Funneling Home to Bisbee for Kate Friday March 25, 2005 (extracted from napkin scrawlings of March 4th) The Grand Hotel Saloon, Bisbee AZ Remember that poem I wrote called Border Beer Run about crossing the border at Naco with Crazy James? Well, seems James just had his spleen removed, and damn if it didn't weigh in at a colossal 16 pounds! Poor James. Sweet crazy James. Here in The Bisbee Grand Hotel saloon on Main Street, Brian paints in watercolor on a kinda unspoken locals only round table in the window-box storefront where the long bar ends and folks linger around the door exchanging greetings. Brian captures well the 3-dimensional stacked effect of Bisbee's steep Mediterranean-like cliffside houses piled high, every staircase a street, every step a threshold full of memories married forever in time, history, stepped over by grooms of dapper bones and lace-shrouded brides ashen yet smiling still as in a snapshot of the happiest moment of their lives. Brian is here for a few months, he says, visiting from Oregon. Smart boy. Rainy now in Oregon. Rainy to drown the strongest of swimmers, spiritually speaking. Rain to kill and die by, delirious with sunless despair. Brian will paint two hundred such portraits while here, he says, then it's back to farming herb in the Pacific Northwest. Lucky boy. [Author's note: on the day of this posting weeks later, Brian shows me a posthumous watercolor portrait of Hunter Thompson. Already upset, I damn near burst into tears. How much would he take for it, I ask? Two hundred dollars, nothing less. I stare into Hunter's one well-lit eye, hand it back and say goodbye.] I think of Bill Carter, fellow writer & traveler, friend of all my friends here yet a man with whom I have yet to connect, to so much as buy him a promised beer in a disproportionate gesture for all the excitement and joy and hope his book brought me. Bill Carter, author of "Fools Rush In," rushing off to Los Angeles tomorrow to work 15-hour days as an assistant director on some German car commercial. Then he'll be back in Bisbee, then off again to Alaska in May with his lovely Lee, he to fish the salmon run, she to don a park ranger's uniform and, in her words, "keep people from being eaten by grizzlies." And Bisbee Kate will make Texas and the Art Car Parade and probably every other art car festival this season. But she'll be back. Kathleen Pearson is Bisbee personified. What fun! What fun! And what have I to do this Spring and Summer but sit on my ass alone out here, in beauty and peace, yes, but cut off from the world, adventureless. This week last year I was just two weeks away from launch day, the first day of Spring, packing socks and trousers I would walk 2000 miles in. Edit: a four letter word. No, I must box up this baby and pass it on, find an editor, someone who truly LIKES to edit (which to me sounds every bit as queer as dentil hygienists who LIKE to stare down people's ugly throats and smell their rotten teeth). April 30. By the end of April I will package my AT baby stylistically to the point where I can pass the baton to an editor and head for Guam. Or Thailand. Or Costa Rica. Or Duncannon, PA. Or maybe even Alaska, she who has long been on my short list of must-go destinations. The possibilities are endless. Everyone who lives in this precious gem of a town yet leaves it from time to time to return flush with real world cash and/or experience and maybe ill with big city life and needing the gem again, they're the smart ones. They have the secret. But secret or no, (and here I don my pirate captain's hat and assume the requisite sneer), once drawn to the black pearl that Old Bisbee most surely is, tis mighty hard to pull away forever. I fancy that everyone, aye not EVERYone but the true characters, the Repeaters, the ones who continually reappear at port, who sign on for another voyage, then another, and another, or better still those who simply give over to the curse and simply STAY, these I imagine have been here before. "Before?" you ask. "What say you speak this word before?" Aye, my lads and ladies! I means to say FOREVER! For founded in 1888, Bisbee, I'm believing, like a good ship with soul in her sails, chose her faux-Mediterranean seafaring crew, her cast of citizens if it please you, long, long ago. And here they remain. Stuck in time and place for as long as this place may be. Sure, they can leave! A little shore leave now and again, as I said before, tis a smart thing. But they'll always return. They have to. It is their destiny. Bill can go to LA and do his thing. Brian can romp through the forest and suffer the rain. Kate can play Dorothy and jet set to Houston & SF, but there's no place like home. James could die in Phoenix tomorrow thinking himself Heaven bound. But I think not. I think the lot of them will be back. Like a sweet curse or a verse in the Koran, it is written. IT IS WRITTEN. And better yet: photographed. Visit the Mining Museum sometime and pore over the old time photos of maidens and ladies and tawdry drunken whores. Or if a man you be, look closely at that blurry black and white photo of the Bisbee Deportation, the one fixed in shame and as long as a ship's oar and tell me if you don't find in it a likeness of yore. (Yourself, that is. Forgive a writer his toyin' with words.) So too will Molly always be. Molly and me. Aye, yes, we've come round to me. Peregrine Jack and Molly the Ratchet, the Wench, the Dancer, the Miner, the Gunfighter of lore. Who knows? For Molly says she could have been a man in the past. Could be. But I prefer to see her as Molly my burlesque wife, the two of us united in a past Bisbee life. Cool of head and eternally opiated, was I the Doc Holladay to this erotic trollop queen, tender of heart, hot-headed and gorgeous drop dead? Dancer, minstrel, mother, likely madame in her time? And once to have had her, to miss her a crime? Molly believes it, and me? How can I not? The pull back to Bisbee is like the draw of the sea. She calls to you, a Siren defiant. Physics 101 don't apply in this town. Nor no typical biblical demise. Here, me thinks, you drown a quantum death, in a wormhole catch your breath, and swim out in the waters of a newborn babe. Whatever's next in this vortex of a town, might I be here to see it be I mayor, merchant or clown. Perhaps I'll be a woman, as Molly would see it. Then a man she'd better be! One day I fancy Bisbee Molly to marry, if time would be so kind as to keep us so aligned. For though Bisbee chose her characters, I don't think she wrote the play. And for today anyway, the plot does not appear to be working in our favor. And sad I am at that. Aye, now! Take heed, and think on other things. For Molly's got a chance. And for Peregrine Jack, there is always the sea. And a string of noble deaths to die, and berths wherein to be bourne anew. And return to the places where the heart knows its own, and finds its way home, to so-called Nirvana, Bisbee if it be, for eternity on. - Peregrine Jack   Copyright 2005 Richard McKinney All Rights Reserved (Just ask & I'll likely let you reprint anything!)