at the sugar.

Mercenary Takes a Stab

at Self-Improvement

One day he thought he'd try to control his nagging tendencies toward anger and arrogance, cruelty and malice, by reminding himself that he wouldn't live forever and that everything he saw squirming in front of him would soon vanish from the earth. When that didn't work he tried allowing the sweet sensations of nature to penetrate his tough hide: glittering morning sunlight speckled through the drifting ginkgo leaves, for instance; the cool breeze playing across his ragged face; distant sounds of children rollicking in the schoolyard. When that didn't work he began conjuring up memories of sexual conquests, going clear back through his teenage years; girls came floating back to him; girls of all sizes, tinged now and then with the glowing aura of love. Whatever that was. What was that? Had he mistaken something temporarily ecstatic for something else? Something lasting? Or was he just getting all worked up in a lather of delusion? How easy it was to get carried away. Erection and all. When that seemed to lead nowhere he tried the old trick of total acceptance. Relinquishing completely to the two-sidedness of his nature. He bucked and whined through it. The warp and weave, as they say; trying to catch his balance, crashing then retrieving the old goose step as good as new. When that wore out he tried the impossible mental exercise of putting himself in the place of another; walking in their proverbial shoes; seeing the inevitable end of civilization through their eyes. The horror show with a twist, if you like. When all that finally failed he chopped off his left index finger just below the first knuckle after the manner of the Arapaho ritual of grief over ancestors lost in battle. He wrapped the gushing wound in oak leaves and held it high above his head, squeezing it tight with his right hand. His good hand. The hand he wrote with. He tried to restrain his breath from galloping away.

Interview in Cafe Pascual

So-sounds, say-favorite sounds.

Um-mockingbird. Meadowlark. Crickets, for sure. Distant hounds.

Hounds?

Yes.

Like dogs, you mean?

No, hounds.

In people's yards or what?

No, hunting. Chasing.

Game?

That's it. Wild things. Pigs mostly.

I see. And that reminds you of days gone by, does it?

Yes.

When was that? When were these days?

When I was a hunter.

Did you kill things back then?

Yes. I ate them.

Meat.

Yes.

How long ago was this?