Banana

 I take a long weekend off and head to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland with the Widder, Robyn, and Robyn’s boyfriend. Ashland is a charming town nestled in the mountains, and despite the sloping sidewalks I don’t have any trouble getting around with my scooter. 

We get back Monday afternoon and I take the light rail from the airport directly to my wound care appointment, luggage weighing down my handlebars. Tim, the free-agent nurse the departments are always fighting over, saws off my cast and says the wound is looking good. 

When she’s through debriding, I ask Dr. Taggert about her trip with he son to Panama. They went there through an organization called Floating Doctors, and slept in hammocks and ate nothing but plantains. She shows me photos taken on the tiny island where she had treated patients for various ailments, most of them related to parasites. “This is our waiting room,” she says, pointing to a row of pregnant women sitting on folding chairs beneath the trees.  “And here is our OR.” She points to a thatched roof on stilts. “No one has diabetes there because if they get it they just die,” she says. “They die of all kinds of preventable stuff. I like being able to help out a little but to be honest it’s pretty grim.”

A few days later I get a call from Tom at Evergreen Prosthetics and Orthotics and we arrange for him to come to my next appointment, which will be on Tuesday instead of Monday, due to Memorial Day. He says he has made the brace and wants to see how it fits.

I run into him in front of the hospital as I’m heading in to my appointment. He’s heading out to his car and says he’ll be up in a few minutes. 

The two guards at the entrance have me put my bag through the x-ray machine but don’t bother to wand me after I roll through the metal detector. I could be hiding a gun in every pocket. 

Upstairs, Karen immediately says they’re ready for me and I glide right in. She says she hasn’t done a cast in a while, then cuts through the fiberglass as if it’s butter, which it is also the color of. The saw’s exhaust fan makes the curtain ripple wildly.

Karen rips off the batting and plucks off the square of padding. I can see that it is completely dry. 

She looks puzzled, and gently prods the wound.

“I’m not sure but it looks like you’re completely closed up,” she says. “I mean, there’s no drainage. Nope, I am just not seeing a wound here.” I twist my leg to get a look. There is still an indentation, inside of which is a layer of smooth, pink skin. 

“Well I’ll be damned,” I say.

Old Karen comes in and says, “I haven’t seen you in a while. What’s new?”

I start to tell her about Ashland but I can tell she’s not really interested. “What’s new with you?” I ask. 

“Nothing. Oh, that’s not true, we got a dog,” she says, and shows me pictures of her adorably morose-looking puggle. “She’s thirteen. Her name was Bea but we started calling her Nana, because she’s an old lady, then it became Bea Nana and now it’s just Banana.” 

When Dr. Taggert comes in, she is pleased to see me healed up, and as she slices at the callus she sings, “It’s the final countdown! Da-da DA duh, da-da DA da duhhh...”

Just then Tom shows up, and Taggert steps aside to watch, grilling him as he opens his bag and takes out my new brace. It’s made of clear molded plastic rather than metal like I had pictured. He examines my wound then slips the brace onto my foot and makes some marks on it with a silver Sharpie.

“It’s weird, I just don’t know why it keeps opening up in that spot,” he says. “Usually people have problems on the side here.” I ask if he thinks the bone might have gotten calcified again, like it has in the past, and he says he doesn’t think so, though I don't know how he can tell without an x-ray. He asks if I brought my other shoe, and I ask one of the Karens to get it from my bag. “It’s a shame we couldn’t fix this with the orthotic,” he says.

“I didn’t really get a chance to use it,” I say. “It opened up before I even broke it in.”

“Well hopefully if you use this for a while and it doesn’t open up, we can go back and try again.” 

“Isn't that plastic kind of hard?” Taggert asks. “His skin is very delicate.”

“It’ll have a soft insert,” he says, working the brace into the shoe and fiddling with the laces. “I’ll have it ready by the time I see you next week.” He puts the shoe with the brace into his bag and slips away. 

New Karen smears lotion on my pasty leg, which feels heavenly. Agnes comes in and plops into the chair. 

“I almost got murdered,” she says. 

“Oh my god, what happened?” I ask. “Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. I went on a date with this guy and he almost murdered me. He didn’t like when I told him I didn't want to see him again. Then I went home and when I woke up the next day there was graffiti on my car.”

“Wow. What did the graffiti say?”

“I couldn’t tell,” she says. “And I’m not a hundred percent certain it was him. But Karen’s got a boyfriend.”

“Congratulations,” I say, a little confused that Agnes’s story about almost getting murdered didn’t seem to involve anything resembling her almost getting murdered. “What does Dolly think of him?”

“She likes him more than she likes me,” Karen grumbles. “I’m a little peeved about it. She totally ignores me when he’s in the room.”

Agnes mutters something about becoming a spinster, then slouches away. Karen wraps my leg then admires her handiwork. It looks perfect, as does the cast Taggert proceeds to wrap over it. It’s gratifying to see your body subjected to such high levels of craftsmanship. 

“Evergreen guy sure left in a hurry,” Taggert says. “Think I scared him off with my questions? I can’t help it, I just like to know things!” I imagine her beneath the palm trees, in a tropical paradise rife with suffering, screeching at an interpreter as she tries to explain to the poor islanders how antibiotics work. I assume she doesn’t tell them that even though there is in fact medicine to treat diabetes, they can’t have any. 

If I had been born on that island, I would have died nearly forty years ago. 

Pancakes for Supper

Once the guards at the metal detector have had their way with me, I speed upstairs. After using the restroom, with one smooth motion I zoom across the waiting area through the office door that Caitlin has just opened into room two and hop onto the chair and slip off my shoe. Caitlin wheels my scooter away. CK yips something. Caitlin yips back. Fires up the saw. 

“Thompson cast, I presume,” she says, digging in the drawer for the cracker.

The wound looks good but the skin of the foot looks like it's becoming macerated. Caitlin isn’t concerned, and chooses instead to fixate instead on a bruise on my shin, despite my assurances that it’s been there a while. I ask if she heard about the goat lady and she says no; like CK, she's off Thursdays, but I assumed they all would have been talking about it the next day. I tell her the story and she laughs and says, “So much for nurse appreciation week. The day before they brought in an alpaca but they only brought one which let me tell you is not enough alpacas for that many nurses.”

Dr. Taggert is also pleased with my progress. “Who knows, maybe it'll be healed up by next week!” she screams.

“It probably will!” I cry.

“That's the spirit! The power of positive thinking!” 

“I'm going to make it happen!” 

The little voice in my head grumbles but I can hardly hear it over all the yelling.

She slices the callus and the loudspeaker announces, “Code Gray in dialysis. Code Gray in dialysis.” 

Taggert laughs. “Who has the energy to cause a scene when they're on dialysis?” she asks.

“Maybe it's not the person on dialysis who's the code gray,” I say. “Maybe it's their jilted lover.” She scoffs and I say, “Wow, I’m sensing some real anti-dialysis sentiment in this room right now. Just because your kidneys are messed up doesn't mean you can't have a red-hot sex life. Maybe the patient's two baby mamas showed up at the same time and are getting in a pregnant catfight. You’re being blinded by your prejudice. Which, frankly, I find disgusting.”

“Don’t make me laugh when I'm holding a knife,” Taggert laughs.

As Caitlin wraps my foot, she says there have been more Code Grays than ever lately. “That's why we keep the door locked now. They put in a new bolt that we can hit with a button in case of a Code Silver.” I ask what a Code Silver is and she says it means there's someone with a weapon, or actively committing an act of violence. I mention that they've been using the metal detectors nonstop lately. “Yeah they’re finally protecting their staff, and not just talking about it.” I don’t tell her how distasteful I find them.

     She leaves and I hope that CK comes in to keep me company, but she doesn't. I can hear Taggert in room three, talking to an elderly couple about the wife's almost-healed wound. She goes on and on, not really giving them any information, just sort of hanging out. I wish she would hurry up and finish up so I could get out of here. 

     She finally comes in and pulls on her paper scrubs. CK comes in and starts to tell her the goat story. Then she stops and says I could tell it better, so I go through the whole thing again, embellishing only slightly.  

     ”Everybody is losing their shit,” Caitlin says. “The other night my husband was picking up pizza at this arcade we like to go to, where they have karaoke. This little kid gets up to do karaoke. He's wearing a helmet so there was definitely something going on there. He started singing so quiet you could barely hear him, and his mother took the other mic and started doing backup vocals. The kid suddenly started screaming ‘Fuck you Mom, shut the fuck up,' over and over again and she couldn't get him to stop. It really shook my husband up.”

“Didn't the karaoke machine have a kill switch?” I ask. 

“My middle one was like that,” says Taggert. “Once he started you couldn't stop him. This one time I was at Safeway with all three of them, the little one was still a baby and I had her strapped on my front, and my middle kid goes right behind the counter and smashes his hand  down on this cake, I mean, splat! I grabbed him and pulled him away and he had the nerve to ask if he could have a cookie, they always have cookies for the kids there. I said no and he started screaming like you wouldn't believe. Then my oldest starts in with wanting a cookie too and I told her, I'll make you pancakes for supper and she was okay with that. But meanwhile the other one is literally on the floor kicking and screaming, I had to pick him up and carry him out like one of those goats. I'm sure everyone thought I was the worst mother in the world. I left the cart when we left and called my husband to come get it. I couldn't believe it was still there. But I took those kids home and made them pancakes and my son didn't get any.”

     Between the old couple and me, it’s apparent that she really needs to talk today, so I just let her. By the time she finishes her tale, my foot is fully encased in fiberglass. Protected from the dangerous world, safe from harm. I roll out into the sunlight, up the hill, past scattered needles and a no parking sign that 's been flattened by a car, to the bus stop. The shelter is covered with advertisements for an AI money management service. An obese woman stands with a huge stroller and two rambunctious little boys leaping around and hollering. 

When the bus arrives, I get on first, and sit next to a banged-up looking Black man dressed all in black, with a black cap with the word DETROIT in black block letters across the front. He wears a black eye patch and sits behind an empty black wheelchair.

“Ain't enough space here,” he growls. As I squeeze in closer I tell him I’m making room for the woman with the stroller, who sits down across from us and tells her boys to sit still. 

As the bus starts moving, the man fishes around in his pocket and pulls out a wad of bills and holds it out to the older boy. 

“Here, buy your kids some ice cream,” he says. 

“Oh, that's very nice, but, no thank you,” the woman says. 

He shakes the money and says it again. “Buy your kids some ice cream,” but she again says thanks but no.

“I was on my bicycle when a car hit me,” the man says, tucking his money away. “Banged me up real good.”

“I'm so sorry,” the woman says. The man just nods and looks at the boys with his one eye and they stare back at him, fascinated.

“Kids should have ice cream,” he says, flashing a smile of crooked, gleaming white splinters.

Escorted from the Premises

 Everyone in the office seems low-energy, even Dr. Taggert. I can’t get a laugh out of anyone, and feeling my energy being sapped, I eventually give up trying. CK’s either off or hidden away in hyperbarics.

Caitlin cuts off my football and is pleased to report that, while the wound isn’t any smaller, no drainage has seeped through and the flesh looks pink and healthy.

Tom from Evergreen Orthotics shows up like we had arranged, and he tells me about how the AFO works. He looks at my foot and says that most of the pressure will be put on my shin, and on the front of the sole. “It’ll be a little like having toes again,” he says. “It takes some getting use to, but after all you’ve been through, I bet you’re up for trying something new.” 

He makes a mold of my entire foot up to my knee with some sort of quick-setting rubbery material, which he peels off and tucks into a satchel bursting with cloth and foam and a dozen pairs of specialty scissors. “They rummaged through it at the checkpoint downstairs and now it’s a total mess,” he says. 

“Remember when Dr. Thompson snuck her knife past the guards?” asks Caitlin. “She was so proud of herself.” I picture her wielding a huge bowie knife but Taggert says it was just a little thing. 

Tom says he’ll be back Monday with my brace, and Dr. Taggert applies my cast by herself. The nurses are all just kind of wandering aimlessly around the office.

“What’s with everybody?” I ask. 

“It’s been a day,” says Taggert. “Now remember, call if anything feels off.”

“I know, I know. And if it’s off hours, go to the ER so they can saw it off.”

“You can call here off hours but you won’t get anybody, so feel free to leave a long, rambling message like some of our patients do.”

Overhearing, Caitlin yells, “Remember that guy who would call drunk all the time and leave those, um, colorful messages?”

“Oh my god yeah. He’d leave long, rambling messages for some woman named Rhonda. That went on for months. The lesson being, don’t drink and hit speed dial.”

 

Three days later I’m back. I’m hoping the drainage remains low enough that i can go back to coming once a week. 

I set off the metal detector, but the guards don’t bother to wand me. The woman behind me says both her shoulders are made of metal but they don’t bother to wand her either. 

Upstairs, I wait a while for them to get my room ready. A large family sits around a table, evidently waiting for someone. “Hey look, it’s 4:20,” says the son.

“Ha, I remember when that meant something, and not just once a year,” the father says. “You kids don’t know how easy you have it. Used to be you had to journey all the way across town and find some guy if you wanted to get high. Sometimes you’d smoke up all day and realize it was ten at night and you were out and had to go searching for more. You kids don’t know how easy you have it.”

“We’re ready for you, Seann Patrick,” says Bridget. “We’re in room one, Jenny’s waiting for you.”

“Oh no,” I say. 

“Hi Seann!” cries Karen. 

“Hey! How’s Dolly!”

“She’s perfect. Want to see pictures?”

“How come you’re nice to everyone but me?” asks Jenny. 

“Because you’re my favorite,” I say, as Karen runs over with her phone. Her beady-eyed dog stares blankly from a log on the beach. 

“Then a bunch of us took the wieners paddleboarding, but Dolly couldn’t go because there were too many of us already.” She swipes to a photo of a bunch of lithe young women in bikinis with daschunds on paddleboards. Then Jenny fires up the saw and she dances off.

“Oh this looks good,” she says. “Let’s say moderate, though it’s really much less.”

“What does it measure?” asks Bridget, staring at the computer like she is trying to remember what it is. 

“Not today, we’re just casting,” she says. 

“God I can hardly keep my eyes open,” says Bridget.

The top of my foot has a row of bright red bruises. Jenny says it was from the Optilock, the foam bandage they put on the wound. “It’s great stuff, but it’s got this thick edge that you can’t trim.” I’ve never had this happen before, but she’s not concerned so I’m not either.

“So today was baby goat day,” says Jenny. 

“Ooh, are they still here?” I ask. I have warm memories of being here for baby goats day two years ago. 

“No. In fact they left early, we didn’t even get to see them. Apparently the woman who brought them freaked out and they made her leave.”

Karen says, “I had just got down there and she was yelling, ‘they don’t think I’m friendly enough so I’m being escorted off the premises!’ She was not having a good day.”

“I hope to someday be escorted off the premises,” I say. “Hey, what do you all think of the room makeover?” 

“I like the blue,” says Karen. “It’s like gazing out at the sky.”

“Bridget despises it,” says Jenny. “Don’t you?”

“Say what now?” asks Bridget groggily

“He wants to know what we think of the new room.”

“I despise it.” I tell her about my idea for a mural. She approves, and says, “I have a poster at home that reads ‘A wound neglected is a wound infected.’ You could put that in there somewhere.”

“You have wound care posters just hung up around your house?” 

As she wraps my foot back up, Jenny tells Bridget she talked to sally.

“How’s she like the new job?” Bridget asks.

“Well, you know Sally. I’m not sure she likes anything. And it’s an hour drive so she’s not even saving any time on the commute.” I hadn’t even realized she was gone; once they made her supervisor she rarely emerged from the hyperbaric room. When you first arrive at a place, you assume everyone had been there forever and always will be. I think about this at work a lot, where after a number of tumultuous years I am one of the few old timers left.

Jenny leaves to call Dr. Thompson, who comes in and squats on her stool. Bridget stands there looking down at the bucket of water.

“What’s wrong?” asks the doctor.

“I couldn’t get the temperature right,” she says. “It really bugs me.”

The doctor dips her gloved fingers into the bucket. “It’s fine.”

“You know what people mean when they say something’s fine,” says Karen. 

“It means they don’t want to tell you the truth,” I say.

“You probably know what it means in the Italian Job,” says the doctor, looking at me. “Freaked out, Insecure, Neurotic, Emotional. Speaking of which, I still can’t get over that woman with the goats,” says Dr. Thompson. “I could see that she was in distress and I asked how she was doing…”

“You actually talked to her?” asks Karen. 

“Yeah I was there for the whole thing. I love baby goats.”

“I thought with, you know, how you are about germs…”

“For the most part, animals are cleaner than humans. A dog’s mouth is cleaner than a human’s mouth.” 

“But the goats walk around with all that poop on their butts,” says Karen. 

“It’s cleaner than our poop. I asked how that woman was doing and she said, ‘I’ve got walking pneumonia, that’s how I’m doing! Do you need to know my whole life story?’ And then she picked up the goats, one under each arm, and kicked the gate open and stomped on out with them. She had to come back for the other two.”

“We kept hearing calls of a Code Gray at the west entrance,” says Jenny.

“She was definitely having issues. The attendants usually help people with the goats but she was just sitting there with her head in her hands. And then she screamed at one guy ‘Don’t hold them like that, you’ll break their backs’ But he was just holding it normally. The gaps seemed happy, anyway.” She shakes her head. “There weren’t any problems with the woman with the llamas yesterday.”

“I missed the llamas,” Bridget says.

“Are you running a petting zoo here?” I ask.

When she’s finished, Dr. Thompson tears off her smock and throws it into a bin in the new cupboard. 

“That’s for linens,” says Bridget.

“Where’s the garbage then? I can’t get the hang of these new rooms,” says the doctor.

“I despise them,” says Bridget. 

“Wound mural,” I say. 

As my cast dries, they all gather in the main room to continue to excitedly discuss the baby goat incident. The whole thing has reinvigorated them; there is none of the office ennui I sensed just a few days ago. 

“Oh shit, I keep forgetting,” I call from atop the chair, which no one has bothered to lower. “Doctor Thompson, can I get you to sign a form for a temporary handicapped parking permit?” Jenny brings my scooter and lowers the chair so I can fish the form out of my bag. The doctor signs it and Jenny makes a copy and I’m free until Monday. I leave by the side entrance and cross the parking lot, which was recently the scene of such goat-related melodrama. It’s quiet now, the only sign of life an old guy in a Primus t-shirt, smoking, who tells me I’ve got a sweet ride as I scoot by. 

Don't Chase

 I spend July 4th in the apartment, alternating between cleaning and sleeping. I didn’t have too much to drink at the barbecue but I still feel sluggish and worn out. I have a pretty pleasant day regardless, and by evening feel perky enough to head down to the Goose for supper. 

There are Lost Dog posters plastered all over the neighborhood, showing a moppy little mutt with the typical admonition “Dont chase will run.” The Goose is busier than I thought but most of the crowd is settling their bills and heading out to watch the fireworks, leaving only a few of us. 

As usual, nearly everyone on the deck is coupled up, but when I walk over to the water cooler I see an attractive woman sitting by herself. I smile and she gives me a big, warm smile back. Well that’s nice, I think, but she’s probably waiting for someone. But when I go to sit down with my drink, I see her start to talk to a guy sitting by himself a few tables away from her. He has a full beard and a baseball cap. He also has a dog. 

By the time my food comes they are laughing and chatting like old friends. His dog barks wildly at every other dog that approaches the deck. “She’s just saying hello,” the man says every time. I can’t make out much of their conversation but I hear him say that he’s in real estate. She’s new to the neighborhood, and fairly new to Portland. I hear them talk about paddle boarding. They look like a good match. Even if I had a dog, I can’t compete with real estate and paddle boarding, not to mention that beard, which is full and lustrous. I can only hope that the cap is hiding a case of male pattern baldness, though I know that wouldn’t make a difference at this point. 

I take my trusty sketchbook out for company but my heart’s not in it. I tell myself this is a good opportunity to practice not spiraling down into self-hatred and misery about how alone I am, how long I’ve been alone, how the older I get the chances of this changing grow ever slimmer. It’s so easy to chastise myself for my cowardice. I should have gone right up to her when I got my drink, talk to her before that irresistible canine spell could take hold. But I couldn’t do it. I am convinced that no woman wants anything to do with me. While this might not be true, it has been many years since I’ve seen any evidence to the contrary.

“I need to get a dog,” the server says to me.

“Same here,” I say. “But I like cats better.”

“Me too,” he says. “But, you know.”

The new friends order another drink and I finish mine and head back up the hill. In an empty parking lot, a gorgeous young woman and a man who looks like her father are fiddling with an automatic ball-throwing machine that their dog is nosing warily. The girl is twitchy and holding her limbs at odd angles, like she’s on something. Dog toys and balls and various bits of throwing apparatus lie scattered across the parking lot. 

At the top of the hill, the lost dog signs grow more desperate, hanging from every telephone pole. The sky is nearly dark. Soon the fireworks will start and all the dogs I saw tonight will be whimpering under their owners’ beds. I wonder where the lost dog will hide, who will comfort him as the world around him explodes.

Clean Towels

        It’s the day before Independence Day and the second Revolutionary War has been won. After decades of fighting, the noble rich have finally thrown off the shackles placed on them by the filthy poor. For us huddled masses, it’s all pretty disheartening, but I have the day off tomorrow and am on my way to a backyard barbecue. As I sit on the bench at the bus stop, I look at the arrival time on my phone. It keeps leaping around, getting longer and shorter as some unseen force impedes the vehicle’s progress. A man on the corner shows a cardboard sign to the traffic. I don’t bother to read it. I used to be interested in these signs, in all the different ways people ask for help, the various kinds of lettering they use, but I can’t look anymore. 

        A teenage girl sits next to me, thumbs skipping across the screen of her phone. There is suddenly an explosion behind us, followed by another, and another. It seems early for fireworks –the sun is still high in the sky. I turn around to look and see puffs of smoke in the air above the bridge. The booms go on for a few minutes. 

        “What was that?” the girl asks uncertainly. She doesn’t have an accent I would guess she’s Pakistani.

        “Oh, somebody getting ready for the fourth,” I say.

        “But that’s not until tomorrow,” she says, sounding confused.

        Just then there is a crash right in front of us. An old hatchback truck crammed with junk has spilled a pile of metal shelves out of its open hatch. The truck speeds through the intersection then pulls over. Fortunately, the car behind it brakes before it hits the shelves, and I walk out in front of it, holding up my hand up. The girl runs out after me and we both gather up  the shelves. The words CLEAN TOWELS are written on a piece of masking tape on one of them. We carry them to the sidewalk and the driver of the truck comes and grabs them without a word. 

        

        The girl and I sit back on the bench. 

        “Lucky that didn’t go through somebody’s windshield,” I say. 

        “Yeah. Pretty scary,” she says. The bus comes and I gesture for her to get on first then she does the same to me and I insist and she says no then we both try to step on at the same time and laugh. As we drive off I look at the guy on the corner and finally decide to read his sign. He’s crayoned an American flag next to the words WAR VETERAN ANYTHING HELPS. I wonder if he knows that the real war is just beginning. 

The Lew Welch Memorial Expressway

I wake up beside the highway. Above it, rather. Over the past year I’ve learned the rhythms of its traffic the way someone living beside the sea learns the patterns of the tide. The traffic never stops on the 405 and its many arteries, though it does slow down at night. The poet Lew Welch ranted about the insidiousness of highways in a letter he mailed from a house one block from here that a few years later was razed to build this very road. If it was still there, I would be able to see the roof from my bedroom window. Despite all the changes to the city, I like knowing that many of the buildings he would have walked by are still standing, including this one. 

The sun has not yet crept around the corner of the building so I’m a little chilly as I sit on the balcony with my coffee. The sparrows vanished last week; I miss their frantic chirping, though I never caught more than glimpses of their beaks. I do my puzzles and read the news, even though I know I shouldn’t. I should be protecting myself from the constant barrage of horrifying updates to the story of our country’s plummet into madness. It’s  rush hour and the traffic light on the ramp is helping to stagger the traffic speeding toward the tunnel that cuts through the hills. 

Last week my mother and I drove through that tunnel on the way to the zoo. She was in town to visit and she said the two things she wanted to see were my new (to her) apartment and the baby elephant. Tula-Tu is four months old; I’d never seen an elephant so young, and while it’s always depressing to see animals in cages, my mother and I were both captivated. It’s a strange experience to stand next to the woman who gave birth to you and watch a baby elephant tuck her trunk into her own mother’s armpit to suckle. 

We had a nice week together. Growing old has not made her bitter and crabby like it did to her own mother, who never was all that nurturing to begin with. I didn’t plan a lot but we managed to pack in a lot. I dragged her along to a program dedicated to the work of a local video artist, which wasn’t great, and a production of Assassins, which was. Assassins is a Stephen Sondheim musical about the people who killed or tried to kill the president. It’s hard to believe there has only been a single botched attempt at eliminating our current president, but the show repeatedly urges us to follow our dreams.

The production was put on by a small local troupe of self-proclaimed marginalized  individuals, all of whom were terrific. They performed in the black box theater at Reed College. Lew Welch went to Reed, along with his friends and fellow Beat poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. I wonder what they would have thought of the play, its usual carnival barker narrator replaced by an imposing drag queen Lady Liberty. 

We spent a few days at the coast, staying in a motel in the sleepy town of Rockaway Beach. It was shabby, but it was clean, and it was right on the beach. We had lunch in Manzanita, which is a bustling metropolis by comparison, then went to my favorite spot on the entire coast, Short Sand. I don’t get there often because you need a car. From the parking lot you follow a creek for a mile through old growth forest, where trees sprout from other trees, their roots forming twisted structures that look like portals to the faerie kingdom. It all looks otherworldly. The path ends at a gorgeous cove rimmed with pines and beloved by surfers. 

Welch famously disappeared into the California wilderness with a rifle when he was 44, leaving behind a note.

 

I never could make anything work out right and now I’m betraying my friends. I can’t make anything out of it – never could. I had great visions but never could bring them together with reality. I used it all up. It’s all gone.

 As I sat next to my aging mother, looking out over the Pacific, I felt grateful that she was still in good enough shape to visit me, to drive to the beach, to walk through the woods to get to this beautiful spot. It has been a hard year, as was last year, as was the year before, as was... The losses keep building up and the planet seems to be spinning faster and faster toward apocalypse. My foot is still fucked up, and as usual I’m aching with loneliness. To cope with it all I’m drinking too much, which, oddly, does not seem to be helping. I’m not ready to give up on this world yet, but if I was, this would be a good place to do so. To let go of this world with the protective arms of the cove encircling us. Juncos twittering in the branches. The sun sparkling on the water. The waves crashing against the sand like the sound of rushing traffic on the freeway. 

For the Cause

It has to be done, I know that,

but God is it boring. Unsavory, of course,

but it’s the boredom that eats away at me.

I stare out at the flies crazing

beneath the ceiling fan, feel like my eyes 

are going to start circling and looping like them 

if he doesn’t finish soon. I’m jerking as hard as I dare;

too fast or too slow and he’ll gripe.

It’s small and flaccid, but I do my best  with the material

as I wait for that final spasm so I can finally 

get some work done. In the meantime, 

I stare at the flies and think about the diagrams,

the lists, the maps, all the scraps of folded paper 

outlining the plan to bring down this gang of rejects

from Monster Island. Some of the information 

is vital –lists of potential allies,

the heights of buildings along various routes,

seating arrangements in the chambers and halls. 

Some of it is more esoteric. Secret sauce recipes

for various fast food items. Sources for exploding

seat cushions. Theories on how to keep a head alive 

once it’s been separated from the body 

so it can still watch and feel as a razor-sharp, 

many-pronged dildo is rammed repeatedly 

into the rectum. Is that really a necessary part 

of the overall scheme? 

There are various schools of thought on this. 

Some fear we will lose focus, as I am right now, 

letting my weary mind daydream about a day 

when a never-ending series of handjobs 

and blowjobs won’t be necessary 

to appease and distract these slobs. 

That day seems so distant, 

but at least this current state of semi-hardship 

is close to coming an end, his cheeks having gone 

from orange to cherry to grape 

as he puffs and groans, sweat matting 

linty cobwebs of hair against his brow. 

Finally, with a little squeak 

his whole body shudders 

and a greasy comet of spunk 

streaks across the room

to splat against the portrait of his daughter 

eying us from the end table. 

Milky tears run down her face 

as he struggles to extract his ass 

from the deep plush. 

It won’t be long now, I want to tell her.

He totters and tugs on his trousers 

and flicks a few bills at me.  

As they flutter to the carpet, 

I go to the bathroom and wash my hands. 

One of the flies follows

and I snatch it from the air with a soapy fist 

and drop it into the sink

where it swirls and swirls before 

being sucked down into the darkness.