...Get back Jojo!
--John Lennon
I remember when I was a kid but wasn't. I was 21, home for a little while, back in that place that still resonates in my mind as a place of monkish solitude. As it turns out, everywhere since then has reflected that experience more or less, to varying degrees. Although there the experience seemed stark, as if I could live a million years and no one would ever find me.
And for as long as I was there, no one did.
That summer, I got a part time job in the Western Washington University mail room. Every morning at around 11 I rode my brother's old bike downtown past the big Horizon bank clock where as a kid I used to check the temperature, excited as the thermometer dropped and as things looked more and more like snow. The colder the better. My child self loved the cold.
My adolescent self craved the tropics.
And now my adult self again craves the cold.
I rode passed the little shops, the kids skateboarding in the little parking lot by the bus stop, up State street, passed the Y, passed the Food Co Op, up the steep, grated hills passed Nash hall, onto the university campus, through red square, passed the big iron statue, passed all the 60'ish university architecture, to the mail room where I began sorting.
And then, after making my deliveries in the delivery van, carrying the mail to various departments and dorms, I would coast all the way home, occasionally stopping at the 3-B to have a Newcastle and to read.
Once I met a girl there with whom I drank and played pool. Then we went to the Royal across the street where she ate what appeared to be a large, drunken meal of fettuccine Alfredo. She said the food there was good, although it looked like a lot to eat after 4 beers. I loaned her my book. I forgot what I was reading. Something serious, worth loaning in a way a serious reader loans a book.
Later, after the summer was over when I was about to return to college we met again so she could return the book whose title just evades my memory. The girl seemed significantly older if only due to the fact that she drank a lot and played pool and had a premature smoker's voice and seemed a part of the college life there where I had always watched the college students and even after taking some classes there, viewed them as much older than myself.
Bellingham lay right on Puget Sound anchored in the south by the Fairhaven fairy terminal, in the center by the Georgia Pacific Paper Mill, and in the North by the ambiguous industrial sector: a cement factory, a distant oil processing facility. And then inland, there were rolling hills that didn't seem to grow anything. There was just land and frosty tall grasses and evergreens stretching toward Mt. Baker, a mecca for ski bums who hitchhiked up their on the weekends.
People cut me, repulsed me, and the one's I wanted to get to know seemed utterly remote, intertwined with the hostile factions, the rebellious young men whose motives for doing what they did I absolutely didn't understand, who seemed part of one tremendous fashion statement that somehow set itself up as a way of life.
Driving into that landscape, my mother's skiing, smoking, architecture designing boyfriend behind the wheel of his Cherokee, I didn't see the beauty of that place. When does one start noticing the beauty of a landscape? I think for me it was when I had left all the pain behind after I left that place and found myself in a totally different landscape. And there, pre cut by everything, this new beauty cut me. It carved a huge gash into my soul which healed over like a tree's wound darkening my vision to everything that came after, spinning me around and around and then setting me loose into the labyrinth of early adulthood.
That's what the view of the Aegean was from the prow of a ship. Meanwhile, the people in Athens seemed totally different, immersed in cafe life, Vodka Lemones, sex and politics, intellectual-ness of a different order. Love seemed everywhere. The possibility was not utterly remote as it always felt in the Pacific Northwest. In Greece, it seemed like if I would have stayed long enough, I would have met a girl into being a girl, liking me in the unthinking, accepting way a girl likes a boy who doesn't know how to be other than how he is.
And so, coming home was like plunging back into this strange state of constant inadequacy, not being quite good enough. Return created a continuous link from my Californian childhood, the strife of growing up with parents whose egos were immeasurably larger than my own. An experience of the link with the past was in and of itself a stressful thing to feel. Although there was something else, something about the place itself, so relaxed, so intent on experiencing a condition of pureness, which was also stressful.
The people in my hometown seemed more than elsewhere intent on being pure, in terms of the things they ate, the clothing they wore. I heard them speak of going into the woods as an act of purification. They came out renewed. They spoke of their renewal, of their plans to baptize themselves again in the wilderness.
One year, I had a biology teacher who told us that she lived in a tepee. She lived in the tepee with her boyfriend. It seemed so odd. At 14, I didn't know what to think of it -- none of us did, and so we instinctively understood that something like that is best mocked rather than fully comprehended.
Although, looking back on it, I can almost fathom the weird series of ruptures and voids that led to her life in the tepee with her boyfriend, just as my own series of snakes and ladders has led to a life in Russia on the fringes of a profession.
I tried to avoid growing up for as long as possible perhaps because instinctively I knew it would be horrible. And the older I got, the more I filled out the shoes of my own solitude which was always somehow connected with the place itself which fed the odd germ in me which resulted in the odder plant. I fed off that place as a chia pet feeds off the sunlight in an inverse photo synthetic process producing an image's negative: the opposite of the home grown, organic, dirt fed native. I was a fraud, a secret Californian, an crypto Jew/Bostonian or else something, I'm not sure what.
"Are you from Boston?" I was often asked by the incomprehensible bumpkins of that ville. I had never been to Boston and still have not.
Going away felt like stepping out of that binding set of untraceable cultural signifiers that make a solitary a solitary. First Greece, then Eastern Europe, then Spain. I conceived of making travel into a kind of life. Elsewhere, I did not feel like an outcast. People noticed me, took interest in me even.
At first I thought they took interest in me just because I was a foreigner. But I am not so sure anymore. I was 19, 20. I must have been just like any young person of that age, worthy of contact. Only back home, I could never adapt to the elaborate cultural signifiers. I wasn't a part of a fraternity. I was a nerd, a blank. I wasn't even that. I was a map maker, a bag pipe player, a myth reader, an atavism, a slip of the collective unconscious. Alchemically, I was enmeshed within a different dimension and so could not fully participate in this one.
I think my undesirability was less felt by foreigners who did not understand that my hairstyle and clothing weren't hip, didn't care that I didn't snowboard or hike, weren't looking for pick up lines, but through the miserable European centuries, had come to appreciate my own brand of oblivious, open-faced interest. And so while I was probably noticed for my nationality, I must have been at least somewhat accepted for the fact that others weren't as aware of my unacceptability and thus must have noticed some of the creature that lay beneath all that American-bread misery.
I met a girl. I went to visit her where she lived on the Canaries. We rented a car and stopped to swim at every beach. We ate shrimps and calamaris in roadside cafes, and then I convinced myself that I had to return. The whole thing happened blindingly fast. I traced my way back in dreams, but somehow that wasn't good enough.
The sound of my hometown is the distant sound of the Georgia Pacific factory on an early December morning when the grass is frosty and your dog's finger nails skate along the icy sidewalk as you throw papers on front porches and look up at the stars dangling above the church steeple with your American religiosity intact contemplating the onset of the Christmas season and the holiness of winter which is the holiness of your own lost childhood, which is perhaps the holiness of humanity's lost Ithaca.
Those early mornings were some of the most beautiful mornings of my late childhood, when everyone was still asleep, when the people were all concealed. The human world drawn back like a curtain, something deeper revealed. An internal state of a universe brimming over with God. Not love. What was that? Love was contact. Love was something so far out of reach you did not even want to think about it. This was the eternal, the immediate unknown, and so on those early mornings you were all you and even a little less than you, a part of yourself lost within a distant star field.
The summer I returned to deliver the mail was not the summer of the Canary girl which seemed to breed 2 years of misery and longing which drove me nearly insane as I sought to replicate the simplicity of that encounter with college girls who expected in me some sort of simulacrum they heard about from somewhere; or else, in that fine-tuned economic way Americans have of spotting a wooden nickel, they knew from the start that I didn't quite belong.
Thankfully, that summer I returned to the mail room was only after Greece and so coming back was almost like re entering the meditative state of my childhood if I could forget the stress of linkages and the stresses of that human world which seemed at once incipiently relaxed and ideological.
On the way back from the mail room, I stopped in at Henderson's bookstore. The owner Robert was a taciturn man from elsewhere who, along with his girlfriend/companion/wife, loved Bellingham's natural looks and hated people in general. He especially hated Michael, the guy who owned "Michael's Books" across the street, who evaded his taxes and later became a Christian fundamentalist tombstone carver. I browsed the titles I always browsed then, Baudelaire, Kafka, Boll, Italo Calvino.
"What is it about guys who like Italo Calvino," said a blind woman 10 years later.
She was a beautiful blind woman who I met out in front of a Brooklyn cafe with her dog.
I didn't tell her that I had been one of those Italo Calvino readers, although I only really read the Baron in the Trees because long ago, in his desolate, divorcee flat in San Francisco, my father had mentioned the title.
I read the titles my father read, adopted the literary tastes of my father, but I also discovered other things like Irish and Welsh myths, the Mabinogian, the Icelandic sagas, Nikos Kazantzakis, Knut Hamson and Herman Hesse,. I read the entirety of Herodotus and even read about 200 pages of the Kalevala about those human Finnish gods occupying their various marshes way up north.
Later, after sifting through required readings no one likes but all pretentious people verse themselves in: Ezra Pound, Virginia Wolff, James Joyce -- I can't even begin to put forward a list of the books I read in class as a literature major simply because they were so god awful I couldn't read them thoroughly -- I gradually found my way back to imaginative writing in the form of Borges, Haruki Murakami, Celine, Orson Scott Card, W.G. Sebald who died tragically at the height of his powers.
Looking back on the sexy cafe life of Greece, I can't imagine having read these things growing up an Athenian, a beautiful Athenian girl in tow, my life neatly planned and satisfied containing other miseries I don't understand.
I can't imagine anyone reading the Kalevala who also drinks Vodka Lemones and sits in the Kolonaki whispering sweet nothing to a spandex-clad dark-haired politically-activated beauty. I can't imagine someone who knows what the Kalevala is, who isn't Finnish, being even faintly intelligible in any sense. To discover something like the Kalevala, on your own, at 15, you have to be nearly totally on the outskirts of society with a huge used bookstore on hand, and I can't recall seeing any huge used bookstores in the Balkans or in Russia for that matter. Although, I remember some in Krakow, which further delineates in my mind the marker which divides true authoritarian and post-authoritarian cultures from the rest of the world. Used bookstores. Bookstores in airports. People reading in public. Dictators turn reading into an idolatrous grind. Although Greece in many ways straddled that divide and was in any event a place I learned little about.
After getting my Newcastle, I would perhaps ride over the Stuarts coffee house where they had the poetry reading MC'd by Bob who dated all the girls in town. On one occasion I met a girl at Stuarts. I began to talk to her, heartened by my time away, heartened by my sense of having been someone else. We spoke of Greece. She said she wanted to go. I told her I had photos and offered to meet her the following day.
The next day after delivering the mail, I came equipped with the photos. She was in a hurry and so thanked me and departed. I wondered if she just came to honor her obligation. Later, I saw her on her scooter, a young man riding along back. For some reason, I still remember the young man, his black hair, yellow shirt, brown shorts, hiking boots. A wild child of nature. I was not a wild child of nature. I was a medieval child of forgotten 80's movie.
"You're scaring me," Miriam said.
We had camped out on a beach. Africa lay somewhere out over the water. I had crawled out of the tent to look at the panorama.
"Just, quiet, for a second," I said, overwhelmed by a feeling of perfection, that I was dong the exact right thing, the exact thing God intended I do which was camp out on a beach with Miriam Suarez on the Canary Islands. The sensation was overwhelming.
It was like a spore of that old place, that old solitary Christmas within my heart lingered. I was an unmellowed wine. And so instead of letting that moment pass over me like a civilized person, I momentarily divorced myself from the fellow creature who had helped bring it on in order to relish it like a desert saint, like a madman, like a Steppenwolf.
"I'm sorry," I said.
Later, she walked down to wash her hair in the ocean.
I was still whole then. The return wrecked me, as did the subsequent departures, farther and farther into the unknown, Central Asia, Russia, the Caucasaus, trying to recapture an experience that was not totally produced out of being a stranger in a strange land, but just from being 22, innocent, as worthwhile as any other 22 year old, not into sports, not particularly handsome or tall, but not ugly either, with things to offer.
I didn't know how to hold onto those moments. And the tawdriness of everything which came after still teaches me lessons if I am lucky.
I wonder why now the idea of a tropical landscape stresses me in a way that the landscape of my hometown doesn't. I currently have no desire for a Spanish beach, a Greek island. I want to be someplace where it's cold in the winter, where the frost blankets the grass in the autumn, where the leaves fall and where everything goes to sleep. Maybe Finland, like in the Kalevala, with the fir trees so green they're blue, the snow clinging to the branches in huge clumps and the dawn exploding with coldness, silencing the human world; where the stars hang over church steeples in empty, Dylan Thomas-singing streets.
No more desire for Greece: even for the Island of Hydra where Leonard Cohen went to live and where he met Marianne which gave birth to the song I wanted to listen to as I sailed across the Caspian Sea, as I trained across Siberia. No more desire for that Spanish island: just an ingrained knowledge of that place where she still lives lost to me with another who knows how to hold onto what is important.
I want to freeze in Siberia, to visit Freuchen land in Greenland, to live with the Sami, the Inuit.
I still on occasion return to that home that was never really a home but was as inhospitable and odd as a mechanically designated asteroid, an MX-37, and every time I return I feel the same feelings. Every time I return, I see the same people. I don't know these people. Perhaps once I was one of them making the rounds in Bellingham, from the coffee shop to the bookstore to the water's edge. We never found each other. Maybe if I had stayed, we would have, or else I would have grown into a solitude equivalently deep, in a way deeper than St. Joseph's hallucinatory desert realm of the spirit, and then it wouldn't have mattered.
There was that tall guy with the big glasses and ginger hair parted on the side. He wore his pants hiked high. I always saw him walking down by Michaels books where I think he might have worked, although I couldn't be sure.
There was the girl who walked everywhere. She was once small, but with all the walking grew bigger and bigger until she had massive, walkers thighs. She strode everywhere, downtown, all the way across town to the ferry terminal which sent ferries to Juno. Sometimes, I saw her out by the mall, having traversed Cornwall Park, striding through the inhospitable strip where nary a pedestrian tread.
There was the lonesome Michael Jackson impersonator, moonwalking on State Street.
There was Uncle Frank (the fake uncle of a friend) whom I always saw in cafes and who, as I aged, began to awkwardly ignore my presence, although this was a common practice among Bellingham residents, and I could count on being ignored by a variety of acquaintances. I think everyone could.
There was Bob the poetry MC who always kind of mocked me and who, as if by way of apology, had tattooed in large green lettering the words "Forgive Me" on the inside of his arm.
There were the ultra hip video store clerks who looked like characters from old Velvet Underground videos who acted like you were insane for talking with them about the movies you watched.
There was that guy who used to live across the street from us who practiced yoga in Broadway park and who had a correspondingly gentile yoga voice. One day as we played basketball in the street at dusk, he came out onto his balcony and shouted at us something along the lines of, "Shut up! My mother is sleeping!" I always saw him in coffee shops reading the paper.
There was the lady who as a 15 year old I occasionally chatted with in Henderson's bookstore. We once spoke of Sir Walter Scott. She was on a Scott kick. She spoke enthusiastically of the Waverly Novels. She had a pretty, bookish quality and I wondered if I were a bit older if there might not have been a spark. Years later, I saw her at Village Books in Fairhaven. She said she worked there for the discount. She was a great lover of books! And then, at last she was a person whom I saw muttering to herself in a coffee shop. Maybe she was having a bad day, and god knows I have been that same solitary coffee shop mutterer! But it was also as if she had grown so distant from the world, now in her 40's, she only had herself for company. I remember there was something cruel in me which kept me from reaching out to her, broaching her silence, reminding her of the day when she spoke enthusiastically of Sir Walter Scott.
I wonder what pain rips people from the rout toward love which at a certain point seems so blisteringly apparent! I wonder what strange, religious spirit drives people into a confusion so deep and a solitude so resounding it is beyond the solitude of the monk and the hermit because it is invisible and unacknowledged and unassisted and untended by the tender hands of supplicants!
As I write, I begin to remember. It's as if, at 33, I am picking up the pieces, remembering like a broken stick about when it was a part of a tree. I wonder if there is a way to grow back into that edifice of wholeness?
That summer when I returned to deliver the mail, I saw someone else I hadn't seen in years and never saw again. I saw Celeste the Tepee woman. She was at the Food Co Op. I don't know why I had stopped at The Food Co Op. It smelled like all health food stores smell. I think there was something about that smell, something which strikes some people as vaguely unwholesome but others as some kind of rallying cry, to join a band of brothers, to radically alter until all the vestiges of the old self die out and something new is born.
She stood before a bin of cashews. I said I remembered her from the old days. I found her voice as insincerely ebullient as I had found it years ago. She must have been just as old as I am now.
I am grateful that I have not wasted my youth in a tepee, but I wish I could go back to reconstruct myself as I was on the Canaries to not feel so much like I am dying.
I wonder if there's a way back, if I can sit here for long enough capturing all those moments and thereby regain my soul?
I remember the inbound flight, arriving in Las Palmas, Miriam awaiting me in the airport. I remember throwing my crab net into Bellingham bay, the way the line felt slick with sea water. I remember her skin so dark on her back there were patches of pink, I remember the way the sea air smelled on days the smoke from Georgia Pacific was blowing out; I remember her fearlessly kicking at bees that had hived in her phone booth, she as she was, complete, abundant, someone who I could never imagine wanting me yet somehow did; I remember Christmas Eve trying to believe in God but in the end trying to find something sublime in the attempt; I remember the way she cried when I left, the way I felt like I could return to the United States and be something more than what America saw in me.
Everything totally unrelated to these memories and the act of writing them down, my ambitions, my professional pursuits, is impure.
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