Haven't published for some time. My time has been devoted to writing a novel. I've decided to put some small segments here for a "taste". I truly hope this is a success. I'm not E-ven going to try to explain this. The novel will likely end up around 6-700 pages. These are just tiny, random tidbits that I like. I simply hope that the teaser of the words will bring about their own world in your head when you least expect it, and some of you who read this will unexplainably awaken in the night and get the urge to get out of bed, find my post, and read it again. Then you'll have to go back to bed and wonder..."Will this man ever publish this thing he's writing?".
The Blue Prophet of Gingham
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On the shelves were pictures in small frames. One was of himself, big and bright in the center of two other men, all dressed in Army greens with no hats on. They had taken them off and were holding them for the picture that someone else was taking for them, perhaps a passing native of the land they were in. But it was an excellent picture, blue skies and a sandy and palmy town in the background, and very blue water just off to the left in the corner of the frame. His army buddies’ smiles were so large it seemed they would hurt themselves. Korea was golden and green. Their youth then was still evident and glowing from them, and must have been impressive even to the photographer, three troubadours on a sabbath, the day belonging to them, so far from home and so much water in the way, but for the moment triuphant. This was as far south in Korea as you could be in that time, the north taken, the starched olive and red army erecting barriers, walling others out, or was it walling themselves in? And Oholibamah then, not having his new name yet, was free as the wind at that time, his discharge up any day, papers to go home, having now learned of the local world across the great sea, having met the enemy face to face in combat and won, having kept his integrity of mind and heart. Oholibamah knew his work there was finished, and his life was uncertain on coming back weather he would get in the school of his choice, or if there was a school of his choice, as had been advertised. He wanted to become an engineer then, and rank amongst those building up America, building highways, bridges, dams, and even more difficult projects. He knew where the money was, and the jobs were, and he thought maybe he knew how to get one for himself. He was full of hope, the picture radiating, the buddies holding on to each other, ready to take a life raft back home if their big transport plane didn’t leave soon, the sun belonging to them, as well as the wind. They had to believe in something, they’d seen so much in the north, and had failed. They’d shot, and rescued, and burned, and saw burning, and faced an invisible enemy, and an enemy that was so very different than they themselves knew of, and they longed for home and the moist dirt and the corn-fed girls and the smell of perfume and lavender toilet water and a movie and a chance at creating something instead of destroying it. Their homesickness was not seen in the picture because they were already home in their hearts and minds, their air lift just being a shuttle really, gifts already wrapped and token of their trip packed, but not much thought of, only home mattered. Oholibamah didn’t know exactly what home would be like when he got there as momma had not written for a month. He figured that since she knew that her boy was coming back and he would not get his mail anyhow she had ceased writing because it would likely be lost in transit or get to the wrong place, and that trouble with daddy had been taken care of that she mentioned, just another one of his failures that they would have to overcome, but maybe…maybe in time he would make good yet. Her last letter seemed broken.
One other picture in particular stood out amongst all others, the picture of the virgin Mary. But this was no ordinary picture. This Mary was quite dark, and beautiful yes, but not slender like so many of the white Marys he had seen, and full in the features, hinting at Africa, but somehow not all African, not all American negro either, but something hybrid, something south across the Mediterranean, and universal about her. After all, Mother Mary was mother to God, and like Eve a new mother, primal and a bit of us all. Maybe she was from Mesopotamia, the birthbed. Yet Oholibamah liked the picture for many reasons, not the least of which was his belief in the Mother, but that is it also reminded him of Her, his own Mother, just more rounded, his mother being more slender, and actually more beautiful he thought. When he thought hard about it, he could see her above him over his bed, the clean white shirts she would wear making her more brown than she was really, there in the reflected light of the doorway, the smell of her perfect skin close to him, the laundry folded in her lap where she left off doing it for a minute to check on him, she folding what came in from the line, her smile perfect somehow, white, not a gap anywhere, the eyes clean like white fire around the greenish deep brown in the center, sometimes reflecting golden in the right light when they were outside, sometimes almost black in light like that by his bed or in the evening half-light. He worshipped her. He did not understand how it was that daddy did not seem to worship her in the same way. Daddy was another story. He was also a beautiful man in his own way, but very sad to Oholibamah’s memory. He seemed always to be striving, unlike the picture there of Mary, holding the little dark child, the same color as she, there in the bundle, only a small speck of his face showing, one closed eye, the virgin Mary looking out and away, not at anything in particular, but the gaze that went beyond the picture frame, beyond you, beyond the horizon, and you knew, out, out beyond the now the here and the real and through all, a lightning strike that seems like an x-ray it’s so brilliant that it pierces things and you can see the inner workings right down to the center of a cell and the mitochondria swimming around in the cell, and right through your heart. She saw God the Father. There wherever that stare went was God the Father, and her even and calm stare said, “I will always take care of this one, hide him until his time comes, hold him and cherish the brief touch of him in this life, keep the bond between us special, even more so because you told me so yourself and kept your unusual promise, and keep my virgin secret, the miracle child here in my arms. I will watch, and wait.” There was no doubt in the picture, or fear.
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It was just Saturday night and all this had accumulated from the settling dust of the night before. Friday had brought the great cloud of accumulation and fear and trembling and joy and unspeakable truths, and Sat. looked like regular lawn mowing day, there in April, like a regular day just to relax and let out a few bars of a favorite song and then go to work on something on the house and catch a glimpse of regular season baseball as it opens up and trim the hedge and call a friend or their family up about the possibility of a barbeque and leaving the kids with a teen so that you can all go out to the drive-in and watch a race movie or hey, the Green Berets was playing last you heard. But that was not what Friday left on the doorstep really. It had pulled in something entirely different other than this snapshot of postwar booming reality. It had dropped off a negative from the photo shop for examination by the photographer to see if he wanted prints, but the negative was much closer to reality than the white picket fence and the clipped grass and American Beauty roses and new storefronts and the polished chrome rims and comparing war tattoos. It had dropped off something that was a cure for the itch that Saundra of the library could not scratch. Whether it was the cure for the thing that she wanted or not, she would not be sure.
The cloud had brought with it a stranger in paradise that hid within him the hard hurt of a personal reality that defied paradise. He had a microscope in his pocket and was taking slides of every soul around him in vain hopes of a cure for a disease he felt that only he had.
The quiet storm had also dropped a blue bomb in the midst of Missouri. He came with paint and words and a quarrel with normal.
But Friday did not indeed just dole out evil without providing the scale equivalent of the cure, and the possibility of grasping at it, and even went so far as to place it carefully within arm’s reach of Sunday morning. Friday wanted it’s own cure worse than Saturday ever knew. Saturday is always oblivious to Friday’s whoredom and willfully ignorant of Sunday’s repentance, being instead the dancing nephew and niece of imprudence and licentiousness, the dazed, heat-of-the-moment reveler at Carnival not knowing where the bottom of the pocket is really whilst playing the games of chance that inevitably empties it.
Saturday was a five aspirin day. A day to sleep in and let the breeze through the window wake you. Children crept up early on Saturday because they knew they could watch cartoons without getting caught because mom and dad were most likely asleep late and didn’t care if Tom and Jerry killed each other or not. Flash Gordon almost always got lazered, even though the evil dominion never really won completely and Roy Rogers was old and boring.
Friday and Sunday were fighting.
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The cloud went East, but moved back over Washington, D.C., and over Chicago, and over the Mississippi to Kansas City, the center of the country, and thought that quite interesting. It had a mind to settle down in one place all of the hard interests that had come it’s way. There were those, like Jerry Rubin, who thought that freedom would be best served in such a way that it meant freedom from restraint. This was certainly a welcome message to the latest and greatest generation, or so they thought themselves, and fed their appetite with freedom of the flesh and freedom of the mind, and mostly, freedom from the rules. If you wore a tie to work you were a rule-maker. The tie was a rope that tethered you to The Man and all of The Man was tied together, so to speak, in one giant boardroom. So the Cloud would be plopping down distinctive tie-cutters and putting them at the doorsteps of the tie-makers. The confrontations were inevitable. It’s just like dust settling in a corner. The question was just which corner would they all find a swirling eddy in which to mix.
Across the land in 1968 all things were breaking. Nothing was working right. Airplanes began to fall from the sky. Baggage for your flight didn’t end up in the right places. Technology was not in place yet to control all of the vast and quickly growing systems that were already in operation. Mail got routed to the wrong addresses, and plain old delivery of packages was becoming a joke. For the first time in North American history there were massive sit-outs, as opposed to sit-ins, of government workers like the US Postal Service, the garbage men of New York, and air and freight unions. They began to expect something back from their America. The cloud brought with it a range of emotions and sentiments that went beyond feeling and catapulted whole people groups into action. But it was 1968 when all the shit hit the fan.
A young man named Hunter began writing about it all on the road and taking it all in; a young man with a pen and a typewriter, and another named Jack.
And there was another strange older young man who’s sentiments ran after all the rest of the young flesh. He was also a writer, but mostly a physical observer of those who wrote and sang and sat-in, and popped pills and shot things in their veins and threw off their clothing in public and piled on each other in orgiastic glee. He did it all too, but not necessarily with deep abandon, but rather with curious observation, and then wrote it all down; a scientist making notes. William dug himself deep enough into the culture to not get out again. He would write about people hanging themselves and the dark side of the 50s and 60s.
The cloud had already picked up and swept up another young man and a young woman at about the same time, almost straight from the beaches of the California coast. The young woman smoked quite a bit of pot, and she had quite a bit of pot to smoke as she lived and breathed amongst the glitterati of Hollywood and Beverly Hills houses during the day and ran off in a (car description) at night to be amongst the thrilling and adventurous and dangerous lives on the strip, daddy and mummy bankrolling her right up until she had enough of her own notoriety and wanted revolution. Jane would have painted herself blue and invaded a small town as well if she had thought of the idea first. But she was off to foreign shores and marches and colleges, believing that her mind and the power of her persuasion and her position as a woman, and a good looking woman at that, had persuasive power in the shifting tide of cultural opinion and direction, the direction that the cloud moved. And they did. Jane was a freedom junkie; freedom from restraint. Everywhere else she touched down freedom from restraint at home led her to hand out freedom from restraint like candy with a spirit of aplomb and a great degree of persuasive politicking.
Speaking of handing out candy, the young man named Timothy practically threw new basement-manufactured pharmaceuticals at people, trying to hit them in the eyes with his little pills and blotters and pads of chemicals; trying desperately to change the face of the human earth with his “natural” science, telling old children that they needed to drop out of their normal day-jobs, tune in to whatever natural occurrences would happen after partaking of his wares, and turn on like some kind of switch which was basically the opposite of what people were in their ‘normal’ waking lives and become something else entirely. This was so appealing that quite a huge number from California to New York, and over the big pond where opium was already a fashion long-enjoyed, partook of his chemicals and did just as described. Many a chaotic moment came and went around this culture of opposites; living negatives walking the streets and lying on the beaches and surrounding the night clubs and some cutting themselves on the sharp edge of the living, and dying instead. Many took trips they would not return from. Timothy swore that his favorite trip was riding a motorcycle as fast as he could go and having a bunch of other motorcycles suddenly come up along side ridden by huge rats with machine guns and shooting at him.
