Mary Sands

 

Excerpt from Honor Rock

Prologue

Puesta del Sol hotel. Beautiful poor maze of tiny buildings, thatched roofs, open arched windows. Immersed in a bevy of nut palms and banana trees, leafy protuberances knocking at screens each night. Think to ask owner of hotel whether any nearby places are good to rent. Maybe should ask Theodore, local fisherman also from Europe, southern France, where to go--what to do. Finally buy netting. It's an imperative. Not that I haven't had my share of bugs and strange sea fish and creatures flashing by my skin on land, water, but mosquitoes here are deadly. First off bus from trip inland to see ruins, someone says two people have contracted Malaria. I put repellent on the netting and also my skin. That seems to keep them out. Everything so tropical here, but the jungle draws me. It is the outskirts of life as I've known it 30 years. People co-exist here. Reminds me of why I came: Zipolite Beach. Not nudity I'm after, but the flock of expats who've made their way here. Reminders of life they too left, even though they try to be different--they only take their ideas somewhere else. Good surf, interesting people. Though not my type either, wholly. I never felt so free as to bare my all to people I don't know. Nothing can take me from where I was raised, and how I was raised, even jungles and ruins caked in slimy air sweat thousands of miles away. It's not only like being in a different county, but in a different time-zone, on a different planet. Surely the same elements exist in this atmosphere: oxygen, carbon, traces of helium, zinc, nickel. Yet what a poor nation--junkyards like shimmering apocalyptic Christmas leftovers. Strange shiny streamers, chrome bellied by sun, stench for miles (remember road to Zipolite, off highway, never again; they say more toll roads will be built).

Gilligan meets Gulliver meets Colonel Kurtz.

-Bron Doyan
June 1991

Chapter 1

June 2001

"Write a touching story about a boy and his monkey," said the faceless muse, when Elaine Larsowitz asked. The line hit her on more levels that maybe it was meant, and her sardonic thoughts wove strange visuals until she returned to watching the way her horizon rolled out ahead in a splendid twist of waves punctured by jagged shadowy rocks on blue, while Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue" played through parlor windows and bamboo frames, and his trumpet skidded across the southern California coastline where everything was perfect, right now.

Elaine ripped another sheet of paper out of the typewriter--an old Underwood she picked up in a Lake Forest antique shop. Shove another paper in. Watch the sky. William Burroughs once said you could write your way out of anything.

"Write a story about a doctor who creates a sex-change button that when pressed actually blows up people. Oh, the hilarity that will ensue!!" said another invisible muse.

Thoughts of Kilgore Trout.

"Combine and fuck with ideas," said a muse with a name: his name was Bolt Vanderhuge.

Elaine drank a glass of red wine, a big glass, not a goblet with an elegant stem, but a large tumbler that had been sitting in the icebox. The wine was cheap, grapey, and serious like a sunset, transporting her to the center of the universe where things were happening while the rest of the world was nearby and parading up and down Pacific Coast Highway. They were in cars, in jars, waving back at the statue of Elier Larson at the Pottery Shack and watching hobos blow bubbles with their home-made wands that they were trying to sell. Just like a Sinatra song, or even a Dead Kennedys song, this coastal town was a combination of Seurat dots that jangled with a romantic ballad or a punk puncher, and everything was both connected and apart, dancing together and apart.

A woman with a straw hat down on the shore was painting something, and she allowed herself to move slowly and freely, her fingers like graceful leaves. Her appearance made Elaine feel safe, because someone else was in her world, in their own world, and Elaine felt less lonely. Because all artists are both alone and a part of everything around them. The woman wore a scarf about her neck, lavender cotton knit shorts, and a frilly smock shirt.

If Elaine walked past the little strawberry patch to the southwest part of the guest cottage, she could see the end of Thalia Street and its tiny beach, and upward toward the main beach in Laguna and southward toward Dana Point, but here at her patio desk she could only imagine the ocean views as they existed; her view if she leaned down to type was mostly obstructed by a gathering of untended and overgrown bougainvillea mussed by eucalyptus branches and tiny, white jasmine petals creeping up wrought iron fencing that her mother had laid around the pink brick of the patio. Red chili peppers dried against the stark white stucco of the Pacific-facing porch. If she went around to Mums' main house and sat on a big rock that she called "Honor Rock," she could once again see the entire expanse of the ocean and as far away as the outward thrust of San Pedro, Catalina Island, and San Clemente Island on a very clear day. Still, June Gloom and hazy days were cotton marine layers early in the morning and evening, so she would wait for the drier and windier days when the Santa Anas would come like ghosts from the desert through the Cajon pass and take all the smog and fog away, and rip apart palm trees so their brown fronds would pellet the ground and then everything would turn brown and there would be no rain for months, until February when days and nights would be sleet and rain and an occasional mudslide.

"The standard third-person, Germanic sentence-structure style is often restrictive."

Miles Davis played a string of notes that reminded Elaine of a time when she was in sixth grade with her friend Amelia near Chicago. They had just been to ballet practice, and it was a rainy day in autumn, the kind of day that makes leaves stick to the street and cars bellyslide and rain fall sideways. Amelia and Elaine were waiting for Amelia's mother (a factory worker who drank too much gin and was often late) come pick them up from the dance academy in a little quaint suburb village called Western Springs, twenty minutes away from their little Polish neighborhood on the far west side near Tony's Bar and Grill. Amelia's mom had not shown, and it was dusk outside, with rain splashing in big tear drops across the sad streets and blurring the lantern orange glow of the coming night. Amelia and Elaine decided to mope and pick at their hair, and complain because they had no jackets with them and the rain was cold. Everyone else had gone home. Elaine stomped her foot to the sidewalk cluttered with maple, elm, beech, and willow leaves of all kinds in a rain growing harder, and said "I want to dance!," and both girls began to jump around and suddenly realized nothing was as bad as they thought. They laughed and threw arms around each other. They were new to ballet, and never did learn the ballet too well, and so jumped and twisted and tippy-toed and arched and pointed their fingers to the sky and were just like the trumpet pings coming in the groove air right now, pouncing softly on the ocean glass. Plink.

"Maybe it's your style that makes the work seem unfocused. Try to fuck with it a bit. Imagine if a book by Leo Tolstoy had been written instead by Chuck Palahniuk." Thanks to muse Bolt Vanderhuge, again.

The glass of wine felt warmer now, while the day grew cooler, and the adjustment of temperature changes made her feel softer than before, like pastel wallpaper in a sunny room in Briton. O' the crag of the sea!

Her mother moved to California twenty years ago after Dad died of an early heart attack. Amelia, her best friend, who now preferred to be called Amy was, two decades later, an associate professor at Columbia College. That move. Away from Chicago and pool halls and times when everyone was together laughing, drinking, and dancing always, but underneath on terrible Sunday afternoons after church, people's real (or were they real?) colors came out as they snored and bitched and shook their heads suddenly finding that last night's unexpected beauty was nothing and all that existed was the brown snow and slush beneath the tires, and it was too cold to go out and enjoy it in the windy city. And on Sundays the warm sun would flood laundry rooms and make puddles for sleeping cats. Cigarette smoke and the smell of ham and applesauce cake, or corned beef and cabbage, would penetrate the whole house on every block--thick dumplings prepared by tired mothers' hands would sit idling in an unscrubbed pot hours after luncheons when everyone was too lazy and hungover to finish cleaning. Fathers would light pipes or another cigarette, and make Bloody Marys or open cheap beer, and sullenly grow from hearty young promising men to the sad shadows of slumped poor men, tired with aching muscles, bulging stomachs from all those years.

The neighborhood back then was the epitome of her heart: brownstone houses and bus-stops, corner bakeries that had been around for half a century, the real city far from the loop. Where Tony would give away free corned beef and one free beer to all his patrons on St. Patty's Day. Everyone got drunk all day in the bar. Even the women. People danced and clasped hands and told stories of the salt mines, the stockyards, the endless factories of red-brick dallying below the Chicago skyline.

Midway Airport, 1990. Red-eye flight from L.A. to Chicago for Amy's mom's memorial service. Mums the whole way sipping tea. One cup lasted from Los Angeles to approximately Denver. Cold tea, no lemon. Elaine hiding in Anne Tyler's Accidental Tourist, the irony of it reaching her like a pit in the stomach. Five gin and tonics, one beer, for Elaine. Four and a half hour flight. California had turned her into a hermit, and meanwhile Mums had made a good living as a photographer, something brand new and out of left field. Mums thrived in California. Elaine hadn't yet. Ten years in utopia had not brought back Amy or Elaine's father. The only thing she did was protest. Protest the winds in the summer and the rain in the winter. Protest the development around Crystal Cove. Protest the tattooed lipstick her mother wore ever since remarrying a guy named Eddie Winters. No shit. That was his name.

Midway airport was where Elaine changed her mind about everything. Realized she had been clinging too much to something long gone. The brick buildings were old, the streets old. Time could warp, not always hug you. Nothing felt right, not even Amy's embrace upon landing. Where was the ocean? Elaine needed it. Ten years made people forget what they had been trying to hold onto. Familiarity should have been touched, felt hard, but had glanced away. Three days later flying back to LA at night, seeing the orange lights of cities for miles, the biggest U.S. city outside New York, all heaved on the edge of the continent, like a big twinkling boulder ready to shimmer off to the sea. Hold on, hold on. Elaine felt finally that she was home.

Later she met Jack, and for years he made her feel at home. Their first kiss was beneath a barkless eucalyptus tree in Huntington Beach, and to this day Elaine still shivered at the beauty of it, the promise of such trees.

Trees last. People didn't.

"I need a break," he'd said, not for the first time in their relationship.

"But h..ho...how do you switch everything off like that? Just like that?" she said.

"You blew up at me. I need time apart."

"Yes, I got mad. You said you wanted to marry me and then began treating me as something meaningless. You broke my heart. That was a punch, and I punched back."

"Damnit, I love you, Ellie."

"Me too, Jack, so much."

But nothing could ever be the same now. They'd changed too much. Yet life would never be the same without having ever met him. Elaine tried to look on the positive side.

An image of Walter Blue formed. He was searching with other drifters for the drums of grace. It was a story, something Elaine had read from an author who'd written a terrific book called Punk Rockwell. Walter Blue was a figment of anyone's imagination. A person who would go to great lengths to find something of essence that had been lost. After all, isn't half your life spent doing that? The half your life that comes after the first half when you held everything at once and thought it would last forever. You must gather all resources to find hope that has been spanked along the way--whittled into a shape that is no longer definable or possibly moldable. You must gather all resources, when there are none, and you have to go looking. You look through the weirdest places: a meadow, a ghetto, a grotto.

Walter Blue, in the story, was faced with a world of no music. Music had been outlawed but it was still alive, ready to be freed, in the bowels of a far-away mountain. The key to finding it was a mystery. Walter must find clues, find a handful of believers who still believed and could help him fight the horrors along the way to bring music out of its guarded place. Elaine lost music when she lost Jack. Finding it again would be tough, for Jack had once been a true man. Gotten screwed in the head, she supposed, along the way. Somehow he'd flipped, freaked out, gone mad. Not mad in a remarkable way to most, but to Elaine who'd shared every part of him for years, the way he walked out on her, lied, and quickly began to adapt to the world of losers he'd shirked for so long--and discredit her honorability and goodness--was indeed insane. He reminded her of the people in Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions: people whose bodily chemicals had going awry. Flesh of strangers, zombies, walking the earth, being weird.

Someday she'd think more on Jack. He'd enveloped nearly her every thought and emotion for six years. For now, Elaine chose to feel the day, for days like this would not be around forever. Forget Jack. Another chapter to be redrawn, kissed, longed for, felt, perceived, pined. Later.

Nearing age 38, heartbroken, Elaine wondered if Walter Blue would walk into her soul and hand her the grace he'd found. If for no other reason than to spend the rest of her life with dignity and peace.

And nothing else. There was nothing else. But the same sky and sage and cliffs that rattlesnakes rumbled through and coyotes howled at. The same mountains and beaches ramshackled by mission priests and people like Padre Junipero Serra. Such wonderful names of people in the past. Laguna, Portola, Serra. Junipero, a fragrant name. There was nothing else. But the Juaneno eating their pinyon nuts beneath the gigantic California sun, scrambling along rivers and across the softest of pine needles splintered on the grounds of holy places, sacred places. Nothing else.

Plein air artists coming from Paris in the 1920s to paint by the surreal light on the West coast, to capture it and preserve in on canvas. Then tents of homesteaders in Laguna Beach when families camped openly on the coastlines and tens of dozens of artists and surfers began to make this their home. And junkies and Slim Gaillard singing his bop and getting a key to the city. Nothing else. Black and white on pages now. Caught perfumed between a book's offerings and thumbed through on white library evenings. Everything else.

Trendy Laguna Beach developed too much, but of all places in the world, Elaine wanted to be here for a while, as long as she could be here. She hadn't crossed the country twice merely for her first breakup and subsequent reunion with Jack--oh the hell with those bleak days--back in Chicago for six months four years ago, flailing each night by lantern light, sneaking out of Aunt Rachel's at two in the morning for a smoke (couldn't smoke in the house). Oh the travesty of time coming back to you after you have let it go--and to be heartbroken at the same time while sitting on a porch step in mid-winter, dead trees barking overhead like ghost dogs--ruing in the blank, black night over matters not understood (how could he have changed his mind about her; he'd acted so happy).

Gone. Back to California for its delicate light and sea. She couldn't be anywhere else after all, with or without Jack. Escape no longer was an option. Escape led to painful things, difficult memories, a lack of belonging anywhere in the world.

But she has this, she mused above the cliffs. Little Thalia Street surfers were bopping in the brine. Artist lady still painted deftly upon her canvas, her easel stuck in the sand firmly. A couple with a Golden Retriever had come to watch the sunset, early enough to watch the sun still play upon the waves in dots and cubes. Seurat. Picasso. French-California painting. The light was never level here; mist grew out of sky corners, played upon the sand and the sea. Languid, thought Elaine, sipping her second wine now. Languid as the moon, forlorn, a pity. But still delicate and with charm to make it as worthwhile as anything else in the world--as any other great moment could ever be fathomed and occupied.

"Strap a DAT recorder to your chest, eat a bunch of acid, and go explore the world. Publish results unedited. Pure and simple."

She didn't need acid; she needed revision.

Elaine wondered whether all aging was a tugboat cruise back into the river, the river that wound backward through time until in its most primordial substance comprised of colorful people slowly stabbing pigs that squealed in their death. The celebration of death. Of new life. Where a lone soul lit by candles murmured inane logic and threw things at a nearby photojournalist, where the horror was commonplace if you just stop to think for a moment of the audacity of time.

Ex-surfers in Vietnam who'd seen the unseen weren't the only to dance on boats. Weren't the only ones wearing face-paint and cuddling puppies--some of the last gentle reminders of life. They were just sometimes the only people to dance outloud. To bring meaning to the bone, to the very being.

The celebration of death. Of new life. Such as Lew Welch disappearing in the desert with a rifle near Nevada City, never having been found later. Gary Snyder's poem "For Lew" brought back the meaning of it: the cycle of life is death. Predatory birds to eat Lew's flesh, after his own sad escape from Chicago (never to go back), and Lew meaning that he was glad to be part of the food chain--for what else eclipsed one's life but that kind of death. Lew lived on in the chain of eat, be eaten, shit, fertilize, blossom plants.

 

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