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English Studies Forum
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Exit Chino an excerpt from A HalfMan Dreaming David Matlin
*The first section of A HalfMan Dreaming appeared in our summer issue.
Fall always seems to be my time of transitions whether a Vermont autumn or a Pacific edge run of waves snapping, ripping the air or the outer membranes of a human body that wants to watch and ride those walls of water building, the only insulation from death upon meeting the curl, a pair of ankle-strapped “Churchill Fins.” No two of even the apparent smoothest, “easiest” left and right waves are the same, and any, especially the smaller three or four foot waves, can fool you with a gentle, disorienting flood, and leave you injured or swept out by a sudden rip current capable of dragging a swimmer an ocean mile, fins, wetsuit and all before the wave gathers to its completed cascade. The sea-edge can, and does, have a gentle tranquility that draws children and adults to its detailed wonders of washed-up, fly-enshrouded sea life; sand crabs, sea-wracked stones in their endless proportions and shapes, diving pelicans, seals, which arriving from the depths, come to test your skills as fellow wave-riders, the occasional sand-shark that brushes against your ankles in the calm shallows where the last surges of white-water become flitting, knee-high pools nourished by wandering under-shadows, sea-gulls desperate for their small plunders, children digging sand-pits and building drip castles with relaxed mothers and fathers. But get waist-high in white water and you’re in a wilderness and the energy at that edge affords no human occupancy though land may be only a hundred yards away. I was really good with fins and my body, but had little feel for or desire to ride a board. Perhaps it was because I had learned the art early and liked the total envelopment of the wave and the intimate, exacting arrangement of a wave that can twist you as the wind twists a seed or a feather. But no matter your choice, you need to know certain things before an eight-to-ten foot wave. A wall of water this big and larger is a force. You can hear it, feel it, smell it swell and build into its beautiful mercilessness as it cracks and folds before you crease every inch of yourself into its blue face, a delicate slash holding those falling tons to your shape and wresting a trajectory you imagine and release yourself into that you can never duplicate again. How to tube it down, spin and then rise up into the bunched-up after-trough, the force of a broken wave, its instant flood almost crushing you and your longed for lung full of air. And when the seals show up to ride with you, you can watch their shimmering bodies as you and them turn face into the wave wall building the curl, sheathing you, hoarding you in the spray, stretching your nostrils and lips. I knew surfers who headed north once to test the really cold waters of Steamer Lane and moved still father north steadily from that point, till they got up to around Shelter Cove. Those surfers were good too, just this side of competition polished, learned their art at six or seven years old and the waves were strong that day, maybe fifteen feet as they were looking “outside” and saw in a rising second swell twenty or thirty yards beyond where they dangled on their boards, a twenty-foot white shark perfectly entwined in their exact rhythms like it was unhurriedly spelling out the name of their deep sleep. They watched, waited for a good swell and took it in, no rush, no fancy footwork, just steady basics of standing, balancing properly, feeling the motion of the board through the bottoms of their feet and letting the wax do the labor, going belly down when it counted all the way to shore then picking up their boards and walking away. Repetition is dangerous for any story, but like I said, these surfers were good, bold, thought they were ready for most of the troubles surfing can offer including terrible wipeouts and near drownings, and neither, who loved the sea, ever went to sea again.
I wrote small passages like this and the ones to follow while locked up for feeding that off-duty cop some hamburger. The writing helped me to remember who I was and where I was from. No one can ever anticipate how the crushing space of a jail cell can swallow what you thought might be your identity and all of its peculiar gestures and carefully honed sympathies that reflect back in those grinding, dead hours as a voracious maggot. The three years in jail, though I never thought I’d experience such a deadening hell, also gave me a gift, one I never imagined would appear in that bottom feeder world. As a veteran I was eligible for an “in-house” college education program, and for me (though Wesley’s parents and mine encouraged me to use their private library), it seemed like the only life-line I’d ever be offered inside that steel to help me get passed the violence and helplessness that seemed the only reality left to me. Some of the hardest labor I ever did, reader, was to read those books and to wait for books from outside libraries. I took history and literature courses and became fascinated with the Great Lakes and the City on the Straits. My cell gave me a place to imagine the ancient freshwater seas and the ambergris floating on their surfaces from sperm, bowhead, and fin whales that breached their way up the Ice Age Mississippi. I learned there were vast herds of walrus as well as long-legged taller than a buffalo musk ox browsing at the edges of the retreating ice. There were peccaries too, and woodland caribou, bison, and the moose-like cervalces siphoning shallow pond and lake bottoms. Reading such things reminded me of the remote canyons where me and Wesley searched for bone fragments and rusted pistols from the nineteenth century California range wars and Indians hunts. We longed to, but never found any skulls of saber toothed tigers or dire wolves. That reading also gave me a way to think about the living and the dead and how I might include them as rhapsodic and even at times exfoliating presences in the leafage of a story.
I also had other friends who got the same sensations strapped into the frame of a dragster or the altered coupes they constructed for the ancient salt pans at El Mirage and Bonneville, and who stopped at Winnemucca for the expert whores once a year who could lick them all over the way no goddamned no matter how perfectly tooled wrench ever could. They'd bring their boards down too once in a while and then do it. The force of the spray carrying a wave's aftershock you'd dive out for or die if it stole your breath. Those friends on their boards above me and all of us scratching to get out beyond the break, rest like otters and float on the swells. Search the horizon for the glistening larger humps that might be that fifteen or eighteen footer pulling at your skin. A small test to find out if you were wrapped.
And there were the others who'd wax their surfboards one week and then jump out of planes at thirty-thousand feet the next, agents of special force landing in the jungles to watch a trail in Asia. One that would become in a few years a river of murderous bicycle and war masters, and we were the ones out of our Southern California towns watching their luring almost invisible kinetics scared the distances between this surf and that trail weren't far enough for any planet. I’d landed, after one of those top secret dives, and gathering my chute heard something heavy breaking the soaked jungle floor with its charge. And it was a tiger curious about my sudden appearance, come for a warning look, and then seeing I was only a man, sprayed piss and walked away. But I knew that tiger's stare had eaten a part of me coming on my goddamned human business to be suddenly unstrung by an inhuman visitor. And I worried about how I might allow myself to be eaten by a shark.
After hours spent treading the sea we caught a last ride then walked down the sunset shrouded coast to the dory fisherman who rowed out and cast their nets twice each day. Their Portuguese was as fresh on their lips as their struggle with the weight of fish. Their hands were punctured by the spines of the beautiful water beasts they'd killed and we knew some of their relatives who had settled inland on the flood plains of the Santa Ana to wrap their fingers around the tits of cattle, also twice each day. The dairy farmers got rich with milk, and a tinge of brown lung from pitchin' hay, hauling and stacking it for the endless appetite of the land beasts they became slaves to. We’d ask for barracuda or gray shark and carried those bodies back to our sunset fires. Split'em, stacked'em out over the salt-baked driftwood still covering those wild beaches in those mid-twentieth century years and pulled that hot spitting flesh off its bones.
Or steal a hemi coupe and visit the judge who'd give you the choice between prison or an AK47 shell snipping off a throw-the-dice section of your spinal cord where you'd roll with that instant dead part of yourself over and over in your dreams about waves when you were whole, the smell of the wax spread over the fiberglass to keep your feet and toes flexed. The water curling, slapping into your knees and ankles testing every inch you once had.
One night in solitary confinement I remembered how Wesley’s father had dived off the coast of Balboa for snails that he carried home to be boiled for their spectacular translucent shells, their summer home stunk up with the invertebrate flesh. And, waiting until after the boiling water did its work, we pressed those swirls of calcium to our ears and thought later we heard the caught roar of both ancient seas and suns, and that their lost plasmas had become the equal to Smokey Robinson or the Supremes.
Before I left for Oregon I visited the Rose Farm which had partially, by that time, gone to rot. The things made of metal and the things made of wood were in equal stages of disinterest and anger they had been abandoned to and I examined all the smells which seemed to have replaced the roses. I climbed the walnut trees that family had grown for the thickened scent of the walnut musk that always enticed me as a child. I sat in the branches and cracked shells for fresh walnut meat and then went to all the other trees which had been planted; the peach, the avocado, the persimmon, and ate there, wanting that meat too, cutting the fuzz of the peach skin with my teeth to feel the fruit hair brush my lips, and the tight persimmon, its stretched orangish presence a visible engorgement where the sexual breakage edging the outer currents of its flesh touched the division point between the late twentieth century Southern California town, its immersion in smog and freeway construction, and this place of constant worries and stories and a coming into life which was always bitten by something. Farming Jews with their communist and zionist sympathies gave the farm and its properties a ready demarcation, one the outer town in its Christian secrets held in contempt, though each in the other were intertwined shadows folded upon evangelical pennies and dimes and arms secretly being smuggled to Israel. Perhaps the mutual Testaments of an extreme Christian America and the Jewish re-birth from the Holocaust in the vision of a new Israel were forged in our Southern California town where Moshe Dayan and other Jewish/Farmer warriors from the eastern Mediterranean visited, not necessarily in secret, because Hoover’s FBI was never at rest before these Rose Growers, but the local papers, in their anti-Semitic editorials about the strange enclave of Jews in their midst, were either too bewildered or wouldn’t understand for decades who such visitors really were. I can remember Dayan’s visit; me and Wesley were watering roses, the black cans lined up in their endless rows that needed to be filled every morning of our boyhood summers. The watering took hours to complete as we were escorted, often, by hummingbirds and the occasional bee or wasp interrupted in their pollen gatherings by the sprays of water we directed. We were almost too small for the weight of the hoses, and the struggle, every day, nearly wore us boys out. It doesn’t seem possible that a simple water-weighted hose can be such an opponent, but sixty feet of rubber and high pressure water could easily damage any about to flower flowers, knock over cans and spill soil and buds, exacting a little hardly noticed ruin, but one, Tom Green and Wesley’s father wouldn’t tolerate. Such apparent insignificant labor and its details taught us to be meticulous about water, the control of hoses, and our own endurance under a grinding desert sun. No shelter, and the survival of thousands of plants was given to us to complete. In to one of these mornings the Farmer appeared with a man equally as strong as himself, but with a black eye-patch, black as the rose cans themselves. He introduced Wesley first, then me.
“This is your son?” the man asked.
“Yes,” the Farmer answered, not needing to go one syllable beyond.
“And is this his friend?”
“Yes. This is my son’s friend, Lupe,” the Farmer offered once more.
The man leaned down and said, “You are doing such important work,” and he smiled and patted each of us and remarked to the Farmer, “Healthy boys,” as he and his host kept walking through the rows of can-encased roses, their adult backs receding in the boyhood distance.
Wesley’s father hybridized a small, delicious avocado with a paper-thin skin, too thin it was said for commercial purposes, but the fruit still hung on the few remaining trees in an abundance to be shared by various insects and birds. I pulled one, cut it in half, sprinkled lemon fresh from a tree. It was one of the delights we had had as children, a simple and direct break from hoeing and watering, and hand crafted in its ways as the rest of the rose farm and its farmer who soaked the boards of his corrals with sulfuric acid to turn flies into little puddles of boiled slime.
The Wedge is a spit of sand lying next to the Balboa Jetty and the entrance to the Balboa Bay. It is, on most days, tranquil and sometimes wind swept with a small ankle-high shorebreak and an undertow that demands some care and respect from the unsuspecting adult or child. It isn’t necessarily dangerous but it can startle someone playing at its borders with a quick, spinning surge. Otherwise it offers no hint of its fall transformation into a rage of immense, snarling twenty-five foot waves, their top curls shredding the air with what seems to be and is a venomous fury that maroons the onlooker in a quivering, watchful awe. It sounds like all the skeletons of the dead have come to this one place to be snapped into their finalized, invisible shreds. Each wave rises straight up out of a veneer of sand and a body surfer at that moment can either opt for a snapped neck or kick out into the closing face of a giant, let it collapse and float the survivor up behind the aftersurge, get a breath and dive for a handful of bottom making sure the next incoming wave can’t get enough lift to smash your sternum with its downpressure. Some bodysurfers can thread these waters as if they were a hanging loom created just for this almost sea otter’s play. I can still hear those runs at night as if they were Pliocene half hyena dogs howling at the edges of the Mojave or one of my sister's night runs and the gang she ran with from Chino to Colton where the girls sprayed their hair into about a foot high bouffant stacked by pure Dippity-Do and the razor blades they hid in there, mash potatoing themselves in dance contests from Pomona to Balboa for the finest hold any dollar could buy and those razors never seemed to slip except for gang-girls and gang-boys from other towns like Corona or Fontana or Colton or Cucamonga.
I bought a beat-up Merc sometime in my junior year of high school for the dashboard’s night-time display and how it turned a bright radium green, for a secret I thought I could keep with Madame Currie. My goal was to travel alone without Wesley or anyone else to Meteor Crater and I chose Route 66 because I could consider a detour through Bagdad, not the one with Kish and Tikrit nibbling at it enchantments, but the one between Klondike and Amboy, pass by the badlands of granite and lava surrounding Bristol Lake where no soil development has taken place since the Hadrocyons, those dog bears of the Pliocene savannahs who sniffed and scared the pronghorns so bad they became the best runners that ever lived, bet this side of twelve million years and the death of eight worlds.
I pulled down a Dewey Weber “T” shirt for good luck cause the surfer himself came one afternoon to the Wedge, slid out and caught one really second thought monster, hung ten for the newspapers and then him and his fiberglass disappeared under the terrible tonnage. The board, which earlier he had a tractor-trailer drive over as a local sales stunt, was snapped up like some used saltine, and Weber reappeared after the near-death episode, like an original Hawiian price knowing the maidens would love his, more than the Wedge ever could, flesh for years to come.
A real Dewey Weber “T’ shirt might have proved to be the dark talisman attracting girls (I didn’t want whales like that captain of the Pequod though I’ve always thought sighting migratory grey whale breath-plumes from the San Onofre cliffs as great a magic as standing under the fire plumes of desert night meteor showers), from who knows where; Yermo, Heber, or Bombay Beach on the Salton Sea, where the fertilizer-glazed mummies of fish wash up to edges of the abandoned Salton City Casino to become other worldly poker chips for the ghosts debarking from the invisible American Train there, fueling at its final station.
The passage over the Colorado River, for me, is a similar rite to crossing the Mississippi, a traversal to be marked; time of day or night, patterns of weather, companions, if any, at that moment. Yet, what strikes the observer with the Colorado is the immediate transformation of plant life and typography. No Saguaros cut the California horizon and the desert has a different, more fractured cast of varying patinas over broken, upheaved landscapes softened by patterns of shadow and light luring the glance, even deferring the glance away from the exacting severities and penalties ribbing these spaces, a horizon less barren, an emptiness no less uncertain, but one not as sharply forbidding as the Algodones Sand Dunes or the great Anza Borrego wastes where the ancient Pleistocene river bed of the Colorado can be seen as hull shaped overturned monoliths in pink-hued isolated valleys of flowering ocotillo that seem like vast, dry pastels as one passes by the million year-old footprints of elephants mysteriously appearing out the vertical striations of a flash-flood scoured arroyo, drying in the sun for one more day, and then as suddenly, disappearing.
Meteor Crater lies on the Northern Arizona plateau next to a petrified Cretaceous forest. The exposed eighty-million-year-old rocks hold the shape of recognizable tree trunks still seeming to wait for the elements to rot them. The Crater cannot be seen in the surrounding vastness of the plateau until one is almost directly upon it. The hole itself pulverizes familiarity as much as its meteoric mother pulverized this section of Earth. The top-most strata is buckled and bears the fresh signature of the inruption and pressure that massed at this single point of impact forty-thousand years ago. It has a barely trodden geologic newness and from the rim of the hole one senses there might be debris in the surrounding sub-surfaces still hot from the thing that folded and vaporized what lay underneath its foreshadowed weapons grade trajectory. But more than anything else this extraterrestrial damage made me think about WAHOO SHOTS, Wein's displacement law, Tenth-value thickness, and Plasma oscillations. It made me know how deeply etched the card is that tells how far anyone is away from the Dose-Distances and sufficient thicknesses of matter everyone is made of and its absorption powers. Samuel Glasstone was thoughtful enough to include a tourist grade picture of the Eniwetok Fireball lighting the Pacific around it a spectacular blood red. I’d picked up "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons" in a used book store after one of my surfer friends told me about it; said it made every minute he'd spent in the jungle a little more meaningful. It was filled with graphs, explanations, equations. The whole thing scared me to a shit-pink panic, and it was filled with a language, an aftertime language that somebody, obviously a rocketship full of somebodys spoke fluently, their brains floated in the ocean of Afterwinds, bone-seekers, Rankine-Hugoniot relations, Skyshine while I and the others in our brittle, weird innocence waited for the seals to join us in the fall runs. The Lovelace Foundation in its contract to the Atomic Energy Commission's Division of Biology and Medicine also included a portable Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer, a five and a quarter inch circular plastic disk that could help us to measure "Glass-Missile Data for Penetration of 1-CM Soft Tissue," "Crater Dimensions," "Early Fallout Dose Rates," and "For example, a 20MT explosion produces a fireball with a maximum radius of 2.3 mi. The minimum height of burst for negligible early fallout, read in same window, is 1.8 mi." You could take this disk anywhere you wanted, spin it, find out how quick your dad's new Chevy would turn into home-built vapor. This friend showed us all how to work that disk one night over a driftwood fire. The other surfers with their faces lit up had either joined the Marines or were running away from the draft or the maryjane police who twittered and smouldered just off everyones’ radar. I buried the disk, didn't want any of our little sisters or brothers to be poisoned by it and we knew we were even if we had never seen it. Where could any of us escape the atomic and nuclear tests that edged up to our earliest front doors. I remembered that every time Wesley’s mother heard about another explosion warning to stay indoors would look out over the San Bernardinos in the direction of Vegas and mumble about some nineteenth century uncle of hers whose last beautifully trained hunting horse had been killed by a grizzly. Perhaps it was her Indian dread that included a shame-misery over the extermination of other Indians and that news which reached the ranchos of her grandmothers’ world about the women of the Sioux or Cheyenne who old or young were scalped, their pubic hair cut out as trophies by the American soldiers and that such violence was being courted once more. I pulled out the One-Eyed Jack I carry, over that recollection, the one one day I may need to give me an advantage over miracles when they do their funny things. At that moment another incident came to mind also about Wesley’s mother and a business trip she, Wesley’s father, and Tom Green took to increase the lines of their roses and introduce the new hybrids to family owned nurseries in Iowa, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. Their version of the rose business could allow this personal touch, and the wives as canny as husbands, flowers fertilizing as hard a state of mind in the women as the men over the bottom line, solidified final contracts on the basis of their mutual impressions and respect. The three of them took a detour through Cheyenne Oklahoma where Custer attacked mostly the aged, women and children at a winter village in the Washita River Valley in 1868. The would-be President of the United States actually began his journey of delusion and murder under the distinctly elegant bluffs overlooking this river and its valley that lies in the quietude of a flood plain covered with grasses and the smells of southern plains wild flowers. The mid-afternoon winds at this site seem to almost crystallize both grasses and light, making what seems to be seen into a frail shell because of the sharp, nervous drifting morbidities that reside here. A tall chain-link fence designates the present border of private property and a historic marker pinpoints where the village encampment once lay. Feathered medicine bundles, both weather torn and new sway in their various sizes in the breeze, watchers that extend from here, Tom Green told Wesley’s mother and father, to where Custer’s men and iron shod horses gathered, and shit, and chopped up everything before their final rush toward the huge village running alongside the Little Big Horn River. For the Sioux women that overlook was a place of deepest peace, fragile in late June with the flowers of ripening buffalo peas whose seed had been gathered and boiled for generations. That Hill of Wild Peas, Tom Green told them, was the place of women’s puberty dreaming for who could count how many of the daughters’ generations and where, he wondered, not expecting an answer from this man and woman he respected as relatives, can such velocities of sorrow or telepathic debris any longer go or come from?
I was used to seeing the factories. The scrubbed clean ones with low roofs where you needed a great grandmother from the American Revolution to get work clearance. You got to put together torpedoes and missiles with atomic and nuclear warheads, take your time, micro-tune those fuckers so that they wouldn't even leave a stain. You could come home to your girlfriend. Have her wrap her legs around your back in the back seat of your Dodge Hemi and know she couldn't even begin to ask how your day went, that it was “Top Secret” installing the beautiful gyroscopes that formed the core of a guidance system. Maybe you could do it eight hours a day, get to love to drop DMT, tell your head it steadied your fingers, sing the same little rodent song that Annette or Darlene sang and have that girlfriend strap on a Mickey Mouse hat, suck and pull your nipples raw, stretch your anus with her hungry wanting fingers, and if you let it become an image where would its eating stop or begin what with those industries surrounding the death of being being another gold rush, and moving between that flow of money and how it could customize a car, buy in-board race boats with blown injected Chryslers and the Northwest wastes of the Mekong Delta where cults and prophets seemed to appear out of a nowhere equal to any Southern California parking lot, the mutual power of incantation licking sensuously, calling everyone to a passage and whether it was beyond cure only death's part in the rescue's price would tell. Ripened. Who can be ripened as the moon is eaten. And may never come back. Warped maze of swollen earth one finger tall. Hell particularly stinks they thought. In all their scrolls the dead in the land of the dead are represented by a fart. And there the most beautiful jewelry to be worn are the freshest eyes of the dying.
I don’t really know, even though I was three years in it, what exactly hell is or how to name it. But I do know how thoroughly I was devoured and how thoroughly I disappeared in order to survive. A prison can be compared to an oceanic trench. The penetration of sun-light is so shallow that you soon forget what this light’s influence actually was. It ceases to touch you and you cease to care about it as you recede from life into this death because such care is too dangerous as you begin to swim in the various stages of shadow and darkness filled with sickened screams, predators, violent guards, rotten food, murder, constant degrading filth, rape, extortion, and a wilting boredom that erodes sanity, humanity, and the most obscure filaments of anything you thought might have belonged to you or were a part of you and you become hungry in this abyss and insatiable and the hungers have no application or reference to any other world. The smell of detergent and fear becomes a toxic dump soaking skin, lips, eyes, mouth, concrete and steel with malice and cruelty, all of it ruled down to the most exacting flesh shredding second by a routine that gradually digests you into a disfigured, malevolent infant. A man in this aquarium can hold on to his humanity ten, fifteen, even twenty years but after that the parts that you thought composed your identity start to drift away and you can see the bottom feeders, eating of that visible and invisible feast, and looking up to the exact cell from where they fall for more of these morsels. One day I was there, and the next day I wasn’t, and what kept me from dressing in some other freshly flayed skin was that college program and those books.
The day of my release I ended up on Woodward Avenue and a preacher walking that cement filled the whole street with his single huge, deep, accordion accompanied human voice that bounced off the bottoms of buildings, the syllables from street level racing to the highest spires. The skin of his black face stretched with the words he spoke. Heat misted on the man’s overcoat shrouded body that was almost seven feet tall. He walked and stopped traffic and made it seem like his reading of Daniel would crawl right under your toenails. He just kept moving, reciting, never looked up from the pages, his baritone almost a wave in itself from one block to another as if he meant to turn the whole thing into the ruins of Jericho with sounds that could waken a Dream Horse from the end of the world along with a couple of Sioux in my company who could make that Horse shit and twist and gulp so much rage it and the apocalypse it announced would break and crumble. I never heard a preacher like this who could make the Bible sound like “The Platters” or “Martha and the Vandellas” his shoulders and neck swelling with the breath it took for each letter to become what he decided it ought to be. Wasn’t looking for paper bags filled with greasy last chance dollar bills or the extra change that designated the borders where malnutrition lurked for the Believers and their Children. The preachers from Earthquake Central could order those objects to levitate down the aisles of a parking lot tent. But this giant only wanted to stretch his accordion for all the sound that machine was worth. I didn’t know why it had to be that instrument other than it was some lung, some disembodied lung he stuck an angel in, maybe a fire-wolf those Sioux’s ancestors had seen in their dreams. Be in the hand held instrument waiting to eat that Bible Screamer from the throat down to the valves of his heart. I picked up a habit that first day of riding buses and that would on go for hours as if I was going to Moab in Utah, the New Kingdom glowing with Uranium spread all over the local canyons except I was still in Detroit watching, asking questions over neighborhoods, legendary local alleys, seeing factories at night, smelling the heat, the ammonia and machinery twisting the air. I constantly watched how the factories seemed to loom and be loomed from the glow of their windows bound with scar and blood and lost fingers, tinge of a million recipes of grease seeped into pores, teeth, staining the bulge of ears, hair thickened with it. I’d go through neighborhoods stunk up with barbecued ribs and dissipated resins, the bars crammed to burst, go in, shoot pool, loose a little at first, then crank it up, see how much and who could be bought, bet for whiskey, pace it with shells of local beer. The brake stench. My nostrils are filled with it. Not only from those bus rides in Detroit but with what starts ten miles down from Lebec on the Ridge Route dividing the LA Basin from the San Joaquin Valley where the bus drivers and truckers carrying hauls there either geared down or died. Wesley and me made a few trips through this pass as young boys riding a Diamond Reo tractor headed to Wasco. The Driver: Tom Green; passengers: two boys who couldn’t have been happier if they’d been placed in the central control console of an intergalactic ice cream truck. But I can still hear those rigs and buses gearing down and see the machinery smoking, tractors and trailers twisted and folded along with cattle, sheep, bails of hay, lumber, oranges, potatoes, cement, a man or two, filling the road. Tom Green could feel the gears of a Daimond Reo as he listened to brakes, quivers in the tire treads of an eighteen wheeler that at any instant could have yawned with back-up weight and started to swallow itself up on a downhill run. He’d bring us boys through, mostly at night, when the fog and land mixed. The Rose Grower that Kiowa loved waited with a thermos full of hot chocolate and they’d tell us stories about Cochran Lake, another body of Fresh Water, big as the oceans of Michigan or Illinois stretching from Lakeview in the south to Modesto in the north, two hundred fifty miles long, and fifty wide with anopheles shrouded marshes inward, and annual tarantula migrations outward covering the dryer plains. “How long you think it would take, Tom, for a hundred of those hairy spiders to eat someone our size?” “Well boys, figure a hundred’s too small a number. Say ten thousand, and by God that’s enough to make any man’s eyelids want to melt.” And the two adults would try to hold themselves over the amazed faces of us two boys trying to imagine that impossible horror, or the grizzlies, as they told it, at acorn-gathering time, “Bellies drug to the ground and oil sloshing from side to side against those huge bear ribs.” “Indians,” Tom Green added, “and grizzlies made promises to kill each other, but only once in a while. And if a bear grew tired of such things, why it ate nests of yellow jackets, those grubs tasting better than any human brain.” Later, when we were fifteen me and Wesley went with friends to the outskirts of Oildale. A couple had some children who turned into wild, mean boys expert in building engines, the blown injected kinds for the sons of rich men in Bakersfield, the way someone else cuts diamonds. They raised game cocks too, back in this hid chicken coop in the Kern Flats. Gave demonstrations. Threw those birds in your face just to see if you could flinch, the San Joachin ripe, edgy with mirages, the roosters primed to describe any part of your face. And those boys laughed, ready to beat your ass if you caused any inch damage to an eight hundred dollar rooster.
There was an Objibwa too, in my first unit. I suppose that was one of the reasons I originally stopped off in Detroit, to find him and let him know Kevin had died. It was one of things Kevin, as well as the others, including myself, would have wanted. I never did find him. Maybe he didn’t want to be found. But the stories he told about the founding of Cadillac’s Fort, the warriors who came from the remote plains; Pawnee, Mandan, Hidatsa, Osage with their death baiting dreams, bodies marked by tattoos, paint and feathered robes to fight and die over empires of fur, and trances gave me and Kevin a fascination about this City, and having survived the war, perhaps on the basis of some of those stories, enough of a reason to order that cheeseburger. He was a sergeant in his late thirties from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan who hooked up with the Marines in early 49, fought in Korea, Lebanon, Vietnam. He watched over me and some others in the beginning; showed us we could stand or crawl, shoot or freeze, eat shit or volcanoes, one way or the other death would either come or it wouldn’t no matter what deal you’d try to make with it or yourself. First ambush he stood, bullets slashing the rice paddies we slogged into, and yelled instructions, voice clear, without panic. First episode of combat, one man shot through his face, one man, feet and half a leg blown off by a mine. The Objibwa saw it as his profession. Listen, pay attention, no frills, no guarantees, maybe get a “Harley” out of it, a new tear the ass off a Death Valley pick-up. That Indian when it mattered bent his head to listen, felt out the beautiful calm of a meadow we were in, or a clearing in the jungle filled with flowers and birds and breezes so gentle. It was, he said, something he’d practiced since childhood, in other jungles where there was said to be another being prowling the edges. “For miles, it can be heard,” he said. “The hiss it lets out, if you listen good, spreads over the tree tops, quiet as a moth.” It had huge, single toed feet, pointed heels, and hands so ugly the first white men to enter the northern jungles of the Fresh Water Seas literally threw up their stomachs in fear. This Windigo, if there were no faces to chew fed on stump mushrooms for their properties of cruelty and precision of mind. “A vampire staining its skull every night. The being that is Faceless, we call it, yearning for the starvation of all that can be seen.” We thought that was some funny shit and laughed. Told him he’d heard too much Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Hank Williams, the three “Bad Medicine Boys” he really loved. He agreed to that too. Rubbed the mud off his forehead to acknowledge the well-rounded rightness of our observation and the fact that it was delivered without any of the traditional white man’s cunning. We never knew for sure, though, what he heard or saw exactly in those Upper Peninsula winters, because he seemed to know, more often than not, who was trying to be invisible and when they’d arrive. We never got quite used to it and couldn’t figure sometimes what spooked us more; him cocking his head to listen the way he did or misted NVA silhouettes barely discernable in the sensual, fractured light of their forests.
Kevin was the one, though, who kept at the Sergeant whose name was Edgar and Edgar didn’t want to be called “Ed” or “Eddie”, and if anyone messed up and called him “Edward” he took it nearly as a piece of personal injury and no one wanted to fuck with that, fuck with being evaporated in the gun dead future trembling over us with no condolences. First week of Kevin’s tour, Edgar saved him. Saw a glint of light in some far off trees not yet wilted by the herbicidal rainbows that made this landscape into a diabolical replica of the future Wesley and me most feared as children, the one imagined and pre-digested by the “Lovelace Foundation” with a first line of instructions that read:
“1. On other side of rule, set hairline on yield and range.”
Except no one, apparently, in that “Foundation” had discovered, even at the moment I and all the others of my generation entered our early man and womanhoods, the measurement of these “mists” and whether or not their arrival time might correspond to a “present” or a “future” as either a “single merge wave” or a “Mach region below the triple point” and what such language might tell us about “Truth” or “Fiction” or the “Civilization” which honed the following syllables and their mathematical formulas: “crater diagrams” estimations of “Optimum Burst Heights” “Ruptured Eardrums” “Threshold Lung Hemorrhage” and “Mortality” as these symptoms and results apply “only to Fast rising pressures of long duration.” I still struggle with what this language might say about our common narratives and I think the portable “Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer” designed for every “American Household”, the one that remains completely “hid” (to use William Blake’s own term in reference to that poet’s devastating self-appraisal over the fate of his life and his work), in its special “pocket”, exists as some sort of central, however concealed medium which has transported the fragile thing I want, or had wanted to call “The World” (especially after experiencing war battle and how stupid and scared I still feel because of the night or the day and that it doesn’t matter what eyes I had, I couldn’t see with them anyway. There were only women, old men, and children in the villages I searched. I was supposed to poke everything with a bayonet: rice, hut walls, the packed earth they slept on, their graves. Some Marines even pissed down village wells. Edgar, who became fluent in Vietnamese, told us each village and its land which included the dead was a “Living Face”) into a séance wording itself endlessly into our fates, and how our Unknowing in that, has become the most subtly ornate specimen of an empire and will to strangeness as I try to avoid being lurid or obscene with what I’m setting down on this page at this exact instant either to myself and to you, the reader. Each “American” nuclear detonation had a name beginning, of course, with “Trinity” and its hollowing references, to be followed by approximately three hundred seventy-two nuclear detonations with, to identify only a few:
1. “Koon” 2. “Climax” 3. “Easy” 4. “Rio Arriba” 5. “Chinchilla II” 6. “Dead” 7. “Little Feller I” which came four explosions after “Little Feller II” 8. “Dog” (with no description of breed) 9. “Harry” (no last name) 10. There are too an “Eddy” a “Mora” a “Lea” and a “Logan”
along with the names of scientists, Indian Tribes, trees, animals, insects, places. After the three hundred seventy-second explosion the namers have no names for the last one hundred and twenty-eight Russian experiments other than “Large” “Small” “Relatively Large” “Substantial” “Several Megatons” “Moderate” “a few megatons” or blanks. The contest of numbers is 372 to 128 as recorded in this document, which to me has the presence of a stir-less, discarded sarcophagus nearly dissolved in the mostly unnoticeable museums of aftertime flitting like a bird’s eye in a too complicated to be unraveled dream, and these minute ruptures (for want of a more accurate description of the phenomena) invoked a kind of forlorn clairvoyance in what Edgar called “certain kinds of human meat” having himself seen and been the historical object of so much butchery that any other vocabulary would seem heartless and imbecilic. Edgar, to say it again, saw a glint of light, and flipped Kevin on his back as the sniper’s shell hit a small ridge ten yards behind them leaving a signature of swirling, partially vaporized dirt.
“Mailman,” Edgar said as Kevin opened his eyes. That word and its tidy, clear grave-yard wit gave the two citizens a reason to become friends. After that Kevin showed Edgar the one book he brought to Vietnam, Mari Sandoz’s “Crazy Horse: Strange Man of the Oglala.”
“Take it,” Kevin said. “Don’t know what else I can give you for saving my life.”
“Don’t want it,” Edgar responded. “Reading makes me feel like slop, but if you loan it to me, since it’s about “Crazy Horse”, I’ll try.” (After I came home from the second tour I went to the sun blasted, chest high faucets that are so much a part of my childhood with Wesley. The dust and wandering pollens blown up their snouts, seemed to be nursing deeper tests of another genetics suspending the human embrace of the Farmer’s and Wesley’s mother’s roses darkened and muffled, in this moment for me, as if they were the initial lips to be touched by the invisible ripples off Yucca Flats, not really making any decision about what to eat, but just here and there sampling, and chewing as if they were the spiders with human faces on their backs at the remotest boundaries of the solar system, subtle, desolate beings weaving their webs out of the minds they had bitten in the twentieth century).
Edgar never hesitated, during the most dangerous patrols, to “sample the air fer flowers” he’d say.
“Know anything about roses, Edgar?”
“Nothin worth ’a shit, cep girls like ’em an’ sumtime boys too. Go thru couple ’a wars ‘an they say sum folks stop discriminatin.”
Edgar, saying these things, kept listening, smelling, turning those ears of his, ready to do “gun ‘r’ knife work, either one. Don’ like it. Better them than me ‘an sign the meat so’s they’ll know the butcher.”
“Do know sumthin ‘bout coffee chicory, though.”
“Well, what’s that?” Kevin would ask, taking up the question as if it were the Witch showing all us Gretels her oven.
And the thing he told couldn’t necessarily be compared to roses, though it cut deep too into the migrations over a whole continent the way Edgar’s ancestor’s knew it, and those of other tribes who’d been touched by the earliest seventeenth century French Voyageurs, who left the oddest signatures of themselves.
“Not a footprint like you’d think” (which reminds me of the way he’d examine a print, human or not; get down and smell it, touch it, estimate its weight, age, state of mind and health at the moment of its passage like it was a painting or a little book describing some business), “but a flower with blue petals signaling wherever a white man’s foot touched, it seemed to sprout up to the farthest wildness anyone had been. There it’d be, my grandfathers were told by their grandfathers with French names. The damndest thing. And the women couldn’t resist it.”
Edgar looked at Kevin, me second, then around at everyone else with grenades, bandoliers, pistols, knives, and M16s hanging from their then living bodies. In other words all the paraphernalia needed for the “Slab.” And it was The Damnedest Thing. A story of vampires mixed with coffee chicory and irresistible human curiosity that made us feel like we might be able to be human again. No one laughed in that pause, came to some big revelation, or said something stupid about women and flowers. The vampire with the taste for Frenchmen we already knew about. It’d migrated personally from the forests of the Fresh Water Seas that would hunt us chase us too to the dream mountains holding the bodies of men, starting fully alive, then in stages going to half life, half flesh all of us whispering over what covered our bodies once, telling each other about the fine faces we had and pricks, our part breath reeking with the gossip of the wind. I remember looking out the window of my prison cell and thinking about some poems Kevin stuck inside that copy of “Crazy Horse” he carried over the “Slab”: one of them asked:
What will happen If we turn to wood Grandmother
and can’t bloom
What will happen, Grandfather if you won’t set our bones
make our eyes see keep our faces recognizable
Where will we go
If you take our greatness with you?
I worried my whole time in solitary confinement about that book of Kevin’s, whether the guards would shred it, let it rain down into my cell as of a thousand crippled moths stranded in that dead hole the way I nearly hallucinated it, and, having declared myself escape prone, what they’d try to arrange; rape, a beating, shit in my food. Nothing fancy, just the essential “steady state conditions that may be assumed to exist until the pressures have returned to the ambient value prevailing prior to the arrival of the blast wave.” There was a prison counselor, though, who visited me and the others every Friday night on that cell block, brought food, and took the time to talk to each of us about the books he’d been reading and also to describe the color of the trees as they were transforming, deer he’d seen, a sow bear and cub scratching for last grubs before the winter; news to keep me and the others from “starving” as he said, knowing almost as intimately as ourselves about the larger starvation that smothered us, and part of him too, or anyone else who stays that one second too long in this herpesarium. He knew I’d been trying to learn about the glaciers and what this land and the Fresh Water Seas may have looked like. Over those months he found at least some of the information and it gave me a way to imagine the desert I had come from and the strange oceans I could, at times smell, composed of the Great Melt that began twenty thousand years ago. And one fact: all the water that ever was and ever will be is here now. Such information may be so distant for the unfolding of our story that it has no immediate consequence but the memory of my fellow Marines pissing down village wells brought this fact out of its suspensions and it seems to me now, as I reckon the truest violences I’ve seen and don’t want ever to see again that those gestures held so sorrowful an obscenity, and cheap little evil that I and my world may be more dulled and crushed by that than all the best violence bought, blacksmithed, or engineered by a theoretical physics.
The desert I came from and the Fresh Water Seas I could smell in the warehouse I was in are the same age, except those Seas, scooped out by continental ice sheets are so huge, that the earth’s rotation has a major effect on their dynamics. There are five now. Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario. These survivors are the largest reservoirs of fresh water on the planet. But once, there were two more. Lake Agassiz was bigger than Huron, Michigan, and Superior combined. It spread from the edges of the Misquah Hills west and downward to where the Missouri River touches the present town of Mobridge, in northern South Dakota. From there its latitudes included nearly all of Manitoba and the half chunk of what today is western Minnesota. The other vanished water body was Lake Ojibwa which lay to the north directly in what is now the Superior and Huron basins. Its shape was more elongated extending from about the present Fort Hope in Central Ontario to Senneterrre in Western Quebec. If you look at your left hand from the thumb-side up and bend your forefinger a slice at the first digit your hand at that angle would approximate the living shape of this other ancient lake. Mammoth, mastodon, and dire wolves walking its edges would have seen whale and walrus out into the far water which glistened for nearly six hundred miles. Both of these small seas, with their depths, shifted and drained at least four times destroying and birthing other seas. But the word “drainage” cannot really comprehend the magnitude of these floods which scoured the land into what are now both exposed and buried fossil coulees where, it is estimated, at least one hundred thousand tons per second of water was released not in only one, but many of these ancient cascades. Such complete losses of body happened within hours or days and one place became the suddenness of another from inland sea to expanses of scoured bedrock, the congregations of life and death weight poised there, for the humans who were probably witnesses by this time, as a cruelly immense and inscrutably beautiful ghost face in restless pangs of drought, constantly advancing and receding ice, and floods of inconceivable ferocity unlike anything seen for at least ten thousand years. From my cell I tried to imagine such a face without being crushed by my longing in that claustrophobia, and I remembered a ride through the desert with Wesley one night as we headed for Amboy Crater to see some fall meteor showers, the streams of light appearing nearly as jets of water if one desired to push that inadequate comparison as this celestial debris slammed into the air, the plunging barbaric fire absorbed by the blankness surrounding it leaving the mind spotted with dispossessions of the momentarily exquisite, dreamily silent tails of green and white flame.
Lake Superior and most Lake Huron live on rock originally pushed through lava tubes of pre-Cambrian volcanoes. These ancient north extrusions yield stingily to weather and are equally ungenerous toward the lands that lie at their shore or the plant life which floats in their waters. But in the south, Lakes Michigan, Erie, and Ontario have their sedimentary shields covered by glacial drift that causes a nutritious stew. The earliest Europeans to begin farming here understood the division forcing the soil to give so completely in the southern Lake regions that the nutrient levels became poison. The Lakes too, are a geochemical theatre moved by wave and wind which stirs them deep, layer by layer of water and temperature mixing until the masses of off and near shore waters get separated by the vertical veil of another water mass that comes between them. And in the spring when the offshore waters heat this vertical mass begins a journey out into the deeper life of the Lakes where it is stopped by the Earth’s Coriolis force and where, too, the temperature difference between near and offshore water masses gets equalized at top and depth. First the wind comes to the surface of these waters and then gravity to make all of the water masses mix and rise and then the Earth’s rotation as it lives in the Northern Hemisphere to direct all currents ninety degrees to the right of their formative flows. It might almost be described as a basket, arrived from the basic scarcities, nothing and water, finger and wrists, the sexual and domestic experimentation in a perfectly controlled spread of women’s mathematics never coming to rest. Without this life of real dancing the living cycle of the Lakes could not appear.
Until 20,000 BC it was ice, in some parts estimated to have been fifteen-thousand feet thick. Ugly winds blew down slope from a huge dome centered over Hudson Bay constantly at over a hundred miles per hour. Those winds traveling to the margins of ice from Southern Pennsylvania through central Illinois and on into Eastern Washington bore straight into the central continent. North America at glacial maximum was covered by ice sheets that could move at velocities we can hardly imagine and the earliest hunting groups almost raced as their prey herds of mammoth and bison followed the movements of the glaciers and their margins where sedges, mosses, and lichens grew in enough abundance to sustain these huge mammals. Where wind, ice, and earth met there was both this tundra and evergreen forest separated in a mosaic of tracts by their mutual intolerance. What is now Michigan and Wisconsin, the Dakotas and Montana, New York and Massachusetts was crushed and sunk bedrock that saw neither light nor air for a hundred thousand years until the beginning the Great Melt. Casts of fossil ice wedges can still be found over this thousands of miles ancient border along with other symptoms of the disappeared sterilization where the southern-most ice froze and thawed at that surface until it rose into a near regular pattern of polygons. Such fossil earths can be walked over in Idaho or Pennsylvania at a hundred degrees above zero where nothing now might bite your toes but an over persistent horse fly.
The newly ice free land was part frozen and then overwhelmed by tremendous lakes whose southern shores received pilgrim seed and pollen and whose northern reaches were glacial cliffs calving icebergs that would begin their float-about in one climate, and going south, melt in another. But it was the state of the ground that ruled. If it was permafrost, no forest. And such condition could have existed immediately after the ice’s recession, or never for thousands of years.
That new surface had had no organism growing in it, none walking or rooting on it, and waited for wind borne soils from the bordering un-glaciated lands in the south to become seeds beds and nurseries and when those first plants died they composted and caused further wind blown soils to accumulate.
I began early to learn these things by going fossil and rock hunting with Wesley, the Farmer, and Tom Green, and listened as the two adults described, for instance, the lava ocean lying to this day under the Anza Borrego Desert as it bends and convulses the mountains, badlands, and plains of this constantly unfolding, raw creation, or their talk of amphicyons, the bear-dogs with speed enough to run down a prong-horn seemed, for Wesley and me, to almost rear up their fifteen million year old outlines hovering for the moment of that talk in the heat lakes of the Mojave. As I picked at myself in my cell estimating if and when I’d kill a particularly brutal guard and have to stay in that hole forever, I wondered also if, in there, I’d become a lifetime spook, an amphicyon hid out from its species death run coming for one more chance to lick the mind of a creature, run me down in my frantic claustrophobia; that, along with Kanhotidan, the stump demon of the woods Edgar told me and Kevin about, emerging out of the rot to wound the lost traveler. And though I’d gone to the end of this version of the earth, I never traveled so much as in that cell, never knew how one second could eat the flesh off my bones. Time turned into a sewer with its polluted variations of decay that make me feel to this day like I’m helplessly peeling by the layer with each odor accompanied by its repercussions of dreams, paranoia, hatred, and before it, and in spite of its intent, I learned that each man I knew there, no matter what had been done to have those gates close on the backs of their necks and mine; every man I knew there was a human being, hard as that might be to comprehend, from the coldest for hire killer, to the stunning, driven insane queens sucking their lollypops; the thieves, thugs, gamblers, bone artists, embezzlers, drunks, junkies, revolutionaries, cop killers, stranglers, crooked police, railroaded innocents, and veterans from my own war who came back completely stunned, crippled, enraged, and broken-hearted only to do one service for their nation as soldiers, and a second service in an unimaginably deranged economy as filler in the largest prison industry humanity has ever seen. I often ask myself questions about the Warehouse Empire; whether or not it is a form of rabies, the final acuteness of warm blooded nightmare and its virulent transmissions or plutonium generated winds that did, without our knowing and without our wanting to intend its devastations, sweep over the shallows and deeps of our dreams. I’ve also asked myself since then if the prisons are a part of series of preparatory steps leading to a gradual phasing away of what someone, a group of someones perhaps, have designated as a worn-out planet. And is our prison system an attempt to foreshadow masses of people in a “Corrections Space” three to five thousand years into a future of complete biometric touch screen systems, graphic flexible experiments to be accelerated in spite of any possible costs into programs of citizen conformable mass surveillance, detention analysis for whole societies, “Corrections” specific weapons grade aerosols to meet the needs of policies and agencies existing in an as yet unnamed horizon where High Volume Spray Area Treatment Weapons Can Deep Freeze Any Forms of Anticipated and Unanticipated Population Unrest. How close are we to the side show of these superb oddities and the unaccounted for restless statures of Death in the newest centuries to come? We have the precedents, which, in part, this narrative explores. Washington on the western slope of the Alleghenies, as a primary instance, looking out at the forests of the Wea, Potwatamie, the Shawnee, Miami, Seneca, wanting the vast acreage, inciting land hunger and speculation at the crossroads of a new vocabulary and its impulses into which he sent convict labor as first insulatory principle against tomahawk and terrain effects proceeding upward and downward as a geography of real-estate and a Garden of Murder. Can those eighteenth century convicts be seen as America’s earliest astronauts, not the hero condition of the Apollo Moon Walkers (not on the Moon I was on, anyway), but the management conclusions of the sacrificer and his arrangement; the hacked convicts sent to what was the equivalent of another planet with its perfect aliens waiting to be adorned with termination. Is the prison I was in with its twenty-three hour isolation cells, its service feasibility projections, wrist-watch pagers, and position location systems a preparatory training space necessary for the austere barbarities of an extra-Earth penal settlement, the first male and female “Clientele” to be checkgated and bidded out to another alien world, criminal Noahs enraptured with heretofore unannouncable Biblical foreshadowings slung up in the cost efficient stupors of their tamper-proof Justice Assignments in order to create a normality for the unbearable creature/horrors of the prisons, and to canonize the apparatus, surround it and the possible plans to oxygenate another planet with the cult of commonplace business? This sense of “business” and its results in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries both for the civilization of the Indians and their various conceptions of land as these two realities were evaporated might be considered in terms of the following equation:
A War Permanent Region of Shock Converted into a directed mass of energy; That is, the energy of motion of the mass of residues Resulting from Disappearance destined to become Doom And its immolations; fragile, dainty, fragrant. The vice of it fantastic in terms of its “philanthropy”, Its “principles of morality”, its mystical ideals of Respectful destruction.
These mystical ideals can be seen in Washington’s strategic use of convict labor, but the labyrinth of scale may really begin with Lewis Cass who in 1819, at the age of thirty seven years offered the last of the Michigan Indians another way to dispossess themselves. He understood that death for the Indians and their world was based on the eternity principles of whiskey. He glued to those principles three thousand dollars of silver for what he and they knew they would lose anyway; half the palm, the middle finger, forefinger, and whole thumb of the state’s eastern anatomy primarily for the showroom endurance of his land promotions. He named his purchase “Ypsilanti” and told the Indians his sale of their lands would help to separate them from the influences of the “Chemokmon,” the Sault Ojibway word for the Americans, or, “Long Knives”; steel slashers and “artifact” hunters they’d known for generations who brought a never before known butchery to the forests of the mid-eighteenth century. Between 1830 and 1836 land sales jumped from one hundred forty thousand acres to four million one hundred ninety thousand. No one had ever seen such craving and Cass became its foremost beneficiary. Chief Ogamawkeketo saw Cass’s gift before anyone else. He told the “General” that he could make “… Our lands melt away like a cake of ice …” Eventually there became no wilderness faint enough in Michigan to escape the soldiers of Cass’s personal army who specialized in eviction and disappearance. His photograph taken in the 1860s shows a man with two very different eyes as if they’d been plucked from a Cyclops who could afford the spares and turn the leaves in the forest white with the unalterable precision of Ogamawkeketo’s allegories of pastry. As I studied this material in the great Burton Collection of the Detroit Public Library I discovered a passage from the young French sociologist who came to America to study America’s prison system at almost the same time Ogamawkeketo composed his allegory for Lewis Cass. Alexis de Tocqueville made an observation about rapacities so peculiar to our own condition that it is almost a perfect twin to Ogamawkeketo’s exact understanding of a savagery so quiet and destituting that only his and Tocqueville’s images might provide us with an account of its mysteries:
The Spaniards were unable to exterminate the Indian race by those unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame, nor did they succeed even in wholly depriving it of its rights: but the Americans of the United States have accomplished this twofold purpose with singular felicity, tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, and without violating a single Great principle of morality in the eyes of the world. It is impossible to destroy men with more respect for The law of humanity.
These are questions that may or may not pertain to a science fiction, a fiction, a poetry. I don’t know and can’t necessarily be sure how and if these queries matter to anyone, but the perverse economics of the “Industry” have a kind of divinatory magic that cast such language far beyond the point of its composition and may possibly carry the repositories of an unseen world almost too dangerous to touch. I often have the temptation to compare this matter with plutonium, uranium, the stores of weapons grade smallpox, which another anonymous “somebody” has actually conceived of delivering, and to extend the carnage of such vocabulary into these treasured currencies which are rising up in ourselves as never before; “Corrections” “Zero Tolerance” “Vapor and Trace Detection Systems” “Smart Doors” “Biometric Surveillance Portals” “Data Warehouses” (to complete the orbit of the Warehouse Empire and the orbital decay of the “American Pastoral” since the Prison Empire has overwhelmed the “Countryside” as the premier employer and rendered the “Family Farm” a maimed puddle). This can only be a partial list of the vocabularies of a new closure which has now closed upon us with what possible irrevocations we still can’t be sure.
Into what world exactly am I placing this prose? I don’t like these questions but they are a part of something I owe the men I spent “Time” with in that prison. They changed my life and helped me to see in a way that I would have never seen before. This is not something I always want but the instance of its necessity, when I think of it now, is exemplified by one man I knew, a Black Man who was the truest revolutionary I have ever met, or expect to meet. He was tall, not emaciated by the grinding years of his imprisonment, but precariously thin nonetheless, as if this was symptomatic of the bedrock disciplines one must have before the endless morbidity of Jail. There were easily dozens of men, bloated by their gigantic hours of lifting steel, their rage and their horizons of despair to be precisely measured by each malevolent second who could have broken this man easily as a toothpick but no one would have thought to or dared. He marked for them a reversal of Hell in Hell Itself and it gave them courage and dignity. He and I, as well as many others, were students in the process of “Rehabilitation.” And we were questioning each other one night in a “walk-back”, that is, literally the word for moving from the Yard back to our cells in an orderly, guard monitored walk where everyone was at risk; if you were the object of a contract or a grudge here you’d find it out by way of some shank work, the paranoia fermenting and aging as if it were almost a vintage wine the Jailers could sip as customized information flow. We were questioning each other this night and he looked straight into me and asked what would happen if every American woman and man and child of an age to have been poisoned were suddenly to experience the disappearance of the psycho/historical scars of racism and their deep seated currencies. I remember the moment and its dignified enunciations, no deadening eloquence to cook it, flavor it. The question was so huge I didn’t and still don’t know what do with it and I told him I didn’t know because I didn’t. His answer was precise and clipped and curiously without strain. “None of us, including myself, would any longer know who we are.” The thing measured as if he had held it in the palms of his hands since birth and done all of such holding one man could do. “We are assuming” he added, “this question is about America and that that might be the Apocalypse no one has the nerve to anticipate, and no one has the nerve either, and this again includes myself, to ask what the true wreckage would be.”
It was his compassionate testimony to the magnitude of the tragedy in what he regarded as each “American Person.” He also, in subsequent conversations, told me of his fear. “My own People are in the process of being hunted down in the same way We were hunted under the Fugitive Slave Law except now it's much more inventive, more sneakily vicious and elaborate. But what will happen when We’ve all been Warehoused? The test will really come, then. Once we’re off the streets they’ll come looking for You.” His gaze was straight and clear, the statement phrased without irony. And presented by one man not prone at all to prophesy or to easy embellishment. Twenty-three years in prison for a crime never committed other than to ask these kinds of questions, diminishes the will to reach for mental luxuries. That, and the reality that the prison education program made us both participants in an inquiry we regarded as a treasure as well as the teachers who came from the surrounding colleges and universities to offer their scholarship, their patience, and their skills.
Another man I knew ate cloves of raw garlic like it was some extra terrestrial vitamin that would deflect the nauseous, crushingly filthy noise, catastrophic boredom with its cesspools of extortion, murder, disfigurement, disorienting filth, dead food, rotten teeth, fevers of cruelty, betrayal, and in the midst of it his own breath transformed into his personal version of a madness so small, so pathetic and lonely and savagely reduced that he did become his own core of desolation without ever knowing how it had happened and frightening those around him in its stages of descent.
How can anyone really describe the Birth of Meanness on the Inside, and how, because this too is a place full of leaks, it has spilled over the walls to inundate the Outside with its stupor of triumphant, insatiable dullness that has strained and immersed the world in a crushing fragility; the secret every prisoner I knew, knew with an intimate sorrow; Outside/Inside poisoned by the heartlessness they saw, which drained them, and that they, and I, did not, and still don’t have any language for, however much any of us did want, or still might want to warn our world that such triumph, more than anything else, may, if you will allow the analogy, resemble the wracking action of plutonium generated winds. If these are images of a language purposefully kept at the margins of what we can’t allow ourselves to know, and which, from those margins, do violate the actual world in their extreme specializations, then, are these images, which have never been properly confronted, of a blinding rottenness of Word-Life and is this a question to be properly dredged up in a novel, a question which may cheat every Beginning and every End?
I was there (and perhaps these three words should be the beginning of the novel, but they are not, and they may still prove to be a useless disruption); I was there (I say again), long enough to examine the shallows of the aquarium with as much precision as I could bring to it, and the men I knew there, knew too. “Hold yourself, Lupe. You got three years,” the Black Revolutionary said. “Study, use the Program. Then walk it the fuck out.” The other veterans who’d killed because they couldn’t stop themselves from killing, robbing, shooting up, being brain injured by the war violence the “Green Machine” threw them into and made it feel like a big, renegade adventure for a while, told me one second longer and they’d know what to do with my life along with a note one of them left: “Keep it. Bleep it. Motherfucker, weep it. Hand on your pussy. Hand on your brain. Drivin’ to Mars and don’t leave no stain.”
It took me time to walk the streets as if they were streets again. To walk a meadow, a forested path, row a canoe on a small lake mirroring the fall transitions of leafage. The minute fascinations seemed a nearly disorienting indulgence to be accompanied, as I anticipated it, by physical pain and inches of distrust to be tested for their truths and recorded, not as if I were an infant, because I did not want to feel shattered by my own analogies, but I could barely manage for months to get traction; I was as keloided by the Darkness as I might have been by the dreaded Light. It was a truth that would not lie to me and I knew I had no resistance to it. Every time I walked as walking might be with all of its chances, its variations, its decorative marvels and coiled pools of noise I’d remember the floors of the prison corridors painted red, windows with ice-encrusted steel bars, guards who’d originally come to the task of “Corrections” as relatively intact young men until their required participation in a first beating. The day before mixing with the day after person with the noticeable pasty skin, hands shaking a little with the palsy of the now unalterable, the voice carrying an abbreviated tone of cruelty, new and shiny and unsafe and chest deep in the soul disgrace and soul gore. I’m never sure about the usage of the words anymore like “Soul” “Humanity” “Humane”; these points of diction have a compulsion of desuetude and shame as if they had drifted into futility and have now, nothing to do with existence. But the transformations in the young “Corrections Officers” I saw were separate from battle where your foe is also armed and is where Death is and each of you has become Death in that renegade adventure though I don’t know if I’ll ever know what the consequences of that assumed identity will be even if the cost of becoming Human rises up irremediable as Death. It wasn’t a suicide the guards had to perform upon themselves; it was the mechanics of good engineering principles wedded to high yield scrutiny, watch-tour systems, point-to-point floor plan graphics, and to say it “mangled” them would be to call upon a too imprecise and ornamental verb for the actual occasion and how to, as exactly as I can, witness it; rather it filled them with Servitudes based upon Simplicity, Flexibility, and Capacity; the SFCs of membrane sensitive closed circuit interior and exterior applications. The giant preacher I saw walking Woodward Avenue, his voice roaring with Daniel, reminded me of the prisoners and guards I knew their eyes hanging from optic stalks for the Zero God to see through. And how can I hold such a God in the palms of my hands, as I’d learned from another man in an inconceivably distant world, and to see how the journey of these words will turn into this story?
The trough of Lake Superior, or the Lake Superior Syncline is made of Keweenawan rock formations up to fifty thousand feet thick. Its surface lava flows are marked by rain storms over a billion years old and you can put your finger tips into the impressions left by those drops so long disappeared the mind can form no bridge about the rivers and streams there and how the life that would be the first terrestrial beings floated at the crossroads of its transition for five or six hundred million years.
Copper deposits crop out from the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula and travel southwesterly through what is now the Porcupine Mountains into Wisconsin. The ancient rocks incline downward and dip beneath Lake Superior. Between a billion two hundred million years and almost nine hundred million years ago lava poured out of the volcanoes in this area with such ferocity that hardly any erosion took place except for some local streams and the layers of sandstone they laid down which were to become the sites of important lodes. Nobody really knows where this copper, king of the industry in North America for a big chunk of the nineteenth century came from, but that too has to do with the life of the Lakes and their water. Hydrothermal waters forming an essential part of the pre-Cambrian lavas and deeper magmas of an earlier Earth. Those copper filled waters, as the magmas cooled, were released and migrated upwards into the zones where eventually they became the soft masses to be torn loose by glaciers, their sand and floods in another world leaving two hundred foot thick screes over the original bedrock.
Upon this mystery you can place one more. The old Copper Indians were the beginners of metal fabrication in the Americas and maybe in the whole world. The upper Great Lakes region where they lived underwent radical change from almost six thousand BC to fifteen hundred BC in climate, plants, animals, and land surface. Lake levels rose as much as four hundred feet and the land, without ice, uplifted five hundred. They were miners and copper smiths. All their mines, at least the ones to have appeared, were located in the Lake Superior Basin, mostly the upper peninsula of Michigan. Remnants of wooden levers, fragmentary birch-bark buckets, hammer-stones, and charcoal from fires have been found in old mining pits, some at least twenty feet deep.
These miners followed the veins of pure copper from surface outcrop by digging pits and breaking the copper from its rock with the aid of fire and water and large beach boulders used as hammers. The rock surrounding the pure copper was heated by fire then cracked by sudden chilling with cold water, then pounded loose with boulder hammers and pried out with wood levers. The metal was then taken to camps or villages where they pounded and shaped their version of fruit by cold hammering and annealing, pounding the copper and heating and chilling it to keep it from going too brittle. Smelting and casting were unknown. The quality, variety, and elegance of their tools still offers no explanation but itself. They crafted socketed spear points and knives, spear points lacking sockets but with different types of tangs, leaf shaped knives and spear points, socketed pikes and axes. Ornamentation was rare. But they did make tubular beads, thick C-shaped bracelets, and thin copper strips that were used like inverted pendants as part of their headdresses and started a sacred industry which covered four civilizations and lasted over seven thousand years.
The old Copper Indians were tall, robust. They hunted deer, elk, barren-ground caribou, lynx, and bison. Their domestic dogs were the first in the upper Great Lakes. Their grave pit dead have been found in New York, Illinois, Kentucky. They would have known Lakes Aggassiz and Ojibwa. The shores of that time are now under four hundred feet of water. Along much of the northwestern part of the Lake Michigan Basin, near Green Bay, there were limestone hills cut by huge rivers, impenetrable rapids. Waterfalls dropped two to three hundred feet. Similar hills would have existed in much of the Superior and Huron Basins. The forest where you could have directly walked from Racine in Wisconsin to Michigan City Indiana, or from Chicago to Benton Harbor Michigan through wooded dunes can only be traversed by fish. At six thousand B.C. the ice front was still in Northern Ontario at about the latitude of the city of Cochrane. The upwarping of land and water, the centuries quaking of the two elements from the hundred thousand year ice sleep may have swept these people into panic. The rising and drowning of those masses of land was too vast for the mind to hold.
I found a small room off of this street called Cass Avenue but I was still so unsure about just being able to move I spent my time reading, going to the great public library and the adjacent art museum. I’d listen to the talk on the streets and I remembered my boyhood horse journeys with Wesley into the Chino Hills where we’d rig ourselves up in games of “Range-war” riding through the oak shadowed canyons where we’d find rusted pistols, bits, horseshoes, and bone swirled up from the deeper soils after spring deluges. We got on our hands and knees like Tom Green and the Farmer showed us to smell and examine the world which had loosened out of its previous nullity in those moments when I felt most dulled (the only word I have to describe for how “Corrections” rearranges you), after prison, seemed another treasure balanced on nothing more than the sum of evaporations which clung to it and in my suddenly wakeful amazements I could hear the names Tom Green told me and Wesley about; “Making Medicine, the Faithful” “White Goose” and “Teeth, the raider who loved the wonderful horses in Mexico,” the Kiowa said as he lit a three-quarters chewed cigar. “Has a taste just this side of buffalo shit. Don’t think you’ll ever stand it in the beginning. By god it sneaks up, though. Stains yer eyebrows to the crease in yer ass. Yew boys wantsum?” The thought of Tom’s long gone question called up another of Kevin’s poems written on the margins of his copy of Crazy Horse.
The weight of time equals the penis escorted by pelicans
their beaks are poised above the waters.
A hand above
equally holds the weight of the sun
prior to its ignition into light.
One cannot read the whole passage clearly
but it indicates the action
of a lost verb.
Perhaps a treatment for cancer. Perhaps a salve to be rubbed on the lips prior to sucking the genitals of a lover. The name and the image which might identify the plant have been rubbed away but there is a ladder there and an unknown galaxy escorted by jade pebbles.
I don’t know the date of this poem, whether Kevin composed it in Vietnam or Oregon but it seems to me now that an imagination of existence in the face of what would have existence mutilated and crushed, so that existence itself becomes slowly, regimentally, the most unfamiliar of possibilities; then how does a poet before these, and I don’t know what else to call it other than intricacies of dismemberment, generate a foundation of yearnings and crisis of beginnings to shatter those mutilations that would, in their triumph, impersonate existence in its shriveled forms? The question forced me to recognize I had to supplement my veteran’s benefits, hoard some money. So I got a job. Old Tom Green told me and Wesley, “Start humble, boys, and that goddamnit is what I mean. Dig this ditch right so I’ll know you won’t stick a pick or shovel through a foot and make it look good too, four foot deep, four foot wide with nice straight walls, an even bottom, about fifty feet long, then we’ll put some pipe down, and fill’er back up so no one’ll ever know what happened.” Most of that thing was dug with anger, resentment; throw in two or three ripped fingernails, and the Kiowa, catching us laughing once made a lunch of pan fried bread and chicken fried steak then told us we’d better get ten more feet done while we were still young. At the end of it though, we didn’t mind. Tom Green got the Farmer and my dad and they acted like we’d just cut a proper diamond. “Never know what kind of shit you’ll have to dig yourselves out of, boys,” the Indian said after that. “Time to water some more roses.” So I’m good at labor. I like shovels, picks, hoes, a maddox, a wheelbarrow, the skills they afford me, and the isolation since so few people actually like to do this work. I love to this day to take plants out of their pots, dig a fine hole, mix manure and soil, make sure nothing’s root bound, add water to avoid shock, and see if a new life will start right there and find its place. I can do that for hours and I’m never bored and it lets the day stretch out into a subtle wonder. I learned early too, that such things as grubs, if set out at the edges of a work space, will attract on-lookers, the ones that have been watching from their shy perches like blue jays who will hop to within inches of your hand and eat of this feast you’ve set out for them, and for child or man, the proximity of this usually distant and very wild visitor gives the worker a chance to be examined himself, to be still for that moment as the bird looks and hesitates and comes to a fragile trust. And a blue-jay is a powerful thing. The Farmer once said, noticing what we’d done, “If it were five foot tall, none of us would ever go outdoors again.” Depending on your location, you have to be careful too. A morning ditch can attract other visitors like scorpions, black-widows, and rattlesnakes so you have to look before you jump, take the cliché seriously. I got bit twice by a black-widow once, didn’t know for a day other than the vaguery of a minor itch, then two little poisonous volcanoes appeared in the crook of my left arm with red lines running half way up my bicep. I was OK until Wesley told me the story about his grandfather who got bit on one of his balls by a black-widow and nearly died. For a few nights after that I didn’t even think about my arm, but I sure as hell looked down at my nuts about every half-hour. Wesley told me to give a good yell if I saw a spider there; he’d come over and kick it, and when Tom Green heard about that, we saw him get in his pick-up, turn up a Tex Ritter song on the radio, and drive away so we couldn’t hear him laugh. We also learned to identify and imitate bird songs, look at decks of wrinkled, stained French pornography cards in complete amazement, read the colors of dawn, and appreciate the glorious burritos and sandwiches made by our mothers.
I wasn’t scared of labor but I was scared of not being able to continue the learning I’d been introduced to by Wesley’s parents and the Higher Education Program in the prison. So a construction job digging more ditches, doing demolition, driving a dump truck in a series of Michigan country towns, and paving roads offered me pocket pay and enough spare change to save. The daily company: a traveling highway crew going from town to town who liked beer at the end of the day and took me along as their mascot (and I was careful as hell this time about where I ordered my cheeseburgers). The two bosses: brothers who’d test piloted virgin pieces of “Top Secret” what Tom Green would have called “some really sweet White Man Equipment.” One brother, riding in the dump truck one day with me talked about being followed at fourteen hundred miles per hour as if that speed was some sort of low range gear, by a flying saucer. By that time, though, I’d heard so many flying saucer stories it’d started to sound like a used car lot but when those brothers started talking about F104s and how they could carry you into a near melt dive it sounded better than a tarantula that could chew your balls off on Sunday. We went from town to town doing mostly twelve hour days trying to beat the season, paving and repairing roads; it was work and sleep, a couple of six packs, a swim in some local ponds and when it was over I had money for food, rent, tuition, books, and another room.
I took a bus into the countryside when that job ended, rented a boat and rowed it to the center of a small lake to see the forest’s reflection on that water; the drying scents of its about to be sleep moldering in the shadowed light adroitly suspending each tree. Magentas thrown up as hints of the ready to begin hibernations carrying countless trees to a translucence so fragile the barest touch of wind or finger could bring complete leafages to the ground in a luster of sun and air and hallowing radiances of frost. I watched the gathering of birds, particularly robins in small meadows hopping, bent headed, listening for worms, groundlings eating themselves into a near flightlessness, not ready to waste their time in the air, not yet anyway, and letting the preparatory feast daze them. I also saw a first cardinal resting on a stump; the bird’s redness in the late afternoon autumn sun staggered me in the same way the orchids in the high meadows of Vietnam staggered me. I think to this day a childhood of watering roses and watching that Jewish Farmer tend to the genetics at his fingertips has given me a central image of flowers which can fill me with bewildered incantation or faceless exile. The cardinal with its black mask and headdress was so glamorously resplendent and furtive it reminded me of certain desert flowers whose plumage spreads only at night and in the midst of the secret hostilities of cactus spine and ancient showers of volcanic stone. The bird also reminded me of the Fox and Pawnee, Huron and Mandan warriors, among others, who came into these forests to hack each other and to hack out the foundations of the “Paris of America” as La Mothe Cadillac wanted the site to be called as he searched in 1701 for greater access to beaver and the empire of fur so important to European dreams of expansion. The “Town Founder” negotiated the possible relocation of the Miami, Ottowa, and Huron who were, by that time, dependant upon the French for metal pots, utensils, cloth and beads, beautiful hatchets, and always, the liquor to debauch them. By 1702 Cadillac talked at least four thousand Huron and Miami into building new lodges in this region which he thought would become a center of peltry once more. His speculation was based on the thirty-year depression caused by Queen Anne’s War. The economic decline had, though, another chilling effect on the constant decimation of beaver and other fur which a hundred years earlier existed in an unaccountable abundance, and, by 1701 had disappeared from the Straight of Belle Isle to the Slate Islands of Lake Superior, so complete an erasure (and harbinger for the unexaggerated billions of passenger pigeons and millions of buffalo) which no number in square miles or acres can comprehend. The period from 1701 to 1712 is marked by a small war of extermination with participants which included warriors from as far away as the Upper Missouri River completely fluent in French and their own ways. Capture over this eleven year period by one tribe or another resulted at worst in being roasted alive; at best, mutilation and slavery, no exemptions. The final slaughter of over a thousand men, women, and Fox children took place on the northeast wash of the Detroit River near Grosse Pointe and the Lake St. Clare outlet where wild potatoes and groundnuts were said to have grown in abundance. The Huron chose some remnant captives for slavery, for the few others, torture that lasted four to five days until there were no more. Cadillac’s second in command (after the Founder had been ordered to Louisiana), Etienne de Veniard de Bourgmont, fascinated with the Plains warriors who came to fight at this French settlement, abandoned his world for theirs, going over sixteen hundred miles up the Missouri, marrying into the tribes not only for that harvest, but for the new treasures in peltry, which by 1712 had been worn to a complete blank over the lands of the Fresh Water Seas in defiance of Cadillac’s speculation and the hoped for regeneration of peltry which the European speculators thought might be the cash-ready result of prolonged economic depression. The foundation of this new “Paris” however; was set in its initial rains of poisonous darts, lead balls, hatchets, and arrows. If there are remnants of these evidences they are buried under the foundations of Grosse Pointe’s mansions and their finality as it might appear out of that remote world of murder is to my mind like the knives Wesley’s father carried; his three or four favorites he was never without and worn down to different formations for peeling, examination, cleaning, and dissecting; little pieces of steel that go finally where words can’t, though these things seem to say always what the rules were or are even in the cold mystery of their bloom. I tried to find the old site of that extermination. I dug for the reputed wild potatoes and there were none and what did “potatoes” mean? Small pumpkins? yams? An unidentified form of squash? And of groundnuts; there were none either, though I would find them at another unrelated site. In the deeper forests some say there are vast towers. That they are ashen and spotted. Their smell ripe on the winds that spread and fly and spiral. There are people there who tell how those towers whisper numbers and the numbers once said by those towers wander in the forests around them searching for the duplicate pus of galaxies, loose teeth, the shifting noun written in the smoke the dead float upon.
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