A Chalice of Blue Light

A Chalice of Blue Light

as always, for Marcia

            In early July of 1974, at a campground in North Carolina, I befriend four broke women: Lucia (the Lucy of my novel Lucy & Eddie), her best friend Liz and kid sister Becky, and Becky’s classmate Caroline. They are hitchhiking back to Manhattan and need shelter from the North Carolina mosquito night. All four are more beautiful than religion. We share my camp, my tent, my pot, my spam, my apples, my beer. All four have starring roles in my imaginings. The morning of Day-Two of our time shared, we visit the historic Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, where, to me,  some things are revealed.

            The ascent of the corkscrew staircase to the top of the tower augurs the high Colorado hikes of late summer. A line of tourists ten minutes ahead of us snakes its way above us, up the steep, indeed, arduously narrow, wooden stairway. The voice of their exertions floats down the stairwell to reach us at the bottom. A chestnut banister clings, as it spirals upward, a man made vine climbing to the light at the top of the wall of pre-Civil War quarried stone. Leading the way I set an easy pace, for the slope is steep and the risers high. I know I am on display from the rear, the male among four females, a lad off to ritual, perhaps in the company of a reincarnated Diana, in the role of her new beaux, along with her trinity of friends, the Fates, for all I know. Lucia is beneath the other girls in our line of ascent; still I sense her eyes upon me even when I’m out of sight, around, beyond the curve of wending stairwell. The last of the tourists who’d gone in before us during the ten o’clock hour pass us going down as we near the top, so when we reach the keeper’s watch room below the light room, we find we have it all to ourselves.

            The view from the windows of the lighthouse is awesome as the narrow width of the cape, its vulnerability to swollen sea, its fragility, is most apparent. Despite the generally placid July Atlantic that is within view, instantly I know I wouldn’t want to be here on this ribbon of land, this far out in the Atlantic, during raucous weather. But it’s incredibly summery today, as summery as the tie-dyed tee shirt the boyish Becky wears.  An airplane drifts towards us from the north, flying slowly and trailing a sign advertising some Cape Hatteras delight. On one of the walls between the windows facing east and seaward, a plaque details the names of those who have died trying to rescue others in these Hatteras waters. Liz remarks that many, most of them, in fact, have the same last name, McKrue, a family that as a ledger on a table below affirms still involves itself in the profession of rescuing shipwrecked sailors. In my mind I imagine the look of a McKrue: the smoking pipe in ocean salted, weather beaten hands, the draw of the apparatus curved like the neck of a swan, the sterling vision of those blue eyes below the widow’s peak of wavy hair, the stained tobacco teeth, an acute feel for the weather in the freckled hands that hold the match, a ponder-er, head full of star maps and charted shoals and coastal landmarks. As this and many of my further adventures lead me to believe: anywhere anyone goes, it seems there’s a family got an understanding of and a lock on the land, on the professions native to the geography of it. For good or for bad? I’m not sure, although I’d wager a McKrue will be ready to rescue shipwrecked sailors from the hazardous shoals a hundred years from now.

            A wonder occurs: what geography of employment c onnects the Mc Bards, what common denominator is there among my clan? I’m scrolling through a mental list of the occupations of sundry aunts and uncles, trying to discern a web between them as I stare out at the horizon that fills my vision from periphery to periphery. Truckers, accountants, union men, government spies, convicted felons, and I realize that they all do have something in common, as perpetuity of motion gives similarity to every ocean wave. Uncle Bob, Dad, Uncle Ray, Aunt Mary, Mother, Vincent, the other Edwin Forrest, anyone of my family whom I call to memory, each and every one, loves to gamble. Pinochle, poker, horses, the numbers, anything to beat the odds. To the Mc Bards it is all about the pleasure of taking risks and winning!, beating the odds with a roll of the dice, a gamble paying off, the ticket at the window amid the noise of the track, and understanding the odds, gauging moves to order the overt randomness of a life into a kindness, simple as that. I imagine this is why these women have accompanied me here, have led me here, to this towering view of the sea, for a circumstantial thought, a question answered, a glimpse of my true nature in the ponder of a musing. If I ever have a kid, I think, I’ll call him Risk, or Lucky. Like this view, fifty-fifty, of sea and sky, I feel I have at least even odds of making something happen with this beautiful Lucia, who now stands on the balcony outside, an image that gives flesh to inspiration and recklessness simultaneously. Encouraged by a sullen but steady breeze, the door marked Keeper Only wings shut, as Lucia must have opened it and gained access to the outside balcony through it. The same slight gust also flutters Lucia’s hair in this vision of her, looking towards Africa one moment and Sweden the next. She exalts in the bluster, in the caress of the wind. Her profile would ennoble the prowl of a ship. She turns away from the sea and looks back into the interior through the window, first at me and then to her girlfriends aside me. She cups her hands around her lips and slowly mouths the words to some prophesy that includes Ireland as well as Sweden.

            Liz joins Lucia on the small balcony, and I notice Lucia has a habit of leaning toward Liz whenever they talk, a gesture that is a function of their difference in height. They speak together conspiratorially and then they both laugh before coming back inside. Lucia is almost blushing and she averts her face from mine to read the small print of the ledger. Becky and Carolyn have a peek at the view from the balcony in their turn, and then I go out alone.

            The breeze and the warm sun are wondrous. I close my eyes against the late morning glare of light on the slate water, and then, squinting, with eyes shaded by a weave of fingers, I search the sea for sight of ships, but I see none. Just that airplane - now well past the campground with its serpent of advertisement - flies languidly towards the extremity of the cape. I wonder at the distance to it, the distance to the horizon. A few miles? Ten? A hundred?  How high the sky? has more meaning here. I have no experience nor perspective by which to judge distance here, for the water confounds me, knowing what I see on the sparkling surface, this disc, this record of shining sea, with the cape but a scratch across it, is but a superficial minor aspect of the ocean’s totality, given the volume of it, the miracle of and diverse quantity of life fulfilling it, the mystery and the hunger, the power below the water’s surface. How far down to the wreck of the Santa Regina mentioned in the log of shipwrecks? How purposeful the lives of men who tend the sea? How like Sisyphus? How heroic? How like Pyrrhus? How extreme? The first ghost riders were sailors.

            Back inside I find I’m alone; the women are gone. I hear squeals of laughter, the trill of girlish glee, and the pattern of racing feet going down the wooden stairs. Whereas it was a long haul coming up it’s a goat’s delight going down, with gravity the drive, and the snake of a hand rail allows the assuredness of arm and hand to steady the momentum downward. When I reach bottom, before going outside, I check the registry we had signed coming in. I am still curious about Carolyn’s lineage. Ever since this morning when I’d startled and woke her, she has not looked me in the eye or spoken directly to me. Above Lucia Cilento I find Carolyn Ararat written in a neat calligraphy. The signatures of Liz and Becky look surprisingly dissimilar, although both resemble Palmer method Catholic. I've signed Eddie Mc Bard, leaving out the Forrest.

            Outside the door to the lighthouse Carolyn is photographing Becky and Liz who are dancing in the sand with the surf and sky as backdrop. Lucia directs the sisters to stand facing each other, toe to toe. They are the same height although Becky at seventeen is slighter than Liz. Their profiles are strikingly similar and Lucia asks Carolyn to get a close-up of their faces, the sky between which she says, “Gives shape to a chalice of blue light.”

            I step out of the shade and the coolness of the lighthouse. A group of people are queuing up in the shade of the tower to the north, waiting to be admitted by the caretaker at eleven. I walk over to Lucia and put my arm around her waist.

            “Carolyn, would you take one of me and Lucy,” I suggest. But when Carolyn puts the camera up to her eye to focus, Lucia indicates with a push on my arm and a shove of the hips that she’d rather I wasn’t so familiar in front of the camera, in front of her friends. The mixed message of her desire to stand independent of me now after our morning together, like the mystery of the ocean’s depth and its contents, astounds me. A fool I am to think Lucia will reveal the treasure of herself as easily as she had allowed the first kiss of morning. There will be more delight than foreplay and orgasm when it comes to making love with Lucia, should she allow our flirtation to go that far. At first I attribute her seeming irritation with my forwardness to shyness in front of friends. Perhaps she is just not used to the familiarity of a man’s hand on her hip. A chant of beats, a poem, pops into my head

She could be virgin

She could be breeze

Lucia be forest

Be tree under me 

A bird’s eye vision of the world colors my thinking to this day because I climbed the Hatteras Tower.

TABOO

  TABOO

as always

for Marcia

(One of my all time favorite flicks is Fellini’s Casanova. Despite its surreal bent, the forces of poetry at work in the film resonate within, with Casanova, the poet, reciting his greatest love poem several times during the course of the movie. His first recitation gets him laid and safe from pursuit, the second provides him with an entire nunnery to bed, his third turn gets him knighted, while his final read elicits loathing and mockery. A poem on the lips of an old man – no matter his resume – is but a shadow of its youthful self. The world renowned poet and legendary lover, a guest at some young fool’s castle, is berated, mocked and abused by all – characters in the scene as well as moviegoers in the theater. As he descends a staircase, down from his pedestal, if you will, Casanova suffers the taunts of the punk and the drunk: “Shut up old man! Shut up and die! Cease to read. Cease to exist. Cease, cease, cease to be!” The response to Casanova’s recital is so uninformed and cruel, it gives new meaning to a pound of selfish; however, having seen Donald-Sutherland-as-Casanova’s inglorious exit from the stage, I must say, I was better prepared, able to deal with, and not really shocked by the events of Taboo. Hell, I was amused.)

Here’s evidence that April is the cruelest month.

A few years ago, when the city was flush with dinero, some civic-minded art administratrix decided to promote poetry in Denver as, besides being Shakespeare’s cruelest month, April is also National Poetry Month. At taxpayer expense the Mayor’s Commission on Art, Culture and Waste of Money, mailed out some deluxe color promotional materials attesting to the importance of poetry in our lives, complete with a list of venues and April literary events scheduled in the Denver-Metro area. The postcard caught my eye as I’ve been involved in the poetry world ever since the last wave of beat sensibility in Denver adopted me in the mid-Seventies - not to brag, but I’ve won awards, appeared (even centerfold-ed) in lit ‘zines, and hosted hundreds of readings for Denver literati these thirty-five years.

When it comes to poetry, a great influence upon me was Larry Lake, publisher of Denver’s Bowery Press. Larry published my first broadside (a poetry tradition in Bohemia for centuries) and my first book; he also instigated my ordination as a minister in The Temple of Man. Aside from matters related to love and family, these two events were pivotal in setting the course of my life’s journey. Over the years my relationship with Larry was like the weather: some days beautiful and some days stormy; after all we both sought the attention of the same muse. Towards the end of his life – Larry died young in the early Nineties – he and I were estranged for reasons of anger and art and alcohol, and, in an attempt to do right by Larry after his death, I wrote a story for the stage, Not Just Another Hose Job, a bit of creative Irish non fiction that celebrated some of Larry’s virtues, offering the short tale as an answer to the question: What’s so good about men, anyway?

Hose Job almost wrote itself in one sitting, start to finish, on my piece of shit Millennium PC one winter afternoon as my wife skied with friends at Mary Jane. I had the house to myself, a state of being (Step One) required for my writing, and hoped to write something new for an open mic night that for reasons of cabin-fever  and ennui, Marcia and I had been attending on Thursday evenings at Michaelangelo’s on Broadway. Although the evening spotlighted singers, guitar players and songwriters, my stories had been well received; consequently, I write the six and half minute narrative about Lake with the attention span of folksingers in mind: (short not long), and my tale of payback and comeuppance is so well received upon first reading that I think the folksingers might parade me down Broadway on their shoulders. Everybody loves it.

Knowing its effect on a live audience, I am looking forward to sharing it at some other venues, and that is where the city’s effort to promote poetry comes in, for on the Mayor’s postcard is mention of an open mic night at a club in North Aurora, The Kasbah, and I decide to attend this new-to-me poetry event. The verbiage of the listing reads Signup and Reading at 8.

Now Marcia and I had been attending the Michael Angelo evenings as a “date night” of sorts, but for sundry reasons she decides not to make The Kasbah reading with me, although she whole-heartedly encourages me to go. “Everyone loves your story. Go, tell it in Aurora. Have some fun without me,” are her parting words, as to a place I’ve never been, I head, on this April night.

Because I like to arrive early for events to check out the vibe, I enter the strip mall door of The Kasbah at 6^th and Chambers at 7:30. The place is bigger than I would have guessed, with a dance floor and stage centrally located. I’d guess the occupancy limit would be two hundred. From north to south the club is restaurant seating, a stage and dance floor horse-shoed by cocktail table seating, a bar, more restaurant seating, and kitchen, with a DJ booth opposite the stage by the front door.

I take a stool at the bar and scan the scene. There are probably sixty people in the Kasbah, all of whom – with the exception of me, one of the bartenders, and the female half of a couple seated opposite the stage – are African American. Thirty or so adults are working out on the dance floor as a gentleman with a wireless microphone leads everyone with his voice and by example. I’m not sure if it’s a dance class or an exercise class but everyone is having fun despite the accompanying retro Seventies disco music.

Over the wishes of Donna Summer (Love to love you Baby), I order some brandy and ask the bartender about the poetry reading, wondering if, perchance, I got the night wrong. She tells me the dance class is over at eight and that’s when the poetry begins. I realize there’s much to The Kasbah and am reminded very much of The Mercury Café as both are cabarets with a dance floor, host poetry readings, offer classes, and provide a stage for locals. Its monthly calendar seems as eclectic as the Merc’s. Hell, the dance instructor, in his enthusiasm and sales pitch for continuing classes reminds me of Tiffany Wine who leads the Jitterbug and Lindy Hop classes at The Merc. I feel strangely at home. I have a second brandy and await the arrival of the poetry host, a woman I am told, who runs “The Show,” a phrase which incites a shiver of my intellect, as such words are generally not used to describe an open poetry reading.

At eight, the dance class ends and the Kasbah goes from being lively to practically empty as the dancers take their lactic acid build-up home with only a few poetry lovers newly arrived to take their place. After an hour of waiting with the host still a no show, the bartender introduces me to the club manager, a nice enough fellow, who tells me he’ll hook me up with a slot once Taboo arrives. In an aside to the barkeep, he indicates he too is irritated at the late start of things. I order a beer and intend to nurse it as I’ve now been at the bar over an hour and half for an event that was supposed to begin an hour ago. At 9:30, the DJ announces that soon things will be getting under way as Taboo is on her way. “Woo woo Taboo,” I mutter to myself, wondering at the lurking disdain in my invocation of her name.

A little before ten there is a flurry of activity in the room and the disco music ends. Soon a young woman taps me on the shoulder, and asks, “Are you the guy who wants in my show?” to which I respond, “I’m the guy who wants to sign up for the open reading that was listed in the Mayor’s guide to April poetry events.”

“What’s your name?” she asks.

I tell her, “Eddie.”

“Just Eddie?” she questions, and repeats. “Really. Just Eddie?”

Now I have a lot of names by which I am called:Ed Ward, Ed, Eddie, Edwin, Eday, Ward, Edwin Forrest, . . . but I feel no need to bring my reputation to bear on my signing up for Taboo’s open reading.

“Just Eddie” I say.

She tells me I am second on the list as she unashamedly rolls her eyes, turns away and sashays to the stage, with sashay being a euphemistic description of her locomotion. Her outfit is over the top provocative. Other descriptive adjectives come to mind, among them slutty and whoreish: turquoise cowboy boots, spidery fishnet tights, a leather skirt short enough to not cover the junction of her thighs and the lines of her booty, and a ghost of a see through blouse highlighting her cleavage. 

Taboo begins with a whine about the unfolding of the night’s event without ever mentioning that the evening is already two hours behind schedule. She apologizes for the small turnout as apparently an upcoming Slam team, Café Nuba, is hosting tryouts in downtown Denver. She offers this as an excuse for the many empty seats in The Kasbah. “Anybody who is anybody is at Café Nuba,” she adds, an ignorant dis on those who have come to listen or read.

“How will we ever fill an hour as I only have three poets on my list?” is the questions she answers herself: “Well, I guess, I’ll just have to carry the night,” before breaking into motion and poetry.

Instantly I am reminded that there is very little new under the sun. On my barstool, I squirm, for her poetry is banal, sophomoric and uninspired, mostly a hiphop indictment of the men in her life. Apparently she hates her former paramours after sex with the same fervor used to seduce them.  Blah, blah blah, men are bad, men are dogs, men are fog that blocks the light. I stop listening and settle my tab with the bartender and move away from the bar. I intend to support with my attention whoever is signed up to read before me and sit at a cocktail table near the stage. When I tune back in, Taboo is still going on about the lice in her life, the balls she would break, etcetera and I again stop listening. I’m enjoying the buzz of two brandies and a beer and I review the text of  Not Just Another Hose Job. I’m chuckling to myself at one of the more humorous moments in my story when a young man at the table next to mine interrupts my reverie.

“Hey, man, are you just gonna take it? I mean, she’s mocking the shit out of you.”

I snap my attention back to Taboo. She’s talking about the Virgin Eddie in the house, a reference, apparently, to my never having been at The Kasbah before. She’s making sure that everyone knows that she can not attest to my ability as a poet, that she is reluctant to let me on stage, but “Hell, how bad can one man be?” she asks, as she ends her “first set of my show” with her final wham-bam-hate-you-man sham of a poem.

I take the stage. The audience seems interested in me as I am a bit of exotica here in East Aurora. Hell, I’m white, I’m old, and apparently I’m interested in poetry, as is the audience. When I introduce my piece as an answer to the question: What’s so good about men anyway? I am warmly received, especially by the stage-left, front row table of listeners, a dozen or so middle aged women. They laugh and snicker as one comes out of her chair to high five and bait me: “Tell us man, what is so good about men?” All clap and woo-woo her friendly query.

I stand and deliver my well-rehearsed story as Taboo, disregarding me, works the room greeting people in the audience. About three minutes into my story, I can’t help but notice the stage lights blink on and off as the disco music blares loudly for a couple of beats and my microphone cuts out momentarily. As everyone in the room is laughing at my recount of Larry’s behavior, I can’t help but think that the light and sound blip was an accident. Past the stage lights, however, I spy Taboo exit the DJ booth and realize the glitches were at her instigation. She stands staring at the stage, her arms akimbo. Her body language implies that I am guilty of some faux pas. She points her right thumb stage left as if to say Get Off My Stage. I ignore her. I press on with my narration, as the audience, beguiled, is leaning stage-ward, wondering where my story will take them. They are engaged, amused, smiling and laughing, unaware of the exasperated Taboo in the back of the room.

Taboo renters the DJ booth and now my mic is dead. As audience members groan dismay, I continue narrating my piece as if the mic is still working although I boost my volume. Taboo and a posse of poseurs rush from the back of the room and assemble stage left.

“Give me my mic,” she demands. Again, I ignore her and step off the stage closer to the twelve top that has been applauding my tale and finish my telling with the dead mic in my hand as Taboo takes the stage with her friends, all of whom are giving me crap for not having stopped when Taboo demanded it of me. “Fuck you old man!” and “Who do you think you are, Grandpop?” and other such ageist remarks are mouthed and spoken.

As Taboo, furious and threatening, approaches me and the front edge of the stage I let the microphone slip to the club floor, playing out the cord as one would a fishing line, before dropping the cord completely. Taboo reels it in from the stage, and once she has the mic and its power is restored, she begins to abuse me.

“Twenty minutes of this old man reminiscing has slain me,” she announces, as she pretends to die and folds her body, crumpling to the stage. “How dare you go on and on for twenty minutes with your old man memories on my stage. This is my show!” she questions and exclaims while prone on the floor, as if speaking from the grave.

Now I’m tempted to retake the stage and pretend to urinate on her, thinking it might revive she who has been slain. You know, unzip my pants and wag my hands as if they were holding my penis. Maybe pull a pants pocket through the zipper and wag the cloth like a fire hose. You know, extinguish her pain at having had to endure my six minute tale; instead, I turn my back on the irate Taboo and address the audience with my indignation, starting with the twelve top: “Have I slain you?”

No one answers. In fact, all avert their eyes, unwilling to take sides or voice their feelings. A minute ago a dozen women were laughing with me and now Taboo has put them as well as everyone else in the room between a rock and a hard place. Side with me and offend Taboo (whose show it is after all) or lie to themselves and side with Taboo. After all, my six minutes of humor were hardly twenty minutes of poor performance. Hell, when in the story Larry Lake exacts his revenge, everyone listening had expressed a collective sigh of amazement and delight, for I had delivered on my promise to answer the question: What’s so good about men, anyway? I walk the room asking everyone with my eyes and the supplication of my hands and the shrug of my shoulders if Taboo’s assessment of my narration was correct. Everyone chooses silence. All eyes look away. None will affirm that I’d been treated rudely. I menace the room, puffing up with adrenaline and bluster and indignation. My one hundred and sixty pounds appears now closer to two hundred. I turn back to Taboo, proffer the peace sign, and head directly to the DJ booth to raise a passionate ruckus. I slam open the door and stare at the three men inside, one of whom is the manager I had met earlier.

“What was that all about?” I ask. “My piece was six minutes, not twenty, and your host heard not a word of it. Everyone in the room loved my story. Ask them, I dare you. In thirty years of running and reading at open mics I have never seen anyone treated so disrespectfully. Really, is this what The Kasbah is all about?’

The soundmen avert my stare and are silent. My indignation possesses the booth and the manager attempts to diffuse the situation with an arm around my shoulder and a whispered offer: “Let me buy you a drink.” He knows I’ve been rudely treated by Taboo, but he won’t apologize for her or himself. “Please, tell me, what are you drinking?”

Calling his bluff and raising the stakes, so to speak, I tell him, “A triple Grand Marnier, that’s what I drink,” knowing that’s about a thirty-dollar pour. He guides me back to the bar and tells the bartender, “Give him what he wants. On the house.” I am handed a snifter full of orange liqueur, and I tune back into the room.

Taboo is on stage rapping another diatribe about the failings of men, elaborating all the short-comings of the men she’s fucked, mocking their penis and brain sizes, belittling all her former lovers with adjectives such as effete and puny and limp.

I’m inspired to rebuke her, and with a new nickname I brand her. “Stop being a snitch, Snitch. No one wants to hear you gossiping rudely ‘bout your boy toys.” The Kasbah goes eerily silent again, a quiet broken by my replay: “Snitch, stop snitching on your boy toys. Ex lovers deserve better!”

The audience does not know whether to laugh, groan or cry. The tension in the room is palpable. How can such a heckled taunt as mine – true as it is – be dealt with? Well, rashly is the answer, and before I count five there are three rather thuggish twenty-something year old bouncers (former linemen at Aurora Central or card carrying ganstas, I can’t tell) aside me, one of whom tells me I’m going to have to leave.

“You mean, I don’t get to finish my drink?”

“That’s right, you’re out of here, Pops. It’s a wrap. Right now. Case closed. You’re out of here.”

Dramatically and slowly I raise my snifter high above my head and pour the liquid contents on the floor, intending that the splash-back finds its way onto all six Nike sneakers that surround me.

Unceremoniously I am boxed in, shepherd-ed toward and out the door, bullied towards my car, and threatened with an ass kicking if I do anything but drive away, never to return. When one of the young men guarding me looks a little too close to violence, I bluster all three: “Touch me and I own The Kasbah. You have no idea who I am. And you can tell Taboo – as the Irish say – It is death to be a poet, death to love a poet, and death to mock a poet. I pity your ignorant allegiance to that ego of excuse for poetry."

April can, indeed, be cruel, but not as cruel as the comeuppance I will exact one day upon Taboo, starting with this retelling.

Larry Lake - ink on paper - Michael Bergt

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.