Stevie Wonder, Me, and The Death of The Fightin’ 88th

So, there I am at my favorite diner in the valley.

It’s a bright Saturday morning; I’m tucking into a stack of Silver Dollar pancakes smothered in blueberry syrup and a damn good cup of coffee, and enjoying the company of the man seated across the booth from me – one Stevland Hardaway Judkins, born May 13, 1950. You know him better as the genius who wrote ’Higher Ground’, released on his 1973 album ‘Innervisions’.

We were talking about this, that and the other thing and before long the conversation turned to dreams, so I told him about the time I dreamt I was being chased across the Gobi Desert by a vengeful Mariachi band…

I ran until I could run no more and when they finally ran me down, they marched around me in an ever-tightening circle, blowing their mighty trumpets as if to crumble the walls of Jericho.  I lay where I fell, battered by the force of the angry sound, balled into the fetal position and doing all I could to protect my head while they stomped ever closer.  Spikes of hot sunlight glinted off their polished golden instruments and the sequins of their exquisite costumes; their brown leather sandals kicked up mile-high plumes of hot dust and desert sand like explosions in an old war movie…

It was a dream within a dream.

I can see it now; the four of us, the only ones left from the Fightin’ 88th - Little Joe, Arizona Frank, Mikey-from-the-Bronx and me, the MoPic – running like Hell while the Devil took potshots at our unprotected backsides.  We dove as one for the relative safety of a foxhole, blown over the top of the uncoiled concertina wire by the force of a nearby explosion.

“Well,” gasped Little Joe a few moments later, ”Whadda’ we got left?”  We dumped out our bags. It didn’t look good. We had 40, maybe 45 rounds of pistol ammo between us, 23 rounds for a Thompson with a jammed feed, three hand grenades, two canteens of water and no rations to speak of.

Arizona patiently counted the ammo a second time.  “We’ll be fine,” he says looking at the rest of us with a bemused grin, ”so long as there’s only 39 of them left and none of us miss.”

As for me, I’ve got three frames left on this roll and a bagful of stuff that will probably never see the inside of a dark room.  I snap three quick portraits of the other men – something for grieving widows to frame and place on the mantle right next to the wedding photo.  Hurriedly, I jot my name and rank, the date, I.D. for each of the men, my serial number, press affiliation, and some final ironic observations about the brutality of war into my field notebook before stuffing it and the camera back into my old canvas bag, covering it with my pock-marked helmet and covering the whole thing with a pile of stones and a white handkerchief.  Hopefully one of our guys finds it. Looks I’ll have to accept that Pulitzer posthumously.

The eyes of the haunted stare back at me, their faces drawn.  It is silent for a moment, save for the boom of distant shelling.  The minds of the doomed men reach out to the friends and families they know they will never see again.

Little Joe suddenly grabs the radio, twisting the crank on the front like a man possessed.  Arizona slowly reaches over and points out, yet again, the gaping bullet hole in the face plate that prevents it from working.  Disgusted, Joe casts it aside.  “This is it,” he fumes.

“I reckon yo’ right about that.”  Arizona speaks slower than a sunset.

“No way!  We’ll get out of this! Right? I’m supposed to get married!” That’s Mikey-from-the-Bronx, dumb kid, still green.  Brand new to the unit, barely 17, lied about his age to impress his old man, killed his first Kraut about an hour ago.

The explosions creep closer, slamming into the ground like a giant’s footsteps… closer, closer still… I jump with each blast, as dirt and debris rain down around our heads.  They’re zeroing in on us… better this way, I guess.  Faster.  A mighty pressure builds in my chest, and try as I might I cannot breathe… we’re not gonna make it out of here, not this time.  We’d pushed our luck taking out that machine gun nest.

Suddenly the air is filled with the Doppler scream of an incoming round.  This is it.  Without thinking, I light up a smoke and jam my fingers into my ears – I don’t know where I’m going next, but there’s no sense in showing up deaf… I close my eyes, shouting to be heard above the banshee wail of the mortar shell.., louder, louder!  “It’s been a hell of run, gentlemen!”

I awoke with a start to discover my own hands clutching my pillow tight against my face and my alarm clock beeping like a dump truck in reverse.

Stevie clapped his hands and laughed with delight, swaying back and forth the way you imagine he might.

We called for more coffee, and continued to talk as the morning sun shone brightly.

 

 

You Go Hither, I’ll Thither

20MAY09 – Just off the train in downtown Ventimiglia, Italy.  Something smells decidedly of toilet, yet everything is perfect; gently sun-bleached, picturesque and worn by untold decades of human interaction.  Blue tiles, tiny cars, indecipherable graffiti, palm trees, jutting balconies conquered by colorful flowerboxes, wild ferns and drying laundry.  Charm has a decay ratio.

28MAY09 – Now moored in Cassis, France, the ship bobbing gently on the waves.  Clean from a shower, feeling properly invisible and somehow in tune with the vibrations of the moment, part and parcel of this sinking second slipping silently into twilight, as the sky becomes roses and the water turns to steel.  Nothing lasts forever except nothing and forever so please, make sense of the now.  Looking around the harbor; jutting rock formations, ancient limestone hips buck and thrust against the sky; the town is dotted with intermingling spits of neon, like expatriated flowers barred forever from the garden of the heavens.  What sort of person makes their home in Cassis?  And how many of them are fucking right now?  (This last thought makes me grin.)

The next day, sitting in a café watching parades of people, souls and animals walk past. The town is tiny, hot and bright; time moves only as fast as the breeze crawling down the street.  Later, drunk on wine and wandering the streets with my camera, unable to decide upon a single frame-filling photo.  Reminded of a scene in “Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams” – the protagonist moves frantically from vista to vista, unable to find anything worth painting that isn’t already a masterpiece.

Underway for Bermuda.  The yards dance a cautious figure eight as we advance westward one surging wave at a time.  It seems awfully damned surreal to me; are we traveling over the foaming surface of the water, or are we sitting perfectly still in the heaving sea as the Earth turns toward us, the water rushing beneath our keel?

Another day, another loss for words; stretched out on the deck like a lizard on a hot rock in the evening sun, absorbed in the microscopic details of the planks, currents and eddy’s forever frozen in a river of wood like the permanently-preserved thought patterns of a long-dead tree.  I squint hard against the sun-punched page of my notebook, racing to blacken it fast enough to save my eyes before yielding to the cool shadows beneath the anchor winches, unconsciously erasing all thoughts of that long lost Midwest city from my mind and vowing, once again, to never return.  It poisons those who choose to remain there.  The air grows golden and more luminous still.  I am 1,800 miles from anywhere, and everything is moving.

I feel as if I’ve been shown the secrets of the universe, my tiny monkey brain filled to the point of meniscus.  But without pen and paper, I’m doomed to forget more and more of the finer facts, repeating the larger laws like a mantra until at last I find pen and paper, only to discover I’ve forgotten the whole damn thing.

14JUN09 – Sitting in a sidewalk café in Hamilton, Bermuda, awaiting coffee and an omelet and drinking up the angry alpha chords of ‘Caped Crusader’ by Jello Biafra and The Melvin’s.  The fact that I’m even writing the word ‘Bermuda’ feels strange, hypnotic, as though the word was a lost letter of our language learned in a trance, and somehow I won it back.  But in order to preserve the vibrating sanctity of the thing, I must isolate it from the rest of the moment, speaking it without speaking, naming without naming, holding it fast beneath my tongue for fear it may from flee my mind like darkness to the dawn.  Should I fail in this task, I’ll be left asking increasingly difficult questions until the questions stop making sense altogether.  “What is a Bermuda?  What does it mean?  Is it a person?  Just remember sunlight, just remember blue, just remember… wait, what?”

10AUG09 – An Arizona coffee house, twirling a Sharpie across my fingertips, the nails of which are cut close to the quick.  Begging for a little more ink, just a few more lines of nonsense and common sense to finish this page.  (Note to self: Sharpie ultra-fine markers must go on each and every one of my shopping lists until the day I die!)  I’m here for work.  I’m also casing out the tattoo parlor across the street…

What have I learned this year?  That people are an illusion.  They aren’t who they say they are, and sometimes that’s a good thing.  But also; finding someone who loves you just as much as you love them is probably the single most important discovery you can ever make.  It is also the most arduous.

Cruising at 35, 000 feet, thinking back on my white trash childhood; memories of staring out the rear window of a Ford Taurus (or was it a Renault Alliance?) being piloted through the dusty turns and hollers of backwoods Kentucky in a city-spoiled car, groaning, bouncing and squeaking along, my work-shirt and pocket-protector equipped father with his Ray Ban shades and perfect hair, one bronzed arm hanging idly from the window, navigating hairpin turns and lost Bluegrass hills in search of relative strangers – his strange relatives, who dwelled in fantastic little piles of sagging lumber and paper shingles, who stored defunct riding mowers in gutted school buses parked forever on their front lawns, who stored silent armies of canned goods in cool mountain caves, who appeared to subsist on bottles of ice-cold Coca Cola and garden fresh green beans, who apologized profusely to their city-slicker relatives for the sweet taste of well-water bubbling up from the cast iron kitchen pump, who decorated their walls with portraits of sepia-toned specters now forgotten, who bore names like Luther and Tallmadge and Rose and Jesse and Liza and Marie, who trapped monolithic June bugs in workman’s hands and taught a goggle-eyed nerdling to fly them on threads, teased with infinite country patience from disintegrating apron strings, who spoke heatstroke-slow when they spoke at all, and usually discussed Jesus or the weather…  Where are those people of yesteryear?  Rejoicing in the ground, I expect.

Cacti, cacti, cacti… every time I travel, I try to see my surroundings as though I’d been living there for about six months.  “This is where I go for a drink, that’s where I get my groceries, I was there last week taking photographs …”  Commercial jet roars overhead, and I wonder what page, what paragraph in the FAA handbook does it state that jets of a certain model, a certain capacity, moving at a certain speed must be wheels up by a certain altitude, or a certain time after departing terra firma.

Stupid things fascinate me: We pass a parking lot full of new Corvettes parked in a haphazard manner, the walls ringed with bitter concertina wire.  Not in such a way as to physically deter anyone but more as an afterthought, like part of a checklist.  “Hey, this place has concertina wire, I’d better not try to steal one of their cars.  Clearly, crime does not pay.”

Later, sitting in a concrete room in close proximity to the hotel swimming pool, waiting for my clothes to dry.  I hate flying with dirty laundry.  Finally made time for that tattoo parlor; my left forearm is cloaked in plastic wrap and it makes me look like a burn victim, the skin still red and angry.  The sky overhead is a perfectly Photoshopped shade of CAD7F7, and a layer of naked trees cast cautious shadows on the brick of the building.

Again, stupid things fascinate the hell out of me; I’m sitting on an aluminum chair in a little room next to the pool located outside my hotel which is within the city limits of Scottsdale, in the state of Arizona, located in the southwest corner of the continental United States, which occupies the Northern Hemisphere of a planet called Earth, which is just one part of a tiny solar system in an unmarked galaxy placed without care or concern along one arm of a massive spiral galaxy thrown haphazardly in the middle of a universe that may have neither a beginning or an end.

Reverse that; starting with me, seated on this chair made of a specific metal, composed of molecules, composed of protons, neutrons and electrons, further composed of quarks, and all of which is located at an X, Y somewhere in the aforementioned galaxy and doesn’t really mean a goddamn thing in the long run.  What happens when my laundry is dry?  I’ll move and fuck up the whole thing.  Am I a fool for wasting nearly half a page (and thirty seconds of your valuable time) by stating the obvious?  Does anyone else think this way?

Am I stuck on stupid, or merely obsessed with the affairs of a simpleton?

Early morning flight,
raindrops flee from gravity.
I am coming home.

Stating the obvious since 1971,