Smoke

                 
cover photo: Stickmen of Cochise County - Marcia Ward 1981


                                        SMOKE
                     
                        as always
                          for Marcia

 In the late spring of 81, after the birth of my first son, I sell my house in Denver and most of my belongings. To kick off my quest to yet again reinvent myself, on a cerulean blue sky afternoon, in my South Pearl Street backyard, - “looking,” one might say, “for magic” - I fill a fifty-five gallon drum full of the paper ephemera of my youth - yearbooks, report cards, collegiate papers, incomplete stories and unfinished poems, squirt charcoal lighter fluid upon the to-be-deleted, and torch my paper trail. Bye-bye prep school, bye-bye teaching career, bye-bye lockets of former girlfriends’ hair. Fire often has a part in ritual - I am reminded of burning poems at my wedding ceremony under the very elm that shades me now- and I am unburdened as the smoke of my youthful dreams disperses upon rising into the unseasonable Chinook that blusters above. Ah, what’s the start of a road trip without smoky endings? 

The family - Marcia, me, our infant son Passion, and our more or less bearded collie Dylan Dog (her mother was a pure bred Old English Sheepdog, her father was a rake) – we spend a year traveling and living for varying lengths of time (a week here, a month there, a season or so somewhere else) at places as diverse as a campsite tent along The Blue River in the National Forest outside Arcada in Humboldt County California and a converted “mini-loft-like” garage in Austin Texas. We operate on whim and circumstance for thirteen months as we explore the West in my Dodge Tradesman van, looking for a place superior to Denver in a hipster sort of way, a place, which, by the way, we never do find.

 For reasons coincidental and some seven years in the making, Bisbee Arizona becomes home for the fall and the start of winter. Well, to be precise, Easy Acres outside Bisbee becomes home, and the setting for this story. My term of endearment for our new home site is Easy A.

 When we arrive in Bisbee after a summer’s meander in California, we wind up – through the machinations of the poetry world – with a September/October house sitting gig in a ramshackle old wooden miner’s kit house high on the cliffs just off of Oak Street. Mornings, over coffee, we look down on the town from our front porch, and I feel lucky and privileged to have such a poetic, cliff-dweller perspective; and when sunlight explodes atop the three metal roofs of the Cooper Queen hotel, I count as blessings the multitude of coincidences that brought me here. Simply said, Bisbee charms me and Marcia, and we embrace its drop-out underground art world, with Marcia scoring at The Barefoot Gallery on Review Alley an exhibition of her silver archival fine art photographs, Artists in Portrait, and me getting to host an ongoing poetry hour for Cochise County Public Access Cable Radio. Because we hope to stay through the winter, in order to land another rent-free, house-sitting gig (as opposed to joining and living like what we call the Stick People, a rag tag assemblage of artists, families and seekers who inhabit, camp-style, the nicer of the many abandoned and one room miner’s shacks that dot the landscape outside town and that date to the Phelps-Dodge boom times), we post a note on the community bulletin board outside the co-operative grocery on Miner’s Alley and wind up with an offer right up our alternative living style alley: free rent in a fairly new two bedroom air-conditioned trailer on Easy Acres - a small enclave of houses and trailers and campers ten miles south of Bisbee - in exchange for some care-taking, as in, watching after an elderly woman, Margaret, while her husband infrequently travels Cochise County on business.

 The brainchild of John Bible, a seventy-five year old scripture quoting poet partial to doggerel, the old testament, and iambic pentameter rhyming couplets, and the handiwork of John and his three sons, Easy A is a sixty acre rectangular patch of desert a mile or so off the blacktop on the way to Agua Prieta in Mexico. This high desert development sports two large, quite lovely adobe ranch houses, scores of undeveloped home-site lots, a relatively new double-wide trailer, an early 70s Winnebago, a camper atop the rear bed of an engineless Ford pick-up, possibly the largest empty blue-plastic tarp above ground pool west of the Mississippi, and innumerable yuccas, cholla cacti, prickly pear, tumbleweed, with a stray saguaro here and there, not to mention posses of arachnids and snakes, a javelina or two, and starry night skies so luminous that even Van Gogh could not paint them justly. Mr. Bible, a trader and entrepreneur and real estate speculator for many of his seventy-five years, had envisioned something a little grander when he built the first ranch house, his home, at Easy Acres years before- say: a suburban community of twenty or more homes - but no one (outside of one son) ever invested in his dream of modern living in the high country desert outback. Mark, the oldest of three brothers, who literally built with his own sweat and tons of cement the five bedroom ranch house across the road from his Dad’s house, had, with his wife and four daughters, long since departed Arizona, reducing the reality of John’s real estate scheme to nothing more than a Bible compound. A daughter-in-law, Connie, married to son number two, Matthew, a wanderer of an interstate trucker who spends most of his time on the road, she lives in the Winnebago when not couch-surfing with friends in Douglas where she works part time as a waitress. A third son Luke had not been back to Cochise County since being drafted early on during the Viet Nam War. If truth be told, most men would have a hard time living a Bible quoting father’s desert dream, no matter the love and kinship, and that now it is mostly just John and Margaret at Easy A is understandable.

 Mr. Bible owns a candy vending machine business with product placements in Tombstone, Sierra Vista, Douglas and Bisbee, and on the occasions when he makes his rounds to collect his coins and re-stock his merchandise, Marcia and I look in on and stay with Margaret, who is dying of cancer. Margaret is cranky – who wouldn’t be – and emotionally troubled. She fixates upon her speculation that when John is tending to his vending machines he is also stepping out on her. All the Bible men, all three of her sons and her husband, she gossips, are philanderers and rakes. Why else would John bother to perfume up before heading out! She has a nose, god damn-it, even if the narcotics she ingests have her eyes closed, dreaming away her pain and remaining time here on earth. She loves all four of the Bible men, but their place in the afterlife is a source of constant worry to her, given their historical lack of commitment to monogamy. These and other concerns (Connie is pilfering her meds, the Border Patrol is shooting javelinas for sport, and that her children will not be home for Thanksgiving) she voices to us whenever she is lucid enough to realize that John is gone and Marcia and I are there. 

Mostly Marcia and I keep to ourselves when we are home at Easy Acres, as do the Bibles. The November weather is rather perfect here in the autumn high desert with tolerably warm days and cool evenings. The atmosphere is empty and bright (you can not begin to count the stars at night) unless the wind is blowing north in our direction the noxious gritty dust of the copper smelter outside Agua Prieta. On the rare occasions when Easy A is perfectly downwind, freshly washed and bleached wet cotton diapers drying on a cloths line appear to rust.

 At eight months, our son Passion, his charms, and his needs consume our attention, and the bliss of being new parents trumps most of our anxiety about our unknown future. Even though The Great American Poem is not being written and Marcia’s film goes mostly unexposed, we are very busy and exceedingly happy in our parenthood roles. A transistor am radio informs us of the news of the world as well as the opportunity to sing along with the latest Tex-Mex country tunes. Not really accustomed to rural life, more so me than Marcia, trips to town for groceries, cultural events, and human exchange happen almost daily. Our itinerary often includes a draft beer at the bar inside the Copper Queen Hotel where I talk writing with the novelist tending bar there. The back and forth of Bisbee to Easy A in the van lends itself to our son’s napping; nonetheless, the ten mile beeline from our trailer to town is not without its dangers. You can’t imagine how many times, heading north towards Bisbee, we are pulled over, the contents of our vehicle eyeballed without benefit of warrant, and questioned by the State Police or the Border Patrol, as my Dodge Tradesman - with its Colorado license plate and sporting a long-haired driver – fits with the misinformed government profile of drug mule. There is a training school for narcs, federal and state, in Bisbee, and during my time here in Cochise County I’ll cross paths with undercover goons at the strangest of places: at the Food Co-op, in art galleries, at poetry readings. The day that the notice of Marcia’s show at Barefoot Gallery is mentioned in the Bisbee monthly rag, two different narcs, sniffing around for connections, visit while we are hanging our artwork. Both are as undercover as datura amidst red roses. So, outside of the drug snoops and the occasional smelter dust, life at Easy A is, as its name suggests, easy, and familial, albeit, Sam Shepard-ie and Fellini-esque.

 Thanksgiving, as it will, arrives. It is an unseasonably warm, summer-like day, windless and still and empty, its mood: like after a wrap on a set. Margaret’s wish that her sons be home for her last holiday meal is granted, a result of Connie’s letter writing and long distance phone call lobbying. Matthew’s big semi rig, a metallic blue cab and a silver trailer scars the high desert view parked as it is at the east end of Easy A. Mark and Matthew after rendezvousing in Tucson have driven the last leg home, together in Matt’s rig. The long lost Luke has driven a rental car from LA after flying from Tiniam in the far South Pacific where he lives with his Vietnamese wife and children. Luke’s rental is parked across the road in the two-car cement driveway of his brother Mark’s locked, shuttered, and drapes-drawn home.

 The Bible Thanksgiving, naturally, is a mixed bag of emotions - Margaret’s suffering diminishes any joy at long separated brothers reuniting – and the rendezvous is as sedate as John Bible’s No-alcohol-rule is strict, holding, as it does, even for holidays and family reunions although I’d wager there could be found some demon rum (most likely Mescal) if one were to snoop around Connie and Matt’s Winnebago, as I’d partied on a few occasions with Connie at the Copper Queen and had seen her swallow the worm more than once. Generally, we have little interchange with John and Margaret, unless John comes by to request a favor of us.

 This holiday morning, there is a note affixed to our front screen door inviting us for breakfast with the Bible clan. “Please, break your fast with the Bibles/ Grace at 8,” it reads.

 When we enter the Bible home, we meet Matthew, Mark and Luke for the first time. All three men are handsome and stud-ly, big like their father. Luke closely resembles his Dad in many respects. He is tall and broad and thick-haired, quarterback material, whereas Mark and Matthew are bald, stout and muscled, line-man material. When she comes in from the kitchen to greet us, Connie appears to have been crying – mascara doesn’t lie – but seems over her trouble now, as we bow our heads for John’s ritualistic saying of grace. It’s a ten minute thanks peppered with out of context Bible wisdoms and a few of John’s own, for instance: every six pack of beer purchased is a bag of cement not bought, a stern indictment in the form of an eye, a nod, to the houses Luke and Matthew have not built at Easy Acres. Because Margaret falls asleep during John’s rambling testified grace, Connie wheels her into the west bedroom. With Margaret out of sight I expect the mood to lighten slightly as I assume the brothers have a lot to tell each other about the last decade. I’m curious as hell as to the story of the shuttered mini-mansion across the road that Mark built and hope to shift the mood of things by bringing it up in conversation. Immediately, upon inquiry about the closed up ranch house, I am aware of an elephant in the room in the shape of Mark’s absent wife and children, when the senior Bible tells me, “The house is Mark’s but the contents belong to his ex-wife. And actually, Eddie, I have a favor to ask. Mark’s ex is on her way here, today, to move the furnishings from Mark’s house to her home in Las Vegas. She’s driving a U-Haul and she’s going to need help with moving her furniture and belongings. That’s where you come in. None of my sons will be lifting a finger to help that divorcee move. Not a hand or even a hello. We have shunned O’Shea for divorcing Mark. None of us will even speak to her when she arrives. I will pay you a hundred dollars to help her load the contents of the house into her truck."

 Well, I can hardly say “No” given the conditions of my rent-free arrangement with Mr. Bible. To share my good fortune and to secure an able hand to assist, I drive to the desert just north of what is affectionately referred to by locals as the Time Tunnel where I find a Stickman acquaintance by the name of Magic who agrees to help with the task for forty dollars. Magic, his wife and four year old daughter pile into my van and we drive back to await the arrival of John Bible’s former daughter-in-law on this great American holiday.

 At noon the largest U-haul that Douglas Arizona had to offer pulls up and parks in front of Mark’s house. O’Shea and all of her four daughters exit the cab and head straight for the Bible compound. Like O’Shea all four daughters are tall for their ages, self-assured, thin and blonde, five different takes on the same set of dominant genes. All have hair piled and pinned on the top of their heads and walk their western outfits like practiced runway models. A mother duck and ducklings come to mind as they cross the road. But as O’Shea gets close to the threshold of the Bible home, she is stopped short by Connie who comes out the front door to greet and deflect her. Connie leads O’Shea and her brood to the shade of the awning affixed to her Winnebago where the sisters-in-law engage in animated conversation. Connie appears sad and dramatically apologetic as she opens her hands in a gesture of I’m-sorry.-What-can-I-do? while O’Shea looks proud and unfazed by whatever it is that Connie is telling her. After their little confab has ended, Connie disappears into her trailer and O’Shea marches herself and her daughters in the direction of Magic and me. They troop and sashay past the Bible window through which can be seen all four Bible men whose prides have shunned O’Shea and her daughters. She stops, removes her oversized sunglasses, hanging them on her rhinestone necklace, plants her hands on her hips, and stares at the men - right through the men, if you will - before she and her daughters blow kisses at the Bibles.

 O’Shea introduces her self, and I note that she no longer uses Bible as her surname. “O’Shea Sullivan”, she says as she shakes my hand and flashes a Vegas showgirl smile in my direction. She has an Amazonian presence and physique. Her wow factor is off the charts. All four daughters have first and middle names as feisty and alluring as their mother’s: Cheyenne Sage, Carly Sue, Rosie Robin and Betty Anne.

 When I enter the house Mark built for the first time I am humored by the faux glitz and incongruous artworks of this high desert home. The furniture inside and the environment outside are an oxymoron. I mean, there are Remington sculpture knockoffs, Andy Wharhol lithographs, perhaps an unfinished O’Keefe and a Blumenshein Pueblo Taos oil amongst a half-dozen velvet Elis Preseleys, and dazzling chandeliers that look like they came out of a hotel, a suspicion that O’Shea confirms when she asks me to disconnect them from the ceiling and pack them. I also disconnect the fancy water fixtures (gold plated swan hot and cold faucets aside burnished copper mermaid spigots) in the kitchen and three bathrooms. There’s marble enough in the form of tables and pedestals to open a new gallery in Bisbee. There are five beds complete with canopies and netting. A total of six very large couches, a half dozen Lazyboy recliners, a slate dinning room table with enough chairs for the Last Supper, antique glass cabinets packed with Apple Blossom china, iron cooking ware, the largest refrigerator and freezer south of Tucson, and enough interior decorator accessories to fill completely the trailer of the U-Haul, a back-breaking task – no matter the ramp and hand truck – that takes Magic and I most of the afternoon. All this work we do as the Bibles go about their Thanksgiving feast pretending that O’Shea and her kids and Magic and I are not here across the road from them, working our asses off.

 When we finally empty the house of its belongings and lock the trailer door shut, I am exhausted, sore and hurting. Many of the items we moved were huge, cumbersome and heavy. When O’Shea tips both Magic and I with a hundred-dollar bill each, we are appreciative and thankful. Marcia, Magic’s wife and the kids join us and both Magic and I inhale the cold beer Marcia has brought. As we clang our empty bottles together in a belated toast to “All our hard work,” O’Shea announces that we missed something, for aside the east side of the house sits a rather un-artistic life size stone and faux stone bear and a large concrete birdbath. I cringe at the thought of trying to move this final quarter ton of marriage-gone-bust ephemera and take heart in my announcement that neither item can possibly fit in the U-haul, jammed full as it is.

 “That’s true, Eddie. But please, give me an hour and I’ll be back with the means to take them. I’ll be damned if those Bibles will take ownership of anything I bought during my marriage to that cheating son of a bitch.” And an hour later after a round trip run to Douglas, O’Shea is back and she’s towing a second small open U-haul that is attached to the rear of the main trailer. She also has a rolling dolly and two rectangular sections of ply wood which we use to move the bear and the birdbath, four feet at a time, from the yard to the road and into the second trailer. After we close the trailer gate on the bear and the birdbath, the five Sullivans parade the property in search of anything else they might have left behind. Satisfied they have it all, O’Shea removes, from under the front seat of the U-Haul, a large white dress, a wedding dress, complete with veil and train. She hangs it from the thorn of a large cactus, and in plain view of the Bible men who stand gawking from the safety of their compound, she removes a crumpled parchment – the ten year old marriage license of Mark Bible and O’Shea Sullivan. She un-crumbles and holds up the certificate before she sets fire to it with a match she lights with the strike of her thumbnail, a one handed action, more powerful than a middle finger. With the flaming parchment she sets ablaze her wedding gown. Its smoke rises languidly into the empty sky as the five look-a-like Sullivans climb into the cab of the U-haul and head northward to Las Vegas. The smiling bear looks happy as it shrinks in my vision, as if it were glad to be leaving Bible land. Unlike the Chinook buffeted smoke of the bonfire that commenced my wanderings, this white cloud hangs in view of the Bible men un-dispersed in the air for a good half hour, a smoky beginning to O’Shea’s new life.

Conspired

Cover art
Steve Wilson

Conspired

as always
for Marcia


Upon a cotton and foam futon, naked I lie; I’ve just awoken from a nap. Many women attend me; they have conspired so. Among the five I recognize my Darlin, who seems to be in charge. One foot on the end of the wood-slat futon frame, the other on her grandmother’s ottoman, she’s wearing a short, short white silk kimono and standing, as would a director or a photographer on a set, above and apart. The other women are dressed smart, all in Darlin’s clothes.

Egypt’s wearing that pleated red satin dress, and as she removes her Hollywood High cheerleader lips from my neck and her nimble seamstress fingers from my chest, she rises up, full breath, and dances. That Egypt will bless us with her art, Darlin is pleased to know. And what a dance, indeed! The rich begging and entreaty for permission to enjoy me, with only gyre-like rhythms and jazzy gyrations for language. The red dress, whirling and whipping so close to my face, exacerbates the Eros of the spell already cast upon us, the one that springs from Darlin’s eyes, now matched by sultry Egypt. Skies will surely crack! Whereas history and legend demand that the dancer needs the queen’s approval, Egypt kisses Darlin’s right foot and leeches upward slowly, drawing color to the calf skin, then nibble tickle high along the mother load of Darlin’s inner thigh. (Mary, July and Dawn have been watching Egypt’s dance, and they now return me their attentions, ignoring my particular arousal with their sloppy wet kisses and fondlings.) At the thought of the orgasm Egypt is after, Darlin whistles her breath with royal delight, feigns a yawn of mischievous boredom, and then denies Egypt permission to mount me. Crestfallen, her smile to a pout like a California earthquake, Egypt snakes back unsatisfied to the writhing ménage that is me, Mary, July and Dawn. But before Egypt takes my one free arm to squeeze, to bind clamped between her ballet thighs, she whispers an intimate, centerfold cheesecake aside to Darlin to remember her by.

Mary, July and Down have all now followed Egypt’s lead and have taken to rubbing their clothed crotches on each my separate limbs. July, however, soon abandons her place and focus on my knee and throws herself diagonally across me, her legs wrapped tight around my right leg, her full milk breast cushioned by my lips and exuding the taste of cookies and milk, she wiggles to find the perfect angle to hug her clit against my hip. Through the black, slight Frederick’s slip she wears seeps the moist mist of her aspirings. Darlin has planned well the ardor of the women. Dawn, who’s wearing an oversized Wyoming Cowboy’s jersey and tapered Wranglers, pulls out four short lengths of rodeo rope from underneath the futon, and as the other women squeeze me , imprisoned between their thighs, she binds and ties me to the frame while July just keeps on coming. Bound so suddenly and adeptly, I wonder: have they practiced these maneuvers? Mary and Dawn, their breath and yearning, fascinate my ears, strangely diverse siren calls, their different accents cooing, alluring: Mary’s mountain drawl, Dawn’s smokey, throaty inner-city crawl.

I’ve always had a hankering for Mary, and now that July has climaxed and climbed off, I speak for the first time, asking Mary to remove the prom skirt that she’s wearing. We both look to Darlin whose smile flashes her generous affirmation. As Mary sheds the hoped brocade, I think of molting snakes at the sight of her taut bow thinness. She stands over me, a pair of un-Catholic high school high-heeled patent leather spikes aside my cheeks, and I look up to see she’s not removed her underwear and that white lace blouse with pearl buttons from abdomen to breast, to see her blonde hair and hungry green eyes gazing down. Now Mary squats to press her crotch squarely on my face, underwear and all, through which, I take it, I’m to eat to get the golden twat. She is almost cruel with the pressure on my face, but I gather from her trembling and moaning that she’s only trying to help herself to pleasure. I can hardly get my breath and my nose grows sore from the friction of her undies when the milli-skin shears and my tongue slips home into the valley of firm birthings, tunneled dark musings. She rises, tenses, falls and squats, a balance of delight, to the pressure of my slurpings; shivers and gushes and wild groanings later, she’s sister snake beside me, says she can’t wait to write this in her diary.

The manner in which my wrists are bound leaves my hands free, with wiggle room, extended over the edge of the futon. Dawn, so to speak, is sitting in my right hand and Egypt in my left. I close my eyes and concentrate on the placement and exploration of all ten fingers. As I suspected, Egypt is naked under the red dress, and my thumb deep within pegs her whole world against the cusp of my index finger. Dawn’s denims are pliable and impenetrable; I offer her a fist as saddle, and she grinds my knuckles hard and roundly to her. July shimmies her fingers up across my abs, my chest, my neck and grooves to massage my ears, my cheeks and temple; next, it’s both her hands clawing down my sides to ply my ass and shank.

Simultaneously, Egypt’s fingers are in my mouthy, exploring, gauging the lie of my teeth and gums. Next, Egypt slowly arches her torso free of my hand and extends her right leg emphatically across me, to slide herself atop me, her body language telling all the other women to back off, the wait’s been long enough. She snuggles my hard-on between her thighs. I open my eyes to catch the beautiful haunt of her face hovering, then descending; instantly she’s got my eyes pinned to visions of capabilities unmentionable. She takes her fingers from out of my mouth and fills it with her tongue, firm and probing. So powerful she is, her body screams of fleshly communion - blood, wine and body indeed! She could such the breath from out my lungs, devour my tongue in an orgy of teeth and one step over the line. All now paw my flesh as Egypt continues, all her dance and beauty embroiled in her mouth kissing mine. What I’m thinking as time and place dissolve in her irises is a jumble of movie stars in slips in railroad cars with my own devilish grin rising moonly in a mahogany framed mirror atop a dressing table. What movie are we in? Produced and directed by whom? I’d rather think movie than myth, right? I kid myself. The actors all live through cinema, but the men of myth are all dead, eaten alive out of sight of the successor. This attempt at humor incites within a mood swing; doubt and trepidation. Terror in the image of the wine that she would offer. A shiver in the bubbly Eros. Pink paranoia. The last sunset in the West. Heart has changed the pattern of its beat forever as Egypt lets go of my mouth and, flashing that beguiling showgirl smile, begins to snap her teeth, jaws hinged and chomping. All the women snap, rattle and chatter their teeth. A chorus of fingers itches the air.

Darlin shuts out the sun-setting light, slowly dropping the bamboo shade, dropping the world from view, from care, all intent and purpose now cloistered in this room, upon this bed. I pull against the ropes; my conclusion: it’s and always has been hopeless, me in the hands of women. Darlin circles the futon thrice, marking time in the drama, and then stands at the head of the frame to stare down, upside down, at me. Her face and smile is lunar; her perfect body says I’ve earned it.

In an instant of other places and different times, the chattering and snapping cases, and it’s five set of very real teeth upon my flesh. Egypt’s back at my mouth, my tongue sucked, captured set between her teeth; a trickle but slight and the taste of my own blood alarms me. July bites, a not so playful pinch, my left nipple hard unyielding. Dawn’s wide mouth and molars mooch my neck and shoulders. Mary leaves her crooked eye teeth impression on my thigh. Darlin attends my manhood smiling-ly.

I flick out of fear, like changing tv channels with a remote, to relax, utterly. (What else?) I am not powerless, I know what they want, don’t I? I flash on the higher moments of my life and remember who exactly wrote them, like the time I wrote Darlin and April into the ceremony, bought them identical bracelets and dresses to wear dancing. Rare is the memory as catalytic as a sexual one, I think, as suddenly the biting and nibbling stops. The women are up undressing. Dusk is done, the room is dark. I can not see the women clearly; I can only smell them, the different oils and lotions they are rubbing on their flesh

Unexpectedly, it’s a blindfold for real and my hands are each unbound from the futon frame, only to be bound behind my back. My feet are set free and I roll off the futon to kneel, to rise up and be led to a spot at the end of the room where I am oiled. Dawn’s throaty voice warns me not to speak, and as I am spun around, Pin the Tail on the Donkey style, Darlin tells me I’m to guess the game.

So the question in my mind is who’s to pleasure whom? Is the proposition: in whom am I to come? Is only one fertile and I’m to find her? Am I to wander around the room, dizzy with passion and arousal, with only my nose and intuition to guide me, to bump against and rub the slickered skins until I name each one correctly? Rank my lusts? Forsake trust in just one name for love? Write more lines? See through this and all life’s other blindfolds for you (all a man can do) and demonstrate that fantasy- like life- is how you write it?

AWKWARD (Times Three)

cover photo: Diane Zagoren Taub

Awkward (Times Three)
Edwin Forrest Ward

as always
for Marcia

When I first spy Jessica on the stage in the auditorium among the group of newly hired teachers, I am cruelly smitten, awash in a flush of lust and testosterone, turned on and, in the long run, doomed. She’s wearing a stack of bracelets on her left arm, some gold, some turquoise, some ebony, that jangle with the motion of her locomotion, as she raises her arm to waive Hello to her fellow teachers. When she is introduced as Ms Jessica Golden, I take heart: at least there is, at present, no Mr. Golden standing between me and any chance I might have of her becoming Mrs. Ward, as, after all, at this point in my life, I’m looking for a mate as much as I would settle for getting laid. All I know is that Jessica’s got the goods that have seduced me: an educated brain (Elmira and Columbia culminating with a Teacher’s Certificate and a Masters in Modern Lit), a very comfortable Rubens-esque sashay to her walk (as if she knows what she wants), flirts for eyes, a face and figure that will prompt married men to doff their wedding ring, an unsatisfied hunger for passion to be straddled, and a consciousness on the other side of her mahogany eyes that I already knew I’d never own. Love counts on each lover to be slightly beyond the other’s control, the other’s ken, and so we are.

Well, it isn’t easy wooing Jessica – I mean: I am spread pretty thin - temporally, physically, sexually and emotionally - what with the women in my life, including (One) my soon-to-be ex-wife issuing terms of our separation and divorce through a major Philadelphia law firm and revenge sleeping with my now ex-best friend – a cruel kind of awkward; (TWO) my summer fling secret lover in Manhattan, and (THREE) my ex mistress-girlfriend, CCee - who as a student teacher I supervised and with whom I had the affair that ended my marriage – CCee now teaching in the classroom right door next to mine – still, I somehow successfully manage to woo Jessica and become her lover, this despite the fact she had been presently already involved with a successful lawyer who years later will become her husband, later divorced, and the father of her son.

I sweep and sweet talk Jessica off her feet – as only a curly haired Irish lover can, with twinkling blue and emerald eyes, decent Scotch, rock poetry, Bob Dylan-isms, and a very hip and groovy lifestyle of after school Kools, 4:20 weed, and sex to die for, hmm, sex to li e for. Somehow, I am so into the eros of me and Jessica, so blind to the differences in our ingrained cultures, I fail to realize that the spell we live under for a year is primarily of my solo making: her multiple o’s, her anxieties stoned, her depressions intoxicated, her dreams acted on. But this tale is not about our love and its loss; this is about things awkward.

Now, although Ms Golden does not have a husband, she does come with a family. Her father died suddenly during her final semester at Columbia last year, and her mother, sister and brother have moved from a gated suburb of Boston to a wealthy Northern New Jersey enclave within sight of Manhattan, where siblings of her mother Isabel and her grandmother live. Her younger sister Rebecca now attends Beaver College outside Philly; and her older brother Josh, a well medicated paranoid schizophrenic, lives at home with Isabel, a woman with whom I only ever have but two conversations, both of which are exceedingly awkward.

The first occurs at the door of Isabel’s home; the second, in a parking lot in Boston.

A phone call from her drama queen sister Rebecca interrupts Jessica and I in our late Friday afternoon, start-the-weekend-right, Scotch-ed and stoned sex-capade. O’Becky, as I call her, is sick, has been for days with some kind of flu. Her dorm mates have left for the weekend and she wants company. She is so sick and weak that she is afraid to be alone. Thus, Jessica and I do a madcap drive from our Jersey apartment in Wenona through Philadelphia rush hour traffic to find her sister almost delirious with fever and dehydration in her Beaver College dorm room. After a call to Jessica’s mother, our plan becomes to drive Rebecca home to Isabel for some chicken soup and mother’s care, a far better idea than Jessica and I nursing her here in a dorm room.

I do the hundred-mile drive from Glenside PA to Ridgeway NJ in my Datsun B-210 in just under two hours and prepare to meet, for the very first time, my lover’s mother and her troubled brother. Beyond the beveled glass of an impressive front door, Josh stands gazing forlornly and thorazine-ed aside Isabel who looks unashamedly grief stricken as she unlatches the door. I’m hoping that her disapproving worried expression is because of the shock of seeing the sickly pale and fever wracked Rebecca, not a result of Isabel’s first sight of me, her oldest daughter’s lover. Sadly, it is the latter, as her comments to Jessica - which she voices as if I’m not standing there - affirm. “Who and what is this Eddie that you would bring in to my house? Is he a Negro?” condescending questions asked as an elitist of any ilk or a racist would: to mock, to bait, to provoke, to dismiss, to put in place, as if my genealogy were an excuse for incivility, prejudice and rudeness.

There is a protracted awkward silence, as is easily imagined. My possible retorts are as numerous as the miles between here and home, beginning with “Am Irish” and ending with “Why, thank you!” the latter of which I choose to voice, as those three words served well the first major outsider and righteous connection in my life, the hippie-long-haired and Fu Manchu-ed Ronnie K. When ignorant and petty people tried to put him down because of his appearance, with such digs as “You look like a girl” or “You look like Charles Manson,” he simply replied “Why, thank you!” and Ronnie meant it, being as he was, quite fond of the dark and feminine side of himself.

“Why thank you,” I say to Isabel without a trace of the resentment roiling in my gut, as Jessica gives her mother a look I will not see again until a parking lot in Boston. Thankfully the Columbian cheba cheba we partake of on the drive home to Wenona neutralizes the acid of my anger at my lover’s mother.

Some months later, the dedication of a plaque honoring Jessica’s father’s bequeathed generosity to his synagogue, is to take place in Boston. She and I do the six hour drive via the yet to be completed I-95 corridor in a little under seven white knuckle hours with late Friday afternoon rush hour stop and go through Trenton, New York City, Bridgeport, New Haven and Boston. It’s especially tricky finding her family’s suburban synagogue as Jessica, princess that she’s always been, had not learned to drive until her senior at Elmira and had never actually driven a car where she grew up and, consequently, was not much help at co-piloting the winding traffic-circled roads outside Boston. But after numerous false starts down poorly lit oak lined roads, countless wrong turns and illegal u-turns, and repetitious back-tracking we drive into the parking lot of Temple Emanuel some ten minutes prior to the start of the service to honor Jessica’s father on the anniversary of his passing.

Bitter Isabel, the struggle that is Josh and drama queen O'Becky are standing outside the doors to the synagogue anxiously awaiting our arrival. I’m quite done in by the huge effort of the drive, but proud and pleased as hell that we made it, as could be sung, “to the church on time.” If truth be told, I’m actually feeling heroic and mythically lucky, given the number of speeding tickets I did not receive that I surely qualified for over the course of the last seven hours. To mask the odor of cheba cheba that clings to our clothing, Jessica mists us with a spray of Canoe Cologne for Men, before we join her very emotional family, none of whom I’ve seen since the night of Becky’s illness. But all the perfume in the world cannot conceal the rank stink of what Isabel barks at me as Jessica and I approach. “Eddie, you are not welcome here. Simply said, you are not Jewish. Do not set foot in our Temple.” To say there was yet another awkward silence would fail to imply the accurate weight of the lead balloon that floated above our heads in that Boston parking lot. So it would not crash down and crush us all I simply said, “Isabel, why thank you” and walked back to my Datsun B-210 and fired up a joint.


A year later in Denver, after abandoning the East Coast, as it has turned out for me, for good, there was not a bit of awkward silence when Jessica (whose dream it had been to move out West) announced that she missed her family, especially her mother, and her culture, and she was leaving. This time, without a trace of sarcasm or acrimony, I, like Ronnie K, really mean it when I say, “Why, thank you,” as she packs her things and lies, “I never loved you.”

At Powwow

Cover Photography - Marcia Ward


At Powwow

as always
for Marcia

Just now the first car to head south out of Rexburg since an hour ago screeches to a stop fifty feet past me and my girlfriend Lucia, as if the driver hadn't seen us until he passed us. His car is an old Fifty-two Chevy Belair. The driver is as young as the car is old. He's got thin straggly hair down to his shoulders. He's missing teeth, upper and lower, in the center of his mouth, but he smiles widely nonetheless.

After a quick introduction, he tells us, “A hockey puck took out my front pearly whites. I played a year of semi-pro hockey after the Marines. Grew up in Canada, but I got relatives here on the Res. You guys headed to Powwow?”

“We're headed south. Eventually towards Bryce and then the Grand Canyon. Mostly we're just wandering and having a look at the West. What's this Powwow?”

“It's the yearly big-to-do on the Blackfoot Reservation. Everybody comes from all over the Res and pitches camp for a week. There's a rodeo and dancing and food and party mayhem. Kids come and fall in love. Lot's of gambling, too. It's a party. That's where I'm headed, you should check it out before you head south to Idaho Falls.”

“Can we camp there, I mean at Powwow?”

“Hell, anybody can. A lot of people from town come out. It's a good time. I been coming off and on since I was a kid. My aunt married into the tribe.”

Contrary to the advice of Bill Rex - who had dropped us off here before hightailing it into the further wilderness - to only accept a long ride out of Rexburg, we accept this short hitch. Twenty miles down the road we exit the blacktop on to a dirt road, and a mile and a half later after ascending a rise I catch sight of maybe fifty large white tepees that ring the southern and western edge of a large oval, the eastern rim of which is comprised of RV's and pickups and cars of all sorts, some down right ancient. The northern end of the oval is a rudimentary area fenced off for rodeo-ing. There's but one stand of trees off to the north where there are a few smaller non-traditional tents staked out. Outside the configured oval to the west there are tented booths serving as concession stands and a couple of small amusement rides.

G. G., our new friend, parks the Chevy on the rim of the oval and scrambles out of the car. “See you around. I've got to go find the drummers. My cousin is one, and around the drummers you'll find the beautiful women, and that's where you'll find me. Hey, sleep in my car if you want. I'll be hanging with my cousin.”

Lucy and I decide to stay for a day or so and wind up staying three days on the Blackfoot Reservation at Powwow. We put up my orange mountain tent amidst the chaos of campers and canvas at the north end of the site. It looks so puny, almost silly, given the noble beauty of the tall white tepees.

Lucia and I have a great time. The visual experience of Powwow is surreal and religious; the ceremonial clothing is part of the highest theater.

The partying is just about around the clock. A cold Coors can be had for fifty cents and a can of pop or juice for a quarter. Frybread is available anytime, day or night. About the only time there's little going on is late mornings. But starting about one in the afternoon the activity is ceaseless and the spirit of this annual rite of summer is contagious.

The days at powwow develop a pattern. We sleep until late morning, eat fry bread for breakfast, watch the rodeo in the afternoon, drink a few late afternoon beers and get high, retire to the tent for the late afternoon to fuck and to nap, eat a dinner of roast corn and bean burritos for the price of a subway token, Steppenwolf a walk outside the Powwow site to smoke a joint, and then return to watch the dancing and listen to the drumming until the wee hours. When we crawl into the tent at say three in the morning, most of the rendezvous-ers are still up and partying. It seems like some of the gambling games go on round the clock.

Basically, although there are a few tourists and townees around in the afternoon to watch the rodeo, Lucy and I are the only white people at Powwow. Our white sticks out among the Blackfoot as the orange of our tent does among the whiteness of the tepees. Lucy's height and my long curly hair give us away even at a distance. For the most part no one seems to care that we are among them. On three separate occasions we are invited to eat with someone. During our time in conversation with the people who befriend us, we are peppered with questions about the most ordinary of subjects. Who's my favorite singer? Do we like football? Of what religion am I? Does Lucy have a beauty secret, as her skin is so perfect? Do we hunt? Do we fish? Have we been to Yellowstone? Did I serve in Viet Nam? What's my favorite beer? What's the best movie out now? I decide we are as exotic and interesting to the Blackfoot as they are to me, judging by their response to our answers to those questions. We laugh and argue opinions.

The most haunting and beautiful aspect of Powwow is the dancing. It begins a short time after dusk. The dancers, men and women, are dressed in traditional ceremonial clothes. The women wear soft skin dresses that sing and the men wear fringe that whips the air about them. Apparently every dance narrates some aspect of Blackfoot history. Generally the dancers follow the route of a large circle. Sometimes during the course of a rotation, dancers will change places or drop out only to return at a later point in the progress of the dance, sometimes wearing different clothing. Movement is for the most part minimal but continual, although there are times of occasional frenzied dancing. The stories we watch danced out are sedate, serious. The most remarkable aspect of the dancing is its duration. For hours dancers dance, some almost seem entranced. Lucy and I watch, we drink beer, we sneak around smoking pot, and we pick up on the trance-like state of two a.m., as a big sliver of moon sails west above our heads amidst a hundred million stars while forty beaded and braided and quilled dancers retell the centuries old tale of the tribe, the dancers and audience aglow in the yellow, red light of the bonfires, bound by the groove of the singing and drumming set by the musicians, all of whom have hair longer than that of the new rock stars. As I imagine the dancers do likewise, I feel that I am watching and walking in my sleep, witnessing a communal dream, lucky and blessed to be here, privy to the expression of such tribal ritual.

Lucy, my film buff companion, says, “Fellini and Truffaut ought to see this!”

Our last night at Powwow, we run into a wee bit of trouble.

It's about midnight, Friday about to become Saturday. Lucia and I have been watching about twenty people, grandmothers, young men and women, parents with babes in their arms, doing some serious gambling. The game is one of deception and guessing. No cards are involved although the players all wear poker faces. With eight players to both of two sides, one of whom seems to be principal player or games-man, the teams drum on a log between them and hope to guide their games-man to be right when the time to speak or nod or reveal is at hand. A lot of money changes hands. Players come and go although I notice many seem never to leave the game. The stoic partnership of the players reminds me of pinochle. I'm still trying to figure out the fine points of the game and watching intently when Lucia interrupts my study.

“There's a drunk behind us talking' bad about us. I don't speak Blackfoot but I get his meaning. He's talking trash. He wants to provoke a fight. With you or anyone who would defend you.”

I turn and take in the scene behind me. A guy in a white, fringed shirt, cowboy hat and boots, bolo, and blue jeans stands amidst three or four other men. He is intoxicated and posturing. He switches in the middle of a sentence from his native tongue to English, ending with “White trash ain't welcome at Powwow.” A smallish man, wiry, he actually looks to be as white as he is Blackfoot. He's probably one of the rodeo riders.

The situation is delicate. I am not naive. As a kid I've been in this situation before: punk with a chip on his drunken shoulder and a minor player egging him on. I am aware of a dozen things on the tip of my tongue, beginning with asshole and ending with zit face. I choose silence. I am aware that everyone is interested in my response. The stage is set for drama, comedy or tragedy, who knows? I step out of the crowd into a more lighted area near the entrance to the rodeo rink. All the while I am scanning the crowd, hoping that maybe G.G.’s around, looking in to each and every one's eyes for an instant. I trust the love in my heart. Things will work out well I tell myself. I catch sight of Little Man as he steps out of the crowd he's with. For an instant we are both on a field of his drunken honor. He spits tobacco juice onto the Idaho dust – which is not the same as tossing tobacco to honor the four directions. He mouths “White Trash” in my direction. I do not bite at his racist bait. In fact, as if nothing of any consequence is happening, as if anything said or done by him could never matter, I step back into the circle of people gathered near Lucia, as if I am nothing but a figment of his imagination. Any fight now is solely at his instigation. He turns to look at his friends for support and further encouragement but none is forthcoming. It seems as if the eyes of the entire tribe are watching. The balance of savage and social is being determined. The moment to look good or vain in the eyes of the gods crawls. Lucia and I so meld with the spirit of the others around us that we effectively disappear. Lucia takes up talking with the people, a family of five, those she'd been conversing with when she'd first overheard him. We all are laughing at a remark of the youngest. The drunk can only now make a fool of himself if he goes on with his braggadocio and threats, no matter what language he chooses to make them in. Others will intervene, elders or friend, for he is out of hand. Everyone, even he, knows his words are hollow. My silence makes them arguably lame.

Throughout the whole minute or two that it takes for this incident to occur, I am aware of the presence of evil. The face it wears is incidental. I've seen troublemakers before. Usually it takes more than one man to open the door to war.

Later after watching a couple hours of dancing Lucia and I return to our tent. A wariness pervades our consciousness. I feel alien this night. I am not horny. My sleep is uneasy.

Rather than stay another day for the conclusion of the festivities - there is an all Blackfoot band going to play some rock and roll prior to the last of the ceremonial dances - we break camp and hike out to the road early in the morning. The trouble that didn't erupt last night could easily happen again should I run into Little Man again. The first mile is up hill. Neither of the two cars that pass us heading out offers us a ride.

Near the top of the hill we stop, as that is the best place to hitch from. We look back on the Powwow scene below. Smoke is now rising from breakfast campfires. The dust of activity in the rodeo arena floats in the cloudless sunlight of Idaho morning. From this vantage point I imagine Little Man searching the campground for sight of me. He's got to watch out for his own back now. He’s hung-over and can't find me. He doesn't know what I might do. He's not sure if I was ever there. He's now got another chip on his shoulder. Another reason to dislike himself. There's no such thing as a happy racist.

A MAGIC MARKER MYSTERY

cover art: watercolor inks: Edwin Forrest Ward


A Magic Marker Mystery

One summer I worked for a start-up stock brokerage firm in Philadelphia, filling in for employees on vacation. A personal assistant or receptionist one week, a margin or mail clerk the next, the actor in me embraced and enjoyed it all, the high speed elevator downtown skyscraper 9 to 5. Near the end of my summer employment, before I was to resume teaching, there was a week with no scheduled vacations; consequently, my boss suggested I take on what he represented as “most likely a fruitless task.” Investigate and figure out what happened to some actual hard copy, paper stock certificates that had gone missing. The missing papers represented a considerable sum of real money, money that business insurance would cover – but only with the added cost of greatly increased future insurance premiums. Stock certificates are simply not supposed to go missing. Ever. Especially when they are part of an initial public offering involving many of the firm’s brokers.

My assignment had been characterized as “most likely a fruitless task” because already, a gaggle of in- and out-of-house accountants, the manager of “The Cage,” himself, the repository where stock certificates were housed and handled, and a Securities & Exchange Commission auditor had spent weeks trying to locate the actual stock certificates, all without success. My boss, with whom I was socially connected on a black market level, told me in an aside: “A stoner and artist might see ledgers differently than accountants and auditors.”

Now this story unfolds in the early Seventies’ days of typewriters, mimeographing and carbon copies. Xerox machines are just coming on line. The human hand and mind are of major importance when it comes to financial record keeping and the commerce of securities and stocks, as are pencils, pens and IBM typewriters. Computers run on key punch cards. Fingers key the punch. Accounting is done by hand. Calculators are mechanical and cumbersome and math is in the accountant’s mind. The pages of ledgers are hand turned and generally full of tears, erasures and carbon fingerprints. For archival purposes, records are photographed on microfilm, and so, the hand-crank of a microfilm viewer is where my search for the missing certificates begins and, within two days, ends, in a magic moment.

The missing stock certificates represented shares in a new company that is now a household name: Magic Marker. It’s hard to imagine a Twentieth Century world without Magic Markers, but in the 60s, ballpoint pens required pressure. The felt tip pens and markers of Magic Marker were first a novelty whose use would become ubiquitous. Although the Magic Marker IPO had been quite successful, our firm’s loss of printed shares might cloud Magic Markers future prospects, making shady the circumstances of the initial offering.

Well, after a day of studying the microfilmed records of transactions involving Magic Marker, I had nothing, and no idea of where to investigate next. Because looking at thousands of pieces of paper was mind numbing, I frequented the stairwell often for a toke of weed. I doubted that anyone had stolen the certificates as their size and number precluded an easy smuggle past the scrutiny of the uber observant Cage Boss whose job it was to secure and track each certificate. The apparent loss of the paper stock was on him and it would be his head that rolled once the SEC finalized its investigation. Somewhat ironically, he was the only employee with whom I had not gotten along during my summer’s employment. He was as straight and arrogant and square as I was inexperienced and pot-headed, and he was over-the-top dismissive of me in my role as investigator, so much so that he did not want me in his Cage when I asked if I could see the steps involved in logging in and recording the handling of the certificates. When he spoke to our mutual boss, however, he was told to let me have unfettered access to the Cage, its protocols, and its employees, a directive which really pissed him off as he could not imagine anyone – especially a long-haired twenty-something vacation temp - figuring anything out, since he, himself, had not been able to.

Now every stock certificate passing in or through the cage creates a transaction form in carbon duplicate, documenting its time in house. Every time a stock certificate changed hands its movement from one account to another account and its actual physical location were recorded and dated. Generally stock certificates were either sent to their owners or warehoused by the brokerage in the Cage. Whenever physical stock certificates were given to owners, the in-Cage transaction form was tic marked in a check box: SENT TO OWNER. None of the missing Magic Marker stock had been so marked. All of what was missing was supposed to be here, in the Cage, according to the microfilm. The protocol for tracking the stock certificates was black and white, simple and straightforward.

It’s at this point that I notice a pencil holder full of colorful plastic pens on a desk by the Cage door, a collection of early production prototypes of Magic Marker pens. When the brokerage had been chosen to help launch the IPO, the manufacturer had sent dozens of boxes of promotional pens, demos of all types, all bearing the name Magic Marker. I liked the bold colors of the pens and helped myself to an assortment as I left the Cage to return to the microfilm viewer for another go-round of hopeless squinting and examination.
Now I’ve always been a doodler and I’m no sooner back at the microfilm viewer – after a stairwell’s toke of ganga - convinced I’m on a lost cause, when I absentmindedly begin exploring the uses of these Magic Markers rather than scanning the microfilm. I like the color richness of the line produced when compared to the line of a fountain pen or a regular ballpoint pen, and I fill a half-dozen sheets of paper with colorful abstract mindlessness. The smooth flow of the ink lends itself to creativity, and because there is no need to press the pen point to paper, the stroke is more flowing, artistic, and less graphic. For an hour or so, in the style I will later call squigglism – a cousin of pointillism – I doodle, and then Eureka! – out of nowhere – comes the question: What happens when someone uses a Magic Marker on a two-page carbon copy?

I return to the Cage and retrieve a blank stock transaction sheet. I fill it out and - no surprise here - on Page Two, the brokerage carbon copy, there is nothing. Because the Magic Marker pen writes effortlessly without pressure, the carbon doesn’t transfer to the second page of the form. I return to the microfilm viewer and go over the records again, paying especial attention to the line where is noted the date a piece of stock was handled and I discover that in the middle of May there was a stint of transactions that bore no date, something that would happen if the recorder of the transaction had used a Magic Marker when filling out the form. There was no date and, similarly, no tic mark indicating that the certificates had been SENT TO OWNER. I added up the number of shares represented by the forms missing their recording date, and voila! - their sum equaled the amount of lost stock. The missing stock certificates were not missing at all. They had been sent to their owners. Just the carbon imprint of a check mark was missing. Like magic, it had come to me, the answer, while doodling with Magic Markers.

My boss, my Cheba Cheba client, was so overjoyed that he took me out to lunch, said I was on paid administrative leave for the rest of the week, and handed me the first serious tip of my stoner life: ten crisp Ben Franklins and a case of Magic Marker pens. I never did get a thank you from the Cage Boss whose job I saved, but I did prove right my boss’s guess: art sometimes is better at solving mystery than math.

Coincidee
(as in the plural of coincidence)
     Last August, my wife Marcia and I are soaking in the large pool at Strawberry Park Hot Springs outside Steamboat Springs when a funny coincidence occurs. I’ve been coming to these waters once or twice a year since 1974 when a summer’s go-wherever hitch-hiking adventure that started in Philly and ended in Manhattan included a week’s stay here. The place was then, and is still, mystic with coincidee.
     Of the events of my first time here many are ripe with other-orld-ly importance. My partner in adventure at the time, Lucia, and I had hitch-hiked ten dirt road miles from town – way off the grid so to speak – to get here. We had been inspired to visit by the storytelling of two kind benefactors, Ron and Vickie, whose buffalo robe scented Dodge van had transported us from Central Nebraska to Rabbit Ears Pass. In their description of the springs, they’d nicknamed the scene Strawberry City and said it was a very high, very trippy place where hundreds of adventuresome characters like Lucia and me were hanging out for the summer. “Don’t go if your adverse to pot or nudity,” they warned, an admonition meant to peak our curiosity.
     And now as Lucia and I approach the Strawberry Park Hot Springs deep in the National Forest in the back of a pick-up truck – two local teens have given us a ride as they have sojourned hither for a local boy’s mischievous teenage binocular-ed look-see at the rumored naked hippie chicks – when we climb out of the truck’s bed and begin our careful descent down the trammeled muddy hill into the pocket of running water and alpine mountain holding the springs, I’m quite disappointed with what I’m seeing as I look down upon the scene. My prurient self had hoped for a fog of pot smoke and sea of naked women and there are not even any strawberries! Just a touch of juniper and hollyhock with a lot of rock and shale adorned with rivulets of steamy smoky water running into a pool aside a creek. Of the half dozen bathers, none are naked and there’s not a wild haired one among them. Oh, where is the summer-long party that Ron and Vickie had described? Where are the sun worshippers? The Hippies? The madcap day-trippers and on-the-road adventures like Lucia and me? Where is Strawberry City?”
     Well. We’re not two minutes into our switch back approach down from the top of the west hill where the local teens had parked towards the waters of the springs when a most marvelous and unexpected thing occurs. Where just now there were six bathing-suited soakers enjoying the warm waters within view, there are now ten times that, as out from behind that many trees and bushes step dozens of naked men, women and children, as if cued to startle us, most with more than enough hair on their heads to qualify the scene as a drop-out hippie city by the name of Strawberry! Lucia and I are quite stunned as the nudists appear for she had just voiced aloud what I’d been thinking, “Where are all the naked people Ron and Vickie talked about.”
     “As if by magic, their appearance” one would think, but, most times, there is a very real explanation for such coincidee.
     Apparently the Steamboat Springs Police have a policy of visiting the Strawberry Park Hot Springs. Daily, they drive up from town for the purpose of writing revenue-generating tickets and scan the scene from a secluded further hill with state-of-cop-art binoculars in search of anyone sans swimsuit or smoking pot. They generally arrive most days in the early afternoon, a routine well known by the denizens of Strawberry City. Usually some civic-minded person volunteers to serve as lookout, and when the gendarmes are spotted approaching, a warning is signaled and everyone naked scurries into the forest to hide from view. When the cops end their surveillance and head back down the mountain, an all clear is signaled and everyone returns from hiding to the sunlight and hot spring waters of Strawberry City, with today’s ruse and theatrics coinciding with our arrival, “a Fellini moment that should be filmed,” as Lucia would say, in the ever-surprising script of a life.
     So, I’m waxing poetic and nostalgic with wife Marcia about my first soak here all those years ago when she queries me with a prankster’s merriment and sky-blue-eyed wonder before swimming away to the cold water of the creek: “Would you rather be here or in Greenwich Village?” And with a splash of mineral water in my direction she adds, “And, look: there’s Damian.”
     Now Marcia and I, after thirty-three years of marriage, have little games we play when out and about in the world. One involves seeing semblances of someone we know in a stranger. We type people because of the way he or she might look or talk or act. And so, I immediately get the “Damian” reference when I study the view where Marcia had been looking when she had said, “There’s Damian,” for across the length of this middle pool and the pool above it, by the sluice gate, a guy stands talking with a young woman many years his junior. She appears amused and bemused with his chatter and to the casual observer (in this case: me) her body language denotes a coquettish interest despite the math of their ages: he: forty-something; she: just legal. His long dark hair gathered and bundled atop his head easily sets him apart from most everyone else and draws attention to his stature. His lean physique suggests fitness not hunger and from this distance, some thirty yards, the sparkling demeanor of his eyes is friendly. He’s willing to share whatever it is he’s got and the young woman wants some. A Damian for sure!
     Now Damian is a man I met some thirty-seven years ago when I departed these springs that first time.
     I meet Damian through the workings of another guy I meet here at Strawberry City, Frank. After a week or so of partying and hanging out, mostly naked and under a cloud of smoke, Lucia and I decide to head out again on our come-what-may hitchhiking adventure. For the most part, we’ll go wherever our rides will take us as we generally have only a half-hearted commitment to any romantic destination we might have in mind: The Rockies, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, or, as we decide upon today, The Grand Tetons. Lucy’s luxuriously French pronunciation of Tetons is barely off her pout-y lips when a stranger appears out of nowhere in the shallows of the small spring aside our campsite. “Hey,” he says, “would you happen to know anybody looking for a ride to Jackson Hole Wyoming. My partner broke his leg and is staying behind to recover. I could use some company as I’m planning to take a very scenic route to get there, as in Forest Service roads, back country access roads, and no roads.” That Jackson Hole lies in the shadow of The Grand Tetons is just another one of them coincidee. And so, we join Frank on a four-day backcountry over-the-mountains meander to Jackson Hole that through another series of coincidee brings us to Damian.
     Did I mention that Frank was a survivalist long before there was a pop reference to that breed of man? His vehicle was a surplus Korean War era U.S. Navy step van (think Fifties bread delivery truck) that he bought as a kit and built himself. He hand tightened every bolt and screw in its assembly. Frank was dropping out into the wilderness, and he was prepared to forage and explore the backcountry of America for the next two years. His well organized van was packed with canned goods and dried food, gallons of drinking water, topographical maps of Montana, Colorado, Utah, Idaho and Wyoming, two suspended hammocks for sleeping in bad weather, assorted fuels, extra this and that, essential spare parts for the van, a generator, a radio, fishing rods and flies, rifles and ammunition, and mountain climbing gear. Cross a mountain man with a Navy Seal and you get Frank, a bearded, self-taught can-do-anything man. Unfortunately Frank thought he could sing as well as conquer wilderness and for much of the four days of our off-highway jaunt to Jackson he sings show tunes, and I’m not talking hip tunes from off-Broadway or the rock opera Tommy, I’m talking Oklahoma. Over and over and over. Believe me, “Oh what a beautiful morning/Oh what a beautiful day/I’ve got a beautiful feeling/Everything’s going my way” is not so beautiful when Frank sings it for the fifty-fourth time! Anyway as we approach Jackson Hole, the only way into town from the south is on a highway that Frank reluctantly takes. We no sooner hit the asphalt after exiting the wilderness when a thunderous hailstorm explodes in the sky and we are forced to pull off. Another vehicle soon joins us on the highway shoulder, and with coincidee ripe, one of the occupants exits the other car and hustles through the hail to join us in the van. This gentleman - his handle is Doc (his ditty bag contained an assortment of drugs, both pharmaceutical and street) - actually is an acquaintance of Frank, for Frank had given Doc a ride a month earlier as Frank crisscrossed the back country of Northern New Mexico outside Taos and Doc sojourned after the ghost of Carlos Castenada’s Don Juan. Doc suggests we (he, Lucy and I) swap cars for the final drive to Jackson Hole so he can sing-a-long with Frank, a suggestion I applaud, as any excuse will suffice to get me out of earshot of another round of “Oklahoma”! When Lucy and I get into the other car, a Comet with Mississippi plates, we meet its back-seat passenger Damian, a meeting which prompts me to whisper “Right out of Blake,” as this starry-eyed stranger could easily have modeled for William Blake as he illustrated the demons and angels in his famous manuscript. His hair had apparently been growing uncut since the musical Hair was first staged on Broadway; aside from dungarees, woolen serape and denim shirt, he is possession-less, even shoeless, barefoot as a Penitentes Brotherhood pilgrim. Carrying neither money nor ID on his way to The Rainbow Gathering in the Great Northwest, his simple currency for travel is his belief that love provides. When not speaking almost reverently of the town of Bisbee Arizona from whence his travels commenced, he quietly singsongs the Beatle refrain, “All you need is love, Love, all you need is love.” With a nod I concur with his belief in the power of love, but say under my breath to Lucy, “It will be me, not love, that will buy him a beer when we get to Jackson.” No surprise here: Damian will provide for further coincidee.
     When our van/car caravan reaches Jackson Hole it is still raining; thus, we travelers – Frank, Damian, Doc, the Comet’s owner Scott, Lucy and I - all take refuge in a tourist saloon on the main square of Jackson Hole. When we enter we are hardly noticed as every patron seems to have their eyes glued to the TV, and for good reason, for at the very moment that I conclude paying for a first round of drinks (Coors for the men and a Coke for Lucia), the first president of the United States to resign, Richard Nixon, does so on the TV under which we stand, prompting an applause that concludes with the firing of a bullet right into the screen of the TV. Glass and cathode tube explode just as a man walks into the bar. This guy, Little John, spies Damian, walks right up and hugs him, and asks if we all need a place to stay. Damian’s eyes catch mine and they seem to sing “All you need is love, Love, all you need is love.” Little John, some long lost friend of Damian, bids us follow and we do, outside, back to our vehicles, and to a smidgen of National Forest land nearby where we are offered the use of a huge communal canvas tent where we weather the late afternoon and evening thunderstorms the next two days. Our first night Damian sermonizes around the campfire about the power of love and about the dropout city he calls home, Bisbee, Arizona. “In Bisbee, all you need is love” he tells us more than once. In fact, his Bisbee rhapsody is so convincing that sixteen years later my wife and I will move to Bisbee in search of that alternate reality where all you need is love. And guess what happens when we venture there? We find Damian living there with a young violinist some thirty years his junior, having managed to live rent-free in the dropout, drop city, former mining town on the Mexican border. Marcia winds up having a solo exhibition of her fine art photography in the studio/gallery that Damian manages, and I wind up with a Poetry Hour on Cochise County Arizona’s community cable radio channel for which Damian produces fine arts programming. Oddly, my mother, before marrying my father, dated Michael Ansara, the actor who played Cochise on the Fifties TV series of the same name.
     Just how many coincidee does it take to lead one to where they are? More than sheer coincidence can account for, that is sure.
     And now, to come full circle, let us return to the hot waters of Strawberry Park Hot Springs last summer, where the guy engaging the attention of the young woman switches his attention to me. After looking in my direction, he bids the doe-eyed youngster ado, and makes his way across two pools to slip into the water beside me and asks rhetorically, “Nice night, yes?” before going on to detail what brought him here. “I just spent a night in Greenwich Village and it ain’t got nothing on this place,” as if he had somehow overheard Marcia ask me if I’d rather be here or in Greenwich Village. She’d asked because the Village is where the American literary world, its capitol, resides, and the writer in me is always lamenting my lack of a literary agent, many of whom live in Greenwich Village. In effect she was teasingly asking would I trade my life here in Colorado for one in Manhattan? And now this guy, Eric is his name, Eric is telling me that he just stayed a week in the Village. He goes on to tell me about how he lives in Boulder Utah and extracts plant essences. He’d been giving a lecture in Maine on the somewhat arcane process he employs and a member of the audience – a young New York City literary agent who counts a Pulitzer Prize winner among her stable of writers - was so impressed with Eric, that she had offered him the use of her place in the Village. She would be traveling for the summer and she gave him the key to her home. With a nod to the surrounding woods, he says, “Yeah, two days ago I slept in a swank big-city condo, but believe me, I’d rather be here sleeping in the Forest Hotel.”
     When I mention the coincidence of my wife just having mentioned Greenwich Village, he quotes Bob Dylan, nasal-ing Bob’s “Take what you have gathered from coincidence” before telling me that I remind him of an old friend.
     In a reply prompted by more coincidee, I tell him that my wife had just expressed the same about him to me, that she called him Damian. Expressing an immediately interest in this line of coincidence, he asks me to tell him about this Damian.
     “Well, for starters,” I say, “Damian’s hair was as long as yours, he loved younger women, and, most unusual, he wore no shoes.”
     “Well, well, well,” he interjects, “neither do I. Wear shoes, that is.”
     We go on to discover much that we have in common as we share a few hours together in the coincidee-laden waters of Strawberry City. We exchange contact info and promise to coincide again some time. He also provides me with the name and contact info for his new friend Mary, the very successful literary agent, in New York.
     Now a coincidence I’d really enjoy would be for Mary to be as interested in me, my writing, as she apparently is in Eric, his plant essence extracting, thereby completing a circle of coincidee almost forty years in the making. To spark her interest, I’ll be sending “Coincidee,” for her reading pleasure.

Tacony, Beer, Art and Age
Edwin Forrest Ward

Gifts I have: – the words and the theater to incite some young men to foolishness. Two examples here I have involving age and art and alcohol.

Some years ago, in the late Eighties, while attending a Bob Dylan concert with my wife – a punk drunk of a rude young man – apparently the spokesman for a pack of the similarly minded, from whom he hoped to get a laugh – asked with feigned incomprehension, disdaining glare and exaggerated posturing, “What are you doing here, Old Man?” – as if how could I possibly be hip to what he thought hip, given the more than quarter century difference in our age. I didn’t inform him that I first saw Bob Dylan before even his parents were born; rather, I just gave him the standard sophomoric Tacony rhetoric of my Philadelphia youth, the one about the sexual proclivities and enthusiasms of his mother. When he responded by throwing thirty-two ounces of urine colored Coors beer in my direction, I adroitly ducked with alacrity, vanishing with my wife – as if by magic – into the surrounding crowd. The Viet Nam vet behind me, whose new Harley Davidson leather vest and 1977-vintage Rolling Thunder tee shirt got Coors-ed-upon, put an end to El Punko’s enthusiasm for disrespecting elders, as well as to the streak of time in his young life that his nose had remained un-bloodied and, judging by the sound of cracking bone, unbroken. I didn’t lift a finger to orchestrate retaliation, except for perhaps my middle and index, throwing him a sign that means peace in the American vernacular and fuck you in its British origin. Check out Emmett Grogan’s Ringolivio for the reference. This is what I mean by the Tacony in me, an attitude I’ll never be without.

Anyway, young rude men and I are natural enemies, and for some, it seems, my very existence causes stress enough to ensure confrontation. Strangely, art – things like song, dance and poetry – art is often central to these confrontations. I mean who would have thought there could be such behavior at, of all places, a Bob Dylan concert? One possible answer to the query is that my wife – who is ten years - and looks perhaps twenty - years my junior – my wife is so present – is such a presence - and of such Western American beauty that the jealous and frustrated testosterone of youth might prompt a fool to disregard the wisdom of the old Irish adage: It is Death to be a Poet, Death to love a Poet, and Death to mock a Poet.

But, then, Marcia is not with me on this Denver early April Poetry Festival day at Metro State in 1993, a day that, as fate would have it, is also opening day for Denver’s new National Baseball League franchise team, the Colorado Rockies. Rather, I am with Woody Hildebrand, a Wobbly of a friend who is the Denver correspondent for The Nation, the newspaper of the IWW, the International Workers of the World. Woody has invited me to participate in a poetry festival on the Auraria campus sponsored by the Metro State Poetry Club, a student group that Woody had organized and for which he had done the paperwork with the dean’s office to gain access to the sundry perks of being a sanctioned student organization, two of which were (one:) funding and (two:) use of the Metropolitan State College Student Union, with its stage, sound board, microphones, bar, tables and chairs. Sanctioned student organizations could reserve The Union for special events such as football team fundraisers, small musical concerts and literary events, and when his application for the funding of the Poetry Club Festival had been granted in October, Woody had reserved the Student Union for the first Monday in April.

Now Woody and I have a certain solidarity engendered by our practice of the poetic arts, and we share an appreciation for anarchy, mischief and mirth, seeing each other as makers of ritual art. The menagerie of our collective allusions includes pranksters with Pan flutes calling to wolves, carnival geeks, a JW Man in eye-dazzling striped pants, a Goddess by the name of Earth. Between us, we have all nine Muses – all the phases of Diana – covered. We two men live quite differently – I, a husband, father, and entrepreneur; he, an unmarried union man, postal worker – but when we are together we are brothers, which is why Woody has asked me to headline his event. Woody’s access to the Poetry Club’s share of student activity funds means my appearance at the festival is a paid gig. So rare is it to be paid real dollars to read poetry in this town, I am truly honored and should shout it from the rooftops: Poet Paid to Read! Woody has put five months into promotion and when I arrive early outside The Union, it appears his efforts have paid off. There’s already a sizeable crowd and with the exception of a few naysaying, stick-in-the-mud curmudgeons amongst my friends and contemporaries, the entirety of the Denver poetry scene is present. Judging by the comrade-ery and enthusiasm of the gathered presenters and attendees milling about this crisp mile high morning on the Union plaza, I wouldn’t have thought for a minute that the confluence of age, art and alcohol might despoil the day.

When I enter the Union and find Woody, I am as happy for Mr. Hildebrand as a friend can be, although he soon confides in me that trouble is brewing, trouble, that is, with the manager of the Union, the bartender, Bob. And the source of the trouble is this: Bob the Bartender is expecting a large crowd of students to fill the Student Union to watch the Rockies game on the big screen TVs that adorn the wall, both sides, close aside the stage where we poets will read. Bob claims ignorance of the Poetry Club’s reservation despite the fact that a large poster announcing the festival adorns the community bulletin board behind him. The uncompromising tension between Woody and Mr. Manager is fraught with the difference between sport spectators cheering their team and performing artists engaging attention. Woody insists the room is reserved for the Poetry Festival while the bartender maintains he will not be turning off the big screens, disappointing baseball fans and losing a great day of tips.

Into the impasse I step and broker a deal. Simply, I suggest, turn off the sound of the televisions. That way the poetry festival can go on while students who want to watch the Rockies can do just that: watch, as one would a baseball game at the stadium. The alternative: poets reading aloud from the stage as aside them the New York Met’s hometown broadcaster in Manhattan prattles on about the nuances of the game, two such audibles at once, simply will not work. When neither Woody nor Bob respond to my suggestion – they are lost in planning further negotiation – I assert the matter settled with “Cool, let the poetry begin” and walk away.

When a grinning Woody - with his two fingers prominently crossed - catches up with me, he says with a mock innocence, “Geez, I had no idea today was the inaugural of The Rockies.” Did I mention Woody is wearing a New York Mets baseball cap?

Both the festival and the game begin at noon, Mountain Time. Fans of baseball and poetry fill the Student Union. As the third reading poet in the festival lineup, I take the stage just as The Colorado Rockies begin their third time at bat. So far the poetry festival attendees and the baseball fans have co-existed amicably, with neither event actually preventing enjoyment of the other. Sadly, three is not one of my lucky numbers, and when I commence to read the third in my series of thirteen poems, I hear and am interrupted with “Get off the stage Old Man,” a request I patently ignore. During the rest of my performance other derogatory comments are voiced by three student baseball fans, all of which and whom I ignore until I am done. When I do finish, all eyes and ears are upon me. Two things I know: (one) my poetry rocked and (two) my response to the hecklers will be part of the record of this day as half the people in the room are writers. After the applause dies down I let Tacony infuse the artist, proceeding directly to the table where the three hecklers are sitting, each with a pitcher of Coors on the table and a glass in their hand. I don’t say anything. I just stare first at one, and then the second, and then the third, wondering, bemused, if these three young men are up for the comeuppance I’ll exact as I make a Charlie Chaplin kind of move: I use a stiffened right leg and knee to “accidentally” cause the table to tip, towards the three of them, a move so unobservable no one could swear it was anything but an accident. The tipped beer pitchers spill into all of the three fools laps. Indignant, Outraged and Dumb jump up from their chairs with the crotches of their imported cargo pants now soaked with local non-union beer. I mouth a phony apology in their direction and wink before turning my back on them. When they begin whining loudly and yelling their assertion that it was no accident, disturbing everyone with their commotion, and the big mouth of the trinity threatens “I’ll kick your ass,” a campus security guard who had witnessed their earlier actions confiscates their Student Union IDs and eighty-sixes them from the Union for the remainder of the school year.

Again, I didn’t lift a finger although I did lift my leg.