Jamira is maybe in her thirties, I don’t know. She’s mentioned ‘my babies’ a few times, so I know her at least to be a mother. But ‘black don’t crack’ as the saying goes, so, with her flawless mocha skin, her age is of mystery to me. I like her youthfulness, though—the other tillers at the Chevron are stubbornly white-haired and have white-hair proclivities. John—who I like—has his homespun aphorisms, my favorite being:
Me: How are you this fine day, John?
John: (halfway drawling) Well, been shot at and missed, been shit at and hit.
Both afford me free coffee on the regular seeing as I go to the Chevron near daily for my Brazilian medium-roast, every other day for my smokes. I’ve put Jamira to the test: upon entering the store and announcing that it is, indeed, a ‘good morning’, I ask her, “So what am I getting?”
Jamira likes this game, though she gets it wrong every time. “Wait, wait—don’t tell me!” and she scans the cigarette display for my brand, which is bottom shelf and to the left. Every single time she hovers over the Cowboy Killers, which are top shelf, before invariably settling on the silver Marlboro lights: “These ones!” I shake my head. “C’mon, Jamira—I told you it’s the ones Kurt Cobain smoked.” (I found out this factoid in one of my internet searches of Kurt—we share the same DSM-V diagnosis and brand of cigarettes apparently).
“Ah—here you go!” and she plucks the Newport 100s from their place on the display. (I learned to smoke 100s at Casa Palmera because with only five cigarette breaks a day, one cigarette per session, you needed a longer smoke. Never have I seen people so eager to hit off re-frys as I did at Casa. Take away substance, addicts need SOMEthing and cigarettes do the trick).
“That’s the one, Jamira” and she smiles pretty. She’s got the best white-toothed grin this side of Cheshire, and lashes that are almost unnaturally long (they’re real, though). Jamira always wears a head wrap so I haven’t seen her hair, still I know it to be short. Her wrap resembles a Sikh turban—maybe it is, our conversations haven’t wandered into theological territory yet—with a large knot in front.
“Someday, I’ll getchoo,” she says, and I trust she will. An impulse comes over me.
“Jamira, I’m going to hazard a guess here,” I say as I pass her my monies, and she raises an eyebrow while still punching keys.
“Mmmmhmm..”
“You’re a singer aren’t you?” She looks up and Cheshire grins again.
It’s a writer’s intuition. ‘The human-sense antennae’ David Foster Wallace called it, as if we were an army of intelligible ants with probing feelers a-twitch, sussing out the people-scape with the energy of a thousand solar cells. Twitch twitch. Mary Wells face. Twitch. Sonorous speaking voice. Twitch. Would look natural as a Vandella or Supreme behind an RCA ribbon microphone. Twitch, twitch. Jamira.
You know, my favorite word—or at least among my favorite words—is ‘sonder’. It’s one of those terms that succinctly labels an inclination or feeling, in this case the ‘realization that each passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.’ Sonder is engine to my writing, an innate curiosity for people, which eventually and inevitably makes its way onto the page. If I’ve sketched you, it’s because I’ve taken the moment to ponder you the manner in which an artist contemplates a subject, clothed or no. That human-sense antennae furiously at play, sending sensorial details by way of synaptic connection to the brain, at first feeling out gestalt, then deconstructing a subject into its sum parts. Like a leafcutter ant segmenting a leaf into convenient triangles, something mandibular, it’s parsing a person into digestible pieces. Do they smell of bergamot? Have a Brobdingnagian nose? Do they gesture with brio? What, when riding a lift, would their “elevator story” be? That is, how would they, in between the lobby and desired floor, take twenty seconds to describe themselves?
“My name is Jamira, and I’m a singer.”
I know this. I’ve got a nose for such things. Comes from eschewing television for the sake of real-life interaction. The sun, after all, “don’t shine in your TV,” and I prefer color to Technicolor. Cathode projections of people can’t compare to the original. We are light, but not the synchronized lights of cinematic monochromes. I mean, was Humphrey Bogart’s coat brown in ‘Casablanca’? I don’t know, but I know Jamira wears a burgundy polo. It says ‘Speedee Mart’, but I can just as easily imagine her, knowing her in real life, wearing a maxi-dress and regency gloves, and clutching a ribbon mic.
Jamira doesn’t say, “How did you guess?” which I had expected. Instead, she steps back from the register and tells me that, once in a drive-thru, she was awarded the same assumption. ‘There’s the singer!’ Four faces pressed through the fast-food window. ‘You’re the singer! We know it! You’re the singer!’
“Somehow, they could guess through the intercom by my voice!” Jamira exclaims.
“So, I was right!” I cooly remark. I want her to break out in song—this was an ulterior motive of mine—but she doesn’t. She tells me what I know, and what I confirm: that people exude things, like she exudes the spirit of a songstress even with lips sealed. Rarely are people completely je no se qua—if your antennae are properly on point, people reveal their essence. Some people read auras—I’m apparently ‘yellow’ so it’s been said, something ebullient—some people read eyes, which is helpful in this time of masks and Pandemia. I read voices, which is why I’m so quick to lure people into conversation. How they say things as much as what things they say. This is how my friend Billie read me from across the room at group therapy, knew instantly that I am bipolar. “Game recognizes game,” he famously says, and I—in turn—am radar to his manias. Just like Jenny can tell instantly if I have been imbibing, I know when Billie is riding the fulgurations of an electrical storm. Also, addicts know each other. Simple as that. There are tells. Why Residence counselors are famously shrewd, particularly if they’ve had the sickness. Of course, it doesn’t take having cancer to be an oncologist, but you know a counselor is legit and worth their mettle if they in turn fly the junkie flag. They are the best counselors. Try and pull your usual rhetorical tricks on them and you may as well be lying with a polygraph sensor directly affixed to your tongue.
(Addicts are at heart liars. We gaslight as second nature, even if we don’t intend to. A recovering addict is simply an addict that has taken up truth-saying for a change, a reverse Apostle Peter, denial something en absentia. Why the First Step, though only 8.5% of the Program, is in fact 90% of the journey).
Jamira is a singer. I’m a writer. And we are evident to each other. “I knew you’s write something,” Jamira says when I reveal my occupation, “You look like it.” I get it all the time. I’m either a ‘writer’ or a ‘professor’. My coats don’t sport elbow patches, so it’s usually the former. I don’t mind the professor label, though, seeing as professors are part and parcel to the pedagogy and I am a pedant for sure. No one guesses I spent twenty years as a zookeeper, though. I have an out of place penguin tattooed among my lithographical ink, but this is in no way a tell (it IS a Picasso after all, so it matches the gallery of High Moderns which decorate my forearms). I don’t talk like a zookeeper; don’t dress the mode—no lifestyle REI for me, no North Face; and aside from the Picasso, don’t wear badges of service like the ubiquitous dolphin pendant and/or ring (or ankle tattoo—every blond wet-suited trainer at SeaWorld sported the ankle tattoo). Being a zookeeper remains my curveball reveal, but let me around your animals and you will see the St. Francis come out. There’s a particular brand of sonder reserved for fauna alone.
A man waits, maybe impatiently, behind me at the Chevron Speedee Mart, so unfortunately Jamira and I wrap up our conversation, and unfortunately without her showcasing her pipes. Maybe if I show Jamira I’ve written about her, she’ll sing for me. People have mixed reactions to being written about or being watched, why, David Foster Wallace argues, people sometimes evade the human sense-antennae and hunker in their living rooms to watch television. They swat away pesky feelers and watch something that cannot in turn watch them back. It is the safest voyeurism, watching television. Writers on the other hand can be very dangerous, transgressive even. “Don’t fuck with a writer—we will describe you,” the saying goes. (Once I posted this as a veiled threat to someone on the interwebs. They recognized they were a potential target, and pensively asked, “Do I need to lawyer up?” I digress). I’m mostly harmless, though: I, reminiscent of David Sedaris, collect stories like a “friendly little junkman” and deliver them as would a wet raccoon with half a frog in its mouth, depositing them here and there for the consumption.
Maybe Jamira will like my story. I’d certainly love to hear a note or two.
“Where are you?” you may ask, though you have my mailing address and I have yours.
I ask the same question most every day. Not out of geographic curiosity. I know where you are and I’ve an idea of what your walls may look like: the beds, the barracks. The sea of prison blue. I know you’re situated in the middle of King’s County with a sky that must be devastatingly incredible.
I’ve driven the 5 a few times over in the time you’ve been gone and have seen the tired pistoning of oil pumps; the ruminative cattle; and the white, white haze which seems to jump senses into whiter noise.
“It’s my family.” I sat on the stoop, shoulders with Maggie, attempting to tell her, exactly, why life had, through the course of one phone call, suddenly changed.
“Family? When is it NOT family,” Mags said in return, shaking back her sleeves and lighting a cigarette.
Twenty hours prior, we had exchanged surprise at the fifth of Amsterdam Maggie had secreted in a potted ficus, yet somehow forgotten during the course of a mutually attended wedding reception. Like goldfish we had disremembered our aqueous surroundings: our friend David’s wedding was on the water, and Maggie and I were aquarium drinking. There was a photo of us taken on a short pier, me and Mags seemingly in deep philosophical discussion, but most likely discussing the particular economy involved in sharing a surprise fifth, we smoking with abandon, our last cigarettes.
Maggie wore black to David’s wedding because although David remained one of her favorite ‘Goys’, to Maggie weddings were on par with Shiva calls. She always wore Onassis sunglasses, especially when ‘I do’s’ were said, a widower’s affect despite not being a widow. She drug around her ex-husband’s last name, though, as if holding on to the dead like an odious and ill-expired pet, taxidermied and talismanic in the corner.
This is not chosen.
Maggie was herself seemingly always sitting Shiva, her own divorce something of funereal gloom and requiring shrouded wedding photos; since the divorce, funerals and weddings were all the same to her, attended with equal distaste and with equal aperitif of vodka. All vows were requiems; all requiems were ‘Well, thank God that’s over’; life was just the something in-between.
She was the first person I called upon receiving the news.
I’m writing this letter. I need for you to hear me, or at least the story of the past three years–those you spent within labyrinthine corridors of concrete. Consider me a conduit. When lightning strikes a tree, its fires are shot through a thousand tissues and limbs fall in beautiful wreckage and the ground crackles a hundred feet around. In the end, the tree bears a scar and it continues wrapping rings of growth around its most blackened parts. The tree keeps growing but it will always have, coiled in its history, proof of its damage.
‘Hang in there’ was something Mags would never have said to me, and God help me were I to ever say as much to her.
‘Hang in there with what—a fucking noose?’
Maggie reserved her gallows humor for any day the executioner’s hood threatened a particular and existential menace. By this metric, her bed may as well been built over two trapdoor flaps, headboard at their join. Every day she wore black in presage of a coffin and the billowier her shroud the better—like Death, just pret a porter and without the scythe.
“My brother was arrested.”
“Ok.”
Maggie smoothed out her dress, a Guatemalan print still wrinkled and maybe half-dry.
“Ok,” she said again, her Sag Harbor accent more prominent this time, and she leveled out the lap of her dress until it was in a neat triangle across her knees.
“Does he have a lawyer.” Maggie had placed her cigarette to the side, needing two hands to fix her skirt; she recollected her American Spirit from its perch on the stairs. We were sitting outside, the same stairs she had mounted just minutes earlier with crossed-arms and ever-present dark glasses.
It may have been the odd first question, not a query into the nature of the arrest, or an inquiry into my wellbeing. Was I upset? Else perversely vindicated of any criminal excess I had participated in over the weekend? Mags and I were both still riding vapors of the night prior, the effluvium of surfeit vodka seemingly present and, back inside, my bedsheets were colored by a night’s worth of near malarial sweat. Maggie had more to drink than I did at the wedding, but by contrast was already properly coifed and perfumed, tight curls dried to her forehead like a magisterial wig.
The last time I sped through King’s County was with Bradley in a U-Haul truck. A trailer shimmied behind us bearing a vintage car and three bristling, sleep-deprived cats. The cab smelled of Kamel Reds and spent coffee cups. By mid-morning, just beyond the King’s County HP Station and directly beyond the rutted half-roads which finger out into the farmers’ fields, I felt I couldn’t concentrate any longer on the highway lines. We pulled over and slept on the grass beneath these wispy clouds that promised an unerringly still, cricket-shivering night. Brad slept on the trailer rig and, when he awoke, pointed out that I had slept in the grass beneath a sign reading: ‘Dog Lawn.’
“Does he have a lawyer,” she said matter-of-factly, and not as question.
Maggie and I both knew, contrary to American judicial practice that we were all—and without need for trial—guilty of something. Innocence was reserved for children and cats. Maggie’s Talmudic learnings plead otherwise, (and she herself was a social-justice warrior—her collected poems speaking to that end) but Maggie was wizened, jaded, fresh off a nasty divorce. To her, life had become unfair and only explicable if everyone shared in a free-floating and collective blame. You couldn’t exactly call Maggie a nihilist; still she wore black to weddings.
And she knew that what everyone needed sometimes was just a really good fucking lawyer.
“I don’t know,” I said rubbing my eyes. “I just found out. He was probably in the back of a police car when Dave was cutting the cake.” I borrowed Maggie’s cigarette and took a draw.
“My mom called,” I said exhaling, “Which means my brother’s already past his jailhouse phone call.” I handed the cigarette back. I still hadn’t showered.
“I mean, I’m sure Mom wasn’t the first one he called upon being brought in. Probably the last person he wanted to talk to.” I crossed my arms while waving away the smoke. “I’m guessing he’s out on bail.”
I thought of you arriving at Avenal, looking up from your handcuff-fisted lap, and seeing stark blue lights against a long-ignored landscape.
Maggie finally asked: “What’d he do?” She looked straight ahead, having worked backwards from her initial question. Mags was the barrister in reverse and, with her black robes, presumed judge, too. I stopped my hand from stupidly waving and inserted it into an armpit. I turned to her with one eye squinted.
“Mom said he thought I’d have known.”
“Known what?” Mags wasn’t impatient, but rather soft in her questioning, dissolving me of complicity before I could place my own self in manacles.
I didn’t answer, not directly. Instead, I turned again to look straight ahead, parallel to Maggie’s’ gaze. I changed the subject.
“You know, I finished ‘American Psycho’ this morning. Ain’t that some fucked up timing,” I snorted. We stared at the street while Mags extinguished her cigarette. A jogger labored past, out of breath.
“Is your brother a psycho?” Maggie deadpanned, still working backwards with her line of questioning.
“Naw. But he is American, so there’s that.”
We’ve both ushered that fire into the ground in different ways, but both bear darkened rings. We’ve both been conduits and have had the lawn throw up sparks beneath our feet. We’ve both had fire run through us, and wait for the ground to speak its response.
Maggie allowed a half-smile. In her less sober moments, which were many, she’d throw on a Clash record and shout along with Joe Strummer: ‘I’m so bo-ooored with the USA!’, just replacing ‘bored’ with ‘scared’. These words she’d shout with expatriate gusto as if her garden gate was border enough to keep out the America she sometimes forswore.
Mags was a raucous rabble-rouser, yet still privately scared of her own rebellion. She was convinced her phone was tapped and that the FBI had a file on her six inches thick. “Fuck the police!” was one of her war cries. “Fuck the Man! Fuck a duck!”
“My brother hit a woman over the head with a rock, Maggie. On a greenbelt. He wanted to drag her into the bushes and—” I couldn’t finish. I scratched my head and blanched at the words. I widened my eyes to rid them of disbelief.
I borrowed Mags’ smoke again. She had lit a second one already.
“Then again, Maggie, I dunno. Maybe he is psycho. On top of being American.”
I’m damaged. You are damaged.
Maggie simply nodded and placed her hand reassuringly on my knee as I blew smoke.
Maggie and I lived in North Park, perhaps a mile apart, and though San Diego spans a 100-mile stretch of shoreline, there are islands in the median, one of which Mags and I inhabited. We were just shy of Balboa Park’s arcaded museums. and regardless of our proximity, we drove cars to see each other. It was like living in Los Angeles, this automobile existence of ours, but without the accompanying road rage.
The first and last prisons built in California reside on the US-Mexico border. If the federal penal system could extend its reach into the Tijuana pleasure-lands, it would, depositing prisons like unwanted cargo just past the border checkpoints. As it stands, San Diego is where Father Junipero Serra built the first Presidio before heading North, waving judicial crucifixes at ‘savages’ and proselytizing others.
Since Serra days, the penal state has extended a thousand miles north, then back, so that at journeyed loop, there lies the last presidio, Donovan Correctional Facility. It is a concrete structure, Class III-IV, parked above CA on one face, MX the other. It can’t go further either way, and bulldozers scape the face of the hill where Donovan perches tenuously. There’s a watershed amphitheater down the canyon to one side and a landfill on the other. A mile distant is an amusement park.
Donovan holds Sirhan Sirhan, a Menendez Brother, also one of the Toolbox Killers—all Los Angelenos with varying and gruesome psychopathy, all somehow housed in the same penitential block. The lot are three hundred miles away from their respective crime scenes–the Toolbox Killers’ gore-theater in the Cleveland Forest being in my opinion the worst—and now all are granted concertina views of Mexico here in California’s fairest climate, an imperfect justice at the end of the Golden State Penal Road. My brother almost wound up there.
Maggie’s boyfriend Christopher—her ostensible boyfriend as the two had only pressed palms against bulletproof glass, else talked on jailhouse phones—resided meanwhile in Corcoran State Prison.
Christopher had been serving time in the Hole—an extended stay—for having too many postage stamps on his person (!). This in a facility where, across the yard, Charles Manson lived in a lush solitary all his own, free to write as many lettered manifestos as he pleased, relative to his notoriety.
Maggie’s boyfriend, Christopher, meekly ran a poetry press from his cell. He was made medicinally servile by the lithium he was prescribed, weakened as well by years of meth abuse up and down the Southwest Sudafed Highway. He was a three-time loser, owlish in his spectacles and with jaundiced eyes; slight of frame; and pompadoured like a jailbird Elvis. When the volume of Christopher’s correspondence became suddenly suspect, he was kicked to the Hole—this somewhere roundabout the time that Mansons’ third—fourth? —parole hearing was being televised.
In the Hole, precious bodily fluid can’t be wasted on postage stamps, so Maggie—by default—ran Christopher’s press en absentia, dutifully licking envelopes and resuming correspondence where Christopher had left off (Christopher’s Rolodex certainly less impressive, less shambolic than Manson’s). It was never talked about that Christopher may also have been dealing drugs during his Corcoran stay. It was easier to just imagine his crime involved going postal, so to speak.
Maggie poured the scotch and we’re sitting on the back porch, which a friend of hers had fenced in with cheap lattice-work lumber, all to hem in the cat and otherwise give the ipoema a place to root, violet flowers sinking into wood, providing cover, but reducing everything to splinters in the meanwhile.
“What is this?” I jogged a pill in my hand, white and nondescript.
Maggie rearranged her limbs to approximate queenliness. She had a crack in her glasses.
“A downer, I think?”
“Percoset?”
“I dunno. Let’s try.”
I shrugged. Mags had a boom-box playing a bluegrass version of Pink Floyd. I swallowed the pill with a hit of Dewar’s.
“Why—Mags—are your glasses cracked?” The Prayer Flags behind her were aged, evaporated with either over- or underuse, and there were two Guatemalan dresses left to dry in the evening air. Big purple blossoms broke the lattice-work balcony, blue in the evening-set, and ‘Comfortably Numb’ played, uncomfortably, on fiddle.
“I was so depressed today; and I got a second psychiatrist. I was prescribed something new and I literally hit the wall.” She shook the rocks in her drink. “I mean, I fucking fell down.”
“Do your psychiatrists know about each other?”
“By name—shu-ure.”
“You really shouldn’t be mixing your meds,” I said, irony train neatly docking into station. The downer coursed my system, leaving behind a shivery wake. I fingered one of Maggie’s poetry books, which lay discarded on the patio table.
“Mayakovsky clutched a rivet, only the rivet metamorphosed into a gun pointing straight at his heart: Art”.
Maggie literally wrote poetry to save her life when life was an otherwise confusion of conflicting meds and medicated conflict.
During Maggie’s divorce, when existence was the figurative wall she crashed into, and not the literal one that cracked her glasses, she wrote a book called ‘7th Circle’. It is a slim-spined collection of poems about suicides; she had sublimated her pain into researching and writing various pieces on Mayakovsky, Jean Seberg, George Trakl, Diane Arbus. It won the San Diego Book Award for poetry.
Despite having narrowly avoided the Seventh Circle herself, she still says: “I can’t fucking take it anymoire.”
“I know Mags, I know.” On cue, ‘Comfortably Numb’ stopped playing.
Maggie slept with a gun in her handbasket next to the bed, paranoid, anxious; she had a confusion of prescriptions, but always a neat handle of scotch in the pantry. I knew because I unpacked it for her when I helped her move. Also, we hit it often when communally writing poetry, else editing other poets’ work. She was a mess and I was fast becoming one, all this speed and slowness, the cigarettes and pills; the walking into walls.
Maggie called life ‘Continuous Performance’, and that’s what it is, that’s what it was.
Brother…
Sometimes I spent the night at Mags’ when the gun was too present in the handbasket, when she was drunk and scared; when I would sleep chastely in her bed, wrapping my arms around her, she the Maude to my Harold, the tobacco present on her dressing gown. I’d lie awake and smell her lavender and love her to sleep.
She had a boyfriend in prison; I had a brother in prison, and we’d fall asleep lotus-eaters, shot through with pathos, rocks settling in the bedside scotch.
I remember when Christopher was released for a brief time and how he held forum at Maggie’s house in front of an ashtray. He was smoking a long and almost effeminately thin joint. Which was “safe” he confided, because “California only looks for uppers in my system.” His hands were strange deep-sea jellyfish, fingers not unlike wavering tentacles. “California is a river of blue, ” he said tapping out an ash, “It is punctuated by a braking of bus wheels and penitentiary-blue lights.”
A wave of the hand, a drag on the tightly-rolled cigarette. “California is blue.” He looked pleased because, above all, he was a poet.
This all happened before and after 9/11. On 9/11, Maggie and I traded a bottle of wine back and forth on her bed and watched the news, saw the Trade Centers fall in occasional time-elapse, like films of flowers speeding to the ground.
“I always hated those buildings,” Mags said, handing me back the bottle of wine, but with tears in her eyes. She was a true New Yorker. Christopher had yet to emerge from the Hole and my brother was just skulking the greenbelts in practice-walks for his later crime. Maggie had vases of yarrow on her bedside, and rosebuds. We were both fiercely against the New Cold War and fiercely into drink.
I don’t know who said: “We deserve this, don’t we?”
And it may have been a personal revelation, on a duvet, in a house with a TV and with buildings falling down, or it may have been a revolutionary statement.
As Maggie wrote:
‘A Gestapo agent pointed to Guernica and asked:/ Did you do this? /No—you did’
We may have had Mexican food that night. I vaguely remember. I just remember falling down in the restaurant and saying, “It’s all my fault” like a building crumpling, like a spent flower.
Christopher was released from the Hole before my brother rode the sea of penitentiary blue. Christopher attended my wedding even—eight months following Tower One’s collapse—as Maggie’s date. And my brother was there, too, hands folded in lap in some premonitory idea of manacles, while my wife and I released butterflies into the June malaise. Both Christopher and my brother would soon ride buses to penitentiary—in Christopher’s case, for the fourth go-round—near the same time.
Anyways, I thought of Christopher there on that dog-piss grass: I saw him last in the SD Jail. Maggie sobbed in the periphery of the visiting room and I took up the phone that lay unceremoniously on the steel-grey table. I picked up the receiver and looked at Christopher behind the glass–he was all slicked-back hair and waxed moustache; he wore a tight-lipped expression. By his admission, he was on a diet of heavy metals and liver medication. He wore thick glasses, which made his eyes look disproportionately huge and wallowy in the otherwise context of grey brick and cold, cold light. Maggie sobbed, and she sobbed. I held the phone to my ear and didn’t know a goddamn thing to say. “Take care of Maggie,” Christopher had a habit of saying during his brief foray out of penitentiary, which I should have taken as premonition.
Christopher was picked up outside a house in La Jolla Farms, high on meth, having attempted to break into a house with clearly lit home burglary system alarms. He was seated calmly on the sidewalk in front of the estate smoking a cigarette in laconic fashion while flashing lights and a waiting pair of handcuffs coursed his way.
My brother, meanwhile, was found with blood on his shoes, walking in a daze after his victim had successfully fought him off. He had an unworn ski mask and a pair of scissors. He wielded other accouterments, too, he later told me, but he never revealed what. The full inventory must be recorded in some police ledger or stenographic receipt somewhere but I don’t have a transcript of his trial: I just don’t know, and some details are superfluous anyway.
To wit: I wore a black suit with a red shirt the only time I visited my brother at Avenal. I had IHOP for breakfast: buttermilk pancakes, black coffee, and two Vicodin Maggie had lent me for the occasion. Everywhere there were oil pumps in various stages of deterioration, piston heads slumped in mechanical inebriation, disused, rusted, their heyday sup of premium crude having long since been polluted with brackish transudation, a great and rusted machinery stopped. The fields were fallow and run through with weed-choked irrigation ditches. The suit which I caught sight of in the IHOP plate glass was the same I had been married in. My shirt was an otherwise feint at insouciance, a vintage find with a large collar worn unbuttoned at the neck.
I was being an asshole. My visit was not so much out of compassion, and I hedged on it even being an obligation. No: I had come for my brother’s birthright. He was the eldest, the forever good son, and I had always been the black sheep—as evidenced even by my choice of black gabardine that day. I wanted to prove that after years in second place, my mere existence outside prison walls won me the favorite son pelt: I was Jacob, and my brother in his stupid penitentiary orange was Esau. Maybe he wore penitentiary green. Again, some details are superfluous. I just remember my brother ate from the vending machines in the visiting room, fingers childishly stained with orange Cheeto dust, and I felt a snarling superiority. My fingers were clean, my shoes unbloodied. “Free, white, and 21,” as Maggie would always say, free in the sense I had virgin wrists, unlike my brother and Christopher whose wrists had been defiled by the snapping of cuffs, their hands literally tied courtesy of the penal system in the great and golden state of Californ-i-a.
I first met Christopher on the phone 3(?) years ago when he corrected my pronunciation of Greek poet Yannis Ritsos. And here we were again–on the phone, but face-to-face. “Thom, take care,” he said. “Take care of M.” I took care of Maggie by kissing her in some hopeless manner on the cheek, and leading her out of the Piranesi-inspired civic building, phone hung-up and Christopher disappeared.
In jail as in prison everything watches you. Elevators only open up to narrow corridors, there are mirrors everywhere. In penitentiary, there are gates upon gates, like steel sentinels, and guards finger their clubs. It’s a matter of guilt by association. Like Maggie said: ‘Everyone needs a good fucking lawyer,” even if there’s no blood on your shoes or if your system is clean of what the system says you can’t have. You’re just guilty for living, guilty by association, even if you haven’t been tried and accused of anything. We’re all guilty, and sometimes we sit on a curb waiting for the guillotine of justice to drop while waiting outside a burgled house, high on Sudafed, or wandering a greenbelt with spatters of Type O negative on our boot-tip.
We’re all guilty. We’re all guilty.
At the Poetry Awards, Mags gripped my arm with nervous strength. A crooked arm flexed.
“I doin’t know,” she said, unsure if she should be here, there.
I kissed her cheek.
“Of course you should be here.”
We drank white wine and hid behind the junipers. When she was in her married house, citrus hedges hemmed in the home, and the wood was dark. Maggie always hid. Her current house was of a strange snail-shell design, her bed in the middle of a coil with an incongruent sunroof, briars out front. She decorated her windows with velvet draperies to hide in midday dark. She hid behind damask and dark sunglasses and drink.
“You ok?”
“Just noivous.”
She shouldn’t have been. She won. Maggie Jaffe for ‘7th Circle.’
I run too fast
I fly too high
I hit too hard
Too wide my eyes
Too full my heart.
Too deep the pain.
In the bathroom of the SD Jail I held her. She was in front of a mirror, red-eyed and cursing. There were so many cameras and squinched-in seats and phones and iron-greys; so many cramped elevators and narrow corridors and convex watching glasses; so many forms and disparaging looks; so much free-floating guilt.
She hunched over the counter with red-rimmed eyes, hands trembling, and her shoulder blades were butterfly-like when racked with sobs, pumping like wings.
“I just can’t take it anymoire,” she cried, jaggedly, and it was about being watched while simultaneously watching over, this curious opticon of prison existence where everyone is assumed guilty and no one is innocent.
“I just can’t take it.”
“I just. Can’t take it.”
“It’s alright, Mags. Let’s go home. I’ll drive.”
I’ve not seen Christopher in a long time—he’s above the law, I think—but while traversing King’s County, a short drive away from the tired city you’ve called home for the past few years–I thought of you arriving at Avenal, looking up from your handcuff-fisted lap, and seeing stark blue lights against a long-ignored landscape.
Maggie–she once told told me about Mayakovsky: how he left his wife because an admirer had, at an intellectual’s party, recited–word for word–the full extent of his 900 line opus. Mayakovsky left his wife to embrace this young admirer. Still–a few years later, he took a gun to his head and left the girl with 900 lines of regret.
As I mentioned, Maggie wrote ‘7th Circle’—a poetry cycle on famous suicides—to stave off her own ideation. I never knew how she planned to do it, whether her ideation was of the passive variety—wanting to just never wake up—or something of greater tenacity: a ravaging of the ulnar, a bullet to the corpus. It’s said a book is more satisfying if one knows its end before its beginning, in which case Mags may have found the thought of a premeditated death preferable to the sturm und drang of life’s opening chapters. Regardless she persisted, never mind her self-annihilative bent. The scotch was always quick to empty, the ice cubes retaining right angles in depleted tumblers. Following Christopher’s departure into the seeming ether—a skipped bail, an assumed return to his home state of Arkansas—Maggie grew more despondent. Then her mother died.
“And now my sister wants to fucking sit Shiva!” Maggie said, slamming her tumbler down on the counter, the amber having been drained.
“My fucking sister!” Maggie pulled on yellow latex gloves to scrub the dishes, which looked ridiculous relative to the pima of her Peruvian dress.
Maggie balled these dresses up in lingerie wash bags, then hung them up still wrinkled to dry off on the back porch. The back porch, despite Maggie’s best efforts, was overrun with morning glory and brugmansia. Poison blossoms, she remarked— “Like a fun tea!” (She was at Woodstock after all).
“Shiva! My goy sister!”
And Maggie furiously scrubbed a dish, which was barely tainted by her lunch. A faux scampi, and sesame-crumbed seitan. Clean food, clean plates.
I held her cat while across the room and glanced at a bulletin board Maggie had constructed. It detailed what birds she’d seen, and where. That sapsucker in Slovakia, the ravens in DC.
“The fucking nerve!”
Maggie scrubbed her ashtray, even after two cigarettes, and placed every clean plate in the dish holder beneath the kitchen window.
“My mutha never worried about me, goddammit. And now I’m supposed to sit in a goddamn room with towels over the fucking mirrors, because now my goddamn sister—my fucked up oldah sister wants Shiva for the mom…for my mom…” She slumped at the kitchen counter.
Despite everything, the cat purred. He was a Norwegian Forest Tabby and preferred clutching your shoulder versus remaining curled in your lap.
“It’s ok, Mags.”
“I’m just tired of being the responsible one, Thawm,” she cried, “Look what happens when you’re the one who was supposed to be ok.”
“’S’alright Mags. I love you. Want me to water your plants?”
I put the cat down, his padded feet thudding on the hardwood floor. He walked away pretendingly nonplussed, the way cats do with ears still held back.
Watering the plants would only encourage the morning glory, but the offer stood. Maggie sobbed, not for the first time or last, while I unraveled the hose from beneath the back stoop and made sure the door was closed so that only I—not the cat nor anything else got out.
Brother–we’ve both ushered fire into the ground in different ways, but both bear darkened rings. We’ve both been conduits and have had the lawn throw up sparks beneath our feet. We’ve both had fire run through us, and wait for the ground to speak its response.
Fire begets earth as everything fire touches is reduced to ash, ash which in turn becomes dirt. Maggie was fiery, but never a phoenix. She was too splenetic, earth her resting spot. She was to never resurrect, never fly away in a theater of flame. Like my brother in his cold expanse of cinder block, her humor was of a bilious nature, black, and she was forever trapped in between a particular melancholy and an autumnal light, a sun eternally setting in its low arc. Leaves crisped around her; the handles of Dewar’s seemingly disappeared themselves. I never knew Maggie not in a prison, whether by tumbler or tumble. Occasionally she’d pretend free, laughing with her head back, making a coyote howl at the ceiling: A-Wooooooo! Then she’d sigh her customary refrain: “Well, fuck a duck,” this her version of ‘and so it goes.’
And so it went. Mags and I eventually parted ways. I had a box of our small press poetry stolen out of my car and scattered to the four winds; some of the poems were returned by a Good Samaritan who collected them from gutters and crosswalks, irreparably marked with tire marks and asphalt grime. Maggie was displeased.
“Why the fuck were they in your CAR in the first place?”
(We had been behind in our correspondences and my apartment couldn’t house all the boxes of manuscript—my trunk doubled as a portable attic).
I was contrite—to a point. Maggie hadn’t done much of the editing work and, having succumbed to a melancholia and alcoholism rivaling Maggie’s, I followed her implied stage direction: <exeunt>. My exit corresponded with my brother’s exit from the penitentiary, surely a swinging wide of gates beneath the glare of cold cathodes and a winking sun; I imagine him a blinking thing, stock still—bovine in repose—staring incredulously at the blue sky. Free. Free save for the guilt, that pernicious guilt we all harbor.
“It’s weirdly beautiful,” Maggie remarked, hand clutched around the bottle of Alexander Valley chardonnay. “Never did like those buildings,” she sighed handing the bottle to me. The TV flickered its reports, the World Trade Center towers at first whole, then leveled upon next report.
Maggie was sad. I lifted the bottle to my lips without wiping the neck. We were side by side on the bed, linens bundled at our feet. The cat was a study in indifference.
“Mags?”
“Hmm?” She was falling inside of herself, I could tell. I just rest my head on her shoulder.
We resumed watching the buildings go down in a wreck of dust and concrete, the papery aftermath of dossiers and fax sheets floating light despite the heaviness of everything—this stupid stupid detritus, which caught the sun when you wished to God, you wished to God, things didn’t look so beautiful in their descent.
Maxine “Maggie” Jaffe made her last descent on March 5, 2011, succumbing to a tenacious form of cancer. She was 62. She is the author of ‘Continuous Performance’, ‘How the West Was Won’, ‘7th Circle’, ‘The Prisons’, and ‘Flick(s): Poetic Interrogations of American Cinema She is missed.
My brother is alive and well, living in the Midwest with his wife and daughter. He is fully reformed and dedicated to his current line of work helping others.
A poem, a song. DaVinci was a musician and arranged the loaves of bread in ‘The Last Supper’ to equate music notes. Bach wrote code into his music to spell out praises. Beethoven was deaf, but he told stories anyways knowing he would never hear them.
“Tell me a story.”
Imagine those first stories around a pit-fire. Mastodons and arrows, legit heart-racing stories about survival, and techtonic shift.
Imagine as the fire dies, the word being the one thing that still exists.
“Tell me a story.”
A poem, a song. Rauschenberg said: I work in the gap between life and art. Maybe that was Jasper Johns.
Andy Warhol offered up a soup can; Jackson Pollock painted his subconscious and was entirely brave for doing so.
“Tell me a story,” my son says to me. I keep the tradition alive. We are all stories.
“Where are you?” you may ask, though you have my mailing address and I have yours.
I ask the same question most every day. Not out of geographic curiosity. I know where you are and I’ve an idea of what your walls may look like: the beds, the barracks. The sea of prison blue. I know you’re situated in the middle of King’s County with a sky that must be devastatingly incredible.
I’ve driven the 5 a few times over in the time you’ve been gone and have seen the tired pistoning of oil pumps; the ruminative cattle; and the white, white haze which seems to jump senses into whiter noise.
“It’s my family.” I sat on the stoop, shoulders with Maggie, attempting to tell her, exactly, why life had, through the course of one phone call, suddenly changed.
“Family? When is it NOT family,” Mags said in return, shaking back her sleeves and lighting a cigarette.
Twenty hours prior, we had exchanged surprise at the fifth of Amsterdam Maggie had secreted in a potted ficus, yet somehow forgotten during the course of a mutually attended wedding reception. Like goldfish we had disremembered our aqueous surroundings: David’s wedding was on the water, and we were aquarium drinking. There was a photo of us taken on a short pier, me and Mags seemingly in deep philosophical discussion, but most likely discussing the particular economy involved in sharing a surprise fifth–an odd number to split on the even—and she, smoking with abandon, her last cigarettes.
Maggie wore black to David’s wedding, because although David remained one of her favorite ‘Goys’, to Maggie weddings were on par with Shiva calls. She always wore Onassis sunglasses, especially when ‘I do’s’ were said, a widower’s affect despite not being a widow. She drug around her ex-husband’s last name, though, as if holding on to the dead like an odious and ill-expired pet, taxidermied and talismanic in the corner.
This is not chosen.
Maggie was herself seemingly always sitting Shiva, her own divorce something of funereal gloom and requiring shrouded wedding photos; since the divorce, funerals and weddings were all the same to her, attended with equal distaste and with equal aperitif of vodka, a bottle of which she carried in her clutch to mediate her more dour tendencies. All vows were requiems; all requiems were ‘Well, thank God that’s over’; life was just the something in-between.
She was the first person I called upon receiving the news.
I’m writing this letter. I need for you to hear me, or at least the story of the past three years–those you spent within labyrinthine corridors of concrete. Consider me a conduit. When lightning strikes a tree, its fires are shot through a thousand tissues and limbs fall in beautiful wreckage and the ground crackles a hundred feet around. In the end, the tree bears a scar and it continues wrapping rings of growth around its most blackened parts. The tree keeps growing but it will always have, coiled in its history, proof of its damage.
‘Hang in there’ was something Mags would never have said to me, and God help me were I to ever say as much to her.
‘Hang in there with what—a fucking noose?’
Maggie reserved her gallows humor for any day the executioner’s hood had any particular and existential menace. By this metric, her bed may as well been built over two trapdoor flaps, headboard at their join. Every day she wore black in presage of a coffin and the billowier her shroud the better—like Death, just ecumenical and without the scythe.
“My brother was arrested.”
“Ok.”
Maggie smoothed out her dress, a Guatemalan print still wrinkled and maybe half-dry.
“Ok,” she said again, her Sag Harbor accent more prominent this time, and she leveled out the lap of her dress until it was in a neat triangle across her knees.
“Does he have a lawyer.” Maggie had placed her cigarette to the side, needing two hands to fix her skirt; she recollected her American Spirit from ash-headed perch on the stairs. We were sitting outside, the same stairs she had mounted just minutes earlier with crossed-arms and ever-present dark glasses.
It may have been the odd first question, not a query into the nature of the arrest, or inquiry into my wellbeing. Was I upset? Else perversely vindicated of any criminal excess I had participated in that weekend? Mags and I were both still riding vapors of the night prior, the effluvium of surfeit vodka seemingly present. If not present, at the very least coloring the bedsheets I’d left unmade back inside, me having been near malarial with sweat. Maggie certainly had more than I did the night prior, but by contrast was already properly coifed and perfumed, tight curls dried to her forehead like a magisterial wig.
The last time I sped through King’s County was with Bradley in a U-Haul truck. A trailer shimmied behind us bearing a vintage car and three bristling, sleep-deprived cats. The cab smelled of Kamel Reds and spent coffee cups. By mid-morning, just beyond the King’s County HP Station and directly beyond the rutted half-roads which finger out into the farmers’ fields, I felt I couldn’t concentrate any longer on the highway lines. We pulled over and slept on the grass beneath these wispy clouds that promised an unerringly still, cricket-shivering night. Brad slept on the trailer rig and, when he awoke, pointed out that I had slept in the grass beneath a sign reading: ‘Dog Lawn.’
“Does he have a lawyer,” she said matter-of-factly, and not as question.
Maggie and I both knew, contrary to American judiciary standard, that we were all—and without courtroom session necessary—guilty of something or other, no need for trial. Innocence was reserved for children and cats. Maggie’s Talmudic learnings plead otherwise, and she herself was a social-justice warrior—her collected poetry spoke to that end—but Maggie was wisened, jaded, fresh off a nasty divorce.
To her, life had become unfair, or at least only comprehensible if everyone shared in a free-floating and collective blame. You couldn’t exactly call Maggie a nihilist; still she wore black to weddings.
And she knew that what everyone needed, sometimes, was just a really good fucking lawyer.
“I don’t know,” I said rubbing my eyes. “I just found out. He was probably in the back of a police car when Dave was cutting the cake.” I borrowed Maggie’s cigarette and took a draw.
“My mom called,” I said exhaling, “Which means my brother’s already past his jailhouse phone call.” I handed the cigarette back. I still hadn’t showered.
“I mean, I’m sure Mom wasn’t the first one he called upon being brought in. Probably the last person he wanted to talk to.” I crossed my arms while waving away the smoke. “I’m guessing he’s out on bail.”
I thought of you arriving at Avenal, looking up from your handcuff-fisted lap, and seeing stark blue lights against a long-ignored landscape.
Maggie finally asked: “What’d he do?” She looked straight ahead, working backwards from her initial question. Mags was the esquire in reverse and, with black robes, presumed judge, too. I stopped my hand from stupidly waving and inserted it into an armpit. I turned to her with one eye squinted.
“Mom said he thought I’d have known.”
“Known what?” Mags wasn’t impatient, but rather soft in her questioning, dissolving me of complicity before I could place my own self in manacles.
I didn’t answer, not directly. Instead, I turned again to look straight ahead, parallel to Maggie’s’ gaze. I changed the subject.
“You know, I finished ‘American Psycho’ this morning. Ain’t that some fucked up timing,” I snorted. We stared at the street while Mags extinguished her cigarette. A jogger labored past, out of breath.
“Is your brother a psycho?” Maggie deadpanned, still working backwards with her line of questioning.
“Naw. But he is American, so there’s that.”
We’ve both ushered that fire into the ground in different ways, but both bear darkened rings. We’ve both been conduits and have had the lawn throw up sparks beneath our feet. We’ve both had fire run through us, and wait for the ground to speak its response.
Maggie allowed a half-smile. In her less sober moments, which were many, she’d throw on a Clash record and shout along with Joe Strummer: ‘I’m so bo-ooored with the USA!’, just replacing ‘bored’ with ‘scared’. These words she’d shout with expatriate gusto as if her garden gate was border enough to keep out the particular stars and stripes she eschewed on her own freak flag.
Mags was a raucous rabble-rouser, yet still privately scared of her own rebellion. She was convinced her phone was tapped and that the FBI had a file on her six inches thick. “Fuck the police!” was one of her war cries. “Fuck the Man! Fuck a duck!”
“My brother hit a woman over the head with a rock, Maggie. On a greenbelt. He wanted to drag her into the bushes and cut off her panties as trophy.” I scratched my head and blanched at the word ‘panties.’ I widened my eyes to rid them of disbelief.
I borrowed Mags’ smoke again. She had lit a second one already.
“Then again, Maggie, I dunno. Maybe he is psycho. On top of being American.”
I’m damaged. You are damaged.
Maggie simply nodded and placed her hand reassuringly on my knee as I blew smoke.
__________________________________________
Maggie and I lived in North Park, perhaps a mile apart, and though San Diego spans a 100-mile stretch of shoreline, there are densely populated islands in the median, one of which Mags and I inhabited, just shy of Balboa Park’s arcaded museums. Regardless of proximity, we drove cars to see each other. It was like living in Los Angeles, but with greater sun-bronzed apathy. The coastal architecture was made up of disused naval ships instead of gantries, and culture less varied than one would expect from a border town.
The first and last prisons built in California reside on the US-Mexico border. If the federal penal system could extend its reach into the Tijuana pleasure-lands, it would, depositing prisons like unwanted cargo just past the border checkpoints. As it stands, San Diego is where Father Junipero Serra built the first Presidio before heading North, waving judicial crucifixes at ‘savages’ and proselytizing others.
Since Serra days, the state has extended a thousand miles north, then back, so that at journeyed loop, there is also the last presidio, Donovan Correctional Facility, a concrete structure, Class III-IV, parked above CA on one face, MX the other. It can’t go further either way, and bulldozers scape the face of the hill where Donovan perches tenuously. There’s a watershed amphitheater down the canyon to one side and a landfill on the other. A mile distant is an amusement park.
Donovan holds Sirhan Sirhan, a Menendez Brother, also one of the Toolbox Killers—all Los Angelenos with varying and gruesome psychopathy, all somehow housed in the same penitential block and classified equally despite the disparate sufferings of their victims. They’re all three hundred miles away from their respective crime scenes–the Toolbox Killers’ gore-theater in the Cleveland Forest being the worst—and now all are granted cinder block views of Mexico, in California’s fairest climate, all imperfect justice at the end of the Golden State Penal road. My brother almost wound up there.
Maggie’s boyfriend—her ostensible boyfriend—as they’d only pressed palms against bulletproof glass, else talked on jailhouse phones, resided meanwhile in Corcoran.
He’d been serving time in the hole—an extended stay—for having too many postage stamps on his person; this in a facility where, across the yard, Charles Manson lived in a lush solitary all his own, free to write as many lettered manifestos as he pleased, relative to his notoriety.
Maggie’s boyfriend, Christopher, ran a poetry press from his cell, and was made medicinally contrite, weakened by the lithium he was prescribed, otherwise ravaged by years of meth abuse up and down the SW Sudafed Highway. He was a three-time loser, owlish in his spectacles and with jaundiced eyes; sleight of frame; and sporting slick-backed hair. When the volume of Christopher’s correspondence became suddenly suspect, he was kicked to the Hole—this somewhere roundabout the time that Mansons’ third—fourth?—parole hearing was being televised.
There are no flashbulbs in the Hole, no video cameras, and precious bodily fluid certainly can’t be wasted on postage stamps, so Maggie—by default—ran Christopher’s press en absentia, dutifully licking envelopes and resuming correspondence where Christopher had left off, his Rolodex certainly less impressive, less shambolic than Manson’s. It was never talked about that Christopher may also have been dealing drugs during his Corcoran stay. It was easier to imagine his crime involved going postal, so to speak.
Maggie pours the scotch and we’re sitting on the back porch, which a friend of hers has fenced in with cheap lattice-work lumber, all to hem in the cat and otherwise give the ipoema a place to root, violet flowers sinking into wood, providing cover, but reducing everything to splinters in the meanwhile.
“What is this?” I jog a pill in my hand, white and nondescript.
Maggie rearranges her limbs to approximate queenliness. She has a crack in her glasses.
“A downer, I think?”
“Percoset?”
“I dunno. Let’s try.”
I shrug. Mags has a boom-box playing a bluegrass version of Pink Floyd. I swallow the pill with a hit of Dewar’s.
“Why—Mags—are your glasses cracked?” The Prayer Flags behind her are aged, evaporated with either over- or underuse, and there are two Guatemalan dresses left to dry in the evening air. Big purple blossoms break the lattice-work balcony, blue in the evening-set, and ‘Comfortably Numb’ plays, uncomfortably, on fiddle.
“I was so depressed today; and I got a second psychiatrist. I was prescribed something new and I literally hit the wall.” She shakes the rocks in her drink. “I mean, I fucking fell down.”
“Do your psychiatrists know about each other?”
“By name—shu-ure.”
“You really shouldn’t be mixing your meds,” I said, irony train neatly docking into station. The downer coursed my system, leaving behind a shivery wake. I fingered one of Maggie’s poetry books, which lay discarded on the patio table.
“Mayakovsky clutched a rivet, only the rivet metamorphosed into a gun pointing straight at his heart: Art”.
Maggie literally wrote poetry to save her life when life was an otherwise confusion of conflicting meds and medicated conflict.
During Maggie’s divorce, when existence was the figurative wall she crashed into, and not the literal one that cracked her glasses, she wrote a book called ‘7th Circle’. It is a slim-spined collection of poems about suicides; she had sublimated her pain into researching and writing various pieces on Mayakovsky, Jean Seberg, George Trakl, Diane Arbus. It won the San Diego Book Award for poetry.
Despite having narrowly avoided the Seventh Circle herself, still she says: “I can’t fucking take it anymoire.”
“I know Mags, I know.” On cue, ‘Comfortably Numb’ stops playing.
Maggie slept with a gun in her handbasket next to the bed, paranoid, anxious; she had a confusion of prescriptions, but always a neat handle of scotch in the pantry. I know because I unpacked it for her when I helped her move. Also, we hit it often when communally writing poetry, else editing other poets’ work. She was a mess and I was fast becoming one, all this speed and slowness, the cigarettes and pills; the walking into walls.
Maggie called life ‘Continuous Performance’, and that’s what it is, that’s what it was.
Brother…
Sometimes I spent the night at Mags’ when the gun was too present in the handbasket, when she was drunk and scared; when I would sleep chastely in her bed, wrapping my arms around her, she the Maude to my Harold, the tobacco present on her dressing gown. I’d lie awake and smell her lavender and love her to sleep.
She had a boyfriend in prison; I had a brother in prison, and we’d fall asleep lotus-eaters, shot through with pathos, rocks settling in the bedside scotch.
I remember when Christopher was released for a brief time and how he held forum at Maggie’s house in front of an ashtray. He was smoking a long and almost effeminately thin joint. Which was “safe” he confided, because “California only looks for uppers in my system.” His hands were strange deep-sea jellyfish, fingers not unlike wavering tentacles. “California is a river of blue, ” he said tapping out an ash, “It is punctuated by a braking of bus wheels and penitentiary-blue lights.”
A wave of the hand, a drag on the tightly-rolled cigarette. “California is blue.” He looked pleased because, above all, he was a poet.
This all happened before and after 9/11. On 9/11, Maggie and I traded a bottle of wine back and forth on her bed and watched the news, saw the Trade Centers fall in occasional time-elapse, like films of flowers speeding to the ground.
“I always hated those buildings,” Mags said, handing me back the bottle of wine, but with tears in her eyes. She was a true New Yorker. Christopher had yet to emerge from the Hole and my brother was just skulking the greenbelts in practice-walks for his later crime. Maggie had vases of yarrow on her bedside, and rosebuds. We were both fiercely against the New Cold War and fiercely into drink.
I don’t know who said: “We deserve this, don’t we?”
And it may have been a personal revelation, on a duvet, in a house with a TV and with buildings falling down, or it may have been a revolutionary statement.
As Maggie wrote:
‘A Gestapo agent pointed to Guernica and asked/:Did you do this?/No—you did’
We may have had Mexican food that night. I vaguely remember. I just remember falling down in the restaurant and saying, “It’s all my fault” like a building crumpling, like a spent flower.
____________________________________________
Christopher was released from the Hole before my brother rode the sea of penitentiary blue. Christopher attended my wedding even—eight months following Tower One’s collapse—as Maggie’s date. And my brother was there, too, hands folded in lap in some premonitory idea of manacles, while my wife and I released butterflies into the June malaise. Both Christopher and my brother would soon ride buses to penitentiary—in Christopher’s case, for the fourth go-round—near the same time.
Anyways, I thought of Christopher there on that dog-piss grass: I saw him last in the SD Jail. Maggie sobbed in the periphery of the visiting room and I took up the phone that lay unceremoniously on the steel-grey table. I picked up the receiver and looked at Christopher behind the glass–he was all slicked-back hair and waxed moustache; he wore a tight-lipped expression. By his admission, he was on a diet of heavy metals and liver medication. He wore thick glasses, which made his eyes look disproportionately huge and wallowy in the otherwise context of grey brick and cold, cold light. Maggie sobbed, and she sobbed. I held the phone to my ear and didn’t know a goddamn thing to say.
“Take care of Maggie,” Christopher had a habit of saying during his brief foray out of penitentiary, which I should have taken as premonition.
Christopher was picked up outside a house in La Jolla Farms, high on meth, having attempted to break into a house with clearly lit home burglary system alarms. He was seated calmly on the sidewalk in front of the estate smoking a cigarette in laconic fashion while flashing lights and a waiting pair of handcuffs coursed his way.
My brother, meanwhile, was found with blood on his shoes, walking in a daze after his victim had successfully fought him off. He had an unworn ski mask and a pair of scissors. He wielded other accouterments, too, he later told me, but he never revealed what. The full inventory must be recorded in some police ledger or stenographic receipt somewhere but I don’t have a transcript of his trial: I just don’t know, and some details are superfluous anyway.
To wit: I wore a black suit with a red shirt the only time I visited my brother at Avenal. I had IHOP for breakfast: buttermilk pancakes, black coffee, and two Vicodin Maggie had lent me for the occasion. Everywhere there were oil pumps in various stages of deterioration, piston heads slumped in mechanical inebriation, disused, rusted, their heyday sup of premium crude having long since been polluted with brackish transudation, a great and rusted machinery stopped. The fields were fallow and run through with weed-choked irrigation ditches. The suit which I caught sight of in the IHOP plate glass was the same I had been married in. My shirt was the otherwise feint at insouciance, a vintage find with a large collar worn unbuttoned at the neck. I was being an asshole. My visit was not so much out of compassion, and I hedged on it even being an obligation. No: I had come for my brother’s birthright. He was the eldest, the forever good son, and I had always been the black sheep—as evidenced even by my choice of black gabardine that day. I wanted to prove that after years in second place, my mere existence outside prison walls won me the favorite son pelt: I was Jacob, and my brother in his stupid penitentiary orange was Esau. Maybe he wore penitentiary green. Again, some details are superfluous. I just remember my brother ate from the vending machines in the visiting room, fingers childishly stained with orange Cheet-o dust, and I felt a snarling elitism. My fingers were clean, my shoes unbloodied. “Free, white, and 21,” as Maggie would always say, free in the sense I had virgin wrists, unlike my brother and Christopher, whose wrists had been defiled by the snapping of cuffs, their hands literally tied, manacled, courtesy of the penal system in the great and golden state Californ-i-a.
I first met Christopher on the phone 3(?) years ago when he corrected my pronunciation of Greek poet Yannis Ritsos. And here we were again–on the phone, but face-to-face. “Thom, take care,” he said. “Take care of M.” I took care of Maggie by kissing her in some hopeless manner on the cheek, and leading her out of the Piranesi-inspired civic building, phone hung-up and Christopher disappeared.
In jail as in prison everything watches you. Elevators only open up to narrow corridors, there are mirrors everywhere. In penitentiary, there are gates upon gates, like steel-braced grimaces, and guards finger their clubs. It’s a matter of guilt by association, like Maggie said: ‘Everyone needs a good fucking lawyer,” even if there’s no blood on your shoes or if your system is clean of what the system says you can’t have. You’re just guilty for living, guilty by association, even if you haven’t been tried and accused of anything. We’re all guilty, and sometimes we sit on a curb waiting for the guillotine of justice to drop while waiting outside a burgled house, either high on Sudafed or with spatters of O negative on our boot-tip.
We’re all guilty. We’re all guilty.
At the Poetry Awards, Mags gripped my arm with nervous strength. A crooked arm flexed.
“I doin’t know,” she said, unsure if she should be here, there.
I kissed her cheek.
“Of course you should be here.”
We drank white wine and hid behind the junipers. When she was in her married house, citrus hedges hemmed in the house, and the wood was dark. Maggie always hid. Her current house was of a strange snail-shell design, her bed in the middle of a coil with an incongruent sunroof, briars out front. She decorated her windows with velvet draperies to hide in midday dark. She hid behind damask and dark sunglasses and drink.
“You ok?”
“Just noivous.”
She shouldn’t have been. She won. Maggie Jaffe for ‘7th Circle.’
I run too fast
I fly too high
I hit to hard
Too wide my eyes
Too full my heart.
Too deep the pain.
In the bathroom of the SD Jail I held her. She was in front of a mirror, red-eyed and cursing. There were so many cameras and squinched-in seats and phones and iron-greys; so many cramped elevators and narrow corridors and convex watching glasses; so many forms and disparaging looks; so much free-floating guilt.
She hunched over the counter with red-rimmed eyes, hands trembling, and her shoulder blades were butterfly-like when racked with sobs, pumping like wings.
“I just can’t take it anymoire,” she cried, jaggedly, and it was about being watched while simultaneously watching over, this curious opticon of prison existence where everyone is assumed guilty and no one is innocent.
I meet Magnus today, who resembles at first Jonathan Franzen, were Franzen to be the unofficial fifth member of ABBA. And, as it so happens, Magnus is Scandinavian who just flew back from Sweden the night prior. He’s the librarian (“of sorts” he’ll be quick to add) at the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur. We both agree that flying is strange.
“This may be lore,” he says as introduction.
“Go on. I like stories.”
“Well it was during the Eisenhower years, chieftains of the Lakota tribe were flown into DC for a meeting over land. It’d been their first time in an airplane, right? When they were summoned to meet Congress, the chiefs said ‘we can’t talk or pow-wow right now. In six days, once our spirits catch up to us, then we can meet. That’s how I feel right now.” I laugh.
“That’s a great story. I don’t care if it’s true or not.”
Magnus has a cup of coffee and a slap-happy look suggesting that this noontime may as well be midnight.
“The TSA harassed me, you know. Said what was my occupation. I said ‘librarian.’ The agent looked up at me, put a finger to his lips, said ‘shhhh’, and handed me back my papers.”
I like Magnus immediately. And he has a quiet befitting of a librarian just without the air of taskmastery. There are flying mobiles and posters and books all around us, and this is the place where purportedly ‘nothing ever happens.’ But we continue talking, and at conversation’s end he hands me a card and says: “Send some of your writing to the Henry Miller Library,” and I am honored and glad to have met him. Things do happen here.
I have a few friends with restless leg syndrome, which is in reference to Willis-Ekbom disease. It causes unpleasant or uncomfortable sensations in the legs and an irresistible urge to move them.
Not me. Although I have the urge to walk everywhere, I have diagnosed myself instead with restless heart syndrome.
Over a prosciutto and gruyere sandwich, I espy the bookstore—Verbatim—where I have looked for Denis Johnson to no avail and where a man offers me a leather coat to sell at the Hunt and Gather.
“I’m looking for forty—if I get $40, I’ll give you twenty.”
“I can try, Man,” I say, “But I’ll just give you the $40.” He has no identification because most likely he has no address. I try and sell the coat for him—he found it on the street—to no reward, and I walk on.
People with faces—it is Sunday—and like a moving Seurat painting, they dot the street, faces moving with hats and without; it is cold and people wear coats.
I am overdressed. I wear a blazer, a chartreuse shirt, purple tie, and olive peacoat. I deny the weather for the sake of being dandy, dressing for a clime not my own but boasting grandiosity as I carry the whole of the world on my shoulders. The coffee was excellent, and I am sober. Roses, they are thrown for me.
How to describe this? This feeling. When it is, you discover the combination to a lock that has been locked for years—click—how to describe this?
I write funny words in my head: “penguin dust and roman coin soup”; I call my friends with abandon and kiss the old ones, Gidget who has visited with sleeves rolled up to reveal her sleeves, ink of phoenixes and naked women.
Mhuah,” she kisses me on the lips and I say, ‘Thank you,” for it is Sunday and there’s no need for coins in the meter and my sponsor has called me.
He wears a creaking leather jacket and an Unwritten Law tee-shirt: “it’s the law of eternal recurrence,” he might’ve said,” which is amor fati, and the fact that you wouldn’t have it any other way.
And I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
You use active, not passive voice in writing, and I write in present active in denial of the past, my restless heart my restless heart.
I had this art professor in college. He was Finnish, tall in stature and Scandinavian in every detail; regardless, he wore a NY Yankees ball cap for American affect. He was fond of teaching lines as something less than static, despite the fact that he curated a class on illustration.
“Lines are always moving,” he’d say, in a fjordland accent, his blond hair peaking out from beneath his cap. “Watch.” And he pressed play on a VCR to exhibit ‘Visite a Picasso’, a 1950 documentary done up in silence: a twenty minute time-lapse video of Picasso painting on glass. Every few minutes it’d seem as if Picasso had finished his piece, but then Picasso would change direction and paint over his old lines.
“Stop, stop,” a few students murmured as Picasso would seem to have settled on an image; Picasso would keep painting, though, to prove his near-aqueous mastery of lines, like a river re-carving its basin on the regular.
“So, you see,” my professor said, repeating himself, “Lines are always moving. Perspective is a constant and shifting thing.” He adjusted his Yankees cap, and scratched his jaw.
“What you need to do now is go outside. Watch how angles change once you approach them. Look at buildings, especially. Develop a language of lines.
“Come back in two hours and we’ll talk.”
I was dutiful to a point. I wandered the campus watching as angles changed the closer I approached them, how architecture would go from scalene to obtuse depending upon my approach. I’d back up a few paces and reimagine how a simple change in perspective could completely change the seemingly immutable.
I say I was dutiful to a point, because I never returned to class. At walk’s end was a cup of espresso, a scone, and an unlined sketchbook at the college coffee shop, where I sat scratching at paper.
“Lines are always moving,” my professor said, and—considering that true—even the definition of ‘line’ is a malleable thing. I stopped illustrating, began writing, where the idea of ‘lines’ are just as important.
My professor gave me the best advice by accident; now I do the same walks he inspired, just translating the scalene and obtuse angles into strings of words, always narrating, always developing a language of lines.
I keep my laptop plugged in next to my corner of the couch and, at night, it sits atop a milk-crate full of records. Some are new—Walkmen and National; there are some plastic-sleeved Smiths bootlegs; most are a bunch of thrift store finds, the Reddings, the Beatles, the Dylans. The milk-crate is perfumed, slightly, with attic effluvia.
If you know birds, you’ll know that to truffle their feathers is akin to taking in the comfortable smell of a hall closet, a wardrobe of old wool and mothballs. Musty, in a good sense. That’s how old records smell, too, else old books.
There’s some transference late at night, some communiqué between the records and the laptop.
When I needle Cayden to, please, just pick up a book, he’ll roll his eyes and unswervingly say: “But, Daddy—I’m moodern.” He prefers his electronics, the movie versions of things, all the things I eschewed as a kid while I plied through the 1958 Encyclopedia Brittanicas my parents had on hand. There was also the aged Merriam-Webster with its laminate thumb indexes. It teemed with silverfish, and silverfish: they live off of carbohydrates. The dictionary, having a thousand pages of starch, always proved good home and a constant buffet.
Cayden did read ‘The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe’, so he understands the figurative intrigue of closets at least, the cedar and mink and mothy perfumes that exist before fantastical exit out the back wall of cupboards.
But he doesn’t understand reading, has no patience for it. I mentioned transference, and despite not having kept company with silverfish, Cayde still manages to best me with knowledge he picks up from wherever the place.
Dylan jokes: are you with Pound or Eliot; Morrissey says Wilde is on his side while Keats and Yeats are on yours. Cayde announces: “I saw this on YouTube…”
Second bit of transference: because my laptop sits atop a basement supply of records, currently a pediment of Buffalo Springfield and John Lennon Live from NYC, I’ll occasionally open my laptop to write and a silverfish will fishtail across the QWERTY, probably having lived in the laptop for a night, confused at the lack of starch. Literal bugs in the system, probably transfused from some record or other, querying the silicon and CPU and assorted drivers.
I’m modern, too, Cayden; but I still keep company with the dictionary-eaters. We’ll both at some point win here.
I don’t know ASL, so I make the same sign for both statements. I raise an index finger and circle it front of my face. I stop, with my index finger pointed up, my thumb and middle finger in an ok sign, the whole hand gesture paused just in front of my mouth.
“Lemme tell you a story,” I say. “I have a plan.”
I have this friend, Janet. She’s Irish; she tells me I’m seanchai. I’m being lazy by not adding the appropriate accents where they need to go, but I figure Americans are naturally ignoring of these things and don’t care about accent marks. I also figure content is more important than form, so let me keep writing.
Janet—she’s my Mamo´. I’m not replacing my mom, certainly,–I love my Mom– but you pick up surrogates along the way who can help you in different ways. People gain in importance as you grow.
As any mom would do—these OTHER moms–they’ll grant you wisdom in their own graces.
Janet: see calls me ‘seanchai´’, which means ‘storyteller.’ She also calls me ‘Dutch Baby’, ‘Armadillo’, ‘Tin Man.’ We have lots of words for each other, and special names are the inheritance.
“Mamo´,” I tell Janet, while enjoying a coffee at my regular place, “I’m pretty happy right now.”
Janet used to live in Aspen. She was in a writing group with Leon Uris and Hunter S. Thompson. I say this perhaps loosely and braggardly. Janet—she just sees this as a fact of her existence. She sees this as fact of her life, and –yeah—any story involving the Dr. Thompson is a fun one. (I’m excited being runged one generation below her, that I’m one Kevin Bacon degree away from Thompson).
But Janet tells me she like facts. She was a journalist for thirty years. She has a way of erasing celebrity and talking about people as they are: just people.
She told Dr. Thompson to quit shooting his fecking rifle errantly, and out the window. Janet’s kid was going to school down the hill.
“Eh, I’ve never hit any one,” was his defense.
“What happens when you feckin’ do? When you do hurt someone?” Janet responded.
It was their last conversation, but Dr. Hunter S. Thompson stopped shooting his guns.
Janet will forgive me for sharing this fact.
“I have a plan.”
Again, this is where we tell each other stories, and sit opposite each other, the see-saw stalled. Mom, celebrity, starry-eyed-kid. Doesn’t matter who you are in this dizzy life.
Don’t shoot out the window. Keep telling stories. Seanchai´ like a guy that doesn’t eventually shoot himself in the chin.
Dr. Thompson wrote exactly one great thing, among all those things he wrote about being completely fucked out of his head and being in bat country. Clarity among the bats. I know Johnny Depp is the barometer of cool; he lived in Thompson’s attic, adopting Thompson’s accent when prepping for Gilliam’s version of ‘Fear and Loathing’. Depp is cool and all, but he beat his wife. And Thompson shot himself. Putting that aside for a second:
“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
What is winning?
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t it? And what is ‘winning?’
Mr. Dr. Thompson, I ask this everyday.
“Let me tell you a story.”
“I have a plan.”
I went to group therapy today. I’ve learned that I need a multiplicity of voices to make me feel better. And I thrive in a group setting where before the fact of any voice outside of my own would scare the shit outta me.
Last August I was hospitalized for my depression and anxiety. THERE. I said it. My big confession.
I told Jenn, “I don’t want my boys to see me like this.” ‘I went on a PR trip’ was the cover story. But really I laid in a hospital bed for six days thinking the worst while I reset my numbers to zero and with great intent at building them back to 100. I was inexplicably, without comment, disappeared. But better than a gun to the chin.
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson—I fucking beat you with an ace of spades.
You did your breakdown in LV; I bet against the house and got better.
Now, I meet and make new friends on the daily.
In therapy, in group there’s this white-board that has a list of questions. Rate your depression. Are you anxious? Etc.
I tell Billy, the counselor—“I’m excited to be here.”
I haven’t been able to go for a few months because my schedule has precluded it. I’ve been stuck working nights, raising penguin chicks. Which is a great imprisonment of schedule.
“Billy,” I say, “I love your board, but I’m passing tonight.”
Why quantify things, things 1-10 when you can better qualify it? I say:
And I read and talk with a voice that commands the room for a second, one I absolutely didn’t know I had. I point to everyone that has already spoken and I repeat their story and bring them into the story I am myself telling.
My friends Bill and Randall tell me, afterwards, “Dude—it’s not what you said, but how you said it. Form and content are THE rules of rhetoric.
Jenn is proud of this new voice of mine. We have a new habit. I’ll tuck her in, lay at the footboard while she gets tired on the pillows and I’ll talk and talk and talk while her eyes do their heavy thing.
I’ve always got a lot of writing to do.
Jenny says: “You know what Cayde said tonight?”
I smile, knowing it’ll be great before I know what it is he’s said.
“He said he was mad at you.”
Not new. Raising Cayde is playing chess with myself, and often no one earns check-mate.
“Go on,” I smile.
“He said,”Jenn yawns, “That he was mad at you for not being here tonight. He said that you’re the best daddy in the world and that he had no one to play Jeopardy with.”
“We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…”
Janet was an editor. Were she to still wield the red pen, and on my behalf; were she to still be telling Hunter S. Thompson to behave himself, she would change the ‘were’ to ‘are.’
“We ARE riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.”
I see my friend Jen today and she says, “Hello, you Brat.”
She’s inexplicably wearing sunglasses indoors because she’s pregnant and her body does funny things, and we all have to adjust to what it is, the funny things our bodies tell us to do to be normal. She is sitting on a chair and grips me around the waist while I give her a hug and kiss her on the head.
“Quit making me cry, Brat. Quit writing.”
“I’m never gonna stop making you cry, Lady.”
Don’t MAKE me put down that pen.
She’s my friend and, Man, do I have good friends. She’s gonna be a Momma and I’m SO happy for her.
I write on the keyboard, I write in my head. I write while I talk to Jenny as I put her to sleep. Weaving words always, and always happy.
Brother:
I had this art professor in college. He was Finnish, tall in stature and Scandinavian in every detail; regardless, he wore a NY Yankees ball cap for American affect. He was fond of teaching lines as something less than static, despite the fact that he curated a class on illustration.
Daddy, medium-well. 