I'm up in this half light 6:30 am and the palm trees, sifting their dry-rasp sounds - and I'm feeling the half madness, flashback to being a little girl at twilight, three or younger, in San Bernardino on Temple Street, being sent to bring my three wheel red tricycle home and afraid of the tall, lingering palms - the sound, I think, or the sound and how it reminded me of the rustle of the priest's confessional booth curtain, sliding shut because he thought I wasn't there, I'd snuck into the tiny black room alone, and that was a downtown once a cienaga, I learned years later, and to be the place where a friend was mugged at the mall.
I'm up in this slant light, a Dickinson moment perhaps, and not yet all the way plugged in. The neighbor's bougenveillia leans over my fence, soft pink and not yet in its full brilliance, the way it will be when the sun moves in on full - another clear, bright desert morning on the journey to our little world. Palm Desert. 29 Palms, longtime home of the Chemeheuevi Indians until they were exiled by authorities for being illegal aliens and shipped down to the low desert, and given their own little reservation due south of what is now a wedge between Coachella and Indio, I like to think there is something real about how the 29 Palms Band of Indians now owns one of the most profitable casinos in our region, Spotlight 29.
And last night after Trap Door Poetry, which I'm hosting now - a big success last night, down to earth, not pretentious, and very cool - we went to I-Hop for pancakes and hash browns and a lot of super hot coffee with my daughter, over in La Quinta on Highway 111, and I met a beautiful young man who is Navajo Indian, living here from near-Page, and with incredible turqoise he wore with heart and fashion - got to talking to him, he's going to be a student at my college, and he is a grass dancer and was just at Morongo Reservation up in the Pass for the recent pow-wow they had there. Tarah is 1/8 Sioux Indian and she can't get tribal recognition; her grandpa Vince was born on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota and when I visited with her dad, years ago, I was taken for Indian and it was my first experience with raw, and ugly, and tall-straw-hatted racial discrimination. For yours truly.
And I think of Willie Boy and Carlota and wonder if the Santa Ana winds were blowing this stiff in the desert that 99 years ago October. Why this story spins itself 'round and 'round in everyone's heads, especially mine. It's a story of unrequited love, of the desperation of sacrificing all for love, and for the price we all pay in our lives for love, how Carlota died and undoubtedly knew there was no turning back once her father was dead. She must have felt terrified and realized then how narrow the space between dark and sunrise really was, in the vast and uncharted caverns of the heart. I am sure she would have given Willie Boy up to have her father back. My parents are in Italy, and they've been gone for three weeks. I haven't spoken with them in all that time, and I'm embarrassed to say that this is probably the longest I've gone in my life without talking to my mother. She came to me in a dream last night, in her long black leather coat that I just sold at a yard sale, because I've never been able to wear my mother's clothes, and it brings me to tears, because she couldn't spend much time with me even to talk briefly because my father came, and she turned and walked away with him. No words.
We don't have words for Willie Boy. It's the ultimate in voyuerism and much more compassionate bringing than all of the tabloids I read, week to week like a dopesick junky, and for unknown reasons other than that I know I've been under way too much pressure at work, with single parenthood, with home ownership, for the past few years, particularly since I bought this house and at one time was not only teaching full time, but adding 2, 3, 4 classes on the side for University of Phoenix Online and another online university - and barely keeping up, in fact, not really keeping up with anything and realizing now how ill I can really afford to live in Palm Desert, I'm off to escape in the desert as much as I can, and on a daylike this, when the scraping wind is this stiff, and makes my nose bleed, and gives me a huge migraine headache as it did last night (thank GOD for Imitrex, or I'd have woken up with severe nausea and other dizzying side effects of migraines) - it will be impossible.
But I think of what it may have been like, for him, brimming with a heart full of love, and desperation too, and other things we can't know - me, in my pathetic efforts of storytelling, how I make his story my story, how I make Carlota's story my story, how I tried to make right balance by bringing Philip here to live, and how desperately I botched the whole thing up, and not that I feel I'm to blame, and I'm working hard to know the delineation between my responsibility and his, but his absence, on this wind-cut morning, when I can't help but cry a little, feeling lonely post-dream and shouldering the house by myself, and wanting to be a poet on a rock, perhaps not a pinion of professor, book editor, mom to a lonely and confused, but elegant and very together overall 20 year old (an amazing and admirable young woman, who would know that her father all but abandoned her, to his sad life in and out of prison, doing sweat lodges and struggling with alocholism and poor choices in life and in friends, as a little girl? She hasn't seen him since she was younger than 10, and often expresses now how odd it is to not feel like she even knows who her dad is.)
Sometimes I think I know why, why a person would risk all for everything, or nothing. I built my life here in this house, raised Tarah, have two dogs, two cars, a pool and spa (well, the pool pump motor is broken right now,) two computers (that's if you don't count the old ones,) and more books than a typical library. All good books, I might add, carefully selected. I know why, because sometimes it is all or nothing. That's how I feel right now. Philip pursued me and then admittedly agressed me, and I responded, and he lived here with me and we were close and we tried to carve out a symbiotic life and we first really connected with each other almost exactly one year ago at Desert Studies Center at ZZYZX Spring and it seems that only in the desert, and I mean way out in the desert, like the Jesus statues on a lonely, Joshua-studded hillside, that I visited for the first time last Friday, to stop and eat a chili relleno burrito from the Santana's drive through in Yucca Valley (one I always visit in Riverside, too) and reconcile my weird alone-ness in a day journey out of Palm Desert, a cottonwood and water/oasis soothing walk through Morongo Preserve (where Willie Boy and Carlota, and later their trackers, stopped for water and to refuel, too) - a day journey I'm not used to doing alone, because I've been alone so much in the desert for so much of my life.
Alone in the desert. For a year, I was not alone. I was going alone, and Philip tagged along, and I welcome him and showed him so much of what I know. Now, my alone going is violated. It at once feels anathemic and also, now, a heavy and sharp reminder of my fragilities and alone-ness. I'm shouldering a heavy pack I didn't know was heavy before Phil nimbled in and started carrying it; I was happy to show him my zone, open up my life and my haunts and open vistas. And I talk to him on the phone a little bit now, and it's so weird. So weird, because I intersected again with my own age and indulgences in my early 20's. In particular, because Philip has seemingly slipped right back into a life of ease and distraction: with his many 20-something friends, going to concerts and the beach. I resent his youth and his ease, that he has a parent who lets him live at home, that last winter he was being pressured to get a career together, and now he seems off the hook - I resent that I'm shouldering so much, after sharing the load for about a year, and that I feel responsible to be and do something in the world and no concert or party can make up for that. The world, my world, the worlds of people all around me, are shattering and crumbling, and our denials are being ripped apart; I'm one of the lucky/unlucky ones who feels it, sees it going down, and can't blind my eyes. I was, I think, going into a numbness for about 2 years, starting when Tarah went to Pitzer in fall of 2006 and the four firefighters died near my home, fighting an impossible fire and flare up of a blaze, and I began to slowly realize for the first time that there were things I couldn't save Tarah from, and it tore me apart. I remember pausing by the dinosaurs at Cabazon, to take pictures from behind their massize necks and heads, of smoke and flames, and saying a little prayer for no one in particular, just those who'd lost their lives and were destined to lose their homes, and we're in fire season again - when a Santa Ana is as fierce as it is today here, it must be 100 mph hell in the passes below the mountains all the way on the other side of the canyons to the coast.
He finally called me back last night, and we had a good talk. I'm glad to not be the target of his intense anger anymore, and yet I feel empty and lost that he's not a constant presence in my life as he was for over a year, arranging hikes and getaways and pulling people together. We both slid into a weird funk this summer, and a dead end, and I never could figure out why he had to hide me on a shelf, he was the slightly deranged mountain lion in my dream, and I walked over to meet him, when everyone else was scared. Without fear, and I can only believe, must believe, that Phil has a heart, that he meant well, that he wasn't playing or using me, and that he really was hurt because I wasn't completely "over" Jeff.
But, for all appearances, Phil has skipped off, gone back to being something I don't even recognize anymore - party boy, lighty hopscotching from one group of friends to the next, enjoying the mixing of his own special blend, and he must be on some level in mourning, as am I, because I know now, with him gone, that I really did and do have real feelings for the guy. Real feelings that were built on much time spent together on road trips and hikes, camping and reading in the house, me on the couch, him in the rocking chair (which I've hid in the bedroom, because it makes me too sad.) And I ask, in my melee of breaking down and tears, that started last weekend after we met briefly at Whitewater Canyon for a little hike, and after I realized that after a year of being pursued and aggressed, he has bailed the fuck out, he's severed his love, he's turned away, and I didn't even really know what it was like to be in the full thrust of his sun, his own brand of wind, hell he really is a kid, next to me, when you think of it, but so often the roles were reversed and I couldn't know which end was up, if he was him or he ws me. In short, Phil may be the only person I've met who really understands the alone-ness of my soul, because he, too, is the same kind of alone, and we found a sort of comfort in that. More than that. We found a bond. I found a companion but for godsake, if I can't deal with the burdens of this house, this "adult" life anymore, at least not now, how could he aspire to that, in his youth?
Part of it must be middle-aged apathy and desperation, and feeling I've lost something that I didn't even know I would ever have. Now, I am in a sad sack empty house, and I face mountains of work every day, moaning over an inane workload, and most specifically, my lack of concentration, my struggles with what's been most recently diagnosed, by a new doctor, as a general anxiety disorder (which is the root of eventual numb depression, and with a smidge of OCD, and common in very bright and very sensitive people such as me) and he's good at finding the parties, and maybe I was just another party opportunity for him, and maybe I can't blame him because in my house when he was faced with real and true things, as is my wont, and my destiny, and my pumpkin carving life work - a 24/7 type of Halloween, for me - he pretty much cracked apart and there was no choice but for him to leave. I cracked up, too.
All I can handle anymore is poetry, and finding comfort in the healing powers of words. I find some small light-glimmer in having a quality discussion with my poetry students this semester, about the politics of language, about the nuances of Fire and Ice. A man in creative writing class is writing beautifully about how he was separated as a child by the Catholic Church association from his sisters and brothers, and now is reuniting with them. I have four bikes now, and they are all two-wheelers, and I'm confident in cruising the local streets long and far on my red Mojave mountain bike. And I've largely recovered from my fear of tall palms, even when they rattle in the wind, especially the fronds that have been cut down and dried, must be a sort of latent Ash Wednesday or Good Friday thing, I'm still a little scared from when I was a kid, but I've recovered.
And as I recircle in on my childhood, and chuckle at old fears, I realize I'm still a little kid in so many ways, and I want to be rescued by somebody, at least part of the time, and that I have gotten so out of the loop, spending half of the past 2 years on sabbatical from my job, and finding my writer's life and niche in ways large and beautiful and small, and always rewarding - a whole new slew of friends, connections, and possibilities that I also had never imagined, 2 years ago - I've developed a whole new direction and feel I've cracked the code of my new life's work - after 20 years of teaching - and can barely handle the old things I used to do, particularly now that I am pretty much alone in this house again. With no real reason to park myself here, how it doesn't feel like home. A sudden conflagration, after all we could our houses in fire zones, and I'm no exception - god, how it's time to go, and it snuck up on me like a spot flame, ingiting a hillside while I slept.
I'm at once grateful, because I have long had a keen sense of picking up and knowing when it's time to go. What I can't handle well is that so much of my life and time have passed in this town, and it's like I've woken up from a long sleep, and I'm suddenly on the run - Philip cracked the code. The vault hangs open on a rusted hinge. The money is gone. The emptiness offers the potential for growing full once again, and there is excitement and a lull that frustates and lures. Your hurt is my hurt - compassion grows and grows and dominates my heart, but these are new feelings I must share. No one can hold this fault-zone-borne beauty and terror inside for long.
And there is also the undeniable sensation of being angry, and scared. Why doesn't, why can't my heart's desert love reach out to me and offer me the generosity of his love, and drive the 60 miles of open space that keeps us apart, and tell me he didn't really mean to break my heart, as I've told him I didn't mean to break his. Just to touch the hand of love and believe in that, and know that the other stuff is human foible and silliness and that we'll all outgrow it one day. Because I, like anyone else, the girl and the boy, 99 years ago, ruined by love and also eternalized by it; like all people, whose illusions and infrastructures inevitably return to the sand; am troubled and anxious and often feel I'm beyond repair. but hoping, in spite of myself, to create a wonderful change - to grow the young plants of a new garden of the writers life that have taken hold in the past 2 years.
It's time to find and light candles, get candy together, create a scary or funny or combination of both type of costume to wear. I'm glad I don't have to go to confession. I'm grateful I'm in charge. And I'm holding a fucked up pumpkin in my hands, its lopsided grin, the hollow chanting of a botched Santa Ana wind morning disturbing my early morning sleep, and I think of Willie Boy on the lam, and his last chance at love, double dead, and how he must have turned to face the open desert, fire-weather wind in his face, and how he must have been filled with dread, and with a giddy sense of liberation, knowing he had nothing else, nothing else to lose, and that the Mojave desert lay in wait for him, the one place he could lose himself, when everything else was irretrievable, was gone.
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