Bonnie and Clyde Files 26

Bonnie and Clyde Files , , , , , ,

I opened the trunk of the car to fetch the treats. Behind me, behind the gate, Bonnie and Clyde were going insane, crying, howling, barking, speaking, There is something new and crazy excited in their anticipation every time I visit.

Why isn’t it like that when visiting people you know?

Maybe it will be that way for me when I start meeting people I used to know. Maybe I’ll bring treats. Maybe they will.

The box felt light. I was down to one measly treat! How could I have forgotten to restock? Bonnie and Clyde would tear me to smithereens!

Then I saw it: a roll of summer sausage among a sealed Christmas gift pack that included cheese, nuts and chocolate, stored in the trunk for a roadside emergency, non-Christmas meal.

I ripped the sausage from the pack and stuffed it in the pocket of my corduroy coat. I unlatched the gate and Bonnie and Clyde bolted out. Clyde went for the sausage pocket and nearly bowled me over. I went to one knee and laughed. I herded the crew toward the pasture and we bounded (somewhat) toward the river. I stopped once, took out the roll and let the dogs sniff it. They cried and whimpered and did little canine Grateful Dead dances in the grass. I then cradled the sausage like a football and took off at a trot, making open field cuts and stiff arms against the two, would-be, veteran, furry tacklers.

We reached the river. It ran slack and thirsted for rain. I dug out my trusty Swiss army knife that has gone all over the world with me. I cut open the sausage roll and sliced up the meat for Bonnie and Clyde. I placed their snacks on the ground and they went at it.

I sat down on a rock and cleaned my knife in the river. My mind drifted to the probation office. Some 30 minutes earlier, I had sat alone in an office with my probation officer. There was supposed to be a whole group in attendance, but there wasn’t.

They were gone, all gone, to the willows, a van, a ditch, a bridge, a slough, a couch, jail, slumber, delusion, booze, pills, hell, a fishing boat, everywhere except for where they were supposed to be to punch the clock of the faceless clock.

It was simple attrition of the human soul. I was the only one left standing, or in this case, sitting.

For the last nine months, I had been doling out Christmas gift packs, McDonald’s gift certificates, clothes, shoes, toiletry kits and books I had written, to the homeless and almost homeless men of the probation group. I was running a rescue mission out of the trunk of my car, and good friends in Astoria had provided the supplies after I shared probation stories of utter human misery, stories that had shattered my belief in the American criminal justice system and drilled a hole in my heart.

No one was left. I had no one left to help.

A few months earlier, after telling my father of my rescue mission efforts, he told me. “Don’t get too involved, take care of yourself first.”

It was not what I expected to hear from him. He always taught me to serve others and I had done exactly that my entire professional life. In this probation group, I had the ultimate OTHERS sitting in front of me, doped up, denuded, delaminated, distended, disintegrating across the table from me, almost invisible like a Ralph Ellison-kind-of invisible, but an insidious new invisibility, a profitable one, (for the corporations) and one largely unseen to the American public who are rapidly deconstructing a nation that will end up intestate.

I saw men devolve in real time. Try that from three feet away. I’ll never be the same and I’ve got to bear witness.

Maybe that’s not such a bad outcome for us, intestate. Let the coyotes and gulls inherit what’s left. Let a wily coyote lift his leg on a Statue of Liberty half buried in the sand. I won’t be the Charlton Heston character wearing a loincloth ,pounding his fist in the sand, furious at the result. I’d be doing a little jig in the surf. I’d being wearing corduroy.

“I’ve got to help some way,” I said to Dad. “It’s who I am.”

We left it at that.

I stood up and put my knife in pocket. I had lost all track of time and Bonnie and Clyde had dozed off in the grass, passed out from sausage overload.

They rousted, came over, and I noticed the sausage wrapper had vanished. Clyde, of course.

I held them close for a moment, a kestrel swooped by, and then we took the trail to home.

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The Joyful Mind

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The joyful mind occupies my mind. In my case, it seems to occur when I least expect it. Something happens, I feel immense joy, and the feeling creates a joyful mind. The state lasts for a few minutes or even a full hour.

I suppose one can pay for a joyful mind, but that seems unlikely for me. Cultivation of a joyful mind, however, is possible. I believe I can cultivate a joyful mind or at least try to initiate one. Going to the beach is such a method of initiation for me.

The other morning, I saw a squirrel on the South Jetty and I was astonished at how much joy quickly reverberated through me. The joyful mind built up to skyscraper heights in a second.

After the squirrel vanished into the rocks, I sat down on the sand and listed everything I could think of that creates a joyful mind within me.

Here it is:

Writing this list of joy.

A good walk with my friend Joe and listening to him discuss the various potions he invents to heal himself and others (myself included).

Discovering an old and out-of-print book that delights me and informs my thinking and writing. The latest discovery: West Coast Shells, first published in 1877.

Building a driftwood fort.

Rescuing forlorn paper from thrift stores.

Building a driftwood sculpture and decorating with beach treasures (pictured here).

Walking with Bonnie and Clyde.

Distributing my books in street libraries and returning to find them gone.

Hearing Russian spoken in nature.

Sipping Calvados with my two best friends.

Teaching writing workshops.

Reading names and equations of love carved into the walls of beachfront cliffs.

Documenting Oregon Tavern Age life.

Encountering anything related to elk, including scat.

Finding Virgin Corduroy Garments (good band name!)

Inventing absurd band names.

Hearing that someone has renounced social media.

Finding keyhole limpets.

Watching deer in my back yard.

Watching deer eat my tomatoes.

Making soup on a rainy day.

Eating breakfast with gulls.

Writing hand-written letters.

Receiving hand-written letters.

Seeing someone change her mind.

Meeting someone with a curious mind.

Reuniting with someone who was once a major part of my life.

Watching men fish for surf perch.

Meeting new people who care about the world.

Generating a new idea to save me from marginalization and financial ruin. (I got one today while watching the squirrel.)

Seeing someone dance on the beach to “LA Woman” by the Doors.

Writing a love story that was pure truth.

Meeting someone who hasn’t written me off.

Hearing from a former student that I taught them something valuable.

Watching Youngs Bay.

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Another Probation Poem

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I sit in my car,

drinking three-day old Yuban.

A young man and woman

vape in the fog.

They look like aliens

breathing sustenance

before the invasion.

I walk in the office.

The receptionist wears

knee-high black boots

and a tight orange skirt.

I pay the Man.

He is there,

in the corner,

monologuing the Coke machine,

telling it about

the Columbus Day storm

he survived,

holding on to a tree.

The Coke machine nods.

Today is Columbus Day.

I walk out.

I simply

can’t take it.

Where is that invasion?

Where is the new Columbus for not only America,

but the world?

Wade ashore and plant that flag.

Convert or die.

I think we need it.

The invaders might even

have mercy.

There are woods

behind the office.

He should consider

walking into them

and never come out.

Sit down and return to earth.

One last honorable act.

It’s a hard thing to think

that about a fellow man.

The worst thought of my life,

a thought that reorders your cells.

What happened to my mercy?

It droppeth not from heaven.

The gentle rain is acid rain.

Mercy has walked the plank,

said Bob Dylan.

Why is Dick Cheney still alive and Prince is dead?

Write me a poem on that.

It’s all the harder because

the man looks Kurt Vonnegut

a week before he died.

Kurt loathed Columbus.

Kurt survived the fires of Dresden

in a meat locker.

This man is already dead…

dead man talking to a Coke machine.

(But perhaps not! He also says he wants to see the Fleetwood Mac tribute band coming to town. He’s collected enough cans and bottles. He wants to rock and roll. The probation officer doesn’t know if he will let him.)

Back in the car,

I pull Walt from

the glove department.

There will be something

in there I missed.

There always is.

The leaves of grass

always leave you wanting more.

I open at random and read:

A woman waits for me,

she contains all,

nothing is lacking.

I smile. I didn’t know

Walt wrote science fiction!

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Oregon Tavern Age: Friday Noon Champagne

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“After mental poisoning, one needs physical remedies and champagne.”

Stendhal, The Red and The Black

 

Rain fell outside the Sea Star Lounge. It fell on a Friday at noon. It was a winter rain but it wasn’t winter yet.

In a pick-up truck parked on the street, a large brown poodle stuck its head out the passenger-side window and lapped at the rain.

An OTA man with a breathing apparatus sat at the bar, drinking a Bud, and watching a 25-year old Arnold Schwarzenegger film. Things were getting blown up.

I sat at the corner table next to the lending library. I was writing a love letter and drinking porter, my rain beer. Behind me on the wall hung a poster for a wellness clinic in town—the first such poster I have ever seen in OTA country. I tried imagining anyone ever reading the poster and going to the clinic. An OTA in a yoga class? That I wanted to see.

The lending library had a couple new items since my last visit. I noticed Henry James’ The American and picked up this old, old hardback edition missing the jacket cover. I’d always wanted to read it, and here it was.

I set the book back on the shelf and found a CD: Bruce Willis’ The Return of Bruno. I picked it up and perused. It was hard to believe Motown had produced this record. Marvin Gaye is still rolling over.

For some reason, I took great comfort in knowing that Henry James’ novel would leave the Sea Star long before Bruce Willis’ CD. In fact, the CD would never leave and end up as mere rubble when the Sea Star met its final end, either in fire, a razing, a new national temperance movement, or when cannabis finally took over the culture and put booze out of work for all time.

An OTA woman wearing black lycra pants and a pink hoodie walked in the bar. A few seconds later, I heard the pop of a champagne cork. It unsettled me. One does not hear that sound very often in OTA country. I recalled only one other time in 20 years; someone was celebrating someone’s suicide.

I looked over and the bartender was pouring a class of Andre, the same type I drank in high school with my girlfriend in her Pinto. I miss her and that car.

Ten minutes oozed by. I kept writing the love letter. Rain fell harder. The porter started crawling through me. I thought about how William Blake used to drink porter in the nude with his wife in his back yard and recite her lines from Shakespeare.

I’d like to try that some day, but maybe passages from Sometimes A Great Notion instead.

Another woman, much younger, walked in the bar. She was wearing black lycra pants, black sneakers and a black hoodie. She had long straight black hair. She was definitely not OTA.

She passed my table and I followed her with my gaze. By the time she sat down on a stool next to the other woman clad in lycra, the bartender had her glass of champagne filled. The two women clinked the glasses together and gulped down the Andre. They got a refill, stood up, and went over to the video poker alcove.

The letter could wait. Its recipient would never read it anyway.

I started imagining a story for the two women—a noir story because it was raining outside, my beer was almost black, and I was drinking it alone in a dive bar.

Here was what I imagined:

The two lycra women are both sleeping with the same rich OTA man (yes, a few are rich, pouring concrete is good money) and the women know this because they are friends, perhaps even lovers. The man is oblivious to the relationship between the woman. He thinks he’s in love with both of them. He’s never married before, has no heirs, but he wants to marry before he dies.

It all started as a lark, sex with the same guy without him knowing they knew each other (it was dare of some kind) but then the women decide to murder the man after he proposes to the OTA woman (in the bar, with a bottle of Andre). They want his money, his house, his guns, and his herd of prize goats. The only problem: how to pull it off without raising suspicion.

They drank champagne late into the night and schemed. There was only one way—a menage a trois. It would take three minutes, tops. His heart would explode. The coroner would sign off in seconds and the OTA woman would weep at the funeral, toss a ceremonial can of Rainier into his grave before the gravediggers buried him, and collect the score after a quick run through probate court. She’d then split everything with her friend. They’d keep the house, shoot off the guns and ditch the goats.

It wasn’t even actually a murder.

Hey, I said to myself, that is a hot idea for a story! Dark and kink. I started taking notes. This was way better than writing a still-born love letter!

The two women came back over to the bar and ordered another round of champagne. A cork popped. I wanted a closer look at them together, for the details, the nuances, sounds, the vibe, so I went up to get another porter.

I stood a few feet away from the women and listened.

The younger woman said to the OTA woman: “Mom— ”

Damn! The story just got ten times better.

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Stalin on the Columbia

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I saw a scrawny small dog tethered to a wooden post of a decaying Lewis and Clark historical display. The Columbia River rolled choppy blue and west a few feet behind it. In the channel, a variegated freighter headed toward Astoria and beyond. Its name: a rather pedestrian American Pacific. Its cargo: nothing on deck, not even containers bearing products no one really needs.

A light rain fell. All the better for my afternoon stroll along the Warrenton trail to my clear my overcast head.

The dog noticed me and looked over. I approached it and noticed its owner sitting on a bench of the display of a large book, an 800-pager at least. I couldn’t discern the title but it was a thick red font in the style of Soviet propaganda art.

I was intrigued. It’s rare to see people reading in the rain, much less with a dog, much less along a mighty river surrounded by molding plaques recounting the myths of two overrated historical figures.

She was elderly and wearing a head scarf reminiscent of the Russian peasant women in the documentary films building tank traps and cooking up borscht near dead bodies to save Stalingrad from the Panzers.

Beside her rested an elderly three-wheeled bicycle, blue, with a little trailer all decked out cozy for the dog.

I took my walk down the river and marveled at the cormorants and gulls perched on the rotting piers. Oh, to join them!

A half an hour later, I saw the woman bicycling toward me on the paved trail.

Here was my chance. I had to know the title of the book.

I angled toward her in such a way that she would have to slow down or come to a complete halt.

Rude.

She pedaled up, huffing and puffing, and the dog was sacked out in the trailer.

I gave ground. We came together and the bicycle barely moved forward.

“What were you reading?” I said.

“Stalin,” she growled in a thick Russian accent.

She passed me.

I caught a glimpse of the book.

Sure enough, the red read STALIN.

I had read this biography years ago.

And here I was meeting a direct descendant from its pages.

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Bonnie and Clyde Files 25

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It was perfect fall football weather: sunny and crisp. I thought of all my good times with football and football with my father. A lot of people don’t know I once coached junior high football with my father for two seasons. It was probably our best time together. We even won a few games but that was hardly the point.

Bonnie and Clyde met me at the gate and Clyde worked up a new crazed inflection in his howling for treats. I laughed and wished I had recorded it.

We made our way through the pasture. Cows had grazed it to stubble except for a few lonely nettles with fluffy seed heads ready to blow. I kicked a field goal or two with the seed heads and split the uprights a hundred times.

An osprey flew overhead. A log truck rumbled in the distance. I saw lichen hanging from the electric fence. Someone had sprayed herbicide along the fence line. The lichen had survived.

The dogs flanked me in the field. I pitched them treats as if they were running backs on a sweep play. We reached the river and it barely moved. I could hear only a slight sound of water trickling down the rapids, if rapids six inches deep can be said to be rapids.

The alders across the river had not yet lost most of their leaves, but the leaves were yellowing and preparing to fall.

I said to myself: I want to see a damn beaver!

The dogs reconned up the bank and I skipped a few rocks. I knelt down and washed my bearded face with my hands in the river. I lathered up my whiskers with water. If I’d brought along my shaving kit, I would have shaved right then and there and pretended a Mountain Man status. I might have even stropped the razor because I love the word strop and once used it in a sentence that read: “I want rain to strop me.”

I noticed a few flat rocks and started building a cairn. I had no idea why. I am certainly no mystical cairn man in nature—definitely more of a chili-from-the-can fort guy.

But, I was building. Five, six rocks and then a collapse. Rebuild. Collapse. Rebuild. I picked out better rocks and the cairn solidified. It became a true marker of something I couldn’t name. No one would ever see this cairn. The elk might but so what? They don’t need cairns.

I suppose I need cairns at this point in my life: everything seems utterly directionless. There is no guide, no path.

Is there anyone or anything building me cairns? What an interesting question to ask of one’s self.

Maybe these two old dogs are.

Clyde came over and sniffed at my pocket for a treat. I stood up, reached inside, and found two. I tossed one to Bonnie drinking from the river and placed the other on top of the cairn. Clyde didn’t hesitate. He gobbled it down. He licked the top rock.

He did not topple the cairn and that made me laugh aloud on the river. And the laughter felt great.

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