Crawfish, Suicide, Big Floods & Butterfly
Anne Sexton. Pulitzer Prize winner. Dead poet of high society. And Then..
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Anne Sexton. Pulitzer Prize winner. Dead poet of high society. And Then..
Crawfish, Suicide, Big Floods & Butterfly
Rollover Bay, TX
Fighting terrible spells of melancholy in recent weeks. Am nearly out
of meds and have, by necessity, trimmed my daily dosage by a 3rd to
stretch what little i have left of the main one. Am totally out of the
other, the one that helps me sleep and staves off episodes of extreme
anxiety. Awoke this morning feeling well enough, however. Coffee. A hot
shower to counter the deep, damp chill left by last night's crawfish
boil storm...
Oooh, what a storm it was! The bay boiling, the Cajun winds howling
ghosts of hungry dead fishermen, red hot crawdads slappin' `gainst the
windows like nickel-sized raindrops, and bluesman Lightning Hopkins
singing and strummin' on the porch while the gods cracked atoms
overhead and the whole night lit up like a roman candle in a craggy
coastal cave and Captain Hook was there and I was Peter Pan and I
laughed as he dodged the sparks of a zillion Tinkerbells and I yelled
to a white breasted bird. She sat high on a stone shelf pretending
disinterest and staring instead at the dark cave wall where the word
"Tomorrow" was written in long-dried blood above a pile of a dead
pirate's bones, and I shouted up to her, swearing, "I will never stop
looking back and forward to, for the future is the smile of a
crocodile, and each new year a deceitful crocodile tear.
''Back to Never Never Land," I hoorah'd to my Tinks, and I accidentally
winked and was back in my bed and the crawfish slid down the windows
with a flump like the lifeless forms of philosophers at a Paul
Pot-Pinochet combo target shoot & barbeque. Flump.
And then I woke up. And somewhere in between what I'm about to tell
you about house-cleaning and ferrets and such, my eyelids swelled up
and fell open like the floppy sides of a kiddie swimmin' pool and I
cried and cried and cried for what I do not know. I cried a half an
hour or so.
After scouring the house for poisons and/or traps for mice, roaches,
ants, whatever, lifting up furniture, sweeping out cupboards, doing the
total "mine sweep" as it were, I let my new ferret friend out of his
cage, set him down on the floor and let him take a look around. He took
a look, all right. He frikken bee-lined a look. Zing! Zang! All over
the place in seconds flat. He checked out everything in true ferret
form.
I'm bedazzled. A new ferret, and for free at that. I'd been starting
to look around, picked up papers in Boston, Savannah, Daytona Beach,
Orlando, then Houston. I can run through a paper faster than anyone,
these days. Maybe it's the melancholy. Maybe it's snobbery. Maybe
it's boredom, ennui (same thing, but cooler sounding). My cousin would
call it laziness. Whatever. I was a reporter for a little while.. it
didn't take long to get the drill. Small town paper. Big town paper.
Same bullshit, different day. Then I got my cherry popped, my big
break, at the expense of a couple of dead kids and Kip Kinkel's
parents, all of whom got popped in, well, another way. And my byline
made front page news in New York.
So I take a paper from the rack, and it's like the fastest waste of
wood pulp and 50 cents you've ever seen. Section A, glance, toss.
Section B, I don't live here, less of a glance, toss. Sports,
immediate toss. Toss everything that even resembles an advertisement,
now we're down to the classifieds. Now, I never worked in classifieds
at a paper, but if I had, I'd probably have lost my marbles a lot
sooner. Dealing with the sight of dead children lying in pools of
blood and having to interview their bereaved families is one thing, but
but trying to weave my scattered, text-baffled way through the complete
ill logic and agate type of classifieds? Ugh. Kill me now. Then pop.
There it is. Oh, okay, that black hole between the 200s and the 500s
makes a shitload of sense now. They pull the pets out and give em
their own little "litter box" right in the middle of the automotive
section.
It's MS Windows-think applied to a medium as old as
Guttenburg, and then some.. as old as monks and cave walls.
Whatever. I'm in grievous awe that the past decades advances
electronically haven't just slaughtered THE NEWSPAPER. The beast that
is print MUST DIE soon. Please. Please tell me newspapers will be
phased out like the telegraph, the 8-Track, the Pet Rock. Oh, and the
encyclopedia, that cumbersome 16-volume, 400 lb. tree-sucking nightmare
from my youth that now all fits on one little shiny plastic disk.
William Randolph Hearst, kiss my internet & hemp-loving ass. Die daily
newspaper! Die! Die! Die already.
Oh, yah. So, I didn't find a ferret, least not one I could afford, in
any of the newspapers that I quickly tore asunder and tossed to the
bums for blankets. Instead, this nice lady named Debbie with gigantic
sheet-metal ram's horns sticking out the top of her truck gave me
Stinky. That's his name for now. I'm observing his behavior. An
appropriate nom de ferret will come to me in time.
I told my mother about these Three Miracles that had come my way this
week. That's what I called them. Three Miracles: a beach house to
stay in for the month of November; a free ferret; and $200 for
arting-out my new Chevy (the latter a miracle because it basically
cancelled out what I paid for the car, $200. Thus, free lodging, a
free car, a free new fuzzy friend.
I think my mother was pleased for me. But it's hard to say. The tone
of disappointment and rejection in her voice at the news that I wasn't
comin' west any time soon was, well, loud and clear.
I found this bullet, this one loaded slug amidst all my stuff. It's
got a history, that bullet. It's hard to find ammo for my 9mm, a
Spanish military pistol with this special "largo" ammo. So this one
bullet is all I've had for awhile. In New Orleans, I'd load and unload
the gun to pass the time between paragraphs, this one bullet hoppin in
the clip and then gettin' spit out the side, always just a trigger pull
away from explosion and expulsion at very high velocity. Fascinating
thing, guns. Kept mine under my pillow for weeks when I first moved
into my place in a not-so-safe slice of the Crescent City a dozen or
more blocks behind Tulane University. It was always a curious sort of
thing, a queer little pair of atoms, the bullet and the gun. The
question hung in the air: was the bullet there for an intruder? Or for
me?
How did Hermann Hesse put it? "Say yes to yourself, to what makes you
different, to your feelings, your destiny! There is no other way.
Where it leads I don't know, only that it leads to life, to reality, to
burning necessity. You may find this unbearable and take your life;
that course is open to all, the thought of it often makes one feel
better as it does me."
So it was with that one bullet and me. So it was.
But now the bullet's back. The gun is gone, but I've still got the
bullet. Are those my teeth marks in the copper slug? Yes, I believe
they are.
Did I mention I decked out my new/old Chevy with a lot of flat black
paint, white for crosses and skulls and such, renamed it the Chevy de
los Muertos and got it to Houston for their World Art Car Day parade.
I crafted roughly a dozen little alters to dead friends and family
featuring photos framed in bits of this and that: seashells, the tiny
vertebrae of some cat-sized animal, pieces of driftwood, old rope from
crab traps, anything. I also painted on crosses, names, birth and
death dates of a handful of my favorite writers. Anne Sexton figures
prominently on the driver's side.
The rain was coming down hard a little while ago, reminding me that the
car's front end was sticking out from under the house a little. Not
wanting the art to get too supersaturated (it's already partially
ruined by the rain, just day's after I completed work on it), I grabbed
the keys and went down to move it back a bit.
On my way out the door, I grabbed my beer. I figgered I'd sit in the
car a bit, let her warm up, listen to the stereo,
smoke a clove, make a little outing of it.
I did. And the weirdest thing occurred to me sitting there in the
running car. I don't know whether my work on the car created some
accidental voodoo or what, but I suddenly felt this peace wash over me
and I was totally at ease with the concept of just sitting there in the
running car with its exhaust leak and going to sleep. "It's how you
went Anne," I thought. Or did I say that aloud? Because.. (and here's
where the voodoo part comes in) I realized that she was there with me.
now, a Siren. And as with the Sirens of Greek lore, or Lorelei on the
rocky shores of the Rhine, her song was lullaby sweet. Mazzy Star's
Hope Sandoval couldn't have entranced me more.
Anyone who made it past junior high school knows you can't smell carbon
monoxide. Should be the other way around though, come to think of it.
Monoxide. Mono. Mono..tone. Boring. Benign. But Dioxide. There's
a word with poet-ential. Di-oxide. Die Oxide. Death breath (and I'm
not talking halitosis, which by the way if any of you women suffer from
and have designs on me, forget it. Bad breath is #1 just above smoking
for my most disliked traits in ANYONE!). Breath this and die, dioxide
seems to say. But no. Science and linguistics are not in accord here.
So the monoxide.. I mean, the engine is running and KTRU out of Rice
University's playing one of those honey-drip-down-her-inner-thigh,
proximity-to-pussy high Cowboy Junkie tunes and I'm on the moon, man,
without a care in the world and my eyelids are getting heavy and the
music isn't music anymore, it's cotton and silk and warm breast milk
and wow. It's so quiet. It's so still, so.. so.. still.
POP! goes a flash of that atom-smashing light I was talking about
earlier and..
WHAM! WHAM! FA-FWAM! slams thunder so powerful it shakes the car!
"JAAZOOOS!" I jolt upright in my seat, my mind a blank.
Then, just as the last rumble of the thunder burst fades to nothing, a
question creeps across my mind. I reach out a foot and tap the
accelerator.
Nothing. The engine is silent.
Back upstairs I pull a white bakery box out of the fridge. I cut
myself a slice of my birthday cake (now a week old but still good),
pull up a chair and pick at it ponderously. I reheat some coffee in
the nuker and sip on that. The rain has returned. In earnest. But no
more thunder. And I wonder.
What the F you see K just happened to me? Had there been a build-up to
that thunderstorm, smaller rumbles growing in intensity and
countdown-proximity to the light? And had I just not noticed it,
sprawled back in my tilt front seat listening to.. the radio. The
radio? And was it some freak electromagnetic pulse from that single
thunder burst that killed the engine? And who..
The hair on my arms stands up suddenly as I recall Anne being there
beside me in the Chevy de los Muertos. Anne Sexton, clear as a dry
martini.
I'm shivering now, not at the thought of Anne's visit, nor of my
siren-song junky nod near re-enactment of Kirsten Dunst's auto-erotic
demise in "The Virgin Suicides," but because it's cold in here.
And no wonder. It's 2 a.m. on a rain-soaked night in November in a
heater-less summer house on stilts and the wind is blowing hard. If this rain keeps up, the crawfish really might reach the windows as
the Gulf of Mexico waters rise and "rollover" the aptly named Rollover
Pass and into the, um.. (sound of throat clearing) aptly named Rollover
Bay and right up the spindly legs of this old cottage eight feet up to
the front door where the water will no doubt have the civility to knock
first before entering to float the house and me and Stinky the ferret
and this damn machine fulla silly words..
Back to Kansas! ..or maybe
Up a waterspout to Oz! ..or
Down the drink of a spinning whirlpool to Wonderland where I will don
the Mad Hatter's hat and happily have at any bottles labeled "Drink Me"
whilst Stinky spills the teacups and taunts the Cheshire Cat.
And somewhere, far above us in the Second Coming of God's Saline
Solution to the bickering, bloodletting ignorance of men, the Chevy de
los Muertos will rise like a cork to the surface of the New World Sea
and, in ark-like fashion though on a much smaller scale, will rescue
the five lucky souls who will, in time, beget the new race of a more
humane humanity.
The animals will all be saved by some other means. However, as it
isn't part of this story, you'll just have to take it on faith that
given my almost absurd refusal to kill anything, a fish, even a bug,
that all God's innocents will be spared the wet-n-wild wrath of "F2."
(That's like T2 as in Terminator but F for flood, got it?)
The lucky five? One little non-Anglo girl from the shittiest, poorest
spot on Earth who's too young yet to have learned hate, who has the
heart of a lion and the brain of Stephen Hawkings, and is cute to boot.
Another little non-Anglo girl, this one from a privileged family but
handicapped in some way, such that she embodies charity, unflagging
spirit, and an instinctual comprehension of social grace and the
infinite potential of the human soul. Their male counterparts? My two
nephews, Jacob and Matthew, both fine boys. And finally, Julia
Butterfly, to speak to the young with the ethereal, almost-super human
voice of wisdom with which she once spoke to me from a tree; in
essence, to be their teacher, to teach them love, heroism,
selflessness, weightlessness.
And that's it. Not quite the crew you were expecting, eh? No
politicians or pop stars. Two male, two female, excellent specimens.
"But what of their teacher?" you're wondering. Who will be there for
her, to spoon her in the night and whisper words of love in her ears
like the soothing sounds of a gentle breeze through the branches of a
giant redwood tree. Who?
I imagine forty days and forty nights in Wonderland would be quite
enough for anyone, wouldn't you? Especially for someone with so much
wanderlust as me.
And a good Chevy always returns to its master.
Tee-hee. Tee-hee. Titter, titter, smile and a wink.
Sweet dreams,
-His Lordship RSM the Duke of Wonderland
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