Lord Jehovah in the name of
Jesus have mercy! In a rapsodic daze I stumbled into the train station,
my lips burning, my soul branded. Did that really happen? Or what?
When
you attempt to be an astronaut but don't quite make it ~ when you're
one unit shy of graduation & on empty ~ when you grow weary of
working some bummer job & can't find anything else but another one
~ when you grow wary of handing all your money over to your greedy
property-gobbling landlord month after month ~ when you have fallen in
love while nobody has fallen in love with you ~ and the military is no
longer a viable option ~
Don't hang yourself. Come with me. And be ~
A tramp ~
And celebrate spring!
Well,
the old dude behind the counter told me it would take 3 days for me to
get on a train ~ a train to Flagstaff, Arizona. Lordy, by that time the
VA could catch-up to me and have me all talked into going back to work.
So I stepped across the small lobby to where a person could catch a bus
instead, which the senora behind the counter told me could be caught at
4 o'clock, about 5 hours away. Okay ~ I bought the ticket. Incidently,
I also had the back-pack weighed. It weighed some thirty-odd pounds ~
hmmm. I checked it in & went and sat down. No. I tried to check it
in but was not allowed to do so 'til a half hour before the bus left ~ five hours away.
Yehaaaaaaa, Greyhound.
Then
I went & sat down, still fondling the pack. There was a little
group of lockers in the corner of the waiting area that didn't work ~
like what else was new? I got up, found this out & wore the pack around downtown
Albuquerque killing time as my womb-burned lips cooled off. After a coffee
here, a pizza there, I came back and sat down again ~ sat the back-pack
down next to me. Me and my pack were rapidly becoming bosom buddies!
Speaking
of which, suddenly, I missed my room-mate. God forbid, how could one
miss a room-mate? For over two years I'd been complaining about having
a room-mate. The unexpected emotion welled-up out of no-where. I sat
there in the train station waiting for a bus, missing my room-mate ~ who was an
old black man with a bad back. Huffing and puffing was I ~ on the verge
of tears!
I
was mashed like potatoes, sliced like bread, spread like mayonaise, and
chilled like milk. But most of all, I was drop-kicked by the "Nigger Of
The Narcissus," by Joseph Conrad. Whoa, what am I talkin' 'bout,
oh reading commander?
It came down to this: this man, with his
overflowing pile of shit in our room that I was not allowed to
shovel-out ~ this man, with his tenacity, sense of worth & fairness
& humanity, not to mention intelligence wisdom & savy ~ this
futher-muckin' son-of-a-whipper-schmucker had pulled my head up outta
my frickin' ass.
I had knocked over lamps, thrown books at the
wall, dumped entire cans of Ajax all over the bathroom and left it
there. I had paraded around naked with Indian war-paint on my face and
with the Dixie Chicks screeching on my music box (and on repeat), "I
need a boy like you like I need a hole in the head!" I couldn't get rid
of this feller, his television, his cancer-like mess of belongings, his
midnight-snacking with his mouth open, or his constant yammering about
his bad back & his last employer & the endless
march-of-the-lawyers aftermath. And he was always there ~ when I
woke-up, when I went to work, when I came back, when I went to sleep.
Other than these & oh so many other incorrigibilities, Quest was a
pretty nice guy.
Early
on, he suggested we stick together for survival's sake. He wasn't
kidding. In time, we grew to understand each other & modified our
noisy media engines. And I became kind ~ I, kind! And that's what I
mean when I say he pulled my head up outta ~ the gravel.
And this
is why I can't help but mention "The Nigger of the Narcissus," by
Joseph Conrad. In this classic olde English novel, a black dude jams up the
white-boy crew on the ship "Narcissus," when he decides to die on a
particular voyage. All the white boys end up taking care of this black feller until he's
finally gone. Quest, bless his soul, was the target
of my "Narcissus," or of my oh so vain & over-blown self-concern.
One day I begun to give him the Dixie Chick treatment on my 25-dollar music box. He raised gospel music to a high level of vibration on his much more elaborate music system, drowned the Dixie Chicks until they were face-down n' dead. The worst part of it was, he started singing to the gospel music ~ all gooey-eyed and walking like an Egyptian while sitting on the edge of his rack, if you can picture that. Singing! We were friends, but this was going much too far.
Lord Jehovah in the name of Jesus have mercy ~ I had left without saying good-bye.
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