A Neighbor's Dog

(I heard this story over the whine of a group of hundred-fifty horsepower electric motors driving the pumps that suck the water from the Snake River at the Dead Ox pumping station then sling it up through six-foot diameter piping and out onto the Oregon Slope onion fields north and west of Ontario, Oregon. The maintenance guy and I had just discussed the fact that neighbors don't seem to help each other as much as they did when we were kids.....)
"Neighbors. Takes all kinds of folks to be neighbors, and you never really know who is living down the lane there. I've moved around some, so I've had different types of people for neighbors, but the one I have now used to be about as different as they come.
"Let's call him Joe. Joe lives in a shotgun shack about a half a mile down a gravel road from our place, and to get to our house, you gotta drive past Joe's place. He moved in there three years ago last April. Lived all alone. Don't know exactly where he came from, but when he showed up he was packing Pennsylvania plates on a Pinto station wagon. He used to spend most of the day drinking on his porch.
"Two Julys ago I was coming home from town and spotted Joe sitting on the porch with his little white .poodle dog, so I slowed down and gave him a big wave, just being friendly, you know, never hurts. Well, I no more than got home than the phone rang, and it was Joe, telling me I had run over his dog. Now, I'm pretty sure I saw that dog up on the porch when I drove by, and I didn't feel any thumps or hear any yelps, but it is hard to be absolutely sure of anything nowadays, so I apologized for running over his dog and asked him if there was anything I could do for him.
"He said he wanted a new dog. Well, I just happened to have a friend across the valley whose bitch had dropped a big litter of poodle-type pups, and I told Joe that I'd do my best to get a white one for him. He said, nah, he didn't want another poodle, that he had his heart set on a registered German shepherd.
"If I had run over a dog at all, I'd run over a mongrel poodle, and substituting a pureblood shepherd seemed to me to be a little like him asking me for a new Cadillac after I'd dented up his Pinto, and I told him so. That didn't help a thing. Just gave him the idea to hit up my automobile insurance company for three hundred dollars for the poodle.
"It took the better part of a month for the insurance company to convince Joe that me and the dead dog, if there was one, had both been in a public road right-of-way when the dog was hit, that I hadn't actually driven up onto Joe's porch and run over the dog, and therefore the dog was in the wrong place at the wrong time to have anything to do with my liability insurance, and that, as a matter of fact, Joe, being owner of the dead dog, would be held liable for any damage to my vehicle.
"Joe took this as writing on the wall, and phoned me one night to say that he had decided that a little white poodle pup wouldn't be so bad afterall. By this time, of course, my buddy had given away all the pups. I told Joe that I figured that the dog question was a done deal and that I'd done all I could for him and apologized once again for hitting his dog, if I had hit his dog.
"Like I said, Joe was a drinking man, the kind that shifts gears on his personalities and gets awful uncorked at a certain point in his boozing. Fifteen minutes after the phone call, Joe was out on our front porch yelling to the high heavens about what a rotten, no-account bastard I was, about how he missed his dog, and about how he was going to take three hundred dollars out of my hide.
"I don't much cotton to anybody calling me names on my own property, so I popped on the porch light to make sure Joe wasn't packing a gun, then went out to meet him.
"Just about the time I was winding up to feed him some teeth, my wife came busting through the screen door, put both hands on Joe's chest, and rolled him off the porch, down five stairs, and into her little carp pond.
That puddle isn't but two feet deep, but Joe was too sloshed to know which direction was up and he went to flailing around like he had been thrown off a bridge into the Snake River. Mostly to keep him from beaching all the carp I went down off the porch, dragged him out of the drink, and set him on the sidewalk.
"Maybe Joe hit his head on the stairs on the way down, or maybe he saw his maker there in the fish pond, or maybe that was the last straw of some kind. Whatever it was, worked like shock therapy on him, cause Joe quit using booze that very night, and he has been the best of neighbors since then. Got a job, bought a horse, went to riding the high country with the search and rescue folks, and does real good at keeping up the fences between him and us. Even found himself a live-in girl friend. I gave them a pedigreed German shepherd pup last Christmas."

Lady and the Tramps

(I heard this story from a one-eyed horseshoer in the Salmon River country of central Idaho. He and I were leaning into the campfire about midnight after three days of drinking beer and swapping lies. I don't remember the subject of conversation.)

"I've been riding, breeding, feeding, doctoring, buying, selling, and trading horses for forty years, and I've done pretty well by it. At least I've always had a few more horses than I could afford. Worst I ever got took in a deal, though, was when I got to messing around with improving the bloodlines of a dog.
"My wife brought home a little cocker pup looking like it came straight from Disney, all flop-eared and misty-eyed, so Carolyn called her Lady. When Lady wasn't more than about six months old, she came into heat. I just couldn't see putting a dog that young into motherhood, so we made a bed for her in our six-horse trailer, and fed her in there. Every cowdog in the county fought for the privilege of pissing on those trailer tires. Lady made it through that first heat a virgin.
"Six months later, the cowdogs started sniffing her butt again, so back in the trailer went Lady. I had been doing my homework, though. The neighbor up the hill had a male cocker, full in the chest, standing proud, a good prospective mate for Lady, but the damn thing was a housedog, and never left the yard.
"The third day Lady was in lockup, I took a ring of baloney and wandered along the property line between us and the neighbor, pretending I was doing some fencing. When the male cocker took notice of me and started yapping, I pitched a chunk of baloney his way. Pretty soon I had him down by our house, eating out of my hand. It was easy enough to pick him up and toss him into the trailer with Lady.
"A couple of hours later I spotted the neighbor man driving real slow down the county lane, whistling out of the car window, honking the horn now and then. When he came to our driveway, I wandered out and played dumb. No, sure enough hadn't seen his dog, what was it a cocker or something, must gone jackrabbit hunting, probably will come home before dark, that sort of thing.
"About that time, the fool dog caught wind of his master, or heard his voice, or recognized the sound of the car engine, and went to whining inside that horse trailer. All that metal just amplified that dog's voice, and the neighbor recognized the yelp, went gawking around, trying to figure out where the sound was coming from.
"I ran over to the trailer before he could figure things out, cracked the door, and out come Ace, I think his name was, went to licking the baloney smell off my hand, while Lady scooted by and ran around the corner of the house, two steps in front of a bob-tailed dingodog.
"I said, by golly, I sure didn't know how that dog had jumped up six feet through that trailer window, but that I did have a bitch in heat, and the power of sex was a wondrous thing, wasn't it? Being an animal breeder myself, I'd be more than happy to pay a small stud fee for the services of his animal, and I peeled off a ten and handed it to him. He was a little hesitant to take the money, but I insisted, so he tucked the bill in his shirt pocket.
"He gathered up his dog, crawled back into the car, fired up the motor, and, as he was backing out of the drive, he leaned out the window, kinda smiled, and told me that old Ace had been neutered for five years. Lady was spayed that September, ten weeks after she whelped a litter of dingo-cocker cross pups."

The Cow Palace

Five miles south of downtown San Francisco, within easy howitzer range of the Transamerica Pyramid, sits a monument to free-span roof systems called the Cow Palace..... a rectilinear barn, built before the rediscovery of the dome, with a main floor plenty big enough for a rodeo, circus, or monster truck crushorama. There is enough off-floor seating for, say, eight thousand folks. During my first full winter in California, I was inside the Cow Palace three times.
The Grand National Horse Show and Livestock Exposition is held yearly there. A few memories linger from my attendance of this event..........The Sons of the Pioneers, looking more like the Grandpas of the Pioneers, lowered from the catwalks on a swaying stage, singing "Cool, Clear, Water" while twenty roving bartenders, with icechests on their chests, worked the crowd, yelling "Beer, Cold Beer."........Monty Montana, straddling a bored paint gelding, twirling two ropes at once, and smiling too widely for the teeth to have been his own........Bobby DelVecchio, from the Bronx, New York winning the most cowpoke event of them all, bullriding......and Bud's Pride, touted as the first fertile Beefalo bull, (cross between a shorthorn and a buffalo) bringing a cool 1.3 million bucks at auction.
The second visit to the Cow Palace was for a performance by the Rolling Stones. Mick Jaegger made his entrance to the Cow Palace in the bucket of a black self-propelled cherry picker, dressed in a navy pinstriped, London-tailored, three-piece serge suit, no shirt or shoes, driving himself down the center isle of the floor, swooping way out over the fans as he sang "Lady Jane."
The third time came after I saw a sign-up sheet in the City Lights Bookstore for volunteers to set up folding chairs for a speech by E. F. Shumacher, author of Small is Beautiful. In the book, Shumacher sets out guidelines for minimalist lifestyles and voluntary simplicity, which is a reasonable enough idea unless you are already living too simply to be able to afford food. I did wonder why the Shumacher folks had chosen the Cow Palace. Maybe small didn't seem all that pretty when it came to book sales. I signed up. I wanted to look a bit deeper into the guts of the big old building.
I carried chairs until both hands were blood-blistered. Fifteen minutes before kickoff, when it was becoming evident that the one hundred voluntary simpletons in attendance were going to be rolling around in the big old building like BBs in a boxcar, I wandered out to the lobby to have a smoke. There I met Abraham, a beefy professional janitor, wearing a faded Cow Palace Staff vest, and nipping on a pint of mid-'70s Mogen David 20-20..
He poured a gulp of the syrup into a styrofoam cup for me We stood in the very same industrial-strength doorway through which Mick had driven his rock and roll contraption a month earlier. Five young devotees were arranging the stage. When it came time for the sound check, a short, eager woman took a microphone and began.... "To be, or not to be, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler....."
Abraham took another slug of the Mad Dog, looked over at me, and said, "Ya know, ya learn something new every day on this job. I kinda figured this Small is Beautiful thing was going to be some kind of Midget Pride gathering, but, by God I always thought Willie Shoemaker was a man."

Somebody No Water Bamboo

TEN
(I heard this story on a bridge over La Honda Creek, in front of Ken Kesey's cabin.)

"Like, the sun was in late Leo/early Virgo the first time I saw San Francisco Bay. I came out of Denver in a drive-away four-door Buick, with my motorcycle took-to-pieces and wrapped in a tarp in the back seat. Everything else I owned was stuffed in the trunk and all around me in the front seat.
"The car was supposed to end up in The City, but I got a little too twisted out by Livermore somewhere and took the hundred mile longcut up and over Mount Hamilton. Anyway, I start coming up the east side of the Bay, and I know that this is where my home is going to be because I hit Fremont on a Sunday afternoon and right there by the freeway is, like, a full-tilt drag strip with, like, hundreds of far out cars and, I swear, right overhead are real gullwing gliders, man, cruising out over the Bay and landing beside the drag strip.
"So, before I turn in the car, I score a little house to rent in Menlo Park, by the cemetery. They'll rent right away to a Buick. I unload my stuff into the house, take the car into The City, put the motorcycle together, deliver the car to some Arab rental company, and putt back down the Bayshore to my happy little home.
"In just a couple of days, I score a job as veterinarian's assistant for a crusty old dude on El Camino in Mountain View. It turns out I don't mind shoveling dog manure, really, but I totally can not handle holding the dogs down while the Doc shoots them up to put them away. Something about their eyes.
"So I pull this trip where I tell the vet that California is just too much for me, that I miss my family and I'm headed back to Colorado, and can I please have my week's pay? This guy is so used to losing help that he, like, just writes the check. No deductions, no goodbyes, no nothing.
"There used to be jobs around every corner. On the way back to Menlo Park I see a Help Wanted sign. I park the bike and go over and read the fine print that says "Janitor needed, easy work, low pay", and gives this phone number, which I call and set up an appointment for an interview the next day at Lee Manor.
"Lee Manor is this hundred-unit, three-story, singles' cinderblock studio apartment thing, down by Bayshore in Palo Alto, shaped like a horseshoe, with a swimming pool in the middle and a rec room wedged into the open end. I stash the bike a couple of blocks away. You never know.
"The job interview was, like, the strangest of trips. This liver-spotted Chinese dude, Mr. Lee himself, is dressed like some kind of Sicilian gangster with a diamond stick pin and big gold pinky ring, sitting in the rec room. When I come in, he offers me a little plastic cup of chocolate pudding and we sit there eating pudding at this, like, church table, and he doesn't ask or say a thing, man, just stares at me, watches me eating pudding. I felt like a deer caught in headlights, man, until finally he says, like, 'Let us walk.'
"I walk, but he's like, ninety years old, and has those metal taps on the heels and toes of his wingtips, so he shuffles, and it is fingernails on the blackboard stuff. Sounds like somebody is dragging a refrigerator down the hall.
"So we are standing out by the pool, and he is waving his arms around his empire and telling me to watch the garbage, and skim the pool, and water the bamboo, (which are these little teenage bushes all around the pool) and paint the rooms every time somebody moves, and buff the hallways, and get three hundred dollars a month. Then he scrapes over to a Lincoln Town Car and peels out toward downtown Palo Alto. I'm hired.
"I never really figured out who it was that lived in Lee Manor. Nobody cares to meet a custodian. But, like, the first floor was mostly big brown guys from junior colleges, being fattened by Stanford as their football team of the future. Big guys produce big garbage.
"And the second floor was a crash pad for stewardesses working out of SFO. They were slobs, man. I mean flight attendants may be the super-tidiest of human beings when they are at work, but you put a couple of them in lounge chairs by the pool and they trash all of East Palo Alto with their damn hair spray cans and wads of Kleenex, then they barefoot it back to the apartment, man, and leave the mess for the servants. Litterers, man. Get out of the airplane and think the outside world is so big they don't need to deal with their trash.
"And then there was the Artichoke Woman on the third floor. I never saw her wearing anything but a pink chenille housecoat. I think she worked nights at Stanford Hospital or something. Anyway, she was goofy, man, like lived on some weird schedule where every Tuesday night she came home, ate artichokes, then tried to run the leaves through the garbage disposal. You can't do that.
"I didn't even know what an artichoke was, man. The first time I took apart her disposal and found all that fiber wrapped around the works, man, I seriously thought that this chick had, like, decided against hanging herself and had shoved the rope down the sink. The second time I ask her what she is putting down there, and she shows me, so we make a deal, man, and every Wednesday morning after that I pick up a little plastic sack of artichoke leaves from in front of door 329.
"First of October I come to work and there is Mr. Lee standing out by the pool and staring at the pool plants, which are nice and gold, like everything should be by the first of October, right? I'm from Colorado. The aspens turn in September.
"Mr. Lee looks me up and down, looks at the plants, looks back at me, back at the plants, then reaches into the breast pocket of his Taiwan suit coat, peels off three one-hundred-dollar bills, hands them to me, and dismisses me from his employ, right there. Says 'You are fired, Sir. Somebody no water bamboo.'"

The Singing Cowboy

Darius and I were in a motel room in Grand Lake, Colorado, waiting for the weather to come to its senses so we could pack into the high country. We were watching a Roy Rogers movie.
The battle to save the ranch was won. The greedy banker was in the hoosegow. Roy hooked his boot heel in the corral fence, the ranch hands took up their instruments, and they began to croon a eulogy to the western skies.
Darius wore a 36-inch inseam on his Wranglers and was a working rancher. He ambled over to the television and slapped the power button, then looked over at me and said, "You know, J. D., I don't know what I would do if anyone ever actually came up to me and sang right in my face."

Fred the Dog

(I heard this story on the cemetery road above Cove, Oregon. We were on our way to visit the plot where Dewie Lovelace intended to spend eternity, and where I promised to retrieve a pint of whiskey from his funereal boots and pass it among the mourners.
There were four of us in the van.....my son Clifford, me, Dewie, and Earl Marshall, Dewie's lifelong cohort in seventy years of cowpoke pranks. Halfway up the hill, before we passed through the whitewashed bridge trusses that serve as portals for both burial grounds in that part of the Grande Ronde Valley, Dewie pulled his van to a whoa beside a grave that seemed to have spilled from the proper cemetery.
There, poking out of the cheatgrass and fescue, was a wreath of plastic petunias, a white cross fashioned from plaster lath, and a real marble headstone, bearing the inscription "FRED". Earl launched the tale.......)

"Yonder lies Fred, the best friend this town ever had. Come to town with a boy named Dixon who was jumping smoke over in La Grande but was living here, down behind the drive-in, a block off the school.
"Dixon, he was gone alot. Guess a smoke jumper's gotta show up for work even when there's two foot of snow on the Fourth of July. Anyway, Fred took to wandering while Dixon was away, took to walking the kids home from school. First he'd walk a pack of kindygardners home, then hustle back to school and pick up another bunch of kids, right on up through the high schoolers that didn't have cars.
"Fred was a big ol' red dog, kinda like a cross between a setter and a long-haired lab, with a wad of teddy bear throwed in. Slobbered some, but he was plumb gentle and kind. The kids loved him, and the town took him on as Cove's unofficial mascot.
"Like most of the townsfolks, Fred hung the saloon at night. He'd come over to your table and just stand there, until you put a dollar bill in his mouth. He could tell the difference between a real George Washington and a waitress' ticket. He'd carry the buck over to the bartender, put his paws up on the rail, and trade the money for one of those big ol' long pepperoni sticks. I watched Fred spend thirty-five dollars one Saturday night.
"It was a dark day for Cove, Oregon when Dixon got transferred down to northern California and took Fred along. There were ten people in town who wanted to run right to LaGrande to find a new town dog. They didn't have to bother. Turns out Fred didn't do anything down in California but get into trouble. They had a leash law down there and Fred cost Dixon six hundred dollars in runaway dog fines before he found a long-haul trucker who was heading this way and asked him if he'd take Fred home.
"We were all in the bar that afternoon when this great big shiny eighteen-wheel Peterbuilt hauling a reefer pulled into town, something that doesn't happen too often around here. Driver opened his door, and out poured Ol' Fred, knowing he was home. Boy, there was some celebrating that night.
"Max, down at the grocery, put a Mason jar by his cash register, unmarked, but everybody in Cove knew it was Fred's food fund. That jar always had at least twenty bucks in it. Fred was eating the best dog food they make. He had fifteen, twenty places in town where he'd curl up on a porch and sleep when he wasn't playing school crossing guard.
"Then one morning Fred came up dead. Folks took him to the vet's to see what had happened and Doc Bilger said that Fred had been poisoned. This town's had a dog poisoner in it for four generations. Nobody's ever figured out who it is. But I'll tell you, if you'da got caught with coyote bait in your garage about then, you'da got hung. As it was, the town kids toiletpapered the trees in the yards of the two prime suspects, but it is still a mystery as to who did it.
"So we took up a collection. Damn near half the residents of this town were for laying Fred to rest right up there in the real cemetery with the humans. Most of the dead folks up there weren't near as lovable as Fred. But the rest of the town figured we'd be starting a dangerous pattern and pretty soon we'd have cats and horses buried up there, and there just plumb ain't that much room left, so we found this little spot alongside the road. This way whoever killed Fred has to look at the marker every time one of their family passes away. Had the headstone shipped clear from Portland. Fred, he sure was a good ol' dog. Me, soon as we got Fred buried proper, I kinda stopped eating pepperoni sticks, just in case."

Einstein for Duck Hunters

Albert and I labored together on a project near Walden Pond, chopping Abraham Lincoln's wife's family farm into a subdivision. Al was seventeen, already a graduate student at MIT, working on mentally mutating a basketball into a donut without piercing the skin, and on a set of formulas that would predict the motion of an ice cube when dropped into a hot skillet. I was twenty-two, healing from a hasty marriage.
Al piled the slash in clearings, to be burned in the fall. I was the chainsaw operator, hacking a road right-of-way through old-growth hardwoods that Mary Todd had climbed as a little girl. During our first lunch together, I asked Albert what he had been thinking about while he was dragging brush. He said that he spent the morning determining that all humans on the planet would fit in a cubic mile box, which when dropped into a Pacific trench would have less than a millimeter's impact on sea level. Cheery stuff. In an effort to change the subject, I asked about his family background.
Al's father was an Italian immigrant, a student of Tesla's electromagnetic theories, who worked through the 1940's as a technician in the Princeton University laboratories during Albert Einstein's tenure there. He named his first son after Einstein.
I confessed my ignorance of the theory of relativity, figuring Al must have a handle on some of it. A duck flew by, headed for Walden Pond. Albert launched into a synthesis between hunting ducks and applying Einstein's theories.............
Einstein believed that the measurements of length, time, motion, and mass are not absolute, but depend on the relative velocity of the observer. If a hunter is standing in a duck blind and trying to kill a duck that is flying past, the hunter must lead the duck, shoot in front of it, so the shotgun pellets and the duck arrive at the same place at the same time. If the hunter is moving faster than the duck, from the back of a jeep for instance, the hunter must shoot behind the duck.
A single shotgun pellet, sitting on a duck's head, will probably not kill the duck, but if we grant the pellet a little velocity relative to the duck's head, the pellet picks up energy, and, in some sense, mass, so that at enough velocity the pellet-duck collision is fatal, usually to the duck.
Not everything is relative in Einstein's duck blind. We need an absolute for the purpose measuring degrees of relativity. The speed of light remains constant independent of the motion of the observer. If a duck is flying toward us at half the speed of light, with a flashlight taped to its beak, the light from the flashlight is going l86,282 miles per second. If the duck is flying away from us and shines the beam back, the light is still traveling l86,282 miles per second. All this somehow meant that energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.
Late that fall, after I had taught Al about motorcycles and drugs and the smell of women, when the first snows fell, we torched the brush piles. We had stacked three of the largest on an ancient peat bog. The fires burned down into underground seams that smoldered for years, leaving much of the Todd estate useless for human housing.

The Leather Potato

David and I were sandal makers during the golden age of gladiator movies. While Victor Mature leered at the prelate’s consort in a thousand theaters, I was in a little shop in the carriage house of the Brattle Inn, Harvard Square, hair to my butt, holding a mouthful of clinching nails, building thigh-high Roman footwear for tenured professors to wear beneath their Harris tweed trousers. Business was good.
Business was too good. At twenty-two bucks a pair, custom fit, fourteen days lead time, we sold sixty pairs a week. We were capable of building fifty-five. That left five disappointed foot fetishists per week, five folks to whom I could not explain that Leary and Alpert and Harvard University had paid me to drink dropper-dosed water, that the water allowed me to read the minds of the of all the customers at Mrs. Barley’s Burger Cottage, that the water washed graduate school from my soul and made me regard ants as equals. Rather than disappoint our customers, we invented Herb.
Herb was an unanswered phone. If a customer showed at the shop and we were not prepared to deliver the goods, David and I found that we could temper our guilt and demonstrate that we were, indeed, dedicated businessmen by dialing one of our own home phone numbers, then ranting and raving at the ring signal in an empty house, asking Herb why Mr. So-and-So’s sandals which we’d sent to him for final polishing were not in our shop, not ready on the date we had specified. We’d then give Herb the “By God....or else” option, apologize to the customer, and ask him to come back in a couple of hours, after we had retrieved his sandals from that no-good Herb. It took us and hour and a half to make a pair of sandals from scratch.
The Irish can make a party out of anything. On a spring morning in 1963, Colleen Mahoney, secretary to the president of the Maine Potato Growers’ Association, entered our shop and asked if we were capable of making a leather potato. Her boss had decided to retire on the 118th anniversary of the Irish Potato famine, and she needed something a bit unique as a present. Aye, and sure we could build a tuber of leather. Could she be coming back in two weeks?
Two weeks later, just before lunch, there she was again. I panicked, grabbed the phone and got brutal with Herb, threatening to terminate his employment with us if he didn’t finish the Mahoney job soon and have it in our shop within two hours, at the latest, by God. Colleen had a bit of shopping to do in Boston. She granted us three hours. David and I went to lunch.
Our lunch was Kantian in its routine. Every noon, year around, we bought two fried egg sandwiches, mine with sweet pickles, his with catsup, and two cartons of chocolate milk from the same woman in the same diner, ate them beneath the same tree beside the Charles River, then played bare-handed, high-fly-ball catch with the same softball, in the sun, snow or mud. Neither of us questioned the monotony of our habit. Lunch tied us back to the Midwest, to our lives before Mad Dog, Romilar, amyl nitrate, the devil weed, and, now, lysergic acid. We needed those fried egg sandwiches.
On the day of Colleen’s return, David launched a ball into the midday sun. I misjudged the trajectory. The ball boinged off the paved bicycle path then plopped into six inches of April-in-Cambridge Charles River muck. I was smitten with creativity.
We soaked the softball in the river, then took it back to our shop, squeezed it in a bench vise, beat it into a spuddy lump with the blunt end of a splitting maul, pecked eyes into it with a small punch, dried it in our toaster oven, dipped it into a vat of antique brown dye, waxed and polished it, then sold it to Colleen for twenty dollars. She was happy. I do know that someday I must return her money.
As she was leaving the shop, Colleen lifted a finger to me, and said “I’d be thinking again about the way you treat this Herb fellow. He stitches so beautifully."

Ahmed

AHMED

Ahmed waxed floors while I changed the ballast in a fluorescent fixture on the sixth floor of a building in San Francisco that housed Glide Memorial Church, where I worked a winter job as a "superintendent of maintenance."
Ahmed and Raffi were janitors, recent immigrants from North Yemen. Between them they held four jobs. While Ahmed buffed floors in our building, Raffi collected tolls at the Universal Parking Garage a block away. At six p.m., they traded places. Their home was the locker room in the basement of our building. They scrambled half way around the planet to work hard and earn enough to open an Arabic restaurant in San Francisco.
Ahmed hit the kill switch on the floor waxer and watched my every twist of the wire nut. When the ballast was installed and the bulbs were snapped back into place, I nodded, and he threw the switch. A slight flicker, then full wattage from tubes bounced off his shiny floor. His teeth flashed against his black mustache. "You are an engineer, no G. D.?"
The three of us became weekend pals. I learned how to say "Allah has given us a great day" in Yemen, and taught then how to interpret the comics in the Sunday Chronicle. We wandered Marin County in my truck, drank Pepsi, and chose the mansions where they would live when their American dreams came true.
When Spring hit the great divide I went home to Idaho and tended hamburger on the hoof until the forage was gone and the trucks came to carry the cattle down onto the winter range in the desert.
The next winter I found a job tending horses on a tax-write-off ranch fifty miles north of San Francisco. On my first Saturday off, I rode a bus into the city and went to our building, where I found Raffi working the day shift on the floors. He was every excited to see me. "Ahmed has done the restaurant, G. D., Ahmed has done the restaurant. Go now to see him. Go to the Hofbrau."
Ahmed had leased a German restaurant, Rolf’s Hofbrau, complete with huge neon sign of women in dirndls carrying steins of lager to men smoking curved pipes. Inside the restaurant were dark men holding cigarettes between ring and middle finger and drinking heavy coffee from tiny cups. Against the wall, a long steam table held trays of couscous, bulgar, mint, lamb and melon.
When Ahmed spotted me, he came running toward me, clapping his hands above his head. "G. D. is here! G. D. is here!" His customers stood, Ahmed introduced me to them, and we shook hands. Each of them offered to buy for me a meal or a coffee or a cigarette.
But I was Ahmed's friend, in Ahmed's restaurant, and it was his privilege to place a feast before me, and sit with me and hold my hand and smile as I savored the saffron and pinon nuts and kebobs.
I asked him when he was going to let the rest of San Francisco know that he operated a fine Arabic restaurant, when was he going to change the German decor on the outside of the building?
"Oh, no, G. D. If they know that this is an Arabic restaurant, someone who does not like us will bomb us. I have many friends, see? They all know that the restaurant is here. It is much safer to allow the others to think that the Germans still own this place."
On the eve of the third winter I took a job editing a magazine in Sausalito. I rode the Golden Gate ferry to San Francisco, walked from the piers into the Tenderloin and found Ahmed’s restaurant abandoned. In gold script on the transom above the entry door was a small string of Arabic characters.
I found Raffi sitting in the janitor's room, lonely, sad and waiting for a ride to the airport. Three weeks before, on a Saturday night, Ahmed was caught in a sting. Supposedly someone from the San Francisco chapter of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals lodged a complaint against Ahmed with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and accompanied the INS on a raid of Ahmed's restaurant. The authorities found Ahmed and three of his customers in the basement, butchering a lamb for the final feast of Ramadan. The INS pulled Ahmed's green card and deported him.
Raffi had no recourse. He was going back to North Yemen, because he could not work four jobs alone. As we hugged goodbye, Raffi said "You know, G. D., this America is a very bloody country. You come someday to live with us, O.K.?"
I asked him about the Arabic script above the door at the restaurant.
“Oh, yes, G. D. It says ‘Ahmed’s Hofbrau.’”

The Monk and the Monkeys

When my daughter was eight years old, she and I found ourselves bunking on the sixteenth floor of an apartment building four blocks off the strip at Waikiki. I had scraped ice off an old station wagon in Idaho and flown for ten hours to watch the apartment while Delta's mother looked into a rumor that some tiny bird was gagging into extinction on the fumes from equipment servicing the observatories atop the mountains on the Big Island.
On Sunday morning Delta announced that she and I and her pal Max were going to the Honolulu zoo. When she phoned to invite Max, his father asked to speak with me. He explained that he was providing a halfway house for Tibetans fleeing Chinese oppression, and asked if one of the monks could accompany us. You bet.
After being lost for an hour in a catacomb of streets with only vowels in their names, we stumbled across Max's house, and there, waiting on the steps, were bright-eyed Max and a featherweight guy dressed in mustard-colored robes, wearing black hightop Kedds, and a chrome Timex with a metal expansion band.
On the way to the zoo, Max explained that he couldn't say the monk's name, that the monk didn't speak English, had only been in America for three weeks, that he slept sitting up, smoked too many cigarettes, and was a professional wristwatch repairman.
The kids ditched us at the entrance to the zoo. The monk and I made quite a couple, one have-a-nice-day-face in a curtain and one overheated drugstore cowboy in lace-up logger boots. We wandered down the zoo paths, smoking Camel stubbies, pointing at animals and giggling at each other's name for the critters. We had a lot to talk about, but couldn't. The Tibetan word for giraffe sounds like "chewing gum."
At the cat cages, the monk was shuffling along, looking back over his shoulder at a yawning lion, so when he turned forward he came eye-to-eye with a standing Bengal tiger, and immediately went into a crouched self-defense posture. From somewhere down in that skinny frame came a throbbing yowl that was so low in pitch that I froze up for a few seconds, before I realized that this fellow had grown up where tigers run wild, and that he didn't care for tigers. I stepped between them and broke the spell. He looked at me, looked at the tiger, nodded his head, then fired up the smile again.
On a concrete island a middle-aged chimpanzee was playing games with the humans, throwing a knotted gunnysack over the moat to the crowd. When it was tossed back to him, he tucked it behind a chunk of driftwood, performed a cheerleader routine, then reached behind the log, and threw the cloth ball back into the audience.
During the third act of this performance, when the tourists were packed around the ditch, popping flashbulbs, the monk grabbed me by the arm and led me up on a knoll, away from the show, just as the chimp finished his arm flapping, foot stomping segment, reached behind the driftwood, filled his hand, and sprayed ten thousand dollars worth of camera equipment with chimpanzee shit.
The kids were waiting at the lunch counter. We bought popcorn and Pepsi, and sat on a warm concrete bench in the shade, munching and slurping, while the pigeons swarmed around us. I fed the birds by broadcasting popcorn by the handful then watching the neck-bobbing scramble. The monk carefully chose one kernel, held it between thumb and forefinger, zeroed in on one pigeon, fed that individual that one piece of popcorn, then switched birds.
When they finished snacking, Delta and Max ran off to see the seals. The monk, using universal sign language, made it clear that he had to use the restroom. I pointed to the appropriate door, then stretched out on the bench, and fell asleep.
The kids woke me, wondering where the monk had gone. I checked the men's room and the tiger cage, no monk, then began asking zoo visitors if they had seen a hairless guy in robes anywhere. A young couple from South Dakota said they had seen something like that down by the telephones.
We found him there, sitting cross-legged on the grass, his entire being focused on a pay phone in a plastic clamshell. Max claimed he was asleep. I kneeled beside him and gently tapped the face of his Timex. He snapped from his reality into ours, smiled, and followed us to the parking lot. On the way back to Max's, over the noise of the kids discussing whether an elephant could beat up a killer whale, the monk hummed a few bars of "Love Me Tender."

Packrat

(There's one street in North Fork, Idaho, and one saloon. This tale was woven between beers in that saloon by a hardrock miner named Rollie. His daughter drank with us. She said that Rollie only removed the hardhat once a week, to wash it when it started leaving stains on his pillows.)

"I once was the smartest fellow in these mountains, then I went to mining. I been hit on the head so many times there ain't nothing left in my noggin but tailings and pus. Blew off these two fingers by squeezing a shotgun shell in a vice. Big experiment. Don't know why I did it. And I've been limping half my life on account of a packrat.
"Thirty years ago, me and Mary McDermitt were working a claim up around Gibbonsville. Mary, she was built close to the ground, went to geologist's school out in West Virginia. When I ran into Mary at the tavern down in Challis, my original partner, Homer, was laying in the hospital in Missoula suffering from a whiskey stroke. About all that was left of Homer was slobber and twitch. So, I took Mary on as a full partner, after she made damn sure I wasn't just looking at her as winter meat.
"Mary brought half of West Virginia with her in a 1938 Chevrolet sedan, including a couple of cords of books, a big leather footstool with birdsfoot legs, and her grandmother's salt and pepper shaker collection. She was the kind of person that believes everything in a house has its own special place, so she toted Homer's stuff out under a yellow pine and tarped it, hung shelves all over her half of our little cabin, and put her knicknacks in nice little rows and clusters.
"She was tremendous help at the mine. Me and Homer had worked a couple hundred feet into a hillside, where we hit a good, wide seam of flecked quartz. Mary showed me better ways to set the charges, so's the good rock would drop right into the tunnel, where we could load it easy into wheelbarrows and carry it out to the dump to be hauled to the mill. She taught me how if you chew on a little wad of DuPont before you go back into the mine after a blast, the smell of the dust and the dynamite won't make you quite as sick.
"One morning over pancakes, Mary asked me what I'd done with her geology magnifying glass, you know, one of those little folding deals about the size of five buck's worth of quarters. Hell, I hadn't touched it. We had a packrat.
"Hardrock miners and packrats are made for each other. A miner works in a hole all day, drinks supper, and sleeps hard. A packrat sleeps in a hole all day, and rummages all night, about like any mousy critter, but it has an urge to steal, or borrow, or decorate its nest or something. Anyway, it'll carry off little bits of tinfoil and beads and buttons and build them into its home. Mary's trinket collection was a packrat supermarket.
"Packrats are too smart to walk into your normal rat trap. About the only way to get rid of one is to stay awake until the rat comes out to play, and then shoot it, which normally ain't that tough, because when a packrat gets to fooling with something shiny, it'll go to patting it's furry tail, kinda like a person'll shake their leg when they're reading. You just listen for the sound, then blow it away.
"So, one night Mary and me arranged a cafeteria for packrats on the footlocker against the wall at the bottom of my bed, drank a whole pot of cowboy coffee, grounds and all. I crawled into my bedroll with a flashlight and Homer's old Colt revolver. We even shelled a few peanuts for bait.
"Sure enough, fifteen minutes later I heard this panting sound, like a squirrel with a chest cold, then the "tap, tap, tap," of a packrat's greedy little trance. I sat up in bed, turned on the flashlight, cocked the pistol, and with the packrat looking right at me, I proceeded to blow the varmit to Kingdom come, right along with the big toe of my right foot.
"I spent a month up there in the hospital with Homer, getting my foot patched up. Meanwhile, Mary had the ore processed, took her share of the proceeds, and, since winter was coming on, packed up her Chevrolet and went back east.
"That Christmas I got a note from her saying she had found her missing magnifier. It was tucked up into the straw stuffing of her fancy footstool."

The Lemonade Fourth

On the third of July, Parks and I left our cowcamp along the Payette River and drank our way to Elk City, Idaho. A buddy of ours had taken the job of representing the Idaho County Sheriff's Department as the sole deputy in Elk City. We wanted to see how he handled an entire town full of two-fisted sawmill workers on a holiday when it was un-American to be caught without a beer in your hand.
I provided the transportation. My cruiser at the time was Daisy, a pistachio-green early-sixties Chevrolet Nova, The car had lived so long on logging roads and goat trails that she wore a lodgepole and bailingwire tie-rod splint to her left front wheel. No shit.
A sixpack beyond Grangeville,, Daisy had an asthma attack and coughed to a stop. I unwired her hood, propped it up with a limb, twisted off her air cleaner, set it on a stump, found a rock, and whacked her alongside the float bowl.
She grunted, wheezed, woke up, and we zigzagged on our merry way. A couple of cold ones later I remembered that the air cleaner was back there on the stump. What the hell, it would be there tomorrow on our way back.
Our pal the deputy wasn't real happy to have in his jurisdiction two more rowdies smelling of horse manure and stale beer, but our brotherhood went way back to wintering together in the high country, thirty miles off the road. He knew we'd never give him genuine trouble, so he tolerated our presence, with the stipulation that we not drive an inch farther until the next morning.
Stewart was charged with keeping the peace in Elk City, with keeping whiskey disputes from escalating into battery. He worked to prevent a midnight drive back to log camp from becoming suicide or vehicular manslaughter. He was well equipped for this job. He was the size of a bunk of plywood, his smile was four lanes wide, and he had been a military policeman in Viet Nam, so he was adept at the use of numchuks, sticks of Oriental hardwood held together by toilet chain.
When the fights inevitably broke out in the joints that night, Stewart walked through the bar doors smiling, with the numchuks whipping and clicking around his elbows and shoulders, looking like a hybrid between Bruce Lee and a baton twirler. The sound of that spinning teakwood stopped all activity in the saloon. Without slowing the whirling, the deputy explained that he didn't want anyone to get hurt in Elk City, and that he would appreciate it folks would stop hitting each other, then he flicked one of the numchuks within a cigarette paper of the nose of the fellow picking the fight. It worked every time. Loggers know what it is like to get smacked in the schnoz with a limb. I was proud of him.
At daylight on the Fourth, Parks and I awoke in the dirt beneath Daisy, sore and grungy, partied out, so we decided to head back toward civilization. Fifty miles of gravel later, Daisy sneezed once on the streets of Grangeville, just enough to remind me that I had driven twenty miles past her air cleaner. What the fuck, I'd find another one somewhere.
It was awfully hot in the Salmon River canyon that day. By the time we hit the edge of Riggins, Parks and I had sweated out twenty gallons of party, were cottonmouth parched, and ready for any kind of liquid besides beer. I nudged Daisy into a strip of shade on the north side of a one-horse drive-in restaurant calling itself "The Home of the Savageburger."
There was a long thirsty line of folks at the take-out window. While Parks and I were waiting our turn, beating the dust out of our hats, looking like a pair of escapees from the O. K. Corral drunk tank, an accountant from Minneapolis, decked out in Bermuda shorts, took his place in line behind us. When it came our turn to order, we asked for the biggest cup of lemonade on the premises, please, the fifty-five gallon size if possible.
After we paid for our drinks and were walking back into the shade to administer the dosage, I heard the pale fellow in the plaid shorts tell the high school girl behind the sliding screen that he wanted two orders of french fries, and the biggest cup of lemonade on the premises, the fifty-five gallon size if possible.
Our lemon drinks went down just fine, we'd live to see our cattle again, but Daisy was suffering from the heat too. When I tried to start her she puked a thimble of gasoline out of her naked carb onto the exhaust manifold, and began shooting flames from the corners of her ratty hood. By the time I had the haywire latch untwisted and the hood popped, I could tell I had to do something quickly, or we were going to be in big trouble in a short time.
Just then, around the corner of the building, I saw that the Minnesotan was taking delivery on his order. Without explaining myself, I ran over to the little ledge in front of the take-out window, grabbed his big cup of lemonade, ran back around to Daisy, jerked up her hood, and, with one lucky splash doused her fire. Whew.
The accountant, however, was sure that he had been the victim of a typical Idaho lemonade snatching. He came scooting around the corner of the building, spotted me with his empty cup, and began to pummel me with big, civilized words about how he wanted my name, right now, so he could notify the proper authorities of my exceedingly inappropriate actions, and how there was a good chance I would be hearing from his attorney regarding certain civil damages, blah, blah, blah.
Parks wanted to squish him. It took five minutes to get Parks backed off and the little dude jacked down far enough to explain that I had acted in an emergency, and how, bless him, his good taste in beverages had saved my car, the frenchfry factory, and the greater part of central Idaho from a horrible, smoky death. I considered him to be a true modern hero, and I would gladly pay for anything that he and the members of his family wished to order from the hamburger establishment.
As Parks, Daisy and I limped back onto the highway, the vacationing accountant, his wife, and two young sons were hunkered in their air-conditioned Oldsmobile Vistacruiser, nibbling on Savageburgers and sipping large lemonades. One of the boys waved a little American flag at us.

Speed Kills

(I learned this story from a big gentle guy who had the Harley bar and shield tattooed across his entire back and always had a bible close on hand. He told this tale while we were cutting firewoood, after we'd known each other for a year. Eventually, Will died of Hep C complications.)

"Before Jesus stepped in and jammed the gun, I considered myself to be one big bad outlaw. I know now that I was nothing more than an addict, a thief, an armed robber, liar, fornicator, and money-hungry drug dealer. I broke all the Commandments but one. I never directly killed anyone.......... but I tried.
"Speed does kill. Everybody I used to know is dead, killed by crystal meth and crosstops and booze and stupidity and greed. My little brother got me started on speed on the streets of Seattle, when he was twelve and I was fourteen. We were walking down along Pike Street and he walked up to this dude, gave him five bucks, and we went into the alley. My little brother was packing the works, man, at the age of twelve. First time meth hit my guts, I messed my pants.
"A year later I was popping myself in the side of the neck, getting the rush that much closer to my brain. When I turned legal to drink, I weighed a third of what you see before you. Look. I ground my molars smooth, just walking around and gnashing my teeth. I was busy.
"Speed freaks need money. No money, not funny. In the early years I got a lot of my cash out of adult video stores. You walk into the back room of a girly joint, you rip back one of those little curtains, you put a gun to the head of some guy who has his unit in his hand, then you take all his money, his watch, his eyeglasses, sometimes his shoes. Nobody who gets heisted in a porno shop is going to complain to the cops. There were twenty seven of those places between Seattle and Portland. Couple of times I got chased when I came back into the same place too soon, but I never got caught. Plenty of money for drugs and candy bars. There wasn't anything else to life.
"My little brother, he always was smarter than me. By the time he was nineteen he knew how to manufacture the stuff, so we moved to Spokane and started the Bros in the Basement crystal meth factory. It took us eleven days to build a batch, then we'd haul back to Seattle, and down I-5 as far as Oakland. Two years later we were big time wholesalers, rolling high. Everybody knew the bros. My little brother was into late-Sixties Cameros, big block, tuck and roll. I liked big motorcycles and bad dogs. I kept pitbulls.
"Our trouble was that we were dealers and users, didn't separate the buzz from the bucks. On the day we got busted we had been drinking and shooting up for six steady days, getting a delivery ready. We were lost and crazy. My little brother was driving his candy-apple green fast ride. I was in the backseat with my big pitbull, Breedin' Butch, and a sixteen-guage Winchester pump shotgun, sucking on a fifth of Black Jack. Lost and crazy, man, cruising down I-5 through the armpit of Oregon and I am blowing away freeway signs with the shotgun at seventy miles an hour, along the busiest commercial route in the world.
"My little brother was even crazier than me. He wheels out an exit in Roseburg, leaves me and the car idling in front of a Payless drugstore, then comes running out five minutes later, tosses a whole garbage sack of prescription drugs in my window, downers mainly, seconol, demerol, codiene, then peels back onto the freeway. I mean, you don't do that, man. You don't stick up a chainstore pharmacy then make a getaway in the only candy-apple green automobile north of Pasadena. We never even thought about that. We were so far gone we were invisible.
"Then, ten miles down the road, south of Myrtle Creek, my little brother decides he has to piss, twists off into a Texaco station and runs for the head, leaving me and Butch, the trunkful of meth, the garbage sack and the shotgun just sitting out in the open, like turds in a punchbowl. First thing I see in the mirror is a bubble gum machine on top of an Oregon State cruiser, pulling up right behind us. I get sober and cranky and scared real fast.
"The windows of the Camero are smoked, way smoked, so I know that the cop doesn't see me. I pump a shell into the shotgun. When the cop steps out of his car, I level on him, through the back window of the Camero, and fully intend to remodel his life with safety glass and number six shot, but when I jerk the trigger there's just a big hollow click. I'd fired a thousand rounds through that gun, and that was the first dud shotgun shell I'd run into. I believe now that Jesus Christ came into that car and saved me from the gas chamber and the fiery furnace of Hell by seizing the gun and causing it to misfire.
"Meanwhile, my little brother comes out of the toilet, spots the cop, and splashes, man, faints dead to the world on the sidewalk, before Allard, the arresting officer, even realizes my little brother belongs to the green car. I gotta hand it to Allard. He was careless and stupid and very lucky, but he took us alone.
"While Allard is leaning over my little brother, I decide to call it quits myself, so I open the car door real easy, sticking my hands out first, talking fast. When the door comes open far enough, Butch blows through the hole and takes Allard by the hamstring, big time. Pitbulls earn the reputation. This one was stout and awful close to mean. Allard is screaming and pounding Butch with the butt of his revolver. Butch ain't letting go.
"There is only one sure way to get a pitbull to stop biting. You grab it by the tail and you put about this much of your finger straight up its butthole. That is what I did. Butch reached around to snap at whatever was buggering him, and Allard shot him through the head, then formally arrested us.
"Four counts of manufacturing a controlled substance, four of intent to deliver, one of armed robbery, one of illegal use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, one of interstate flight. I was looking at thirty years, fixed, before Allard testified to the sentencing judge about Butch, and about how I had saved his leg. As it was I got five to fifteen, indeterminate, and spend six years and four days, working in the print shop, reading the Holy Word. My little brother is still in there. Praise Jesus."

Shimming the Ching

(My 1964 Dodge Powerwagon blew chunks climbing out of the Missouri breaks on the Rocky Boys Indian Reservation south of Havre, Montana. I was laying on a flattened banana box in the middle of nowhere, replacing a u-joint, when Charlie Swallow appeared from somewhere across the prairie. He wore an army blanket as a poncho and drank from a neatly creased brown paper bag. He lay down, looked under the rig and started this tale. )

"Throwing the I Ching is like jerking the handle on the big cosmic slot machine, like reading chicken gizzards and tea leaves, like following an eighteen wheeler through the fog. Depends on how you use it. But, in all the years I've been flipping coins and fumbling through hexagrams, I've only one time seen the Ching be right, exactly, dead on.
"About ten years back, I woke up one morning in my van underneath that railroad overpass east of Cut Bank. You watch the weather on the tube? That is the coldest spot in the lower forty-eight. You leave a sixpack outside on the Fourth of July in that town, it'll freeze overnight. I was running real low on weed, out of money, too grubby to get a job. Red dog wine was ruining my eyes. So I pulled out my three bronze Chinese bus tokens, got 'em in Nam, that kind with the square hole in the middle, and threw the Ching on the question of just exactly what the fuck I should do next.
"The hexagram came up with a broken line at the bottom and solid lines all the way up from there, "Kou, Coming to Meet", talking about how the strong and the weak, the good and the evil, are part of the same thing and are going to meet and join. The first line said that bronze was going to be real important to me.
"I took it all to mean that it was time to get out on the road, so I put twenty bucks worth of gas on my brother's Chevron card, and headed south. Fifteen miles below Darby, going up the Bitterroot, I came around a long righthand corner and damn near rear-ended a big white Cadillac Seville that was stopped in my lane. A couple of senior citizens were dancing around on the center stripe, waving me down with a purple Pendleton blanket.
"The folks were from California, headed north out of Jackpot, Nevada, on their way up to see Glacier Park. The wife bought a book in Boise to help her identify wildflowers. She'd spotted a patch of Indian paintbrush, had the old man pull a U-turn in the highway so she could pick a sample. The car crapped out on them right there by the flowers, wouldn't even turn over.
"When I squoze my belly under that big old boat, I saw that Mr. Goodwrench down in Anaheim had used an air tool on the mounting bolts for the starter and had run the threads to mincemeat. The starter wasn't making electrical contact with the flywheel housing anymore, just hanging there on the studs by gravity, which wasn't quite good enough for a ground path for the electricity. No juice to the starter motor.
"Meanwhile the folks were chatting me up. You know, did I live in a tipi, did I have a herd of horses, did I eat buffalo? Not exactly savvy travelers..
"Right then I remembered the Ching, "Coming to Meet," and how bronze is going to be important, so I went back to the van, got my Ching coins and a little ballpeen hammer, and drove the bronze tokens as shims around the starter motor. The positive and negative electrical paths came to meet. The solenoid still threw the starter gear far enough, and the Caddy started five times in a row. The old couple were tickled shitless, and the dude laid a hundred silver dollars on me that he won in Jackpot.
"I told him they should, for sure, stop up in Missoula at a real garage and get things fixed right. Last time I saw my Chinese coins, they were under that Caddy, headed north on Highway 93. Been throwing the Ching with these here three silver dollars ever since. Got any smoke?"

Cro-Magnon Coffee

I had a Cro-Magnon experience in my kitchen today.
It was late afternoon when I hit the coffee wall, that place in every caffeine addict's day when the morning's bucket of coffee erodes from the nerve endings and all remaining brain cells are swamped by secretions from the glands of laziness.
"Go ahead, flop on the couch and sleep," whispered the imp of the perverse, but I knew that I shouldn't, that there were novels to write and firewood to stack and peach cobbler to cobble.
So, in the spirit of modern problem solving, I elected to consume more drugs. I poured the slush from four abandoned mugs into my ducky cup, popped the concoction into the microwave, selected a minute's worth of radiation, and opened a women's clothing catalog.
When the time's-up bell dinged, I retrieved my afternoon fix from the bowels of the machinery and tested its temperature with my right index finger. It was very hot. While standing there with my finger in my mouth, staring at the contraption that had produced lava in less time that it took to appraise fully the fit of an underwire bra, I was transported back through the decades to Mrs. Merdinger's demonstration of how the Cro-Magnon folks discovered cooked food.
Mrs. Merdinger was my third, fourth, and fifth grade teacher. She was built close to the ground and wore stockings rolled down into dark brown doughnuts at mid-calf. She and her husband fattened hogs with the corn they grew north of town. She had actually seen New York City during the Depression as lead soprano in a women's choir. A person wanted to be about ten paces away when Mrs. Merdinger hit the high note in "In the layund of the freeeeeeeeee." I don't remember ever knowing her first name.
Mrs Merdinger was a brave person, who, fifty years ago, in the course of digging farm kids out of the cultural dirt, began teaching evolutionary theory in the fundamentalist hickwaters of Western Nebraska. She was normally a proper and reserved person, but when she addressed the subject of how blind luck and natural selection had driven us humanoids from way back there to clear up here, she became a silent film actress, the Faye Wray of the Sandhills. I was privileged to witness three performances of her Cave Woman Discovers Pork Roast act.
According to Mrs. Merdinger's theory of the evolution of cuisine, a cave-dwelling woman from the Cro-Magnon region of present-day France is out walking her pet pig on a mountainside one day about twenty thousand years ago. (Mrs. Merdinger climbs a pretend Alp in front of the blackboard, pausing now and then to stroke the invisible hog at her side.) The cave woman and her pet get caught in a sudden, ferocious storm. (Mrs. Merdinger cowers behind her desk, beckoning to her faithful porker to join her.) Devastating lightning, wind, and rain ensue. (Mrs. Merdinger is on top of her desk, making broad zig-zag sweeps with her arms, little fluttery rain motions with her fingers, her hair buffeted by gale force winds from the forced-air heater.)
The pig gets struck by lightning. (Mrs. Merdinger is thrashing and twitching on the floor.) A general conflagration results from the storm. (Mrs. Merdinger is behind the map stand, shielding her face from the heat.) The fire passes. (Mrs. Merdinger peeks out from behind the maps.) Cave woman discovers that Porky is inanimate. (A tragic wringing of hands accompanied by silent sobbing.)
A ray of hope shines in the forest. (Mrs. Merdinger approaches the spot where the invisible pig lays on the classroom floor, and tries to nudge it to life with an index finger.) A recently roasted pig is hot to the touch. (Mrs. Merdinger puts her finger in her mouth to cool it off.) Mmmmmm, pet pig tastes good after being hit by lightning and burned in a forest fire. (Mrs. Merdinger looks at the sky, looks all around at the remains of the stone-age barbeque, then repeatedly pokes the pig and puts her finger in her mouth.)
Pork roast has been invented. In the final act of this drama, Mrs. Merdinger, as brand-new Cro-Magnon carnivore, looks at the sky and tests the wind while leading another pig up the same classroom mountainside. She smiles, whistles, and carries a stubby little finger-length stick about the same length as the spoon which I now use to test the temperature of microwaved coffee.

No Woman is an Island

(heard in a North Beach restaurant, San Francisco, 1976)

“When he began to court me, my first husband was quite a bit older than I, but his car was brand new and very expensive, a Jaguar sedan, British racing green. Riding in that car was like sitting in a Rolex. Really, it was such a plush ride that you could literally hear the analog clock running in the teakwood dash at sixty miles an hour.
“We were both West Coast advertising people. He had his own agency, a big firm with very big accounts, and he was very good at what he did, which was manipulating the national consciousness and making money. I cast commercials. Remember Bartels and James, two duffers on the porch selling wine coolers? That was my work..
“Harold and I kept bumping into each other professionally until he finally convinced me that I was in love with him. It took us almost a year to divest our relationship of his wife. His kids were grown. Meanwhile we met secretly in airport hotels. We would work our twelve hour days then fly separately a thousand miles to sleep together. I was living on champagne and smoked almonds.
“It cost him eight hundred thousand dollars and a house in Monterey to divorce Helen, who was wanting out for her own reasons. Two days later we flew to New York and were married in the lantern of the Statue of Liberty by Mayor Ed Koch. In return for the favor, Harold agented Koch for the job he now holds on television as a fake civil court judge. We spent our wedding night in the Ritz, watching television, and running up a three thousand dollar room service bill, just the two of us. It was one of the loneliest nights of my life. I just wanted something normal to happen, you know, like my mother to share in my happiness and a real lawn and friends next door. Instead I got beluga caviar.
“The next morning we had a ten o’clock with the people from investment. Sold them on the “We make money the old-fashioned way” campaign. Late that afternoon, Harold ordered a limo to take us to Newark airport. When I asked where we were headed, he said that the honeymoon had just begun, to be patient, that I had a surprise coming.
“There is something about me that does not like surprises. Call me Ms. Predictable, but I would much rather know what to expect and what to wear than have a big hole in my agenda. We had a little spat in the car about just that fact. I said that I thought I had a right, as a full partner in our marriage, to know where we were going. Harold said that he felt that it was his right to surprise me if he damn well pleased.
“But, down deep, the guy was a just a guy, right? No guy can keep a secret. Ask the CIA. So, when we were over Iowa, I pulled out of Harold that he bought an island for me for a wedding present, and that was where we were headed, to an island off the coast of Honduras, in the Islas de la Bahia, where he has had a “little getaway” built on a three acre island of my very, very own. I must admit to being flattered right out of my foul mood and any desire whatsoever to blend back into suburbia. He even had pictures.
“We were the only first class passengers from L.A. to Mexico City. Then we squeezed into a flying culvert, a prop plane headed to Tegucigalpa. Out of thirty people on that flight, only two others were female, two German nuns trying to get to Nicaragua, and only six other than Harold and I were Americans, and they were all military. The rest were Latin men.
“I speak Spanish. Fifteen minutes after take-off, three young guys in the front of the plane stood up and informed us that we were now in the official custody of the Front for a Democratic Honduras, that when we landed in Tegucigalpa the women were to deboard the plane and the men stay. Very polite, very matter of fact. No screaming. I had to wake up Harold to inform him that we were prisoners. The soldiers got a little perturbed at first, but when they were shown the automatic weapons, they calmed down. I don’t think the nuns understood a word.
“So, an hour later I was spending my honeymoon in a cinderblock building next to a runway in the middle of a country smaller than Connecticut. A hundred yards away my husband was on the airplane, being held hostage until certain political prisoners were released and the airplane was allowed to fly to Cuba. The scariest part was when our Army intelligence guys showed up and turned the little terminal into a command center. The nuns booked a flight to Managua and left on the first evening.
“It went on for three days. Finally some sort of compromise was made and ten Honduran men were released. One by one they walked across the steamy pavement and into the terminal. Then, a couple of hours later, the door opened and down the metal stairs came Harold, wpbb;y but fast. I remember thinking that he looked very sweaty. He had his Armani briefcase, and he was running.
“When he reached the plate glass entrance to the building, he pushed it once, twice, then used the briefcase as a sledgehammer and blew it into a billion pieces and stepped through the opening into the lights of the CNN cameras. Harold was like that. Nothing got in his way. He was still standing just inside the door, looking just a bit like Kirk Douglas as a victorious gladiator, when a U.S. Army officer, on camera, informed Harold that perhaps he had acted a bit hastily, that the door actually opened outward.
“I never saw my island. Harold never regained face enough to take me there. He could not recover from the door incident. Got mopey and mean and very reclusive. Dropped out of his agency and took to writing a memoir. After six months I filed for divorce. He got the island, insisted on it, although I know he has never gone back. I got the Jaguar.”

Bull Spit

I am sitting in a $42, eighth row seat of a 4,000-person grandstand wearing relatively clean clothes, White’s boots, and a Mariners ball cap. I’m surrounded by folks in cheap wool felt hats with plastic turquoise bands stuffed with too many feathers and wearing too- pointy-toed plastic-lizard boots.
More than a few of them have committed what I’ve always considered to be le grande faux pas of western fashion: they’ve tucked their pants into their boots and tied a snotrag around their throat. Junior account executives have dressed themselves for this event as though they expect to buckaroo through brambles during a dust storm.
For the 98th year in a row, it is Round-up week in Pendleton, Oregon, and this is the first evening of the Professional Bull Riders tour. The ticket to this event was given to me because I did some grant writing for the folks who operate the facility. I’ve spent the last six months of Sunday nights studying the sport on television.
This isn’t my first live exposure to the sport. I’ve been in Cheyenne, Calgary and the Cow Palace, up and down the Pecos twenty-thirty times, in and out of every jail in Texas. I remember fifty years ago, in Burwell, Nebraska, when I was a wannabe rodeo fool, watching Jim Shoulders, the most famous of all bullriders, being brought to the arena by ambulance for the last go-round, riding his bull, then leaving the rodeo grounds by ambulance.
An empty beer can toss below me is the arena, surrounded by modular Powder River steel panels, with the words US BANK carefully scratched by a shovel artist into the fluffy dirt floor, each letter about ten feet tall. Across the arena, above the bucking chutes, hangs a video screen the size of a couple of sheets of plywood this is looping commercials from tonight’s corporate sponsors, including the local hospital, the smokeless tobacco industry, two cell phone companies, a casino, an insurance company and US Bank.
Between commercial episodes, the entire west half of Pendleton is flooded with “I-might-cheat-on-you-Honey-but-never-on-America” canned twang being blasted from a bank of six-foot Marshall speakers mounted beside the screen. The woman beside me tears her hamburger napkins into little spitwads and crams them in her ears, then points toward a holding pen at the east end of the chutes and asks “What in the hell is he doing?”
I recognize the scene. Two young bullriders have brought modern athletic techniques to the rodeo game and are visualizing their rides-to-occur. Holding a fist tightly clenched around a visualized bull rope directly in front of his be-Wranglered wanker, his other arm held above his head, legs spread around an invisible bull, each of them herks and jerks and spins around the pen in a dance that would elicit applause in the baths of San Francisco but surely get them arrested in the produce aisle of the Safeway down the block. Context is everything.
At eight o’clock high, the announcer asks us to stand for the invocation, during which he asks for divine protection for the contestants, the audience and, of course, our country. Then a teenage violinist whom I’ve known since kindergarten plays a technically perfect National Anthem over the megawatt speaker system. I wince at every amplification of the rasp of her fingers moving up and down the strings. Some instruments don’t translate well to locomotive scale.
Then, while we are all still standing, the arena goes dark as the inside of a cat, there is a beam of bright red from somewhere in the superstructure and the US Bank logo in the dirt bursts into diesel fueled flames. The country rock band blows chunks of patriotism while a hundred more points of laser light whiz overhead like zap rays from alien craft.
A cadre of epileptic spotlights whip back and forth through the exhaust cloud hanging over Interstate 84, take a couple of shots at the three-quarter moon, and finally settle on the bucking chutes, where a chorus line of 39 bullriders clad in every hue of shirt and chaps are standing, hands on hips, under a slew of broad brimmed black hats
The announcer introduces each of them, tonight’s gladiators. I recognize a few of the names from my home studies, including an older bullrider, who is thirty-five. These fellows average in the mid-twenties. The beefiest of them might weigh slightly more than my left leg. (Bullriders are small by design. The ideal size formula applies mass and angular momentum constants to the rapid spinning of a bull. A whirling tennis ball on a string is less likely to break the string than is a bowling ball.)
But they are all professional bull riders, specialists in this sport, who have climbed through a formal farm team system to make it to this level. This is their way of making a living.
As in any formal sport, the actual contest has specific rules, procedures, and scoring criteria. Generally speaking, the contestant climbs into a confined space, or chute, with a 1500-pound very male bovine, ties a rope with a handle around the animal just behind the front legs, holds the rope taut with either hand, straddles the bull, slides forward, nods for the gate to open while another person pulls tight a “flank strap” just south of the bull’s bullness and just north of its ballness. This, apparently, encourages the bull to buck.
For the human, the object is to stay astride the bull for eight seconds without touching it with the other hand. The animal’s goal is to dislodge the monkey on its back and the rope around its flank as quickly as possible so that it can go back to the holding pen for a late evening snack and bull session. Both the rider and the bull are scored on their performances by four guys with clipboards.
More often than not tonight the bull doesn’t have to work a full eight seconds. Some of them do lose their composure and try to squash, beslobber, gore, trample, butt, scoot, nose or roll on the cowpokes. That is why we in the audience are here, to live dangerously, but vicariously.
The real heroes of the night are the bullfighters, previously called clowns, whose jobs are to make themselves the objects of the bovine ire, to put themselves between a contestant and a ton of angry burger on the hoof until the cowboy can pull his face out of the arena floor and make it safely to the fence. The bullfighters are totally successful tonight, and no contestant is hauled away in an ambulance.
No, Virginia, there are no female bull riders in the PBR. I don’t know why, I don’t know if things will ever change, and it is not my fault. I would hope, though, that most young women have sense enough to avoid the intense testosterone-flooded maleness of all participants, human and bovine, that are involved in the sport, even if a few semi-suicidal women are lured by the $15,508 that Pim Rosa, of Sao Paulo, Brazil, hobbled away with at the end of this event.

Arma virumque cano

At a rodeo in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, in an August wind that smelled of cotton candy, I made it five jumps out of a splintered bucking chute on a grey gelding named Pistol before I hooked my right kidney on a fencepost then lay eight days in St. Andrews Hospital with a catheter dripping blood from my manhood while student nurses in powder blue bibs used my lime green room to smoke Old Gold straights.
It was too tall for the rodeo game. I sold my bareback rigging, chaps, and spurs, and my blue and white boots with the wild roses on the top to my cousin's hog farming husband, then became the first person on either side of my family to attempt college.
Three years later, I sailed out of New York in the bowels of the Italian Line's "Vulcania", headed for Naples as a scholar of the American Vergilian Society. The money my mother earned sorting papers for the Rural Electrification Association purchased tweed coats from the Harvard Coop, interlinear translations of Greek and Latin, and small chunks of blond Lebanese hashish.
The throb of the diesel engines made me homesick for my railroading father. My roommates were a pair of fifty-year-old Sicilians, dressed alike in gabardine janitorial uniforms, who spoke neither English nor Latin. They perched on the edges of their bunks, hands in their laps, waiting for the nine-day voyage to end. I was invisible to them. The Vulcania's merchant seamen lounged outside the engine room and blew rings of Turkish smoke at my boots as I clomped across the steel grating above them.
The tourist class bar was just above waterline, with two scummy portholes and a waxed teakwood dance floor where men with black eyebrows spread their arms, squatted, and whirled to Patti Page tunes. I drank brandy and pretended to read.
Two days east of New York, fate slapped me together with Ursula, a trilingual poet from the Black Forest who was headed toward a publisher in Barcelona with fresh translations of Creely and Olsen into German and French. She was a Leo, still running from the bombing of her home in 1944. She smiled too easily. Sparks ran up my leg when our knees touched. We discussed Ferlinghetti, Ginzburg, the question of German guilt. Six hours later we found privacy in a life boat and made quick clumsy love. Her breasts tasted of salty cheese.
The Vulcania stopped for a week in Barcelona. Ursula and I rented a white plaster bedroom from a woman who sold parrots and light bulbs from her living room. Our afternoons were layered with sweat and tortured lust, our evenings with bread crusts and harsh wine. On the morning of the seventh day Ursula announced that she had decided to find a German publisher, that she had been offered an automobile ride to Munich. Goodbye.
The customs officer in Naples tried to buy my Levis. The Vergilian Society's villa north of Pozzuoli was swank, larger than the Carnegie library in Alliance, Nebraska. My room had speckled marble floors, high arched doorways, and leaded glass windows overlooking an overgrown Roman-era amphitheater where schoolboys tended delicate young grape vines. The Society provided a cook and a gardener, Maria and Biaggio.
My assigned course of study was "To ascertain, from extent works in Greek and Latin, whether the temple on the acropolis at Cumae had been an octostyle or enneastyle structure," whether it originally had been supported by eight or nine columns per side. The hill containing the ruins was a half mile from the villa. On the morning of the second day of my new life, I walked up to the temple and counted the stumps of nine columns per side. I was supposed to sit in a hollow mansion for eight months, translating dusty text, when any of the kids kicking soccer balls in the cobbled roads below could answer the central question of the inquiry and have one finger left over.
At breakfast on the twenty-third of October an envelope addressed to me lay beside a plate of fresh mozzarella. Inside was a poem from Ursula in Munich.

Come, speak with your child.
Plunge your cowboy tongue into my navel
And
Touch its gentle mind.
Listen at my hipbones with your thumbs
Hear this sibyl of your design.

I withdrew eight hundred dollars American from the Vergilian Society's account and gave half to Biaggio, telling him to tend his vegetables with care, to inform anyone who asked for me that I had gone into the field to study, that I was expected to return by Christmas. While waiting for the northbound train, I watched a German couple eating live baby squid from a small pewter bowl in the depot restaurant.
In Munich, I found Ursula living above the bakery where she worked. Beneath a woolen blanket I chewed on her collarbones as bread smells seeped through the floor. I lay the night listening to the chirping of distant Bavarian ambulances, deciphering a future containing a poetess and a child. On the next morning there was a large bloody print on the stiff grey percale sheet. Ursula had begun to menstruate.

Kate Wolf

Five years before Kate Wolf died of leukemia, I was forty years old, living in a hired man's shack with an open pint of Jim Beam and a Martin guitar that I could not chord. Across the haughty hills of Marin County, big productive Holstein cows were being branded on their faces and sold for slaughter. The USDA had determined that there was a surplus of milk on this planet.
I worked for a woman who owned just a little too much of northern California. The toughest parts of the job were disposing of a thousand dollars cash money every month and suppressing the desire to strangle peacocks. I was wearing out my bootsoles walking around pool tables. I believed that old drunks spoke the truth.
One Sunday morning came down awfully hard. I awoke with a flash of energy as the last of the double shots and slow dances with Roberta, a Jackson Pollack tattooed on her left breast, blew through my nerve endings. Five minutes later, the goddess of excess smote me behind the right ear with a splitting maul, and I crawled back into the bunkhouse flannel with the Sunday Chronicle.
In it was a small panel advertisement announcing that, on that day, a healing fair was to be held in Cotati, with Mimi Farina and Kate Wolf providing the tunes. Two bucks. Cheaper than church. I did need the healing. I fired up Red-haired Nancy, the Ford stock truck and rolled down into the flatlands above the Bay.
Mimi sang in semi-tongues of neo-Christian joy. Kate Wolf sang of dirt and love and working hands and feathers and honest eyes and freedom lost and found. Kate sang of the bunkhouse soul. The static in my head sucked at her voice. I jerked down my hat against the sun and studied her breasts. I was on the way to being healed. I simply had to change my ways.
It took four sober bunkhouse nights to compose a letter of courtship to Kate Wolf. I told it all…of learning whiskey in the morning in the milkhouse from Uncle Mart, and how he died in the morning pitching hay to the horses, of poaching a deer on the Pine Ridge Reservation on my wedding night and of the sweaty terror of a rotting marriage in the shadow of Harvard Square. I told of imaginary chess games with Harley McGhee, through the iron wall, in the next cell, the man without a tongue. I professed an admiration for her very essence and promised that if she ever needed anything, she had only to think my name and I would be there to help.
The bosswoman flaunted a smoky intuition. She was sure that Kate Wolf lived in Berkeley, so I laid all my whiskey need before a directory assistance operator, and he granted me the address for Kate Wolf, in Berkeley. I whispered to the stamps as I licked them.
I spent a week of afternoons fixing fence within sight of the mailbox, every night fighting the urge to shoot nineball and play eyefuck with the barmaids, until finally a legal-size envelope arrived from Kate Wolf, in Berkeley. I squatted in the red dirt beside the road to Point Reyes and smelled the letter carefully before opening it.

Dear Sir,
Thank you so much for the letter.
You have led a very interesting life,
and you seem to be a very kind man.
I must confess to you, though, that I
am not the Kate Wolf who sings.
I am Kate Wolf, the nurse.
If, on the other hand, the Kate Wolf who sings
is getting these kinds of letters,
I intend to learn how to play the guitar.
Yours Truly,
Kate Wolf

She enclosed the original letter. I went back to the barroom when I should've gone to Berkeley. But Kate Wolf's music continued to heal. I learned the words and the chords to "Green Eyes” and began to care whether I died in a barroom toilet. I drank the whiskey stash on the mud porch dry, then didn't replace it. I washed the truck.
When Kate Wolf played the community center in Petaluma, I sat with my toes curled in my boots. Afterward, I stood at the periphery of fans until it was my turn to shake her hand, and I told her the story of the mistaken identity, and delivered the letter.
She read it there on the basketball court, patting her foot in three-quarter time. She smelled of lemon grass. When she finished the reading she folded the letter into the pocket of her skirt then wrote her mailing address on the envelope and handed it to me. "Write to me more, from Idaho." She winked.
Kate Wolf, the singer, and I became the best of pen pals. When her bone marrow transplant failed we were discussing the perfect Koolaid mustache.

Louis LaForce

The LaForce brothers hired me out of the Slave Lake Saloon, Alberta, Canada. They were cutting pulpwood in a swamp alongside the Athabasca River and looking for help. Five bucks an hour, under the table, screw the work visa if I could run a chainsaw and pile slash.
The pulp trees were an endless thicket of peckerpoles growing in a mosquito hatchery. The LaForce boys were pulpwood professionals. They had worked together so long that they pissed in unison before walking onto the logging unit. I spent most of my days staying out of their way. They were hunched men, top-heavy from working with their arms and shoulders, simple and honest and friendly, except for Louis LaForce, the eldest, who didn't like Americans of any shape. In the camp at night they played rummy and talked in French of the politics of Quebec while I lounged in my camper shell, listening to a short wave radio and applying Calamine lotion.
On the first Saturday night of my employ I drew three hundred and fifteen dollars Canadian for one week's work. In the Slave Lake Saloon, with a dozen Molsen's beers in him, Jerry LaForce confessed to me that he and his brothers were paid a penny a square foot for knocking down the pulpwood. We were averaging five acres a day. Forty thousand square feet to the acre. This pencilled out to six hundred dollars per brother, per day.
The LaForce Boys were superstitious Catholics. St. Christopher stood among the chainsaw parts on their dashboards. Jean had the bleeding heart of Jesus tattooed on his left forearm. We did not saw pulpwood on Sunday. That was was my assigned morning to cook.
On my third Saturday night, surly Louis instructed me to have the Sunday breakfast ready by nine o'clock, because the CBC would be broadcasting the final game of the World Cup soccer match at ten and he had once played sandlot soccer in Montreal.
After pissing into a nettle patch at six on Sunday morning, I crawled back into the camper to take a hit of current events from my radio. There I discovered that the British Broadcasting Corporation was broadcasting on shortwave the same soccer game that their Canadian affiliate had elected to delay airing until a more civilized hour.
I listened through my old Koss headphones so I wouldn't wake the brothers. It was a juicy game, in which Germany led by a goal until the very final moments of play, when an Englishman named Geoff Hurst scored two goals in one minute, making the final score England 4, Germany 3. I got out of the sack and had the coffee, hog parts, and pancrepes ready by nine.
That gave me a full hour to pimp Louis. I talked soccer like a sucker, like an American, said I figured the game could go either direction but that I favored England because I'd been reading in the papers about some guy named Hurst. A French Canadian is going to take the Hessians over the Queen every time. By ten o'clock I had Louis on the hook for five hundred, Canadian.
I held my breath at the beginning of the broadcast. The CBC never mentioned the taped delay. Neither did I. I tended the cook fire and watched Louis' face as Hurst became the first player in the history of the World Cup final to score three goals in one game. I stashed Louis' money in the air cleaner of my truck.
Two months later, when the snow began to fly, the brothers shut down the pulpwood operation. Alaska seemed too far away in the wrong direction. It was time to drink my way back to California. First I drove to Athabasca, bought Louis a brand new American chainsaw and a Pakistani soccer ball, and left them on the seat of his truck outside the Slave Lake Saloon.

The Fork

In the fall of 1968, five of us were trying to live together in three bedrooms, a kitchen and the one bath of a stout white apartment building near Harvard Square. Charles, the producer of the unfinished film that gnawed at our waking lives, shared the room he reserved for worrying and tossing in his sleep with Beryl who ate only with chopsticks and spent her days with runes and Tarot cards.
I'd left California, enrolled in graduate school in Cambridge, then dropped out in order to operate a Nagra tape recorder for Charles as he ran his lens across the new consciousness developing in the Haight-Ashbury. In Cambridge my college friends were now dealing Mexican weed and windowpane acid. I bunked in a sweaty leaded-glass turret with a radiator that sounded like it was puking hailstones. There were brown roses on my wallpaper. If I pressed my thumbs on my eyes, just so, the roses swirled, collided, and turned pink.
On the third floor, in twin beds placed as separately as possible in a twelve-by-twelve room, slept Eva and Ladd, two New York film editors who had been dropped into Charles' art by the television company that underwrote our voyage to San Francisco and two hundred hours of footage of the Summer of Love. The company was hungry for a return on its money. The film simply must be cut, soon, they insisted. Charles believed the film would bloom from his vision.
Eva was a shy crossword puzzle addict with the professional fingers required to splice film precisely and quickly. She missed her two cats, Honey and Muhammet. She wanted to finish the film and get back to New York. She waxed her shoes nightly and disliked stepping on the leaves that cover everything in Cambridge in October.
Ladd talked loudly, chewed with his mouth open, and limped. He showered Eva with harsh direct commands. He used the triple-negative "No, No, No" when he disagreed with Charles. Charles considered Ladd to be the antithesis of the film's content, but he could not bring himself to terminate Ladd's employment. The whirling dance of Golden Gate Park rapture had softened Charles' approach to vermin. "Do cells believe?" was the central question of his new theology.
So Charles stewed and the film sank slowly into a month of muddy indecision. Eva carried bundles of New York Times crossword with her to work. I painted the studio floors. Ladd lived on the phone with New York. Beryl whittled bundles of chopsticks from elm twigs with a kitchen knife.
Until one Sunday morning.............
We rotated the cooking chores for our communal Sunday breakfast at the grey and chrome table in our kitchen. It was Charles' morning to cook. He carefully sculpted twenty crepes on an upside-down cast iron frying pan, opened a quart of his mother's Indiana apple butter, squeezed a gallon of fresh orange juice, whipped a quart of cream, sweetened it with maple syrup, brewed coffee with chicory, then whacked the wind chimes to call us to the table. We all came a-running, except for Ladd, who was chronically late for everything. Way up in the attic we heard him swing his locked knee off the side of his bed and begin to dress.
Eva, Beryl and I politely sat at attention, sipping coffee, watching the crepes cooling and the cream deflating, while Charles slouched with his chin on his chest, tracing his fingers back and forth along the chrome molding on the table's edge. Ladd thumped down two flights of hardwood stairs and into the bathroom, where he hummed a piano concerto while he operated his electric razor.
The kitchen air smelled of lightning and aluminum by the time Ladd nudged Eva forward, hooked the crook of his cane over the chair at the small of her back, waved his napkin twice before placing it in his lap, smiled, and said, "By God, let's eat."
As Ladd reached across the table to yard the entire plate of crepes closer to his grasp, a knotted leather button on his camel hair blazer caught in the tines of a fork beside his plate, and the fork sprang off the formica and down onto the checkerboard linoleum floor. It rang like a sleighbell.
That tiny tinkle brought Charles to critical mass. He leaped from his chair, pointed to the fork as though it were a viper, screamed at Ladd, "You are fired, you bastard!" then stormed out of the front door, off the verandah, and into the orange Harvard Square streets.
Beryl plucked at a crepe with her new chopsticks. Eva took the cane from the back of her chair, leaned it against Ladd's knee, and said "I shall not be accompanying you." Ladd sat dumbfounded and grave for a few moments, then struggled back up the stairs.
I ate the bowl of whipped cream, then went in search of Charles I found him reading Friday's "Variety" over a bowl of noodle soup in a Hayes-Bickford cafeteria filled with hangovers. We finished the film in a week, then I bought a map of Alaska.

Sylvia and Wyatt

In the last year before school consolidation, before the farm kids were jerked out of the soil and sent to city packing sheds, I taught nine students in a one-roomer, way out on the hard red winter wheatfields of northern Montana.
In August I received a list of unfilled positions from Helena, and applied by letter from California to School District 19, Toole County. “It’s a dead-end deal,” said Sam Black, the chairman of the school board, when we shook hands on the phone. “One year, then we fold the school and you are dismissed. I won’t lie to you. You are the only one who has called about this. We’ll take the chance if you will. Five thousand dollars and a place to stay for the school year. Plenty of opportunity for weekend work if you can handle equipment.”
There was no school bus. The children were delivered to the white frame building by wind-wrinkled mothers smelling of diesel, clabbered milk and manure, driving stubnosed grain trucks and Pontiacs with singing shock absorbers. Through the slumping panes of the teacherage’s kitchen window, I could forecast the day’s attendance by counting the dust plumes that boiled out of the Sweetgrass Hills and converged on the section-line roads.
For the first weeks, because I wore my hair long and had witnessed the world beyond Great Falls, I was a bug in a mayonnaise jar to the kids, to be viewed through a shell of flat, cautious politeness until it was determined whether I raised welts or spat stinky fluids. The younger ones softened first, handing me their friendship in big wads of giggles. By Columbus Day we were claiming a corner of Rasmussen’s wheatfield for our school by planting an art-project flag in the dusty stubble. Shortly afterward I was J. D., one of the gang, to most of my students.
But not to Wyatt, who, at age eleven, had read all of Louis Lamour and believed it possible to live, and to die, as a gunfighter. Hormones were beginning to gather behind his dinnerplate-sized belt buckle. His entire being focused on fair Sylvia’s scant breasts during history class. To Wyatt I was an effete outlander, an agent of change, someone bent on jamming mathematics between him and his bull-riding future.
In the puncture weeds at the perimeter of the pea-gravel parking lot were several ant mounds. Wyatt’s courtship of Sylvia consisted of carefully working his freckled hand and lower arm into an ant hill, until it was swarming with a black scurry, then chasing her around the schoolyard yelling “Ant Arm Man is going to get you! Ant Arm Man is going to get you!.”
During one such episode of cowpoke foreplay, Sylvia went down hard on both knees against the lip of the concrete pad that anchored the flag pole. Restrained tears fogged her glasses. “Damn you, Wyatt. I’ll get you.” These were strong words from a whispy farm girl who dressed as her grandmother had.
Wyatt booted rocks down the road ahead of us. I was pissed. I told him to cut the crap, to try a little tenderness, that Sylvia was in pain because he had worked an old joke one too many times, and that I didn’t like any pain, intentional or accidental. He’d better come around, settle down, before I called in the big dogs, his folks and Sylvia’s, to put the clamps on this foolishness. Wyatt tipped back the bill of his tractor hat, checked the clouds, flashed a coyote grin, and said “Yes Sir, Mister Smith, Sir.” That night a cold front seeped over the Canadian border and covered the ant hills with a foot of snow.
For Christmas I bought each student a harmonica. By Saint Valentine’s Day, with Sylvia sitting first chair,we were a one-song band, playing “The Streets of Loredo” to an audience of aquarium guppies. March afternoons were spent in model rocketry, firing chunks of balsawood and cardboard way, way up into the huge crystal skies. Then we trudged a mile downwind for the retrieval. A wind that smelled of crawdads whistled up from the Missouri River breaks in early April. Overnight the snow was gone.
One sunny spring morning after the yellow clay schoolyard had dried enough to permit play, Sylvia and Janet asked if they could take the new canvas bases outside and design a softball diamond. Sure.......but mind the windows and the wind.
Each team had a pitcher, a first baseman, and a couple of roving stubblefielders. I was to be both teams’ catcher. Wyatt captained one group and chose Sylvia, Janet, and the two first graders for his helpers. Sylvia was unusually aggressive in demanding that her team bat first.
Of course, Wyatt was the leadoff hitter. He punched the first pitch through a hole where the shortstop would’ve been, a clean single, but the girls knew Wyatt, so, as he was scampering up the baseline toward first, Sylvia and Janet yelled “Take two, Wyatt! Take two!.“ When he made the turn, going for the double, they changed their chant to “Slide, Wyatt! Slide, Wyatt.! Slide Wyatt!,” and he slid................ headfirst into a busy community of red ants which had recently been covered by second base.
He came up swatting, spitting and slapping. He was a tough little hombre, but I could see that he was in trouble with this situation, so I hustled him into the four-seater outhouse, jerked off his boots while he tore at the snaps on his shirt, and helped him brush the cooties off his back and out of his hair. I left as he fought with his belt buckle. Sylvia sat smiling in the swing.
A month later the job ended. On the last day of school, as I was boxing the artifacts of my teaching career and packing my truck to head toward Alaska, I looked out into the schoolyard and there by the flagpole sat Sylvia and Wyatt, holding hands while they waited for their rides back into the Sweetgrass Hills.