Shiftless Seattlite Tour : Austin (Stop 3)

As I stared at the scorpion mere inches from my face, its swollen stinger-tail raised and flicked in repeating staccato. I froze there on my hands and knees, my head lodged underneath the futon where I had been sleeping. Soon, I would be dead. He’d whiplash that thing around, catch me between the eyes, and that would be it. Venom would course through my body, and I’d fall like a stone.

My companion was dozing away peacefully in the other room, no doubt dreaming about buttercups and blue turkeys, but still I dared not move a muscle to shout out for help. No, it was just me and the devil bug, face to face, mano a buggo, and only one of us would make it through the night. To think that I had survived the mountain only to be brought down in my bed. An ironic tragedy, that.

The day had started with an early morning rise, weak coffee and very good eggs, which had the effect of making the weak coffee taste even worse than it did. That should have been my first clue. As a Seattleite, you learn to divine the future by the cut and quality of the coffee at any given moment. Natives have over two thousand local language terms for the bean and the grind of the bean, and at the best of times having a simple cuppa equates to a full-sensory I Ching reading mixed with half and half.

The drive to Enchanted Rock was uneventful, full of visions of rain and mist-hazed blue bonnets along greenways, the poppy thump of 80’s mix tapes, and the faint odor of cattle. We arrived at the Mountain’s parking lot and pulled in next to the only other car, which as luck would have it belonged to my traveling companion’s former boss. He rambled something of a warning to us that I missed because I was trying to figure out the best way to slide a cold water bottle into the deep pockets of my cargo shorts without freezing my cockles. It was something about rain and the stone and death. I brushed it aside as I frantically tried to shift the bottle’s position away from the old how’s-your-father, fixed my hair, and cheerfully set out along the path.

Enchanted Rock lives up to its name, or at least the second part of its name, which is to say that it’s one big rock. And I don’t mean that it’s a pile of rocks that together make a mountain. It’s one…big… rock. It’s like two thousand miles high or something and glistens pink. Yes, pink. Here in the middle of Texas is a big, two thousand mile high chunk of solid pink granite. It is every drag queen’s dream, and I was no exception. I had jumped at the chance to come here, me and my gold lame.



Now, however, as I stood at the bottom of Enchanted Rock and stared up at its immensity, the sloping grace of the approach to the summit, the sparse vegetation, the exposed peak with scattered, random outcroppings – sharp-edged granite that grew in dangerous angles from the landscape, I only had one thought. There is no way under heaven or on earth that I’m going to be able to climb this thing and live. I’m no slugabed, no sloth-monkey, but then again I’ve had my fair share of cartoon marathons with a bag of Kettle Chips and a case of Tangerine Soda at my side. I like my jeans to be loose-fitting, if you catch my drift.

The sun emerged from the clouds and my companion was all chipper and companion-like and said to me, “We are going to walk straight up that thing!” in a very chipper, companion-like way. I could only crack my mouth into a smile and nod with a desperate jerking motion. The poor bastard, I thought, he’d be carrying me down the mountain before this was over.

We began the climb and engaged in our usual banter, which included the varied topics of computer games, friend gossip, conditioners, and upcoming movie releases, you know, real geek fodder. And this continued until we were halfway up the side of the mountain when our conversation suddenly went in this direction:

“So… puff… puff… see… puff… that rock… huff huff… over there?”

(Looking) “Wheeze… pant…. Yeah?… wheeze.”

“Sweat…. Huff… pant…. That’s the… huff…. Puff… place… where… whew… we left my mother.”

(stopping) “You…pant… your what?”

“Hufffffffff pufffff…. Yeah…. Pant…. Choke…. She… couldn’t make it… up…. Pant… pant… So we had… to leave her.”

It was then for the first time, there clinging to the side of Enchanted Rock, that I realized my companion was insane. This whole trip idea had been some elaborate plot, some twisted, nefarious scheme. If he had abandoned his own mother on the side of the mountain, what was he likely to do with me once my heart had given out? I grinned stupidly and remarked something about lettuce, I think, or gardenias. I can’t remember. But I kept my eye on him the rest of the trip up, which probably took the better part of a week.

When we finally reached the summit and I asked somebody what year it was just to make sure, I was greeted by such beauty that had I any breath to take away, it would have been gone. Likewise, any suspicions I may have had about my companion’s intentions vanished as well.

We stood, looking out over the blue hills painted upon the horizon, and all sense of time and space shifted in on itself. That pink-rock Martian landscape was a vast, solid desert that stretched out in all directions, catching and perverting the light and shattering any real sense of depth perception. Small oasises were tunneled into the stone, filled with shallow, blue-green water and surrounded by alien plant life that hoarded and shadowed space like a thick, scraggly beard. Scrub trees tangled their limb fingers and stood swaying like some beginning theoretical acting class’ idea of what a tree should look and act like. And the hawks and buzzards spiraled lazily in the upcurrents, calling out to each other with a sound that bounced repeatedly off the hollow granite walls of the valley, mixing and merging into each other, a natural symphony of challenge and response.

We wandered over this landscape largely alone, explored a small cave system, and fell into the silence of being in silence. And so it was that seated on a gentle slope and overlooking another chunk of pink rock in the distance, my companion said something idly about killing me. Well, actually, that’s when my companion said something idly about the approaching clouds, which in a round-about way would turn out to be something about killing me. In our best, male, ignore it unless it is charging you and about to run you down way, the conversation went something like this:

“Looks like there might be some rain approaching.”

“Yeah.”

“If it rains while we are up here, we won’t be able to get back down.”

“That would suck.”

“Yeah.”

Naturally then, we did nothing but continue to marvel at the clouds as they rolled low over the tree line and the sky darkened. We marveled at how the wind picked up. We marveled at how quickly the little sprinkles of rain fell. We marveled at the speed in which other people left the mountain.

Now, the thing I have learned about pink granite, or rather a chunk of unending pink granite that reaches like two thousand miles into the sky is that it tends to be one continuous surface, or in geological terms, one face. Climbing or descending is like walking up a seemingly unending urban street hill in San Francisco or Seattle. When it’s dry, it’s a good workout. Add water to the smooth, shiny countertop, however, and you have the world’s biggest slip-and-slide. If, say, you were foolish enough to climb up while it is dry, remain at the top until it got wet, and then attempt a descent… well, nobody would ever be that foolish so it’s not worth the conjecture. Needless to say, it’s not a good idea at any time.

“It sure seemed like a good idea at the time,” my companion said as we headed to the cave for shelter, right on cue. Well, actually, he said this after we had yelled, “Make for the Cave!” or something to that bravado effect. I slip-clambered down the hill to the rocks outside the entrance to join him and we looked at each other, looked up the hill, looked down into the cave and had the same thought. I imagined if I lived through this to write about it, the scene would be as follows:

I stared at my companion, my guide, the seasoned climber who even now was sinking dejectedly onto the rock at the entrance of the cave. He tossed back a few swigs of pure grain alcohol and wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve.

The rain came down in sheets, ripping my manly, stubbled cheek to shreds and the torrent of wind billowed my sweat-stained shirt out behind me. I licked my lips and tasted blood, winced painfully. Vultures sat waiting with a surly silence, the cold stare of inevitability.

My companion began giggling even as the storm picked up. He smashed the bottle against the ledge and grinned manically at me.

This was bad news, I thought to myself. Grown men shouldn’t giggle. My companion had gone mad - mad from the heat or the altitude or the lack of women in our party.

Together, we clung to the slick, pink stone, unable to move lower into the safety of the cave for the danger of falling to our deaths, unable to climb any higher up the glass surface of the mountain. We were trapped at the mercy of the elements, exposed to God’s Mightye Wrathe.

He spit and turned to me, his breath hot and putrid from drink. “It seemed a good idea at the time, Will.”

I knew those words would haunt me for the rest of my life, which I knew now would be mercifully short.

But that’s a slight exaggeration and I’m not prone to that sort of trickery. Rather, there we were sharing a rock, stuck in the rain, unable to climb, unable to descend, two pale-skinned geeky guys in shorts. Like any good men when faced with certain death from all sides, we chose to do nothing. And so we got wetter and wetter. And the day got older and older. And we got wetter and wetter.

Finally, he half-yelled into the wind, “I think it’s starting to let up”. The sheer illogic of this statement stunned me. It was so horribly untrue that it started at truth and wrapped all the way around it to the other side, almost making it back where it began. And really, faced with that amazing level of untruth, all you can do is agree with it.

“Yeah, it does”… were the words coming out of my mouth, which at the sheer untruth of what was being said, instantly shriveled up and retreated inside my jaw. I grinned, lipless at my insane partner and then followed him up the mountain again, barely able to move a few inches without a misstep and a stumble.

I returned to my previous premise. Indeed, it was clear he was trying to kill me just like he had tried and failed to kill his own mother, who being older and wiser than I, saw through his attempts and escaped. It was then that I realized I hadn’t asked him if she ever made it back down to the parking lot. This, I decided, was not the time for that question.

By the time we had crested the peak, the wind was very high and the rain had stopped being rain and started being one continuous plane of water. The good news was that it was now blowing sideways so that all of it collected on our bodies and not on the stone beneath our feet. In our unerring logic, then, it seemed like a good time to try for the full descent to base camp. It was either that or wait out the storm and begin the long debate as to which of us would be eaten. (It had been almost five hours since breakfast, I was to learn later. I’m surprised we had the energy to continue. It just goes to show you the strength and endurance that lies in the untapped recesses of the human spirit.)

The climb down took a few more years. We hobbled like little old ladies, randomly slipping and waving our arms with the characteristic old lady “Woooo” or an “Oh Dear!”
Eventually, however, my companion discovered natural cracks in the stone which provided at least some friction. We began to follow these cracks and were for a time buoyed up by our trail-smarts and skill and made very good progress. What clever lads we were.

That was until we heard somebody shouting at us from below.

I believe the words were, “Don’t follow the cracks!!!”

There was another small party of people trapped at the end of a very large crack, not sure where to go or what to do. My companion chose to look at the warning as some sort of Divine Intervention that in his religion was a sign to continue with the crack-following. I brought this logic to his attention and he pulled a gun on me and warned me that if I didn’t follow the crack like he ordered, he’d put a cap into my knee. Or maybe I just followed him because I didn’t know what else to do. The details are spotty.

It’s like when your mother asks you, “If Paul were to follow the crack down the cliff, would you?” I guess I know that answer now.

Around the time we reached the end of the crack, the other trapped party of people had slid to their deaths, or in other words, slid down the rest of the way safely to the gravel area below them and were walking to their car. We, however, were frozen in indecision, stuck, unable to move in any direction yet again. There we were, crouched, squatting, dripping wet in our little shorts, water bottles bulging from our pockets. We were like some perverted Austin bobsledding team who couldn’t afford a bobsled, or apparently from our position, modern plumbing facilities.

I’m not sure exactly what happened next, but it involved a brief discussion about why the human body has a butt, some rudely drawn diagrams, an overview of exactly what was going to happen, and then one accidental slip of a shoe.

I can’t imagine the sound we made as we slid half on our asses and half on the soles of our shoes down to the gravel, holding on to each other for dear life. I’d like to suppose that it was a very manly, triumphant howl or even maybe a devil-may-care whee. Let’s just pretend that was indeed the sound. And let’s forget the sudden head-jerks upward of families below us, the finger pointing, and the picture taking.

The important thing is that we had survived. Not even lunch surrounded by a gaggle of well-meaning, purple-clothed, red-hatted ladies could quench the glow of our accomplishment. No swarming, snot-webbed worms on the forest path could diminish us. No gay country-western dancing could faze us. We had beaten the mountain. We were no longer boys, but men. We ate M&M cookies and drank iced tea to our good fortune.

As the sweat beaded on my forehead and the scorpion poised to strike, I thought about all of this. What a waste that I would not live to tell the tale to generations of children so that they might learn from it. This small Jurassic creature would close out my final chapter. I readied myself for death.

And then suddenly, my companion, my Passepartout swooped down from the heavens above me, a deus ex-machina in a white terry-cloth robe, brandishing an instrument of doom. I shrank back from him, knowing in my final moments that all of this had been planned, the mountain adventure, the rain, the scorpion under the bed. The sharp instrument angled past my face…

“Cool, a baby scorpion. I’ve never seen one this small before. I’m not sure it could even break the skin,” he said. With the tweezers around it, he walked cheerfully out of the room and down the hall, fading into the yellowing glow of the bathroom light and was gone.

That had been his chance, I realized, to kill me. And yet, he had not. Our time together on the mountain had made us comrades. Our differences had been set aside. The ordeal of our journey had forged our hands in a grudging friendship.

Maybe that, truly, is the meaning of whatever metaphor you can draw from any of this.

As for me, I’m only happy that I have lived long enough to tell you the story.

Farewell, Austin, land of pancakes and longhorns. Farewell.

Shiftless Seattlite Tour : San Francisco (Stop 2)

I

She is San Francisco.

She came to me late at night, turned down the covers and nymph-writhed her body next to mine. “So,” she said. “So,” I answered.

We lay there wrapped up in each other, staring at the ceiling. I thought about the first time we met, how I crossed her bridge over and over until we were both sweaty and tired. The twisting maze of her valley lingered as I drove from her, the sweet salt scent of her shores and her bulging-moon-captured hollow would beckon me back.

We arranged our trysts discretely, danced around each other coquettishly like thin paper coils in an updraft. We walked along the curiosity shoppes sharing chocolates and goat-skin drum heads. We chased each other through long, long alleyways perimetered with loud-colored townhouses that rose suddenly from each horizon as if our hidden hands were sliding the chewed plastic levers in a popup book.

She wrapped her starfish limbs around my toes to hold on as the tide pulled.

“It’s been seven years, you know,” she said casually, shifting her bare feet onto the sofa arm.

“Yeah,” I answered numbly.

“What do you think we should do about it?” she asked.

I ran my hand over my face slowly, pinching the unshaved skin together at my jugular. “What do you think we should do?” I responded.

We stared at the ceiling with our hands prayered upon our stomachs, and the hours passed.

II

As seen through glazed cellophane, she leaned forward throwing blurs of motion into the periphery. I was already pawing at the solid round table, counting nail points and reading the history of knees. “So, what is your spiritual practice?” she asked.

It all tunneled. Maybe they were Christians or maybe they were Buddhists or maybe they were Hindus. I couldn’t tell anymore. I fell back to stutters and fidgets, swallowed a hard egg lump, stumbled something about paganism or shamanism or wiccanism, all the while tensing my muscles for flight.

Years ago, in that office, she had cornered me and asked me what kind of faith is not based on the reverence of a sacred text, what kind of pathwork is not subject to systems of master/teacher, what kind of salvation could be gained without the structure of practice and movement. I wanted to explain that all these things were present in their fashion, that the basis for what I follow is as old or older, that I worked feverishly and with passionate dedication to my path, but more importantly that the comparison didn’t matter. But in the conflict heat, I could not. I blurted out something like, “It’s a feeling”.

She sneered and said, “Feelings change” and closed her bible on my fingers.

“So, what is your spiritual practice?” she asked with her soft heart, with her open, honest interest as the other faces turned to me and the cellophane ripped in raptor-shards. I wanted to leap over tables, spilling chai and scattering tofu, dashing towards the open window laughing gleefully, “Huzzah! You’ll never catch me!” I was the heretic in dirt mud marketplaces or the hermit starving in isolation or the fat child endlessly mocked and alone.

This is the stain of persecution. I cannot choose this any longer.

III

“What’s the word? The word is Revolution. You gotta make the choice now, kiddo. What’s it gonna be?”

I scoffed my feet across the cracked, elephant-skin curb and raised the coffee to my lips. The breeze of a late Sunday struck the sides of slow cruising cars and slid over their sun-hot roofs to roll down the hillside towards the bay. Flocks of children on low dirt bikes changed direction and intent with silent agreement, limbs and eyes and heads flashed in motion, indistinguishable to the predator.

I looked up at her, at the oiled, jet-black hair in tiny spikes, the silver lip piercing handcuffing her mouth, the scar along the her right eye. Her grey-faded clothes were punctured by underlayers of flame red. They hung in loose ripped segments down to her Converse tennis shoes, which were beaten and patched with bumper stickers, caution tape, and Hello Kitty logos.

I looked into her eyes and said nothing, didn’t need to say anything. There was nothing to be said.

She smirked and bit into her fingernails, “That’s your problem, sport. You always want it both ways, but that’s not how it works. Got no time for that shit anymore.”

I leaned back on my chair against the brick wall of the café and pushed my cup away from me, leaving a small smear of cream-brown and sugar on the tabletop. She laughed a short bark and scratched at the inside of her ear.

“Right? It doesn’t matter if you are right or not. Nobody ever knows that and who gives a fuck anyway? That’s not what it’s all about. This is Belief, brother.”

She took two steps forward and grabbed the chair opposite from me, turning it around in one sudden movement with a sickening metallic scrape. She swung one thin leg over it, straddling the seat, and leaned her hands upon the laced metal back.

I could smell her breath now. It was earthy, like sage, like infrequently brushed sage teeth, with the tart scent of cheap lavender candies. She smiled her pointy carnivores. Behind her, faint shadows flickered against the white wood doorframes.

“It’s all or nothing, kiddo. Time’s up for you. We either stay, or we walk now. Make it a good one.”

IV

The thing about poetry is that it infects you. When you hear good poetry, poetry that really reaches you, it causes little eggs to hatch in your brain.

That’s Mary. She’s my friend. That little poem is one of the best poems I’ve heard in a long time, and my friend Mary, she wrote it. She’s reading it right now, out loud, in a room full of ears. I’m having to hide my face with my hand because I can’t keep from crying. I’m sure I’ll brush it off later, maybe ask her for a copy, and not gush forth with exactly how this is affecting me.

The whole trip is crystallized in this moment, the warmth of the room, that scraggly-faced, beat-poet throwback standing next to me, so San Francisco. I’m sustained here, suspended with just that single voice speaking. She is radiant. And I’m feeling something way down deep in a place where I haven’t felt anything in a long time.

There’s a poem there. My poem is there. I’d forgotten what it was like to think poetically, how some things just want to be expressed that way. I touch it timidly. Maybe I’ll never write this poem. Maybe I’ll keep it secret and special, suspend it in this moment as well.

How long has it been since I felt this? Three years? Four years? Could it be five?

I’m realizing now that Mary’s poem is shorter than I want it to be, but then again, I want it to last for hours. This used to be what it was like to hear poetry and write poetry, the singular ecstatic moment, closer to sex and death than anything I can imagine. It used to be all that I ever wrote. I filled legal pads, journals, napkins, hard disks with this stuff. It’s funny the things you forget, the things you allow to die.

She’s finishing now. I bet she is nervous. The room responds enthusiastically. I cry again and pretend to scratch my nose. I close my palm around my poem and rise to leave.

V

We laid on our backs with enough space between us to allow our skin to cool down, but not enough to break the circuit. Her stomach rose and fell slower, slower and she gazed onto the place where the Y of walls meet.

I shut my eyes slightly, wandered my focus, and let my knee lightly rest against hers.

“It used to be simpler,” she said.

“Yeah,” I answered, barely moving.

She turned her head and ran her eyeline over the aging skin of my cheekbone, tracing small imperfections, a lover marking inventory.

“I don’t know what I want,” I said, letting my eyes fall open again, bringing the cracked plaster into sharp vision.

She sighed, which was my answer, and turned over onto her back again. Her fingers entwined mine, little cold porcelain sticks with seal skin nails. Her small breasts floated on her chest cavity, her underarms seaweeded against the random curves of her body. She put her head against my ribcage and smiled a faint, tiny smile.

“Honey, who ever does?”