Let Me Take You, Baby, Down To The River Bed

WAIST DEEP IN THE BIG MUDDY. I dove off of the bow of the 22’ Galaxy walk around, from the little prow out front where the anchor sits; off and out and down, headfirst about 5-6 feet into the brown, soupy, and surprisingly cold water.

The boat belonged to a friend of mine, whose daddy owned a local fast food franchise, I think it was. My friend was one of those kids who wasn’t too bad a guy, but put off a lot of people just by being a rich kid; so ironically he was a bit of an outsider, socially. Naturally enough, we became friends. I had a tendency back then to collect people like that – outsiders, misfits, weirdos, etc. Come to think of it, I still do.

I was solid with the ‘in’ crowd in school – from elementary on up – and truthfully, I suppose I was a regular member for the most part. But at the same time I found quirky, unpopular people interesting, too; and so I cultivated friendships with kids outside the social whirl as well as within it. I sat at the same table at lunch most days, with a bunch of my ‘in’ friends, but occasionally I’d feel compelled to sit somewhere else. Often I’d go sit at my younger brother’s table, on the other side of the cafeteria. He was two years behind me in school, and he and a bunch of his stoner friends sat together, not eating much, killing time before easing on out to the huge field between the cafeteria exit at the back of the school and the baseball field where, along with at least half of the people in second lunch, they’d chain smoke cigarettes and weed before the fifth period bell.

My brother got a kick out of it when I sat with him, and his estimation among his friends rose when I did. Those kids thought I was ‘cool’ just because I was older, if nothing else; and if sitting with them made them feel good and gave my brother some cachet, too, I was all for it. I don’t think I really bought into the adulation part, but then again, maybe I did, a little. I was, like, seventeen at the time. Being thought of as ‘cool’ back then was the pinnacle of achievement.

Anyway, sometimes I’d sit with my brother, and sometimes I’d kind of wander around and work the room, like a politician does. Whether I bought into what was projected onto me or not, let me tell you it is a nice feeling to randomly drop in somewhere and realize the people there are glad to see you, just glad you are there with them.

There was some nobility in all this on my part, I suppose; but on the other hand, I sometimes struggled with reconciling my dual set of friends/acquaintances, and I’m sorry to say I was a bit ashamed of my oddball friends sometimes, when the cool crowd was around.

Anyway, wandering around the cafeteria hanging out with the not-quite-so-cool kids was how I met my friend John, the one with the boat. Sometimes we’d ride around after school in his 1976 Corvette Stingray, with the T-tops off and the stereo turned up, drinking aimlessly. When spring came he would invite me over to swim and party at his house. It was a really nice house, with a big pool out back. So I started hanging around there a lot. After awhile, I wouldn’t even call first; I’d just drift in, whether John was there or not. If he wasn’t, I’d still go on in like I lived there, get something out of the fridge, then head on back to the pool house to change. His family was cool with this, by the way. His little sister was in junior high school then, that age where older guys were ‘dreamy’ and acting silly about it with one’s friends was the norm. I got the sense his parents thought it was great that John had a real friend who wasn’t hanging around just to mooch off of him (well, except for using the pool). After awhile, they pretty much treated me like an adopted son over there. That was sometimes preferable to what I was getting at home at the time, so I began going over to John’s house pretty often, and our friendship deepened.

During and after high school it was popular in the summertime to hang out on the Neches River on the weekends, if one wasn’t going to the beach or out of town. I didn’t have a speedboat or a jet ski – well, my dad had a 18’ run-about he used to fish out of, but I wasn’t allowed near it. I knew people who did have boats, though. I’d ice down a cooler of refreshments, put a couple of packs of Kents in a watertight Tupperware sandwich thing, and head for the public boat landing at Collier’s Ferry, or further down at the yacht club or Riverfront Park downtown. Just sit out there on my cooler for awhile, working on the tan and draining a few cold ones. Before long, someone I knew would cruise by, see me, and circle back around to pick me up. We’d ski or tube or just drink, and try to ingratiate ourselves with all the nice looking, bikini-clad women that seemed to be everywhere out on the river on those afternoons.

The main recreational area on the river was above the Port of Beaumont, north of the IH10 bridge; and on the particular day I am thinking of, we’d gone even further upriver, up above Lakeview on the Orange County side. There is a huge salt-water barrier there now; but before there had been a sandbar, where the main part of the river makes a fairly sharp turn. It was popular back then to run one’s boat aground on the sand in the shallow water, and then wade over to the sandbar, which was basically like a small beach. Lawn chairs, music, coolers of beer, Frisbees, women – it was the scene of an impromptu, kick-ass party on most weekends.

That day, we were slowly easing upriver, above the country club. It was wise to slow it down in that stretch. The channel was deep enough in the middle, but in the spring, during runoff, logs and even whole trees might wash down and snag and/or lie submerged around there. The water was muddy and tannin-colored, but still clear enough to see obstructions through, if you weren’t going too fast.

I looked around, and we had on board, besides my friend and myself, a couple of other friends of ours. College friends; we were all 19-20 then. And, we also had five or six 14-16 year old high school babes with us. West End upper middle class stuck-up lovelies; with tanning-booth tans, and gym-tight asses and legs and tits everywhere. The girls would get stupid drunk on maybe two beers, and then run around the boat in skimpy 1970s-style bikinis, causing a lot of commotion ... rubbing up against us older guys and stuff. It was all a bad fucking idea from the get-go, and we knew that, but it seemed inevitable. And we were drinking, too, so on that day in particular, common sense and good judgment were at a low ebb.

We’d set out that morning, the four of us guys, to ride around the lower reaches of the river, around a big jump and slalom course in a side channel, and ski for a few hours. Then we planned to cruise upriver and party away the rest of the day. And our plan was going along pretty well. We skied and swam and rode around all morning; and by the time we were ready to pack it in and head upriver, all of us needed to piss. Rather than diving back into the river or getting the boat off in some slough and peeing over the side, I suggested we ride down to the Civic Center. They had nice public restrooms there, right on the dock; and meanwhile we could see if there were any shapely babes hanging out down there who wanted to go for a ride out on the river.

***************

SHIP OF FOOLS. When we arrived at the Civic Center, we moored the boat along the boardwalk, and climbed out and took turns using the public facilities. I had noticed a group of girls on the dock when we first pulled up. It was obvious they were looking for a ride, and obvious to me they probably wouldn’t have much trouble finding one. As we got closer to the dock, though, I could see they were high school freshman age or thereabouts, so in my mind I immediately discounted any thoughts of us being the ones to pick them up.

Today, if I met an attractive woman five or so years my junior, I wouldn’t think twice about it. But in teen-age, five years was a huge difference and, after all, a gateway to statutory rape, if the age spread was enough. I knew some guys never looked at it that way. But I was operating on the faulty assumption that my friends had some common sense among them.

I'd forgot to factor in the beer, though. Before I knew what was happening, some of our crew had talked up the girls and convinced them they should ride with us. So they all piled in - ass-over-tea kettle, so to speak - and before long we were underway again, heading upriver toward the sandbar.

It didn’t help things any that one of those girls was an acquaintance of mine. Our families had been close at one time – her father and mine were in the same firm for awhile – and we spent a lot of time with them back in those days. I’d practically watched this girl grow up, from a little kid to what she had become, which was pretty fucking awesome, a gorgeous young woman. Her name was Lynne, and I had always considered her as sort of a little sister to me, I guess. So, when she sat her drunk, barely-covered self down in my lap on the boat that day, and put her arms around my neck, and pushed her decent-sized ... womanhood into my chest ... and started kissing me on the ear and neck and cheek and – a few times – on the lips, well . . . She had started off in a kidding way, but I began to realize at some point she wasn’t really kidding anymore. That is when I knew for sure I was in trouble.

By the time we made it to the party upriver, there was other illicit activity of a semi-sexual nature beginning to occur on the boat, I noticed. I had managed to cool Lynne’s jets somewhat by then, but she was still in my lap, arms around me, rubbing the back of my neck. To be honest, I was having conflicting thoughts and emotions about her, and what she was doing to me when she thought no one was looking ... which is a nice way of saying that, for all my high-mindedness, I was sorely tempted to forget all that and just go with the flow, with Lynne. Which would have been a disaster, ultimately. Which I knew. Even so, I had yet to make it out of the woods at that point.

We beached the boat on the sandy bottom, and everyone scrambled to get out and go to the sandbar. Lynne was taking her time getting off of me, and just as she was getting up, she turned and kissed me in earnest, full-on, and everything. Wow. It was about then I decided I needed to cool myself off and clear my head, so I told her I’d be over to the party in a minute, and edged up onto the prow of the boat. The water was shallow around us, but I knew from previous experience there was a small, deeper pool in front of me, created by eddies in the river as it worked itself around the bend there. So I dove off head first, down into the cool, brown water.

It was early in the summer, when the river normally ran languid, but I noticed right away the current was surprisingly strong. I was still under water, trying to gauge how far it had carried me since I’d jumped in. Around the time I guessed I was even with the back of the boat, I came up for air. I was surprised to see I was 30 yards beyond where I’d guessed I was. By the time I swam toward the east bank into shallow enough water to stand up, I’d been carried downstream another 30 yards or so, and the boat and the people on the sandbar seemed to be far away.

I stood there for a moment, to catch my breath, and I tried to decide what to do. I didn’t think I could swim all the way back to my friends, against that current. I decided to edge my way along the bank, mostly in the river because everything on the bank was overgrown and would be difficult to navigate fully dressed, much less in a pair of canvas shorts, no shirt, no shoes. Generally, the current was stronger in the middle of the channel. I could hardly feel it, wading along the bank. My biggest worry was not stepping off into some hole, or beating myself up on cypress knees, which were everywhere.

I’d progressed maybe 20 yards, and could hear more clearly the voices coming from the sand bar and make out individual figures, when Lynne saw me, and waved. I could see her talking to one of my friends and pointing to me, and he waved and yelled something. I sped up my pace a little, and was just edging further out into the river to get myself around an overhanging cottonwood tree, when I heard and saw commotion on the sandbar. Damn it! The Orange County sheriff's department periodically raided the sandbar on weekends, mainly checking for underage drinking. I could see people milling around, and saw a couple of deputies scrambling down the bank above the sandbar. Crap!

My group of friends had charge of five underage girls, all of them drunk as hell. In addition, upon request I’m sure, a couple of the girls had removed their bikini tops. I was pretty sure the deputies spotted that, right away. So we were not only liable for contributing to the delinquency of those minors, we might be up for some charge having to do with underage sex, too. I hung back behind the cover of the tree to watch and, sure enough, I saw people being ‘cuffed and hauled up the bank. There wasn’t going to be a mere citation and/or warning that day. One of the deputies waded out and secured our boat to the bank. I assumed they were going to impound it.

As much as I cared about the people being hauled off, I didn’t move from my hiding spot. I couldn’t see the point of going to jail with them. One of the deputies stood out on the edge of the bar and gazed along the surface of the river, looking for stragglers I guess; but he didn’t look as far down as where I was. I was pretty sure I was in the clear. I hadn’t left anything on the boat except a cooler, which didn’t have my name on it. I knew none of my friends would say anything. I figured the best I could do for them at that point was find some way back downriver to the public launch, where my car was; then see about bailing them out of jail.

Turns out, getting back downriver was easy. There had been a few other boats at the bar with us, and once the deputies figured out who had the teenage girls, they let the other boats go. I waited until one was almost on top of me. As it was swinging out to go around the bend, I stepped out and waved it down. It was some people I didn’t know, but my friends had been partying with them on the sandbar. They picked me up, no problem, and brought me back downriver and let me off.

All the while, I kept thinking about before, when I had been standing in ankle-deep water, in the leaves and branches of a cottonwood tree, watching as, in the distance, my friends were being arrested. I was absolutely still. It was in order to avoid detection, mostly. But really, I had been absolutely still, hardly even breathing. I realized I hadn’t just been hiding from the Orange County sheriff’s department; I was hiding from The Big Overseer, as well. The Big Sheriff. I didn’t want Him to see me there, hiding in the bushes, instead of stepping out. I didn’t want Him to know about the girls, or some of the thoughts that had been running through my head, earlier that day. Whenever I did something good, I wanted Him to know. But even then, it would be pointed out to me there was some selfish motive on my part. I surely did not want to know what He thought about the events of that day. Even though I had eluded the deputies, I couldn’t revel in my good luck. Because I knew, no way around it, there would be repercussions. I never got off scot-free.

Meanwhile, as I stood in the cover of the tree, it occurred to me that for that moment, I was completely alone in the universe. An rank outsider, looking in. There would be short-term consequences for my friends, admonishments from parents as they bailed their kid out and began making arrangements to have the charges reduced, or dropped altogether. But they would also have a bond, getting thrown in jail together; and they would laugh and tell stories about it later. I wouldn’t be part of that, except on the periphery. I couldn’t decide if it was worth it, to be left hiding in the bushes, undetected and unarrested. And all alone.

I thought a little bit about Lynne, too. Our brief encounter on the boat that day on the river was mostly benign, thankfully. We just had a little too much beer, is all. We would go back to being friends again, once we got over the embarrassment of it all; and I am sure we’d laugh about it one day, privately - our little secret. Nothing to it, just some youthful, drunken shenanigans, no need to give it any more thought or weight than that. No need to think about it at all.

But, you know? In a way, Lynne slipped through my fingers that day. I had the sense that we had maybe blown any chance of getting together, later on, when we were more age-appropriate. I hadn’t realized, but I was harboring some latent feelings for her I guess, strong feelings. As, apparently, she was for me. She was a beautiful girl and, having known her for so long, I thought the world of her.

Really, though, the moment she came onto me that day, we were done. No matter what my reaction was. It would have been wrong, wrong, wrong for me to pursue her sexually, at that point. I knew that, and I suppose I could have congratulated myself for having the will, even though drunk and being strongly come onto, to resist the urge. But, really, I was not so sure. If there hadn’t been a raid, and that day had gone on as we had planned, and I kept on drinking, and Lynne kept molesting me, would I have had the will then? I know myself; if I had enough desire built up, and was drunk enough, I could have come up with some excuse in my head . . . an excuse to temporarily bulldoze all my morals and make ragged, sloppy love to this sweet girl, who I had thought of for years as almost a sister. That’s how fucked up I was then.

It was no wonder I was left on the outside, looking in. It was where I deserved to be.

***************

I MIGHT LIKE YOU BETTER IF WE SLEPT TOGETHER. I mentioned earlier about standing in the river, concealed in the heavy foliage of a leaning cottonwood tree, and how I felt like I was totally alone and an outsider, watching my friends in the distance on the sandbar, being arrested.  That instance was a brief and over-dramatic realization; but to be honest, since I was a kid, I always felt like a bit of an outsider. It wasn’t a black and white, cut-and-dried thing. There was a lot of ambiguity to it. Just a fleeting thing.

In general, I was a well-adjusted kid, outgoing and popular. It came to me naturally; I didn’t really have to work at it. I was blessed with what I guess most people considered decent looks. I was pretty smart, pretty funny, and pretty good at athletics. I was pleasant and at ease with most people, and always had a pretty good grip on my temper. I was blessed, plainly put.

And yet, since my earliest memories, I always felt like I was missing out on something, like everyone else knew something I didn’t. I subsequently studied just enough psychology, in college, to be dangerous; and now I think a lot of my early achievement was driven by a desire to avoid feeling like the outsider that, deep down, I knew I really was. It seemed when I accomplished things, I was more accepted, more popular. Being good in school got me into fights on the playground sometimes, but I figured out that, everything else being equal, women preferred a guy who had something on the ball, intelligence-wise, over one who did not. Plus, it kept my parents and teachers off of my back. Being good in sports also helped with the girls, plus it often meant some acceptance by the older kids in school and in the neighborhood I couldn’t have got, otherwise. And so on.

I think my childhood insecurities sprung from some things going on at home, to be honest. I know that now; I had no idea back then. Either way, I couldn’t have done anything about it. You play the hand you are dealt, you know? Take the bad with the good. I had a poker-playing, black Irish uncle who told me that all the time. I loved my uncle, but he drank like a fish, and that was the only advice he ever gave me that made any sense, or was useful to me in any way. Most of his advice was along the lines of, “When you get the woman home, have her make you tea before you take her back to the bedroom and slam her good.” Just random stuff like that, after he’d been pulling on the pint of Jameson’s in his coat pocket all afternoon. “OK, Uncle Joe. I’m only in second grade, but thanks for the tip.”

But the playing one’s hand thing was good advice. That is how it became an adage, a bromide, an old saying. As tired as they sometimes are, there is almost always some truth in those things.

On the other hand, I thought it was kind of weak, as advice goes – that you played the hand you were dealt was self-evident, yes? What the hell else were you going to do? When I was young, I wasn’t capable of recognizing the slight nuance in that statement of advice, the implication. I couldn’t hear the unspoken part of it, which was that you played your hand, whatever it was, in good spirit. No whining about one’s fate, or one’s station in life. Just play your hand, win or lose; then move on.

Without understanding it all back then, that is basically what I went ahead and did. I had a really good childhood, for the most part. It was only occasionally that the outsider feelings would come up. I often discounted them, at the time. In fact, I'd mostly forgot about all that.

That one day on the river remains a vivid memory, and I am not sure why. We spent dozens of days like that, on that river ... with pretty much the same results. Yet I only remember those other days in bits and pieces. I could say the raid on the sandbar made that one day stand out, but the truth is that raid happened mostly to my friends. It didn’t have that much of an impact on me.

The only other thing to consider was my awkward encounter, uninitiated by me for once, with a pretty girl in a skimpy bathing suit who was drunk and horny and all over me. No big deal, stuff like that had happened before, and probably would again.

Of course, that time was different because I actually knew the girl. And I cared about her. I cared about her so much, in fact, it surprised me. I did not realize how strong my feelings for her were. How would I have? I only saw Lynne rarely in those days. She was a sophomore in high school, I was a college freshman. We lived in different worlds. In a sense, she had grown up and gone her way and I had grown up and gone mine, and I really didn’t know her anymore at all. If we did cross paths somewhere, we would exchange greetings and smile; but we were smiling about things that had happened years before, back to when she was a pre-schooler and I was a family friend, an older boy who gave her some of my attention, pushed her on the swing set, admired her crayon drawing of a horse. That is what we smiled about when we met. It had nothing to do with who we were when we bumped into each other later, at the 7-11, or McDonalds. By then, we’d both grown up, and had grown apart. Or, that is what I thought.

If my friends and I had not chosen to go to Riverfront Park to piss that day, if I had not had the idea to do it in the first place . . . there is a chance I would never have run across Lynne then. She and I might have kept on growing separately, with no residual feelings for each other we knew of. Then maybe four or five years later we would have seen each other again, in a more intimate setting, and maybe we would have realized we had these strong feelings for each other, so different from the ones we had as children. If so, we could have done what is to me the sweetest thing in this life two people can do. We could have fallen in love, together. We could have jumped into that mighty river together, and held on tight to each other, and just let it take us where it would.

Eventually, later on, Lynne and I talked. It was around six months later, at Christmas time. I went to her house one evening with some of my family, to exchange gifts with her family; and to drink bourbon in coffee mugs and in general bring good cheer to the season. At some point the dads went into another room to watch TV, and the moms became engrossed in a conversation about something or other, and the other kids wandered off to various destinations in the rest of the house. And Lynne took my hand, and we went into an alcove off of the main foyer downstairs, and sat on a love seat (ironically), and we each talked and listened to each other about our feelings for each other before and after that afternoon on the river; and we talked about our impressions of where the minor chaos of that day had left us, afterward.

***************

I turned off the television, which I had not been watching, anyway. It was dark in the house, and quiet. I had been sitting up late again. I felt a tinge of sadness, realizing everyone else had turned in. I hadn’t even realized. I walked through the house, checking deadbolts and turning off lights. I tripped over a pair of Crocs in the den, dammit. My son wears them when he goes out to check on his dog before he goes to bed. That boy is always leaving his stuff everywhere, wherever it lands. He has always done that, since he was little.

I looked in on Walter, the red betta fish my other son won at the State Fair, back in March. He brought Walter home in a bag of water, and I didn’t even want to waste the money and effort to get a proper fish bowl. I didn’t think that fish would last until the end of the day. But of course, I was on my way to Petco, my son in tow, before I knew it. Just a little 2- gallon plastic aquarium, and some rocks and fake weeds and a little stone bridge, and a small water pump and filter setup. We put all that together and dumped Walter in there, and right away he started swimming around like he owned the place. Since then, he has thrived; and I feel a little guilty each evening when I look in on him. He doesn’t know, but I had no faith in him. Walter didn't know any better, and just went on living.

I turned into the hallway and heard a muffled thumping sound coming from one end of the hall, from my high-schooler’s room. He falls asleep with the stereo on. I used to try to go in there and turn it off, but every time I did, as soon as I switched the sound off, my son would bolt upright in his bed and ask me what the heck I was doing. After awhile, I just left it alone. As long as his door was shut, it didn’t disturb anyone else. I walked to the other end of the hall, past my younger son’s room, and opened the door into mine. It was pitch dark; and as I shut the door behind me, the darkness just engulfed me. I wasn’t used to it. It was like I’d stepped off into an abyss, and it took my breath away. I felt as if I were falling helplessly, spinning around and around, like that guy in the opening sequence of The X-Files. I didn’t know if I would ever stop.

That Yuletide evening, years and years ago, Lynne and I sat down and talked about a day we both got drunk and stepped outside of ourselves for a bit. She apologized for coming onto me that day, and I told not to apologize too much, that in truth I kind of liked it. We laughed, but of course some things were being revealed. I think we ended up resolved that we’d each continue our separate lives, and whatever happened, happened. But I got the feeling that was basically it, as far as Lynne and I went. I had never even looked at her in a romantic way before that anyway, and it should have been easy for me to just move on. Yet for some reason, I had a hard time with it. I came away from our meeting that evening very sad.

That sadness eventually passed, and Lynne and I both went on with our lives, to marriages and kids and all that entails. I am pretty sure we forgot about each other along the way. So I was kind of startled and pleased when I bumped into her in H-E-B not too long ago. I hadn’t seen her in a long time, or talked to her in longer. She is a middle-aged mom now, but she still looks pretty damn good. At the store we fell into easy conversation, discussing our families, and the families we’d gone on to start ourselves. Then, the weirdest thing, when we ran out of small talk, we fell right into a conversation about the day we almost had a fling, out on the river, way back when.

We talked around it for awhile; and then this sweet girl, who I’d known for most of her life, whose virtue I fought (myself) mightily to preserve one day all those years ago, smiled at me and said, “You know, you should have just fucked me that day. We didn’t get together later on, anyway; so at least we’d have that. It’ll never happen now.”

Goddamn it to fucking Hell. Even when I try to do right, I do wrong.

But I am not feeling sorry for myself. Got to keep playing the hand I was dealt, right Uncle Joe? That last conversation with Lynne at H-E-B keeps replaying itself in my mind. I am 51 now; but still in decent shape. No grey hair. Most of my scars are psychic in nature, and don’t show. Lynne is 47 or 48, and looks great, to me. What I am saying is, there is time.  I hope she doesn’t think about me nearly as much as I think about her - usually late, while I am trying to fall asleep.

Okay, yeah I do.

Whether she does or doesn’t, there is one thing in this life I have learned for sure, and I am trying everything I can think of to communicate it to her, telepathically or cosmically or whatever it takes.

Never. Say. Never.

***************

Out Where The Great Black Rivers Flow

All my achievements in days of yore

Range from pathetic to piss-poor

But all that's gonna change

           

Because here comes sunrise

Yeah, here's your sunrise

I was driving along, late at night, with nothing serious on my mind.  Just a vaguely pleasant feeling of having accomplished something, of having done well and of seeing satisfying results come from my efforts.

I was coming from the hinterlands, from one of the outlying towns that was ancillary to the city I was now driving back into.  Earlier that night in the city I had met an outlier girl, from one of the outlying towns.  She had a sweet smile and gorgeous pale green eyes.  All legs and hips and tits and long-ish blond hair, and these fucking eyes that just mesmerized me, and drew me in closely to her.

After a time, we had ended up back at her place, back in her outlying town.  Just one side of a duplex, with two small bedrooms and a living area/kitchen, one bathroom I think, and not much else.  I heard the not unpleasant sound of freight trains rumbling by in the night, somewhere nearby, at regular-seeming intervals.  There was a full sized bed, in a smallish bedroom.  My outlier girl was on the bed, lying on her right side, with her face up very close to mine on the pillows.  She was looking at me intently, into my eyes, while I stroked the smooth skin on her back gently with the tips of my fingers.  It was as if she was trying to discern something, I couldn’t imagine what, as she lay there, staring into my eyes.

It was weird, but when we were really up close like that and I looked back at her in the semi-darkness, her face and eyes and visage in general took on a somewhat different appearance than normal.  The feeling I got observing this was very pleasant and intense, and I seemed to see it especially if she was being brought to some level of pleasure at the time.  I had the oddest impression that she was a chameleon of some sort.  Her entire being seemed to change in some slight but basic way when she was brought to the brink of physical ecstasy.

I was thinking about that as I drove along in the night.  Soon, I approached the Purple Heart bridge that would bring me back into the city.  As I began to make my way up the incline of the bridge, my own heart was beating evenly, and I felt pleasant and happy and at peace.

Then, as I was crossing over the bridge, I caught a glimpse of the great, black river flowing in the darkness underneath.  Ambient light from the city was playing off of the surface of the water here and there.  It startled me a little at first.  The river was basically benign in appearance, but at seeing the vast blackness beneath me, and the mysterious, unknowable river flowing through it, I was quickly robbed of my feelings of pleasantness, and peace.  Instead, I was filled with a vague sense of dread.  All our superficial happiness is forever being eroded away, by a silent black river that flows and flows down beneath us, out of sight and out of mind.  A great, black river that can occasionally be spotted, when a bit of light glints off its surface.  It is a bit chilling to be reminded that the river is down there, always flowing, always eroding.

As I came up over the crest of the bridge, I spotted the city laid out below, and saw on the distant horizon the earliest hint of dawn. Because of the odd combination of streetlights and lighted advertising along the highway mixed with the natural light just beginning to eke its way into the darkness, the city seemed to look a bit softer than it normally did.  And upon noticing, my mood began to soften, as well.  I had crossed the great black river, and was descending into a zone of familiarity and relative comfort.

Oh, I might from time to time consort with an outlier girl, and lie with her for awhile in her bed in her house in her outlying town, out in the hinterlands.  But in the end, even if it was the very end of the night, I always made my way back through the darkness, back across the wide, black river.  Back to home.

It is funny how a seemingly random arrangement of concrete and steel, glass and wood, blight and indifference and ugliness, can become so familiar over time they become pleasing to us, almost beautiful in their way.  These cold materials, arranged as they are and as we have seen them arranged for years and years, take on an aura of intense familiarity, and comfort, and safety.  As I descended to the foot of the bridge that night, and then continued on, to make the long curve around downtown, and out toward the residential areas on the west side of town, the dread I had so recently felt when crossing over the river receded.  A warm feeling of comfort slowly came over me to replace it.  I was home.  I had made it home, once again.

And somewhere out across the great black river, on the other side, in one of the outlying towns out in the hinterlands, there lay a beautiful outlier girl, her beautiful green eyes glistening in the semi-darkness of her small bedroom, in her half of a small house.  Her eyes were moist, but she was not crying.  She was in fact smiling, though mostly to herself; but if one looked closely, one could see on her lovely face, framed by her long, blond hair, a hint of her beautiful smile.  She was smiling, inside and out, because she knew that at about that same moment, this guy she’d met that night, and had brought home with her for awhile, was returning to his place in the city, beyond the great river.  And he was thinking that he’d returned safely to home.

To home.  Of course, home is where the heart is, as they say.  And at the thought of that, the beautiful outlier girl smiled to herself again, and then rolled over onto her side and pulled the covers up over the naked top half of her as she sank her head into her pillow.  She was happy, and at peace.  She slowly closed her eyelids over her beautiful eyes, robbing the universe of their light, at least for a little while.  And she fell gently to sleep, to the sound of a lone freight train rumbling by, somewhere out in the darkness.

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Little Jenny On The High Wire

“Jesus Fuck! What am I gonna do?!” I was in the mens room of the bar inside the Gallagher’s restaurant, fronting up a urinal. Leaning into it, actually. My joint was resting in my right hand, and my left forearm was resting against the wall above the urinal. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I needed $20, like, right away; and I had no fucking idea where I was going to get the money from. But I had to have it before I left that restroom, that was for sure.  And even though I was full of bourbon and really, really needed to go, there was no way I could whiz long enough to save myself from my fate. Unless I could somehow manage to piss out twenty bills, that is.

By then, I had been a clerk at one of the larger law firms in town for a couple of years. I had initially got the job through family connections, and I liked it because it was easy, and there was always a lot of gorgeous women around – legal secretaries, court reporters, all the babes working in the county clerk’s office, etc. Also, the law clerk job paid way better than the menial jobs most of my college friends had. I was able to go to school full time, pay rent and utilities for a small, austere apartment, and pay a new truck note and insurance, and still have enough left over to party a little bit, and wine and dine some of those attractive women I was always seeing, as I perambulated around in my job. All solely on the income from an after school job at the law firm.

I had even managed to get my employment classified as an internship; and since I was technically a pre-law major, it earned me three credit hours a semester, just for going to work. I had to write a 2-3 page paper at the end of each term about an interesting case I’d done work on, and I would get an A.  Sweet.

One summer, I think it was 1980 but I’m not sure, I had the assignment to get up early one morning and drive one of our partners, and an attorney co-consul from another local firm, and his assistant, to Houston Intercontinental so they could catch a plane to New York.  It was basically just a chauffeur’s job, but I did all kinds of shit like that for my firm. I figured it was a blow off day – drive our partner Paul’s LTD Brougham and everyone on board over to the airport, dump them off, then tool around Houston for awhile before heading back to Beaumont, taking the long, roundabout way back; down I-45 South through Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula, then back up FM 124 to I-10. I figured I’d stop along the way at one of the places along the seawall in Galveston, for fresh oysters on the half shell and a few beers, before catching the ferry across to Port Bolivar. Just an easy, pleasant day, and all on the law firm’s dime.

That is what I did, too. It was a nice, sunny, uneventful but fun day, mostly. The only thing that made it remarkable, and kept it in my memory, was the co-consul’s assistant. She was a year or two older than me, a not necessarily striking but really decent-looking blonde. Her name was Jennifer, and the other firm’s attorney I was chauffeuring, the one she worked for, was her dad. His name was Dave, and he was some big deal partner in the most prestigious firm in town, and he and Paul (and Jennifer) were off to New York take or sit in on depositions, in a deceptive trade practices suit I never really understood the details of.

It turns out what I had imagined would be a quiet, mundane trip over to Intercontinental that morning was anything but. For one thing, Dave turned out to be the loud, garrulous sort, used to holding the floor, and he jabbered non-stop from Beaumont to Humble, while meanwhile filling the passenger compartment of the LTD with thick cigar smoke, from the fat heater he kept jammed into one corner of his mouth. Also Paul, who was generally quiet as a monk around our offices, apparently had another side to him. The whole way over, he was in the front seat with me, telling me stories about his acid-taking days at Stanford in the late 1960s, and about how he and his wife Lettie – who was quite attractive in a middle-aged kind of way (and quite flirty with a certain law clerk at the firm’s occasional social get-togethers) – used to practice “free love” and all this shit, before they settled down to the straight-laced upwardly mobile genteel life, with three kids and a big fancy house in the tree-lined West End. Meanwhile, he was changing tapes in the 8-track player after every song.

The cacophony from Dave in the back and Paul in the front, the loud music, and the cigar smoke – sometimes so thick I could barely see out of the windshield – were distracting and a bit off-putting, actually.  Several times along the way I stole a glance in the rear-view mirror at Jennifer in the back seat, to see how she was taking it all. She seemed to be doing all right, and she caught me looking a few times, too. When she did, she would just roll her eyes in her dad’s direction. I felt like we formed sort of a silent bond that morning, drawn into kinship through our mutual suffering.

When we finally got to the airport and I let everyone off at the terminal, there was a minute or two while all the luggage was being taken care of, etc., and I went over to Jennifer and we laughed for a minute about Dave and Paul. Then she told me they’d be back from NYC by the end of the week, and would I call her then? And I told her that, yes, I surely would. As soon as she got back.

***************

We were naked on the sectional sofa in Jennifer’s living room, in each others arms and panting a bit; after having made love for quite awhile, it seemed like. Right there on the sectional. The thing was, Jennifer’s house was two stories, and the living room was in the middle. The upstairs was all bedrooms, and the upstairs hallway had a railing all around on the inside, where one could stand and look down on the living room, which was sort of a two-story atrium, I guess. When Jennifer had suggested we do it right there, in the living room, I had balked. I like sex as much as anyone, but I am not a sexual thrill-seeker, or risk-taker. I don’t need the chance of being caught in the act to get me off. Still, when she insisted … I found I was not really distracted by the risk factor once we got going, and I will admit the thought of her dad or mom or one of her siblings getting up in the middle of the night to take a piss and looking over the railing and seeing naked Jen and I down there, going at it hammer and tongs, so to speak … it may have actually added a little to the arousal factor for me. I am not saying it did, but I am not saying it did not.

That was on our first date, by the way, after Jen had got back from her New York trip.  I had picked her up from her house and we’d gone straight to a bar, and what I found out right away was that my date liked to drink. A lot. That only endeared her to me more, and before long we were both three sheets to the wind and headed back to her house, for some sloppy, high-risk sex on her parents’ living room sectional. Most of our dates that summer followed a pattern similar to this.

We lay there in each others arms that first night, post flagrante delicto I guess you could say, on that sectional; and as Jennifer buried her face into my shoulder, I gently traced my fingertips across her naked back, all along the lines of the multiple scars that were there, and my mind drifted back …

We had gone to the same elementary school, way back when, though Jen was a few grades ahead of me, and I don’t think we really knew each other then. One day I was sitting in class, maybe second grade, looking out the windows at the street that ran past the north side of our school, and I noticed there was a lot of commotion down at the corner, cars stopped and stuff. The next thing I knew there were a couple of ambulances screaming by down that street, and then they stopped at the corner, too. It turns out the fourth graders had been at recess or something, and Jennifer had wandered out into that street and had been run completely over by a car.

I didn’t remember everything about the accident, but I had heard that the girl who was hit had broken her back in several places and had lost a lot of blood, spilled right out onto that street in front of our school. I heard she nearly died – it was touch-and-go for several days. But she hung in there and, remarkably, endured a series of surgeries on her back that eventually made her whole again. If you didn’t know her history, you might not even realize what had happened to her. I knew, because I was there, as a barely-conscious-of-it 9 year old. And because 10 years later I held her naked in my arms, and traced the ridges of scars along her back (which she seemed to enjoy, by the way.) Other than that, she was left with an almost imperceptible limp, the result of one leg being slightly shorter than the other (after the accident.)

She was also left with, I thought, a bit of sadness in her. A bit of world-weariness. I cannot really explain it, and I never talked to Jennifer about it. I just felt like there was some darkness in her; and I was attuned to that, being the bearer of so much darkness, myself. And I guess it was a good thing in the long run that Jen and I were only together for part of one summer, while she was home from school (Vanderbilt, I think.)  Her darkness, and her serious devotion to John Barleycorn, fit perfectly into my fucked up view of the world at the time, and I was quickly enthralled by her, and I could easily see us falling in love; or more likely into a terminal embrace that might not have eventually killed one or the other of us, but surely would have left us both worse for the wear. As clueless and lost as I was back in those days, I still had the sense that someone dark and fucked up like me should not be seeking out a woman with the same traits; though I almost always did, anyway. I’ll admit, I still find that sort of thing attractive. Even though I know now and knew then that what I need is someone bright and good, to offset my darkness. But I guess part of me was always looking to do the worst thing for myself, to jump off into the deep end with someone like-minded, not caring one fucking bit where we ended up.

I still have some of that in me, too.

But all that is really too heavy to be putting off on Jennifer. I liked dating her that summer. It was so … easy. Go out somewhere, get loaded, then go home and make love, for hours.

Once during that time I had gone down to the beach for the day with friends. We sat down there all day drinking beer and getting seriously fucked up. We finally headed back to town at dark. On the way back it suddenly struck me that it was Jennifer’s birthday, and I hadn’t got her anything, even a card. What to do? What to do?

When I got home I took a quick shower and then, still smelling of the coconut oil that had apparently seeped down into my skin, I hauled ass for the liquor store. I got there about ten minutes before they closed, and bought a fifth of Jack Daniels Black Label. The liquor store guy fished around in the drawer behind the counter and found a slightly disheveled red stick-on bow for me, and I put it on top of the bottle of Jack. Then I headed for Jen’s house. When she opened the front door, I handed her the fifth without saying anything, except for a sheepish and mumbled, “Happy Birthday”. She took the bottle and looked at me, blinking; and then she started to cry, it looked like. She was so happy that I remembered her birthday, and gave her a fifth of a gallon of her most favorite thing in the whole world. I couldn’t believe how smoothly I managed it, how easy it was. Neither could I believe the supremely positive effect my perfunctory gesture had on Jen. That night, she started taking off her clothes almost as soon as we got in my Jeep, almost before I could get off of her street, even.

Jennifer was a Jack Daniels aficionado, for sure. She told me later, half-jokingly I think, that one of the main reasons she chose Vanderbilt was because it was only 70 miles or so from Lynchburg, where the Jack Daniels distillery was. When she first got up there, her and her friends made the pilgrimage every weekend, for the distillery tour, and especially for the hospitality room afterward. I mean, I loved whiskey and all, but she really, really loved it.

That’s how we ended up in the bar at Gallagher’s one night. Back then, Gallagher’s was a chain, some kind of franchise operation. It was supposed to be an Irish steak house or something, although I don’t recall ever having eaten there. And the bar in the restaurant was about what you’d expect. Not much, no décor or atmosphere or anything. No business to speak of. It was briefly popular only because they’d instituted a 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., 3-for-1 happy hour on Thursday nights. Instant atmosphere. Suddenly plenty of business.

We were meeting friends there that night, and I figured a 3-for-1 deal would save me some money, especially the way Jennifer put away the whiskey. Once we’d got there and settled in, I started ordering 3-for-1 call drinks, JD and water, and I was getting blitzed. What I didn’t realize was that Jen was bypassing the 3-for-1 deal, and ordering two fingers of Jack on the rocks, neat. Expensive drinks, and she was putting them away, too.

That night sort of went like most of them did back in those days – it started off fun and coherent, and then somewhere along the way it veered off into chaos. It ran off the road and got stuck in a mud hole full of craziness. And, I loved that so much. I loved chaos in my life back then. I think it was how I got away from some of the stuff going on that I didn’t really want to deal with.  There was a song on Ric Ocasek’s solo LP, which came out a few years later … “Keep It Out Of Control”. That was my modus operandi. The more fucked up and crazy and dissonant and chaotic my life was, the better.

Of course, even then, reality would pop up here and there. Like at the end of the night at Gallagher’s, when the waiter brought the tab for me to settle up, and I realized it was $15 more than what I had in my pocket. I excused myself for a moment to go to the men’s room to take a piss, and try to get myself together.

After having moped at the urinal for awhile, I was at the nadir of my despair, and I realized I would just have to go back out there and face the music, and admit to the waiter (and my date) that I could not cover my bar tab. I was about to gather myself up and go do it when a friend of mine named Gary came staggering into the restroom to take a piss. “Hey, man,” he said.

“Hey, Gary, do you want to save my life?” I said.

“Yeah, man. Sure.” he said. “What can I do?”

“Loan me twenty dollars.”

“Sure, no problem.” He reached into his wallet and pulled out $20 and handed it over.

“Dude, really. You just saved me, “ I said, and then I went on to thank him profusely.

Then I marched back out into the bar and settled up my tab and even left a smallish tip. My girl was impressed with me, I imagined; though in reality she was barely coherent by that point. No matter.



***************

I called Gary the next day and thanked him again, and promised to pay him back on my next payday. Twenty bucks was no small change to a poor college student back in those days.

But Gary said to forget it, that he owed me at least that much for the night I’d saved him. I could not recall what he might have been referring to, and so he reminded me.

One night a few years prior, when we were high school juniors, Gary had simultaneously got hold of the new Rush LP, 2112, and also a quarter-lid of Oaxacan that was supposed to be really kick-ass. His parents were out of town that weekend, so several of us gathered at Gary’s house, along with his little sister, who Gary was supposed to be baby-sitting, to smoke cheeba-cheeba and listen to this new album everybody thought was so great. (I thought it sucked; but I figured kick-ass weed could make almost any record sound good, even Rush; so … ) Then Gary realized he did not have any papers to roll with, and no pipe or anything else to employ as a smoking apparatus. Party plans ruined, except I had wandered out into his garage to his dad’s work bench, and found a piece of pipe, called the J-pipe I think, a pre-fab piece used for putting together a P-trap under a sink. I took that back into the house and got some aluminum foil out of the kitchen drawer to cover the opening on the short end of the “J”, and then I poked holes in the foil. Then we put a clump of weed onto our impromptu foil screen, and lit it. Sucked on the long end of the “J” and, voila!, we had a pipe to smoke weed with.

It worked pretty well, except for at first, when you would suck and get smoke from the Oaxacan mixed with dust that had accumulated inside the pipe over however long the time was it had sat on Gary’s dad’s work bench. After a few pulls, though, it was pretty much cleaned out, and everything was copacetic. It was agreed by all, in the easy hyperbole that often characterizes the conversations of dedicated pot-smokers, that my McGyver-like inventiveness had truly saved the day.

And Gary said it was easily worth $20 to him, what I had done; and that he had been waiting for the occasion to pay me back.

And, you know, God works in mysterious ways, I guess. He put Gary in that restroom to take a piss and give me the twenty dollars I so desperately needed to pay off my bar tab, while simultaneously giving Gary the opportunity to pay me back for piecing together a means to smoke ganja at a party at his house one night, several years before.

Yep, the Lord works in mysterious ways. And one day, when He has some time, I’d like to sit down with Him and talk about that a little.

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Peace In Our Time

I saw a squirrel running across the street today, with a full slice of pepperoni pizza in his mouth.  He had the crust end in his teeth, and the pointed end out ahead of him. Hauling ass.

That has to be an omen of some kind, a portent of something. Only, I have no idea what; and I have even less of an idea of how to look it up and find out.

At the time, I was on the way to my ex uncle-in-law’s house, to bring him a tubing plum set for an IV pump, the kind with the cartridge at the end of the tube, instead of a filter.

Long story, but I’ll get to it …

***************

The universe is fucked up, man; fucked up in some basic ways. We look out into space and we see the smooth, starry sky, the Milky Way, the evenly expanding universe. But there are anomalies, rents in the fabric here and there. There are folds in the otherwise smooth surface that throw everything off. I don’t know the reason why.

It’s just fucked up, is all. And I intend to get to the bottom of it, if I’ve got to go to Mars and back to find out.

***************

Dusk was approaching, and the evening air was cool, dry, and comfortable. I was sitting on the deck in the backyard of my new house, post-cookout, savoring maybe my fourth or seventh Miller Lite pint of the day. Who knows? I don’t usually count.

I’ve been on a serious Stones kick lately, and I had Let It Bleed playing over the outdoor speakers, pretty loud, too. As Keith Richards launched into the searing, apocalyptic opening chord run of “Gimme Shelter”, I had a shiver run all the way through me. It wasn’t the weather that gave me goose bumps. I looked up and saw my next door neighbor, Ted, sitting in an adjacent lawn chair, a beer in his hands, his eyes closed and his head nodding slightly, to the music. He was smiling.

In the whole great universe, there are many wonderful things to see. I was thinking about that, sitting there rocking to the music, and I’d closed my eyes by then, too. I imagined a vivid image taken from outer space, from the kind of spy satellite that can take vivid pictures of the most minute details of things down on the earth.  For some reason, on this day, out of all the awesome things on the planet they could zoom in on and look at, the guys operating the satellite decided to zoom in on my postage stamp-sized backyard (I recently moved into a garden home, of all things) in the tree-lined west end of Beaumont, near the Gulf of Mexico, in southeast Texas.

And what they saw, in vivid detail, was two middle-aged guys sitting in lawn chairs, beers in hand, eyes closed and heads bobbing in rhythm to something, some type of music, it seemed.  It was probably the least important thing going on, on the entire Earth at that moment.  Seriously, the satellite guys should have been looking for nuclear plants in Iran, or Al Qaeda camps in the Sudan, or something. Somehow, though, they found the sight of these two guys in lawn chairs, perfectly at peace, with the weather, with their lives, and their beers, and whatever the fuck music they were listening to … they found the sight of Ted and I so compelling for some reason that they couldn’t pan away, while meanwhile trucks full of weapons grade plutonium were rolling across the desert north of Tehran …

People are forever seeking inner peace; and they’ll climb to the mountaintop, move to the desert, blast themselves out and up amongst the stars, trying to find it.

And good luck to them, too.  It is just that … some of us have found out you don’t always have to go very far to find inner peace. Sometimes it comes to you in un-beautiful places, in mundane surroundings. Not while viewing a breathtaking vista in the Himalayas, not amongst the austere, terrible beauty in the heart of the Sahara or Gobi, not out in the desolate reaches of outer space, looking back longingly at our blue, blue world … no, sometimes you may find your inner peace right where you live, in the smallest events, in the simplest details.  The reason I shivered at the beginning of “Gimme Shelter” is because the perhaps unlikely combination of 60 degree weather, Keith Richards playing lead guitar on one of the best songs ever written by anyone, a little Miller Lite, and my friend Ted, brought to me a profound feeling of well-being and peace, right there on my 10 x 10 deck in my small backyard, in the wild west end of Beaumont, TX, USA, Planet Earth, Milky Way, Universe, 77707. I didn’t need sherpas or a Land Rover or a Saturn 5 rocket to find it. Just a couple of nine-packs of these bad-ass Miller Lite pints in aluminum bottles, a kick-ass outdoor stereo system (that came with the house), the second of four straight awesome fucking LPs by the greatest band of them all, and my neighbor Ted, who I have known for maybe two months now.  That’s it.

The say you can see God in the tiniest details. I am not going to say you cannot. But, if so, then maybe God can see us in the tiniest details, too.

Ponder that over your next nine-pack, whilst listening to the Stones, in your backyard, with your neighbor. Then tell me if I am right, or if I am wrong.

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